JEFF JARVIS comments on the Steve Lovelady / Mark Yost discussion of media coverage on Iraq:

What is amazing about this is that Lovelady is the managing editor of the friggin’ Columbia Journalism Review Daily. You’d think that he would welcome intelligent, reasoned, two-sided discussion about media’s coverage of this controverial story. Instead, he acts like the fat kid on the playground egging on the bullies in a fight.

And we certainly know where the Columbia Journalism Review stands on war coverage, don’t we now?

I think we already did.

CHIRAC IS DISSING THE BRITS AGAIN, saying that the French are better. But will he have the guts to quote Daniel Pipes?

UPDATE: Chirac won’t have to quote Pipes, whose piece has just been reprinted in Le Figaro!

DON SURBER is hosting the first Hillbilly Blog Carnival.

DONKLEPHANT is a new centrist group blog. This essay by Michael Totten there is worth reading. And his blogmates have posts on centrism, and the explanatory value of Josey Wales, that are also worth your time.

FORGET OLIVER STONE: Greg Gutfeld has the perfect director for the 9/11 movie. But will he take their calls?

IS IT TIME for me to say I told you so yet?

Yes, I think it is. And the politicization and hysteria on this issue has made things even worse than I feared.

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh wonders if things are really any different.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Is this the Golden Age that Andrew is talking about?

IN RESPONSE TO POPULAR DEMAND, the Insta-Wife’s documentary, Six, is now available on DVD. It seems that VHS is really going out of style.

MUSLIMS REJECTING TERROR:

Osama bin Laden’s standing has dropped significantly in some key Muslim countries, while support for suicide bombings and other acts of violence has “declined dramatically,” according to a new survey released today.

In a striking finding, predominantly Muslim populations in a sampling of six North African, Middle East and Asian countries are also as alarmed as Western nations about Islamic extremism, which is now seen as a threat in their own nations too, the poll found. . . .

Compared with previous surveys, the new poll also found growing majorities or pluralities of Muslims surveyed now say democracy can work in their countries and is not just a political system for the West. Support for democracy was in the 80 percent range in Indonesia, Jordan, Lebanon and Morocco and the highest score at 43 percent in Pakistan and 48 percent in Turkey, where significant numbers were unsure.

“They are not just paying lip service. They are saying they specifically want a fair judiciary, freedom of expression and more than one party to participate in elections. It wasn’t just a vague concept,” said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center and director of the project. “U.S. and Western ideas about democracy have been globalized and are in the Muslim world.”

That’s really a big deal. (Via Ed Morrissey, who has more thoughts.)

SOME DARE CALL IT TREASON.

DUST IN THE WIND: Noah Shachtman reports from Iraq.

I DON’T KNOW WHAT’S SILLIER: Sending the feds after Grand Theft Auto and similar videogames, or the notion that doing so might violate international law.

Anyway, as I’ve suggested before, the case against videogame violence is pretty thin. Don’t we have more, um, pressing issues before us?

THE EVER-GENEROUS TOM MAGUIRE OFFERS answers to Josh Marshall’s questions: With lots of links.

ANN ALTHOUSE on Supreme Court nominees:

Presidents should not use trivial, political grounds to select the person who will interpret the law for us all for a generation. That we ought to see as an outrage — a shocking abuse of power. But “the person with the biggest brain”? I know a lot of big-brained people in law. I’m not sure which one has the biggest brain. Maybe we could sit them in a room and grill them with a series of tests. But there’s a damned good chance the person with the biggest brain would be a disaster on the Court.

Yes.

EVERYBODY SEEMS TO BE DOGPILING ON JUAN COLE AGAIN. I would feel sorry for him, but once you call for “opposition research” on other bloggers, well, it’s hard to be that sympathetic.

UPDATE: The love won’t stop.

Well, it’s more “tough love,” really.

MAX BOOT:

The London bombings have occasioned many comparisons with the 1940 Blitz. This is usually cited as evidence of British fortitude — the attitude exemplified by cockneys in the heavily bombed East End who told Winston Churchill, “We can take it, but give it ’em back.” That is indeed the dominant British (and American) attitude, then and now, but it is important not to ignore a streak of timidity there (and here) that may get stronger in the years ahead and that was present even when civilization faced an existential threat from Nazism.

Appeasement did not end with the German invasion of Poland in 1939. Even afterward, many in Britain (and even more in the U.S.) opposed active resistance. Conservative worthies like Lord Halifax sought a negotiated settlement. Fascists like Sir Oswald Mosley sought to bring Nazism to Britain. And communists and their fellow travelers opposed fighting Stalin’s ally until Hitler invaded Russia. . . .

Orwell’s words, written in October 1941, ring true today: “The notion that you can somehow defeat violence by submitting to it is simply a flight from fact. As I have said, it is only possible to people who have money and guns between themselves and reality.”

Indeed. More historical perspective here.

And Tim Blair notes the phenomenon in the present, from Phillip Adams.

AUSTIN BAY thinks that Europe may be waking up.

IN THE MAIL: A copy of Bernard Goldberg’s new book, 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America : (and Al Franken Is #37). The Insta-Wife immediately stole it, so I can’t report on it, but she was laughing a lot while reading. The flamewars in the Amazon reviews are amusing, too.

SEVERAL READERS HAVE WRITTEN to ask whether Sandy Berger was sentenced as scheduled on July 8. The answer is no, because the sentencing has been postponed until September, but this news account, which is all I could find, isn’t very informative as to why.

THE BBC IS GETTING BACKLASH IN BRITAIN FOR ITS TERROR COVERAGE:

When is a terrorist not a terrorist? When he is on the BBC, of course. Where – according to the corporation’s editorial guidelines – “the word ‘terrorist’ itself can be a barrier rather than aid to understanding”. . . .

Within hours of the explosions, a memo was sent to senior editors on the main BBC news programmes from Helen Boaden, head of news. While she was aware “we are dancing on the head of a pin”, the BBC was very worried about offending its World Service audience, she said.

BBC output was not to describe the killers of more than 50 in London as “terrorists” although – nonsensically – they could refer to the bombings as “terror attacks”. And while the guidelines generously concede that non-BBC should be allowed to use the “t” word, BBC online was not even content with that and excised it from its report of Tony Blair’s statement to the Commons.

A row has now broken out with a handful of the corporation’s most senior journalists and news executives, fighting what one described yesterday as a “disgusting and appalling” edict. He was particularly angry, he added, because most World Service listeners don’t even pay a penny for the BBC.

Biased BBC comments:

I wonder which parts of the World Service audience might be offended by calling a terrorist a terrorist? And why should the BBC pander so desperately to the sensibilities of people who might be thus offended anyway? Surely the BBC’s job is to tell it like it is, as understood by the highest standards of British common-sense and decency, whether or not it offends those who are so backward or primitive that they regard the random murder of civilians (in London or anywhere else) as anything less than terrorism.

Whether funded through the telly-tax or the taxpayers money given to the World Service, the BBC is supposed to be the British Broadcasting Corporation – it is high time for the BBC’s voluminous news output to reflect and represent the views, values and standards of those who are forced to pay for it – the great British public – particularly since the BBC’s enormous tax-funded dominance stifles all but the most hardy of alternative news providers, thus perpetuating the BBC’s distorted White City Goldfish Bowl view of the world throughout Britain’s broadcast media.

Read the whole thing. And there’s more commentary at USS Neverdock, which observes that the BBC isn’t taking the criticism very well.

UPDATE: “Very well?” Who am I kidding? They’re lashing out desperately.

JOSEPH WILSON ON THE TODAY SHOW: Jim Lindgren has some questions and observations.

UPDATE: Bob Shrum gets some flak. Really, it’s hard to believe that Joe Wilson is nonpartisan.

SHOCKINGLY, this is currently the most-emailed photo on Yahoo.

PERHAPS IF WE BUMPED A FEW OF THEM OFF, IT WOULD DISCOURAGE THE OTHERS:

The US government has suggested wealthy Saudi individuals remain “a significant source” of funds for Islamic terrorists around the world, despite widely-publicized efforts by the desert kingdom to shut down these channels.

The statement by Treasury Undersecretary Stuart Levey before the US Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, contrasted with earlier upbeat assessments by US officials that Saudi Arabia was making good progress in stemming the flow of private money to terrorist groups.

Yeah, that’s probably not the best approach. But we certainly need to be putting more pressure on the Saudis somehow.

At least they’re getting bad publicity:

For many Iraqi police, shutting down al Qaeda has become something of an obsession. Iraqi television and radio cover this battle with the terrorists intensely. The deaths of Iraqi civilians and security troops are given front page coverage, as are the operations against the terrorists. Much to the dismay of Iraqi Sunni Arabs, the media keeps pointing out that nearly all the Iraqi supporters of the al Qaeda terrorists are Sunni Arabs. The leaders of the Iraqi Sunni Arab community are working hard to prove their loyalty, before popular opinion against Iraqi Sunni Arabs gets out of control, and widespread attacks on Sunni Arabs begin. . . .

These kinds of attacks have made the terrorists very unpopular in Iraq, just as similar attacks in Egypt and Algeria (during the 1990s) turned the population against Islamic terrorists there. Tangible examples of that hatred are seen daily as more and more Iraqis report terrorist activity. This has led to more arrests of terrorists, and the capture of bomb making materials, workshops and the bomb makers themselves.

The Saudis may come to regret not cleaning up their act sooner.

UPDATE: Some useful perspective, from The Belmont Club.

VIRGINIA POSTREL: “Because of a brain defect, I’m unable to spend my time surfing the Web and writing blog posts and still get any real work done.”

It’s a good thing the rest of the country isn’t like that, or the economy would be in the toilet.

MICKEY KAUS: “Tom Maguire has praised a 2003 Web article by Howard Fineman so often he finally pushed me into reading it. It’s good–too good to actually publish in Newsweek, apparently!”

SHUTTLE UPDATE: Ben Chertoff of Popular Mechanics will be on Fox & Friends tomorrow morning at 6:45 talking about the pros and cons of the Space Shuttle. My own thoughts are below, and I suspect that Rand Simberg, who’s sounding rather grumpy tonight, will have more to say tomorrow, too.