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Want to ride on a vintage DC-3 in England? Hurry because Samizdata says the EU is about to shut them down.
… There are no exceptions for classic aircraft and thus after July 16th the soulless gray men will make the European world that much more like themselves. …
British blogger posts on the folks leaving his country.
… If things don’t change Britain will continue to lose far too many of its best and brightest.
Mark Steyn on the Clinton dénouement. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.
On the day that Margaret Thatcher was toppled by her own party, I ran into an old friend, a hard-core leftist playwright, Marxist to the core, who wasn’t as happy as he should have been. He jabbed me in the chest. “You bastards on the right!” he fumed. “You wouldn’t even let us be the ones to drive the stake through her heart.”
I’m sure in America’s Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy there are similar mixed feelings. The Clintons have met their Waterloo but it’s not some doughty conservative warrior who gets to play Duke of Wellington, only some freshman pap peddler of liberal boilerplate whom no one had heard of the day before yesterday. …
Charles Krauthammer examines the Dem desire for defeat in Iraq.
… Despite all the progress, military and political, the Democrats remain unwavering in their commitment to withdrawal on an artificial timetable that inherently jeopardizes our “very real chance that Iraq will emerge as a secure and stable state.”
Why? Imagine the transformative effects in the region, and indeed in the entire Muslim world, of achieving a secure and stable Iraq, friendly to the United States and victorious over al-Qaeda. Are the Democrats so intent on denying George Bush retroactive vindication for a war they insist is his that they would deny their own country a now-achievable victory?
There’s been a lot of reaction to the NY Times McCain hit piece. We’ll start out with reaction from the left. Seattle Post-Intelligencer editor first.
I chose not to run the New York Times story on John McCain in Thursday’s P-I, even though it was available to us on the New York Times News Service. I thought I’d take a shot at explaining why.
To me, the story had serious flaws. It did not convincingly make the case that McCain either had an affair with a lobbyist, or was improperly influenced by her. It used a raft of unnamed sources to assert that members of McCain’s campaign staff — not this campaign but his campaign eight years ago — were concerned about the amount of time McCain was spending with the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman. They were worried about the appearance of a close bond between the two of them.
Then it went even further back, re-establishing the difficulties McCain had with his close association to savings-and-loan criminal Charles Keating. It didn’t get back to the thing that (of course) the rest of the media immediately pounced on — McCain, Iseman and the nature of their relationship — until very deep in the story. And when the story did get back there, it didn’t do so with anything approaching convincing material. …
LA Times blog posts on the pass taken by the Boston Globe.
… The Boston Globe, which is wholly owned by the New York Times, chose not to publish the article produced by its parent company’s reporters.
Instead, the Globe published a version of the same story written by the competing Washington Post staff. That version focused almost exclusively on the pervasive presence of lobbyists in McCain’s campaign and did not mention the sexual relationship that the Times article hinted at but did not describe or document and which the senator and lobbyist have denied.
On Thursday the Globe’s website, Boston.com, did provide a link to the Times story on the Times’ website. But such a stark editorial decision by a major newspaper raises suspicions that even the Globe’s editors, New York Times Co. employees all, had their own concerns about the content of their parent company’s story. …
Sen. John McCain has a legitimate gripe. A New York Times story that highlighted his relationship with lobbyist Vicki Iseman was unfair. It implied more than it delivered.
The implication, if true, would be devastating to any politician – but especially to McCain, an Arizona Republican who has styled himself as a Mr. Clean reformer.
The fact that some of McCain’s advisers were “convinced the relationship had become romantic” in 2000 is not the same as them having evidence of infidelity. It is a suspicion, otherwise known as gossip. If these anonymous sources did have persuasive evidence of such misconduct, they either failed to provide it to the newspaper – or the newspaper declined to offer it to its readers. …
… Regrettably, the Times left itself and our profession open to … allegations of bias by publishing soft-focus evidence of what would be an outrageous breach of public trust.
Enough with the libs, now some of our favorites post on the Times. American Thinker first.
The decline and fall of the New York Times accelerates, with Thursday’s anonymously-sourced hit piece on John McCain. I will leave to others like Rick Moran and Ed Morrissey the debunking of the story itself. What concerns me is the manner in which the CEO of the organization has jettisoned standards that once would have ruled out publication of such material.
“A fish rots from the head” goes an old Chinese saying. If it is true, as reported, that the story was controversial within the Times, and only ran because the paper feared that The New Republic would publicize the office politics at the Times over publication of the story, the Sulzberger’s responsibility is all the greater. His inability to set clear guidelines, hire capable editors, and maintain newsroom harmony and discipline was about to be exposed to the public. To protect his hind quarters, he went with a disastrously bad story. …
Two posts from Power Line.
The New York Times’ story about John McCain’s alleged involvement with a female lobbyist brings to mind its infamous coverage of the alleged rape by members of the Duke lacrosse team. As Stuart Taylor recounted in his book on that sorry affair, Until Proven Innocent, the Times reporter who initially covered the story, Joe Drape, quickly learned facts that strongly tended to exonerate the accused players. The Times, however, refused to print his material and soon replaced him with Duff Wilson who took a pro-prosecution slant, thereby enabling the Times to peddle its preferred narrative of white privilege and racial oppression.
In McCain’s case, the Times received “exculpatory†material from his campaign which documented instances in which McCain did not take positions congenial to the female lobbyist in question. The Times refused to use or acknowledge that material, selecting only instances that enabled it to pursue its preferred narrative that McCain was unduly influenced by that lobbyist. …
Abe Greenwald from Contentions.
… The boomerang effect of this non-scandal and the way it has redistributed sympathies recalls another recent phenomenon that unfolded this primary season: the Clintons’ failed exploitation of identity Democrats. Hillary decided that winning the Democratic nomination was a crude matter of mathematics. Getting all of the white vote and most of the Hispanic vote would do the trick, and playing on those groups’ prejudices would secure their support. She and Bill intentionally isolated the white vote, pandering to a section of the electorate they thought would somehow fear Obama’s nomination. Not only did she begin to lose support amongst blacks (which presumably, she thought she could survive), but whites and Hispanics saw the effort for what it was and were repelled. In two months time, the Clintons gave Obama heaping chunks of every demographic group. …
And, of course, the Captain.
… So what do we have? We have salacious but completely unsubstantiated gossip, combined with a rehash of at least one old Times smear, placed on the front page of what used to be the premiere newspaper in America. And what exactly does that do for the Times’ credibility for the rest of this electoral cycle? They can’t run anything on McCain now without it being seen in the context of what the Times itself calls a “war” between the Times and McCain. Keller and company declared war on McCain yesterday, and it fired a bazooka of effluvium as its opening salvo. They’ve marginalized themselves for the next nine months.
American Spectator looks at smoking bans in “Serfdom by a Thousand Cuts.”
… smokers are not without hope. Less than a year after Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich signed the smoking ban, and gushed, “This law will save lives. The realities are that smoking kills people…My only regret is that this took so long,” the news out of Springfield is that the owners of taverns, casinos and strip clubs may soon be able to buy a “special license” that will allow their patrons to smoke inside.
So all of that talk about saving lives from second-hand smoke was all just a bunch of…second-hand smoke. Or was it just another Chicago-style scam so the state could sell expensive smoking licenses to bowling alley operators? The fact is officeholders thought the smoking ban was a terrific idea — or at least an efficient way to get those annoying single-issue pressure groupees out of their offices and off their backs — until they discovered that Illinois would have a budget shortfall of $750 million next year, and learned how much tax revenue the state made off its smokers, boozers, gamblers and stripshow devotees.
Illinois bar owners report that revenue is down in some cases by 50 percent. Casinos report that the ban has caused a 17 percent drop in gaming. I haven’t spoken to any strippers recently, but I bet they are feeling the pinch too. …
Neal Boortz on all the climate bureaucrats in San Francisco.
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has decided that his city is not doing enough to combat climate change. So what is his solution? More government! Not only more government, but a new government bureaucrat will be added to the payroll in San Francisco. Looking for a job? San Francisco’s Director of Climate Protection Initiatives will make a generous $160,000 a year. Not bad for a government bureaucrat dedicated to hack science and a phony cause.
Wait .. there’s more. Newsom could, perhaps, get away with this new position … if he didn’t already have 25 employees on the city’s roster that are dedicated to “climate issues.” …