POLITICAL CORRECTNESS--it's not just for leftwing atheists anymore! The state school superintendent for Georgia has proposed striking the word evolution from Georgia's science curriculum and replacing it with the phrase "biological changes over time":

Superintendent Kathy Cox said the concept of evolution would still be taught under the proposal, but the word would not be used. The proposal would not require schools to buy new textbooks omitting the word evolution and would not prevent teachers from using it.

Cox repeatedly referred to evolution as a "buzzword" Thursday and said the ban was proposed, in part, to alleviate pressure on teachers in socially conservative areas where parents object to its teaching.

"If teachers across this state, parents across this state say, 'This is not what we want,' then we'll change it," said Cox, a Republican elected in 2002.

There's no doubt that much of the bloom has come off of Darwin in the past few years, but pandering is pandering. If you're going to continue teaching evolution (and frankly, I'm not losing any sleep over its being taught in school), might as well call it what it is.

CNS News reports, "New York Times Tells Its Reporters Not to Carry Guns".

I love this line:

"The carrying of a weapon, for whatever reason, jeopardizes a journalist's status as neutral," Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis told CNSNews.com.

Why is a reporter for an American newspaper neutral? As someone once asked of CNN, "Who do you think you are? Switzerland?"

THE NAKED TRUTH: Mix magazine looks at the making--and mixing--of the Beatles' "new" Let It Be...Naked album.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

"In a real sense, the high-water mark for the Palestinian cause was September 10, 2001."--Steven Den Beste

Read the whole thing.

HEAVENLY DRECK: Slate asks, "Why is airplane music so universally bad"?

"I AM YOUR PUBLIC SCHOOL": Chris O'Donnell Fisks a horribly written, uber-politically correct, self-serving Webpage by the unfortunately named Frosty Troy (!) of the Oklahoma Education Association.

Here's Frosty's original essay. As O'Donnell writes, "Barf bags are highly recommended".

And here's Frosty's bio, which says he's not just popular--but hugely popular!

(Via Joanne Jacobs.)

MORE ON BETTY ONG: Bryan S. has some thoughts, and a link to a tape of her phone call.

For our original post, click here, or just scroll down to Wednesday's posts.

KERRY SAYS TERRORISM THREAT IS EXAGGERATED: John, you big lug you--three simple words: Little. Green. Footballs. Read it, learn it, love it.

And then let's talk.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan adds, "Back to the 1990s or post-9/11 Bush. Law enforcement versus war. It's a clear and important distinction. Let's put it at the center of this debate, where it belongs."

ANOTHER UPDATE: Speaking of Little Green Footballs, Charles Johnson posts:

According to the New York Daily News, Democratic candidate Wesley Clark sought the political support of the Muslim American Society and the Islamic Circle of North America—two Muslim groups that have been linked to terrorism by numerous sources, and are currently under investigation by the FBI.

Clark campaign spokesman Matt Bennett told the Daily News that they were unaware of the allegations or the FBI probe.

But as Johnson writes, "If that last statement is true, what does it say about how seriously Clark is taking the war on terrorism?"

About as seriously as the rest of the candidates (save Lieberman). Because as Sullivan previously wrote, for much of the left, "9/11 didn't really happen".

VOIP--LET IT FLY: I've written several articles over the past couple of years on voice over IP. James Glassman says it could be the killer app for broadband, which has had impressive growth over the past few years:

Experts see VoIP as the "killer app," the powerful application that will inspire Americans to subscribe to broadband. Today, 20 percent of U.S. homes have broadband -- up from 5 percent when President Bush took office. That's a start, but with VoIP, the figure should grow to 50 percent in a few years.

Meanwhile, VoIP is already igniting an explosion in investment that will eventually employ hundreds of thousands of new workers at companies like Lucent, Net2Phone, Intel, Dell, Comcast, Vonage, Qwest, Cisco, SBC, AT&T, Oracle and start-ups we can only guess about. It's a timely cure for a recovering economy.

What can stop VoIP dead in its tracks? The same thing that could have stopped the Wright Brothers -- rules and taxes created for another era and a different paradigm.

Said a recent news story in the Wall Street Journal, "Because of the Internet's regulation-free status, phone calls sent as tiny electronic packets over the global computer network avoid all of the regulations, taxes and fees of the traditional public phone system."

So far, anyway. But companies with an interest in maintaining that traditional system are complaining that VoIP is not really an Internet application. It's more like a long-distance phone call. So it's subject to rules and expensive access fees that will jack up costs to consumers and kill VoIP in the cradle.

The FCC's Powell can cut through this nonsense and make a historic decision to keep the Internet free. Last week, he said, "If you're going to say that Voice over IP is something that needs regulation, then you're going to have to explain to me why e-mail isn't also, or streaming video or instant messaging is not also."

Glassman says that "Such free-market rhetoric is encouraging, but with Powell, you never know." But at least he's saying it. Imagine a quote like that from anyone if there had been a Gore administration.

SUPERFLY, RIP: Orrin Judd reports that Ron O'Neal, the actor who played--and created--the iconic Superfly during the early 1970s "blaxploitation" craze passed away. O'Neal was quoted in a recent LA Weekly piece as saying:

the press thought I was some n****r off the street who made a movie about his own dissolute life. I never used drugs in those days. And my film was about a dealer who quit selling drugs and got out of that system. Still, the negative press soured my career and, eventually, it soured me.

That quote speaks volumes of the stupidity of either Hollywood, the press that covers it, or both. I don't know about you, but I never for a second thought that O'Neal was a former dealer himself, any more than I thought Marlon Brando was actually once the head of an organized crime family.

Ironically, O'Neal passed away, at age 66, of pancreatic cancer, the day before Superfly was released on DVD. Along with Shaft, Superfly represents the zenith of the blaxploitation period, and has an absolute knockout of a score from Curtis Mayfield.

NAT HENTOFF--HOSS: Hentoff writes about the American Library Association, and their pro-Castro agenda.

Hentoff's response? In June of '83, he received the prized ALA Immroth Award for Intellectual Freedom:

The citation reads: "For courageous and articulate advocacy of the First Amendment as an author, speaker, and activist for human rights" (June 1983).

I now publicly renounce the Immroth Award and demand that the American Library Association remove me from the list of recipients of that honor. To me, it is no longer an honor. Someone I know in the ALA, who was at the San Diego meeting, explained to me that some members of the council whispered privately that they agreed with the amendment calling for freeing the librarians but had to vote it down because they didn't want to be vilified as being "on the wrong team." They have put themselves in their own prison.

For more, see this World Net Daily article on Hentoff, the ALA, and Castro.

THE TERMINATOR MEETS THE GIPPER: On Thursday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a proclamation declaring February 6th--the Gipper's 93rd birthday--as 'Ronald Reagan Day' in California.

It would have been a cold day in Sacramento before Gray Davis would have made such a proclamation, and it's further proof that California is in play for President Bush.

FROM THE FROZEN TUNDRA OF MOUNT LAUREL, NJ: I have a profile of NFL Films, (which I had the pleasure of visiting this past summer, after interviewing several of their executives by phone) in Tech Central Station.

Think of it as a great way to kick off this Super Bowl weekend.

And click on the Amazon link on the right, if you want to pre-order NFL Films' documentary of Sunday's game. You'll have it in your hands, and in your DVD player, on February 24th, less then a month from now.

SWEDEN--IT'S AS EASY AS ABC: Well, at least if ABC stands for Abba, bestiality and crime. Not only does Sweden have more crime and more poverty than Mississippi, it's got more people--a lot more people--who want to get frisky with Fido as well.

I'm sure Peter Singer will be retiring there as soon as his stint at Princeton is up.

THE DOMINO EFFECT: Andrew Sullivan writes, "Raines. Boyd. Davies. Dyke. Does it get any better for fair journalism?"

Well, yeah. There's a lot more distance to go to get anywhere near a fair and balanced (to coin a phrase) mass media. But 2003 and early 2004 has seen some very positive--and welcome--steps.

IS POSTMODERNISM PASSE? Pejman Yousefzadeh, linking to a Christian Science Monitor article, says "Behold another sign that postmodern literary theory is on its way out".

I hope they're right. But I fear the damage that a generation of this stuff has caused college kids.

BIG, BIG TROUBLE FOR DISNEY: Pixar ends Disney distribution deal.

Pixar, who has produced digitally animated films beginning with Toy Story in 1995, has helped kept Disney afloat, by making fun, non-PC-obsessed (no pun intended, given that Steve Jobs is Pixar's CEO) animated films. Beginning in the 1990s, Disney's animated films always seemed to want to teach politically correct shibboleths; but Pixar just seemed to want to have fun.

Combine this with Michael Eisner's recent headaches with his board, and the result is not a pretty picture for Uncle Walt's successors.

UPDATE: The New York Times agrees:

The timing of Pixar's announcement creates a public relations nightmare for Mr. Eisner, who has been under pressure to turn around Disney's fortunes. This week, two former directors — Stanley Gold and Roy Disney, the nephew of the company's co-founder — called on shareholders to oust Mr. Eisner at Disney's annual meeting in March. Mr. Gold and Mr. Disney have complained that Disney's formerly renowned animation division has faltered under Mr. Eisner. They released a statement on Thursday saying that Mr. Eisner had mismanaged the relationship with Pixar.

Already the news of the failed talks created a flurry of interest from competitors including Warner Brothers Studios, which said it would be interested in distributing Pixar films.

The Times adds, "One film executive suggested that Mr. Jobs could now be considered a candidate to run Disney if indeed Mr. Eisner ever left."

The Disney empire under Steve Jobs--now that would be interesting to watch.

THE BIG PICTURE: The folks posting in National Review's Corner Weblog are grousing about Bush's proposed increases in the NEA's spending, and quite right so, but there are some interesting angles going on here. First, it's an election year, and this sort of stuff sounds appealing to undecided moderates. Second, it blows out much of the Democrats' demagoguery about the man. As David Bernstein of The Volokh Conspiracy notes:

Remind me again of why liberals are so hostile to George Bush? Give him a phony Haavaad accent instead of phony Texas twang, a wonky college life, a less religious persona, and an attorney general other than John Ashcroft, and George Bush, in theory, would be a dream president for many liberals, judging by their ex ante policy preferences. But the dirty little secret of American politics, as explained so well by Michael Barone, is that cultural cues are more important than policy and ideology. W just represents lots of things that coastal liberals dislike, and they will continue to dislike him regardless of how he governs policy-wise. But I find it amusing when they dress up their cultural prejudices in rhetoric along the lines of claiming that Bush is running a "right-wing" or "ultraconservative" administration that wants to roll back not just the Great Society, but also the New Deal.

Back in July of 2003, Jonathan Rauch wrote on Bush's efforts to transform the Federal Government:

The plan, therefore, has both tactical and strategic elements. In the short run, give people things they want; in the longer run, weaken the Democrats' base while creating, program by program, a new constituency of Republican loyalists who want the government to help them without bossing them around. Most important of all, however, is what might be thought of as the meta-strategy.

Essential to FDR's success in capturing the loyalty of two generations -- first the New Deal generation, then the Great Society one -- was his success in capturing the mantle of progressive reform for the Democrats. Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, had been a reformer, but so was Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican. FDR's hyperactive reformism decisively resolved the ambiguity. Regardless of what one thought of particular New Deal programs, as a group they established the Democrats as the party of progress. From that day to this, Republicans have been stereotyped as backward-looking and nay-saying -- the stick-in-the mud party, the perennial advocate of "turning back the clock."

The identification of liberals and Democrats with progressivism is essential to the Democrats' political appeal and, especially, their self-confidence. When all else fails, they remain the party of enlightenment, not least in their own minds. Thus, in his new book, The Clinton Wars, Sidney Blumenthal, a former Clinton aide, characterizes Bush as attempting "to repeal the progressive policies of the 20th century." Progressive presidents (meaning Clinton) "are elected because they stand for the idea that the old ways will not work -- and should not work," he writes, whereas conservative presidents (meaning Bush) "preserve their power through inertia... The allies of conservative presidents are indifference, passivity, and complacency. Nostalgia is the emotion that underlies many conservative sentiments -- a magical belief that if little is done, a simpler, happier time can be restored and a world of change kept at bay."

Conservatives, for their part, believe that today they are the ones who stand for progressive change, in the face of "reactionary liberalism," but they have never been able to convince the public. That is what Bush seeks to do, both by rejecting the mantra of minimal government and by passing reform after reform. Never mind how you feel about any one of his initiatives; as a group, they seek to establish that it is Republicans who now "stand for the idea that the old ways will not work." If the Democrats dig in their heels and fall back on stale rants against greed, inequality, and privatization, so much the better. The voters will know whom to thank for the empowering choices that Republicans intend to give them. As for which is the "party of nostalgia," the voters will also remember who defended, until the last dog died, single-payer Medicare, one-size-fits-all Social Security, schools without accountability, bureaucratic government monopolies, static economics, and Mutually Assured Destruction.

Reagan, the other conservative reformer among recent presidents, made important changes, but his agenda was more about undoing (Big Government, inflation, detente) than doing. He also had to deal with a Democratic Congress and a predominantly Democratic country. Bush, by contrast, can reasonably expect to enjoy eight years in office with Republican majorities in Congress and, effectively, on the Supreme Court. Republican and Democratic voter-registration numbers are now about even.

While Bush is enlarging government programs, he's frequently staffing them with conservative minds. Writing about the NEA, Roger Kimball says:

Under normal circumstances, the White House announcement that the president was seeking a big budget increase for the National Endowment for the Arts might have been grounds for dismay. Pronounce the acronym "NEA," and most people think Robert Mapplethorpe, photographs of crucifixes floating in urine, and performance artists prancing about naked, smeared with chocolate, and skirling about the evils of patriarchy.

Thanks, but no thanks.

But things have changed, and changed for the better at the NEA. The reason can be summed up in two trochees: Dana Gioia, the distinguished poet and critic who is the Endowment's new chairman.

Within a matter of months, Mr. Gioia has transformed that moribund institution into a vibrant force for the preservation and transmission of artistic culture. He has cut out the cutting edge and put back the art. Instead of supporting repellent "transgressive" freaks, he has instituted an important new program to bring Shakespeare to communities across America. And by Shakespeare I mean Shakespeare, not some PoMo rendition that portrays Hamlet in drag or sets A Midsummer Night's Dream in a concentration camp. (Check the website www.shakespeareinamericancommunities.org for more information.)

And Orrin Judd wrote in December:

The New Deal stood for the proposition that the government will take on the responsibility of providing for your every need. President Bush--though the process actually began with the Republican Congresses paradigm-shifting Welfare reform--is moving the country in a radically different direction, towards a system where the individual will resume the responsible, to the maximum degree feasible, of providing for his own social services--health care, unemployment insurance, education, mortgage, retirement, etc. (The operating title for this new system is apparently the "Ownership Society", ownership evoking yesterday's bit of de Tocqueville.) Now, conservatives, not known for their intellects, are terribly confused about all this, because the Welfare State which took 70 years to build wasn't reconstructed yesterday, which is apparently their test of someone's bona fides.

However, the Ted Kennedy's and Hillary Clinton's, far smarter and more sensitive to even tiny shifts in the zeitgeist than we Neanderthals, are well aware of what's going on. Mr. Kennedy actually figured it out after helping pass the wolf in sheep's clothing that is the No Child Left Behind Act. Nothing better illustrates the lag in Conservatives' comprehension than their continued belief that the NCLBA represented a Republican defeat. More recently, the Medicare reform--which included means-testing, MSA's and a series of other measures that Republicans have been pushing futiley for a quarter century--has been greeted as some kind of secret socialist coup by the Right, but Democrats fought it because they recognize that little reforms and the executive rule-making powers have a tendency to lead to sweeping change over time. And, at this point, time is on the GOP's side--whether they recognize it or not.

This isn't my vision of government--but then, I don't have to get elected, either. And as Rauch wrote:

"The Republican Party in 1994 tested a proposition," says a White House aide: "that people wanted government to be radically reduced. And they found out that people didn't want government to be radically reduced." Bush saw this, and he saw that the anti-government conservatism of Goldwater and Reagan had reached a dead end; and if there is a single characteristic that distinguishes Bush, it is his willingness to meet a dead end with a bulldozer. In 2002, "he really did set out to have the Republican Party stand for something different," says Michael Gerson, who signed on with Bush in 1999 and is now his chief speechwriter.

Bush's view, expressed in his book and in the 2000 campaign, is that government curtails freedom not by being large or active but by making choices that should be left to the people. Without freedom of choice, people feel no responsibility, and Bush insists again and again, as he put it in the book: "I want to usher in a responsibility era."

Big government without statism? With a minimum of top-down controls? Doesn't seem possible to me, and it's not the government model I personally want, but then I don't have to get elected, either.

UPDATE: Scott Ott "looks" at the first play those new bucks will be funding at the NEA.

NOT LIBERAL, NOT LEFTIST, merely "burgeoning": Judy Muller of ABC News takes a biased look at Moveon.org, the folks who brought you the Bush=Hitler commercials.

SURE, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL has always been a great read when it comes to improving your bottomline. In the past, it was all about stocks, bonds and mutual funds.

Today, it's illustrating a different kind of way of making money: in the betting pool for Super Bowl XXXVIII.

ON THE BOTOX BEAT: Lloyd Grove is smoothly at the forehead of politics.

ROGER L. SIMON connects the dots.

THE HEAVEN'S GATE/WES CLARK CONNECTION, as discoverd by John Cole.

WHAT WOULD HARRY LIME THINK? James D. Zirin of The Washington Times writes that "Switzerland, the landlocked country that invented the cuckoo clock and the secret numbered bank account, has overcome its strong commitment to neutrality to get into the same sandbox with the other international players on counterterrorism". Zirin adds:

The Swiss were not always so quick to crack down on international terror. A U.N. report issued last month criticized Switzerland for failing to interdict support for Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network and the Afghan Taliban. The report alleged Switzerland was a pipeline for terrorist arms and money. Evidence had linked bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to Swiss bank accounts in the 1990s. Mohamed Atta and another of the September 11, 2001, terrorists briefly passed through Switzerland. It is no secret al Qaeda operatives have used Swiss cell phone numbers to communicate.

The news is that the Swiss, who were ever so neutral about Adolf Hitler, whom they eagerly provided with a depository for Nazi plunder, are not neutral about the terrorist threat. They appear now to recognize their obligation to the world community to take strong counterterrorist action.

On the other hand, Zirin says--and this is no surprise--don't hold your breath when it comes to Saudi Arabia doing anything about terrorists.

A FRIENDLY DRINK in a time of war: Why yes, I have experienced variations of this conversation a few times myself.

The online version of it, which sadly does not involve cocktails--at least not face to face--goes something like the "debate" posted on Roger Simon's site by Daniel, the third commenter from the top.

IF YOU'VE SENT ME AN EMAIL and I haven't responded, because of all of the viruses "in the air", I've been fairly agressively deleting stuff with attachments from people I don't know via my Web host, before it hits Outlook. So there's a chance one or two replies that were legit emails got nuked as well.

UPDATE: Joanne Jacobs is having a similar experience.

SHARPTON FINED BY FEC: Al Sharpton's campaign is being fined $5,500 for violating federal election laws by the Federal Election Commission. I wonder if anyone will interview Steve Pagones for his thoughts on this.

I haven't seen Cold Mountain, a revisionist (to say the least) Civil War film, but Blixa's detailed review of the film (scroll down to bottom of the page), and its themes, speaks volumes about how out of touch Hollywood is with big chunks of its audience:

There is some lip service paid, in some of the dialogue, to some bizarre notion that Inman, seemingly for the sole reason that because he has fought in a (gasp) war, is now "not good enough" for Nicole Kidman's angelically beautiful and newly-independent Ada, apparently unlike before, when he mostly "worked wood". (A preacher's daughter, she now co-runs the farm, having been quickly taught farming by Bridget Jones - or something.) He's gone off and killed people and fired guns doin' it. He's tainted, you see. Why, the things he has done! It's almost like he's a man or something.

This should be a tipoff. It jarred me out of the film entirely. Because in context that makes no sense whatsoever. This is a thought which, historically, would not have even come to the mind of an Ada, let alone an Inman. If anything, a real historical Ada may have rejected an Inman - or, rather, an Inman would have been ashamed to call upon her in the first place - because he was a deserter - but not "because he killed". Please! He was a soldier, and in joining the war, he did no more and no less what any other able-bodied man of his time and station would have felt honor-bound to do.

I think lots of modern writers simply don't know how to construct a story in which the female hero ends up with a man who has done some, shall we say, historically-"manly" things. Such as killing in a war, for example. We can't quite wrap our minds around the idea that anything so base as fighting in a war could once have been considered honorable. What is "honor" anyway?

And it's true, the prospect of a movie ending with Nicole Kidman settling down and nesting with a man who has (gasp) killed other men - a man with blood on his hands, on the wrong side of the Civil War to boot - might well be too confusing to modern audiences. Shocking, even. Jude Law was "tainted" - not necessarily by historical standards, but in the eyes of the likely audience for both the book and the film. Better to just get rid of him. His continued presence in the story would be inconvenient, out of place, causing us discomfort.

What's curious is that Hollywood films that don't completely PC-ify war and honor often do extremely well at the box office, such as Mel Gibson's The Patriot, and We Were Soldiers, Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down, and recent hits The Two Towers and Master and Commander.

Cold Mountain was directed by Anthony Minghella, whose biography page on the Internet Movie Database quotes as saying, "The only lesson to extract from any civil war is that it's pointless and futile and ugly, and that there is nothing glamorous or heroic about it. There are heroes, but the causes are never heroic."

Gee, I guess freeing the slaves doesn't count as heroic in Mr. Minghella's eyes.

(Via Stephen Green.)

UPDATE: For a more favorable review of Cold Mountain, check out Mackubin Thomas Owens in National Review Online.

I ran out to pick up the mail at my office a little while ago, and one the way back, while flipping stations on the car radio, came across the Sean Hannity Show. Hannity played the audio tape of Betty Ann Ong, the stewardess on American Airlines Flight #11, who called in to request help--any help--after terrorists maced the passengers in first class, stabbed the crew in the galley, and barricaded themselves in the cockpit of the plane, which they eventually crashed into the World Trade Center.

According to this Fox News article:

The Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States heard portions of her 23-minute conversation with the American Airlines operations center on the second of its two-day hearing Tuesday.

Nydia Gonzalez, who was on duty at the operations center that morning, told the panel how she received Ong's call at about 8:20 a.m.

"Several media accounts of what occurred on Flight 11 claimed that Betty was 'hysterical with fear,' 'shrieking' and 'gasping for air,' she said. "Those accounts were wrong."

"In a very calm, professional and poised demeanor, Betty Ong relayed to us detailed information of the events unfolding on Flight 11," Gonzalez added. "I honestly believe after my conversation with Betty that the 81 passengers and new crew members on Flight 11 had no idea of the fate they were to encounter that day."

In the tape played before the commission, Ong tells the operations center her flight and seat number and describes the scene on board.

"We can't even get into the cockpit. We don't know who's there," Ong says, before the call ends in a dial tone.

If I find, or someone emails me a link to a Real Audio or Windows Media file of Ong's conversation, I'd very much like to link to it. Ong really had ice water in her veins to be that cool under enormous--and ultimately fatal--pressure. While history may record that she was unable to get help in time, she created a vital document of the last seconds of Flight #11.

Listening to that tape left me feeling like I punched in the gut. But Jonah's right: This stuff needs to be played over and over again. We shouldn't forget the horror--and the evil men that caused it.

UPDATE: Orrin Judd writes:

It's the damndest thing, we're far enough removed from the events of that day that we can refer to 9-11 without tapping every time into the memories that are stored away somewhere in our viscera. But then you hear something or see something or read something--as happened to Brother Driscoll--and it does indeed hit you like a physical assault. What may be most interesting about the whole phenomena is that it seems to demonstrate that we may be almost too decent a people. Rare, maybe even unique, is the culture that would consciously choose to put away the most inflammatory images, sounds, and stories of that day, even as it pursues the perpetrators and wars with their comrades in terror.

Imagine the effect, even the cheap effect, to which such remembrance could be put. Recent criticism of the President--particularly in the wake of the Paul O'Neill book--has dwelt on the notion that 9-11 merely provided a convenient excuse for him to act out some kind of psychodrama whereby he got to settle his father's score with Saddam and introduce fascist rule under cover of the Patriot Act. How about an address to the nation where he just plays the tape of the two planes crashing into the WTC and then says: "History may one day show that Saddam Hussein was less of a threat than we thought he was, but what we did we did because this must never happen again." Whether something like that would work or might instead backfire doesn't even matter, because the fact is it is somehow not in the American grain to use the tragedy in that way. It's almost as if we share some kind of collective intuition about just how terrible--though not necessarily unjustified--are the things we might do if we were to exploit the darker demons of our nature.

But does that make sense? Can an entire people know (and fear) themselves at such a level? Or is there some other explanation for the way in which the central event in our recent history has been carefully stored away, only to be encountered in almost accidental fashion?

Given that the Republican National Convention will be in New York in late August, I'd like to think this is one central event that will be relived. But who knows?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Kevin Hisel sent me a link to audio of Betty Ong's conversation.

ONE MORE UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan looks at a recent article by Joshua Micah Marshall in The New Yorker and writes:

For the Clintonites, 9/11 didn't really happen. Everything the Bush administration has tried to do in foreign policy is perverse, neocon imperialism - despite the fact that Bush ran as less interventionist than Al Gore in 2000. It doesn't seem to have occurred to them that this administration's hard line against terror-sponsoring regimes and those developing WMDs was not some ideological plot - but a reaction to events.

And it's probably easier to move images of an event that cause so much cognitive dissonance in your worldview that it "didn't really happen" (to use Sullivan phrase) to the videotape archive, rather than beaming out to an audience who care about them far more than you do.

QUICK UPDATE (1/30/04): Bryan S. has some thoughts, and a link to a tape of her phone call.

BBC CHAIRMAN RESIGNS: Andrew Sullivan's response? "Yay!"

Tough to argue with him.

FOOTBALL GREAT Elroy "Crazy Legs'' Hirsch, an NFL Hall of Famer and later the athletic director at the University of Wisconsin, died today, at age 80.

CHUTZPAH: Did John Kerry, husband of Teresa Heinz, widowed heir to the Heinz Ketchup fortune, really say he was going to take a stand against "the economy of special privilege"?

Really?! Seriously? Get out of here!

PAGING MR. ROVE...PAGING MR. KARL ROVE: John Hawkins has some advice on how Bush can shore up support among conservatives.

ROE VERSUS WADE VERSUS DEAN, crackpot Clark quotes, and John Kerry on global warming/cooling/warming. All over at James Taranto's Best of the Web Today...today.

SWAN SONG: This coming season will be Jerry Rice's last.

CAN YOU SAY "BAKED"? I knew that you could.

THERE'S NO MEDIA BIAS WHATSOEVER. And like Monty Python, when I say there is none, I do mean that there is a certain amount:

ABC News correspondent John Stossel, the co-anchor of 20/20, said most mainstream journalists, including those at his network, are leftists who view conservatives as "selfish and cruel" for embracing capitalism.

Stossel was in the nation's capital Tuesday to promote his new book, "Give Me a Break," at the libertarian Cato Institute. Although he praised ABC News for letting him present free-market viewpoints on 20/20, he criticized his peers for their hostility toward those ideas.

"Where I live in Manhattan and where I work at ABC, people say conservative the way people say child molester," he said. "[Conservative] is the worst thing for a reporter to be called. And I'm a little puzzled why they call me a conservative."

Stossel said, for instance, that he has libertarian views when it comes to drug use, prostitution, homosexuality and flag burning. Regardless, liberal media watchdogs like Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting have attacked him for aligning with conservatives.

Before adopting a skeptical view of the government and public-interest groups, Stossel was an enterprising consumer reporter. He won 18 Emmys while exposing shady business practices. But since realizing that more regulation might not be the answer to the world's problems, Stossel said he has observed changes, and he has only won one Emmy in that time.

Meanwhile, John Podheretz looks at how that sort of groupthink has affected the coverage of the Democratic primary:

The results last night in New Hampshire represent a humiliating disaster for the mainstream media. The political reporters and editors who have been judging this race for a year have made utter fools of themselves.

Nobody foresaw John Kerry's huge victory in Iowa. It was suggested that Kerry was doing better in the weeks before the caucuses, but no reporter even imagined Kerry might pull 38 percent of the caucus-goers there. The press failed just as miserably in New Hampshire - but this time by overestimating and overrating John Edwards.

And Colby Cosh finds an interesting contrast between Dennis Miller and Robert Redford.

ONCE A WONDER, The Houston Astrodome seems smaller now.

HE HATE ME: Remember the XFL? The renegade pro-football league who hired Jesse Ventura to broadcast their games? The XFL gave their players the option of a slogan or nickname on the backs of their jerseys, rather than their last name.

"He Hate Me" was on the jersey of Rod Smart who played for the Las Vegas Outlaws. His unusual nom de gridiron gave him his 15 minutes of fame.

Today, Smart is a kick returner and backup running back for the Carolina Panthers. He Hate Me (minus the silly name on his jersey) is in the Super Bowl.

THE RAIDERS' NEW COACH: Skip Bayless writes that for a head coach, Norv Turner is a great offensive coordinator:

Norv Turner is not made of the right stuff to be a successful head coach -- especially not one required to regain control of this Raiders locker room. I wince at the thought of the Turner I knew in Dallas thrown into this players-rule war zone. It would be like casting Henry Gibson instead of Mel Gibson in ``Road Warrior.''

* * * Yet I stress that Turner is a rock-solid coordinator capable of calling killer games. As Washington's head coach/coordinator, Turner had no one to blame but himself for betting his future on two high draft picks who failed spectacularly -- quarterback Heath Shuler and receiver Michael Westbrook. But now Turner will have absolutely no input into personnel decisions.

So if he can buffer himself with some ``bad cop'' assistants -- a tough-guy defensive coordinator and an enforcer on the offensive staff -- he has a chance.

Turner inherits a mess in Oakland. It will be interesting--and probably painful at times--to see if he can clean it up.

LEE ATWATER ONCE SAID, "This isn't complicated. When you got 'em by the throat, you take out a damn howitzer and blow their brains out." John Ellis writes that Kerry has 'em by throat. But will he pull the trigger in South Carolina?

DUDE, WHERE'S MY CANDIDATE? I really hope National Review paid Andrew Cline combat rates for spending time with the psychedelic--and odiferous--folks who make up Dennis Kucinich's supporters in New Hampshire.

JACK PARR DIED, at age 85. Parr took over The Tonight Show from Steve Allen in 1957, turned it into a late night talk show, and then handed the ball over to Johnny Carson in 1962. Parr retired completely from TV in 1965 to concentrate on his business ventures.

LIFE IMITATES WOODY ALLEN DEPARTMENT: In 1971's Bananas, Allen, playing a nebbishy New Yorker named Fielding Mellish, joins the Che-like rebels of the fictional Latin American country of San Marcos. To feed the troops, Allen and the rebels stop by a roadside dinner and order 1,000 grilled cheese, 300 tuna and BLT sandwiches, 700 coffees, 500 Cokes, 1,000 7ups, and mayonnaise on the side. After being given the food, Woody's character assumes the role of rebel leader and yells, "Get your money from Vargas, we're the rebels!!!!"

According to Scott Hoffman, the owner of the Brown Bag Deli in West Des Moines, on the 16th of January, Howard Dean's campaign ordered 200 brown bag specials, with turkey, roast beef, ham and veggie sandwiches for a total cost of $963.01:

As he headed out that day, Scott remembered this customer has paid its bills late a couple times before. So he promised delivery this time with one condition, "c.o.d."

He showed up at the customer's downtown office just in time for lunch. The Dean headquarters was utter chaos. But he couldn't find anyone who'd pay him. They said try the other building next door. Same answer next door, try the other building. Scott went back and forth for 20 minutes. Nobody would pay.

He just assumed they would pay in good faith. After all, Dick Gephardt's campaign paid its lunch bills on time. And Howard Dean has thousands of followers in Iowa. Can't one of them give Scott his money?

We tried all day to reach Howard Dean's people-- no comment from them yet. By the way, Scott Hoffman says he considered himself a possible Dean supporter before the incident. He's since changed his mind.

To me, the answer is simple: Hoffman should hire Al Franken to collect his debts.

HEY ANDY, DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THIS ONE? According to John McCaslin, Al Franken would do better as a pro wrestler, rather than as a comedian and peace-loving pacifist:

Former comedian and soon-to-be-launched liberal talk show host Al Franken, author of 'Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right,' reportedly threw a Howard Dean heckler to the ground at a political event in Manchester, N.H., yesterday, breaking the man's eyeglasses in the process.

A witness tells Inside the Beltway that the heckler, a supporter of Lyndon LaRouche, 'would neither shut up or leave' the Palace Theater.

So Mr. Franken, who admits in his book that he needs to lose '40 pounds' from his buttocks, morphed into a bouncer and 'knocked the guy to the ground, breaking his glasses.' "

The ghost of Andy Kaufman appears to be alive and well--and mad as hell.

UPDATE: The New York Post has more details, including the fact Franken grabbed the guy from behind. Jonah Goldberg has some thoughts on how the media would treat this story if it were Rush Limbaugh employing a similar move.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Almost a year ago, another Hollywood peace activist, Tim Robbins, threatened to "hurt" a Washington Post reporter when he published a story that Susan Sarandon's Republican mother didn't condone some of her wackier activities. Aren't there more nuanced ways to deal with threats than violence? Shouldn't we try to get to the root causes of why people disagree with us?

GATEWAY GETS GOOGLED: Next time you search on Gateway, there's a very good chance that Stephen Green's angry letter will be showing up, simply because somebody there didn't realize that a CD that costs forty nine cents to burn and about a buck to ship is a helluva lot cheaper than thousands of people reading very public--and very bad--PR about your company.

PEGGY NOONAN ASKS "Democrats, for the good of the country: Stop Wesley Clark!"

Gen. Clark gives off the vibrations of a man who has no real beliefs save one: Wes Clark should be president. The rest--the actual meaning of his candidacy--he seems to be making up as he goes along. It seems a candidacy void of purpose beyond meeting the candidate's hunger. He is passionately for the war until he announces for the Democratic nomination facing an antiwar base, at which point he becomes passionately antiwar. He thanks God that George Bush and his aides are in the White House, then he says they're the worst leaders ever. Anyone can change his mind; but this is not a change, it's a swerve, and without a convincing rationale. Last week, Brit Hume asked Gen. Clark when it was that he'd "first noticed" that he--Gen. Clark--was a Democrat. There was laughter, but that was a nice big juicy softball. Gen. Clark flailed and fumbled. Later he blamed Mr. Hume for being a Republican agent.

When you are making it up along the way you make mistakes that might, politely, be called tonal. It is not terrible that he was introduced the other day in New Hampshire by a bilious activist, Michael Moore, who called the president a "deserter." Gen. Clark didn't address the charge when he took the stage. He could have been distracted, and it certainly would have been ungracious to say, "Thanks for that introduction, which I must disavow because it suggests a grassy knoll extremism with which I cannot associate myself." But in the days afterward Gen. Clark was repeatedly questioned about Mr. Moore's charge. He dug the hole deeper by leaving open the possibility that it was true.

Maybe the Democrats are listening to Noonan. Monday's USA Today reported, "Clark's Democratic presidential bid could be in serious trouble."

"I'LL BET THEY'RE ASLEEP IN NEW YORK", Bogie said to Dooley Wilson in Casablanca. It's certainly true on Broadway, where, like Hollywood, it's September 10th again, and they apparently don't want your money if you're a conservative, according to James Panero.

IF YOUR NORTON A/V PROGRAM HAS BEEN GOING CRAZY, you probably already know about the latest e-mail worm, called "Mydoom" or "Novarg" by antivirus companies.

Because of Outlook's previous vulnerability to the program, if you can access your email online, rather than pulling it down with Outlook, I'd try to pre-screen as much of it as possible and delete anything with an attachment from someone you don't recognize--maybe even from people you do recognize.

And obviously, running updates from your antivirus program's provider and from Microsoft is probably a wise move as well.

DENNIS MILLER'S NEW CNBC SHOW: Nina and I tuned in for Dennis Miller's debut tonight. Miller got off some great lines, but the show's format seemed to work against him. The monkey at the beginning--what was that all about? Unlike Saturday Night Live or his HBO show, Miller only had the crew on the set to laugh at his riffs, which seemed to make many of those lines fall flat. In a sense, no laughter is far better than a handful of nervous chuckles from a crew who's probably preoccupied with moving cameras, mics and keeping an eye on the Teleprompter. Miller mentioned something about going for a Tom Snyder Tomorrow show atmosphere, but Snyder's show was a much more intimate affair, designed to allow the post-Tonight Show audience to wind down in the wee hours. Miller's rants and cornucopia of pop culture references need more ummph behind him to nudge the guy in his living room in the ribs and tell him when to laugh.

On the plus side, Gov. Schwarzenegger was a can't-miss choice to launch the show. Miller's argument with an offscreen Roger Ailes was amusing (You owe me $12,000, Roger. Let's split the difference each send $6,000 to charity, OK?), and a nice way to tweak Fox News, where Miller stopped by for a cup of coffee before landing the CNBC gig.

And it's more than a little surprising to see Miller interviewing David Horowitz and David Frum. None of these guys (well, maybe, possibly Frum) are your father's conservative. Sandwiched between the two was Naomi Wolfe, Ms. Earthtones herself, who seemed to offer little more than Copperhead Conjunctions: "Sure Saddam's bad. But..." "I'm happy to see him gone. But..." Frum and Horowitz seemed to pull their counterpunches, but such is the nature of television. Either people throw chairs (ala Morton Downey or Joe Pine, who was name dropped by Miller early in the broadcast), or they throw softballs. Par for the course.

Like most new TV shows, I'm sure Miller's gig is a work in progress, and the rough edges will get smoothed out--or it won't stick around all that long. And it will be interesting to see if he becomes a hip alternative to Bill O'Reilly. Their politics are probably fairly similar, so it's more a matter of tone. There's obviously a marketplace of hardcore news junkies who are conservative to some degree. Who will they choose--happy-go-lucky hipster Miller, or tough-as-nails O'Reilly?

BRASS IN POCKET: Orrin Judd writes, "One further reason to use nuclear weapons on North Korea is that we could trigger just enough of a nuclear winter to counteract global warming".

Heh. Of course, they might also counteract the coming global cooling, as well.

NORV GETS THE NOD: Norv Turner, the former head coach of the Washington Redskins, and offensive coordinator of the Dallas Cowboys for their first two Super Bowls under Jerry Jones' ownership, is apparently the next head coach of the Oakland Raiders.

For the moment.

Sean Payton, the Cowboys' current offensive coordinator, had the gig last week, but turned the Raiders down. Skip Bayless writes that Payton may have hurt his long term career by doing so. "If you've just turned 40 and have the opportunity to coach the Raiders, you do it for room, board and tuition", Bayless opines, "You do, that is, if you're tough and smart. Your dream job will probably be your next one. You'll make your big money later".

Turner, fired by Dan Snyder during Snyder's first (incredibly rocky) year of ownership, is a decent head coach but a very good offensive strategist. Let's see if he can bring some discipline to the Raiders, after the mess that cost Bill Callahan his job.

PAGING MARSHALL McCLUHAN: Channeling the author of the '60s sociological classic, The Medium Is The Message, Suzanne Fields notes that:

Television is a "cool" medium, and politicians sometimes learn the hard way that it's unkind to overwrought emotions. The small screen distorts big passions, whether in a narrative drama or a stump speech. Great playwrights long ago learned that pity and fear are best evoked on a stage with an audience. Exuberant stump speeches can galvanize the troops with passionate persuasion, but such rhetoric "resonates" through a glass (screen) darkly.

Those who watched Howard Dean's "concession" speech on caucus night in Iowa nearly all agreed with Jay Leno's verdict that the governor looked like "Mr. Rogers with Rabies." Mara Liasson, the Fox News commentator who was in the room in Des Moines, was one observer who disagreed. She thought he was acting like a man refusing to accept defeat, rallying his disappointed troops, urging them on to New Hampshire.

Interpretations of candidate television performances have been grist for morning-after conversations in the five decades since the video camera became the dominating factor in presidential campaigns. This was first and famously discovered after the first Nixon-Kennedy debate in 1960, when nearly everyone who listened to the radio broadcast thought Richard Nixon had won: He had mastered the material and presented his views firmly, concisely, authoritatively. But John F. Kennedy, with big hair and no five-o'-clock shadow, had movie-star looks. The eye of the beholder trumped the ear of the listener.

Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first candidate, in 1952, to recognize the importance of the remorseless eye of the camera. He hired Robert Montgomery, the movie and television star, to help cast a television personality for him. Ike was ridiculed for it at the time, but he was prescient before he was president. He served two popular terms.

The dictates of television also helps to explain Charles Paul Fruend's theory (see below) about the increasing importance of candidates to tell a good story.

Incidentally, even though he died in 1980, back in early 2002, shortly before this blog went live, we interviewed Dr. McLuhan ourselves, and came away fascinated by his thoughts on not just television--but Weblogs as well.

TEMPORARILY TRADING IN HIS ABSOLUT FOR ROBITUSSIN, Stephen Green writes that for John Edwards, "My gut tells me the nomination is his, if he doesn't screw it up...Edwards is Clinton without the bimbo eruptions."

UPDATE: Maybe Robert Novak has taken a few nips from Steve's Robitussin bottle. Novak ponders "whether the magic found by Sen. John Edwards in Midwestern prairies could be transported across the country. The process has been slow and uncertain, but the answer still could be 'yes'.

IS THE PERSONAL POLITICAL when it comes to presidential campaigns? Charles Paul Freund of Reason argues that increasingly, having a good back story works better for presidential candidates than an issue-driven campaign:

In Iowa, candidates with a good story to tell did much better than candidates without one. In the case of Sen. John Edwards, who came in second in Iowa, an effective personal story turned out to be more valuable than the vaunted "organization" that the mainstream press kept citing as a determining ingredient for Iowa success. Edwards didn't have much organization at all. What he had was a winning and empathetic presence and a brilliant stump speech, one that combined his populist politics with his own life narrative of (according to him) struggle against wealth and privilege. It worked; Edwards is a contender for a top-spot in New Hampshire, too.

Conversely, candidates who sought to limit their personal exposure paid for it. That would be Vermont's former Gov. Howard Dean, who came in third in Iowa despite the fact that the gatekeeper press covered him as though he had already won the state. Dean based his early campaign heavily (if not exclusively) on issues, especially his opposition to the Iraq war, and protected—to a remarkable degree—his and his family's privacy from media inquiry. There was very little in the way of character construction and less in the way of storytelling in his campaign, and the "backstage" story was off limits entirely. In their place, he offered high-profile endorsements, though in an age of political intimacy, endorsements don't mean very much. Dean's is a campaign that understood one technological revolution—the Internet, and its organizational opportunities—extremely well, while it ignored the demands of the remainder of the technological environment.

In the end, Freund adds:

Dean could not insulate himself from coverage that has become nearly ubiquitous, and the character that emerged from footage of his campaign behavior apparently struck people as intemperate, thin-skinned, arrogant, and abrasive. Before it was over, one could add "crazy" to that list as well.

A random thought: did the ponytail guy at one of the debates in '92, and Bill Clinton's squishy reaction to him foreshadow this trend in presidential campaigns?

ROCKIN' RODNEY HARRISON: Don Banks of Sports Illustrated writes that "It wasn't exactly the shot heard 'round the world, but the New England Patriots' second Super Bowl run in three years started with a nasty little collision in late July that still resonates to this day".

Well, so much for Howard Dean being anesthetized by Dr. Judy:

"You can say that it's great that Saddam is gone and I'm sure that a lot of Iraqis feel it is great that Saddam is gone," said the former Vermont governor, an unflinching critic of the war against Iraq. "But a lot of them gave their lives. And their living standard is a whole lot worse now than it was before."

The standard of dying is most assuredly improved, however. But Dean would rather have had Saddam remain in power and free to throw people feet first into the plastic shredder.

Not surprising, is it?

As James Lileks wrote on September 11th of last year:

Two years later I take a certain grim comfort in some people’s disinterest in the war; if you’d told me two years ago that people would be piling on the President and bitching about slow progress in Iraq, I would have known in a second that the nation hadn’t suffered another attack. When the precise location of Madonna’s tongue is big news, you can bet the hospitals aren’t full of smallpox victims. Of course some people are impatient with those who still recall the shock of 9/11; the same people were crowding the message boards of internet sites on the afternoon of the attacks, eager to blame everyone but the hijackers. They hate this nation. In their hearts, they hate humanity. They would rather cheer the perfect devils than come to the aid of a compromised angel. They can talk for hours about how wrong it was to kill babies, busboys, businessmen, receptionists, janitors, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers - and then they lean towards you, eyes wide, and they say the fatal word:

But.

And then you realize that the eulogy is just a preface. All that concern for the dead is nothing more than the knuckle-cracking of an organist who’s going to play an E minor chord until we all agree we had it coming.

I’ve no doubt that if Seattle or Boston or Manhattan goes up in a bright white flash there will be those who blame it all on Bush. We squandered the world’s good will. We threw away the opportunity to atone, and lashed out. Really? You want to see lashing out? Imagine Kabul and Mecca and Baghdad and Tehran on 9/14 crowned with mushroom clouds: that’s lashing out. Imagine the President in the National Cathedral castigating Islam instead of sitting next to an Imam who's giving a homily. Mosques burned, oil fields occupied, smart bombs slamming into Syrian palaces. We could have gone full Roman on anyone we wanted, but we didn’t. And we won’t.

Which is why this war will be long.

At time, Lawrence F. Kaplan wrote: "are you a September 10th American, or a September 11th American?"

With the exception of Joe Lieberman, who doesn't stand much of a chance of getting the nomination, the entire roster of Democratic presidential candidates are September 10th Americans. To a man.

UPDATE: Regarding the standard of living in Iraq, Tim Blair writes, "A lot more of them seem to be actually living, however. It’s difficult to measure the living standard of people in mass graves".

QUEER EYE FOR THE BLOG GUYS: Samizdata gets a sophisticated--one might say metrosexual--makeover.

LADY KILLERS: Mona Charen writes, "Women are beginning to sign on for jihad in significant numbers, and radical Islamists are deciding that while women may not show their faces in public, they may explode their bodies in order to kill". It's an amazing bit of Orwellian doublethink by the jihadis--Muslim women normally must keep their faces and bodies covered up, but they can expose them via concentrated blasts of trinitrotoluene. (O'Brien would be proud.)

Charen adds that it's ideas that cause suicide bombers, not poverty:

News events are filtered through a press in the Islamic world that is just staggeringly false and propagandistic. Conflicts in Bosnia, Chechnya, Kashmir, Iraq and Israel are presented as evidence of a worldwide anti-Muslim conspiracy. The most vile and idiotic slanders against Jews and Americans are presented as fact. It is the ideas in men's minds -- mad or fantastic though they may be -- that move the world. And it is the battle of ideas that we must fight with every bit as much vigor as we do that on land, sea and air.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: I'd like to think, that much as Imperial Japan's creation of Kamikaze squads signaled the beginning of their end, and the drafting of old men and teenagers into Hitler's Volksturm the collapse of the Third Reich, the enlistment of women as suicide bombers is also a sign of militant Islam's coming collapse. But it's probably too soon to be that conclusive. And Kamikaze pilots unleashed plenty of destruction before the Japanese were vanquished in 1945.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Charles Johnson links to an Arab News article titled (and no, we're not making this up, as Dave Barry would say), "Women Driving Cars Is a Sinful Thing".

But women blowing them up is just honky-dory. Suuuure it is.

TWENTY, TWENTY, TWENTY FOUR HOURS TO GO, I WANNA BE SEDATED: Mark Steyn writes that "ever since last Monday's audition for 'An American Werewolf In Des Moines'", Howard Dean has been "in sleep mode":

''What I'm not is a rock star,'' he told Diane Sawyer, as she struggled to stay awake. No, indeed. He's turned into Perry Como. Not Perry Como sitting in a patterned sweater in a rocking chair singing ''Sleepy Time Gal.'' But Perry Como after some shortsighted elephant hunter has fired an extra-strength tranquilizer dart into his butt. Instead of impassioned pleas about taking back the country so everyone has the right to live the American Scream, er, Dream, he talked in a voice so evenly modulated that Diane Sawyer kept dropping in tape of the Howlin' Howard roar every five minutes like Baron von Frankenstein frantically clamping the electrodes to the monster and getting no response. Sitting next to the Vermonster, for the first time ever on TV, was his wife, Dr. Judith Steinberg. After being absent for months, all of a sudden she can't leave his side, just in case his medication wears off.

Steyn adds, "Not even Al Gore, in his bewildering array of alternative identities, managed to be both crazy and comatose in the same week".

UPDATE: Speaking of Dr. Steinberg, Paul Jacob quips, "If a Democrat ends up being the next president of the United States, please let it be Judy Dean".

THE SOFT BIGOTRY OF LOW EXPECTATIONS: Joanne Jacobs writes:

This is mind-boggling. Writing in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Marquis Harris, a black college graduate with excellent credentials, says he was rejected for a high school teaching job for being too articulate.

Be sure to read Harris' rejection letter. Yes, God forbid we have articulate teachers in our classrooms. Students might actually...learn. And become...articulate themselves.

No, that's far, far too much to ask of them. Think (as that cliche of the mid-'90s went) of the children.

"DO AMERICANS HATE ARABS?" Is (a paraphrase of) a question asked by one of Steven Den Beste's readers, an Arab-American himself, working in Syria. Den Beste replies:

For most of us, that is exactly what we like about ourselves as a nation and a people. It is that diversity, and that tolerance of diversity, which makes America different from any other nation. It is that diversity, and that tolerance of diversity, which we value in ourselves. It's what we call "the melting pot".

* * * The Arabs who think America hates Arabs should consider what their own governments would do to Israel if they had one thousandth of the nuclear arsenal that the US has, and then compare that to what the US has actually done. Do our actions really make sense as an expression of hatred, given what else we could have done instead?

Exactly.

IS MULTICULTURALISM DESTROYING HOLLAND? Linking to an article in The Daily Telegraph, Andrew Stuttaford has some thoughts.

BRITISH RESTAURATEUR MIGHT SUE CRITIC: Granted, the Sunday Telegraph's reviewer is over the top:

It was, both parties will submit, not quite a glowing review. Indeed, phrases such as "the eighth circle of hell", "among the very worst restaurants in Christendom" and "meals of crescendoing monstrosity" may have conveyed the impression that Matthew Norman, the prize-winning restaurant critic of The Sunday Telegraph Magazine, was not entirely enamoured with the food on offer at Shepherds in Westminster, central London.

But it is a British restaurant, which means that the odds are that he's got a 50/50 shot at being right.

All of which ties in with my unified theory of Great Britain's pre-World War II expansionist policies: Britain had to establish colonies in places like India, Hong Kong, and Jamaica--if only to get decent take out.

(Group Captain Mandrake should be along any moment now to tell you just how sublime England's cuisine is.)

UPDATE: There he is!

WAS IT OVER WHEN THE GERMANS BOMBED PEARL HARBOR?! The Delta House/Iranian Parliament and Harry Truman/Truman Capote connections explored by the Brothers Judd.

Glenn Reynolds links to a photo of Josh Marshall in action in Iowa, and suggests a grooming tip. I'd also recommend that Josh ditch the hat. The only guys who can pull off a backwards baseball cap are MLB catchers, rap stars, SWAT snipers and 12 year old kids, and last time I checked, Josh was none of the above.

I was invited to dinner Saturday night at Piatti's, a somewhat upscale restaurant in Palo Alto, which serves a sort of fusion of Italian and California Cuisine. I knew I'd be one of the few guys wearing a dark suit and tie there, but I'm always surprised at just how shabby people dress for a Saturday dinner out in one of Northern California's richest suburbs. Pony-tailed middle-aged men wearing leather jackets, cheap collarless shirts, sweats, and lots of other items that Tom Wolfe would probably describe as prole gear were the order of the night.

In The Substance of Style, Virginia Postrel argues that America's aesthetics have never been better. And in terms of design--cars, buildings, appliances, household goods, etc., I agree. But somehow, after the sleek 1980s, men reverted back to dressing like the worst of '60s and '70s.

And yet, ironically, this nation has to spend more per capita for clothes than any other on the planet. And money isn't the issue--An hour and a half drive away from Palo Alto is the Gilroy Outlet Mall, where names such as Ralph Lauren, Brooks Brothers, Hugo Boss, Perry Ellis, and many, many others sell extremely nice clothes at deeply discounted prices. And there are certainly plenty of books on the subject as well. Not to mention wives who are probably sick of their men looking like their gardeners.

It just seems odd to see men who own imported European cars that cost somewhere in the vicinity of $52,391, and living on some of the most expensive real estate on the planet to be dressing worse than their gardener or mechanic probably does when he goes out on the town.

Update: In July of 2004, I spun this post into an extended essay in The New Partisan.

WELL, I'M GLAD we cleared that one up!

BIASED ENVIRONMENTAL REPORTING IN ACTION: Nick Gillespie of Reason links to this Cincinnati Enquirer story and notes that the real news (stricter EPA analysis) is buried so as to write a scare tactic first paragraph.

Because let's face it--a tougher EPA under President Bush just doesn't fit the meme, right?

THE SECOND WAVE OF E-TAILERS: Michael Jennings of Samizdata writes that when it comes to the next generation of e-businesses, Britain leads the world.

Colonial pride forces me to say I'm not sure if I agree with that (although apparently, The Economist does), but Jennings does have some interesting thoughts on the subject.

NEW REVIEW: I have a review of The Jaz-Mobi Project's CD online at Blogcritics. It's very eclectic stuff.

THE ONCE LOST MARS ROVER has been found. Scott Ott has the "details".

HELMUT NEWTON, 83, KILLED IN AUTO ACCIDENT: Curious as to why AP decided to mention that the celebrity photographer was Jewish in his obit.

MMMM....RIBS: Orrin Judd quotes from the "Remarks by the President to the Press Pool", live from the Nothin' Fancy Cafe, Roswell, New Mexico. The title sort of reminds me of the Monty Python "Live from the Grill-O-Mat Snack Bar" episode, and the whole thing reads just as surrealistic.

Like President Reagan's episodes with Sam Donaldson, Bush really loves making these guys look like stuffed shirts, doesn't he?

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh compares the president's exchange (which, as Orrin notes, the White House had the chutzpah to upload onto their site) to a can of New Shimmer.

BOB KEESHAN DEAD AT 76: Keeshan played the gentle Capt. Kangaroo for decades on TV--I grew up watching him, and you probably did too.

Philadelphia television in the early 1970s also had the Captain's counterpart from a different branch of the service: Capt. Noah, as well as Captain Kirk, who began his endless reruns on Channel 17 in 1970.

Good rank to reach if you wanted to be on TV!

PRESCIENT: Florence King demolishes Hillary's mystique--almost 12 years ago.

Is it due for a comeback? And if so, what would Mies van der Rohe think about today's practitioners?

CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER: National Review's Corner-ites are praising Peter Jennings for his handling of tonight's Democratic primary debate in New Hampshire.

Start here, and then scroll up.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan also praises Jennings' performance as debate moderator.

STARBUCKS A GO-GO: For such a commercial success, Starbucks really is balanced between the worst of all possible worlds when it comes to the anti-global crowd. The coffeehouse chain had its birth in the 1970s in Seattle (the site of numerous recent anti-global riots), and it has just opened its first branch in Paris, where the anti-global crowd occasionally firebombs American chains like McDonald's.

JUST RECEIVED A REVIEW COPY OF Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life, a handsome coffee table book due out in April (you can pre-order now on Amazon of course). Watch for my review on Blogcritics soon.

I'm way behind on material I need to review for Blogcritics, but I'll also have a review of Steve Thomas' Jaz-Mobi Project CD in the not-too-distant future. Very interesting stuff--sort of John McLaughlin and Pat Metheny-style jazz guitar meets space-age digital multitrack recording technology.

THE TIMES, THEY ARE A'CHANGIN': After his "