"There is nothing like a journalistic plane crash to inspire newsroom loudmouths to jump on their desks and lecture colleagues about the collapse of standards and crow that they're such exemplars of the craft that never in a trillion years could they or their publication be snookered by a fabulist, a hoaxer, a dissembler or a liar.

"Thanks to the release of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism's authorized and comprehensive report on Rolling Stone's horribly flawed (and now officially retracted) expose 'A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA,' this sort of posturing is clogging the Web today. I, too, would be doing a condemnation-dance on my desk to celebrate Rolling Stone's stupidity if I wasn't so certain that the lessons the Rolling Stone debacle teach us are fleeting. The time may soon come that the pontificators flop as miserably at the fundamentals of journalism as reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely and her Rolling Stone editors have. ...

"'The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust,' wrote Samuel Butler."

"We now have a definitive answer to the oft-asked but hardly challenging question of whether President Obama wanted a deal with Iran so badly he would accept a truly awful bargain. The answer: Of course he did.

"Iranian negotiators have triumphed on nearly every substantive point: They will get complete sanctions relief and U.N. legitimacy all at once, while keeping thousands of centrifuges, multiple nuclear sites, the right to develop new, more advanced enrichment equipment -- even permission to continue nuclear research at a highly reinforced underground facility that was kept secret from international inspectors for years. In exchange, the West got promises of a new, tough inspections regime, even though there is already a long record of Iran's developing nuclear facilities in secret. The White House says the deal pushes the time it would take Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon to a year, but widely respected arms-control experts have said, given the difficulty of performing good inspections and of building consensus around violations, that this is not enough. ...

"We hope the president and our allies will come to recognize the folly of the tentative deal before it is formally complete. If not, Congress must do everything it can to scuttle it, and show the world -- and our allies -- that U.S. policy has some adult supervision."

"Here is the fact. The intention behind a deal -- to stop Iran from developing, and in the end using, nuclear weapons -- could not be more serious and crucial. The Arab world has entered a war phase that may go for decades. Its special threat is that the struggle is not only an essential one -- Sunni vs. Shia, in a fight to the end -- but that it engenders and is marked by what British Prime Minister David Cameron has called 'the death cult.' Many in the fight have no particular fear of summoning the end of the world.

"Once Iran has what used to be called the bomb, there will be a race among nearby nations -- Persian Gulf states, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey -- to get their own. As each state builds its arsenal, there will be an increased chance that freelancers, non-states and sub-states will get their hands on parts of it."

"U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez now begins a fight for his political life that could last for years. New Jersey would be better off if he would resign and conduct that battle on his own time.

"The state needs a respected senator who is focused on his job, not a tarnished defendant who spends his days fending off credible charges of corruption and raising money for his legal defense.

"Menendez vows that he will not resign. He argues that he should be regarded as innocent until he is proven guilty, a claim that cannot be taken lightly. But that is the standard for imposing criminal sanctions like jail and fines. For senators, the bar should be much higher. ...

"Regardless of the outcome, it is hard to fathom Menendez's lack of judgment after a long career in a state that has been cursed by so much corruption. Why would he even dance close to this line?

"He has done good service to this state over the past 40 years. But that is now tarnished forever. His decision to stay and fight only compounds the damage."

"Recent statements from United Nations officials, that Iran is already blocking their existing efforts to keep track of what is going on in their nuclear program, should tell anyone who does not already know it that any agreement with Iran will be utterly worthless in practice. It doesn't matter what the terms of the agreement are, if Iran can cheat.

"It is amazing -- indeed, staggering -- that so few Americans are talking about what it would mean for the world's biggest sponsor of international terrorism, Iran, to have nuclear bombs, and to be developing intercontinental missiles that can deliver them far beyond the Middle East. ...

"The road to World War II was strewn with arms control agreements on paper that aggressor nations ignored in practice. But those agreements lulled the democracies into a false sense of security that led them to cut back on military spending while their enemies were building up the military forces to attack them."

"Since President Obama took office, The Wall Street Journal reports, employees of Google 'have visited the White House for meetings with senior officials about 230 times, or an average of roughly once a week.' Google's top lobbyist had more than 60 meetings at the White House. That's more meetings than most of Mr. Obama's Cabinet members. ...

"Perhaps Google should just change its name to Obamoogle, but it wouldn't be the first time a corporation has curried the favor of an administration. Between lobbyists and political donations, and even long-standing relationships, Americans have seen how some companies manage to secure Most Favored Nation-type relationships with presidents and their administrations. ...

"This revelation about the intensity of the Obama-Google merger also helps explain the Federal Communications Commission'€™s determination to regulate the Internet using the pretext of 'net neutrality.' The biggest winners of that action? Obama supporters Google (through YouTube) and Netflix, which now consume at least 50 percent of Internet bandwidth."

"The tragedy of the discussion around 'school choice' in America is the hidden presumption that 'school choice' doesn't exist already. But it does -- for the privileged. This is not only a matter of the privileged being able to afford private schools, but also the fact that, through the public school catchment system, the real estate market is really the market for schools. Every family in America wants to buy a house in a place where there are good schools. Every commonwealth tries to boost real estate values by improving schools. That's how the system works. The rich get school choice, the poor get... whatever.

"The drive for school choice is not a drive to turn schools into a marketplace, it's only to give the poor a way to access the preexisting market, which is currently closed off to them."

"'I don't understand how Jews in America can be Democrats first and Jewish second and support Israel along the line of just following their president,' vented Representative Steve King (R., Iowa) on Boston Herald Radio last week. ...

"Part of the confusion is that being Jewish and supporting Israel have never been wholly synonymous, and regrettably they are getting less synonymous all the time. This is a source of great consternation in many Jewish circles, and a source of profound confusion and frustration in conservative circles. Just as right-leaning non-Jews are embracing Israel, left-leaning Jews are pushing it away. ...

"One reason Jews are still liberal is that ideological and partisan affiliations die hard. They tend to be passed, like religion itself, from parent to child, generation after generation. But such loyalties aren't static either. And while Steve King could have phrased it better, he was absolutely right that at some point -- now or in the future -- support for the left and support for Israel must conflict. And King is right to lament it when Jews choose the former over the latter."

"Qatar's 'strict monitoring' of the Taliban 5 -- if it ever really existed -- is set to expire this spring, effectively allowing them to roam free. Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the House Armed Services Committee earlier this year that there is 'very little' his agency can do to prevent them from returning to the battlefield and trying to kill American soldiers.

"So, far from the fairytale of a hero'€™s homecoming that President Obama tried to spin for the American people that Saturday morning 10 months ago, this story doesn't have a happy ending for America. In his effort to empty the Gitmo detainee facility, the president traded five hard-core terrorists for a man who now stands officially accused of abandoning his fellow soldiers. He very may well be court-martialed and spend a good deal of his life behind bars. It's the Taliban 5 who, beginning in just a few short weeks, get to live happily ever after."

"The socialist government in France usually doesn't have much in common with congressional Republicans, for whom both France and socialism tend to be anathema.

"But the French, according to a Wall Street Journal report, are taking the toughest line among the powers negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program and are alarmed by the Obama administration's accommodating approach.

"'Some US officials,' the Journal writes, 'privately believe France is seeking in part to maintain strong ties to Israel and to Arab countries deeply skeptical of Washington's outreach to Tehran.'

"When the Quai d'Orsay is more concerned than Foggy Bottom with maintaining warm ties to Israel, it is a sign of a world turned upside down."