THE BLOGOSPHERE’S “SMOKE-FILLED BACKROOM:”

Are Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas (of the famous Daily Kos) engaged in a pay-for-play scheme in which politicians who hire Armstrong as a consultant get the support of Kos? That’s the question that’s been bouncing around the blogosphere ever since The New York Times’s Chris Suellentrop broke the news last Friday about a 2000 run-in Armstrong had with the Securities and Exchange Commission over alleged stock touting. But Armstrong, Kos, and other big-time liberal bloggers have almost entirely ignored the issue, which is a bit surprising considering their tendency to rapidly respond to even the smallest criticism.

Why the strange silence in the face of such damning allegations? Well, I think we now know the answer. It’s a deliberate strategy orchestrated by Kos. TNR obtained a missive Kos sent earlier this week to “Townhouse,” a private email list comprising elite liberal bloggers, including Jane Hamsher, Matt Stoller, and Christy Hardin Smith. And what was Kos’s message to this group that secretly plots strategy in the digital equivalent of a smoke-filled backroom? Stay mum!

As usual, I wasn’t invited, but then I don’t smoke that stuff. As for the scandal aspects, well, this seems to me like politics as usual. Perhaps, following Kinsley’s Law, that’s the real scandal, but — except to the extent, probably small, that this causes Kos’s readers to lose faith in him as something new and special — I don’t see a big scandal in this, though I can’t help noting that if something like this were going on on the right, the bloggers of the “Townhouse” list would probably be somewhat less charitable.

But remember — it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up!

UPDATE: Ann Althouse: “I wonder who’s the leaker among the elite bloggers.”

Outside the Beltway has a roundup, and notes that Stirling Newberry is accusing The New Republic of libel, though his post doesn’t actually say that the email isn’t genuine. (He may want to look here for some libel advice.) He also attributes the story to both “Nasty Republicans” and “establishment Democrats.” It’s a conspiracy so vast . . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Patrick Kelly emails: “FWIW, I put a link to the TNR article in the comments at Firedoglake (Hamsher and Smith’s blog), it didn’t last 5 minutes.” Hey, it could have been worse.

And Will Collier observes: “Yep, this one just crossed the entertainment threshold. Time to make some popcorn.”

MORE: Zengerle says it’s all about the Benjamins for the liberal bloggers. “Kos (along with Armstrong and Bowers) gets to decide which blogs belong–and don’t belong–to Advertising Liberally, which means a lot of these blogs’ financial health hinges upon staying in Kos’s good graces. Is it any wonder they’re so obedient?” Still no scandal here, exactly, but boy would these guys be making a stink if this stuff were happening on the right. (Via the Hotline Blog.)

Meanwhile, Blogometer asks: “If Kos is so beholden to Armstrong, why would he support James Webb? Webb wasn’t the candidate of choice in Mark Warner’s world.”

And as an aside, I see some blog-commenters are speculating that Kos is gay. Why that should matter, I don’t know, but I remember — back when the blogosphere was younger and people were nicer — commiserating with Kos over his wife’s miscarriage (my wife and I had several) and assuring him that it didn’t preclude successful pregnancies later on, which I believe his wife has since had. So try to keep things at something better than a seventh-grade level.

STILL MORE: Kos is defended at TAPPED: ” I’m a member of the Liberal BlogAds Network. I’ve mocked Kos’s “Libertarian Democrats” concept, derided his elevator pitches, and generally been surly and disagreeable when it suited me. The idea that Markos can just throw folks off the list is a bit silly, particularly for any of us who remember the endless e-mail thread when Jerome and him tried to create some uniformity in the rules for entry.” Also, see Max Sawicky: “I have run afoul of Kos — f** him and all — and I am still in the network. Got an ad or two this past month too. If you’re big enough for exclusion from the network to be financially meaningful — I’m not, that’s for sure — then being excluded would not prevent you from getting ads independently. There are other blog networks too.”

Blue Crab Boulevard: “it sounds like old fashioned backroom politics. Not exactly cutting edge. . . . The email is a different story. If lefty bloggers are indeed following Kos’ directions to starve the story of oxygen by not writing about it, those bloggers may damage themselves in the long run.”

THIS SEEMS PRETTY DAMNING where college admissions are concerned:

In “Negative Action Versus Affirmative Action: Asian Pacific Americans Are Still Caught in the Crossfire,” William C. Kidder takes issue with the Princeton study and similar findings by other scholars. It’s not that the demographic shift seen by the Princeton researchers wouldn’t take place in an admissions system that’s truly race-neutral, says Kidder, a senior policy analyst at the University of California at Davis. Rather, it’s the question of why those slots would go to Asian applicants.

The reason, he says, isn’t the elimination of affirmative action, but the widespread use of “negative action,” under which colleges appear to hold Asian American applicants to higher standards than they hold other applicants. Using the available data from the Princeton study — and not all of it is available — Kidder argues that the vast majority of the gains that Asian American applicants would see come from the elimination of “negative action,” not the opening up of slots currently used for affirmative action. Based on the data used by the Princeton study, Kidder argues that negative action is the equivalent of losing 50 points on the SAT.

The lead author of the Princeton study did not respond to messages about the findings. . . . Kidder argues that all the references to growing Asian enrollments in a post-affirmative action world encourage a return to the “yellow peril” fear of people from Asia taking over. More broadly, he thinks Asian Americans in particular aren’t getting accurate information about the real cause of their perceived difficulties getting into competitive colleges. Their obstacle, he says, isn’t affirmative action, but the discrimination Asian Americans experience by being held to higher standards than anyone else. He says that the differential standards appear to be growing and are similar in some ways to the way some Ivy League institutions limited Jewish enrollments in the first half of the 20th century.

Quotas for asians have been suspected for a while, and this is troubling. Would more asians mean more “diversity” or less? Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: More on diversity developments from David Bernstein.

THE WORLD’S LARGEST DNA DATABASE, in Tennessee.

I’LL BE ON NPR’S TALK OF THE NATION in a few minutes, talking about the GOP and the midterm elections.

SOME VIDEO FROM AFGHANISTAN, shot by Bill Roggio, at Pajamas Media.

“JEEP JIHADI” Mohammed Taheri Azar will plead guilty. (Via Bob Owens).

VOTING ON ABORTION: Some thoughts at GlennReynolds.com.

PROBABLY NOT: “You know, what the Democrats need is a presidential candidate who was critical of the war early on, but who now firmly supports the successful completion of the mission. Gore?”

BAD NEWS FOR AHMADINEJAD AT THE WORLD CUP: “Did you ever think you’d see the same people waving Israeli flags and singing Deutschland über alles?”

No, but I wouldn’t want to get on their bad side . . . .

UPDATE: The Independent report seems to be in error.

THIS IS MORE LIKE IT: An Army of Davids tops NRO’s summer reading list. ” I admit I’m already half-way through this book, and it’s great — an exhilarating and provocative exploration of how technological change is empowering individuals and spurring the creation of a new, dispersed entrepreneurial class.”

In other news, Jesse Walker sends this link to a bad review of a Christine Rosen piece on videogames. She just doesn’t seem to like, or understand, technology much. She likes Leon Kass, though, which may explain her antipathy to my work. Good thing I didn’t have a chapter on eating ice cream cones in public!

AVIAN FLU UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal (free link) is analyzing bird flu deaths to date.

DAN GAINOR WONDERS WHY the Fannie Mae scandal isn’t getting more attention:

When most people hear the word “Enron,” they mentally complete the phrase by adding the word “scandal.” As reporter Lester Holt of NBC’s “Today” put it in a Jan. 1 story, “Enron has been the poster child, if you will, of corporate scandals.”

It isn’t the only one, though. There’s $40-billion scandal with most of the same elements — even connection to prominent politicians. Just don’t expect to see much about it on TV. After all, the top people involved here are Democrats.

Welcome to Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored mortgage giant. As part of a scandal that’s been running nearly two years, Fannie Mae has “misstated earnings” to the tune of $10.8 billion. That’s some tune.

Okay, he doesn’t actually wonder.

IT’S A “KOSOLAFEST” over at Kausfiles, but Tim Blair has the really damaging stuff.

SLATE GOT JONAH GOLDBERG AND EUGENE VOLOKH, among others, to write about what’s wrong with it as part of its 10th Anniversary section.

I still have my original Slate umbrella, a premium for subscribing during their brief subscription phase. It ought to fetch a pretty penny on eBay, as I think I was the only one . . . .

CHINESE ASTRONAUTS WITH A JAPANESE FLAG: CBS News’ layers of professional editors and fact-checkers seem to have dropped the ball.

UPDATE: John Kreiser of CBS emails: “Thanks for pointing out that we had the wrong flag on the story about China planning its moon mission. We goofed; we’ve fixed it.”

That’s the way to do things.

FROM KABUL TO QALAT: Bill Roggio posts another report from Afghanistan, this one involving a close encounter of the Taliban kind.

LARRY LESSIG looks at net neutrality and Gary Reback’s latest efforts.

ERIC UMANSKY is skeptical of Ron Suskind’s revelations.

TIM CAVANAUGH LOOKS AT No-Knock raids after Hudson and sees more danger for innocent civilians and police alike:

Ironically, part of the impetus for the no-knock raid is the safety of police and civilians. There’s a certain logic to that: A quick and efficient raid, in which the power of the police is immediately established and no resistance is possible, would seem like the quickest means of assuring domestic tranquility. But what happens when a citizen with a legally purchased handgun reacts to a home invasion, by people who have not knocked and are less than prompt in identifying themselves as police officers, in the most reasonable manner available—by shooting one of the invaders? The Mississippian Cory Maye is famously sitting on death row for shooting a cop who didn’t identify himself before trespassing on Maye’s residence. But Officer Ron Jones, by all accounts an excellent cop and standup guy, is dead. This case is not directly applicable (Maye’s home was not part of the search Jones was conducting), but the principle is the same: A violent home invasion increases the likelihood that somebody will get hurt, and the Supreme Court ought to proceed with caution before raising the likelihood of an event like that. We can take a charitable view and assume that Scalia and the high court majority are committed to reducing the amount of violence in America. But the best way to avoid a fight is not to start it.

Armed people breaking into homes unannounced ought to be in danger of being shot at. Police shouldn’t put themselves in that situation except in extraordinary cases — where, for example, someone’s being held hostage. Worries that someone might flush a bag of reefer don’t qualify, in my opinion.

ARMED ROBOTS for urban warfare. Is it too late to trademark the name “Bolo?”

CRAIG NEWMARK announces a resolution to the Cox Cable / Craigslist problem.

GRAND ROUNDS is up!

DARFUR UPDATE: “Despite rapidly escalating violence throughout Darfur and eastern Chad, the UN Security Council refuses to push for urgent measures to protect civilians and humanitarians. Instead, deferential Council members have repeatedly insisted that the genocidaires of the National Islamic Front regime in Khartoum will determine whether an international force deploys to Darfur, even as the regime continues to send explicit signals that it has no intention of allowing for such deployment.”

UPDATE: Lou Minatti says it’s all about the oil.

TRUTHOUT EXPLAINS ALL: Tom Maguire is amused but not impressed.

READILY-PREPARED STORY LINES: Heh.