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?"

Late Update: Needless to say, this topic became one of the central theses for Jonah's Liberal Fascism book.

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.

"Hannah Arendt had it right", Patrick Moynihan once told an interviewer. "She said one of the great advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive."

Which is exactly what the critics of Bjorn Lomborg, the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist have tried to do, time and again. Only this time, as Dean Esmay writes, they've "been publicly upbraided and spanked by the Danish Ministry of Science and Technology".

THE MUSIC MUST CHANGE: Dean Esmay says that rock is dead.

Sadly, I'm inclined to believe him.

One of the lessons of Bill Clinton and the 1990s was that if you cocked up on a spectacular enough scale, it wasn't necessarily the end of your career, because there's a thin enough line between fame and infamy to survive. So Bill buggers interns and subverts the law, but because he was the president, he'll always have lucrative new speeches to give, new articles and new books to sell, and new talk shows to appear on.

While few men living have had the power that Clinton did, numerous celebrities have committed similar crimes and misdemeanors and have managed to maintain whatever level of power or fame they've achieved quite nicely afterwards

Speaking of "Crimes and Misdemeanors", 50-something Woody Allen rogered his decade-long partner's adopted teenage daughter, but sells enough tickets in Europe and DVDs around the world, and is enough of a Hollywood icon that a studio will always give him a director's contract.

Janet Jackson may have exposed herself to a worldwide primetime audience of parents and their kids and violated the decency standards of the television network which carried it, but so what? She's now probably guaranteed a minimum level of CDs she'll sell, concert halls she'll fill, and TV shows to appear on.

And likewise with Jayson Blair. Sure, he cooked the books at The Times, but in his eyes, it's all OK, because the man was trying to keep him down. So let's give him a book deal and book him on all the talk shows!

The lesson in all of this? Crime pays--if it's a big enough offense, and you're already very successful at the time you commit it.

And morals? They're strictly for suckers.

IS THE BLOGOSPHERE HALF-EMPTY OR HALF-FULL? I have the lead article in Tech Central Station tomorrow.

And it's online now.

ESPIONAGE ON THE CHEAP: Ten grand was allegedly all it took for Saddam to pay off former Democratic congressional staffer and journalist Susan Lindauer. H.D. Miller writes, "Who knew you could buy these peaceniks so cheaply? (I mean, who knew other than Saddam and Sons?)"

Whenever I'm on the east coast, I take Amtrak from Penn Station in Manhattan to the New Jersey station nearest to where my parents live. And even after 9/11, security is extremely lax.

Which is why the lead to this CNS News article doesn't surprise me:

In light of terrorist attacks in Spain that killed nearly 200 people, two Republican members of Congress Friday urged Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge to re-examine security measures involving the U.S. rail system. And a noted counter-terrorism expert gave U.S. passenger rail security a grade of "F."

Last month, I saw one serviceman (who with his M-16, camo fatigues and beret looked a bit like John Amos in Die Hard II) standing on the main floor of Penn Station, and none standing near the actual tracks. After this past week, I hope that changes--and fast.

SOON TO BE APPEARING AT A GLUE FACTORY NEAR YOU: When I first saw the trailer for Hidalgo around Christmastime, when it ran prior the last Lord of the Rings movie, I said to my wife, "Swell--it's Lawrence of Arabia meets Seabiscuit". And made by Disney and starring anti-Bush wag Viggo Mortenson, to boot. Flak's Andy Stilp writes, "Hidalgo emerges barely worthy of being called Seabiscuit II. In the movie, [Mortenson] rides the little mustang that could to improbable victory against the finest Bedouin thoroughbreds in a life-or-death Cannonball Run".

Meanwhile, Jami Bernard of The New York Daily News says:

The title character of Hidalgo is a handsome, feisty horse, a white-splotched mustang that emerges in the first few frames from a landscape of brown earth and frost, like a chunk of the old American West come to life.

I have nothing bad to say about that gorgeous beast and the several stand-ins that double for him.

"The movie on the other hand", she writes, "is a horse of a different color". And unusally bad history, even for Hollywood.

CHECK THE WEATHER CHANNEL PLEASE, for Hell must have surely frozen over. Roger Kimball writes:

"the biggest thing you would notice is freedom"

Thus quoth Dan Rather on the Larry King show on March 12.

I, too, was amazed. Dan Rather, the dyed-in-the-wool, Saddam-Hussein-interviewing liberal. What happened? Mr. Rather went back to Baghdad. He looked around. And he liked a lot of what he saw.

Oddly enough, maybe that's why Senator Kerry is ahead in this new poll.

CLARENCE PAGE: "It's not easy to be black. Just ask John Kerry".

FRITZ EYE FOR THE BLOG GUYS: "On the Fritz" is doing extreme blogspace makeovers.

He's got some suggestions for Mission Control.

TWO WORLDVIEWS: Mel Gibson versus Tom Wolfe, Christ versus Epictetus.

(Via The Brothers Judd Blog.)

CATS AND DOGS, LIVING TOGETHER: Peter Robinson of National Review bumps into Al Gore in Palo Alto last night, and feels sorry for him.

THE KERRY CAMPAIGN: redefining nuance, even by his staffers!

I had requested review copies of Apollo 11: Men On The Moon and their upcoming disc on the Saturn V from Spaceflight Films, and while I'll have a more detailed review eventually online, my first impression is that if you're at all a fan of the space program, run, don't walk to your local store (I saw them at Target this past weekend), or buy them online from Amazon.

This is absolute space geek nirvana.

The Apollo 11 package arrived today, apparently, they'll be shipping the review copy of the Saturn V disc as it gets closer to its release.

I was just young enough to not remember firsthand much of the Apollo missions, with the exception of the last one, Apollo-Soyuz. But I certainly devoured lots of books on the subject, as well as the DVDs of For All Mankind and Apollo 13.

But watching Apollo 11: Men On The Moon, I felt like that whole period was right before me. Probably because it was! This set of three DVDs was assembled by a small organization run by Mark Gray, a 20 year TV veteran, whose father was worked as a NASA contractor. The discs are distributed by 20th Century Fox. Gray and his team basically assembled all of the 16mm and 35mm film and video that NASA shot to document the mission, beginning with the incredible footage of the Saturn V being assembled, all the way through to the moon landing. (And to the landing back on Earth, but I haven't gotten that far yet!)

In a way, it really reminds me of the stately pacing of 2001: A Space Odyssey. On the one hand, this is staggering footage of one of the most important events in mankind's history. On the other hand, because it's largely raw and unedited, it sort of reminds you why the Apollo missions quickly lost the interest of the American public: the pace of a lunar spaceflight, given the enormous distances involved, is waaay too slow to be television friendly.

The Saturn V assemblage at the beginning of the film is just astonishing. Seeing the components with men from NASA and Rockwell standing next to them to place them into scale, it's a bit like Mies van der Rohe was asked to make one of his skyscrapers fly: the individual stages of the Saturn are that huge, and the Vehicle Assembly Building they're mated together in is even bigger. And seeing non-stop footage of the tank-treaded platform that hauls the whole thing to the launch pad is equally astonishing: how many skyscrapers move?

This isn't Ron Howard's Hollywood version of Apollo 13, so there are only glimpses of the personalities of the Apollo 11 crew, but it's interesting: watching Neil Armstrong on the ground, he seems to have a slight smirk on his face, a slight cockiness. But hey, if I was a hotshot former X-15 test pilot and Gemini astronaut who was about to become the most famous explorer since Christopher Columbus, I'd probably be a little cocky too. It's also an amazing contrast watching the crew in both their white spacesuits, and their off-duty togs: Buzz Aldrin's powder blue turtleneck and cardigan, and the Ban-Lon short-sleeve sportshirts worn by the other two men are just too much. (It reminds me that in a way, the future--our future--is in the past: the space program should be decades ahead of where it is now. We've wasted so much time piddling around with the Space Shuttle.) The DVD also contains the crew's postflight debriefing, and it's interesting to compare their no-nonsense tone talking among fellow NASA personal with their much more jovial attitude when they knew their statements were being beamed back to Earth for live, worldwide consumption.

After posing for PR photos, the three men then hop into their space capsule atop the Saturn V, and the whole shebang is launched into orbit.

Which is covered by 15 synchronized cameras.

That you can click through and choose with your DVD player's remote control.

The multi-angle function of DVDs is rarely taken advantage of, and this is a tour-de-force of what it can do. Of course, the whole package is a tour-de-force of what DVD can do. I'll have more thoughts later, or when I upload my actual review. But God, I'm loving what I see so far.

If you're a casual fan of the Apollo missions, this in-depth, full immersion treatment may be a bit overwhelming. I'd suggest watching Apollo 13, From The Earth To The Moon, or Criterion's painfully underrated documentary DVD, For All Mankind. But if want to feel like you're actually onboard with Neil, Buzz and Michael, this is your DVD.

(Also on Blogcritics.)

It's hard to tell, but I don't think James Lileks really is looking forward to seeing the remake of Starsky and Hutch.

Similarly, we watched Finding Nemo last night. All I can say is: political correctness? You're soaking in it!

OK, two other things: now that Pixar has broken off from Disney, hopefully they'll return to making fun buddy pictures, such as the Toy Story films, and Monsters Inc, rather than something like Nemo, which felt far more like it had Disney's uber-PC stamp on it than Pixar's.

And you know digital animation has come of age, when you realize a film looks incredible, but you still hate it, and wish it were cut up into millions of digital guitar picks.

QUOTE OF THE DAY comes from a reader of James Taranto's "Best of the Web Today". Taranto sets it up by writing:

Somewhat surreally, the bombing, on the semianniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, comes as one of the major American political parties has just nominated a presidential candidate who believes terrorism is principally a law-enforcement matter rather than a war. Reader Andrew Fox pithily puts things in perspective:

Maybe we can send Spain some state troopers or something to help them clean up the mess. Maybe a team of FBI agents to plot trajectories, determine chemical compositions and give the Spanish national police force lessons on how not to profile ethnically.

Or we could tell them that the 101st Airborne Division will remember their families, too, when the time comes to deliver justice.

Amen to that.

Taranto also has several links concerning the bombing, Reuters' unending equivocating bobs and weaves, and Susan Lindauer.

AL FRANKEN AND JANEANE GARAFALO? WHERE DO I SIGN! Sgt. Stryker writes:

A new liberal radio network, called 'Air America Radio' and featuring Al Franken [and] Janeane Garafalo, is coming to an AM Station near you. No word yet on whether the networks' founders are aware of the irony in having a liberal radio station named after an illegal and undercover CIA operation during the Viet Nam war, as well as a mediocre Mel Gibson film.

Heh.

I'm sure Sean Hannity, Hugh Hewitt, Rush Limbaugh and other conservative broadcasters are shaking in their Florsheims drooling in anticipation of the new material they'll soon be making sport of.

Ranck And File and the Mudville Gazette each have great roundups of links on how the media has handled the discovery that a Democratic staffer and former journalist was apparently on Saddam Hussein's payroll. And Media Research Center examines how television in particular handled reporting the news (badly, in a nutshell).

Clay Ranck wrote, "I am amazed at how blatant the media spin on behalf of the Democrats has become".

I agree. I'm not sure if the combination of relentless criticism by organizations like the MRC, books by Bernard Goldberg, and the Blogosphere have caused them to finally admit that the jig is up, but since last August during Arnold Schwarzenegger's campaign, any former pretense of objectivity has been eliminated.

What's a curious new element is that more and more big media journalists are willing to admit it.

DRAMATIC PHOTOS of today's silent march in Washington to honor those killed yesterday in Spain, on InstaPundit.com.

MORNING IN AMERICA UPDATE: Jerry Bowyer uses a dramatic graph to compare the Bush Boom with other periods of economic growth.

BBC WHIPLASH: A reader of National Review's "Corner" Weblog watches the BBC turn on a dime in their coverage on our war on terror--and terror's war on us.

FROM THE HOME OFFICE OF...ME: Next to the media room, in the past ten years, for many, the home office has emerged as the most technology-laden room in the house. While the concept of telecommuting has been around as early as the 1970s, when Alvin Toffler wrote about it in his seminal 1980 classic, The Third Wave, it was only in last decade that it began to explode in popularity. Add to it the ever-increasing number of self-employed in the US, and you’ve got a lot of people working from home. And that number is only going to increase in the 21st century.

Which is why my latest "Ideas For Every Room" newsletter for Electronic House magazine is on that very topic.

NOT SURPRISING: Joe Strupp of Editor & Publisher writes, "One other thing I learned about Jayson Blair from interviewing him that I haven't seen anywhere else: He changed his name from Jason to Jayson in eighth grade, but gave no reason why. He said he did not change it legally so, in a sense, even his very name is a lie".

Figures.

UPDATE: As does this quote by Blair, the latest nominee for Andrew Sullivan's Sontag Award:

"I could not help but think about the hurt and fear that would cause a group of men to commit suicide by flying planes into the World Trade Center buildings. Anger as a byproduct of hurt and fear was not a foreign concept to me." - Jayson Blair, identifying with the mass-murderers of 9/11 on the day it happened, in his new book, "Burning Down My Masters' House."

With an attitude like that, no wonder the Times hired him!

PASSION UPDATE: Yesterday, we linked to a story that said Mel Gibson could make $100 million from The Passion. CNN says double that amount.

LOOSE LIPS SINK CAMPAIGNS: Balloon Juice rounds up a variety of Kerry gaffes, flip-flops and obscenities, C.D. Harris illustrates things graphically, and Hugh Hewitt shows us how Old Media have fumbled the ball, and thus have clearly taken sides in the 2004 election.

And speaking of taking sides, note how it was to a blogger who reads the L.A. Times to nudge the paper into providing some balance to one of its stories.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: Because of the terrorist bombs in Spain, which killed nearly 200:

...we now know that the only people in the world who believe that the liberation of Iraq was George Bush's unilateral action are the people who seek to replace him in the Oval Office.

"BoiFromTroy", via InstaPundit.

UPDATE: Roger L. Simon writes that the number of people murdered in the Madrid tragedy is nearly as bad as 9/11 based on percentages of population of the countries involved.

IT'S CALLED "THE CHEESEBURGER BILL", but it's actually designed to eliminate frivolous lawsuits against the food industry by obese consumers. And it passed today in the House.

John Banzhaf, call your office.

DEMOCRATIC CONGRESSIONAL AIDE ARRESTED AS IRAQI SPY: Instapundit has several links to the story, and writes, "Many in the blogosphere have been speculating about Saddam making payoffs in the U.S., but this is the first case to materialize. It's likely not the last."

UPDATE: David Cohen of The Brothers Judd has lots of additional links.

US CHIPMAKERS STOP WI-FI SALES TO CHINA, after the Chi-Coms demand their own encryption algorithm.

(Via Fierce Wireless.)

ALL THE COOL KIDS IN THE BLOGOSPHERE are posting photos of where they blog, and since they're not jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge, I figured I might as well join them. After all, I posted photos of my frickin' bathroom here a month ago, so why not my den as well?

While I occasionally blog from my patio via 802.11, often blog when traveling, and I have a study/guest room equipped with a computer and my library of books (you remember those, don't you?), most of my writing is done in my den. It's appeared in a couple of magazine articles I've written, and shortly after 9/11, I wrote about what it was like to experience that horrific day from here, but I don't think I've posted photographs of the room on my Website. So here's Mission Control: the side by side computers, since my wife often joins me at night in here, and we often simultaneously surf the net, while watching DVDs or TV via the media room cabinet at the front of the room. The desk is on a platform, allowing much of the wiring to be run underneath. It also raises the desk above the chairs for guests. (On Super Bowl Sunday, this room often has about 10 to 15 people packed in it.) And yes, those guitars get a workout from time to time as well.

I CAN'T SAY I WAS EVER A SPALDING GRAY FAN. I had nothing against him, and I remember watching Swimming To Cambodia in the late '80s. (I forget if I rented the tape, or watched it on cable. Probably the latter.) He was one of those performers whose work never clicked with me, even during my artiest phase in the late-1980s, probably for the same totally random reasons that other artists of the era happened to.

But Chris Ott of Flak Magazine has a sensitive memoriam to the late actor, writer, and monologist.

OUT OF THE MATRIX: I just spent an hour doing major Photoshop brain surgery. Those of you who are veterans of this Website know that my wife and I had our home remodeled last year. Right around this time a year ago, I was blogging out of a nearby hotel room, because our house had the plumbing turned off, a front entryway that consisted of plywood sheets, and the lawn sported a couple of crater-sized depressions where the new concrete would be poured for the new entryway and a new walk-in closet.

This year, among other, more modest improvements, we're thinking of changing the front fence, which is very rustic-looking, unlike our actual house, which is a fairly sleek looking rancher (after the architect, contractors and painters had their way with it last year). Unfortunately, the fence, due to years of weathering is now too rustic looking and is due for either replacement, or scrapping. Since it's purely cosmetic (as it is now, it won't keep any kids or critters in the front yard, nor keep anybody out), we may very well pull it out, or perhaps leave just a line of fencing in the front, and none on the sides.

So I said to my wife, "Hey, I'll fire up Photoshop, and see what the house looks like with no fence!"

Easier said than done.

What was the line that Joe Pantoliano said in The Matrix? Staring a screen full of Kanji symbols and green gibberish, he tells Neo, "All I see now is blonde, brunette, redhead". Having stared at a bunch of green pixels that represents my front lawn at 700 percent the size of the photo, sliding bits around to fill in where the fence was, I know how he feels. It's a bit like when I'm recording music, editing digital audio and sliding little chunks of sound around to get it all in time. Both processes turn a computer into a device that feels a bit like an electron microscope, as you make what feels like subatomic manipulations of a photo or layers of sound.

On the other hand, it probably would have cost several hundred dollars to have an artist airbrush an 8X10 glossy of the front of the house. In The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler talked about how technology allows consumers to do many of the functions that professionals normally do, and is changing how we interact with them. And often eliminating the need for them. What he didn't mention is how many different hats it would allow the average person to wear, and how strange it sometimes feels to put a new one on from time to time, perform brain surgery, and then return to your normal life.

Anyhow, just wanted to post some thoughts before the red pill wears off...

THE VENTURE CAPITAL INDUSTRY REBOOTS, says Tech Central Station, which is obviously a very, very good thing. However, as the Washington Post noted, an unintended consequence of the Sarbanes-Oxley bill may be preventing further growth, along with new jobs.

KERRY'S LATEST GAFFE: Hugh Hewitt compares it to Bush's infamous quip about Adam Clymer.

Andrew Sullivan wrote last June that "The one thing that knowledgeable people have told me about John Kerry is that he doesn't know when to stop. He has no controlling mechanism when he goes on the attack."

How long can the press keep covering for him? I don't know. But Will Collier asks:

Just what will it take before a major, non-conservative media figure and/or outlet describes Kerry's charges as "mean" or "nasty", without the ritual reference to "both sides," particularly when the Bush side's rhetoric doesn't even register on the vitriol scale compared to Kerry's?

If not this, then what? Is there anything that Kerry could say that's worthy of media criticism, or even scrutiny?

As Michael Graham wrote today, "If the coverage of the presidential race continues at its current, egregious pace, this may be the year when the media finally end the pretense that they are not dominated by liberal interests".

Whenever I see anyone outside of National Review, The Weekly Standard, or a handful of other publications who have some working knowledge of the right use the word "neocon", I get suspicious. It isn't always anti-Semitic, but all-too-often, it's code for it. Lawrence F. Kaplan of The New Republic writes:

One of my colleagues and I have a running bet: Who can find the dumbest reference to 'neoconservatism'? Until last week, the honor was Tina Brown's. In a Washington Post piece last year, she recalled 'the New Deal for which neocons of the '30s bitterly reviled FDR as 'that man''--the problem, of course, being that 'neocons' did not emerge until 30 years after FDR's death, and the movement's founders vigorously supported the New Deal. But, in a new play, Embedded (opening later this week at New York's Public Theater), film star and director Tim Robbins outdoes even Tina Brown. Embedded, moreover, is not only dumb. It is poisonous, a production-length conspiracy theory guilty of the very sins it attributes to the 'cabal' that it claims to expose.

Read the whole thing, before pacifist Robbins threatens to "find" and "hurt" you, as he did a Washington Post reporter last year.

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN CITY: Fascinating book review on the New Partisan Website. It makes a nice bookend with this Reason interview with Jane Jacobs from 2001.

UPDATE: And speaking of the decline (if not quite fall) of an American city, the New Partisan also has a not-so-glowing look at the first term of New York's Mayor Bloomberg.

HISTORY DOESN'T REPEAT, BUT IT DOES RHYME: The Washington Times notes:

John Kerry would be the first presidential candidate to visit a war zone since the failed bid of Sen. George S. McGovern, if the presumptive Democratic nominee decides to visit Iraq on a fact-finding trip.

In September 1971, Mr. McGovern, the liberal South Dakota senator, visited South Vietnam, where he declared President Nixon's policy a "glaring failure" and called for a complete withdrawal of U.S. forces.

Mr. Kerry, a four-term senator from Massachusetts, said this week that he is considering a trip to Iraq, although he left open the possibility that he might ask a group of congressional colleagues to conduct a fact-finding mission for him.

I suppose he could always ask Jim McDermott and David Bonior...

THE PASSION IS PRINTING MONEY FOR MEL: Hollywood Reporter runs the numbers, and finds that Mel Gibson could easily walk away with $100 million in the bank from his movie.

Two weeks ago, the New York Times was quoting Hollywood executives saying that Mel would be blacklisted for making a conservative film about Christ. It now seems far more likely that he'll emerge as the next George Lucas, with the vast profits from his low (for Hollywood) budget film giving him the power to make any future films he wants.

As I posted on Sunday, that's far more than Orson Welles could ever say.

MAN WHO SUED THE WORLD UPDATE: Last June, we wrote:

There's a new Website, called John Banzhaf Watch, aimed at monitoring "the trial lawyer who dreamt up the tobacco lawsuits that drained billions of dollars from a legal industry and made lawyers like JB billionaires. That's billionaires with a B!"

Today, Jacob Sullum of Reason writes:

But now that Congress is considering a ban on lawsuits that blame food makers and sellers for making people fat, Banzhaf admits he may have exaggerated a bit. In a press release issued yesterday, he says the Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act "is surely premature, because there has been only one obesity lawsuit, and it was dismissed by a federal judge." Before Congress passes legislation like this, he says, "there should be a real history of abuse which must be corrected, not orchestrated panic based upon one failed lawsuit and some quoted-out-of-context rhetoric."

Having orchestrated the panic and provided the rhetoric, Banzhaf knows whereof he speaks.

Meanwhile, in other legal news, The New York Times is threatening Bloggers. I guess if you can't beat 'em, beat 'em.

RAGE AGAINST THE VOTE ROCKERS: Jonah Goldberg looks at the silliness passing as outrage over those "Voting Is For Old People" T-Shirts.

KERRY ADMITS TO VIETNAM ATROCITIES: In The Nation, Kerry is quoted as telling Meet The Press, "I committed the same kinds of atrocities as thousands of others", including shooting in free-fire zones, search-and-destroy missions, and burning villages.

Rich Lowry of National Review asks, "Will Kerry stand by his contention that he committed atrocities, or flip-flop?"

Is there video or audiotape available of Kerry's statement? Or have Meet The Press' archives become suddenly lost?

YOU DON'T SAY: The New York Times reports:

Study Finds That Teenage Virginity Pledges Are Rarely Kept
Based on that headline, the Times seems surprised!

This is right up there with the study a few years ago that astoundingly reported that teens with tattoos get involved in more crime than teens without them.

Gee, there's a shocker. Human behavior isn't that difficult to understand, and isn't as pliable as the left thinks it is. Why do they always seem so astonished when studies turn up findings your grandmother could have told you?

WRITE YOUR OWN KERRY CAPTION, here.

WELL, I SUPPOSE we should have seen this coming.

RUSSELL KIRK: Ten Conservative Principles.

HEY, IT BEATS THUMB WARS: Entropy House Productions Presents...Lord of the Peeps!

(Via Who Tends These Fires.)

LINGUISTIC CRIMES: Pejman Yousefzadeh asks, "How much do Noam Chomsky and his acolytes know about anti-Semitism"?

RAY HARRYHAUSEN AND UFO: My review of two fun new books, titled, "Guilty Pleasures of the Large and Small Screen" is online at Blogcritics.

TERRORIST ABU ABBAS DIES: Naturally, Reuters once again managed not to use the T-word when describing a Palestinian, although I suppose we should be thankful for small favors: they at least mention that he hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise ship in 1985.

Because he died in US custody, Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review writes, "Expect the media emphasis to be on in U.S. custody not terrorist".

THE NEW YORK POST PUTS ALL THE PIECES TOGETHER concerning the recent "outrage" over President Bush's 9/11-themed ads.

Glenn Reynolds writes, "The blogosphere knew this, but it's nice to see the mainstream press noting that the "furor" over Bush's 9/11 ads was entirely manufactured".

As much as I like The Post, I'm not sure if in this case, "mainstream press" is entirely accurate. When The New York Times picks up the story, and then Dan and Tom and Peter report it on the evening news, then I'll believe that word is getting out.

THE POLL RESULTS YOU HAVEN'T SEEN, via Byron York.

As for the poll results you have seen, Hugh Hewitt has some thoughts.

In other polling news, Gallup says:

Americans see international terrorism as the most critical threat to the United States, according to a new Gallup Poll that suggests that unless a candidate is seen as strong in the war on terror, voters will not view his campaign as credible.

According to the survey, 82 percent of Americans said international terrorism is a "critical threat" to the vital interests of the United States, and 75 percent said the spread of weapons of mass destruction is also a critical threat.

Great timing, Mrs. Kerry!

THE NEW YORKER DOWDIFIES* A VICTOR DAVIS HANSON QUOTE: Why doesn't that surprise me?

(Via Charles Johnson.)

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

"It's only a matter of time before the Middle East is stable and democratic. It's also only a matter of time before it's armed with nuclear weapons."

Michael J. Totten, in his Tech Central Station essay, "Liberalism in the Balance".

WHAT'S NEXT--LULLABY THE VOTE? In yet another sign that the mere presence of Governor Schwarzenegger is driving California Democrats absolutely insane, a state senator has introduced legislation to allow 14 year olds to vote.

WELL, THAT ONLY TOOK FOUR OR FIVE DECADES: Ayn Rand's books are being printed in her native Russia.

Can't understand what the delay was...

JEFF JACOBY LOOKS AT the courage of Muslim moderates.

FROM SPECTRE, WITH LOVE: Eccentric Cinema looks at one of the very best of the Bond films, From Russia With Love.

(Via the newly reconstituted Protein Wisdom.)

BACK! FINALLY!! Protein Wisdom lives again!

THE PASSION OF THE SOUNDTRACK: Matt Rowe of MusicTAP reviews John Debney's soundtrack for The Passion of the Christ.

As I wrote in my review of the film, I wasn't crazy about its score. Matt enjoyed it far more, giving it three and a half stars.

OUR WOULD-BE "SECOND BLACK PRESIDENT": Civil rights group seeks Kerry apology.

SUZANNE FIELDS TAKES AIM at the arms suppliers of the culture war.

A NATION IS REBORN: Iraqi Council signs interim constitution. If you're reading this at the time of this post, Hugh Hewitt is doing the intro to his radio show on the subject. Click here to listen live.

UPDATE: Stephen Green has some thoughts.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Steven Den Beste writes that the constitution "contrasts rather sharply with the proposed constitution of the EU, which is phone-book length and is unlikely to be ratified. Perhaps the Europeans should travel to Iraq to learn how it's done".

On the other hand, Scott Ott "reports" that it's already been overturned by that pesky Ninth Circus Circuit Court!

FOR MUCH OF THE LEFT, 9/11 NEVER HAPPENED, Andrew Sullivan wrote in January, which explains how those repressed images of the WTC caused them to go absolutely nuts when President Bush used them to kick off his reelection campaign.

Lee Harris picks up the theme in his latest Tech Central Station column.

THE TERRELL OWENS/NORMA DESMOND CONNECTION, as revealed by Skip Bayless.

UPDATE: Gene Upshaw of the NFL Players Union is interceding on Owens' behalf. Peter King of Sports Illustrated says Upshaw "sounds insane to me", and compares Owens' image to Ryan Leaf.

ANOTHER UPDATE: In today's column, Bayless writes:

The Washington Post reported Sunday that Upshaw is threatening to file what's called a "special-master case'' to try to get the trade rescinded and Owens declared an unrestricted free agent.

But several league sources said Sunday that this appears to be so much sword-rattling by Upshaw, who simply wants to look as if he's "doing everything he can'' to support a high-profile player who believes he was wronged. Upshaw's reputation among many players is that of a politician as concerned about keeping the league as happy as the union he represents.

Yet if this case does go to special master Stephen B. Burbank, who's in charge of settling disputes arising from the collective bargaining agreement, Owens surely won't have a leg to dance on.

Bayless says that it's possible that Owens could end up back with the Niners!

DID KERRY JUST JUMP THE SHARK? As early as April of last year, Jay Nordlinger was writing comments about what a pistol Teresa Heinz-Kerry is. He described her as "a Martha Mitchell for our time", who's "going to be a big story in the '04 campaign".

Boy, was he right.

Matt Drudge links to the official John Kerry for President Blog, which has this story in it:

When Teresa Heinz-Kerry arrived, she handed me a pin that read in the center: “Asses of Evil” with “Bush”, “Cheney”, “Rumsfeld” and “Ashcroft” surrounding it. She met, greeted and talked to a jam-packed room of Kerry supporters and others who came for the MoveOn documentary. Many were curious, others undecided, or belonging to other candidate camps.

Hillary Clinton in 1992 was infinitely more politically savvy than to do something that stupid. Likewise, picture any potential first lady of either party handing out a badge like that.

Further, all it does is illustrate the chief weakness of her husband's campaign: his not taking the war on terror, or heck, foreign affairs in general, seriously.

Incidentally, you might want to download and save a copy of that page. Chances are it will be gone rather quickly.

The popular "Jump The Shark" Website isn't about when TV shows end, it's when their freshness date expires and the inevitable rot begins to set in. This might just be the moment the Kerry campaign has left the ramp to go into midair. The subsequent landing may not be a smooth one.

John Hawkins has a photo of what's more than likely the button Mrs. Kerry was handing out. As he says, "Can you imagine Laura Bush handing out something like that at a campaign event?"

Nope. But then again, as I said, I can't picture Hillary doing such a thing. Or for that matter, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Kennedy, or Nancy Reagan. All three women were too classy and too smart to do anything that would have jeapordized their husbands' chances of getting elected.

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: We're watching it right now on DVD; my wife wanted to see it. It's innocuous enough, and Johnny Depp's performance as Keith Richards the lead pirate is certainly a riot. David Frum pointed out the Karen Allen-like performance of the heroine, as part of the usual revisionist elements that Hollywood insists on inserting into its films, but it's got enough Earl Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks atmosphere to overcome them. And every establishing shot at the start of a new scene seems to be from the Disneyland ride. There's even a potshot at the French midway through the film. There are also some great Dolby EX rear speaker effects periodically throughout the film, if you've got the proper decoding rig and rear speaker(s).

I'm kind of sorry I didn't see it in the theaters--it's perfect Saturday matinee fair.

UPDATE: Spoiler alert: highlight the text below with your mouse if you've already seen the film (or just don't care about the ending).

The ending was terrible: a British Navy captain willingly letting a pirate go? And a governor letting his daughter marry a professed pirate? C'mon. I could see Depp, his sidekick and the girl escaping, as Depp is rescued from the hangman's noose. But that was a dreadful ending the filmmakers chose for an otherwise enjoyable amusement park ride (so to speak) of a film.

GREAT MOMENTS IN RESTAURANT REVIEWS: The Four Seasons it ain't, but according to this critic, this large regional chain offers "a unique dining experience", however, he "does not recommend it for a first date. Not if you are planning on a second date."

JOHN F***ING KERRY: The saga continues.

The Passion has now grossed $212,034,000, according to Box Office Mojo.

One reason why a lot of "Old Hollywood" (to coin a Rumsfeldian-sounding phrase) may hate Mel Gibson is that he broke the cardinal rule in Hollywood--never spend your own money on a project--and his $26 million risk paid it off for him, in spades.

That's more than Orson Welles could ever say. As I wrote a couple of years ago:

Welles was far from blacklisted--a far, far too loaded a word to describe what happened to his career post-Kane. He worked constantly in movies, both in front of and behind the cameras. He just couldn't come to grips with the seemingly obvious fact that movies have to turn a profit, which means they have to connect with a mass audience. Even Kubrick, the most avant-garde of American directors, knew instinctively that he had to build his films around large, popular themes - nuclear hysteria, outer space, horror, Vietnam, and sex. (His one film that didn't have a theme that a large audience could immediately tap into, Barry Lyndon, failed to turn a profit in the US. He wouldn't make that mistake again for the three films he had left in him.) Welles couldn't find a plot or protagonist that a mass audience could bond with.

Not that The Passion is on the same level as a film as Citizen Kane is--but Welles had the best studio technicians at RKO working on it, and Herman Mankiewicz and John Houseman to help him with the screenplay. Without the access to craftsmen of those caliber again, Welles would spend most of the money he made as an extremely in-demand Hollywood character actor to make his own films, but never live up to Kane's potential.

In contrast to Welles, in terms of finding a character and a story that connects with an audience, Gibson's movie, funded by his own efforts as an extremely in-demand Hollywood actor, has certainly accomplished everything its maker set out to achieve. But will Hollywood get the message?

BACK ON TUESDAY, we wrote, "Appeasement seems to be the order of the day with Colonel Sanders". Andrew Stuttaford says that McDonald's is doing some appeasing of their own.

THE ADS AND THEIR AFTERMATH: Newsday reports, "More than a dozen families who lost relatives in the Sept. 11 attacks released a letter Saturday declaring their support for President Bush and his use of images of the destroyed World Trade Center in campaign ads".

Meanwhile, John Kerry personally believes that they're "inappropriate". (And to prove his point, Kerry will stop using references to his own war service in his speeches and advertising....right?)

The press really tipped their hand to their partisan nature shortly before Schwarzenegger's election to the governership of California, and then left no doubt when they jumped all over Bush's National Guard record. Was the concentrated and immediate nature of the press's attack on President Bush's 9/11 ads launched by a coordinated response by the DNC or Kerry's team? If so, it deserves to backfire, and badly.

If we're lucky, this most recent attack by the press may have just woken up the Red States, and the many good people on the left side of the aisle, who think that the war on terror is one that's worth fighting. President Bush didn't start it, but he deserves to finish it.

MATT DRUDGE BEGS TO BE PHOTOSHOPPED: Just as when the Professor went on vacation and left a holiday snapshot prominently displayed on his Website, somebody's going to have a lot of fun with this picture of Drudge.

I'LL BELIEVE IT WHEN I SEE IT: Every year (right around this time), WorldNetDaily runs a variation or two on a story that the income tax is about to become history.

Someday, it will eventually be replaced by a flat or consumption tax--but considering this theme has been kicking around since the heady Contract With America days of 1994, I'm not holding my breath waiting.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN DEMOCRATS DEFINE LIBERTARIANISM? You get quotes like these, along with a quote like this from last summer, from a then-struggling leftwing candidate for the presidency.

DON'T SHARPIE THAT CONTRACT JUST YET: Even though he was traded to Baltimore, Terrell Owens wants to play for Philadelphia this coming season.

THE VEEPSTAKES: Kerry is beginning the long, arduous search for a potential running mate, and has hired an outside consultant to assist.

ALLAH IS IN THE HOUSE--and he's scooping Matt Drudge. And so is Michele Catalano.

ATTORNEY GENERAL IN HOSPITAL: John Ashcroft hospitalized for pancreatitis.

THE MAN CAN'T BUST OUR BANDWIDTH: Like most stories, there's probably more to this than what's on the surface, but Julian Sanchez writes about Patrick Arthur Richard, who:

volunteered his web hosting services to the Macomb, Michigan, sheriff's department for two years. When he decided he couldn't afford to keep doing it gratis, and the department refused to pay, he was hauled off to jail and charged with "extortion," among other felonies.

Be sure to follow the links that Sanchez has posted.

MRS. KERRY AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE: Teresa Heinz Kerry has given millions of dollars to fund an anti-war September 11 victim group quoted ("usually without any context", Charles Johnson notes) in nearly every story about President Bush’s new advertisements.

Meanwhile, Mickey Kaus notes that the wife of New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, "back when she was single", dated Senator John Kerry.

And speaking of without any context, Sen. Kerry is giving radio speeches charging that President Bush "shortchanges troops on gear". Naturally, the article on the subject doesn't mention Kerry's own attempts at shortchanging them on gear.

UPDATE: A thought: if George W. Bush is "molesting the dead", as this screedy Jimmy Breslin column claims, why is it acceptable for Kerry to be using our soldiers and their welfare, as pawns in his political campaign? And will any paper call him on the double standard?

Also, if Kerry is so concerned about their welfare, does this mean that he renounces his Winter Soldier speech, where he declared US soldiers (including himself, presumably) to be war criminals?

ANOTHER UPDATE: The Mudville Gazette has some thoughts.

INTERESTING SLANT IN NEW YORK TIMES LEAD:

3 American Muslims Convicted of Helping Wage Jihad
By JAMES DAO
ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 4 — In a victory for the Bush administration's campaign to root out home-grown terrorism, a federal judge convicted three American Muslims on Thursday of conspiring to help a Pakistani group wage "violent jihad" against Indian forces in Kashmir and possibly American troops in Afghanistan.

Why is it only a victory "for the Bush administration's campaign to root out home-grown terrorism"?

Does The Times assume that Democrats don't mind home-grown terrorism? Why is this a partisan issue to the Gray Lady?

Just curious.

NATIONWIDE OUTRAGE AS PRESIDENT USES WAR IMAGERY IN BID FOR RE-ELECTION: Survivors of vicious unprovoked attack on US are furious at the president's lack of sensitivity.

"DEMS LEAD IN '04 SMEAR CAMPAIGN...by tons" writes Mort Kondrake, hardly a right-wing ideologue.

How long before some budding entrepreneur uploads a "Free Mumia"-style "FREE MARTHA" logo to Cafe Press and creates "Free Martha" T-shirts, bumperstickers, and the like?

UPDATE: Muggeridge's Law strikes again--there is no way that a satirist can compete with real life for its pure absurdity:

http://www.cafeshops.com/grmartha

http://www.cafeshops.com/freemarthashop

And a whole bunch more.

WE ARE THE NINETIES: Martha Stewart convicted of all counts.

No signs yet of angry suburban white homemakers rioting in the streets.

While he was off on his prediction at the end of it, there's much truth in this 2002 Jonah Goldberg piece about Martha and the 1990s.

WMDs FOUND AS RESULT OF IRAQ INVASION: "Libya Admits 44,000 Pounds of Mustard Gas in Declaration of Chemical Weapons".

The domino principle keeps chugging along.

THREE-HEADED FROG FOUND: Through his assistant, Waylon Smithers, C. Montgomery Burns, prominent Springfield entrepreneur and CEO of Springfield's nuclear reactor, issued a statement denying that he had anything to do with its appearance.

(Via Drudge.)

THE LIBERTARIAN FILM FESTIVAL: I'm not sure if I agree with all of the choices, but Tim Cavanaugh and his readers are making a list of films with libertarian themes.

I weighed in with a suggestion of my own.

THE STAKES: Victor Davis Hanson writes on what's at stake in November:

Just as a presidency of earlier ossified liberals like Michael Dukakis or Walter Mondale probably would have led to support of a utopian nuclear freeze and subsequent Russian intimidation of Europe, unilateral cuts in military preparedness, and acquiescence to the Soviet Union, so too the election of John Kerry may well undo much of what has been achieved these last three years as we return to the old, normal way of doing business.

With Howard Dean gone, Kerry realizes that suddenly he must move rightward to sound tougher than George Bush. Finally, he seems to understand that every northern liberal Democrat in the last 30 years who ran to the left on national security lost badly — like McGovern, Mondale, and Dukakis. And so Mr. Kerry abruptly will have to talk grandly of what he would have done to make us more secure. Yet a better guide is his own record in opposing defense programs, in harboring a chronic suspicion of using American force, and his own contradictory past votes about deployments to the Middle East.

When you consider the president's successes, it's no wonder that the press is trying to prevent him from getting that information out.

THE DOMINO PRINCIPLE: It's working in the Middle East, writes Roger L. Simon, who's gutsy enough to admit, "and, boy, did I ever hate it back in the old days of Vietnam".

CRUCIFIXION--IT'S NOT JUST FOR ROMANS ANYMORE: Kicking it old school style--very old school style, Saudi Arabia apparently still uses crucifixion as a form of capital punishment.

FORTUNATELY, NO SNAIL DARTERS WERE HARMED: Ananova reports, "Acclaimed wetland was result of leaky pipe".

(Via GCLM, who writes, "This'll upset Treehuggers & White Light Smokers, Inc.")

WELL, IT HASN'T HURT THE MAYOR OF SAN FRANCISCO: Barbra Streisand is refusing to obey the law in California.

RUN RALPH RUN! Moving up faster than a souped-up Corvair, everybody's favorite leftist scold is at six percent in the polls.

UPDATE: Obviously, I was being silly with the above post. I think Betsy Newmark is closer to reality when she writes, "I bet that his actual vote total will be much less. Many of those people will not go to the polls and there is no guarantee that Nader will even be on the ballot in all 50 states".

GREAT QUESTION: The Media Research Center's Brent Baker asks, "Will Media Hold Kerry to Same Standard: No Vietnam in TV Ads?"

COMMITTING "A MICRO-AGRESSION": I love this; and suspect a meme has just been born.

MORE ON MANUFACTURING "OUTRAGE": Charles Johnson writes:

Notice in all of these headlines: no quotes around “disgusted,” “angered,” “outraged.” Reported as fact. Yet the same wire services carefully surround every reference to “terrorism” with doubt-inducing scare quotes.

Read Charles' commenters, as well.

"WHAT LIBERAL FACULTY?": Stefan Beck of The New Criterion's Weblog writes:

So, let's have a look at the record, shall we? Daniel Pipes, taunted and booed at Berkeley. Antonin Scalia, denied "endorsement" by sixteen professors at Amherst. Former terrorist, welcomed with open arms at Dartmouth. And still they ask, "What liberal faculty?"

On the other hand, when you become The Establishment, you give the hipper kids something to rebel against. Which may be why, as Prof. Reynolds writes, the left has lost its teen spirit, especially on campus. And why longtime rock and roll insider and leftwing booster Danny Goldberg is also upset.

BEST. PLAN. EVER: Deroy Murdock writes that there's "a glimmer of hope to those who want to see the Twin Towers rise again".

I like it. A lot.

"RATS!" Robert Moran places the manufactured outrage over the use of 9/11 images in President Bush's commercials into context.

At some point, it may just begin to dawn on most Americans that the press won't allow President Bush the benefit of appearing to do anything right this year. And that they may have placed their bet on who they'd prefer to win the election and are actively trying to influence the outcome. If only just a little...

UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg writes:

I think these complaints are nonsense squared. A lot more people died during Vietnam than on 9/11 and John Kerry has been running ads with footage from there for months. These families may have a unique relationship to 9/11 but they do not have ownership of that day, politically, culturally or otherwise and it would be absurd if this administration caved on this point, even though I'm sure the media will be delighted to exploit the personal tragedies of these families.

I don't know if it could be done as a TV commercial for the Bush campaign, or as a profile on Fox, but someone should track down a Vietnamese refuge and get his thoughts on Kerry's Winter Soldier speech, and his efforts to cause America to lose the war in Vietnam, thus resulting in millions of unnecessary deaths.

Sounds ugly? Hey, no worse than smearing Bush's service record.

UPDATE: Hey, great minds think alike. I just came across this post on National Security Blog:

Dan Tran said speaking as a member of Vietnamese Americans Against John Kerry, "On behalf of tens of thousands of Vietnamese-Americans, we are determined to demonstrate against Senator Kerry all across this nation."

Dan Tran, a NASA engineer and president of the Vietnam Human Rights Project, said, "John Kerry aided and abetted the communist government in Hanoi and has hindered any human rights progress in Vietnam."

Well, yeah.

ANOTHER UPDATE: When I wrote "manufactured outrage" above, I was referring to the press. But "Lt. Smash" writes that they're not the only ones manufacturing outrage at President Bush.

I hate to sound like a broken record (and yes, this is very much a rhetorical question), but why isn't the media making these connections??

(Via InstaPundit.)

In a post titled, "George Mitchell, TV News Titan", Tim Graham writes:

Left-wingers FOR YEARS have tried to insist that the executive at the top of the Big Media Company is the most important person in the news flow. See the Eric Alterman "What Liberal Media?" chapter title "You're Only As Liberal As the Man Who Owns You." People who study the news (and work inside news rooms) know that's rarely the case. But by this Alterman conspiracy theory, now that former Sen. George Mitchell is the top dog at Disney, ABC News is now run by the man who ruined the first President Bush with his back-stabbing liberal partisanship! How is it that the lefties are now going to say the reporters are liberal, but their bosses balance them out?

It does rather invalidate the "vast right wing media conspiracy" meme that Al Gore and others on the left tried to float after the 2002 elections.

T.O. TRADE MAKES 49ERS D.O.A. THIS SEASON: The Baltimore Ravens acquire receiver Terrell Owens in a trade with the '49ers. And Jeff Garcia is looking at the Browns as his next team.

It's going to be a looooong season for San Francisco this year.

Skip Bayless, the San Jose Mercury's veteran sportswriter, writes, "If he wants to help 49ers, York should sell them", adding that the 'Niners are in danger of becoming the next Arizona Cardinals, a perennial cellar dweller.

LILEKS' NEWHOUSE COLUMN UPDATE: I just updated my post below to include this incredible story by CBS News, "If Anne Frank Only Knew...".

THE "INEXPLICABLE EVENT": Bush calls Kerry and congratulates him on winning the Democratic nomination. David Cohen and some of the commenters on the BrothersJudd Blog have some thoughts.

SAME AS IT EVER WAS: CNSNews reports that, "If not for a conservative magazine, the complete investigation into John Kerry's anti-war associate Al Hubbard and Hubbard's fabricated Vietnam War record would not have been published in 1971".

Not surprisingly, Kerry's getting a pass this year as well.

Advantage James Lileks, who writes in his latest Newhouse column:

Let's just be blunt: The North Koreans would love to see John Kerry win the election. The mullahs of Iran would love it. The Syrian Ba'athists would sigh with relief. Every enemy of America would take great satisfaction if the electorate rejects the Bush doctrine and scuttles back to hide under the U.N. Security Council's table. It's a hard question, but the right one: Which candidate does our enemy want to lose? George W. Bush.

England's far left Independent today (complete with Robert Fisk ad to the right of the story):

If the human race as a whole, rather than 50 states plus the District of Colombia, could cast a ballot this coming November, John Kerry would surely win the presidency by a landslide.

Unfortunately for President Bush-haters around the world, only the 200 million United States citizens of voting age will have that right - and the outcome is anything but sure.

And The Guardian, also from England, picks up the theme:

America's voters have done themselves a great favour. If they had picked Mr Dean, Mr Bush would have made mincemeat of him. By picking Mr Kerry, they have given the Democrats their best chance of recapturing the White House. That is something for Britons to welcome too. Nothing in world politics would make more difference to the rest of us than a change in the White House.

The free world has never had a stronger interest in the result of a US election than it has in the defeat of Mr Bush. Senator Kerry carries the hopes not just of millions of Americans but of millions of British well-wishers, not to mention those of nations throughout Europe and the world.

Of course, you could find similar articles at the time about the Republican who was in office in 1984, as well...

UPDATE: Speaking of the North Koreans, CBS News reports that North Korea is using The Diary of Anne Frank to teach kids about American(!) Nazis:

Anne's plea for peace is a curious message for these students, because North Korea is constantly preparing for war. Dictator Kim Jong Il spends the country's meager resources maintaining a powerful military. And it turns out that North Korea is using Anne's diary to tell students they must sacrifice for the military -- because war with America is inevitable.

“The Americans enjoy war. It excites them. It's part of their nature,” says one student.

Here, they teach that today's Nazis are the Americans – and that today's Hitler is George W. Bush. And, to hammer that home, whenever North Korean students refer to President Bush, or to other Americans, they're taught to call them “Nazis,” or “warmongers."

“As long as the warmonger Bush and the Nazi Americans live, who are worse than Hitler's fascists, world peace will be impossible to achieve,” says another student.

As James Taranto wrote, "Ever wonder where the Angry Left gets the loony idea that "Bush = Hitler"? Maybe from Pyongyang."

KERRY REJECTS HILLARY'S OUTSOURCED ENDORSEMENT: Hillary's rebuttal is a hoot as well.

As is this.

WOW: One of the dangers of owning a Blog is that you're essentially live without a net. There's no gruff but benign veteran Lou Grant-style editor to say, "Son, are you sure you want to say that?" Or simply redline out potentially offensive language.

Or as that sage philosopher, Uncle Ben Parker once said, "With great power, comes great responsibility". And a great chance to do something that causes you to auger the aircraft deep, deep, into the ground when you hit that button labeled "Post & Publish".

As this fellow just did.

(Via John Hawkins.)

UPDATE: Oliver Willis writes, "Sometimes you drink the kool-aid and think blogs can do better than the real world, and then you see that. Sick."

Exactly.

Michele Catalano and her commenters have some thoughts as well.

THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULDN'T: Michael Graham looks at the end of John Edward's candidacy.

AS HEADS IS TAILS: After decades of suggesting that the Constitution was a living, breathing document, capable of being molded in any direction they wanted it go in, all of a sudden, Democrats, lead by DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe, have become strict constructionists.

Try to guess why.

UNSAFE AT ANY SCREED: Thomas Sowell debunks the book that began Ralph Nader's career.

BUSH'S "WAR BASE" is the subject of a lengthy post on Instapundit.com, complete with the thoughts of a number of the Professor's readers.

BUWAHAHAHA!! Put down your Big Gulp or Slurpee, and then look very, very carefully at the photo the Pakistan Tribune has chosen to accompany an otherwise routine article on our efforts to track down Osama bin Laden. It could offer a clue as to where to find him.

(Via James Taranto, who has the original photo, in case the PakTribune changes it.)

HUGE LOSS DETHRONES 'KING AL', says this New York Post headline:

The Rev. Al Sharpton's abysmal single-digit showing last night in the New York primary left him considering dropping out of the presidential race.

Whether he continues or not, the paltry 8 percent of the vote that Sharpton received in his home state is likely to diminish his role as a local political leader, consultants told The Post.

He finished third behind John Kerry and John Edwards and couldn't even win his base - losing the African-American vote to Kerry by a double-digit margin, according to exit polls.

Sharpton plans to meet with advisors today and decide by the end of the week whether to continue his campaign.

"Al Sharpton has failed," said consultant Norman Adler. "He's no longer the king of the African-American vote in New York City."

Sharpton fell well short of the 15 percent of the statewide vote that many analysts said he needed to retain credibility.

Does this mean that we'll be spared a repeat of disgusting scenes such as this in 2004? That's progress for the Democrats, although they should never have pandered to Sharpton in the first place.

SPEAKING OF "TINY MUMMIES", I guess Tom Wolfe should be glad his piece actually ran. Lucette Lagnado writes how The New Yorker's William Shawn drove the New York Times' Arthur Gelb crazy, to the point where Gelb's 1966 Times profile of Shawn never ran.

KEYSHAWN JOHNSON DEAL "IS CLOSE" according to The Dallas Morning News. The former Tampa Bay Buccaneer receiver, who got his start in the NFL with Bill Parcells and the New York Jets could soon be reunited with Parcells's new team, the Dallas Cowboys.

CALIFORNIA VOTERS OK PROPS 57 and 58, the centerpieces of Gov. Schwarzenegger's budget plan.

Proposition 56, which would have made it easier for the state to raise taxes, was soundly defeated by a margin of 64 percent to 36 percent.

MEL GIBSON: FEMINIST? Over the weekend, I mentioned to my wife that somebody could make a pretty good case that The Passion has a feminist slant to it--some of the strongest characters in the film are women: the two Marys, Pilate's Claudia, and Veronica, the woman who wipes Christ's face on His way to the crucifixion. (She's played by an actress who looks a bit like Sofia Coppola, but I can't find her name in any searches. Any clues, folks?)

Via this Blog (via Technorati), I discovered that Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review Online has written just such an article.

(I'm not sure what to make the film's androgynous Satan, who looks like a cross between Marilyn Manson and Sinead O'Connor, and is played by this striking looking Italian actress who went the Persis Khambatta route, and shaved her head for the role. Did Mel intend for the devil to be a woman--or merely of indeterminate gender?)

THE PEACEFUL, PEACEFUL WEST: Brian Micklethwait of Samizdata.net writes that the wild wild west was not wild--it was "hard work, trade, tedium, and peace".

IT'S A FAMILY AFFAIR: Tech Central Station's Stephen Schwartz has a modest proposal in the hunt for Bin Laden:

Bin Laden is a Saudi. Why not interrogate his numerous Saudi relatives about his probable whereabouts?

Read the whole thing.

YEEEEARRRRGH!!!! Howard Dean finally wins one: his home state of Vermont.

In other Vermont news, life imitates Jonah Goldberg, as Killington has voted to secede from the state and become part of New Hampshire.

UPDATE: Tying both topics together, Pejman Yousefzadeh writes, "Yes, I know that Dean is no longer Governor. But this move likely stemmed from policies he implemented in the past, and represents a startling vote of no confidence in the manner in which Vermont conducts its affairs".

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO THE MAN IN THE WHITE FLANNEL SUIT: Tom Wolfe, who, as anybody who's read this site for a while knows is my favorite author, is 73 today.

All of his books are worth seeking out, but I'd recommend particularly Radical Chic, for its backstage look at sixties liberalism at its apogee; The Bonfire of the Vanities to see how Wolfe jumpstarted the dying tradition of the Great American Novel; and Hooking Up, as a definitive look at the major issues preoccupying America right before 9/11. Hooking Up also contains "Tiny Mummies", Wolfe's mid-sixties "murderous gutter journalism" balloon-popping of The New Yorker's pretensions, which put him on the map as a writer to be reckoned with, but remained out of print for almost 35 years.

Wolfe's anthology of non-fiction, The New Journalism has been out of print since the mid-1970s, but is well worth seeking out for any budding writer who wants a how-to of Wolfe's techniques, and a great collection of the best non-fiction writers of the 1960s and early 1970s, a golden era of journalism.

Last year, R. Emmitt Tyrrell gave us a brief preview of Wolfe's next novel, which will be on a subject Wolfe has wanted to cover since at least the mid-1980s: the American university scene. As Tyrrell wrote:

I never probe too deeply when Tom is at work on a novel. It just does not seem like the right thing to do. But from what he has let slip about this latest work, I suspect the American university is about to suffer a staggering expose. Wolfe will leave his readers not only outraged but laughing -- that is the cruelest cut of all.

I'll be first in line when it hits the streets.

OUT OF THE CLOSET: C.S. Lewis' "Chronicles of Narnia" will become a Disney-distributed film.

The success of The Lord of the Rings trilogy seems has reminded Hollywood that dead white males have made some pretty good literature over the past couple of millennia or so.

UPDATE: Betsy Newmark writes, "Shhh. Don't tell Hollywood about all the Christian symbolism in the Narnia books".

FOR A KENTUCKY COLONEL, HE SURE SEEMS FRENCH TO ME: Charles Johnson notes that "several KFC restaurants in Australia have removed bacon from their menus, to avoid offending Muslims".

Appeasement seems to be the order of the day with Colonel Sanders. Last year, KFC knuckled under to PETA, which, not surprisingly, has only opened the door to further assaults from PETA and other fringe groups.

BUH.......BYE: John Edwards is out. Or as Roger L. Simon humorously put it:

This just in...

"God and John Edwards are dead." --Friedrich Nietzsche

Heh.

49ERS RELEASE QB JEFF GARCIA, and give Terrell Owens "permission to seek a trade", after T.O.'s agent was late with his paperwork, preventing Owens from becoming a free agent.

As Skip Bayless recently wrote, the Niners aren't going anywhere this season.

UPDATE: But Garcia may be--Don Banks of Sports Illustrated describes him as "suddenly the top quarterback in this year's free-agent market".

USING MP3s FOR WHOLE-HOUSE AUDIO: And now for something completely different: tired of our wall-to-wall politics and Passion coverage? My latest Electronic House newsletter is online, and low-carb to boot!

KERRY KEEPS FEEDING SCOTT OTT waaay too much good material.

AIRBRUSHING NEWS STORIES: It's not just for the BBC anymore!

THE 100 MILLION DOLLAR MAN: AP reports that "Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts Tuesday agreed to a $99.2 million, seven-year contract that includes an NFL-record $34.5 million signing bonus".

JAMES LILEKS LOOKS AT THE LATEST IN LOW-CARB FOOD--and drink, too! At the Bay Area's popular Max's Cafe chain, whose food is yuppified Jewish deli fair, (and GC Mandrake's favorite stop after a 12 hour flight from London to SFO), they've recently started selling low carb desserts--low carb cheesecake and low carb chocolate cake. Our waitress on Sunday simply rolled her eyes when she described them to us, and with that in mind, we avoided them like the politically correct plague they are.

ONE OF THE BENEFITS OF A REPUBLICAN-LED SENATE is that it will stand-up for the controversial issues where the opinions of the majority of working Americans differ from the liberal elites of both coasts. Such as this vote today.

[/Sarcasm]

Bush would be very, very wise to veto this mess, if he wishes to keep his base fired up.

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds writes, "More likely the bill will just die".

ANOTHER UPDATE: If I'm reading this article correctly, it's dead, Jim.

ONE MORE UPDATE: "Back to square one on protecting the gun makers from abusive litigation. But look out, Sens. Schumer and Feinstein. Unless you're able to work some kind of miracle between now and September, the Clinton gun ban will sunset. The world will not come to an end, crime will not skyrocket, and the nation will see that that particular gun control law was worth nothing".

ONE MORE, ONE MORE UPDATE: "Despite it being the single most important day of the primary season, both John Kerry-Who-BTW-Served-In-Vietnam and John Edwards shuttled in for the vote. The pro-gun control votes they cast today are the first votes either has actually bothered to participate in so far this year".

KERRY WAFFLES ON GOD AND LIBERALISM: During Sunday's debate, Kerry was pitched softball questions about whether God is on the side of the US, and whether or not he's a liberal, and he waffled, hemmed and hawwed, and tried to have both sides of the argument (gee, there's a shocker).

These are the sorts of the questions that Bill Clinton could have batted out of the park, and sounded presidential doing so. But instead, for Kerry, who, by the way, served in Vietnam, it's not 1968 all over again, it's 1988: Kerry sounds much like Dukakis flip-flopping over whether he was a liberal, and the waffle that sunk him--when Bernard Shaw of CNN asked him about what he'd do if his wife was murdered.

JESUS IS A VIKINGS FAN: "When I was on the cross, I was thinking about the Minnesota Vikings," James Caviezel said. Caviezel recently played the title role in a recent film you may have read a little about. His brother-in-law is the Vikings' offensive coordinator.

It speaks volumes that Caviezel is a football fan--somehow I don't think many in Hollywood are crazy about the Red States' favorite sport.

MARK STEYN, IN ENGLAND'S SPECTATOR:

If Gore or Kerry had been in the White House on September 11, I’m certain the Taleban would still be in power, and Afghanistan would still be a playground of terror camps. Oh, to be sure, there’d have been sanctions and Security Council resolutions and some arrests of associates in the US, but the broad context of 9/11 would have been different: it would have been a ‘tragedy’, not an act of war; mounds of teddy bears, not regime change. For that critical, liberating distinction we have to thank Don Rumsfeld and George W. Bush. According to Rowan Scarborough’s new book Rumsfeld’s War, at one o’clock that afternoon, as the Pentagon still burned and after he’d helped with the injured, the Defence Secretary told the President, ‘This is not a criminal action. This is war.’

November’s election is a referendum on Rumsfeld’s judgment that day. After Pearl Harbor, Admiral Yamamoto said that he feared all he’d done was wake a sleeping giant. But it’s been two years now. If you figure it’s time the sleeping giant resumed his slumbers, Kerry’s your man.

RTWT.

Welcome To Our Second Anniversary! On March 1st, 2002, EdDriscoll.com, a radical new experiment in Internet self-publishing, not to mention self-promotion, was born. And the Internet hasn't been the same since.

OK, actually, it wasn't that radical a new experiment, and the Internet would probably get along just fine without us. Unlike some of the folks who've parlayed Weblogs into steady writing gigs, I was a freelance journalist who came to the Web after publishing numerous "dead tree" articles. Obviously, Glenn Reynolds' InstaPundit was the chief model for our site, and its look. As I've written before, I had seen Virginia Postrel's Weblog, but prior to 9/11, hadn't really thought it as such--to me, it was an E-Zine, and I didn't want to manually FTP up new pages every day. At the time, the term "Weblog" meant to me lame diaries about what their authors had done that day--and I doubted that the world really cared which shopping mall I had last been in. James Lileks' brilliant writing is the exception that proves the rule: very, very few authors, whether they're on the Web or dead tree, have the textual chops to make daily personal details interesting.

But I had read Glenn's Weblog in early September of 2001, when I discovered it doing a Google vanity search (he had linked to one of my first NRO pieces). It was the combination of seeing the Blogger logo then on his site, and then my frequent reading of it, Postrel's, Sgt. Stryker's and Joanne Jacobs' in the dark days immediately after 9/11 that caused me to put all the pieces together in my head: Weblogs could comment on the news, express a different slant from what Big Media wanted to say about a topic, and allow anyone to have his or her personal daily editorial page. And since the media usually does a terrible job at covering a war, Weblogs gained a large new audience as they had a field day pointing out the biases and errors of the media. This seemed like pretty cool stuff to me.

At the time, I was still using a lame CompuServe email address that took forever to spell out whenever I did an interview. In early 2002, when I discovered that the EdDriscoll.com URL was available, I immediately grabbed it, if only for an email address with a professional sound to it, and then figured that Blogger's templates would allow a decent looking site to go up fairly painlessly, even with my limited HTML skills.

A further bit of luck was on my side: my good friend, "Group Captain Mandrake" (whom you may know from his Across The Atlantic Weblog), was not only visiting Sillicon Valley for a few weeks in early 2002, but even more fortunately, he was staying in my house. So his HTML knowledge and general Internet chops were a Godsend. (And it worked out nicely for him as well, as my efforts here quickly inspired him to launch his own blog. In a way, just as InstaPundit has launched a surfeit of Weblogs, this site has given birth to at least one spin-off of its own.)

Shortly before I launched the site, I did an article for the late, lamented SpinTech site, (and since republished by Catholic Exchange) interviewing some of the elite of the Blogosphere: the afore mentioned Reynolds, Jacobs, and Paul Palubicki, who back then was still going exclusively by his nom de Air Force, Sgt. Stryker. I think holds up fairly well as a good snapshot of the days immediately after 9/11, and what was coalescing in mind as I put the ideas for this site together.

I had also interviewed Virginia Postrel, Orrin Judd of the Brothers Judd, and had recently come off of a fun stint posting articles for the launch of National Review Online's Financial column.

Fortunately, many of the people I interviewed before the site was launched were happy to link to it once I established my beachhead, Deep Space Nine, Delta House (call it what you will) on the 'Net, and many others have since linked as well. And we were able to hit the ground running--and typing. And typing. And typing some more...

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that Weblogs are astonishingly easy to start--and as CNN recently tried not to say, about seven million people have done just that. (And not all inspired by InstaPundit!) But it can be difficult for many people to keep them going, and I definitely miss some of the sites who were around before I started and have since fallen by the wayside, such as Protein Wisdom, Patrick Ruffini, and others.

But as we go into year number three, I'm still here and still having fun. Writing a Weblog is very different than writing a magazine article or a book. The difference between longform articles and chapters and short posts full of HTML code that link and comment on someone else's reporting is almost a right brain/left brain equation. But the two formats work nicely together--there's no doubt that this Blog has lead to numerous additional paid articles, and it's allowed me to expand, discuss and update those articles as well. It's also lead directly to our regular gigs at Tech Central Station and Blogcritics, and we'd like to thank Nick Schulz and Eric Olsen, respectively, for letting me hang my fedora there as well.

So Rush may have half his brain tied behind his back, but I'm using both sides of mine, and plan to continue for some time to come.

Thanks for sticking around and making it all possible!

"RAISING THE VOLUME" Jonah Goldberg surveys the frontlines of America's culture wars, while Stanley Kurtz looks at one possible conclusion to them.

IS THE BLOGOSPHERE HALF EMPTY OR HALF FULL? A friend sent me a CNN article with the depressing headline, "Study: Very few bloggers on Net":

Despite the potential of turning every Internet user into a publisher, relatively few have created Web journals called blogs and even fewer do so with regularity, a new study finds.

Some bloggers indeed update their journals often, in some cases several times a day. But it's clearly a minority who are taking advantage of the blog and its potential to steer the online discourse with personal musings about news events and daily life.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project, in a study released Sunday, found that somewhere between 2 percent and 7 percent of adult Internet users in the United States actually keep their own blogs.

But let's look at a few more numbers, shall we?

According to these fellows, the number of adult Internet users in the US is 146 million people. And if we average the CNN figures to five percent of those users, that means that there are 7,300,000 Weblogs in the US alone. And that's a lot of Weblogs!

I can see how CNN wouldn't like the idea of Weblogs to become any more popular than they already are--since the very best of them have beaten the pants off of CNN when it comes to accurately and fairly editorializing and explaining the news. And unlike CNN, most Weblogs haven't admitted to being in bed with Saddam Hussein.

This article sounds a bit like the way CNN reports the same unemployment figures depending upon which party is in the White House--something that was noticed by an Australian blogger.

UPDATE: Scott Ott puts it all into perspective.