I’M IN NASHVILLE, where I delivered a Tennessee Constitutional Law lecture to hapless students studyng for the bar. I’m now in the lobby of the Sheraton, waiting to meet the Insta-Wife, who had a meeting here this morning, too. I’m using the phantom Sheraton wireless, which comes and goes for no obvious reason and doesn’t seem to cover the lobby. More blogging later — in the meantime, check out Geitner Simmons’ new home and read his post on the New York Times’ inexplicable failure to cover Sen. Charles Schumers federal election law problems.

Also, Dave Kopel corrects an error in a story about NYT gun coverage that I linked below.

If only Maureen Dowd were so graceful about corrections!

POSTING WILL BE INTERMITTENT AT BEST today and tomorrow. Back to normal tomorrow evening.

HANS BLIX:

It’s true the Iraqis misbehaved and had no credibility but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they were in the wrong.

Uh huh. Then there’s this:

It could have been bad brinkmanship. Saddam could have misjudged and read about the demonstrations in London, Paris, here and thought they won’t dare to go after me.

Indeed. Some of us were pointing that possibility out at the time.

UPDATE: Matt Howell is unimpressed with Blix’s interview.

MORE THOUGHTS ON NEW MEDIA, OLD MEDIA and self-financed journalism, over at GlennReynolds.com.

LIES ABOUT WMD? GUESS WHO SAID THIS:

In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members, though there is apparently no evidence of his involvement in the terrible events of September 11, 2001. It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons. Should he succeed in that endeavor, he could alter the political and security landscape of the Middle East, which as we know all too well affects American security.

You’ll have to go here to find out. Meanwhile Pyrojection notes some self-serving historical revisionism on Hans Blix’s part.

SPINSANITY NOTES THAT John Dean and Salon are recycling the bogus Wolfowitz quote from The Guardian long after The Guardian retracted it. TomPaine.com did, too. Shame on all of them.

UPDATE: Salon has corrected the Dean quote.

ANDREW SULLIVAN RAISED ANOTHER TEN GRAND in donations yesterday. Meanwhile, I bought a yoga strap (the deluxe $9.99 kind!) and scheduled a couple more visits with my stretching trainer. Computer-spine is on the run!

On a more serious note, I’ve seen a certain amount of jealousy and grousing about this around the Blogosphere (er, Sullivan’s ten grand, not my yoga strap), and I’m not sure why. You can blog for the money — in which case you should be very glad that Andrew is raising the bar, and generating a general sense that it’s okay to donate. Or you can blog for fun, in which case why should you care if he’s getting some bucks out of it?

I don’t try to make money from this site because (1) I have a day job; (2) this is a hobby; and (3) I’m afraid that — as with Tom Sawyer and the whitewashed fence — this would cease to be fun if I tried to turn it into a job. I appreciate the donations to the site (which, beyond bandwidth charges, in general go for fun gadgets, software, etc.), but the return on my time is minuscule. It’s like a guy with a $50,000 electric-train collection who occasionally sells one for more than he paid and says “see, I’m turning a profit!” (For me, the donations’ greatest value is that they offset the hatemail. People who like your stuff enough to send money outweigh any number who send nasty emails for free.) It’s different for Andrew, who’s actually making a living.

Hobbyist-bloggers shouldn’t care that he’s making money. Journalists and would-be pro-bloggers should be ecstatic that he is. I don’t see why anyone should be upset about it.

UPDATE: Roger Simon has some comments on selling his book online via the blog.

The Insta-Wife has had an interesting experience. She’s pitching her documentary to TV outlets while also selling it online, which gets a revenue stream going and helps demonstrate its viability. So far she’s made back over 20% of her investment via web sales, in about 6 weeks. That’s not bad for a documentary (most of which, I think, don’t ever make back 20% of the investment). It’s also interesting — and here’s where the tie-in with Roger’s post comes in — that how it sells via the web isn’t very strongly correlated with traffic. I’ve plugged her film here and on GlennReynolds.com (hey, it’s traditional in the industry to plug the work of good looking people who sleep with you, right?), but she’s gotten far more sales, from less traffic, when websites or print media that focus on people interested in violent teenagers, mental illness, etc. send people that way. A hundred pageviews by people who are seriously interested are worth more than thousands of pageviews by people whose interest is only casual.

I think that cottage industry will do very well via the web, but the missing link is still putting the interested people together with things that they’re interested in. I suspect that niche-marketing publications like Gizmodo may go along way toward filling the gap.

WELL, THIS really is about oil!

The Green Party TD for Dun Laoghaire and environment spokesman has, according to his declaration of interests, shares in Chevron Texaco, which was fined for pollution offences in Angola; General Electric, which has a nuclear division and arms links and Procter & Gamble which was convicted of water pollution in Nenagh.

Heh.

I’VE OCCASIONALLY POSTED ABOUT VIDEO SOFTWARE, etc. Here’s a roundup on video capture and editing, and DVD-burning, from PC Magazine, for those who are interested. I remain quite pleased with Sonic Foundry’s Vegas Video 4 / DVD Architect bundle, which scored very well in their tests, though my rendering times seem a good deal quicker than theirs.

LOOTING UPDATE: Howard Kurtz writes:

We’re used to journalists being misled in the famous fog of war, but this is ridiculous.

Everyone in journalism makes mistakes, especially routine mistakes – the misspelled name, the mangled title, the wrong date. In this case, though, the press told us that, in a crushing loss for western civilization, 170,000 artifacts were stolen.

The actual number: 33.

Yes, some of the booty was later returned, but 169,967 items? Maybe Don Rumsfeld was right that TV kept showing the same vase being carried away over and over.

And here’s the worst part:

We’re sure various news outlets have mentioned it, but certainly not with enough frequency to correct the impression left by the earlier hyped reports. This hasn’t exactly been a staple of cable TV. The news business has just sort of moved on without even murmuring an apology.

Yep. And that means that a lot of us will trust them a lot less, next time. That said, this AP estimate of Iraqi civilian deaths (3,240) is probably in the ballpark, though with Saddam’s fedayeen fighting in civilian garb, etc., the notion of a separate tally for civilian deaths becomes somewhat, well, notional.

IS FRANCE DEAD? Here’s a FrontPage Magazine symposium on that very topic. I don’t think that things need to turn out badly for France, but I’ve feared that they would since well before 9/11 and the French leadership’s increasing disconnect from reality bodes poorly. What’s worse is that most world conflagrations start, one way or another, with France.

UPDATE: Merde in France has posted some photos from last night’s demonstrations, and via email sends this observation:

Predictably, the demonstrations turned violent yesterday evening. The government has yielded to the teachers’ unions on some points, and now the unions smell blood at the first sign of weakness. Renewed demonstrations are called for tomorrow and I expect that things will turn violent again by the end of the day. This entire process will end up as it always does. The government will give in enough so that both sides will claim victory and France will hobble on as always. It’s worked so many times before that there is absolute denial as to the fact that France cannot hobble on much longer.

Stay tuned.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The Dissident Frogman has all sorts of interesting information on French doings, and a very cool Flash banner on WMD.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader David Gilbert emails:

I was in Paris yesterday (Tuesday) until our flight at 01:00 (pm) from Charles De Gaulle [Yes, we made the flight but the announcement from UA that several didn’t was noticed by the empty seats].

In hindsight, it was obvious that there was going to be trouble because at 9:30am the Rue de Rivoli was almost deserted (very few shops open). Our hotel staff let us know that about 1/2 the trains and buses weren’t going to work and asked if we had transportation to the airport. We were staying about 8 blocks down from the Place de la Concorde — where some of the riots were.

We just missed the strike the week before (Tuesday) because that was the day we flew in, and we just had a tour that afternoon (nice and quiet).

Tourism is very much down there in Paris, several people commented on it including our tour guide to Versailles.

Yeah, and I’m sure this will help.

STILL MORE: Here are photos of the Paris riots, from Xinhua.

NO WONDER HAROLD PINTER IS ANGRY — Here’s yet another Iraqi cultural treasure fallen victim to the Americans’ philistinism:

Saddam’s last novel — “Get out of here, curse you!” — was about to go on sale when U.S. and British forces invaded Iraq on March 20. It never saw the light of day.

“This was his fourth book. It was written sometime in 2002,” said Ali Abdel-Amir, a writer who has analyzed Saddam’s books.

Then again, there’s this stunning revelation:

Abdel-Amir said Saddam did not write the books himself but got a committee from the Information and Culture Ministry to do it for him.

“Saddam would record the outlines of his novel on a tape recorder and palace employees would transcribe it and give it to the committee, whose members included a number of writers and intellectuals,” Abdel-Amir said.

“They would write the novel and return it to Saddam. It would go back and forth until the novel got his approval.

Shocking.

JAMES LILEKS ON WHAT THE WAR WAS — AND IS — ABOUT:

Does the failure to find WMD mean we were handed a sack of lies?

Nope. The administration was clear from the get-go: Iraq was part of the Axis, and the Axis had to go down. Each part would be sundered as circumstances permitted. The destruction of the fascist regime in Baghdad would be the object lesson for the region, the proof that America had a new mission: Extirpating the flaming nutballs and the societies that nurture them.

Yep. But read the whole thing.

AUSTIN BAY WRITES on the Bush Administration’s biggest failure in the war on terror. He has some advice, too.

NEW FLASH: Harold Pinter is still an idiot:

The playwright Harold Pinter last night likened George W Bush’s administration to Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, saying the US was charging towards world domination while the American public and Britain’s “mass-murdering” prime minister sat back and watched.

Pinter, 72, was at the National Theatre in London to read from War, a new collection of his anti-war poetry that had been published in the press in response to events in Iraq.

In conversation on stage with Michael Billington, the Guardian’s theatre critic, Pinter said the US government was the most dangerous power that had ever existed.

The American detention centre in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where al-Qaida and Taliban suspects were being held, was a concentration camp.

The US population had to accept responsibility for allowing an unelected president to take power and the British were exhausted from protesting and being ignored by Tony Blair, a “deluded idiot” Pinter hoped would resign.

Sounds like Pinter’s been spending too much time surfing Democratic Underground.

RUMSFELD VS. THE ARMY BRASS: Phil Carter has the latest interesting developments.

CANNIBALISM IN NORTH KOREA: Ken Layne reports that it’s been going on longer than I suspected.

IF THE WAR WAS ABOUT OIL, asks Orrin Judd, then what about this?

I WAS SERIOUSLY REMISS by failing to mention this NPR story on blogs and The New York Times from Sunday. This story calls Romenesko a blog, a characterization that some other stories seem to disagree with.

TOM MAGUIRE SAYS HE HAS FOUND four bogus quotes from Paul Krugman’s column today.

Matthew Hoy isn’t happy with today’s effort, either.

I HAVE NO PLANS TO DISCUSS HILLARY’S BOOK HERE. If you want to read about it, you can go, well, pretty much anywhere else. I recommend this ESPN column by Gregg Easterbrook (scroll past the basketball stuff), which makes this overdiscussed subject more palatable by including lots of photos of cheerleaders, “dancers,” and beauty pageant contestants.

MAKING YOUR LIFE A LITTLE BIT WORSE, to make Big Entertainment feel better:

Due in August, the new ReplayTV 5500 series will remove the “Commercial Advance” and “Send Show” options present in models that are currently for sale.

This is to avoid angering the TV networks, apparently. (Via Gizmodo).

ALPHECCA’S WEEKLY SURVEY OF GUN BIAS IN THE MEDIA IS UP a day early, for some reason. He also points to this piece on biased gun reporting in the New York Times. Fox Butterfield’s reporting — the flaws in which have been pointed out here from time to time — comes in for particular criticism.

A BLOGGER TRADE ASSOCIATION? I’m not sure what I think about this idea. Except for the open bar part.

HERE’S STILL MORE FROM INSTAPUNDIT PARIS CORRESPONDENT CLAIRE BERLINSKI:

I just went out and asked the cops who are busy searching vehicles as they enter the Palais de Justice — pretty thoroughly from the looks of it — what precisely they were looking for, and what the helicopters were all about. To my surprise, they told me that it had nothing to do with the strikes. It’s all about the Elf trial. Your readers may know that French prosecutors are trying to put the former president of Elf away for a good long time. The charge is that the former president, the marvellously-named Loik Le Floch-Prigent, conspired with his buddies to run a vast corruption network that bankrolled countless French politicians and unsavory African leaders. Key search terms: slush funds, suitcases full of cash, millions of francs worth of jewelry, lavishly-appointed villas, and, of course, Jacques Chirac. One of the defendants, Andre Guelfi, is known — I am not kidding — as “Dede the Sardine.” Apparently, there are some people out there who do not want Le Floch-Prigent and Dede the Sardine to meet their just desserts. There have been highly credible threats against the Palais de Justice, which is right outside my door, hence the choppers right above my head. The alert is due to last until mid-July. Here’s a link to the story: Pure, delicious sleazefest, Instapundit readers; enjoy:

Link [Covered on Instapundit here]

Bill just sent me this: Link. It seems things got really ugly at the Place de la Concorde a few hours ago when the demonstrations against the pension reform scheme turned, yet again, violent. Masked demonstrators barricaded the street, set dustbins on fire, and then launched bottles, sticks and rocks at the police. One of those rocks connected with some poor photographer’s head. He’s been taken to the hospital, but evidently he’ll probably be okay . The police had to evacuate the area with teargas grenades and water cannons. Hence the sirens.

I’ll let you know if anything else happens. All of this is, of course, playing havoc with my afternoon nap schedule.

I can imagine. Thanks, Claire! Readers who appreciate this reportage should consider buying her novel, Loose Lips, which will be out next week.

UPDATE: MerdeinFrance has more.