The New Editor talks about it on the part of both the democrats, and a media that refuses to report on it.

[Update at 8:20 PM EDT]

And Hugh Hewitt continues to express his dismay and amazement (shared by me) at the Star-Trib’s treatment of James Lileks:

Of course James is my friend, but a lot of my friends suffer at the hands of bad management, and I don’t say a word about it on my blog or my show.

I am exercised about Lileks because it is an astoundingly stupid decision affecting an industry with which I am connected and in which merit used to matter. The collapse of the media business and the rise of mediocrity is what’s bugging me.

I offer you Dave Barry as an expert on the field of newspaper columns. Case closed. Ten thousand second stringers can line up and berate Lileks, but we know better, and Barry’s assessment just ends that discussion.

And a comment from Dave Barry’s post:

Yeah, one thing that Lileks’ blog revealed was how much life and quirk was being squeezed out of his writing to make it fit in the Star-Tribune. (For which the editors blame him, not themselves.) Anyway, I don’t think we should be bashing the people here who don’t find Lileks funny. Humor is individual, they’re entitled to their opinion…

…and isn’t it interesting that at least they HAVE an opinion of Lileks. How many other writers at the Star-Tribune can anyone here say that of?

And a similar comment from Ken Layne, who would know such things:

This is completely retarded. Lileks is the best-known writer on that whole paper — if there’s any nationally-known writer other than Lileks on that paper, I’ve never heard of ’em. I wouldn’t be surprised if his personal site gets more traffic than the whole Strib site.

Here’s a quiz to see if you’ve “got what it takes” to be a newspaper editor:

You’re in a fading industry that’s making a slow & dumb transition to the online world. You’ve moved so slowly & clumsily that most of the things you used to control — comics, sports news, classifieds — have already been reinvented and seized by people who aren’t involved with newspapers at all. But on your staff, you’ve got a local columnist who has a big & loyal online readership you would spend millions trying to get on your own. Do you:

a) Give him a substantial raise and have him write exclusively for your online paper?
b) Demote him to local coverage.

If you answered B, then you’re ready for a high-flying newspaper management career … for a few years, anyway, when the last local print newspaper shuts down for good. Jesus …

The questions about Iraq that the media isn’t asking.

Because they’re run by morons like the ones at the Star-Tribune who don’t understand, or even have the mental capacity to recognize, that they have one of the great treasures in current American writing working for them:

As it happens, they’ve killed my column, and assigned me to write straight local news stories.

Really.

There

…at the New York Post–he’s falling down on the job. They could have taken that alliterative headline to the mth degree: “MOUNTAIN MEADOWS MASSACRE MOVIE MIFFS MORMON MITT.”

A colleague of mine has a son who is a senior in engineering at VPI, who was fortunately not on campus when the shooting occurred. He was traumatized nonetheless, as were all the students, and my colleague drove down from DC to Blacksburg this past weekend to see how he and his friends were doing. He took some pictures of the improvised memorials.

While not as moving or lovely, this is the one that interested me the most. Such a sign was apparently on the door of every campus building, to keep away the ghouls. I don’t think you’ll see this picture in the papers.

A colleague of mine has a son who is a senior in engineering at VPI, who was fortunately not on campus when the shooting occurred. He was traumatized nonetheless, as were all the students, and my colleague drove down from DC to Blacksburg this past weekend to see how he and his friends were doing. He took some pictures of the improvised memorials.

While not as moving or lovely, this is the one that interested me the most. Such a sign was apparently on the door of every campus building, to keep away the ghouls. I don’t think you’ll see this picture in the papers.

A colleague of mine has a son who is a senior in engineering at VPI, who was fortunately not on campus when the shooting occurred. He was traumatized nonetheless, as were all the students, and my colleague drove down from DC to Blacksburg this past weekend to see how he and his friends were doing. He took some pictures of the improvised memorials.

While not as moving or lovely, this is the one that interested me the most. Such a sign was apparently on the door of every campus building, to keep away the ghouls. I don’t think you’ll see this picture in the papers.

After a story about cave-man (and woman) sex (“So easy, a cave man can do it!”): “Now back to serious news–American Idol.”

Oh, Megyn, you used to sound so smart before you started doing that morning show.

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, on reflection, maybe she was being tongue in cheek. I’d certainly like to think so.

[Update a minute or so later]

Actually, now that I think about it some more, I just like to think about her tongue in a cheek. Maybe even mine.

But I probably shouldn’t have thoughts like that. I’m quite confident that my darling Patricia wouldn’t approve. Nor should she.

Nope. Not thinking about that at all.

Called Al Qaeda. (Democrat) John Wixted, on the prevalence of the false “civil war” meme:

Awareness of al Qaeda is slowly growing in the minds of mainstream media reporters who have been hamstrung by the civil war schema that they simply cannot get out of their heads. Even so, there is not the slightest mention of the fact that al Qaeda was probably behind yesterday’s bombing. Millions upon millions of readers of countless stories like this all over the world will read about that bombing and then shake their heads at the escalating “civil war” in Iraq. And then they will rage at George Bush for what he has done. Here is CNN’s coverage of that event, and, again, not the slightest hint that this was an attack by al Qaeda (because, I assume, the reporter thinks this was part of the civil war). The CNN story even notes that this was a suicide bomber. Many stories fail to mention that key detail. It is important because virtually all suicide bombers are members of al Qaeda, as I detailed here. As such, this bombing was not part of that civil war. It was another atrocity designed to provoke a civil war that has largely abated since the troop surge began. That’s the key distinction, and it cannot be emphasized often enough. People just don’t get it, so it needs to be explained repeatedly until they do. In fact, what’s missing from discussions by Bush and McCain and others who have the details right is the emphatic statement that these attacks are not part of the civil war; they are attempts by al Qaeda to provoke a civil war. Just stating that these attacks were perpetrated by al Qaeda does not go far enough to change the thinking of those whose minds are ensnared by an obsolete civil war schema. You have to specifically tell them that they are wrong to think like that. That gets their attention (because they are under the comfortable impression that the civil war debate was settled long ago), and it momentarily arouses disbelief (trust me — I’ve been down this path with people many times). When they are presented with incontrovertible facts regarding the role of al Qaeda in Iraq in a moment of disbelief, it has been my experience that minds change (including liberal minds). But you have to directly assert that these attacks are not examples of the civil war in action, nor do they represent sectarian violence. If you don’t, people have great difficulty assimilating the idea that attacks by Sunni al Qaeda against Shiite civilians do not constitute examples of sectarian violence/civil war.

His emphasis, not mine.

I recall reading in The Economist, many years ago, a leader (editorial to the Yanks) that described an anecdote about the British Foreign Service, in which one of the people was describing some benighted Third World former colony. “The problem they have, is that they lack a sense of irony.”

Apparently Reuters has the same problem.

Hey, one man’s anti-violence protester is another man’s Jihadist.

Any of my trolls going to try to defend this one?

And let’s see how long it stays up in that form.

[Update]

Oh, ye of little faith.

Here’s the link, Bill, from Yahoo. I’ll keep a screen shot of it, for when they decide to memoryhole it.