WORTHWHILE CANADIAN OP-ED: No, really.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING PIECE ON PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN WEBLOGS, by Lance Knobel in The Guardian:

The template for successful presidential campaigns was established by James (“It’s the economy, stupid”) Carville and Karl (Boy Genius) Rove. Stay relentlessly on message, control the agenda. But Howard Dean thinks there is another way. The Dean campaign for the Democrats has enthusiastically surrendered control to the internet. The success of Dean, who now leads the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, means other aspirant candidates are following his lead. . . .

“Our belief was you have to let control go,” says Gross. “We truly are a grassroots campaign and if you build a command structure on top, you kill it. You have to have trust in the American people.”

On the Web, you gain power by giving up control. The Clark crew doesn’t seem to have quite figured that out yet, but they will, if they stay in the race long enough.

It’s a real problem for the Bush campaign, because to an incumbent — and especially the people who work for an incumbent — the need for control seems much greater.

MORE TIRESOME CHIN-TUGGING by the self-appointed guardians of journalistic ethics:

Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, believes that Leno — along with other late-night talk show hosts — crossed the line from entertainment into political journalism a long time ago, and needs to play by the rules of journalism.

“If you have a big show like Jay Leno and reach a lot of people, you have the power to influence hearts and minds. You have a responsibility to the public,” Rosenstiel said. “If you want to play Peter Jennings, then you have to play by some of the same rules as Peter Jennings, even if 99 percent of your show is pure entertainment. You cross a line when you start to get into this other game. If his responsibility is to entertain people, and it ends there, maybe he should refrain from having political people on the air.”

If Peter Jennings and his ilk, were better at discharging their responsibility to the public, and if experts in journalistic ethics were as quick to criticize the nonstop lefty-celebrity partisanship of the Today show as they are to jump on the host of the Tonight show when he supports a Republican, I guess this might have some substance.

MICHAEL BARONE on Schwarzenegger — and Tony Blair:

But the main reason for his victory was that he is an outsider challenging a political system in which insiders have operated without effective supervision.

That’s right, and it’s why the Euros find the Schwarzenegger election so appalling, I think.

DAVID BERNSTEIN REPORTS A CENSORSHIP SCANDAL AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA — involving, of all people, David Bernstein.

First Roy Moore, and now this. It sounds as if the University of Alabama should be deeply embarrassed by this gesture of contempt toward academic freedom and free speech.

RECALL ARNOLD! OR, IS ARNOLD LIKE SEX? — however you put it, it’s addressed over at GlennReynolds.com.

AT LUNCHTIME TODAY, I moderated a panel discussion on digital downloading and music, featuring a bunch of musicians, songwriters, and industry people from Nashville. Here’s the scary bit: one of the industry guys said that their big legislative priority is to try to create a regime where you have to register with a unique, verifiable ID to access the Internet.

No doubt the next step would be to take away that ID as punishment for “misconduct” on the Internet. Shades of Vernor Vinge’s True Names.

UPDATE: Declan McCullagh links this post with a reference to the RIAA, and follows up with a post in which the RIAA (humorously) denies it. I should be clear that there was no RIAA representative at this panel; it was an industry guy, but not one from the RIAA.

RUTH WEDGWOOD WRITES:

If you can’t enjoy a good laugh, you shouldn’t serve as a diplomat at the United Nations. One source of amusement is Syria’s current membership on the U.N. Counter-Terrorism Committee.

There are, of course, widely circulated reports that Syria has offered safe haven and training camps to groups such as the Islamic Jihad, Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command.

Any succor to terror groups that seek out noncombatant civilians for mayhem and maiming for “political” purposes might seem to be inconsistent with the Counter-Terrorism Committee’s program. . . .

Yes, it might.

MARK KLEIMAN HAS MOVED OFF OF BLOGSPOT, for which his readers will be forever grateful. And he’s got an interesting proposal for getting to the bottom of the Plame affair. I like it, though of course the problem with his approach — as opposed to my subpoena-the-journalists approach — is that you’d have to be sure that the leaker was within the group in question, and I’m not sure how you could do that.

UPDATE: Chris Mooney has moved, too.

SCHWARZENEGGER RECALL PRESCIENCE: Back when this first came up, James Lileks wrote that the best reason to support a Schwarzenegger governorship was that “like all typical examples of American craziness, this will just horrify the Europeans.”

Now Andrew Sullivan points out that he’s right, with this quote from Le Monde:

Here’s a state with 35 million people and a GDP about the size of France’s. . . . And yet here’s a state where, at a cost of millions of dollars, voters can dismiss a sitting governor barely eleven months after his election.

You can see why the unpopular French establishment would regard this as dangerous.

UPDATE: Roger Simon has more evidence of Lileks’ genius. Chortle.

IF YOU’RE JUST READING INSTAPUNDIT, or maybe a few other blogs, you’re missing out on the richness of the blogosphere. Why not drop by the Carnival of the Vanities, hosted this week by Shanti Mangala, and visit some of the blogs linked there? You might find some you like.

[Better than Instapundit? — Ed. Hey, it could happen!]

Meanwhile, over at GlennReynolds.com, I’ve got some thoughts on the past and the future.

HERE, VIA DAVE WINER, is an absolutely fascinating map of the counties Arnold carried. Bustamante won only a narrow coastal strip centered around the Bay Area. What’s more, my earlier post saying that Schwarzenegger and McClintock together got nearly 60% is wrong. They got over 60%. Given how California has gone in the past, I suspect that this has a lot of California Democrats worried. The most positive spin you can put on it is that Gray Davis was horribly disastrous. But I think the problem goes deeper than that. Will they be smart enough to do some serious rethinking, or will they blame the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy and try to continue as before? (I’ll bet I know what Karl Rove is hoping they’ll do . . . .)

UPDATE: Several readers point out that it’s not just the Democrats who need to be thinking. Reader Ken Bascom notes:

Perhaps the California Republican Party should be worried about these results, as well. If there’s 60% of the population willing to vote for a Republican candidate, why didn’t they do so 11 months ago when they had the chance? What is there about the policies, practices or philosophies of the Republican Party that prevents them from fielding a candidate that can win? Why is it that only an outsider that in effect imposes himself on the party the only Republican that can win?

Reader Byron Matthews adds:

Part of the blame for the California mess must be assigned to the state’s Republicans for their sheer political ineptness in recent years. The system doesn’t work when there is no credible opposition party.

I think that’s right. And reader Debbie Lundell questions the validity of the numbers:

Glenn, isn’t the greater than 60% for Arnold and Tom a bit misleading/?? It is actually 60% of 54% that voted FOR the recall…not 60% of voters….still impressive but…….

But that’s not right, is it? You didn’t have to vote in favor of the recall to vote on the replacement election, and Bustamante was — until last week or so, anyway — telling people to vote “no on the recall, si on Bustamante.”

HERE’S AN ARTICLE on bloggers hitting the bigtime by Maureen Ryan in the Chicago Tribune. Among those mentioned are Matthew Yglesias, Michael Totten, Steven Den Beste, and Elizabeth Spiers.

TIM BLAIR FINDS AN EMBARRASSING CNN SLIP — the kind that would get someone fired if it involved race.

HERE’S MORE ON THE OPEN VS. CLOSED SPLIT in the Wesley Clark campaign, from James Moore:

Three weeks ago a friend of mine traveled to Little Rock and began working for the Clark campaign. Despite having very good personal access to General Clark, he quit after a few days, citing the closed nature of the campaign organization. And now we hear a similar tale from the campaign manager.

By contrast, the Dean campaign is open to people and ideas. It is “out of control” in the best sense of the word. Innovators such as the people of MoveOn and Meetup and DeanLink are embraced. The campaign is fresh, alive, and inviting.

As I said at BloggerCon, on the Internet you get power by giving up control. The Dean people seem to get this. Clark’s people, so far, don’t. And they’ve started their campaign late enough that they’re going to have to learn fast if they’re going to learn at all.

ONCE AGAIN, the press kept the story from us:

News organizations had been poised to write the Hollywood ending for days, and the networks had been sitting on their exit-poll projections for hours — no Florida humiliation possible because the thing wasn’t close. The night’s only cliffhanger was the Marlins beating the Cubs in the 11th.

And there was something surreal about reading Drudge’s report — which was correct — that it wasn’t close, and that the networks were going to call it for Schwarzenegger the minute the polls closed, and then turning on the TV just before they did and seeing the talking heads acting as if the whole question were up in the air, when they knew better, and were just about to say so.

Yeah, I know there’s controversy about reporting this stuff before the polls close, but there’s something worse than unseemly about, basically, lying to viewers for what you see as their own good. And once you admit you’re doing it some of the time, as the networks do in these cases, you make people wonder when else you’re doing it.

UPDATE: It’s revealing, I think, that arguably the three biggest stories at the moment — Iraq, the Plame affair, and the California recall — are all marked by the press not telling us the whole story. And Ralph Peters is hopping mad about the Iraq coverage:

Recently, I visited Germany to speak with our soldiers, many just back from Iraq. The situation depicted in the media was unrecognizable to them. They’d just left a country where every indicator of success was turning positive. Yet the media insist we are incompetent and failing.

The Kurds are prospering. The Shi’ites no longer live in fear. Even most Sunni Arabs feel relieved that Saddam’s gone. The mullahs are behaving. Local markets are busy and full of goods. The electricity’s back on – more reliably than before the war. Schools are open. Oil’s flowing. The Iraqi media is booming, boisterous and free. The Governing Council has convinced previously hostile factions to cooperate. Iraqis provide more and more of their own local security. And the torture chambers are closed.

What do we hear from Iraq? Another soldier killed. The rest is silence.

Actually, there have been some modest improvements as late. But he’s basically right. And he’s right about this, too:

They’ve already made a success of post-modern terrorism as surely as Colonel Tom Parker made Elvis a star.

Terrorists are parasitic on the press, and a particular kind of press coverage. Likewise, the press has become parasitic upon terrorists, since they provide dramatic stories without hard work.

But will the public respect, or trust, parasites? Or even continue to support expansive press freedom, in light of the press’s irresponsibility?

Just something to think about.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader points to this passage from the Peters oped on Iraq and contrasts it with the election coverage:

Much of the media has already called the game’s outcome as a loss before we’ve reached half-time. Even though the scoreboard shows we’re winning.

Heh. Yes, they’re willing to call a war a quagmire as soon as the shooting starts, but they won’t call an election when they know the outcome.

NOAH SHACHTMAN thinks that concerns about biochem weapons are overrated.

I hope he’s right.

ORRIN JUDD WRITES that we should be moving to an open-source intelligence model.

THERE’S MORE TO THE WORLD THAN CALIFORNIA, and here’s a roundup of African events from Winds of Change.

DANIEL WEINTRAUB WRITES:

It is sad, in a way, that the state’s public affairs are in such terrible shape that it has come to this. . . .

I understand the bitterness, but I’m disturbed by its depth. Several of the Democrats I spoke to were in strong denial about the message sent by the voters, the message being that they, and Davis, have been poor stewards of state government. They see this is an isolated event, a venting, that will quickly pass while they fight to maintain everything they have done the past five years. My gut tells me they are wrong, that there is something deeper here, a desire for fundamental change in the way the state does business and in the way politics works, or doesn’t work, in California.

I hope that the California political establishment will be smart enough to realize that this was a colossal rebuke, and will be moved to mend its ways. But if it were that smart, would things have come to this?

I suspect that national Democrats will respond to this by becoming still more bitter and shrill, that being the response that we’ve seen to other reverses lately, which won’t help things either. But maybe not.

MICKEY KAUS offers a personal exit poll. Read it!

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan is happy, and thinks this presages a revolution in politics. I’d like to see that, but I’m not so sure.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s a firsthand report from a reader at Arnold’s HQ last night:

A couple of quick observations from a long-time reader after spending a couple of hours at the Century Plaza Hotel where Arnold’s campaign party was tonight:

1. Arnold’s crowd doesn’t look or act at all like typical California Republican supporters. They are younger and about 1000 times less dweeby/uptight/Babbit-y than the Republicans I remember turning out at events like this when I worked putting on events like this 10 years ago.

2. The crowd was genuinely friendly, polite and well behaved. [By way of contrast, a staffer’s nightmare at events like this is the Podunk County party chairman or donor who thinks that their $500 donation entitles them to an uninterrupted half-hour with the candidate, etc.]

Well, Arnold did bring in a lot of new voters. But will they stick around for next time?

IT’S (UN)OFFICIAL: CNN and Fox are both calling the recall successful, with Schwarzenegger elected. The racial privacy initiative, which was polling well a while back, is projected by CNN to fail. (Interestingly, CNN says that women went for Schwarzenegger by a decent margin over Bustamante despite the late-breaking grope scandal. But you knew that anyway, because I had already disclosed my scientific exit-polling results.)

Congrats, Arnold. Now all you have to do is govern the most ungovernable state in America!

UPDATE: Most interesting bit so far: someone noted that according to the exit polls, Schwarzenegger and McClintock together got nearly 60% of the vote. That’s got to have a lot of California Democrats worried.

How much should people trust the exit polls? I don’t know. This is a rather, ahem, atypical election. On the other hand, the margins seem pretty big.

ROGER SIMON THINKS we’re seeing the future.

UPDATE: John Scalzi, meanwhile, is unhappy.

A REALTIME INSTAFEED? Hmm. So far today I’ve had nearly 150,000 pageviews. At $4.95 an hour that’s. . . oh, my.

Beats the tipjar!

DRUDGE says it’s a Schwarzenegger landslide, and that the networks will call it for him as soon as the polls close.

UPDATE: Drudge must be right. The Dem spokesmen I just saw on TV were all complaining about the polling places. I suspect that they wouldn’t be doing that if they expected to win.