The Ward Churchill thing just keeps going. I have come to the conclusion that he has to be, at this point, intentionally seeking publicity. The question is what will he do with his newfound name recognition?

Dean - Churchill ‘08?

Michelle Malkin has some links, as does Pirate Ballerina. LGF has more.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has the story of Millionaire John Gilmore, who won’t show his ID:

John Gilmore’s splendid isolation began July 4, 2002, when, with defiance aforethought, he strolled to the Southwest Airlines counter at Oakland Airport and presented his ticket.

The gate agent asked for his ID.

Gilmore asked her why.

It is the law, she said.

Gilmore asked to see the law.

Nobody could produce a copy. To date, nobody has. The regulation that mandates ID at airports is “Sensitive Security Information.” The law, as it turns out, is unavailable for inspection.

What started out as a weekend trip to Washington became a crawl through the courts in search of an answer to Gilmore’s question: Why?

More…

As happens to the disobedient, Gilmore is grounded. He is rich — he estimates his net worth at $30 million — and cannot fly inside the United States. Nor can he ride Amtrak, rent a room at most major hotels, or easily clear security in the courthouses where his case, Gilmore v. Ashcroft, is to be heard. In a time when more and more people and places demand some form of government-issued identification, John Gilmore offers only his 49-year-old face: a study in stringy hair, high forehead, wire-rimmed glasses, Ho Chi Minh beard and the contrariness for which the dot.com culture is renowned.

Boing Boing notes that Gilmore is “the guy who Sun hired to write their first code, the guy who co-founded EFF.” Smart Mobs links, and Dan Seto wonders:

Regardless of the reasons for asking, the scary thing is the law Mr. Gilmore supposedly violated is secret. So secret not even his lawyers are allowed to see it. Why? How is someone supposed to defend himself in court if you can’t even view, much less challenge the very law he is charged with violating?

There seems to be a bit of controversy bubbling up about the new feature of the Google toolbar that allows it to edit any page on the web. Zeldman fans the flames with this:

To the delight of gadget freaks and the consternation of some web designers and thinkers, the new Autolink feature in Google’s latest toolbar sticks links on your site that you didn’t put there.

For instance, if your company’s site includes a street address, a link to Google’s map service will magically sprout from your page when users click the Autolink button. Likewise, a book’s ISBN number will trigger a link to an Amazon page selling that book. The BBC and CNET cite additional examples.

The problem is, they’re wrong. No client side tool can change the server version of a web site without permission (unless the server is being hacked of course). What this is doing is allowing users of the Google toolbar to edit, add links, make notes, whatever, on their own local version of the page they are viewing.

Much ado about nothing. In fact, a pretty slick tool if you ask me.

UPDATE: Mentalized.net agrees with me. And as a commenter on WizbangBlog noted, it’s no different than letting a user scribble in the margins or highlight text in their own copy of a book. It doesn’t change what anyone else sees. Aaron Hockley points to SearchEngineWatch who links to Threadwatch (dizzy yet?) for web publishers to opt out if you’re still not convinced.

UPDATE: Speaking of Google… speculation is growing about the Google OS. They have hired Microsoft Operating System architect, Mark Lucovsky. Via Coops Corner.

The Associated Press quotes Howard Dean* as saying:

“I want to reach out to people who are worried about values,”

Apparently people who are worried about values are currently a foreign constituency who are not reached by the Democrat party.

“We are going to embrace pro-life Democrats because pro-life Democrats care about kids after they’re born, not just before they’re born.”

… as opposed to the non-pro-life Democrats who do not care about kids before they’re born?

… or as opposed to pro-life Republicans who only care about kids before they’re born and not after?

* The DNC chair who hates Republicans and everything they stand for, and who says Republicans are evil.

UPDATE: Some black Republicans in Mississippi want Dean to resign as head of the DNC after his hotel staff comments a few weeks ago, but LaShawn says:

I disagree with them on this. I say let Dean stay. The more he puts his foot in his mouth, the more facts we conservatives have to support our opinion that Howard Dean is good for the Republican party.

RedNova News reports:

Could two lookalike galaxies, barely a whisker apart in the night sky, herald a revolution in our understanding of fundamental physics? Some physicists believe that the two galaxies are the same - its image has been split into two, they maintain, by a “cosmic string”; a San Andreas Fault in the very fabric of space and time.

If this interpretation is correct, then CSL-1 - the name of the curious double galaxy - is the first concrete evidence for “superstring theory”: the best candidate for a “theory of everything”, which attempts to encapsulate all the phenomena of nature in one neat set of equations.

Never heard of “String Theory”? Check out PBS’s NOVA site, which includes a link to an exercise where you try to imagine four dimensions.

Brian Greene has a book, The Elegant Universe, which discusses this theory in much more detail, and he has a newer book entitled The Fabric of the Cosmos. Part of the Amazon editorial review says:

Assuming an audience of non-specialists, Greene has set hi mself a daunting task: to explain non-intuitive, mathematical concepts like String Theory, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and Inflationary Cosmology with analogies drawn from common experience. For the most part, he succeeds.

Nature.com has a report on some cool tech.

The idea of a cloak of invisibility that hides objects from view has long been confined to the more improbable reaches of science fiction. But electronic engineers have now come up with a way to make one.

(Via Professor Bainbridge … but Psuedo Polymath says to read the fine print.)

A New York Times op ed today says:

Still, this has so far been a year of heartening surprises - each one remarkable in itself, and taken together truly astonishing. The Bush administration is entitled to claim a healthy share of the credit for many of these advances. It boldly proclaimed the cause of Middle East democracy at a time when few in the West thought it had any realistic chance. And for all the negative consequences that flowed from the American invasion of Iraq, there could have been no democratic elections there this January if Saddam Hussein had still been in power.

Nashville Truth reacts:

All of this reminds me of the eighties when liberal politicians, academics, and journalists were all opposing the Reagan arms buildup. They said that Reagan was going to cause a nuclear war and that the Soviet Union could never be defeated. They said we could only hope to contain the spread of communism. Like Bush, Reagans critics made fun of him, called him a cowboy, and called him stupid.

Joe says:

Take note: when the world’s foremost wordsmiths cannot spin current events into some tragedy, things are going very well.

Debbye has some thoughts. Decision ‘08 has a roundup of the latest meme. IsraPundit thinks the NYT must have choked on the editorial. And Roger L. Simon wonders:

Is this the beginning of a new trend for the Times? Who knows? Soon they may be sounding like Michael Ledeen.

On a somewhat related note, the transcript of Keith Olbermann’s show last night is pending, but apparently he is giving credit to the Bush Doctrine for positive changes in the middle east. (Transcript link via Olbermann Watch). LGF links to DU going nuts over this “sellout.”

UPDATE: (3/3) Ace of Spades thinks the cowboy got the cows moving.

And Friedman defines the other pole– how conservative a liberal is allowed to be before having to turn in his membership card.

When Friedman speaks, more reasonable liberals listen. Frankly, I think he’s overrated and often just tells you the bleeding obvious, but liberals understand that when Friedman says “You must admit, or at least begin to consider the possibility, that all of this may in fact work,” his admirers in the New York Times and Slate and Salon and all the rest know they need to follow his lead or else they’ll begin looking… well, a bit like Paul Krugman.

[List of posts about other articles trumpeting, well, at least acknowledging, that democracy in the Middle East may be a good trend].

Unbelievable. When I first brought up the possibility that Friedman’s column might cause a stampede of media groupthink towards the right, I was only half-serious.

Well, less than half-serious. I didn’t think it would happen; I just speculated that with Thomas F’n’ Friedman now admitting that freedom might actually work, the press corps might feel obliged to reconsider three years of relentless negativity and doom-saying.

But the stampede does in fact seem to have happened.

Anyone who can get cows to move that fast must have a little cowboy in him. Which makes Thomas Friedman something of a kindred spirit to President Bush.

From the Santa Barbara News Press:

Harding Elementary School PTA President Meredith Brace has led a battle for several years to stop her white neighbors from transferring out of the heavily Latino Westside campus.

Now she’s joining them, saying she’s not willing to make her son the guinea pig any longer.

Looks like Ms. Brace has put her children above feel-good political ideals.

Over the years, she has criticized district officials for maintaining open enrollment as an easy way out. Now it’s a policy she is taking advantage of.

LaShawn has somc thoughts:

Read the whole story. It’s a hoot. Brace is a hypocrite for snatching her kids out of the school after getting in everybody else’s face, but I support her decision 100 percent. Liberal politicians in D.C. send their precious offspring to private (safe) schools, not the District of Columbia school system. I applaud their rational decisions.

Now if they’d only leave the rest of us alone, tone down the preaching and stop castigating parents for doing what’s best for their own kids, we’d all get along.

BTW: LaShawn Barber will be on MSNBC. She’s nervous, but I say “Don’t worry… you’ll be on next to Ms. Cox, who will make you look good for sure.” (Remember her “Stay Puft Marshmallow Man” appearance after the VP debates?) :-)

This story was just so far out there, I had to post it.

His suit contends that Irons, without his knowledge, kept some of his semen and used it to impregnate herself.

The relationship ended when Phillips learned Irons had lied to him about being recently divorced and was, in fact, still married to another doctor, according to court documents.

Nearly two years later, Irons slapped Phillips with a paternity suit. DNA tests showed Phillips was indeed the father, court papers state.

In the Agora has some interesting observations and links regarding the Supreme Court decision yesterday to declare unconsitutional the capital punishment of minors (and in the process, overturned 19 state laws).

Vote for Judges notes the international element in the decision:

And the opinion, relying heavily on international — not constitutional — norms, was written by Justice Kennedy of all people. Kennedy raised eyebrows by citing international law in his majority opinion last year in Lawrence v. Texas. In this case, Roper v. Simmons, he again spends a couple of pages wringing his hands over the world’s view of us.

PoliBlog says, in part:

My initial reaction to the headline about the juvenile death penalty was fairly ho-hum, insofar as I found it to hardly be a shock, and at first blush there is distaste to be associated with executing juvenile offenders in the first place (even when they are deserving recipients of the penalty).

Still, a little thought on the subject, and some knowledge now of the opinion, and I must admit, Law Professor Stephen Bainbridge hits the problem on the head:

Once again, nine old men and women in robes have elevated themselves into a super-legislature in which they have exercised privileges they deny to our elected representatives.

Like it or not: there really is no constitutional basis for barring the various states from making their own laws on this subject. So, really, what we have here, is the idea that five individuals can supplant the opinions of the citizens of nineteen states with their own for no other reason than (ultimately) that they object to the practice.

New World Man quotes Baseball Crank with this (and has a roundup of other quotes):

On its face, this may sound like the typical stuff of Supreme Court decisions. It is not. In fact, the Court has, at least as far as the death penalty is concerned, abolished the traditional mechanism for constitutional amendments by act of state legislatures embodied in Article V.

Ex Post has more.

UPDATE: Professor Bainbridge has some thoughts as well:

I’m increasingly opposed to the death penalty on both pragmatic and moral grounds, but I nevertheless found much to agree with in Justice Antonin Scalia’s scathing dissent from the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision striking down the death penalty for offenses committed by juveniles (text of opinion):

For those who haven’t seen it yet, Strom Thurmond’s FBI files have been released.

From The State:

On Monday, the FBI released the first installment of Thurmond’s FBI file — nearly 600 pages of sometimes heavily-edited memos, letters and other documents. The documents detail a long, secret and mutually beneficial relationship between Thurmond and the FBI. An additional 1,700 pages remain to be released.

The PDF is here for the really curious.

Via JQuinton here and here.

It seems people are jumping all over this for the racist element. The files (which I have not taken the time to read) say the following, according to The State:

U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond and his staff tried to get the FBI to build a case against civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965 on the grounds that he was “controlled by communists.”

Thurmond’s efforts are documented in a memo, part of his recently released FBI file. The memo shows the late senator’s attempt to marry two causes dear to him — fighting communism and defeating civil rights.

UPDATE (3/3): 76 more pages released. (HT: JQuinton)

Inspired by a WSJ article, Michelle Malkin looks at the number of Americans reading political blogs.

Basically she concludes that the blog readership numbers are generally inflated, but there was one other thing she said I found interesting:

Here’s a validity check. We know an Instalanche typically produces somewhere between 800 and around 4,000 hits.

Insty gets four times as many hits per day as Michelle gets (200,000 v. around 50,000). But the other day, when she linked to me, I had about 7,500 visitors and 9,000 page loads that day… it could be that was a popular post, but I found it interesting that her link generated hits beyond that of a typical instalanche with only one fourth the traffic.

DePaul prof Thomas Klocek is protesting his suspension last year:

Last fall, DePaul University professor Thomas Klocek was suspended without a hearing for challenging the viewpoints of certain Muslim students on campus at a student activities fair. He is now demanding a public apology from the university president in order to avoid litigation.

Klocek showed up to the news conference bound and gagged, illustrating what he believes the university did to him by censoring his views on the Middle East. Klocek says he was unfairly suspended for his views on the Muslim and Palestinian people.

I have no background on the situation, just passing this along to you.

(HT: Michelle Malkin)

And Mean Mr. Mustard (huh?) says:

Call me a cynic, but I doubt the all the “confrontational way” crap. This is usually used as hyper-PC academy-speech for “he walked up to me and said things I don’t like.”

Well, hunting of Bigfoot, Noah’s Ark, Amelia Earhart’s plane, Osama bin Laden and the Holy Grail. The Omaha Senator has filed these and other ammendments to the state constitution (35 in all).

The AP reports:

They’re all being used to make a point by Omaha Sen. Ernie Chambers, who is taking aim at a measure to protect hunting.

and …

While there is no immediate threat, there are animal rights groups that would like to see hunting, fishing and trapping outlawed, said Sen. Ed Schrock, who introduced the measure. “I think we should probably get out ahead of this.”

The proposed amendment would add one paragraph to the state constitution that says fishing, trapping, and hunting are a “valued part of the heritage of the people and will be a right forever preserved.”