LIFE IS GETTING MORE LIKE A THRILLER NOVEL EVERY DAY:

Police suspected a mystery man photographed with Dr David Kelly in Moscow in 1993 was BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan.

Police constable Jonathan Martyn Sawyer mentioned the existence of the photograph during evidence to the Hutton inquiry.

He was one of the officers who carried out a search of Dr Kelly’s home the day he was found dead on 18 July.

Dr Kelly apparently committed suicide eight days after being publicly named as the suspected source for Mr Gilligan’s report claiming the government had “sexed up” the intelligence case against Iraq.

Pc Sawyer said he took the photograph from Dr Kelly’s study during the search.

I have no idea what, if anything, to make of this. This story from The Guardian is, strangely, less positive on the photo than the BBC story quoted above.

ROBERT TAGORDA WRITES about Bustamante:

Personally, I’ve seen and heard enough to be convinced that Bustamante has no plans to follow through on MEChA separatism. But I’ve also seen and heard enough to be convinced that Bustamante’s recent actions are part of a broader political strategy. It’s understandable for a politician like him to act this way. Still, it’s rather disappointing, especially when you consider that taking a strong stance against a radical ideology should be easy for someone who believes that “[r]acial separatism is wrong.”

You’d think.

UPDATE: Howard Owens has much more on Bustamante, Aztlan and MEChA, and writes:

The Aztlan thing may seem to some like a dime’s worth of peanuts, but it is an idea that has gained a surprising number of adherents. Even small ideas can be dangerous. Small ideas can grow into big movements. Bustamante, as the leading Latino politician in the state, has an obligation to use his leadership position to make clear that the Aztlan myth has no place in a progressive and pluralistic society. . . .

What I was going to write about is all of the ways liberals are coming up with to defend and retranslate “Por La Raza todo. Fuera de la Raza Nada,” which is rendered most simply and obviously as “For the race, all; Outside the race, nothing.” Democrats/MEChA defenders/liberals are doing handstands trying to explain away this overtly exclusionary phrase. It’s not working. No matter how that phrase is parsed, it doesn’t fit into the supposedly “inclusionary” principles of the Democratic party, and it has no place in a modern pluralistic society. I find it rather amazing and amusing that Democrats would rush to defend a non-inclusionary group. I guess it’s only white males that need to be inclusionary?

I guess.

ANOTHER UPDATE: You can hear Mickey Kaus on the radio here.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Kaus also scores on the lame defense offered by Dr. Velia Garcia, chair of La Raza studies at S.F. State University. Sheesh. You can only capitalize on inattention until people start paying attention. And why am I not surprised that we’re hearing this lame defense of overt racism from someone at S.F.S.U., which is noted for such things, nowadays?

BEST OF THE WEB is back after a rather lengthy August hiatus.

NEWSWEEK says that Afghanistan is “sinking deeper into poverty,” but Ambit notes that its economy grew 28% last year according to the IMF.

IBERIAN NOTES HAS A POST ON THE SPANISH SUCCESSION: The one coming with the next elections, that is.

Here’s more from EuroPundits.

HERE’S A 9/11 REMEMBRANCE dedicated to the intellectual class. Meanwhile, I argue that the politicians are doing better than Big Media over at GlennReynolds.com.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis responds.

I JUST GOT A COPY OF JOURNALISTIC FRAUD: HOW THE NEW YORK TIMES DISTORTS THE NEWS AND WHY IT CAN NO LONGER BE TRUSTED in the mail. I haven’t read it yet, but the title seemed, even to me, a bit strong.

But then I read this article on the Times’ coverage of the Alabama Ten Commandments flap:

When I first saw this story on The New York Times Web site, I knew it was bound to run on that newspaper’s front page, and it did:

“MONTGOMERY, Ala., Aug. 20 — They came streaming in from all directions, wearing their crosses and Confederate T-shirts, carrying dog-eared Bibles and bottles of water and enough power bars to last a siege.”

But I was immediately skeptical about this “color story,” every sentence written as if a punch line lurked just around the corner.

I had seen endless TV footage of the Montgomery protests, and I had noticed not a single Confederate T-shirt, nor any other Confederate memorabilia, for that matter.

Some of the protesters did wear shorts and T-shirts beneath the infernal August sun, but they were mostly middle-aged and elderly people, neatly groomed and, frankly, kind of dull.

Next time I have a surly crowd chasing after me, this is exactly the kind of mob I want it to be.

But by slyly clothing the protesters in “Confederate T-shirts,” Times writer Jeffrey Gettleman was pandering to his audience, eliciting snickers by conjuring up a revival of gap-toothed, barefoot, unreconstructed racists.

I’m no fan of Moore or his myrmidons (and neither is columnist Michael Marshall), but this sort of cheap shot is the kind of thing that has deeply wounded the Times’ credibility. Read the whole thing for more examples of apparent Times embellishment or worse, and for a more-than-usually sensitive take on journalism and the use of vivid images that aren’t representative.

UPDATE: This piece by Cathy Young is good. (It’s on Moore, not the Times.)

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Dale Wetzel sends this link to a MediaBistro interview with Bob Kohn, the author of Journalistic Fraud.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Minority of One blogged the event here and here. Somewhat more Confederate stuff reported than in the column above, though Marshall does mention that the neo-secessionist League of the South showed up and was asked to leave. Certainly no evidence that the Times account was representative of the crowd.

BLOGGER JOURNALISM: Airport security badges found in men’s room — with photos.

I feel so very secure. . . .

UPDATE: Well, I feel more secure now — read the comments on the post to see the Blogosphere’s self-fact-checking at work!

ADVICE TO INCOMING FRESHMEN: Pretty good, I guess — except that free food is not always your friend. But the advice in the comments to put your cellphone on “vibrate” or just turn it off in class is absolutely essential. Take it from a prof. — if it rings during class, you will wish it hadn’t. I’ll make sure of that.

Then there’s this one: “blog. it’s cathartic!”

MORE ON MECHA: Juan non-Volokh has a post responding to the claim (originally linked below) that the Bustamante/MEChA issue is just a right-wing smear.

And here’s a link roundup on Left Beach, a blog I hadn’t visited before.

PrestoPundit, meanwhile, continues to be on top of the story, and has the Bustamante pictures his campaign doesn’t want you to see. Oui magazine never would have published this. . . .

UPDATE: Oh, and don’t miss CalBlog, either.

THE GUARDIAN ASKS IF THE BBC “SEXED UP” ITS OWN REPORT:

The BBC chairman has admitted the corporation may have overplayed David Kelly’s status in the rush to head off a government row, confessing that a PR wrongly inferred Andrew Gilligan’s story had come from an “intelligence source”.
In a private exchange of emails published by the Hutton inquiry, Gavyn Davies admitted the line was inserted into the last draft of a key statement by the board of governors giving full backing to the Today reporter.

“The bit about intelligence sources was drafted in at the last minute by a PR person – the way of the world!” he wrote.

Not ready for prime time, if you ask me.

TERRY EASTLAND WRITES ON THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION AND CAMPUS SPEECH CODES: I should note again, just in case anyone missed it, that Gerald Reynolds is no relation.

SPAM ASSASSIN has been blocking some non-spam emails lately. I’ve tried to fix it. Between this problem, and the continuing viral assault on my (ha!) “personal” account, and the server crash on the Law School account, I’ve probably missed some emails. If you sent me anything truly vital that I don’t seem to have gotten, you might want to resend it. Please don’t resend anything less than truly vital, or you’ll just make the flood worse.

IS THERE (OR SHOULD THERE BE) A RIGHT TO FORGET? Richard Glen Boire says there should be. Randall Parker isn’t so sure:

There are aspects of how our minds work that are essential for the proper functioning of a rights-based society. The exercise of some kind of modification of the brain that undermines the ability to make a rights-based society work can not itself be an unlimited right. The biggest challenge facing us with mind engineering is that it will eventually become possible to modify minds in a number of ways to create sentient beings that are highly rational but which behave in ways that make the continued existence of a rights-based society highly problematic.

These are issues that will soon be — if they are not already — non-hypothetical.

GRUNTDOC is a medical blog I hadn’t seen before.

VIRGINIA POSTREL’S NEW BOOK is officially out today. And she’ll be on CNN talking about toilet brushes and drawer pulls at 10:45 ET. Sadly, I’ll be preparing for my Administrative Law class, an activity in which aesthetics play no great role.

UPDATE: Here’s an interview with Virginia in The Atlantic Monthly.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis saw her, and she really did bring toilet brushes.

JEFF COOPER:

We are somewhat saddened by this anti-French propaganda which seems popular at the time. It is certainly possible to dislike a head-of-state without letting that influence our social judgments. This Chirac is nobody’s favorite person, but let us not forget that the United States has had presidents over preceding decades of whom we have no cause to be proud. My father was something of a Francophile, and spoke the language to a useful extent. He insisted on one occasion that the French must be a truly great people when you consider they can cook a carp and make it taste good.

Good point.

BUSTAMANTE UPDATE: Mickey Kaus has the latest developments covered. Plus, an eBay coverup!

TANNED, RESTED, AND READY: Andrew Sullivan is back from vacation.

MICHAEL MOORE has, um, altered parts of the DVD release of Bowling for Columbine, Spinsanity reports.

UPDATE: Tim Blair: “Moore will be up to his 15th remake before Bowling is able to be called a documentary.”

SOMEONE TELL THE BELGIANS! Tim Blair links a report of French complicity in Argentine state torture.

THE GOOD NEWS: Daniel Drezner says I’m right.

The bad news: I’d rather be wrong.

UPDATE: Lots of interesting comments to Drezner’s post now — you might want to read through them if you’ve got a few minutes.

A REPORT ON NORTH KOREA, from The New Yorker:

PHILIP GOUREVITCH: It’s one of the most brutal governments on earth. One of the difficulties in assessing the nature of existence inside North Korea is that it’s so sealed off and insular. And the regime is masterful at preventing anybody who comes in from seeing what’s really going on. So, in the end, one has to rely to a large extent on the word of people who come out. The testimonies of such refugees and defectors have been available only since the mid-nineties, when more and more people, driven by extreme hunger, started to flee North Korea. The picture that has emerged from their accounts certainly confirms everything that one had suspected. It’s a place where the level of sheer physical brutality is extreme and the psychic violence is constant. . . .

There is no civil society. There has never been a civil society in the territory known as North Korea. There was an oppressive dynasty. There was an oppressive imperial presence, and then there was an absolutely and totally oppressive prison camp. I mean, the country’s a gulag. It’s a prison camp. That doesn’t mean that these people are all zombies. They live in a zombie-ish culture, but many of them, judging by the defectors, are capable of retooling their mentality. But it takes a lot. These are lives that have been criminally wasted.

Read the whole thing. If you have the stomach for it.

UPDATE: Michael Ubaldi emails: “Reading that Gourevitch piece really puts the Albright wine-and-dine into a different, more blood-curdling context.”

Yes. It’s sometimes necessary for diplomats to wine and dine thugs, of course. What’s distressing is how many of them seem to forget that it’s thugs they’re wining and dining.

CAR BOMB ATTACK THWARTED:

Security forces have arrested two men outside a mosque in the Iraqi city of Kufah after finding two cars laden with bombs.

The arrests came amid warnings from clerics that Saddam Hussein loyalists or al-Qaeda members will strike over the next two days.

The men were arrested outside the Masjed al-Kufah mosque, 180 kilometres south of Baghdad.

A reader from Britain, who sent the link, adds:

Beeb assiduously ignoring this in order to dump all over new Iraqi provisional government before it’s even got started, and raise with hostile-to-America studio guests numerous lurid and highly improbable hypotheticals all tending to ultimate prostration and trampling in dust of Yankee Imperialist Entity.

But of course.

BELLESILES UPDATE: Ralph Luker notes:

Ten months ago, responding to the report of Emory University’s panel of outside reviewers in the case of Michael Bellesiles, the Organization of American Historians announced that: “The editorial board of the Journal of American History will consider a commissioned essay or a roundtable to address the ethical issues of this and other recent cases and how much historians rely on trust in practicing their craft.” As of this date, the editorial board of the JAH has given no indication, to borrow the language of Watergate, of what it intends to do or when it intends to do it.

There’s “deliberate,” and then there’s just plain slow, fading over to “unmoving.” As Luker notes, the OAH was embarrassed by its inability to deal with the Bellesiles matter, and by the way amateurs outperformed it. Now they seem to hope that the whole thing will just go away.