AN ATKINS-DIETER’S NIGHTMARE: Looks yummy to me, though.

STEPHEN GREEN has some thoughts on Kerry, political scandal, and taking the high road.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, along the not-so-high road, the Kerry story is getting front-page treatment in the New York Daily News and Post. Nothing really new here: Kerry denies everything. Intern’s father does too, but calls him a sleazeball — though it’s not clear on what grounds.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Mickey Kaus disagrees with John Ellis about whether Big Media coverage is justified.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Tim Blair notes the New York Times’ scrupulous respect for balance and privacy where President Bush is concerned.

MORE: A guy from CNN emailed to say that they were working hard on the Kerry story. So I guess we can expect to hear more. That’s certainly what this story promises.

DUKE DIVERSITY UPDATE:

Robert Munger, chairman of the political science department, said he was impressed by Duke’s intellectual diversity, which he called “relatively healthy” compared to other universities.

Still, Munger recalled a recent meeting in which he heard a fellow department chairman say it was Duke’s job to confront conservative students with their hypocrisies and that they didn’t need to say much to liberal students because they already understood the world.

“There was no big protest [at the meeting], and that was wrong,” Munger said.

Munger said the history department’s political makeup surprised him, however.

“Thirty-five Democrats and no Republicans? If you flip a coin 35 times, and it ends up heads every time, that’s not a fair coin,” he said.

The people who say, ‘I don’t think ideology is appropriate in hiring would have to look at the process that provides such a skewed outcome,” he said. . . .

Intended to depoliticize universities, the bill, in part, calls for taking steps to promote intellectual diversity whether through faculty hiring or the selection of campus speakers.

What’s next: Goals and timetables?

UPDATE: John Rosenberg has a lengthy posts with many links, and quotes from Stanley Fish. Meanwhile Duke philosophy chair Robert Brandon responds to his critics. I’m not sure this response helps him all that much, but you can read it and make up your own mind.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Carey Gage has read Brandon’s response, and discusses its flaws at length. (“In other words, being exposed to Professor Brandon’s politics is an opportunity to discard your stupid political beliefs in favor of the more intelligent ones advocated by … Professor Brandon! How could conservatives have been so blind? “).

A VERY PRETTY PICTURE from Melissa Schwartz.

BROADCAST POLITICS: Jay Rosen has an essay on Joe Trippi and the Dean campaign.

DEREK LOWE is all over Gregg Easterbrook.

MOST BLOGGERS didn’t bother to comment on Alex Beam’s piece conflating the Dean campaign with the blogosphere.

But Tim Blair did. “Apparently in BeamWorld, Dean’s use of the internet as a campaigning device means that all bloggers were part of the Dean campaign, because — the logic is inescapable — those bloggers are on the internet too!”

OVER AT REASON’S BLOG, Tim Cavanaugh has the Kerry news ‘n’ links roundup.

UJAAMA UPDATE:

SEATTLE — James Ujaama, a Seattle-raised Muslim convert who pleaded guilty last year to aiding the Taliban, was sentenced Friday to two years in prison. With credit for time served, he’ll be free this summer.

The story says he’s provided unusually extensive cooperation.

DONALD SENSING HAS advice to bloggers on how to get other bloggers to link. My advice, echoing what Eugene Volokh has said, is to sell the post, not the blog. I frequently get emails from people saying “I started a new blog,” but when I follow the link the new blog has only one or two posts, one of which is “well, here’s my new blog.” I’m much more likely to link to a post that has something relevant to what I’m already writing about, or that has something new that I should be writing about.

HUGH HEWITT HAS SOME COMMENTS FOR PETER BEINART on scandals and media double standards:

The New Republic’s Peter Beinart and I mixed it up today, when after dancing around the fact that he and the staff at TNR had been discussing the Kerry allegations he chastised me for bringing up the DrudgeReport’s allegations on air without any evidence for their veracity. Trap sprung. I asked Peter for the evidence supporting the allegations that Bush was a “deserter” or “AWOL”, allegations that he and the TNR staff have been rolling about in for days. The only “evidence” he could cite was General Turnipseed’s alleged charge.

Understand that Turnipseed has never alleged that Bush was AWOL or a deserter. Never. Four years ago he said he doesn’t recall seeing him. On Tuesday he stated that Bush could well have been on the base, but that he just didn’t see him.

In other words, there is no evidence whatsoever to support Terry McAuliffe’s slanderous charge that was repeated in Congress yesterday by a Democratic congressman and by countless pundits including the increasingly repugnant Begala, and widely read websites of the left like Joshua Marshall’s.

But while Beinart and his colleagues of the left have no problem covering the Bush story and shifting coverage from the lack of evidence for the charges leveled at Bush to their dissatisfaction with the completeness of the Bush denials, they are feigning shock that a report from Matt Drudge on alleged Kerry infidelity should be mentioned outside their newsrooms.

The timing of the new allegations is wonderful especially because it throws such a defining light on the bias of the Washington media –ever ready to carry the water of the Democrats and dismayed that they might be obliged to cover some nasty business about the front-runner from the left.

I am, as I’ve said before, underwhelmed by the Kerry scandal. But I’m even more underwhelmed by the National Guard flap. It’s quite obvious that there’s a double standard here, and Hugh is right to chastise them for it.

Scroll down or click here for more.

UPDATE: Then there’s this comment from reader Don Williams:

Given their constant rush to put out breaking news, I was surprised that the TV networks haven’t let out a peep re Drudge’s report of a Kerry affair with an intern.

Then it occurred to me that if Kerry’s “electability” is questioned –if the Kerry bubble pops –then Howard Dean is the last man standing. Given how the TV networks torpedoed the Dean campaign with roughly 473 misleading broadcasts of his “Iowa Scream” (with the cheering crowd edited out) can anyone doubt what a Dean FCC would do to the networks?

Isn’t Edwards still standing?

ANOTHER UPDATE: TNR has responded to Hewitt on its campaign blog. “This isn’t an example of ideological bias. It’s actually the opposite. It’s the press trying to be scrupulously unbiased.”

Yet another reason why all media operations should have blogs.

Then there’s this cartoon, taking a somewhat different perspective.

MORE: Bo Cowgill comments on the TNR response.

STILL MORE: Here’s another response to the TNR post. (“So how can you argue that the AWOL story should be covered because it was being discussed by a major Democratic candidate, but NOT cover the Kerry adultery story even though it was being shopped around by the exact same person?”)

RYAN ANDERSON, the National Guardsman charged with Al Qaeda ties, is a Muslim convert. What’s interesting is that before he converted, Anderson also used to be interested in militia groups, and used to post on the misc.activism.militia Usenet group. I’ve noted the danger of links between extremist right-wing groups and radical Muslim extremists before, and though this sort of crossover might seem odd, I think that many of these guys are driven more by generalized anger toward society than by a coherent ideology. And, of course, there’s the unifying thread of antisemitism to make the transition easier.

JEEZ, I just looked at the traffic for yesterday and it was a hair over 220,000 pageviews. The only time it’s done better was at the beginning of the Iraq war. Though traffic has been up in general lately, the extra 75 – 100,000 pageviews were obviously because of Kerry. The difference is that the war was getting a lot of Big Media attention, and Kerry isn’t. That probably means something, though I’m not sure quite what.

JAMES LILEKS RESPONDS to my earlier comments on Kerry.

A SOLDIER IN IRAQ is grateful for support from the home front.

WONKETTE listened to Kerry on Imus.

UPDATE: John Ellis says that Big Media are doing the right thing by holding back on the Kerry story.

But not everyone agrees.

THE BOSTON GLOBE REPORTS that the Bush AWOL story is collapsing, as a key witness turns out to have lied. Capt. Ed observes:

The Globe, which has been at the forefront of the media pushing this story, now reveals that the entire series of accusations had no basis in reality and in fact should never have been legitimized by the press in the first place. . . .

Listening to Hugh Hewitt’s show yesterday, Peter Beinart of The New Republic vehemently accused Hugh of irresponsible journalism by mentioning the Drudge Report story about Kerry’s alleged infidelity without having done any responsible verification of the sources, in effect making Kerry publicly prove his innocence without having any evidence of his guilt. However, TNR and every other media outlet has done the exact same thing to George Bush despite the normal presumption of innocence and the extraordinary presumption of satisfactory and complete service that an Honorary Discharge presents.

Yeah. And if this infidelity story were about Bush, with the woman in question out of the country, they’d be running with it in a big way already.

UPDATE: Here’s another officer who remembers Bush from the National Guard days:

A retired Alabama Air National Guard officer said Friday that he remembers George W. Bush showing up for duty in Alabama in 1972, reading safety magazines and flight manuals in an office as he performed his weekend obligations.

“I saw him each drill period,” retired Lt. Col. John “Bill” Calhoun said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press from Daytona Beach, Fla., where he is preparing to watch this weekend’s big NASCAR race.

Nice that they’re finally starting to do interviews like this, now that the story’s been out and circulating for weeks. Reader Harvard Fong weighs in with this comment on the media’s double standard:

Where was all this confirmation process for Bush? And I don’t mean W.

Recall the alleged infidelity flap back in ’92 of GHW Bush, with an aide who was so conveniently dead. I recall it well because that’s when I changed my voter reg from D to L.

So where was the careful vetting of the allegations of infidelity then?

Yeah.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The unravelling continues as other witnesses come forward.

THEY DON’T CALL HIM THE “LITTLE IDIOT” FOR NOTHING: Political dirty-tricks advice, from Moby.

UPDATE: No, really, they do call him that. In fact, he calls himself that. Get hip, people. . . .

U.S. SOLDIERS: Winning Iranian hearts and minds. No, really, that’s what it says.

MY SO-FAR RATHER UNDERWHELMED TAKE on the Kerry scandal is now up over at GlennReynolds.com. Excerpt: “I have to say that, to me, how Kerry would do on the war is a lot more important than what (er, or who) he’s doing in the sack.”

AMERICANS AND PAKISTANI NUKE CODES: This is interesting, and more important than Senatorial sex scandals. I wonder if it’s true?

LANNY DAVIS IS DEFENDING KERRY: Reaction: “Davis tipped the scale for me – if Davis is telling your story, you have something to hide. ”

Heh.

UPDATE: [Item removed, at the suggestion of a thoughtful reader who was right. You can find this stuff on Google easily enough, but I don’t think I want to link to it.]

ANOTHER UPDATE: John Hawkins has excerpts from the Enquirer story, which isn’t about the Drudge scandal. And Robert Tagorda has spotted an interesting letter in Newsweek.

MORE: Interestingly, the Washington Post cancelled its Terry Neal live chat on politics this afternoon, just as the Drudge story on Kerry broke. Why would they do that? (Via Tim Graham).

WELL, THIS didn’t take long. . . .

KERRY’S ON THE FRONT PAGE OF THE NATIONAL ENQUIRER out tomorrow.

UPDATE: Megan McArdle comments.

CATHY SEIPP: “Blogging is essentially an unregulated, free-agent activity, and that can drive people who prefer rules and regulations and decision-by-committee crazy.”

I did, in fact, get in trouble for “reading ahead.”