links for 2009-03-30

Jonah, re your musings on JournoList, Marty Peretz the alleged "f***ing racist" and "crazy-a** racist", and his lack of defenders:

Like you, I don't know him and have never had any contact with him. I seem to recall him taking a swipe at me during the 2000 Florida recount, but that's ancient history. And I agree with Lisa that he's a Zionist rather than a racist, and that increasingly liberals seem to have adopted their own version of the old UN Zionism=racism thing, which is why he's being targeted in the first place.

Missile experts from Iran are in North Korea to help Pyongyang prepare for a rocket launch, according to reports.

Amid increasing global concern over the launch, which the US and its allies consider to be illegal, Japan's Sankei Shimbun newspaper claimed today that a 15-strong delegation from Tehran has been in the country advising the North Koreans since the beginning of March.

The experts include senior officials from the Iranian rocket and satellite producer Shahid Hemmat Industrial Group, the newspaper said.

The Iranians brought a letter from President Ahmadinejad to the North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il stressing the importance of co-operating on space technology, it added.

Don't expect any change soon to the "don't ask, don't tell" policy about gays in the military.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates says both he and President Barack Obama have "a lot on our plates right now." As Gates puts it, "let's push that one down the road a little bit."

The White House has said Obama has begun consulting with Gates and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on how to lift the ban. Gates says that dialogue has not really progressed very far at this point in the administration.

The Pentagon policy was put in place after President Bill Clinton tried to lift the ban on gay service members in 1993.

The policy refers to the military practice of not asking recruits their sexual orientation. In turn, service members are banned from saying they are gay or bisexual, engaging in homosexual activity or trying to marry a member of the same sex.

Gates appeared on "Fox News Sunday."

Major props to Caleb Howe for exposing just how ignorant and reckless Edward R Olbermann's ravings about The Great Fox Twitter Conspiracy really were. He interviews the man Olby fingered as behind the "conspiracy", researches all the Twitter accounts associated with Krazy Keith and The Hour of Spin, and concludes:

The incompetence that led to Keith Olbermann naming Twitter the "Worst Person in the World" is staggering. He smeared the popular service and a fellow liberal Democrat enemy of Fox News, because he got an email he didn't understand, about a technology he didn't understand, and neither he nor his staff did a click of research.

The incompetence that led to Keith Olbermann naming Twitter the “Worst Person in the World” is staggering. He smeared the popular service, Fox News, and a fellow liberal Democrat enemy of Fox News, all because he got an email he didn’t understand, about a technology he didn’t understand, and neither he nor his staff did a click of research.

There is no better summary to this comedy of errors than that of Dan Cooper himself:

“What goes on at MSNBC is astounding, disgusting, and has been so under successive administrations.”

Absolutely. You can find both Dan and me on the Twitter, assuming you don’t have an Olbermann level of internet skill. I’m sure we’ll be tweeting about this all day.

With an entourage of 500 staff, an armour-plated limousine and a fleet of decoy helicopters, America's new president will arrive for his first visit to Britain amid huge razzmatazz on Tuesday for the G20 summit. But it will be his closed-door meetings with world leaders that are likely to prove the most significant of the trip