Archive for 2007

MICKEY KAUS: “The DREAM will never die but it has failed to achieve cloture. . . . Netroots fave Sen.Tester voted against.”

“WELCOME TO NON-NEW ORLEANS:” Bill Bradley reports from the SoCal fires. Hmm. Hurricane Charley in Florida went okay. Katrina response in Mississippi was a lot better than in New Orleans. Now California seems to be dealing with this disaster competently. What could explain these differences?

THE VENDING MACHINE DIET: Or maybe the diet vending machine.

MEGAN MCARDLE: “The anti-war libertarian flirtation with the Democratic party may be even shorter than I expected.”

Plus, offering the wisdom of experience to excitable youth.

MORE TROUBLE FOR FRANKLIN FOER AND THE NEW REPUBLIC: Beauchamp Story Collapses. Documents at the link.

At the very least, they should be embarrassed about their snarky response to those who doubted the story.

UPDATE: Reader Kyle Kveton emails:

Let us hope that TNR and its defenders will salute the “leaker” of this information as ardently as they saluted the leakers of classified national security information which appeared on the front pages of our “papers of record”.

As I recall, TNR isn’t very supportive of those who leak secrets that make TNR look bad. And I notice that Peter Scoblic of TNR seems awfully anxious to make sure that the record reflects his non-involvement with the decision to publish the Beauchamp piece.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More at Hot Air.

I’m not seeing anything at TNR’s website yet, though.

MORE: Reader Bob Kramer looked at the TNR website: “A search for ‘Beauchamp’ now matches no documents. I tried this a couple of weeks ago and could still find matches.”

He’s right.

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Still more here. “Now, here is a truly disgusting moment. Beauchamp lets TNR know he wants to talk to other news outlets to tell them he is NOT being censored. And what does TNR do? It attempts to censor him. Franklin Foer, and I quote, leans on Beauchamp to ‘let us control the way this story proceeds.’”

MORE STILL: “Is the investigation over now?”

Plus, “Who will star in the sequel to Shattered Glass?

STILL MORE: Another reader points out that no searches are working at the TNR site right now. Possibly it’s just a technical glitch.

EVEN MORE: Now the Drudge links aren’t working. But you can find the documents he links to here. Go figure. But note that TNR isn’t disputing the documents’ accuracy, just Drudge’s take. And here’s an email from TNR:

My name is Ben Wasserstein and I’m the editor of The New Republic’s website, TNR.com. As readers of Instapundit have noticed, and as we wrote about yesterday http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=3c2accec-63b5-449d-9c96-6c5e6e6867cb our relaunched website is unfortunately very much a work in progress, and has many bugs. At the moment, no searches are working, and some of our archives have not yet made the transition to the new site, including all comments on pre-relaunch articles and blog posts. In the meantime, articles pertaining to Scott Thomas Beauchamp can be found at the below URLs:

“War Bonds” 1/29/07 – http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=a420fc77-246f-4dc9-b62c-8cc98b6f1109

“Dead of Night” 6/4/07 – http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=f3f83377-7b85-4ad8-8c27-e8167e59a412

“Shock Troops” 7/13/07 – http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=860c9bec-a77a-4786-a869-cc893a43c8b2
A Statement from Scott Thomas Beauchamp 7/26/07: http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=f05dd2f7-2a55-4c51-9d6e-922054f97ff6

A Statement on Scott Thomas Beauchamp 8/2/07: http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=5f60f6be-9dc6-456c-93ce-249117645fed

A Scott Beauchamp Update 8/10/07: http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=be58af95-1a50-4033-a62f-9ee7289e0619

Thanks, Ben. And stay tuned, folks, as there’s probably more to come. And Dan Riehl has some observations.

Stephen Spruiell has further thoughts. And there’s this observation: “It does seem bizarre to me, too, that TNR didn’t release these documents on their own. They are in an awful spot and it is made worse by not just providing everything they know. ”

And a lengthy analysis can be found here.

Meanwhile, InstaPunk moves on to the important stuff: casting the movie, Shattered Glass 2.

LAST WORD: From Gawker:

If the magazine had come forward with how this asshole blew them off, we suspect they’d have garnered a decent amount of support. Instead, it now looks like they were just hoping everyone would forget about the whole thing.

That seems right to me.

FACT-CHECKING MIKE HUCKABEE: Shockingly, it turns out that most signers of the Declaration of Independence weren’t clergymen, as he claimed. What could he be thinking? How could anyone who knows anything about the signers of the Declaration of Independence think that?

I haven’t looked at the video to see if maybe he misspoke or was misquoted, but the sheer absurdity of this statement would argue in favor of that. Or, alternatively, in favor of voting for someone who knows something about the basics of American history. (Via The Corner).

THOUGHTS ON POLITICS and shy millionaires.

THAT WAS FAST: “Eliot Spitzer, the Governor of my state, has achieved a thing I would have thought impossible: He has made me yearn for the days of George Pataki.”

Just seeing “Pataki” and “yearn” in the same sentence is messing with my mind.

IN THE MAIL: Josh Conviser’s Empyre, the sequel to Echelon.

DOUBLE-REVERSE CHICKENDOVE. “The politics aside, there is something particularly loathsome about Friedman’s snide screed this morning. . . . War supporter turned surrender enthusiast makes ironic funny about how painful this war has been for him. The terrible barrage of headlines, slogging through all those long, bitter thumbsuckers. News is hell. But apparently, he hasn’t been reading it.”

J.D. JOHANNES WANTS TO GO BACK TO IRAQ and finish his documentary. He’s asking for your help. He’s also posted some cool video at the link. While Hollywood makes films about how we lost Iraq, he’s been actually reporting what’s going on. I’ve donated.

AS THEY RUN UP TOWARD THE 2008 ELECTIONS, the Republican leadership should probably read this post from before the 2006 elections.

Have you fixed these problems? Do you plan to fix these problems? If you don’t fix them, what makes you think you’ll win anyway?

VIOLENT PROTESTS in Venezuela.

IN THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR: Media myths about the Jena 6. “The media got most of the basics wrong. In fact, I have never before witnessed such a disgrace in professional journalism. Myths replaced facts, and journalists abdicated their solemn duty to investigate every claim because they were seduced by a powerfully appealing but false narrative of racial injustice.”

The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong. Where have I heard that before?