According to TIME magazine, Al Gore has been proceeding with plans to start a liberal cable network to counteract the pernicious influence of FOX News, among few others.
John Podhoretz has scooped the rest of the media on the proposed schedule for the network. Here is part of it:

* Live at Five with Eric Alterman: 5 p.m.

The Red Tribe uses underhanded tactics to defeat the Blue Tribe.

This lineup should surpass the ratings of the "Big 3" networks.

Michael Blowhard has some outstanding ruminations on the book-writing process and the book-publishing business. The comments add a lot to the discussion, as does this post by Aaron Haspel.

Anne Applebaum, about to become a New Yorker, has had two outstanding columns in the last week.
First, today's column has one of the most devastating and accurate disses of Manhattan that I've ever read:

In fact, what makes me nervous about Manhattan nowadays is not the criminals, who have faded back into the Bronx, but the people who replaced them: clever people, accomplished people, well-educated people -- and people who agree about almost everything.
I first became aware of this phenomenon some years ago when in New York at a dinner party given by a publisher. Seated around the table was a cluster of minor literary and publishing types, chatting about this and that, all making light fun of that summer's Republican convention, which had just ended. A European visitor at the table was listening, brows knitted. Finally he spoke up. "But what's wrong with Bob Dole?" he asked. "He seems like a perfectly nice man to me."
What's wrong with Bob Dole?: All conversation stopped (and I am not making this up). Everyone stared at the clueless European, who was too naive to know that it isn't polite to say anything positive about any Republican, even a moderate Republican -- even a moderate Republican heading for a massive defeat at the hands of a Democrat.
It wouldn't happen in Washington, or at least it wouldn't happen quite that way. Washington is partisan, there's no denying it. But part of the partisanship comes from the awareness, even the hyper-awareness, of the existence of another point of view. The memoirs of Sidney Blumenthal and Hillary Clinton are fiercely defensive precisely because they know what the other side is going to say in response. Republican rhetoric gets sharper here than it does anywhere else, precisely because the rhetoricians know exactly what the response is going to be. Of course you can go to a dinner party in Washington and hear people profess shock and horror at the words of an out-of-place Republican, or indeed a lone Democrat. But that's because they disagree, not because they've never met one of the other species in polite company.

I think just about every conservative in the greater NYC area can relate to what I used to call the "Giant Panda" reaction: when a group of people, having just become aware of the exotic species in their midst, react with the strange mixture of curiosity and condescension: "I've heard such species exist, but I never expected to actually meet one!" Then there's the "Misplaced Compliment" variation, where the reaction is a stammering "But..but you're nice and smart ... you don't seem like a fascist!" Anyway, her comparison of Manhattan to Washington is well-taken.
Applebaum also had a great and chilling piece last week, which I am surprised did not get more attention in the blogosphere:

"Do you see any parallels between the security state that George Bush has created in America since 9/11 and the Gulag?" For a moment, the question struck me dumb. It had been put by a BBC radio interviewer, and we were on the air. It seemed impolitic to say, "What a ridiculous question," and I was too surprised to laugh. Finally I mumbled something about not having noticed that great a difference between daily life in George Bush's America and daily life in Bill Clinton's America, and left it at that. What I should have done was point out, tartly, that access to information is still far freer in America than it is in Britain, that immigrants are far better treated in America than in Britain, and that democracy remains a more open affair in America than in Britain. One always thinks of these things too late.
Yet in the days that followed, I did, rather surprisingly, have the opportunity to try out a few more answers. I was in London because a book I wrote about Soviet concentration camps had just been published there. For some, it seemed, the combination of that subject and my nationality offered the perfect opportunity to discuss the viciousness of contemporary American society. Several times I was asked if Guantanamo Bay should be considered a concentration camp. One reviewer, after saying a few neutral words about my book, complained that "the author has missed an opportunity to condemn human rights violations in her own country." Another interviewer asked whether people in America are often arrested for insulting the president on the Internet.
...
Partly, though, it reflects something I first noticed two years ago and am still at a loss to explain fully. This is the animus that George W. Bush personally inspires among what the British, among others, call the "chattering classes," in Europe as elsewhere. Recently, a Pew Research Center poll gave statistical backing to a phenomenon that many have observed anecdotally. Much of the world -- and Europe is no exception -- has a love-hate relationship with America. They consume our mass culture but simultaneously resent the impact of that mass culture on their own. They watch our television programs but are wary of importing them. On a host of issues, ranging from beliefs about the death penalty to preferred brands of sneakers, Europeans and Americans are actually growing closer, and the much-vaunted "values gap" is growing narrower. Yet when asked about it, Europeans often focus on what drives us apart.
Somehow -- and the Pew results support this too -- Bush has come to stand for the hate part of the love-hate relationship, symbolizing the downside of mass culture and the pushy side of our foreign policy, rather than the economic freedom and political openness that many admire. Largely this is because Bush, as a fully paid-up conservative, is at odds with Europe's left-leaning political elites, most of whom hate not only him but also the things with which he is associated, rightly or wrongly, such as a freer rein for the private sector. What they hate, in other words, is his domestic policy, more than his foreign policy.
Hatred of Bush has, in turn, slanted the reporting in the European press. Huge amounts of attention were given to the reports, after the fall of Baghdad, of the looting of the Iraqi state museum, which played into negative stereotypes (anti-culture Americans!). Far less attention has been paid to subsequent discoveries of the museum's treasures, hidden in vaults, safe from looters. Much was made a year or two ago of the administration's apparent lack of interest in Middle East peace (warmongering Americans!). By contrast, there has been relatively little interest in the president's recent trip to the Middle East, which has been widely dismissed as a cynical maneuver.
(Emphases added.)

European elites holding such attitudes need to ask themselves if they are encouraging and exacerbating the dismissive attitudes of the Bush administration towards their countries. (Hint: yes.)

The Weekly Standard has been all over the failure of the American Association of University Professors to acknowledge the alleged activities of Sami-al-Arian, the former professor at the University of South Florida who has been indicted for running Islamic Jihad's American operations. Here's their latest update. For more, click here and here.

What should you do when you read an excellent summary of what makes a good blog and realize that your blog has very few of those attributes?

Mark Lilla has a fascinating piece in the New Republic, arguing that European distaste for Israel is rooted in the latter's devotion to the nation-state while European elites swear fealty to the ideal of transnationalism:

It is not the idea of tolerance that is in crisis in Europe today, it is the idea of the nation-state, and the related concepts of sovereignty and the use of force. And these ideas have also affected European intellectual attitudes toward world Jewry, and specifically toward Israel.
...Anyone who pays close attention to how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is handled in the European press, and even in intellectual journals, will see this frustration expressed on a regular basis. I do not think this can be ascribed solely to European pro-Arabism, just as American press coverage cannot be attributed entirely to the feelings of Jewish Americans for Israel. I am convinced that at a deeper level the differences have something to do with the way Americans and Europeans think about political life more generally today, differences that Robert Kagan has highlighted in his powerful little book Of Paradise and Power. While it may not be true that Americans are uniformly Martian (Woodrow Wilson was not Belgian, after all), Kagan is correct that the European consensus today, from left to right, is thoroughly Venutian in spirit. This causes occasional friction with the United States, but it is a source of fundamental disaccord with the Zionist project. For Zionists today are indeed from Mars, par la force des choses.
Even European sympathy for the Palestinian people, which is understandable and honorable, has an oddly apolitical quality to it. One would think that those concerned about the future of the Palestinians, and not simply about their present suffering, would be thinking chiefly about how to remove them from tutelage to terrorist and fundamentalist organizations, and how to establish a legitimate, law-abiding, and liberal political authority that could negotiate in good faith with Israel and manage Palestinian domestic affairs in a transparent manner. But there is almost no intellectual awareness in Europe of the political obstacles to peace that exist among the Palestinians, nor has there been much encouragement of political reform. To judge by what is written, the European fantasy of the future Middle East is not of decent, liberal nation-states living side by side in peace, but of some sort of post-national, post-political order growing up under permanent international supervision. Not Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat shaking hands, but Hans Blix zipping around Palestine in his little truck.
Anyone schooled in the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is well aware of the political pathologies of the nation-state and the idolatry that it invites. The legitimacy of the nation-state should not be confused with the idolatry of the nation-state. But for many in Western Europe today, learning the grim lesson of modern history has also brought with it a forgetting of all the long-standing problems that the nation-state, as a modern form of political life, managed to solve. The Zionist tradition knows what those problems were. It remembers what it was to be stateless, and the indignities of tribalism and imperialism. It remembers the wisdom of borders and the need for collective autonomy to establish self-respect and to demand respect from others. It recognizes that there is a cost, a moral cost, to defending a nation-state and exercising sovereignty; but it also recognizes that the cost is worth paying, given the alternatives. Eventually Western Europeans will have to re-learn these lessons, which are, after all, the lessons of their own pre-modern history. Until they do, the mutual incomprehension regarding Israel between Europeans and Jews committed to Zionism will remain deep. There is indeed a new Jewish problem in Europe, because there is a new political problem in Europe.

Read the whole thing.

I know - I've procrastinated long enough about posting on the missing WMDs.
My original reaction to the "Bush lied" crowd was to dismiss them with reference to (among others) this, this, this, this, this, this, and all the links in this item. But - as tempting as it is to dismiss the "Bush lied" crowd with a sneer - it's hard to improve on the following formulations of Stephen Hayes:

There are serious questions the Bush administration will have to answer:
*How did a forged document about Iraq's pursuit of uranium make it into the State of the Union address?
*Why would President Bush tell the world that "we have found weapons of mass destruction," when quite plainly we have not?
*Before the war, the administration rightly focused on interrogating Iraqi scientists about WMD. What are the scientists in U.S. custody saying today?
*Is it possible that some of Saddam's WMD have already been distributed to terrorist networks?
For some of the not-easily-dismissable allegations that the Bush administration exaggerated the threat from Iraq, click here, here, here or any entry on Eric Alterman's blog.
One of my biggest problems with the emerging "Bush lied" meme is the way it shifts, for convenience's sake, to encompass several different concepts and arguments. Here are my takes on two different concepts that are conflated as necessary by Bush opponents:
1) The fact that we haven't found WMD yet shows that our intelligence about such weapons' very existence was flawed or false.
2) The fact that we haven't found WMD yet shows that even if they existed, the threat to the U.S. was exaggerated by the Bush administration to build the case for war.
The first argument can be disposed of by reference to any one of the links cited above (about my initial reaction to the "Bush lied" crowd), which is why the most intelligent administration critic - Josh Marshall - opines that "I still have a very hard time believing Saddam doesn't have chemical munitions stored somewhere." The second argument is best formulated by Marshall:

The public didn't get sold on this war because Saddam had nerve gas, or botulinum or even anthrax. True or not, a lot of people believed that. (I believed it -- and I still have a very hard time believing Saddam doesn't have chemical munitions stored somewhere.) The public got sold on the war because the administration argued consistently and vociferously that Saddam was on the brink of amassing far more fearsome weapons -- particularly nuclear weapons ("We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud") and that he had growing operational ties to terrorists to whom he might give these weapons or even some of his less threatening chemical agents.
It was fairly clear before the war that neither of those claims were true. Since the war it has become clearer by the day that they were almost certainly not true.
Those were the imminent threats that made the war necessary in March. No waiting for inspections, no building up of alliances, nothing. There was an imminent threat and countries respond militarily to imminent threats.
The only thing that's pretty clear is that there was no imminent threat. And there is a growing body of evidence -- much of which was known, frankly, before the war -- that the administration did everything it could to push the claim that there was an imminent threat using what was often very, very weak evidence.
(Emphases in original.)

I would argue very differently. The public got sold on the war because they bought into the worldview of the Bush administration shaped by 9/11. That worldview was based on a fear - I'd argue prudent, but reasonable people can disagree - of the unknown. We knew Saddam had all sorts of nasty weapons. We knew he had been trying to get nukes. And we didn't know what he had been doing since the inspectors were kicked out in 1998. The lesson of 9/11 is that what you don't know can hurt you, and that threats you thought were manageable may not be. The point of the Rice quote - "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" was almost exactly the opposite of what Marshall asserts. It was based on the fact that we didn't know whether the threat was imminent or not. That unknowability was the point.
Think about it. What else was the point behind the controversy of the new doctrine of "pre-emption" in the country's strategy of national security? If the administration's argument was that Iraq was an imminent threat, what was the big deal about pre-emption? It was only important because it was not based on the certainty of an immediate threat. The Bush administration's arguments to the country were based on uncertainty about the threats. That is one reason why the country has not turned against Bush yet, even though the weapons may not have turned up yet.

(I welcome citations to polling evidence regarding my argument about what swayed the American people, either pro or con.)

I haven't yet read Eric Alterman's book What Liberal Media, but Jonah Goldberg's review raises a noteworthy point:

Sure, conservatives have built a parallel media structure. No secret there, even if Mr. Alterman makes it sound like it is one. (If we've spent billions, though, I feel cheated. Most of what I see operates on a shoestring.)
But back up a step: Why did conservatives feel a need to set up parallel media channels, with all the effort that entailed? Because the existing structures--elite newsrooms, plus the academic, publishing and entertainment industries that intertwine with the news business--are so hostile to conservative views that the only way to compete in the public debate was to set up shop across the street.
...But anyway, why is it dangerous to democracy if conservatives who view the media as too far left try to pull them back? That sounds like healthy democratic activism in action. Besides, Mr. Alterman's doing the same thing, trying to move the media left. So what is the big deal?

For another day: what this has to do with the blogosphere. (A lot, I think.)

God bless the New York Times. Without it, we may not have had the opportunity to read this delicious saga of high-class hypocrisy:

...Walter Cronkite, America's éminence grise, has issued a dire warning from his second home on Martha's Vineyard. ''I'm very concerned about a private developer's plan to build an industrial energy complex across 24 square miles of publicly owned land,'' Cronkite intoned in a radio and television ad recently broadcast across the Cape.
The industrial energy complex in question is a wind farm. And the publicly owned land is really water -- Nantucket Sound, which separates the Cape from Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. That is where a Boston-based company called Cape Wind Associates hopes to build America's first offshore wind farm. At a cost in excess of $700 million, Cape Wind plans to spread 130 windmills, spaced a third to a half of a mile apart, across a shoal less than seven miles off the coast of Hyannis. Embedded in the ocean floor, each turbine would tower higher than the top of the Statue of Liberty's torch, its three 161-foot blades churning at 16 revolutions per minute. The wind forest promises to provide Cape Codders, on average, with 75 percent of their electricity, 1.8 percent of the total electrical needs of New England, without emitting a single microgram of greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide or mercury and without burning a single barrel of Middle Eastern oil.
The nation's leading environmental groups can barely control their enthusiasm. ''We're bullish on wind,'' says Kert Davies, research director of Greenpeace USA. ''Everybody has to ante up in the fight.''
But like residents of dozens of communities where other wind-farm projects have been proposed, many Cape Codders have put aside their larger environmental sensitivities and are demanding that their home be exempt from such projects. As Cronkite puts it, ''Our national treasures should be off limits to industrialization.''

It gets better:

This is not, like most anticorporate sagas, a David and Goliath tale. Despite the alliance's portrayal of Cape Wind as an ''energy giant,'' nothing about Jim Gordon suggests evil capitalist or environmental rapist. During his 25 years in the energy business, he has never fallen afoul of the Environmental Protection Agency and has even won the admiration of notoriously feisty Greens. ''Jim Gordon is the real thing,'' says Kert Davies of Greenpeace. ''There aren't many entrepreneurs out there willing to take risks to clean up the environment.''
The members of the alliance's board are similarly miscast in their self-assigned roles as small-town folk fighting corporate greed. Over the past several years, Wayne Kurker infuriated many Cape environmentalists when he expanded his Hyannis Marina by erecting corrugated metal hangars along the harbor. And the group's president, Doug Yearley, is a former C.E.O. of Phelps Dodge, one of the world's leading copper-mining companies. The alliance's lobbyist, John O'Brien, is a principal in a Boston firm that represents Exelon Generation, one of the largest fossil-fuel generating companies in the United States. Its Washington attorney is Guy Martin, a former assistant secretary of the interior. And, of course, there is the high-profile support of Robert Kennedy Jr.
''I am all for wind power,'' Kennedy insisted in a debate with Gordon on Boston's NPR affiliate. ''The costs . . . on the people of this region are so huge, . . . the diminishment to property values, the diminishment to marinas, to businesses. . . . People go to the Cape because they want to connect themselves with the history and the culture. They want to see the same scenes the Pilgrims saw when they landed at Plymouth Rock.'' (It should be pointed out that the Pilgrims never saw Nantucket Sound, and if they had, they wouldn't have spied the Kennedy compound.)

Read the whole thing, of course.

Listen up: I'm about to reveal a shocking secret that lawyers don't want you to know.
An article about the impending split of the prominent plaintiffs' law firm Milberg Weiss (which specializes in securities litigation) contains the following quote:

A Milberg Weiss lawyer, who spoke on the condition that he not be named, said a reason for both the partner departures and the split of the firm was the obvious one: money.
"It's easier to make money with fewer lawyers," he said, "and plaintiffs' lawyers at the end of the day want to make money."

I worked for a very prominent plaintiffs' firm (specializing in mass torts) before going to law school. And nobody loves to criticize such firms more than I do. In fact, I've been known to opine that securities litigators like Milberg Weiss embody all of the social costs of ambulance chasers without any of their social benefits (though that assessment doesn't look so good in the post-Enron era). But - and it hurts my fingers to even type this - the plaintiffs' lawyers may be getting a bad rap here.
The undisputable truth is: At the end of the day, virtually all lawyers want to make money.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'd better go on the lam before the bar association catches me.

On an infinitely more serious note, please do read this personal item by Josh Marshall.

I know the topic deserves a serious post, but I can't resist this cheap laugh.
Writing about whether the Bush administration lied to the country about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, Josh Marshall opines:

Seldom, I think, has a country undergone such a subtle, textured, distinction-granting debate about lying and truth-telling.

Let's check the historical record...

It depends upon what the meaning of the word "is" means.
- President Bill Clinton, August 17, 1998

(And I'm not even touching the issue of the precise definition of "sexual relations.")

UPDATE: A warm welcome to all Instapundit referrees and commenters. Yes, I did read the rest of the post where Marshall writes:
Washington's newfound appreciation of the 'subtleties' of truth-telling and lies is, well ... what shall we call it?, a revealing contrast to the common-sense definitions bandied about through 1998.
So Marshall probably did mean to encompass the entire post-1998 period in his reference to a national debate about truth and lies. But the thrust of his piece also seems to be based on the premise that the current debate about the Bush administration is unprecedented, and that leaves him open to the cheap jibe.
And yes, the topic does deserve a far more substantive post than this effort, which is in the works (and you may assume that I am less troubled by the Bush administration's conduct than Marshall is). And I promise it will have no cheap Clinton-bashing - only substantive Clinton bashing will do.

I forgot to link this piece when it was published in the NYT last week, and now - thanks to the Times' new archiving policy - it's too late. But the IHT was kind enough to publish this great piece by Mark Bowden about the BBC's attempt to discredit the U.S. military about the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch (see here for a roundup of links debunking the BBC's effort):

But if the Pentagon was really attempting to sell a Hollywood scenario, they fell badly short. At his briefing, Brigadier General Vincent Brooks said that Lynch had been "retrieved," not rescued. He showed a videotape consisting of a brief muddy clip through a green night vision lens showing special operations soldiers carrying her on a stretcher from a Black Hawk helicopter.
If the Pentagon had wanted to manufacture a bogus firefight surely they could have done better.
In fact, Brooks acknowledged at the first briefing that there was no resistance inside the hospital. He said there had been gunfights going in and coming out, but did not characterize them as fierce.
There is no doubt that the American media took these bits and pieces from the fog of war and assembled them into a heroic tale. This is how the media works today, for better or worse. It happens without any prompting from the Pentagon.
It will be a while before what really happened to the ill-fated 507th is known. War is like that. Until then, we'll have to settle for the tendency to weave what little we know into a familiar shape - often one resembling the narrative arc of a film.

According to Judith Weiss:

Enough of the coupla thousand civilian occupation workers living and working in various comandeered Saddam palaces are observant Jews that glatt kosher meals are coming out of Saddam's kitchens, and there are well-attended Shabbat services and even daily minyans by the Tigris, where - 2500 years ago - ". . . we sat and wept when we remembered Zion." Gives me chills to think about. There was a Pesach seder held in Ur this spring. That is so cool, let me repeat that: There was a Pesach seder held in Ur this spring.

Babylon was a center of Jewish culture from the destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C. till long after the redaction of the Talmud around 800 A.D. "There is nothing new under the sun..."