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 when I lived in New Jersey. Hopefully Lileks and family will ride this one out without incident.

UPDATE: James is fine. I'll post a couple of comments about his latest Bleat later today.

THE LEFT SEIZES THE ALAMO, and Don Feder watches it, so you don't have to.

SPAM QUESTION: Lately, I've gotten what seems like 57,321 spam emails that start off with the supposition that "A friend has set you up on a blind date". Who's doing it? All my friends know I'm happily married, right? If you're a friend reading this, dude--save the dates for the guys who need 'em, OK?

Thanks.

(Does anybody fall for this spam approach? I'll bet this fellow would know.)

ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET DVDs: The early James Bond films are being remastered using an ultra-HD technology. The New York Times describes it as "600 Macs, 4,000 Lines, One Giant Leap for DVD's".

GRAHAM ON GORELICK: Michael Graham writes that if Jamie Gorelick "does not testify, then the entire 9/11 Commission's report can be rightfully ignored. For such a direct, glaring oversight will show that the Commission's agenda is something other than a complete and thorough investigation of all parties involved. If Gorelick doesn't quit, then the rest of the Commissioners should."

IS KERRY USING THE ZAGAT GUIDE to foreign policy?

Of course, one question still remains: when he goes to the Four Seasons, is he a Grill Room man or Pool Room man?

(These are the important issues you ponder after just coming back from brunch at Max's.)

UPDATE: Kerry also flip-flopped, as well as hemmed, hawed and squirmed on Meet The Press today over his Winter Soldier activities.

But don't question his patriotism!

ANOTHER DINING RELATED UPDATE: Check, please!

LAST DINING RELATED UPDATE: The service at the Milpitas Sushi Lovers is usually pretty poor, but tonight seemed particularly bad. Sneering waitress, no goodbye or thank you on the way out, and as usual, our order for drinks and appetizers gets taken after we've had several pieces of sushi from the boats--and this on a night when the place was half-empty.

And no recognition from the staff that we typically eat there three or more times a week.

But now it's in Google...

ON THURSDAY, Greyhawk posted an obituary of the co-pilot of the B-29 that dropped the second atomic bomb on Japan, which effectively ended WWII without requiring an invasion of Japan that could have killed over a million men. He asked, "Could America drop a nuclear weapon, if it would actually save lives, today?"

The Wall Street Journal today makes the case for new low-yield nukes, designed to combat terrorism with a pinpoint response, or to hit targets buried deep underground, rather than the Cold War objective of obliterating whole cities.

AMERICAN CHRISTIANS DON'T THREATEN JEWS: In the Wall Street Journal, Rabbi Aryeh Spero writes:

And herein lies one of the most disheartening but salient observations one is forced to make, post-"Passion," about many in the Jewish community: They still don't get it. Even after more than two charmed centuries in America, they confuse contemporary America with medieval and postmedieval Europe, still not realizing how America and American Christians are a category wholly different from those of other nations, other religions and other strains of Christianity.

* * * To be sure, there were justifiable reasons for apprehension given some elements in and circumstances surrounding the film. Aside from the understandable worry that Jews were for the first time being depicted on widely distributed American celluloid as eager for Jesus' death, there was the devilish ugliness in which they were physically portrayed, something not found in the New Testament. The graphic ugliness, blood and gore was thought to be potentially more scorching than the Gospel text.

What's more, Mr. Gibson's father is a notorious Holocaust denier. Surmising that perhaps branch follows root, some suspected that the producer-director's intent was to portray Jews as the focal point of evil in the crucifixion episode, to return us to the pre-Vatican II days of Jews as official "Christ-killers." Mr. Gibson declined to distance himself from his father's remarks about Jews, whether because he agreed or simply out of filial loyalty. Added to this mix was the combustible ingredient of Mr. Gibson's subscription to a fundamentalist brand of Catholicism critical of Vatican II.

Yet for all this, acts against Jews never materialized. The reason is that anti-Semitism flowers not so much in the seed as in the soil, and the American soil--the disposition of its people--has proved over two centuries to be remarkably resistant to strains of anti-Semitism.

Read the whole thing.

(Via the Brothers Judd.)

THE WILHELM SCREAM: If you're more of a die-hard Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark or Tarantino fan than I am, this may be old hat to you, but I hadn't read about it until tonight. Common to many, many films is a sound effect called "The Wilhelm Scream". It's a stock sound effect that dates back to early 1950s Warner Brothers films, but it was given new life by Lucas's sound effects man, Ben Burtt, who calls it his personal signature. Whenever a Nazi or Imperial stormtrooper gets it in one of Lucas's films, chances are, you're hearing...the Wilhelm Scream.

According to the Internet Movie Database, it's heard in Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs when Steve Buscemi's "Mr. Pink" character "pushes a pedestrian on the sidewalk while being pursued by cops during his escape from the failed jewel heist".

I wonder if over time, the Wilhelm Scream will be supplanted as a sound effect by this one. I've already downloaded it and used as a Keith Moon-like scream for a drumbreak in a song I recorded back in February, and these folks have also made good use of it as well.

I'M DREAMING OF AN NFL CHRISTMAS: AP reports that "the NFL schedule, released Wednesday, has two Christmas games--Oakland at Kansas City and Denver at Tennessee. They will begin at 5 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. EST, respectively."

If one's a snow game, so much the better. I'm dreaming of a white Christmas--on TV at least!

Oh, and on Christmas Eve, the Vikes play the Packers. Since it will be in Minneapolis's Metrodome, not much chance of snow on that field.

(If you're as antsy as I am for the season to begin, be sure and check out my essay on the back page of this month's Electronic House magazine.)

SEN. ZELL MILLER LOOKS AT THE 9/11 HEARINGS, and does not like what he sees.

FOLLOW THE MONEY: Remember when Jim McDermott and David Bonior spoke in Saddam Hussein's Baghdad in late September of 2002 against President Bush? Orrin Judd links to an AP article which says:

Rep. Jim McDermott of Washington has returned a $5,000 contribution made to his legal defense fund by an Iraqi-American businessman who has acknowledged financial ties with Saddam Hussein's regime.

In a post titled, "The Money's Just A Bonus", Orrin writes, "Does anyone really think Mr. McDermott betrayed his country for the money?"

What about the other half of the Democratic duo? Back on March 15th, we posted:

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?"

[Scott] 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.

And of course Saddam sent ten big ones to this former Democratic congressional staffer as well.

And then there are the boys in the UN...

PATRIOTISM: Pejman Yousefzadeh (by way of Inigo Montoya) says that John Kerry, the old Winter Soldier himself, keeps getting its definition wrong.

Pejman also notes that Kerry has dusted off the old chickenhawk sophism, to boot.

PASS THE DUCHY ON THE LEFT ONE TIME: I'll have whatever Hillary's smoking.

AT EDDRISCOLL.COM, NEVER LET IT BE SAID THAT WE'RE SEXIST: We believe that many jobs can be performed equally well by men or women. As proof, here's an article about a man who's looking forward to "seeing that bouquet of flowers on my desk" on Monday, National Secretary's Day.

HOW VERY 1970s: I used to see lots of articles with lines like this one has; they seemed to have died down a bit recently. But over time, you sort of get used to seeing sentences such as, "Just because someone's -- gasp! -- a Republican doesn't mean he doesn't belong on the planet".

Insert black/Muslim/Indian/Polish/Jewish/Catholic, etc., and see how well it plays. Political correctness for thee, but not for me.

(Via "The Corner".)

SURE--THEY'RE FOR WHEN THE RAIDERS PLAY THE BRONCOS:

Dozens of federal, state and local law enforcement agents searched a warehouse near Oakland International Airport Saturday for weapons including rocket launchers, officials said.

The exact nature of the raid, which began around 6 a.m. Friday and continued Saturday, was unclear because the federal search warrant was under seal.

But U.S. Magistrate Edward Chen told The San Francisco Chronicle: "The warrant was for a bunch of devices for rockets that could be launched from military vehicles and (for) some M-16s," semiautomatic assault rifles used by the U.S. military.

Federal agents denied that the search was part of a counterterrorism operation.

(Emphasis mine. Found via Ruminations.)

THE IGNOS: "The Invasion of the Duh People" was a very, very funny Florence King essay. ("What did you say your name was?" "King." "How do you spell that?") She followed it up with "The Invasion of the Ignos", who are basically "duh people" with a college degree:

There's nothing wrong with their gray matter, it's just that it remains virgin soil. They sow it not, and neither do they reap it. It just lies there undisturbed, as fallow as the day it was born, until at last, like other overdue virginities, it loses all capacity for response and you can't do a thing with it.

Ignos are the chief crop of Diversity Ed, what sprouts when Western Civ's Dead White Males are eliminated from college curricula and replaced with African oral historians, Aztec vivisectionists, and the diaries of Ana?s Nin.

Columnists have made hay with dumbed-down curricula. I've written my share of polemics, but I made the mistake of confining myself to arguments against multiculturalism per se. The narrower but more intriguing subject of Igno psychology is one that I left unexplored until two recent incidents convinced me that we are witnessing the spread of a new kind of stupidity that developed nations have never before had to deal with.

The first incident came about when I had to correct a public record involving my Social Security number. I dealt with an administrative assistant, a cordial, seemingly competent woman in her early thirties. She assured me that my problem was all straightened out, but given my natural pessimism, I automatically said, "I can see the handwriting on the wall." That's when she looked at the wall. Turned around and gave it the old up-and-down once-over. Looked back at me with eyes as big as saucers. "It's just a figure of speech," I mumbled.

If you've ever felt like there was a forcefield when you spoke to someone you thought should have been a like-minded peer, read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Cassandra has an encounter with ignos armed with PhDs.

PETER ROBINSON writes, "A democracy in Iraq would be splendid, of course. But since in all history the Arab world has seen exactly one democracy, that of Lebanon, which lasted only from the 1940s to the 1970s, it would represent a high achievement if we could merely ensure that Iraq proved, on the whole, peaceable and prosperous, becoming, as Mark Steyn has put it, 'the least badly–governed Arab country.'"

PICARD TO ENTERPRISE: A Next Generation style communicator which clips onto lapels is being tested in hospitals.

Hopefully warp drive and the transporter will be next...

THE AIDS LIE: James Glassman of Tech Central Station looks at how President Bush is fighting AIDS in Africa, and how his critics are (surprise, surprise) distorting his record and policies there.

SPEAKING OF PERNOD AND GAULOISES, Denis Boyles writes that France could use a good pub or twenty for the growing number of English expatriates taking up residence there.

THE ABSOLUTE INTELLECTUAL: Brian C. Anderson looks at Jean-Paul Sartre and sees an early idiotarian:

What Sartre actually offers us is a paradigmatic example of the leftist mind, in all its dodgy enthusiasms. Sartre’s early existentialism presents a nihilistic conception of human freedom that still informs some forms of liberal thought; his later political writings seethe with the pathologies of the far left, including an admiration for bloodletting, so long as it targets democrats and capitalists and Westerners generally. Sartre may indeed have been “the absolute intellectual,” but only in a negative sense: His oeuvre stands as an absolute warning about the wrong turns that moral and political thought can take when untethered from nature or any sense of reality. Were Sartre alive today, he doubtless would place the blame for September 11 and Palestinian suicide bombings on their victims — defending, as he frequently did, the indefensible.

Read the whole thing; the Pernod and Gauloise are optional.

BIG APPLE LOOPHOLES: Heather Mac Donald looks at how New York City evades welfare reform.

UNILATERALISM, redux.

Eric Gibson looks at how Ikea is bringing modernism to the masses, "for those of us who did not grow up with Mies van der Rohe or Alvar Aalto in the family".

In some places, it wasn't very modern at all. Raymond Loewy was one of the great designers of the 20th century (with a career ranging from the Pennsylvania Railroad's magnificent GG-1 locomotive to Air Force One to Skylab.) So the photos that Virginia Postrel posts are a tough thing to swallow.

PATRIOT GAMES, PART DEUX: Jeff Goldstein writes:

Kerry had his potential Sista Souljah moment teed up for him and he struck out. Worse, he was fanned looking. Which hardly inspires confidence that he'll be able to get the bat off his shoulders when it really matters -- when, say, North Korea decides to posture with nukes, or when a drunk Teddy Kennedy asks to borrow the town car so he can give a ride home to a young staffer.

For some background, follow the links here.

NOW THIS IS A CORRECTION! England's Grauniad Guardian displays its vast knowledge of American libertarians and their leading lights:

In our report, Life after Living Marxism, page 10, July 8, we referred to the Reason Foundation and said its "leading writer, the syndicated columnist Sandra Postrel, is author of the libertarian book The Enemies Of Freedom and frequently talks at the Hudson Institute". The Reason Foundation points out that no one of that name works at the Foundation or for Reason Magazine. The editor-at-large and former editor of the magazine is called Virginia Postrel. She is a columnist for Forbes and the New York Times but not a "syndicated" columnist. Her book is not called The Enemies Of Freedom. It is called The Future And Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise and Progress (Free Press). The Reason Foundation says Ms Postrel has never been to the Hudson Institute and has no connection with the organisation.

(Via Samizdata.net.)

ADVANTAGE TARANTO! James Taranto called this one almost a year ago.

WE'RE GONNA TURN IT ON, WE'RE GONNA BRING YOU THE POWER: Chuck Simmins charts electricity and phone service in Iraq.

THE FOOD MULLAHS: Nick Gillespie is calling for show trials and forced fitness regimens for Mayor McCheese, Grimace, and all the other McDonaldland characters.

AFTER THE MUSIC'S MIXED, THE MASTERING BEGINS*: I have a review of Izotope's Ozone music mastering plug-in for PC-based hard disk recording programs, online at Blogcritics.

(*If that title sounds even vaguely familiar to you, you were probably once as hardcore a Woody Allen fan as I was.)

FRED OLIVI, the co-pilot of Bocks Car, the B-29 that dropped the second atom bomb on Japan that helped end World War II, died at 82 in the Chicago suburb of Lemont.

Mudville Gazette has his obituary, and a question.

PATRIOT GAMES: On his MSNBC page, The Professor writes that Senator Kerry has a problem with a lack of patriotism in his base.

Like this fellow.

UPDATE: Ed Cone (no relation) has some thoughts as well.

ANOTHER UPDATE: If this ad is real, Kerry's patriotism problems aren't just with his base of voters.

YOUR TUITION DOLLARS AT WORK: They won't be paying for leading gay rights and gay marriage proponent Andrew Sullivan to speak at Brown University, because...Sullivan is "renowned for his sexist, transgender-phobic/transphobic, and anti-inclusionary writings, statements, and public sentiments".

I don't even know where to begin to parse this one out. At some point, idiocy becomes so compact, its molecules so dense, that it's impossible to begin to separate them.

UPDATE: Hey, maybe they could get Oliver Stone. Or Fidel could phone in a speech. Err, on second thought...

ABOUT TIME: The New York Times reports that "The Transportation Security Administration plans to begin testing techniques for improving passenger rail security at a station in New Carrollton, Md., that is served by Amtrak and commuter trains".

Back in March, I blogged about the laxity of Amtrak's security in the densely populated, and heavily traveled Northeast Corridor.

Reading between the lines though, it seems like the TSA's efforts in New Carrollton are far more for show than to actually get a working system in place that might actually prevent trains from being bombed.

WHICH KEAN COMES CLEAN? Check out these two quotes by 9/11 commission chairman (and former New Jersey governor, who used to say "New Jersey and you--perfect together" in TV ads with a New England accent thicker than Teddy Kennedy's) Thomas Kean:

"We made a conscious decision, and part of it was under strong pressure from the [victims'] families, to make this commission as transparent and as visible as possible."--9/11 commission chairman Thomas Kean on commission members' repeated TV appearances, quoted in the New York Times, April 15

"People ought to stay out of our business."--Kean, on allegations that commissioner Jamie Gorelick has a conflict of interest, quoted in the Washington Post, April 15

(From James Taranto's "Best of the Web Today".)

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES: Nick Gillespie looks at why your house costs so much, "if you're lucky enough to live in a progressive area with 'inclusionary zoning' ordinances".

A.K.A.--the Bay Area.

BRESLIN UPDATE: Back on Wednesday of last week, we had some thoughts on Jimmy Breslin's alleged faked quotes in his latest essay. It takes him until the last paragraph to say so, but the editor of Newsday writes:

The April 7 Breslin column should have indicated that it was based on a conversation that took place in 1992. And the column did not adhere to Newsday's standard of publishing only direct quotations that are accurate and precise.

Maureen Dowd could not be reached for comment.

TERESA'S TAXES: She's trying to keep them private; Drudge compares her situation to the "ghost of Ferraro", who campaigned to be Walter Mondale in '84.

Meanwhile, in Tech Central Station, Kevin Hassett looks at the loophole that her husband would introduce to reduce the taxes of companies that are organized in a particular way....like the HJ Heinz Company.

Actually, it's great to see Senator Kerry come out in favor of cutting corporate taxes. As Hassett writes:

Most other countries have reduced their corporate tax rates sharply in recent years. The U.S. has not, and the result is that we are now one of the highest tax countries on earth.

But Kerry's had almost 20 years in the US Senate. Why has he waited until now to even jawbone some (minor) tax cutting?

His interviewer just demolishes him over his lack of knowledge of Castro, whom he's just made a (thoroughly whitewashed) documentary on.

And this is the guy who was going to get to the bottom of the Kennedy assassination!?

UPDATE: David Cohen adds, "This interview serves as an important reminder that sometimes there's no conspiracy. Sometimes, at bottom, there is just an ignorant idiot."

ANOTHER UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan writes, "Just when you think Stone couldnt get more morally depraved...The man is laughing - laughing - at a gulag".

MIDEAST BREAKTHROUGH: John Podhoretz writes, "George W. Bush outlined a path for peace between Israel and the Palestinians that has the distinct advantage of being based in reality".

President Bush's plan pretty much leaves Yasser Arafat in the dust. But then, Orrin Judd adds, Bush "wrote off Arafat two years ago. When he called for new Palestinian leadership he made it crystal clear that they had to be prepared to cut a deal with Israel. The Palestinians failed to produce such leaders, so he's moving on."

THERE'S GOT TO BE A MORNING AFTER: I'm not sure if I buy all the arguments that Kay S. Hymowitz makes in this City Journal piece, but it's got a great thesis:

If you listen carefully, you can hear something shifting deep beneath the manic surface of American culture. Rap stars have taken to wearing designer suits. Miranda Hobbs, Sex and the City’s redhead, has abandoned hooking up and a Manhattan co-op for a husband and a Brooklyn fixer-upper, where she helps tend her baby and ailing mother-in-law; even nympho Samantha has found a “meaningful relationship.” Madonna is writing children’s books. Gloria Steinem is an old married lady.

Yessiree, family values are hot! Capitalism is cool! Seven-grain bread is so yesterday, and red meat is back!

Read the whole thing.

(Via Joanne Jacobs, who sums it as "Bourgeois is back!")

MY MACHINE SHE'S A DUD, STUCK IN THE MUD: Air America hits turbulence, bounces check, gets taken off the air in Chicago and Los Angeles.

UPDATE: "Note to George Soros: Next time, buy the stations. Then they have to play what you tell them to play."

ONLY TANGENTIALLY RELATED UPDATE: Speaking of cash flow problems, Courtney Love "owes millions" according to this Reuters piece.

THE BEST OF TIMES, THE WORST OF TIMES: Matt Welch looks at the state of journalism, both in the US and abroad.

Glenn Reynolds also has some related links.

WE WERE SOLDIERS ONCE...AND YOUNG: Charles Johnson reprints an astonishingly powerful 1945 letter by future CBS News president Fred Friendly. It was written when he was an army master sergeant with the unit that liberated the Nazis' Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.

PRESIDENT BUSH'S PRESS CONFERENCE IS ON RIGHT NOW. But the Washington Post already has it written up in the past tense!

(Via Instapundit, who writes, "It's like they've already decided on the storyline or something. . . .")

HOUSEHOLD HINTS FROM LILEKS: Sick of Heloise? James Lileks has got Hints from Heckoise!

LOST IN TRANSLATION: Got a hot-looking Japanese tattoo? Chances are it doesn't say what you think it does!

(On the other hand, you'll still be hipper than this fellow.)

(Via H.D. Miller.)

OUTSIDE THE WALL: John Ashcroft slamming of Jamie Gorelick is the subject of this
Instapundit post. Glenn also has links to lots of other material about Gorelick and her Chinese wall.

STOCK UP ON HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE MEDICATION, if you're a conservative planning to go to the movies this fall.

Click here and here for some of our thoughts on Hollywood's recent efforts.

UPDATE: On the other hand, keep these figures in mind: in spite of all of the press coverage it received, Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine grossed $21,244,913. In contrast, Mel Gibson's The Passion grossed $26.5 million.

On its first day.

As Brian Doherty of Reason wrote when Bowling first hit the theaters, "Grander socialist dreams died with the Soviet Union. All the progressive left has are laments, tears, and tragedies. That suffices to sell movie tickets—moviegoers have always loved tragedy. It isn't enough for a lively and effective political movement."

THE APPARENT LINK BETWEEN SADDAM AND SCOTT RITTER seems to be getting a little closer.

FRANKENFEST: Andrew Sullivan tunes into liberal talk radio.

TO EVERYTHING, BID, BID, BID: Roger McGuinn of The Byrds' 1966 Rickenbacker 12-string electric guitar is up for auction on eBay, and can be yours if this price is right--the opening bid starts at a cool $99K.

IRAQ IS JUST LIKE VIETNAM, writes Ramesh Ponnuru:

Except that we've captured Ho Chi Minh, we've taken Hanoi, there's no draft, and the boat people have mostly come back. Not all of the comparisons are, however, to our advantage: It took nine years for the Democrats to be willing to cut off funding for the military then. It took seven months this time.

I recently read The New Dealers' War by Thomas Fleming, who is surprisingly negative about how FDR's administration handled World War II. But at no point that I can remember in Fleming's book, other than possibly a fear of nerve gas, did FDR's men try to compare the second great war to the first. Nor do I recall many of President Clinton's military efforts being compared with Vietnam.

As Alvin Toffler wrote in War and Anti-War, the American military's tactics were radically changed after the debacle of Vietnam. Maybe Senators Kennedy and Kerry and the rest of the left never got the memo.

PEJMAN POWER: Pejman Yousefzadeh has some thoughts on how the Blogosphere has handled the recent Daily Kos scandal, in Tech Central Station.

NOTHING CAN STOP THE ARMY AIR CORPS: American inventors may have invented powered flight, but it was a long and surprisingly shaky path towards our becoming the world's preeminent air power. Daniel Ford looks at how it happened.

"DON'T ASK, DON'T TELL", Wonkette writes, "but the little dog sort of screams it".

KERREY CLARIFIES: Dennis Prager writes:

This is how Bob Kerrey, a member of the 9-11 Commission and former Democratic senator from Nebraska, opened his questioning of Condoleezza Rice before the Commission last week:

"Thank you, Dr. Rice. Let me say at the beginning I'm very impressed, and indeed I'd go as far as to say moved by your story, the story of your life and what you've accomplished. It's quite extraordinary."

Prager adds, "Like many people of his political persuasion and in his political party, [Kerrey] saw her as an extraordinary black and female well before he saw her as an extraordinary individual".

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Kerrey's racism is remarkably subtle in comparison with the blatant stuff that Charles Johnson looks at here. In contrast, there was a remarkable sentence that President Bush uttered tonight:

"People want to be free. Some people think that if you're Muslim, or if you have brown skin, you somehow don't want to be free. I reject that."

God, I love that line.

...OR MAYBE IT ISN'T: Matt Drudge writes that Florida Democrats have placed an ad threatening to attack Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. "We should put this S.O.B. up against a wall", the reasoned, nuanced copy reads, "and say 'This is one of our bad days,' and pull the trigger".

This equally reasoned and nuanced fellow would probably agree.

UPDATE: Damian Penny agrees:

The world is splitting into two groups: those who want the Americans to win in Iraq, and those who want the Ba'athists and Islamofascists to win. At least we know which side these guys are on.

SIMPLIFY, SIMPLIFY: Florida is ready for 2004.

TIMING IS EVERYTHING: Powerline Blog writes, "The New York Times assigns two reporters to chew over the really important issue -- the possible impact of [Bill Clinton's] memoirs on the Kerry campaign, of course"

FOR YOUR THIGHS ONLY: Mark Steyn is able to look beyond--far beyond--conventional wisdom, for his take on who made the best James Bond.

WE COULD HAVE WON: Mackubin Thomas Owens writes that the conventional wisdom concerning Vietnam is deficient.

See also Orrin Judd's review of Lewis Sorley's A Better War, which Owens quotes from.

It's not too hard to tie the War on Terrorism to Vietnam. Had we won the latter, it's not that huge a stretch to say that we may not have had to fight the former.

GANGS OF L.A.: Joanne Jacobs writes that gangs control enrollment at Los Angeles high schools, according to the LA Times. "The district must transfer students out of their neighborhoods to alleviate overcrowding. But a 'blue' (Crips) student can't be sent to a 'red' (Bloods) campus".

When did we let the inmates run the asylum?

ALL WE ARE SAYING...is give Peeps a chance!

HEY, LOOK WHO'S ON THE COVER OF FRANCE TODAY! As Orrin Judd writes, "We kid you not".

There's a headline on the Internet Movie Database's "Studio Briefing" page today which I find almost laughable:

Disney Staggered by 'Alamo' Defeat

The post under it reads:

The Alamo fell for a second time over the weekend, and this time, the scope of the defeat, although bloodless, was no less staggering than the original. The $100-million Disney movie took in just $9.2 million, tying for third place with the $12-million urban comedy Johnson Family Vacation, which played in only about half the number of theaters. (Some box-office trackers were predicting that when the final numbers are released later today, The Alamo will finish fourth.) "I'm shocked, quite honestly, at the number," Disney distribution chief Chuck Viane told USA Today. Analysts had predicted a relatively low figure, but had not anticipated the utter debacle that transpired. They also had not anticipated that Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ would be resurrected in first place again four weeks after dropping out of that position. "That's unprecedented. I've never seen that before," Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations, told the Associated Press. "The Passion is just rewriting box-office history." (However, Dan Marks of the rival Nielsen EDI told the Los Angeles Times that almost the same thing happened in 1996 when Jerry Maguire returned to No. 1 after dropping out for three weeks.) Passion has now earned a total of $354.8 million and ranks eighth on the all-time domestic box-office list. Other new films also tanked at the box office. The Whole Ten Yards with Bruce Willis and Matthew Perry, debuted with just $6.7 million. The girls' flick Ella Enchanted drew a less-than-enchanting $6.1 million, just ahead of The Girl Next Door, which earned $6 million. And in yet another dose of bad news for Disney, the studio's The Ladykillers, starring Tom Hanks, dropped out of the top 10 after just two weeks.

Given that the film was originally promoted as a Christmas release, and was then pulled back for four months of additional cutting and possibly reshoots after it bombed in previews, Disney had to know that things did not bode well for their revisionist epic.

Also, given the backlash that CBS's attempted smear job of The Reagans received, and Pearl Harbor (another piece of revisionist Disney history) more and more Americans are becoming aware that Hollywood has an increasingly warped view of America and its history, at least when compared to those in the Red States.

So when Disney distribution chief Chuck Viane tells USA Today, "I'm shocked, quite honestly, at the number," how honest is he being about being shocked?

(Probably about has shocked as Claude Rains was to discover that there was gambling going on at Rick's cafe.)

MODERNISTS, MARK YOUR CALENDARS: After three years of remodeling, New York's Museum of Modern Art (AKA "MoMA") is scheduled to reopen its 11 West 53rd Street location on November 20th. Some of my favorite days in New York have involved visiting MoMA and then wandering over to the nearby (and equally modernist) Four Seasons for lunch or dinner.

Beef: It's what's for dinner! Except in Cuba, where killing cattle by citizens was made illegal by Castro's communist state, because their cattle are so rare (pun not intended).

Matt Welch writes:

When I visited Cuba in 1998, a favorite way of getting beyond the grim, mostly meatless food rations was to raise a pig -- illegally, of course -- in your apartment. The only problem was the squealing, so Cubans would simply cut the little porkers' vocal cords.

Workers' Paradise, indeed.

"ATTACH ORBITER HERE. NOTE: BLACK SIDE DOWN": Terrrific photos of the 2003 Edwards Air Force Base Air Show, found via Stephen Green.

SPEAKING OF DISNEY'S VERSION of The Alamo, John Fund looks at Davy Crockett, libertarian.

UPDATE: Steve Antler of Econopundit looks at some of the film's critics, including the Times' Elvis Mitchell, who screedily describes the fun, innocent Disney Davy Crockett Fess Parker film series of the 1950s as "poisonously intoxicating".

NFL BROADCASTER PAT SUMMERALL RECEIVES LIVER TRANSPLANT: Summerall, 73, was a very heavy drinker in his heyday, but has been on the wagon since 1992. By the then, though, the damage had been done to his liver. It finally gave out earlier this year.

BLOWBACK: Glenn Reynolds has some thoughts on the results of the partisan 9/11 hearings.

CAPT. PIKE'S BEARD: In 2002, Kathleen Parker may have had the first "what if" article that speculated on what the results would have been, had President agressively proactively pursued terrorism prior to 9/11.

Considering how contentious Bush's election was, none of this stuff sounds too far fetched.

Kids today are listening to their parents' music in large numbers, according to Jeff Brokaw. And as Jonah Goldberg wrote a while back, they're still watching many of their parents' TV shows as well. (After watching Ice Cube's Barbershop last night on Showtime, I ended up watching a couple episodes of the Cheers first season DVD and an episode of The Cosby Show on Nick at Nite. Those shows both debuted over 20 years ago!)

Hollywood Interrupted paints a damning picture of several bankrupt media--music, film, and television. It could be that because the last two have gone from feeling like they need to entertain (as invited guests, in the case of Steve Allen's phrase about TV), to needing to preach to Middle America, their prospective audiences have decided to tune them out, in surprisingly large numbers.

Couple this with Bernard Goldberg's looks at media bias, and you have three politically correct media (film, TV, and news), as well as pop music, which have each dramatically failed a very big chunk of the very consumers who buy their products.

And in the case of music, there's an interesting paradox: production techniques have never been more slick. But almost in unison, songwriting has gone rapidly backwards. A few times this past week, while I was driving around, Liz Phair's song "Extraordinary" has been on the radio. It's not that great a song--but at least it is a song. It's got verses and choruses (love that refrain--"I'm just your average everyday sane psycho") and a winning performance by its singer. And sadly these days, that alone seems like a remarkable achievement.

NOW IT ALL MAKES SENSE! Scott Ott "reports" that, "Bush Failed to Stop al Qaeda During Clinton Years".

FLASHBACK: The Alamo was finally released this weekend. It's currently number three on the charts, with The Passion, out for almost two months already, earning double its take. For a look at why a film whose trailers ran last Thanksgiving in anticipation of a Christmas release took so long to finally come out, click here.

AMEN.

INSTAPUNDIT HAS A NEW LOOK: It's more of a subtle tweaking of a design that works very well, but I think the new look of having the content on the left, and the links and ads on the right works quite nicely.

Stacy Tabb (aka Sekimori) does good work. I'll have to hire her someday to redesign my site!

THE SAC BEE'S CARTOONIST REACHES A NEW LOW.

THE BLAIR SWITCH PROJECT: As I've written before, Jayson Blair's efforts (to borrow from a phrase of Tom Wolfe's) to cook the books is nothing new. And it happens in the Blogosphere as well.

REDNECK PLANET: In Redneck Nation, Michael Graham wrote that during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the left castigated the South for its obsession with race, and then, rather than moving towards a color-blind society as Martin Luther King had rightly demanded, became race and double-standard-obsessed itself.

In a recent Tech Central Station piece, Lee Harris writes that the philosophy contained in the late Edward Said's Orientalism, a book which became the intellectuals' guidebook on the Middle East, is itself a strain of racism:

Orientalism is sophistry; but one that worked quite well as an ideology, as sophistries so often do. Because the West could not see the East from the East's point of view, it could not judge the actions of Easterners by our own ethical standards.

Now there are two ways to take this. One is defensible, and it means that no one in the West has the right to interfere with the ethical standards that the Easterners chose for themselves, when they are on their own lands and around their own hearths. The other is madness, and it means that we are not permitted to judge the actions of the Easterners even when these actions are directed toward us; and even when they are clearly meant to harm us.

Does it need to be pointed out that such an ideology dehumanizes the very people whose interests it is supposed to be defending? If we exempt a group of people, like the Palestinians and the Arabs, from normal ethical demands we make on Europeans, Americans, and the Asians, are we respecting their culture, or pitying them for having such a rotten one? To say that we must apply a whole new set of ethical rules to the Arabs implies that they are not fit to be judged by ours. Furthermore, to fail even to bring our ethical standards to their attention, is to imply very strongly that they could not appreciate these standards if we did.

Thus Orientalism is racism turned to the advantage of the group that is being discriminated against. You cannot judge us the way you judge yourselves; therefore, you must lower the standards for us -- and continue to lower it until we tell you to stop.

As Harris writes, "To refuse to allow others to rise to your standard because you believe that they are inherently inferior to you is simple racism; but to refuse to demand that others rise to your standard for the same reason is also racism -- just a tad less blatant, and far more cruel."

(Found via The New Criterion's Stefan Beck. Be sure to read Beck's comments on Harris's article.)

Happy Easter!

WELL, THIS IS FUN: Charles Johnson writes, "the Kerry campaign is allowing visitors to create their own web pages".

Hilarity ensues...

STANDING ATHWART THE 21st CENTURY, YELLING STOP: Along similar lines to comments by Jonah Goldberg and Radley Balko, Charles Krauthammer writes on "how times have changed":

We now know that the secret to curing hunger and poverty is capitalism and free trade. We have seen that demonstrated irrefutably in East Asia, which has experienced the greatest alleviation of poverty in the history of man. In half a century, places like Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea have gone from subsistence to First World status. And now free markets and free trade are lifting tens of millions of people out of poverty in India and China.

And what has been the Democratic reaction to the prospect of fulfilling Humphrey's (and their party's) great dream? Fear and loathing. Democrats today thunder against the scourge of ``outsourcing'' -- American firms giving (what would otherwise be American) jobs to Indians and Chinese and other menacing foreigners.

The anti-outsourcing vogue is part of a larger assault on free trade, which until recently -- meaning the Clinton administration -- Democrats had supported. Remember Al Gore's televised debate with Ross Perot, in which Gore demolished Perot's anti-free-trade arguments? Which makes the recent Democratic assault on free trade so jarring, never more so than when John Edwards and John Kerry competed with each other before Super Tuesday to see who was against more trade agreements with more Third World countries.

Krauthammer adds, "Democrats have given up the mantle of tribune of the world's poor -- precisely at a time when we have finally figured out how really to rescue them".

MORE FUN WITH CAPTIONS AT AP: Charles Johnson looks at "The Honor of Jihad", with those nutty Hamas activists.

Various bloggers have linked to this Gregg Easterbrook post of an alternative history of our actions to prevent 9/11, but I hadn't had a chance to read it until now.

If you haven't seen it, definitely read the whole thing. As David Cohen wrote a couple of weeks ago, "So, the criticism is that we should have acted pre-9/11 in Afghanistan the way we acted in post-9/11 Iraq and in post-9/11 Iraq the way we acted in pre-9/11 Afghanistan?"

Yes, but if we did--the results would probably have been staggeringly close to what Easterbrook wrote in his Blog.

UPDATE: File this under "great minds think alike": Kathleen Parker has a similar essay in TownHall.com, with a similar ending.

I'VE OFTEN WONDERED WHICH IS WORSE: Listening to Elton John's "Candle In The Wind" or having a wisdom tooth pulled. What I never considered was the diabolical torture of having to submit to both simultaneously, thanks to my dentist's Muzak.

Blogging will resume in a bit.

HACK ATTACK: Matt Welch writes, "when citizens become journalists, and journalists become accountable, the biggest losers will eventually be politicians with something to hide".

BUILDING THE HIGH-TECH FOYER: My latest newsletter for Electronic House is online.

RENDEZVOUS WITH DESTINY: Greg Buete of Tech Central Station writes that we need to stay on course to turn Iraq over on June 30th:

An arbitrary date? Tell that to Abu Zarqawi and other terrorists opposed to Iraq's democratic transition. What we're witnessing in Fallujah and Ramadi is the execution of Zarqawi's playbook -- in the form of a letter addressing future insurgent strategy. In this letter, captured by Kurdish soldiers, Zarqawi fretted that time is running out for the insurgency. In response, Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist linked to al Qaeda, urged sparking a civil war between Iraq's Shia and Sunni Muslims, and most importantly, to do so before June 30, the date the US officially begins its transition of power to Iraq. At that point, Zarqawi noted, any further insurgency will be seen as a fight against fellow Muslims instead of a fight against America.

Zarqawi said, "...if we fight them [Shia], that will be difficult because there will be a schism between us and the people of the region. How can we kill their cousins and sons and under what pretext, after the Americans start withdrawing? The Americans will continue to control from their bases, but the sons of this land will be the authority. This is the democracy, we will have no pretext."

Were we to follow the leadership of John Kerry, and push back our transfer date, we would be delivering a gift-wrapped package to the promoters of chaos and instability in Iraq, just as the Spanish population delivered them a victory by capitulating to terror.

It is imperative that coalition authorities stay the course. But in a repeat of last summer, armchair strategists are misdiagnosing the issue. With every milestone achieved putting more Iraqis in control, the insurgent factions -- whether former Saddam loyalists, Iranian-supported Shiite extremists or al Qaeda network terrorists -- lose ground. They are threatened by the June 30 transition date because on that day forward an insurgent attack is no longer against "occupiers" but against Muslims. Their argument and support will erode.

Sen. Kerry isn't alone, unfortunately. Over the weekend two frequent Republican critics of the president, Senators Richard Lugar and John McCain (but of course!), joined Democratic Senator Joe Biden in advocating moving the transition date. The issue is thus added to the rest of the red herrings that never die in the course of this war: The most notable others being "more troops required" and a lack of an "international face" in Iraq.

RTWT.

MEET THE NEW GREG PACKER: Just the same as the old Greg Packers.

FUN, FUN, FUN UNTIL DADDY TAKES YOUR HOT WHEELS AWAY: I have a nifty review of automobile writer Randy Leffingwell's book, Hot Wheels: 35 Years of Speed, Power, Performance Attitude, on Blogcritics.

It makes a nice double feature with this recent Tech Central Station by Ralph Kinney Bennett on the rise and continued popularity of Detroit's full-sized muscle cars of the 1960s.

SO THAT'S WHERE ROSE MARY WOODS WENT TO: A local talk radio station does some selective editing of Condi Rice's testimony.

(Via Protein Wisdom.)

DO YOU YAHOO!? Jeremy Reynalds says that Al-Qaida does.

ED'S IN ELECTRONIC HOUSE: If you're a football junky trying to survive the offseason, I have some tips on the back page of Electronic House magazine this month.

Leonard Nimoy Jonah Goldberg discovers something that I never saw when I was in high school or college: kids under 21 who said that they don't drink because it's against the law!

Of course, the drinking age in New Jersey was raised from 17 to 21 during my senior year in high school, so it was very new, and we were young bucks who wanted to protest. And it was much closer to the '60s and '70s ethos of getting drunk and having a good time on the weekends. As Jonah writes (and he's a few years younger than I am), "I associate college so much with social drinking; I have such an ingrained and generalized contempt for the 21 drinking age; and I’ve simply never met anybody who used this explanation before, let alone heard that this is a fairly widely held attitude among college students. It makes me rethink the power of the law to shape culture in America."

AT THE SOUND OF THE BEEP, James Lileks has some memories of Joe Zimmermann and the ubiquitous technology he wrought.

ASYMMETRIC VERBAL WARFARE: Instapundit has some great quotes from Condi Rice's testimony today. Scroll down for her great rebuttal to Bob Kerrey.

UPDATE: More on Kerrey in November of 2001, here.

GREAT MOMENTS IN CAMPAIGN ORATORY: Charles Johnson caught this nuanced bit of oratory from John Kerry:

Yesterday on CNN, John Effin’ Kerry was asked how he would handle the situation in Iraq, after his strident criticisms of the Bush administration’s handling of the war. His response:

“Right now, what I would do differently is, I mean, look, I’m not the president, and I didn’t create this mess so I don’t want to acknowledge a mistake that I haven’t made.”

As someone wrote on Charles' comments section, "I don't see what all the confusion is about, Kerry is clearly forgenst Bush's handling of the war."

THIS EXPLAINS VOLUMES: Joanne Jacobs explains that the School of Engineering "is a frill" in the postmodern "academic" world of San Francisco State.

IPCENTRAL REVIEW is a new e-journal focusing on intellectual property issues of interest to both public policy specialists and the general reader. It's put out by the Progress & Freedom Foundation.

If IP issues are of interest to you, stop on by!

LILEKS: "So [Saddam's regime] was a threat, except that it was never a threat. Senator Kennedy either lied to us, or misled us. Right? No other choices".

Don't hold your breath waiting for the media to pick up on that particular meme.

2001: A TYPOGRAPHIC ODYSSEY: Via Bill Peschel, who has some interesting thoughts of his own on the subject.

For more on Stanley Kubrick's font fetish, be sure to check out this article in England's Guardian.

THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU'RE ED: As James Lileks once wrote, "parachute journalism" is the laziest sort of reporting. "Find a Symbol of America, talk to a guy eating supper, and discern the Pulse of the Culture".

Which is why I'll be flying into Denver on Friday May 28th to stop by the Rocky Mountain Blogger Bash. If you're attending, you can't miss me--I'll be the guy who sort of looks like this.

SENATOR BYRD'S HITCH IN THE CONFEDERATE ARMY--complete with photographic proof! Wow, I knew the guy was old...but not this old!

WELL, THEY ALREADY CRASHED COLUMBIA: Nothing like having the EPA in bed with NASA and the Air Force. The EPA's order to NASA to change the foam on the space shuttle's external tank may very well have doomed Columbia last year.

For its next brilliant move into the final frontier, the EPA is reducing the distance our nuclear missles can fly! StrategyPage writes that he U.S. Air Force "is in the process of replacing the decades old solid fuel rockets of its 500 Minuteman III missiles":

The last of the Minuteman III missiles will receive their new motors by 2008. It costs about $5.2 million to replace the rockets on each missile. The new rocket motors, which have to comply with EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) rules, will have a shorter range than the original motors.

Via James Taranto, who adds, "If nuclear missiles have to comply with EPA regulations, what about the warheads?"

BECAUSE THE MEN IN THE BABY-BLUE HELMETS CAN'T PROTECT THEMSELVES: Matt Drudge writes that "The United States has asked more than a dozen countries to join a new international military force to protect the United Nations in Iraq, according to late reports from Washington tonight":

Bush Admin has approached France, which led opposition to the war in Iraq, as well as India, Pakistan and other nations that were reluctant to join the U.S.-led coalition that invaded Iraq.

The list includes 'a good global mix,' said a State Department official familiar with the proposed force.

But no Arab countries or neighbors of Iraq are on the list, with Turkey notably absent.

Senator Kerry told NPR today:

The alternative to that is to get off your high horse and begin to show a little humility and begin to share responsibility and share risk and ask the world to come to this effort. The world has a legitimate effort, a legitimate interest in not having a failed Iraqi state. The world has a legitimate interest in beating back terror, and it is astonishing to me that given the legitimacy of that interest, this administration has managed to proceed so unilaterally. There are so few allies who are genuinely there both in serious numbers of troops taking risks and serious amounts of money committed to this.

Let's see if Kerry's friends agree with him.

Back in February, we posted:

SOUND ADVICE FROM MICHAEL GRAHAM (especially after the Torricelli and Paul Wellstone episodes in 2002): "Don't assume you know who's on the Democratic ticket until Election Day."

Recently, Thomas Lifson wrote:

Keep in mind that there are still almost 200 days left before the election. There is plenty of time for second and third thoughts about Kerry, on the part of America's non-ideological voters, and plenty for them to think over. The vetting of candidate Kerry has only just begun.

But of course, Kerry isn't really the nominee yet. He is only the "presumptive nominee."

So it is time to seriously wonder if the Democrats might not exercise what we can call the "Torricelli Gambit."

"And we all know who is waiting in the wings", Lifeson somewhat ominously adds.

In a way, it makes a bit of sense. Arnold Schwarzenegger chose the shortened time period of the recall election to announce his candidacy, rather than face the heightened scrutiny of a full campaign slog. He may very well have started a precedent. If you feel you're popular enough to win, and have enough superstar clout to pull it off, why go through a full, bruising campaign when you can abbreviate things? Besides, your biggest attacks invariably come in October. Why not keep your bullets fresh?

SELF-VANDALISM: Are the numbers of Tawana Brawley wannabes increasing? Michelle Malkin has some thoughts.

HAMAS AND HIZBALLAH are "a sort of terrorist alignment", says John Kerry.

Sort of??

DID BRESLIN COOK THE BOOKS? I was just thinking the other day that Jimmy Breslin's writing, since I've been reading him on the 'Net in the late 1990s, is no great shakes, considering his superstar rep. Breslin's name was initially made back in the early days of the New Journalism with Tom Wolfe, when they both wrote for the New York Tribune in the mid-1960s. (Scroll down to a Thursday Bleat by Lileks for his take on the Herald Tribune.)

Lately, Breslin's writing has seemed partisan, shrill, and downright nasty. And frankly, this news (concerning faked quotes in this article) doesn't surprise me all that much.

Remember Moveon.org's Bush=Hitler ads? Kerry has just hired Zack Exley, a strategist with MoveOn.org, as his director of online communications.

FUTURE SHOCK: Well, I suppose that eyeball jewelry was merely a matter of time.

THE LOTT DODD DOUBLE STANDARD: Daily Newsbrief compares the two scandals, and notes that Dodd himself said, during the height of the Lott scandal, "If a Democratic leader had made (Lott's) statements, we would have to call for his stepping aside, without any question whatsoever".

OK, clock's ticking, Chris.

IT'S NOT YOUR FATHER'S REPUBLICAN PARTY: Err, unless your father is Cpl. Max Klinger.

On the other hand as James Lileks observes in a Minneapolis shopping mall, its influence is spreading...

STOP THE PRESSES! Reuters manages to use the words Islamic Terror in a sentence--a headline no less--and with nary a quotation mark in sight! Hallelujah! Up off their feet at last!

It's probably a mistake, it won't last, and it's pointless to get your hopes up. But it's a nice--if all too brief--change of pace from terrorism's favorite western news source.

FARK PHOTOSHOPS FRANKEN: Geeks in sticks sics Photoshop on pix.

GHOST TOWN: P.J. O'Rourke once wrote a book called Holidays in Hell. If you're up for a virtual one, how about a motorcycle ride past the abandoned hulk of Chernobyl and its nearby deserted ghost towns, with Elena, a beautiful Russian brunette as your guide?

THE AMERICAN THINKER THINKS ABOUT AIR AMERICA:

All of this fuss over a network whose outlets numbered five low-powered, low-rated AM stations, whose airtime was purchase in blocks by the network. Not one program director in the entire country decided on his own that the potential listenership was attractive enough to merit carriage of the network as a commercial venture. Even worse, Air America’s radio outlets in the two largest markets, New York and Los Angeles, formerly served black and Hispanic ethnic audiences. There has already been one protest rally in New York, as “community leaders” protest the loss of their ethnic broadcasts.

Not since Howell Raines published dozens of stories about Martha Burke’s efforts to force Augusta National to admit women members, while she was only able to muster a handful of demonstrators at the climax of her campaign, has there been such an obvious case of obsessive-compulsive coverage.

But Raines was one (now-unemployed) editor. The Air America overkill was collective. Nobody who pays attention to the news has been able to escape repeated exposure to the story. All this for an operation reaching, in all probability, fewer people than a single evening newscast in a decent-sized TV market.

You don’t have to be a Ronald Reagan worshipper to think to yourself, “There they go again.”

Thomas Lifson, the author of the piece writes, "The proper term for this phenomenon is clear. It is a death spiral".

Needless to say, RTWT.

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds has some additional links (there's a shocker!) on the topic.

THE SILVER LINING IN THE DARK CLOUD: Tremendous essay by Steven Den Beste on Fallujah. Den Beste writes, "The most important thing that happened in the last few days is that many of the most dangerous people in Iraq gave us an excuse to destroy them. CENTCOM won't throw this opportunity away."

THE REUTERS SYNDROME: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has a very selective use of quotation marks when it comes to the war on terror.

LYNCH MOBS: Virginia Postrel and Mark Bowden have some thoughts on them, and the psychology of those who participate in them, both in the south in the 1930s, and Fallujah in 2004.

WEEKEND AT BERNIE'S: OK, it was a half-hour, not a weekend. And it wasn't "at", it was from my den via phone. But I just got off the phone after an interview with HBO and former CBS producer Bernard Goldberg, author of Bias and Arrogance, to get his take on how the media's covered events since the release of those two books. I'll let you know when it's online.

In the meantime, here's Jonah Goldberg's look at Bias. And here's John Hawkins' interview with Goldberg.

TEDDY VERSUS JFK: On his MSNBC Blog, Glenn Reynolds writes, "Kennedy doesn't seem to care: What happens to America is second to the all-important task of beating George Bush. Kennedy -- like all too many Democratic party stalwarts in Washington -- sees Republicans, not Islamist terrorists, as the real enemy. That's a formula for disaster at home and abroad."

PROFILES OF THE FUTURE: Stephen Pollard of England's The Telegraph speaks ill of the late Peter Ustinov and his terrible, pro-totalitarian politics.

Expect similar obits of many of today's celebrities in 40 or 50 years.

Jonah Goldberg writes:

The Atlantic is still a great magazine, but it seems to be inching further and further into official Liberal Magazine Land. One can be a liberal magazine and still be a great magazine, The New Republic has proved that more than a few times. But what made the Kelly and post Kelly era Atlantic particularly special was its effort not to be predictably on one side of the political ledger.

Goldberg writes the Atlantic's current pieces, "contribute to the continued Slateification of the magazine, by which I mean that 'post-partisan smart' is defined as a certain kind of enlightened liberalism which enlightened liberals see as simply correct, not liberal".

THE KERRY JOBS MACHINE: Wow, this'll be quite a feat!

UPDATE: Buried in this New York Times article is another Kerry gaffe:

He added: "I'm not a church spokesman. I'm a legislator running for president. My oath is to uphold the Constitution of the United States in my public life. My oath privately between me and God was defined in the Catholic church by Pius XXIII and Pope Paul VI in the Vatican II, which allows for freedom of conscience for Catholics with respect to these choices, and that is exactly where I am. And it is separate. Our constitution separates church and state, and they should be reminded of that."

Mr. Kerry apparently meant John XXIII, as there is no Pius XXIII.

I don't expect anybody who's speaking extemporaneously to the press and the public to have a perfect command of the facts. But it does seem that Republican gaffes get far more coverage than Democratic ones, don't they?

CLELAND UPDATE: Yesterday, I quoted from an Ann Coulter piece on Max Cleland. Mike Spenis of the Feces Flinging Monkey Blog (now that's a Blog name!) emailed me an addendum to it:

Yes, Cleland was crippled as the result of an accident, not as a result of combat. However, Cleland did win a Silver Star for valor in combat a short time before the accident which ended his tour. A Silver Star is a serious combat medal, not the sort of thing they just hand out to anybody.

Coulter said that Cleland was 'no hero', and I think that's what got her into trouble. I'm no fan of either Coulter nor Cleland, but Cleland has earned my respect for his service. He's a victim, and a hero, one right after the other.

Mike also has news of an amazing marketing feat by Reason magazine, one that's gotten them surprisingly positive press in that other hardcore libertarian publication, the New York Times.

HUGH HEWITT: "I added as many affiliates this week as AirAmerica assembled in a year. I wonder if the New York Times will call today?"

"What happened, Jack", Michael Medved writes, to all those missing moviegoers?"

Despite his unquestioned eloquence, elegance and charm, Mr. Valenti presided over history's most disastrous decline in the audience for feature films. In 1965, the year before he left the Johnson administration to assume his plush position as chief mouthpiece for the entertainment industry, 44 million Americans went out to the movies every week. A mere four years later, that number had collapsed to 17.5 million.

In other words, some potent, puzzling force drove more than half of the nation's film fans to break the habit of movie going.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, Chris Kanis notes the difference a change in administrations makes when it comes to Hollywood and foreign policy.

NANCY PELOSI URGES FAST ACTION in finding a suitable vice presidental candidate for Senator Kerry. Here's a modest proposal...

QUAGMIRE WATCH: On February 27th of last year, a month before surprisingly brief hostilities broke out in the war to liberate Iraq (as opposed to the post WWII-like difficulties reconstructing it afterwards), CNN was already declaring the war a quagmire.

On Sunday, four months before the actual event, AP declares, " Boston's Democratic Convention a Quagmire"!

(Via James Taranto.)

I'VE READ MICHAEL CROWLEY'S SLATE ARTICLE on former Georgia Sen. Max Cleland, and while Crowley writes that, "Cleland...lost two legs and an arm to a grenade explosion in Vietnam", he really, really underplays just how Cleland's accident occurred, and that it wasn't in combat. I'm no fan of Ann Coulter's writing style and sneering tone, but she took an enormous amount of flak for researching and simply writing about the incident:

Cleland lost three limbs in an accident during a routine noncombat mission where he was about to drink beer with friends. He saw a grenade on the ground and picked it up. He could have done that at Fort Dix. In fact, Cleland could have dropped a grenade on his foot as a National Guardsman – or what Cleland sneeringly calls "weekend warriors." Luckily for Cleland's political career and current pomposity about Bush, he happened to do it while in Vietnam.

There is more than a whiff of dishonesty in how Cleland is presented to the American people. Terry McAuliffe goes around saying, "Max Cleland, a triple amputee who left three limbs on the battlefield of Vietnam," was thrown out of office because Republicans "had the audacity to call Max Cleland unpatriotic." Mr. Cleland, a word of advice: When a slimy weasel like Terry McAuliffe is vouching for your combat record, it's time to sound "retreat" on that subject.

Needless to say, no one ever challenged Cleland's "patriotism." His performance in the Senate was the issue, which should not have come as a bolt out of the blue inasmuch as he was running for re-election to the Senate.

And Crowley never mentions the Dan Quayle like gaffe that Kerry made in January on Meet The Press in defending Cleland:

We saw what they did to challenge the patriotism of Max Cleland, a triple amputee, a man who left three of his limbs on the ground in Vietnam. They challenged his patriotism. His regret is he didn’t stand up and fight back.

To be fair though, Crowley does quote a particularly poor choice of wording by Kerry, although he fails to telegraph it to his readers:

"If they're going to try to question my commitment to the defense of our country, then I'm going to fight back," Kerry said at a February campaign event. "Because they did that to Max Cleland ... and I'm not going to stand for it."

Neither of course, is Cleland. Had Quayle or George W. Bush made either gaffe, both men would be crucified by the press. But Kerry's gaffes always get a pass.

In general though, Crowley is right: the Democrats, in constantly portraying themselves as the party of victims and "losers of life's lottery", may find themselves real losers in November, unless they start offering ideas other than "vote for Kerry, because he's not President Bush."

UPDATE: Mike Spenis of Feces Flinging Monkey has an update to Coulter's article. Click here or scroll up to read it.

14:59 WATCH: Matt Drudge writes that Alanis Morissette strips to her birthday suit in Canada--only she doesn't, she's wearing a body suit with fake nipples and...stuff to protest Janet Jackson and Nipplegate. So it's a fake protest about a fake controversy, done in Canada, rather than in the US itself.

In the photo that accompanies Drudge's copy, Morrisette looks surprisingly embarrassed--as well she should.

UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg agrees.

Only this time, rather than involving Republicans Trent Lott and Strom Thurmond, it's Chris Dodd praising Robert Byrd, whose checkered background includes time spent as a KKK Grand Dragon.

Both episodes began with quotes broadcast on C-SPAN and pushed forward via the Blogosphere and talk radio. In 2002, Lott ended up being disgraced--as a result of the elections that November, he was about to resume his role as Senate Majority Leader. Instead, he's now an anonomous backbencher.

Lott's speech was made as part of Thurmond's retirement celebration, and the 100 year old senator from South Carolina died shortly thereafter.

To the best of my knowledge, Byrd isn't planning to retire, and if anything, Dodd is more powerful in Democratic circles, than Lott is with Republicans.

Let's see if the traditional media picks up on this, and if anything happens to either of Lott or Byrd as a result of this speech and its initial reaction.

(Senator Lott Dod, from The Phantom Menace unfortunately could not be reached for comment about his two namesakes.)

IS CALIFORNIA IN FREEFALL? Greg Ransom writes that California has lost 355,000 manufacturing jobs in the past three years, because the cost of doing business is 32 percent higher in California than in neighboring states.

THERE'S A BUMPER STICKER IN THIS, SOMEWHERE: Joanne Jacobs writes that "The best school system in the U.S. is run by the Defense Department".

There's always a danger when Republicans try to be too hip, something clearly George W. Bush understands. John Kerry's Dean-like claim that he's "fascinated by rap" illustrates that it's always a danger whenever 60 year old guys who aren't Jack Nicholson try to be too hip:

''Oh sure. I follow and I'm interested,'' says John Kerry. ''I'm fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think there's a lot of poetry in it. There's a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think you'd better listen to it pretty carefully, 'cause it's important . . . I'm still listening because I know that it's a reflection of the street and it's a reflection of life.''

Really? You're ''fascinated'' by rap and ''listening'' to hip-hop? You're America's first flip-flopper hip-hopper?

The best riposte to Kerry came from an encounter a few years ago between his predecessor Al Gore and Courtney Love, lead singer of the popular beat combo Hole, when they chanced to run into each other at a Democratic party night in Hollywood.

''I'm a really big fan,'' gushed the vice president.

''Yeah, right. Name a song,'' scoffed Courtney. The panicked vice panderer floundered helplessly. Fortunately, his Secret Service guys moved in before he wound up completely riddled by Hole. As wise old campaign consultants always say, the politician's First Rule of Holes is: When you're in one, stop digging. Al introduced us to a Second Rule: When you're with one, stop pretending to dig her.

If only that MTV guy had said to Kerry, ''Yeah, right. Name a song.'' Think Kerry could've? Reckon if you bust into his pad and riffled through his and Teresa's CD collection you'd find a single rap album? Of course, you wouldn't find any in George and Laura's CD collection either. The difference is that President Bush doesn't feel the need to pretend.

Needless to say, read the whole thing.

(Hat tip to Betsy Newmark.)

CROSSED OUT CROSSES: James Panero notes that Columbia University has subtly morphed the three crosses in their crown-shaped school crest into denuded vaguely diamond-shaped blobs. Michael Newdow should be happy, at least.

Panero describes Columbia's supremely PC gesture as being "in the spirit of radical creep", a subject he's written about before.

THIS'LL SELL: CNSNews.com is reporting that "Environmental activists are warning church-goers that Palm Sunday services are not compatible with 'environmental sustainability'."

Gaia was OK, but her disciples are a bit thick and ordinary...

THE GOOD ARE HARD TO FIND, EVEN HARDER TO LOSE: Ron Rosenbaum has some thoughts on why he misses Mike Kelly.

Stefan Sharkansky disagrees:

"Neutral" journalism would give equal time to those who argue that slaves were happier than free blacks, that homosexuals should be executed or that Communism works well in practice. Fortunately, that's probably not what the Times has in mind. Meanwhile, newspapers that pretend in earnest to be "neutral" have given rise to the varieties of journalism that inspired us to launch this blog in the first place. The Times would have more credibility if instead of flogging the conceit of "neutral reporting" it simply acknowledged its reporters biases and also extended its "commitment to diversity" to broaden the diversity of opinions in its newsroom.

As John Poderhertz wrote last year in the New York Post:

I've worked for two newspapers - this one and the Washington Times. One of the primary qualities that has distinguished these two papers from most others in the country is that they do not pretend to be something they're not. They are run by conservatives. Readers know it, and are given the opportunity to read them and judge for themselves whether the information in them is improperly colored by the ideological views of the owners and managers.

In the world of professional journalists, this lack of pretense is considered a black mark against these institutions. They are criticized and held in lesser regard precisely because they have the integrity to be honest with their readers about what they are.

And as Bob Goldfarb wrote in December:

I think history will show the faith in unbiased journalistic "truth" to have been a temporary aberration. The national papers of Great Britain, like the American press of the 19th century, are popular precisely because of their well-known ideological positions, not from any pretense of neutrality. They report the news by their own lights, recognizing that readers prefer the news to be filtered through values and beliefs similar to their own.

So does The New York Times. The Times has become America's only truly national, general-interest newspaper because it has the best reporting, writing, and editing in the country...and because its worldview matches that of its target consumers. It doesn't need to purport to be unbiased. Okrent believes that his, and presumably the paper's, "only concern" is to be "dispassionate." It will be enough if he and The Times continue to serve its readers' interests rather than their own.

Somewhat surprisingly, a number of journalists have recently been coming forward to admit their biases. Maybe eventually the Seattle (and New York) Times will join them.

IF 9/11 DIDN'T CHANGE EVERYTHING IN AMERICA, it changed a lot of things.

For proof, check out this Instapundit post. Had it been posted prior to 9/11, I would have taken it as a delayed April fool's joke; it would have been that impossible to be believed.

Back on Wednesday, February 25, I wrote:

THE PASSION: It opens today; the last film to generate this kind of controversy was probably Oliver Stone's JFK (I was going to say The Last Temptation of Christ, until I remembered the angry debates on shows like Nightline that Stone's film generated at the time of its release about its historical accuracy.)

In today's review of JFK on The Digital Bits DVD site, Adam Jahnke writes:

Every so often, a film comes along that draws an ideological line in the sand, making it virtually impossible to simply discuss its merits as a motion picture. You cannot address its strengths and weaknesses as a movie without getting into a debate about its subject matter. Currently, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ is the agent provocateur du jour. I don't imagine Gibson and Oliver Stone would have too much common ground in a political discussion but I can't help but wonder if Gibson solicited Stone's advice on how to deal with the media in the wake of a firestorm of controversy.

Apropos of nothing, I'm not sure how well Jahnke's analysis holds up. While critical opinion of the film was often on ideological lines, I'm not sure if viewership was. Somewhere I read that a fair number of its audience were African-Americans and Hispanics--and I'll bet that a fair chunk of both groups don't subscribe to National Review. And Roger Ebert, who last year gave an interview to The Progressive on his leftist views, gave The Passion four stars. Meanwhile William F. Buckley, of whom, rumor has it, gets comped his subscription to the conservative NR, had seriously mixed emotions about the film.

The ideological complexity holds true for JFK as well. I'd say I'm just ever so slightly to the right of Oliver Stone. But I saw JFK, bought the laser disc and later the DVD, and loved the film. Mind you, I think that other than Kennedy's death and LBJ replacing him in the oval office, it's entirely a work of fiction, but it's tense, dramatic and exciting stuff, just as The Manchurian Candidate, another leftwing paranoid fantasy was.

(Incidentally, I passed by the late Clay Shaw's house in New Orleans last week. It's a handsome walled mansion located back and to the left, back and to the left, of Bourbon Street. The conspiracy of men who assassinated JFK--Ed Asner, Jack Lemmon, Gary Oldham, Joe Pesci and Tommy Lee Jones--were nowhere to be found.)

UPDATE: I hope I'm not sounding like I'm trashing Jahnke's review of Warner's new JFK DVD. He's very good reviewer, and both his article--and apparently the new disc--are actually quite good. However, I'm also not sure if I agree with this comment of Jahnke:

The Kennedy assassination was a turning point for this country and continues to be a lightning rod for controversy to this day. Witness the recent brouhaha over a cable documentary that explicitly tied presidential successor Lyndon Johnson to the assassination (even Stone didn't go quite that far).

He didn't? Watching JFK certainly left me with the impression that Stone implicated Johnson in Kennedy's assassination.

DEATH IN FALLUJAH: Yesterday we looked at how television was covering it. Today, Glenn Reynolds looks at how some on the left side of the Blogosphere are reacting to it. Be sure and read Roger L. Simon's thoughts on the topic as well.

RHETORICAL SPAM QUESTION: I have a reasonably solid Spam filter attached to Outlook, but I still check the emails that get sent to the junk mail directory before deleting them, just in case.

So why is an email titled, "taiwan dishes" about refinancing?? I know Spammers try seemingly random combinations of words that they hope will get past filters, but with a title like that, I was expecting something a little--heck a lot--racier, if you know what I mean.

50-50 OR 60-40? The last presidential election revealed a bitterly divided nation, and many experts believe November could be just as close. Others however, believe that the nation may have moved further to the right as a result of 9/11.

If either prediction is true, why on Earth is Hollywood alienating at least half its audience? As the Professor writes, "And they wonder why viewership is down".

In the old days, television sponsors and network broadcast standards departments kept a close eye on scripts, as well as finished shows before they aired, so as not to offend audiences. They understood that, as the late Steve Allen once put it, "When on television you were the guest of the family in the family's home". And that meant families of both major political parties. Hollywood deliberately chose to forget that idea in the last twenty years--and most modern sponsors don't care as long as profits are up, and the board can rub shoulders with the stars at the next board meeting or trade show.

UPDATE: Captain Ed (no relation) also has some thoughts.

NEVILLE AGAIN: Thanks to Mark Steyn, a meme is born. And as Stefan Beck writes, Spain has discovered that, "a jihadist's promise isn't worth the cassette it's recorded on. On the bright side (if this can be said to have one), this wake-up call did not cost any lives. Let's hope they heed it."

DEMOCRAT OR CATHOLIC: It sounds like the church is going to make John Kerry choose one or the other. Tom Daschle and former California Governor Gray Davis each ran into a similar wall last year. Guess which choice both men made?

WE'VE ALREADY SAID GOODBYE: Victor Davis Hanson says it's time we "go now" from Europe.

To a great extent, I agree. And it would be amusing to watch the governments try to spend on both a welfare state and a meaningful defence. Sooner or later, one or the other would have to give.

I'M WATCHING SOMETHING'S GOTTA GIVE right now, and really feeling alienated by it. I'm not entirely sure why. Nicholson and Keaton have great chemistry together, and certainly make a handsome couple. But there's something really offputting about the film. I think it's the notion of watching 50 to 60-somethings act like 22 year olds. On the other hand, having read Hollywood, Interrupted this past weekend, it's pretty obvious that lots of 50 to 60 somethings act like 22 year olds there.

Comedies are either typically very broad farces, or they're about real people in wacky circumstances. Woody Allen's best films (Annie Hall, Manhattan, Play It Again Sam, (all of which starred Keaton, of course)) felt like they were about believable people. Neither of these characters felt much like real middle age people to me.

And then there's the usual Hollywood anti-smoking stuff--and the French music (and ultimately, a trip to Paris itself), in a film that was probably being shot while we fighting the Iraqs and being screwed by their French allies. And Keanu Reeves as a doctor? "Whoa--stat!"

James Bowman was also turned off by the film, but for rather different reasons: he finds it disturbing watching wrinkled people make love. I don't mind that at all--I'd actually like to see a film about mature grown-ups having adult relationships.

But mature, adult, and grown-up are sadly what's missing from this film. And from most films these days.

UPDATE: OK, film's over. My wife and I talked about it, and came to the conclusion that it's not the PC of the film, it's the crappy writing. We found plot holes you cold drive Nicholson's Mercedes roadster through, and couldn't remember one funny line after the film was over. Whereas the Woody films I listed above all have great catch phrases, snappy dialogue, and (other than Bogie appearing in Woody's bedroom in Play It Again Sam) reasonably believable plots and characters.

How do producers get a budget big enough to afford Nicholson and Keaton, and not have a decent script? I suppose that perhaps the filmmakers and studios (Yes, that's plural--Columbia and Warner Brothers both backed this film) believed that once the cast is assembled everything's in the bag. (And the film is pretty well cast, right down to the supporting players: while I don't buy Keanu as a doctor, this is the most human I think I've ever seen him--and while I'm sure he was reasonably well paid, it takes guts for any headliner to accept a supporting role). Something I've written about several times here--since the mid-90s, Hollywood films have repeatedly felt to me like they've been gone into production with a script that should have been rewritten once or twice.

This one could have used a lot of polishing before being greenlighted.

UPDATE: One of the stranger aspects of Something's Gotta Give are the unbelievably airbrushed photos in its marketing campaign (click on the IMDB link above to see the DVD cover). The whole point of the film is that Keaton looks like a typical 55 year old, wrinkles, jowls, and all (nicely preserved body though, in the ultra-quick flash cuts of her). But the massively Photoshopped DVD box makes her--and Nicholson--each look about 30!

HEH:

SADDAM HUSSEIN, TERRORIST: Interesting polling data on the Power Line blog.

THE FRANK BURNS/JOHN KERRY CONNECTION, as discovered by Hugh Hewitt. I can certainly see it--Kerry's "I don't fall down, the son of a b*itch knocked me over" line does sounds very Burns-like, doesn't it?

On the other hand, Hewitt writes, "We lack the information to make any comparisons between Theresa and Major Margaret "Hotlips" Houlihan, but both at least share a tendency toward outspokenness". Hot Lips, whatever her faults, was a career Army nurse and patriot. Can't see her ever doing this to Harry Truman or Ike.

While we're on the subject of M*A*S*H, not too long ago, I thought Dean bore some similarities to the worst aspects of "Hawkeye" Pierce. But at least Hawkeye was cool in M*A*S*H's early days as a TV series, and as portrayed by Donald Sutherland in the original film. With his snowboarding shtick and trying to sound hip by defending rap music, Kerry's trying way too hard, to come across as cool.

Here's Nightline Executive Producer Leroy Sievers on Fallujah:

"War is a horrible thing. It is about killing," ABC News "Nightline" Executive Producer Leroy Sievers said in an unusual message to the program's e-mail subscribers discussing the issues posed by Wednesday's killings. "If we try to avoid showing pictures of bodies, if we make it too clean, then maybe we make it too easy to go to war again."

And here's ABC News chief David Westin on 9/11:

"The question is, are we informing or titillating and causing unnecessary grief?" ABC News chief David Westin told the New York Times just days after the Sept. 11 attack. Explaining why his network decided not to show any pictures of people leaping to their deaths at the World Trade Center, he said, "Our responsibility is to inform the American public of what's going on, and, in going the next step, is it necessary to show people plunging to their death?"

As I wrote last year:

What would [the media] think about showing the gore from the attack on the World Trade Center on television more? Shots of people jumping out of the windows of the WTC to their certain deaths rather than be burned in the fire or smashed by collapsing rubble? I doubt they'd be in favor it. And certainly the media has downplayed--practically eliminated--those images from its library of stock footage because, as ABC News chief David Westin told the New York Times, it was "disturbing".

Curious, that when it serves their interests and their biases, the media certainly doesn't mind disturbing its viewers.

Instapundit also has some thoughts on Sievers' quote:

terrorism is, in a very real sense, a creature of the mass media. But what strikes me is that after 9/11 they didn't want to show graphic images of dead Americans for fear that it would make Americans want to go to war. Now they are proud of showing graphic images of dead Americans in the hopes that it will discourage Americans from going to war.

Now that they've admitted that they're not neutral on this stuff, you have to wonder what side they're on.

UPDATE: Westin of course, was the fellow who couldn't initially decide if it was wrong for Al Qaida to have attacked the Pentagon on 9/11:

The Pentagon as a legitimate target? I actually don’t have an opinion on that and it’s important I not have an opinion on that as I sit here in my capacity right now. The way I conceive my job running a news organization, and the way I would like all the journalists at ABC News to perceive it, is there is a big difference between a normative position and a positive position. Our job is to determine what is, not what ought to be and when we get into the job of what ought to be I think we’re not doing a service to the American people. I can say the Pentagon got hit, I can say this is what their position is, this is what our position is, but for me to take a position this was right or wrong, I mean, that’s perhaps for me in my private life, perhaps it’s for me dealing with my loved ones, perhaps it’s for my minister at church. But as a journalist I feel strongly that’s something that I should not be taking a position on. I’m supposed to figure out what is and what is not, not what ought to be.

A few days later, after being excoriated, Westin backpedaled:

Like all Americans, I was horrified at the loss of life at the Pentagon, as well as in New York and Pennsylvania on September 11. When asked at an interview session at the Columbia Journalism School whether I believed that the Pentagon was a legitimate target for terrorists I responded that, as a journalist, I did not have an opinion. I was wrong. I gave an answer to journalism students to illustrate the broad, academic principle that all journalists should draw a firm line between what they know and what their personal opinion might be. Upon reflection, I realized that my answer did not address the specifics of September 11. Under any interpretation, the attack on the Pentagon was criminal and entirely without justification. I apologize for any harm that my misstatement may have caused.

As Bernard Goldberg asked in Arrogance, why wasn't that Westin's initial take?

ANOTHER UPDATE: H.D. Miller and Kevin of The Smallest Minority also have some thoughts.

JUST BEAT IT: Wow, more surprising announcements: House Republican leader Christopher Cox and Michael Jackson "reached a ground-breaking agreement on a new bill to curb indecency on the public airwaves".

AND SOME INTERESTING QUOTES FROM THE MEDIA, rounded up today by the Media Research Center.

SOME INTERESTING PRODUCT ANNOUNCEMENTS TODAY: Google debuts Gmail, and gets surprisingly positive press from the New York Times. In the music world, Fender debuts the long overdue Keith Partridge Stratocaster.

Bitchin'! It includes "a custom tolex case in the same color scheme as the famous Partridge Family bus"!

UPDATE: Google is hiring, looking to fill out their swank new office campus. Bit of a commute for must of us, though.

SADLY, THIS DOESN'T SURPRISE ME: Jay Nordlinger includes the following anecdote in his latest column:

A friend of mine from Arkansas writes the following: "Thought you'd appreciate this little anecdote. A co-worker of mine has a daughter in public elementary school, here in Pine Bluff. They're still doing Black History Month stuff, apparently, because the kids were told to come to class dressed as a famous (and presumably accomplished) African-American. My co-worker's kid was told to come as Tina Turner. My co-worker informed the teacher that her child would come as Condoleezza Rice instead. The teacher refused to allow it, on grounds that Rice 'is for white people.' Nice, huh?"

Disgusting--and, again, very American. Sadly so.

(Is the reverse true? The inference the Arkansas teacher makes is that Tina Turner is only for black people. We have at least one of her CDs. Should we return it?)

Along with Colin Powell, President Bush has appointed two of the highest ranking blacks in office ever, and has kept on Colin's son, Clinton appointee Michael Powell, as head of the FCC. And still, cracks like this occur. Will a black Republican ever be respected? I'm sure if the teacher was fired, Nordlinger's friend would have mentioned it in his email. This is a rhetorical question of course, but why aren't more teachers let go for such blatantly racist statements?