Thomas M. Tamm

Michael Issikoff, in Newsweek, systematically applies the coat of whitewash, drapes the red-white-and-blue bunting, and affixes the journalistic left’s paper mâché halo to Thomas M. Tamm, renegade attorney from the Department of Justice’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR), who leaked damaging allegations about the NSA foreign communications surveillance program to New York Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, ultimately resulting in their famous December 16, 2005 Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts story, which naturally won them the Pullitzer Prize.

Tam, you see, was understandably outraged by the following nefarious practice.

After arriving at OIPR, Tamm learned about an unusual arrangement by which some wiretap requests were handled under special procedures. These requests, which could be signed only by the attorney general, went directly to the chief judge and none other. It was unclear to Tamm what was being hidden from the other 10 judges on the court (as well as the deputy attorney general, who could sign all other FISA warrants). All that Tamm knew was that the “A.G.-only” wiretap requests involved intelligence gleaned from something that was obliquely referred to within OIPR as “the program.”

Obviously any fair-minded attorney would conclude that an instance of special handling of particular intelligence information or the exclusion from participation in its processing and examination by any subordinate judges of Justice Department officials always ipso facto constitutes a sufficiently grave breach of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the US Constitution to necessitate an immediate donation to the John Kerry Campaign and a covert phone call to the Times. What else is a patriotic American do?

Issikoff procedes to explain that Tamm’s Hamlet-like struggle with his conscience over leaking and Raskolinkov-like agonies over fear of being caught and punished made the poor soul depressed.

He had trouble concentrating on his work at the U.S. Attorney’s Office and ignored some e-mails from one of his supervisors. He was accused of botching a drug case. By mutual agreement, he resigned in late 2006. He was out of a job and squarely in the sights of the FBI. Nevertheless, he began blogging about the Justice Department for liberal Web sites.

And Tamm had good cause for fear.

With the investigative speed and precision the FBI is famous for, brandishing guns and wearing flak jackets, G-men promptly descended a mere two years later upon Tamm’s suburban home to seize his desktop computer, his children’s laptops, some private papers, and his Christmas card list.

Let that be a lesson to policy free-lancers, leakers, violator of the Espionage Act, and traitors everywhere!

Divulge highest level classified information, participate in undermining US counterrorism, act consciously to discredit the elected government you serve, and the FBI will come over and browbeat your family and steal your PC.

That, of course, is as far as it is going to go, if the administration you are discrediting happens to be George W. Bush’s. The Bush Administration has never been able to muster the intestinal fortitude needed to make sure that the people working in the highest level classified positions in its War on Terror are actually on its own side, and still less has it able to steel its nerves to the point where it dares actually to prosecute such cases.

The Bush Administration understands only too well that it would be represented, after all, in court in cases of that kind by representatives of the Bush Administration. The leakers and traitors would be represented by skilled counsel from leading white shoe law firms and the cream of the faculty of Ivy League law schools. The defendants would additionally have the mainstream media operating as full-time public relations managers and publicists. So I suppose the administration’s timidity may be at least partly exculpated by its self awareness of its own inadequacy.

Henry Blogett draws a grim pictures of the Times’ unhappy situation.

Specifically, the company must deliver $400 million to lenders in May of 2009, six months from now. The company has only $46 million of cash on hand, and its operations will likely begin consuming this meager balance this quarter or next. The company has been shut out of the commercial paper market, but has a $366 million short-term credit line remaining that it entered into several years ago, when the industry was strong. It has not yet drawn this cash down, and given the current environment and the trends at the company, we would not take for granted that it will be able to do so.

The New York Times is in discussions with its lenders about the May payment, and management thinks it will be able to work something out (“We expect that we will be able to manage our debt and credit obligations as they mature.” Note the use of the word “manage” as opposed to “meet.”)

So sad. Maybe they can sell the paper to Murdoch.

Read the whole thing.

Captain Ed waxes a trifle sarcastic as he reads the Times’ damage control reporting.

Despite the fact that Obama worked for Ayers at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge for several years and with Ayers on the Woods Fund for a few more, the Paper of Record insists that the two men have no real ties at all.

The first clue as to their spin? The headline — “Obama and ’60s Bomber: A Look Into Crossed Paths”. Crossed paths? Are they just two ships that passed in the night?

How can Scott Shane write with a straight face that “[t]heir paths have crossed sporadically since then”? Obama worked as CEO of the project that Ayers helped found, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, for several years. Ayers served on the board at the same time. In an overlapping period, both men served for a few years on the Woods Fund, which notably granted $75,000 to Yasser Arafat’s associate, Rashid Khalidi, during that time.

Their paths didn’t cross “sporadically”. They worked on two projects together, political projects, for almost a decade in Chicago. That’s hardly “sporadic”; that’s a well-established working relationship, and certainly much more substantial than Obama’s description of Ayers as just another familiar face in the neighborhood.

Read the whole thing.

Roger Kimball enjoys the New York Times’ dilemma on how best to suppress Jerome Corsi new book.

Oh dear, Oh dear, Oh dear. Jerome Corsi, author of the bestselling Unfit for Command in 2004, a book that turned the phrase “swift boat” into a verb and helped defeat John “Reporting for Duty” Kerry, has written a new book about Barack Hussein Obama (yes, I know I am not supposed to mention his middle name, but I am going to anyway) called The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality. It’s officially published only today (you can order it from Amazon here), but already it is # 1 on The New York Times bestseller list with 475,000 copies in print so far. The Times, naturally, is in a swivet lest Corsi’s book undermine The Messiah’s planned advent in November and they have wheeled into print with a longish dismissal masquerading as a review today. “Significant parts of the book,” the authors write (the Times requires two reviewers when a serious demolition job is commissioned), “have already been challenged as misleading or false in the days since its debut on Aug. 1.”

“Challenged”? Who would doubt it? Anything can be challenged: “Who goes there?” But have those “significant parts” been shown to be false? ...

That’s one of many questions the public should be asking about Barack Hussein Obama. Today’s piece in the Times veritably weeps with anxiety. Corsi’s book has dwarfed a similar effort to discredit John McCain (35,000 in print): is there no justice in the world? The Times was in a tough spot with this book. The paper’s usual procedure with books it dislikes is to ignore them. Someone must have made the calculation that it was better to try to head off Corsi’s book at the pass, to strangle it in the crib as it were. I think they will rue the decision. Most people who read the Times would probably have been only dimly aware of The Obama Nation had the Times not brought it to their attention. Now they have had it rubbed in their faces. The paper did its best to dismiss the book, but questions and doubts will linger–not so much about Jerome Corsi but about Barack Hussein Obama. Who is he? Who are his friends? What does he believe? Is he the sort of person the American public wants leading the country? Is he a “stealth radical liberal”?

Actually, I think a Tuesday slash-and-burn article under Politics combined with studied non-recognition in the Book Review itself is pretty much Times’ standard operating procedure.
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Earlier Obama Nation post.

Weev, man of mystery, commodity investor,and Rolls Royce-owner (according to the Times): a troll

LULZ is an Internet abbreviation, produced as a variation on LOL “laughing out loud,” meaning “laughing at your expense.”

In the Sunday Times, Mattathias Schwartz (who clearly comes from a family afflicted with serious typo problems) ventures into the Internet jungle to meet its most fierce and exotic denizens, the perennially immature, the inadequately socialized, and the congenitally rude, i.e. the objectionable participants in on-line dialogue traditionally referred to pejoratively as trolls.

Journalists are clearly too busy writing features and brown-nosing editors to spend all that much time on the Internet, and our intrepid explorer finds some idiots, listens gravely to their nonsense, and a legend is born.

I first met Weev in an online chat room that I visited while staying at Fortuny’s house. “I hack, I ruin, I make piles of money,” he boasted. “I make people afraid for their lives.” On the phone that night, Weev displayed a misanthropy far harsher than Fortuny’s. “Trolling is basically Internet eugenics,” he said, his voice pitching up like a jet engine on the runway. “I want everyone off the Internet. Bloggers are filth. They need to be destroyed. Blogging gives the illusion of participation to a bunch of retards. . . . We need to put these people in the oven!” ...

As we walked through Fullerton’s downtown, Weev told me about his day — he’d lost $10,000 on the commodities market, he claimed — and summarized his philosophy of “global ruin.” “We are headed for a Malthusian crisis,” he said, with professorial confidence. “Plankton levels are dropping. Bees are dying. There are tortilla riots in Mexico, the highest wheat prices in 30-odd years.” He paused. “The question we have to answer is: How do we kill four of the world’s six billion people in the most just way possible?” He seemed excited to have said this aloud.

Ideas like these bring trouble. Almost a year ago, while in the midst of an LSD-and-methamphetamine bender, a longer-haired, wilder-eyed Weev gave a talk called “Internet Crime” at a San Diego hacker convention. He expounded on diverse topics like hacking the Firefox browser, online trade in illegal weaponry and assassination markets — untraceable online betting pools that pay whoever predicts the exact date of a political leader’s demise. The talk led to two uncomfortable interviews with federal agents and the decision to shed his legal identity altogether. Weev now espouses “the ruin lifestyle” — moving from condo to condo, living out of three bags, no name, no possessions, all assets held offshore. As a member of a group of hackers called “the organization,” which, he says, bring in upward of $10 million annually, he says he can wreak ruin from anywhere.

We arrived at a strip mall. Out of the darkness, the coffinlike snout of a new Rolls Royce Phantom materialized. A flying lady winked on the hood. “Your bag, sir?” said the driver, a blond kid in a suit and tie.

“This is my car,” Weev said. “Get in.”...

Zeno of Elea, Socrates and Jesus, Weev said, are his all-time favorite trolls. He also identifies with Coyote and Loki, the trickster gods, and especially with Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction. “Loki was a hacker. The other gods feared him, but they needed his tools.”

Somewhere in the caves of California, I hear the cackling and gibbering of trolls busily typing LMAO.

Less than a week after the Times ran an Obama editorial, the “newspaper of record” has rejected a rebuttal editorial from his opponent.

Drudge

I don’t like McCain, but I don’t see how I can do anything but publish his reply to Obama which the Times rejected.

In January 2007, when General David Petraeus took command in Iraq, he called the situation “hard” but not “hopeless.” Today, 18 months later, violence has fallen by up to 80% to the lowest levels in four years, and Sunni and Shiite terrorists are reeling from a string of defeats. The situation now is full of hope, but considerable hard work remains to consolidate our fragile gains.

Progress has been due primarily to an increase in the number of troops and a change in their strategy. I was an early advocate of the surge at a time when it had few supporters in Washington. Senator Barack Obama was an equally vocal opponent. “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there,” he said on January 10, 2007. “In fact, I think it will do the reverse.”

Now Senator Obama has been forced to acknowledge that “our troops have performed brilliantly in lowering the level of violence.” But he still denies that any political progress has resulted.

Perhaps he is unaware that the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has recently certified that, as one news article put it, “Iraq has met all but three of 18 original benchmarks set by Congress last year to measure security, political and economic progress.” Even more heartening has been progress that’s not measured by the benchmarks. More than 90,000 Iraqis, many of them Sunnis who once fought against the government, have signed up as Sons of Iraq to fight against the terrorists. Nor do they measure Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki’s new-found willingness to crack down on Shiite extremists in Basra and Sadr City—actions that have done much to dispel suspicions of sectarianism.

The success of the surge has not changed Senator Obama’s determination to pull out all of our combat troops. All that has changed is his rationale. In a New York Times op-ed and a speech this week, he offered his “plan for Iraq” in advance of his first “fact finding” trip to that country in more than three years. It consisted of the same old proposal to pull all of our troops out within 16 months. In 2007 he wanted to withdraw because he thought the war was lost. If we had taken his advice, it would have been. Now he wants to withdraw because he thinks Iraqis no longer need our assistance.

To make this point, he mangles the evidence. He makes it sound as if Prime Minister Maliki has endorsed the Obama timetable, when all he has said is that he would like a plan for the eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops at some unspecified point in the future.

Senator Obama is also misleading on the Iraqi military’s readiness. The Iraqi Army will be equipped and trained by the middle of next year, but this does not, as Senator Obama suggests, mean that they will then be ready to secure their country without a good deal of help. The Iraqi Air Force, for one, still lags behind, and no modern army can operate without air cover. The Iraqis are also still learning how to conduct planning, logistics, command and control, communications, and other complicated functions needed to support frontline troops.

No one favors a permanent U.S. presence, as Senator Obama charges. A partial withdrawal has already occurred with the departure of five “surge” brigades, and more withdrawals can take place as the security situation improves. As we draw down in Iraq, we can beef up our presence on other battlefields, such as Afghanistan, without fear of leaving a failed state behind. I have said that I expect to welcome home most of our troops from Iraq by the end of my first term in office, in 2013.

But I have also said that any draw-downs must be based on a realistic assessment of conditions on the ground, not on an artificial timetable crafted for domestic political reasons. This is the crux of my disagreement with Senator Obama.

Senator Obama has said that he would consult our commanders on the ground and Iraqi leaders, but he did no such thing before releasing his “plan for Iraq.” Perhaps that’s because he doesn’t want to hear what they have to say. During the course of eight visits to Iraq, I have heard many times from our troops what Major General Jeffrey Hammond, commander of coalition forces in Baghdad, recently said: that leaving based on a timetable would be “very dangerous.”

The danger is that extremists supported by Al Qaeda and Iran could stage a comeback, as they have in the past when we’ve had too few troops in Iraq. Senator Obama seems to have learned nothing from recent history. I find it ironic that he is emulating the worst mistake of the Bush administration by waving the “Mission Accomplished” banner prematurely.

I am also dismayed that he never talks about winning the war—only of ending it. But if we don’t win the war, our enemies will. A triumph for the terrorists would be a disaster for us. That is something I will not allow to happen as president. Instead I will continue implementing a proven counterinsurgency strategy not only in Iraq but also in Afghanistan with the goal of creating stable, secure, self-sustaining democratic allies.

Matt Pressman at Vanity Fair explores the many ways in which Americans hate the New York Times.

It’s such a given in the media business that few even stop to notice it: people love to hate The New York Times. They read the paper every day, and seemingly could not function without it, yet they never tire of, and often seem to delight in, pointing out its errors, biases, and various other real and imagined shortcomings. They’re a bit like the callers on sports talk radio—hopelessly devoted to an institution, but wanting nothing more than to voice their (often very loud) opinion about how awful and disappointing it is. ...

The most commonly cited explanation was that same nagging emotion that makes the French love to hate America and computer geeks love to hate Microsoft: envy and resentment. “The Times is the coxswain, the one setting the pace for the entire culture,” Jonah Goldberg says. “Sociologically, it just matters more.” (“Ideologically, it drives me fucking bonkers,” Goldberg couldn’t resist adding.) “It occupies a position that no other newspaper does,” adds Alex Pareene. “So you get more offended when they’re using that platform to promote David Brooks or something.”

Then there’s the question of the paper’s attitude. “Almost in inverse proportion to its own survivability, The New York Times becomes more and more holier-than-thou,” says Michael Wolff. “You’ve lost your way journalistically, you’ve lost your way from a business standpoint, you’ve lost your way from an authoritative standpoint, and yet you are still so holier-than-thou.”

Goldberg echoes Wolff’s complaint, saying, “The idea that ‘we’re not part of that club’ feeds a sort of resentment on both the left and the right.” Goldberg says, among his conservative brethren, the paper’s offenses occasion “an eye-rolling thing—there they go again.” But when the Times “screws the left,” he says, “it feels like a matter of betrayal. So, in some ways the rage is much more intense.” ...

Wolff, it’s fair to say, has stopped expecting better. “Once, it mattered. Once, it set an agenda,” he says of the Times. “But it’s like a time delay: We know you’re over with, but you don’t know it, and you’re still here, so die! Let’s not put a fine point on it. They don’t do anything right. Their journalism is not good, their view of the world is not correct.”

The mainstream media responded to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’s successful criticism of John Kerry’s military record and subsequent statements as anti-War activist by transforming their very name into a verb referring “to smearing the reputation of a candidate, to making political attacks using false charges.” The falsehood, of course, consisted of the manner of leftwing media’s use of that name. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’s charges were true.

A recent story in the New York Times attempted to transform the indignation of Navy veterans who served on Patrol Craft Fast (PCF) boats at the slanderous use of the name of their vessel into a supposed anger against the Swift Boat Veterans who opposed Senator Kerry’s candidacy.

The Times’ story represents yet another posthumous attempt to re-write the history of the 2004 Presidential Campaign, and another pretence that John Kerry was telling the truth or able to refute anything then, or now.

In the American Spectator, Mark Hyman responds:

Kerry’s Silver Star:

Throughout his political career, Kerry has long offered a John Wayne Kerry version of the February 28, 1969 events that led to his being awarded the Silver Star. Eyewitnesses offered a far different account. The core of the dispute is the details surrounding the killing of a suspected Viet Cong guerilla by Kerry. The heroic version of events offered by Kerry was presented in his 2004 campaign book Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War. This version described a guerrilla “standing on both feet with a loaded rocket launcher, about to fire” before Kerry shot first and killed him.

Kerry buttressed his version of events with a narrative of the events in the Silver Star certificate signed by Navy Secretary John Lehman. The problem is that Lehman served as Navy Secretary under President Ronald Reagan and this certificate promoted by Kerry on his presidential campaign website was generated 16 years after the 1969 awarding of the Silver Star.

Shortly after he was elected to the Senate, Kerry contacted Lehman’s office, alleged he lost his Silver Star certificate and requested a new one. A staff member in Lehman’s office told me that Kerry offered language for the replacement certificate. The staffer recognized the sensitive politics involved in the request: Kerry was a sitting U.S. Senator. The Secretary’s office treated the use of Kerry’s proffered language as harmless since Kerry had left military service a decade earlier. The Navy quickly issued a replacement certificate utilizing Kerry’s language. The problem with this turn of events was that a copy of Kerry’s original Silver Star certificate existed and could have been easily found. Because an award certificate is a public record I quickly obtained a copy from Navy archives.

While the overall tone of the two certificates is similar, the 1986 version contained superlative language not found in the original certificate signed by then-Vice Admiral Elmo Zumwalt in 1969.

Kerry’s first Purple Heart:

There were two very critical documents that were generated during the Vietnam war when someone was wounded by enemy fire. The first is a combat casualty card, a 3×5 inch typewritten card. This card contained the main facts such as the wounded serviceman’s full name, military service number, rank, branch of service, the date and description of the wound and the prognosis for recovery. Navy officials described combat casualty cards as “valuable as gold” and they are “protected like Fort Knox” because they are a key record often used to determine disability benefits after military service.

The second required document was a personnel casualty report. It is a mandatory report transmitted to Washington, D.C., with the details of anyone wounded as a result of enemy action.

Combat casualty cards and personnel casualty reports exist for the wounds resulting in John Kerry’s second and third Purple Hearts. However, Navy officials have never located a combat casualty card or a personnel casualty report for Kerry’s injury for which he received his first Purple Heart. In fact, no Navy record has ever been unearthed documenting that there was any hostile action that occurred that specific night involving Kerry and the Boston Whaler. Officers in Kerry’s chain-of-command recall turning down Kerry’s request to be given a Purple Heart for his scratch.

The possibility certainly exists of Navy officials losing a combat casualty card or personnel casualty report. According to a Navy archivist, the possibility of losing both documents for the same individual and for the same event is “virtually impossible.”

As a back-up to his claim, Kerry could make public his Navy medical records detailing the extent of his injury from the night of December 3, 1968, and the subsequent medical treatment. Kerry did not respond when given the opportunity to provide a copy of his combat casualty card, personnel casualty report, or the release of his medical records in order to bolster his claim he was wounded by enemy fire in December 1968.

Read the whole thing.

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The left has never recognized that it was not exaggerations resulting in medals that sunk Kerry’s candidacy, or even lies about Christmas in Cambodia. It was the Swift Boat Veterans reminding the public that the John Kerry “reporting for duty” at his nominating convention and glorying in the role of combat veteran and war hero was the same John Kerry who came home early in order to build a personal political career on anti-War activities, and who thus not only stabbed his comrades-in-arms still fighting in the field in the back, but who also viciously slandered them, by spouting a pack of lies to the US Senate, testifying that Americans had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, tape wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam.

Once the voting public heard afresh that infamous statement, delivered in John Kerry’s snotty and self-infatuated St. Paul accent, the 2004 election was over.

Says the New York Times.

On the other hand, some other people seem completely lost without one.

1:13 video

When Bush Administration policy opponent Richard Armitage’s disclosure of Valerie Plame Wilson’s job in the course of gossiping with Robert Novak was apparently subsequently confirmed to Novak by administration officials interested in pointing out the partisan planning behind former Ambassador Wilson’s junket to Niger, the revealing of Mrs. Wilson’s CIA employment was treated by the left as major crime, despite the fact that Mrs. Wilson was not a covert agent in the terms defined by the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982.

Valerie Plame Wilson was working in the Counterproliferation Division of the Agency, liaisoning with other American and international agencies and publicly chairing meetings discussing that international problem. No evidence has ever been brought forward to indicate that she was doing anything likely to provoke a special personal animosity directed at herself on the part of terrorist organizations.

But for a Sunday headline, the New York Times today gleefully revealed the name, career background, role as targeting officer and interrogator of major al Qaeda prisoners, and current employment of a former CIA officer who certainly could be a particular target for revenge on the basis of his service, rejecting pleas on behalf of Mr. Martinez’s personal safety from the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency himself.

Gen. Michael V. Hayden, director of the C.I.A., and a lawyer representing Mr. Martinez asked that he not be named in this article, saying that the former interrogator believed that the use of his name would invade his privacy and might jeopardize his safety. The New York Times, noting that Mr. Martinez had never worked undercover and that others involved in the campaign against Al Qaeda have been named in news articles and books, declined the request.

The irony is that the American left is perfectly capable of successfully indicting, prosecuting, and convicting political opponents on the basis of supposititious intelligence crimes, armed with control only of the media, while the Bush Administration is demonstrably unable to deter, prevent, or punish genuine intelligence leaks obviously rising to the level of violations of federal statutes, while theoretically in control of the entire Executive Branch, including the Intelligence agencies doing the leaking and the Department of Justice.

Says the New York Times: there are people starving in Sub-Saharan Africa, and throwing food away causes Global Warming, too.

Americans waste an astounding amount of food — an estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption, according to a government study — and it happens at the supermarket, in restaurants and cafeterias and in your very own kitchen. It works out to about a pound of food every day for every American. ...

The numbers seem all the more staggering now, given the cost of groceries and the emerging food crisis abroad.

After President Bush said recently that India’s burgeoning middle class was helping to push up food prices by demanding better food, officials in India complained that not only do Americans eat too much — if they slimmed down to the weight of middle-class Indians, said one, “many people in sub-Saharan Africa would find food on their plate” — but they also throw out too much food.

And consider this: the rotting food that ends up in landfills produces methane, a major source of greenhouse gases.

Lots of luck, NY Times pinkos, Americans know that charitable garbage donation begins at home.

Poor Hillary! Now that she is the less-leftwing alternative for the democrat party, she might just as well return to her Youth-For-Goldwater conservative roots. The democrat’s nutroots base of ultra-leftists hates her these days with a passion normally reserved for Republicans.

Wearing its heart upon its editorial sleeve, the New York Times was mincing no words:

The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it.

Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.

Hillary must have bribed Charles Gibson and secretly advised George Stephanopoulos to ask the annointed candidate of Change all those nasty and completely irrelevant questions which cost him the debate and, with it, the Pennsylvania primary. It’s so unfair!

the ineffable Michael Pollan

The New York Times rather outdid itself on Sunday in serving up its traditional ration of stupidity and cant, but Earth Day occurs this week and provided the occasion for the Times to devote the entire Sunday Magazine to an Enviro-PC-Fest of preening libs.

Michael Pollan, for instance, took a long, hard look into his own navel, and understood that changing the world, the choices, habits, lifestyles, and behavior of all of the world’s 6 and a half billion inhabitants, reversing the course of history, and rejecting capitalism, consumerism, and modern industrial civilization might be only a matter of setting a personal good example.

It’s hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: “Personal choices, no matter how virtuous [N.B.!], cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money.” So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live. Why? Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle — of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences.

For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It’s hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.

Thirty years ago, Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and writer, put forward a blunt analysis of precisely this mentality. He argued that the environmental crisis of the 1970s — an era innocent of climate change; what we would give to have back that environmental crisis! — was at its heart a crisis of character and would have to be addressed first at that level: at home, as it were. ...

f you do bother, you will set an example for other people. If enough other people bother, each one influencing yet another in a chain reaction of behavioral change, markets for all manner of green products and alternative technologies will prosper and expand. (Just look at the market for hybrid cars.) Consciousness will be raised, perhaps even changed: new moral imperatives and new taboos might take root in the culture. Driving an S.U.V. or eating a 24-ounce steak or illuminating your McMansion like an airport runway at night might come to be regarded as outrages to human conscience. Not having things might become cooler than having them. And those who did change the way they live would acquire the moral standing to demand changes in behavior from others — from other people, other corporations, even other countries.

All of this could, theoretically, happen. What I’m describing (imagining would probably be more accurate) is a process of viral social change, and change of this kind, which is nonlinear, is never something anyone can plan or predict or count on.

And even if what you do personally doesn’t actually have any real impact on the world, you should, of course, do all this goofy green stuff anyway, since even if you can’t meaningfully change the world, you can change yourself into an environmentally-PC member of the more-enlightened-than-thou elite, a nobler, finer being, capable of experiencing the orgasmic sense of narcissistic self-righteousness that only comes from composting.

Who knows, maybe the virus will reach all the way to Chongqing and infect my Chinese evil twin. Or not. Maybe going green will prove a passing fad and will lose steam after a few years, just as it did in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan took down Jimmy Carter’s solar panels from the roof of the White House.

Going personally green is a bet, nothing more or less, though it’s one we probably all should make, even if the odds of it paying off aren’t great. Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can’t prove that it will. That, after all, was precisely what happened in Communist Czechoslovakia and Poland, when a handful of individuals like Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik resolved that they would simply conduct their lives “as if” they lived in a free society. That improbable bet created a tiny space of liberty that, in time, expanded to take in, and then help take down, the whole of the Eastern bloc.

So what would be a comparable bet that the individual might make in the case of the environmental crisis? Havel himself has suggested that people begin to “conduct themselves as if they were to live on this earth forever and be answerable for its condition one day.” Fair enough, but let me propose a slightly less abstract and daunting wager. The idea is to find one thing to do in your life that doesn’t involve spending or voting, that may or may not virally rock the world but is real and particular (as well as symbolic) and that, come what may, will offer its own rewards. Maybe you decide to give up meat, an act that would reduce your carbon footprint by as much as a quarter. Or you could try this: determine to observe the Sabbath. For one day a week, abstain completely from economic activity: no shopping, no driving, no electronics.

But the act I want to talk about is growing some — even just a little — of your own food. Rip out your lawn, if you have one, and if you don’t — if you live in a high-rise, or have a yard shrouded in shade — look into getting a plot in a community garden. Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do — to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.

Max Boot had a spot-on response to the New York Times’ Sunday Big Story.

Hold the front page! Heck, on second thought, hold three full inside pages as well. Notify the Pulitzer jurors. The New York Times has a blockbuster scoop. Its ace reporter, David Barstow, has uncovered shocking evidence that . . . the Pentagon tries to get out its side of the story about Iraq to the news media.

Are you surprised? Outraged? Furious? Apparently the Times is: it’s found a new wrinkle in what it views as an insidious military propaganda campaign. You see, the Defense Department isn’t content to try to present its views simply to full-time reporters who are paid employees of organizations like the New York Times. It actually has the temerity to brief retired military officers directly, who then opine on TV and in print about matters such as the Iraq War.

As I read and read and read this seemingly endless report, I kept trying to figure out what the news was here. Why did the Times decide this story is so important? After all, it’s no secret that the Pentagon–and every other branch of government–routinely provides background briefings to journalists (including columnists and other purveyors of opinion), and tries to influence their coverage by carefully doling out access. ...

I think I got to the nub of the problem when I read, buried deep in this article, Barstow’s complaint that the Pentagon’s campaign to brief military analysts “recalled other administration tactics that subverted traditional journalism.” But the Times would laugh at anyone who claimed that activities “subversive” of America’s national interest are at all problematic. After all, aren’t we constantly told that criticism–even “subversive” criticism–is the highest form of patriotism? Apparently it’s one thing to subvert one’s country and another thing to subvert the MSM. We can’t have that!

How dare the Pentagon try to break the media monopoly traditionally held by full-time journalists of reliably “progressive” views! The gall of those guys to try to shape public opinion through the words of retired officers who might have a different perspective! Who might even be, as the article darkly warns, “in sync with the administration’s neo-conservative brain trust.”

The implicit purpose of the Times’s article is obvious: to elevate this perfectly normal practice into a scandal in the hopes of quashing it. Thus leaving the Times and its fellow MSM organs–conveniently enough–as the dominant shapers of public opinion.

The New York Times warns of the latest occupational health peril: blogging.

They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create a global media outlet without a major up-front investment. At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

When Glenn Reynolds and Michelle Malkin (who each do about five or ten times the work most of the rest of us do) start falling over, then I will begin to worry.

Is it possible? Here’s the New York Times actually reporting without derision scientific questioning of the responsibility of Anthropogenic Global Warming for an observed instance of change in the natural world.

In the scientific equivalent of the board game Clue, teams of biologists have been sifting spotty evidence and pointing to various culprits in the widespread vanishing of harlequin frogs.

The amphibians, of the genus Atelopus — actually toads despite their common name — once hopped in great numbers along stream banks on misty slopes from the Andes to Costa Rica. After 20 years of die-offs, they are listed as critically endangered by conservation groups and are mainly seen in zoos.

It looked as if one research team was a winner in 2006 when global warming was identified as the “trigger” in the extinctions by the authors of a much-cited paper in Nature. The researchers said they had found a clear link between unusually warm years and the vanishing of mountainside frog populations.

The “bullet,” the researchers said, appeared to be a chytrid fungus that has attacked amphibian populations in many parts of the world but thrives best in particular climate conditions. ...

Other researchers have been questioning that connection. Last year, two short responses in Nature questioned facets of the 2006 paper. In the journal, Dr. Pounds and his team said the new analyses in fact backed their view that “global warming contributes to the present amphibian crisis,” but avoided language saying it was “a key factor,” as they wrote in 2006.

Now, in the March 25 issue of PLoS Biology, another team argues that the die-offs of harlequins and some other amphibians reflect the spread and repeated introductions of the chytrid fungus. They question the analysis linking the disappearances to climate change. ...

“There is so much we still do not know!” David B. Wake, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in an e-mail note after reading the new paper. The origin of the fungus and the way it kills amphibians remain unknown, he said, and there are ample mysteries about why it breaks out in certain places and times and not others.

Ah! but here we go, wait for it, here comes the Times’ conclusion:

Ross A. Alford, a tropical biologist at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, said such scientific tussles, while important, could be a distraction, particularly when considering the uncertain risks attending global warming.

“Arguing about whether we can or cannot already see the effects,” he said, “is like sitting in a house soaked in gasoline, having just dropped a lit match, and arguing about whether we can actually see the flames yet, while waiting to see if maybe it might go out on its own.”

Never Yet Melted March 4, 2008:

Fight Fiercely, Harvard

concerning the scandal about Harvard’s admissions of basketball players on the basis of lower academic standards.

New York Times
March 9, 2008:

Editorial Notebook
Fight Fiercely, Harvard
By PHILIP M. BOFFEY

concerning the scandal about Harvard’s admissions of basketball players on the basis of lower academic standards.

Mike Gallagher applies the New York Times’s own standards of journalism to “the Newspaper of Record.”

I have two sources, both of whom wish to remain anonymous, that report to me that New York Times Editor Bill Keller was spotted in a dumpster last weekend in the Hamptons snorting crack cocaine and smothering a pair of cocker spaniel puppies with a pair of sweat socks.

So now I’m reporting it to you.

Wasn’t that fun?

Of course this isn’t true – not that I know of, anyway – but it sure was easy to get out my laptop and write those words down so thousands of eyes could read them.

Evidently, the “Old Grey Lady” possesses the same standards as a supermarket tabloid that breathlessly reports that “sources” claim they saw Elvis munching on a Krispy Kreme donut in Myrtle Beach.

Read the whole thing.

The New York Times today gave John McCain a slightly belated Valentine’s Day bouquet, in the form of a major, clearly long-prepared profile of the candidate, discussing in great detail John McCain’s past ethics issues, and dropping lots of dark hints about a relationship between the Arizona senator and an attractive telecom lobbyist.

The Huffington Post managed to grab the lady’s profile from her firm’s web-site before it was taken down, and also provides a story of its own.

Leading New York Times traitor James Risen is facing a federal investigation for being the beneficiary of further Intelligence Community anti-Bush Administration leaking.

A federal grand jury has issued a subpoena to a reporter of The New York Times, apparently to try to force him to reveal his confidential sources for a 2006 book on the Central Intelligence Agency, one of the reporter’s lawyers said Thursday.

The subpoena was delivered last week to the New York law firm that is representing the reporter, James Risen, and ordered him to appear before a grand jury in Alexandria, Va., on Feb. 7.

Mr. Risen’s lawyer, David N. Kelley, who was the United States attorney in Manhattan early in the Bush administration, said in an interview that the subpoena sought the source of information for a specific chapter of the book “State of War.”

The chapter asserted that the C.I.A. had unsuccessfully tried, beginning in the Clinton administration, to infiltrate Iran’s nuclear program. None of the material in that chapter appeared in The New York Times.

Hat tip to Frank A. Dobbs.

Tigerhawk notes the latest exercise in issue avoidance from the public’s supposed ombudsman Clark Hoyt.

The “public editor” of the New York Times, Clark Hoyt, remains as ever unwilling to challenge the paper’s editorial leadership on questions that matter. Today’s column is devoted to defending Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse from charges from a conservative blogger that she has a conflict of interest when her husband—a lawyer—writes briefs filed in cases before the court. He basically concludes—and any blogger would agree—that the Times should be more transparent in disclosing conflicts or apparent conflicts. For my money, the whole column is a waste of ink—speaking as a blogger who finds something to criticize in the New York Times virtually every day, I have long thought that Greenhouse does a better job of writing neutrally than the vast majority of the paper’s news reporters.

The real question, of course, is why Hoyt spent his week defending Greenhouse against a cranky blogger instead of explaining why it was that the Times decided to devote its front page to discussing murder rates among American veterans without acknowledging that they are lower than for American civilians. Apparently we need another public editor to explain why the first one spends himself on trivia and the arcania of conflict policy instead of examining a front page story with statistical “reasoning” so unbelievably fraudulent it is hard to believe that it was not intentional.

Clark Hoyt, the latest toadying lapdog sycophant yesman occupying the bogus role of “Public Editor” at the New York Times, the voice supposedly speaking truth to journalistic power, yesterday defended the outsider, anti-liberal establishment point of view by explaining exactly why Bill Kristol does not belong on the Times’ editorial pages.

Kristol is a particularly polarizing figure in a polarized age. While he holds the full range of conservative Republican views on economic and social issues, he is most identified today with ardently pushing for the war in Iraq, a war sold to the American people on the basis of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist, though a fair reading of Kristol’s statements includes broader arguments. Today, the public widely sees the war as a mistake, but Kristol remains its aggressive, unapologetic champion. In his first column last Monday, he warned against electing a Democratic president who would “snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory in Iraq.”

Rosenthal said: “Some people have said we shouldn’t have hired him because he supports the war in Iraq. That’s absurd.”

That is not why I think Sulzberger and Rosenthal made a mistake, and I agree with their effort to address an Op-Ed lineup that, until Kristol came aboard, was at least six liberals against one conservative who isn’t always all that conservative. I’ve heard all the arguments against Kristol — he is “wrong” on Iraq, he is overexposed as editor of The Weekly Standard and a regular commentator on Fox News with nothing new to say, he is an activist with the potential to embarrass The Times with his outside involvements — and one of them sticks with me:

On Fox News Sunday on June 25, 2006, Kristol said, “I think the attorney general has an absolute obligation to consider prosecution” of The New York Times for publishing an article that revealed a classified government program to sift the international banking transactions of thousands of Americans in a search for terrorists. ...

Kristol’s leap to prosecution smacked of intimidation and disregard for both the First Amendment and the role of a free press in monitoring a government that has a long history of throwing the cloak of national security and classification over its activities. This is not a person I would have rewarded with a regular spot in front of arguably the most elite audience in the nation.

Thomas J. Lueck, one of the New York Times’ professional chin-strokers, contemplates a recent case of self defense against New York City crime, draws comparisons to history (Bernhard Goetz shooting four subway muggers in 1984), consults “expert” authorities, and concludes the incident must have been a meaningless aberration.

Law enforcement experts looking for parallels between Mr. Parks’s confrontation and that of Mr. Goetz 23 years earlier said there were few to be found.

Malcolm Gladwell, a staff writer for The New Yorker, included an analysis of the Goetz case in his 2000 book, “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.” ...

“These two events are just not comparable,” Mr. Gladwell said. “The Goetz incident was when we hit rock bottom.”

“There was a spontaneous outpouring, with people calling him a hero,” he said. “We are so far from that now.”

There’s the classic liberal perspective.