My Dad with his retirement congratulations certificate.

Going to my dad’s retirement dinner. Will try to post a picture or two.

Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd have resigned. I was right: heads had to roll.

I’ll post more later, when I’m home. Right now, I’m still in New York City (at Kinko’s). But, I’m sure Andrew Sullivan and Mickey Kaus and Glenn Reynolds will have plenty to say about this in the mean time. :)

UPDATE: Yeah, Dane, that’s about right. But, I’m still at Kinko’s, waiting for my mom to come get me, so I guess I might as well post a little more.

Personally, I’m happy about this, needless to say. I think it is a very good thing for the Times, not only because it properly holds the responsible parties accountable for the massive management failure that the Blair scandal represented, but also because a Raines-less Times may edge back toward being a “newspaper of record” instead of a newspaper of the political opposition. And that would be a good thing. Subtle bias is perhaps unavoidable; the problem is that, under Raines, the subtle bias become blatant, but of course remained officially unspoken and unacknowledged — and if that’s not the definition of hypocracy, I don’t know what is.

Andrew Sullivan, surprisingly, doesn’t have anything on this yet. (Perhaps he’s still sleeping. The man seems to be something of a night owl, judging from his frequent 3:00 AM posts. Not that I should talk.) Neither does Mickey Kaus, yet. Roger Simon does have some thoughts, though. He believes the resignations are “a harbinger of things to come,” in the sense that the blogosphere is having more and more influence on “big media.” I’m not sure how much that applies in the Times case, which seemed more like an internal revolt to me, but it certainly applies in this case, where the Guardian has been shamed by blogosphere fact-checkers into correcting its ideologically convenient and thus somewhat suspicious misquote of Paul Wolfowitz.

Anyway, getting back to the Times, you can get a complete listing of blogs that are linking to the story here (ranked by how recent the post is) or here (ranked by “blog authority,” i.e., how popular/well-respected the site is).

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here is Publisher Arthur Sulzberger’s memo to the Times staff. (Thanks, lostremote.)

Here is a Google News search for howell raines, which should produce pretty much all of the relevant news articles as they appear throughout the day.

As for blogosphere reaction… Dan Gillmore writes simply: “Wow.” Dody Gunawinata agrees with me about the accountability angle:

Good. It is a necessary step to restore the confidence of the newsroom of the top executive and the mass of the integrity of the newspaper. This action shows that they really understand that the buck really stops there.

Brainysmurf has a kind analysis:

A group of people, their motives and ethics questioned, their management eroded, took the honorable step of calling it quits for the good of the institution for which they spent a great part of their lives. They even had a decent track record: They won a record number of Pulitzers just 14 months ago.

Admitting failure and defeat is a difficult trait in humans, and even if they were practically forced to resign by the higher echelons of the NYT, I do think this is sooner than most people thought it might happen.

Then there’s this:

The editors should have resigned a long time ago for putting out a consistently boring paper filled with repetitive and overly-long articles which fail to inform or educate the reader.

Meanwhile, ScrappleFace reports:

Mr. Raines told reporters, “Not everyone gets the chance to retire at the top of his game, with a bunch of recent awards and his integrity intact. It’s a luxury I cherish.”

Mr. Boyd echoed those sentiments, but added that he’s leaving the Times “because I’m black.”

Hee hee. Fellow fake-news blog Fanatical Apathy, for its part, reports that the whole story may be a fraud: “Since day one, we’ve had to take the Times’ word about how unreliable its word was.” Heh.

FINAL UPDATE: Sullivan has posted! He, too, believes this is a victory for the blogosphere:

A few years ago, they would have been able to ride out the storm, using the Times’ enormous media power to protect themselves. But the Internet has changed things. It means that the errors and biases of the new NYT could be exposed not just once but dozens and dozens of times. It means that huge and powerful institutions such as the New York Times cannot get away with anything any more. The deference is over; and the truth will out.

Well, I guess so, sure. Mostly, though, I think it’s just a victory for accountability and truth and journalism as a whole. Obviously, Sullivan agrees with me on that:

It was about stopping a hugely important media institution from becoming completely captive to the elite left and a mercurial, power-crazy Southern liberal. Of course, that battle isn’t over. But the massive power-grab that Raines attempted was foiled in the end.

In NYC, but camera battery too low to take pictures, and I forgot the charger. :(

Hehe: U.S. Director of Central Intelligence William Tenet took himself into custody this morning under suspicion of having deceived himself about the extent of Iraq’s weapons development program.

Also: Today the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will approve a new set of rules allowing newspapers no one reads to buy TV stations no one watches. Again, hehe.

In an historic step toward peace between their two peoples, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas agreed in principle Wednesday that President Bush’s tie was “really garish.”

Sharon and Abbas were unable to agree, however, on the nature of Sharon’s tie, which Sharon referred to as “understated and classy,” while Abbas called it “kinda gay.” A Palestinian Authority spokesman later said, “I mean, c’mon. It’s sky blue.”

Thumbs up: I’ve done it! I can now post photos directly to this page, and they automatically display in a way that actually looks decent! Hurrah! I’m going to New York City tomorrow, so hopefully I’ll get a chance to post some pics from there. Stay tuned!

Check out this wonderful cap-and-gown-wearing monkey that Kim Stone, my honorary sister, gave me yesterday as a graduation present!

They’re obviously just trying to cover up their deep homosexual attraction to one another. :)

As usual with astronomical events, SpaceWeather.com has some great photos of Saturday’s partial/annular solar eclipse. In the one above, the sun looks a bit like the One Ring from Lord of the Rings, don’t you think?

Here’s a picture of the crescent sun rising in Germany:

And here’s one where, thanks to intervening clouds, the sun looks sort of like an orange Jupiter or Saturn (with a little bite off the left-hand side):

They’ve also got cool images from the aurora storm last week.

Move over, Michael Jackson. Out of the way, Scott Peterson. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… the criminal trial of Martha Stewart. Film at 11!

There are some great, vigorous discussions going on about liberal media bias and the search for Iraqi WMD. Keep those comments coming!

In the mean time, here is some more food for thought on the motivations of the antiwar crowd:

Given the choice which would you prefer:

B. George Bush is proven incorrect. No peace in Iraq. No peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Bush defeated.

Glenn Reynolds said, “The answer to that one is pathetically obvious.” I think he might be painting with an overly broad brush, at least implicitly, but there certainly are far too many antiwar folks who would prefer Option B, consciously or subconsciously.

(And no, Sean, discussing antiwar motivations is not an irrelevant ad-hominem attack. It’s a separate discussion from the one that deals with the rights and wrongs of the war, but it’s a legitimate and indeed important discussion in its own right.)

I bought a Sprint PCS Sanyo 8100 camera-phone yesterday. Above is a photo of the phone, taken by the phone. (The screen that’s visible is the “Sub LCD,” which turns on when the phone is closed. It also has a large LCD screen inside.)

Other photos taken with the camera and uploaded automatically to my blog are here and here and here!

I’m still looking for a better way to format them for upload, so that the pictures will actually appear on my homepage when I send them to the blog. For now, they only appear as links (see below), because otherwise the formatting would screw up the homepage. So, bear with me on that.

But even so, the whole thing is pretty cool.

It’s worth noting that I first discovered this camera phone nearly a month ago, while procrastinating at USC when I was supposed to be writing a paper. That same night, I also signed up for Audblog. So, see? Sometimes good things happen to those who procrastinate. Or at least, good things happen to their websites. :)

UPDATE: It’s working perfectly now!!! Thanks to the genius of Moveable Type “plugins” (and to several hours’ hard work perfecting the HTML/MT coding), I now have my blog set up so that all phone-posted images are formatted just the way I want them. In other words, they look pretty. :) The changes are retroactive, too, so even the earliest images are formatted propertly. Hooray!

My new phone, seen in the mirror.

Apparently the First Amendment does not apply in Florida, where a judge has ruled, on privacy grounds, that a former boyfriend of a former Miss Vermont cannot publish anything about her on his website — not her name, not her title, nothing. He’s even barred from linking to her website, a prohibition that a Cardozo law professor calls “kooky.”

The ruling also prohibits the ex-boyfriend, Tucker Max, from disclosing, digitally or verbally or by any other means, “any stories, facts or information, notwithstanding its truth, about any intimate or sexual acts engaged in by” himself and the ex-Miss Vermont, Katy Johnson. (emphasis added)

Yup, you read that right: a judge has ruled that this guy is not allowed to talk about his sexual history with this woman, even if what he’s saying is true. He’s been legally barred from discussing his own sex life!

The court-ordered prohibition of speech, verbal or written, before it occurs (or is published) is known, in First Amendment circles, as a “prior restraint.” Prior restraints are supposed to be virtually nonexistant in this country, reserved for only in the most extreme cases, such as news articles that would divulge the exact location of troops at war or the identities of CIA informants overseas — in other words, situations where, if the information is published, someone will surely die.

Prior restraints are not supposed to be used to protect reputation, damage to which can be repaired (or at least compensated for) through libel or invasion-of-privacy litigation after the fact.

InstaPundit’s Glenn Reynolds (himself a law professor at Tennessee) has nothing but scorn for this ruling, and I agree whole-heartedly.

Don’t get me wrong. For all I know, Tucker Max is probably a total scumbag, and although I can’t now read what he wrote about Katy Johnson — he removed it from his site in compliance with the order by the thought police, er, court — I probably would disapprove of it. But guaranteed freedoms have to apply to everyone, not just the people we approve of.

Morally, people shouldn’t deliberately hurt other people by publishing private information without their consent, unless they have some sort of very good reason to do so. But legally, this ruling is bulls**t.