TODD ZYWICKI: “A David Broder column in today’s Washington Post mourns the decline of journalistic standards and emphasis on accuracy in the modern media business. Given Broder’s track record of sloppiness and bending the truth to score his own political points, however, his complaints seem somewhat misplaced.” Unlike Broder, Zywicki provides specific examples and support for his statements.

Meanwhile, Nick Gillespie observes:

Despite the flurry of exposed journalistic fakes (a decade-long flurry, if one throws in the usual suspects, including Ruth Shalit, Stephen Glass, Mike Barnicle, blah blah blah, along with Jayson Blair, the USA Today guy, the recent Rather boo boo, etc.), there’s little reason to believe that mainstream journalism is any more corrupt than it ever was. Indeed, the only thing that has probably changed is that it’s easier to get caught, which should be a good thing in anybody’s book.

Except, apparently, Broder’s.

JUST IN CASE YOU DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH TO WORRY ABOUT: “Seismic activity at Mount St. Helens has changed significantly during the past 24 hours and the changes make us believe that there is an increased likelihood of a hazardous event, which warrants release of this Notice of Volcanic Unrest.”

ON FRIDAY, I promised that I would take some pictures with the new 28-200mm lens I bought for the D70. I did, and I’ve posted them over at the Exposure Manager gallery. Bottom line: Very nice results. For a proper test, these should have been done on a tripod, and on a less-hazy day. Nonetheless, I’ve got shots at the wide and tele settings, and a very nice quasi-macro close-up shown below. Complaints: The autofocus can be a bit slow. Overall, especially when shooting into the sun, the lens seems a bit softer than the 18-70 kit lens that comes with the camera, and more-than-a-bit softer than the 50mm 1.8 lens. And, as a drawback to the low weight, the lens is light enough that holding it steady at the longer focal lengths is harder than it would be with a heavier lens.

On the other hand, as you can see by comparing this photo taken at 28 (equivalent to about 42mm on a 35 mm film camera) with this picture taken at 200 mm (equivalent to about 300 mm), you get a very impressive zoom range, quite good quality, very small size, and — key — a very reasonable price. The 70-200 mm VR lens that the camera-shop guy tried to sell me is undoubted a lot better, but at around $1800 it had better be. ($1600 — cheap! — here). It’s also heavy. Sometimes that doesn’t matter, but sometimes it does.

OKAY, I haven’t done any catblogging lately, but the last time I did some people requested dog pictures. Sadly, I don’t own a dog. But I spotted this fine specimen at in Sequoyah Park this morning.

TOM MAGUIRE notes an auto-rebuttal at the Times and offers debate-prep advice for John Kerry.

BUSH VOLUNTEERED FOR VIETNAM — yeah, we’re living in Bizarro world.

UPDATE: More thoughts from Russell Wardlow. And I didn’t realize it — somehow CBS missed the story, I guess — but the Bush-volunteered story actually came out in February.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Shockingly, this was even reported in Newsweek:

The standard rap against Bush is that he was ducking combat by joining the Guard. Actually, the Texas Air Guard had a program called Palace Alert that allowed pilots to volunteer for flight time in Vietnam. Three of Bush’s fellow pilots—Udell, Woodfin and Fred Bradley—recalled to NEWSWEEK that Bush inquired with the base commander about signing up for Palace Alert. He was told no; he had too few flying hours at the time and his plane, the F-102, was by then deemed obsolete for air combat.

Funny that this hasn’t gotten more attention. Does anyone read Newsweek?

RATHERGATE UPDATE: Bill at INDCJournal has an interview with Bob Schieffer. Who says bloggers don’t do original reporting? (It’s worth noting, as some otherwise-good histories of RatherGate haven’t, that he was also the first to bring in an outside forensic expert to evaluate the CBS documents.)

UPDATE: Bill Adams and The American Thinker have more on the latest CBS developments.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here, too.

NATO: A “FRAUDULENT ALLIANCE?” Germany is pulling out of a joint training exercise because of a Ralph Peters column? Peters’ reply is on-target:

Called for comment at home in northern Virginia, Peters said, “It’s perfectly all right for the Germans to call President Bush a Nazi, it’s perfectly all right for the Germans to criticize everything about America, to lionize [“Fahrenheit 911” director] Michael Moore and treat our soldiers as second-class human beings … but they want to try and censor the American media.”

Peters said the German decision was disappointing but not surprising.

“I think the fact that they’re pulling out is the best imaginable indicator of how weak our alliance is, how meaningless Germany’s contribution is,” said Peters. “If they pull out because they can’t stand one 800-word opinion piece in an American newspaper, how could we possibly expect them to stand by us in a violent crisis?”

We’ve already learned how much we can expect from them in that regard, I’m afraid.

UPDATE: Reader Eric Lundberg emails:

While sharing Medienkritik’s general disgust with the German double-standard regarding criticism, I think it is pertinent that the reason the German general pulled out of the exercise is that Ralph Peter’s is scheduled to be a featured speaker at the event (according to the September 24 “Stars & Stripes”). That said, I can’t imagine the U.S. Army being as thin-skinned.

Good point.

JOANNE JACOBS is thanking Dan Rather and Big Media generally for subsidizing her work on more worthy, but less salable, topics. Or something like that.

THIS DOESN’T SEEM ALL THAT TRAGIC, TO ME:

A car bomb in the Syrian capital, Damascus, has killed a senior member of Palestinian militant group Hamas. Izz El-Deen Sheikh Khalil died after the bomb exploded in his car, completely destroying it.

Perhaps some of the Iranian mullahs who are supporting Sadr might be next? I don’t know, but when you put it together with this story it gets interesting:

An Arab state provided Israel with valuable intelligence on the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and its leadership overseas, the London-based Arabic daily al-Hayat reported Friday.

According to the newspaper, an intelligence agency belonging to an Arab state supplied Israel with intelligence on Hamas leaders living in Beirut, Damascus, Tehran and Khartoum at the request of Mossad head Meir Dagan.

Hmm. Meanwhile, in a gratifying, but probably unrelated, development we have this report:

KARACHI, Pakistan (AP) – Paramilitary police may have killed a suspected top al-Qaida operative Sunday in a four-hour gunbattle during a raid on a house in southern Pakistan that led to the arrest of two other men, a senior Pakistani intelligence official said.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the dead man was thought to be Amjad Hussain Farooqi, who was wanted for his alleged role in the kidnapping and beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002.

Other intelligence officials said earlier that the raid was launched after police received a tip that Farooqi was hiding in the house.

He will not be missed.

THIS SEEMS LIKE GOOD NEWS:

America has mounted a covert operation to safeguard Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and prevent warheads from falling under the control of rogue commanders or Islamist terrorists.

Teams of American specialists, deployed in Pakistan’s most sensitive military sites, have formulated launch codes to prevent the unauthorised use of nuclear missiles.

“They are sending their experts to our nuclear sites to roll back our nuclear programme and declare Pakistan a rogue state,” said Munawar Hassan, deputy leader of Jamaat-I-Islami, the main Islamist party. “Pervaiz Musharraf is playing into the hands of the US. He is not our ruler, he is serving the interests of America.”

America’s involvement in compiling missile codes raises the possibility that it might be able to prevent Pakistan from launching its nuclear weapons.

I don’t see a downside to this, and I hope things are as reported.

GEN. DAVID PETRAEUS offers thoughts on what’s going on in Iraq. Very much worth reading.

HEY, MAYBE HE BELONGED IN GUANTANAMO AFTER ALL:

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan – Afghan security forces killed a senior Taliban commander and two of his comrades in a raid in southern Afghanistan, an official said Sunday.

Maulvi Abdul Ghaffar, reportedly a former inmate at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, died in a gunbattle Saturday night in Pishi, a village in the southern province of Uruzgan, said Jan Mohammed Khan, governor of Uruzgan.

Just possibly, anyway.

BELDAR IS CHALLENGING THE MEDIA to demonstrate that the SwiftVet charges have been “debunked.”

IN THE MAIL: Actually, a couple of weeks ago, but it seems worth mentioning now in the wake of RatherGate: Richard Viguerie, et al., America’s Right Turn: How Conservatives Used New and Alternative Media to Take Power. Based on a quick look, it’s not bad (and there’s lots of interesting stuff on book publishing, talk radio, and direct mail as well as the Internet), but I still think that Joe Trippi’s book is the best overall in terms of recent Internet-and-politics works.

HE’S NO WIMP:

U.S. Senate candidate Barack Obama suggested Friday that the United States one day might have to launch surgical missile strikes into Iran and Pakistan to keep extremists from getting control of nuclear bombs. . . .

Obama said that violent Islamic extremists are a vastly different brand of foe than was the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and they must be treated differently.

“With the Soviet Union, you did get the sense that they were operating on a model that we could comprehend in terms of, they don’t want to be blown up, we don’t want to be blown up, so you do game theory and calculate ways to contain,” Obama said. “I think there are certain elements within the Islamic world right now that don’t make those same calculations.

I wonder if the Times will start calling him a conservative?

DARFUR UPDATE:

Many refugees in Sudan’s wartorn Darfur region still live in a climate of fear and are reluctant to return home as they do not trust the government to protect them, according to the United Nation’s (UN) human rights chief.

“The stories we heard in all three states of Darfur convey an acute sense of insecurity,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour said.

Many refugees “continue to live in a climate of fear”.

An estimated 50,000 people have died and 1.4 million have been displaced in Sudan’s western Darfur region where UN officials say pro-government Janjaweed militias have carried out a scorched earth campaign of ethnic cleansing against non-Arab minorities.

The Arab News, on the other hand, says this is just more Crusader-talk.

THE NEW YORK TIMES PICKS UP on the story of Kerry’s Chinese assault weapon:

In interviews appearing in the October issue of Outdoor Life, Mr. Kerry and President Bush were asked whether they were gun owners, and, if so, to identify their favorite gun. . . .

“My favorite gun is the M-16 that saved my life and that of my crew in Vietnam,” Mr. Kerry told the magazine. “I don’t own one of those now, but one of my reminders of my service is a Communist Chinese assault rifle.”

Mr. Kerry’s campaign would not say what model rifle Mr. Kerry was referring to, where he got it and when, or how many guns he owned. A spokesman for the senator, Michael Meehan, said Mr. Kerry was a registered gun owner in Massachusetts. On Thursday morning, Mr. Meehan said he had not been able to ask Mr. Kerry about the rifle because of Mr. Kerry’s hoarse voice; he did not respond to further inquiries.

He’s got laryngitis! Go away!

Call me crazy, but stuff like this isn’t going to help with the Kerry rebranding effort.