HEY, THAT’S OUR W! A reader notes this post from yesterday and writes:

“UW” has and always will be short for University of Washington, home of the Huskies. Go Dawgs.

No, no. Go Badgers. We got the W in 1848. You kids are 1861 upstarts.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

Ya, we get the same thing all the time There is one UT (THE University of Tennessee, Go Vols) founded in 1794, and we keep geeting confused with some johnny cum lately (1883) down in Texas (Hook em horns, what Kind of a mascot is that?). They even stole our School Colors. All this after we pulled thir Chestnuts out of the fire at the alamo.

IS THE NYT BOTCHING ITS COVERAGE of Air America’s problems? Brian Maloney marshalls the evidence. Clearly, the Times waited too long to report on the allegations of improper financial dealings, but did they reword what Al Franken said on the air? Maloney thinks so. He does have two different quotes. But Franken has a long talk show, and he does ramble on and repeat himself. Maybe he said both things.

From the NYT article:

[W]ord of the investigations ignited a firestorm of criticism on the Internet, especially among conservative-leaning blogs that have essentially accused the network of robbing from the poor to pay its bills.

To my ear, that sounds as though the Times did not appreciate bloggers pressuring it to report a story.

Amusingly, the NYT knocks the conservative bloggers for the robbery metaphor, but Franken himself used that metaphor on the air. He said, “I think he was robbing Peter to pay Paul.” The Times quotes Franken as saying “I think he was borrowing from Peter to pay Paul.” Did they change the quote to jibe with their attitude toward the bloggers? Even if Franken said both things, the choice of the more mealy-mouthed of two available quotes would still seem to be based on a desire to make the bloggers look rabid.

“WHERE HAS THIS HOSTILITY COME FROM?” Clive Davis on anti-Americanism in England.

THE PERPETUALLY DOOMED DOLLAR David Altig poor mouths the dollar, pointing out that it fell on news that the Russian Central Bank decided to hold less of it, and that things are looking up in Japan and Europe.

Yes, well, when you’re at the bottom of a pit, there’s nowhere else to look but up. Japan is still struggling against deflation; EU GDP came in at an anaemic 0.3% in the second quarter (compared to 0.8% in America). There are a couple of bright spots in Europe, such as Ireland and Spain, but they are dwarfed by Germany, the EU’s biggest economy, which had no growth at all in the second quarter, and France, which posted 0.2%. Italy rebounded from recession with an unexpectedly strong 0.7%, but as traders like to say, even a dead cat will bounce if it falles from a great enough height. These numbers are encouraging only because analysts had expected them to be worse still.

Until GDP growth improves elsewhere, America will continue to be the destination of choice for capital looking to invest in the rich world. That will boost the dollar (and our current account deficit). China’s revaluation of the yuan was distinctly underwhelming (and as this article from The Economist explains, its currency peg is still heavily weighted towards the dollar), meaning that for the time being, it will continue to pour money into propping up the dollar.

Over the long run, of course, America’s gaping current account deficit is not sustainable, and the natural path of adjustment is a decline in the value of the dollar. But given the countervailing pressures in the world economy, I wouldn’t try to make any money betting against the dollar.

THE PERSEID METEOR SHOWER may be exceptional this year. It is supposed to peak at 4:18 a.m. Eastern Standard Time (1:18 a.m. Pacific Time) Friday morning. That’s slightly more than three hours from the time I posted this entry.

OMAR BAKRI fled London for Lebanon after the authorities considered charging him with treason. Some people in Lebanon aren’t very happy about this and they are not going to put up with him.

UPDATE: That didn’t take long. He was arrested in Beirut.

POTUS, Rick Shenkman’s one-man blog, suddenly has 15 new bloggers – eminent presidential historians, including the UW’s own Stanley Kutler.

WHOOPS: Today The Guardian published an opinion piece by a man linked to Al Qaeda.

WENT TO DINNER TONIGHT with my co-blogger on my regular blog in Jersey City. I walked down a couple of miles from Hoboken, enjoying the oddness of it. Half of Jersey City looks like a “City of the FUTURE!!!” exhibit, ca. 1960–shiny glass skyscrapers and wide, empty boulevards. Most of the rest looks like a rotogravure spread on “The Tragedy of the Tenements”, ca. 1908. I find the juxtaposition aesthetically stimulating. But I had to laugh at the sign just south of the Holland Tunnel informing me that I was entering Historic Downtown. Judging from the area where it was located, the history of Jersey City was written in cinderblock.

NOT TURNING TAIL YET Bush says that the US will not prematurely withdraw our troops from Iraq.

THE MILITANT MIDDLE: Christopher Hitchens identifies the bipartisan militant middle in an interview with Washington Prism. He is asked “If there was a Democratic president on 9/11, would there have been a difference of opinion in the American left about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq?”

Not from people like Michael Moore (the American film director and strong critic of President Bush), who makes a perfectly good brownshirt [fascist]. Or Noam Chomsky. No, it would not. To them it would have been further proof that the ruling class just has two faces and one party. But I think, in the mainstream of the democratic and Republican parties, you would have seen an exact switch. Richard Holbrooke’s position (Holbrooke was Clinton’s UN Ambassador and is a leading Democratic foreign policy thinker) would be Dick Cheney’s position. The ones in the middle would have just done a switch, finding arguments to support or criticize the war. In fact, I remember that people in the Clinton administration spoke of an inevitable confrontation coming with Saddam. They dropped this idea only because it was a Republican president. That is simply disgraceful. It is likewise disgraceful how many Republicans ran as isolationists against [former Vice-President] Al Gore in the 2000 elections. The only people who come out of this whole affair well are an odd fusion of the old left – the small pro regime change left – and some of the people known as neoconservatives who have a commitment to liberal democracy. Many of the neocons have Marxist backgrounds and believe in ideas and principles and have worked with both parties in power.

AL CAPONE REDUX: The Pinochet family is busted for tax fraud in Chile.

CHRIS MUIR NEEDS YOUR HELP. And, no, he’s not asking for money. Just read and click the cartoon.

RUSTY SHACKLEFORD says everyone is wrong about the drug war.

THEY CAN HEAR YOU NOW: When I was in Beirut in April one of the leaders of the Cedar Revolution, Nabil Abou-Charaf, told me that Syrian intelligence agents used cell phones to “spy” on people.

“You mean they monitor your phone conversations,” I said.

“No,” he said. “They can listen to us all the time even when we’re not using the phone.” He could tell I didn’t believe him. “We know as a fact they can do this.”

The Middle East is notoriously paranoid. When your country is infested with secret police that will happen. Nabil had good reasons himself to be paranoid. He told me he had already been arrested and beaten for standing up to the Syrian puppet regime. Just a week before I met him someone ran his car off the road and left a message on his answering machine and said that was just the beginning.

Still, I didn’t believe what he said about spies using his cell phone as a bug. If the cell phone is off or just sitting there it isn’t transmitting a signal.

Looks like I was wrong. Julian Sanchez at Hit and Run points out this chilling excerpt from a story in last week’s Guardian.

The main means of tracking terrorist suspects down has been the monitoring of mobile phone conversations. Not only can operators pinpoint users to within yards of their location by “triangulating” the signals from three base stations, but – according to a report in the Financial Times – the operators (under instructions from the authorities) can remotely install software onto a handset to activate the microphone even when the user is not making a call.

I’m sure the police love this feature. Police states apparently love it, as well.

LOVING SHORT WOMEN, DAMNING KEN RUSSELL, AND SITTING AT PETER JENNING’S TABLE – some miscellaneous and perfectly composed entries from Terry Teachout’s diary.

OH, THE THEME SHOULD HAVE BEEN LAMB! Remember the best episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” where the woman kills her husband by clubbing him with a frozen leg of lamb, then thaws it out, roasts it, and feeds it to the cops, who are looking for but can’t find the murder weapon? The woman was played by Barbara Bel Geddes. RIP. (Side note: that episode was written by Roald Dahl.) Bel Geddes also touched many hearts with her performance in “Vertigo,” as the woman who was not mysteriously glamorous (like Kim Novak). She’s quintessentially not sexy. We first see her, in Scene 1, discussing a bra with Jimmy Stewart:

What’s this doohickey?

It’s a brassiere! You know about those things, you’re a big boy now.

I’ve never run across one like that.

It’s brand new. Revolutionary up-lift: No shoulder straps, no back straps, but it does everything a brassiere should do. Works on the principle of the cantilevered bridge.

Later Jimmy will have a hot scene under a bridge, but with Kim, not Barbara.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

I first saw Vertigo when I was in high school in the 70s. I found it simply incomprehensible then (and still do today) that anyone (any male, I guess I should say) would have preferred Kim Novak to Barbara Bel Geddes. Not that anyone would turn their nose up at Novak (as if!); it’s just that Midge was so, so, so … hot. Those red glasses, her voice, the way she carried herself. It wasn’t a hot cha-cha-cha kind of thing; it was an understated attractiveness. You knew that if you had BBG as your girlfriend (as if!) she would be *yours* and not run off with the next guy along who was taller or better looking or richer or something (the way you knew Novak would). She was *solid*

Which is a long-winded way of saying (politely, I hope) that you are wrong, oh so wrong, when you say that BBG was “quintessentially not sexy”. I know, sexiness is in the eye of the beholder, but you’re wrong.

Aw! Half of this email reminds me of that cool old Jimmy Soul song “If You Wanna Be Happy” and half of it seems to express a genuine preference for a nice, hardcore nerdgirl.

THE VIEW FROM THE ICE BAR IN DUBLIN, from the always-wonderful Sheila Variations.

IN THE WAKE OF OUR BLOATED NEW TRANSPORTATION BILL, Robin Hanson suggests the government switch to diet pork. One-third less guilt than regular log-rolling!

WHY IS THE FUR OF UNBORN LAMB considered especially disturbing?

“That’s just a little too much,” said the designer Carmen Marc Valvo, explaining why he draws the line at using fetal lambs…

I love the use of the word “explaining” here. What’s explanatory about “too much”? Is there some connection to the sensitivity about fetuses caused by the abortion debate? Because that really wouldn’t make any sense at all.

SHARPLY INKED DOGS AND CAT-GIRLS – including these, purportedly drawn by foot. Found via the great illustration blog Drawn! The exclamation point is in the name of the blog, though I am actually pretty excited about the blog. And am I doing a foot theme today? Stick around and find out. The trick would be to get Megan and Michael to go with the theme. We shall see.

WHEN BLOGGERS MEET AT THE CAFE, they crowd the table with laptops. No, get that thing out of the way. And now the laptop’s on the floor and she’s blogging with her feet!

SITZKRIEG’S END: Marcus Cicero remembers the Cold War and wonders if, somewhat counter-intuitively, we’re in more danger now than we were then.

It turns out the Cold War amounted to an entire half century of having it all, creating nominal safety. The nothing part of M.A.D. — Armageddon — never came to pass. And so we did indeed create a playground of prosperity: Shopping malls, freeways, cheap global travel, and the Internet; the plethora of things, rock-n-roll, the rise of socialism and multiculturalism; baseball, apple pie and Chevrolet. We got very used to that. Three generations grew up in the soil of transparent global war.

M.A.D. conditioned us to have our cake and eat it too. But today’s WMD perils are unlike the days of M.A.D. In the Cold War, we could depend on the rationality of our adversaries, the Soviets. We could mutually agree on something, heinous as it was. M.A.D. created a sense of certainty out of nucler parity. That certainty was: if it happens, everyone dies. That’s it. No debate necessary. If you were alive, it meant everything was normal. If you were dead, well…

Weapons of mass destruction in the 9/11 era no longer represent the end of everything. The threshold to this brave new terror-nuke world is far lower than the threshold to M.A.D. Parity is no longer apparent. That makes catastrophe with a small ‘c’ far more likely to happen.

Read the whole thing.

YOU’RE EITHER WITH US OR YOU’RE AGAINST US: James Wolcott is beating up on liberal hawks (he singles out Roger L. Simon in particular) for making common cause with conservatives by supporting the Terror War:

The fact is that by subscribing to Bush’s War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq with every corpuscle of your tired body you’ve made common cause with Republican conservatives, neoconservatives, and Christian fundamentalists who are dedicated to destroying those parcels of liberalism on which you stake your tiny claims of pride…Do you really think that conservative supremacy in the executive, congressional, and judicial branches of government means that gay rights and abortion rights will somehow be spared?

I can’t speak for Roger, but I didn’t vote for “conservative supremacy in the executive, congressional and judicial branches of government.” I voted for a Republican White House and a Democratic Congress. That’s the sort of thing liberal hawks and other centrist types do. I made “common cause” with the Religious Right, which as a social-liberal/left-libertarian isn’t much fun. At the same time I made “common cause” with Dennis Kucinich, which as a foreign policy hawk isn’t much fun.

Politics isn’t binary, James. It’s not a war between the white hats and the black hats — or the blue hats and the red hats for that matter. Tens of millions of Americans answer with “neither” when asked if they consider themselves liberal or conservative. Some of us vote for third parties. Some of us vote for both of the two major parties at the same time. It’s about tough choices and lesser evilism. If you’re a liberal I suppose the choice is an easy one. Some of us non-liberals see nuance and shades of gray. Maybe you’ve heard of those things.

UPDATE: On a related note, Harry Hatchett says many on today’s anti-war left strikingly resemble right-wing nationalists and isolationists. It begs the question then. Who, really, are the new conservatives? I couldn’t care less, personally, about being tainted with conservative cooties. But those who fear and loathe the idea might want to read Harry’s essay.

DON’T “STIFLE THE GENIUS.” Supreme Court nominee John Roberts shows some commitment to federalism values:

[Senator Ron] Wyden said that he asked Judge Roberts whether he believed states should take the lead in regulating medical practice, and that the nominee replied that “uniformity across the country would stifle the genius of the founding fathers.”

Roberts seems to have disapproved of Congress’s intervention in the Schiavo case. I have to say “seems to” because he’s speaking at a high level of abstraction — quite appropriately, as everyone is gathering material to turn against him.