Got hot links if you want ’em!

In “Ripping Nine-Inch Nails” at Salon, James Hannaham writes: “Reznor has always had problems with authority. What better way to subvert his own influence than to encourage his fans to remix the new NIN record before it has really solidified in the public consciousness? If he allowed fans any closer to his process, they’d be writing the songs themselves.”

Scott Ritter on the laptop of mass destruction: “The fact that this computer is acknowledged as coming from [anti-Islamic Republic Iranian terrorists] the MEK and the fact that a proper forensic investigation would probably demonstrate the fabricated nature of the data contained are why the U.S. government will never agree to such an investigation being done.”

Photographer Zoriah Miller has been disembedded by the US military in Iraq. Michael Kamber and Tim Arango of the New York Times report: “The fact that the images I took of the suicide bombing — which are just photographs of something that happens every day all across the country — the fact that these photos have been so incredibly shocking to people, says that whatever they are doing to limit this type of photo getting out, it is working.”

Daniel Ellsberg, interviewed by Glenn Greenwald: “We don’t actually have an Official Secrets Act. . . which criminalizes any unauthorized disclosure of classified information. Almost nobody knows that we don’t have such a law, so [laughs] when they pass it I’m not sure they will notice.”

Matt Taibbi: “It turned out, for decades, that Bible-thumping Americans didn’t mind having their jobs shipped to China, so long as someone was worrying about the air supply to Terri Schiavo’s brain lump.”

Juan Cole: “Bush had clearly executed a ‘Rockford’ or reverse 180 of the sort you see stunt drivers pull off in spy movies. And the reason for that reversal of course [on Iran] was, indeed, reality — not just a recognition of the limits of the U.S. military, but a taste of $5-per-gallon gas. ”

Sports

From the Houston Chronicle: “Half a world away, reaction to the news of the Rockets getting Ron Artest was a pair of Olympic thumbs working overtime. Yao Ming and Luis Scola spent Wednesday morning furiously exchanging test messages and opinions after word of the deal broke out of Houston. ‘For some reason, I like (Artest),’ Yao said. ‘Because in the games we play against him, I hate him.'”

Manny Being Manny Department

In the end, Ramirez lobbied to stay: “Of all the Manny moments in Boston, the last ranks as one of the most confounding. Within an hour after Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein informed Manny Ramirez he had been traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers Thursday, Ramirez’s agent, Scott Boras, called the Sox back. . . . If the Sox dropped the option years on his contract — which they had agreed to do if they traded him — Boras said Ramirez would not be a problem the rest of the season.”