APPARENTLY, IT’S DIFFICULT TO GET AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL MOORE — even when you try really hard.

Go figure.

UPDATE: Reader Robert Racansky points out that “four years ago Michael Moore had this guy arrested.”

And, of course, Moore has admitted to, ahem, counterfactual material in Bowling for Columbine, though Spinsanity is unimpressed with his overall honesty.

GEITNER SIMMONS HAS A NICE POST on poverty and the Third World.

THE OTHER REASON (besides power outages) that I’ve been blogging less this weekend is Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver — which is also the subject of an interesting collaborative annotation project here.

JEFF JARVIS IS UNIMPRESSED with Burger King’s new low-fat sandwich. It’s awful. And so small!

DAVID BROOKS WRITES ON THE CRUSHING OF DIVERSITY ON CAMPUSES. Juan Non-Volokh agrees:

When I was an undergraduate at Yale, I had several long discussions with my senior essay advisor about whether to pursue my PhD. My advisor, who was himself quite liberal, cautioned against it, largely because of my emerging, right-of-center political views. As he described it, succeeding in the liberal arts academy is tough enough as it is without the added burden of holding unpopular views. To illustrate the risk, he noted that one of his colleagues on the graduate admissions committee explicitly blackballed each and every candidate who had ever received financial support (scholarships, fellowships, etc.) from the John M. Olin Foundation because, his colleague insisted, the Olin Foundation only funded people who thought like they did, and Yale did not want any graduate students who thought that way. If I truly wanted to be an academic, he counseled, I was better off going to law school.

Anything but that! Follow the links in the Volokh post for more comments on Brooks’ column.

UPDATE: David Adesnik agrees with Jacob T. Levy (quoted in the Brooks piece, in case you didn’t follow the link) that this isn’t such a big deal.

Since the piece is about arts and sciences hiring, I couldn’t say, and I imagine that it varies a lot from institution to institution. Hiring at my school is pretty non-ideological, and the committees generally get along pretty well. But then, we’re a pretty collegial faculty, and plenty of others, er, aren’t.

And read this, too.

UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg comments.

QUAGMIRE IN KNOXVILLE: The power was out this afternoon. It’s back on now.

EVERYBODY is getting into the Iraq-media-criticism game:

Bishop Abouna, a Chaldean Catholic, told the Catholic Herald in London that the situation in Iraq is steadily improving rather than descending into a morass resembling the Vietnam War, as often depicted by media outlets.

“It’s getting better but still there are many problems,” Bishop Abouna said. “The first problem is that they need security, then they need water and electricity — and all these things are getting better.”

“The media are exaggerating a lot of things. They should be realistic about the situation in Iraq. Newspapers and television are saying a lot of things that aren’t true. When they go there they can see everything (is changing),” he said.

It’s officially a trend now.

HOSSEIN DERAKSHAN has a post on what weblogs can do for Iran.

RED HERRING IS BACK. Well, sort of.

HERE IT IS, a major holiday, and I almost missed it!

UPDATE: A reader emails:

Glen:
Can’t believe you still celebrate this overly-commercialized holiday. Ever since Bush, Cheney and their bloodsucking crew took over this country, this holiday has been turned into nothing but another day for Big Cooking Oil and Big Corn to rape the public.

Wasn’t like that during the Clinton years. Those were the days when corn dogs were real; and big, too.

Bush-Cheney and corn dogs is just a way now to distract the public from the failed policies of the administration. Corn dogs and circus, that’s what it is.

But you can get them with mustard! Gulden’s!

DR. MANHATTAN offers a eulogy for Edward Said:

I’d argue that few if any intellectuals of his generation can truly be said to have been more devoted to “gods that fail.” Said spent much of the 1970s and 1980s advocating for a two-state solution for the Israelis and Palestinians. But when faced with the possibility that such a solution might actually be possible, Said became a fierce enemy of the concept and the means of its realization. Rather than agitating for a way to make the Oslo Accords better, he denounced Yasser Arafat as a dictator and a sellout. (The “dictator” part was certainly true, but Said’s sudden discovery of those tendencies after a long history as an Arafat adviser does not speak well of his powers of observance.) Rather than trying to work against Arafat to build a better Palestinian society during the Oslo years, he became a leader of the intellectual resistance to the whole two-state enterprise. His proposal was a “secular, binational state” – an idea that only makes sense in the ivory tower. It is well known that the Palestinians supported Yasser Arafat’s refusal to accept the Palestinian state offered at Camp David, believing they could get all of Israel. They were encouraged in this hope by intellectuals such as Said.

Read the whole thing.

CHICAGO TRIBUNE BLOGGER ERIC ZORN weighs in on the Bee blog brouhaha:

In reality, what needs to emerge here if the j-blog isn’t going to die at birth, is an understanding on the part of editors and readers that, procedurally, a blog is much more like an appearance on a TV panel program or talk-radio show than it is a fully sanctioned, completely vetted declaration in cold type.

My fellow columnists and I frequently appear on radio and television and offer live (and in many cases broadcast on the internet), unedited statements under the color of our publications. Several Tribune staffers even have their own radio shows. We give speeches. We respond to e-mail and letters in writing. We give interviews to the New York Times.

And almost never is the substance and wording of such communication approved in advance by minders or editors.

Yep.

IS THE SECRET SERVICE RESTRICTING ANTI-BUSH PROTESTS? Read this post by Eugene Volokh. And scroll up for more.

“TWENTY QUESTIONS THE MEDIA WILL NOT ASK ABOUT IRAQ:”

1. Where is all the money from the UN’s Oil for Food Program?

2. How many people have now lived at least six months longer than they would have under Saddam?

3. How many civilians were really killed in the major combat portion of the war?

4. How many civilians have been killed since the end of major combat?

5. How unreliable is the Iraqi electric distribution system in comparison to, say, the Washington, D.C., area system?

You’ll have to follow the link to see the rest. I’d like to see question #1 answered. And I’d like to see Kofi Annan face some close and careful questioning on the topic.

DAVID NISHIMURA POINTS OUT that the French are now questioning themselves. As they should. I like it that Chirac’s handling of the Iraq matter is being called a “diplomatic Agincourt.”

PAUL JOHNSON WRITES ON THE FRENCH HEAT DEATH WAVE and related topics:

One thing history teaches, over and over again, is that there are no shortcuts. Human societies advance the hard way; there is no alternative. Communism promised Utopia on Earth. After three-quarters of a century of unparalleled sufferings, the Soviet Union collapsed in privation and misery, leaving massive Russia with an economy no bigger than tiny Holland’s. We are now watching the spectacle of another experiment in hedonism, the European Union, as it learns the grim facts of life.

Meanwhile the latest total is 19,000 deaths in Europe, 14,802 in France, which Johnson identifies as the source of the EU’s governing philosophy.

CHINESE PLANS FOR A MANNED SPACE PROGRAM continue to advance.

HERE’S ANOTHER PIECE ON MEDIA REPORTING IN IRAQ (“More of the media should embed themselves with the Iraqi people outside the Sunni Triangle, rather than inside the Baghdad bunker”), and here’s another firsthand report from the troops hitting the mainstream media. I think we have a trend, here.

Meanwhile Jay Rosen gets it right:

In press think, journalists choose the watchdog who growls too much over the cheerleader with plastic smile, and they believe these to be the relevant choices. . . .

Maybe the complaint is not with covering the problems; it’s the narrow range of problems seen in the news. Maybe you’re not missing the positive note so much as proper warning signals about what could go wrong, if we’re not alert. Preventative journalism, (one possible alternative) talks openly about problems; it also has tacit confidence they can be solved, which is a democratic attitude.

I don’t think the press is too negative. But it is at times too unimaginative to tell me what’s going on. Personally, I want to know about problems on the ground in Iraq, a country my country has occupied; and if it takes relentless problem-scouting by special ops in the press, I want that too. But relentless problem-solving is what’s needed on the ground and in the atmosphere of Iraq. This much we know. There’s a big story in wait out there, but journalists do not necessarily know how to tell it.

Or at least, care enough to do so. But that seems to be changing. And I agree, I don’t want cheerleading. But fake-toughness is just as phony as a plastic smile.

IF IT CAN’T BE FIXED WITH DUCT TAPE, it can’t be fixed.

RANDY BARNETT looks at the swift passage of do-not-call legislation and asks what happened to “gridlock?”

Perhaps genuinely popular legislation is not so hard to pass after all? Perhaps the other stuff is harder to enact because significant segments of the population oppose them?

Questions worth asking.

UPDATE: And Ernest Svenson was asking them over a year ago. And invoking Father Guido Sarducci!

HERE’S A USA TODAY STORY on the explosion of consumerism and entrepreneurialism in Iraq.

Virginia Postrel comments: “TVs, refrigerators, and air conditioners–Anna Quindlen won’t like this news.”

Boo freakin’ hoo, as they say. Here’s the really good news from the story:

Hassan al-Dinwani, 53, owner of al-Yussir Trading Shops in Baghdad’s Karada neighborhood, says one of his new customers was a policeman. ”This was a surprise to me,” he says. In the past, officers couldn’t buy goods at his shop because their salaries were too low.

Iraqi police Lt. Raad Rasheed says his salary is now the equivalent of $275 a month, up from $25 before the war. ”My family is happy,” he says. ”I am also more focused on my job because I no longer have to worry about money.”

Underpaid police and functionaries, and the resultant corruption — many literally can’t feed their families without income from bribes — are a blight on much of the world. Sounds like this isn’t the case in Iraq.

AL QAEDA IS WORRIED ABOUT INFILTRATORS and engaging in mole hunts. They’re also (scroll up) facing problems in Yemen. Heh. All from Rantburg, a site that’s chock-full of interesting intelligence.

CONTENT ANALYSIS: “BBC reporters seemed much more sceptical about Coalition claims than they were about what the Iraqis were telling them.”

You don’t say.

BIG EARTHQUAKE IN JAPAN: Not much news yet.

“WE’VE UNDOUBTEDLY LOST SOME OF OUR AUDIENCE, to Web sites that specialize in politically tinted news.”