FriendFeed: Also: Biggest risk …

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Also: Biggest risk of prosecuting terrorists in civilian courts is not too much fairness to terrorists, but too little fairness for everyone else: erosion of rights due to courts setting bad precedents on horrible facts (e.g., the facts of 9/11). Best argument against KSM prosecution is a civil libertarian one, not a chest-pounding anti-terror one.

FriendFeed: Conservatives, please note: …

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Conservatives, please note: prosecuting terrorists after they act does NOT mean we’re returning to a purely law-enforcement-based approach to terrorism. The principal problem with the “law-enforcement-based” mentality is the difficulty of taking adequate preventative (before-the-fact) measures. That’s a separate issue from a KSM prosecution.

Mid-major madness: Pioneers-Panthers

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College basketball got underway with its usual whimper on Monday, but Friday is the day things really get started, what with 125 games involving Division I teams happening all around the country. And I’ll be going to one of them — a pretty decent mid-major showdown, right here in Denver.

Northern Iowa, defending champion of the Missouri Valley Conference, is coming to town to face the Denver Pioneers, picked to finish second in the Sun Belt’s West Division. And Becky, amazing wife that she is, has agreed to let me go, even though it means she’ll have an extra couple of hours of “evening duty” with the girls at the tail end of an exhausting week. (Have I mentioned lately that I love Becky?)

UNI returns all five starters from last year’s NCAA Tournament team, so it’s no surprise that big things are expected of them. The Panthers rank fourth in College Insider’s “Mid-Major Top 25,” behind only Butler, Gonzaga and Siena. SI’s Seth Davis writes that Northern Iowa is “leading a resurgence in the Missouri Valley Conference,” and says they’re one of “nearly a dozen…mid-majors [who] are beginning the season with legitimate hopes of reaching the tournament’s second weekend.” ESPN’s Fran Fraschilla opines similarly:

Last season, the Panthers came out of nowhere — actually Cedar Falls — to win the Missouri Valley Conference and a school-record 23 games before falling to Purdue 61-56 in the NCAA tournament. They did it playing fundamentally sound basketball, shooting 75 percent from the free throw line while turning the ball over only 12 times per game. The great news for coach Ben Jacobson is that all five starters and 92 percent of the team’s scoring return. The uniqueness of this team is there is no one star player. Adam Koch is a 6-foot-8, 245-pound workhorse inside, and the Panthers’ backcourt of Ali Farokhmanesh and Kwadzo Ahelegbe is rock solid. This is a team capable of getting to the Sweet 16.

As for Denver, nobody’s talking about a Sweet 16 run — the Pioneers, after all, have never even been to the NCAA Tournament — but they, too, return all of their starters, and there’s a lot of optimism for this season. This is something of a novelty: DU has been pretty bad in recent years, losing 43 straight road games from 2006-2009 and going 4-25, 11-19, and 15-16 in the last three seasons. But note the trend: the Pioneers have been steadily improving since their nadir in 2006-07, after which former coach Terry Carroll was fired and former Air Force and Princeton coach Joe Scott was hired. The Pioneers won their last two road games of 2008-09, and this is supposed to be their breakout season, or so the thinking goes.

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