ROGER L. SIMON GOES PSYCHOANALYTIC on Bill Keller: “[T]here was something weirdly self-destructive in the newspaper’s behavior on this matter….”

WHAT ANDREW SULLIVAN LEARNED ABOUT THE CLINTONS: “Clinton is a terrible manager of people. Coming into a campaign she had been planning for, what, two decades, she was so not ready on Day One, or even Day 300. Her White House, if we can glean anything from the campaign, would be a secretive nest of well-fed yes-people, an uncontrollable egomaniac spouse able and willing to bigfoot anyone if he wants to, a phalanx of flunkies who cannot tell the boss when things are wrong, and a drizzle of dreary hacks like Mark Penn.”

VDH: Victor Davis Hanson looks at how the Democratic Party ended up with Barack Obama.

SELF-DESTRUCTION: Yael Kaynan says Gazans are hurting themselves far more than they will ever hurt Israel.

NOT A GOOD SIGN: The European Union withdraws from Northern Kosovo.

MARXISM STILL DEAD: Cyprus elects a communist president who promises to preserve the market economy.

IN THE MAIL: J. Storrs Hall’s Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine. An increasingly important topic.

TIME FOR ME TO GO OUT window shopping in Brooklyn Heights…

… window shopping and fisheye-lensing. (To enlarge the photo: click.) (What’s the place with the blue pig? What do you think? It’s The Blue Pig.)

“CRIPPLED BY YEARS OF SEXY DANCING,” Prince — aged 49 — is getting hip replacement surgery. Dance, Music, Sex, Romance… Somebody call the doctor… Say ooh, yeah, yeah… Help me!…

Ralph!

HILLARY IS SHAMING OBAMA for telling people she’s going to force them to buy insurance whether they can afford it or not. It really is so unfair. She’s going to force them to buy insurance only if she thinks they can afford it. There will be tax credits and subsidies to get them to the level where they will be told they can afford it. Surely, no one will think they can’t afford it once they government has figured out that they can. How dare Obama hinge his argument on the notion that people will have ideas of their own about how to spend their money.

NORA EPHRON SEEMS TO BE THE ONLY PERSON who knows that Charles Dickens died of multiple sclerosis.

HEH: “Memphis wanted to prove it really was the best team in the country, maybe even make a run at perfection. Turns out, the Tigers aren’t even best in their own state.” I now return you to your regularly scheduled guestbloggers.

HEZBOLLAH IN IRAQ: The late Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh — who was assassinated by car bomb in Damascus — was reportedly the man who organized the training of Moqtada al Sadr’s radical Shia Mahdi Army militia in Iraq.

FOR YOUR PRE-OSCARS PLEASURE: a beautiful morphing of the faces of beautiful actresses. It’s interesting to see the how similar the faces of beautiful women are even as they are strikingly individual. Do you find yourself trying to decide who is the most beautiful? Wasn’t it Vivian Leigh?

CLARK HOYT, THE NYT PUBLIC EDITOR, EXAMINES the journalistic ethics of the McCain story published last Thursday:

“If the point of the story was to allege that McCain had an affair with a lobbyist, we’d have owed readers more compelling evidence than the conviction of senior staff members,” [NYT executive editor Bill Keller said.] “But that was not the point of the story. The point of the story was that he behaved in such a way that his close aides felt the relationship constituted reckless behavior and feared it would ruin his career.”

I think that ignores the scarlet elephant in the room. A newspaper cannot begin a story about the all-but-certain Republican presidential nominee with the suggestion of an extramarital affair with an attractive lobbyist 31 years his junior and expect readers to focus on anything other than what most of them did. And if a newspaper is going to suggest an improper sexual affair, whether editors think that is the central point or not, it owes readers more proof than The Times was able to provide.

“Ignores” is putting it way too mildly. It’s a ludicrous argument. It would mean that editors could purvey all sorts of trash as long as it is embedded it in a larger story. And when we get outraged, they could look down their noses and insult us about our poor reading comprehension.

Here’s Jeff Jarvis on the subject:

[Keller] tries to tell us that we’re concentrating on the wrong thing here, that we don’t see what the real story is….

Do they have no news judgment? The lede in this story was obvious to everyone but the Times…

That the editors of the Times don’t see that is incredible — that is to say, not credible.

More at the link, but I’ve boiled it down to make it clear that Jarvis thinks Keller is dissembling.

(Cross-posted here, where you can comment.)

EYECATCHERS: A terrific selection of photographs at American Digest.

THE REGIME DOESN’T PROTEST TOO MUCH: Lebanon’s Minister of Communications wonders why the Syrian government doesn’t vow to avenge the assassination of Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh, who was killed by a car bomb in Damascus. It was a “major insult to Syria’s national security,” he said, “unless Syria was involved in liquidating him.”

RFK REDUX: Roger L. Simon supported Robert F. Kennedy back in the day, but found his rallies a bit disturbing and compares them to Barack Obama’s.

NEW YORK TIMES READERS, not the most conservative bunch in the country, overwhelmingly disapproved of the paper’s story about John McCain’s alleged affair with a lobbyist. With McCain and Barack Obama as candidates, we actually might have a somewhat cleaner election this time.

UPDATE: It gets worse. (For the Times, that is.)

CONTACT LENSES WITH CIRCUITS AND LIGHTS. Is there something you’d like to see with your eyes other than what’s really in front of you?

DIGG AND WIKIPEDIA WORK because the vibrant democracy we see on the surface is checked and balanced by a less conspicuous and more reliable elite group — Chris Wilson explains.

“THE KIDS BUYING MUSIC DON’T WANT immaculately-performed songs that remind them of their grandmothers; they want music that will help them get laid, which is exactly what AI’s audition process doesn’t test for.”

ELMO AS KRUSTY. Didn’t this happen on the “Treehouse of Horrors III”?

OUT OF BELGRADE: The United States is pulling non-essential staff out of Serbia.