DID DIIULIO FAIL BECAUSE HE’S AN ACADEMIC? Daniel Drezner points out that Condi Rice, another academic, is doing just fine in the Administration. Rice, however, was an Administrator, and the snakepit of academic administration breeds minds Machiavellian enough to flourish in any other environment.

DiIulio, on the other hand, was a Talent. As an academic star, he didn’t have to waste a lot of time on the bureaucracy, and probably didn’t develop the requisite skills. I think that’s the difference.

UPDATE: Josh Claybourn has some thoughts, too.

ALTERNATIVE WEEKLIES ARE IN DANGER OF EXTINCTION: And the reason is John Hiler’s new CityBlogs initiative. Okay, I exaggerate. But one of the main reasons people pick up free alt-weeklies is for the entertainment listings and quirky local coverage — and that’s something that blogs can do better than once-a-week publications with print-level overhead. So I think that Alt-weeklies will have to either join the blogging revolution, or go out of business. I suspect that ventures like Hiler’s will do better than most web ventures at attracting advertising, too, for obvious reasons. Heck, he’s already got a real estate agent advertising there!

Check out his page and see what you think. I think it’s news.

UPDATE: J.D. Lasica calls CityBlogs “amazing.” It has also inspired a spirited discussion on my local alt-weekly’s discussion board.

The extra competition would certainly help to address this kind of problem. But my real point was that ink-and-paper, updated once a week, will have trouble competing with the dynamism of projects like Hiler’s. Smart Alt-weeklies, though, will try to emulate it.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis thinks the alt-weeklies are safe, at least for now.

OBVIOUS HEADLINE OF THE WEEK: “For Boston Archdiocese, Bankruptcy Would Have Drawbacks” — gee, do you think?

But it’s not all bad news, as Scott Ott reports under the headline “Bankrupt Archdiocese Plans ‘Huge Blow-Out Sale.'” According to Ott’s probably-not-reliable account, ads will feature Cardinal “Crazy Bernie” Law announcing that “everything must go, down to the bare walls!”

NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN THE RACINE RAVE PROSECUTION, which I wrote about earlier here, here, and here.

The first scheduled day of hearings in the mass arrests led to so many not-guilty pleas that the city may have to hire an outside prosecutor to handle the volume. Prosecutors appear to be running scared, as they offered to drop the original charges in exchange for a token $100 payment if people would plead guilty.

They should be scared. This is an outrage — much like the Houston mass arrest that has produced perjury charges and lawsuits there — and if there’s any justice Racine will in deep financial trouble as a result.

“SNOBBISH, RACIST, AND PLAYING A DANGEROUS GAME OF DOUBLE STANDARDS:” Ian Buruma takes on the world’s reaction to the Miss World riots. Well, the non-Blogospheric world’s reaction, anyway:

Staging the contest in Nigeria might not have been wise, and the journalist may have been courting danger. But some of the reactions in London suggest that the killers may have had a point. There is an odd convergence between fashionable political correctitude and religious bigotry, as though people who have the bad taste to enjoy beauty parades are criminally culpable. Rod Liddle, for example, found it difficult to disagree with the Muslim lynch mob, “from a theoretical point of view”, that Miss World represents everything that is horrible about “western culture”. . . .

Besides snobbery, there is a worse reason for being more outraged by western vulgarity than non-western murderousness. It might be called moral obtuseness, or even moral racism. The assumption appears to be that Africans or Asians can’t be held to our own elevated standards. They are more like wild animals, whose savagery should not be provoked by our foolishness. When we do provoke them, the consequences are entirely our fault. It would be as misplaced to apply our moral standards to their behaviour, as it would be to expect tigers to talk. The murder of Nigerians or Indian Muslims, or Iraqi Kurds, is par for the course, unless we did it, or Americans, or Israelis.

Yes.

MATTHEW HOY SAYS PAUL KRUGMAN IS LYING when he accuses the Wall Street Journal of advocating tax increases for the poor.

VIA DAVE WINER I found this take on last week’s New York Times piece about women and weblogs, by porn-blogger “Reverse Cowgirl.” I’d say it’s the final word on the subject.

TODAY WAS A BIG DAY AT THE SUPREME COURT, with a lot of major grants of certiorari in high-profile areas. I mentioned the sodomy case below, but affirmative action, several criminal-rights cases, and other important stuff is now on the docket. One reader speculates that Rehnquist has decided this will be his last term of Court and wants to go out with a bang. I don’t know, but it’s certainly become an interesting term.

THE ADVANTAGES OF TECHNOLOGY: Some audio on the PBS “Media Matters” documentary wasn’t so hot and they wanted to rerecord it. After being stranded in Newark last time, I wasn’t hot on flying to NYC. So I rerecorded the stuff in my own home studio, emailed MP3s to the producer so he could pick the version he liked, and now I’m sending it on CD (in both .wav and .aif formats) via FedEx. Of course, you do lose something in the translation, as this report from him indicates:

We recorded Megan, Oliver & Anil in New York this afternoon. Afterwards Megan and Oliver debated non-stop — they had to be evicted from the studio, and then continued their cross-fire over lunch. Sorry you missed it.

I’m sorry too — but this was a whole lot easier.

FEWER GUNS, MORE CRIME:

England and Wales have the highest crime rate among the world’s leading economies, according to a new report by the United Nations.

The survey, which is likely to prove embarrassing to David Blunkett, the Home Secretary. shows that people are more likely to be mugged, burgled, robbed or assaulted here than in America, Germany, Russia, South Africa or any other of the world’s 20 largest nations. Only the Dominican Republic, New Zealand and Finland have higher crime rates than England and Wales.

It’s not just gun control of course. Gun control is just the most visible symptom of a systematic surrender to society’s worst elements that has been the core element of British crime strategy for over fifty years. Gun control is bad in itself, but it can only exist in a setting in which the right to defend oneself against aggression has already been devalued in a way that makes crime much more rewarding, and hence much more common. That’s what has happened in Britain, and it’s why the historically low British crime rates have skyrocketed.

The good news is that things have gotten bad enough that there are now voices of sanity being raised. The bad news is that the authorities still haven’t caught on, responding to cellphone theft by putting up posters telling people to keep their cellphones out of sight in public.

This reminds me of the gold-chain-snatching epidemic in Ed Koch’s New York. The response: a ban on gold chains. That was when I knew things had hit rock bottom. And I was right.

UPDATE: Iain Murray isn’t crazy about the UN survey mentioned above, but notes that the International Crime Victimization Survey also puts the Brits at the top.

HEY! SOMEBODY WHO GOT THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE AND ACTUALLY DESERVED IT!

I’M KIND OF SURPRISED THAT THESE STORIES ABOUT AMERICAN MUSLIMS’ NEW SKEPTICISM OF SAUDI MONEY haven’t gotten more notice around the blogosphere. These folks are actually being pretty courageous as they do the right thing, and I think they deserve our praise.

UPDATE: Porphyrogenitus agrees.

WAS JOHN KERRY’S PHOTO DIGITALLY ALTERED? Rich Galen thinks so, and it does look that way.

UPDATE: Reader Randy Paul is unconvinced:

I’m sorry, but this seems so silly. You’ll also notice the other colors in background of the “doctored” photo seem a lot richer, also. This is similar to what happened during this year’s World Cup feeds. The same images on ABC’s and ESPN’s feed were a LOT duller and flatter than Univision (the Spanish language) feeds, yet they were same cameras taking the same images. Indeed, that may explain why the audience for the Univision broadcasts beat the ABC broadcasts in many markets – and not just among Spanish speakers. I speak Spanish and watched Univision for the better images and the better commentary.

I also don’t think that the lousy pictures on ABC and ESPN were signs of a nefarious effort to trash soccer in the USA. I don’t think that anyone should think that Kerry’s picture was doctored for the same reasons. Maybe Galen needs a new television.

Hmm. Well, sadly there’s no tipjar on his site, so I guess there’s nothing anyone can do about that. . . .

IS THE LORD OF THE RINGS RACIST? Steven Chapman responds with admirable restraint to the maker of that claim:

Now we now why the modern human rights movement has produced no Paine or Jefferson: its proponents seem to prefer instead to adopt the snippy tone of the schoolma’am or head prefect to anything that might actually move us. . . .

I wonder how many of the critics of LotR (you’ll find links to their pieces via the link above) would fawn uncritically over the oral traditions of myth-making and storytelling among the ethnic tribal folk of the Congo and Amazon? Yet, strangely, when a white Englishman tells a story with a strong mythic component, they jerk awake from their guilt-induced slumber and launch into a highly predictable and highly tedious political critique with all the clanking, grinding and letting off of steam we’ve come to expect. Who’s the determinist now, Mr Yatt?

Indeed.

MINNESOTA HATE CRIME UPDATE: The friendly posters at Twin Cities IndyMedia think that defacing a Norm Coleman billboard with swastikas and SS symbols is just peachy. Republicanism, we’re told, is “one-hundred times more dangerous than mere Nazism.”

They also appear to be near-illiterates, but that’s not really a surprise either.

BALTIMORE’S PUBLIC LIBRARY has refused meeting space to the World Church of the Creator, a rather unsavory white-supremacist group. Eugene Volokh has a post on the First Amendment issues.

And speaking of free speech Jacob T. Levy responds to the claim that the problem with campuses is too much free speech.

ALL KINDS OF INTERESTING DEVELOPMENTS over at Rantburg, which should be a regular stop.

I SUPPOSE IF PEOPLE RIOT when this guy comes to New York, observers will blame “irresponsible French media” and not violent Americans. Right?

IN RESPONSE TO MY POST ON ANTI-AMERICANISM AS A DISTRACTION, reader Mostafa Sabet emails:

I brought up the same thing to my father this weekend, though not using anti-Americanism as the focus. We were discussing Israel as the lynch-pin of the MidEast debate, however I think this is a state sponsored red herring. This is the one cause the oppressive regimes of the region feel safe in allowing their people protest for. As long as their people complain loudly about Israel, they remain blind or numbed to their own hopeless condition. I brought up how in Iran, which appears to be on the cusp of popular revolt, it seems like there are far fewer revolts and protests about Israel than about their own conditions. They are no less sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinian people, but have better things to worry about, their own lives. This is similar to the position of anti-Americanists, distraction instead of improvement. Blame America instead of corrupt officials and your oppressive regime.

However, we shouldn’t use the “they want us to change” excuse as a reason not to improve our policies. We are starting to see how bankrolled thugs can bite us in the ass with the Saudis. Also, our hypocrisy in foreign policy does alienate potential allies. Not to say we should roll over and die, but rather we need honestly examine and improve our MO in foreign policy. It is not appeasement, but rather appraisal and editing.

I agree. I think we should make clear that we’ll happily live in peace with people who mean us no harm, but that corrupt thugs who hate us — or pretend to — are another matter entirely.

WHY I LOVE MELISSA SCHWARTZ’S BLOG: In the same entry, we get both this:

What I want for Christmas is a Red Ryder 200-shot carbide-action model air rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time.

And this:

I saw the San Francisco ballet on Saturday. Balanchine’s Serenade was just exquisite. The other two ballets in the program were Helgi Tomasson creations, which I had mixed feelings about.

‘Nuff said.

IS GOOGLE’S ODOMETER STUCK? Henry Copeland has a scoop.

GIVEN WHAT ESQUIRE HAS ACCOMPLISHED with its apparent DiIulio scoop, Daniel Drezner thinks that Maxim and Stuff should send reporters to the White House.

UPDATE: Now DiIulio says the quotes are fake. But at least in Maxim they’d be surrounded by sexy photos of Carmen Electra!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Patrick Ruffini is calling this “Esquire’s Bellesiles.” I think it’s a bit early for that, but it’s certainly going to make somebody or other look bad.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s DiIulio’s memo and here’s a letter by Esquire reporter Ron Suskind. Did nobody tape the earlier interviews?

HMM. MAYBE THIS ARGUMENT APPLIES TO EUROPEAN ANTI-AMERICANISM, TOO:

Although anti-Americanism is genuinely widespread among Arab governments and peoples, however, there is something seriously misleading in this account. Arab and Muslim hatred of the United States is not just, or even mainly, a response to actual U.S. policies — policies that, if anything, have been remarkably pro-Arab and pro-Muslim over the years. Rather, such animus is largely the product of self-interested manipulation by various groups within Arab society, groups that use anti-Americanism as a foil to distract public attention from other, far more serious problems within those societies.

This distinction should have a profound impact on American policymakers. If Arab anti-Americanism turns out to be grounded in domestic maneuvering rather than American misdeeds, neither launching a public relations campaign nor changing Washington’s policies will affect it. In fact, if the United States tries to prove to the Arab world that its intentions are nonthreatening, it could end up making matters even worse. New American attempts at appeasement would only show radicals in the Middle East that their anti-American strategy has succeeded and is the best way to win concessions from the world’s sole superpower.

The European leaders certainly have enough problems to merit a distraction-based approach. Here’s a report on Germany’s tax problems, which look likely to cause trouble throughout the EU.

EDWARD L. BEACH, author of Run Silent, Run Deep, has died. He also commanded the nuclear submarine Triton on its pioneering round-the-world voyage. I enjoyed that book — a sort of proto-Tom Clancy novel — and met him briefly once just after I graduated from law school, when my girlfriend was renting a house next door to his.

CULTURE-SHIFT ALERT: A pro-hunting editorial at The New York Times.

This news story is more ambivalent, carefully noting:

Whether hunting should survive — and whether an overlay of ethics and responsibility can overcome the objections that many people have to killing animals for recreation and food — is another question.

But it’s still reasonably fair, also noting that something has to keep the numbers of deer, etc., under control in the absence of predators, and not portraying hunters as drunken bums probably bent on rape or murder in addition to pathologically wanting to torture defenseless animals, the latter portrayals being more common in some politically correct circles.