WELL, DIVERSITY IS A GOOD THING, RIGHT?

Saying that they want to ensure that a wide range of views is heard and tolerated on college campuses, a group of state lawmakers is proposing legislation that would ask South Dakota’s six state universities to report periodically on their efforts to promote “intellectual diversity.”

Rep. Phyllis Heineman, R-Sioux Falls, chairwoman of the House Education Committee and the chief sponsor of HB1222, said Wednesday that the goal is to prevent situations already seen in other states where students, speakers and faculty members have been harassed because of their views.

“This is not an indictment at all,” Heineman said. “For us, it is good governance. . . . We are just trying to be proactive and not wait for any incidents, such as the Iraq war veteran who was harassed at Columbia University.”

Indeed.

HOW BAD HAVE THE DEMOCRATS’ PROBLEMS with their “activist base” gotten? Bad enough that Joan Vennochi in the Boston Globe thinks they’re going too far to the left:

Calling for a filibuster makes political sense for Kennedy, who is adored by every left-wing constituency in America. He isn’t running for national office; he can afford to stick to strict liberal principle. He wants to go down fighting. For Kennedy, a filibuster call mollifies the left at no political cost. It is also an attempt to make up for the obvious: He used the wrong tone and tactics during the hearings. Going after Alito as a bigot backfired. Forget about Mrs. Alito’s tears. The moment Kennedy was exposed for belonging to a discriminatory college fraternal organization, it was over. He lost the moral high ground.

Kerry’s enthusiasm for a filibuster is harder to fathom, except as more of the same from a perpetually tone-deaf politician.

Why volunteer to look like a creature of the left if you are plotting a second presidential campaign? The perception helped undercut Kerry’s first presidential campaign. . . .

The longer Democrats and Republicans in Congress maintain the high level of hostile partisanship, the less attractive any would-be presidential candidate who hails from Congress looks. These senators who would be president help the cause of governors — Democrats and Republicans — who hold the same ambition.

I think that’s right, but the Senators are looking at the Kos/Moveon crowd. (Via Paul Mirengoff).

LIBERAL BLOG MYDD has commissioned some professional polling. Here’s the first installment, and here’s a writeup by Mystery Pollster, who lauds the transparency and openness involved, with all the data being put online.

UPDATE: Reader Rachel Walker emails:

I just finished reading MyDD’s opinion on polls. As a liberal I was rather disturbed with the blogger’s wish that Bush’s approval rating was in the 30’s. Does that mean he is so unimpressed by our own party that the only way we could win is to make Bush look bad? With such an attitude, we don’t look so great either.

It’s such whiny and desparate behavior that leads me to more centrist and conservative blogs than anything Kos or DU related. It seems to me liberals have forgotten to be liberal (tolerant, polite, yet firm in belief), and such behavior is why many people, though they do not like Bush or some conservative ideas, tend to distance themselves from the left. I know that’s the reason for me.

Well, wishing for the other guy to go down is natural, I think. I was mostly interested in the poll for its transparency, and because I think it’s good to see blogs out there doing this kind of thing.

That said, I think that lefties are over-focused on Bush, and that the GOP likes it that way. Bush’s numbers may be down (though they seem to be trending up on Rasmussen at the moment, for reasons that aren’t obvious to me; the filibuster talk, perhaps?) — but it doesn’t matter. Bush isn’t running again. The next GOP candidate will run on an “I’m not Bush, but you can trust me on security more than the Democrats” platform — as the elder Bush did in 1988. The Democrats’ Bush-hatred just plays into that strategy. If they were smarter, they’d be building up some people of their own, which among other things would involve keeping them out of the fray of Bush-bashing. The only candidate who seems to fit that bill is Mark Warner, but I suspect the Kos/Moveon crowd won’t like him.

FILM NOIR involving the dread Gizmodo crime family. That’s scary, all right.

PAUL BOUTIN discovers that the Chinese Google filter only works if you can spell.

THE SAD THING IS, I actually kind of want one of these.

CATHY SEIPP:

When journalists go from keeping secrets about sources to expecting sources to keep secrets about them, something in the media has begun to stink with self-importance. I think this corner of the sausage factory could do with some inspection and fresh air, so I wrote about all this on my blog.

Read the whole thing.

CARNIVAL-O-RAMA: I was pretty lame about posting blog carnival links last week, so here’s a makeup roundup. First, the Carnival of Couture, which as always was super-fantastic. Some other highlights: The Carnival of Education, Don Surber’s new Carnival of the Celebrities (Google-bait!), and the Carnival of Homeschooling.

Lots more carnivals, of course, at BlogCarnival.com.

BOB WOODRUFF and an accompanying cameraman have been seriously injured by a terrorist bomb in Iraq.

UPDATE: Joe Gandelman has thoughts.

FINISHED READING Joshua Palmatier’s The Skewed Throne. I enjoyed it very much — it’s quite good, even leaving aside that it’s a first novel.

UPDATE: He’s got a blog, too. This story about an accidental rejection letter is pretty funny.

I once got a rejection letter from a law review for a piece I’d never submitted to them. On the other hand, I’ve also gotten an acceptance for a piece I never submitted, so I guess it evens out.

ARNOLD KLING: Is blogging a fad?

UPDATE: In a related topic, Terry Teachout and Rick Brookhiser debate the future of e-books.

I SUSPECT that a lot of these too-busy grandparents were too busy as parents, too.

AUSTIN BAY looks at some modest signs of political progress in Kuwait. Meanwhile, Kevin Drum wonders if Kuwait is running out of oil. IAs I understand it, some of this reflects inflated estimates from past years (I had an item on similar questions about Saudi reserves, and I’ve seen speculation that Iran has less than it lets on), but of course it’s in the interest of these countries to inflate their reserves, thus discouraging additional drilling and competition that might lower prices.

Perhaps this is an argument for not drilling in ANWR and elsewhere in the United States yet — leave that stuff in the ground for a few decades while consuming Middle East oil now, and eventually we’ll be selling oil to them. Or not . . .

GOOGLE’S NEW MOTTO: “Be semi-evil. Be quasi-evil. Be the margarine of evil. Be the Diet Coke of evil — just one calorie; not evil enough.”

Lots more on Google at the China Syndrome blog.

UPDATE: BizzyBlog wonders why the lefty blogs don’t seem to be paying much attention to the Google story.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Joe David McReynolds emails:

IMHO your reaction, and much of the right side of the blogosphere’s, to Google’s entry into the Chinese marketplace is wrongheaded. Do you think that if Google doesn’t go there, Chinese internet users will just twiddle their thumbs and not search for stuff? That a blow will be struck to their machine of censorship?

Of course not. There are Chinese search engines that are almost the same, and they will (and have been) use those.

If anything, Google going into China is a net benefit to the Chinese people, same as MSN was.

Why?

American companies censor like the government forces them to, but as we see in the case of MSN, they are FAR MORE LAX about censorship and reporting of suspect activities than similar Chinese companies.

Getting Google into the Chinese market will probably neither slow nor accelerate the demise of China’s ruling regime, when and if that comes; the vast majority of Foreign Direct Investment in China comes from abroad.

As far as the “Resistance to evil” factor, what one might call “washing our hands”, that ship sailed a long time ago. The economic miracle that has been the Party’s foundation of legitimacy in China was financed largely by overseas Chinese, not American multinationals. China is not like the Soviet Union, where dissidents could take comfort that somewhere, out there, there was someone who would fight the Soviets to the end. That just isn’t the case in China, and Google’s decision makes no difference.

I’m sorry that Google’s action makes it harder to feel “clean” of the world’s unpleasantness, but as stated above, if anything this is to the benefit of China’s citizens who would like a free internet.

I imagine you’ll get plenty of e-mail on this topic, but I’d hope this argument (whether made by myself or those more articulate than I) is something you will address.

Yes, my TCS column this week will look at those “constructive engagement” arguments. They’re nontrivial, but still . . . .

MORE: Here’s a defense of google.

MICHELLE MALKIN has a Davos roundup, with video.

CONGRESSIONAL STAFFERS REWRITING WIKIPEDIA to make their boss look good. Charming.

UPDATE: Sean Hackbarth says this is another blow to Wikipedia.

IS CINDY SHEEHAN becoming the voice of the new Democratic Party? Hey, they used to dismiss Kos as fringe, and now he’s mainstream.

UPDATE: Bruce Kesler isn’t happy with this mainstreaming.

G.M. ROPER: “Thursday, January 26th, I was diagnosed with lung cancer. Talk about a kick in the teeth.” Drop by and offer him your good wishes.

HERE’S AN AP story on Michael Yon:

The 41-year-old former Army Green Beret, self-published author and world traveler didn’t know exactly what he was going to do when he got to the war zone last year, nor did he have any particular plans to report what he saw to the world at-large.

But that’s what he did.

After getting himself embedded as a freelance journalist with troops last year, he used his Internet blog to report on the car bombs, firefights and dead soldiers. But he also wrote descriptively about acts of compassion and heroism, small triumphs in the country’s crawl toward democracy and the gritty inner workings of the military machine.

Yon’s dispatches have been extolled by loyal readers as gutsy and honest reporting by a guy who’s not afraid to get his hands dirty. He has been interviewed and his blog quoted by major newspapers and TV news networks, and he has drawn comparisons to Ernie Pyle, the renowned World War II correspondent who shared the trenches with fighting soldiers.

Nice story. Read the whole thing.

WRITING IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, Hossein Derakshan blames Bush for the rise of Ahmadinejad. Seems like a bit of a stretch, to me.

UPDATE: A comment here: “Derakshan fundamentally does not understand democracy.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here.

IMMIGRATION REMAINS THE “SLEEPER ISSUE” in U.S. politics, but I just got a press release from Time suggesting that it may not sleep much longer:

Almost two-thirds of Americans (63%) consider illegal immigration a “very serious” or “extremely serious” problem in the United States, according to a TIME Poll. The majority (74%) believes the U.S. is not doing enough to secure its borders. . . .

TIME’s Poll shows that half (50%) of Americans favor deporting all illegal immigrants back to their home countries (45% oppose). Three-in-four (76%) favor allowing illegal immigrants in the U.S. to earn citizenship if they learn English, have a job and pay taxes. . . . Meanwhile 700,000 undocumented immigrants from around the world continue to enter the U.S. each year, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

I favor making legal immigration easier — essentially under the guidelines above — but I also favor much stricter enforcement against illegal immigration. Which, I think, puts me pretty much on the opposite side of the issue from the Bush Administration.

The issue is, I think, heating up beneath the surface and it’s only been kept from breaking out politically by the extraordinarily low unemployment rates of recent years. Once unemployment, inevitably, moves back up toward historical averages, people will become much more vocal about this issue in a hurry. It would be nice if we could come up with a sensible policy before that happens, as the discussion is likely to be a lot nastier if we wait.

UPDATE: John Tabin has a podcast illustrating some of the politics of this issue.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Rep. J.D. Hayworth of Arizona has an oped on the subject. He stresses the importance of immigrants adopting American culture.

As Jim Bennett says: “Democracy, immigration, multiculturalism. Pick any two.”

BLOGS OF THE UNION: Chris Lydon’s Radio Open Source invites you to write your own State of the Union address. They’re collecting them for a broadcast on the real thing.

MARK TAPSCOTT: “The pork is not the point about the pork.”

TOM MAGUIRE:

I would guess that blogs and the internet have made the unelectable left even better organized and harder to work around; the days when a candidate could tell Barbra Streisand what she wanted to hear, pocket her check, then tell the public something that made sense are long over.

Indeed.

AUSTIN BAY looks at the Hamas victory and what it may mean. The Belmont Club looks at the money. And Patrick Belton continues to report on Oxblog. My favorite bit is Hanan Ashrawi’s unhappy take:

Not mincing words, she expressed utter disbelief in the Hamas 2.0 hypothesis, said she would not be open to joining a coalition with the party and told me that she thought Hamas would bring the West Bank and Gaza into theocracy.

Sorry she’s unhappy, but her crowd had years and years to do something about Hamas, to get their rampant corruption under control, and — for that matter — to make (and keep) a peace agreement that would have led to prosperity in Gaza and the West Bank. They didn’t, and this is part of the consequence.

Meanwhile, an article in the Knoxville News-Sentinel features interviews with locals with Palestinian roots, and I have to agree with this guy:

Fathi Husain agreed. He said that everyone would like to see peace and working relations in that part of the world, but for now he will wait and see what comes out of this democratic election.

“Democracy is a process, not just an event,” Husain said. “It takes a lot of effort to make it work right.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

UPDATE: Here’s a transcript of Hugh Hewitt and Frank Gaffney talking about this subject.