REMEMBERING PAUL WELLSTONE. From the time he entered the Senate, Paul Wellstone was someone about whom I was aware, if not particularly familiar. My first real exposure to him came during the 2000 presidential campaign. Wellstone was supporting Democratic candidate Bill Bradley, who struck me as a priggish jerk. Bradley couldn't make it onto one of the talking-heads shows, so Wellstone filled in. It was a revelation. He was smart, funny, charming, self-deprecating, and every bit the progressive that Bradley only pretended to be.

A little more than two years later, Wellstone died in a plane crash while campaigning for re-election in Minnesota. It was a tragedy that redounded doubly to the Republicans' benefit when they and their conservative media allies (Rush Limbaugh, Fox News) grotesquely exaggerated a few partisan moments that took place at Wellstone's memorial service.

Late Sunday afternoon, I dropped by the Old West Church, a few blocks from Government Center, to attend a Wellstone remembrance to benefit the Union of Minority Neighborhoods and Massachusetts Jobs with Justice. Several hundred people were jammed inside as the likes of Al Franken, Arianna Huffington, Jim Hightower, and Boston city councilor Chuck Turner paid tribute to the most progressive member of the Senate. Neither Boston daily covered the event. No, it wasn't newsworthy, but neither were the dozens of parties that the Globe and the Herald reported on today. For that matter, neither is the convention itself, unless you think there is some chance that the delegates are going to choose a ticket other than John Kerry and John Edwards.

The most noteworthy aspect of the tribute was the way that what one observer called "the responsible left and the looney left" invoked Wellstone's memory to advance their particular agenda. Franken, Huffington, and Hightower - the responsible left (and Franken isn't all that left) - insisted that Wellstone would be working hard for Kerry.

Indeed, Huffington, who got a big assist from Wellstone in organizing the lefty Shadow Conventions at the Democratic and Republican conventions four years ago, went so far as to say that Wellstone wouldn't have even wanted a Shadow Convention at the DNC this year, so committed would he have been to electing Kerry and defeating George W. Bush. "When your house is on fire, it's not the time for remodeling," she said.

Franken followed a rousing call by California congresswoman Barbara Lee to bring the troops home by arguing that that's "easier said than done," noting that Secretary of State Colin Powell had warned Bush that if he invaded Iraq, "You break it, you own it." He also puckishly suggested that Kerry recycle one of Bush's 2000 campaign slogans - "I'm a uniter, not a divider" - with the difference being that Kerry could actually mean it.

Yet the uneasy alliance between the Democratic Party and the far left was laid bare by Turner - and the raucous applause he received for his extremist remarks. Turner - last seen unveiling porno shots at City Hall and claiming they depicted American troops raping Iraqi women - compared Wellstone to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., quoting King as saying, "We have to get rid of militarism, materialism, and racism if we are to be a whole and healthy country."

So far, so good. But then Turner asserted that King "was killed by government forces.... I believe it. Hopefully you believe it." Now it's true that conspiracy theories abound about King's assassination, and that the King family itself believes them. But all credible evidence points to the guilt of one lone racist, James Earl Ray. Never mind. The crowd applauded.

Turner continued: "Brothers and sisters, let's be real. The military-industrial complex has control of both parties." More loud applause. Okay, I suppose you could make the point with Halliburton. But both parties? The Democrats are not pure, but come on.

Turner also accused Kerry, like Bill Clinton, of being "controlled" by the Democratic Leadership Council, a "New Democrat" group of moderate centrists. "Kerry isn't prepared - mentally, emotionally, spiritually - to be the president we need," said Turner, arguing that though he supports Kerry's election, progressives will have to pressure him from the left if he becomes president. Now, Kerry isn't Wellstone, but he's considerably more liberal than Clinton.

"We can purge the cancer from the soul of the body politic," Turner said. And, returning to the King theme, he concluded, "If there's nothing worth living for, there's nothing worth dying for." The applause was loud and intense, punctuated by a few dozen people giving him a standing ovation.

Turner's remarks represented exactly what Kerry doesn't need if he's going to defeat Bush: a hard-left wing supporting him while simultaneously hectoring him, overladen with anger and conspiracy theories. It's too bad Paul Wellstone wasn't there to stand up to Turner's stridency.

MORE ALLEGED NEWS. Will the dinosaurs of broadcast journalism please stop whining about the fact that the networks are showing only three hours of the Democratic convention this week? PBS's Jim Lehrer was aghast at Sunday's Shorenstein Center get-together, as Mark Jurkowitz reports in today's Boston Globe.

To which I say: the networks should cover news, and there is no news to be made this week. Conventions used to pick the candidates; now primary voters and caucus-goers do that. Why there needs to be obligatory coverage of anything other than the speeches of the presidential and vice-presidential speeches is beyond me.

Lehrer called the DNC "four of the eight most important days we can possibly have as a nation." Good Lord! Not even close. The debates - which you'd think Lehrer might have some recollection of, given that he's passively presided over a few of them - are infinitely more important.

Today people have choices. An enormous amount of convention coverage is being carried by CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, C-SPAN, and, for those who don't get cable, Lehrer's own PBS. Essentially Lehrer is arguing that viewers should be forced to watch an infomercial. Gee, maybe the off switch could be remotely disabled this week as well.

THE RIGHT WING AND THE NETWORK NEWSCASTS. Do the major network newscasts bend in the face of conservative and corporate pressure? At a panel discussion on Sunday at Harvard's Kennedy School, the Big Three news anchors - Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Peter Jennings - all said no. But they admitted that the pressure is real, and is something they feel.

It was Rather who broached the topic. As he put it, there are certain types of stories where "you can't afford to be wrong," adding, "That can be a positive or it can be a negative." If it means more checking or possibly holding a story for a day, he explained, that could be a good thing. But, he warned, someone inside the network might kill it, saying, "You know what? This story is going to be trouble with a capital 'T.'"

NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw followed Rather by observing that the pressure has always been there. But now, he said, it's easier to apply that pressure - "just flip a switch" and the e-mails come flooding in, spurred by conservative media activists like Brent Bozell. Brokaw added that he has someone screen his e-mails for him - he deliberately avoids wading through all of them himself lest he be overly influenced.

Which led Jennings to walk up closest to the edge of admitting that, yes, conservative groups do influence the news. "I hear more about conservative concerns than I did in the past," Jennings said. Just recently, he said, a man walked up to him and yelled, "America-hater, leave the country immediately!" This "wave of resentment," Jennings said, has found its way to "the corporate suite" and to advertisers, which these days are urging greater caution.

It was an enlightening moment. But the crack Jennings had opened was closed quickly. Rather responded to Jennings's remarks by saying that he has never gotten any pressure to change the content of his newscast. "At CBS I have not felt this one iota," he said. To which Jennings chimed in, "My boss has been terrific, too ... 100 percent supportive.... But I feel the pressure of the anger all the time."

And Brokaw slammed the door shut by observing that conservative voices were almost never heard in the 1960s, leading to the culture of resentment that prevails among those on the right today. So there you have it: the conservatives are angry, and they attempt to use their power to influence the evening newscasts. America's best-known anchors acknowledge the anger, feel the pressure, and, in Jennings's case, admit that the corporate bosses and the advertisers would rather appease the right-wingers than tell them to shut up and go away. But none of this, we are to understand, actually has an effect on the nightly news.

What's frightening about this is the Big Three might actually be right. It may be that their prestige and long record of accomplishment allows them to protect their newscasts from the crassest of market and political pressures. Once they pass from the scene - and Brokaw's retirement has already been scheduled, with Rather and Jennings perhaps to leave before the 2008 election - who's to say whether their successors will be able (or be allowed) to take the heat?

Sunday's event was sponsored by the Kennedy School's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. Center director Alex Jones moderated, and pushed the participants hard. Jones began by asking whether they should do a better job of pointing out when politicians and public officials are not telling the truth. You can't do "he said/she said," Jones noted, when people are saying things that "aren't true."

"It's not my job to say, 'Candidate Y is lying,'" Rather replied, explaining his job is to report that one person said this, one person said that, and here are the facts.

But is that really the case? As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and others have noted, major news organizations in 2000 repeatedly allowed then-candidate George W. Bush to deny Al Gore's claim that Bush's proposed tax cut would disproporationately benefit the wealthy. The problem, of course, was that Gore was right on the mark and Bush was - well, lying.

If anything, Jim Lehrer, the anchor for PBS's The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, was even more emphatic than Rather. The mild-mannered Lehrer said, "I am never tempted to yell, 'Liar!'", making his point so loudly that the audience burst out laughing. He added, "I am not a lie-detector machine, that is not my function.... There are very few things that are black and white.... For journalists to declare, 'This guy is a liar and that guy is not a liar' is risky business, and those of us in the mainstream don't do it."

The fifth member of the panel, Judy Woodruff, anchor of CNN's Inside Politics, expanded on Lehrer's point, saying, "Politicians have always shaded the truth." Her examples: Franklin Roosevelt's promise to balance the budget, John Kennedy's fear-mongering about a phony "missile gap," and Richard Nixon's "secret plan" to end the Vietnam War. Much of what politicians say is "shaded," she said, noting that a point about the economy will be made on the basis of wages or household income depending on which is more supportive of that point.

To which a somewhat exasperated Jones replied, "If everything is true, then where am I?"

What Jones was driving at, though he didn't say the word, was that there are real limits to that old-fashioned concept of "objectivity." Journalists are used to covering "both" sides (as if there was always a duopoly when it comes to the matter of sides), and letting the reader or viewer or listener sort it out. But what qualifications does a news consumer have to sort things out? If Bush - or, for that matter, John Kerry - is clearly lying, isn't it better for Dan Rather to tell his 10 million or so viewers rather than to require that they figure it out for themselves?

Another way of getting at this was articulated by Democratic congresswoman Anna Eshoo, of California, who asked whether the networks could have done anything differently in the run-up to the war on Iraq. Rather replied that when the president tells the public that there is a direct threat to their security, there is "heavy prejudice" to take him at his word. "I'm not apologizing" for that presumption, Rather said, but allowed that tougher questions should have been asked. Added Brokaw: "It was our responsibility to put up more caution signs than we did."

Jennings, by contrast, said that ABC News - and especially Nightline - repeatedly pointed out how little evidence there was that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had ties to Al Qaeda.

Granted, there is no way the network newscasts could have prevented Bush from going to war, even though, with their combined audience of 20 million to 30 million viewers per night, they remain the largest, most influential news media in the country. And as Rather properly observed, this was not a story that could have been reported independently: reporters could not travel to Iraq and determine whether Saddam Hussein had WMD. Remember, the UN had an entire team of inspectors swarming across the country, and they were unable to reach any definitive conclusions in the short time that Bush gave them before going to war.

But even the New York Times has acknowledged that it was too credulous in its coverage of the White House's claims about Iraq. It was not a shining moment for the media.

BUSH TO FOREIGN REPORTERS: SCREW! The international media have been notably critical of the Bush administration for thumbing its nose as the world before, during, and after the war in Iraq. Well, the Bushies know how to get even.

According to MediaNation - a joint project of Harvard's Nieman Foundation and UMass Boston - the White House has cut the $15,000 to $25,000 normally budgeted for helping some 400 foreign reporters navigate the two political conventions.

The story, by Seth Effron, will likely appear in MediaNation's print debut, in tomorrow's Boston Globe. But you can read it now.

IS THIS ANY WAY TO RUN A CONVENTION? After getting my credentials, I decided to check out the media center at the DNC this afternoon. Big mistake! I couldn't get my umbrella through security; an apologetic guard told me umbrellas have been classified as contraband, but that I could get it back at a table on the way out. (Wrong.)

Then, no one seemed to know how to find the media filing center for reporters who are not affiliated with large organizations that are renting their own space. A few of us finally located it, on the third floor of the FleetCenter (nice, actually, since the big orgs are stuck in a tent outside), but some techs were still setting up the Ethernet network.

So my plan to blog earlier today was put off till this evening, when I was able to get onto the Net from a Starbucks in Harvard Square.

Tomorrow will be different. I hope.

THE DIVIDED ELECTORATE. More evidence that this year's election may be about the passionate base of each party rather than swing voters: the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, which shows that 79 percent of potential voters have already made up their minds, up from 64 percent at the same stage of the campaign four years ago. Times reporter Robin Toner writes:

Rarely has a presidential campaign been this intense, this polarized, this partisan, this early. The conventions historically begin the general election season, ending a lull after the primary season has wound down. But for months now, the general election battle has been fully joined.

Which is why Franklin Foer's New Republic piece (sub. req.) on consultant Bob Shrum's takeover of the Democratic Party, and of the Kerry campaign, raises some worries about Kerry's chances. Foer's main point about Shrum is that he's not as bad as you've heard. (Well, that's a relief!) But his secondary point is that Shrum is a master of focus groups and day-to-day tactics, not strategy and vision. Foer observes:

In truth, Shrum's greatest weakness is not the ideological inflexibility for which he's often derided - even in private he did not urge Kerry to take more liberal positions on gay marriage and the Iraq war - but rather a strategic myopia. According to one consultant who has worked with Shrum, in the heat of a campaign, "He's far more tuned into focus groups and polling data than moral arguments." He has a gift for churning out pithy lines and spin that will win a newscycle but a harder time devising a grand message for the campaign. He may be an excellent tactician, but former congressman Tony Coelho, who chaired the Gore campaign, told me, "My concern is how good of a strategist he is. In the campaign, Shrum against Karl Rove, I'm not sure that we end up with the long stick." Indeed, during the Kerry campaign, Shrum hasn't produced anything comparable to the leitmotifs that Rove provided Bush in 2000. There's nothing akin to Bush's "compassionate conservatism" or his relentless emphasis on "restoring honor and dignity to the Oval Office" - or, for that matter, to Edwards's "two Americas."

Of course, if ever there was a candidate who needed help in crafting his million-and-one policy ideas into a grand strategy, it's John Kerry. But given that Shrum also has a reputation for not playing well with others, it may become difficult for the campaign to reach out and help Kerry translate his myriad little thoughts into two or three Big Thoughts.

MEDIA! CELEBS! (WELL ...) FOOD! BOOZE! Nice to see the new South Boston convention center filled last night at the Boston Globe-sponsored media party. It could be a while before it's filled again. It would have been a great place for the Democratic National Convention. Why didn't somebody think of that?

The celebrity-journalist quotient was rather low, which may have had something to do with the fact that it was held on Saturday rather than Sunday, when much of the media arrives. The Reverend Jesse Jackson and Bill Russell were there, and Little Richard performed. The most notable media celeb I ran into was New York Times columnist David Brooks, a nice guy whose very aura exudes "Not a Media Celeb."

The Globe spent a reported $500,000 on the party. The food was great and the booze was free - wasted on those of us who had to drive home. The best-line-of-the-night award goes to WLVI-TV (Channel 56) political analyst Jon Keller, who told the Globe's Geoff Edgers: "It's a good marketing ploy for the convention center, and I thank the Globe for the free beer, but Ferris wheels and open bars are a dangerous combination."

Yes, there was a Ferris wheel. No, Media Log did not get on it.

THE CLINTON NON-SCANDALS REVISITED. A confession: the scales didn't fall from my eyes until September 1998, when Bill Clinton's nemesis, special prosecutor Ken Starr, issued his pornographic report. Up until then, I had actually believed that Starr would somehow tie the Monica Lewinsky matter to Whitewater. My favorite theory was that Clinton associate Vernon Jordan, who had attempted to find a job for Lewinsky, could be pressured into testifying about what if any favors he had done for Clinton's crooked friend Webster Hubbell, who was maintaining his silence from his prison cell.

The Starr Report removed all such illusions. Suddenly, the entire country knew (and believe me, the country was ahead of most of us in the media) that the president was being pursued by an out-of-control right-wing extremist whose obsession with sex revealed a highly disturbed mind. The fever broke, and Clinton's presidency survived, though it was permanently weakened.

Those events still seem so recent - and so irrelevant following 9/11 - that I wasn't sure I wanted to relive them. But on Friday evening, I saw a new documentary about the Clinton non-scandals by Clinton buddy Harry Thomason and Nickolas Perry, The Hunting of the President, at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. Based on Joe Conason and Gene Lyons's book The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill Clinton, the film is flawed, and it's difficult to see where it's going to find an audience. Fahrenheit 9/11 it isn't. Yet it does manage to bring home in an occasionally powerful way the madness that gripped the media and political worlds before and during Clinton's presidency, all of it driven by - as Hillary Clinton memorably called it - the vast right-wing conspiracy.

First, the flaws. I nearly laughed when, near the beginning, journalist-turned-Clinton-aide Sidney Blumenthal smugly explained that the right decided to destroy Clinton because it feared the change he represented. You may recall that during his first two years in the White House, Clinton bet his presidency on forming alliances with corrupt hacks like Dan Rostenkowski, who eventually went to prison. Later Clinton hooked up with such noted reformers as Dick Morris. Clinton's alleged reformist zeal couldn't have been detected with a microscope. If he had been more of a reformer, he might have made more of a mark.

Also, Thomason and Perry don't trust the audience's attention span. The Hunting of the President is edited as though it were made for MTV, with head-whipping scene changes and a liberal use of clips from old black-and-white movies to inject a note of fun into the proceedings. It doesn't work.

But there is much of value here, as Thomason and Perry meticulously recount the Arkansas branch of the Clinton scandals, none of which ever amounted to a damn thing. Most important, we see Ken Starr for what he was: a politically motivated Republican activist, an ideological extremist with absolutely no integrity. It is amazing that, to this day, Starr has not been disbarred or otherwise sanctioned for his grotesque abuse of office. Far from it: in April, Starr was named dean of Pepperdine University's school of law, an institution that has benefited from the generosity of another right-wing extremist and fellow-traveler in the Arkansas wars, Richard Mellon Scaife. It's a job that Starr nearly took in the middle of the Whitewater investigation. Too bad he didn't.

The undisputed star of The Hunting of the President is Susan McDougal, the woman who would not lie. In a long, emotional interview, McDougal recounts how her ex-husband, the late Jim McDougal, terrified of being sent to prison, urged her to go along with Starr and his gang, who were trying to get her to fabricate a story and testify about illegal business dealings with Bill and/or Hillary Clinton. She recalls her ex-husband telling her, "They'll give you the story - you don't have to worry about it." She wouldn't do it, and she served hard time for that refusal, being imprisoned in a ward for child-killing mothers, locked in a cage on bus on the way to court appearances as male prisoners masturbated in front of her and urinated on her.

Dan Moldea, the author of A Washington Tragedy: How the Death of Vincent Foster Ignited a Political Firestorm, expresses disgust to Thomason and Perry about the media's complicity in amplifying Starr's leaks in order to move the scandal forward, calling it "the most corrupt journalism" he'd ever seen. Newsweek's Jonathan Alter talks about how socially unacceptable it was within media circles for a journalist to write or say anything positive about the Clintons. The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz recalls the media burying a story about the Clintons' being cleared of some fairly serious Whitewater allegations.

The Hunting of the President begins and ends with Arkansas senator Dale Bumpers's memorable speech during Clinton's Senate impeachment trial, in which he said, "When they say it's not about sex, it's about sex." That would be bad enough. The deeper truth, though, is that it wasn't even about sex. It was about getting Clinton by any means necessary.

It's impossible to know whether Clinton could have been a great president, but we do know this: given the 10-year-long witch hunt devoted to destroying him and his wife, he really never had a chance to do much more than hang on and survive.

And Clinton's enemies on the right and in the media are still at large. They helped destroy Al Gore's campaign four years ago, and they're primed to go after John Kerry today. Amid the celebrating in Boston this coming week, Kerry's strategists had better be ready for what's to come. Because Scaife, Starr, and their fellow right-wing thugs make Karl Rove look like a weenie.

STAY TUNED THIS WEEKEND! I'll be blogging daily at and around the Democratic National Convention, including throughout this weekend, so if you're not an e-mail subscriber to Media Log, please check in frequently. I'm going to try to take a camera to some events and post those as well.

Also, the Phoenix staff will be posting reports all week here.

NO MORE MUSH FOR THE MUDDLED. Consider the Undecided Voter. He or she is a sorry specimen. Though surely there are some undecideds who are knowledgeable about and interested in politics, the general rule is that our U.V. is disconnected, unaware, bored, and will, in the end, choose on the basis of John Kerry's hair, or George W. Bush's smirk.

The quest for the U.V. is why presidential candidates generally say so little that matters. Look at the 2000 race, a time when - if you listened to the campaign rhetoric - it appeared that the most important issue on the face of the earth was whether senior citizens could afford their prescription drugs. Now, this is not an issue without importance. Still, it was perfectly obviously that Bush's and Al Gore's handlers had decided this was the best way of appealing to that narrow sliver of undecided voters without alienating anyone who had already decided to support them. It wasn't pretty.

But things may be different this time. The Boston Globe's Anne Kornblut and Susan Milligan reported recently on the Bush phenomenon of catering to the conservative base in hopes of driving up turnout. They quoted anti-tax activist Grover Norquist as saying, "Forty-five percent of the country is for Bush, forty-five percent of the country is for Kerry. How much time do you spend trying to talk to the 10 percent in the middle who don't know what they think?"

The conventional wisdom is that this opens up some room for Kerry in the middle, and perhaps it does. But what if Norquist's 45-45 figure is actually too low? What if it's more like 48-48, with four percent undecided (with a point or two for Ralph Nader)?

That may indeed be the case. Last night, I attended an event at the Mary Baker Eddy Library in which three Christian Science Monitor journalists - White House reporter Linda Feldmann, political reporter Liz Marlantes, and editor Paul Van Slambrouck, who moderated - kicked it around. What struck me about Feldmann's and Marlantes's observations was that, in 2004, almost no one is undecided.

Unlike 2000, this is seen as an important race about vital issues. "In this election, it seems that everything is on the table," said Feldmann - war, terrorism, foreign relations, the economy, and lesser but highly polarizing issues such as same-sex marriage and Supreme Court appointments. As a result, she noted, a recent poll showed that the level of voter engagement is already the same as it was in October 2000, just before that election.

"There are precious few undecided voters out there," said Marlantes. She observed that she recently interviewed potential voters in Pennsylvania, one of about 17 swing states, and found that "people are very, very sure which way they're going to vote."

At that point, Van Slambrouck asked for a show of hands from the several hundred people in the audience. Who, he asked, is undecided? Maybe three hands went up.

Which raises an interesting possibility for the Kerry campaign. Whether you support Kerry or not, you have to concede that his greatest difficulty as a politician is his reluctance to take clear, decisive stands on issues. Partly this is admirable - we live in a world of nuance and grays, and someone who understands that would be an obvious improvement over what we've got now. But Kerry takes it to a new level. As Marlantes observed, when it comes to specific issues, Kerry may not be any more of a flip-flopper than Bush. (Remember compassionate conservatism? The faith-based initiative? The promise to stay away from nation-building?) But Kerry, she said, has the "personality" of someone who doesn't come off as particularly decisive.

But if there more votes to be gotten by appealing to the Democratic base rather than pandering to the U.V.s in the middle, Kerry has an opportunity to articulate a clear vision of what he wants to do with the presidency should he win it.

It will start with the Democratic National Convention. I asked Marlantes and Feldmann what they think Kerry most needs to get out of the event. Their answers fit well with the drive-up-your base scenario. Marlantes said Kerry needs to introduce himself to the country - even to those who already say they support him, noting that, to an unprecedented degree, the public is choosing on the basis of party affiliation rather than person. "A lot of voters still say they don't know very much about John Kerry," Marlantes said. Added Feldmann: "This convention is essentially a big pep rally. They want Democrats to get excited."

What this could add up to is something very different from- and potentially better than - the mush to which we've been subjected in recent years. In honor of Dick Morris, call it the End of Triangulation.

WHAT IF THE U.S. WERE MORE LIKE MASSACHUSETTS? There were would be more cops and less crime. There would be higher taxes, but much higher incomes. There would be more bipartisanship and ticket-splitting. The country would be more liberal, but not by as much as out-of-staters might think.

Something for Democratic National Convention delegates to ponder in the latest CommonWealth magazine.

TECH UPDATE. The celebrating was premature, but now it's official: I managed to get Claris Home Page back onto my iBook, so the formatting problems of the past week should be history.

NO GUTS, DEFINITELY NO GLORY. Margaret Cho joins Whoopi Goldberg and Linda Ronstadt on the list of liberal performers who are paying the price for their beliefs. Unlike Goldberg and Ronstadt, though, Cho is being censored in advance. According to this press release, Cho has been dropped from a Unity ’04 event, scheduled for Avalon in Boston on Monday night, out of fear that her provocative material might harm John Kerry.

Cho's manager, Karen Taussig, tells 365Gay.com:

I am not surprised at the reversal in light of how the Kerry campaign has distanced itself from Whoopi's routine in response to the unrelenting media hype and Republican criticism. It's Whoopi's job as a comedian to say things that are sometimes shocking. I wish they could have backed her up. Dennis Miller can make gay jokes about Senators Kerry and Edwards at a recent Bush rally in Wisconsin to a complete absence of media scrutiny. No one demanded a tape of that event or alleged that his comments as a comedian might reflect poorly on Bush.

According to this AP report, a new bit by Cho on the Iraqi prison scandal is so over-the-top that she had to be escorted from the stage. And the problem is what, exactly?

Perhaps the Kerry campaign didn't have anything to do with this. Perhaps the Human Rights Campaign and the other gay-rights groups organizing this event did it on their own, not wanting to embarrass the nominee.

If that's the case, there's a simple solution. Kerry should personally re-invite Cho back onto the program. After all, if this is how the Democrats and their allies are going to behave, what, precisely, is the point of having Democrats?

QUITE POSSIBLY THE LAST REVIEW OF FAHRENHEIT 9/11 THAT YOU'LL EVER READ. Media Log kicks off its official coverage of the Democratic National Convention today with a review of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. (Click here for Peter Keough's Phoenix review.) I realize that I'm late to the scene, but hey, I've been busy. But since yesterday afternoon was relatively unscheduled, I figured I'd hop over to Harvard Square and watch it with a sympathetic audience.

That turned out to be Mistake #1: rather than the rapturous crowds I'd heard about from the likes of Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman, applauding Moore's every Bush-bashing touch, there were maybe a half-dozen of us. My fellow theater-goers looked, for the most part, like they were trying to get out of the heat as much as they were hoping for some good old-fashioned left-wing agit-prop.

Mistake #2 was thinking that Fahrenheit 9/11 was going to suck. I've never been a fan of factual distortion, regardless of ideology. I'd read Christopher Hitchens's monumental takedown of Moore in Slate, as well as Newsweek's dissections of Moore's alleged problems with the truth (click here and here). The film also did not get off to a promising start in its evocation of the Florida fiasco. Moore, like many unthinking critics, suggested that there was something sinister about Bush's cousin John Ellis making the call from his post at the Fox News Channel. Well, I know Ellis, and I know that he's a good guy. He also happens to be a professional pollster whose job it is to get it right. Perhaps he shouldn't have let himself get wedged into such an awkward position (although he's got a right to make a living, doesn't he?). But he'd be the first one to tell you that the screw-ups that night - not just his, as you may recall - were bad for business.

Then a funny thing happened. I became totally engrossed in Moore's take on the Bush presidency. It was as though we had arrived at roughly the same place by traveling different routes. Moore takes up permanent residence on the wilder edges of Bush-bashing. His insinuation that George W. Bush was slow to act against Al Qaeda because of his family's business ties with Saudi Arabia and the bin Laden family is unsupported. And, as has been widely reported, one of Moore's accusations more or less blew up in his face when former counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke, hardly a Bush fan, took personal responsibility for letting the bin Laden family fly out of the country.

But on broad, thematic, big-picture stuff, Moore has it right, and presents it in a way that is both funny and moving. Critics have gone after Moore for making fun of Bush as he sat stone-faced in that Florida classroom for seven minutes after learning that the second World Trade Center tower had been hit. Well, why? After all, he knew at that point that the country was under attack. Didn't occur to him that he could have politely excused himself and then gone and made a decision or something? (Oh, right; that's what Cheney's for.)

Moore has also been criticized for exploiting Lila Lipscomb, whose son, Michael, a sergeant in the Army, was killed in Iraq. Indeed, Moore depicts Lipscomb's grief in the rawest manner imaginable. But there's also no doubt that Lipscomb wanted Moore to be there - to get out the message that this former conservative Democratic war supporter has been radicalized by the death of her son, and that she wants others to know what is going on in Iraq. Here's what Lipscomb told the Guardian recently:

The reason I didn't hesitate was because I was carrying my son's words with me. And as a mother I have to carry each and every day the fact, could I have done a little bit more? Could I have been more vocal so that the president would not have been given that much authority within himself? And nobody can make that go away. My son got sent into harm's way by a decision made by the president of the United States that was based on a lie. Would my son still be here today if I had had my uprising then?

Of course, war is a terrible thing, and intellectually we understand that Lipscomb's grief was amplified thousands of times over in World War II, just as we understand that Moore's depiction of normal, happy people in Iraq before the war is completely at odds with the totalitarian terror with which Saddam Hussein ruled his country.

But we also know that the world is an ugly, complicated place - that Iran and North Korea, and, yes, so-called friends such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia may be bigger threats to the US than Iraq was. We now know that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and no real ties to Al Qaeda (unlike Iran). More than 900 American soldiers have been killed, and we're placing all our hopes in an appointed prime minister who may turn out to be Saddam Lite. The international community was right. Bush was wrong.

The Bush presidency has been a tragedy in many ways - for the country and for the world. A few factual quibbles aside, Moore has captured that tragedy. If the Democrats had any guts, they'd show Fahrenheit 9/11 on one of those big plasma screens at the FleetCenter next week.

MEDIA LOG'S ASSIGNMENT DESK KICKS INTO GEAR! The Globe's Hiawatha Bray has a good piece today on how WiFi-equipped laptops may be a security threat at the Democratic National Convention. According to Bray, there won't be any WiFi inside the media area, and laptops may be rendered unusable unless the WiFi card is turned off.

Okay. Now, Hiawatha, for your next piece, please investigate this lead paragraph from an article in Tuesday's New York Times:

Work spaces have been assigned and wireless Internet access has been arranged. Phone lines, electric outlets, parking spots for satellite trucks: all are details being worked out for the massive media center that will be created in Midtown Manhattan for the Republican National Convention at the end of August.

Why New York and not Boston? Why the Republicans and not the Democrats? Why the Yankees - oh, never mind. Just find out, okay?

HOWIE CARR, "SIMPERING CLOWN." Bob Somerby nails the bad boy of the Boston Herald and WRKO Radio (AM 680). (Scroll down a bit.)

TECH NOTES. As you might have surmised, Media Log is back at full computational strength. The Apple store was able to restore my data, but I had to reinstall the software myself. My coal-era Web-design program, Claris Home Page, would not install, so I'm using the free Mozilla Composer. It has some nice features - for one thing, I like not having to switch back and forth between OS 9 and X. However, it leaves a few things to be desired.

If anyone has a suggestion for a good, cheap WYSIWYG Web-design program for OS X, I'm all ears.

On the bright side, I got upgraded to Panther. Nice file management!

NEW IN THIS WEEK'S PHOENIX. A delegate's guide to the Boston media. Plus, a breathtakingly incomplete guide to the national political press.

DOING THE RIGHT THING. Sandy Berger stepped aside from John Kerry's presidential campaign almost immediately yesterday, which shows that he understands the seriousness of the charges against him. Even if his removal of highly classified documents from the National Archives was inadvertent - even if he didn't stuff them in his socks - he's nevertheless made himself radioactive to Kerry's presidential hopes.

This Washington Post story, by Susan Schmidt, is much tougher and more informative than Eric Lichtblau's effort in the New York Times.

Fortunately for Kerry, the Republicans may already be overplaying their hand. According to Schmidt, Georgia senator Saxby Chambliss, who won his seat in part by impugning the patriotism of triple-amputee war veteran Max Cleland, is charging that Berger supplied stolen documents to the Kerry campaign. His evidence ... well, he doesn't have any.

TENSION CITY! As Bush 41 used to say. Or was that Dana Carvey? Last night I went to the local Apple store to pick up my iBook, which had blown its logic board the previous week. The hard drive had been (gasp) reformatted!

Supposedly the drive had been completely backed up at the store before it was shipped out. It says so right on the receipt, which I have been staring at with the hopefulness of a child staring up the chimney on Christmas Eve. But the guy who waited on me had no way of checking that out. So I find out this morning whether I've lost any data, including several years' worth of photos.

Yes, I should have a better backup strategy, but such things are expensive. Not as expensive as this, though. Media Log's fingers, toes, arms, and legs are crossed. And if Steve Jobs spares me, I promise to get an external Firewire drive.

A NATIONAL-SECURITY CRISIS FOR KERRY. For the second time in recent weeks, a respected national-security adviser to John Kerry has gone into total-meltdown mode. First it was Joseph Wilson, the former ambassador who visited Niger in February 2002 to investigate claims that Iraq had sought to buy yellowcake uranium. Wilson loudly and publicly complained that the White House had ignored his finding that there was nothing to the Iraq-Niger connection. He also denied that his wife, CIA covert officer Valerie Plame, whose identity was revealed in a Robert Novak column, had recommended him for the mission.   Thanks to the Senate Intelligence Committee report and Wilson's own book, we now know that Wilson actually did stumble across evidence that Saddam Hussein's agents may have attempted to buy Nigerien yellowcake as recently as 1999. The committee also found that Plame recommended her husband in pretty strong terms. That makes it seem likely that whoever outed her to Novak was doing so not as political retribution, but to explain how it was that Wilson came to be chosen for a mission for which he was clearly unqualified.   Wilson defends himself in this Salon story. I'm unimpressed.   It gets worse. Now comes word that Sandy Berger, Bill Clinton's national-security adviser, is under investigation for having removed classified documents from the National Archives in connection with his testimony before the 9/11 commission. "Sandy Berger Probed over Terror Memos" is the headline on this Fox News story. Check this out:

Berger and his lawyer said Monday night he knowingly removed the handwritten notes by placing them in his jacket, pants and socks, and also inadvertently took copies of actual classified documents in a leather portfolio.

How stupid can you get?   I mention Fox because you know that Hannity, O'Reilly, et al. are going to beat this into the ground, right into the run-up for the Democratic National Convention.   What does this have to do with Kerry? Well, here is a recent press release touting Kerry's ties to Berger. And here is a Washington Times story on Wilson's role in the Kerry campaign, published months before that would have been controversial.   Josh Marshall is skeptical about the timing of the Berger story, noting that it's been the subject of a rather low-key investigation since last October. By Marshall's logic, the White House gets a two-fer by springing this now: diverting attention from the pending report of the 9/11 commission, which is likely to be highly critical of George W. Bush; and smearing Kerry by association just as he is about to accept his party's nomination.   Well, okay. And I'm certainly not naive about how these things work. But the fact is that the polls continue to show that national security is the area where Kerry is least trusted by voters. Yes, I know how mind-boggling that is. Bush may be the worst national-security president we've ever had, while Kerry is an experienced internationalist well-suited to navigating a post-9/11 world. But the country is scared, and at such times people tend to be more comfortable with a leader who blows things up and kills people, whatever the reason.   The fact is that Wilson, and now Berger, are dead weight for Kerry. He needs to throw them overboard before the FleetCenter curtain officially rises. In Berger's case, at least, it may not be fair. But when has that ever had anything to do with it?

TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES PERSIST. Applying the three-strikes-and-you're-out theory to blogging, I am abandoning today's attempt to post more than a sentence to Media Log. Meanwhile, click here.

BACKDOOR CENSORSHIP. Freedom of speech is a great thing. Too bad we're using the tax code and arcane campaign-finance laws to regulate it to death. I can think of several examples of liberals and progressives being silenced or threatened. The most outrageous: a suggestion that advertisements for Fahrenheit 9/11 could be banned because they amount to illegal campaign contributions to John Kerry.

This morning, though, two examples of conservatives being targeted for speaking their minds.

The first involves Governor Mitt Romney, who delivered a speech on presidential politics earlier this week. Romney certainly deserves criticism on substantive grounds, and Boston Globe columnist Scot Lehigh sticks it to him today. More troubling, though, is this Globe story, by Raphael Lewis, reporting that Massachusetts Democratic Party chairman Phil Johnston is filing an ethics complaint against Romney for politicking while on the taxpayer's time. Says Johnston:

The entire trip was political. He [Romney] went to Washington to bash John Kerry to the National Press Corps as a spokesman for the Bush-Cheney campaign. Now we find out he stopped off in New Jersey for their Republican Party. Why should the taxpayers pay one dime for the cost of this trip?

The second example is a story in today's New York Times by David Kirkpatrick, who reports that Americans United for the Separation of Church and State has filed a complaint with the IRS charging that the Reverend Jerry Falwell's advocacy of George W. Bush's campaign violates the tax-exempt status of Falwell's religious organization. The Reverend Barry Lynn, head of Americans United, tells the Times:

I certainly hope that this sends a clear message that religious organizations have got to operate within federal tax laws restricting partisan politicking. And I think the message is that the campaign has been reckless in its approach to churches, recklessly trying to lure them into political activities.

Johnston and Lynn may well be right, and Romney and Falwell may indeed be violating some law or regulation. And you could certainly argue that it wouldn't be difficult for them to get on the correct side of the law. Romney could have used campaign funds to pay for his trip. Falwell could haved used his separate lobbying organization to get out his pro-Bush message - as indeed he claims he did.

But political speech ought to be the most unregulated, freewheeling speech there is. Mitt Romney and Jerry Falwell - and Michael Moore and anyone else - ought to feel free to speak out on public issues without worrying that they've broken some provision of the tax code, or violated campaign-finance laws.

In our understandable but misguided zeal to get special-interest money out of politics, we're enroaching on free-speech rights.

A few months ago I wrote about what's wrong with campaign-finance reform. Click here to read it.

CONVEY GETS #2 JOB AT HERALD. One of the most respected editors in Pat Purcell's media mini-empire has been named managing editor of the Boston Herald. Kevin Convey, editor-in-chief of Purcell's Community Newspaper chain, returns to One Herald Square, where for many years he was managing editor for features under former editor Andy Costello.

A Herald source who asked not to be named said Convey's appointment was greeted with "a great sigh of relief, especially in the upper newsroom ranks." However, the source added, staff members have been told "not to expect any changes" to the downscale-tabloid formula that Purcell has been pursuing to one degree or another for the past year-plus.

Convey could not immediately be reached for comment. Several years ago, Purcell dispatched Convey to run Community Newspapers - comprising about 100 papers, most of them weeklies, in Greater Boston and on Cape Cod - shortly after purchasing the chain from Fidelity Capital for a reported $150 million.

In the spring of 2003, Purcell brought in Ken Chandler, a former Herald editor and former New York Post editor and publisher, as a consultant. In an effort to boost sagging circulation and revenues, Chandler began tarting up the product, adding a more explicitly tabloid edge to a paper whose main strengths had been local news, sports, and business.

That trend accelerated this past winter, when Costello was forced out, Chandler was named editorial director, and former Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle was brought in. Costello's managing editor, Andrew Gully, left several weeks ago. But Convey's status as a member of the previous ruling troika is sure to play well in a newsroom battered by a raft of departures and worries about the paper's direction and future.

The Herald's press release says in full:

Patrick J. Purcell, president of Herald Media, Inc. announced today the appointment of Kevin R. Convey as managing editor of the Boston Herald. Convey will be responsible for the editorial operation of the Herald, and will report directly to Editorial Director Kenneth A. Chandler.

"This is a job I've been working toward my entire career," said Convey. "I'm thrilled with the opportunity to work with Pat and Ken and the first-class cadre of journalists at the Herald."

Convey began his career at the Boston Herald in 1981 as a business reporter. In 1984, he was appointed assistant managing editor, responsible for the news department. Convey left the Herald for a brief period to become articles editor for Boston Magazine, and returned in 1990 as editor of the Sunday Boston Herald. He was promoted to managing editor for features and Sunday in 1994. Since February of 2001, he has served as editor-in-chief of Herald Media's Community Newspaper Company, overseeing the editorial direction of four suburban dailies, 89 weekly newspapers and numerous specialty publications.

"Kevin's tenacity, integrity and keen sense of our business are second to none. He has dedicated his professional life to journalism, and I am thrilled to give him this opportunity," said Purcell.

Chandler said, "I'm delighted to welcome Kevin aboard. We have been colleagues on and off since 1986 and I know he shares my vision for the future of the Herald."

Convey and his wife, Kathleen, live in Brockton with their two children.

Staff reporter Tom Mashberg, who chairs the Herald editorial unit of the Newspaper Guild of Greater Boston, praises the appointment. "He was a very popular editor the last time through," Mashberg says. "There's a good comfort factor in having him back."

Mashberg adds that he hopes Convey is able to persuade management to increase the size of the reporting and editing staffs.

"There are a lot of intelligent people working at the Herald trying to make it a good paper and keep it alive," Mashberg says.

Convey had a reputation for having the most eclectic interests of the old Costello/Gully/Convey troika. Left to his own devices, he would be a good bet to come up with some creative ways of attracting younger, smarter readers. That's going to be difficult to do in the context of the sensationalized product that Chandler has created.

Still, this is the best news to hit One Herald Square in quite some time.

NEW IN THIS WEEK'S PHOENIX. Months after claims were dismisssed that Saddam Hussein had sought uranium in Africa, the story is getting a new life. And the right wing is delighted.

NOT A BUG, A FEATURE! Media Log yesterday was hit with a catastrophic computer meltdown. Until it is solved, blogging will be erratic, and formatting will be affected as well. Thank you in advance for your patience.

THE LAST GATEKEEPER. I suppose it's not fair to stick it to Tom McPhail on the basis of one short quote in the current USA Today. But I'll do it anyway: he would expect no less.

McPhail, a journalism professor at the University of Missouri, is quoted in a piece by Peter Johnson on the credentialing of bloggers at the Democratic National Convention:

That bloggers get front seats bothers Tom McPhail, a journalism professor at the University of Missouri.

"They're certainly not committed to being objective. They thrive on rumor and innuendo," McPhail says. Bloggers "should be put in a different category, like 'pretend' journalists."

Where does one even begin? Well, okay. I'll begin with something small: I'm not sure what Johnson means by "front seats." Most bloggers, I imagine, will be allowed to roam the perimeter, outside the convention hall, and to work in a press area for journalists from smaller news organizations, such as Farm Implements Quarterly or some such thing.

But to get back to McPhail. Surely he knows that some journalists have jobs in which they are expected to be "objective," whatever that means (try "fair"), and some are lucky enough to be opinion-mongers.

Most of the best bloggers - Josh Marshall, Andrew Sullivan, Eric Alterman, Danny Schechter - write for print publications, too. Mickey Kaus, who's admittedly gone a bit daft with his Kerry hatred, but who's still entertaining, is a longtime print veteran. Besides, he blogs for Slate. Isn't that a non-pretend news organization?

But all this takes McPhail's observations too seriously. The days of gatekeeper journalism are long gone. Letting bloggers in is no different from credentialing alternative weeklies - or, for that matter, Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, and Tom Brokaw.

The old order is dying. I guess word hasn't gotten out to Missouri. (Via Romenesko.)

YOU COULD LOOK IT UP. SO WHY DIDN'T THE TIMES? As Casey Stengel used to say, "You could look it up." Incredibly, the big-time national political reporters who help to define the presidential campaign all too often couldn't be bothered.

Today's example: the New York Times. A front-page story today by Richard Stevenson and Jodi Wilgoren on George W. Bush's defense of his Iraq policy claims that John Kerry has changed his explanation for why he voted against $87 billion in reconstruction money for Iraq and Afghanistan last year. They write:

In an apparent response to Mr. Cheney, Mr. Kerry also said he was "proud" that he and Mr. Edwards had voted against the administration's request for $87 billion to help finance military and reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan because "we knew the policy had to be changed." That was a new explanation by Mr. Kerry for a vote that has been a point of much contention during the campaign.

...

At the fund-raiser, Mr. Kerry also attacked the administration as unnecessarily sending young soldiers into harm's way, and he spoke about the votes he and Mr. Edwards cast last fall against the $87 billion.

"I'm proud to say that John joined me in voting against that $87 billion when we knew the policy had to be changed, we had to get it right, we needed other countries involved, we needed to reach out to our allies, we needed to put other boots on the ground," Mr. Kerry said.

Earlier, Mr. Kerry had said he voted against the bill because he thought the war and reconstruction should be financed by rolling back part of the Bush administration's tax cuts. That, he explained, was why he had voted for the $87 billion appropriation when it included an amendment demanding that the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans be reversed, then against it once that provision was stripped. His explanation has been mocked as a flip-flop by Republicans and featured in their campaign commercials.

So there you have it: Republican talking points dressed up and trotted out as serious political analysis. Kerry's a flip-flopper! But wait - here is what Kerry said at a Democratic debate on October 26 of last year, according to the Boston Globe's Patrick Healy and Anne Kornblut:

Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, who has suffered intense criticism for his seemingly ambiguous position on Iraq, sought to present a clear explanation for his decision to authorize military force but later oppose the $87 billion proposal to pay for the war's aftermath. "It is absolutely consistent, because what I voted for was to hold Saddam Hussein accountable, but to do it right," Kerry said. "This president has done it wrong every step of the way." He ridiculed Bush's efforts to internationalize the war as a "fraudulent coalition."

And check out what Noelle Straub wrote in the Boston Herald last October 17:

Presidential hopeful Sen. John F. Kerry said he opposed the funding because he believes Bush has not put forward an adequate plan to protect troops and bring in other nations to help and because the money comes at the expense of domestic priorities.

"We need to stand up to this president," Kerry (D-Mass.) said. "They've already proven they can't be trusted, they've already proven that they're willing to mislead, and this particular plan for $87 billion is top down, starting with Halliburton and the other great friends of the president."

Is it true that Kerry supported an amendment to fund the $87 billion by rolling back tax cuts for the rich? Yes. But the Times tag team of Stevenson and Wilgoren makes it sound like that was Kerry's only reason for opposing the $87 billion.

Kerry deserves to be whacked for failing to explain himself clearly, and for that ridiculous clip in which he says that he actually voted for the $87 billion before he voted against it. But Stevenson and Wilgoren are taking dictation from the Bush-Cheney campaign, claiming that Kerry has flip-flopped on his reasons for opposing the $87 billion even though he's actually been a model of consistency.

By the way, Media Log thinks Kerry got it wrong twice: he should have voted against authorizing Bush to go to war, but then he should have voted in favor of the $87 billion. But this isn't about anyone's opinion - this is about getting it right.

GUILD AGREES TO GLOBE CONTRACT. How long had Boston Globe newsroom employees been working without a contract? Not long ago I ran into an old colleague at a party. He'd been at the Globe for some time. And he told me, laughing, that he'd never worked under a union contract.

Until now - or, rather, soon. Today the Globe and the Boston Newspaper Guild announced they had reached a tentative agreement on a new five-year contract. Here's the press release, in full:

BOSTON, MA - Monday, July 12, 2004 - The Boston Globe and the Boston Newspaper Guild, Local 31245, announced today that they have reached a tentative agreement on a five-year labor pact covering a term from January 1, 2001 through December 31, 2005. The agreement is subject to ratification by the union's rank and file membership scheduled for August 5, 2004.

The wages for the first four years reflect the pattern increases in place with the Globe's other unions of approximately 7.5% in increases for Guild members over that span. The newspaper and the union also negotiated a $12 per week increase for January 1, 2005 and a further $12.50 per week increase on July 1, 2005, constituting an approximate combined increase of 2.14 percent.

The new agreement provides significant new operating flexibility for the Globe aimed at making it more competitive in a changing media marketplace. In return, the Globe agreed as a quid pro quo for such flexibility to increases in funding for the Guild's Health Plan that will result in significantly reduced health care payroll contributions by Guild covered employees.

"The new agreement represents a fair balancing of the competitive needs of the Globe in a changing marketplace with the needs of our employees to have appropriate protections with such changes as well as addressing the rising health care costs impacting everyone," said Globe Senior Vice President and lead company negotiator Greg Thornton. Steve Richards, president of the Boston Newspaper Guild, said of the tentative agreement: "It was a long and difficult negotiation but the union's negotiating committee feels this tentative agreement brings stability to our health fund, which was one of our primary goals. We also feel it protects our members and our union while giving the Globe added business flexibility."

Both the Globe and the Boston Newspaper Guild declined to comment further on the pact until the union's ratification meeting August 5. The agreement culminates more than three and a half years of negotiations between the parties.

It looks like the Globe, at any rate, will have labor peace during the Democratic National Convention. Would that Boston mayor Tom Menino - still tied up in an ugly dispute with the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association - could say the same.

But notice that three and a half years of the Globe contract is retroactive, and that the five-year period that it covers expires in just 17 months. Assuming it gets ratified, it sounds like the negotiators ought to take maybe a week off - and then return to the negotiating table.

STAHL'D OUT. I hope I don't see a worse interview all year than the one Lesley Stahl conducted on 60 Minutes last night with John Kerry and John Edwards. Mrs. Media Log was covering her eyes in embarrassment as Stahl alternated between oozing unctuously and taking the viewers for fools.

The worst moment came when Stahl tried to play gotcha with Kerry on his vote in favor of the war in Iraq. She started by running that clip of Kerry saying that before he voted against the $87 billion in reconstruction money he voted for it. That was obviously not one of Kerry's finer moments, and she was right to bring it up.

But then she tried to use that as a way of demonstrating that Kerry can't give a straight answer on whether he regrets his vote in the fall of 2002 authorizing the president to go to war. Her news peg was last week's Senate Intelligence Committee report. Among other things, she noted that the Democratic vice-chairman, Jay Rockefeller, now says he would have voted against the war if he knew then what he knows now. Why, Stahl demanded of Kerry, can't you just admit you made a mistake?

The transcript isn't available yet, but CBS News's synopsis matches my recollection:

Is Kerry for or against the war in Iraq? "I think the president made a mistake in the way he took us to war," says Kerry. "I am against the war - the way the president went to war was wrong."

The Senate Intelligence Committee has just issued a report saying that the basis for the war was erroneous, and that there weren't weapons of mass destruction. Given what he knows now about that report, would Kerry have made the same decision?

"What I voted for was an authority for the president to go to war as a last resort if Saddam Hussein did not disarm and we needed to go to war," says Kerry. "I think the way he went to war was a mistake."

"I know you want to make this black and white, but the difference is - if John Kerry were president of the United States, we would never be in this place," adds Edwards. "He would never have done what George Bush did. He would have done the hard work to build the alliances and the support system."

"Why build an alliance if they didn't have weapons of mass destruction," asks Stahl.

"We would have found out, that's the point," says Edwards.

Regardless, Kerry says he doesn't regret his vote: "I believe, based on the information we have, it was the correct vote."

Edwards has said that if he is elected "no young Americans will go to war needlessly."

"That's true," says Edwards. "He [President Bush] didn't do the things that should have been done before taking this country to war. This is not a -; I mean, we've now said it 10 times, this is not a complicated thing."

Gee whiz, why can't Kerry give a yes-or-no answer? It's no wonder that Edwards got irritated with Stahl's disingenuous questions - and Edwards is not someone who gets easily irritated, at least not in public.

Stahl would have known better if she had read the Boston Globe's Kerry bio. Here's what Kerry said before his vote giving Bush the power to wage war:

The vote that I will give to the president is for one reason and one reason only, to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction if we cannot accomplish that objective through new, tough weapons inspections in joint conference with our allies. I expect him [Bush] to fulfill the commitments he has made to the American people in recent days - to work with the United Nations Security Council ... and to "act with our allies at our side" if we have to disarm Saddam Hussein by force. [p. 346]

In other words, Kerry's position on the war today is precisely the same as it was in the months leading up to it. He has been absolutely consistent. As Edwards said, it's not a matter of "black and white." To the extent that Kerry later turned against the war, it was because Bush didn't wait for the inspections to play out, didn't consult with our allies so much as dictate to them, and didn't act with the explicit authority of the Security Council.

Is this really so difficult? Apparently it is if you're Lesley Stahl.

NEW IN THIS WEEK'S PHOENIX. "That '90s Show": Its dubious literary merits aside, Bill Clinton's My Life sparks nostalgia for a decade of peace, prosperity, and presidential sex.

JOHN SQUARED. So it's John Edwards, probably the best of some not-great choices. Edwards proved himself to be by far the most engaging public personality in the Democratic presidential primaries. His biggest problem, of course, was that he couldn't get anybody actually to vote for him. Also, is he going to be willing to rough up his vaunted Mr. Nice Guy image by playing the attack-dog role normally filled by running mates?

More questions:

- I know people fell into a catatonic state whenever Dick Gephardt's name came up, but Gephardt might have at least brought Missouri into the Blue Zone. Can Edwards help Kerry win his home state of North Carolina? Probably not.

- Does anyone think the Bush campaign was really worried about running against a trial lawyer last winter? Get ready for a barrage of accusations about how Edwards made his fortune. Before the Edwards campaign fell apart, there were already some websites out there claiming that he got rich with a combination of junk science and courtroom histrionics. Are the Kerry people ready to fire back?

- The most telling criticism that Kerry had supposedly murmured about Edwards was that the guy simply isn't experienced or knowledgeable enough to be president. Now, Edwards is no Dan Quayle, but he's no Al Gore, either. How is this going to play in a post-9/11 world?

That said, Kerry did okay. His dalliance with John McCain already proved he was willing to run with someone more charismatic than he. Edwards will be an asset to his campaign, and help cast him in a more centrist light.

HAPPY FOURTH! The family and I are heading over to Salem for fireworks. I'll be in San Francisco most of next week for the annual conference of Little People of America, where I'll be giving a reading and trying to move some product. Blogging will be light to non-existent.

DEPT. OF SELF-PROMOTION I. A wicked good time was had by all yesterday on National Public Radio's The Connection, where host Dick Gordon interviewed me about my book on the culture of dwarfism, Little People. Laura Zirpolo of Little People of America joined us for the hour. The occasion was next week's LPA national conference, in San Francisco, where I'll be reading at a book event.

Click here, and you can listen to the show and flip through a photo album.

DEPT. OF SELF-PROMOTION II. The Columbia Journalism Review's CampaignDesk.org website has just posted a Q&A with yours truly.

FIREFOX IMPROVES. Slate's Paul Boutin has posted an ode to the glories of Firefox, one of several alternatives to Internet Explorer that I wrote about a few weeks ago. Boutin is using Windows, but it sounds pretty much like the Mac version.

One thing I didn't know until I read Boutin was that the Mozilla folks have upgraded Firefox from version 0.8 to 0.91. I grabbed myself the new version and found that a formatting problem I'd recently encountered on MSNBC.com (including Newsweek) went away. Good news!

THE BEAST WITHIN. A few years ago - quite a few years ago, actually - Ted Koppel traveled to Cambodia for an incredible moment: the trial of Pol Pot, one of the great monsters of the 20th century. For two nights, Nightline showed Pol Pot being tried for his crimes against humanity.

Thought to have been responsible for the deaths of more than a million of his fellow Cambodians, Pol Pot was every bit as evil as Hitler, Stalin, or Mao, lacking only the means to project his horrors beyond the borders of his own country.

The trial, as I recall, was something of a farce, aimed more at getting his fellow mass murderers off the hook than at bringing Pol Pot to justice. Still, seeing him being brought to account, no matter how cynically, should have made a far greater impression than it did. But in the hyper-fast media cycle of 1990s America, so-called big stories - some of which weren't very big at all - began to blend together. O.J. equals Princess Diana equals Monica equals Pol Pot. It's only gotten worse since.

I was thinking about Pol Pot last night as I watched the arraignment of Saddam What an amazing thing to see this evil man, the cause of so much misery and torture and death, brought into an Iraqi courtroom to hear the particulars of his evil read against him.

He looked good, didn't he?

I'm sure Hannah Arendt's phrase "the banality of evil," which she used to describe Adolf Eichmann, will be bandied about quite a lot in the days and months ahead. I'm not sure if it applies. Perhaps to the flunkies who were led in after Saddam, corrupt, amoral little men like Tariq Aziz.

But to Saddam himself? Saddam isn't Eichmann. He's Hitler. Watching him snarl and snap on television, he didn't strike me as a bureaucrat dispensing death and torture like another might dispense rice and road improvements. No, this was the monster himself, and you could see it, see the evil, as he lectured the judge. Other than the gassing of the Kurds, he didn't even bother to deny anything, going so far as to say the Kuwaitis deserved it.

John Burns's article in today's New York Times is literary bordering on magisterial, and thus is what you should make sure you read.

But do we understand what's going on? Do we realize that this is a historic moment? Or will this blow by us, to replaced by another update from the Scott Peterson trial as soon as the novelty begins to wear off?

MORE ON MOORE. Media Log has such diligent readers. D.S. found the link to the Michael Moore quote that Joe Scarborough and Christopher Hitchens were kicking around on Wednesday. Here are the offending comments:

There is a lot of talk amongst Bush's opponents that we should turn this war over to the United Nations. Why should the other countries of this world, countries who tried to talk us out of this folly, now have to clean up our mess? I oppose the U.N. or anyone else risking the lives of their citizens to extract us from our debacle. I'm sorry, but the majority of Americans supported this war once it began and, sadly, that majority must now sacrifice their children until enough blood has been let that maybe - just maybe - God and the Iraqi people will forgive us in the end.

The transcript of Wednesday's Scarborough Country is now online.

This is much ado about not much, but it's MSNBC, so I'm being redundant. On the one hand, Moore is considerably to Media Log's left; though I think the war in Iraq was misguided, I can't imagine how anyone couldn't at least wish that it leads to a decent, stable new order in that country.

But the way I read Moore's piece, he's simply asserting that it's not going to happen, whereas Scarborough and Hitchens seem to accuse him of hoping that it's not going to happen. Two different things.

And how can anyone argue that French and German troops should lose their lives for our mistake? Mind you, I don't want to see anyone lose his or her life in Iraq. But this is our mistake, not theirs. Which, I think, is Moore's point.

MOORE AFTER THIS. Does anyone know what Joe Scarborough and Christopher Hitchens were talking about on MSNBC last night? I tuned in briefly during the closing moments of another putrid Red Sox-Yankees game. They were claiming that Michael Moore had posted some outrageous comments on MichaelMoore.com - something to the effect that more Americans must die in Iraq in order to wash away the sins of the Bush White House. Hitchens was of the opinion that Moore was taking the same line as the jihadi terrorists.

The transcript wasn't up this morning, so I don't know exactly what they said. But when I cruised on over to Moore's website this morning, I could find nothing remotely resembling what Scarborough and Hitchens were claiming. What is going on?

We already know that Hitchens doesn't like Moore.

Anyway, Media Log seeks elucidation. If anyone can point to Moore's alleged remarks, drop me a line.

IT DEPENDS ON WHAT THE MEANING OF "READ" IS. Jack Shafer finds that not everyone who's reviewed Bill Clinton's turgid, endless My Life has actually, well, you know, read it. I have. On the other hand, I guess that's why my review won't appear until next week.

NEW IN THIS WEEK'S PHOENIX. The Seventh Annual Muzzle Awards. Bring a copy to Governor Mitt Romney - but be sure to tell him the Phoenix is a newspaper, not a leaflet!

TUNE IN THIS MORNING. I'll appear on The Connection, on WBUR Radio (90.9 FM), at 11 a.m. to talk about my book on the culture of dwarfism, Little People. Appearing with me will be Laura Zirpolo, who helped organize last year's annual conference of Little People of America.