DID BUSH MAKE THE WORLD HATE US? Don Surber comments, and Ann Althouse wonders if Hillary can gather in the love.

POLICE MISCONDUCT in Minnesota.

BURKLE, HSU, RIORDAN: Mickey Kaus has the scoop.

R.I.P.: A moment of silence for Marcel Marceau.

OOPS:

The old gray lady has some explaining to do.

Officials at the New York Times have admitted a liberal activist group was permitted to pay half the rate it should have for a provocative ad condemning U.S. Iraq commander Gen. David Petraeus.

The MoveOn ad, which cast Petraeus as “General Betray Us” and attacked his truthfulness, ran on the same day the commander made a highly anticipated appearance before Congress.

But since the liberal group paid the standby rate of $64,575 for the full-page ad, it should not have been guaranteed to run on Sept. 10, the day Petraeus warned Congress against a rapid withdrawal of troops from Iraq, Times personnel said.

“We made a mistake,” Catherine Mathis, vice president of corporate communications for The Times, told the newspaper’s public editor.

Mathis said an advertising representative left the liberal group with the understanding that the ad would run that Monday even though they had been charged the standby rate.

The group should have paid $142,083 to ensure placement that day.

This also leaves some of those who defended the Times’ discounted rate by claiming that the critics didn’t understand the ad business in an awkward position.

UPDATE: Heh: “No full explanation, but a sober assessment of the available information would suggest that the dog ate NYT’s homework.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here: “Terrible. Embarrassing, too, now that we know it. What else is there that we don’t know. Could Hoyt look into that?” And, from the comments: ‘ To those who said this was a fake controversy (ahem), it is a surprise that it isn’t. To those who at least suspect it was, it is a surprise they came clean about it.”

GUN OWNER RECEIVES APOLOGY FROM POLICE CHIEF:

Trevor Putnam knew the gun laws. The officer who stopped him didn’t.

“When I told him that I hadn’t done anything, he said he’d find a reason to put me in jail,” said Putnam, 24, who works with guns every day as vice president of Coal Creek Armory in West Knoxville.

“It’s not that I have a problem with police officers. I deal with police officers nationwide from Arizona to Maine every day. But I lost my confidence in a legal right that I knew I had.”

Knoxville police officers will get a refresher course on the state’s gun permit laws after an officer who didn’t know the law stopped, frisked and threatened to arrest Putnam for legally carrying a gun inside a Wal-Mart this summer.

Officer Glenn Todd Greene’s actions June 21 at the store on Walbrook Drive in West Knoxville earned him a written reprimand and remedial training for rudeness and not knowing the law, Internal Affairs records show. He’s worked for the Knoxville Police Department for about seven years.

Putnam got a written apology from Police Chief Sterling P. Owen IV.

Read the whole thing. For not knowing the law and acting like an ass, the punishment is about right. For threatening to “find a reason” to put someone in jail, he should probably be fired.

LOOKING AT the Blackwater video.

And there’s more here.

MARC AMBINDER LOOKS AT the massive scope of the AFL-CIO’s political program. “Remember: all of this — almost all of this — goes to help Democrats.”

TAKING IT HSU THE NEXT LEVEL: A special prosecutor for the Norman Hsu case?

THIS SEEMS LIKE NEWS: “Israeli commandos seized nuclear material of North Korean origin during a daring raid on a secret military site in Syria before Israel bombed it this month, according to informed sources in Washington and Jerusalem. The attack was launched with American approval on September 6 after Washington was shown evidence the material was nuclear related, the well-placed sources say.”

FRANK J.: “I agree; it’s a huge failure of the conservative movement someone hasn’t thrown fame and fortune at me by now.”

MEGAN MCARDLE: Armed and dangerous.

TELLING THE SAME ANECDOTE TWICE, with different quotes. “I think it’s fair to suspect that Toobin assembles material into quotes that are not really quotes.”

“WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED IN JENA?”

The reporting on this story is atrocious. It’s all updates with no background. So, I’m wondering not only what happened in Jena, but why is the press reporting it this way?

Sullivan links to Megan McCardle’s summary of the Wikipedia article on the subject, which she understands is “pretty authoritative.” It’s pathetic that we’re reduced to going to Wikipedia because the mainstream news of a current event is too skimpy.

Indeed. But here’s much more on the case from Patterico.

UPDATE: Further thoughs here.

ATLAS MUGGED.

ED CONE: Make Yom Kippur a national holiday.

Not until we get “whacking day” approved. Meanwhile, a foiled Yom Kippur terror attack in Tel Aviv.

“GENERAL JAMESON?” Now that’s funny.

DAN RATHER’S Revenge.

HOW TO SABOTAGE AHMADINEJAD: Have some scantily-clad coed run up and give him a kiss. Make sure photos are distributed in Iran.

UPDATE: Yes, this is tongue-in-cheek, as some of our dimmer lefty blogger friends seem to have missed. (Hey, I thought they were in favor of “make love, not war.” But maybe this is “fake love, not war.”) It was, however based on a real incident. Had they been paying attention to the news, they might have remembered that.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Okay, this would be better: Dan Riehl suggests a Jewish Lesbian Kos diarist. Plus, her admiration is already on record.

THERE’S A BLOG AIMED AT DRAFTING ALASKA GOV. Sarah Palin for Vice President. I don’t see that as terribly likely, but I certainly like her action on the Bridge to Nowhere, and I wouldn’t mind seeing her fill Ted Stevens’ seat.

A BRIGHT FUTURE for large-scale solar farms?

IS IT JUST ME? Or is Brian Wilson channeling Johnny Cash in this photo?

MORE LIBEL-LAW BASED CENSORSHIP, in Britain.

DANIEL DREZNER: “What the f@#% is going on with the University of California Regents?”

THE MAN, THE MIND, AND THE MONEY behind MoveOn.org.