A Near-Miss And A Bank Shot

Since this blogging business is so highly unpaid (at least as conducted here), the currency most of us bloggers take to the emotional bank is “hits,” the number of people who stop by to sample our free wares. We earn nothing from each visit but we make it up in volume, deriving great satisfaction from many visits. And the quickest way to be deluged with visitors, at least for a day or so, is a “plug,” or linked mention, on one of the mega-blogs such InstaPundit, Volokh, or kausfiles.

Here at Discriminations the hit-o-meter was kept happily busy today, thanks in large part to a kind reference in a post by David Bernstein on Volokh. But there were two tantalizing near misses that, had they occurred and been added to the total, would have produced significantly larger totals. First, this appeared on InstaPundit today:

DAVID BERNSTEIN WRITES on “hostile environment blowback:”

Now comes word, via John Rosenberg, that the University of North Carolina professor in question, Elyse Crystall, is, along with UNC, being investigated by the Department of Education for violating federal civil rights law by creating a hostile environment for white, male, Christian students. A conservative Republican Congressman, Rep. Walter Jones, helped instigate the investigation.

I don’t approve of such things, but there’s no better way to put an end to this asinine speech-suppressing body of law than to start enforcing it evenhandledly.

This was my bank shot. So close, and yet so far.

And then this appears on kausfiles, added to the bottom of the Sunday, March 28, 2004, post discussing Richard Clarke’s misleading, and apparently disingenuous, description of himself as a registered Republican.

Update: Clarke’s scenario of ‘asking for a Republican ballot’ is a bit spun itself. It’s not as if he was offered a choice of two ballots on primary day and picked the Republican one. As alert Virginia-based kf reader J.R. notes, there was no Democratic primary election in Virginia in 2000. Virginia Democrats held caucuses later in the year, in April–and by the time of the GOP primary in late February it was clear the Democratic nominating contest would be over by April. The Bush vs. McCain primary was the only game in town when Clarke “asked for” his ballot. Most of the Democrats I know would have done the same thing. (But then, most Democrats I know would happily vote for McCain in any election.)

Yep, that’s me, J.R., the “alert Virginia-based kf reader.” And while I’m at it, since Clarke lives in Arlington County, which I believe has had voting machines in each precinct since right after the earth cooled, he would not have had to ask for a ballot of any kind even if there had been a Democratic primary.

So, I’m left with a solid hit on Volokh, a bank shot from InstaPundit (no direct link), and an anonymous near miss from kausfiles. Actually, now that I think about it, that’s not so bad for a day’s non-work. I suspect they will re-charge the blog batteries about as effectively as a stream of visitors would have done.

Say What?