THOMAS LIFSON: “The business model he established for the New York Times Company continues to collapse under the feet of Pinch Sulzberger. The very latest revenue figures of the company released just minutes ago show that advertising revenue and gross revenue are declining at a rate that cannot be matched by growth in revenues from the expensive internet properties purchased by Sulzberger.”

DISSING THE “PAJAMA PEOPLE” on Studio 60.

As usual, the pajama people have gotten the last laugh.

POPULAR MECHANICS ROUNDS UP last-minute gadgets and tools for Father’s Day. I kind of like the Stanley FuBar, and I admire whoever named it, but I wonder if it would really make a good gift. And who would give it. My suspicion is that these roundups are as much about presents for men to buy for themselves as for actual Father’s Day purposes.

BUREAUCRATIC OPPOSITION TO SPACE TOURISM in the European Union? Not hard to believe. It’s new! It’s innovative! It’s an American idea! It must be stopped!

CARMAKERS AREN’T GETTING THEIR MONEY’S WORTH from the politicians they’re supporting.

IS POLYGAMY LAW IN A pre-Lawrence state of non-enforcement?

OH, YEAH: France!

BILL ROGGIO IS NOW BLOGGING ON IRAQ for The Examiner.

COMPARING GAZA TO THE SOPRANOS is, I think, an injustice to Mafiosi everywhere. Still, I take the point.

DOWNSIDE OF MISQUOTING BLOGGERS: They correct you.

Upside: They link to you.

Downside: They point out that, apparently, they’re your only reader.

TRENT LOTT LASHES OUT AT TALK RADIO: Mickey Kaus notes the irony. Lott’s a pretty good indicator of what’s wrong with the GOP at any given moment.

UPDATE: No, really. A year ago, Trent Lott was saying he was “damn tired” of PorkBusters, and now the GOP is all about fighting the pork. Difference? They lost an election by listening to him. Now what will they be saying after the next election? Because if they listen to Lott, a textbook example of what’s wrong with the GOP on Capitol Hill, they’ll lose that one, too.

JOHN TAMMES POSTS HIS REGULAR ROUNDUP OF news from Afghanistan. As always, it’s full of stuff you probably didn’t see elsewhere.

LOTS OF NIFONG ACTION YESTERDAY: I didn’t have time to follow it, but K.C. Johnson did.

IMMIGRATION BILL UPDATE: It’s baaack!

BOYS TO MEN: Tony Woodlief has thoughts on Father’s Day, in the Wall Street Journal. And he’s got a new book out, too.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: John Boehner is claiming victory:

House Republicans banded together this week to force Democrats to restore GOP earmark reforms that brought real transparency and accountability to the budget process.

Faced with a united Republican Conference, the Democratic leadership backed down on their plan to hide earmarks in a series of multi-billion dollar slush funds and, effective immediately, agreed to allow Republicans to challenge wasteful spending in appropriations bills on the House floor.

As part of the deal completed after extensive negotiations that ended late today, Republicans agreed to allow two appropriations bills (Homeland Security and Military Quality of Life) – bills that include few or no earmarks – to move forward immediately. All 10 remaining appropriations bills will come to the floor later with their earmarks fully disclosed and subject to challenge by any lawmaker – a key element of the 2006 GOP reforms.

The issue of transparency and accountability in government spending has been at the forefront of congressional action all year.

If only the Republicans had been this anti-pork last year. But then, I’ll bet they’re wishing that now, too. Still, better late than never.

HAPPY FLAG DAY!

UPDATE: An observance.

HOME AGAIN, H0ME AGAIN: So I drove to Nashville for another meeting of the Gubernatorial Succession committee. It went well, and Ned Ray McWherter — who wasn’t able to make the first meeting — was there. He’s looking pretty spry, and offered some interesting insights. He’s an old-fashioned politician in the best sense — I was an intern for the State Senate when he was Speaker of the House, and yet he learned my name and remembered me when I ran into him years later. I can only imagine the kind of mental rolodex that takes. I certainly don’t have that kind of mental rolodex.

No pictures of the Capitol this time, as I was in too much of a (pointless, as it turned out) hurry to start home. But here’s one of the Legislative Plaza and War Memorial.

POLITICO 1, LEFTY BLOGOSPHERE ZERO:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid confirmed Thursday that he told liberal bloggers last week that he thinks outgoing Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Peter Pace is “incompetent.”

Reid acknowledged similarly disparaging Army Gen. David Petraeus, head of Multinational Forces in Iraq.

But Reid, whose comments to bloggers first appeared in The Politico, also told reporters: “I think we should just drop it.”

I’ll bet he does.

UPDATE: Yes, this certainly calls into question statements like these:

We asked Joan McCarter, who blogs at DailyKos under the name McJoan and wrote about being on the call here, if she recalled Reid calling Pace “incompetent.”

“I don’t remember him saying anything like that,” she answered. “I can’t swear he didn’t say it. But I have no memory that he actually did. It’s not in my notes.” . . .

“I don’t even recall Pace’s name specifically being mentioned,” adds Barbara Morrill, who blogs at Kos under the name BarbinMD and says she was on the call. “If it was, he did not say that he was incompetent.”

Asked if he’d criticized Petraeus, Morrill said: “Not that I recall. I checked my notes,” and there was nothing like this. . . .

Finally, here’s what MyDD’s Jonathan Singer, who wrote about the call here, told us: “I don’t remember him calling Pace incompetent.” He added that while he couldn’t promise that he hadn’t done it, “I just don’t recall those statements.”

Most likely, those sorts of statements just don’t make much of an impression with the netroots. Which is ironic, since Reid probably made them for their benefit.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Stan Smith mocks them for their Scooter Libby stance: “And these folks can’t
even remember what someone said mere DAYS ago….”

Call Patrick Fitzgerald!

MORE: J.D. Johannes, fresh back from Iraq, has more thoughts on Reid’s remarks. “Mr. Reid, these men and women are not toys. When you treat them as pieces in your electoral games you treat them with contempt.”

And reader C.J. Burch emails: “You’re more charitable than I am. I would say that the lefty blogosphere is out right lying…again.” Well, I’d be interested in seeing the traffic from the new, more secure version of the Townhouse list. But I think it’s really just that antimilitary slurs are so common in that crowd that they don’t make enough of an impression to be memorable.

GETTING IT BACKWARDS, AS USUAL: I don’t pay much attention, generally, but I’m stuck in a car with nothing but Technorati for company, and noticed that in one of his typically verbose efforts, Glenn Greenwald gets around, eventually, to making two points, One is that I’m a geek, whose interest in Western culture’s retreat from traditional ideas of masculinity is thus silly:

Glenn Reynolds — who, by his own daily admission, devotes his life to attending convention center conferences on space and playing around with new, cool gadgets in the fun room in his house, like a sheltered adolescent in his secret treehouse club — to fret: “Are we turning into a nation of wimps?”

But, see, that’s the point. I’m a geek. If I notice it, it’s probably real. It would be like Greenwald complaining that the country was going overboard in hatred of Bush.

He also accuses me of favoring a “more rubble, less trouble” approach to foreign policy. He offers no link because it’s such a stretch that even Greenwald’s readers might notice. Here’s what I actually said, once, after a lengthy discussion of the situation with Iraq:

On the other hand, it’s also true that if democracy can’t work in Iraq, then we should probably adopt a “more rubble, less trouble” approach to other countries in the region that threaten us. If a comparatively wealthy and secular Arab country can’t make it as a democratic republic, then what hope is there for places that are less wealthy, or less secular?

I’ve made clear, in that post and elsewhere, that I think democracy can work in Iraq — this comment was aimed at advocates (like Greenwald) of giving up. Though Greenwald has shown trouble understanding conditional statements in the past, I’ll note that his failure to link probably indicates that this is, even for him, a stretch in terms of misrepresenting my positions.

Greenwald also shows his instinct for the capillary here, as the real weak point in that post is the suggestion that Rumsfeld wasn’t likely to go. Well, if Bush had known what he was doing, he would have let him go before the election or not at all. But there’s that damn conditional again . . . .

UPDATE: Greenwald’s acolytes are mocking this picture as insufficiently manly. But hey, who but a man secure in his masculinity would pose in that hat?

MORE: And he gets more attention than he deserves, here: But then, that’s usually his goal, and any attention fills that bill. But there’s this: “Let’s translate that last paragraph from Glennwaldese to plain English: No, you guys are wimps. . . . Do women not exist in Glenn G’s world?”

CALL THE BLOG ETHICS COMMITTEE!

WHAT I’M SEEING AT THE MOMENT: Alas, I’ve been seeing it for a while.

UPDATE: Stuck for an hour, waiting for this. But it had the whole road blocked until they dragged it to the side.

REPORTERS: Don’t trust news reports!

At least not when they don’t make the proper political point. Meanwhile, some liberal bloggers are disputing the Reid story, The Politico is standing by it, and as far as I can tell Harry Reid hasn’t commented — but I’m on the road and may have missed something. Ed Morrissey has a roundup on the story.

PORKBUSTERS UPDATE: Claiming victory on earmarks:

House Republican leaders Thursday announced an agreement to end the standoff over member-requested spending projects that temporarily stalled floor action, allowing the annual appropriations bills to move forward.

But Democrats were not so sure. “The deal is not final, and negotiations are ongoing,” said Stacey Farnen Bernards, a spokeswoman for House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.).

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) laid out a compromise at a morning news conference, boasting: “House Republicans worked together to demand an end to secret slush funds for earmarks. … We’ve won this round.”

Democrats, in the tenuous accord, agreed to include a list of earmarks in the 10 spending bills the House has yet to address. In addition, they’ll give lawmakers the opportunity to strike specific projects from the final version of each appropriations bill after both chambers have passed their respective versions.

Not to beat a dead horse, but if Republicans had been this diligent in opposing earmarks a year ago, they’d probably still be in the majority. But hey, better late than never.

A NEW IRON TRIANGLE?