THE ROOT CAUSE OF TERRORISM? Oliver Kamm reports on a study that suggests it’s tyranny.

Sic semper tyrannis.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis has more on this, and observes, “Judge the Iraq strategy in this light.”

STEVEN DEN BESTE reprints a letter from France.

DAVID ADESNIK OF OXBLOG (whose freakin’ permalinks aren’t working) says that the blogosphere should be flooding the zone on the plight of Aung Saan Suu Kyi — who has vanished in the custody of the thugs who rule Burma. He’s right, of course.

UPDATE: From David’s blog to Colin Powell’s ear: The United States is threatening sanctions against Burma.

THE RAVE ACT is being used to shut down benefit concerts for drug legalization groups.

I blame Joe Biden — for sneaking through this abomination — and Ashcroft’s Justice Department, for applying it this way.

This legislation has always been part of a culture war, not an anti-drug effort, and this application just makes that crystal clear for anyone who hadn’t noticed.

ERIC OLSEN NOTES THAT PEARL JAM is abandoning its label for the Internet. Is this the “beginning of a stampede away from the lumbering dinosaurs that the major labels have become?”

It’ll be interesting to see how it goes for Pearl Jam, though I think it would be a better test with a band that was a bit, um, fresher.

THE CHICAGOBOYZ have moved to their own, non-Blogspot, site. Hooray!

KAMIL ZOGBY POINTS TO a report that Jews are flooding into Germany.

BILL HOBBS SAYS THE BLOGOSPHERE’S THE THING:

Raines is gone, but the blogosphere isn’t. The NYT – and the rest of Big Journalism – are now being watched, ’round the clock, by bloggers from the political Left, Center and Right, and errors, bias and spin will be exposed.

It’s often said that the press is a free society’s watchdog on its government. But who watches the watchers? Thanks to the Internet and blogging software that has lowered the cost of publishing almost to the vanishing point, the answer to that question is We, The People. As it usually is when things are set right in America.

He’s right — though this cautionary note from Jeff Jarvis bears repeating:

Let’s hope that the blogosphere does not become known as nothing but a land of destruction.

Tearing down people can be deserved. It can be fun. It can be righteous good work.

But if all you do is destroy — and complain and carp and snark — you don’t build, you don’t contribute.

He’s right about that — though the Times and other media outfits are in no position to complain about such an attitude. But as one of the commenters to Jeff’s post notes: “These people destroyed themselves. Nobody went on a witch hunt for Raines or Lott, they dug their own graves and made a lot of enemies all on their own.” (You may want to read all the comments, actually, as there’s an interesting debate going on.)

MARK STEYN HAS MORE FROM THE MIDEAST, and in particular on the prospects for liberal democracy there:

It’s right that Iraq should be run by its own people, but national politics is no place to start. It’s easy to imagine an Iraq with three regional parliaments in Mosul, Baghdad and Basra, harder to foresee a single legislature filled by members of nationwide parties. But if it ever happens it will be the very last piece of the puzzle. Americans understand this: the original colonists learned self-government in their towns and their states and eventually applied it to an entire continent.

By contrast, those European sophisticates sneering that Washington won’t stay the course are often the same crowd who’ve found it easier to elevate the friendliest local strongman than create a durable constitutional culture. Dominique de Villepin, the ubiquitous Frenchman, declared the other day that Paris was indispensable to postwar reconstruction because it had so much experience in Africa. I don’t know about you, but I think Iraq deserves better than to be the new Chad or Ivory Coast.

I think we need to be pushing for freedom in Francophone Africa, too.

WHO SHOULD THE TIMES HIRE as a new op-ed columnist? Roger Simon has been running a contest and the results are now in.

TIM RUTTEN SAYS THE INTERNET BROUGHT DOWN HOWELL RAINES:

More significant, the Times scandal — which began a little more than a month ago when it was revealed that 27-year-old reporter Jayson Blair had fabricated and plagiarized news stories — was the first institutional crisis of its kind to unwind in real time. Just as live combat reports from the Iraq war transfixed a global audience, so too did reports on events inside the New York Times transmitted via Internet media news sites, online magazines and newspaper editions, blogs and e-mails.

Every significant turn in the entire sequence and every memo issued by Sulzberger, Raines and Boyd was immediately posted on the Internet. When Rick Bragg, the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning feature writer and a Raines favorite, was suspended for turning in a story based on an unsalaried freelance writer’s uncredited work, he defended his conduct as standard among the Times’ national correspondents. For 24 hours or so, that defense caromed around the Internet, uncontradicted by Raines or Boyd. . . .

And, in the end, it was the new world of Web sites, blogs, online editions and e-mails — not Raines — that set the pace of his exit.

Indeed.

UPDATE: Rand Simberg notes that Rutten wasn’t always so impressed with blogs. Well, live and learn.

MAYBE THERE’S HOPE FOR FRANCE AFTER ALL:

France’s exhaustion with its unions has found its voice in a 21-year-old student, Sabine Herold, who is challenging the silent majority to revolt against the strikes crippling her country and causing havoc for British travellers.

With schools and government offices closed yesterday, Channel ferries halted, and airlines cancelling most of their flights to and from France, Mlle Herold called the union members ‘reactionary egotists’

They “claim to defend public services but are just defending their own interests”, she said.

With her pale blue mascara and long eyelashes, she makes an unlikely Joan of Arc. But her words have found an echo in large protests by students and parents against repeated strikes by teachers and threats to disrupt this summer’s exam schedule.

She has also become an emblem for the many in French society who believe that economic reforms are long overdue. She blames President Jacques Chirac for caving in repeatedly during his career to union pressure.

Give him hell.

BRIAN MICKLETHWAIT and Ken Layne report on the damage that the New York Times’ brand has suffered. Meanwhile Randy Barnett laments Howell Raines’ resignation:

Now the paper can go back to posing as an objective arbiter of the truth rather than the spirited ideological publication it’s always been. By taking the white gloves off the Grey Lady, Raines did truth in advertising a great service. Now he’s gone and the Times gets to go back to pretending. ‘Tis a pity.

They can pretend — but that’s about all. I think it’s going to take more than a name-plate shuffle in the editorial offices to restore confidence in the Times. It will take an obvious recommitment to good, honest, reporting. And, as Andrew Sullivan and Collin Levey have both noted (see below), people are watching.

ERIC MULLER, who is posting over at the Volokh Conspiracy this week, writes on the dangers of overwrought analogies in civil-liberties debate.

ANDREW SULLIVAN’S WRAPUP on the Howell Raines scandals is worth reading in full. But here’s an excerpt:

It’s worth reviewing that the blogosphere was there before the mainstream media caught on and long before the Jayson Blair revelation. First, blogs revealed how many of the NYT’s polls were skewed in the way they presented or spun data. They exposed the anti-Bush fervor of the Enron coverage. Then they broadcast the revelation of how Paul Krugman had once had lucrative former ties with Enron. We exposed blatant lies on the front-page – from allegedly soaring temperatures in Alaska to the fabricated cooptation of Henry Kissinger into the anti-war camp in August 2002. The process was relentless. In the end, even fabulist Maureen Dowd couldn’t get away with doctoring quotes from the president to make a partisan point because a relatively little known blogger caught her, and passed it on. And in all this, we were helped by hundreds of readers who found errors and bias where others didn’t – meta-bloggers, if you will.

It’s that horizontal knowledge at work! (And Collin Levey, writing in the WSJ, agrees.) The irony is that professional journalists — even though some have gotten their backs up over all this criticism of the revered Times — should appreciate this. The way for Big Media to respond to the blogosphere’s criticisms and competition is to do a better job, which means largely reversing the past couple of decades’ trends toward downsizing, bureau-closing, homogenization, and substitution of “analysis” for reporting.

UPDATE: Lileks, being a genius, goes to Fark to collect his NYT reax quotes. And there’s this:

10:03 Andrew Sullivan just floated six inches off the ground and gently revolved in mid air, and when he touched down he said to himself: Howell Raines has just resigned. I can feel it.

Heh. And here’s a good wrapup news story by Matthew Rose and Laurie Cohen from the WSJ. Excerpt:

“There is an endemic cultural issue at the Times that is not a Howell creation, although it plays into his vulnerabilities as a manager, which is a top-down hierarchical structure,” Linda Greenhouse, a veteran Times reporter who covers the Supreme Court, said in an interview last month. “And it’s a culture where speaking truth to power has never been particularly welcomed.”

Indeed.

BUT THERE’S NO CONNECTION BETWEEN IRAQ AND TERROR, RIGHT?

BRUSSELS, Belgium, June 5 — Belgian authorities arrested an Iraqi man Thursday after 10 letters laced with toxic powders were sent to the Belgian prime minister, the American, Saudi and British embassies and other offices. . . .Belgian media reported the envelopes included a card signed in English by the ”International Islamic Society.”

Well. . . .

HERE’S AN INTERESTING ACCOUNT OF FRENCH CRITIQUES OF FRENCH DIPLOMACY, over at Innocents Abroad.

JIM MILLER WRITES that the widely-reported Pew survey on international attitudes toward the United States is also widely misreported:

The most important pattern that I see is this: In every single nation for which we have March and May data, the image of the United States improved in that period. In other words, the trend is in our favor. Would you have guessed that from reading the lead paragraph I quoted?

There’s a New York Times problem, too.

LOOSE LIPS, the new novel by InstaPundit Paris correspondent Claire Berlinski, will be out in less than two weeks. You can pre-order a copy here — and you should!

THE VOLOKH CONSPIRACY has more firsthand reporting from Iraq.

GUARDIAN UPDATE: Charles Johnson reports:

The Guardian’s lie about Paul Wolfowitz was even more egregious and disgraceful than it first appeared—because the accurate quote from Wolfowitz was published on their own web site last weekend, in a context that makes it unmistakably clear what Wolfowitz was saying: U.S. to Put Economic Pressure on N. Korea.

North Korea would respond to economic pressure, unlike Iraq, where military action was necessary because the country’s oil money was propping up the regime, Wolfowitz told delegates at the second annual Asia Security Conference in Singapore.

“The country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse,” Wolfowitz said. “That I believe is a major point of leverage.”

“The primary difference between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options in Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil,” he said.

Pretty damning.

FACT-CHECKING BY BLOGGERS: Here’s an Online Journalism Review article on the blogosphere’s role in fact-checking the Guardian, the New York Times, and others.

ANDREW SULLIVAN:

This really shouldn’t be a sign of a revolution, but it is. In any other business, Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd would have resigned weeks ago. And a few years ago, they would have been able to ride out the storm, using the Times’ enormous media power to protect themselves. But the Internet has changed things. It means that the errors and biases of the new NYT could be exposed not just once but dozens and dozens of times. It means that huge and powerful institutions such as the New York Times cannot get away with anything any more. The deference is over; and the truth will out.

No word from Kaus yet, but he’s bound to weigh in soon. And if this is your first time here today, scroll down for lots of news about the NYT and the Guardian.

UPDATE: Kaus has posted now. Best bit:

If this had happened 10 years ago, when the Internet didn’t exist, Raines would still be running the place. The Times staff would be just as unhappy, but they’d be unable to instantaneously organize and vent their displeasure on Romenesko and elsewhere.

Yep.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Meanwhile, Donald Luskin is dancing about on Raines’ grave, and Roger Simon wants to know who you’d pick as a new oped columnist if you were the new editor of the Times.

THE VOLUNTEER TAILGATE PARTY IS UP. It’s blogalicious.

A READER ASKS IF I USE “STRINGERS.” Nope. I use a different resource, called “readers.” A lot of my links come to me from readers, along with firsthand reporting, sometimes. (I’ve especially gotten excellent reports from Paris correspondents Nelson Ascher and Claire Berlinski over the past year). I think I’ve got an Afghan correspondent lined up, too.