LEAVING THE LIBERAL COCOON: Paul Beston, a former NPR producer, describes how he accidentally joined the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy:

My main responsibility was to distill guests' books into a few single-spaced pages and write interview questions for [longtime public-radio host and producer Larry Josephson] that he could accept or reject while adding his own. As part of my job, I read omnivorously in the conservative literature--books, periodicals and the Web sites that were coming online.

Larry had print subscriptions to just about everything, from Reason to Crisis. The piles of conservative magazines lay around my workspace like a stack of Hustler in Saudi Arabia, daring me to look inside. Opening the pages of National Review or Commentary for the first time gave a certain thrill of heresy.

It quickly became clear that my understanding of conservatism was a cartoon. The writers took perfectly reasonable positions and argued them with eloquence. Always, there was the sense of limits to what one could hope for--and the warning that taking action could make things worse instead of better. After my years in the fervent environs of the left, the sober skepticism of the conservatives was very appealing. I couldn't help but think that many of my fellow liberals had, like me, assiduously avoided coming in contact with their arguments. That was easy to do in New York City.

Bernard Goldberg made exactly that last point in Arrogance--he suggested dispersing the news divisions of the big three networks to small town middle America (aka "flyover country") as a way to allow them to at least come in contact with more of their viewers, rather than spending all of their time safely inside of what Mickey Kaus once dubbed the liberal cocoon.

And as another Goldberg--Jonah--once noted, isn't it curious that far more people make the journey from the left to the right, than go the opposite direction? Indeed, the phrase "neoconservative" originally began as--and frequently remains--an epithet used by the left to describe apostates who've since changed sides. (Although post-9/11, its been used so frequently by those who have no clue what it means, that it's been rendered almost nonsensical.)

(Via The Blog from the Core.)

UPDATE: Orrin Judd writes, "One is struck by how often recent converts to conservatism and those who've simply come out of the closet--like Dennis Miller--mention that Rudy Giuliani, and the success of his conservative crime-fighting programs, played the key role in their journey".

JAMES TARANTO IS LOADED FOR BEAR TODAY: Read the whole thing.

KARMIC JUSTICE PART II: Pro-Bush blogger Matt Margolis was beaten up at an anti-Bush rally last week. Today, billionaire leftist George Soros (described last fall as "a perfect storm of Angry Leftism and anti-Semitism" by James Taranto) had white glue and water tossed onto the lapels of his navy blue double breasted Saville Row suit while speaking in Kiev.

That comes as no surprise. But maybe the Senator should tour America's "vast pestilential wasteland" before describing the place as an "Alaska wildlife refuge".

In 2002, a U.S. Geological Survey stated that, as The Washington Post described it, "the most likely drilling scenarios under consideration should have no impact on caribou". I guess Kerry never got the memo.

It's also further proof that in the last decade or two, that ironically, it's really become the left that's internalized National Review's old motto, "Standing Athwart History, Yelling Stop". No wonder Radley Balko recently dubbed them, with tongue only slightly in cheek, "the conservative left".

CONDI'S MOMENT: Mark Goldblatt writes that liberals feel "They stuck it to Bush" by getting National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to testify under oath. But Goldblatt writes that the fun is just beginning. Michael Novak has some similar thoughts.

SPEAKING OF KANE, is Kerry's daisy his Rosebud? The secret to his whole life's path? Or maybe it's the snowboard, a 21st century updating of Kane's sled. (And does this mean that Teresa is Kerry's Susan Alexander? Or should I quit this analogy while I'm ahead?)

As Glenn writes, "Message to the Kerry Campaign: Release the Daisy Records! America wants to know."

CITIZEN KUBRICK: A reader sent me this great story from The Guardian on visiting Stanley Kubrick's estate a few years after he died. It really does feel like touring Xanadu shortly after Charles Foster Kane's death, which is rather ironic, considering that Kubrick went out of his way to be as far removed from Orson Welles as possible, both in terms of lifestyle and career path.

In the end, it's fascinating how Kubrick's obsessive collecting and archiving paralleled that of Welles' greatest protagonist.

NADER ADVISES KERRY TO LOOSEN UP: Betsy Newmark writes, "It's pretty bad when Ralph Nader is giving advice to loosen up. Because you know what a wild and crazy, get down and party type guy Ralph is."

Besides the general idea of Ralph Nader suggesting somebody else get down and get funky, there's something awfully peculiar about this article. Last time I checked, Ralph was earnestly running for the presidency himself. Since when does a competitor offer his opponent advice? Will The Guardian be soliciting President Bush for his thoughts on what Kerry should do to win??

MEMO TO KARL ROVE: Sign the guy up who made this home-made ad for President Bush, at once. Or just buy the rights, copy it on 2-inch videotape, and book the airtime for it on TV. You'd have the perfect update to President Reagan's "Morning In America" ad from 1984.

UPDATE: The Blogosphere appears to be in broad agreement--this is a great ad.

KARMIC JUSTICE: CNN, which announced last year that it had been in bed with Saddam Hussein throughout the '90s, and then ran an article that hid the size of its grassroots competition in the Blogosphere, has lost more than half its audience in the last year.

A BOUNTY OF BUSINESSWOMEN BLOGS: Linking to my recent Tech Central Station piece on the size of the Blogosphere, Kirsten of Re:invention Blog has a nice list of businesswomen with Weblogs. I'd also add Capitalist Chicks, and of course, Virginia Postrel.

PICTURE PERFECT: I couldn't find Leonard Nimoy, so I'm going solo in my latest newsletter for Electronic House, "In Search of the Ultimate Picture".

And for those who missed it, my pieces from two weeks ago on Dolby EX and the Home Office are back online as well, after a server SNAFU left them stranded in digital limbo.

Duty now for the future! You'll want the best sound and picture when synthetic MTV stars start getting jiggy with it. (Just in case you missed my TCS article from yesterday.)

In two long posts on "The Corner", Jonah Goldberg looks at:

the generalized ignorance or silence of mainstream liberals about their own intellectual history. Obviously this is a sweeping -- and therefore unfair -- generalization. But I read a lot of liberal stuff and have attended more than a few college confabs with liberal speakers speaking on the subject of liberalism itself. And it seems to me that liberals are intellectually deracinated. Read conservative publications or attend conservative conferences and there will almost always be at least some mention of our intellectual forefathers and often a spirited debate about them. The same goes for Libertarians, at least that branch which can be called a part or partner of the conservative movement.

Just look at the conservative blogosphere. There's all sorts of stuff about Burke, Hayek, von Mises, Oakeshott, Kirk, Buckley, Strauss, Meyer, the Southern Agrarians, et al. I can't think of a single editor or contributing editor of National Review who can't speak intelligently about the intellectual titans of conservatism going back generations. I'm not saying everybody's an expert, but I think everybody's made at least the minimal effort to understand their intellectual lineage and I think that's reflected in conservative writing, for good and for ill. I would guess that the same hold true about the gang over at Reason.

I just don't get the sense that's true of most liberal journalists. When was the last time you saw more than a passing reference to Herbert Croly? When was the last time you read an article or blog posting where a liberal asked "What would Charles Beard think of this?"

BLIX FOR KERRY! James Taranto writes, "Hans Blix stopped short of a full-fledged endorsement, but when asked by the New York Times magazine what he thinks of John Kerry, the erstwhile weapons inspector said, 'I welcome his attitude toward multilateral cooperation. I think he is trying to get back to the traditional U.S. attitudes.'"

Setting aside the obvious insult about unilateralism in Blix's statement, is it worth it for Senator Kerry to accept an endorsement from a man who believed that chasing phantom global warming was more important than liberating Iraq from a tyrant? Of course, it makes a nice addition to the other world leaders and opinion makers who have pledged to support Kerry.

In a distant nation, only until recently led by a totalitarian madman who may or may not have had weapons of mass destruction, bent on killing millions of his own people as well as his enemies, savaged by war against a relentless coalition of Allies, reconstruction and efforts to bring a democracy seem grim.

In other words, George Orwell looks at Germany in 1945, as World War II was ending.

UPDATE: See also these magazine articles from the same period.

TWO DAYS, TWO GREAT LOST VOICES: Sir Alistair Cooke died today, after only just recently putting down his BBC microphone. Sir Peter Ustinov died yesterday.

MISTAKEN SIGNINGS: Rob Hurtt of The Sporting News asks, what were these NFL teams thinking when they signed their recent acquisitions?

THE MORNING BRIEFING: Because I was blissfully away from Clarke, Kerry, Condi, Cheney, et al last week, I'm happy to send you to the Mudville Gazette's 30 Mar 2004 Morning Briefing to bring things up to speed. "Why? So if you run into General Myers in the elevator you'll have something to talk about".

GOOD AND DECENT C-SPAN: Jonah Goldberg looks at how C-Span is Big Media’s gift to democracy in America:

Callers will vent about how America is being taken over by corporations, how Rupert Murdoch is poisoning the airwaves with the sound of Sean Hannity's voice, and how tobacco companies want to get puppies addicted to nicotine-rich chew toys, but they almost always preface their comments by saying something to the effect of, 'God bless C-SPAN!'

What I've always found so amusing is that the people who are convinced that America's corporate powerhouses are enemies of democracy and goodness see no irony in the fact that C-SPAN is paid for entirely out of the goodness of the hearts of America's greedy Big Media companies.

By simply turning their cameras on, and leaving them on, C-Span has "broken" many a news story, such as when Trent Lott, as Goldberg writes, "bizarrely declared he wished Strom Thurmond had won the presidency on his segregationist platform", something that Big Media completely missed, but the Blogosphere ran with.

And Brain Lamb's Booknotes series of author interviews has introduced many a viewer to books he would have otherwise never heard of.

SPIM: No, that's not a typo. Lionel of Across the Atlantic writes, "Spim is like spam, but delivered by instant message".

I'm back--my wife and our friends and I had a great time in New Orleans. This was my first trip to the South since a few days in Atlanta four or five years ago.

The pluses in New Orleans? Good music, friendly people, great food, great seafood, drive-through daiquiri bars (why yes, you did read that correctly). The D-Day Museum that Stephen Ambrose helped to spearhead is a moving experience, one I'll try to write about in more detail later.

The minuses? Bourbon Street on a Friday night is like being in the middle of Animal House, except that it's an entire street full of drunken louts instead of one small frat house. Seeing flashes of naked boobage is a very big deal for many drunken young American men. Being able to buy black t-shirts with white text that uses the F-word multiple times is apparently a bold and daring move for many Americans of both sexes, as there were numerous stores selling such products. ("F*** you, you f***ing f***" is a particularly hot selling slogan, it seems--sans asterisks, of course. Remember this next someone complains about censorship by the Bush administration.)

While Howard Dean said he wanted to be the president for Confederate flag-waving southern good ol' boys, there are surprisingly few such flags in Louisiana. I counted exactly two: one attached to a flagpole on a house in the middle of nowhere, and the other, a small rolled up flag being carried into the hotel last night by a 40-ish blonde staying at our hotel.

Regular blogging to follow shortly. In the meantime, check out my newest article at Tech Central Station!

OFF TO THE BIG EASY: I'm in the American Airlines Admirals' Club in Dallas right now, in between flights from San Jose to New Orleans, where I'll be until Monday. Blogging will be sporadic, but I will be checking email. So help yourself to the free beer and pretzels, but try to keep the place tidy, OK?

COMING ATTRACTION: There's a jazz museum coming to Harlem; an idea that's long, long overdue.

The man who's bringing it there? Perhaps surprising to some (for instance, me!), it's Leonard Garment, former advisor to President Nixon. On the other hand, as Net Hentoff wrote, "Mr. Garment was the only presidential counsel to have, in his youth, been in Woody Herman's reed section".

THE DEFINING MOMENT: Brendan Miniter explains why Republicans are running negative ads against Kerry now, rather than waiting 'til the summer.

DID RICHARD CLARKE block efforts to apprehend Osama bin Laden?

JOANNE JACOBS FISKS A TIME MAGAZINE article on home schooling.

SENTENCES THAT WOULD HAVE MADE NO SENSE before the Blogosphere came into existence: Hugh Hewitt writes, "Powerline's Hindrocket fisks Clarke".

DAVID ADESNIK OF OXBLOG, linking to my post from the weekend on the subject, has some thoughts on the Jack Kelly/Jayson Blair kerfuffle.

IDIOT CULTURE: Carl Bernstein quips that President Bush is "the most radical president of my lifetime and perhaps in the century."

Err, which century?

Since the 21st century actually began on January 1st, 2001, that means that Bill Clinton served 20 days (and about six hours) as president this century (and spent his last night pardoning everybody short of Osama bin Laden), before George W. Bush was inaugurated on January 21st, 2001. So there aren't a whole lot other presidents "in the century" for Berstein to compare Bush to.

Unless Bernstein means the 20th century. He does know it's over, right?

HUGH HEWITT: "The perception that the Democrats are weak on defense and hesitant to engage the terrorists is out there because the Democrats are weak on defense and hesitant to engage the terrorists".

DOING THE JOB THE MEDIA USED TO DO: Indepundit interviews Rebecca, a representative of the University of California, San Diego chapter of the International Socialist Organization. Rebecca spoke this Saturday--"a white, apparently middle class American girl, standing in the middle of San Diego, advocating support for thugs and terrorists who murder Americans and Iraqis alike".

DID HILLARY CLINTON REALLY SAY that with Saddam Hussein gone, there have been "pullbacks" in the rights Iraqi women enjoyed under his rule? Nat Hentoff has some thoughts.

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

A BIG DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE RIGHT AND LEFT COASTS? Earthquakes registering 2.0 on the Richter scale get news articles in Philadelphia.

A quake that small is usually the butt of jokes by Californians, who know that the Richter scale moves upward exponentially, and know what a serious earthquake is.

MEN ARE FROM MARS, WOMEN ARE FROM VENUS, and its author is apparently threatening bloggers with lawsuits. Instapundit has the details.

"A HOUSE OF HORRORS" is how John Facenda, the late "Voice of God" narrator of NFL Films once described Philadelphia's Veterans Stadium, and in many respects, the epithet certainly fit. But the stadium is no more: it was imploded on Sunday.

SIGN OF THE TIMES, MESS WITH YOUR MIND: John Hawkins writes, "I'd like to see some of these placards that are being carried around by some of these "brave dissenters" show up in the mainstream media sometime. Normally, if there's any hint of controversy, the media just CAN'T wait to slap it on the front page. But when it comes to these anti-war rallies, for the most part it's see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil".

Hawkins has four photos of some of the signs that were carried this weekend. The last shot is just staggering: as the Professor would say, the person carrying it isn't anti-war, just on the other side.

UPDATE: And he's the subject of today's "Bleat" by James Lileks. Read the whole thing.

HAMAS FOUNDER KILLED in an Israeli missile strike.

DECISION MADE: If you try really, really, really hard, I'll bet you can guess which of the men running for the presidency just received Noam Chomsky's endorsement. I'll give you a hint: surprisingly, it wasn't Ralph Nader.

If you give up, Tim Blair has all the details.

Joanne Jacobs writes that in England, the PC clean-up crew is trying to get sign language changed because they feel it relies on outdated social stereotypes. But deaf Britons are resisting.

In some respects, written English has already been split into two languages--one that's traditional and one that's PC (for very simple examples, changing Christmas to holidays, mankind to humankind, etc.). It looks like sign language could be headed in the same Babel-like direction.

IN THE BEGINNING: I like Chris Muir. I think he's a helluva cartoonist. I even interviewed him last year for Tech Central Station. But he's just made me feel like I should I apply for Social Security:

I cut my teeth on my school's Altair back in '76. It was hooked up to a Western Union teletypewriter, which was being used as its keyboard and printout device. The monitor, a converted television set, would come a little later. Programs were entered in and saved to paper tape, which the machine punched, a bit like a player piano, to save programs.

I was about ten at the time. I'll never forget walking into the classroom where it was kept: seeing that machine in its blue and gray box for the first time, was a bit like all of my dreams from watching Star Trek and Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey had come true.

And now it's the equivalent of a Model T from 1908.

Incidentally, Muir is trying to get Day by Day into newspapers. Please call, write, or email the syndicates he has listed on his site if you'd like to see it there as well.

COMING NEXT YEAR: THE ANTI-PASSION: Jack Matthews of the New York Daily News writes that Ron Howard's film of The Da Vinci Code is scheduled to be released next year. Matthews' description of the film (and the book it was based on) makes it sound like there could very well be the same sorts of protests against The Da Vinci Code that accompanied The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988.

And in other Passion news, it was finally knocked off the top of the box office charts--by, ironically enough, The Dawn of the Dead.

JIU-JITSU: Orrin Judd notes that "Mr. Bush is doing something unique in American politics here: he's making the Senator a target of open ridicule. The campaign's message leap-frogged over negative and went straight to dismissive. Even more daring, it's the President himself taking the lead. The key to this will be to stay relatively light-handed and to avoid outright contempt. If they can do that and treat Mr. Kerry as an object of fun, it will be just devastating".

Because the press has to cover the president, no matter how much they dislike him, it also forces them to put into print at least some of Kerry's innumerable gaffes and flip-flops, something they've been astonishingly reluctant to do.

MEET THE PRESS: How will wide receiver Terrell Owens and the press in Philadelphia get on together? Larry Beil of Yahoo Sports has an article called, "Notes Before The Storm":

Owens often complained that the reporters in San Francisco were too harsh and tried to run him out of town. This guy has no idea about the media buzz saw he's about to encounter in Philly. It'll only take a couple of dropped balls – IN PRESEASON – to get the bubbles of discontent rising.

Owens is such an avid basketball fan, you'd think he would have observed Allen Iverson's tumultuous relationship with Philly's media and opted to stick with Baltimore.

Beil is right--this could be brutal to watch, unless Owens truly delivers a spectacular season. Less than a month after his father died, the Philadelphia media trashed Brett Favre--and his late father.

And then there are the boo birds...

HOPE FOR THE OLD GUYS YET: Warren Sapp signs a seven-year contract with the Oakland Raiders.

The Raiders still have major problems--not the least of which is an abundance of gray hair on their players' heads. But if he stays healthy, Sapp should help stabilize their defense this year, leaving Norv Turner to focus on what he does best, coaching the offense.

While Sapp departs the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, they're at least getting a new wide receiver this year, as the Cowboys and Bucs have completed their swap of wide receivers Keyshawn Johnson and Joey Galloway. Don Banks of Sports Illustrated wrote that deal took so long to complete (a good month, it seems), "I believe Tom Landry and John McKay initiated the trade talks".

UPDATE: Skip Bayless writes that acquiring Sapp is another coup for Al Davis, and payback for getting creamed by the Bucs in the Super Bowl last year. Who's next for the Raiders? Bayless writes, "Don't be surprised if Davis eventually trades for Bengals running back Corey Dillon at Davis' price. Dillon wants to be a Raider."

WHY NO OUTRAGE OVER KELLY? Yesterday, we had some thoughts on Jack Kelly, who was discovered making stuff up at USA Today.

Nick Gillespie of Reason wonders why there isn't the same level of outrage over Kelly as there was over Jayson Blair. Leftwing Blogger Atrios believes it's because of racism, but as one of Gillespie's commenters notes, "USA Today isn't the Times, and hasn't been (as far as I know) under scrutiny for editorial office shenanigans".

It's worth remembering that Blair's firing came after three years of Howell Raines reworking the Times from a fairly staid, if left-leaning publication, to an activist one, all the while claiming:

Our greatest accomplishment as a profession is the development since World War II of a news reporting craft that is truly non-partisan, and non-ideological, and that strives to be independent of undue commercial or governmental influence....But we don't wear the political collar of our owners or the government or any political party. It is that legacy we must protect with our diligent stewardship. To do so means we must be aware of the energetic effort that is now underway to convince our readers that we are ideologues. It is an exercise of, in disinformation, of alarming proportions, this attempt to convince the audience of the world's most ideology-free newspapers that they're being subjected to agenda-driven news reflecting a liberal bias.

And as Bernard Goldberg made clear in Arrogance, stories that the rest of the media picks up on usually begin in the Times--and rarely, if ever, in USA Today.

UPDATE: I just checked Memorandum and Technorati, and found that over 25 blogs, many of whom could safely be classified as conservative, or at least, right-leaning, have linked to the AP story on Kelly.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Welcome OxBlog readers!

THE ARTIST FORMERLY KNOWN AS MACHIAVELLI: Samizdata.net looks at The Prince.

(I really liked 1999 and Purple Rain myself. But he began to lose me with Around The World in a Day and that whole symbol business. Oh wait, wrong fellow--nevermind.)

THE AP/REUTERS' STYLEBOOK: Steven Plaut takes a satiric flip through "The Mass Media Guide on How to Become an 'Activist'".

BUCHANAN'S WHITE WHALE: Lawrence Auster of Front Page writes of Pat Buchanan's obsession with Israel, "along with Israel's purported agents in America, the neoconservatives.":

As a sign of his obsession, at the very moment when America and its Coalition partners were launching the war against Iraq last year, and most Americans were focused on how to win this tremendous battle, Buchanan published a long diatribe in The American Conservative called "Whose War?", in which he charged that President Bush was in thrall to "the neoconservatives' agenda of endless wars on the Islamic world that serve only [emphasis added] the interests of a country other than the one he was elected to preserve and protect."

David Cohen of The Brothers Judd has some thoughts on Buchanan:

for about five minutes he thought that he was going to be president, [Buchanan] was captured by the demogoguery he thought he could use and then set aside, and he started his long, strange trip to his current position just the smallest bit to the right of the far left.

Cohen notes that "even in his heyday, [Buchanan] never met a Nazi war criminal he didn't like".

FALLING DOWN: Robert Moran notes that "Not all spills are equal at the Washington Post".

UPDATE: Powerline Blog looks at Kerry's shopping trip the day before his fall.

If AP applied the same spin to protestors as they do to bloggers, this headline would read, "Few people Protest on Iraq War Anniversary".

Charles Johnson notes that yesterday, "Even in the dark heart of idiotarianism, San Francisco, mere "hundreds" turned out for today's feeble-minded protests against the Iraq War".

I always thought Scott Ott did a great job of putting the protestors at their peak into perfect perspective in January of 2003.

(Sorry about that last sentence. Alliteration? You're soaking in it!)

UPDATE: Power Line notes that the protestors aren't protesting against the war--which of course was over shortly after it began. Instead, in San Francisco, they're chaining themselves together and blocking theentrancee to Bechtel, one of the chief contractors involved in rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure. "I can understand how well-meaning people can be opposed to war, one of the greatest evils known to mankind, even in circumstances where their opposition is misguided. But it is a measure of the moral bankruptcy of the left that its protesters now march against reconstruction."

Great point.

UPDATE (4:20 PM): Roger L. Simon writes, "the real story, the relative failure of the demonstrations, is not addressed at all by CNN and only barely by MSNBC. What's up with that? (Well, it couldn't be more obvious.)"

And Power Line (who's done a superb job on these protests, doing the analysis the traditional media used to do) notes who was sponsoring them: "International Action Center and International A.N.S.W.E.R., both Communist front groups run by the Workers World Party, whose leaders openly support Saddam Hussein and Kim il-Jong. Today's protests were led, for the most part, by these Communist front groups. Watch for that to be reported in your local newspaper."

Riiiiiight....

JFK JR. JR.: It's very difficult for me to imagine the original JFK cursing out a secret service man assigned to protect him during a photo op. On the other hand, it's not at all surprising to read John F'ing Kerry, while snow boarding in front of the press, called his agent a "son of a b*itch". After all, the man drops F-words in magazine interviews, reams out potential voters, and his wife calls a sitting president and his staff, "Asses of Evil".

Earlier this week, we linked to an article on "The Perpetual Adolescent". Today, Steven Hayward asks, what sort of 60-year old man snowboards? (I'm waiting for Kerry to show up for a photo op at the skateboard park in the Great Mall of Milpitas in pads, shorts and a helmet, toting his board.)

For all his faults, the original JFK, along with his wife, knew how to comport himself in public. The Kerrys could take a lesson from them.

A year ago, we liberated a country from a man who thought nothing of throwing his people, feet first, into plastic shredding machines. Or cutting out their tongues. Or having his female citizens raped by an officially appointed "violator of women's honor". Or having his sons torture his country's Olympic athletes.

All the while controlling what was reported by no less a news organization than CNN, who had the gall to dub themselves the "Most Trusted Name in News".

For a flashback to how events occurred last year, click here and then start scrolling up. There are numerous dead links and fog of war fuzziness, but I think it's still quite an interesting as-it-happens chronology. By American standards, I had no life last year: I blogged incessantly about the war, because I was living in a hotel room while my home was being remodeled, and the plumbing was off and the front entrance consisted of sheets of plywood nailed in to keep the elements out.

In other words, compared to the people who lived in Iraq, I was living a life of unimaginable wealth, not to mention unimaginable personal freedom. (Not the least of which is the ability to say anything I want via this Weblog and my magazine articles, and not fear my new front door being kicked in.)

How are things today? Be sure to check out Michael Graham's post on "The Year That Wasn't". The Wall Street Journal notes that "the natives must not be reading Reuters". And Stephen Green notes that "Germans are less optimistic about their future than Iraqis are."

The media as a whole won't put the pieces together--won't remind people how despicable Saddam Hussein was. Or the now-unarguable proof that Saddam and Al Qaida worked together. Or the million or more people Saddam killed.

Given the speed at which we liberated Iraq, and the astonishingly low number of soldiers killed, this should be a day we remember just as we remember V-E and V-J day. Or the day the Berlin Wall fell.

In time, maybe it will be.

COOKING THE BOOKS CERTAINLY DIDN'T BEGIN WITH JAYSON BLAIR: Jack Kelly, 43, had a 21 year career with USA Today and was five times nominated for a Pulitzer Prize before resigning in January "after admitting he conspired with a translator to mislead editors looking into the veracity of his reporting", according to AP.

Their article adds, "USA Today said Friday that an examination of the work of journalist Jack Kelley found strong evidence that the newspaper's former star foreign correspondent had fabricated substantial portions of at least eight major stories".

SEND THE BA'ATH A TUB FULL OF EMAIL! H.D. Miller has the email address for the Ba'ath party of Syria. "Give the Ba'ath a piece of your mind", he writes, "regarding the on-going crackdown against Kurdish pro-democracy demonstrators in Syria."

Miller adds, "I probably won't help, but it certainly can't hurt to let these thugs and hoodlums know that the world is watching them."

One thing I haven't seen addressed by the Blogosphere in the back-to-back action of the Madrid train bombing and the replacement of Spain's government with Bush-hating, terrorist-appeasing Socialists is, will Spain's tourism from America take a nosedive?

France's certainly did, and curiously, from what I've read, Chirac and company were genuinely surprised. It sort of reminds me of Gray Davis during California's dreadful rolling blackout period of a few years ago. Davis railed on about how he'd tear a new one to any power company who refused to supply him with electricity at rates he deemed appropriate. But when a utility said, "You know what? We think we're going to pass on building a generating station here. California doesn't seem too business-friendly right now. Have a nice life, Governor!", Davis seemed genuinely astonished that a business took his words seriously. (This is a huge paraphrase on my part. I remember the story, but I can't seem to input the right parameters to bring up a Webpage with the details via Google.)

I wonder if Spain's new government will be equally surprised when revenue from tourism goes south. They'll draw exactly the wrong conclusion from it: tourists today know that a horrific terrorist attack can--and will--occur somewhere. What they care about is, what are you doing about it? (That's sheer speculation on my part, but it seems like common sense.)Spain's appeasement of terrorism doesn't seem like a message that cries out, "Come visit us! Come back to Spain!" when the subtext is, "We're now two-thirds softer on terrorism!"

And that's a shame. I visited Spain for a weekend in the middle of a ten day trip to England back in 2000. At first, it was purely to satisfy my modern architecture Jones, and visit Mies van der Rohe's 1929 Barcelona Pavilion, generally considered to be one of the jewels of modern architecture, even by people who doesn't like much else in the genre.

I spent many hours at the Pavilion, taking God knows how many shots of it (I think I went through three or four rolls of film on it alone. And yes, we finally bought a digital camera a year or so later.)

But what I discovered beyond Mies's building was Barcelona itself, a marvelous city. I had interviewed Franz Schulze, the Chicago-based architecture critic, journalist and professor, for an article on Mies's furniture for Modernism magazine. He introduced me to the firm that arranges architecture tours for the Illinois Institute of Technology, where Mies taught architecture from the late 1930s (after fleeing Nazi Germany) until the late '50s, designing its campus in the interim. Our tour guide drove my wife and I around Barcelona in a private car with another woman driving, so our guide could concentrate on explaining the city to us.

It's a beautiful, beautiful city. (you may very well be reading this and thinking, "no kidding, Sherlock". But sometimes I have to see these things for myself.) Up until 9/11, I wouldn't have hesitated to go back. After that terrible day, I'd probably think about it, and then bite the bullet and say, "what the hell".

With an appeasing government in power, that's all changed.

And I'll bet I'm not alone.

WHAT DIGITAL DIVIDE? 200 million Americans, three-fourths of the US population, is online.

But only a small minority have Weblogs, of course.

KERRY'S FOREIGN ENDORSEMENTS: No link yet, but Drudge has an item on his home page that says:

KERRY: NO FOREIGN ENDORSEMENTS, PLEASE... Kerry Foreign Policy Advisor Rand Beers issued the following statement today: '...It is simply not appropriate for any foreign leader to endorse a candidate in America's presidential election. John Kerry does not seek, and will not accept, any such endorsements'...

Meanwhile, as it turns out, Kerry's already got one--from former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, complete with an anti-Semitic slur in it. Mohamad, you'll remember, was the fellow who told a summit of Islamic leaders last October that "Jews rule the world by proxy" and the world's 1.3 billion Muslims should unite, using nonviolent means for a "final victory." (President Bush issued Mohamad a stern rebuke shortly thereafter.)

Given some of the places where Teresa Heinz has been spending her money, and her generally lackadaisical views on evil in the world, such an endorsement from Mohamad doesn't seem all that surprising.

UPDATE: Here's another! Neville Chamberlain will no doubt be endorsing Sen. Kerry posthumously.

FOURTEEN MINUTES, AND FIFTY NINE SECONDS: Time's almost up on Courtney Love's 15 minutes of fame.

UPDATE: Speaking of 14:59, Jayson Blair's book sales aren't exactly shooting through the roof.

FOLKS, THIS IS WHAT THEY INVENTED WEBLOGS FOR: A Georgia couple was arrested after a heated argument over The Passion turned violent. According to AP, "The two left the movie theater debating whether God the Father in the Holy Trinity was human or symbolic, and the argument heated up when they got home.

"According to a police report, Melissa Davidson suffered injuries on her arm and face, while her husband had a scissors stab wound on his hand and his shirt was ripped off. He also allegedly punched a hole in a wall."

My wife and I argued and debated the merits of the film for hours after we got home from seeing it on the Friday after it opened. We decided to write his and hers reviews and post them online rather than punching walls and stabbing each other.

But hey, that's us!

THE GLOBAL NEWSPAPER: Roger L. Simon has some thoughts on having the world's newspapers available online.

SHADES OF TAWANA BRAWLEY: AP reports that a Claremont College (30 miles east of downtown Los Angeles) professor "who claimed she was targeted in a hate crime that stirred student protests at the Claremont colleges is suspected of staging the vandalism herself, police said Wednesday".

THE QUOTE GENERATOR IS BROKEN AT REUTERS. Charles Johnson spotted it in the shop when it came to a couple of a photo captions featuring Spain's incoming socialists.

UPDATE: Johnson spots more madness at Reuters. Better switch from Guinness to Shamrock Shakes next St. Patrick's day, fellows.

GREAT LINE BY VIRGINIA POSTREL: "True liberation makes the personal apolitical".

DICK CHENEY opened up a can of whoop-ass on John Kerry today. It's quite a speech.

UPDATE: Scott Lindlaw of AP says, "White House political chief Karl Rove said Wednesday that President Bush had just begun to demonstrate the kind of targeted, multi-front campaign he plans against Democratic rival John Kerry."

(On the other hand, Lindlaw was the fellow who has inserted blatant bias into his AP copy, so take it all with a grain of salt.)

THERE'S NO BIAS AT THE NEW YORK TIMES. And when I say there's none, I do mean that there is a certain amount. Just check out the sea of "D's" in the list of campaign donations that San Francisco blogger Michael Petrelis has discovered.

BOMB DESTROYS BAGHDAD HOTEL, "killing 27 people and leaving a jagged, 20-foot-wide crater just days before the anniversary of the start of the Iraq war", AP notes.

And less than a week after the terrorist attack and its appeasement in Spain.

SPEAKING OF OUTRAGEOUS, this is not something I want to see when I visit a men's room at JFK Airport in New York.

I wonder if Virgin will be sued by Mick Jagger--their urinal design looks awfully close to the Rolling Stones' record label.

(Wow, there's a sentence I never thought I'd write.)

IN 1960, COMEDIAN MORT SAHL made a crack on one his records about the South sending "a couple of exchange students into the 20th century". Overall, the region has made enormous strides, but this is just outrageous.

THE DIGITAL PUB: Vicki Smith has an interesting slant on my Tech Central Station article, and blogging in general.

Of course, if the idea of a "digital pub" is what you're really shooting for with your Website, I'm not sure why you would choose Blog software as your site's main platform over say, vBulletin, which allows for a very professional-looking message board to go online quickly and (relatively) easily.

(And of course, you could always combine the two--having a Blog for hot news and links, and an online forum for discussion.)

MEL GIBSON BREAKS HOLLYWOOD'S 10 COMMANDMENTS: I've written about a few of these, in giving my take on The Passion and the incredible and unexpected level of success it's having. But using the "Ten Commandments" theme allows The Hollywood Reporter to lump them together quite nicely.

The Blair Witch Project was a terrible film (my equilibrium and thus my stomach have barely recovered from watching two hours of unending handheld camerawork on a 30 foot high screen), but it had a brilliant marketing campaign that really put the Internet on the map in Hollywood's eyes as a marketing tool. It will be interesting to see if Hollywood incorporates any of Mel's unconventional filmmaking and marketing strategies in the future.

HOWARD DEAN: Open mouth, insert foot.

By now, you may very well have read or heard the browbeating that Kerry gave a potential voter in a townhall meeting in Bethlehem, PA on Sunday:

Kerry: No, wait, wait, wait, wait you asked me if I'd met with any leaders. Yes. I have had conversations with leaders, yes, recently. That's not your business, it's mine. I've met with foreign leaders for any [inaudible] purpose--I never said that. What I said was that I have heard from people who are leaders elsewhere in the world who don't appreciate the Bush administration approach and would love to see a change in the leadership of the United States. I'm talking our allies, I'm talking about people who were our friends nine months ago, I'm talking about people who ought to be at our side in Iraq and aren't because this administration has pushed them away in its arrogance, that's what I'm talking about. Are you a registered Republican? Are you a Republican? You answer the question. That's not an answer. Did you vote for George Bush? Did you vote for George Bush? Thank you.

James Taranto (who set the above lines in bold) has a great slant on this exchange:

Apparently the man said he did indeed vote for Bush. Perhaps it hasn't occurred to Kerry that if he is to win the presidency, he will have to persuade some Bush voters to support him instead. The only thing Kerry seems to stand for so far is hatred of Republicans, and that's not going to be sufficient to win him the White House.

How many people who voted for Ike in '56, or the first President Bush in '88 did Kennedy and Clinton get to switch allegiances during their campaigns?

Remember the Reagan Democrats of the 1980s?

Kerry doesn't. Of course, neither did Dean.

IN ENGLAND, LIFE IMITATES BRAZIL, where David Blunkett, the Labour Home Secretary, "will fight in the Royal Courts of Justice in London for the right to charge victims of miscarriages of justice more than 3000 pounds for every year they spent in jail while wrongly convicted. The logic is that the innocent man shouldn't have been in prison eating free porridge and sleeping for nothing under regulation grey blankets".

"THE WARNING KERRY IGNORED": Paul Sperry of The New York Post writes:

SEN. John Kerry boasts how he "sounded the alarm on terrorism years before 9/ 11," referring to his 1997 book "The New War." Too bad he didn't blast it when it really counted - four months before the hijackings, when he was hand-delivered evidence of serious security breaches at Logan International Airport, with specific warnings that terrorists could exploit them.
Former FAA security officials say the Massachusetts senator had the power to prevent at least the Boston hijackings and save the World Trade Center and thousands of lives, yet he failed to take effective action after they gave him a prophetic warning that his state's main airport was vulnerable to multiple hijackings.

For a guy who views the War on Terrorism as a defensive battle to be fought largely via law enforcement, this is damning stuff.

Jeff Goldstein asks:

So, will this story receive as much mainstream media play as, say, Turkeygate?

Yeah, I know. Just kidding.

Nah--the beer's too watered down for that to happen.

KERRY'S IMAGINARY FRIENDS: "for an experienced politician with a reputation for caution, Kerry comes out with a remarkable number of off-the-cuff blunders".

It's starting to impact him in the polls.

DOES DOLBY EX DESERVE A PLACE IN YOUR DEN? My latest Electronic House newsletter is now online.

IRAN ERUPTS? Very interesting post on "The Corner". Glenn Reynolds also has some thoughts and links.

OK, MAYBE M*A*S*H WAS WRONG: Sometimes, suicide isn't painless, especially when you try to crucify yourself(!), and then discover you're unable to nail your other hand to the board...

SPREADS OUT THE TARGETS: Mike Wiliams explains why cars are safer than trains when it comes to protecting yourself from terrorism.

I'm inclined to agree with him.

WHAT DID THE BLOGOSPHERE THINK OF MY ARTICLE ABOUT IT IN TCS? Thanks to sites like Technorati and Memeorandum, there's a good roundup of coverage available by reading the blogs that both sites include in their searches.

SPEAKING OF PERPETUAL ADOLESCENTS, "Like a three-year old throwing a tantrum at the toy store", John Tuvey, senior editor of Fanball.com writes, "Terrell Owens finally got his way", and is now a Philadelphia Eagle.

UPDATE: Peter King of Sports Illustrated writes:

Though I hate the way it went down -- Baltimore was absolutely screwed for listening to the NFL Management Council tell it that San Francisco had a valid contract with Owens and was able to trade him anywhere it wished, meaning the Ravens lost out on every talented receiver in this year's free-agent market -- Owens probably has gone to the team that, with the possible exception of Dallas, could best handle him. [Philadelphis head coach Andy Reid], a mild-mannered, no-crisis guy, is the perfect coach to turn a cancerous player into a team player.

King says, "How Reid handles Owens will go a long way toward determining whether the Eagles will make it to their fourth straight NFC Championship Game this year. Or further".

I COULD HAVE WRITTEN THIS ARTICLE ON "The Perpetual Adolescent", and really wish I had.

Be sure to read Stanly Kurtz's thoughts on it, as well.

UPDATE: Meanwhile in England, Theodore Dalrymple writes that "Mass drunkenness has turned us into a nation of barbarians":

There is something peculiar about modern British drunkenness, when you observe it close up. There is a quality of desperation, or hysteria, about it. The women shriek and scream in public, and no one laughs except at the top of his or her voice: it is as if everyone is trying to persuade everyone else what a good time they are having, the better to deceive themselves. A feeling of sadness overcomes the observer: these are people who do not know how to enjoy themselves and must therefore pretend.

The drunkenness has an ideological component as well. To lack social or personal inhibitions is to distinguish oneself from those poor, misguided older generations who believed that self-restraint, at least in public, was a virtue. What terrible harm all those inhibitions and ideas of self-respect did! Everyone knows that you have to let your hair down at frequent intervals, and that if you do not, you will harm your health and emotional well-being most terribly.

The young drunks in the centre of our towns and cities are not just drunk, they are triumphantly, ostentatiously drunk. They are celebrating the triumph of the egotistical lowest common denominator that has so thoroughly vanquished any idea that there is a higher and a lower, a better and a worse, in our culture.

The impotent police, who would once have arrested people behaving in like fashion, wander through scenes of drunken debauchery that all too often turn to violence, but do absolutely nothing about them. If by some miracle they did, there would be hundreds of thousands of arrests each night. The drunkenness of the masses in effect taunts them, and represents the liberation of modern man from the social inhibitions that make him a civilised being. The drunkenness in our streets is the victory of brute impulse over all refinement, of stupidity over intelligence; and those who drink in this fashion challenge the rest of us insolently to do something about it.

"To foreigners", Dalrymple writes, "we are a nation that has lost all self-respect, that is charmless, brutal and stupid. They are right: we are barbarians, savages. If you think I exaggerate, visit the centre of any British town or city on a Saturday night".

Thanks to my parents, I got just a taste of grown-up culture. How I long forlornly for its return.

THE TIM ROBBINS/LYNDON LAROUCHE CONNECTION, revealed.

For more on Robbins' play, click here, follow the links.

By the way, it looks like Robbins has learned his lesson: he took a lot of flak for voting for Nader's Green Party in 2000. I guess his use of LaRouche-based material signals his return to the Democratic party...

UPDATE: Tim Graham looks at the New York Times' carefully nuanced review of the play.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Powerline Blog has some thoughts on Strauss, and a marvelous quote by him, as well.

SHE BULLDOZED HER WAY INTO OUR HEARTS, one year ago today: Rachel Currie, that is. Charles Johnson writes:

This means that practically every media outlet in America will now run stories on her, tediously repeating all the lies that have long since been debunked. I was going to find a particularly bad one and link to it, but why bother? We all know the drill. They’re going to say she was “run over” by the bulldozer. She wasn’t. They’re going to say she was protecting the “home of a doctor.” She wasn’t. They’re going to say she was clearly visible to the bulldozer driver. She wasn’t.

Some of them will even call her death “murder,” though it’s better described as suicide through sheer stupidity.

The effort to make propaganda hay out of Rachel Corrie started before her body hit the ground, and has never stopped.

His photos of her are damning, proving Johnson's point that "Saint Rachel didn’t just hate Israel, she hated America too".

Funny how those two hates often go together. And I don't have any urge to revise my initial thoughts from last year.

SPEAKING OF THE MEDIA, yesterday I posted about Jayson Blair, and the lingering effects of the Clinton '90s, where "crime pays--if it's a big enough offense, and you're already very successful at the time you commit it".

Clarence Page has some thoughts about Blair, along similar lines.

MARK STEYN ON THE MEDIA and how they've covered Susan Lindauer, the journalist and Democratic staffer charged with working for Saddam's intelligence agency:

It's one thing for the press to be antiwar and feel Saddam should be given another decade or two to come into compliance with Security Council resolutions. It's quite another to be so smitten with the old butcher that your copy editors internally absorb Ba'ath Party tribal politics and assume that mere second cousinship with members of the Bush clan automatically puts you in the inner circle.

Steyn writes it's no wonder why "the media are held in such low regard by the public--in polls of the most respected professions we usually come somewhere between Nigerian e-mail scammers and serial pedophiles".

That's brutal. Brutally honest, that is. It also explains why the media have been losing its audience--and simultaneously losing its employees--at a rapid clip from the 1990s to today.

But there's more from Steyn:

Anyone who took the war seriously can certainly find fault with the administration. But not if you stand there like a 5-year-old boy and never get beyond pointing your fingers and sticking your tongue out: "Ooh, Bush lied. And Ashcroft's a big bully. And Cheney's stealing it all for his oil buddies. And you shouldn't mention the war in your campaign ads, because it's not fair. Nyaa-nyaa."

Two hundred people died in Madrid because of a war Democrats refuse to admit exists. But hey, you never know, maybe the guy who did it will be a third cousin twice removed of Karl Rove.

Read the whole thing.

Will the media learn? This recent "admission" by Boston Globe reporter Patrick Healy that he flubbed a key quote by John Kerry--despite the fact that Kerry has defended that very quote--sounds more like taking one for the team (and Kerry, its de facto leader) than any sort of responsible journalism.

IS CNN HALF-FULL OR HALF-EMPTY? For CNN, what does 60 people protesting the Iraq war mean? Big news. How do they title an article that reports that the number of people with Weblogs is now in the seven digit range? "Study: Very few bloggers on Net".

Thank you, thank you, thank you, CNN: you just made the point of my Tech Central Station article in a nutshell.

"GOZER DOES NOT DWELL IN MY REFRIGERATOR": A friend sent this to my wife; it's a list of "The 213 Things Skippy is No Longer Allowed to Do in the U.S. Army".

While some may view service in the military as requiring unnecessary discipline in order to maintain ranks, numbers 72, 80, and 116 seem especially sound to me.

LAST APRIL, Jonah Goldberg wrote, "If I was the commanding officer in charge of sifting through these Iraqi files, I would be barking out orders to find the 'R' file -- for [Scott] Ritter."

In The Journal today, Robert L. Pollock looks at "Saddam's Useful Idiots", and asks, "Did any Iraqi money filter back to American war critics?"

Ritter is prominently mentioned, along with Democratic congressman David Bonior as having ties with Shakir al-Khafaji, a Detroit-area businessman whose name was included in a recently published list of individuals receiving oil money from Saddam Hussein.

TUBULAR BUNNIES: Ever wandered what The Exorcist would look like if it featured animated bunnies?

No? Me neither, to be honest.

But these fellows did, and have produced "The Exorcist in 30 Seconds (and Re-Enacted By Bunnies)".

Hey, no worse than "Lord of the Peeps"...

Joanne Jacobs notes a teachers' union official's attempt to equate charter schools with Nazis, and quotes from a newsletter which has this unintentionally hilarious line written by the president of the Federal Way Education Association, Michael Comstock:

To paraphrase what Joseph Gerbles, the Nazi propaganda minister said, 'Repeat anything enough times loudly enough, no matter how untrue it is, and people will begin to believe it.'

Neither Gerbles, Ron Vibbentrop nor Heimlich Bimmler could be reached for comment.

Remember all the "If ___, then the terrorists will have won" cliches shortly after 9/11?

After committing Spain's equivalent of 9/11 last week, guess what?

They won--at the ballot box.

InstaPundit has lots of thoughts and links.

UPDATE: Virginia Postrel writes:

Warning to terrorists: Americans do not draw the same conclusions from massacres that the Spanish did. Americans tend to rally around the president and direct our anger outward.

At the risk of jettisoning any Kerry-like nuance, damn straight.

A MODEST PROPOSAL: David Hogberg has some interesting suggestions for Kerry's vice-presidential nominees.

IS THE DEER HUNTER ANTI-ASIAN? Interesting slant in The New Partisan about a film that captured five Academy Awards in 1979.