Ted

Isn’t she lovely
Isn’t she wonderful
Isn’t she precious
Less than one minute old
I never thought through love we’d be
Making one as lovely as she
But isn’t she lovely, made from love

Congratulations, John and Belle!

At 10:31 Central time, here’s the top news on the top news websites:

MSNBC: Trains Crash, Explode
CBS News: Heavy Toll In N. Korea Train Crash
FOX News: Report: Thousands Hurt, Killed in N. Korea Crash
CNN: Michael Jackson indicted
ABC: Michael Jackson facing trial

The stories on the crash are reporting as many as 3000 dead or injured. Meanwhile, CNN and ABC have the story in sidebars. These are not good priorities, my friend.

UPDATE: At 10:55, Michael Jackson is still the top story at both CNN and ABC.
UPDATE: 11:25. CNN’s top story is now the crash, while ABC’s is still Michael Jackson.

Jay Nordlinger, of the National Review, on hypocrisy:

I had a memory: It was of Ronald Reagan and his dealing with the hostage situation in Lebanon. An AP reporter was held captive there — name of Terry Anderson. He had a sister named Peggy Say, and she became kind of a spokeswoman for the hostages’ families. Every day, she’d be out in front of the White House, sockin’ it to Reagan, saying how he was hard-hearted and callous and rigid and all the rest of it. And the media were in broad agreement with this. Reagan had a ridiculously inflexible position: No negotiations with terrorists.

But, lo, it was revealed that Reagan was a softie, that he was, indeed, flexible, that he was engaged in some maneuvering to free those hostages, so concerned was he about the individuals’ fates.

And the media (along with the rest of the Left)? They turned on a dime. Now they were super-principled about terrorists. Now any dealing for the release of those hostages was a travesty and an outrage.

Is Nordlinger honestly and truly trying to say that the President should have the authority to secretly cut deals rewarding terrorists? It appears that he is.

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Unforgivably horrible.

Iraqi police recruits, children on a school bus and many others were killed today in a series of bomb attacks in the British-controlled city of Basra that claimed at least 68 lives…

The explosions sowed panic across Basra, which had been relatively peaceful during this month’s upsurge of violence in other parts of central and southern Iraq.

US officials believe al-Qaida linked Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was behind the Irbil, Baghdad and Kerbala attacks. They claim an intercepted letter revealed a strategy to foment civil war between Sunni and Shia Muslims to make the country ungovernable.

Basra’s governor also blamed Osama bin Laden.

From today’s Washington Post:

The Pentagon deleted from a public transcript a statement Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld made to author Bob Woodward suggesting that the administration gave Saudi Arabia a two-month heads-up that President Bush had decided to invade Iraq.

At issue was a passage in Woodward’s “Plan of Attack,” an account published this week of Bush’s decision making about the war, quoting Rumsfeld as telling Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, in January 2003 that he could “take that to the bank” that the invasion would happen…

Woodward supplied his own transcript showing that Rumsfeld told him on Oct. 23, 2003: “I remember meeting with the vice president and I think Dick Myers and I met with a foreign dignitary at one point and looked him in the eye and said you can count on this. In other words, at some point we had had enough of a signal from the president that we were able to look a foreign dignitary in the eye and say you can take that to the bank this is going to happen.”

We are hearing about this because the Administration directly contradicted a celebrity Post reporter about a hot news story, and the reporter kept his own records.

What haven’t we heard about?

UPDATE: Some insightful commentary on this story, and Woodward generally, from Ranting Profs.

* Listening to “Appetite for Destruction“. I wasn’t much of a metalhead, but it’s still a terrific album. It’s noteworthy that in a genre known for showboating drummers and extended drum solos, their drummer is the very opposite of a showboat. (A “tugboat”, maybe?)

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Prince Bandar enjoys easy access to the Oval Office. His family and the Bush family are close. And Woodward told 60 Minutes that Bandar has promised the president that Saudi Arabia will lower oil prices in the months before the election – to ensure the U.S. economy is strong on election day.

60 Minutes, “Woodward Shares War Secrets”, 4/18/04

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Good question from Roger Ailes:

It’s also interesting to see that the Moonie Times has placed scare quotes around “marriage” in Sully’s item on gay marriage and polling. Seriously: why does Sully allow these bigots to tamper with his work product?

The local alt weekly, the Houston Press, can be hit or miss, but it’s a good week. Worth reading:

* The cover story on Islamica News, a Muslim Onion-style spoof website that’s not bad. Headlines include “Halal Butcher Loses Finger, Hopes No One Notices“, “Muslims Form New Bloc Vote Organization: ‘Get Backstabbed 2004“, and “Man Blames Everything on Jews“.

* Music writer John Lomax tells the story of Nirvana’s three Houston shows. It includes this anecdote:

“The day after the Houston gig, the band was supposed to play an electric in-store at Waterloo in Austin, but the Waterloo staff spaced and forgot to get amps. Someone in the audience furnished Cobain with an acoustic guitar, which he destroyed at the end of the show.”

My affection for Kurt Cobain just went way, way down. I don’t care if you’re Jimi Hendrix, you don’t smash a fan’s guitar.

* Finally, there’s an eerie story about one of Spalding Gray’s worst performances.

UPDATE: In comments, Basharov says that he attended the Spalding Gray show described in the article, and tells his story.

Left-wing partisans: file this story away somewhere. You never know when you’ll need it. Thanks, Steve.

John D. Negroponte is apparently expected to be appointed to the position of ambassador to Iraq after June 30 handover to whoever. (The “D.” stands for “Death squads”). Matthew Yglesias has links and commentary here, here, here, and here. I’d be surprised if Beautiful Horizons didn’t have something on it soon. Me, I’ve got to spend the morning washing my hands over and over and over again.

UPDATE: Grammar Police has more. Also, check comments on this post for an especially good one from Keith M. Ellis.

Ezra Klein has a take on Bush’s press conference that seems right to me:

Bush stood up there for an hour and ran for President the same way he did 4 years ago; as if he wasn’t the President. The advantage of being the challenger is you get to talk about visions and ideals and intent and desire. When you’re President, you have to defend a record. That apparently isn’t so with George W. Bush. He stood there for an hour answering questions as if no policy he put into place required an honest defense, no consequences from his actions merited note. Rather, he casually threw aside whatever the situation was, expressing sympathy for the suffering contained therein and reiterating how much he loved freedom and how the bad guys don’t.

To me, the most dismaying Q&A wasn’t the part where Bush couldn’t come up with any mistake he had made, or his inability to explain why he and Cheney were insisting on appearing together before the 9/11 commission. It was this:

QUESTION: Mr. President, who will we be handing the Iraqi government over to on June 30th?

BUSH: We’ll find that out soon. That’s what Mr. Brahimi is doing. He’s figuring out the nature of the entity we’ll be handing sovereignty over.

That’s the whole answer, and it’s not good enough. June 30 is 77 days from today. Both of these statements cannot be true:

(1) We don’t know who we’re handing soverignity to on June 30.

and

(2) We have done a reasonable job of planning Iraq’s transition to a stable, democratic state.

Finally, I’d like to register my disgust for this little song-and-dance:

BUSH: Some of the debate really centers around the fact that people don’t believe Iraq can be free; that if you’re Muslim, or perhaps brown-skinned, you can’t be self-governing or free. I’d strongly disagree with that.

I reject that. Because I believe that freedom is the deepest need of every human soul, and if given a chance, the Iraqi people will be not only self-governing, but a stable and free society.

I expect that kind of slur from instant pundits, not from the President of the United States. Appalling.

I haven’t seen this anywhere but Unfogged, so I’m going to take the liberty of restating his post:

The famous August 6th briefing contained this sentence:

The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full-field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Ladin-related. (my emphasis)

But commisioner Roemer said the following when Rice was testifying:

We have done thousands of interviews here at the 9/11 Commission. We’ve gone through literally millions of pieces of paper. To date, we have found nobody — nobody at the FBI who knows anything about a tasking of field offices.

We have talked to the director at the time of the FBI during this threat period, Mr. Pickard. He says he did not tell the field offices to do this.

And we have talked to the special agents in charge. They don’t have any recollection of receiving a notice of threat.

Nothing went down the chain to the FBI field offices on spiking of information, on knowledge of al Qaeda in the country, and still, the FBI doesn’t do anything.

Roemer brought this up before the briefing was released- he had read it, but the press had not. The apparent discrepancy has slipped past everyone but Ogged. 70 full-field investigations is a significant investment of manpower. It’s the kind of thing that the commission should have been easily able to verify, but Roemer is saying that they haven’t. Ogged charitably suggests that it may just be a difference in classification, but I find that hard to believe. Not if the number “70” bears any relationship to reality.

Unfortunately, his subsequent question (“Isn’t that some of the responsibility of the national security advisor?”) just put Rice on the defensive about her responsibilities vs. the FBI’s. It’s a shame, because there’s an important point there: was the person who prepares the President’s Defense Briefing deceiving the President?

I do hope that we get an answer to that.

UPDATE: Dave Neiwert points to a Newsday article addressing the “70 investigations” number.

FBI spokesman Ed Coggswell said the bureau was trying to determine how the number 70 got into the report…. Coggswell Friday said that those 70 investigations involved a number of international terrorist organizations, not just al-Qaida. He said that many were criminal investigations, which terrorism experts say are not likely to focus on preventing terrorist acts. And he said he would “not characterize” the targets of the investigations as cells, or groups acting in concert, as was the case with the Sept. 11 hijackers.

National Review is possibly the most popular target for media criticism from liberal bloggers. Part of the reason is surely The Corner, which gives NR writers a chance to let their hair down in an easy to link (and easy to parody) format. Part of it is the strong personalities of the writers; between John Derbyshire, Donald Luskin, Jonah Goldberg, Rich Lowry, and so on, they sometimes seem more like characters than pundits. (The Rich Lowry link, I should mention, hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves.)

But part of the reason is surely that they just plain get things wrong with some frequency. Brad DeLong is fond of asking, doesn’t anyone over there even care?

I’m sure that they care. But that isn’t really the right question.

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