TOM MAGUIRE: “The Times editors continue to follow the Social Security debate; unfortunately, they fail to follow their own newspaper’s reporting.”

UNLIKE MOST OF US, John Hinderaker has read the entire CBS report and has some observations on what was covered and what was not.

WHILE LGF IS DOWN, Charles Johnson is posting here.

THOUGHTS ON GOVERNMENT PROPAGANDA, Armstrong Williams, and the blogosphere: My TechCentralStation column is up.

UPDATE: Sean Hackbarth emails that I should have mentioned the daschlevthune scandal in that piece, and he’s right. I had mentioned it in my blog post on Williams, and I thought I mentioned it in the article — so much so that I went to look, only to find that I had somehow left it out. My mistake; sorry.

ECONOBLOGGING: This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists is up.

TENNESSEE GOVERNOR PHIL BREDESEN is expected to announce the fate of TennCare this afternoon.

HACK ATTACK: Yes, HostingMatters was down last night (I posted on it over at the backup site). It was a DDOS attack. I believe, though, that LGF remains down because of an unrelated (well, it’s not directly related) hardware problem — I saw where its server had thrown a drive on reboot.

The folks at HostingMatters seem to have done an excellent job dealing with multiple attacks recently. And although I’ve gotten a lot of emails from people upset about it, these things just happen. If there’s important stuff going on, I’ll keep posting over at the backup site. If it’s late at night and there’s not, as in the last couple of cases, I’ll just read a book and go to bed, and I suggest that you do the same. It’s only a blog, after all. A few hours’ withdrawal won’t hurt any of us. . . .

RATHERGATE UPDATE:

Four CBS News employees, including three executives, have been ousted for their role in preparing and reporting a disputed story about President Bush’s National Guard service.

The action was prompted by the report of an independent panel that concluded that CBS News failed to follow basic journalistic principles in the preparation and reporting of the piece. The panel also said CBS News had compounded that failure with “rigid and blind” defense of the 60 Minutes Wednesday report.

Asked to resign were Senior Vice President Betsy West, who supervised CBS News primetime programs; 60 Minutes Wednesday Executive Producer Josh Howard; and Howard’s deputy, Senior Broadcast Producer Mary Murphy. The producer of the piece, Mary Mapes, was terminated.

Sounds good so far.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis reacts. Here’s a link to the complete report, which is quite long even though the appendices haven’t been added yet. (So I guess I should really call it the “incomplete report?”) I think that many bloggers will be combing through it rather carefully in search of interesting nuggets, despite its length.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader notes that nobody from the press asked Bush about this at his morning Q&A, and suggests that they’re covering up for their fellows. Maybe, maybe not. But as a public service, here’s a “reconstructed” transcript that I just got by fax from a Kinko’s in Washington. I’m sure it’s authentic:

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Mr. President, how do you feel about the firings and resignations at CBS, over the presentation of a show designed to influence the election, one based on documents that CBS’s own experts said were probably bogus?

THE PRESIDENT: I feel pretty good.

Close enough for government CBS work.

MORE: TVNewser is all over the RatherGate story. So is Jim Geraghty. Both think that the panel pulled punches on the question of whether Rather and Mapes were politically motivated. Since it’s obvious that they were, I have to agree.

So does SoxBlog, which calls the report “half a loaf:”

Here’s what I wanted to hear and I bet you did, too: Number 1, the documents were forgeries; and Number 2, The CBS apparatchiks involved in this sordid affair were animated by their black hearts’ desires to wound the President. Alas, the Report says neither.

But here’s what you do get. The Report lays out the factual case of what happened here better than anything else that I’ve read. And the factual case is incredibly damning to CBS News and the soon to be departing individuals involved in this endeavor. Yes, the Report doesn’t explicitly say that the documents were forgeries, but no sentient reader could make any other conclusion based on the evidence it offers. . . .

I have a feeling those of us in the right wing blogosphere will dismiss the Report because it declines to make explicit that which we “know” regarding CBS’ motives and the documents authenticity. To do so would be a mistake. The Report lays out the facts and those alone are damning enough.

Indeed.

MORE: Here’s an observation that CBS is comfortable assigning political motivations to bloggers, but not to its own people. Meanwhile Hugh Hewitt says that the treatment of the political angle is a “whitewash.” That might seem a bit strong, but the less-partisan TVNewser agrees:

CBS may not have been advancing a “political agenda” — but it seems that Mary Mapes was.

I expect we’ll hear more on this. In fact, we already are: Big roundup here.

STILL MORE: Jim Geraghty:

Does the panel really think that CBS would have acted in the same manner in a seemingly-great story that would have hurt John Kerry? Are we really to believe that it was solely “competitive pressures” that led to this, and that no one in this process had their thinking influenced by a desire to see Bush defeated in this year’s election?

It seems that CBS’s unwillingness to admit this is turning into the big story.

I’m busy (classes start today) but Jeff Jarvis and RatherBiased.com have much more. Jeff’s best bit:

I see that the report is calling for more commissions and committees and all that — which is just the wrong thing to do: It puts yet more distance between the journalists and the public they are supposed to serve. They should be doing just the opposite: tearing down the walls, making journalists responsible for interacting with the public.

This is bigger than Dan Rather. This is bigger than CBS News. This is about the news and the new relationship — the conversation — journalism must learn to have with the public, or the public will go have it without them.

Indeed. But Dan Rather isn’t backing down:

Rather informed the Panel that he still believes the content of the documents is true because “the facts are right on the money,” and that no one had provided persuasive evidence that the documents were not authentic.

Sheesh. Will Collier, meanwhile, notes several dogs that didn’t, or won’t, bark.

MORE STILL: Here’s another CBS scandal:

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)–A former columnist for CBS MarketWatch.com will pay more than $540,000 to settle charges he used his investment newsletter to make profits by promoting stock that he owned.

Thom Calandra, who wrote the Calandra Report for the company now known as MarketWatch Inc. (MKTW), settled the Securities and Exchange Commission charges without admitting or denying wrongdoing.

The SEC said Calandra made more than $400,000 in illegal profits by buying shares of thinly traded small-cap companies, writing favorable profiles of the companies, and then selling most of his shares after his columns had driven up the price of the securities.

Ouch.

And Johnny Dollar is rounding up the Rathergate-related TV punditry so that you don’t have to, you know, watch it.

BUSINESS WEEK looks at the future of the New York Times, which doesn’t seem terribly bright. Steve Sturm has further thoughts.

At any rate, the Bush Administration — and Republicans generally — should be overjoyed to hear that the NYT is considering turning its web edition into a pay-only site, a sort of oversized Salon.com:

Advertising accounts for almost all of the digital operation’s revenues, but disagreement rages within the company over whether NYTimes.com should emulate The Wall Street Journal and begin charging a subscription fee. Undoubtedly, many of the site’s 18 million unique monthly visitors would flee if hit with a $39.95 or even a $9.95 monthly charge. One camp within the NYT Co. argues that such a massive loss of Web traffic would cost the Times dearly in the long run, both by shrinking the audience for its journalism and by depriving it of untold millions in ad revenue. The counterargument is that the Times would more than make up for lost ad dollars by boosting circulation revenue — both from online fees and new print subscriptions paid for by people who now read for free on the Web.

Sulzberger declines to take a side in this debate, but sounds as if he is leaning toward a pay site. “It gets to the issue of how comfortable are we training a generation of readers to get quality information for free,” he says. “That is troubling.”

I don’t know whether it would make money, but the Times would lose a lot of influence if it made this move, since it would only be talking to the true believers. Send Pinch Sulzberger one of these, pronto! Maybe two . . . .

MICKEY KAUS on RatherGate: “I’m not alone in thinking that the potential Staudt libel angle may be playing a big part in CBS’s Danron/’Memogate’ response. My guess (which may be disproved within hours!) is that CBS would want to settle any disputes with Col. Staudt before releasing any report that could provide him with evidentiary ammunition.” He has thoughts on gerrymandering and torture, too.

TSUNAMI UPDATE: Amit Varma, who has been touring Tamil Nadu for the last 12 days, offers some lessons learned: “I’m speaking in hindsight, of course, but before the next event – for no disaster is ever the last one.”

Meanwhile, Malaysian blogger Rajan Rishyakaran has some related thoughts.

CLINTON AND BUSH: FAST FRIENDS?

For two men at opposite ends of the political spectrum, the relationship between the 43rd and 42nd presidents has grown surprisingly warm and personal over the last six months. Clinton endorsed Bush’s approach to the tsunami catastrophe, defending him against criticism about his initial response as well as raising cash alongside the president’s father. Friends and aides say the two men enjoy each other’s company and, as fellow pros, respect each other’s political talents.

Clinton has also been quite supportive of the terror war, especially before international audiences.

ARNOLD KLING looks at what Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong are saying about Social Security reform. Hugh Hewitt, meanwhile, says that the GOP is behind the curve, here: “The Social Security Debate: Somebody Tell the Republicans It Has Begun.”