BOTH DONALD LUSKIN AND LYNXX PHERRETT HAVE GONE TO THE TRANSCRIPTS on the Financial Times budget-deficit story that everyone’s been talking about. They agree with the Powerline post I mentioned above that the story is bogus. The sad thing is that this is likely to make reporters less willing to post interview transcripts, because then they can’t get away with anything.

The good news is that when they do, they can’t get away with anything. And post-Blair, I’d like to see this made standard practice. Server space is cheap.

Meanwhile the question is, will this deconstruction make the Sunday talk shows? Or are they too far behind the Blogosphere curve?

UPDATE: Billy Beck writes:

There, you can read a transcript of a Financial Times interview with one Kent Smetters who, as an assistant deputy Treasury secretary for economic policy, led the work on the study that’s got everyone’s asses up in flaming boils. And if you follow my advice, dear readers, and go see what he has to say, then you will discover that, of the $44 trillion (yes, that’s right) that everybody is fainting about, more than $36 trillion is devoted to Medicare.

Do you understand this?

Thirty-six trillion dollars of these deficits projected into the future are about the degree to which America has achieved socialized medicine, and only that. . . .

The flap going on out there is about the Bush tax cuts, and how they’re going to wreck everything, and I want you to watch and see how many people — if any at all — are alert enough to grasp what the real nut of this is. They are fretting their little nerves over $350 billion in tax cuts in the face of $44 trillion in projected deficits, and the matter of $36 trillion of that going to Medicare alone is somehow getting past them.

Read it all, and don’t miss the Zappa quote.

SUMAN PALIT NOTICES UNILATERALISM in action.

I THINK THAT ONE OF THEM WAS REALLY KEN LAYNE: He digs that whole anonymous-busking thing.

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE OIL FOR THESE GUYS:

The ghost of France’s first Socialist president, François Mitterrand, has come back to haunt France’s biggest postwar sleaze trial – in the form of an extraordinary tale involving his golfing partner, a luxury chateau on the outskirts of Paris, and the sum of £2.6m.

A total of 37 defendants are on trial in Paris over claims that £120m was siphoned from the accounts of the oil giant Elf during the late 1980s and early 1990s, much of it allegedly being paid out in illegal business commissions to various African leaders and their families, and to political parties.

The trial is, in reality, that of a whole system of state-sponsored corruption that flourished in France for decades: presidents and ministers regarded the country’s numerous state-owned multinationals not just as tools of foreign policy, but as a convenient source of cash to keep friends happy and foes quiet.

Hmm. Golfing partner, eh? I wonder if the back nine is playable. . . . Nah, sadly it’s nothing that amusing. Just your usual socialist oil-money-for-chateau scandal.

FORMER CONGRESSMAN BOB WALKER WRITES:

At my Washington office a few weeks ago, I met with a visiting Japanese parliamentarian who specializes in science and technology issues. I related to him my belief that the Chinese would be on the moon within a decade with a declaration of permanent occupation. He disagreed. He smiled and said my conclusion was accurate but my timing was off. In his view, the Chinese would be on the moon within three to four years.

Regardless of who is right about the time frame, and I still believe that even a decade is ambitious, the fact remains that the Chinese are devoting resources and gearing up to do something that we are no longer technologically capable of achieving in the immediate future. We went to the moon, planted our flag, gathered samples, took credit for an amazing achievement in human history and then abandoned the effort. The space technology available to us today could not be used to replicate what we did 35 years ago.

I haven’t stayed in touch, but I knew Walker pretty well when he was on the House space subcommittee, and I was doing pro bono lobbying for the National Space Society. He’s a smart and thoughtful guy. Read the whole thing, which is really about what China’s ambitions in space mean to the United States in a wide variety of areas.

I just sent off a blog entry on space to the MSNBC folks, though it was unfortunately before I saw this item. But stay tuned. (Via Pathetic Earthlings).

JEFF JARVIS HAS BLOGGER’S ELBOW from too much time at the computer. Me too. I also have blogger’s neck, blogger’s shoulder, and blogger’s lower back. So far, I’ve avoided blogger’s wrist and blogger’s big toe, but it’s only a matter of time.

Hey, we’re suffering for your amusement, here. . .. .

A REPORTER COMES OUT OF THE CLOSET after “passing” for years. It’s a must-read. Excerpt:

The sad fact of the matter is that many progressive Democrats are intolerant and mean toward those with whom they disagree politically. Their behavior doesn’t hurt so much as amuse. I’ve been sitting at their dinner parties for two decades now, sipping Chardonnay, munching on salmon steaks, and listening to self-professed progressive thinkers talk like bigots. It makes me chuckle to think that, on average, even here in the mid-South, I probably hear 10 bigoted comments about Republicans for each time I am exposed to the “n” word. To be sure, some perspective is needed. Clearly, the many minorities in Nashville and elsewhere whose lives are daily and cruelly affected by bigotry have it worse than your average golf-playing Republican.

The profile of people who use the term “Republican” in a bigoted fashion tends to be fairly straightforward: Educated, intellectually gifted and generally thoughtful in their speech. They are the very people I sat next to in newsrooms in New York, Chicago, Tokyo and Johannesburg. They are my friends and neighbors. They are academics, lawyers, bankers and stay-at-home moms—decent, kind and sensitive people, for the most part.

But they are, and remain bigots.

Read the rest.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

Bigot is a very strong word, sir. And I would thank you to qualify your tacit endorsement of this man’s piece. I consider myself a progressive, and yes, I have little patience for the POLICIES of Republicans. So, I’m intolerant. So what. The Republican party has given and continues to give shelter to the most offensive sociopaths in American society: White Supremicists, Anti-Semites, Homophobes, Fundamentalist Christians, Pat Buchanan. This is largely why we’re so bigoted towards Republicans. If you want to label Progressives bigots, fine, I’ll accept that title. Be aware that your sitting in a glass house, and progressives aren’t in short supply of stones either.

P.S. This sort of finger-pointing reflects terribly on you, as someone whose intelligence I would like to respect.

But people are always throwing stones at me. Well, verbal ones, anyway, which don’t actually break my bones or anything.

But, you know, the lumping together of fundamentalist Christians — with whom I disaagree on a lot of things, but who are a rather diverse crowd — with white supremacists and anti-semites (actually, a lot of fundamentalists are pretty pro-semitic — remember that whole “evangelicals for Israel are running the White House” meme that people have been peddling?) seems pretty bigoted itself.

So I think the guy has a point. Any kind of speech that the hearer might find “offensive” is un-PC, unless, of course, it’s directed at those who hold un-PC beliefs. If that’s not bigotry, it’s hypocrisy of the first order, and mean-spirited hypocrisy at that. Which is close enough for me.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Geoff Matthews emails:

The funniest thing about this reader’s e-mail condemning Republicans because of their support for Buchanan is that Pat Buchanan left the Republican Party for the Reform Party (and promptly turned it into an irrelevant organization).

Heh. And Buchanan supporters are nothing if not diverse — at least as long as he’s got Justin Raimondo!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Damon Chetson observes:

Your email correspondent’s email – “Bigot is a very strong word, sir.”

Bigot is indeed a strong word. So why do some Democrats use it to describe people who simply oppose affirmative action?

Because that’s different.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Tony Adragna says it’s about partisanship and points out that there’s plenty of vitriol from the right. And that’s true — but it’s sort of like responding to the Bill Bennett gambling story by noting that Democrats, gamble, too. Bennett set himself up as a moral arbiter, which made people see what he did as hypocritical.

In the same way, Stern is remarking on how PC types who make a fetish of avoiding name-calling and stereotyping are in fact happy to do just that. Which makes them seem, well, hypocritical. And just as Bennett seemed to a lot of people to be immoral by the standards that he professed, so too do these people seem bigoted by the standards that they profess. When Bennett said “but I never condemned gambling,” it was about as persuasive as when these people say “but we never condemned this sort of thing when it was aimed at Republicans!”

BEEN BUSY. Back later.

The execution of the children was the event that established the character of the regime. Yes, yes, regicide was often accompanied by such atrocities, but this was the 20th century. Why, this was the birth of Scientific Socialism. There is nothing so powerful as an idea has time has come!

But just in case it’s not that powerful yet, let’s shoot the little girls.

JIM DUNNIGAN WRITES on efforts to rebuild Iraq’s army. Some interesting observations, including this one:

Which brings us to some serious cultural differences. Arab armies rarely get the kind of constructive competition you see in Western armies. That is because, for Arab soldiers, it is seen as safer to not compete, so no one is “disgraced” by losing, than it is to compete and improve everyone’s skills. Of course there is competition in Arab society, in business as well as sports. But the concept of “losing gracefully” is not as readily accepted as it is in the West. This can be overcome. Arab officers attending American military schools over the last half century learned to live with the competition, even if it is a bit of a shock at first. But there will be some resistance to introducing these “barbarian” customs on the entire Iraqi army. No doubt general Abizaid will have to give his “Do you want to be part of a kick ass army” speech many times to keep things moving along.

The competition means officers, NCOs and troops will be expected to take the initiative. This has traditionally been discouraged. Initiative can lead to failure, or unexpected situations. Arabs prefer to avoid both. The new Iraqi army will have to learn to live with it.

Read the whole thing. Of course, in Saddam’s army the losers would have been fed into a shredder, feet-first, which probably also discouraged proposals for competition.

WELL, THIS ACTUALLY IS NEWS:

The Australian Federal Police (AFP) today ruled out terrorism as the motivation for the alleged attempted hijacking of a Qantas flight to Launceston.

Federal agent Graham Ashton said the man charged over yesterday’s incident, David Mark Robinson, was an Australian national, had no Islamic background, and appeared to be acting alone.

Then, of course, there’s the inevitable next bit:

Meanwhile, Robinson was today described by his former boss as an affable, hard working employee. Robinson resigned from Ipex Computers in Melbourne in April.

Ipex company director David Cohen said Robinson had worked as a senior engineer with the company – located in Robinson’s home suburb of East Bentleigh – for six years.

He said staff at the 300-strong firm had been shocked by today’s front page news about their former colleague they knew as “Mark”.

“He was affable, very likeable, passionate about his customers … generally a very nice guy,” Mr Cohen told AAP.

“So are you surprised he shot Buckwheat?”

“Oh, no, it’s all he ever talked about.”

JOSH MARSHALL continues to be all over the Texas / Homeland Security story. That’s the nice thing about a blog: it lets you indulge in the kind of monomania that a newspaper seldom can, unless it’s about Augusta National. And when people do that, it’s often useful.

SELF-HATRED: Understandable, of course, in some cases — but not a sound basis for a political orientation.

VIRGINIA POSTREL has some advice for the New York Times:

I’ll just add a strategic point, the kind of thing they teach in business school. If you are going to adopt a strategy to be a national newspaper, you must add the capabilities to be a national newspaper. That doesn’t mean parachuting in reporters from Manhattan to interview a few natives and report back on their peculiar habits. It means having lots of well-staffed bureaus and, if necessary, credited stringers. It also means breaking out of a worldview that considers Manhattan normal and every other place weird.

The truth is that the NYT is not a national newspaper. It is the New York Times (more accurately, The Manhattan South of Harlem Times). It assumes its readers have the prejudices of well-educated, affluent Manhattanites, and it staffs, writes, and edits accordingly. To take an apolitical example, from a national perspective, the Times business pages grossly overcover the media business. From a Manhattan perspective, that makes perfect sense.

There is nothing wrong with this strategy, but it is a different strategy from the stated one of being a national paper. The mismatch between strategy and capabilities seems to account for many of the paper’s current managerial problems, including the seeming inability of editors to keep track of exactly when and where reporters travel.

Makes sense to me.

SALAM PAX will be writing for The Guardian — and The Guardian is already mangling his words to fit the correct political line! Now that’s fast!

BUDGET CONSPIRACY THEORIES? Powerline reports that the Financial Times story claiming a deficit coverup is bunk, and has transcripts of the interview suggesting that the story has been rather vigorously spun, to put it mildly:

So the thrust of the article published by the Financial Times, and elaborated on by CNN, the BBC, Reuters, and, no doubt, just about every newspaper in America by tomorrow morning, is the precise opposite of what the Financial Times reporter was told by one of the authors of the supposedly “buried” study.

I’m entirely an agnostic on the Bush tax cuts, and I find the debate — in which Democrats predictably claim that it wll bankrupt the country and starve the poor while Republicans claim it will lead to universal wealth — predictable and unpersuasive. Take it away, Paul Krugman and Donald Luskin.

SARS — not only back in Toronto, but now back in British Columbia, too. I don’t believe that they’ve got as good a handle on this as they thought.

JUST SO YOU KNOW: There’s some sort of mailserver problem on the InstaPundit account. I don’t think I’m getting mail, since I’m not even getting copies of messages I send to myself. So if you’ve emailed me unsuccessfully, sorry.

HERE’S A NIFTY MOVABLE TYPE TUTORIAL FOR BEGINNERS. If nothing else, it should reduce the apprehensiveness of people who are thinking of switching from Blogger.

ANOTHER UNCREDITED STRINGER FOR THE TIMES comes out of the closet. He begged for a byline, and was denied:

As more and more of my stuff got into the paper, I began beseeching my editors to give me a byline or a tag.

It was not just a matter of ego, though I must admit it is an honor seeing my name in the Times.

The real reason I was so vociferous is that the people who pick up a newspaper have the right to know who provides the information therein.

It is a matter of trust, to the readers and to the sources.

After a while, and especially with the Iverson mess — involving a couple of B-movie bunglers trying to pin a bum gun rap on The Answer — sources began to joke about my veracity when they didn’t see my name in the paper. People who are quoted like to know who did the quoting, because, should anything be wrong, they want to know whom to yell at. (The good news was that I got everything right and nobody, to my knowledge, complained. The bad news is that I didn’t invent any of my interviews, which, at the going rate, would have guaranteed me a very large jackpot.) . . .

My pleadings, via telephone and e-mail, were answered with a standard this-is-the-policy line, lest something be of such import and substance that it would be impossible to ignore.

So explain to me, again — well, actually just for the first time — what exactly it was that Rick Bragg did that was so bad?

(Via Romenesko).

UPDATE: Ana Marie Cox, on the other hand, writes that Bragg should have been fired for superciliousness and condescension.

Boy, a lot of jobs would open up if that were the standard. . . . And scroll down to read Al Giordano’s comment, which is brilliant.

ROBERT MUGABE IS SECRETLY ARMING HIS STREET THUGS WITH GUNS so that they can crush the opposition — which has been disarmed — next week.

Typical.

ETHICAL CONCERNS GET MAUREEN DOWD’S COLUMN DROPPED. Ouch.

JOHN SCALZI IS UNIMPRESSED with the Bush tax cuts.

GUANTANAMO: A “DEATH CAMP?” Only if arteriosclerosis counts, apparently:

Is America the only country in the world that could run a prison camp where prisoners gain weight? Between April 2002 and March 2003, the Joint Task Force returned to Afghanistan 19 of the approximately 664 men (from 42 countries) who have been held in the detention camps at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay. Upon leaving, it has been reported, each man received two parting gifts: a brand new copy of the Koran as well as a new pair of jeans. Not the act of generosity that it might first appear, the jeans, at least, turned out to be a necessity. During their 14-month stay, the detainees (nearly all of them) had each gained an average of 13 pounds.

In America, where 13 pounds is what many of our citizens’ chins weigh, the prisoners’ slightly enlarged girth might seem negligible. But given the low-bit-resolution video footage we have seen of stooped and shackled men in orange jumpsuits, and the collective protests from international human rights groups, the revelation that the men detained from last year’s war would leave the Guantanamo prison camps sporting a larger pair of trousers than the ones they showed up with comes as something of a surprise.

I blame the fast-food industry.

EMILY LITELLA EXPRESSES HER VIEWS on the HostingMatters outage.