Unlike Time, which blocked all responses to Joe Klein's factually challenged column on FISA, via Matt Yglesias, Slate has published a response by Stephen Metcalf to Will Saletan on race and IQ. The nuts:

Much of Saletan's précis of the rest of the research surveyed in "Thirty Years of Research Into Race Differences on Cognitive Abilities" is highly questionable. His takeaway regarding the "admixture" studies is precisely the opposite of what an American Psychological Association task force concluded the studies show—that more "European" blood in a black American does not make him smarter. Saletan points up the problems with a favorite study of the environmentalists, into the IQ outcomes of children fathered by foreign soldiers and raised by (white) German mothers. This study showed that kids with African fathers scored the same as those with white fathers. But, Saletan says, it suffers from a fatal flaw: Blacks in the military had been screened for IQ. Saletan concludes, "Even environmentalists (scholars who advocate nongenetic explanations) concede that this filter radically distorted the numbers." But this is flatly untrue. The two most prominent environmentalists, Richard Nisbett and James Flynn, have dismissed this very objection. Both have pointed out that white soldiers were also screened, and so had higher IQs than the general white population. James Flynn has argued extensively that the black-white gap in the military was the same as in the population at large.

In essence, Metcalf demonstrates that Saletan, like Joe Klein on FISA, simply did not know what he was writing about. It is to Slate's credit that it was willing to publish such a demolition of one of its regular writers. Score another one for honesty for Washington Post Company, which allowed Krauthammer to be demolished today.

Think Progress notes NBC White House Correspondent David Gregory's response to a question asking who is at fault for the polarization of American politics? His answer:

I think it’s because of the internet largely. The polarized atmosphere in the internet and blogs and whatnot have been a major contributor to that.

As John Amato at Crooks and Liars says,

Yea, and it was the blogs that spent millions of dollars trying to impeach and indict President Clinton for years and years and of course, we accused him of murdering Vince Foster. Didn’t we? Or maybe it was Richard Mellon Scaife. Isn’t he a blogger too?

From Annie Hall:

. . . MAN: Now, Marshall McLuhan--

WOODY ALLEN: You don't know anything about Marshall McLuhan's work--

MAN: Really? Really? I happen to teach a class at Columbia called TV, Media and Culture, so I think that my insights into Mr. McLuhan, well, have a great deal of validity.

WOODY ALLEN: Oh, do you? . . . Oh, that's funny, because I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here. Come over here for a second?

WOODY ALLEN: Tell him.

MARSHALL McLUHAN: -- I heard, I heard what you were saying. You, you know nothing of my work. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.

WOODY ALLEN: Boy, if life were only like this.

Sometimes it is. Via Josh Marshall, Charles Krauthammer gets his comeuppance on some nonsense he wrote on stem cell research. Groundbreaking stem cell researcher James Thomson delivers it:

Krauthammer's central argument -- that the president's misgivings about embryonic stem cell research inspired innovative alternatives -- is fundamentally flawed, too. Yamanaka was of course working in Japan, and scientists around the world are pursuing the full spectrum of options, in many cases faster than researchers in the United States.

Ah, sometimes life IS like this.

For the Fort Collins, CO couple who received dead pot plants back from the police.

This is a big week for the Center for Constitutional Rights with the Supreme Court about to hear oral arguments in the Guantanamo case, Al Odah v. United States. To raise consciousness on the case, it tried to buy an ad on Fox News. Fox rejected the ad. CCR says (no link yet, received by e-mail):

In our ad, Danny Glover says the Bush administration is “destroying the Constitution,” and they said we needed proof. Were they expecting video of Bush sneaking into the Library of Congress with a shredder? I wonder how many times Bill O’Reilly has accused someone of destroying America or destroying Christmas?

You can watch the ad, Rescue the Constitution, here.

The CCR also has a campaign to send President Bush a copy of the Constitution as a Christmas present.

Timothy Rutten at the LA Times skewers CNN over the questions asked of the Republican candidates at the You Tube debate, calling it a masquerade and suggesting the focus on immigration was done to boost Lou Dobbs' ratings.

When CNN brought the Republican presidential candidates together this week for what is loosely termed a "debate," what did the country get but a discussion of immigration, Biblical inerrancy and the propriety of flying the Confederate flag?

....CNN chose to devote the first 35 minutes of this critical debate to a single issue -- immigration. Now, if that leaves you scratching your head, it's probably because you're included in the 96% of Americans who do not think immigration is the most important issue confronting this country.

The Pew Center which studies issues of concern to voters, ranks the issues of most importance as:

A repentant Don Imus returned to the airwaves this morning.

He's hired two African-American comedians as "sidekicks" and the three will provide "“an ongoing discussion about race relations in this country.”

He's vowed to avoid making racially disparaging remarks. He says he deserves this second chance. Among his guests this morning, willing to provide it to him:

Senator John McCain of Arizona, who is seeking the Republican nomination for president, and Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, who is seeking the Democratic nomination; the author Doris Kearns Goodwin, and the political strategists James Carville and Mary Matalin.

Some of his targets remain the same:

“Dick Cheney is still a war criminal,” Mr. Imus, 67, told the audience, in an effort to reassure them that he did not intend to completely alter his style, or curb his tongue. “Hillary Clinton is still Satan. And I’m going on the radio.”

Diana Taylor, Mayor Bloomberg's significant other doesn't use the NYPD as her personal taxi service...why did taxpayers have to foot the bill for the NYPD to ferry Judith Nathan around?

Taylor, 52, takes the bus every day to her midtown office and rides the subway to business appointments. In the six years Taylor and Bloomberg have lived together, she said she has never had reason to want or need personal NYPD security.

"I don't have security in Bogota or Nairobi or Moscow when I travel there on business, why would I need security in the safest city in the world?" Taylor told the Daily News yesterday.

Unlike Nathan, Taylor "has acted as the city's unofficial First Lady, frequently marching with Bloomberg in parades, hosting Gracie Mansion social functions and campaigning with him."

Peter Baker of the Washington Post blogs in defense of WaPo's spreading lies about Obama:

Two furors stoked by the blogosphere over the last 24 hours neatly illustrate the changing political climate in the United States these days and underscore the depths of suspicion, anger and hostility out there as the country tries to pick a new leader. . . . [L]iberal bloggers ripped The Washington Post for publishing a story on untrue rumors that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is secretly a Muslim. . . . [A]ny legitimate criticism and sober-minded discussion of the issues raised get drowned out by the loudest, most vituperative voices. The net result is not dialogue, but a contest of outrage.

That, my friends, is a textbook red herring. And, last I looked, CJR was not a vituperative liberal blogger and the CJR writer stated that "In The Washington Post this morning, reporter Perry Bacon Jr. wrote what may be the single worst campaign ‘08 piece to appear in any American newspaper so far this election cycle." And indeed, Baker has little substantively to say in defense of the WaPo story. This seems his best shot:

The reporter wrote the story because a voter in Iowa told him that Obama is a Muslim and he was struck that people remain so ill informed. . . . But somehow a story intended to debunk the false claims, trace their origin and explore the challenge they present the campaign in trying to quash them spawned a furious eruption among liberal bloggers accusing the Post of spreading the rumors.

This is disingenuous to say the least. I feel confident that the Obama campaign wasnot pleased with the story. Does Mr. Baker wonder why? Perhaps Lyndon Johnson can explain it:

[O]ne of Johnson’s favorite jokes is about a popular Texas sheriff running for reelection whose opponents decide to spread a rumor that he f[***]ks pigs: “We know he doesn’t, but let’s make the son of a bitch deny it.”

Via Greenwald, this is hilarious as it confirms what we already knew -Joe Klein was repeating Hoeskstra's false GOP line on FISA. This is supposed to help Joe in his moment of disgrace? Frankly, Hoesktra just buried him. As Glenn notes:

Today, Hoektstra went to National Review to defend his good friend, "liberal pundit" Joe Klein, in what Hoekstra called the "venomous debate [that] has raged between Time columnist Joe Klein and his far-Left critics." As always on the pro-Bush Right, those who believe in the radical instrument called "search warrants" are deemed to be "far leftists." Hoekstra pronounces Klein correct in everything he said, and then confesses that he was "one of Klein's sources for the complex technical and legal points that seem to be in contention." So, in other words, it was Hoekstra -- one of Washington's most partisan GOP operatives -- who lied to Klein by claiming that the House Democrats' bill requires warrants for every foreign terrorist's call and that the bill thus gives the same rights to foreign Terrorists as American citizens. That's a real surprise. And Klein The Journalist then mindlessly wrote down Hoekstra's smears without bothering to check if they were true, and Time printed them as fact.

Klein's disgrace is now complete.

Update: Time now prints this correction, which isn't much of a correction:

In the original version of this story, Joe Klein wrote that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would allow a court review of individual foreign surveillance targets. Republicans believe the bill can be interpreted that way, but Democrats don't.

****

The uproar over Joe Klein's FISA articles in Time Magazine is growing:

If you are new to the story, start with Ryan Singal at Wired or Glenn Greenwald.

Then check out Matt Stoller at Open Left, Dan Gillmoor and Jane at Firedoglake.

What Klein said initially:

Former Regan Books (Harper Collins) chief and Bernie Kerik paramour Judith Regan tells her side of the story of her firing by Harper Collins and News Corp in Bazaar (full article here.)

While she doesn't address her lawsuit against News Corp, there's plenty there that shows how her life tumbled after her firing.

For a look back to what she said at the time about her OJ book, check out Why I Did It.