THE WASHINGTON POST has pulled down comments in response to “personal attacks, the use of profanity and hate speech.” Some people are unsurprised, while other enterprising folks have dug up the comments after deletion, thanks to Yahoo’s cache.

It’s hard for me to get very exercised about this. Given the Post’s addition of technorati links to many of their stories, they’re in a better position than most to say “the blogosphere is our comment section.” And, you know, it is.

UPDATE: Related post from Jay Rosen.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Mister Snitch asks: “At what point did we become obliged to put up with obnoxious houseguests? Why would anyone care whether some ass thinks they are “engaging in censorship” because someone’s attempt to derail a train of thought was moved off a blog? If the argument’s good, the commenter can start his/her own blog for free, and do the work needed to get the word out. If the argument stinks, why is it smelling up our blog? Don’t our other readers have ofalctory rights?”

DEPRESSING THOUGHTS ON IRAN from Joe Katzman.

UPDATE: Jonathan Gewirtz offers a more positive view via StratFor. I hope it’s right, though I’m not a big StratFor fan in general.

BRENDAN LOY says the White House and the New York Times are both wrong when it comes to Executive powers.

BLOG-O-RAMA: The National Journal has a lot of blog coverage in its new issue, and Daniel Glover has reproduced it on his blog. Click here for the main story (which notes that PorkBusters had a dramatic influence on the Republican Conference), and here’s a sidebar on members who blog. Also, here’s his interview with me, and here’s one with Andy Roth. He’s also got interviews with Arianna Huffington and Henry Copeland posted.

PUBLIUS says Code Pink has been photoshopping pro-liberation protesters into antiwar protests. I guess they’re taking lessons from Hugo Chavez.

GREG DJEREJIAN: ” I did want to emerge very briefly to say, when I hear the word ‘truce’ emit from UBL’s lips (or, perhaps, whatever impersonator is doing a stand-in on his behalf), I conclude that we are winning the battle against al-Qaeda. . . . So I guess I disagree somewhat with Muhammad Salah, Cairo bureau chief for the pan-Arab daily Al Hayat, who says to the NYT: ‘The fact that he was able to record the message, deliver it and broadcast is in itself a victory for him.’ Well, yeah, maybe. But that’s really defining victory down quite a damn lot, isn’t it?” He’s properly non-triumphalist here, and you should read the whole thing, but I think that’s right.

UPDATE: Related thoughts here.

SCIENCE FICTION UPDATE: I’ve been reading Larry Niven’s The Draco Tavern, a collection of short stories that fall outside his “Known Space” universe. I like interesting aliens, and Niven has come up with quite a few. This book has some old stories, but also several new ones, along with some old ones I’d somehow missed.

HUGH HEWITT looks at blogging and the GOP leadership race:

Will the collective effort matter? I am certain it already has, though the race is clearly up in the air. Information changes everything, and a previously closed system has been completely thrown open to public scrutiny.

Old media’s interest has been narrowly focused on Abramoff and his money, and while the bloggers have spent considerable time on the corruption issues, so too have they brought important policy debates into the middle of the leadership contests.

Earmarking, for example, is not going survive this process as it used to be practiced. The openness movement is gaining momentum across the board.

I certainly hope he’s right.

FROM THE BEIRUT SPRING TO TOPPLING ASSAD: Austin Bay looks ahead.

IRAQI VOTE RESULTS: “The election commission said Friday that an alliance of Shiite religious parties won the biggest number of seats in Iraq’s new parliament but too few to rule without coalition partners. Sunni Arabs gained seats over the previous balloting.”

There’s lots more on this over at Iraq the Model.

HARRY’S PLACE notes a story I’d missed: “Responding to the Egyptian government’s imprisonment of opposition leader Ayman Nour, the Bush administration has halted negotiations with Cairo over a free trade agreement.”

KEEP AN EYE ON CNN: After the Eason Jordan affair, we know that they’ll slant coverage to keep access to dictatorial regimes. And Iran has already been playing games with them:

Iran lifted its ban on CNN on Tuesday, a day after the government barred the U.S. network from the country because of its mistranslation of nuclear comments by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, state television reported.

Ahmadinejad ordered the reversal “due to the expression of an apology” from CNN over the mistranslation, the state-run TV broadcast said.

So, as I say, watch ’em with a jaundiced eye on this subject. As Matt Welch wrote back when the Eason Jordan story broke:

This is appalling, though no surprise. The embarrassing Peter Arnett interview on Iraq TV was just a brief public glimpse on what has been a nasty little private “secret” for years — that “news bureaus” in Baghdad and other totalitarian capitals (Havana, to name one) are actually propaganda huts, churning out what CNN producers call “sanctions coverage” (pieces on the awful humanitarian toll of international economic sanctions), while refusing to report the awful truth. It is possible, though intensely difficult, to do honest journalism in such circumstances. But with this column, I think we have the final proof that CNN will not be the news organization to rise to that challenge. Shame.

I can’t see any reason to think they’ll do better this time around, though I’d like it if they did.

UPDATE: Will Collier has more history.

RICHARD WHITMIRE writes in The New Republic on boys and education:

What’s most worrisome are not long-standing gender differences but recent plunges in boys’ relative performance. Between 1992 and 2002, the gap by which high school girls outperformed boys on tests in both reading and writing–especially writing–widened significantly. Given the reading and writing demands of today’s college curriculum, that means a lot of boys out there are falling well short of being considered “college material.” Which is why women now significantly outnumber men on college campuses, a phenomenon familiar enough to any sorority sister seeking a date to the next formal. This June, nearly six out of ten bachelor’s degrees awarded will go to women. If the Department of Education’s report is any indication, in coming years, this gender gap will grow even larger.

The report illustrates a dramatic and unsolved mystery: At some point in the early ’80s, boys’ relative academic records and aspirations took a downward turn. So far, no one has come up with a good explanation for this trend, but it’s a story that affects millions of boys and their families. And yet, according to LexisNexis, the report was cited by name in only five newspaper and magazine articles. . . . Not only has there been little media attention to this crisis in boys’ education, but there has been surprisingly little research. And the conventional wisdom offered up to explain the problem–boys play too many video games and listen to too much hip-hop music–can’t explain a gender slide that’s affecting not just the United States but much of the developed West.

Read the whole thing. (Via Ann Althouse, who notes that the article is short on solutions). Read this, too.

UPDATE: Still more on this subject, here.

CHRIS MATTHEWS compares Michael Moore to Osama bin Laden.

This is absurd, of course. Osama has a much better-tuned sense of the dramatic.

N.Z. BEAR has a roundup page tracking GOP House Majority Leader candidates’ answers to blogospheric questions.

ANN COULTER: “Mainstream Democrat”.

MORE ON UCLA’S ANGRY ALUMNI: Ann Althouse and Kieran Healy both have thoughts.

At best, the alumni seem to have two things confused. If they’re concerned about a lack of ideological diversity on the campus, then listing all the left-wing activities of the faculty, and their voter registration, has some relevance, I guess. But it’s not because it’s wrong to be a Nader voter or a pro-labor activist, anymore than it’s wrong to be a white male — it’s just evidence of insufficient diversity when you have a wildly disproportionate number of either.

On the other hand, if you want to focus on faculty doing wrong, then asking for tapes of professors bullying students in the classroom makes sense, but the other stuff is irrelevant. The UCLA project seems to conflate the two in an unfortunate fashion, suggesting that left-wing activism by faculty is somehow comparable to bullying students over ideology, which it’s not at all. By doing so, the UCLA alumni hurt their own credibility.

UPDATE: More thoughts from Cathy Young, and from John Cole and The Argument Clinic.

ORIN KERR: “We’re all just guessing here, of course. But my sense is that Alito is less conservative — both politically and methodologically — than a lot of people seem to think. This means that if you’re on the left, you probably have less to fear from a Justice Alito than you expect. On the other hand, if you’re on the right, you’re probably going to end up a bit disappointed.”

THE BELMONT CLUB looks at the post-post-colonial world:

The problem of what to do with chaos in the Third World is the one thing to which the pop doctrines of multiculturalism and transnationalism had no answer. The system of double-accounting, where Washington news was highlighted while events resulting in hundreds of thousands of Third World deaths [were] relegated to the back pages was the outcome of a system which knew how to the critique the one but not the other.

Read the whole thing.

THE PLUTO MISSION has blasted off: “The New Horizons spacecraft blasted off aboard an Atlas V rocket in a spectacular start to the $700 million mission. Though it is the fastest spacecraft ever launched, capable of reaching 36,000 mph, it will take 9 1/2 years to reach Pluto and the frozen, sunless reaches of the solar system.”

INTERESTING REPORT FROM DENMARK:

Despite pressure by various Muslim countries (including Turkey, Bosnia, Egypt, etc.), by international organisations (including the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the European Union) and by some of Denmark’s own ‘sophisticated’ diplomats, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen has courageously refused to limit freedom of expression in connection with the publication of cartoons of Muhammad in a Danish newspaper. Though most of the cartoons were far from offensive, Islam forbids depicting the Muslim prophet. So far no other European (or for that matter Western) government has spoken out in support of Rasmussen, but this, too, appears to be changing.

Instead of the Danish government surrendering to Muslim radicals, moderate Danish Muslims are now speaking out against the extremists. A group of Muslims in the Danish city of Århus intend to organize a network of Muslims who do not want to be represented by fundamentalist Danish imams or others who preach the Sharia laws and oppression of women. “There is a large group of Muslims in this city who want to live in a secular society and adhere to the principle that religion is an issue between them and God and not something that should involve society,” said Bünyamin Simsek, a city councillor and one of the organizers. Århus witnessed severe riots after the publication of the cartoons in the newspaper Jyllands-Posten last Autumn.

I think that moderate Muslims are a lot more likely to speak out if they feel confident that the government will stand up to the immoderate ones.

MORE TRANSPARENCY THAN USUAL: Roy Blunt, candidate for House Majority Leader, had a conference call with bloggers. You can hear the audio here.

UPDATE: But not everybody got to ask their questons.

I HAVEN’T, IN FACT, been following the Ophelia Ford case, but Bob Krumm has been.

UPDATE: Michael Silence has more.

MICHAEL TOTTEN interviews the Muslim Brotherhood. “They are moderate, I suppose, depending on who they’re compared with.”

NORAH VINCENT’S SELF-MADE MAN is getting some attention around the blogosphere. The Insta-Wife has a roundup.