Early yesterday, Jonathan Martin filed a report on the McCain campaign's growingJohn And Cindy in 2000: When the press was still their base frustration with what they feel are double standards in the way the media are covering John McCain versus the way they're covering Barack Obama. Is there a precise antonym of 'serendipity'? Because something tells me there won't be too many more Sedona cookouts for the "base" if articles like this Mail on Sunday piece --- complete with Shymalanian Ross Perot cameo! --- migrate across the pond and proliferate :

When Carol was discharged from hospital after six months of life-saving surgery, the prognosis was bleak. In order to save her legs, surgeons had been forced to cut away huge sections of shattered bone, taking with it her tall, willowy figure. She was confined to a wheelchair and was forced to use a catheter.

Through sheer hard work, Carol learned to walk again. But when John McCain came home from Vietnam, she had gained a lot of weight and bore little resemblance to her old self.

Today, she stands at just 5ft4in and still walks awkwardly, with a pronounced limp. Her body is held together by screws and metal plates and, at 70, her face is worn by wrinkles that speak of decades of silent suffering...

'My marriage ended because John McCain didn’t want to be 40, he wanted to be 25. You know that happens...it just does' [Carol McCain said].

Some of McCain’s acquaintances are less forgiving, however. They portray the politician as a self-centred womaniser who effectively abandoned his crippled wife to 'play the field'. They accuse him of finally settling on Cindy, a former rodeo beauty queen, for financial reasons.

McCain was then earning little more than £25,000 a year as a naval officer, while his new father-in-law, Jim Hensley, was a multi-millionaire who had impeccable political connections.

It gets more unflattering from there. For the record, I'm not endorsing this; dumpster-diving is a poor substitute for journalism. The point, though, is that angrily lashing out at the press, as the Martin piece suggests is the McCain camp's strategy, is just going to lead to a negative feedback cycle in which only McCain stands to lose. You'd think their savvy new communications expert, Michael Goldfarb, would know that. If the McCainiacs don't want to face a spiral of hostility, leading questions, and sensationalism from the media, the solution is fairly straightforward: They can work with the Obama campaign to apply bipartisan pressure to keep coverage clean and focused on issues (good on both sides for shutting ABC out of future debates, by the way; the way to deter future McCarthyite spectacles like the Philadelphia debate is to punish the parties responsible).

Alternatively, they can try to overcome deplorable, barely-sourced snooping into McCain's private life, by paying Michael Goldfarb $X more than he's worth (where X = his total salary) to win over hardline militarists who supported Hillary Clinton by regaling them with tales of McCain's fondness for ABBA. Whatever works.

Trouble in the Brit blogosphere. A number of leading blogs have been taken down due to the threat of legal action by an Uzbek billionaire who claims he was being libelled.

Alisher Usmanov recently bought shares in Arsenal football club, one of the top four teams in the English Premiership, and is looking to extend his shareholding. It's been alleged in several quarters that if they choose to dine with this guy, ‘the Gunners’ should be supping with a very long spoon. The Guardian takes up the story:

Schillings, the lawyers acting for Usmanov, have been in touch with several independent Arsenal supporters' websites and blogs warning them to remove postings referring to allegations made against him by Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan.

Usmanov was jailed under the old Soviet regime but says that he was a political prisoner who was then freed and granted a full pardon once Mikhail Gorbachev came to power as president. Schillings have warned the websites that repetition of Murray's allegations were regarded as "false, indefensible and grossly defamatory".

It appears that m'learned friends' intervention has had the desired effect. Murray edited his posting, but insisted that his allegations were true and that he would take his chances in court. He hasn't been given the chance. Rather than suing him for libel, as is Usmanov's right, his lawyers went directly to the webhosts. And in the face of a flurry of threatening letters from Schillings, the webhosting company caved.

A number of ‘offending’ blogs have had the plug pulled, including Tim Ireland’s Bloggerheads and Craig Murray himself. Both of them had published comments about Usmanov which prompted him to reach for the phone to his lackeys at Schillings. Worse, and particularly stupidly, a whole network of unrelated political sites hosted on the same server have also been taken down, among them prominent Tory MP and London Mayoral frontrunner Boris Johnson, none of whom were involved in any way.

More from DavidT at Harry's Place:

Bloggers cannot operate if they are bullied by rich plaintiffs. Defamation law in the United Kingdom is both farcical and unfair, and is in desperate need of fundamental reform. Errors on blogs can easily be remedied: particularly where they permit open commenting (a libel risk in itself) which allows postings to be criticised, facts corrected, and arguments opposed. I know what it is like to be at the receiving end of a well funded threat of defamation proceedings, and it is no fun at all. It is outrageous that the law of defamation should be used to break bloggers: like butterflies upon wheels.

That's entirely right. This ugly development demonstrates that blogs are vulnerable to big bullies with bigger sticks. We can't defend ourselves the way a magazine or newspaper can. There's no legal budget for us to dip into. And let's be clear on this point; these blogs are down not because Usmanov has been libelled, but because he says he's been libelled, and has a room full of paid monkeys sitting at typewriters firing off theatening letters to that effect.

In the US you have a First Amendment right to free speech. This has the effect, among other things, of making it rather harder to bully the little guy into silence. In Britain we have no such protection. As most of us use US-based blog platforms such as Google-owned Blogger, it’s unlikely that a thug like Usmanov would succeed in shutting us down if he didn’t like what we were writing (he could still sue us for libel, of course, but that’s a slightly different matter). But if a foreign businessman can have a whole network of blogs taken down in their entirety with just the threat of legal action, we're all in trouble. Next time, who's to say it won't be a politician? And then where does that leave us?

But Usmanov's problems are far from over. US sports blogger David Warner sums up Schillings' problem nicely:

It appears Schillings has fallen victim to something our pals at Techdirt like to call "The Streisand Effect." Back in 2003, Barbra Streisand sued a photographer in an attempt to remove an aerial photo of her California home from the Internet, despite the fact that the photo was part of a publicly funded coastline erosion study and wasn't even labeled as her home. As a result, photos of her house were published all over the web within days.

[...] for all their claims that Murray is libeling their client, Schillings has not actually sued Murray for libel. They have told anyone who will listen that Murray's book, Murder at Samarkand, is defamatory against Usmanov, but it's been out for more than a year, and they have never taken any legal action against Murray. Instead, they seem more focused on getting any mention of Murray and his allegations against Usmanov removed from the web -- and as the Streisand Effect teaches us, that's pretty much impossible.

If Murray's goal was to make Usmanov look like a thug, then mission accomplished.

I knew nothing about Alisher Usmanov this time yesterday; a rich businessman trying to increase his stake in a football club. So what? They're ten a penny, if you'll pardon the phrase.

Today, I know that he's a [snip! - Jewcy lawyers], a fat [snip! - Jewcy lawyers] who was imprisoned for [snip! - Jewcy lawyers] and even, it is whispered among his fellow Uzbeks, the perpetrator of a particularly vicious [snip! - Jewcy lawyers]. And this is all directly because his decision to legal up, and his lawyers' decision to bring out the elephant guns, led me to find out what all the fuss was about in the first place.

Letters are being written to the football authorities, questions asked in Parliament, and the original allegations are spreading through the internet like wildfire. Google his name and see what I mean. Tomorrow it'll probably be in some of the national papers. The stench around this guy's name continues to grow. Hundreds of Arsenal fans who yesterday only knew about his deep pockets are now going to start wondering if this is a fit and proper person to involve himself in the running of their famous old club. This may yet backfire horribly for old Alisher.

The website of Schillings, Usmanov’s lawyers, has a page boasting a case study in how to neutralise "the internet attacker". Oops.

The tendency to ascribe greater significance to natural phenomena is nothing new – ever since a dozy Egyptian Pharaoh misinterpreted a perfectly ordinary plague of frogs as a sign from God, we’ve tended to read our own beliefs, fears and prejudices into natural disasters. The US had a notable example of this a couple of years ago, of course, when Katrina left New Orleans underwater. Depending on who you asked, Katrina was retribution for America’s obsession with abortion, the gay pride parade planned for New Orleans that week, or the invasion of Iraq. The delightful Rabbi Ovadia Yosef even blamed the disaster on US support for the disengagement from Gaza. 

At the time, there was a bit of a controversy in Britain over the tone of some of the reports: Tony Blair privately described the BBC’s coverage as ‘full of hatred of America’ and ‘gloating at the country's plight’, and he may well have been right. There was a definite subtext in our [liberal] media that seemed to be saying, This is what you get for refusing to sign up to Kyoto, or not having a civilised welfare state [sic] like ours, or for neglecting the racial divide in your country. Maybe not schadenfreude, perhaps; but certainly a rather British superciliousness.

Well, no-one’s sneering now.

 Tewkesbury

As I write this, large swathes of England are underwater, in a vast arc from London through Oxford up to the Welsh border. It’s the worst flooding the country has seen in modern times, and follows hot on the heels of similar problems in the north a couple of weeks ago. And sure enough, commentators have not been slow to share their opinions on what has caused this misery for hundreds of thousands of people.

The Bishop of Carlisle shocked his sleepy flock by labelling the first wave of floods a sign of God’s anger at new gay equality legislation. This was a particular surprise: Church of England vicars are normally too timid even to ask for biscuits with their tea. A couple of days later, the horrendous left-wing columnist Polly Toynbee – a woman so awful that if you were trapped in an elevator with her and Ann Coulter and had two bullets left, you’d shoot her, twice, just to be absolutely sure – tried to claim that if the floods had been happening in the south of the country rather than the impoverished North, they would be taken more seriously by the media, gleefully ignoring the brainless wall-to-wall coverage of the rising waters from welly-clad anchors on all the major channels. Either way, she got her wish: the floods have now hit the leafy south, and the news channels have once again despatched their star names to wade through sodden fields and streets bringing us up-to-the-minute footage of water lapping at doors with all the pompous solemnity that the great British media can muster when it really tries.

Inevitably, of course, the blame has now shifted from God and poverty to that favourite bugbear of the European media, climate change. (We used to call it 'global warming', but nowadays floods, droughts, heavy rain, sparse rain, warm weather and cold snaps are all mobilised as evidence of the impending meteorological Armaggedon.) In today's Guardian newspaper, columnist Jackie Ashley takes us all to task for ignoring the signs of global catastrophe, citing the dire warnings of political Britain's US pin-up du jour, Al Gore - a man who, for writers on papers like the Guardian and the Independent, is as close to secular sainthood as anyone this side of Fidel Castro - and noting with approval the praise heaped on him by the new Prime Minister and his team of dullards and no-marks. And the beauty of this global warming climate change evidence, anecdotal as much of it is, is that it's non-falsifiable; Katrina and the unusually severe hurricane season of 2005 are identified as harbingers of doom by such as Gore, who described it - with unusual elegance - as "the first sip, the first taste, of a bitter cup that will be proffered to us over and over again", but who was strangely silent 12 months later when 2006 drew to a close with not a single hurricane making landfall in the US.

That's not to say that I deny that our climate may well change, and for the worse, as the impact of man on the environment grows ever more stark, nor to assert that we don't need to act to reduce the negative 'footprint' that we leave on the planet, and act promptly. But this gathering bandwagon of vacuous celebrities, ignorant journalists and opportunist politicians drives me to quiet despair; and watching government ministers scramble to apply a thin veneer of greenplate to every policy announcement, in a desperate attempt to persuade us that they're raising our taxes for the sake of the children, fills me with a deep, boiling rage. It almost makes you yearn for the old days, when they just bent us over and hosed us the old-fashioned way.

For the context, go here. It's worth it.

P.S. Thanks Israellycool.