IS THIS WHAT TINA BROWN MEANT when she said that she favors a more metrosexual approach to foreign relations?

"You can't ever make serious progress against terrorism unless you deal with Israel. We are not dealing with Israel. We've backed away. We're afraid of the political consequences."

Pat Buchanan talking? No, in fact it was former New York governor Mario Cuomo. Furthermore, said Cuomo in an interview with the New Haven Register, the U.S. should tell Israel: "Up until now it was just you and the Palestinians killing one another - now you are killing us. Now there are people out there who are taking Israel as the provocation to terrorize us all over the globe - in the United States and elsewhere."

And Cuomo suggested that Israeli leaders be told that "you have a responsibility to all of us (and) we are going to be more assertive in dealing with you.... So let's sit down and talk."

Forty-eight hours after his words appeared in print, a backpedaling Cuomo called the Register to "clarify" his comments. "We have to be more assertive as to both sides, to force them together, not just the Israelis," he said, although he did not retract any of his earlier statements.

More surprising than the harsh tone of Cuomo's remarks was that no New York newspaper, or any media outlet, for that matter, reported them. Then again, given Cuomo's status as a Democratic Party hero -- and in light of the relatively positive press coverage he received during a 12-year tenure as governor that was long on rhetorical flourishes and short on tangible accomplishment -- the silence of New York's media lambs was to be expected.

Ace of Spades writes:

Bias by commission occurs when the media report a story in a slanted fashion.

Bias by omission occurs, most dramatically, when the media simply refuse to report a story whatsoever.

The media is constantly offering us what are claimed to be objective and neutral rules which, they imply, more or less dictate that they report a story in a certain way, or don't report a story at all. Trouble is, the "rules" established for, say, giving anti-Jew remarks by a Republican the full-court press suddenly seem inoperative, and not quite "rules" at all, when a Democrat makes similar remarks.

With tongue probably in cheek, Jeff Goldstein simply says:

I used to tell the story about how Mario Cuomo once complimented my mother's kishkes. "These are great kishkes," he said. "Fabulous. Best I've ever had!"

But f*** him if I'll tell that story anymore.

Can't say I blame him.

WATCHED CHARADE LAST NIGHT: I would have loved to have visited the pretty, romantic Paris depicted in that film (and having Audrey Hepburn as a tour guide wouldn't have been too shabby, either). But that France is long, long gone.

FROM THE HOME OFFICE IN TIKRIT: David Letterman lists "Top Ten Ways Saddam Hussein Celebrated His 67th Birthday".

The recent attacks on President Bush by two of Sports Illustrated's writers after Pat Tillman's death in Afghanistan, and the vicious piece by University of Massachusetts student journalist Rene Gonzalez have a curious tone to them. I thought the general consensus of the left was, "Sure, go after Al Qaida. Afghanistan makes sense. But don't invade Iraq." But SI's Rick Reilly is "furious that these wars keep taking them". And Gonzalez describes Tillman's involvement in the war in Afghanistan as, "defending or serving his all-powerful country from a seventh-rate, Third World nation".

So in their minds, I guess we should have done nothing after 9/11. But we did nothing after the WTC bombing in '93, and the attack on the Coles in 2000, when Bill Clinton was still president. And the result was 9/11.

Nearly three years later, terror attacks are at their lowest level in 30 years. But that wouldn't have happened if we had followed their advice.

Compare the outbursts by Reilly and Gonzalez with how the left banded together when President Clinton deployed our troops in Kosovo, and cruise missiles against Iraq. As I wrote in February of 2003:

I'll never forget the conversation I had back around 1999 with an attorney who was an acquaintance of my wife, while we had dinner at a Los Gatos restaurant with another couple and her. A sixty-something hyper-liberal, after she had brought up (God knows how we got on the subject) the importance of liberating Kosovo, I casually mentioned that I didn't see why it was in our national interest to get involved there. She erupted like a volcano with, "We've got to liberate those poor people suffering under Slobodan Milosevic!!!! Don't you understand!!???", Well, no. But I'll bet any amount of money she's against liberating the equally suffering people of Iraq, largely--if not entirely--because of who will get the credit for it.

On the other hand, as Radley Balko wrote earlier this year, doing nothing has become the left's answer to just about everything.

TED KOPPEL'S NIGHTLINE RATINGS STUNT is put into perspective by these two Instapundit links.

And it's nice to see that John McCain's respect for the First Amendment continues to flourish.

UPDATE: John Hawkins and Joe Mariani have some thoughts on Koppel's "tribute". And Glenn Reynolds has a list of items that he hopes Koppel also reads, "Just in the name of balance, you know".

RADICAL CHIC GOES THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS: The peasants are revolting--and worse, they're talking out of turn at Manhattan dinner parties! And--heaven forbid--upsetting Tina Brown!

For more on Brown--who "favors a more metrosexual approach to foreign relations" (yes, she actually wrote that), click here. And also here, to read of the "neocons of the '30s [who] bitterly reviled FDR as 'that man''"--40 years before neoconservatives came into existence.

Last year, Mickey Kaus coined the term "the liberal cocoon", and Mark Steyn ran with it. The New York Times, and to a lesser extent, The Washington Post, which runs Brown's column, exist to keep everyone happy within the cocoon. But sometimes reality intrudes, no matter how carefully one plans the cocktail parties.

UPDATE: Brown's article has given us...the Ultimate Kerry Bumpersticker!

SPEAKING OF THE COMMISSION, Michelle Malkin is not very happy about Bob Kerrey's shenanigans both behind the scenes--and in front of them:

Catapulted back into the limelight thanks to the mass murder of 3,000 innocent men, women, and children, Kerrey took advantage of his terrorist-induced celebrity to appear on Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

Now, it would be one thing if Kerrey used his privileged position to inform Stewart's younger audience of the gravity of the 9/11 panel's task. But instead, Kerrey yukked it up. First, he dished with Stewart about President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney's upcoming private meeting with the commission. When Stewart mocked the president's "buddy system," Kerrey guffawed: "He is bringing his buddy, that's exactly right, for safety." Emboldened by audience applause, Kerrey riffed that it was more like "Screw you, buddy." Asked by Stewart whether people were really blaming each other over the terrorist attacks during closed hearings, Kerrey snorted: "Oh, Jee-zus, yeah." More audience approval. (Taking the Lord's name in vain is always good for a few cheap laughs.)

Next, echoing a profanity uttered earlier in the show, Kerrey blurted out with a clownish grin: "Life is [expletive bleeped]." When Stewart proposed that Kerrey ask the vice president, "What the [expletive bleeped] is wrong with you people?" Kerrey cracked up and promised to use the question. And when Stewart called Attorney General John Ashcroft a "big [expletive bleeped]," Kerrey chortled some more.

After nearly ten minutes of knee-slapping hilarity, it was time for Kerrey to wrap things up. Instead of paying lip service to those who died in the terrorist attacks, Kerrey used his last moments on the program to suck up to Stewart. The Daily Show, Kerrey cooed, was one of the few shows he TiVo'ed. The other, he joked, was [the PBS kids' show] Boohbah. Ho-ho-ho.

House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R., Mo.) was spot on Tuesday in his reaction to Kerrey's performance: "His appearance on a program designed to satirize current events proves that Kerrey lacks the seriousness of purpose that this Commission requires and the American people deserve. This is not a laughing matter."

RTWT.

Add this to Harkin and Lautenberg's coordinated chickhawk outbursts, and John Kerry's meltdown this week on Good Morning America, and you have to ask--just what's happened to the party of Roosevelt, Truman and John Kennedy??

When you add the Gorelick controversy to this, it's hard to escape the conclusion that the 9/11 commission are now officially a partisan self-parody: sound and fury signifying nothing, except how far the left has fallen.

"People out to stay out of our business" was the unbelievably arrogant quote that commission chairman Thomas Kean barked when asked about Gorelick. But just what is your business?

(And yes, I know Kean is--or was--a Republican. I wonder if he knows how he's being used?)

END OF AN ERA: Oldsmobile, the nation's oldest line of cars, has died at age 106.

THOMAS SOWELL LOOKS AT the greatest singer of the 20th century, Der Bingle.

For decades, Crosby has been my father's favorite singer, and he owns darn near every LP--and 78(!) that Crosby ever made. He's also contributed a few odds and ends to some earlier biographies of Bing.

Crosby's hiring of this fellow as his guitarist, who would go on to greatly influence Jimmy Page, allowed my dad and I to sort of bridge the gap between our respective tastes in music, and gave me an entry into my father's music when I was a teenager.

BECAUSE I AM SO HIP: My review copies of the sublime Charade, starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, and Robert Altman's 3 Women, a very strange (even by Altman standards) mid-'70s film that starred Sissy Spacek and Shelly Duvall, arrived today on DVD from the Criterion Collection. Expect a review on Blogcritics in the not too distant future.

UPDATE: Speaking of hip, my copy of Craig Anderton's Sonar 3: Mixing and Mastering arrived from Amazon this afternoon. Expect a review of it as well, similar to my review of Izotope's mastering software from earlier this month.

IMPORTANT SAFETY TIP: Playing Keith Richards-style barre chords in open-G tuning on your Fender Telecaster can lead to blisters above the joints of your index finger, until you build up calluses there. Especially if you haven't used that tuning in quite a long time.

Take proper precautions.

WHAT WILL RICK ATKINSON COVER NOW? A Washington Post Iraq war reporter had admitted that he was "against the war before, during and after it". Will The Post continue to allow him to cover the war now that he's gone on the record and admitted he's biased against it and the Bush administration?

Both Tom Harkin and Frank Lautenberg used the sophism in attacking Dick Cheney.

But don't question the left's patriotism!

UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt writes, "Reprehensible enough for you? Hypocritical in the extreme considering Lautenberg's support for Bill Clinton? Historically asinine given FDR's role as war time leader of greatness?"

How to explain the Lautenberg melt-down? Well, many, many callers and e-mailers who heard me play the speech think he was drunk. I don't. I think he is acting in concert with a desperate Kerry campaign. But Lautenberg, like Kerry, has zero understanding of the American people. They have breathed deep the MoveOn.org swamp gas, and they have become as unbalanced as Dean.

In 1976, Bob Dole, serving as Gerald Ford's vice president, was widely attacked by the press for churlishly referring to the 20th century's four "Democrat Wars"--the two World Wars, Korea and Vietnam--because our involvement in each war was initiated by a Democratic President.

Watch Lautenberg and Harkin's remarks to go virtually uncommented on by the traditional chattering classes.

CALL IN THE SECRET SERVICE? A 15 year old boy draws sketches that show "a man in what appeared to be Middle Eastern-style clothing, holding a rifle"--along with President Bush's head on a pike.

The Secret Service are called in to investigate. An interesting discussion ensues on Joanne Jacobs' Weblog.

LIES AND THE LYING LIARS WHO TELL THEM: Steven Den Beste (by way of Opus of Berke Breathed) speaks truth to power.

KINSLEY TO HEAD LA TIMES OP-ED SECTION: Hence, the title of this blog.

INTEGRATING ISLAM INTO LIBERAL SOCIETIES: Canada is allowing Islamic courts to decide disputes. The British government is allowing Muslim women to be exempt from ID card photos. And in the US, as Charles Johnson writes:

Muslim groups in Hamtramck, Michigan, who want a special exemption from noise ordinances to blare the Islamic call to worship over loudspeakers five times a day, are going to get their wish.

(Shouldn't the ACLU be all over that last one?)

When did multiculturalism triumph over the rule of law in the West?

IMAGES OF KERRY: Keith Burgess-Jackson writes, "The flap about John Kerry’s medals is much ado about nothing. But those images!":

Look: This country is still divided about Vietnam. It will be divided for as long as anyone who lived through it is alive. John Kerry may have fought valiantly for his country, but he turned against his fellow soldiers when he came home. Night after night, we see images of John Kerry with long, scraggly hair, wearing military fatigues on the streets of the nation’s capital, in the company of other scruffy protesters, causing trouble. These images are being seared into the nation’s consciousness.

Don’t say Kerry was in the right. That’s irrelevant. Many people think the war was right and that those who protested it gave aid and comfort to the enemy. Images don’t lie. We see how Kerry behaved thirty-odd years ago. We see the crowd he ran with. We see the tension he sought to generate. I’m afraid this election is over, folks. Journalists will do everything they can to make it a horse race (for their own selfish reasons), but it’s over.

Kerry has had numerous opportunities to say, "I was young and stupid. Everybody does stupid, irrational things in their 20s." But he can't ever seem to admit to being wrong, and given the number of flip-flops throughout his career--virtually his entire adult life--some of those positions and statements have to be wrong.

Bill Clinton could make contradictory statements such as his famous riff about smoking pot but not inhaling, because they were usually about minor issues, and there was little photographic evidence of his youth (in between the photo of young Bill with President Kennedy (the original and still best JFK) and his becoming governor of Arkansas. The photographic evidence of Kerry's youth is overwhelming, and damning.

THE POPULATION BOMBS: Will the 21st century turn out to be an era of population decline?

Time to dump those shares of Soylent Green.

"STRAIGHT TALK OF SAVAGERY": A newspaper editor who gets it.

MUTUAL OF PYONGYANG PRESENTS "Seasonal Moonbat IMF Migration", deep in the whichy thickets of Washington DC.

(Via Charles Johnson.)

UPDATE: Jeff Goldstein places it all into perfect perspective.

KERRY AFTER VIETNAM: His 1984 campaign for Senate memo promised cut after cut in defense programs--many of which are in use right now, to liberate Iraq.

KERRY, BUSH AND VIETNAM: James Taranto and Jonah Goldberg each have some thoughts.

UPDATE: As does Chas Rich, who also adds Bob Dole and Dan Quayle into the mix.

MEMO TO THE GOP: Where are you?

UNSCAM (AKA KOFIGATE) IN A NUTSHELL: This chart explains all, although the Seattle Times may have added reason for not printing anything about it.

THE RELIGIOUS LEFT: I was kicking around ways of writing about Al Gore's support of the new film The Day After Tomorrow when I first read the story on Drudge last night. But Steve Green has it nailed:

It's The Passion of the Christ for the anti-globalization crowd.

Read the whole thing.

THOMAS SOWELL TAKES AN UP CLOSE LOOK AT bait-and-switch media.

ATLAS BLANCHED: Coming soon: Ayn Rand on black velvet?

As a follow-up to yesterday's post, a reader sent me a subscriber-only story on Sports Illustrated's Website by Rick Reilly, which ends:

Athletes are soldiers and soldiers are athletes. Uniformed, fit and trained, they fight for one cause, one team. They take ground and they defend it. Both are carried off on their teammates' shoulders, athletes when they win and soldiers when they die.

Pat Tillman and Todd Bates were athletes and soldiers. Tillman wanted to be anonymous and became the face of this war. Bates wanted to be somebody and died faceless to most of the nation.

Both did their duty for their country, but I wonder if their country did its duty for them. Tillman died in Afghanistan, a war with no end in sight and not enough troops to finish the job. Bates died in Iraq, a war that began with no just cause and continues with no just reason.

Be proud that sports produce men like this.

But I, for one, am furious that these wars keep taking them.

Iraq had "no just cause and continues with no just reason"? I guess Reilly would prefer Saddam was back in power. Of course, so would the folks who worked for another part of the Time-Warner conglomerate.

My reader added, "Sports writers/journalists try to give themselves intellectual credibility by inundating us with politically correct commentary and asides. My feeling is that they believe this insulates them from the criticism that they are lightweights that 'only write about sports'."

Exactly. And it's probably why Paul Zimmerman of SI has a similar story on Tillman which begins with this ee cummings quote:

Buffalo Bill's defunct who used to ride a watersmooth-silver stallion and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjust like that Jesus he was a handsome man and what I want to know is how do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death

Zimmerman's last paragraph begins:

It's impossible, the whole thing is impossible, the whole crazy world and the fact that young men such as Pat Tillman have to go out and do what they think is right and find death at 27 years old.

Does Zimmerman feel that volunteering for the Army and defending your country isn't right? That's certainly what's implied by his sentence. And check out "Mister Death" in the cummings quote, which Zimmerman uses as a thinly-veiled reference to the president.

Of course, as the man said, "You're making a powerful assumption, young man. You're assuming that you represent the public. I don't accept that".

Zimmerman and Reilly represent the public that orbits the SI offices at 1271 Avenue Of The Americas. It's a safe bet they doesn't represent the infinitely larger public who inhabit the blank area of that famous New Yorker cartoon between there and Los Angeles.

SOMEWHAT RELATED UPDATE: Over at Tech Central Station, Keith Burgess-Jackson, a self-professed liberal himself, has an article titled, "Explaining Liberal Anger".

CALIBRATING YOUR HOME THEATER: My latest newsletter for Electronic House is online.

Speaking of food, the Stay-Puft Marshmellow Man puts in a brief cameo appearance.

FOODBLOGGING: Stephen Green's better half certainly sets an amazing birthday dinner!

THE $1000 HAIRCUT: I realize it's important for presidential candidates to have Very Important Hair. But how do you purport to fight against "the economy of special privilege" when you fly your hairstylist in before a big TV gig, in your wife's Gulfstream private jet?

UPDATE: "If I've lost the Village Voice..."

HOT WHEELS: My review of Randy Leffingwell's Hot Wheels: 35 Years of Speed, Power Performance and Attitude is now on Cleveland.com's Weblog section.

It originally appeared in Blogcritics, where the comments were quite fascinating--they went from "hey, I had those toys as a kid" to arguments over gender and marketing!

YOUR TUITION DOLLARS AT WORK: Big Bird from Sesame Street will be Villanova's commencement speaker this year.

Could be worse--it could have been this guy, who spoke in 1999 to Evergreen College in Washington, via satellite.

PEARL 2001: Gut wreching emails from a Little Green Footballs regular to his girlfriend written on 9/11 and a few days afterwards.

"SOMETHING WHICH THE GREATEST GENERATION DID NOT HAVE TO DO": Robert Alt writes:

There is a temptation to say that Pat Tillman demonstrated a courage and ethic belonging peculiarly to a previous generation—perhaps Tom Brokaw’s Greatest Generation—one in which athletes and movie stars served. But that would be a mistake. This generation should not be underestimated. The young men of today’s military have done something which the Greatest Generation did not have to do: they volunteered to serve after the Brokaws of the world lost faith in the American military. These soldiers have fought valiantly in Afghanistan after the press all but forgot them, and in Iraq after the press, yielding to unfounded accusations, forgot who they were. They have seen recent military victories cast as defeats. They answered the call to higher duty, only to have the elites question it as lower-class service. And despite politicians using the shameful rhetoric of "quagmire," the number of volunteer soldiers is increasing.

Which ties into Glenn Reynolds' post yesterday about who the media represents, and the vignette he linked to:

And the reporter then said: Well, how do you then know, Mr. President, what the public is thinking? And Bush, without missing a beat said: You're making a powerful assumption, young man. You're assuming that you represent the public. I don't accept that.

THE RIGHT MAN FOR THE JOB: The New York Post and James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal agree: Rudolph Giuliani should be the US's next ambassador to the U.N.

Taranto writes:

Not only would Giuliani be a bully-pulpiteer in the great tradition of Jeane Kirkpatrick and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, but he would bring the penetrating eye of a former prosecutor to the continuing Oil-for-Food scandal--which may well turn out to be the corrupt reason why countries like France and Russia fought so fiercely to keep Saddam Hussein's murderous dictatorship in power in Iraq. To be sure, some of Giuliani's critics, including our colleagues at The Wall Street Journal, are of the view that he was overzealous and unfair in prosecuting white-collar crimes. But that's all the more reason why he's a perfect fit for the U.N., which certainly doesn't suffer from an excess of prosecutorial fervor.

Apart from the president himself, it's hard to think of any more powerful spokesman and symbol for America's war on terror than Rudy Giuliani, and not only because of his inspired mayoral leadership after Sept. 11. Giuliani took a stand against terror even when it was unpopular. In 1995 he ordered security to eject Yasser Arafat from Lincoln Center, in an era when the terror boss was being feted at the White House and lavished with Nobel Peace Prizes.

Works for me.

Tim Graham writes:

Sports Illustrated/CNN.com picks winners and losers in the weekend NFL Draft: "The Pats coming away with Miami defensive tackle Vince Wilfork at No. 21 is the NFL equivalent of the Bush tax breaks for the richest Americans. It just doesn't seem fair."

Last Wednesday when I arrived early for my focus group, I killed time in the lobby by reading a Sports Illustrated from the week before this year's Super Bowl. There was a section on "Super Bowl Memories from throughout the years", which seemed innocuous enough, with several stories written by veteran sportswriters along the lines of "I watched Hunter S. Thompson do blotter acid at the '72 Super Bowl!" and "Howard Cosell was such a bore when we met him for dinner the night before the '80 Super Bowl". But there were also numerous digs at John Ashcroft, Bush 43, and even Bush 41 scattered throughout by Sports Illustrated's writers.

I guess they figure that conservatives don't bother reading SI these days.

Peter Bart of Variety writes that it didn't end after Howell Raines left:

[The Times] has found its entire experience with Mel Gibson to be a painful one. Prior to its release (and prior to anyone on the paper seeing it), the Times declared "The Passion" an outrage and threat to social harmony. After its release, the Times quoted the predictions of unnamed power brokers in Hollywood that Gibson would be blackballed by the film community, his career ruined.

As predictions go, the Times' entire litany could stand major "correction." Despite the fact that Frank Rich compared it to "a porn movie," by the end of its run "The Passion" could rank second only to "Titanic" as the highest-grossing movie ever made. Further, there have been no signs of anti-Semitic outbreaks tied to the film's release -- not even in places like France and Argentina.

As for Gibson, there's no indication that his viability as an actor or filmmaker has been compromised. Indeed, Hollywood reveres success, and Gibson's personal take from his film -- somewhere north of $400 million -- will surely be history's biggest. That makes Gibson not an outlaw, but a Hollywood folk hero.

It is not my intent here to indulge in Times-bashing. I spent eight very happy years on the Times staff, and I respect that paper's unique role in our journalistic establishment.

Still, the Times has vastly stepped up its coverage of pop culture and, in doing so, seems to be bending its normal rules of journalistic fairness. "The Passion" is a prime example.

Bart adds, "There are legitimate disagreements about the film's take on biblical history. What is beyond dispute, however, is that "The Passion" is a true phenomenon in the history of motion pictures. As such, it is "news" and deserving of objective reporting by the media. Even by the Times."

"Objective reporting by the media"? Dude, that's so 1950s!

WHO IS JAVIER ROBERT? H.D. Miller looks at the UN's Oil For Food debacle, something the mainstream press seems more than a little reluctant to do.

INFLATION: While there's little fear of it in the national economy, it does seem to be heating up in Des Moines, where the local press spins Kerry's attendance figures at a local rally from "about a 1000" to "3000 supporters". Maybe even more!

If you add up all the information about John Kerry--much of it from his own Website and his own words, you see, in 1971, a 27 year old man who threw away not only the medals of men who served in Vietnam but also of those who served in World War II. And then there's his Winter Soldier speech in front of the Senate on April 22, 1971, the birthplace of the 1970s' "'Nam vets are baby killers meme." All of which occurred while he was still in the Naval Reserves.

"Strange that they think there's a way to spin this that doesn't make him unfit to lead our nation", writes Orrin Judd.

Captain Ed writes that on Good Morning America today, "Even Charlie Gibson wasn't buying Kerry's explanation, and if Kerry loses ABC, things are definitely going downhill".

UPDATE: Not surprisingly, Mickey Kaus has lots of thoughts on Kerry GMA, and even "www.johnkerryisadouchebagbutimvotingforhimanyway.com", which is an actual (if not for the faint of heart), working URL!

President Bush has a new strategy for dealing with the press, writes Jay Rosen in a must-read piece.

(Via Glenn Reynolds, who adds "If the public thought like the press, no Republican would ever be elected President" among other comments.)

THE NFL DRAFT IS ON: Serious draftnicks will be glued to the wall-to-wall coverage on ESPN, but I'm content to see who's picking up who via the 'Net. As Larry Beil of Yahoo Sports writes:

We are now "on the clock" for the most-hyped, NON-event in sports history.

It is officially known as the 69th Annual National Football League Player Selection Meeting, but you know it best as THE DRAFT. No pass will be thrown (unless Suzy Kolber runs into Joe Namath again), no tackle will be made, no touchdown will be scored, but somehow, someway, THE DRAFT will be one of the most watched NON-events on ESPN this year.

Somewhere in this great land of ours are men who willingly sit through every second of this weekend's 17 televised hours of draft coverage. These guys are either single, soon-to-be single or incarcerated, and they eat up the draft like Gilbert Brown attacks hot dogs.

The draft is the ultimate reality show, a strangely compelling marathon of mini-dramas. Like "Survivor" in pads. Fortunes rise, fortunes fall, fortunes vanish and it happens at the speed of a root canal. My question is simple: "Why does anybody watch it?"

It's like a never-ending episode of "Battlestar Galactica" with Chris Berman starring as Lorne Green.

I dunno--I think Berman would be a lot more fun than Greene was. Lt. "Double Latte With Foam" Starbuck to your Viper!

OVERLAP: More on Kerry's overlapping dates of service and dates of protest.

YOUR TUITION DOLLARS AT WORK: Rutgers University publishes a viciously anti-Semitic cartoon for its student newspaper's "Holocaust Remembrance Week" issue.

Yesterday, John Derbyshire of National Review asked if the elites of the future would ditch diversity for open racism. It looks like we're seeing it already on our campuses.

ONLY IF YOU ASK NICELY: Protein Wisdom interviews Noam Chomsky. Arising from that social construct known as the English language, though weighed down by years of its tyranny and imperialistic oppression, laughter--and at times even mirth--does occur.

It's a little-known fact, but John Kerry served in Vietnam. (Surprising, huh? He rarely mentions it in speeches.) But he's misreported at least two aspects of his service: when he took command of his swift boat, and that the date of his discharge.

Kerry's discharge wasn't until 1978, according to Kerry's own Website. Which means that his Winter Soldier shenanigans occurred while Kerry was still in the Naval Reserves!

Given how the press hounded President Bush over his National Guard duty, will they now report what Kerry was doing while still a part of the service?

HOW DO YOU REACH AGE 81, producing a top rated television news show for most of your adult life, and, as Don Hewitt does in this interview, honestly try to claim that you don't have any political biases?

UPDATE Maybe Hewitt should read The Dallas Morning News more often.

PAT TILLMAN DIED YESTERDAY: The former Arizona Cardinals safety was killed in Afghanistan. Dan Wetzel of Yahoo's sports section writes:

Tillman isn't a hero for dying, but for living. For putting his morals where his mouth was and not just enlisting, but doing it in the most humble and honorable way.

When he and his brother arrived at Georgia's Fort Benning to begin their training in July 2002 he "came in like everyone else, on a bus from a processing station," the base's public information officer said then. Tillman promptly turned down hundreds of requests for interviews and went about anonymously being a soldier.

No press. No fanfare. No "look at me" publicity stunts.

His move shocked professional sports, populated by so many of our most able-bodied Americans. Tillman was the only one to enlist from the NFL, which is fine – there is no shame in not enlisting.

But it is difficult to cheer ever again for a knucklehead like [Tampa Bay Buccaneers defensive end] Simeon Rice, who went on Jim Rome's radio show and said about Tillman, "He really wasn't that good, not really. He was good enough to play in Arizona, [but] that's just like the XFL."

After Rome stopped him, Rice finally relented. Sort of.

"I think it's very admirable, actually," Rice said. "You've got to give kudos to a guy like that because he did it for his own reasons. Maybe it's the Rambo movies, maybe it's Sylvester Stallone, Rocky, whatever compels him."

Or maybe it was just serving his country. Maybe it was being a part of a cause greater than his own self-interest. Maybe it was trying to help in a seemingly helpless situation.

In actuality, what Tillman did was no different than what thousands of other American men and women have done. The country needs them and they answer the call. He may have been the only one staring at a $3.6 million contract, but that's money.

This, obviously, is something more valuable than that.

Tillman probably would cringe at the outpouring of attention and affection that his death will bring. He didn't get into this for that. But if his death can remind Americans about the sacrifices of our soldiers, rich and poor, famous and faceless, then maybe something positive can come of it.

Our volunteer military has performed brilliantly overseas. They've served with great skill and made great sacrifices.

Not just the NFL millionaire. All of them.

Amen.

NORTH KOREAN TRAIN DISASTER: This Blog has lots and lots of information, including links and photos.

(Via Instapundit.)

SUPREME COURT BLOCKS CLARETT FROM ENTERING NFL DRAFT: More here.

MILLIONAIRE ENTREPRENEUR OUTSOURCES JOBS: Americans that could have found work in Website design and server management will have to keep looking, as Michael Moore outsources those jobs to the country located to the north of his native Flint, Michigan.

Roger Smith could not be reached for comment.

INTERESTING REVIEW OF Schindler's List on The Digital Bits Website.

THE CRACK-UP: Sioux Falls Argus Leader editor Randell Beck discovers Blogosphere, blows gasket.

Found via Glenn Reynolds, who writes, "When I see some editor lose it this way, it doesn't fill me with confidence in traditional media".

UPDATE: Scott W. Johnson of the Minnesota-based Power Line blog quips, "Funny, we don't look Yahooish".

Begging To Differ adds:

What I find most interesting is this part of Beck's response:

But there’s a small group of people—and you know, some of them don’t live in South Dakota, not everybody out there knows that. You know there’s a couple of yahoos in Minneapolis and there’s a guy out in Denver, there’s people from outside the walls of South Dakota who are perpetuating this hate campaign.

So someone from South Dakota—South Dakota!—is calling some bloggers from Minnesota "yahoos"? And here I thought it was only people from around here in the Northeast who look down on people from other states ...

You just know Lileks is going to have lots of fun with this tonight.

ANOTHER UPDATE: In other Daschle news, his lawyer is calling for ad that he doesn't like to be removed. I'd love to get Daschle's take on these three ads.

TRAIN CRASH IN NORTH KOREA--UP TO 3000 KILLED, AP reports:

Two fuel trains collided and exploded in a North Korean train station near the Chinese border Thursday, according to South Korean media, which reported large numbers of casualties. One television station said 3,000 people were believed killed or injured.

* * *In another sign of the accident's magnitude, the secretive North Korean government cut international phone lines to prevent news of the collision from leaking across its borders, [South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported], citing no sources.

(Emphasis mine.) Cut phone lines? And what sort of fuel explosion kills 3000 people? Given North Korea's nuclear weapons program, this sounds mighty suspicious.

ALL I NEED IS THE AIR THAT I BREATHE: Scott W. Johnson of the Power Line Blog writes that the 2004 Index of Leading Environmental Indicators by Steven Hayward is now out. If you don't want to wade through the whole report, Johnson has a summary.

Bottom line?

For the first time, the Index contains a special section comparing U.S. environmental trends with trends in European Union nations -- a feature of special importance in the Kerry era. This year's Indicators show that the environment continues to be America’s single greatest policy success. Environmental quality has improved so much, in fact, that it is nearly impossible to paint a grim, gloom-and-doom picture anymore.

That won't stop the doom and gloomers from believing that we're five minutes away from Silent Running or THX-1138, but at least there's a rebuttal.

ED LEADS THE WAY TO THE KITCHENS OF TOMORROW! I got invited to attend a focus group last week--they actually called for my wife, who's done a few of these, but she was out, I answered the phone, the friendly fellow on the other end said "well, maybe you'd like to attend", and I said, sure.

As a result, I spent the past two hours in a room with ten other people and the moderator, and I never saw people argue more passionately over refrigerator designs in my life. Forget the war in Iraq. Forget Israel and the Palestinians. Forget Bush and Kerry. The real burning issue of the day is the placement of the chilled water dispenser!

Or so you would have thought with this group, and I felt more than a little in over my head once I got there. Me? I like having the freezer on the bottom so I don't have to stoop when getting a Diet Coke out. That's about the extent of my design preferences when it comes to fridges, so I just sat back and watch the opinions fly.

It didn't help matters that one of the fellows (there were four guys including myself, the rest were women. Our ages varied from mid-30s to I guess mid-60s) looked like a tougher version of Ted Turner (good shock of white hair; pencil thin moustache) and sounded a little like Broderick Crawford. 35 years ago, I'll bet this guy was a helluva platoon leader in 'Nam. Ten years ago, I'll bet he kept San Jose streets safe as a hardnosed cop. Tonight, he's busy barking his opinions on every aspect of refrigerator/freezer design. And brother, did he have a lot of opinions! (He blew in, looked at the name cards on the counter and said, "Can I pick who I want to be? I want to be Carol. Can I be Carol?" Carol took a lot ribbing when she next showed up.)

On the other hand, I once dated a woman who was a focus group moderator, and have sat a few times with the ad agency or product manufacturers on the other side of the two-way mirror. So I have a sense of what's involved in leading one of these things, and then writing a report based on the data collected. And I'll bet the woman who moderated tonight probably loved this guy egging everyone on and getting them talking about design elements.

There's a second part of this tomorrow night, at a hotel instead of tonight's standard-issue focus group room with a two way mirror. It will be interesting to see how they get four hours of discussion out of fridge designs.

DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?! Wanda Baucus, wife of Democratic Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, is accused of assaulting a woman yesterday at a Northwest Washington DC garden center. "Mrs. Baucus was upset because another customer was getting help with mulch ahead of her":

Sources told News4's Pat Collins that Mrs. Baucus dropped a bag of mulch under the woman's car, then struck the woman in the body and face a number of times.

Collins reported that Mrs. Baucus drove from the scene, and returned a while later with her husband. That is when she talked to police about the incident.

Gee, what a class act.

RED McHEIFER DAYS: McDonald's introduces "Adult" Happy Meals. Reason's Nick Gillespie, and James Lileks each have some (properly disparaging) thoughts about them.

HE'LL EVEN SPOT YOU THE T: You only get one guess, writes Stephen Green, about which word is missing from The Christian Science Monitor's gushing profile of Yasser Arafat.

SHARPE DECISION: Tight end Shannon Sharpe, 35, will play for the Denver Broncos for at least one more season.

THE DOUBLE FLIP FLOP MANEUVER: Senator Kerry has released all his military records--or has he?

Just don't question his patriotism!

STRIKE OUT: Why is the Los Angeles Times distorting its coverage of the Ninth Circuit Court's three strikes decision?

THE STEELERS' CLASS OF '74: With the NFL draft rapidly approaching, the benchmark is still the Pittsburgh Steelers' class of '74, the only year a team drafted four future hall of famers.

IF IT BLEEDS, IT LEADS: I guess that's the new motto of what was once (many decades ago) called "The Tiffany Network". According to this article, CBS plans to air photos of Princess Diana, dying in the aftermath of her horrific 1997 auto crash in Paris.

CLAUDIA ROSETT has some thoughts on how the U.N. can begin paying its debt to Iraq's people.

THE PASSIVE/AGGRESSIVE COLIN POWELL, as noticed by Anne Applebaum.

WELCOME NATIONAL TOURING COMPANY OF THE WIZ AND SPINAL TAP! Err wait a second, that's not it; let's try that again! Welcome to everybody clicking over from Blogcritics (where I'm apparently "Blogcritic of the Day"--thanks Eric!) to visit my humble little abode here. Make yourselves comfortable, folks--there's plenty of food in the fridge, plenty of posts in the blog, and for more reading, click over to the essays page.

NRA TV: Brilliant method by the NRA to circumvent idiotic--and in a sane world--unconstitutional--campaign finance reform laws. Glenn Reynolds writes:

What lets the NRA go into this business is technology -- setting up a nationwide TV network via the Web is a lot cheaper than relying on broadcasting or even cable, and with the growing penetration of high-speed internet services, NRA News may reach as many people as some cable channels.

Of course, getting more viewers than CNN is not all that hard to do these days. But the concept is terrific.

As I wrote back in early 2002, about a different kind of self-publishing, Weblogs:

Today, the cost of putting a Web site up ranges from free to a hundred bucks or so a month (that’s simply the monthly fee for a server such as Verio, Hosting.com or Exodus. I’m not talking about graphic design, content, etc.) Compare that to the late 1980s. When Rush Limbaugh began his national radio show in 1988, Ed McLaughlin, his producer, had to go from station to station, to get them to buy his show. In comparison, ten years or so later, when Limbaugh put up a Web site, he was able to reach a national audience (heck, a planetary audience, although I don’t know how well El Rushbo translates in other countries) simultaneously, for the cost of his Web server.

As Glenn writes, "given that it's easy to enter the media, and that the law treats media organizations more favorably than non-media organizations, we're likely to see a lot more people following the NRA's lead".

PRESIDENTIAL HISTORY: Interesting tidbits about Republican and Democrat election patterns.

HEH.

OIL FOR FOOD CORRUPTION AT THE UN: Andrew Sullivan has some thoughts, adding, "We were so right to intervene [in Iraq]. The alternatives were far, far worse".

UPDATE: Not surprisingly, Roger L. Simon links to the article, as he's owned this story for weeks now.

POTTERY BARN IS MAD AT COLIN POWELL--or is it Bob Woodward, if he invented the quote? In any case this UPI article reads like something Scott Ott would write.

LA SHAWN BARBER HAS HARSH WORDS FOR TOM BROKAW: "Sorry, Tom, but you and the rest of the Bush-bashers have been exposed. Your industry is just finding out what the rest of America already knows: The mainstream media is biased toward the left".

Actually, I think Tom's merely a bit behind the curve. What's been fascinating for me to watch are all of the people in the media who have come forward in the past few years to admit that it's biased. And it's equally fun watching the folks who didn't get the memo still try to claim that there's no bias in the media. (The "conservative media bias" meme seems to have died a relatively quick and merciful death, thank God.)

CLARETT GOES TO THE SUPREME COURT to try and enter the NFL draft.

(See our previous links here.)

SEATTLE NEWSPAPERS AREN'T ANTI-SEMITIC, writes Stefan Sharkansky: "old ladies with numbers on their arms get sympathy in Seattle. It's socially acceptable to honor victimized Jews and to remember the Holocaust. As long as they don't have the chutzpah to, say, actually defend themselves to prevent another one".

ARLEN SPECTOR: With friends like these...

NEED TO KILL AN HOUR OR TWO? This fellow has MP3s of dozens of classic television theme songs.

FIVE SIMPLE WORDS: Phone sex in Saudi Arabia. Roger L. Simon calls it "An Idea Whose Time Has Come".

THE DARKEST OF THE DARK HORSE CANDIDATES: It's no surprise that President Bush and Senator Kerry are blowing the doors off of Ralph Nader when it comes to fundraising.

What is surprising is who else is--and as of last month, he's has raised nearly ten times as much money as Nader!

FLIP-FLOPS: NOT JUST A KERRY FASHION STATEMENT: Back in 1998, after reporters and journalists poured over husband's background and records, Hillary Clinton claimed to be the victim of "a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy".

Today though, she says "Newspapers Should Press Bush for Info".

Chutzpah, thy name is Hillary.

ONE SMALL STEP FOR ED, ONE GIANT LEAP FOR MANKIND: Hot on the heels of my Saturn V post in Blogcritics this morning, I have an essay on Spacecraft Films' earlier DVD, on Apollo 11, in my newest Electronic House newsletter.

VE HAVE VAYS OF MAKING YOU READ DIS: I rarely take exception with what James Lileks writes, and this is a pretty minor one, in the scope of things. But in Monday's "Bleat", he wrote:

Friday night I decided to dip into the Classic Movie Collection. I usually buy the DVDs of classic movies restored to original luster, just because you want to support that sort of thing. I took down "Dr. Zhivago." I lasted 35 minutes. It's lovely but it's dull and disjointed. It has that sodden pace of an Important Movie. The real deal-killer, though, was the inexplicable fact that everyone spoke with an English accent.

Why not a Russian accent? Did they think that a movie about Russia would be somehow unauthentic if the characters sounded like, you know, Russians? I would have accepted French accents among the upper classes. But British? It certainly doesn't help suspend your disbelief. Especially when the first character you meet is Alec Guinness.

I have similar mixed emotions about Dr. Zhivago. It's far from the ripping adventure yarns that Bridge On The River Kwai or Lawrence of Arabia are, but it's actually aged rather nicely, considering how savaged it was by critics at the time of its release. It is a little too ponderous for me to want to watch as often as the two Lean films that came before it, but I own it on DVD. (And it was one of the first laser discs I bought, back in the dark ages of the late 1980s, when letterboxed movies were A Big Deal and few and far between. And you had to walk 50 miles to the few stores that sold laser discs to get 'em. And those 12-inch discs were heavy and hard to carry back. You kids today don't know how easy you have it with your new fangled five-inch DVDs, dagnamit!)

As far as Zhivago's British accents, the reason for that might be that, other than Omar Sharif and Rod Steiger, everybody in the film is British, as is the director, screenwriter and most of the crew. And I tend to respect films set in non-English speaking countries that don't have people talking in fake accents more than those that do. (Liam Neeson's thick German accent in Schindler's List is the exception that proves the rule, I think.)

Stanley Kubrick once gave an interview where he said that a critic complained that the soldiers in Paths of Glory should have been speaking with French accents. His response was simple--the entire film was set in France, the characters were supposed to be seen interacting with each other as they normally would, and fake French accents would have been distracting. (The one German character who appears at the end of the film--who would later become the future Mrs. Kubrick--only spoke in German.)

I think the same is true for a film set Russia--if the entire cast were speaking in Russian accents, they'd risk starting to sound like Boris and Natasha awfully fast.

Maybe The Hunt For Red October did it best--have the characters start speaking in Russian with subtitles, and then just when the audience thinks it's in for a lot of on-screen reading, zoom into a character's mouth and then zoom back out, and have everybody speaking in English. (Doesn't Zhivago have a similar shot early on, but with signage, to explain why all the writing in the film is in English?)

Patrick Stewart once gave a speech to the National Press Club in Washington DC that was broadcast by C-Span. Afterwards, a reporter wanted to know if Star Trek's producers ever asked him to do Captain Picard with a French accent. Stewart said he tried it once or twice in early rehearsals, "but it came out sounding rather like Inspector Clouseau. So I quickly concluded that Captain Picard loved the English language so much, he decided to speak it in its native tongue".

One thing I will agree with Lileks on is the dangers of increased taxation on petroleum distillates--and he does a thorough job of demolishing Andrew Sullivan's proposal to raise them, which ran in Time magazine no less.

COALITION TROOPS MAY HAVE TO STAY TEN YEARS IN IRAQ TO KEEP ORDER: Heck that's nothing--we've had to stay for over 50 years here.

DOLLAR BOOK FREUD: Between an essay on the differences between book and film people, and Freudian essays on writers and what made the Columbine killers tick, we've got your pop psychology quotient for the week right here, baby!

BEST INTERNET ESSAYS OF 2004, as found by Bill Peschel.

SOUND ADVICE: "Those who live in yesterday cannot build tomorrow", writes Ralph Peters:

The game of "this was mine and must be mine again," whether structured along religious lines or in terms of national identity, is as dangerous an enterprise as any in history. One great American strength has been our willingness to leave "the old country" behind, abandoning all claims to repossession.

Wherever opposing factions claim the same land for their gods, conflicts are insoluble without extremes of bloodshed. When we insist on chaining God to any patch of earth, we make Him as small as us.

Islamic terrorists will not reconquer Spain. But they may do colossal damage to their faith.

DO WOODWARD AND CLARKE'S BOOKS HELP BUSH? Jonah Goldberg argues that they do cut off certain lines of attack against him.

And they reinforce exactly what the key issues of the day are, which may explain these numbers.

UPDATE: Scroll up past Jonah's post for some thoughts on the subject by his readers.

LOADED FOR BEAR: There are too many great lines in Jay Nordlinger's latest "Impromptus" column today. So click on over and RTWT.

PAYBACK: After being hammered by the press earlier this year over President Bush's military records, the GOP wants John Kerry to reciprocate.

Watch the press relentlessly hound Kerry the same way they did President Bush.

(I know, I know--I'm just kidding.)

UPDATE: Via Instapundit, Joe Gandelman has some thoughts.

WILL KURT WARNER BE CUT BY THE RAMS on June 1st to reduce their salary cap? Certainly makes sense.

THE MIGHTY SATURN V: I have a review of Spacecraft Films' newest DVD, the companion to their Apollo 11 disc, up on Blogcritics.

FROM WORST TO FIRST: Corey Dillon traded to the New England Patriots for a draft pick.

JOURNALIST'S LOVE FOR CASTRO IGNORES OBVIOUS: We know the Washington Post leans to the left; that's a given. But don't they have editors smart enough to prevent embarrassing columns like this one from being published? Couldn't they forward such a column to the city's weekly alternative "underground" paper?

As Ramesh Ponnuru jokingly writes, "Do you know what's wrong with Cuba? The one thing they need that would make life better? Affirmative action, that's what."

And finally, enquiring minds want to know--what does Oliver Stone think about Cuba's affirmative action deficiencies?

GREETINGS FROM ASBURY PARK: Orrin Judd looks at the GOP's chances in New Jersey. Could Steve Forbes run for governor in 2005?

UPDATE: And (keeping our strained but fun vintage Springsteen theme going), in a "Meeting Across The River" in New York, "Rudolph Giuliani is a clear front-runner for governor in 2006".

DESTROYING THE CAMPUS NEWSPAPER: It's tactic by leftwingers on both coasts that's growing in popularity, when they don't like what the paper says.

The Dartmouth Review has a novel solution, however.

MAURICE CLARETT UPDATE: A federal appeals court has barred the Ohio State running back from entering the NFL draft as a sophmore.

Skip Bayless had some thoughts on the issue, back when it looked like Clarett would be able to enter the draft.

GIVE ME LIBERTY OR...NEVERMIND: Citizen Smash compares Zapata and Zapatero. As Glenn Reynolds writes, "Socialism ain't what it used to be".

GEE-WHIZ VERSUS BIG BATTALIONS: Peter Robinson prints an email from a US Army Officer, which compares our occupations of post-Nazi Germany and post-Saddam Iraq, and concludes, "Hi-tech may be a gee-whiz way to win wars rapidly but when it comes to occupation, God still favors the big battalions".

WILLIAM HAMAS HARRISON: James Taranto has some thoughts on Abdel Aziz Rantissi, who served for month as leader of the Hamas, "the most vicious of the Palestinian Arab terrorist groups, after his predecessor, Ahmed Yassin, bit the dust last month. Like William Henry Harrison, Rantisi took office in March and died the following month, though Harrison actually was in office for a full month".

UPDATE: In a related story, USA Today is reporting, "Administration says it wants Hamas 'put out of business'".

'Bout time.

"FAUX MITZVAHS" are becoming all the rage amongst non-Jewish kids, writes Joanne Jacobs.

And of course, there are now Bark Mitzvahs, as well...

WOW: I hope that all is well at Bleat HQ. We do get the odd earthquake in the Bay Area, however, we tend to take the weather for granted (Virginia Postrel wrote a fantastic essay a few years ago on how weather and earthquakes influence east coast/west coast thinking). But I remember numerous severe storms