THIS BUSH INTERVIEW from The Times is worth reading, but this part seems to have caught the eye of a lot of InstaPundit readers:
In person Mr Bush is so far removed from the caricature of the dim, war-mongering Texas cowboy of global popular repute that it shakes one’s faith in the reliability of the modern media.
You don’t say.
UPDATE: Some reflections on what this means, from The Daily Ablution.
DAVE KOPEL has more thoughts on the ongoing mass murder in Zimbabwe, something he’s been writing about presciently since 2001.
IN THE MAIL: Theodore Dalrymple’s Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses.
THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES is up, with rich bloggy goodness from lots of bloggers you may not have read before.
PLAME UPDATE:
Lawyers for Time Inc. are considering turning over documents that would reveal the identity of a correspondent’s anonymous source, according to the reporter and people with knowledge of the matter.
The correspondent, Matthew Cooper, faces a prison sentence of as much as 18 months for contempt of court if he refuses to reveal the source to a federal grand jury by next Wednesday; if that were to happen, lawyers for Time Inc., a unit of Time Warner Inc., believe the company could be exposed to legal liability or government sanctions. . . .
Time Warner depends on government approval for a number of matters. It is, for example, awaiting antitrust approval for its acquisition — with Comcast Corp. — of Adelphia Communications’ cable assets. It depends on the government’s largesse to issue securities. And though it is a cable operator and holds no broadcast licenses from the Federal Communications Commission, the company is vulnerable to FCC pressures on issues of media content.
One other potential issue is a deferred-prosecution agreement struck last year between the Justice Department and Time Warner relating to America Online. A deferred prosecution contemplates cooperating with the government in its ongoing investigation into specific wrongdoing, in this case alleged accounting fraud.
“Time Warner has got to be inclined to be as cooperative with the government as they can on all fronts,” says Washington attorney Hank Asbill, who is representing a former America Online executive charged with securities fraud.
Sounds like another argument against media consolidation. My USA Today piece on reporters’ privileges from yesterday is here.
RAND SIMBERG writes on space shuttle safety.
JOE KATZMAN calls the U.S. / India military pact seismic in its importance. “Note, too, that the Vietnamese are also making friendly overtures toward the USA these days.”
CNN IS MAKING VIDEO AVAILABLE, which is cool. But individual items don’t seem to be separately linkable, which is too bad. Why do so many sites use those java popup players for video?
UPDATE: Via email: “When one of the windows has loaded, simply right-click on the page and choose ‘Properties.’ The URL to the page will be in the ‘Address’ field. Just copy and paste.” That works.
ORIN KERR has thoughts on tone in the blogosphere.
THE KELO AFTERMATH: Virginia Postrel rounds up some responses and adds: “I’d suggest another front: shareholder and consumer activism to get businesses to pledge not to use eminent domain for their own private purposes.”
“Yes, I am coming for the Bush amnesty program.” That’s what one illegal immigrant reportedly told a U.S. border patrol questioner in a survey the Bush administration understandably failed to complete. About 45 percent of those questioned “said that ‘amnesty rumors’ influenced their decision to cross the border illegally,” according to WaPo’s report.
This won’t play well among the Republicans who are angry at Bush over immigration, and there are a lot of those. Kaus also draws a parallel between welfare reform and immigration reform that seems apt to me.
The border: barrier? Or a “place of coming together?”
GATEWAY PUNDIT is seeing a rising surge of patriotism.
JIM GERAGHTY: “It’s interesting that Democrats are willing to study King of the Hill as part of their process of rebuilding and figuring out how to rebuild a majority, but listening to Zell Miller is apparently beyond the pale.”
TOM MAGUIRE PUTS THE HURT on William Safire. Safire is, I think, guilty of tilting too much toward the home team.
WARD CHURCHILL ON FRAGGING FOR PEACE: Jeez.
GUILTY OF VOTE FRAUD IN EAST ST. LOUIS: Gateway Pundit has the story.
WHAT’S RIGHT, WHAT’S LEFT? Skippy the Bush Kangaroo is pondering the difference between the left and right blogospheres’ reactions to the Kelo decision.
IT’S ALL IN THE ADJECTIVES: Object lessons from Bill Quick and Orin Kerr.
ROGER SIMON foresees a Buchanan/Feingold ticket in ’08.
