That’s right folks, the 2004 Elections Issue is now available on-line. Links above and to the right, you know, where the links are. Also, the archive has been updated. It’s HTML, and I helped! [5 points if you get the reference]

Randy Barnett, constitutional scholar and member of the Volokh Conspiracy, is coming to the law school to talk about his new book, Restoring The Lost Constitution, on Monday, April 19, high noon, room 142. Some blurbiage:

In his new book, “Restoring the Lost Constitution,” Randy Barnett argues that, especially since the 1930s, courts have been cutting holes in the original Constitution to eliminate the parts that protect liberty from the power of government. Barnett offers a practical solution: adopting a “presumption of liberty” to give the benefit of the doubt to citizens when laws restrict their rightful exercises of liberty. Barnett is the Austin B. Fletcher Professor at the Boston University School of Law and a senior fellow of the Cato Institute. Free and open to the public. Sponsored by the Federalist Society student group.

It’s in a rather small room, seating for 60 or so, so if you’re really really interested, show up early. For help finding your way there, lay an email on me:

datkinso@law.uoregon.edu

This new MT blog like totally rocks! New issue is finished, to web press, will be uploaded tomorrow morning. Now, because I feel like ass, I shall sleep.

Movable Type is now up and operational! I will be sending invites to everyone on the old blog soon. Elements of the website may change in appearance over the weekend as I tweak it and add or remove MT features. The Blogger archives will still be available through the link at the bottom of this page.

Rock out.

If you haven’t heard of it, Fundrace 2004 is a pretty handy-dandy resource that allows you to look up how much money your neighbors have given to their presidential candidate of choice. Locally, it yields fairly unsurprising results, such as the preference for John Edwards among plaintiff’s lawyers and law professors, or good ol’ Frank Stahl’s $675 patronage of Dennis Kucinich.

Neato.

Please excuse our mess. We’re making a transition over to a new host and so blogging had been non-worky all day, thus the late-published posts. Hopefully, everything will be working with our new host by tomorrow morning. Then, we’ll finaly be able to make our jump over to Movable Type. Word.

It could have been worse than this for the Ol’ Dirty:

College Papers Pay for April Fools’ Issues

Or, at least, the one Ashcroft thinks is most important. This has been all around the blogosphere already, but I think Andrew Sullivan had the best quote on this:

This, one recalls, is the battle John Ashcroft was really hoping to wage. Terrorists are one thing, but porn-consumers – now there’s a real threat. With the Justice Department having nothing better to do, like catch Jihadists, it’s very important that they keep a fierce and unrelenting eye on adults enjoying themselves in the privacy of their own homes. Hey, they can’t even arrest homos any more. You’ve got to give the feds something important to do. Now, excuse me while I surf the, er, web.

Personally, I’m not much of a porn-enthusiast, but this is certainly way over the line. Ashcroft is trying to prosecute material viewed by consenting adults in their own homes…material containing the activities of other consenting adults, at that. Going after child-porn is one thing, and should be done, but this is a completely different ball park, hell, it’s not even the same goddamn game. It used to be that Republicans paid lip-service to the hard-right and enacted the policies of the moderate conservatives, now the tide seems to move in precisely the opposite direction. I’ve been a defender of Bush on all sorts of issues, but this has officially made me “undecided” in this race. Yeah, I know about Kerry’s tax proposals, but a Republican controlled congress won’t let any of that pass. Yeah, his ideas about trade are bollocks, but the Republicans will do the opposite out of partisan rage. The only real issue left is the war…and we’ll have to see how that debate shapes-up over the course of the elections cycle. Dear Republicans, THIS BULLSHIT IS LOSING YOU SUPPORT! STOP! NOW!

You are Thomas L. Friedman! You’re the foreign
affairs expert. You’re liberal on most issues,
except you’re a leading voice in the pro-war
movement. You’re probably the most popular
columnist at the Times, but probably because
you play both sides of the Iraq issue and
relish your devotion to what you call
“fanatical moderatism.” You sure can
write, but you could work on your sense of
humor.

Which New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Not that accurate, but at least I’m not Krugman. Via Verdon [DRINK!]

The Marginal Revolution guys, admittedly a biased sample, pass along this list of reasons to become an economist. Also, apparently the median salary for a full professor of economics is $138,000 per year. Not too shabby.

I haven’t seen anything on the TV, but Zeyad of Healing Iraq says a “coup d’etat” is underway in Baghdad. I hope Zeyad, OC alum Bryan and everyone else stays out of harm’s way over there.

UPDATE: Here’s a UPI story on the open uprising.

Although the temperature is in the high 40s in Eugene right now, the weekend was nice and sunny and is indicative of a warm-up to summer; a season the usually rain-soaked, snivelling majority of U students miss out on.

So to celebrate, let’s all enjoy some great summer treats: Vodka Cranberry-flavored ice cream bars and Kahlua-laced cookies.

Well, early this morning I configured and uploaded all the necessary Movable Type files to our server only to be foiled by a connection error when I ran the final initialization step. After re-uploading files and re-reading the MT installation guide, I gave up and fired off an e-mail to our host and went to sleep. This afternoon I received a response and was informed that our server does not support Movable Type and the MySQL access that I needed was not available. Damn.

So, I guess for now we’ll be sticking with Blogger until our host decides to support MT, or until we decide it’s worth the trouble to switch to another host. I’ll post an update when something new comes up.

If any character from Winnie the Pooh would do something this horrible, it would definitely be Tigger.

Whether you like him or not, Matt Drudge is an important figure in the recent technological revolution in journalism. Through the growth of the Internet we have seen the rise of web-based news sites, outlets for political opinion, and first-person local coverage.

So happy 9th birthday, Drudge Report.