Just to prove it's as behind the curve as its midtown "competition," the Sun takes on the blogosphere with today's piece on Mickey Kaus' move to Slate, entitled "Apocalypse Is upon the Bloggers of the Web — Or Is It?" Given that writer Seth Mnookin concludes with a resounding "no," we're left scratching our heads over just what this is doing on the front page. Mnookin directly contradicts the subhead, "Cyberspace Stunned as Mickey Kaus Moves kausfiles.com to Microsoft Site," by writing on the jump that "no one seems overly concerned about a dampening of bloggers fiercely iconoclastic ardor." In fact, the two bloggers Mnookin interviews — Virginia Postrel and Joshua Michael Marshall — both say they don't have a problem with the move. Nor should they — Kaus already writes a good deal for Slate, his new home, and so the fact that Microsoft is now picking up all, and not just some, of his paycheck is small beans. The only person who seems to care — besides Mnookin, of course — is Kaus himself, who sent Glenn Reynolds, another blogger, an e-mail asking himself "why are you selling out to a giant soulless monopolistic corporation?" Um … At the end of the story, Kaus tells Mnookin, "Please, create problems. It'd be good for me. Bring on the readers!" Seth, Seth, Seth — if you're going to write press releases and call them news, at least don't make it so obvious.

---

Obviously assured that Mnookin's barnburner will bring in the readers, today's Sun holds off on its daily anti-China screed until Page 3. There we get "Taiwan Holds a Children's Event," which discusses a reception held by Taiwanese officials that ran parallel with the UN Special Session on Children. Because the UN doesn't recognize Taiwan, the country wasn't invited. Obviously the Sun is afraid that most people aren't aware of the fact, because rather than discuss at all what happens at the event (after all, it is, you know, the headline), the paper focuses on the Chinese bullying that keeps Taiwan out of UN events. As to what was said at the Taiwanese event or how many people attended, not to mention what attendees might have said to interviewers, we never find out; the only quotation is a blanket statement by the director of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office about Taiwan's exclusion from international organizations. Nor do we get to know what happened at the UN session — important stuff like US intransigence over population control policies and an announcement by Bill Gates of a new anti-child poverty fund. Nothing, though, as important as reminding readers that Seth Lipsky doesn't like China.

---

Today's lead graphic is a nice watercolor of Gov. George Pataki, reading a copy of Washingtonian that he's slipped inside a copy of The New Yorker. Too bad it has nothing to do with Page 1; instead, it's linked to a one-two punch on the op-ed page, an editorial and a lengthy anti-Pataki opinion by Harry Siegel, himself an editor at the Sun. Not that Pataki's done much recently to justify the attack, at least nothing that might qualify as news. No, it's just another one of the Sun's daily reminders that it is, after all, less a newspaper than a political bandstand, and that inconveniences like journalistic propriety have no place in the paper's songlist.