READER J. SCOTT HARRIS ASKS “DOESN’T ANYBODY FACT CHECK AT THE NYT ANYMORE?” AND FORWARDS THIS LINK to a story on gay Republicans, which says:

As president, Mr. Bush has appointed several openly gay people, including James C. Hormel, the ambassador to Romania, to high-level jobs, and he has also declined to overturn executive orders issued by President Bill Clinton that bar discrimination against gays in federal employment and security clearances.

(Emphasis added.) Actually, Bill Clinton, not Bush, appointed Hormel to be Ambassador to Luxembourg not Romania. Romania does have an openly gay ambassador appointed by President Bush, but his name is Michael Guest. Can the folks at the Times not conceive that there might be multiple gay ambassadors?

Whatever else it suggests, this certainly suggests that things haven’t tightened up at the Times just yet.

UPDATE: Oh, and then there’s this bit of editorial/advertising crossover in tomorrow’s NYT magazine, which suggests that there aren’t enough sharp eyes there, either.

ANOTHER UPDAATE: 58, 68, Carnegie, Century, it’s all the same to the Times according to Marcia Oddi.

LINDA SEEBACH HAS A GOOD COLUMN ON THE BLOGOSPHERE:

This is an entire virtual superorganism evolving in Internet time right before our eyes, based on an unfiltered free trade in ideas. Its participants are far more engaged than the average newspaper reader. . . .

And the blogosphere is not limited by geography. At www.buzzmachine.com Jeff Jarvis harps on the importance of nurturing Web logs in Iraq, Iran and other places where the means of free expression have been severely restricted.

Thankfully, she overstates the number of emails I get per day. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten 1,000, though at the beginning of the war I got more than half that. Now, though, things are back to normal.

MATT WELCH WRITES:

When O.J. Simpson was ruled not guilty of murdering his wife, the United States discovered overnight the chasm of difference in perception between blacks (who found the verdict reasonable) and whites (who found it insane).

Something similar is going on with the fabrication scandals that have rocked The New York Times this month. Elite reporters and editors are reacting to the Jayson Blair and Rick Bragg revelations with sorrow and anxiety, while the rest of us proles revel in the spectacle of a haughty institution being humbled and mocked. . . .

Almost every newspaper that views the Times as a role model, on the other hand, is a local monopoly in a less liberal city. Chances are, it will equate success with such Timesian yardsticks as Pulitzer prizes, and (in the immortal words of Rick Bragg) the ability “to go get the dateline.”

All the more reason why the Times’ horrible month will be good for journalism — if it causes papers to reconsider their newsroom values and journalistic role models, old bad habits may receive a fresh round of scrutiny.

Indeed.

UPDATE: Orrin Judd writes:

So as the press now becomes Ouroboros, the beast that feeds on itself, you’ll pardon us if we crack open a Pabst, open a bag of Cheez-Waffles, and enjoy the spectacle. We feel like Christians getting to watch the Romans be fed to the lions.

Well, Pabst is the hip beer, nowadays.

OPEN-SOURCE GOVERNMENT: This is amusing:

WASHINGTON (CNN) – The Federal Communications Commission has received so many public comments on its Web sites regarding Monday’s vote on media ownership consolidation that the agency is having “problems” with its server, an FCC official said Friday.

And the messages aren’t just coming via e-mails. The official said the FCC is experiencing problems with their voice comment phone line, which has also been swamped.

The official said the agency is working to fix the problems.

The FCC is scheduled to vote Monday on proposed changes to its rules on multiple ownership of broadcast outlets. The changes are expected to be approved 3-2, with the backing of FCC Chairman Michael Powell. . . .

Opposition to relaxing the rules has brought together strange bedfellows like Common Cause, the National Rifle Association, the liberal National Organization for Women, and the conservative Family Research Council.

Maybe this proves Michael Powell’s point about the ability of alternative media to spread news — the Big Media have virtually blacked this out, but they’re still hearing from the people. On the other hand, it certainly proves my point about the need to defend the Internet from Big Media control. (Via Richard Bennett).

BLOGCRITICS has recovered from the outage and has a bunch of new posts. Check ’em out.

IN A DEVELOPMENT THAT MUST MAKE FUGITIVES EVERYWHERE NERVOUS, Eric Rudolph has been caught:

MURPHY, N.C., May 31 — Eric Rudolph, the longtime fugitive charged in the 1996 Olympic Park bombing and in attacks at an abortion clinic and a gay nightclub, was arrested early Saturday in the mountains of North Carolina, the Justice Department said. The FBI confirmed Rudolph’s identity through a fingerprint match, authorities said. . . .

Early Saturday, Murphy Police Officer Jeff Postell spotted a man behind the Save-A-Lot grocery who was rooting through trash and looked suspicious, officer James Pack said.

Postell was alone when he approached the man, and the man tried to run, but he stopped when Postell pointed his gun at him, Pack said. He said officers didn’t realize until they brought the man to the police station that it was Rudolph.

Obviously giving Rudolph credit for being smarter than he was, I figured that he had left Western North Carolina long ago, and had sympathizers planting the occasional false clues in the region. Well, I was wrong: apparently, he really was hiding out in the mountains just as advertised.

Some people might be surprised that he managed to hide out for so long without being found — but if you’ve ever spent any time in that area, which is astonishingly wild and empty, you wouldn’t be surprised at all.

I hope they throw the book at him.

CAREY ROBERTS LOOKS AT THE ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS to find more spinning at The New York Times.

PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH GOES TO THE TRANSCRIPT on a Paul Wolfowitz interview that has gotten some attention, and discovers that — surprise! — there’s journalistic spinning going on again.

This whole online-transcript thing is very revealing. And what it reveals about journalism isn’t that pretty.

UPDATE: More fact-checking. Unfogged has read the transcript, too, and says:

I just read the transcript of the entire interview and, although I’m as happy as the next guy to see this administration come to grief, I have to say that Wolfowitz doesn’t say what’s being alleged, and in fact seems rather honest about the deliberations leading to war.

So which version will we hear on the Sunday talk shows? The one reflected in the transcripts, or the one in the misleading press accounts? Unfogged adds:

Two final points. I haven’t read the Vanity Fair piece, but based on this interview, I have to say that Sam Tannenhaus does a fantastic job. Read the entire transcript and you can see that this is a guy who’s really done his homework, asks smart questions and then gets out of the way of the answer. This is a peculiar firestorm in that the original journalist seems to have done a fine job but the coverage of the coverage still manages to be careless.

Finally, there’s been plenty of debate about neo-conservative Straussians running the government. But Wolfowitz gives a fascinating account of his filial and academic lineage and puts paid to any notions of “Straussians” running the government. (Do read the whole thing.)

Yes, do. Here’s the transcript link. As I said earlier, this business of posting online transcripts is really going to do a lot to keep people honest. Now if we just had PunditWatch back, to keep the talk shows honest!

ANOTHER UPDATE: This story has hit the news, (it’s addressed here, too). Excerpt from the second:

What gives with this Vanity Fair interview, then?

What gives is that Tanenhaus has mischaracterized Wolfowitz’s remarks, that Vanity Fair’s publicists have mischaracterized Tanenhaus’s mischaracterization, and that Bush administration critics are now indulging in an orgy of righteous indignation that is dishonest in triplicate.

But fact-checked, on the Internet.

HERE’S A NICE WRITEUP of the Tennessee Digital Freedom Network’s defeat of some really unpleasant Internet legislation.

LOOTING UPDATE: Okay, I’m convinced. There should have been more troops policing this uncivilized, anarchical city.

GEORGE GALLOWAY’S DUMBER BROTHER?

A leftwing Labour MP, who praised the “sacrifice” of IRA bombers, faces the threat of expulsion from the party for his outburst, which was widely condemned yesterday.

John McDonnell, a member of the Socialist Campaign Group, who unsuccessfully tried to unseat the prime minister during the Iraq crisis, horrified the Labour leadership by declaring that it was time to honour people such as Bobby Sands, the IRA hunger striker who died in 1981 during his prison protest.

At a republicans’ meeting this week in London, the MP for Hayes and Harlington said: “We are in the last stage of imperialist intervention in Ireland and only armed struggle has stopped it. It is about time we started honouring those people involved in that armed struggle. It was the bombs and bullets and sacrifices made by the likes of Bobby Sands that brought Britain to the negotiating table. The peace we have now is due to the unilateral action of the IRA.”

When will these people learn that it’s bad form to root for the other side?

Of course, to them it’s not the other side, is it?

JOE BIDEN WANTS TO KILL YOUR CHILD!

For years volunteer groups like DanceSafe have been passing out fliers at raves and night clubs with advice on how to avoid dangerous overheating — drink water, take frequent breaks, abstain from alcohol (which compounds dehydration). Event sponsors have helped by providing bottles of water and ventilated “chill out” rooms, measures intended not to encourage drug use but to reduce drug-related harm. Under the new law, however, such sensible precautions could be seen as evidence that the host or owner knew guests would be using drugs, exposing him to $250,000 or more in civil penalties, a criminal fine of up to $500,000, and a prison sentence of up to 20 years. . . .

In addition, the anti-rave legislation is likely to push events toward clandestine sites, where conditions will be less safe, supervision less responsible and emergency help less prompt. At remote locations, drug reactions that might otherwise have been quickly treated could turn deadly.

Well, he doesn’t want to. He just didn’t mind if that was an (obvious) consequence of the stupid RAVE Act that he sponsored and snuck through rather sleazily earlier this year. Neither did Orrin Hatch or its other backers.

UPDATE: Virginia Postrel observes:

[T]his law, a gift to the nation from Joe Biden and Pat Leahy, is the sort of thing that explains why libertarians who engage in politics lean toward the Republican party. We all know the problems of the social right, but Democrats are largely useless, and often awful, on the issues where their supposed respect for tolerance and civil liberties might make a difference.

Yes, it was the abandonment of traditional Democratic positions on civil liberties during the Clinton Administration (especially with the 1994 and 1996 crime bills) that caused me to lose faith in the Democratic party.

I’VE GOT MORE ON SPACE over at GlennReynolds.com — and be sure you follow the links to the Phil Chapman article.

BOTH DONALD LUSKIN AND LYNXX PHERRETT HAVE GONE TO THE TRANSCRIPTS on the Financial Times budget-deficit story that everyone’s been talking about. They agree with the Powerline post I mentioned above that the story is bogus. The sad thing is that this is likely to make reporters less willing to post interview transcripts, because then they can’t get away with anything.

The good news is that when they do, they can’t get away with anything. And post-Blair, I’d like to see this made standard practice. Server space is cheap.

Meanwhile the question is, will this deconstruction make the Sunday talk shows? Or are they too far behind the Blogosphere curve?

UPDATE: Billy Beck writes:

There, you can read a transcript of a Financial Times interview with one Kent Smetters who, as an assistant deputy Treasury secretary for economic policy, led the work on the study that’s got everyone’s asses up in flaming boils. And if you follow my advice, dear readers, and go see what he has to say, then you will discover that, of the $44 trillion (yes, that’s right) that everybody is fainting about, more than $36 trillion is devoted to Medicare.

Do you understand this?

Thirty-six trillion dollars of these deficits projected into the future are about the degree to which America has achieved socialized medicine, and only that. . . .

The flap going on out there is about the Bush tax cuts, and how they’re going to wreck everything, and I want you to watch and see how many people — if any at all — are alert enough to grasp what the real nut of this is. They are fretting their little nerves over $350 billion in tax cuts in the face of $44 trillion in projected deficits, and the matter of $36 trillion of that going to Medicare alone is somehow getting past them.

Read it all, and don’t miss the Zappa quote.

SUMAN PALIT NOTICES UNILATERALISM in action.

I THINK THAT ONE OF THEM WAS REALLY KEN LAYNE: He digs that whole anonymous-busking thing.

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE OIL FOR THESE GUYS:

The ghost of France’s first Socialist president, François Mitterrand, has come back to haunt France’s biggest postwar sleaze trial – in the form of an extraordinary tale involving his golfing partner, a luxury chateau on the outskirts of Paris, and the sum of £2.6m.

A total of 37 defendants are on trial in Paris over claims that £120m was siphoned from the accounts of the oil giant Elf during the late 1980s and early 1990s, much of it allegedly being paid out in illegal business commissions to various African leaders and their families, and to political parties.

The trial is, in reality, that of a whole system of state-sponsored corruption that flourished in France for decades: presidents and ministers regarded the country’s numerous state-owned multinationals not just as tools of foreign policy, but as a convenient source of cash to keep friends happy and foes quiet.

Hmm. Golfing partner, eh? I wonder if the back nine is playable. . . . Nah, sadly it’s nothing that amusing. Just your usual socialist oil-money-for-chateau scandal.

FORMER CONGRESSMAN BOB WALKER WRITES:

At my Washington office a few weeks ago, I met with a visiting Japanese parliamentarian who specializes in science and technology issues. I related to him my belief that the Chinese would be on the moon within a decade with a declaration of permanent occupation. He disagreed. He smiled and said my conclusion was accurate but my timing was off. In his view, the Chinese would be on the moon within three to four years.

Regardless of who is right about the time frame, and I still believe that even a decade is ambitious, the fact remains that the Chinese are devoting resources and gearing up to do something that we are no longer technologically capable of achieving in the immediate future. We went to the moon, planted our flag, gathered samples, took credit for an amazing achievement in human history and then abandoned the effort. The space technology available to us today could not be used to replicate what we did 35 years ago.

I haven’t stayed in touch, but I knew Walker pretty well when he was on the House space subcommittee, and I was doing pro bono lobbying for the National Space Society. He’s a smart and thoughtful guy. Read the whole thing, which is really about what China’s ambitions in space mean to the United States in a wide variety of areas.

I just sent off a blog entry on space to the MSNBC folks, though it was unfortunately before I saw this item. But stay tuned. (Via Pathetic Earthlings).

JEFF JARVIS HAS BLOGGER’S ELBOW from too much time at the computer. Me too. I also have blogger’s neck, blogger’s shoulder, and blogger’s lower back. So far, I’ve avoided blogger’s wrist and blogger’s big toe, but it’s only a matter of time.

Hey, we’re suffering for your amusement, here. . .. .

A REPORTER COMES OUT OF THE CLOSET after “passing” for years. It’s a must-read. Excerpt:

The sad fact of the matter is that many progressive Democrats are intolerant and mean toward those with whom they disagree politically. Their behavior doesn’t hurt so much as amuse. I’ve been sitting at their dinner parties for two decades now, sipping Chardonnay, munching on salmon steaks, and listening to self-professed progressive thinkers talk like bigots. It makes me chuckle to think that, on average, even here in the mid-South, I probably hear 10 bigoted comments about Republicans for each time I am exposed to the “n” word. To be sure, some perspective is needed. Clearly, the many minorities in Nashville and elsewhere whose lives are daily and cruelly affected by bigotry have it worse than your average golf-playing Republican.

The profile of people who use the term “Republican” in a bigoted fashion tends to be fairly straightforward: Educated, intellectually gifted and generally thoughtful in their speech. They are the very people I sat next to in newsrooms in New York, Chicago, Tokyo and Johannesburg. They are my friends and neighbors. They are academics, lawyers, bankers and stay-at-home moms—decent, kind and sensitive people, for the most part.

But they are, and remain bigots.

Read the rest.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

Bigot is a very strong word, sir. And I would thank you to qualify your tacit endorsement of this man’s piece. I consider myself a progressive, and yes, I have little patience for the POLICIES of Republicans. So, I’m intolerant. So what. The Republican party has given and continues to give shelter to the most offensive sociopaths in American society: White Supremicists, Anti-Semites, Homophobes, Fundamentalist Christians, Pat Buchanan. This is largely why we’re so bigoted towards Republicans. If you want to label Progressives bigots, fine, I’ll accept that title. Be aware that your sitting in a glass house, and progressives aren’t in short supply of stones either.

P.S. This sort of finger-pointing reflects terribly on you, as someone whose intelligence I would like to respect.

But people are always throwing stones at me. Well, verbal ones, anyway, which don’t actually break my bones or anything.

But, you know, the lumping together of fundamentalist Christians — with whom I disaagree on a lot of things, but who are a rather diverse crowd — with white supremacists and anti-semites (actually, a lot of fundamentalists are pretty pro-semitic — remember that whole “evangelicals for Israel are running the White House” meme that people have been peddling?) seems pretty bigoted itself.

So I think the guy has a point. Any kind of speech that the hearer might find “offensive” is un-PC, unless, of course, it’s directed at those who hold un-PC beliefs. If that’s not bigotry, it’s hypocrisy of the first order, and mean-spirited hypocrisy at that. Which is close enough for me.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Geoff Matthews emails:

The funniest thing about this reader’s e-mail condemning Republicans because of their support for Buchanan is that Pat Buchanan left the Republican Party for the Reform Party (and promptly turned it into an irrelevant organization).

Heh. And Buchanan supporters are nothing if not diverse — at least as long as he’s got Justin Raimondo!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Damon Chetson observes:

Your email correspondent’s email – “Bigot is a very strong word, sir.”

Bigot is indeed a strong word. So why do some Democrats use it to describe people who simply oppose affirmative action?

Because that’s different.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Tony Adragna says it’s about partisanship and points out that there’s plenty of vitriol from the right. And that’s true — but it’s sort of like responding to the Bill Bennett gambling story by noting that Democrats, gamble, too. Bennett set himself up as a moral arbiter, which made people see what he did as hypocritical.

In the same way, Stern is remarking on how PC types who make a fetish of avoiding name-calling and stereotyping are in fact happy to do just that. Which makes them seem, well, hypocritical. And just as Bennett seemed to a lot of people to be immoral by the standards that he professed, so too do these people seem bigoted by the standards that they profess. When Bennett said “but I never condemned gambling,” it was about as persuasive as when these people say “but we never condemned this sort of thing when it was aimed at Republicans!”

BEEN BUSY. Back later.

The execution of the children was the event that established the character of the regime. Yes, yes, regicide was often accompanied by such atrocities, but this was the 20th century. Why, this was the birth of Scientific Socialism. There is nothing so powerful as an idea has time has come!

But just in case it’s not that powerful yet, let’s shoot the little girls.

JIM DUNNIGAN WRITES on efforts to rebuild Iraq’s army. Some interesting observations, including this one:

Which brings us to some serious cultural differences. Arab armies rarely get the kind of constructive competition you see in Western armies. That is because, for Arab soldiers, it is seen as safer to not compete, so no one is “disgraced” by losing, than it is to compete and improve everyone’s skills. Of course there is competition in Arab society, in business as well as sports. But the concept of “losing gracefully” is not as readily accepted as it is in the West. This can be overcome. Arab officers attending American military schools over the last half century learned to live with the competition, even if it is a bit of a shock at first. But there will be some resistance to introducing these “barbarian” customs on the entire Iraqi army. No doubt general Abizaid will have to give his “Do you want to be part of a kick ass army” speech many times to keep things moving along.

The competition means officers, NCOs and troops will be expected to take the initiative. This has traditionally been discouraged. Initiative can lead to failure, or unexpected situations. Arabs prefer to avoid both. The new Iraqi army will have to learn to live with it.

Read the whole thing. Of course, in Saddam’s army the losers would have been fed into a shredder, feet-first, which probably also discouraged proposals for competition.

WELL, THIS ACTUALLY IS NEWS:

The Australian Federal Police (AFP) today ruled out terrorism as the motivation for the alleged attempted hijacking of a Qantas flight to Launceston.

Federal agent Graham Ashton said the man charged over yesterday’s incident, David Mark Robinson, was an Australian national, had no Islamic background, and appeared to be acting alone.

Then, of course, there’s the inevitable next bit:

Meanwhile, Robinson was today described by his former boss as an affable, hard working employee. Robinson resigned from Ipex Computers in Melbourne in April.

Ipex company director David Cohen said Robinson had worked as a senior engineer with the company – located in Robinson’s home suburb of East Bentleigh – for six years.

He said staff at the 300-strong firm had been shocked by today’s front page news about their former colleague they knew as “Mark”.

“He was affable, very likeable, passionate about his customers … generally a very nice guy,” Mr Cohen told AAP.

“So are you surprised he shot Buckwheat?”

“Oh, no, it’s all he ever talked about.”

JOSH MARSHALL continues to be all over the Texas / Homeland Security story. That’s the nice thing about a blog: it lets you indulge in the kind of monomania that a newspaper seldom can, unless it’s about Augusta National. And when people do that, it’s often useful.