Recently in the Politics Category

These numbers are a bit sad.

So let's see. Assuming their number is right -- 160 billion divided by 1 million. Does that mean the stimulus costs taxpayers $160,000 per job?

Jared Bernstein, chief economist and senior economic advisor to the vice president, called that "calculator abuse."

He said the cost per job was actually $92,000 -- but acknowledged that estimate is for the whole stimulus package as of the end of 2010. --Jake Tapper, ABC

In California, the governor's office reacts to hearing of a vulgar message hidden vertically in the first row of letters in this gubernatorial veto. As The Swamp puts it:

"My goodness. What a coincidence," a shocked, shocked Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear is quoted by the Associated Press as saying. "I suppose when you do so many vetoes, something like this is bound to happen."

I am not too happy about the way wild conclusions drawn from this self-published research periodically pop up in the media. Kudos to Liberman, from Language Log, who tries (yet again) to explain.

The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness

The best way to describe this, I think, would be to say something like:

In the early 70s, women self-reported their happiness at levels somewhat higher than men did. Specifically, 5.1% more of the women reported themselves "Very happy", while 1.5% fewer reported themselves "Not too happy".

30-odd years later, in the mid 00s, women's self-reported happiness was closer to men's, though it was still slightly higher. 1.4% more of the women reported themselves "Very happy", while 0.1% fewer reported themselves "Not too happy".

To Arianna Huffington, this means that "women are becoming more and more unhappy", while "men ... have gotten progressively happier over the years". To Maureen Dowd, this means that "Before the '70s, there was a gender gap in America in which women felt greater well-being. Now there's a gender gap in which men feel better about their lives."  Ross Douthat described these numbers with the generalization "In postfeminist America, men are happier than women."

All of these statements are either false or seriously misleading.  Maybe, if you look at the data through a sophisticated statistical model, you can support a conclusion about the relative signs of the long-term-trends for males and females.  But any way you slice and dice it, there's not much there there.

I've cited the earlier stages in this discussion as motivation for a moratorium on using generic plurals to describe small statistical differences.  The contributions of Arianna Huffington and Maureen Dowd are, if anything, even better arguments for this (hopeless) cause. --Mark Liberman, Language Log

Kanye West has tried to apologize twice, once on his blog and once on Jay Leno. He blew it both times. In each case he referred to having stolen Taylor's moment. West doesn't understand that what he did was wrong, threatening and self-centered. He simply acknowledged that his completely narcissistic behavior cut into another celebrity's moment of self-centeredness!

Ms. Williams, having nobody famous to whom to apologize, has yet to properly acknowledge the implications of threatening a line judge with bodily harm. Like Mr. West, Ms. Williams fails to understand that it doesn't matter how much pressure she was under, it's not about her! She was wrong and she should simply say that, apologize for it and shut up. The storm would pass and she would be forgiven. But that seems to be beyond her.

Apparently, it's beyond Joe Wilson also. He apologized to the President and he has no plans to apologize any more, not to his colleagues and not to anyone else. Like Kanye West, Wilson seems to think that his words caused a personal hurt to the President and he is willing to apologize for that, but not for anything else. --Brad Hirschfield

Last night I came across the text of the statement by Serena Williams, which a headline writer had identified as an "apology," but the statement begins by praising Serena for her passion, it repeats the claim that the judge's call was unfair, it confuses the concepts of "passion and emotion" and "foul-mouthed tantrum, and it imagines that the continued adoration of her "fans and supporters" -- rather than any change on her part -- will help her to "move forward and grow".

Last night everyone could truly see the passion I have for my job. Now that I have had time to gain my composure, I can see that while I don't agree with the unfair line call, in the heat of battle I let my passion and emotion get the better of me and as a result handled the situation poorly. I would like to thank my fans and supporters for understanding that I am human and I look forward to continuing the journey, both professionally and personally, with you all as I move forward and grow from this experience.  --Serena Williams Issues Apology Statement

OMG! The prez is in ur internet, killin ur freedomz!

The new version would allow the president to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "non-governmental" computer networks and do what's necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for "cybersecurity professionals," and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.

"I think the redraft, while improved, remains troubling due to its vagueness," said Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, which counts representatives of Verizon, Verisign, Nortel, and Carnegie Mellon University on its board. "It is unclear what authority Sen. Rockefeller thinks is necessary over the private sector. Unless this is clarified, we cannot properly analyze, let alone support the bill."--Declan McCullagh, C|Net

People on the road can turn an LOL into a great big O-M-G. -- Katie Couric, advocating a "designated texter."

A good overview of a genre I've been following from the beginning. I sometimes wonder why references to political cartoons aren't more common in discussions of games about current events. At any rate, the article begins by mentioning the importance of Flash, the 9/11 attacks, and Gonzalo Frasca's thought-provoking response, September 12th.

Water Cooler Games, a website maintained by Frasca and Bogost, tracked the development of what they labelled "newsgames" (which we can now separate into the sub-genres of newsgames, "editorial games," "political games," and "documentary games" with the benefit of hindsight) from 2003 until today. The year 2004 saw the creation of Madrid--Frasca's follow-up to September 12th that we've covered elsewhere--an editorial game that simply asks one to remember a tragic event, an early entry into the documentary genre called John Kerry's Silver Star Mission by Kuma/War, and the controversial doc game JFK Reloaded, wherein one tries to mimic the exact shots fired on President Kennedy (supposedly) by Lee Harvey Oswald. Ed Halter notes the popularization of Osama bin Laden whack-a-mole games in the mid-2000s, but no other prominent editorial games appear to have popped up until early 2006.

Here begins a series of chronologically-ordered micro reviews, for which I will provide meta-commentary throughout and at the end of the article. For the most part, I will be embellishing on the notes made by Frasca and Bogost as they documented the editorial games made through the bulk of 2006. -- Simon Fefrari, News Games

Cardin's Newspaper Revitalization Act would allow newspapers to operate as nonprofits for educational purposes under the U.S. tax code, giving them a similar status to public broadcasting companies.

Under this arrangement, newspapers would still be free to report on all issues, including political campaigns. But they would be prohibited from making political endorsements.

Advertising and subscription revenue would be tax exempt, and contributions to support news coverage or operations could be tax deductible. -- Thomas Ferarro, Reuters

Will struggling for-profit papers be able to compete with government-supported papers?  PBS and NPR do top-notch work, though the perceived liberal bias of NPR is one reason why conservative talk radio has flourished in the last decade.

[My own thoughts will appear in brackets. I regularly assign Rose's essay, "I Just Wanna be Average" to my freshman writing students. He considers the editorial a valuable form of public writing, and teaches graduate classes that ask students to use their specialized subject knowledge to produce editorials of value to the broader community.]

Bringing our knowledge into the public sphere. Disciplinary knowledge, teaching and classrooms, and personal knowledge.  As a group we are oriented toward practice. This talk is an opportunity to discuss going public with what we know.

[Rose's talk was very structured... so structured that I fear I may have missed labeling a section or two, either because I was inspired by something he had just said and was writing rather than listening, or because I was listening so closely that I forgot to take notes.]

When I sat down in the middle of January with an Arabic-language translator to look through Facebook, we found one new group with almost 2,000 members called "I'm sure I can find 1,000,000 members who hate Israel!!!" and another called "With all due respect, Gaza, I don't support you," which blamed Palestinian suffering on Hamas and lamented the recent shooting of two Egyptian border guards, which had been attributed to Hamas fire. Another group implored God to "destroy and burn the hearts of the Zionists." Some Egyptian Facebook users had joined all three groups.-- Samantha Shapiro, New York Times

The URL says it all.

www.whitehouse.gov/blog

The "serious gaming" community is abuzz over Raid Gaza:

in which you take on the role of the Israeli military, building tanks, fighter planes and missiles in order to pummel the Palestinian territory and kill as many people as possible within three minutes. Bonus points are awarded for hitting hospitals and police stations. Meanwhile, the Hamas threat is characterised by spluttering Qassam missiles, which whir out of Gaza and usually explode uselessly in fields. The author of the game claims in a recent interview to have begun the project almost two years ago, in response to a UN report on the human cost of the continuing conflict.

Reactions have been mixed. News site Kotaku clearly feels it's in poor taste, but political gaming expert Ian Bogost writes that Raid Gaza is successful as a polemical attack on Israeli tactics.

At the heart of the debate is an ongoing question - are videogames an appropriate medium for political satire? -- Keith Stuart, Guardian

Are you a politician? a candidate for real political office? an MP in the UK? A Senator or member of the House of Representatives in the US? or the equivalent anywhere in the world? If so, I...a humble games programmer from the UK would like to give you a free gift. a FREE copy of Democracy 2 for you to practice with. There are no strings attached whatsoever, I won't publish your name anywhere unless you say I can, I'm not getting anything out of it other than the knowledge that just *maybe* I'm helping to make our current crop of politicians more prepared for the task ahead, especially with a global recession on the horizon. -- Positech Games (Via)

The McCarthy purges were a disgraceful blot on the national record of any nation aspiring to free speech, and are still, evidently, a matter of passionate concern.

When Elia Kazan, who sang like a bird, was awarded a lifetime Oscar 40 years later, many in Hollywood made it plain that his betrayal was a matter of the rawest feeling.

Still, there is something naive and faintly bizarre about Miller's much-admired response to the McCarthy period, The Crucible, comparing the communist hunt to the 17th-century witch hunt. As Kazan's wife pointed out, the difference was that there really were communists. It was disgraceful to pursue people for their political views, but it was absurd to suggest that the political views were dreamt up in bouts of mass hysteria, like the accusation of witchcraft.-- Philip Hensher (Telegraph)

Arthur Miller lived for some 50 years after his greatest literary successes, though I have taught (and will teach again this spring) his 2002 play Resurrection Blues. 

Camille Paglia puts her finger on something that has vaguely troubled me.  For years I've enjoyed reading Language Log's posts on Bushisms -- which as often as not included the reminder that we all garble our syntax from time to time, and even daringly suggests that Obama makes his own share of gaffes. Remember the gratuitous Nancy Reagan joke? (Of course, that's not nearly as bad as Reagan's "We begin bombing in five minutes." But I digress.)

Paglia targets Dick Cavett's Nov 14 NYT blog on Sara Palin,"The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla,"  calling it

...insufferably supercilious. With dripping disdain, he sniffed at her "frayed syntax, bungled grammar and run-on sentences." He called her "the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High," "one who seems to have no first language." I will pass over Cavett's sniggering dismissal of "soccer moms" as lightweights who should stay far, far away from government.

I was so outraged when I read Cavett's column that I felt like taking to the air like a Valkyrie and dropping on him at his ocean retreat in Montauk in the chichi Hamptons. How can it be that so many highly educated Americans have so little historical and cultural consciousness that they identify their own native patois as an eternal mark of intelligence, talent and political aptitude?

Paglia then recounts an anecdote about a talented and popular Yale professor who used class time to make a sneering, classist, sexist statement about a marriage between a well-heeled socialite and an italian-American mechanic.

Yes, that is the lordly Yale that formed Dick Cavett's linguistic and cultural assumptions and that has alarmingly resurfaced in the contempt that he showed for the self-made Sarah Palin in "The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla." I am very sorry that he, and so many other members of the educational elite, cannot take pleasure as I do in the quick, sometimes jagged, but always exuberant way that Palin speaks -- which is closer to street rapping than to the smug bourgeois cadences of the affluent professional class.

English has evolved, and the world has moved on. There is no necessary connection between bourgeois syntax and practical achievement. I have never had the slightest problem with understanding Sarah Palin's meaning at any time. Since when do free Americans subscribe to a stuffy British code of veddy, veddy proper English? We don't live in a stultified class system. In the U.K., in fact, many literary leftists make a big, obnoxious point about retaining their working-class accents. Too many American liberals claim to be defenders of the working class and then run like squealing mice from working-class manners and mores (including moose hunting and wolf control). What smirky, sheltered hypocrites. Get the broom! -- Camille Paglia, Salon

If I were still teaching Seminar in Thinking and Writing (which has units on topics such as education, race, class, and gender), I'd definitly assign Paglia, since she works so very hard [edited to insert the following word] not to fall into the kind of intellectual rut that leads students to try to turn a bumper sticker slogan into a five-paragraph essay.

A new generation of wired politicos will give journalists much fodder for scandal, but isn't this making it a bit too easy for them?

Incoming Obama administration director of speechwriting Jon Favreau (L) and a friend pose with a cardboard cutout of incoming Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at a party. (Obtained by The Washington Post)

Question No. 63 asks that applicants "please provide any other information ... that could ... be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the President-Elect."

For a while there this afternoon, President-elect Barack Obama's immensely talented chief speechwriter, 27-year-old Jon Favreau, might have been pondering how to address that question.

That's when some interesting photos of a recent party he attended -- including one where he's dancing with a life-sized cardboard cut-out of secretary of state-designate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, and another where he's placed his hand on the cardboard former first lady's chest while a friend is offering her lips a beer -- popped up on Facebook for about two hours. The photos were quickly taken down -- along with every other photo Favreau had of himself on the popular social networking site, save for one profile headshot. --Washington Post

Fiction - including poetry - should be taken just as seriously as facts-based research, according to the team from Manchester University and the London School of Economics (LSE).

Novels should be required reading because fiction "does not compromise on complexity, politics or readability in the way that academic literature sometimes does," said Dr Dennis Rodgers from Manchester University's Brooks World Poverty Institute.

He said: "Despite the regular flow of academic studies, expert reports, and policy position papers, it is arguably novelists who do as good a job - if not a better one - of representing and communicating the realities of international development. -- Telegraph

Professor Philip Busse blogs about his adventures stealing political signs. 

Sure, I understand that stealing a sign will not change anyone's mind, and, most likely, will only embolden McCain supporters' disdain for liberals. Even so, yanking out the signs and running like a scared rabbit back to my idling car was one of the single-most exhilarating and empowering political acts that I have ever done. -- Huffington Post

Stealing signs is bad enough. He blogged about it, and expressed surprise that he got a negative response from his readers.

Writing the essay was an opportunity to explore and talk about political speech and the desire that most of us have to express our politics -- both in mature and immature ways, and sometimes a mix of the two.... I'm disappointed that most readers seem to have focused on the thefts, and not on the larger thoughts. -- Northfield News

The web today is not the same as it was during the last presidential election.

Old media, apparently, can learn new media tricks. Not since 1960, when John F. Kennedy won in part because of the increasingly popular medium of television, has changing technology had such an impact on the political campaigns and the organizations covering them.

For many viewers, the 2008 election has become a kind of hybrid in which the dividing line between online and off, broadcast and cable, pop culture and civic culture, has been all but obliterated.

Many of the media outlets influencing the 2008 election simply were not around in 2004. YouTube did not exist, and Facebook barely reached beyond the Ivy League. There was no Huffington Post to encourage citizen reporters, so Mr. Obama's comment about voters clinging to guns or religion may have passed unnoticed. These sites and countless others have redefined how many Americans get their political news.

When viewers settle in Tuesday night to watch the election returns, they will also check text messages for alerts, browse the Web for exit poll results and watch videos distributed by the campaigns. And many folks will let go of the mouse only to pick up the remote and sample an array of cable channels with election coverage -- from Comedy Central to BBC America.  David Carr and Brian Stelter, New York Times

My six-year-old daughter is in the next room, playing with her hand-made paper dolls. 

A few minutes ago, I heard her tones get a little deeper, and as I listened, I heard, "I'm Barack Obama, and I approve this message." 

Then I heard the rustle of another paper doll, and my daughter said, again in a deep voice, "Well, I'm John McCain, and here's why you should vote for me."

As near as I could figure it, the political differences between the Obama and McCain platforms hinge on birthday parties, the alphabet, the answer to five plus zero, and the dubious value of cooked carrots.

Vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin's private Yahoo e-mail account was hacked, and some of its contents posted on the internet Wednesday. (Wired)

Was Palin's personal account fair game because she has been accused of using her personal account to conduct public business? If there really is damning evidence in that account, and a judge delivers a search warrant, I'm sure that Yahoo can pull the whole thing from a backup tape, even if Palin has deleted the account.

Seton Hill's e-mail servers go down every night from 2 to about 5:30, and I'm sorry to say that I'm often up that late, so I often use my Yahoo account when I am contacting other professors for research projects.  For along time my Yahoo account was much better at blocking spam than my university account, so I always use my Yahoo account to sign up for subscription-only content. 

I'm generally reluctant to use any e-mail account to give out grades or adjudicate disputes between student editors, and there's a boilerplate legalistic disclaimer that we're supposed to append to all our messages.  (I tack on that message where I explicitly say something about a grade or a student's performance; I don't add it to routine replies such as "Thanks for telling me how much you enjoyed my website.")

I'm looking for a current event that will be of interest to my "Writing for the Internet" students, and I wonder if this will fit the bill. But it might be a little too early in the course... we've had a brief unit on e-mail and we're talking about smileys now, but we're mostly focusing on hand-coding HTML.  Today we spent a whole class period on basic file management, since most of these point-and-clickers had never heard terms like "subdirectory," and I notice that once I start asking students to post their online work in directories ("JoeStudent/project1: and "JoeStudent/project2") there's often a bit of backsliding in the confidence level and an uptick in the tension level.

Well, I'll see how the media machine treats this story.

Great little vignette highlighting the perils of live TV reporting.

NBC's Andrea Mitchell demonstrates the perils of live television as she gamely tries to report from the Republican National Convention during the midst of a major balloon drop in this clip that's amusing the chattering class the day after the two-week convention marathon has come to an end.

My colleague Lee McClain passed this article on to me -- via a post-it note attached to the dead-tree edition of the story.

"Move over, mainstream media, it's the voter's turn," says the blurb for an event called: "Tapping the Creative Community: The Power of Voter Generated Media."

To be sure, there are television satellite trucks parked in the parking lots around the Pepsi Center, blow-dried anchormen speaking earnestly into cameras and dignified, old hands like Bob Schieffer of CBS roaming about the hall.

But in the media security lines snaking outside the convention venue, the faces are mostly young, the equipment mostly laptops, and the credentials for Web sites you may have never heard of. --Mackenzie Carpenter, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

I remember the Biden law school incident. Not long after that, during the Clarence Thomas hearings, I remember reading that law school students were secretly photocopying homework assignments submitted by their arch enemies, in the hopes of one day using that information to torpedo a big political appointment.

By choosing Joe Biden as his running mate, Barack Obama has insulted academics -- students and teachers alike -- a constituency that was significant in bringing him the nomination of his party. Especially in a year that has seen two prominent political careers hamstrung by sex scandals, and in an era where choosing vice presidential candidates seems to be foremost an exercise in avoiding skeletons in the closet, it's surprising that Biden's record of plagiarism did not disqualify him from Obama's consideration.

Joe Biden, you will remember, ran for president in 1988. He delivered a speech that presented the thoughts of British Labour Party Leader Neil Kinnock is if they were his own, and was slow to explain or apologize for this transgression. The ensuing scrutiny of Biden's record revealed that he had also plagiarized in law school, failing a course for doing so. Shortly after these revelations, he dropped out of the race. -- Jonathan Beecher Field

It was intersting to see online political discourse (with a case study on the Kerry-Edwards attempt to build a blog presence in 2004) and a history of the internet filtered through a folklorist's lens. I'm saving this in case I need ever need to update some of the insights found in the older, classic, historical studies of cyberculture (such as Buckles's dissertation on Adventure, or Levy's Hackers, or Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine).

While mass-mediated communication technologies have empowered the institutional, participatory media offer powerful new channels through which the vernacular can express its alterity. However, alternate voices do not emerge from these technologies untouched by their means of production. Instead, these communications are amalgamations of institutional and vernacular expression. In this situation, any human expressive behavior that deploys communication technologies suggests a necessary complicity. Insofar as individuals hope to participate in today's electronically mediated communities, they must deploy the communication technologies that have made those communities possible. In so doing, they participate in creating a telectronic world where mass culture may dominate, but an increasing prevalence of participatory media extends into growing webs of network-based folk culture. -- Robert Glenn Howard, Journal of American Folklore 121(480): 192-218 (PDF)

As traditional news organizations face increasing pressure to cut back on investigative reporting and depend more heavily on celebrity and puff pieces (cheap to produce, attractive to advertisers, accessible to a mass audience), Dan Gillmor suggests that advocacy groups such as the ACLU have an opportunity to fill the gap.  If only they were fairer to the opposing view...

They're falling short today in several areas, notably the one that comes hardest to advocates: fairness. This is a broad and somewhat fuzzy word. But it means, in general, that you a) listen hard to people who disagree with you; b) hunt for facts and data that are contrary to your own stand; and c) reflect disagreements and nuances in what you tell the rest of us.

Advocacy journalism has a long and honorable history. But the best in this arena have always acknowledged the disagreements and nuances, and they've been fair in reflecting opposing or orthogonal views and ideas.

By doing so, they can strengthen their own arguments in the end. At the very least they are clearer, if not absolutely clear, on the other sides' arguments, however weak. (That's sides, not side; there are almost never only two sides to anything.)

A 2001 article from the Columbia Journalism Review... blogging it because one of my journalism courses this fall will focus on election coverage.

What's sure is that TV's election night practices are in for significant reupholstery well before the 2002 races. Several networks promise they'll project winners in the future only when all polls have closed in a state, not just a majority of them. ABC intends to advise viewers that projections are "informed, statistically based estimates" of the probable outcome of elections, not definitive declarations. They'll also remove television sets from the proximity of their decision desks so that analysts feel less pressured to make hasty calls.

Beyond that, legislators -- mostly in the person of congressman Billy Tauzin, Republican of Louisiana -- have been scrutinizing TV's election night performance. Tauzin says he won't sponsor any bill aimed at preventing exit polls or limiting vote projections -- legislation which, in any case, would clearly affront the First Amendment. He and a Democratic congressman, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, are introducing legislation to require the fifty states to close their polls at the same moment -- an often-proposed idea that would force drastic changes in the way TV news handles projections.

Despite the mistakes, gaffes, and embarrassments, or perhaps because of them, election night 2000 attracted the most households and viewers to TV screens since Nielsen began keeping such records with the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon cliffhanger. The late-night host Conan O'Brien joked that the networks were so thrilled with the ratings that they plan to call all elections incorrectly from now on.

The public's loss of trust in television news, however, was no laughing matter. In a CNN poll 79 percent of Americans said the networks did not act "responsibly" on election night. In future close elections, will most viewers believe what the networks tell them? How long will it take to regain their confidence? Why serve up quick-draw projections at all, since the public isn't clamoring for them? Is it really worth each network's paltry saving of $5-$10 million per election cycle to cede to a single entity so much influence and discretion? Or, contrarily, should the networks dismantle their individual decision desks and delegate a reconstituted, better funded VNS to make all projections, but in a more cautious, unhurried, less frenzied, and non-competitive mode?

Fascinating stuff... according to CNN, the story is, in order to secure the release of 15 hostages, the Colombian military set up a fake website that borrowed heavily from a real organization's identity.

The organization's logo -- a stylized red bird on a white background in the centermost of three concentric circles, with blue leaves on white in the middle circle and the organization's name on a blue background in the outermost circle -- is featured prominently throughout the site.

That same logo was pasted on the side of a helicopter used on the rescue mission that brought former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, three American contractors and 11 Colombian police and soldiers back from the jungle, according to unpublished video shown to CNN by a military source who had been looking to sell the material.

The emblems can't be seen in the heavily edited video released by the Colombian Defense Ministry. CNN declined to purchase the unpublished material. 

But Mision Humanitaria Internacional doesn't exist. Although the site said the group was registered with the Spanish Interior Ministry and the regional Department of Justice, Spanish Interior Ministry spokesman Alvaro Pena said the organization was not registered with the ministry and was not in its records.

http://misionhi.org is turning up 404 now, but there are a few pages left in the Google cache.

Threat Level has a story on the McCain campaign's tracking of the Obama website. Nothing really new about the practice, and nothing stunning about the revelation that the Obama camp sometimes updates its website (gasp!), but what's unusual is that instead of independent pundits doing this in their pajamas from their living rooms, this is now a tool being employed by the campaign itself.

The politicos' mutual stalking has reached unprecedented new levels this year: At least one side has started to spider the other's campaign website to track that campaign pages' precise word changes up to an hourly basis.

John McCain's campaign published a side-by-side comparison of Barack Obama's Iraq War policy web pages on Tuesday using a new automated online tracking service called Versionista.

From the New York Times blog, The Lede:

In the four-missile version of the image released Wednesday by Sepah News, the media arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, two major sections (encircled in red) appear to closely replicate other sections (encircled in orange). (Illustration by The New York Times; photo via Agence France-Presse)

Latest update at 3 p.m. Eastern Agence France-Presse has retracted the image as "apparently digitally altered." More developments at the bottom of the post.

As news spread across the world of Iran's provocative missile tests, so did an image of four missiles heading skyward in unison. Unfortunately, it appeared to contain one too many missiles, a point that had not emerged before the photo was used on the front pages of The Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times, The Chicago Tribune and several other newspapers as well as on BBC News, MSNBC, Yahoo! News, NYTimes.com and many other major news Web sites.