Media Log on vacation. I will be out of the office until Monday, July 7. Look for occasional updates at www.bostonphoenix.com/medialog, but this will be my last e-mail version until then.

I will be spending most of my time at the Little People of America national conference in Danvers, hanging out with my family and shamelessly promoting my book, Little People: Learning to See the World Through My Daughter's Eyes, which will be published in October by Rodale.

Conservatives for same-sex marriage. New York Times columnist William Safire isn't exactly in love with the idea. But this morning he sounds like he's ready to put the culture wars to rest and accept the inevitability of same-sex marriage.

The clincher: "I used to fret about same-sex marriage. Maybe competition from responsible gays would revive opposite-sex marriage."

If you haven't read it yet -- and you must -- here is the Phoenix's Susan Ryan-Vollmar this week on "The Case for Same-Sex Marriage." It's a no-brainer -- but, tragically, many people have no brain.

Lydon on Raines. Burrowing more deeply into Christopher Lydon's weblog, I just read his June 6 post on the resignation of New York Times executive editor Howell Raines.

Obligatory triple back-scratch: I'd seen it yesterday but didn't have time to read it. Al Giordano credits me with leading him to Lydon's blog -- and now he's leading me back to Lydon's Times post.

Anyway, if you can only force yourself to read one more thing on the downfall of Raines, read Lydon. He writes:

If Howell Raines is to be held responsible for serious lapses, let it be for the Times' pusillanamity around the unnecessary war that the Bush team slipped past the Congress and the sleeping watchmen in the serious press.

And that's not all. Not even close.

Sodomites 6, theo-fascists 3. US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia gets it exactly right. Commenting on the Court's six-to-three decision throwing out the Texas sodomy law and, in effect, virtually legalizing same-sex relations, a bitter and angry Scalia accuses his colleagues of having "taken sides in the culture war" and having "largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda."

Damn straight! This week has really been a wondrous one for progressives, who've gone from looking at the Court as a virtual extension of the Bush presidency -- whose very existence it had hurried into being -- to, surprisingly, a last bastion of justice.

Earlier this week, of course, the Court upheld affirmative action in college admissions, although rigid quota systems will not be allowed. Unfortunately, the court made a bad call in upholding a law ordering public libraries that receive federal funding to filter out Internet porn. But the republic will survive that a whole lot better than it would have survived bad decisions in the sodomy and affirmative-action cases.

These stunningly good decisions are accompanied by recent buzz that, contrary to longstanding rumor, none of the justices is seriously contemplating retirement.

Media Log's theory: buyer's remorse. When five justices rushed to hand the presidency to George W. Bush two and a half years ago, they may have seen him as a garden-variety conservative cut from the same mold as his father.

Now that they -- or at least Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy, the most moderate of the five conservatives -- have gotten a look at how radical Bush really is, they've decided to stay put for as long as they can.

Long live the Supreme Court!

Christopher Lydon, natural-born blogger. While the Supreme Court is kicking up its heels, we continue to be hampered by a quiescent and complacent press.

I've been negligent in not giving a plug to a newish blog by veteran journalist Christopher Lydon, although I have no doubt that his many fans have discovered it anyway.

But here it is -- and the most recent entry is a link to a terrific column by Newsday's Jimmy Breslin, who is appalled at the way his younger colleagues accept the secrecy with which the government is fighting the war against terror. Says Breslin: "You believe the FBI, you belong back in public school."

Lydon also offers some intriguing thoughts on Ralph Waldo Emerson, "A God for Bloggers" ("He is a man for bloggers to embrace most especially, not for Emerson's glory but for our own understanding of a transformative moment we are living through"), and on the internecine warfare at the New York Times.

Reading and drinking. I'll be reading tonight between 7 and 9 p.m. as part of the Writers with Drinks series at the Lizard Lounge, at 1667 Mass Ave, in Cambridge. I'll definitely be doing something from the political-media axis, but I may have a surprise as well. So drop in if you get a chance.

Scatology and the law. Denver Post editor Greg Moore -- the former managing editor of the Boston Globe -- is reportedly being sued over a barnyard metaphor he offered in the Post newsroom to explain why he'd fired a veteran editor.

According to Westword's Michael Roberts (scroll down to "Back to the barnyard"), Moore helpfully explained to his staff that he'd gotten rid of assistant city editor Arnie Rosenberg because "the way to clean up a place is not to move manure around the barnyard." Holy shit! (Via Romenesko.)

New in this week's Phoenix. Making sense of the media frenzy over UMass president Bill Bulger's memory-impaired congressional testimony.

Also, "News Dissector" Danny Schechter writes an insta-book on the war in Iraq -- complete with a soundtrack starring a rapping George W. Bush.

We live in a political world. And whether we are about to be done in by human-caused global warming depends very much on your political perspective.

David Appell has a good piece in Scientific American over a new study by two scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics that purports to show that there's nothing to worry about. It seems that the consensus view among their colleagues, though, is that global warming is real and the study is deeply flawed.

The best quote: "You'd be challenged, I'd bet, to find someone who supports the Kyoto Protocol and also thinks that this paper is good science, or someone who thinks that the paper is bad science and is opposed to Kyoto."

More on the WMD deception. Can the Bush administration's deceptions about Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities blossom into a real issue? (I don't mean just for the Democrats, but for anyone who cares about our ability to obtain enough honest information to be able to govern ourselves.) Two newish pieces suggest that the Great WMD Deceit isn't going away.

First, this week's New Republic -- perhaps the most significant liberal organ to support the war in Iraq -- has a long cover essay this week by John Judis and Spencer Ackerman documenting in convincing detail how the White House continually cooked intelligence reports to make it look like Iraq had both extensive WMD capabilities (including nukes) and ties to Al Qaeda.

Judis and Ackerman revisit the matters of the aluminum tubes and the forged uranium documents from Niger. More important, though, they show an overarching strategy to pressure intelligence officials -- right up to and including CIA director George Tenet -- to make assertions that weren't true in order to stoke war fever.

Unlike most TNR content, this article is freely available online. Read it. And ask yourself why Tenet, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld -- at a minimum -- haven't been subpoenaed to testify before Congress about their public prevarications. Can you say "Gulf of Tonkin"?

The second piece is Sunday's column by the Washington Post's George Will, reprinted in Monday's Boston Globe. Will doesn't say anything startling except for the fact that it is he -- the staunch old Republican warhorse and adviser to Ronald Reagan -- who's saying it. Writes Will:

Some say the war was justified even if WMD are not found nor their destruction explained, because the world is "better off" without Saddam Hussein. Of course it is better off. But unless one is prepared to postulate a U.S. right, perhaps even a duty, to militarily dismantle any tyranny -- on to Burma? -- it is unacceptable to argue that Hussein's mass graves and torture chambers suffice as retrospective justifications for preemptive war. Americans seem sanguine about the failure -- so far -- to validate the war's premise about the threat posed by Hussein's WMD, but a long-term failure would unravel much of this president's policy and rhetoric.

Good Reaganite that he is, Will holds out the possibility that Saddam's WMDs were removed before the US invasion, and/or that they will eventually be found. But there's no mistaking Will's general thrust: his bowtie is spinning in consternation.

In light of the daily updates from Iraq -- continued fighting, and the possible emergence of a radical Shiite theocracy -- you'd have to be Ari Fleischer to pretend to be pleased with the way this is playing out.

The Penguin and the Apple. Even as Apple Computer rolls out a new line of sexy products, Slate's Paul Boutin writes that the Macintosh operating system will soon slip into third place, behind Linux, in the number of personal computers on which it is installed.

Boutin references a Business Week article, but offers additional analysis suggesting that third place is, essentially, where they put intensive-care patients who aren't likely to recover.

More bad news for us Mac users.

Some thoughts about the "M" word. In a piece for yesterday's "Week in Review" section in the New York Times, Natalie Angier considers the possibility that some short adolescent males will be given human growth hormone (hGH) in order to add a few inches.

She is talking about boys whose height is not the result of any medical or genetic condition, and is merely on the low side of normal. By contrast, she notes, hGH has long been given to children -- boys and girls -- who have a type of dwarfism known as growth-hormone deficiency. She writes that "without the treatment, they would be true midgets, perhaps under four feet tall as adults; with the shots, they are brought up to low-normal heights."

Her use of the word midget is interesting. Angier probably doesn't know this, but the M-word has long been considered offensive within the dwarf community, in much the same way as the N-word is considered unacceptable to African-Americans. That is, a few dwarfs might toss the M-word at each other as kind of an inside joke, but virtually no one wants to hear outsiders use it.

Yet Angier's use of the phrase true midget suggests something else -- that there is an actual, clinical definition of the word. And in fact, the M-word has long been restricted to those whose profound short stature is the result of growth-hormone deficiency or some other endocrinological cause. These people's proportions -- their arms, legs, head, and torso -- are the same as those of "average-size people," the politically correct term for the vast majority of us who are unaffected by any kind of dwarfism.

By contrast, dwarf has traditionally been reserved for people who have one or another type of skeletal dysplasia -- that is, genetic and/or medical conditions affecting bone development. These people, who constitute the vast majority of the profoundly short statured, tend to have average-size torsos, slightly larger-than-average heads, and exceedingly short arms and legs.

So is there a good reason to distinguish between midgets and dwarfs? Not really. The origins of dwarf are ancient. By contrast, midget is a made-up word whose lineage can only be traced to 1865 or so.

The American Heritage Dictionary gives this as the first definition of the word: "Offensive An extremely small person who is otherwise normally proportioned." So even though the AHD embraces Angier's meaning, it also notes that its use is discouraged.

The Oxford English Dictionary (not freely available online) gets closer to the heart of the matter: "An extremely small person; spec. such a person publicly exhibited as a curiosity." No mention of proportionality, by the way. Thus, according to the OED, the M-word is closely tied to the idea of public performance -- of the side show, the freak show, with such latter-day offshoots as midget wrestling and midget porn. No wonder it came to be considered offensive.

Midget is sometimes thought to have been coined by P.T. Barnum, but such is not the case. Barnum, of course, was the employer of Charles Stratton and Lavinia Warren -- two proportionate dwarfs who were better known as General and Mrs. Tom Thumb. If the M-word could accurately describe anyone, it was surely they. Yet in Barnum's 1855 autobiography, he describes both Strattons as dwarfs. The reason is simple enough: the M-word had not yet been invented.

These things tend to come full circle. Next week, hundreds of dwarfs will arrived in Greater Boston for the annual conference of Little People of America. Among the more politically aware members, there continues to be a simmering debate over terminology. Some would like to reclaim midget as their own; others do not want to hear the word at all, thank you very much.

Obviously the most important thing to keep in mind is that LPA's members are all individuals. Dwarf is a lot better than midget, but the person's name is best of all. This is the first national LPA conference to be held in the Boston area since 1983. Boston is not renowned for making visitors feel welcome, but maybe this time we can make an exception.

Commissioner Connolly? Media Log feels obligated to say something about yesterday's congressional testimony by UMass president Bill Bulger, in which the witness appeared to have studied method acting with an Alzheimer's patient. But what?

Globe columnist Brian McGrory's assessment this morning is overly sympathetic to Bulger, but he gets this much right: "It promised high drama. It delivered the excitement of a raisin scone, but with none of the nutritional value."

Of necessity, that was pretty much true of the voluminous media coverage as well.

The Herald got things off to a rocking good start yesterday with an investigative report that Bulger's homicidal brother, mobster James "Whitey" Bulger, has apparently been using a Caribbean hideout while attracting little interest from the FBI. Several congressmen brought it up during yesterday's questioning. But even Bill Bulger's most vociferous detractors wouldn't accuse him of having anything to do with that.

The Herald may have stumbled onto another opportunity yesterday as well: Howie Carr Bobble-Head Action Figures. I especially enjoyed watching him roll his eyes in the instant replay on WFXT-TV (Channel 25) last night.

But absent anything truly arresting (bad pun intended), the prize will go to the first reporter who can get former Boston mayor Ray Flynn to talk about Bulger's hazily admitted effort to get his buddy John Connolly, the corrupt ex-FBI agent, named as Boston's police commissioner.

Bulger was diffident about the matter, acting as though he didn't even know who the mayor was at the time. But Herald columnist Peter Gelzinis (subscription required) says this morning:

Though Flynn did not respond to phone calls yesterday, in a conversation several years ago he spoke of the "intense pressure from the State House" to appoint John Connolly police commissioner. Consider the horror of that for a moment. Life in Boston would have resembled a scene out of "Blade Runner," or worse, Baghdad under Saddam. Boston's cops would've been Whitey's cops.

Flynn, of course, did the right thing and appointed Mickey Roache as his commissioner. Roache's tenure was troubled, to put it mildly. But he was honest. Certainly he wouldn't have looked the other way as prized informants tortured and killed their enemies.

Updating the scorecard. Check out this letter to the Globe from state Democratic Party chairman Phil Johnston. Johnston takes issue with a June 16 op-ed piece by Kennedy School lecturer Mickey Edwards, a former Republican congressman and former Herald columnist. (Edwards's column is no longer freely available online.)

Edwards, making fun of the recent Democratic state convention for adopting an ideological "scorecard" for elected officials, wrote:

That's where Phil Johnston and the Democrats come in. Johnston, the state's Democratic Party chairman, presided a week ago over a state convention at which approximately 1,000 party activists voted to produce a "scorecard" rating members of the Legislature on their fealty to the state party platform.

Johnston:

On several occasions I have stated my opposition to the "legislative scorecard" adopted by delegates at the June 7 convention.

And here's what Johnston told Globe columnist Scot Lehigh on June 11: "It is a rather bizarre idea, one that will be very difficult, if not impossible, to implement. And I don't think it is helpful to Democratic candidates."

Advantage: Phil. Edwards uses implication rather than direct assertion, but the tenor of his column suggests that Johnston was all but demanding that the delegates support the scorecard idea.

Ah, but then Johnston gets carried away, writing:

A secondary point also requires correction: There were 3,000 delegates at the convention, not 1,000, as Edwards reported.

But that's not even remotely what Edwards said. Here's what Raphael Lewis reported in the Globe on June 10:

At Saturday's convention, Johnston allowed the report card vote to take place, even though fewer than half of the 2,265 delegates who attended the convention at Lowell's Paul E. Tsongas Arena remained. The reason, Johnston said, was that it did not mention any one lawmaker by name.

Now, I can't explain the discrepancy between Johnston's figure of 3000 delegates and Lewis's 2,265. Johnston may have been including alternates. But if, as Lewis reported, "fewer than half of the 2,265 delegates" were on hand for the scorecard vote, then Edwards had it almost exactly right when he asserted that "approximately 1,000 party activists voted to produce a 'scorecard' rating."

Almost, I say, because nearly every single delegate still present would have had to vote "aye" for Edwards's statement to be wholly accurate.

Can't anyone get this straight?

New in this week's Phoenix. The Herald, beset by sliding circulation, goes back to its tabloid roots, even as publisher Pat Purcell ponders whether to buy more media properties -- or, ultimately, to sell.

Also, an innovative idea for breaking the file-sharing copyright impasse.

Redefining the e-newspaper. David Gelernter is identified as a "professor of computer science at Yale," so maybe I'm just too dense to understand what he's talking about.

But in his cover essay for the current Weekly Standard, he argues that the "Next Great American Newspaper" will be conservative (we'll see about that), published on the Web (he's probably right), and implemented in a far more appealing and useful way than today's electronic papers. He writes:

[T]oday's web-papers are wedge-ins, stop-gaps, crack fillers, with all the character of putty in a plastic spritz-tube; people read them not for pleasure and illumination but to extract a necessary fact or kill time when they are stuck at their desks. Their builders don't seem to have grasped what makes the newsprint newspaper one of design history's greatest achievements.

I'm not going to disagree. Otherwise, why would we have four daily papers delivered to our house every day? But, as far as I can tell, e-papers are implemented about as well as today's hardware (limited portability, good-but-not-great displays, faster-but-not-fast-enough access) will allow for.

So what does Gelernter have in mind as an alternative?

Imagine a parade of jumbo index cards standing like set-up dominoes. On your computer display, the parade of index cards stretches into the simulated depths of your screen, from the middle-bottom (where the front-most card stands, looking big) to the farthest-away card in the upper left corner (looking small). Now, something happens: Tony Blair makes a speech. A new card materializes in front (a report on the speech) and everyone else takes a step back--and the farthest-away card falls off the screen and (temporarily) disappears. So the parade is in constant motion. New stories keep popping up in front, and the parade streams backwards to the rear.

There's more to it, of course, but that's where it begins: with cascading virtual index cards. This is a big improvement? I'm unimpressed.

So who's "bizarre," anyway? Perhaps a new record of sorts this morning. The Herald's "Inside Track" and the Globe's "Names" column both poke fun at Teresa Heinz Kerry for making "bizarre" statements on the occasion of a speech she gave at the Fairmont Copy Plaza.

Examples: none!

The Globe resorts to a previous Heinz statement, which it paraphrases as "her needing another Botox treatment" to back up its "bizarre" assertion. But the only direct quote it can come up with from Monday's talk is "her admonition to 'work to make this world a whole place.'" So now it appears that if she can get through a speech without saying anything "bizarre," that in itself is news. How bizarre.

The Track goes it several times better, offering no direct quotes, but asserting that she gave "a bizarre, rambling speech ... about hormones and the big, bad pharmaceutical companies' conspiracy against women!" Here's the money graf:

"It was endless, pointless and confusing," said one politically connected chick. "And it was far, far too technical as a dinner speech. I mean, the Latin names of drugs? There was an exodus out the door before dessert."

At a reported length of 35 minutes, Heinz might justifiably be accused of trying her listeners' patience. But "bizarre"? Media Log is still waiting for even one bit of evidence.

Death, coal, and Romney. The Herald editorial page today offers grudging praise of Governor Mitt Romney's successful efforts to jawbone the coal-burning Salem electric power plant into cleaning up its act.

How grudging? Well, at one point it simply ignores reality. Referring to an appearance Romney made in front of the plant last February, the editorial states:

Romney ... got a little carried away at the event, declaring "that plant kills people," a charge he has never substantiated.

Well, here's a press release put out by the Harvard School of Public Health back when it issued the results of a study it had conducted on the health effects of the Salem plant and the Brayton Point plant, in Somerset.

The subhead: "Attributes 159 Premature Deaths Per Year in Region."

Kerry or not, here they come. It's John Kerry Week in the media. The most significant example is the Boston Globe's seven-part biographical series, written (so far) by Michael Kranish.

Now in its third day, the series accomplishes its institutional mission: being comprehensive enough that no enterprising news org is likely to come in from the outside and dig up any startling revelations about Kerry's past, thus embarrassing the gumshoes at 135 Morrissey Boulevard.

At about 5000 words per installment, it adds up to a small book, which it probably will become once the series has run its course.

Slate's William Saletan is stunned to discover that Kerry can be loose and funny. "If he keeps this up," Saletan writes, "he might actually become president."

In the New Republic's online "TNR Primary" (open to non-subscribers), my former Phoenix colleague Michael Crowley -- who wrote an entertainingly (and perhaps excessively) tough profile of Kerry last year -- gives him a "General Likeability" grade of "A" on the campaign stump. Crowley also notes that the Globe series reinforces Kerry's "special moral authority" in going up against the Hero of the Texas Air National Guard, George W. Bush.

Time magazine columnist Joe Klein follows up the favorable piece he did on Kerry in the New Yorker last year by praising his health-care proposal. Calling it "the first significant new idea of this political season," Klein says that only Kerry's plan is responsible enough to restrict benefits to those who need it the most.

Finally, another former Phoenician, Al Giordano, on his new weblog Big, Left, Outside, believes that Kerry -- for whom he once worked, and whom he covered as the Phoenix's political reporter in the mid-'90s -- can win ... but only if he gets in fighting trim. Giordano writes:

Here's the key: To wake Kerry up, you have to piss him off. You have to put his back up against the wall and slam into him with everything you've got to awaken his mutant powers. And then the real John Kerry stands up: he's golden in those moments: American politics' version of the Incredible Hulk. The American political highway is littered with the higher political aspirations of former giants (Jim Shannon, Ed Markey, Ray Shamie, Bill Weld, and a dozen or so others you probably haven't heard of) slain by Kerry when he was awake.

Microsoft breaks alliance with Apple. Last January, I wrote about Apple's announcement that it would take on Microsoft in the software arena. Now the first casualty: Microsoft will no longer develop Internet Explorer for the Macintosh.

Microsoft seems to be playing this very low-key, saying simply that Apple's Safari is all that Mac users need, and that, in any case, Web browsers have become an integrated part of the operating system. That was Bill Gates's argument during all those years of the antitrust case, and he must find it satisfying now to be able to say it about someone else -- even though the truth of that proposition was always dubious at best.

But this is actually huge news, Microsoft's first step away from Apple since Gates and Steve Jobs embraced in the late 1990s. Microsoft claims that it's not going to walk away from the really important products, such as the Mac version of Microsoft Office, but who knows? If the next version of AppleWorks is as compatible with Office as has been rumored, then all bets may be off.

I've switched to Safari for nearly all of my Web browsing, mainly because it's incredibly fast -- much faster than Explorer or Mozilla. But it's still in beta, you don't get page numbering or headers when you print (note: if I'm wrong, send directions!), and there are a few sites that it doesn't work with at all -- such as Blogger.com, the engine that drives Media Log. For that, I use Mozilla.

I love my new iBook, and I would hate to think that it will be my last Mac. But Microsoft's latest could be the beginning of the end for Apple.