Fact-checking the New York Times is always fun for two reasons: 1 – they’re so pretentious about being the “newspaper of record” and 2 – it’s so easy to do.

Tonight, I barely started the paper’s latest “authoritative” report Both Iran and West Fear a Trap on Uranium Deal when I came to the following paragraph: “In Washington, the concern is precisely the reverse. Here, even some of President Obama’s aides are wary that Iran is setting a trap, trying to turn the administration’s signature offer of engagement into a process of endless negotiations. They are acutely aware of the fact that the clock is ticking: While talks continue, Iran is steadily enriching more uranium, the fuel it would need if it ever decided to sprint for the bomb, much as Israel and India did 30 years ago, followed by Pakistan and North Korea.”

Thirty years? Oops. As it happens I had been doing a little routine research – about thirty minutes worth – just the other day for a blog post I was contemplating writing on the subject and (hello fact-checkers wherever you are!) the NYT seems to have gotten its chronology wrong. India set off its first self-described “peaceful nuclear explosion” in 1974, thirty-five years ago. And the CIA reported Israel had nuclear weapons in 1968, fully forty-one years ago. (My suspicion is they had them earlier.)

So, in general, more like forty years than the thirty reported by the “newspaper of record.” A distinction without a difference? Besides the obvious that this discrepancy makes you question The Times’ other facts when they play fast and loose with something so simply ascertained – yes, I am aware that these dates may not be precise, but they seem vastly more accurate than the NYT’s – there is a more important point. The larger the number of years these countries have had nuclear weapons, the older and, probably, more common the technology. Pakistan, the putative home of the Islamic bomb with AQ Khan, had its first “nuclear explosion” in 1987 – twenty-two years ago. Khan apparently gave his nuclear knowledge to North Korea. Did he give – willingly or not – similar knowledge to the mullahs?

We don’t know. But we do know this is old technology, more than forty years old for the Israelis and gaining on seventy (!) for the US. Is there something wrong with the Iranians that they don’t know all about this by now? Is it possible that they have had a bomb for some time without letting anybody know, just as the Israelis apparently were able to do? We don’t know – and therein lies the subtext of the Times piece. They are – no surprise here – worried for their man:

But few in the White House doubt how the narrative will be written if the Iranians actually gain a weapons ability on Mr. Obama’s watch. That is why Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who as a presidential candidate dismissed Mr. Obama’s engagement policy with Iran as naïve, last week warned anew that “the process of engagement cannot be open-ended.” The strategy behind the negotiations that unfolded in Vienna last week was pretty straightforward. If Iran was truly interested in peaceful uses for its nuclear fuel, it should accept the West’s help in using its own stockpile to fuel the reactor in Tehran that makes medical isotopes. If they rejected the deal, it should be easier, in theory, to get Russia and China to join sanctions.

In theory indeed. No one has yet explained to me successfully why Russia and China would really want to help us with the Iranians. But if the New York Times says it’s possible, it must be, n’est-ce pas?

ADDENDUM: One of the other concepts the NYT is trying to sell us in the above linked Iran update is that there is serious disagreement on the nuclear issue among the Iranian ruling class. I doubt this. I think they are just playing for time – and that’s it. Nuclear weapons are, alas, one thing on which all the mullah/thugs agree. This evening we have this report from the regime’s PressTV: Iran waiting for a change in US policy:VP. Uh-huh. Right. More stalling. More whirling centrifuges. Obama’s talk-talk policy seems worthless and toothless to me.

The news tonight from the religious psychotic oil kingdom of Saudi Arabia is alas scarcely shocking: “A Saudi court sentenced a female journalist Saturday to 60 lashes for her work on a controversial Arabic-language TV show that aired an episode in which a man bragged about his sex life, two sources told CNN.”

Ho-hum. So life goes in the land of our great allies, the primitive misogynists. But the next graph of the CNN report did make me laugh: “The court in Jeddah also imposed a two-year travel ban on Rosanna Al-Yami, according to a Saudi Information Ministry official, who could not be named because he is not authorized to speak to the media.”

“Not authorized to speak to the media”? The diplomatic double-speak of our own press and Western governments is now being invoked by The Kingdom when giving a woman sixty lashes. Holy-moly!

On the latest POLIWOOD, Lionel and I interview Thor Halvorssen who, through his website and company Motion Picture Institute, is starting to distribute films – documentaries and narrative features – online. Is this the wave of the future? Well, probably in some way or other. It’s hard to tell which direction things are going, but, as I indicate on the show, as of now, chances are you follow this guy. He’s the Francis Ford Coppola of our times, even though he doesn’t make up stories.

But speaking of Coppola, he inspired us to do this episode when he made certain statements about the state of the industry at the Beirut Film Festival: “It’s a period of incredible change,” says the director of “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now.” “We used to think of six, seven big film companies. Every one of them is under great stress now. Probably two or three will go out of business and the others will just make certain kind of films like ‘Harry Potter’ — basically trying to make ‘Star Wars’ over and over again, because it’s a business.”

Watch this all on Poliwood here. Catch up on the “brilliance” (oh, shut up) you may have missed here.

Well, you know the answer to that headline “riddle,” if you read this blog. But things are really coming to a head today as the international negotiators await word from the Iranian government (not the people!) to the UN’s latest proposal: “The plan would give Iran access to uranium enriched to a level sufficient for civilian use, but lower than what is needed for a nuclear weapon. Negotiators in Vienna had set a Friday deadline for an agreement.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said the indications from Tehran are “not positive.” But he said he retains hope the Iranians will still accept the deal.”

A few days ago, many people (even a few Israelis?!) were jumping up and down about a possible nuclear breakthrough with the Mullahs. It’s the end of the day in Tehran now and it doesn’t look good (assuming this was even a breakthrough in the first place, and not a charade). The French, first President Sarkozy and here FM Kouchner, have been the skeptics all along, playing hardball with the vicious regime and being much more outspoken than our president when millions of democracy demonstrators took to the streets of Iran. More than anything, that demonstrated Obama’s core personality to me. Most of us were moved, sometimes to tears, by these brave people but Barack kept dreaming of some accommodation with Khamenei & Co., an accommodation that would yield him plaudits for negotiating a deal that in all probability would be worth less than the paper it was written on. I can’t think of one nuclear power that has told the truth, even remotely, about their development of atomic weapons. The US began the whole thing at the clandestine Manhattan Project. We should know, but apparently we don’t.

Meanwhile, as the current negotiations continue, every minute lost in blablabla is a minute used by the Iranians for weaponization. But we all know that and still the dumb show continues. There are no easy solutions, far from it, but only one superpower has muscle to do anything serious but we are as likely to do that as fly to Alpha Centauri with our current administration. No wonder Sarko is miffed, as indicated in a new “analysis” from Reuters. The writer ascribes much of it to personal slights, but even she eventually gets down to the nitty gritty – Iran: “Officials say the disconnect is centred on real issues, such as Obama’s attitude to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, which has been less hardline than Sarkozy’s hawkish stance.

“There is an annoyance about what the French see as naivety in the Obama administration,” said Bruno Tertrais, a senior research fellow at the Foundation for Strategic Research.”

More to come, undoubtedly.

Team Obama certainly ran a brilliant election campaign, but since they left Chicago for Washington, they seem to have dropped about twenty-five IQ points – or do they think the rest of the world is like Chicago? I’m not even sure it’s that simple, because Moscow in some ways (corruption) resembles Chicago, but they sure seem to have misjudged the Russians, among many other things.

Of course, they can (and do) blame their tanking poll numbers on Fox News, but that’s a sure fire prescription for having them tank even further. Even the New York Times admitted that Team Obama was blind to the most conventional of wisdom about “punching upwards not downwards,” thus benefitting Fox instead of themselves by attacking the network. I always thought the Bushies were a disaster at public relations, but the Obamanoids are giving them a run for their money. Maybe Lord Acton should be revised: Power corrupts, but absolute power makes you absolutely clueless!

And the cluelessness is absolutely mind-boggling. What, pray tell, was going through the head of Anita Dunn (a Democratic Party political “pro“) when she named Mao (along with Mother Teresa) as her philosophical inspiration at a high school (not college – my bad) graduation speech? If this weren’t an act of monumental stupidity (neither are philosophers, to begin with, although Mao’s “On Contradiction“, a work I would bet my house Dunn has never read or even heard of, is an interesting compendium of the Marxist rhetoric of the time), it was an extraordinary act of unconscious self-immolation. On top of it all, Ms. Dunn apparently hadn’t gotten the message from Christopher Hitchens regarding the sanctity of Mother T.

But never mind. This is dumbness beyond dumbness, a desperate attempt by an aging boomer to show how hip she was to a younger crowd. Whether she knew Mao was the greatest mass murderer of all time was beside the point. She was cool. [NOTE TO TROLLS: Spare us the argument she was being ironic. Only a blithering idiot could believe that. Was she being ironic about Mother Teresa in the same sentence?] What fascinates in all this – and potentially gives us scary insight into the Obama crew – is the following from Wikipedia about Dunn: During the presidential transition of 2008-09, Dunn trained White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.[citation needed]

I have left the “citation needed.” As of now, Dunn is innocent (of that) until proven guilty. But if it is true, that’s all we need to know. When does the housecleaning start?

It’s hard to know how old Internet trolls are. The conventional wisdom is most of them are young, but with unemployment up at ten percent, we can safely assume some trolls, at least, are pushing up into the senior realms.

Well, good news for them because, brainless as their contributions often may be, their brains themselves are being improved by their endless midnight ramblings: “Adults with little Internet experience show changes in their brain activity after just one week online, a new study finds.

The results suggest Internet training can stimulate neural activation patterns and could potentially enhance brain function and cognition in older adults.”

Well, trolls clearly can’t be classified as people with “little Internet experience,” but just as increased cardio exercise has been shown to be good for brain function, it may be that the more time you spend on the Internet, the sharper you are. Of course, this remains to be researched (could be the reverse or could be the equivalent of too many glasses of red wine). But, for now, good news for trolls indeed!

If we’re to believe the mainstream media and the Internet, there’s an epidemic of racism going around these days. It would seem that this horrible behavior is under every rock and those rocks are being turned over right and left by political pundits, bloggers and legacy journalists.

Now I’m an old civil rights worker but I must be dumb, because I don’t see what they’re talking about. I see the reverse. I see a country that has successfully reduced, even squelched, racism to a remarkable degree, legally and socially. I’m not saying we’re racism free. No population our size (or any significant size) could be. But it is no longer an essential problem of our culture. In fact, being a racist has become genuinely creepy, like having a form of extreme social halitosis that makes you a pariah. Most people recoil from racists.

Don’t believe me? Ask yourself this question: When was the last time you heard someone sound like a genuine racist in private conversation? And what was your reaction to him/her?

Well, for me, it’s hard to remember anyone acting that way in recent years and, if they had, I would certainly regard them as a pariah and not want to deal with them again. And I think that’s the point. This is all about pariah status and not about the truth. In other words, if you disagree with someone ideologically or dislike him personally for any of a number of reasons (he attacked you in the past, etc.), he has to be a racist. It’s a form of wish, a wish that – if you can convince others (and yourself) of its veracity – can lead to that wished-for pariah status for your opponent.

PajamasXpress blogger Ron Radosh and his wife Allis have won The Washington Book Institute Prize for 2009 for their book A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel. The prize carries with it a cash award of $30,000.

According to the Washington Institute: The Book Prize, established to highlight new nonfiction books on the Middle East, is among the world’s most lucrative literary awards. Winners were announced before an audience of more than 300 journalists, diplomats, scholars, and members of the Institute’s Board of Trustees at the organization’s annual Weinberg Founders Conference in Leesburg, Virginia.

All of us here at Pajamas Media and PJTV are tremendously proud of Ron and Allis and congratulate them both for their well-deserved honor. We are also proud to have Ron as one of our PajamasXpress bloggers and look forward to continuing our relationship with him in the future.

My PJTV interview with Fred Barnes is up. It was fun doing it in front of Nancy Pelosi’s private jet… scratch that…. Reagan’s Air Force One. But of course whatever is ferrying Nancy about is probably now vastly superior to the dated eighties-era vehicle porting The Gipper. Still, if you’re ever at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, you will doubtless want to go inside Air Force One, though it is surprisingly small on the interior, at least from my standpoint. [Beats Jet Blue.-ed. Even VirginAmerica.] Anyway, hope you enjoy the interview. Fred is one of those people who is just the same off screen as on – amusing, generous, smart (clearly), unflappable.

With Obama’s poll numbers down and the hapless Democratic Congress thrashing about for traction on virtually every issue, you would think these would be the glory days for the GOP. But one look at the results of the new Rasmussen Poll, trumpeted as a “shock” on Drudge, leave little to be shocked, or even surprised, about. Despite Huckabee’s mild ascendance, there is not one new face here or one new idea. It’s the same old, same old. Indeed even Palin at this point represents pretty conventional conservative thinking.

Of course on the other side of the ledger it’s worse. Even (or especially) with Obama’s increasingly tedious exhortations for “hope” and “change,” the Democrats aren’t offering us anything the slightest bit original. It’s just recycled LBJ. You would think in our high tech era there would be some thing new, but no. All the creative intelligence in our culture seems to be being invested in iPhone apps these days.

We can’t entirely blame the politicians, however. It is in the nature of that political culture NOT to reward original thought. And the media makes it worse. They don’t seem to be interested in the slightest in the search for new ideas. Everything is a score card. Who’s up? Who’s down? And, of course, in preserving their own liberal status quo. Nothing new there.

But speaking of iPhone apps, I highly recommend GPS Drive from MotionX… and good, old fashioned Scrabble.