No news per se, so it’s time to do what American society always does on Sundays—sit around and let a bunch of pundits reanalyze the week that was:

Chris at Outside Report (no relation) notes the politics surrounding the case, describing Righteous Townie DA Mike Nifong’s newfound role as the White Avenger:

Even though there are several problems with the timeline of events with the rape story, the lacrosse members have already been convicted in the court of public opinion. Ever since this incident, Mike Nifong has been on TV and in the local Durham papers nonstop discussing this case and its implications. He and the police have kept this story overtly vague while leaving little doubt of the Duke lacrosse members’ guilt. The entire rape scandal has been a boon of free press and publicity for incumbent Mike Nifong who I frankly had never heard of before this scandal.

Now, we have word that Nifong won’t release the results of the DNA test and won’t file charges until April 10th. Curiously, that is even closer to the May 2nd primary and will keep him in the papers and on television for another two weeks. Duke students are too oblivious to read the local papers or know a single thing going on in Durham, thus I’m sure none of the lawyers or the national press recognize this political element to the story.

While Duke did not handle this story in the best way, the DA office published this story without any mention of the doubts as if though it had been true. In many ways, its a brilliant political move in Durham, where whites and blacks are equally divided in population (48% white/40% black). The one thing that all Durhamites hate (particularly black Durhamites) is Duke. Nifong has won alot of African-American friends in his strident attack on the Duke elites.

Steve Donohue notes a weird quote in Greg Garber’s latest ESPN.com report:

“North Carolina is the Bible Belt, and a fair amount of folks in the black community feel the sexual attack was something the young woman brought on herself,” said Mark Anthony Neal, a Duke associate professor who teaches black pop culture in the African-American Studies Department. “On a certain level, they’re most concerned with the racial epithets.”

Wow, I really hope that isn’t true. I’ve said that certain aspects of the story have seemed fishy since the very beginning, but if the rape accusations are true, then the most serious aspect of the story isn’t that some rich white kids called black people “niggers”. Yes, nasty racial language isn’t decent or proper, and I wish the word stricken from the English vocabulary posthaste. But think about how horrible that is: if the girl was raped, she sorta deserved it because she was an exotic dancer? I just can’t believe that many people in any community would say, “sure, a girl may have been violated in the most severe possible way, but listen to what they said!”

Last, but not least, Lisa of A Complete Bunch of Pants has a theory as to why Larry Moneta decided to disseminate the “gang threat” rumors. Then again, maybe people are rightfully jumpy after a reported attack on two students in west Durham and a bizarre pair of shootings in Walltown, several blocks north of East Campus.

Lisa also says that Jill Hopman, who wrote this commentary in Monday’s Chronicle, has been banned from Charlie’s. Makes me half-tempted to go over there and do some reporting of my own.

This AP story does a reasonably good job of dissecting the stereotypes and reality surrounding Duke and the wider community in the wake of the rape allegations against the lacrosse team. Also, WRAL tonight carried an interview with a female Duke student athlete who stood behind the team; a snippet of her interview is quoted in this piece that mostly focuses on the threat of gang violence against Duke students.

Another question from my growing mental file: my suspicion is that people who would commit a gang-rape are typically not first-time rapists. Even if that’s not the case, if we are to believe the statistics on rape—that one in four women have been raped in their lifetime, and that most rapes are committed by people who know the victim—I can’t imagine that not one of the 47 lacrosse players (or one of 47 other randomly-selected males, for that matter) haven’t raped someone in their lives. So where are the other rape victims? This has been national news for a week, and not a single additional woman has come forward claiming that one of these guys has raped her. I don’t know that it matters in terms of the credibility of these charges, but it just seems weird in and of itself.

Brendan Nyhan has a link to a timeline compiled by the News and Observer that incorporates the observations of neighbor Jason Bissey.

Meanwhile, Righteous Townie DA Mike Nifong has apparently decided that fiddling while Durham burns is going to be his primary strategy in the case. When’s that Democratic primary again?

Apparently the local gang community has made what are believed to be credible threats of drive-by shootings targeting Duke students living off East Campus, according to the Chronicle and a Duke press release.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say this is not a good sign.

Update: Another link for the insomniacs: TalkLeft also takes note of the timeline inconsistencies.

(I initially drafted this as a comment to a post at Brendan Nyhan’s blog, but it’s gotten pretty unwieldy so I’ll just post it here. Note that it is somewhat speculative, but I think it fits the established facts. “Woman 1” is the alleged victim of the rape, “Woman 2” is the other exotic dancer.)

My plausible timeline works something like this:

• Party happens, although it’s not exactly established when. The neighbors could put a rough time on the “cotton shirt” comment, at the very least. This should be in the witness statement to police.
• Women leave, lax players skedaddle afterwards. This has to take some time.
• Woman 2 decides to make first 911 call from somewhere in Durham to get lax players in trouble with police, not knowing lax players are on Franklin Street (or who knows where) by now. Maybe Woman 1 has told Woman 2 she left stuff in 610 house, and figures if cops are competent they’ll look around and find it. (Knowing the exact address—even if the numbers were actually removed between the incident and today—does seem a bit odd for a mere passerby; I doubt you could read the address at night in the dark from the street even if the numbers were still there, as Buchanan is not a very well-lit street.)
• Police show up immediately, are mystified that nobody is there, find evidence of a party earlier, interview neighbors, then leave.
• Women venture out to Hillsborough Rd Kroger, in West Durham near 15-501, the opposite direction in town from where most African-Americans live, to do something (I can’t imagine they were there for groceries). Woman 2 goes inside Kroger, leaving Woman 1 in car parked in fire lane. Kroger security guy finds Woman 1 in car, calls 911. Woman 2 comes back to car, finds Kroger guard on phone, has to tell what happened.

This timeline doesn’t preclude the possibility of an assault, but it does put it quite a bit earlier than the first 911 call. Or it puts it somewhere other than the 610 house (Edens Quad?).

Unsolved mysteries: why leave everything in 610 house for 2 days—clearly one player was there when the warrant was served (he’s listed as the person receiving the inventory)? What did the police find in the room in Edens Quad and the Edens student’s car? (Related: What lax team members live in the specified room in Edens, if any?)

The victim claims she scratched one of the alleged rapists on the arm, so which (if any) of the 46 lax players had abraisons on their arms? I can’t believe the cops didn’t check this when they were all called in for the DNA testing—which, given the latest out of Nifong and DPD, may have just been a ruse to get everyone in so they could look for the scratches.

Why are two women who allegedly don’t know each other driving around Durham together for at least 20 minutes? Kroger on Hillsborough is 5–10 minutes from Buchanan and Markham at 1 am, and a straight shot west on Markham until it turns into Hillsborough. If you were looking for a drug store or grocery store, there are closer ones (Food Lion on Hillsborough near Erwin Mill Tower, Rite Aid and Walgreens further west nearer Kroger).

This whole thing is damned peculiar. Not that everything needs to add up for the rape allegations to be true, but if there’s no DNA and the women aren’t credible on the timeline, Righteous Townie DA Mike Nifong’s going to have some real trouble prosecuting this thing, particularly once Nifong narrows down the suspects and they get good high-priced lawyers who can start poking holes in this investigation and his jury pool tampering and borderline unethical conduct—for example, I’m pretty sure it’s against the rules for a prosecutor to assert that people who have been targeted by an investigation and hired lawyers must have something to hide.

Elsewhere, Timothy Burke ponders the “cotton shirt” comment, while Doug Wright thinks other important issues may be lost in the shuffle if the rape allegations turn out to be false (or at least unproveable). Out in the dead tree media universe, the Chronicle reports on the media circus; there’s also a good op-ed by Boston Cote in today’s paper. Last, but not least, UD offers the following suggestion:

The school needs to shut down most of its other operations for awhile and reopen as a rehab unit.

You know, if I were going to go out of my way to plaster the 610 house with signs showing my support for the lacrosse team, at the very least I think I’d switch on spellcheck in Word:

It’s not my photo, by the way; I found it in Flickr under a CC-license.

Elsewhere, the proprietor (I think) of a blog called “Happy Toilet” sent me this link to his/her post belittling the lacrosse teams’ high-powered ambulance chasers attorneys. Well, high-powered might be a bit of a stretch, but then again Righteous Townie DA Mike Nifong doesn’t exactly strike me as Durham’s answer to Eliot Spitzer either…

Update: Friday’s Herald-Sun reports that two Durham cops were at the scene of the alleged rape investigating a reported disturbance 16 minutes before the Kroger 911 call:

Police arrived at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. just two minutes after a woman called 911 to report she and her black friend had been verbally accosted by men outside the house yelling a racial slur early on March 14, according to computer dispatch records.

"Officers responded to the call at 610 N. Buchanan within a minute of the dispatch. The complainant was not on the scene and no one seemed to be at the house, according to the officers, so they cleared the scene after checking the area for several minutes," said police spokeswoman Kammie Michael.

The dispatch records show officers were on the scene for more than 11 minutes.

In the immortal words of Jagged Edge and Nelly, “Where The Party At?” The News-Observer version of the story indicates that police found evidence of a party earlier in the evening, but no sign of anyone at the house. Police believe the first 911 caller was not the victim, but neither story says whether or not it matches the voice of Dancer Number Two, and Durham 911 dispatch apparently has no record of any caller ID information.

The Herald-Sun account also indicates that Righteous Townie DA Mike Nifong is beginning to downplay the significance of the DNA testing, and may not even reveal the results of the testing to the public. When’s that Democratic primary again?

While I’m adding links anyway, here’s a post from dcat that makes a lot of good points, found via UD.

This article from WRAL has a pretty good roundup of today’s developments (or lack thereof) in the Duke lacrosse scandal, including ambulance chaser attorney Joe Cheshire, who represents one of the team captains who was not named in the warrant, hitting back at Righteous Townie DA Mike Nifong. Also mentioned are a form letter from President Brodhead to all of the parents of current Duke undergraduates, and the Mystery of the First 911 Call.

Speaking of backlash, for the most part neither dukeobsrvr nor his/her commenters are laying down for the dominant narrative in the case, reflecting the impression I got from my unscientific observation of the chatter on a full east-west bus this afternoon.

Surprisingly, the bus that caught fire at the West Campus turnaround yesterday apparently wasn’t arson committed by a Righteous Townie, but instead just the result of routine crappy maintenance by Duke Transit.

In rape investigation news, a dorm room at Duke was searched on Monday, by Durham PD apparently without the foreknowledge of Righteous Townie AD Mike Nifong, the lacrosse team allegedly continues to show (White) Brother Solidarity by wearing their lacrosse team T-shirts around campus and otherwise behaving boorishly (some members having the temerity, for example, to buy lunch from campus hot dog vendor Pauly Dogs and discuss the topic everyone else is talking about with other people in line), DSG surprises nobody by doing nothing, and the local Students for Academic Freedom ringleader went and cried to police about a professor being mean to David Horowitz (which, of course, has nothing to do with the rape investigation, except for wasting the time of prosecutors and police that might be better spent on other things, like, I dunno, the rape investigation). Sadly I was not named in the SAF’s complaint.

In the blogosphere, Duke alum Ralph Luker reacts, while University Diaries links a Washingtonian Magazine story on a cheating scandal at the Landon School, one of the DC-area prep schools that serves as a feeder to the Duke lacrosse team. And, you can go read the original search warrant courtesy of The Smoking Gun (þ: UD and Alfie)—incidentally, the item taken from the house that stands out on the list (the K-Y jelly bottle) is the one thing that isn’t named as an object of the search at the beginning of the warrant.

Elsewhere, Amber Taylor dislikes appeals to conscience based on the alleged victim’s having male (or female) relatives, and Brendan Nyhan notes that, since the second “exotic dancer” has finally surfaced and talked to police, some inconsistencies between the accounts of the evening have emerged.

It’s also not entirely clear to me that the first 911 call, alleging the use of racial slurs by the partygoers, wasn’t made by one of the two women in question—most likely the woman who wasn’t allegedly raped—although it has been presented as being a call by two black women who happened to be passing by the 610 house on foot around the same time as the incident. Today’s Herald-Sun looks at this angle, which I’d been pondering on my own over the past two days or so, since I learned of the 911 calls. (þ: BN)

University Diaries provides a window into the preppy origins of many of the men’s lacrosse team members in the leafy green suburbs of Washington and the other northeastern corridor cities.

Meanwhile, everybody’s favorite poet, Duke president Richard Brodhead, somehow managed to defuse some of the on-campus tensions in his meeting with students this morning (much to my surprise) while up-for-reelection DA Mike Nifong continues to bask in the glow of free publicity as a ringleader of Righteous Townie Anger.

And, oblivious to it all, dozens of Duke students decided to spend the afternoon loitering on the rooftops and balconies of their overcrowded, overpriced, slumlord-owned rental properties along Buchanan Blvd, just a stones’ throw away from the site of the alleged rape, blissfully unaware that their neighbors, if they had their druthers, would have them all lined up and shot in a heartbeat.

If this account is true—and I have no reason to believe it isn’t—I think I’ll be putting a few bucks on extreme (negative) outliers on the IQ scale.

þ: UD, for alerting me to a piece I tuned out after experiencing information overload.

I just witnessed a camera man and some sort of technician chase a black female student (who clearly wanted no part of it) across the lawn in front of the Duke Chapel; I couldn’t tell at a distance whether this was a vain attempt at an interview or just an effort to collect some footage for later voiceovers.

In other good news for the university, we made A-1 in at least one edition of the New York Times today. Lucky us. Needless to say, it wasn’t because the womens’ basketball team beat UConn.

Nothing much new here, but since some of you seem to be coming here for news on the Duke men’s lacrosse rape allegations, there you go. The press conference itself was nothing earth-shattering; it was one of those deals (admittedly like most) where there was something for everybody who wanted to reinforce their preconceived notions.

More interesting perhaps is the team captains’ categorical denial of the charges in the face of DNA evidence. Since Duke students—even lacrosse players, by stereotype—aren’t stupid and presumably understand the rudiments of how DNA works, they’re either extreme outliers on the IQ scale or extremely confident that nothing happened. My money? As far away from this wager as possible.

The blaring headline on today’s Duke Chronicle is “Unrest hits Main West.” I hate to think how they’d report a riot.

Meanwhile, for those of you out in the real world beyond Duke, go read Timothy Burke’s response to the Kenyon debacle.

Update: Actual news on the rape allegations is here, including the not-very-shocking revelation that there are lacrosse team members who have faced alcohol-related charges in the past (your Claude Raines moment of the day) and the news that what really made the dancers run for the door wasn’t the alleged racial slur about the provenance of one of the players’ shirts but instead that “one of the men watching held up a broomstick and threatened to sexually assault the women,” presumably using said broomstick. (þ: UD)

The fun and excitement level of living in Trinity Park seems to be leaning more in the “excitement” direction lately—and not in a good way. The two big highlights: they found a dead guy in a ditch just across from East Friday morning, and a recent party at 610 Buchanan Blvd involving members of the men’s lacrosse team resulted in rape allegations against 3 unidentified team members and a few neighborhood folks seeming to cross the line from holding a vigil to becoming vigilantes—assembling outside private residences and hurling insults at the occupants doesn’t strike me as particularly productive behavior, although perhaps it is understandable given the bad blood between the university and wider community on a variety of issues. (Standard conflict-of-interest disclaimer: I have taught and am teaching members of said team at Duke; I have no idea if any of the students I have taught were involved in this alleged incident, or even at the party in question.)

More thoughts on the latter incident from University Diaries.

Update: See also Brendan Nyhan and the notorious dukeobsrvr .

I am now the proud owner of two tickets to see Death Cab For Cutie (with Franz Ferdinand) on April 7th at Cameron Indoor Stadium. Would that finding a date for the second ticket was so easy as getting the ticket in the first place…

Modern computer processors have this feature called “speculative execution,” in which they try to guess which code path is more likely to be executed, and actually go ahead and execute that code before seeing which path is taken. This is a perfectly sensible strategy; however, if the prediction is wrong, the computer has to “undo” all that work and take the other branch.

Today I engaged in a little speculative execution of my own by putting in the paperwork to teach my (hypothetical) research methods class in the fall in an Interactive Computer Classroom. It’s not a huge investment by any stretch of the imagination, but every little commitment edges me down the path of spending another year in Durham. And given the state of the job market these days (and perhaps my generally picky nature), the chance of a branch misprediction seems rather low at this point.

So long as they keep Veronica Mars on the air, I’m fine with the proposed merger of UPN and the WB into the oddly-named CW Network. I’d be happier, though, if it showed up in high definition.

Speaking of high def, Universal HD is just a week away from arriving on cable in Durham, which means Battlestar Galactica in all its high definition 1080i glory. Wee hee!

See, I knew there was an upside to not getting the job in Frozen Tundra country, it just took me a month to realize it. The concept that there’s a temperature below which it is too cold to snow, and that people in Wisconsin have empirical evidence of this fact, is truly frightening to me.

My power has briefly (i.e. about a second each time) cut out at least twice this morning, for absolutely no discernable reason I can figure out—the weather is unremarkable, if a little cold. Weird.

Louis Farrakhan came to town this week, and our illustrious mayor gave him the key to the city. Maybe I should have lived in Chapel Hill after all…

What I woke up to this morning:

The officer that responded said that mine was the fifth car with a broken rear window in recent days in the neighborhood; like in the other cases, nothing was taken from the car. So now my car looks like one of those mid-80s clunkers with a plastic bag covering the window—although it isn't rusted out or burning oil, so it doesn't quite fit in the ghetto yet.

The only real motivation I can think of: there were TiVo and POW-MIA stickers on that window. I doubt it was a ReplayTV owner, but I suppose it’s possible this could be some sort of idiotic anti-war statement by the Birkenstock brigade. Thank you, Cindy Sheehan!

This is my first ever entry in the OTB Sunday Drive, which seems oddly appropriate.

Monday’s Washington Post reports that conference negotiators are finally getting somewhere on the renewal of the federal transportation authorization bill, which expired 21 months ago. The reason for the sudden burst of progress: members of Congress are sick and tired of wrangling over the bill:

“I just want to get it all over with,” Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) said as final negotiations began Thursday.

At stake are around $290 billion in road, rail, and transit projects over the next six years (well, four years and three months, at this point). The same article also reports that the Senate may actually come up with a workable compromise on the energy bill. The stars must really be aligned this month or something…

Also on the roads beat, an interesting article on the trend toward building more toll roads recently appeared on Wired News. One such project is North Carolina’s proposed Triangle Parkway, an extension of the Durham Freeway south to the I-540 Western Wake Expressway through Research Triangle Park.

If you go to North Carolina, you’d probably expect you won’t see anything from Jackson there. If you did, you’d be wrong:

More photos from Duke and Durham are over in my Flickr photostream.

Well, I managed to get back from Durham OK today in more-or-less one piece. I don’t think I’m entirely conscious at the moment, since I had to get up at 6:15 Eastern to make my flight, but that’s OK. I think I have an apartment, but all the i’s and t’s aren’t properly dotted and crossed yet. Durham photos coming sometime soon. Last, but not least, huzzah and kudos to the incomparable Kelly (and Friday) for a ride back from the airport.

I spent today looking at more apartments than I really care to remember. I don’t know that I accomplished much, but I think the day at least let me narrow down my possibilities a bit.

Now if only I could get over the massive high-speed Internet withdrawal I’m suffering I’d be set—dragging my butt to various places with WiFi is a poor substitute for having my own access at the hotel.