JAY ROSEN ON THE JOURNALISM THAT BLOGGERS DO: And he doesn’t even get to things like Rathergate, Eason Jordan, the debunking of Reuters and AP photo-fakery, or numerous other examples.

UPDATE: Oops, I’m wrong. Bill Ardolino emails: “Jay Rosen did get to Rathergate in his article; he just highlighted Joseph Newcomer as a ‘blogger’ that drove the story. (no Powerline, etc.).” Yeah, the absence of references to Dan Rather, Powerline, Little Green Footballs, etc. caused me to miss it. In my defense, I was still on my first cup of coffee.

WANT TO HELP BILL ROGGIO SUPPORT INDEPENDENT REPORTING FROM IRAQ? Then go here.

Unless you’re, you know, happy to get your news from Scott Beauchamp. Me, I just sent ’em 20 bucks. (Bumped).

JULIETTE OCHIENG HAS SOME DOUBTS about a report on VA hospitals I linked earlier.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON on things that used to be true, and still are.

“COME BACK, SHANE!”

ANNE RICE: “Christianist?” Does that go with the whole vampire thing?

A READER EMAILS: “I’m curious why you didn’t mention the NYT Op-Ed written by seven American foot soldiers (not officers, mind you) about their recent experiences in and perspective on Iraq. I realize you don’t like to link to stories that are ‘widely covered’ but this seems to have gone largely under the radar. Is it because their views don’t conform to yours or the majority of your readers? Why not link to it anyway and at least provoke a debate?”

I pointed out that I actually had linked it, and he was kind enough to reply: “A huge (and sheepish) apology. I searched the main page and didn’t check the archives.”

I’m mostly amused that something that appears on the New York Times oped page is “under the radar” when it’s not mentioned on InstaPundit. Has TimesSelect done that much damage to the NYT’s influence?

Probably not. But if one reader could miss it, others might, and there has in fact been some debate, though more from milbloggers with Iraq experience — who have more to say — than elsewhere. Blackfive had a post, and here’s one from Greyhawk. And Fred Kaplan wrote about it, and echoes some of my concerns at the end of his piece. Plus, here’s a guest post at Altercation, focusing in part on whether they should have written the piece. And Kaplan has a piece coming out later this week — in Times Select, meaning that it probably will be under the radar — on tension between junior and senior officers.

UPDATE: Hmm. I kind of doubt this explanation. But who knows?

DON’T TUG ON SUPERMAN’S CAPE. I’d say that The New Republic’s defenders haven’t helped its position any. Or their own.

UPDATE: Deconfabulation. And a related item here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Kaus weighs in. And there’s this: “The New Republic is clearly out of friends just as surely as it is out of ammo.” They do seem to have trouble finding defenders from outside the TNR family, and even the defenses they’re getting are oblique — attacks on the critics, rather than defenses of TNR. Big roundup on TNR here.

I ONCE HAD A GIRLFRIEND WHO QUIT JOURNALISM and went into P.R. because she said public-relations work was “more ethical.” I thought of her when I read this:

Media credibility takes another hit: Fishbowl DC’s hottest reporter contest wasn’t on the up-and-up, reports Farhad Manjoo. “What’s surprising is not that anyone cheated — online polls are about as trustworthy as Soviet Bloc elections — but how brazen, and how easy, the cheating was,” he writes. Friends of this year’s two oh-so-hot winners built software “bots” that voted thousands of times for each of them on the Mediabistro site.

Sigh. (Via Michael Silence).

UPDATE: Dave Weigel says this is all backwards: “The media didn’t rig this silly popularity contest: Some dudes with websites did. Be proud of that.”

A NEW SITE DESIGN FOR CAPTAIN’S QUARTERS: Ed Morrissey wants to know how you like it.

I HOPE THAT JONAH GOLDBERG WILL use his powers for good, and not for evil.

OVER AT OPINIO JURIS, they’re having a symposium on Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule’s Terror in the Balance: Security, Liberty, and the Courts.

THOUGHTS ON CONGRESSIONAL “RECALIBRATION” from Bob Krumm.

UPDATE: More thoughts from Captain Ed.

RELIGION AND BOBBY JINDAL.

SURF’S UP! In Gaza.

DANIEL DREZNER: “Quiggin wants international law to be a powerfully binding constraint on state action. That’s nice, but what Quiggin wants and what actually happens are two very different animals.”

OOPS:

The front-runner for a $2 million NASA competition to build mock lunar landers has lost one of its two main vehicles in a fiery crash. The company, Armadillo Aerospace, says it will enter a smaller vehicle instead, but outsiders say the upset will level the playing field and add suspense to the upcoming contest.

The Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge is designed to spur innovation in future vehicles that could take off and land vertically on the Moon. The event will be held on 27 and 28 October at the X Prize Cup in Alamogordo, New Mexico, US.

Nine teams have signed up for the competition, but Armadillo Aerospace of Mesquite, Texas, US, is by far the leading contender for the prize. The company, led by Doom video game creator John Carmack, nearly won the 2006 contest, in which it was the only entrant.

Here’s a picture of the Pixel that I took a few months back. And as I’ve noted before, it’s not a failure if you’ve learned something useful.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More thoughts from Rand Simberg. “I don’t think it’s a disaster for Armadillo. These kinds of things are going to happen along the way, as we start to understand how to develop operable and affordable space transports (a goal that has eluded both the military and NASA, almost half a century after the dawn of the space age). I also find it interesting (and I have to confess, somewhat amusing) that the failure was fundamentally a software failure, given the pedigree of the company that provided the funds that created the vehicle.”

MEGAN MCARDLE: “I don’t know why people think I’m pro-torture, except that I suspect they are angry that the morality of torture can even be discussed; they want to put it in the same basket of questions we dismiss with visceral horror, such as ‘Child pornography: good for society?’ So even though I agree with them as a policy matter, and even as a moral matter, they are angry that I don’t agree with them in the right way.”

Yes, I’ve had similar experiences. It is not enough to have the right opinions. You must have them at the right time, and you must express them in a way that reflects people’s desire to feel good about themselves.

BUSH’S DEMOCRACY-PROMOTION AGENDA: Now you see it, now you don’t!

ROGER SIMON: TNR changing the story.

UPDATE: “The New Republic still has not responded to Richard Miniter’s PJM article on the Scott Beauchamp scandal and the facts therein.”

IT USED TO BE “LISTEN TO THE GENERALS:” Now it’s “don’t listen to the generals.” The story keeps changing; only the motivation remains the same.

UPDATE: Related thoughts here.

ARNOLD KLING ON THE CURRENT ECONOMIC SITUATION: “Sebastian Mallaby calls this ‘irrationality’ on the part of investors. Instead, I think of it as a breakdown in trust of the financial intermediation process. This breakdown is occurring not so much at the level of the average consumer, but among large institutional investors.”

SARKOZY “CORRECTS” CHIRAC’S ERRORS.

OMAR FADHIL REPORTS ON the political scene in Baghdad. Their politicians seem as bad as ours.

THE PURGES BEGIN. “Twenty-six out of thirty-eight (68%) of these targeted Democrats are from Southern or Southeastern regions, which makes sense, since it’s primarily Blue Dogs we’re talking about here. That makes this another netroots war against regions of the country that elect these Democrats precisely because they are Blue Dogs.”