HOLLYWOOD PHOTOBLOGGING, from Prof. Bainbridge.

HERE’S A TRANSCRIPT of Hugh Hewitt’s appearance on Kudlow & Cramer, talking about Eason Jordan.

UPDATE: “What happens in Davos, stays in Davos.” Heh.

THE LONG GAME VS. THE SHORT GAME, on Social Security. Ron Brownstein thinks that Bush is likely to lose on Social Security reform. Mickey Kaus thinks that Bush had better lose, and fast: “That is why the reports that Bush is pushing for an ambitiously expedited consideration of his proposal aren’t necessarily a sign of strength, or of a cunning high-pressure Rovian strategy for victory. They may be a strategy to lose quickly, with minimal harm done to the Republican majority.”

That’s the short game. Bush may, in fact, lose there, too. But the long game is based on the fact that Bush has taken the “scaring seniors” bit off the table — except for those who haven’t gotten the news that people over 55 aren’t affected — and that younger voters tend to regard Social Security as somebody else’s retirement program, not their own. As 20-something writer Laura Thomas noted recently in The Washington Post:

People my age are as likely to believe in Social Security as they are in Santa Claus. And, if you ask me, it would be equally naive for a twenty-something to believe in either one.

They’re putting their faith in 401k plans. Bush won’t win their votes in large numbers by promising to give them a bit more to invest. But by maneuvering the Democrats into becoming the party of the status quo yet again — or maybe “the party of the AARP” is a better term — he helps cement their minority status, and makes them send the message that they don’t care about younger voters. As the long game progresses, that can only help the Republicans, and hurt the Democrats. But the real point here is that a lot of people are having trouble understanding what Bush is doing, because they haven’t figured out the difference between the long game and the short game. And he’s pretty clearly playing the long game.

[Speaking of long games, this was posted late because I saved it as a draft, and just noticed it had never appeared. D’oh!]

A HANDSOME APOLOGY FROM BILL MOYERS, and perhaps a lesson for some other people.

SHANTI MANGALA has some cool stuff.

HUGH HEWITT will be on CNBC’s Kudlow & Cramer in a little while, talking about Eason Jordan. Kudlow also has a column on the subject.

UPDATE: Jim Geraghty has a good, sober summary of where things stand:

We’ve got two dramatically different interpretations here – the account of Rony Abovitz and Rebecca MacKinnon and Barney Frank, and the account of Eason Jordan. (Dodd’s statement appears to confirm Rony & Company but is brief; Gergen mostly confirms Rony but is sympathetic to Jordan; Richard Sambrook’s account is pretty close to Jordan’s.)

These accounts are so contradictory on so many key elements that one has no choice but to conclude one side is dramatically misrepresenting what happened.

The videotape that the Davos authorities are sitting on would solve this issue immediately.

Either Rony, MacKinnon, and Frank are passing on inaccurate accounts that will trash Jordan’s reputation, or Eason Jordan’s denial is a lie. . . .

Either Jordan said it, or he didn’t. Right now, the reputations of the five “he said it” witnesses (Rony, MacKinnon, Frank, Gergen, Dodd) – are on the line on one side, and Jordan and Sambrook’s reputation is bet on the other side.

Davos authorities, this cloud cannot hang over each side’s reputation forever. You can settle this by releasing the tape. Help us learn who’s telling the truth.

And everybody else in the media – blogs, mainstream, left, right, big, small – can help add to the pressure by politely but firmly calling on the World Economic Forum to release the tape.

Yes. Austin Bay, recently returned from Iraq and thus I guess one of those military guys (allegedly) charged with slaughtering journalists, has more thoughts.

KERRY: Can’t shake “Senate-ese.”

I really think the Democrats could have done better.

THE EASON JORDAN SCANDAL: Not an isolated event, according to Ed Morrissey.

THE LONG GAME VS. THE SHORT GAME: Gerard van der Leun thinks that CNN has, for the moment at least, successfully defused the Eason Jordan scandal: “The Eason Jordan vs The Bloggers match ended its first set today with a high lob set-up from Howard Kurtz at the Washington Post put away by an overhand smash by Mr. Adams of Davos who announced that the videotape of the Davos meeting, in which Jordan claimed the US Military was deliberately killing journalists in Iraq, would not be released to the public. . . . In this world, if it doesn’t happen on television it doesn’t happen, and without the videotape this will not happen on television.”

I hate to accuse Gerard of old-media thinking, but I think that’s what’s going on here. It’s true, of course, that without video the story won’t get a lot of play on TV. But that’s the short game, in which the goal is getting rid of Eason Jordan. Or hanging on to him.

The long game is different, and Jim Geraghty gets it:

What we need from the Davos conference organizers is simple – the tape of what Jordan said. It would be good to get the entire event, but really, what is at issue here is what Jordan said, and how much he backtracked.

If the Davos organizers refuse to release it, and CNN refuses to call for its release, and the BBC refuses to call for its release, and every other news agency refuses to call for its release…

…then remember this, the next time the media gets up on a high horse about the public’s right to know. Remember this the next time Dick Cheney has a meeting with energy executives. Remember this the next time reporters complain about Bush not holding enough press conferences, and not doing enough interviews. Remember this the next time they talk about the importance of a free press, and an informed citizenry.

Because it’s all conditional. None of this applies when the situation includes a media executive says something in a big forum that he later realizes he doesn’t want the public to hear. Then all of a sudden, none of this matters, because it’s bad form for other news agencies to look into the story if he wants it to go away. “Bad manners, old chap. We journalists have to stick together.”

You don’t need TV for those ideas to spread. And when they do — and they are — getting rid of Eason Jordan doesn’t matter so much. Because neither does Eason Jordan. On the other hand, if the Eason Jordans of the world are all untrustworthy, self-interested boobs, and seen as such, it’s going to be hard to sustain public support for press freedom. Unless, perhaps, enough people are blogging that the public sees its own face on “press freedom” and not the likes of Eason Jordan’s.

JOE GANDELMAN has an Eason Jordan roundup.

ACADEMIC FREEDOM UPDATE: Are you a professor who criticizes the military or the war? Watch out — you may be creating a hostile environment for veterans!

This is idiotic, of course, but it’s the natural consequence of hostile-environment theory, and I suspect that we’ll see a lot more of these shoe-on-the-other-foot complaints.

UPDATE: Some wise thoughts from a lawyerly perspective, from Beldar.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ is highly critical of Columbia University.

ANTEDILUVIAN NANOBOTS: Less than compelling.

JAMES LILEKS presents one of his rare, but always worthwhile, Fiskings of pretentious punditry.

HERE’S MORE ON WHO BENEFITS FROM FARM SUBSIDIES:

David Rockefeller, the former chairman of Chase Manhattan and grandson of oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, who received 99 times more subsidies than the median farmer;

Scottie Pippen, professional basketball star, who received 39 times more subsidies than the median farmer;

Ted Turner, the 25th wealthiest man in America, who received 38 times more subsidies than the median farmer; and

Kenneth Lay, the ousted Enron CEO and multi-millionaire, who received 3 times more subsidies than the median farmer.

Not exactly the Joads, here.

UPDATE: Josh Claybourn doubts that the proposed cuts will ever happen.

IS GUN CONTROL DEAD? Read this from The Hill:

The expected election of former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean as chairman of the Democratic National Committee this month will strike a crippling blow to the gun-control movement, lobbyists and political observers say.

Like Dean, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is a strong supporter of gun rights. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) supports gun control but rarely mentioned the issue before the 2004 election. . . .

In November 2003, the Brady Campaign lambasted Dean for saying the issue of guns crossing state borders had been resolved. The group said the remark was “totally untrue and unsupportable.”

The group last year said it did not support Dean because “he has chosen to run to the right of the Democratic Party on gun issues.”

Gun-control advocates were heartened last year when Dean’s bid for president crumbled.

Read the whole thing.

CNN: “The most busted name in news.” Heh.

IN THE MAIL: Peter Huber and Mark Mills’ new book, The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy.

Just as I hoped that the predictions in J.D. Lasica’s Darknet were wrong, I certainly hope that Huber & Mills’ rather optimistic view turns out to be right.

WARD CHURCHILL UPDATE: University of Colorado Law Professor Paul Campos says that Churchill has problems with academic fraud:

To the extent that Churchill was hired because he claimed to be a Native American, he would seem to be guilty of academic fraud. But the situation is worse than this.

Thomas Brown, a professor of sociology at Lamar University, has written a paper that outlines what looks like a more conventional form of academic fraud on Churchill’s part. According to Brown, Churchill fabricated a story about the U.S. Army intentionally creating a smallpox epidemic among the Mandan tribe in 1837, by simply inventing almost all of the story’s most crucial facts, and then attributing these “facts” to sources that say nothing of the kind.

“One has only to read the sources that Churchill cites to realize the magnitude of his fraudulent claims for them,” Brown writes. “We are not dealing with a few minor errors here. We are dealing with a story that Churchill has fabricated almost entirely from scratch. The lack of rationality on Churchill’s part is mind-boggling.” (Brown’s essay can be read here: http://hal.lamar.edu/~browntf/Churchill1.htm.)

Similar charges have been leveled against Churchill by University of New Mexico law professor John Lavelle, a Native American scholar who has documented what appear to be equally fraudulent claims on Churchill’s part regarding the General Allotment Act, one of the most important federal laws dealing with Indian lands. (Lavelle also accuses Churchill of plagiarism).

At my institution, we don’t hire people without reading their publications. We don’t tenure people without reading them and sending them for outside review by leading scholars in the field. Yet Churchill was both hired and tenured — and made department chair — in the ethnic studies program at Colorado. I’m not sure what’s more damning: If they didn’t perform these checks first, or if they did, and if people on that faculty, and in that field, thought Churchill’s work was just fine. As with the Bellesiles scandal, this suggests some serious problems with peer review in the discipline.

EASON JORDAN UPDATE: Roger Simon has more.

THE MUDVILLE GAZETTE offers a news quiz. I wonder how Eason Jordan would do?

FARM SUBSIDY UPDATE: Fritz Schranck looks further at where the money’s going. And Virginia Postrel, who challenges Hugh Hewitt and others to pay some attention to this issue, observes:

I remember when Barney Frank and Dick Armey used to team up on this issue, for all the good it did. Beating back the welfare queens of agribusiness takes more than a couple of congressional iconoclasts. For one thing, it requires senators.

Indeed. Meanwhile, farmer Kieran Lyons says bring it on.

OVER THE WEEKEND, I mentioned that the Insta-Daughter was watching Mulan II, but that I hadn’t paid much attention to the plot. Blogger Kate Marie did, though, and wasn’t impressed.

HEALTHCARE BLOGGING: Lots of it! Over at this week’s Grand Rounds.

EASON JORDAN, QUOTE UNQUOTE: Howard Kurtz has a story on the Eason Jordan scandal in today’s Washington Post.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who attended the World Economic Forum panel at which Jordan spoke, recalled yesterday that Jordan said he knew of 12 journalists who were killed by coalition forces in Iraq. At first, said Frank, “it sounded like he was saying it was official military policy to take out journalists.” But Jordan later “modified” his remarks to say some U.S. soldiers did this “maybe knowing they were killing journalists, out of anger. . . . He did say he was talking about cases of deliberate killing,” Frank said.

Read the whole thing, as there are some disagreements. But the stonewall seems to have cracked. Where’s the video? And La Shawn Barber has noticed some interesting aspects, and Ed Morrissey thinks that Kurtz is trying too hard to give Jordan the benefit of the doubt. And Mickey Kaus, who has a lengthy analysis of Kurtz’s piece, thinks so too.

UPDATE: Here’s another news story that’s far less kind to Jordan, from the New York Sun:

Mr. Jordan’s remarks might have shocked the American attendees, but they certainly played well among some in the audience. The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens, who covered the panel for his paper, told the Sun that after the panel concluded, Mr. Jordan was surrounded by European and Middle Eastern attendees who warmly congratulated him for his alleged “bravery and candor” in discussing the matter.

And this question from Barney Frank goes to the heart of things: “Did he have proof and if so, why hadn’t CNN run with the story?”

This also goes back to the question that, as Kaus notes, the video could answer:

If the tape shows a CNN executive willing to distort the truth in the course of pandering to and inflaming unjustified anti-U.S. sentiment, then I’d say there is more than a benefit of a doubt involved.

So where’s the video? The Davos people are now saying that they won’t release it unless everyone there gives permission. Hmm. Would they be dragging their feet if this tape exonerated Jordan? It’s hard to imagine.

There’s a roundup here and an observation that Eason Jordan is re-backtracking (front-tracking?) on his accusations, here. Gerry Daly has more thoughts, too.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Power Line: “For now, at least, CNN undoubtedly hopes that this story has ground to a halt with the ‘limited, modified hang-out’ facilitated by Kurtz.”