IN THE COURSE OF FACT-CHECKING something I said in a post below, I spent a bit of time in the Slate Fray archives, and it reminded me how much I enjoyed The Fray, and how much I owe to it. Here’s a post I had forgotten, about McCain-Feingold.

OLIVER WILLIS IS DOING TV. I think he’s made for the medium.

HERE’S THE LATEST ON HAPPENINGS IN IRAN:

After almost a week of protest, the violent demonstrations rocking the Iranian capital each night are limited in size and confined to less than a square mile. And they remain a leaderless expression of anger.

But what started out as a paltry student demonstration is now loaded with significance for the future of the Islamic Republic.

Unlike the student demonstrations four years ago, say analysts in Tehran, these protests are tapping into an unexpectedly fierce determination by thousands of ordinary Iranians – many of them young, and some families with children in tow – who are frustrated with the slow pace of political change in Iran.

In the past, unelected clerics led by Iran’s conservative supreme leader, Ayatollah Sayed Ali Khamenei, were the target of protests. That’s true again, with the first-ever public chants calling for the ayatollah’s hanging. But now the reform-minded President Mohamed Khatami – whose widespread popularity during six years in office is ebbing, as reforms are systematically blocked – is also a target.

“It’s scary talking to these people [the protesters],” says a seasoned political analyst reached by phone in Tehran, who asked not to be named. “There is such a determination in their eyes and their behavior. They are fearless; they are ready for combat. It’s like [urban] warfare.”

“They say: ‘This is just the beginning, we have started it, and we are going all the way to the end,’ ” the analyst says. “But if you carry on the conversation, they have no idea about what the end should look like…. It is very dangerous.”

The last part is troubling, I suppose, though typical for revolutions. And I rather suspect that they have some idea. How do you say “Democracy, Whiskey, Sexy!” in Farsi? Here’s a report of gunshots. This story from the Daily Times of Pakistan wonders if the United States is behind all of this. I don’t know — and I suppose there are upsides, as well as downsides, to having people think we are. Here’s the interesting bit, though, in answer to the concerns expressed above:

The main reason for the dearth of attractive leaders outside Iran is their abundance inside it. Many, even if they acknowledge the failure of Mr Khatami’s movement, describe themselves as reformists and lean towards a version of democracy that the Bush administration would endorse.

But then there’s this:

To the frustration of expatriates living in America, few of them are inclined to use violent methods, or to lay down their lives, to end the stalemate. In this, they typify the vast majority of Iranians.

That’s usually how it is with revolutions, though, at least before the endstage.

UPDATE: Here’s more.

JAMES LILEKS is looking for a CD printer. I just ordered the Epson Sylus Photo 900, which prints on CDs and DVDs and costs $199. It’s gotten good reviews; I’ll report on how it works. (And check your email, James — I’ve sent you a question of my own.)

ROGER SIMON LOVED THE DOCUMENTARY SPELLBOUND, about the National Spelling Bee. Slate’s movie critic David Edelstein loved it, too. I wish I could see it.

UPDATE: Simon has updated his post with some inside dirt on Academy voting procedures.

THEY DUG THE HOLE THEMSELVES:

[T]he French are beginning to get worried about business relations with the US. French sales to the US seem to be collapsing. In March they had a €97 million trade surplus with the US, but in April that became a €202 million trade deficit. A change that massive means either a dramatic rise in American sales to France, which seems unlikely, or a dramatic decline in French sales to the US, and it’s got to be a lot more than just wine and cheese. There isn’t any official boycott or trade sanctions, but there seems to be something big going on.

Yep. I hear that tourism is down dramatically, too.

UPDATE: A reader points out something that I should have thought of — the Euro has been rising against the dollar. On the other hand, the article notes that France’s trade position vis-a-vis Japan has improved, and the Euro has also been strong against the Yen. That suggests that there’s more going on than simple exchange-rate pressure.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Eric Thorpe emails:

$100 to $200 million isn’t that much money, especially when items like Airbus and Boeing aircraft can go for up to $180 million a pop. Maybe Boeing had more deliveries to France in April than Airbus had to the U.S. Anyway, the vagaries of aircraft deliveries, which are ordered years in advance and wouldn’t be affected by a short-term boycott, could have a lot to do with the numbers.

Good point. I’ll be interested in seeing what other people come up with. I think that the reports of a decline in tourism, however, are pretty solid.

MORE: Tom Maguire isn’t sure about those trade figures, but notes that the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the French are worried about a decline in trade with the United States, especially in light of France’s other economic troubles.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING PIECE ON WHITE COLLAR UNEMPLOYMENT:

The white-collar crowd was concerned, but they knew that those three forces would also help get the American economy humming. And they did. Now that trust has come back to haunt them. Technology has allowed companies to handle rising sales without adding manpower. Gains in productivity mean one white-collar worker can do the work that would have taken two or three of his peers to do ten years ago. All that has led to slower wage growth. Back in 2000 wages for professional and technical workers were growing by nearly 5% annually–today they’re rising by less than 2% a year.

The scariest blue-collar parallel, however, is only just beginning to be felt in the white-collar world: overseas competition. Like automakers that moved production from Michigan to Mexico or textile firms that abandoned the Southeast for the Far East, service firms are now shifting jobs to cheaper locales like India and the Philippines. It’s not just call centers anymore. Indian radiologists now analyze CT scans and chest X-rays for American patients in an office park in Bangalore, not far from where Ernst & Young has 200 accountants processing U.S. tax returns. E&Y’s tax prep center in India is only 18 months old, but the company already has plans to double its size. Corporate America is quickly learning that a cubicle can be replicated overseas as easily as a shop floor can.

None of this bodes well for the jobless white-collar workers who are hoping that a more robust recovery will bring the next paycheck. The numbers of those who are searching are staggering. Of the nine million Americans out of a job, 17.4% are managers or specialty workers, according to a study of Labor Department data by Hofstra University economist Irwin Kellner. During the 1990-91 recession only 10% of that group was unemployed. Even after the much deeper recession of the early 1980s, just under 8% of unemployed workers were white collar. Sure, there are more white-collar workers today, but joblessness among them has risen faster than their share of the overall job market.

“White-collar workers and college graduates are in a state of shock,” says Kellner. “It appears these job losses are permanent. They’re not necessarily coming back when the economy does.”

At the bleeding edge of the blue-collarization trend are techies–not just the twentysomethings who jumped on dot-com jobs either, but people like Jim Klinck, a 52-year-old IT exec out of West Windsor, N.J. . . . This phenomenon is still in its infancy, but it’s already sending ripples through the service economy. E&Y’s Bangalore tax-preparation center has been operating full-time for only 18 months. Yet already it’s paying off. “There’s no question [the office] has allowed us to lower prices in the U.S. and capture market share,” says Alan Kline, E&Y’s Americas director of tax operations. “We’re not H&R Block. Each return we do is a custom job. But this has allowed us to lower prices and be much more competitive. We’re getting new jobs because of India.” E&Y’s Bangalore office is the mirror image of a similar center in Indianapolis, says Kline, and the firm uses the same metrics to evaluate the performance of the 200 chartered accountants (the local equivalent of a CPA) in Bangalore as it does with the 200 CPAs in Indiana. “The work product is almost identical,” raves Kline. “You cannot underestimate the quality of the people. It’s amazing how good they are.”

And how cheap

Read the whole thing. And I don’t care how safe you think your job is — it isn’t. Even if you’re a tenured professor like me — at least, I can’t help but feel that higher education is in line for a shakeup in the not too distant future. What’s funny is that it’s lefties — who are supposed to be in favor of helping people in poorer countries, at the expense of better-off people in richer countries — who seem most upset by this job-export stuff. Could it be because the phenomenon is just now hitting the kinds of jobs lefty opinion leaders, or at least NPR donors, tend to hold? At any rate, I think the politics of this stuff are likely to play out in interesting and unpredictable ways.

I wrote a bit more on this subject here. I don’t claim to really understand this phenomenon, though, and I don’t think that anyone really does.

IRANIAN PROTESTERS ARE EMAILING THE BBC WITH REQUESTS FOR AMERICAN HELP:

The Iranian people have shown their urgent tendency for freedom. Now the US must start to support the demonstration by warning the Iran government not to act against the people. This enforcement from the outside and people’s demonstration inside, will finally down the Iran regime. We are waiting for immediate support of the US.

Of course, some people aren’t with the program:

I absolutely reject the concept of “democracy” and “freedom” as nakedly false phantoms of the west. Who would ever want to be “free” when they could instead live in the glorious order and sanctified grace of Sharia? Why does anyone need to have an opinion for himself?

Or are they?

UPDATE: Unfogged notices that the BBC doesn’t seem to understand sarcasm.

DR. FRANK has abandoned blogspot and has a spiffy, new Movable Type-powered blog.

So has Jessica’s Well!

UPDATE: Blaster’s Blog has moved, too.

JOURNALISTS AND LIES: Sarah Baxter writes in the (London) Times:

A powerful editor of The New York Times just lost his job over the fabrications of Jayson Blair, a young newsroom protégé. Admittedly Blair lied deliberately, pretending to be all over America when he was actually at home in Brooklyn, but his little flights of fancy look trivial next to the casual anti-American distortions of so many newspapers.

The Wolfowitz story was too good to be true and too good to check. A freelance at The Guardian was so delighted with it that he went to the trouble of translating Wolfowitz from German into English, when he had spoken in English in the first place. And the German story was wrong anyway. No matter: another journalist turned it into the splash.

Bloggers, and in particular The Belgravia Dispatch, (who unlike many journalists appear to have mastered Google) come in for praise and attention.

PROF. STEPHEN ANTLER has taken over the EconoPundit blog. There’s a lot there that’s worth reading.

UPDATE: Speaking of econoblogging, Steve Verdon notes that claims that Bush caused the recession credit Bush with the power to travel in time, since the recession started in the winter of 2000, nearly a year before Bush took office.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Verdon emails that he said we were “heading toward” recession a year before Bush took office. I recall posting in Slate’s The Fray in March of that year, though, that I thought we were in recession, and I think we were. Blaming Bush for the recession is more revisionism, engaged in by people who certainly won’t give him any credit for the recovery.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Oops. I misremembered. At least this Fray post says it was May of 2000. I can’t find the original one, though — it seems to have vanished into the Slate maw.

REMEMBERING GARETH JONES, the man who wasn’t Walter Duranty:

WASHINGTON, June 12 (UPI) — What can you expect if you fearlessly expose the systematic, genocidal murder of 10 million people?

You can expect to be branded as a liar in the most prestigious newspaper in the United States. You can expect to be murdered yourself by bandits probably in the pay of conspirators perpetrating equally colossal, monstrous crimes against humanity. And you can even to be betrayed after your death and airbrushed out of existence by one of your closest professional colleagues and friends.

That was the fate of Gareth Richard Vaughan Jones, a brilliant, idealistic and utterly fearless young journalist who published the first major expose in the United States and the first signed articles in Britain of Josef Stalin’s deliberately imposed famine in the Ukraine in 1933. . . .

Duranty, an 11-year veteran of Moscow who had won the Pulitzer Prize the previous year, disparaged Jones as having made a “somewhat hasty” judgment on the basis of “a 40-mile walk through villages near Kharkov” where he “had found conditions sad.”

Having dismissed the conditions that in fact led to the deaths of 10 million men, women and children as merely “sad,” Duranty went on to explained that “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” He explicitly stated “there is no famine.”

On May 13, The New York Times published Jones’ rebuttal of Duranty’s article. He had visited, he said, many villages in the Moscow area as well as the Ukraine and also in the rich “black earth” lands of the North Caucasus. He had amassed evidence from “between 20 to 30 consuls and diplomatic representatives of various nations and … their evidence supported my point of view.” And he had talked with hundreds of peasants in those regions. The Soviet propaganda machine in Moscow meanwhile worked overtime to brand Jones a liar.

The Soviet propaganda machine, of which the Pulitzer-winning Duranty was a part.

DEAN ESMAY HAS THE SECRET TRANSCRIPT of Colin Powell’s meeting in Damascus. I sure hope it’s accurate.

MARK STEYN:

The one guy to get the Iraqi Museum story right from the get-go turns out to be not a professional journalist, but our old friend, the philistine warmonger Donald Rumsfeld. Rummy observed at the time that the networks kept showing “the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase”. But it was the same vase “over and over and over”. The same vase, 170,000 times. Rummy was right.

You want a heritage catastrophe? At the very moment the Baghdad Museum was being non-sacked, workers at the University of Toronto threw out 280 boxes of colonial and Indian artefacts dating back to the 15th century. What’s left of them is now deep in a landfill in Michigan. I’m a Torontonian, so that’s my heritage in there. Any takers? I thought not. Harder to pin on Bush and Blair.

Interestingly, Toronto is not only more culturally desecrated than Iraq; it’s also more diseased. There have been 238 cases of Sars in Toronto, with 32 deaths. There have been 66 cases of cholera in Basra, with three deaths. Basra public health officials, assuming there are any, are doing a much better job of controlling cholera than Toronto public health officials are of controlling Sars.

The Ontario health guys, who sound more like a gung-ho Chamber of Commerce, keep announcing they’ve got Sars licked and then it goes and infects a big bunch of new hospital patients. And meanwhile the Canadian media keep raving about what a great job the Toronto healthcare folks are doing, and then return to ululating about the massive humanitarian catastrophe about to engulf Iraq.

Heh. You don’t see that many ululating Canadians these days.

UPDATE: David Appell says that Steyn understates the problems in Iraq, though Appell’s lack of comparative data weakens his case. (So does his claim that the Toronto lost-antiquities matter was different because it was “an accident” — surely he’s not buying the bogus conspiracy theories that the United States deliberately allowed looting for the benefit of shadowy American art dealers?) Meanwhile, however, archaeologists are beginning to face up to the fact that they blew their credibility on the looting episode, as this post notes:

The academic world blew it in response to the looting in Iraq. Too many people cried wolf too soon and they have seriously undermined our credibility with the outside world. A case in point (one that could be multiplied) is the ASOR (American Schools of Oriental Research) Statement on Baghdad Museum, 4/16/03.

The statement in question (linked and quoted in the original) compares the looting in Baghdad to the sack of Constantinople, the burning of the
Alexandrian library, etc., etc. More:

This is a terrible tragedy, but a Mogul invasion it is not, and exaggerating its scale like this can lead to no good. There were hints days before this statement – indeed on the very day the looting was announced – that the scale of the looting might be less than the initial reports, but this information is ignored. The invoking of Alexandria, Constantinople, etc. is not only overblown, it compares like with unlike in that these other lootings were by the invaders whereas it was the people being invaded who carried out the looting in Iraq.

The academic community — antiwar all along, and a bit too obviously looking for a way to make Bush and the war look bad — shot itself in the foot, and will command much less respect on such topics in the future.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader sends this link to an article in Archaeology magazine written before the war, about archaeological treasures being moved out of the Baghdad museum in preparation for war. He notes: “The academic community knew before the war of these plans. Why did they ignore what they already knew?”

Because the pleasure of bashing the Administration was irresistible. You should also read this column by Charles Krauthammer, who flat-out calls Donny George a liar:

George saw the story of the stolen 170,000 museum pieces go around the world and said nothing — indeed, two weeks later, he was in London calling the looting “the crime of the century.” Why? Because George and the other museum officials who wept on camera were Baath Party appointees, and the media, Western and Arab, desperate to highlight the dark side of the liberation of Iraq, bought their deceptions without an ounce of skepticism.

Of course they did.

MORE: Cronaca comments: “if you recall the original folk tale, crying wolf carries a rather steep price once the wolf finally arrives.” Indeed.

BLOGGING WILL BE LIGHT for the remainder of the day, most likely. In the meantime, check out The OmbudsGod for interesting stuff on slave-driving at the New York Times, charges of slant at Romenesko, and tart comments by Anne Applebaum. And don’t miss Jeff Jarvis’s spirited dissent against ruling-class member Anita Roddick.

Also, this essay by Paul Johnson, is worth reading, and PrestoPundit is running a Greg Packer photo caption contest. And Steve Verdon wonders why lefties are condescending to America’s youth. “Don’t trust anyone under 30?”

UPDATE: Jay Ambrose says hail to the Bloggers.

Lots of cool stuff at Kesher Talk, too. And here’s more news from Iran:

What started as a small student march against the issue of university privatization on Tuesday has snowballed into violent nightly protests by demonstrators from across the social spectrum demanding more social, economic and political freedom.

The protests on Friday night were the largest and most violent to date, erupting on the campus of Shaheed Beheshti University in northern Tehran and clogging the two major highways leading to the dormitories of Tehran University.

“This is civil disobedience,” said a 45-year-old man beside his car on Chamron Highway, where demonstrators ignited tires and even trees along the road. “We are standing up against them. We are resisting and protesting against the regime.” . . .

As the first bonfires were lit and the traffic started to snarl, one driver yelled at a man who climbed out of his car and tried to direct traffic around a bonfire.

“Just be patient, we are trying to have a revolution,” the man answered.

Good luck, and godspeed. (Read this briefing on Iran, too.)

HOW BAD ARE THINGS IN AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ? Well, the refugees are pouring . . . in.

THE ARAB NEWS HAS SOME SURPRISINGLY SENSIBLE ADVICE for Iran’s Mullahs:

It was next the turn of the Taleban in Kabul to prolong this tale of folly. In December 2001, the Taleban chief, Mullah Muhammad Omar, breaking his silence, told a radio interviewer that the US attack on Afghanistan would mark “the destruction of America.” Need one recall what happened?

Next, it was the turn of Saddam Hussein to make heroic noises. “Iraq is not Afghanistan,” he told his Revolutionary Command Council in January 2003. The television channel owned by Uday, Saddam’s son, showed his “fedayeen”, some with beer bellies, toting Kalashnikovs and promising to “annihilate the Americans.” Again, the Americans did attack, and Saddam, Uday and other members of the Baath gang were the first to run for cover.

In every case, unpopular leaders, blinded by hubris took their wishes for reality. From Cedras to Saddam, and passing by Mladic, Milosevic and Mullah Omar, they had promised to create “another Vietnam” for the Americans. But none became another Vietnam.

And yet it seems there are people who have not learned a lesson. Some of the mullas ruling in Tehran are repeating the same hubris-inspired nonsense that came from Cedras, Mladic, Milosevic, Omar, and Saddam. “Iran is not Iraq,” says Hassan Rouhani, a junior mulla who acts as secretary-general of the High Council of National Defense in Tehran. “Our heroes will fight to the last drop of their blood. The Americans will have another Vietnam.” Similar commends have come from other Khomeinists, unable to see what has happened to their east in Afghanistan and to their west in Iraq.

It seems that the lessons that those evil neocons wished to impart to the Arab world are starting to sink in. Too bad that so many Western pundits still think the Vietnam analogies fit. But maybe they’ll catch up with The Arab News eventually.

KOSHER MEALS COOKED IN SADDAM’S KITCHENS: One word: Heh.

JIM TREACHER is an innocent bystander in the Blogwars. At least, that’s his story, and he’s sticking to it.

I SHOULD HAVE MENTIONED THIS EARLIER, but it came out while I was on travel — an excellent, link-filled post on Al Qaeda’s Algerian connection, something that I’ve been harping on for quite some time.

OKAY, BELGIANS, NOW HERE’S A PROPOSAL:

The Belmont Club thinks the US should start a war-crimes tribunal of its own and indict the United Nations peacekeeping heads, who were responsible for the massacres in Rwanda, Kosovo and, now in the Congo.

Heh.

PETER BEINART can’t avoid anti-Bush snarking, but the real point of this column is that the United States isn’t imperialist enough. Of course, he wrote the column before the utterly pathetic nature of the French presence in the Congo became inescapably clear. Surely Beinart doesn’t think that token pseudo-interventions of that sort would be a good thing.

It’s also a bit dodgy to treat Liberia as equivalent to a colony. It was, I think, rather sui generis.

UPDATE: InstaPundit reader, and typical New Yorker, Greg Packer writes:

I’m not at all persuaded by Beinart’s piece. Ordinary New Yorkers like me think the President is doing a fine job. I’ve told a bunch of New York Times reporters that, but they keep mangling my quotes. Who does a typical joe like me call about that, anyway?

Who, indeed? David Manning, maybe.

UPDATE: David Adesnik writes that I don’t give enough weight to the idea that a successful interventin in Liberia wouldn’t be that hard, but then goes on to make the same point that I at least thought I was making above:

The one thing Peter doesn’t seem to recognize is that rampant accusations of imperialism in the run-up to the second Gulf War may, in part, be responsible for US disinterest in Liberia. Given that Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush are predisposed to ignoring Africa, they’re probably thinking to themselves: “Why bother with Liberia? It has no strategic value. And the Europeans will only accuse us of unilateralist imperialism if we go ahead and act. Let them take care of it if human rights are so important.”

I agree with David that this view is suboptimal, but it’s also true — in no small part as a result of European obstructionism — that the United States is not in a position to easily intervene anywhere else at the moment. U.S. troops are rather thoroughly occupied. There are plenty of idle French and German and even Belgian troops available.

I HAD SOME MORE EMAIL PROBLEMS, which have been an on-and-off thing since the fire at the server center. The HostingMatters people were great, and finally figured out what was wrong. My experience with their tech support has been consistently terrific — though I haven’t needed it much, which has been even more terrific.

HEY! The Insta-Wife’s film is featured on the MovieLine website. Cool.

WHAT BUDGET CRISIS? Tennessee is in surplus.