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Robert Tracinski writes for Real Clear Politics on the coming war with Iran.
For more than a year now, I have been arguing that war with Iran is inevitable, that our only choice is how long we wait to fight it, and that the only question is what cost we will suffer for putting off the necessary confrontation with the Islamic Republic.
Now, finally, there is evidence that some of our leaders are beginning to recognize the necessity of this war and are preparing to fight it. And so for past few weeks, as I have been documenting in TIA Daily, the newspapers have been filled with rumors and speculation about an American air war against Iran. …
John Fund says one of the worst of Alaska’s GOP crooks might be at the end of the road.
On Friday Alaska’s Gov. Sarah Palin ordered the state to prepare a “fiscally responsible” alternative to the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere,” which made the state a national laughingstock and shone an unwelcome spotlight on the pork-barrel greed of its all-Republican congressional delegation. The $398 million bridge would have connected Ketchikan (population 7,400) to its airport on a nearby island inhabited by 50 people.
The same day, the Associated Press reported that the FBI has recorded two phone calls between Sen. Ted Stevens, who sponsored the bridge, and Bill Allen, a Stevens patron who dominated state politics as the head of the oil-services firm VECO until he pleaded guilty to bribing state legislators this year. Mr. Allen has also testified in open court that he paid some of the bills incurred in the expensive remodeling of Mr. Stevens’s Alaska home. Last month, FBI agents raided the senator’s home to secure evidence about the remodeling work. Few expect Mr. Stevens, who has served since 1968 and rose to become chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee, to survive politically. …
Rich Schapiro has the first of three items on NY Times’ giveaway to MoveOn.
… “We made a mistake,” Catherine Mathis, vice president of corporate communications for The Times, told the newspaper’s public editor.
Mathis said an advertising representative left the liberal group with the understanding that the ad would run that Monday even though they had been charged the standby rate.
The group should have paid $142,083 to ensure placement that day. …
Roger Simon does NY Times duty for Pajamas Media.
… The question is how systemic is this – how high and deep this bias goes in the paper’s structure?. How long has the Times been showing this kind of favoritism and to whom? More specifically – who knew about the Moveon ad and when did they know it?
Sound familiar? Papers like the Times and the Washington Post make their reputations conducting such investigations. It will be interesting to see if they do one here. We will be waiting. At a moment in history when the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is visiting New York, it is no small matter that the city and the country’s most respected newspaper – or the one that for many years claimed to be – is guilty of unethical behavior that risks jeopardizing our nation’s security.
A few years ago, in a loose-lipped moment that now seems more like projection than anything else, Bill Keller, the editor of the New York Times, accused blogging of being a “one man circle jerk.†What greater “circle jerk†exists today than the New York Times?
The Captain tells why the NY Times story is important.
Volokh Conspiracy provides four items today on Duke. Why continue with this? The first two posts are Stuart Taylor covering the storm from the media. We just finished discussing the NY Times subsidy of MoveOn,org. How did the Times cover the Duke story? Pickerhead is sooooo glad you asked!
… The first Times reporter to conduct detailed interviewing about the evidence in the rape case was sportswriter Joe Drape, who authored or coauthored articles that appeared on March 29, March 30, and March 31. In each article, he quoted Nifong but also presented a defense viewpoint.
Drape quoted Durham defense lawyer Bill Thomas providing an unanswerable reply to Nifong’s taunts: “Everyone asks why these young men have not come forward. It’s because no one was in the bathroom with the complainant. No one was alone with her. This didn’t happen. They have no information to come forward with.â€
The more Drape pushed, the more he came to believe that Mangum was not credible and her rape charge was probably false. Encouraged, Bill Thomas provided all the evidence of innocence then in his possession to the Times reporter, expecting a great article. But in early April Drape called Thomas and said there would be no article because he was “having problems with the editors.â€
And soon after Drape privately told people at Duke — and, presumably, at the Times — that this looked like a hoax, his byline disappeared from the Duke lacrosse story. The word among people at Duke and defense supporters, including one who later ran into Drape at a race track, was that the editors wanted a more pro-prosecution line. They also wanted to stress the race-sex-class angle without dwelling on evidence of innocence. They got what they wanted from Drape’s replacement, Duff Wilson, whose reporting would become a journalistic laughingstock by summer, and other reporters including Rick Lyman.
Times editors also got what they wanted from sports columnist Selena Roberts. Her March 31 commentary, “Bonded in Barbarity,†seethed hatred for “a group of privileged players of fine pedigree entangled in a night that threatens to belie their social standing as human beings.†…
KC Johnson covers the Duke administration in two posts on Volokh.
… Brodhead appears to have been cowed by extremists within his faculty. (It’s worth remembering that this case began just over a year after Larry Summers lost a vote of no-confidence in Harvard’s Faculty Council.) A turning point event came in an emergency meeting of the Academic Council on March 30, 2006. The president urged caution and asked faculty to wait for the facts to come in. But the assembled professors, around 10% of the arts and sciences faculty, responded with vitriolic attacks against the team. One speaker claimed that Duke, as an institution, tolerated drinking and rape, and the lacrosse incident reflected a University problem from the top down. Another suggested punishing the team by suspending lacrosse for three years and then making it a club sport. A third asserted that the team embodied the “assertion of class privilege†by all Duke students. A fourth called on the University to do something to help the “victim.â€
Three professors overpowered the meeting: Houston Baker stated as a fact that African-American women had been “harmed†by the lacrosse players and claimed that students in his mostly white, female class were terrified of the lack of an administration response. Wahneema Lubiano alleged favoritism by Duke toward the team and demanded a counter-statement from Duke denouncing the players. And Peter Wood asserted that two years previously, the team was out of control, and demanded a hard line against the athletic director, coach, and team. These remarks, according to several people who attended the meeting, received robust applause.
One week later, when Brodhead cancelled the lacrosse season, he appointed a “Campus Culture Initiative†to explore issues raised by the case. Wood chaired one of the CCI’s four subcommittees. Two other subcommittees (race and gender) were chaired by Group of 88 members Karla Holloway and Anne Allison. And one of the four student members was Chauncey Nartey, an African-American student who had sent an e-mail to the Presslers that the former coach’s wife considered a threat against their daughter. The Presslers filed a police report and told the administration what Nartey had done; the appointment went ahead anyway. …
A Volokh post asks whether the blog should be covering the Jena 6. Pickerhead has no idea what’s going on there, but thinks the Wikipedia entry is pretty thorough.
The Captain has a Rather post.
… He can’t stand not having the spotlight. He also can’t admit his own fault in his downfall, and so the only explanation that he can accept is that Les Moonves, Sumner Redstone, Josh Howard, and Don Hewitt of all people are actors in a vast, Bush-based conspiracy to discredit him.
Unfortunately, Dan does that well enough on his own, and even his colleagues have to admit it.
Charles Lane in WaPo has some Rather thoughts.