THE ALLAWI / ALICE COOPER CONNECTION: Frank Zappa is involved, too.

IS IT A MEDIA ENRON? There certainly seem to be funny numbers, and inadequate auditors:

In addition to its massive self-examination of circulation problems at its own paper, Newsday of Melville, N.Y., today also examined, as it it put it, “questions about who is minding the store” elsewhere, with special focus on the Audit Bureau of Circulations. And, according to Newsday, “some Wall Street analysts and advertisers now say the system is broken” at ABC.

It quoted a former, unnamed ABC employee: “ABC sends their best auditors to the biggest newspapers, like the Chicago Sun-Times and Newsday,” two papers embroiled in the current circulation scandal. “So what this is saying is, if their best auditors went into these papers, they kept signing off on no-good circulation year after year.

“You guys are cheating, granted, but ABC’s going in and saying you are correct. How come they’re not the ones who have to pay the advertisers now?”

I think that there’s more to be discovered, here.

UPDATE: More here:

In a surprise announcement, Tribune Co. today replaced its publishers at Newsday and Hoy — two newspapers reeling from circulation scandals.

What’s next?

TERROR IN THE SKIES AUTHOR Annie Jacobsen is on MSNBC right now, with her husband.

UPDATE: Good hour of TV. The Jacobsens seemed credible — by which I mean they seemed honest. The experts afterward were skeptical that they actually witnessed anything untoward, but they all agreed that security is still weak. Annie Jacobsen said that the investigators couldn’t even say what kind of instruments the musicians were carrying suggesting that the investigation wasn’t as thorough as the FBI is claiming, and at the end Joe Scarborough said they had been flooded with emails from passengers and crew who said that things have seemed odd lately on a number of flights.

I don’t know if there’s anything to this or not, and we may never find out. It’s certainly true, though, that it’s focusing attention onto problems with flight security, and we need that.

SANDY BERGER UNDER INVESTIGATION: This is bizarre:

WASHINGTON – President Clinton’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger, is the focus of a criminal investigation after removing highly classified terrorism documents and handwritten notes from a secure reading room during preparations for the Sept. 11 commission hearings, The Associated Press has learned. . . .

Berger and his lawyer said Monday night he knowingly removed handwritten notes he had made while reading classified anti-terror documents he reviewed at the archives by sticking them in his jacket and pants. He also inadvertently took copies of actual classified documents in a leather portfolio, they said. . . .

The officials said the missing documents were highly classified, and included critical assessments about the Clinton administration’s handling of the millennium terror threats as well as identification of America’s terror vulnerabilities at airports to sea ports.

(Via Ed Morrissey, who wonders what Berger was thinking.) Has anybody seen Fawn Hall lately?

UPDATE: I didn’t know this, but it turns out that Berger is “now a chief foreign policy adviser to Senator John Kerry.” You’d think that a man in his position would be more careful. (Via TLM — and via the TLM comments you can see this item from Kerry’s website in which Berger serves as a spokesman).

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Brian Leone wants to call this “trousergate.”

Tom Maguire looks forward to evaluating some commentators on the basis of consistency. And did Dana Milbank speak too soon?

MORE: Hugh Hewitt:

Ask yourself what would be going on in Washington, D.C. tonght, and on the network news, within the blogosphere, and in the morning papers, if it had been revealed that Condi Rice was the target of a criminal investigation for removing classified handwritten notes from the government records relating to terrorism.

I think we know. But it’s early yet — this may get more attention from Big Media tomorrow. Or, I suppose, it could turn out to be nothing — though for that to be true, the news accounts would have to be awfully wrong.

More links here. And Josh Marshall is troubled. “The whole thing seems almost inexplicable.”

And Tom Maguire emails: “One of my commenters says he finds it refreshing that a Clinton Admin official got in trouble for what he put INTO his pants.” Lots of blog posts, here.

MORE: Here’s a report on the missing after-action documents and what they said — apparently, something embarrassing for the Clinton Administration. And read this, too.

JOE WILSON was reportedly an unexplained no-show on the PBS Newshour tonight.

UPDATE: I didn’t see it, but reader J.M. Hanes saw Wilson on Paula Zahn tonight and sends this:

You’ve probably heard this by now, but Joe Wilson did appear on Paula Zahn’s show tonight. As he’s been doing in his written defenses lately, he avoided answering questions by reading from documents instead. Zahn ended up by reminding the audience of the Select Committee’s finding on the role of his wife — which Wilson essentially had to listen to without being able to respond as the segment wrapped. The guy can parse words with the best of them, but these days, he doesn’t go anywhere without his notes and his reading glasses!

Interesting. No transcript online yet.

ANOTHER UPDATE: David Corn’s defense of Wilson is evaluated here.

JAY ROSEN has further thoughts on Alex Jones’ piece on weblogs and journalism:

He’s a fine person, a serious man, with deep knowledge of his craft, willing to stand up and be counted when it comes to protecting professional values. I respect his opinion, and his experience. But that analysis Sunday is beneath his standards and the standards he saw himself as protecting in the Los Angeles Times.

Overall, the piece hasn’t been terribly well received.

UPDATE: If monopoly newspapers keep cutting budgets, there will be nothing but bloggers soon.

DEMOCRATIC BLOGGER KEITH BERRY: “If I had to pick a Democratic senator to lose in November, it would be Senator Tom Daschle.” Republicans are invited to pick their least favorite senators, too.

UPDATE: Want more on the Daschle v. Thune race? Go here!

CUBANS FOR KERRY: Is the Bush campaign blowing Florida?

THIS JOE WILSON OPED from February of 2003 certainly undercuts the “Bush Lied” argument:

There is now no incentive for Hussein to comply with the inspectors or to refrain from using weapons of mass destruction to defend himself if the United States comes after him.

And he will use them; we should be under no illusion about that.

Or maybe, considering the source, it doesn’t. . . .

HERE’S A TROUBLING OPED ON CHINESE MILITARY NANOTECHNOLOGY: The Chinese want a revolution in military affairs that will offset U.S. power. (Via Soundfury).

IN THE MAIL: Hugh Hewitt’s new book, If It’s Not Close, They Can’t Cheat: Crushing the Democrats in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends on It, — and, taking what I think is probably a very different view, a pre-print of Maureen Dowd’s forthcoming Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk. (Irresistible Dowd-like observation: Bush? Enter? Sounds like a porn flick! Hey, there’s a column in that, somewhere. . . .) I haven’t done a compare-and-contrast, but I’m pretty sure they disagree a lot.

THE TRUTH HURTS:

French President Jacques Chirac informed Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon he is not welcome in Paris after he urged all French Jews to leave the country immediately, Israeli television reported. . . .

Sharon sparked anger in Paris with a speech on Sunday in which he urged all French Jews to move immediately to Israel in order to escape what he called the “spread of the wildest anti-Semitism.”

More arrogant unilateralism from the increasingly isolated Chirac, who saves his open-arms welcomes for corrupt, murderous dictators.

UPDATE: Maybe this has Chirac out of sorts:

Young guns conspire to get rid of Chirac

The machinations in the court of the president, the finance minister and their party, the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire, were summed up yesterday on the front page of the newspaper Libération, which showed Mr Sarkozy and Mr Chirac shaking hands beside the headline: “How far will they go?”

The newspapers have been packed for several days with reports from meetings of loyalists on both sides. Mr Chirac’s old guard have been rallied for one last stand for their man, while Mr Sarkozy’s gunslingers are taking every opportunity to paint the president as well past his prime.

Perhaps he can commiserate with Yasser Arafat.

THIS is interesting:

The Sun is burning brighter than at any time over the past 1,150 years, according to a study by a professor at a Swiss university.

Professor Sami Solanki said this could be compounding the effects of greenhouse gases and contributing to global warming.

“We have to acknowledge that the Sun is in a changed state. It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago, and this brightening started relatively recently – in the last 100 to 150 years. We expect it to have an impact on global warming,” he told swissinfo.

Via Futurepundit, who speculates that this means the Earth is likely to be cooler in the future (since it’s at an apparent high point now). Hmm. Fallen Angels is looking more prophetic all the time. Gary Hudson, call your office!

UPDATE: More here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Hey, Fallen Angels is available for free online at the Baen Free Library. Thanks to reader Ray Alderman for the pointer. For those too busy or too lazy to follow the links, the twist in Fallen Angels is that the Earth has been in an ice age for a hundred years, with only greenhouse emissions offsetting it. When those are cut for environmental reasons, the ice age falls and the glaciers advance.

STEM CELL RESEARCH: Heating up as a political issue?

TERROR IN THE SKIES, UPDATE: Here’s another piece by Annie Jacobsen. It’s worth reading in connection with this post by Daniel Drezner.

And — in the interest of continuing the I-told-you-so motif — read this, this, this, and most especially this.

UPDATE: Donald Sensing remains skeptical.

I DIDN’T BELIEVE THE LATEST SEYMOUR HERSH STORY that everyone was emailing me. Looks like I was right.

UPDATE: But read this from Ed Cone, which doesn’t misquote Hersh. I must confess that I tend to dismiss what Hersh reports until it’s confirmed elsewhere by a more reliable source. His stuff is sometimes right, sometimes wrong, but always in a “we’re losing” vein, and it’s been that way since before we went into Afghanistan.

JOHN FUND:

Locked in a stalemate with the Democratic legislature over the state budget, Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger abandoned his charm campaign this weekend and went on the attack. He toured three districts of vulnerable Democratic incumbents and accused them of being “obstructionists” and “girlie men,” in a takeoff of that old “Saturday Night Live” skit that parodied Schwarzenegger-like bodybuilders.

But the governor was engaged in a lot more than just sound-bite politics. His spokesman indicated he was seriously considering sponsoring initiatives to both change the entrenched legislature to part-time status and to redraw California’s gerrymandered political districts. “This weekend, the budget fight stopped being about local government and started being about major political reform,” said Dan Schnur, a GOP political consultant.

The California electorate is hungry for such change, and the governor had large crowds in three cities eating out of his hand. “I want you to go out there and go after those Democratic legislators. Vote them out of office, and we will put new faces in there,” he said in Stockton. The audience in Ontario went wild when he launched into a description of how legislators catered to special interests: “If they don’t have the guts to come up here in front of you and say, ‘I don’t want to represent you, I want to represent those special interests, the unions, the trial lawyers, and I want them to make the millions of dollars — if they don’t have the guts, I call them girlie men.”

Democrats responded that the remark was sexist, anti-gay and bullying, but given the lighthearted way Mr. Schwarzenegger delivered the remarks those criticisms aren’t likely to gain traction. Democrats must also realize that the governor’s approval ratings are close to 70% while the legislature’s ratings are a measly 30%.

If Mr. Schwarzenegger moved quickly he could qualify an initiative mandating new boundaries for California’s 120 legislative districts and then hold a special election next May. That ballot could also contain an initiative to create a part-time legislature, which might prove popular with a frustrated public. “He could pass an initiative,” says Bob Stern of the Center for Governmental Studies, a Los Angeles think tank. “He could get 60%. It would pass easily.” Democratic legislators may yet come to regret that through their intransigence on the budget they have unleashed the political Terminator.

As a bodybuilder, Schwarzenegger was very good at playing on his opponents’ insecurities. I guess he still is.

MARK STEYN on Why They Hate Us:

The Arab Islamists despise America because it’s all lap-dancing and gay-phone sex; Europe’s radical secularists despise America because it’s all born-again Christians hung up on abortion. They’re both right. The free market enables Hustler to thrive. And the free market in churches enables religion to thrive.

I’m sure there’s a Harry Potter angle to this.

TOM MAGUIRE HAS MULTIPLE POSTS on the Joe Wilson developments. They’re all must-reads — just keep scrolling.

CENSORSHIP IN CANADA: I wish that this were a surprise.

UPDATE: Sissy Willis notes that it’s not just Canada. Read this, too.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I guess it goes with the mindset differences displayed by these two towns, one American, the other Canadian:

First we called up the respective town authorities. Hyder, the American town, turned out to have no town authorities–and, technically, no town. The Hyderites chose not to incorporate as a municipality, creating instead a community association–a private nonprofit corporation. Stewart, the Canadian town, is a real municipality with a traditional government.

When we phoned Stewart, the government agent refused to answer any questions until they were submitted in writing. The Hyder community association representative said, sure, she’d tell us anything we wanted to know, right now, on the phone. But to make it a fair comparison, we faxed written questions to both parties, and got written answers back.

The Canadian government official, evidently aspiring to create a faceless bureaucracy in this 700-person outpost, signed the response as “Government Agent”–capital letters but no name or sex–and explained that Stewart had a “Municipal Government incorporated under the laws of the Province of British Columbia,” with a mayor and a city council of six members. As to Stewart’s nearby neighbors, Government Agent from Canada said diplomatically, “I’m not sure how Hyder is governed,” but expressed polite disapproval of its apparent libertarian streak.

Heh.

UPDATE: Reader Sean Galbraith points to this entry from The Vancouver Scrum, saying that the censorship claim linked at the top of this post is wrong.

SOME INTERESTING OBSERVATIONS on campaign blog comments — I’m not sure what this means, but it’s not what I would have expected.

MORE ON JOE WILSON:

And he sipped tea poolside, never really investigated a thing, and upon returning to the US, delivered a verbal briefing after the trip.

To whom? Well, the same people who sent him to Niger, naturally. Who are…?

We don’t know. But we should. Because Wilson’s mission appears to have been a sham from the start.

Meanwhile William Safire has more on Wilson’s imploding credibility:

Two exhaustive government reports came out last week showing that it is the president’s lionized accuser, and not Mr. Bush, who has been having trouble with the truth.

Contrary to his indignant claim that “Valerie had nothing to do with the matter” of selecting him for the African trip, the Senate published testimony that his C.I.A. wife had “offered up his name” and printed her memo to her boss that “my husband has good relations” with Niger officials and “lots of French contacts.” Further destroying his credibility, Wilson now insists this strong pitch did not constitute a recommendation.

Wilson is scheduled to be on PBS’s Newshour tonight. I hope they ask him some tough questions on these, and other, problems with his public statements.

Michael Barone has more on the collapse of the “Bush Lied” argument:

So much for the wild charges that Bush manipulated intelligence and lied about weapons of mass destruction. He simply said what was believed by every informed person — including leading members of the Clinton administration before 2001 and Sens. John Kerry and John Edwards in their speeches in October 2002 supporting military action in Iraq.

The Senate Intelligence Committee report also refuted completely the charges by former diplomat Joseph Wilson that the Bush administration ignored his conclusion, based on several days in Niger, that Iraq had not sought to buy uranium in that country. Democrats and many in the press claimed that Wilson refuted the 16-word sentence Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech, noting that British intelligence reported that Iraq sought to buy uranium in Africa.

But British intelligence stands by that finding, and the committee noted that Wilson confirmed that Iraq had approached Niger, whose main exports are uranium and goats, and intelligence analysts concluded that his report added nothing else to their previous knowledge. And the report flatly denied Wilson’s statements that his wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame, had nothing to do with his mission to Niger — it quotes Plame’s memo taking credit for the appointment.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: More questions here.

UNSCAM UPDATE: Claudia Rosett was right — it’s not just an oil-for-food scandal, but an oil-for-terror scandal:

American officials believe that millions of dollars Saddam Hussein skimmed from the scandal-plagued U.N. oil-for-food program are now being used to help fund the bloody rebel campaign against U.S. forces and the new Iraqi government, The Post has learned.

U.S. intelligence officials and congressional investigators said last night that the “oil-for-insurgency link” has been recently unearthed in the numerous probes now under way into the giant U.N. humanitarian program, in which Saddam is believed to have pocketed $10.1 billion through oil smuggling and kickbacks from suppliers.

We should send Kofi a bill. And somebody should send Rosett a Pulitzer as she’s been consistently ahead on this story.

DARFUR UPDATE: Here’s an argument for secession.

PUBLIC ATTITUDES TOWARD NANOTECHNOLOGY: Interesting stuff from an NSF-Funded study:

Despite lacking concrete knowledge about nanotechnology, most Americans hold a generally positive view of the emerging science and believe the technology’s potential benefits outweigh its perceived risks. At the same time, most Americans do not trust business leaders in the nanotechnology industry to minimize potential risks to humans.

Read the whole thing. Read this, too.