FORBES attacks bloggers with an angry, adjective-filled article by Daniel Lyons that seems to live up to the worst claims it makes about the blogosphere — even to the extent of shilling for companies that purport to offer “brand protection” against blog attacks.

Here’s how to protect your brand: don’t be an ass. And I’m giving that advice away for free.

UPDATE: Dan Gillmor:

Do bloggers sometimes go too far? Of course. But if the best-read bloggers typically did work of the lousy quality shown in the Forbes stories, they’d be pilloried — appropriately so. . . . Let’s hope Forbes returns to its normally higher standards in the future.

Indeed.

FOUND PHOTOS: “The pages below show prints I made from processing film I found in old cameras. In many cases the exposed films were over fifty years old. You are seeing them for the first time as they were lost by the photographers that took these images. . . . Each roll of found film I am successful with makes me wish I could find the families of the subjects in the photographs. What a wonderful gift it would be to show them what I’d found.”

(Via Fred Lapides’ not-safe-for-work blog. The images linked above, however, are all work-safe. Lileks would love them, and the commentary.)

THE U.N. POINTS OUT MORE SYRIAN MISCONDUCT IN LEBANON: Publius has the scoop.

MICHAEL MALONE REPORTS from the blog summit in New York.

HERE’S A REVIEW of James Lileks’ new book, which is still doing quite well in the Amazon rankings.

A REVIEW of Dennis Hastert’s blog: “I don’t know if he’ll keep up with it, but from reading his initial post, it seems clear that he’s not employing ghostbloggers.”

TOM MAGUIRE: “On Wednesday the normally fine Douglas Jehl of the NY Times went into the tank on the Tim Russert question.” It’s a coverup!

I’LL BE ON OPEN SOURCE RADIO at about 7:40 talking about the Miers fallout and the GOP’s future. It’s XM channel 133, or you can listen live here.

UPDATE: That was fun — I was on with Megan McArdle — and the big topic was George Bush’s political future. My suggestion: Since Bush isn’t running in 2008 it’s not all about him any more.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran appears to have named a building after himself.

HERE’S A POST-MIERS roundup from Business Week.

PLEDGING DONATIONS to anti-pork candidates. I like this idea.

A WHILE BACK, I linked to a National Academy of Science study on competitiveness. Carl Bialik at the Wall Street Journal says its numbers are fishy.

NEAL BOORTZ wants you to support Air America.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Just had an interesting conference call with Sen. Coburn and several other bloggers. We discussed a lot of ways to increase transparency in funding bills, and it was clear that (1) the White House is beginning to feel the heat; and (2) this will be going on over the next year. It’s a war of attrition, not a quick-hit.

Ultimately, I think we need to move toward Open Source Legislation as a model, though as Sen. Coburn was quick to point out, the Congressional leadership will fight tooth-and-claw against that. And heck, if we can get Dennis Hastert blogging, anything’s possible.

UPDATE: More, including a list of who was on the call, here.

MORE THOUGHTS ON THE MIERS WITHDRAWAL, over at GlennReynolds.com.

UNSCAM UPDATE: “2,000 firms ‘paid oil-for-food kickbacks:'”

Preferential treatment was given to companies from France, Russia and China, the report says, all permanent members of the Security Council, who were more favorable to lifting the 1990 sanctions than the America and Britain.

The independent inquiry committee, which began its work in 2004, said in an earlier report that the program became deeply corrupted as Saddam arranged for surcharges and kickbacks while an overwhelmed UN headquarters failed to exert administrative control over the program.

Read the whole thing, which is still more support, if any were needed, for the Den Beste Theory that France, et al., were opposed to invasion in part for fear that once Saddam was toppled we’d discover how much they’d been violating sanctions. There’s also this possibly related item:

The suspicion of past corruption tainting Jacques Chirac’s presidency returned to haunt him yesterday when a court imposed suspended sentences and fines on his former henchmen. . . . The outcome of the trial, which highlighted kickbacks of £50 million from school building contracts, was another crushing indictment of a political system riddled with corruption from the late 1980s to the mid 1990s.

Riddled with corruption? You don’t say.

HALLEY SUITT:

I think liberal bloggers like me preferred Miers becoming the devil we knew and now wait for the next nomination which will be a devil we don’t know and should not look forward to.

It’ll be interesting to see who’s next.

IN THE MAIL: Richard Miniter’s Disinformation : 22 Media Myths That Undermine the War on Terror. Looks quite interesting, and the “myths” in question are held on both left and right.

TRENT LOTT MAY NOT CARE about the blogosphere, but these guys seem to get it, and they’re engaging in a bit of preemptive fact-checking.

GOOD NEWS FROM IRAQ:

This left Abu Theeb, a man who has devoted himself and his resources to fighting the Americans, in a curious position. His battle on polling day would be to secure a safe and smooth voting for his people – in a referendum organised by the enemy. In doing so he would be going up against the al-Qaida forces, and risking a split in the insurgency in Iraq.

I spent five days with Abu Theeb and his people last week, and I witnessed a very curious thing: a bunch of mujahideens talking politics and urging restraint. “Politics for us is like filthy dead meat,” Abu Theeb told me. “We are not allowed to eat it, but if you are passing through the desert and your life depends on it, God says it’s OK.” This is a profound shift in thinking for these insurgents, a shift that might just change the way things develop in Iraq.

And in The Guardian, no less. Read the whole thing, which underscores the point made in the StrategyPage excerpt below: Attacking Iraqis has been deadly for Al Qaeda. Read this, too.

HARRIET MIERS HAS WITHDRAWN HER NAME from nomination. You can see the text of her letter to President Bush in the Washington Post.

She’s to be commended for doing this. The White House made a dreadful error in nominating her, which it compounded by its ham-handed efforts in support of her candidacy, and this was perhaps the only way to ensure that it wouldn’t be a complete debacle for the Bush Administration. Let’s hope that they’ll do better the next time around. I’m not hoping for Alex Kozinski or anything — okay, well, I’m hoping — but we need a nominee who’ll meet the high expectations established by the Roberts appointment. That Miers wasn’t up to those standards is no discredit to her, as very few lawyers are. But it is a discredit to the White House, which nominated her. Now it’s a do-over, and they’d be well-advised not to blow it.

UPDATE: Reactions here, here, and (free WSJ link) here.

CHIEF WIGGLES’ NEW BOOK, Saving Babylon, is out. I read it in manuscript and thought it was quite good.

IIPM UPDATE: A “breakout moment” for the Indian blogosphere, according to Mark Glaser in the Online Journalism Review.

Read the whole thing. This flap is, as I noted before, more evidence that heavy-handed tactics don’t work very well against bloggers. Which, given that anyone can be a blogger, means that heavy-handed tactics are just a bad idea nowadays.

STRATEGYPAGE:

There’s an interesting pattern developing in Moslem media, especially the satellite news networks like al Jazeera; they are featuring more stories about Islamic terrorist attacks killing innocent Moslem civilians. Moslem journalists have an interesting, largely symbiotic, relationship with Islamic terrorists. They need each other. The terrorists need the favorable exposure in order to encourage people to join (especially for suicide missions), give money and provide support for actual operations (a place to hide, information). Islamic terrorists tend to be popular with Moslem audiences, especially when they are killing non-Moslems. Thus Moslem journalists do well when they feature stories of Islamic terrorists.

Arabs in particular, and Moslems in general, have adopted an attitude of victimhood, and tend to blame most of their problems on others, especially Westerners (although occasionally they will use other, usually nearby, but different from them, Moslems). Thus the enormous popularity, among Moslems, of the 911 attacks, and other terrorist operations that kill lots of infidels (non-Moslems). But the hero turns to zero when the victims are Moslems, especially if they are of the same ethnicity or nationality as the journalists.

Terrorists actually have the same symbiotic relationship with western media, who usually aren’t so squeamish when their fellow-nationals are murdered.

In a related post from a while back, Nelson Ascher wonders when Buddhists will bomb Paris — and if so, whether it will just be seen in the West as a justified response to imperialism. Personally, I blame the Crusades.

MICKEY KAUS issues a multiple-count indictment against The New York Times’ management. “And, of course, Pinch’s overarching, original crime: Freeing a respected national newspaper to become an unashamed cocooning organ of New York liberal political and aesthetic prejudices (with a few exceptions, like Miller, that are slowly being corrected).”