LEE SIEGEL, last seen accusing the blogosphere of thuggery, has been suspended by The New Republic for sock-puppetry. There sure seems to be a lot of that going around.

The New Republic also seems to have sent all of his posts to the memory hole, which seems rather extreme.

UPDATE: Reader C.J. Burch writes: “We are approaching an election and the left and the press are in full melt down mode. I’ve seen this movie before.”

Meanwhile, here’s a non-left/right take: “Siegel is perhaps the single most pretentious person in America today, close to unreadable at length no matter the topic on which he is writing and immensely uninteresting as a blogger. It turns out he was conspiring with someone to post comments on his blog — evidently to create the impression that said blog had at least one reader.” Ouch. Upside: Now James Wolcott’s position in the blogosphere is unchallenged!

A LOT OF PEOPLE HAVE WRITTEN to ask about the music from The Nevers in our last podcast. Sorry, but you can’t get it anywhere at the moment — it’s from an unreleased demo. I’m trying to talk them into releasing it, though, and I’ll let you know if they do.

DISSIDENTS at Dartmouth.

DONALD RUMSFELD ISN’T BACKING DOWN: “I do worry about the lack of perspective in our national dialogue — a perspective on history and the new challenges and threats that free people face today. Those who know the truth need to speak out against the myths and distortions being told about our troops and our country. My remarks at the Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion conventions have generated much discussion. I encourage everyone to read what I actually said at defenselink.mil/speeches.”

UPDATE: And I just got copies of letters that Rumsfeld sent to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Click “read more” to read them.

(more…)

HMM. Some actions by Sen. Ted Stevens that have benefited his son Ben’s clients.

VIOLENT DEATHS IN IRAQ dropped dramatically in August. As I’ve said before, I think it’s a mistake to make much of these short-term trends, but given all the press that bad news gets, it’s at least worth mentioning them.

UPDATE: Matoko Kusanagi emails: “Yesterday 64 civs died, 287 wounded. I wonder if the jihaadis see the declining death stats in the media (like for august) and work feverishly to pump up the number of deaths.”

Sounds like middle-managers trying to make a quota. But wouldn’t that dynamic lead to a spate of attacks at the end of the month, before the period closes?

The bottom line, though, as noted above, is that it’s only the long-term trends that matter. What’s disturbing is that the press tends to report short-term, and to emphasize bad news over good.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Looks like the good news may have been in error.

WILL FRANKLIN HAS more on the U.N. and self-defense.

UH OH: “I’m hearing all kinds of disturbing, though predictable, stories about a Clintonista offensive against ‘The Path to 9/11,’ an ABC documentary written and produced by Cyrus Nowrasteh (‘Into the West’), and directed by David Cunningham (‘To End All Wars’).” . . . Apparently, the documentary recounts the bureaucratic bungling and lack of action against al Qaeda that was pervasive prior to the September 11 atrocities. It is by no means, I understand, pro-Bush. It is, instead, an effort to present history accurately. This evidently has many former Clinton officials and apologists in their default kill-the-messenger mode. Great pressure is being brought to bear on ABC and Disney to reopen the editorial process at this late stage (the documentary is supposed to air on September 10-11) so that the years 1993-2001 may remain forever airbrushed.”

It seems to me that enough people have previewed it already that the consequences for ABC of making changes at this point would be disastrous.

UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt: “I, and I am sure many others, have been sent the entire six hour program to preview and review, which I will be doing over the weekend. Edits post-distribution of the review DVDs would invite scrutiny of the very portions sent down the black hole, underscoring the episodes the censors hoped to hide. No, I don’t think ABC would injure its brand that way, and certainly not when they couldn’t get away with it.”

MORE: Stephen Spruiell called ABC and they say it’s “locked and ready to air.”

POLLSTER.COM is a new polling-related site set up by Mark “Mystery Pollster” Blumenthal. More about it here. I predict that it will become a daily stop for political junkies.

A WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL pronounces the Plame scandal bogus.

Nevertheless, it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame’s CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming — falsely, as it turned out — that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush’s closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It’s unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.

Including the Washington Post, alas. They should have been reading InstaPundit. Though I remember some people at the Harvard blogger conference in 2003 reacting with incredulity at my view that the Wilson narrative was extremely dubious, so I guess reading InstaPundit isn’t enough. . . .

UPDATE: Roger Simon has questions for the New York Times.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Duncan Black isn’t bitter that Fitzmas has become Fizzlemas.

And Tom Maguire is making the rubble bounce. Bounce, rubble, bounce!

IN THE MAIL: Cass Sunstein’s new book, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge. It’s interesting, because the original concept for An Army of Davids was going to be called Horizontal Knowledge, and was going to be something much closer to what Sunstein does in this book. That discussion wound up getting shrunk down to a single chapter in Army of Davids, as the book went in a different direction. But I always felt that the stuff I left out deserved more attention, and now I’m happy to see it getting some — and, no doubt, done better than I would have done it anyway.

Interestingly, the “discussion forum” for the book leads with this question: “Is having a discussion topic for each book necessary?”

FBI RAIDS ON ALASKAN LEGISLATORS, including Ben Stevens, son of U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens.

CHICAGO TRIBUNE: “Busted by the bloggers:”

To the right of the masthead at the Web site porkbusters.org is a quote attributed to former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott: “I’ll just say this about the so-called porkbusters. I’m getting damn tired of hearing from them.”

Sens. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) and Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) are probably damn tired of hearing from them too, but taxpayers ought to listen up–and applaud. The porkbusters led a pack of bloggers who outed the two senators for bottling up a bill meant to help the public track how its tax dollars are spent. . . .

When they were caught, Stevens and Byrd offered lots of blather about why they were preventing taxpayers from finding out how their money is spent.

Byrd’s office said he just wanted to slow things down so the bill could get a thorough and open debate. Stevens’ staffers said he was concerned about the cost, and he wanted a cost-benefit analysis and assurances that the database wouldn’t create more bureaucracy and blah blah blah. Stevens could have brought all this up while the bill was in committee, but he skipped those hearings.

A more likely motivation: Stevens was mad because Coburn had tried to block a $223 million appropriation for Alaska’s infamous “bridge to nowhere” that Stevens inserted in last year’s federal highway bill.

It’s a good day for taxpayers and the bloggers who got to the truth. And a bad day for secrecy in the U.S. Senate.

Indeed.

BRUSSELS JOURNAL: “The Belgian authorities have destroyed archives and records relating to the persecution and deportation of Jews in Belgium in the 1930s and 1940s. Some of this happened as recently as the late 1990s. This was revealed during hearings in the Belgian Senate last Spring. Though the Senate report dates from 4 May the Belgian press has not yet mentioned the affair.”

Maybe the Belgian press is afraid of being treated the way Brussels Journal is being treated.

WAKE ISLAND GOT HIT:

Super Typhoon Ioke has made a direct hit on Wake Island, pounding the tiny U.S. Pacific territory with catastrophic winds of up to 300 kilometers an hour.

Ioke is the strongest central Pacific typhoon in at least 12 years. Forecasters expect the “monster” storm to submerge Wake Island and destroy everything on it that is not made of concrete.

The winds were strong enough to blow out the weather gear, but it recorded gusts of 190 mph before failing.

UPDATE: Brendan Loy thinks I’m misreading the gusts bit:

I think you’re misreading the linked AP article (at the L.A. Times website) about Supertyphoon Ioke. I would be very, very surprised if the weather instruments on Wake Island survived long enough to actually measure 190 mph wind gusts. And I don’t believe the AP is saying that they did. The article says: “the instruments blew out as the storm approached with winds up to 155 mph and gusts up to 190 mph.” The description of what the storm “approached with” refers, I believe, to the official National Hurricane Center estimate of the storm’s strength as it approached — not to any actual measurements at Wake Island. A little strangely worded, but I think that’s what it means.

Er, okay, though that does seem strangely worded. Either way, I’m certainly glad I wasn’t there to experience it firsthand.

ARE JOBS LESS SECURE THAN THEY WERE A GENERATION AGO? Greg Mankiw says no.

UPDATE: A modest proposal for raising the median wage.

DEMOCRATS PUSHING A DRAFT? Sort of.

THIS SOUNDS PROMISING:

Cancer results from cells gone wild. Proliferating out of control, the cells spawn malignant growths that can travel throughout the human body, spreading the disease. Some patients’ immune systems are able to recognize such tumors and begin to attack them, and research has shown that boosting the patients’ levels of such tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes can help defeat deadly cancer. Now scientists have transformed immune cells into cancer fighters outside the body–and prompted complete remission in two subjects when those cells were reintroduced.

Let’s hope that more extensive tests bear out these results.

IF PRO WRESTLING SEEMS TOO CALM AND DIGNIFIED, you can always read law reviews.

MORE ON THE U.N., SELF-DEFENSE, AND INTERNATIONAL LAW: “People writing reports for the U.N. should consider what the founders of the modern ideas of the law of nations had to say about the subject. Hugo Grotius was quite clear on the subject. Emmerich de Vattel was too. . . . the U.N. has cut international law off from its root.”

MORE THOUGHTS ON ECONOMIC ATTITUDES, from Dr. Tony.

UPDATE: Meanwhile The New York Times is changing its tune.

DR. MELISSA CLOUTHIER says that full-spectrum lighting is better than fluorescent.

AVATAR INTERVIEW: Mark Warner was interviewed at Second Life. The transcript is here.

HERE’S MORE ON THE “SECRET HOLD” EXPOSURE, from The Hotline:

Stevens’ admission “offered a glimpse into the increasing role that online pundits play in U.S. policymaking.” It came a day after Senate Maj. Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) “posted a Web entry asking colleagues to cooperate with bloggers who were trying to identify who was using the legislative maneuver to stall a vote.”

The measure, co-sponsored by Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), “has bipartisan support” and has been “championed for months by bloggers who, regardless of their political persuasion, advocate for more information to be available through the Internet.” RedState.com’s Erick Erickson: “The left can very easily find out which earmarks Halliburton is involved with, and the right can find out which earmarks Planned Parenthood is involved with.” Obama spokesperson Tommy Vietor: “When you have InstaPundit and RedState, some of the most influential conservative bloggers, working with (left-leaning) DailyKos, that’s sort of a powerful grassroots alliance” (Talev, McClatchy Newspapers, 8/31).

CNN’s Koppel: “This political-who-done-it captivated bloggers for days and brought together an unusual alliance on both sides of the aisle. …

Let’s hope it’s just a beginning, and not a one-off.

UPDATE: Here’s more on the Byrd secret-hold story.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Byrd admits it!

West Virginia Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd admits that he placed a “secret hold” on legislation that would make uncovering the Byzantine world of federal contracting as easy as typing a Google search.

Tom Gavin, spokesperson for Byrd, confirmed to Cox Newspapers that the senator placed the hold on legislation introduced by Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Barack Obama, D-Ill., before voting on the measure.

Byrd joins Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, for holding up the bill right before Congress left town on August 4. . . .

Byrd has released his hold, now that there “has been time to better understand the legislation,” Gavin said.

Excellent news. And TPM Muckraker has more.

MORE: Bill Frist makes a commitment: “In September, I will bring S. 2590 to the floor of the Senate for the vote it deserves.”

WHERE ARE ALL THE STUDENT ANTIWAR PROTESTS? Ann Althouse has some thoughts.