MATT DRUDGE REPORTS (yes, this is an actual report, not just a link) that Donahue has the lowest Nielsen rating possible. Having caught a bit of the show, that doesn’t come as a complete surprise. What’s really shocking is that the whole MSNBC network isn’t doing much better. They’re not that bad. But I guess they don’t have to be that bad — just bad enough that you switch to Fox or CNN.

A FEW DAYS AGO, I posted a reference to a plan by Dave Winer and Larry Lessig to target members of Congress who are shilling for big media. I asked for suggestions on who to target, and a bunch came in. Follow the link and read the comments. And reader John Robb has posted some candidates, with supporting data on vulnerability and Big Media ties.

TODAY IS MY BIRTHDAY. After I finish my Administrative Law class, I’m heading out — my wife has various activities planned. I won’t be back blogging until later this evening when the babysitting runs out.

ROBERT FISK HAS BEEN INVITED TO SPEAK at George Mason University. A reader wants some links shedding light on Fisk’s journalistic and moral failings, as demonstrated over the past year. I could provide the usual, but I thought this ought to be a group project. Comments are enabled. Working links are appreciated.

SOMEBODY THROW THESE BOOK-COOKING CROOKS IN JAIL:

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Concealing debt and operating costs. Flouting court orders by shredding documents. Failing to properly track assets and liabilities.

These misdeeds have blackened corporate America’s eye and prompted criminal investigations and the wrath of Congress and President Bush.

Yet these same accounting failures and sleights of hand have for years been common practice in the federal government, fiscal experts say. . . .

The financial statements of many federal agencies are in such dismal shape that the General Accounting Office (GAO) — the investigative arm of Congress that audits federal accounts — has been unable to provide an opinion on the government’s finances for the past five years.

You knew this was coming, didn’t you?

(Via Bill Quick).

THE JOHANNESBURG CONFERENCE IS LOOKING MORE LIKE DURBAN EVERY DAY — or maybe like SFSU.

MERYL YOURISH HAS AN SFSU UPDATE: She says that SFSU is railroading the lone Jewish student to be charged in what everyone agrees was a riot started by anti-Jewish Palestinian students and sympathizers.

SFSU is a proven disgrace, so I find this entirely credible.

Meryl’s got President Corrigan’s email.

FRANK J. WRITES: “The Palestinians seem to be in a never ending war with any feelings of sympathy I may have for them.” Yeah, and they’re doing better in that war than in the one with the Israelis. (Here’s another example of why).

JUST FOR THE RECORD: I expect privacy when I enter my passwords. Interfere with that expectation at your peril.

TOO RHETORICAL FOR THE NEW YORK SUN? Apparently, this piece by Norah Vincent was, so she’s put it on her blog instead.

Given that the New York Sun has yet to pay me for the piece I wrote for their first issue, Norah may be just as well off. In fact, if anyone who reads her piece hits the tipjar, she’ll be ahead of me.

RADLEY BALKO says that studies trying to link abortion and breast cancer are junk science. Excerpt:

As I noted below, epidemiologists rarely give much attention to any study with a risk ratio of less than 3.0 — that is, less than a 300% increase in likelihood of, in this case, breast cancer striking women who have had an abortion. Of the 63 studies on the abortion/breast cancer site, none poses a risk ratio of greater than 3.0. And, in fact, only two of them poses a risk ratio greater than 2.1, which is the risk ratio between pasteurized milk and lung cancer. Sixteen of the 63 represent either no increased risk at all, or actually show a negative risk — that is, women who had had abortions were less likely to get breast cancer. And over half of them — 35 — failed to show a risk ration of greater than 1.3%, what most epidemiologists consider to be the threshold of statistical significance.

So more of these studies showed no statistically significant link between abortion and breast cancer than did. Only two of 63 showed a higher correlation than a common, everday risk posed to us each time we put milk on our cereal. And none of the 63 showed a risk great enough to bump “correlation” into a possible “causation.”

Since Balko is pro-life, he deserves extra points for making this clear.

SALON SEXWATCH UPDATE, special nostalgia edition: Still no sex in Salon (“My girlfriend doesn’t banter well?” Puhleez. This is a sex column?) Sadly, Rachael Klein is long gone from the Daily Cal, but her successor, Teresa Chin, has advice on combining food and condoms.

Advantage: Daily Cal. Like that’s news. Hey, maybe Teresa could give helpful advice to the Johannesburg Summit attendees.

TUNKU VARADARAJAN says Bush needs to support free elections in Pakistan.

“LOBSTERS, CAVIAR AND BRANDY AT SUMMIT ON STARVATION” — No surprise here, but a great headline.

UPDATE: Here’s more, in a similar vein.

IS MICKEY KAUS WARPED? You be the judge.

THE BOSTON GLOBE IS REPORTING ON Harvard Law School’s opening-up to military recruiters — something InstaPundit covered back on August 23. Well, I guess you can’t expect Legacy Media to be on top of everything the way we official cyberjournalists are. . . .

I’VE BEEN TRYING TO PAY MORE ATTENTION TO NORTH AFRICA, but it’s hard to get much news out of some places, and the problem seems to have gotten worse of late. The links I usually use for Chad are no longer there, and this is the best I seem to be able to find. If you know of some good news sites, please email me.

TENSIONS AMONG MUSLIMS AND CHRISTIANS IN KADUNA, Nigeria are on the mend for the moment.

STOP THE PRESSES: The Arab News is telling the truth. I wonder if heads will roll over this.

And, no, I’m not really speaking figuratively.

WHISTLEBLOWER PAUL VAN BUITENEN ADMITS THAT European Union corruption is incurable.

REALPOLITIK:

Will someone explain to me why America expects European concurrence in any of our affairs militarily or otherwise? Any European history dilettante knows that balancing power between states has been the modus operandi in the foreign affairs of their nation-states dating back to the Middle Ages. One waits in vain if he expects them to walk away from 700 years of habit. Often this old world realpolitik was entirely defensible. America is the world’s sole superpower today, and thus will the Europeans see themselves as the counterweight to our strength. While to us this posture looks absurd, to them it is merely instinct.

THE SIXTH CIRCUIT HAS RULED that deportation hearings must be public. Note: The two actual Court of Appeals judges on this panel, Damon Keith and Martha Craig Daughtrey, are among the farthest-left on the Sixth Circuit. (The other is a district judge sitting by designation, about whom I know nothing). This suggests that an en banc rehearing is more likely than otherwise, but I haven’t read the opinion closely enough to base that on substance; I’m just going by the panel.

UPDATE: Here’s a story from today’s (Tuesday’s) Washington Post.

PETER BEINART SAYS THE “STARSHIP TROOPERS ARGUMENT” is a bogus attempt to prevent the very dialogue Democrats have been calling for. Excerpt:

In fact, over and over during the ’90s, the generals with firsthand battlefield experience guessed wrong–and the civilians without it guessed it right–about what would happen when the United States went to war. Before the Gulf war, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell–who had spent his life in uniform–said war with Iraq would prove too costly. He was overridden by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, who once infamously told a reporter that he “had other priorities in the ’60s than military service.” In 1992 Powell wrote a New York Times op-ed warning against U.S. military intervention in Bosnia–intervention that (in tandem with a Croat ground assault) eventually forced the Serbs into a peace deal. And in 1999 the Joint Chiefs of Staff leaked to the press their opposition to U.S. war in Kosovo–a war that drove Slobodan Milosevic from Kosovo without a single American combat casualty.

Why were the civilians right? Perhaps because they better understood the political context that shaped the war’s outcome. Perhaps because they hadn’t experienced Vietnam, which led ’90s military leaders to repeatedly overestimate the enemy. The point is they had other forms of knowledge at their disposal, knowledge that in these cases turned out to be more salient.

And it is precisely the interaction and competition between those different forms of knowledge that Hagel, Rich, and Pinkerton seek to shut down. If taken seriously, their argument disqualifies anyone who hasn’t, won’t, or can’t see combat from ever advocating American military intervention, including last year against Afghanistan. By that logic, women and the openly gay–both barred from combat–can never be pro-war. (In fact, by that logic, people who haven’t served can’t even legitimately oppose gay exclusion–since they have no experience of the military morale that the prohibition against open homosexuality seeks to preserve.) And authenticity is an infinitely expandable debaters’ trick.

Oh, and by the way, Colby Cosh had the Starship Troopers analogy way back on August 5.

Yeah, I know I just mentioned him below, too. But what can I do? Powered by all that Canadian oil money, he’s unstoppable!

UPDATE: The IndePundit has a withering response to all this “chickenhawk” talk from the antiwar crowd. Be sure you read all the way to the end. And read this, too.

WHEN YOU FILL UP YOUR S.U.V. YOU’RE FINANCING TERROR Colby Cosh. Good God: Glad I drive a VW.

HERE’S MORE on the Al Qaeda / Asimov connection, in The Guardian. (Via Electrolite.)