AUSTIN BAY: Whittling Away At Sadr.

UPDATE: A lengthy email from a Colonel in Baghdad provides some more background. Click “read more” to read it.

THE COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW corrects Barack Obama’s deceptive references to McCain’s “100 years” remark and wonders why the press lets him get away with this. Me too.

TO DEMONSTRATE A DEPRESSION IN 2008, The Independent ran a picture from 2005. (Via Gateway Pundit). Hey, at least they weren’t using frame grabs from Titanic in a story about Russian Arctic exploration. Layers of editors and fact-checkers . . . .

THE A.P. AND CHELSEA CLINTON, engaging in the same old Kyoto revisionism:

Clinton told about 250 people at N.C. State that her mother, New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, would work to repair the nation’s reputation abroad.

“I think the world will breathe a sigh of relief when this president is gone,” Clinton said, criticizing Bush for pulling out of various accordings, including the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.

In fact, this isn’t true:

On July 25, 1997, before the Kyoto Protocol was finalized (although it had been fully negotiated, and a penultimate draft was finished), the U.S. Senate unanimously passed by a 95–0 vote the Byrd-Hagel Resolution (S. Res. 98),[63][64] which stated the sense of the Senate was that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol that did not include binding targets and timetables for developing as well as industrialized nations or “would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States”. On November 12, 1998, Vice President Al Gore symbolically signed the protocol. Both Gore and Senator Joseph Lieberman indicated that the protocol would not be acted upon in the Senate until there was participation by the developing nations.[65] The Clinton Administration never submitted the protocol to the Senate for ratification.

(Emphasis aded). Also, what’s an “according?” And what happened to those “layers of editors and fact-checkers”? After all, they’ve made this mistake before, on multiple occasions.

STEPHEN GREEN ON NATO EXPANSION: “What Is the Game Plan?”

FACTCHECK.ORG: Getting a little too slick.

DIVISIONS IN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND on how to deal with Islam. (Via JWF).

BILL RICHARDSON: Why I endorsed Obama. “In my view, Sen. Obama represents our best hope of replacing division with unity. That is why, out of loyalty to my country, I endorse him for president.”

JEFF FOUST on the new (commercial) space race. “As the schedule for SpaceShipTwo slips, it provides an opportunity for other companies to gain a better footing in the market, and possibly even try to enter service before Virgin. Last week XCOR Aerospace made its latest move into the suborbital spaceflight market, announcing a vehicle, dubbed Lynx, that could enter service within two years. The efforts of XCOR and others are resulting in a wide diversity of vehicles, leaving it up to the market to determine which one—or ones—work best.”

A VERY PERSONAL POST, from Donald Sensing.

AGING SUCKS: Older brains are prone to microbleed lesions. It’s not some supernatural process. It’s just things breaking down.

DANIEL SOLOVE LOOKS AT the contradictory goals of law-school rankings. I like this illustration of how things really work:

Let’s look at Cornell Law School. In 1997, they were 12, then their ranking went like this over the next decade: 12, 10, 10, 12, 13, 10, 12, 11, 13, 12. When they drifted from 10 to 13 over the course of a few years, there were probably cries of outrage for dropping out of the top 10. When they suddenly jumped from 13 to 10, they probably celebrated with great cheers. Headline: “Cornell dramatically rises to the top 10!” In reality, Cornell is trapped in an orbit around 11.5 (that’s their average ranking over the past decade). And they barely go much higher or much lower than that. From year to year, it appears that there is something going on — Cornell appears to be moving. But it’s just a clever illusion, created by US News to achieve the two contradictory goals of rankings.

Or the one overriding goal — to sell magazines and make money . . . .

EDITOR’S CHOICE: Some DVD recommendations for April.

JAMES JOYNER: Obama-Webb 2008. Strong ticket, but Webb would probably be something of a loose cannon as veep. Plus, does he want to give up his Senate seat so soon after winning it?

GRAND ROUNDS is up!

HEH. Indeed.

THIS SEEMS FISHY: Changing the Tenure Rules — Without Telling Anyone? “Several university officials said, senior administrators have come to believe that departmental standards were not rigorous enough and so applied new standards, which have never been shared with faculty leaders, let alone with those who submitted tenure portfolios under the old standards.” High standards are good. But double-secret high standards are not.

ANALYZING THE NEW MCCAIN AD: “The new McCain ad does many things, but one thing it does is engage subtly and forcefully in the debate over religious values.”

THE REAL BUSH INTELLIGENCE FAILURE: “What we can say with assurance is that even as George W. Bush has overseen the single most far-reaching reorganization of the U.S. intelligence community (IC) since the CIA was created in 1947, his single greatest failure as a president might well be that American intelligence remains mired in bureaucratic mediocrity.”

IN MEXICO — Anti-Emo riots?

Rioting seems a bit much. Most people in America just settle for mockery.

FOND MEMORIES OF THE 1969 Volkswagen Beetle. I owned one of these for years. It wasn’t as reliable as we thought, but it wasn’t bad and it was easy to work on except for the limited engine-compartment space. It had great traction. I once took it up a muddy road in Vermont to Rob Merges’s brother’s cabin — really muddy, like over-the-hubcaps muddy — and Bruce said “hey, nobody’s ever made it up that road when it’s like this without a four-wheel drive.” (To prove his superior mechanical skills, he also said that the #3 cylinder sounded like it was running hot, and sure enough I had a burn-through a few months later. Then again, the #3 cylinder always ran hot on these cars because of the oil-cooler positioning.) The picture in this one looks like a later model than mine, though — more slots on the rear hood and bigger taillights/turn signals.

PHYLLIS CHESLER responds to Alice Walker.

THE APOCALYPSE IS UPON US: Frank J. is in USA Today.

DISSONANCE ON rich and poor. “On one hand, we have Barack Obama drawing the line between rich and middle class at families who make $75,000 or more — a surprise to those who find themselves above that line, most of whom consider themselves solidly middle class. At the same time, we have New Jersey’s Democrat-run state government setting the poverty line for children’s health-insurance subsidies at … $295,000.”

TALKLEFT: “One of the complaints I’ve had with Barack Obama is the difficulty trying to pin him down on issues. His positions too often seem to shift over time.”