Vote in the Ruffini poll, and then read my WeeklyStandard.com column on the MSM's failure --collapse, really-- in New Orleans.

Here's the bottom line on MSM post-Katrina:

Everything that American media could throw at a story, it threw at New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina. No expense was spared. All hands were on deck. And yet not one news organization produced anything like complete coverage of the events unfolding inside the city's convention center or the Superdome. Horrific stories of murders and rapes spread like wildfire, reports of little girls with their throats slashed stunned Americans, and hysteria gripped many in the MSM. Weeks later the Los Angeles Times and others began to examine the collapse of the media's own levees that traditionally hold back rumor and urban myth.

Given this failure to capture the true story in New Orleans even with all of the combined resources of all the MSM working around the clock, why would anyone believe that American media is accurately reporting on the events in Iraq from the Green Zone, in the course of a bloody insurgency fought in a language they don't understand? If the combined forces of old media couldn't get one accurate story out of the convention center, why for a moment believe it can get a story out of Mosul or Najaf?

I'll stick with Michael Yon, Major K, and Training for Eternity when it comes to Iraq.

And since the MSM was willing to ask the "hard" race questions in the storm's aftermath, when will it ask itself whether such rumor-mongering and the attendant suspension of ordinary journalistic standards was possible because the elites in MSM were willing to believe the worst about the generally African-American underclass at both locations?

The "Guide to the Journo-Blogs" at the CBS attempt to imitate blogging continues to produce a ton of e-mail. Look, any "journo-blog" list that omits Barone, Kelly, Lileks, Malkin and Sullivan is self-evidently absurd. A defense of the exercise that falls back on the assertion that the declaration of "subjectivity" neuters the claim of "Guide" is a surrender, though one not given in any spirit of honest error. Thus the CBS neo-blog produces early evidence of all the oafishness and arrogance that crippled Rather and Mapes. The attempt of the gate-keepers to rebuild the gates is amusing. The transcript is here.

I mention Ed Driscoll in my on-air conversation with Brian Montopoli. Here's why. Ed's a superb journalist.

So, for that matter, might be Brian. I first met him at the Democratic National Convention last year. He was quite gracious to me, helping me figure out the bizarre DNC rules. He's smart, energetic and full of opinions. Perfect. But CBS could ruin him.

There is no club. A "cable show on a network" is no credential --look at Olberman for goodness sakes. He's a dummy. Ask yourself this: If Glenn Reynolds tells me "A" is true, or Roger Simon tells me "A" is true, do I believe them, or Keith Olberman or Chris Matthews telling me "not A" is true?

I will believe Instapundit or Roger or Mark Steyn. And most of the people at CBS appear not to have heard of Steyn. I rest my case. It is like a physicist not hearing of Einstein.

Let those who have ears, hear.

That's the question that matters. Not who is signing your paycheck.

UPDATE: The New York Times sets another standard for "journalism."

The Ruffini Primary continues. Vote.

I interviewed Brian Montopoli of CBS Public Eye and Heath Allen of NBC's New Orleans' affiliate on the program today. Radioblogger will have the transcripts up later. Media people say the most extraordinary things.

And Rumes of Boz has come out of retirement.

Fires have been burning in southern California for nearly two hours. No sign of FEMA yet. Another FEMA collapse. They ought to have known that Santa Anas kick up this time of year.

When will Senators feinstein and Boxer present their demand for billions in fire break maintenance funds?

First I get left off the CBS journo-blog list. Then K-Lo leaves me off the SCOTUS tip sheet.

Time to get my application in to the Brendan Sullivan Society.

A Texas prosecutor with a history of abuse of his office, Ronnie Earle, has indicted Tom DeLay. Earle is a sort of Jim Garrison without the integrity. Soon to follow: Giant MSM coverage, show trial, acquittal and exoneration, DeLay's return to Majority Leader for another 20 years.

This is really funny. CBS speaks! And I'm "right on the line" but don't qualify! Egads. Not up to Brian ("I haven't always been a journalist") Montopoli's measure. Out, out, damn spot.

Heads up CBS: You will want to add TrofeeHusband to your list.

Bookmark and browse All Things Beautiful and RedneckPeril. The former introduced me to the latter, and I discovered the latter had posted extensively on David Allen White's thoughts on suffering over at OneTrueGodBlog, and on Charlie Weiss' kindness towards Montana Mazurkiewicz. So I looked up his bio and read this:

Dessie and I have been married since June of 1989. Kasia ("KAH-shuh") came along in 1990; identical twins Sean and Kegan followed in 1992, and then Merry Elisabeth showed up in 1995. In 2002 we met and fell in love with two orphans from Kazakhstan, and in 2003 we brought Sally and Rusty (both born in 1997) home to Austin, Texas. In the process, though, we fell in love with the unadoptable kids who were never going to make it into permanent families; and we now run a very small foundation (http://www.cccpfoundation.org/) helping those Kazakh orphans. As I type, Dessie is actually in Kazakhstan on a foundation trip; and we hope to move to Kazakhstan sometime in 2006. We're in a race against time to adopt two more girls before the elder turns 18, after which we expect to be done expanding our own personal family. After all, even with the extra seat welded in the back of our green Suburban, Jack Daniels (so named because he'S A BOURBON...Dessie insists that our cars must have names and my sense of humor runs to bad puns)...at any rate, even with that extra seat, we're about to run out of seatbelts.

What a country.

First, vote in Ruffini's straw poll.

Then read Fred Barnes' analysis on why 2008 will be a very tough road for whomever wins the straw and real primary votes.

Barnes' piece reminds the White House why a Luttig/Jones/McConnell nomination would be a very good thing: Illustrating the gap between the center-right and the hard left now entrenched in the Democratic Senate caucus motivates the center-right to take its politics seriously, and not be sidetracked into the sort of intramural battling that a minority party loves.

The stresses building within the Democrats over the judicial nominations are illustrated by Blue Mass. Group's big sigh over the inability of the Senate Dems to get a strategy together on Roberts. The Dems have to oppose anyone Bush nominates, and do so with every brick they can throw, or their moonbat base will explode. Given that we are going to get a filibuster and it will have to be broken, send up a nominee the base will immediately understand is worth fighting for.

Read all of the recent entries at National Review's Media Blog, but concentrate on MSNBC's Heath Allen's "fake but necessary" corollary to the Mapes/Rather "fake but true" theory of MSM responsibility. Stephen Sprueill correctly notes that the logic of Allen's argument is that any exaggeration of facts is acceptable if the exaggeration will bring "help" to people who need it. The Allen argument is a defense of propaganda, and MSNBC apparently approves of the approach.

Certainly Chris Matthews has no trouble with propaganda.

Dan Rather was interviewed by Marvin Kalb a couple of nights back in what can only be described as a Titanic event. Radioblogger has the MP3 and transcript of key excerpts (inexplicably, Radioblogger starts referring to Marvin Kalb as Lawrence Korb at some point in the transcript, so read LK to mean MK --it must have been late) but here's a money quote from Dan that is filled to the brim with self-congratulation, condescension and incoherence, and yet still manages to provide a standard that condemns Allen/Matthews "journalism":

Public relations people. PR may not consider themselves as part of the media, but I would. They don't claim to be journalists, and I don't consider them to be journalists. So media is an overarching definition, I wouldn't say all-encompassing, but encompassing a lot of different disciplines and professions and crafts within it. Journalism, I get back to the off-hand definition I gave your before, of what a journalist is, and what journalism is. If you seek to explain, cast news light on, give eyewitness and/or introduce testimony to who, what, when, where, why of events, then that's journalism. And that's the practice of journalism. And those who do it are journalists. And I would add to it, if one sees oneself, and insofar as is humanly possible to do so, tries to be an honest broker of information, they'd be filled with their own opinions, but an honest broker of information. It comes down to the core of the practice of journalism has to be integrity. And integrity starts with, you know, some accountability. And again, if you just want a fast way to do it, I'd go back to if the person is a blogger, and wants to be called a journalist, I'd say well, let's start first of all, is your name, address on it. Do people know how to reach you? Are you accountable for what you do? I would eliminate anybody who doesn't do that.

Even Rather knows --unlike Allen-- that you can't make things up. And I suspect that even Rather --unlike Matthews-- would have Sheehan a serious question or two.

Now here's an exchange between Kalb and Rather on old media and new media which led one caller yesterday to suggest this is how it sounded when T-rex met Triceritops to discuss the asteroid that hit last week:

MK: We're discussing differences between, in a way, old media and new media. And we're very much old media.

DR: You are, Marvin. I'm out there on the cutting edge of new media, as you well know.

MK: I mean, every now and then, it even looks as if the new media's at war with the old media. I want to go back to the National Guard story of last year. It was the blogger, the internet blogger, who instantly went after you and CBS, with an effect that was very damaging all the way around, and played an impact indeed on the presidential campaign. I've always been astonished that even before the program ended, it was still on. A blog site called Freerepublic.com, run by an active Air Force officer, blasted the program. Four hours later, another website called Buckhead, ran a detailed critique of the documents that you used in the report. And I've always wondered to myself, that's an amazingly swift bit of research. You watch something on air, four hours later you are prepared to run pages and pages of detailed criticism of the documents. How does somebody do that that quickly? Now, the L.A. Times identified Buckhead as a Republican lawyer in Atlanta named Harry McDougall. I don't know if that's true. But that's what the L.A. Times says. What happened then is that dozens of other bloggers joined in. Then the mainstream media joined in. And then, everything shifted, and the focus was on you. The focus was not on the substance of your story. The National Guard aspect of the whole thing sort of dropped to the side, and this media focus was on you.

DR: Well, I don't find that unusual, that the media focus should come down to the on-air reporter. But there's so much in that question, Marvin, and I don't want to bog us down. I want to be directly responsive to it. But before I go to that, I need to return to something before I forget it, and before the trail goes cold, on your saying well, why is it that every poll shows that reporters are not held in the kind of esteem that we once were. I think by and large, that we are responsible for that. And I do not exclude myself from that criticism. There are a lot of other factors going into Spiro Agnew's speeches, politicians, and all the other thing. But I'm a great believer in the ten magic words, which are if it is to be, it is up to me. And that...you have to have personal responsibility. Then, besides that, you have to have professional and craft responsibility. The public, when journalism is at or near its best, when journalism is doing what American journalism has made its reputation doing, when we are true to ourselves, the public responds. And they respond in a positive way. You need look no further than what happened with Katrina the hurricane.

Rather is holding up Katrina coverage as the standard for journalism just as the country is becoming aware that the hysteria induced by MSM also affected MSM's own coverage.

That's why we love Dan. We don't need a fictional Ted Baxter. We have a real, breathing Ted Baxter, and he's still working for CBS!

Kausfiles comtinues to ridicule the New York Times' New Coke strategy of charging a high price for columns very few people will pay for. The good news is that this fiasco will certainly discourage other papers from experimenting with pay-for-view news. If you aren't the Wall Street Journal, it will be difficult to charge for an internet subscription unless (1) it is for the whole paper and (2)there's a lot of web-only content. This is an obvious rule, but one which the aristocrats couldn't figure out. Reason: They believe we must read them.

Nobody is irreplaceable. Especially not Dowd and Krugman.

The cover story of the new National Geographic is avian flu --H5N1.

Are we paying attention yet? (HT: Mike Lynn)

Here's the "Learn More" page. Learn more.

On September 10 I wrote the first of many posts on MSM induced hysteria in the aftermath of Katrina. Now, more than two weeks later, MSM is catching up to the fact that their coverage was deeply flawed and obviously so. John Podhoretz comments here.

Patrick Ruffini has the new straw poll up. Earlier straw polls run by PR have already bcome much talked about tip sheets among political junkies, and this month's edition has some new features. Stop by and be sure to fill out all the questions. The candidates want to know, and so does the political press.

I don't know Mr. Estrada, and prefer not to gamble with SCOTUS appointees when there are plenty of solid judges out there like Luttig, McConnell, Jones, Garza and Owens.

But if ConfirmThem is correct and Miguel Estrada is the nominee, the Democrats face a horrible prospect of a nationally televised mugging of an immigrant success story who has a background very similar to John Roberts'. When you have to begin every statement with a denial of anti-Latino bias, you are losing not just the nomination battle, but an electoral demographics war.

From the new Mapes book:

Within a few minutes, I was online visiting Web sites I had never heard of before: Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, Power Line. They were hard-core, politically angry, hyperconservative sites loaded with vitriol about Dan Rather and CBS. Our work was being compared to that of Jayson Blair, the discredited New York Times reporter who had fabricated and plagiarized stories.
All these Web sites had extensive write-ups on the documents: on typeface, font style, and peripheral spacing, material that seemed to spring up overnight. It was phenomenal. It had taken our analysts hours of careful work to make comparisons. It seemed that these analysts or commentators---or whatever they were---were coming up with long treatises in minutes. They were all linking to one another, creating an echo chamber of outraged agreement.

I was told that the first posting claiming the documents were fakes had gone up on Free Republic before our broadcast was even off the air! How had the Web site even gotten copies of the documents? We hadn’t put them online until later. That first entry, posted by a longtime Republican political activist lawyer who used the name “Buckhead,” set the tone for what was to come.

There was no analysis of what the documents actually said, no work done to look at the content, no comparison with the official record, no phone calls made to check the facts of the story, nothing beyond a cursory and politically motivated examination of the typeface. That was all they had to attack, but that was enough.

I don't think a good defense begins with an admission of total ignorance of well-known commentators in an emerging medium. I also think it is pretty amusing that Mapes is complaining that no one thought of the "fake but true" defense on their own, as though fraudulent documents shopuld not have mattered to the Rathergate story.

This is a bookstore read for sure, not a purchase-worthy book, and before long she'll turn up teaching at a J-school somewhere, toasted as a victim of the VRWC instead of the dupe she was and the scold she became. I hope the Powerline gang has the time to do a detailed review (Scott Johnson's first brief comment is here.) I don't.

But one of the interesting things to watch will be the selection of reviewers for the big book reviews. My guess is that we will have a lot of old media types mixed with professors tabbed as the reviewers as MSM circles the wagons one more time.

From the AP this morning:

In Washington, U.S. defense officials said that Abdullah Abu Azzam, a leading deputy to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaida's leader in Iraq, was killed this weekend. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the information.

The U.S. military on Tuesday said U.S. and Iraqi forces, acting on a tip, raided a high-rise apartment building in Baghdad where Abu Azzam was located early Sunday.

"They went in to capture him, he did not surrender and he was killed in the raid," Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, a U.S. military spokesman, told The Associated Press.

Zarqawi's got big trouble when U.S. and Iraqi forces start showing up at the correct door of a high rise.

See "The Language of Katrina."

Alan Greenspan is out to kill home prices, which are surely bubbling in some markets, but which are just as surely not bubbling in others but simply reflecting the lack of supply. Look. You can't build on the California coast anymore. Period. If even 1,000 new coastal view homes are constructed in the next five years, I'll be amazed. Folks who want an ocean view in California have limited options, and those that have those homes aren't going to lower the price because the Fed Chair is worried about a housing bubble. For a sophisticated thinker, Greenspan's repeated blasts at the housing market seem to me far more political than economic in their motivation.

TUE 27 TAMPA BAY 7:05 FSOH
WED 28 TAMPA BAY 7:05 FSOH
THU 29 TAMPA BAY 7:05 FSOH
FRI 30 WHITE SOX 7:05 FSOH
OCTOBER
SAT 1 WHITE SOX 1:25 FOX
SUN 2 WHITE SOX 1:05 No TV

That's the Tribe's schedule. In case you were wondering. About the best team in baseball in September.

I will broadcast today from Phoenix and the annual "Medal of Honor Convention," which hosts the living recipients of the nation's highest honor. The Medal of Honor Foundation hosts the event annually, and also publishes the Medal of Honor: Portrait of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty book and DVD which contains a biography of 117 recipients of the Medal of Honor.

Louisiana wants $40 billion in Army Corps of Engineer projects. Whatever the final cost, it will be in billions, and the Senate Republicans should insist that as part of the package, reforms in the federal Endangered Sprecies Act --similar to this that are poised to pass the House-- be included in the appropriation so that the notoriously expense-increasing and private property rights destroying ESA not delay or increase the costs of these projects or other Corps projects across the country. A simple tightening of deadlines widely abused by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service when the Corps "consults" with that agency under the ESA would be a huge step forward.

Instapundit has much more on the proposed ACOE funding.

This is a crucial week in Israeli politics as Likud ponders tossing out Prime Minister Sharon from its leadership position, almost certainly triggering a major realignment in Israeli politics and early elections.

It could also be the week when the president unveils his new SCOTUS choice. Though conventional wisdom suggests he will wait until Judge Roberts is confirmed. The argument for going now is that the debate on the Senate floor would proide a great opportunity to set up the next nominee for the battle ahead. The Roberts hearings underscores that the more the public knows about Bush nominees to the bench, the better off those nominees do. Only when the Democrats left fringe in the Senate combine with tilted media coverage can the nominees be successfully smeared.

Watch ConfirmThem and BenchMemos for more.

Or we might read the name here first. Heh.

Lorie Byrd provides a round up of crcuial links on the fizzled anti-war protests of the weekend. A pathetic turnout. Even the first anti-Vietnam protest, way back in 1965, drew 16,000 to the White House. Four years later, the crowd passed 250,000. But the fringe left today, even with massive MSM support cannot get 2,000 folks together.

The Washington Post warns that Senator Frist's stock sale "adds to GOP ethics troubles," and added that the charges against Frist "have handed Democrats a chance to broaden their long-stated claim that Republicans push ethical boundaries and focus on laws that help the rich, political analysts said yesterday." No word from the paper or the "political analysts" on Chuckaquiddick's impact on the Dems' reputation for felony-level dirty tricks.

And David Allen White and Mark Roberts have weighed in at OneTrueGodBlog on the suffering following the two hurricanes.

Go and see this movie. It will stay with you for a long, long time.