ED'S ON ACID: Acid Planet that is, where my Blogcritics piece on improving vocals is currently the lead article in the "Dirt from Dave" links.

And they made me look just like David Bowie in the photograph they selected, too! (Now you do you sound like you're on acid--Ed. Oh sure--and talking to myself certainly helps matters!)

THE ROAD AWAY FROM SERFDOM: 2004 marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek. Arnold Beichman writes that "to remain a Marxist today or a Marxist fellow-traveler when the whole world has voted against the malice of Marxism raises the most profound questions as to the rationality of the true believer".

In other ecomomic-related news, Larry Kudlow declares the current economy "a boom with legs":

Over the past year, following enactment of the president's tax-cut plan, real economic growth has increased 5 percent with only 1.6 percent inflation. After-tax profits have increased 37 percent (fully adjusted for depreciation and capital consumption). Business spending on equipment and software has grown 12.5 percent.

Since last August, 1.1 million jobs have been created. Spendable income has increased 4.9 percent in real terms. Consumer spending is up 4.3 percent.

The economy is roaring at its fastest in 20 years, and there's no clear reason the prosperity trends won't continue.

Kudlow asks, "Why can't the naysayers see it?"

HEY STEVE, YOU'RE RIGHT: You really do feel the hangover more when you're a mile above sea level!

Others had different kinds of mile high adventures last night. Although to be fair, I don't recall seeing Jeff Goldstein with his pants off.

Thanks to Zombyboy, Darren Copeland, and the others who organized the event. A great time was had by all--even if some of the details are still hazy and will require the same attention to forensic detail normally reserved for the Zapruder film to be recalled.

Oh, and Sammy was cute when she rolled around the floor.

UPDATE: Andrew Olmsted looks at what a diverse crowd attended the Press Club and yet how amicable the conservation was, and concludes, "Rodney King would have been proud".

LOOK OUT DENVER: I'm in town and ready for tonight's shindig. (Although to be honest, I haven't been participating in the pre-bash warm-ups as much as Steve Green has been.)

I'd like to especially thank the Jennifer Aniston-wannabe sitting next to me on the flight in for accidentally spilling her Sprite on the right cuff of my trousers and my black loafers. (Neither of which I'm wearing tonight.) She was very apologetic; my immediate reaction was an Yngwie-like "YOU HAVE UNLEASHED THE F***ING FURY!!", but it came out with more a Woody Allen-style "That's OK, not a problem. Can happen to anybody."

That minor hiccup aside, I'll see whoever shows up in a few hours.

THE RIGHTEST OF THE RIGHT STUFF: Meet William Foxley, hero. And be sure to read to the end.

PERFECT TOGETHER: Pat Buchanan meets the Arab News.

ARE UN AMBULANCES BEING USED to transport Palestinian terrorists? Charles Johnson has a damning photo from the Israel Defense Forces web site.

TOTALITARIANS, HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS AND AMERICA'S RESPONSE: Peter Burnet looks at the similarities between the left's appeasement of the original Axis of the 1930s and today's Axis of Evil.

DAVID LETTERMAN, HOSS: He chided CBS for running a sitcom instead of showing President Bush's speech Monday night. "The network feels that the war in Iraq is important, however not as important as the season finale of Yes, Dear. So they couldn't be bothered."

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 stopping by the Rocky Mountain Blogger Bash tomorrow. If you're attending, you can't miss me--I'll be the guy who sort of looks like this.

AFTER WATCHING AL GORE FLIP OUT YESTERDAY, John Hawkins writes, "If only we could transfer the towering hate and rage left-wingers like Al Gore & Howard Dean feel towards Republicans to the terrorists who want to kill us all, our country would be better off."

On the other hand, Byron York writes that secretly, some Republicans love it.

UPDATE: Maybe Morgan Spurlock should investigate Al's choice of cereal in the morning. (Via Will Collier.)

ANOTHER UPDATE: Say what you will about Al, he's a unifier, bring disparate people from all walks of life together in harmony. James Taranto writes, "give Gore credit for helping liberals and conservatives find common ground in this era of polarization":

"It is now clear that Al Gore is insane," writes the New York Post's John Podhoretz. "I don't mean that his policy ideas are insane, though many of them are. I mean that based on his behavior, conduct, mien and tone over the past two days, there is every reason to believe that Albert Gore Jr., desperately needs help. I think he needs medication, and I think that if he is already on medication, his doctors need to adjust it or change it entirely."

Maureen Dowd of the New York Times agrees. When he delivered a speech to the far-left outfit MoveOn.org yesterday, she writes, "Mr. Gore hollered so much, he made Howard Dean look like George Pataki." She says the erstwhile veep represents "the wackadoo wing of the Democratic Party."

And while in the past, we've been no great fan of the former Vice President, we certainly agreed with his comments about Iraq--or at least those he made in 1998.

DISHING IT OUT, BUT NOT TAKING IT: On Monday, Maria Bartiromo of CNBC confronted Morgan Spurlock, the director of Super Size Me. James Glassman writes that "He was reduced to a fool. It was beautiful to watch".

And read.

UPDATE: The Internet Movie Database reports:

Roadside Attractions and Samuel Goldwyn films have accused MTV of refusing to air commercials for Super Size Me, the award-winning documentary which landed in the top-ten box-office attractions last weekend, something rare for a documentary. The two companies said in a statement that they were told that the ads were "disparaging to fast-food restaurants," which are big advertisers on the youth-oriented cable outlet. MTV disputed the charge, saying that the distributors balked at a deal. (More here, for when the IMDB link scrolls off.)

Wait a second--Spurlock told Bartiromo, "we live in a country where people should have the right to say what they want". So why are his backers upset that MTV doesn't want to run their ads?

SUPER-SIZE THIS UPDATE: Somebody could make a whole documentary about this.

BLASTS FROM THE PAST: Stephen Hayward deconstructs Jimmy Carter's failure to prevent the Shah from falling and concludes, "In retrospect, the fall of Iran may have been the single greatest foreign policy blunder of the last 50 years, not excepting Vietnam. Had Iran not become a bastion of international terror, it is unlikely we would be where we are today." (Advantage Simpsons? Well, I wouldn't go that far--Ed)

And O.J. Simpson is on a tenth anniversary tour of his most infamous moment, including a photo-op at the scene of the murder.

THE PRE-TIMES UNIT ROLLS INTO ACTION: It's rare to Fisk an article even before it's written. But thanks to a piece I wrote in March, I'm able to do just that. The Brothers Judd link to an article in today's the New York Times that says:

The number of bloggers has grown quickly, thanks to sites like blogger.com, which makes it easy to set up a blog. Technorati, a blog-tracking service, has counted some 2.5 million blogs.

Of course, most of those millions are abandoned or, at best, maintained infrequently. For many bloggers, the novelty soon wears off and their persistence fades.

Sometimes, too, the realization that no one is reading sets in. A few blogs have thousands of readers, but never have so many people written so much to be read by so few. By Jupiter Research's estimate, only 4 percent of online users read blogs.

And how many people is four percent of online users? As I wrote in my March Tech Central Station article about a similar piece that appeared on CNN's Website, according to one study, there are 146 million adult Internet users in the US alone. If we assume that only four percent of online users are reading them, that's 5,840,000 readers:

Scott Ott, the humorist whose Scrappleface Website is a Blogosphere favorite (in January of 2003, Ott coined the brilliant "Axis of Weasels" meme that later graced the cover of The New York Post), puts things into sharp perspective. In one of his typically satiric news articles, he wrote that if only about two percent of Internet users actually write Weblogs, it means that there are more bloggers writing, than people reading USA Today (whose circulation is 2.6 million), The New York Times (1.6 million) or The New York Daily News (805,000).

Ott doesn't mention CNN, but since the article most prominently appeared on CNN's Website, it's probably worth noting that in the US, CNN's typically daily viewership is only about 450,000 viewers. (The Fox News Channel, the cable news ratings leader, gets an average of 799,000 viewers during their broadcasting day.)

Of course, if I were CNN, I'd be worried about having, in a manner of speaking, all of my viewers, and then some, owning Weblogs.

That goes double for the Times, where Bloggers had a field day with Howell Raines, Jayson Blair and Maureen Dowd. (And naturally, there's no mention of Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Reynolds or Mickey Kaus, who used their Blogs to pummel The Times last year at the height of the Blair scandal).

...and stories like this one, which find the one blogger on the planet who doesn't know what his stats package says:

Mr. Wiggins, 48, a senior information technologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing, does not know how many readers he has; he suspects it's not many. But that does not seem to bother him.

"I'm just getting something off my chest," he said.

It then concludes, "Indeed, if a blog is likened to a conversation between a writer and readers, bloggers like Mr. Wiggins are having conversations largely with themselves."

Oh sure, that never happens at The Times.

UPDATE: What did others in the Blogosphere think of the story? Ask Memeorandum!

LAST UPDATE: Instalanche! Welcome readers of The Professor.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES: Daniel Grant looks at the legal obligations owners of artwork have to their artists.

UPDATE: For links and info on artists' rights under the law, my wife suggests this page.

Brendan Miniter of the Wall Street Journal looks at what might have happened had President Bush #41 liberated Iraq, with Democrats controlling both the House and the Senate at the time.

Of course, the elder Bush was assailed by both many on the right, and by opportunists on the left, for not finishing off Saddam. Just as Bush #43 is being assailed by both many on the right, and by opportunists on the left, for doing just that.

MORE PRISONER ABUSE IN IRAQ: Andrew Sullivan has the details.

Scroll up to here, where Sullivan also asks why gays in America have ignored the plight of their counterparts in the Middle East.

THE END OF DAYS: How else to explain this headline:

"'Spanky' the Clown Arrested on Child Porn"

Herschel Krustofsky could not be reached for comment.

"SOMEWHERE", Richard Baehr writes, "Pat Buchanan is smiling" at the latest round of anti-Semitism.

THE RUBBER DIPLOMA CIRCUIT: Via Betsy Newmark, Ben Shapiro has an amusing look at who's speaking at college commencements this year.

(For what it's worth, my graduating class listened to Malcolm Forbes. It was a fairly pedestrian speech, as I recall. But on the other hand, that's not necessarily a bad thing.)

LET'S NOT ASSUME THE SALE JUST YET: Kerry's plane has "John Kerry President" on its side. Despite the best efforts of the press, I don't think it's official yet.

And I suppose this was inevitable:

Comparing the plane to aircraft that brought U.S. troops to and ferried them home from Vietnam, Kerry called the plane his ``freedom bird.''

But after Vietnam, Kerry said:

I did take part in free-fire zones, I did take part in harassment and interdiction fire, I did take part in search-and-destroy missions in which the houses of noncombatants were burned to the ground. And all of these acts, I find out later on, are contrary to the Hague and Geneva conventions and to the laws of warfare. So in that sense, anybody who took part in those, if you carry out the application of the Nuremberg Principles, is in fact guilty.

If that's how Kerry feels, why is he naming his plane after those that transported armies of fellow war criminals to and from their destructive tasks? You'd think somebody that ashamed of his actions in Vietnam would want to play them down.

UPDATE: Rich Lowry notes that AP didn't pick up on the missing "for" in the "John Kerry President" emblazoned on Kerry's campaign aircraft.

Al Gore has harsh words for anyone with an (R) to the right of his or her name, and thinks that Iraq is a "catastrophe".

His running mate in the 2000 elections thinks differently.

Will any reporter ask either man why he thinks his counterpart's view is so bi-polar?

UPDATE: Actually, I agree with Gore on Iraq. Especially when he says things like this:

''We need national resolve and unity, not weakness and division when we are engaged in an action against someone like Saddam Hussein,'' the vice president said on CNN's Larry King Live.

Wired for a round-robin of live interviews with five network TV anchors, Gore blanketed the airwaves with a prediction that critics of the president's decision to strike Iraq would change their opinion as they learned more about the situation and received more information from military leaders. ''This action is the correct action,'' he said.

Whoops--that was in 1998. Nevermind. The press certainly doesn't.

I don't know about you, but I can absolutely picture this exchange between writer/producer/director Lionel Chetwynd and a Hollywood mogul:

When he was 17, Ike's screenwriter and co-executive producer Lionel Chetwynd joined the 3rd Battalion Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment), spending two years in the Canadian peacetime military. During that time he met some veterans of Dieppe, a bloody but necessary dress rehearsal to D-Day that established the futility of invading a fortified European port.

Now in his early 60s, Chetwynd is a longtime naturalized American citizen who was born in England and raised in Montreal. He'd remembered from Canadian regimental history that of the 4,400-odd Canadians sent to Dieppe, about 3,600 were killed. Although they knew it was basically a suicide mission, not one man failed to report for duty. Chetwynd asked one of the old soldiers in his regiment, Sgt. Gordon Betts, why.

"My generation had to figure out what we were ready to die for," Chetwynd recalled Betts telling him. "You kids don't even know what to live for."

Many years later, when Chetwynd was a successful Hollywood writer specializing in historical dramas, he told the Dieppe story during a Malibu dinner party — as a sort of tribute to the men who died there so people could sit around debating politics at Malibu dinner parties. One of the guests was a network head who asked Chetwynd to come in and pitch the story.

"So I went in," Chetwynd told me, "and someone there said, 'So these bloodthirsty generals sent these men to a certain death?'

"And I said, 'Well, they weren't bloodthirsty; they wept. But how else were we to know how Hitler could be toppled from Europe?' And she said, 'Well, who's the enemy?' I said, 'Hitler. The Nazis.' And she said, 'Oh, no, no, no. I mean, who's the real enemy?'"

"It was the first time I realized," Chetwynd continued, "that for many people evil such as Nazism can only be understood as a cipher for evil within ourselves. They've become so persuaded of the essential ugliness of our society and its military, that to tell a war story is to tell the story of evil people."

Kind of puts it all into perspective when someone living in Hollywood is complaining about "the essential ugliness of our society" and thinks that during WWII the real enemy wasn't the Nazis, but the men who fought them, doesn't it?

2007 Update (10/4/07): Welcome those clicking in via StumbleUpon; please visit my much newer post on this topic to bring things up to date.

CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER: Orrin Judd praises Bill Clinton.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "The hottest part of hell is reserved for those who, at a time of grave moral crisis, steadfastly maintain their neutrality."--Winston Churchill

(Via Tom Maguire.)

Ilya Shapiro writes on being "Stuck in Purple America", which makes a nice trifecta alongside of Rod Dreher's "Crunchy Cons" piece and David Brooks' Bobos In Paradise.

HOME THEATER IN A BOX: My latest Electronic House newsletter is now online.

TESTS CONFIRM SARIN GAS in Baghdad bomb.

Follow this link to read just how deadly even a single drop of sarin can be. And continue to watch the media keep moving the goalposts.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan spots Dan Rather spinning the story as only he can.

REUTERS "UPDATE": The kings of quotation marks aren't acknowledging this find, either.

ONE MORE UPDATE: H.D. Miller has more, here.

OPENING SOON: Jonathan Last looks at the art of the movie trailer.

Last doesn't mention it, but my favorite trailer is the one that Welles narrated for Citizen Kane, where he uses his most ingratiating voice-over style to introduce his cast of then-unknowns. It's included on the DVD, and as RKO's advertising men said of the film, it's terrific.

QUOTE OF THE DAY comes from Joe Lieberman, a Democrat who gets it. "If we don't lose our will, someday we'll look back on what we've done in Iraq with pride."

THE BROKEN WINDOWS THEORY: In his commencement speech at Hillsdale College, Edwin J. Feulner, the president of The Heritage Foundation, applies it to public discourse. Too much good stuff here for me to quote an excerpt. Instead, RTWT.

Too bad E.L. Doctorow didn't apply similar reasoning to his commencement speech this weekend.

UPDATE: For background on the broken windows theory, read this Atlantic article from 1982 by James Q. Wilson, and this transcription of a PBS program hosted by Ben Wattenberg, who explains how Wilson's theories led to a dramatic increase in the quality of life in Manhattan, and not coincidentally, a drop in its homicide rate, when they were applied by Rudy Giuliani. As Wilson himself said, "The ability to measure the crime rate permits you to test theories, to test competing arguments, to see who is correct."

LIFE IMITATES THE ONION: Betsy Newmark has two examples, here and here.

Malcolm Muggeridge, call your office.

GLENN REYNOLDS LOOKS AT the latest findings from the Pew Research Center on the political demographics of America's newsrooms. Be sure to read the comments from Mike Gordon, one of Glenn's readers, as well. And click here and then scroll down for James Taranto's thoughts. (Scroll down a little further to the "Red Alert" for the probably-not-all-that-astonishing source of John Kerry's campaign slogan.)

RATINGS TRUMP WAR FOR CIVILIZATION: None of the broadcast networks are expected to carry President Bush's speech tonight. It will only be available on the cable news channels.

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds has some thoughts.

How else to explain this passage in his ESPN column:

The long-dreaded 2004 Olympics in Greece will be the ultimate crossroads for sports and politics in this new and vicious century. The recent photos of cruelty at the Abu Grahaib all-american prison in Baghdad have taken care of that.

Yes, sir. We have taken the bull by the horns on this one, sports fans. These horrifying digital snapshots of the American dream in action on foreign soil are worse than anything even I could have expected. I have been in this business a long time and I have seen many staggering things, but this one is over the line. Now I am really ashamed to carry an American passport. Not even the foulest atrocities of Adolf Hitler ever shocked me so badly as these photographs did.

As I said last Sunday, Thompson and the late William S. Burroughs are the prime examples that sooner or later, decades of pharmaceutical excess catch up with a writer--and the results are not pretty. As James Lileks wrote that same day:

Thompson has less hope than the Islamists; at least they have an afterlife to look forward to. All we have is a country so rotten and exhausted it’s not worth defending. It never was, of course, but it’s even less defensible now than before.

He can say what he wants. Drink what he wants. Drive where he wants. Do what he wants. He’s done okay in America. And he hates this country. Hates it. This appeals to high school kids and collegiate-aged students getting that first hot eye-crossing hit from the Screw Dad pipe, but it’s rather pathetic in aged moneyed authors. And it would be irrelevant if this same spirit didn't infect on whom Hunter S. had an immense influence. He's the guy who made nihilism hip. He's the guy who taught a generation that the only thing you should believe is this: don't trust anyone who believes anything. He's the patron saint of journalism, whether journalists know it or not.

Does anybody at ESPN proof Thompson? Is there an editor who receives his copy and says, "Abu Grahaib is worse than the Holocaust. Yeah, sports fans will love this!" Rush Limbaugh and Gregg Easterbrook were fired from ESPN last fall because of their excesses. It should be interesting to see if anything happens to Uncle Duke.

UPDATE: And the Airbrush Award of the month goes to...ESPN. After the Drudge Report had a link to the article which contained the above quote, ESPN doctored it to now read:

The long-dreaded 2004 Olympics in Greece will be the ultimate crossroads for sports and politics in this new and vicious century. The recent photos of cruelty at the Abu Grahaib all-american prison in Baghdad have taken care of that.

Yes, sir. We have taken the bull by the horns on this one, sports fans. These horrifying digital snapshots of the American dream in action on foreign soil are worse than anything even I could have expected. I have been in this business a long time and I have seen many staggering things, but this one is over the line. Now I am really ashamed to carry an American passport.

Gee, and I thought only the BBC airbrushed their stuff.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Drudge is mentioning the airbrush, here. Drudge writes:

But after being linked to the DRUDGE REPORT, a top editor demanded the sentence be immediately edited --without Thompson's okay, according to an ESPN.com staffer.

"Hunter can go too far sometimes," the Bristol-based ESPN employee told the DRUDGE REPORT.

Yes he can. So why aren't Thompson's excesses noticed before ESPN is deluged with email?

Of course, as Drudge notes:

As with the original, Thompson still concludes with the thought: "Now I am really ashamed to carry an American passport."

Why not move to France?

LIES AND THE LYING LIARS ON THE LEFT WHO TELL THEM: Fred Barnes writes that he has just the person to look into Michael Moore's lies and distortions: "Al Franken has taken special interest in public liars, writing a bestseller called Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. Al, the Moore case is now in your court".

Found via "The Corner", where Tim Graham writes:

If you can't get upset with a film that crazily attacks the president and slanders the war effort, and makes wild accusations about the Bushes being tight with the bin Ladens, then you should take some outrage pills. Then there's all the liberal film critics. The same people who earlier this year sounded like a pack of anthropologists who miraculously all attended the crucifixion of Christ and became fiercely convinced that Mel Gibson is mangling history will now all treat Michael Moore like his documentaries aren't the slightest bit factually mangled.

Well, this was the year that Hollywood honored Leni Riefenstahl at the Academy Awards.

MOVE ALONG, NOTHING TO SEE HERE: Another railroad-related article, this time about a motion detector being discovered alongside the heavily trafficked Northeast Corridor in Philadelphia, written in the same "nothing unusual here" style as the article we linked to last week about a rocket launcher(!) found near Atlanta's railroad station.

Here's another article, about New Jersey railroad lines being videotaped.

Here's a brief article in The Washington Times that actually tries to put a few of the pieces together.

I really fear that we're going to wake up to another Madrid, only it will be in Manhattan's Penn Station, not Spain.

DON'T EXPECT TO SEE SGT. STRYKER at either of the chief parties' conventions this year: "I've always thought political conventions were for folks who considered DragonCon way too hip", he says, among other thoughts, here.

ANOTHER CASABLANCA REMAKE: In addition to the David Soul/Hector Elizondo TV series from 1983, Hollywood also remade Casablanca 13 years later...with Pamela Anderson.

And as Richard Rostrum emailed to tell me:

if the thought of Pamela Anderson standing in for Ingrid Bergman turns your stomach, well, don't be too alarmed--her character is not the Ilsa Lund equivalent.

As James Panero wrote, it's always worse than you think. Especially when it comes to Hollywood.

THX-1138 STREETS ON DVD ON 9/14: It will also have a limited run in major city theaters as well, around that same time. Like the first three Star Wars films, George Lucas is tinkering with it though, "opening up" the film with new digital special effects, and showing more of the film's underground city. The Digital Bits has the details and additional links, including the film's promotional Website.

CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER: National Review's Dave Kopel praises Al Franken's radio show in his column for the Rocky Mountain News. However, he's not very fond of The Randi Rhodes Show, which follows it:

On the radio, hyperbole and invective usually succeed only if they're funny - as they sometimes are on Franken and Limbaugh. With Rhodes, however, all you get is the same kind of flat pronouncements you could hear from a seventh-grader in Boulder: George Bush is "deaf, dumb and blind" and "stupid" and "an idiot" and people who vote for Bush are "morons" and "pathological."

For someone with such a smug sense of intellectual superiority, Rhodes is remarkably ignorant. Monday, for example, brought the bizarre claim that United States bombed Dresden after the Germans had surrendered in World War II. Actually, the bombing was three months before the Germans surrendered.

This sounds like it should be the subject of the next Michael Moore "documentary".

THERE'S A NEW WORLD WAR II MEMORIAL IN ESTONIA: There's just one problem though:

It honors the SS.

GOT $2.7 MILLION UNDER YOUR MATTRESS? Then the birthplace of Bilbo Baggins could be yours, as JRR Tolkien's home in north Oxford is now on the market.

And you can decorate it with this!

THE OIL-FOR-FOOD SCAM: Claudia Rosett asks, "What Did Kofi Annan know, and when did he know it?"

S-21: James Bowman reviews a new documentary called S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine:

Vann Nath reflects on the Party’s favoring the word "destruction" for its enemies, rather than "killing." He says: "If you think about the word ‘destruction’ it’s more than cruel. In the word ‘kill’ there still seems to be a moral aspect, but in ‘destruction’ there’s nothing human left. We become dust, just particles blowing in the wind." From the now-empty site of a mass grave where one of the guards explains how he killed the prisoners — by striking them from behind with an iron bar then cutting their throats and pushing them into the already-prepared grave where they died — to the final scene of the empty prison with the wind sweeping through it and blowing the dust about, the film dramatizes this observation. It never does answer the question, "Why?" No one ever really can. But it is hypnotically watchable.

I wonder if John Kerry will be in the audience.

THE COLD WAR BEGAN HERE: "Once Stalin had got away with [the Katyn massacre], he realized he could get away with anything".

2004: THE YEAR OF BLOGGERS AND FRIDGES: Not too long ago, I wrote about my experiences focus-testing refrigerators.

Today, the fruits of my labor and vast refrigerator knowledge paid off, as James Lileks (I know he's not, but he's close enough to make the headline work) visits the appliance story to inspect the latest in Freon-cooled goodness.

WHAT GOES UP OFTEN MUST COME DOWN, but that doesn't mean that both events get the same amount of coverage from the press. Especially when it's the rise and decent of Air America.

Remember the story we linked to on Tuesday about the seven Iraqi men fitted with new prosthetic right hands by a Houston hospital after they were chopped off by Saddam Hussein?

Stefan Sharkansky writes that AP left off two details, one relatively minor, the other not-so-minor. First, it was originally nine men, but two have since died. Second, Saddam's butchery occurred at Abu Ghraib.

As one of Sharkansky's readers says, "gosh, that wouldn't have any relevance to current events now, would it?

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: Why is Steve Largent donating money to fund Tom Daschle's re-election campaign?

(Via The Corner.)

DID BILL GATES SHAKE THE BLOGOSPHERE? Bill Gates told Warren Buffett about blogging on Thursday. CNN could not be reached for comment.

UPDATE: As Dandy Don Meredith would sing, "Turn out the lights, the party's over"....

INTO HOME RECORDING? If you're like me, and not the world's greatest singer, it helps to use technology creatively for better vocals. That's the subject of my latest (long) post at Blogcritics.

DAVID OGILVY WOULD APPROVE: Jeff Goldstein has a terrific new advertising slogan for Emory University.

NANCY PELOSI, MILITARY GENIUS: Patton, Bradley and Schwarzkopf all pale next to the all-powerful strategist from San Francisco.

Jeane Kirkpatrick, call your office.

UPDATE: More here.

HAS "JUMPING THE SHARK" JUMPED THE SHARK? Patterico writes that the oft-used phrase "jumped the shark when it was used by the Shark."

(The Shark himself replies, "Maybe so, but at least I don't go around using phrases after they've jumped the shark ... ;) )

MORE FROM THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF NIXON: Yassar Arafat says he'll protect the Olympics from terrorism. Just as he did in 1972.

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

UPDATE: Following the same theme, since Paul Ehrlich's freshness-date expired right around the same time, Ronald Bailey comments that "Ehrlich has never been right. Why does anyone still listen to him?"

THE SECRET PLAN: Roger L. Simon looks at how John Kerry is channeling Richard Nixon.

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds picks up the Kerry-as-Nixon theme on his MSNBC page.

NEWSWEEK EDITOR CALLS BUSH ADMINISTRATION "CLOWNS": as noticed--appropriately enough--by Oh, That Liberal Media, who has some interesting comments on the matter.

The editor in question is Jonathan Alter, who has been predisposed against the president even before he took office.

GOOD NEWS FROM IRAQ: You may very well have read this already, thanks to Glenn Reynolds and Andrew Sullivan. If not, click here.

FOR COMMON SENSE, PLEASE PRESS #1: Michelle Malkin looks at one Democratic ex-governor's anger at multiculturalism.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Kofi? Your move."

US DISPUTES STRIKE REPORT ON IRAQI WEDDING PARTY: Two questions: What sort wedding finishes at 2:45 in the morning? And even if it was actually a wedding, while I know old customs die hard, isn't rather stupid to be firing weapons to celebrate in a war zone?

I thought the tradition in the Middle East was to fire weapons after a military victory. Do they unload a clip at the end of a wedding as well?

Why not just break a wine glass? It's so much more civilized.

UPDATE: More here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here as well.

ANOTHER JOURNALIST COMES CLEAN: On The Today Show this morning, Katie Couric had this to say to David Brock:

Couric contended that “most people, I think, on the street would say the media it tends, tend to be more liberal than conservative" and she proposed: “Aren't most people in journalism, primarily, except for say on Fox, and in certain conservative publications, aren't they for the most part, and of course the media is, are not monolithic, but pro-choice, you know, against prayer in school, probably favor affirmative action? I mean don't you think that's, that's fairly typical? And if so is it, why isn't it fair to say that liberals, sort of, are controlling the mainstream media?"

Brent Baker writes, "A lot of journalists, who see no bias in any mainstream media outlet, are magically able to see bias on the Fox News Channel. Couric may be the first to recognize bias beyond FNC."

Actually, there have been several other journalists who have gone on the record about media bias recently; something we discussed originally here, and then fleshed out in our interview with Bernard Goldberg, the man who helped to break the logjam.

THE GREAT ELVIN JONES, drummer for John Coltrane's quintet died, at age 76. For our take on one of the Coltrane quintet's finest hours, click here and here.

Sadly, I never got to see Jones live. But I did see McCoy Tyner, Coltrane's pianist, a couple of years ago at the Iridium Club in Manhattan. Not surprisingly, his playing is still world class.

THE KINGS OF QUOTATION MARKS: Reuters has never met a terrorist it didn't like. Which is why, I suppose the word "heroes" is in quotation marks in this headline, as it refers to those who tried to save innocent lives, as opposed to kill them:

Giuliani Lauds 9/11 'Heroes' Amid Angry Hecklers

LEFT EYE'S VIEW: John O'Sullivan, Glenn Reynolds and Neal Boortz have harsh words for the media.

UPDATE: More from Reynolds here, including a particularly damning photo.

FRITZ HOLLINGS: ANTI-SEMITE? AP is reporting that a column he wrote is being "labeled 'anti-Jewish' by some".

Jonah Goldberg has a couple of posts on the topic, as does John J. Miller.

THE BATTLE FOR YOUR LIVING ROOM*: My article on LCD versus Plasma TVs from the debut issue of TechLiving Magazine is now online.

*It's the subhead of the article. And yes, I realize how incongruous it sounds at the end of a day's worth of posts on rocket launchers, sarin, amputating limbs, Saddam, Castro, Nader, and Dukakis.

Have one of these, and it'll take your mind off whatever ails you. But remember! It "does not contain any drug that depresses the heart, or dopes the mind: a fact quickly noticed, for it is exhilarating instead of stupefying".

ROCKET LAUNCHER FOUND NEAR ATLANTA RAILROAD STATION: Love the tone of this Ledger-Enquirer piece: rocket launcher found near train station and eight miles northwest of Atlanta International Airport--ho-hum, you can go about your business. Nothing to see here, move along.

THE SIGNIFIGANCE OF SARIN: Joe Carter has a two part look at just how deadly even a single drop of that nerve gas could be. Keep the numbers that Carter posted in mind as the media spins this discovery.

(Via Hugh Hewitt.)

SPEAKING OF THE MEDIA'S TEMPLATE, Betsy Newmark has a couple of interesting links on the subject.

Of couuuuurse he can. But hey, if I was the personal physician to a murdering communist dictator and had a wife or family I wanted to protect, I'd probably say stuff like that, too.

UPDATE: Via James Lileks, this is a great piece of writing on Castro's dissidents, as well as his useful idiots in the US.

Seven of them actually, to men who were once Iraqi small business owners who had their right hands cut off nine years ago when Saddam Hussein punished them for Iraq's collapsing economy. (Nevermind the UN embargo after the invasion of Kuwait and Desert Storm. When in doubt--punish your shopkeepers.)

There are many, many more stories like this, involving Americans both here and in Iraq, and yet they're published so infrequently, because they don't fit the media's template.

UPDATE: And of course, CNN ran few stories of Saddam's torture while he was in power, because they were in his pocket. Surprisingly though, ESPN did run a piece or two on how brutally Uday Hussein treated Iraq's Olympic athletes.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A.M. Rosenthal has harsh words for the paper he used to edit.

ME AND MY RED CORVAIR: Jim Geraghty looks at how Ralph Nader might do in November.

UPDATE: Orrin Judd looks at Nader's net worth, and quips, "As Jesse Jackson knows, there's good money to be made shaking down corporate types".

As somebody once said, heh.

THE SPIN DOCTORS: James Taranto looks at how the media is spinning the sarin story.

Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds looks at how the media have become a weapon of war themselves.

I GUESS OSCAR HAS THE APARTMENT TO HIMSELF NOW: Tony Randall died on Monday, at age 84.

WE'RE GONNA PARTY LIKE IT'S 1988: Or, maybe we won't. When it comes to the presidential election, James Pinkerton asks, "Is It 1988 Again"?

AND IT WAS RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEIR NOSES: Sometimes when you're too close to something, you lose objectivity. Rod Dreher looks at how the Democrats became "The Godless Party", and why the press never even saw it coming.

(Via The Brothers Judd.)

BLESSED BY THE GODS DEPARTMENT: We've been permalinked by "Armavirumque", The New Criterion's Weblog.

Thank you!

"TOO SMALL BY HOLLYWOOD STANDARDS": The New Criterion is blogging about a Hollywood remake of Brideshead Revisited:

Jude Law will play Sebastian. Notice how this report claims that Castle Howard, the setting of the 1981 series, "was considered too small by Hollywood standards." Nice.

Castle Howard was also used as Castle Hackton in Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon. I actually visited there in 2000--and it's enormous--both the castle and the estate that it's on.

James Panero writes:

I asked James Bowman if it is a Hollywood imperative that all great films be remade as bad films. Even 'Psycho,' he pointed out, was redone--but not yet "Casablanca." Which leads me to wonder, is it only a matter of time before we get "Casablanca, The Reckoning... because, this time, it's personal"?

Does the TV series that starred David Soul as Rick, and Hector Elizondo as Louis Renault count? It had a mercifully brief run in 1983, but still, it demonstrated the sheer hubris of trying to remake one of the great films of all time.

On the other hand: Citizen Kane II: The Wrath of Susan Alexander has yet to be made. But give 'em time...

CHEMICAL WEAPONS IN IRAQ: Glenn Reynolds notes that the spin as already started.

UPDATE: Brian Crouch looks at how Reuters, those kings of quotation marks, are spinning things.

FIFTY YEARS AFTER BROWN VS BOARD OF EDUCATION, segregation remains a serious problem, writes Arnold Kling, in Tech Central Station.

James Lileks runs roughshod over Hunter S. Thompson, a man for whom the freshness dating on his writing expired about twenty years ago.

Thompson and William S. Burroughs are the prime examples that sooner or later, decades of pharmaceutical excess catch up with a writer--and the results are not pretty.

PUTTING OUT THE FIRE WITH GASOLINE: John Fund writes that Democrats have started to realize that a campaign of hate won't beat President Bush. I'm not sure if a majority of the left has realized this yet, but Fund makes some great points nonetheless.

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

THINGS I NEVER THOUGHT I'D SAY: Gene Simmons of Kiss: anti-idiotarian.

(Via "The Corner".)

KAFKA.COM: Steven Den Beste writes that Belgium and the Netherlands have proposed launching a website where businesses and citizens can report and complain on the administrative burdens caused by the insane quantities of standard issue EU regulations and red tape.

The proposed URL? www.kafka.eu.

To coin a phrase...heh.

THE REAL PICTURE SHOW: Roger L. Simon says he has a scoop about some of the content that will soon be broadcast on the new Arab-language television network, Alhurra: photographs and videos of Saddam's henchmen in action, torturing--and I mean torturing--"light years beyond what you have seen from our troops in Abu Ghraib", as Simon puts it.

Simon has three questions about this material:

I would like to know if any of these torturers is actually in Abu Ghraib right now. Let's hope they were not among those let out. I also would like to know what Senator Kennedy has to say about the moral equivalence of our actions after watching these tapes. And finally, I would like to know why it took so long for these to come out.

All good questions. But don't look for the press to question Ted anytime soon about his recent statements anytime soon.

I WAS AGAINST THE WAR BEFORE I WAS AGAINST IT: Power Line Blog notes how John Kerry is subtly rewriting his past.

HOME RECORDING UPDATE: If you use the popular Reason program* (as I frequently do) to record software-driven virtual synthesizers, Propellerhead Software has an update that contains a variety of simulated vintage instruments.

...Because guitarists aren't the only musicians who like the sound of old gear.

*Not to be confused with the also popular Reason magazine--which has some great words, but is much tougher to dance to.

JOHN PODHORETZ ON TIME MAGAZINE:

Take a look at Time magazine's cover this week. It features an artist's rendering of one of the photographs from Abu Ghraib with the line: "Iraq: How Did It Come to This?"

"It" didn't come to "this." "It" is a war to liberate 25 million people and rout Islamic extremists, terrorists and those who thirst for the mass murder of Americans. "This" was an aberrancy that was stopped almost five months ago, when the revelations at Abu Ghraib led to investigations, arrests and the wholesale reinvention of the Iraq prison system.

Time's cover line is a vile and grotesque slander against every American in uniform in Iraq. It remains the case, more than two weeks after the public exposure of the Abu Ghraib photographs, that not a single digital photo showing mistreatment has emerged from another cellblock at that self-same prison, or from any of the other 24 prisons in Iraq.

Indeed, every photograph shown to U.S. senators yesterday is part of the same set of pictures featuring the same eight dirtbags.

The scandal isn't widening. If anything, it's contracting. The focus continues to zoom in on the actual people in the pictures and their disgusting conduct in them. And yet Teddy Kennedy, a man who once let a woman die, feels free to speak the following unspeakable words: "We now learn that Saddam's torture chambers reopened under new management, U.S. management."

The United States is, according to the man in whose car Mary Jo Kopechne drowned, no better than the regime of Saddam Hussein.

Teddy Kennedy isn't just some outlier. Teddy Kennedy is the chief surrogate of the Democratic candidate for president of the United States and a lionized figure - so lionized that a worshipful profile of him published in Boston magazine won a major journalism award last year.

So let's be clear what's going on here. As we speak, 138,000 Americans are serving under dangerous conditions in Iraq. And our forces in Karbala are fighting against the goons and thugs of Muqtada al-Sadr with some success. They're risking their lives for freedom and honor and duty and love of country.

And conventional liberal opinion wants them to lose.

Back in December, Charles Johnson wrote:

Am I the only one who thinks it's more than a little weird that TIME Magazine names "The American Soldier" as their "Person of the Year," only days after publishing a story by a TIME reporter who's hangin' out with the mujahideen trying to kill that same "Person of the Year?"

Linking to Johnson's post, I wrote, "Pick a side boys, so the readers know where you stand".

Looks like they have.

SEX APPEAL: Roger L. Simon looks at two scandals--one with world-changing implications, and one that's pretty minor in the scope of history, and compares and contrasts the coverage each is receiving:

Drudge (linking Media Life Magazine) is telling us the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times are locked in mortal combat to see who will own the suddenly important Graydon Carter Story. Vanity Fair editor Carter, whose magazine features movieland coverage, has evidently been profiteering off his cozy Hollywood ties, even to the tune of an alleged hundred grand 'consulting fee' from Universal. Creepy, I guess, and unethical... but these same papers don't seem too concerned that the Wall Street Journal and the 'lowly' tabloid New York Post own the UN Oil-for-Food Scandal. Why is that, one wonders, when surely the latter story is vastly more important to the current world situation and to how the international community could conceivably go forward? Yet they seem content to be Missing-in-Action on that. It would be interesting to know how many reporters the two papers have assigned to both stories and hear an explanation of why.

I suspect that Simon knows exactly why the Graydon Carter story is getting more ink: it's got more sex appeal. And it involves "killing their own". As Woody Allen once said, "intellectuals are just like the Mafia--they only kill their own". The media works much the same way: they love to see one of their peers take a fall.

Most importantly, Hollywood and journalistic corruption is nothing new. But if you're a liberal journalist, to believe that the UN is corrupt is to change a worldview you may have held since childhood that the UN is a benign organization full of wonderful humanitarians that helps keep the peace and keeps the "evil" United States in check. And if that's no longer true, then all of those bad things that conservatives have been saying about the UN...may be true! And that can't be possible.

Maybe Stefan Sharkansky is right--this is the week the media jumped the shark.

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds reminds us that UNSCAM isn't the only scandal in town among global elites.

WAS THIS THE WEEK that the mainstream media as we know it jumped the shark?

UPDATE: This certainly lends a bit of credence to that theory.

ANOTHER UPDATE: As does this.

THE DEFINITIVE INSTAPUNDIT INTERVIEW: Read the whole thing.

All I can add is...heh.

"BOSTON GLOBE PUBLISHES ANTI-AMERICAN PORN": James Taranto has a pretty good link-filled rundown on the duping of the Globe. And Glenn Reynolds has some thoughts on, as he puts it, the Globe's "rather lame" apology for blowing it, big time.

As Glenn writes, "Note that it doesn't say, anywhere, that the images were actually fraudulent, though they were. Is this an adequate apology for running explicitly pornographic images that were falsely labeled as representing atrocities by American troops?"

BUSTIN' MAKES ME FEEL GOOD: There's a surprisingly authentic looking complete Ghostbusters' suit for sale on eBay.

HOME AUTOMATION AND HOME THEATER: My latest Electronic House newsletter is online.

UPDATE: My monthly "Ideas For Every Room" piece is online as well. We look at the high tech--well, really medium tech--kitchen this month.

WHAT WE WEREN'T TOLD: Shell of Across the Atlantic wants to know why the press hasn't reported that Nicholas Berg was Jewish:

It doesn't matter what the killers knew. They could put in the story, "Berg was Jewish, and it is uncertain whether his killers knew that." Simple as that. No bias one way or the other.

To excuse the *media* for not knowing he was Jewish is ridiculous though. They're reporters. It's their job to find things out. How hard is it to find out someone's religion? Obituary writers do it all the time.

The media's theme for this story has been "revenge for Abu Graihb". If they report that he was Jewish, then the theme might become "racists terrorists brutally murder Jewish American". Is that the media's motivation for not reporting something as important as someone's religious identity?

I don't know. And I'll say that.

Questioning the media's motivation is always a good thing. In a link-filled post titled, "Why The Big Media Continue To Lose Their Audience", Glenn Reynolds writes, "big media leaders seem almost desperate to keep the story on Abu Ghraib" But on the Internet, "where users set the agenda, not Big Media editors and producers, it's different". And Nick Berg is the story, as well it should be.

"STARK RAVING MAD": Joel Mowbray has more on "Pete" Stark's freakout answering machine message last week to a constituent who's a military veteran.

INCIDENTALLY, sorry for the recent lack of posts--I've been in crunch mode, with several articles due simultaneously.

Bart Howard only wrote one hit song in his lifetime. As Mark Steyn writes, it was the only one that he needed:

In 1969, Buzz Aldrin took a portable tape player up there with him, and “Fly Me To The Moon” became the first moon song to get to the moon itself. “The first music played on the moon,” said Quincy Jones [who arranged Sinatra's definitive version]. “I freaked.”

Steyn adds:

Had any other nation beaten NASA to it, they’d have marked the occasion with the “Ode To Joy” or Also Sprach Zarathustra, something grand and formal. But there’s something very American about Buzz Aldrin standing on the surface of the moon with his cassette machine.

Exactly.

OUR MEDIA, IN DAMAGE OVERDRIVE: Brent Bozell makes a great point in the middle of his weekly media column, which was probably written before video of Nicholas Berg's beheading surfaced:

Does America have the "right to know," to see every image of smiling American morons at Abu Ghraib? To see every image of the horrors of the war? Contrary to what they might say on the chat-show circuit, the media themselves do not have an absolute position on that. Look no further than March 31, when a vicious mob shot four American contractors, mutilated them, burned their corpses, dragged them through the streets, and hung body parts from bridges. Like the prisoner-abuse story, this was the ugliness, the horror of war. But in this case, most in the media determined the public did not have a right to see the pictures.

Notice the great irony behind the Abu Ghraib pictures. Because they are less graphic and disturbing, since the prisoners are being humiliated, and not killed, they are more acceptable for airing, and then more acceptable for complete over-airing. The end result is that Americans are inundated with visuals of injustices committed by Americans, and lost is the reality of far graver and more frequent atrocities committed against Americans. Reality gives way to the perception of reality, all in the name of "news." [Emphasis mine--Ed]

Now, the media elite are showing us the most remembered gloomy images of Vietnam, the war America lost when Americans lost heart. By putting those Iraq pictures next to these, the media are vying for similar results. If not, why make all the comparisons? Why are our media taking sexual humiliation and comparing it to the Kent State shootings, or more outrageously, the mass murder at My Lai? Do they have no ability to distinguish between these, or do the ends justify the means, with one image just as good as the next one?

It certainly fits the profile of why they justified running footage of Fallujah in March, but not of the 9/11 attacks by Al Qaida on our own soil. Or as Glenn Reynolds writes, the media's viewpoint is that "Publishing images that might inflame Arabs against Americans is responsible journalism. So is not publishing images that might inflame Americans against Arabs."

Nicholas Berg's killers directly cited the images from Abu Ghraib as their justification for beheading them. I wonder if the media feels complicit.

Well, actually, I don't.

UPDATE: Speaking of damage overdrive, one of Steve Green's readers emailed to tell him:

The Berg family was sandbagged in their grief by an AP reporter who told them for the first time that their family member had been decapitated and the video of the murder was online. An AP photographer was on hand to record the family's response. The father collapsed on the sidewalk in tears.

Green has contact info for AP, for those who like to discuss this example of fine quality journalism with them.

I'M MORE OF A MIES VAN DER ROHE AND CORBUSIER GUY MYSELF, but I can think of one or two people who wouldn't mind decorating their digs with Middle Earth Furniture.

PLACING IRAQ INTO PERSPECTIVE: Something maybe Teddy Kennedy should consider.

UPDATE: James Lileks does a little perspective-izing himself.