George Moonbat Monbiot at the Guardian thinks Rupert Murdoch rules the world.

If you want to know how powerful Rupert Murdoch is, read the reviews of Bruce Dover's book, Rupert's Adventures in China. Well, go on, read them. You can't find any? I rest my case.

The Economist
Sydney Morning Herald
Australia's ABC radio
Business Week
Salon

On the charge that Murdoch had a review of the book in the Far Eastern Economic Review spiked, I found coverage in
The New York Times
The International Herald Tribune
Slate

If Murdock is all powerful, he sure is careless.

Left wing blogger and UCLA professor Mark Kleiman denounces the Pope's views on academic freedom, paraphrasing them as:

"You'e perfectly free to think anything you like, as long as you wind up agreeing with me."

After a while, you get used to university life working that way.

UPDATE: In the comments, Mark Kleiman is unhappy, to put it mildly, and says I have misrepresented his views. This, I think, is the relevant extract from his original post:

So that raises question #3: in the absence of a criminal conviction, does Yoos conduct warrant removal of tenure? I don't think so.

It wasn't committed in connection with his university duties. The act of giving advice to the President, even bad advice, isn't obviously inconsistent with competent academic performance. For a law faculty to set itself up as the judge of whether the advice Yoo gave fell so far below professional standards as to raise questions about his scholarly credentials, and to do so in a politically-charged atmosphere, strikes me both a terrible idea on its own merits and a precedent I'd hate to see established.

So, strange as it seems, I'm inclined to think that John Yoo belongs in prison (along with his client) but not to think that in the absence of a conviction he ought to be stripped of tenure.

Of course, that's not to say that Yoo's colleagues at Boalt have any obligation to give him collegial assistance in his scholarly work, have lunch with him, or even acknowledge his presence. I think the appropriate treatment is called "being sent to Coventry."

1. My post was snarky, which is okay, but I should have spelled out my point more specifically: Kleiman says the Pope praised academic freedom, but does not really believe in it, and my point was that Kleiman says he believes in academic freedom but does not seem to believe in it.
   
2. Kleiman''s post defends not academic freedom, but tenure. The charges against Yoo are political, and nothing, and I emphasize nothing, in Kleiman's post would offer any protection of Yoo's academic freedom if Yoo were untenured.
   
3. Kleiman's supposed defense of academic freedom consists of saying that Yoo should not be fired, he should be "sent to Coventry", that is, isolated and ignored. Is he serious? The point of academic freedom is to keep ideas from being suppressed, not job protection for people with advanced degrees. Kleiman calls for suppressing ideas, and thinks this serves academic freedom? Sorry, but this makes him as uncommitted to academic freedom as says the pope is.
   
4. I have seen this "sent to Coventry" game played lots of times, and it is pure thuggery. An example: when I taught at Northern Illinois University in the 1980s, a tenured sociologist did something deeply wicked: he admitted he was sufficiently unhappy with Michael Dukakis that he was thinking of breaking from being a lifelong Democrat to voting for Bush. Being isolated was the good part. On one occasion, he was carrying a pile of books down the hallway, and another member of the department elbowed him to knock the books down. Hothead that I am, I said he should he file a police complaint. He did not do so, because his field was the then fashionable field of gerontology, and he had lined up another (better paying) job. He did not want that job offer messed up by publicity, and he told me that in his next job, he would keep his voting plans to himself. Nothing like open discussion. (And that, frankly, is one of the less noxious cases of being sent to Coventry that I have encountered.)
   
5. I will be more general here: an important function of the tenure system is to ensure that only right thinking people get tenure and therefore get any sort of protection, so that they can deny academic freedom to the untenured. I will add a point I think I have made before. Hatred of the untenured by the tenured is common, and is partly driven by politics, as in "I think that bastard is a Republican", but is much more commonly driven by "that bastard already has three good papers, and I haven't done a lick of work in ten years, so he is getting the graduate students that I am entitled to". Nasty left wing politics have helped make universities rotten places, but vanity, entitlement, thuggery, and envy are much more consequential, and some of the finest defenders of academic freedom and energetic opponents of wretched academic thuggery I have known have been hard core leftists.
   

LAST UPDATE: The comments on belief in the update are misleading, because it distracts from the issue by focusing on what people really think, . So let me put it more simply. Kleiman criticized the Pope for offering a defense of academic freedom which he says actually undercuts it. I was amused, because Kleiman had just offered a defense of academic freedom which I though pretty clearly actually undercut it. Universities are like that: there are lots of opponents of academic freedom, and even its supporters frequently do it damage.

Everyone knows Bush has alienated Europe hopelessly. That is why Germany, France, and now Italy have pro-American governments. But of course there is Britain, where the left got all excited by pro-American Tony Blair's replacement by supposedly America-hostile Gordon Brown. So the left must be in a fury with today's Guardian headline:

Brown and Bush reignite that special relationship
Leaders see eye to eye on battle against terrorism, Iran sanctions and Mugabe

UPDATE: Abe Greenwald is a tad, but only a tad, less snarky than me on this point. And I note my snarkiness is partly a consequence of discovering that the demand for visas to the US is so big that it takes nearly a month to get a visa appointment at the US embassy in Dublin, even though the bulk of Irish passport holders do not need a visa.

The Guardian reports:

Sebastien Tellier, the electro-pop star who has been chosen to represent France at this year's kitsch sing-a-long, has incurred the wrath of the French establishment after it became clear that the song he is set to perform, Divine, contains some lyrics in English.

The New York Times has a boring piece about a boring event: hanging a picture of Madeleine Albright at the State Department. Sec. Rice hosted, and everyone was on good behavior because, well, because State Department types do that sort of thing. At the end, though, there was this bit of gossip:

While Ms. Rice has been busy stamping out speculation that she might consider a becoming the Republican vice presidential candidate, Ms. Albright — a supporter of Sen. Hillary Clinton — seemed to really miss her old job as secretary of state.
She allowed how much she envied those "still in the business of making foreign policy" and made clear that with myriad pursuits as a college professor, writer, consultant and chairman of the National Democratic Institute, she's not slowing down. "I still have miles to go and work to do," she insisted.
If Ms. Albright has any aspiration to reprise her role as secretary of state, though, she's going to have to get in line. Democrats Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Richard Holbrooke, a former United Nations Ambassador, among others, are jockeying for the position if there is a Democratic administration.

Kim Jong-il misses having Albright as secretary of state, too.

The Washington Post does a hit job on Jimmy Carter's trip, by the simple step of publishing a piece by Hamas foreign minister Mahmoud al-Zahar.

President Jimmy Carter's sensible plan to visit the Hamas leadership this week brings honesty and pragmatism to the Middle East

Duke "University", having not tried but convicted its lacrosse players in public, got all unhappy when the lacrosse players used the same tactic against them, so they tried to shut down the players' website, www.dukelawsuit.com. The judge told Duke, in really polite legal language, to drop dead.

U.S. District Court Judge James Beaty denied a motion by the University and Durham to sanction a Web site posted by lawyers of the 38 unindicted members of the 2005-2006 men's lacrosse team in a hearing Tuesday.

A few years ago, Ireland imposed a ban on smoking on pubs, imposed by the then health minister, Michael Martin. Martin is the sort of politician whose hand you don't want to shake, because you not only need to check for your wallet afterwards, but you need to shower as well. Martin was an inept minister whose jackboot stunt was a cover for his general ineptitude. The sad part about it was the way the Irish caved to this jackboot stunt. No objections, just meek surrender, even in Cork, which laughably calls itself the Rebel County. Hah.

So it was good to read this report in the Irish Independent by Ian O'Doherty.

Yeah yeah yeah, this column has been getting it in the neck for being so mean about those lovely Chinese, who only want to hold the Olympics without pesky Westerners banging on about human rights and democracy and all that namby pamby liberal hogwash.

But there are some things we can admire in them – – particularly the fortitude of their smokers. Furious at the proposed smoking ban in public places, the country of 350m puffers are quite simply refusing to obey.

In fact, when they tried to introduce the ban in one of Beijing's restaurants the smokers barricaded themselves inside the dining room and refused to either come out or allow the staff to enter until they had finished their fag.

Which, in a country where they run you over in a tank for talking about democracy, was a pretty brave thing to do.

Warning: vanity alert. I am as vain as the next academic, although I like to think I at least have the decency to be a little embarrassed by it. So stop reading here.

Holman Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal writes on the airline mergers, and notes:

We hesitate to tax a newspaper reader with theory, but a theory that fits is University of Chicago economist Lester Telser's "empty core" — which describes certain peculiar industry structures that are incapable of equilibrium.

Let's take it slowly: Businesses don't exist unless they can cover their costs, and yet airlines exist. Indeed, until Scotty gets the transporter beam working, commercial aviation is a hugely valuable product without a close substitute. But profits are chronically elusive. Why? To oversimplify, because the seats must fly whether they are empty or full, so competitive pressure drives carriers to provide more seats than they can fill and then to fill the seats by cutting fares close to marginal costs — i.e. the cost of a bag of peanuts and the wear a passenger's posterior inflicts on the upholstery.

Now before there was a University of Chicago, another industry faced a similar set of dynamics — scheduled ocean shipping. Steamship operators who were unfettered by certain modern regulatory notions devised a solution to the circumstances they encountered: They engaged in price fixing.

Such price fixing did not make scheduled shipping excessively profitable, but it did discourage shipowners from cutting rates below cost to fill up their ships before their scheduled departures. And their customers actually benefited, because it made the reliable service they sought economically viable.

William Sjostrom, of National University of Ireland, Cork, is your economist of authority here.

Michael Tomasky of the Guardian is really, really mad at Mayhill Fowler, who reported Obama's snide remarks about rural Pennsylvanians.

I have various quibbles, but let's cut right to the chase – namely, whether Fowler was playing by the rules in reporting Obama's remarks.

The Guardian comments are sometimes entertaining. I liked this one:

Let me summarise. The old journalism often amounted to a conspiracy between journalists and politicians against the public. Let "citizen journalists" in and the whole cosy arrangement is in danger of collapse, and the public are in danger of finding out what their lords and masters really think of them.

The ever reliable Tariq Ali announces, to no one surprise, that he wants Ken Livingstone re-elected as London's mayor.

The leaders of both the mainstream parties in Britain continue to support involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. And apart from the valiant but small group of antiwar campaigners, the country seems to have forgotten that a million Iraqis have died since the occupation of their country, three million have become refugees and millions in the country face the most horrendous conditions in their everyday lives. If a country considered hostile to the west had behaved in this fashion, the outcry would have been deafening.

I note in passing that a lot of commenters have made fun of old Tariq because the mayor of London does not exactly have a big role in decisions about going to war. This one struck me as particularly funny:

So with Ken Livingstone as Mayor the Greater London Army won't get itself embroiled in any messy conflicts.

Good to see the Guardian focussing of the real issues for once.

I think there are a lot of people in prison who do not belong there. But there are also a lot of people in prison who really, really belong there, to keep them away from the rest of us. Of course, that is pretty much non-controversial because I have said anything particularly useful, say, which prisoners fall into which category. You would no doubt think it pretty lame if I declared that the guy who committed eight ax murders should be there, but not the guy with four unpaid parking tickets. You would be right, of course, but that would put me way ahead of Marie Gottschalk, a political scientist at Penn, who bravely takes to the pages of the Washington Post to come out in favor of less incarceration.

Many of today's crime control policies fundamentally impede the economic, political and social advancement of the most disadvantaged blacks and members of other minority groups. Prison leaves them less likely to find gainful employment, vote, participate in other civic activities and maintain ties with their families and communities.

[Obama] generally has not focused on the perils of mass incarceration. Neither has Sen. Hillary Clinton, though the $4 billion anti-crime package she unveiled last week did call for elimination of the federal mandatory five-year sentence for minor crack cocaine violations.

I feel good this morning, and E.J. Dionne, the tedious lefty at the Washington Post who used to do good political reporting but mostly now just does banal commentary, gets the credit.

The Democratic presidential candidates are doing a splendid job of helping John McCain get to the White House.

Now then, back to piling on Obama. Thomas Sowell nails Obama and his supporters.

An e-mail from a reader said that, while Hillary Clinton tells lies, Barack Obama is himself a lie. That is becoming painfully apparent with each new revelation of how drastically his carefully crafted image this election year contrasts with what he has actually been saying and doing for many years. . . . However inconsistent Obama's words, his behavior has been remarkably consistent over the years. He has sought out and joined with the radical, anti-Western left, whether Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers of the terrorist Weatherman underground or pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli Rashid Khalidi.
.        .        .
It is understandable that young people are so strongly attracted to Obama. Youth is another name for inexperience –– and experience is what is most needed when dealing with skillful and charismatic demagogues.

Those of us old enough to have seen the type again and again over the years can no longer find them exciting. Instead, they are as tedious as they are dangerous.

Obama may be the fulfillment of modern liberalism. Explaining why many working class voters are "bitter," he said they "cling" to guns, religion and "antipathy to people who aren't like them" because of "frustrations." His implication was that their primitivism, superstition and bigotry are balm for resentments they feel because of America's grinding injustice.

By so speaking, Obama does fulfill liberalism's transformation since Franklin Roosevelt. What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its working people has become a doctrine of condescension toward those people and the supposedly coarse and vulgar country that pleases them.

When a supporter told Adlai Stevenson, the losing Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956, that thinking people supported him, Stevenson said, "Yes, but I need to win a majority." When another supporter told Stevenson, "You educated the people through your campaign," Stevenson replied, "But a lot of people flunked the course." Michael Barone, in "Our Country: The Shaping of America From Roosevelt to Reagan," wrote: "It is unthinkable that Roosevelt would ever have said those things or that such thoughts ever would have crossed his mind." Barone added: "Stevenson was the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle-class American culture –– the prototype of the liberal Democrat who would judge ordinary Americans by an abstract standard and find them wanting."

Stevenson, like Obama, energized young, educated professionals for whom, Barone wrote, "what was attractive was not his platform but his attitude." They sought from Stevenson "not so much changes in public policy as validation of their own cultural stance." They especially rejected "American exceptionalism, the notion that the United States was specially good and decent," rather than –– in Michelle Obama's words –– "just downright mean."

I had fun once before with Jacques Berlinerblau, a professor at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service specializing in Jewish studies. Once again, he gives me an excuse to be amused. Last night, Hillary and Obama went at each other at what was dubbed the "compassion forum" on faith and values at Messiah College in Pennsylvania. No surprise, since they are in a ferocious primary battle. This is how the New York Times describes the event:

Both Mrs. Clinton and Senator Barack Obama gave thoughtful, pious answers to questions about faith and moral values at the CNN event held at Messiah College near Harrisburg, Pa. But Mrs. Clinton, who spoke first, didn’t shrink from also going on the attack.

In answer to a question, she decried what she called Mr. Obama’s lack of faith in American values, labeling a description he gave of "bitter" voters in small-town Pennsylvania as "elitist, out of touch and, frankly, patronizing." And with a straight face, Mrs. Clinton simultaneously claimed the high ground, saying twice that she would allow Mr. Obama to speak for himself on the matter, noting "he does an excellent job of that."

When it was his turn, Mr. Obama tried to explain that his remark, which he said was "clumsy," had been misunderstood by critics and distorted for political gain by Mrs. Clinton. (Last week, he told donors in San Francisco that some working-class people "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them" as a way to explain their frustrations.) But the television camera has a way of zooming in on discomfort. Mr. Obama sounded defensive, and his explanations were stilted and uneven.

Ah, except of course for the silly professor. Berlinerblau wrote this about the forum the other day in the Washington Post:

y guess is that senators Obama and Clinton will discuss at length what they view as the wrongfulness of (the absent) John McCain’s policies, not to mention those of the party that he represents.

This raises the question as to why the Senator from Arizona declined the invitation to participate from the sponsoring group, Faith in Public Life.

One possibility is that he didn’t want to prevent the Democrats from continuing to kick one another’s heads in. The Obama and Clinton campaigns are not only sapping one another’s energy (and money) but graciously identifying weaknesses in one another’s candidates for the GOP to exploit in the fall.

Still, if this was McCain’s rationale I think he was mistaken. For my prediction is that Obama and Clinton will suppress their reflexes and refrain from enfilading one another. Those expecting a repeat of that raucous, zinger-filled Congressional Black Caucus Institute Debate with its parrying, pugilism and perfect ill-will are likely to be disappointed. On the contrary, the senators will be doing the discursive equivalent of wearing their Sunday Best.

One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.

The Guardian offers up what is surely old news:

Engineers argue that, as robots begin to form a bigger part of society, the new machines will need a way to interact with humans. In short, they will need artificial personalities.

This week, engineers, psychologists and computer scientists from across Europe will begin a major project that aims to develop the first robot personalities.