MORE FALLEN JOURNALISTIC ICONS: Now it’s the famed fact-checkers at The New Yorker, who allowed Ken Auletta’s statement that the term “Axis of Weasels” was first published in the New York Post into print when — as anyone with Google should have known — it really originated with ScrappleFace.

SPEAKING OF BAD NEWS FOR GERMANY, here’s a German writer who says that Germany lost the Iraq war via Schroeder’s machinations:

Wars always have winners and losers. Saddam Hussein–dead or on the run–is, of course, the Iraq war’s biggest loser. But Germany has also lost much, including the many US troops who will now reportedly be re-deployed to bases in other countries. Despite the announcement of plans to create a European army along with France, Belgium, and Luxembourg, Germany is less relevant in both European and world politics than it was before the Iraq war. Repairing the damage will not be easy.

Every part of Germany’s international position has been wounded by the Iraq war. The country can no longer play the role of transatlantic mediator between France and America. It can forget about US support in its campaign to gain a permanent seat in the UN Security Council. Instead of forging a “third way” for Europe’s left with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder needs Blair to plead his case with President George W. Bush, who feels personally betrayed by the Chancellor’s conduct in the run-up to the war.

In postcommunist Eastern Europe, Germany is no longer perceived as an absolutely dependable advocate of the region’s needs. Multilateral institutions that served as pillars of German foreign policy for almost half-a-century have been weakened: the European Union’s hopes for common foreign, security, and defense policies have been gravely jeopardized.

German-American relations suffered a devastating blow when Schröder stoked the country’s overwhelmingly pacifist attitudes. By doing so he drowned out the concerns about low growth and high unemployment that were threatening his re-election prospects. But that political strategy left President Bush believing that Schröder had stabbed him in the back. As with people, so too with states: trust once lost is extremely difficult to regain.

Read the whole thing, as they say. (Via Jeff Jarvis).

WELL, THIS ISN’T ENCOURAGING:

In Germany, deflation is drawing closer. The largest economy in Europe, Germany’s, is already technically in a recession, its second in three years, as economic output turned negative over the last two quarters. The government said Friday that prices rose just 0.7 percent in May from a year earlier – not far from an outright decline in prices.
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Many analysts now say that at least a modest deflation is likely this year, with several months of falling prices. While the prospect of cheaper BMWs may sound appealing to some, it is actually a symptom of a serious problem: a lack of demand as Germans cling ever more tightly to their wallets. Will Germany turn into another Japan, where falling prices and subpar or nonexistent growth have caused a “lost decade” for the second-largest economy in the world?

Though there’s a temptation to engage in schadenfreude at the prospect of economic misfortunes for one of the Axis of Weasels, in truth this is bad news. Japan is already in trouble. Now Germany’s heading that way. The United States can’t hold off a global recession, or worse, on its own. I’m not an econoblogger, but this worries me. I also suspect that Germany’s problem has a lot to do with excessive rigidity in regulation and employment rules, and that the reaction to this problem will tend to be in directions that make that worse, rather than better.

BACK HOME. Some of the posts below have been updated. More later.

JUST GOT TOGETHER WITH HOWARD OWENS, who’s in town for a bit on business. Now I’m heading to the lake. Blogging will resume sometime tomorrow.

RICK BRAGG HAS BEEN SUSPENDED from the New York Times. Based on the email I’ve been getting (see below) a lot of other journalists ought to be nervous, if this is the standard now.

Call me a cynic [You’re a cynic! — Ed.] but this smells like Howell Raines trying to change the subject. I had a reader email me back when the Blair matter broke, predicting that a white guy would be disciplined at the Times within a couple of weeks. I didn’t run the email because it seemed too cynical. But — whoever sent that one, well, you were right. [LATER: He wrote back in — so now I can say “Advantage: Lee Goldston!”].

UPDATE: A reader says I’m wrong:

You’re wrong about the Times. This isn’t about reporters suddenly being held to a higher standard; it’s about Howell’s favorites FINALLY being busted for their mistakes. The new revelations make life much worse, not better, for Howell. And you can bet that angry Times newsroom staffers are behind the revelations. This is a purge and Howell might be the last one out the door.

Reader Michael Gebert smells something, too:

Yes, and think how perfect Bragg is for this ceremonial whipping‹ he’s practically Raines¹ doppelganger, culturally, which will make it seem like Raines is sparing no one‹ yet as every article points out, he earned his fame under Joseph Lelyveld, not Raines, so he doesn¹t reinforce the Raines-favoritism story. Plus he has a strong enough literary reputation that he can easily survive a few months in the wilderness. If it walks like a setup and talks like a setup…

Interesting difference in perspective. Steve Verdon is even more cynical. I think the charges of racism are a bit over the top, though. And Craig Henry says this doesn’t come close to the Blair scandal.

UPDATE: Kaus has much more on this. It does seem that there’s a systemic problem with bylines at the Times. So what’s the big deal about Bragg? Is there more to come? Stay tuned. Meanwhile I love this bit from Kaus:

It turns out we weren’t reading the reporting of the famous, cream-of-the-profession Times employees, but the reporting of unidentified “stringers” we’ve never heard of. … Conventional journalists sometimes sneer at blogs because there’s no way for a reader to know whether what a random, unknown person says on his Web site is true. But it sounds as if the Times is not so different from a blog after all–what you are reading is really the work of random, unknown “legs” and stringers. …

Of course, in other ways the Times and the typical blog are very different forms of journalism. One obsessively reflects the personal biases, enthusiasms and grudges of a single individual. The other is just an online diary! …

All I can say is, “indeed.” Meanwhile, via MediaMinded, here’s a piece on nepotism in high end media, and here’s a sensible quote from William McGowan, author of Coloring the News:

I don’t think the Blair case should impose a stigma on all minority journalists. It shouldn’t invalidate all diversity efforts either, especially efforts aimed at casting a wide net, opening doors to talented people, all the while maintaining standards as you are doing so. But I do think you’d be journalistically at fault if you didn’t acknowledge where diversity and race was a factor in the Blair case and the Times institutional response to it.

Well, I think that’s right. I was initially skeptical (and even more so here) of claims that the Blair scandal was about affirmative action. And in a way I still am — this isn’t a “classic” affirmative action case of somebody unqualified who was hired because he was black. Everybody seems to agree that if Blair weren’t some sort of lying weasel he’d be capable of good reporting. Instead, Blair’s case seems to have been one in which most authority figures were unwilling to respond to obvious problems with a black reporter for fear of being called racist, which in the diversity-seminar culture of the Times might be a career-ender. The bad thing about the Times’ diversity culture, now well-documented by Kaus, Sullivan, et al., is that when you have things like the Bragg case it’s hard to know whether they’re justified or whether they represent some sort of politico-racial balancing. And that’s the trouble with diversity culture in general: it makes everything, and everyone, suspect. Instead of minimizing racism, it makes every single decision racially charged. And by encouraging bogus charges of racism, it ultimately makes those charges meaningless: the first refuge of scoundrels rather than items of moral substance.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The emailers seem to have it right the Wall Street Journal reports that the practice of using uncredited stringers is so common that other people at the Times wonder why Bragg is in trouble.

AUSTIN BAY’S NEW NOVEL, THE WRONG SIDE OF BRIGHTNESS, comes out next week. InstaPundit readers know I’m a fan of his nonfiction writing. I read the novel in manuscript and liked it very much. So did a colleague of mine who’s a former Marine helicopter pilot with a good deal of familiarity with the world Bay describes. It’s a good read — I just wish it had been longer.

HOW A BLOGOSPHERE STORY GROWS: An interesting piece, though I wish there were more detail. This part certainly squares with my observations:

Rarely can an individual blogger get a story going. It is far more usual that several bloggers blog about an occurrence, an event or a comment elsewhere and then after that bloggers in groups get going. Even a so called influential blogger blogging about a story can rarely get others going. It is only when there are several bloggers writing opinions does a story really get going.

Yep. Which is probably a good thing. (Via Doc Searls).

FORGET CONTAINING SADDAM: Jonathan Rauch writes that the antiwar far-left’s new agenda is to contain America:

“As the United States government becomes more belligerent in using its power in the world, many people are longing for a ‘second superpower’ that can keep the U.S. in check,” writes James F. Moore, of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, in an article that he posted online. The newly energized Left is just such a force, he argues. . . .

Note that Moore speaks of confronting not imperialism or corporate capitalism or human-rights abusers, but the United States. This is significant. . . .

But the Left will pay a crippling price. If its new rallying cry is going to be “Contain America first!” the Left had better pack its bags for a long, long stay in the political wilderness, at least in America; and if it is going to make excuses for Saddam as it once made excuses for Stalin, it can kiss its moral relevance goodbye. One only wonders whether the Left still has time to back away from the cliff.

I’m not sure this agenda is as new as Rauch suggests. But the antiwar left’s moral relevance is already gone, squandered in increasingly desperate efforts to shore up Saddam for no other reason than that he was the enemy.

BIGWIG BLOGGED THE BIRTH OF HIS SON. Start at the link and scroll up; there’s a picture at the top.

A POTENTIAL SUSPECT IN THE YALE LAW SCHOOL BOMBING?

Best anecdote from Suskind’s Esquire story: In Thomas’s office at the Supreme Court, he keeps a sign on the bookshelf. It reads: “SAVE AMERCIA, BOMB YALE LAW SCHOOL.”

Thomas should know. He’s an alumnus.

Just having a motive isn’t enough, though, or all those jealous Harvard alumni would be suspects too.

THE VOLOKH CONSPIRACY HAS MOVED. It’s still Blogger-powered, though, and the permalinks aren’t working at the moment.

CLAYTON CRAMER HAS A MUST-READ POST on the assault-weapon ban. Or as the post puts it, the ban on normal-sized magazine, and on buying the rifle you want.

JACK SHAFER HAS MORE ON RICK BRAGG, who looks set to be the Times’ next source of reportorial controversy. [White guy, right? With a WASP-y name? How convennnient! — Ed. Don’t be so cynical. It’s purely a coincidence, I’m sure.]

Shafer may be too hard on Bragg, and not hard enough on the Times, though, as reader Edward Barrera emails that the practice of using freelance reporters — called “legs” — to do the shoeleather work isn’t so uncommon at the Times:

Rick Bragg is not the only NY Times staffer who uses freelance work without attribution. The metro section of the Times uses freelancers, they call them ‘legs,’ to run down stories in New York City. They sometimes do all the reporting on the story, interviews, etc. The ‘legs’ call it in, and someone else writes the story. The freelancer, who gets paid by the hour, gets neither a shared byline or even a credit tagline at the end. I worked as an intern at the Daily News, and we always received either one. I use to ask these guys about it, and they just said, “It’s the Times way.” Why shouldn’t Bragg dismiss a freelancer’s work? It’s the “Times way.”

I don’t know anything about this, but if it’s true it’s pretty damning to the Times, but puts Bragg’s work in a less-damaging light. It’s something that journalists on the story ought to look at, anyway.

UPDATE: Another journalist reader emails:

In reference to your latest post about Rick Bragg, I did some freelance work for the Times last November on the tornadoes up in Morgan County and received no credit line in the finished story, at least not in the online edition. It’s possible something was different in the hard copy, but I doubt it. Just thought I’d let you know.

Hmm. It definitely sounds as if someone should look into this.

ANOTHER UPDATE: This is looking less and less unusual. Dexter Van Zile emails:

A few years ago, I worked as a freelance stringer for the Boston Bureau of the Associated Press. I covered a story where a kid came ran out in a snowstorm the day before thanksgiving and he was found a few days later in a swamp.

I did knocked on door to the family’s home (they refused to talk) I hung out in the town and gathered all the info.

Then toward the end of the assignment, a staff reporter for the bureau came down to give me a cell phone. by driving down to the town, he was able to use his byline on the story as well as the dateline. otherwise it would have been an unsigned story. He did no information gathering whatsoever, but by delivering a cell phone, and writing the info up at his desk in boston, he got a byline and a dateline.

Sounded screwy to me, but that’s what it was.

So this sort of thing may or may not be wrong, but it certainly doesn’t sound all that unusual, and not just at the Times. Meanwhile, Lou Dolinar emails:

Regarding the stringer thing at the Times: I’d love to know how that’s changed in the last 30 years. I worked for Wally Turner (Black Money) as his Las Vegas stringer in 1972, and ran my ass off to get a couple of bylines. Had to be your own story, an exclusive, and hard news. In those days, I can’t imagine someone parachuting in from New York and stealing your work, and your byline.

I don’t know the story here, but it seems as if things here are more complicated than they sounded at first.

UPDATE: There’s much more on this in a later post, here. And although there’s more than a whiff of opportunism about the Bragg disciplinary action, these facts do support my earlier suggestion that the white males at the Times have a lot of problems, too.

THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’:

”Students are upset with what they see as anti-Americanism on campuses,” Auchterlonie says. ”Patriotism is big now.” It’s a patriotism that the national college movement has pushed to the fore as an issue that can win the sympathies of kids who are not overtly political. ”We handed out red, white and blue ribbons on the anniversary of 9/11,” Charles Mitchell says. ”I didn’t think anyone was going to take them. We ran out in half an hour.” . . .

But a movement based on patriotism and Reagan-worship alone could not have spread so rapidly nationwide. Here’s where the left has unwittingly helped to energize the conservative movement. Visit any college campus today, and you’re struck by the forces of what the conservatives call overweening political correctness that have seeped into every corner of life. Same-sex hand-holding days, ”Vagina Monologues” performances, diversity training seminars, minority support groups, ”no means no” dating rules, textbooks purified of gender, racial or class stereotypes — for all their good intentions, these manifestations of enforced tolerance can create a stultifying air of conformity in college life. Hence the cries for ”individual responsibility” and ”freedom of speech” that are the leading slogans of today’s campus conservative movement — a deliberate echo of the left-wing Free Speech movements of the 1960’s and a direct appeal to the natural impulse, on the part of young people, to rebel against the powers that be.

Read the whole thing, which is pretty good, although the author takes a few too many pains to try to paint the growth of non-lefty campus activism as a creation of conservative Big Money — as if the 1960s variety of student activism was some sort of spontaneous creation without any nurturance from monied groups who shared its agenda.

UPDATE: David Bernstein has some observations. And Cardinal Collective notes:

But the big problem with the article is that it doesn’t take campus conservatives seriously as anything other than a tool created by national right-wing groups like the Leadership Institute (LI) and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI). It’s true that LI and ISI spend money to help fund some of these groups, especially when they are just getting started (and they are invaluable to campus conservatives for that) and each offers free seminars every year to help “train” people to be conservative activists, but the article dramatically overstates their influence.

Take it from me: I was the editor of the Stanford Review, Stanford’s conservative newspaper. LI and ISI invited us every year to go to their seminar – each year we viewed it as a fun way to meet people and get free drinks at the bar. And they do offer some good advice about how to get noticed and big mistakes that papers can make. But LI and ISI aren’t on the ground making editorial decisions or organizing campaigns by the College Republicans. They don’t have the staff or the influence to make a national campaign beyond publicizing what other organizations have done.

I don’t mean to denigrate these groups – as I said, they are a major influence in helping groups get off the ground and in making campus conservatives realize they are part of a national movement. But the writer of the article makes the usual mistake journalists make: he talked to the “grown-ups”, fell for their spin, and assumed they were calling the shots. After all, LI and ISI are going to tell the New York Times that they are absolutely essential to campus conservatism: it helps them get donors. And it makes a better story for the New York Times to see a vast right-wing conspiracy instead of an essentially student-run movement. But the truth is that there is no vast right-wing conspiracy and that LI and ISI think they are more essential than they are.

Orin Kerr, meanwhile, thinks he’s read this article before.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING FIRST/SECOND AMENDMENT CASE from New Jersey:

The district has agreed to distribute to students three age-appropriate fliers prepared by the NRA affiliate, the Association of New Jersey Rifle & Pistol Clubs. These fliers are slated to be provided to public school students today.

The lawsuit was based on the Montclair public schools’ dissemination of fliers from Ceasefire New Jersey, a gun-control group with a regional headquarters located in the township, to students three years ago. The fliers advocated attending a rally in Trenton to support childproof handgun legislation.

After two parents failed to convince the Montclair School District to distribute fliers that advocated attending a rally opposing the childproof handgun bill, the Montclair couple joined with the association in filing a lawsuit against the district, charging it was advocating only one side of a two-sided societal issue.

“The lawsuit is based on the First and 14th amendments,” said Scott Bach, the association’s executive vice president and an attorney. “You can’t use publicly funded institutions to stifle debate on one side of an issue. If you open the door to one side, you have to open the door to the other side.”

The District said it “inadvertently” allowed the anti-gun flyers to be distributed. It’s funny, isn’t it, how often we see people “inadvertently” favoring the anti-gun side of the debate, and how seldom they make such mistakes in the other direction?

You can read more about this here.

THE TOMPAINE BLOG WRITES:

The New York Post embedded reporter Jonathan Foreman got a lot of notice for writing in The Weekly Standard that the liberal media were hyping the bad news from Baghdad and ignoring Iraqis’ “love bombing” of U.S. troops. Joe Scarborough , Mona Charen and Glenn Reynolds all fell for his story. But as Micah Sifry points out, the same Jonathan Foreman reported a few days later in the Post that America faces an intifada by this summer in Iraq.

Of course, I pointed out the second Foreman story, too, here. In fact, I did so several days before Micah Sifry noted the story. So what’s their point? That I do a better job of following up things than they do? I admit it: they’re right.

UPDATE: Okay, to be fair, they’re new at this blogging stuff (they don’t even have permalinks yet).

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Bill Richmond emails:

What I fail to see is how these two are incompatible with each other. Some, maybe even most, Iraqis may be love-bombing our troops while another independent group may be considering more traditional bombs. The Tompaine blog commits a classic logical fallacy here, unless they can show (or Jonathan Foreman suggests) that a substantial number of the current/former love-bombers are going to join the posited intifada.

Another reader emails:

What a lot of people apparently can’t recognize (and what the folks at “Tompaine” probably don’t want to recognize) is that both things can be true; in a country of about ~25 million, it can be true that many, many Iraqis welcome the U.S. presnce (and this didn’t get much attention in the relentlessly negative press), AND that there are enough people who don’t like us that, if things don’t get fixed, they could make a mess of things, produce an intifada, etc.

The problem with the insightful folks at Tompaine, and others, is that for them fer’ners are a monolith: either thems folks hates us, or thems folks likes us. Can’t be that there’s a range of opinion over there (just like here, where the folks at Tompaine.com hate Dubya’s guts and would be glad to see an intifada against his policies, and others dissent from that, and would like to see these policies work out well).

Yes, I suspect there are different camps here. We need to be sure our side wins and the other side loses. Big.

ANDREW SULLIVAN POINTS TO what looks like more chicanery at the New York Times.

ORRIN JUDD HAS EXAMINED CHRIS HEDGES’ BOOK, and is unimpressed with the quality of Hedges’ moral reasoning.

FROM THE GOOD NEWS / BAD NEWS DEPARTMENT: Things in Iraq could be worse — it could be like Pakistan:

KARACHI, May 23 (Reuters) – Rival Sunni Muslim groups traded heavy gunfire in Pakistan’s restive city of Karachi on Friday over control of a mosque, killing a teenage boy and wounding six people including two policemen, police said.

Dozens of armed militants belonging to one radical Islamic group attacked the mosque in northern Karachi in an attempt to seize it from their rivals, they said. . . .

Disputes between the rival Islamic groups over control of mosques are frequent in Karachi. Many mosque compounds house big residential quarters for clerics as well as seminaries and shops.

But at least Pakistan’s power isn’t out. Oh wait:

ISLAMABAD, May 20( ): Pakistan Peoples Party Tuesday condemned power breakdown in major areas of Karachi, a metropolis of Sindh and termed it failure of Karachi Electric Supply Corporation’s professional responsibilities. . . .

“The agony caused to the people of Karachi calls for the sacking of all those whose inefficiency, corruption and lack of sense of responsibility contributed to the repeated and unscheduled power breakdowns without prior notice or warning to the citizens,” he said.

The power breakdown caused water shortage leading to near riot situations in a number of localities as the KESC officials slept over the plight and misery of the people.

Not to minimize the problems in Iraq, but this adds some perspective.

THE JURIST HAS A ROUNDUP OF NEWS about the Yale Law School bombing, including this admirable quote from Jack Balkin:

And that’s the Yale Law School too. You can try to bomb us, but we will just do a backflip and come up good as new.

Indeed.

HOW ISLAMIC SUICIDE BOMBERS ARE BOOSTING THE AUSTRALIAN ECONOMY — and much, much more, all at Tim Blair’s new site!

VICTORY FOR THE GOOD GUYS: The Tennessee’s “super-DMCA” bill, which would have made it a felony to attach a TiVo to your cable without permission, appears to be dead for this year:

A bill pitting telecommunications and entertainment companies against some of their customers won’t come up for a vote in the General Assembly this year, its sponsors said yesterday.

Backers said the bill was needed to update state law on the theft of cable and other telecommunications services.

Opponents — many of them computer professionals and enthusiasts who mobilized via the Internet — said no new law was needed and the measure as originally written threatened privacy and civil liberties.

A hearing on an amended version of the bill had been scheduled for Tuesday in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Instead, Sen. Curtis Person, R-Memphis, said yesterday that he will introduce a joint House-Senate resolution to send the measure to a study committee charged with reporting back to legislators by Feb. 1, 2004.

The study-committee option will allow more time for discussion, Person said, adding that his aim as the bill’s Senate sponsor was to draft a measure that would punish lawbreakers, not infringe on freedoms.

I’m very pleased. Bill Hobbs has more.

UPDATE: Slashdot has more on these bills in several states, including an amusing letter explaining that the sponsor of Oregon’s bill withdrew it after deciding he’d been scammed by the MPAA lobbyist.

NO SURPRISE HERE:

Baghdad – Throughout the 13 years of UN sanctions on Iraq that were ended yesterday, Iraqi doctors told the world that the sanctions were the sole cause for the rocketing mortality rate among Iraqi children.

“It is one of the results of the embargo,” Dr. Ghassam Rashid Al-Baya told Newsday on May 9, 2001, at Baghdad’s Ibn Al-Baladi hospital, just after a dehydrated baby named Ali Hussein died on his treatment table. “This is a crime on Iraq.”

It was a scene repeated in hundreds of newspaper articles by reporters required to be escorted by minders from Saddam Hussein’s Ministry of Information.

Now free to speak, the doctors at two Baghdad hospitals, including Ibn Al-Baladi, tell a very different story. Along with parents of dead children, they said in interviews this week that Hussein turned the children’s deaths into propaganda, notably by forcing hospitals to save babies’ corpses to have them publicly paraded.

I’m waiting for the apologies and retractions from all those who accused the United States of murder-by-sanctions.

UPDATE: Reader Linda Jones emails:

It will be interesting to see if Saddam and the Baath party come in for criticism from the Muslim world over their refusal to allow these babies to be buried according to Muslim strictures. Where is the Muslim outrage over this?

“Muslim outrage” seems to appear only when convenient. I should note that it’s not at all unlikely that sanctions did lead indirectly to some deaths — particularly as Saddam was diverting the oil-for-food money to palaces and weapons. But, given that diversion, it’s pretty damned indirect.

I LIKE THE NEW BLOGCRITICS DESIGN better. It’s easier to navigate.