Matt Towery writes that it could turn its sagging fortunes around by taking some lessons from the NFL.

Brian Williams, the heir apparent to Tom Brokaw, praises bloggers to their faces, and then trashes them when talking to fellow members of the legacy media:

Williams, 45, is capable of showing good humor and a dry wit in public. When Time magazine held a lunch to discuss candidates for its person of the year, he exposed a side of his personality that is seldom seen on the air.

When a fellow panelist mentioned that bloggers had had a big impact on the reporting on Election Day, Williams waved that point away by quipping that the self-styled journalists are "on an equal footing with someone in a bathroom with a modem."

I must admit that I expected better from Williams. As many readers will recall, I participated in NBC's election night coverage on Nov. 2. I was at Rockefeller Center with Ana Marie Cox and Joe Trippi, representing the blogosphere. Around 1:00 in the morning, I was walking through a deserted lunch room, returning to our set, when a man approached from the opposite direction, heading toward the men's room. Because he was well dressed and tanned, I took him to be an on-air person. He went out of his way to walk up to me, extended his hand, and introduced himself as Brian Williams. I'd never heard of him, but I said I was John Hinderaker. He said: "I just wanted to tell you that I really appreciate what you guys are doing." I thanked him and walked on.

So: is Williams a secret admirer of bloggers like us, or not?

Beats me. I do wonder, though, about the bathroom reference. First we're in our pajamas, now we're posting from our bathrooms. What's next, nude blogging from our hot tubs?Get over it, I say.

[beat]

OK, to be honest, I've never actually blogged from my Jacuzzi. But I have blogged about it--it's amazing what being desperate for material will do to a man when he's facing a deadline...

Legalized euthanasia in Europe.

As Hugh Hewitt notes, it didn't end very well the last time it was tried, either.

Update (12/1/04): Hewitt notes no coverage of this story in major US newspapers and concludes:

MSM does not care to cover this. You figure out why. In silence is approval, and in approval, an invitation to proceed.

Meanwhile, Jim Geraghty adds, "Hugh wonders why his favorite bloggers are saying nothing, so here's my brief bit of something: The canary in the coal mine just slumped over, coughed, and died."

President Bush is in Canada. Protesting moonbats are in full force. Glenn Reynolds has the links--including a disturbing photo of a mutated American flag.

Back in August of 2003, I noted in Blogcritics that Hollywood executives had blamed cell phones--especially texting cell phones--for their drop off in box office revenue that summer.

Today, Forbes writes that Disney and Pixar are using advertising via cell phones to help promote The Incredibles and keep it afloat in theaters.

Rich Lowry writes that it's the mindset on college campuses:

The left's new faith, now that socialism has died, is pessimism. I'm struck by this when I'm on college campuses. I want to say to these kids (and professors), “OK, you think Bush's foreign policy is a disaster, but what do you believe, what's the alternative, what's your vision?” There is none. These people believe in nothing. They aren't even soft-headed idealists anymore because Bush's idealistic rhetoric has prompted them to reject idealism. All they have is a smug faith in American failure, that whatever we do--literally whatever we do: whether its militaristic or altruistic or something in between--is wrong and doomed to fail.

Pat Sajak is wondering why Hollywood is silent--completely silent--after Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered by Islamofacists on November 2nd.

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I spent much of last week visiting the great state of Texas. My only previous visits had been stopovers at D-FW Airport while I changed planes; but last year for Christmas, my wife gave me two tickets to see the Cowboys play the Bears on Thanksgiving.

While at the game, we witnessed two anecdotes--a silly one before kickoff, and another more serious example after it was over, that help illustrate the atmosphere surrounding the Cowboys' home turf, Texas Stadium.

When I first became interested in football back in the mid-to-late 1970s, the Cowboys were absolutely peaking as "America's Team": they had crushed the Broncos in 1978's Super Bowl XII, narrowly lost to the Steelers the following year, and had a world famous cheerleader squad starring in made-for-TV movies. More importantly, they had Roger Staubach at quarterback and Tom Landry as head coach, whose powerful image as straight shooting military veterans and Men of God made for impressive role models.

Of course, those Cowboys are long since gone: Staubach retired in the spring of 1980 at age 38 to make his fortune in real estate, and Landry passed away in 2000. Jerry Jones, the Cowboys' current owner, has lived off that legacy of the America's Team period of the Cowboys, the foundation built by Landry and former general manager Tex Schramm.

Now, I admire Jerry's business sense, and his ability to amass a fortune large enough to buy the Cowboys in 1989 and keep them one of the most profitable franchises in the NFL since.

But this is not a team that the man whom sportswriter Skip Bayless dubbed "God's Coach" would recognize.

For proof, check out exhibit #1:

I shot this photo of the Cowboys emerging from an inflatable tunnel with an inflatable Cowboys helmet attached to it as white dry ice oozed out. The air being pumped into it made the whole thing sort of...bob...and vibrate. And both the tunnel and the helmet have large Levitra logos on them.

(Levitra is a competitor to Viagra; both are drugs to cure what is politely called erectile dysfunction. The big difference is marketing: while both are built around dark-haired spokespersons, Levitra's is a sensuous 30-something brunette actress. And Viagra's is Bob Dole. But I digress.)

Of course, the answer why the Cowboys have a vibrating inflatable tunnel with an inflatable Cowboys helmet attached to it and both displaying Levitra logos is obvious: it's a little known fact (very little known, actually. In fact, I'm making it all up) that Woody Allen's largest fan base, by far, resides in Texas. And to appease them, Jerry Jones has instructed his team to recreate the famous climax...of Woody's 1972 film, Everything Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, But Were Afraid to Ask at the start of every Cowboys home game.

Not buying it, huh? Well, I can only surmise that Sigmund Freud's theories aren't especially popular in the Lone Star State, which is why the Cowboys would risk having their players shooting out of an inflatable tunnel festooned with logos promoting a product designed to cure erectile dysfunction. And that Jerry is a guy who will do anything for a buck. Or six or seven figures worth of them.

When they deflated the whole thing after all the players had emerged, I felt the intense urge to light up a Laramie. I'm not sure why...

Red State; Blue And Silver Tolerance

On a more serious note, especially after the ultra-ugly NBA incident in Detroit the week before last, I was really surprised at how many Chicago Bears fans were visibly enforce at the game. There were several tailgate parties built around cars and vans displaying enormous Bears flags in the parking lot before the game, and many, many people in the stands with Bears jerseys with Brian Urlacher or Walter Payton's numbers on their chests, and "GSH" logos on their sleeves for "Papa Bear" George S. Halas.

And from what I could see, none of the Cowboys fans hassled them. After the game was over, Nina and I walked back to our rent-a-car parked upteen rows deep in the enormous stadium parking lot on the other side of (I think) Highway #183, and walked the pedestrian overpass to reach that lot along with a crowd of thousands. Ever see one of those History Channel World War II documentaries where they show thousands of captured soldiers marching off to interment? That's what this crowd sort of looked like as it snaked its way through the overpass, except that they were far more boisterous, given that the Cowboys had just won, 21 to 7. But even in their excitement at winning, nobody that I saw flipped a Bears fan the bird, or got in their faces, or did anything to incite them.

I have no idea if that's par for the course at Texas Stadium, where I assume lots of fans from distant cities fly in to see their teams play the Cowboys. But having been to my share of games at Philadelphia's old Veterans Stadium, and having driven through the parking lot of Raider Nation once (and God, what a frightening experience that was), it's tough to imagine Philadelphia Eagles or Oakland Raiders fans being as tolerant with fans showing up wearing the opposition's colors as the Cowboys' fans were.

And after the Rumble In Motown, and listening to "Dieter" and ABC's Carole Simpson each describe the red states like they were located on another planet, it was good to see.

« Close It

The Digital Bits DVD news and reviews site seems to think it has. Start here then scroll up to the next post for their take.

Roger Kimball of The New Criterion explores how the left has become the new puritans, disdaining sybaritic pleasure at every turn--and smugly punishing those who don't toe their rigid and arbitrary line.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal offers an example of new puritanism in action in England.

Kimball's post builds on an essay from June in the Weekly Standard by James Piereson which he called "Punitive Liberalism":

Via Ressurrection Song, you will believe, in spite of yourself, that a French car can be cool.

(Or that a well-paid advertising team can somehow find a way to make them appear cool.)

John Leo has a look at the reasoned, sublimely nuanced use of language by celebrities and the media in this ever-so-calm election year.

(Via Betsy Newmark, whose writing is fortunately always the exact opposite of that which Leo highlights.)

Democrats can fight long, hard, and dirty when they want to. If they actually chose to defend America itself against its enemies with as much force as they deploy during election-time, they would never have to rely on such tactics in the first place.

For example, Power Line looks at the sad case of Steve Gardner:

Jim Geraghty, via Slant Point, notes the bipartisan consensus building power of Howard Dean as potential chairman of the DNC.

I just inserted the code into our sidebar to the right that allows our latest headlines to be included in a My Yahoo homepage. You can click through those headlines and go right to this Website. I've used My Yahoo as my home page since, I guess, the late 1990s, and I suspect more than a few of our readers do as well. If you're one of them, click here, or on "+ My Yahoo!" icon on the sidebar, and you can enter this site straight from your homepage.

Incidentally, Yahoo recently redesigned their My Yahoo page, and now allow virtually any site with an RSS feed to be accessible from it--it's possible to really customize the thing. Those guys over at the Museum of Media History were really onto something when they talked about the increasing customization of the news. Or they will be in a decade. Or something like that.

Just before I left for Dallas last week, Dan Rather announced that he'll be stepping down from his nightly CBS news broadcast. Over at his swank MSNBC blog, Glenn Reynolds has a good post about Captain Dan, including several links, and some typically sound advice for the legacy media.

...Who will of course, ignore all of it, thus ensuring the Blogosphere will be happily kept busy throughout the next year--and into 2014, at least.

The next ten years of Internet-based journalism are laid out in this incredibly well done museum exhibit-style piece beamed back in time from 2014.

Reality won't be nearly as clean, but I suspect this site gets more right than wrong. And as The Professor notes, "the news wars of 2010 were notable for the fact that no actual news organization was involved."

Update: I had completely forgotten about this throwaway post from June of 2002, when I wrote that Seagate had announced a 120-gigabyte hard drive. I found it just now, after searching my site for something else I had written.

Two years ago, a 120-gig drive was big enough news that I felt compelled to blog about it.

The Friday before last, I installed double that--a 240-gigabyte hard drive--as a second drive in my PC, to hold all my music software (including both prerecorded loops that I've purchased, and new material that I've recorded). And that was only because my local computer store was out of 300-gig drives.

So I could easily see the technology that leads to the news wars of 2010 coming to pass.

John Hinderaker of Power Line writes:

I bought a book today (Sharpe's Rifles) in my neighborhood Barnes & Noble. It was the first time I'd been in the store since shortly before the election. I was struck by the difference: then, the tables were piled high with anti-Bush books. Dozens of them. Today, they had disappeared without a trace, not even in evidence on a remainder table. It was as though the book store (or the left) had said: Oh, well. Never mind.

Which got me thinking--remember the al Qaqaa story? Ten days before the election, it was of vital importance that we find out what happened to a "missing" one-tenth of one percent of the munitions in Iraq. Since the election? Who cares?

Or how about the draft? Remember how just before the election, the Democrats were feverishly trying to convince college students and others that, should President Bush be re-elected, there was a secret plan to reinstate the draft? Well, now that President Bush has indeed won re-election, shouldn't the left be gearing up to resist this very real danger? Um, no. Forget about it. The draft rumor has served its purpose (or, rather, failed to serve its purpose). The left has Moved On.

Do you suppose, two years or four years from now, when the Democrats are again spinning fables, anyone will remember how quickly they abandoned some of the principal themes of this year's campaign?

I was about to say, "Just ask Winston", except that that supposes that the clean-up in aisle #12 at Barnes & Noble (and Borders) is the result of some sort of top-down conspiracy--but I think it's something in the left itself that allows it to instantly disgard old ideas and create new ones just as quickly as the American populace can go from one fad to another: skateboarding, rollerskating, disco, jogging, and down the line.

Hello? Check one, two! Check one, two! Is this thing on?

Hope you had a nice Thanksgiving; I spent mine in Dallas--in fact, I'm still there, waiting for my plane at D-FW Airport. (I'm using the Wi-Fi at the American Airlines Admirals Club.)

Watching for regular blogging to resume shortly, hopefully tomorrow.

Update: Safely back; though lots of turbulence on the second half of the flight.

Heh.

Update: This is also heh-worthy.

Interesting essay by Scott Hogenson of CNSNews. It makes a good double feature with this October 2002 piece on left-wing bigotry by Andrew Sullivan, who wrote it just as the bloom was coming off the all-too-brief post-9/11 detente by the American left.

When I originally linked to it, a week before the 2002 mid-term elections, I wrote:

When you resort to the examples that Sullivan gives above, it says to me that you're losing the argument; you've relinquished your role as moral leader, and you've got to crank up the noise--and the hate--to compensate.

I have a review of Peter Gabriel's new Play DVD over at Blogcritics.

Jim Geraghty has some thoughts on the sociological ramifications of Friday's NBA fight over at the (presumably soon-to-be-retitled) Kerry Spot at National Review Online.

A few years ago, when NFL Films began running its Inside The Vault series on ESPN, I was struck by how conservative and dignified most mid-'60s fans looked. There was little or no team merchandise available, so fans arrived to stadiums on Sunday looking like they had just come from church (which many no doubt had), rather than wearing rainbow-colored wigs, Darth Vader Helmets, or cheeseheads. No doubt, the games had their share of hecklers, but I'll bet that in general, fans of the past were much more subdued than today's members of Raiders Nation, the Philadelphia Eagles' crazed fans, or...the courtside fans of the NBA's Detroit Pistons.

This isn't meant to exclude the players' guilt in Friday's incident: compare atheletes of the past with today's every-millionare-for-himself attitude. (Indiana's Ron Artest, the player who was banned for the rest of the season for being the pointman in the fight, actually asked for time off before the fight--to promote a rap album he was releasing on his recording label!)

But somehow, and without really thinking consciously about it, society has created the notion that sports arenas are a place for fans to go almost literally insane, rather than merely observe the hometown team in person and cheer for them. But the Pistons/Pacers rumble gives sports--and the public that watches them in person--a chance to hit the control/alt/delete keys and reset.

Will it? To be honest, I doubt it, but we'll see. Geraghty's right though: the politician who actually addresses this issue will look very smart.

Update: Welcome Kerry Spot readers!

Err, former President Bill Clinton that is, for the funding of his library.

Betsy Newmark has the details--including a link to information about the library's Tinky Winky exhibit. (Why yes, you did just read that correctly.)

Michael Moore could not be reached for comment.

Update: In other Clinton news, the Weekly Standard says that somewhat surprisingly, his campaigning efforts had little or no effect on the November elections.

Jami Bernard of The New York Daily News gives The SpongeBob Squarepants Movie three stars.

Her panel of carefully chosen experts agree.

Update: Meanwhile, Virginia Postrel is praising The Incredibles, which is a film I really need to see while it's still in theaters.

President Bush's rescue of his Secret Service man is being played by most in the Blogosphere as another example of Bush=Machismo. But Power Line notes that it could have larger--and possibly far darker--implications.

Back on November 4th, The American Spectator quoted sources who said that the bogus exit polls of election day afternoon were leaked--or heck, manufactured--by the Kerry Camp to the press.

But rather than investigate their source, and how they made their way to both bloggers and Matt Drudge, the legacy media are using them as a tool to trash the Blogosphere.

Concerned that President Bush won reelection? Feeling trapped in "Jesusland"? Don't hitch the U-Haul to the Yugo and head towards the 49th parallel just yet: Fox News is coming to Canada.

Back on Friday, we received a huge Insta- and Power-Lanche from our post about seeing Tom Wolfe speak in San Francisco and witnessing the remarkable exchange between Tom and the fellow in the audience I dubbed "Dieter", after the Mike Myers Saturday Night Live character.

Today, Hugh Hewitt writes that Dieter's mindset is proving to be the rule, not the exception in today's Democratic Party:

The hostility towards religious belief expressed by some Democratic activists is extraordinary. This was once the party of the working poor and immigrants who have always cherished their faiths. If the elites of the party share this resentment --even if it is not openly expressed-- the party will never recover. I would like to see some from among those elites answer this growing anti-Christian sentiment within their ranks.

Glenn Reynolds, blogging on a 1972-era eMachine that he purchased surplus from the Texas Air National Guard, writes that CBS is continuing to stall whatever "investigation" they're supposedly mounting, even as humorists run roughshod over CBS's brand name and goodwill.

On November 17th, Sean Hackbarth wrote that while Kmart has acquired Sears, that strategy that's emerging is that Kmart is more than likely to keep the Sears name and junk their own brand.

Today he notes that others agree wth his initial take.

Yesterday we linked to video of the brawl in the stands of the Detroit Pistons game on Friday.

Today, the NBA has handed out stiff suspensions to players on both the Pistons, as well as the Indiana Pacers, as well as sent a cautionary note to potentially rowdy fans:

One the issues that we've been tracking off and on here at EdDriscoll.com HQ is the ongoing fight to allow oil drilling in the area of Alaska that Jonah Goldberg once dubbed "America's Vast Pestilential Wasteland" .

You'd think that the left would favor such drilling, especially since they're driving around in cars with "NO BLOOD FOR OIL" bumperstickers--but they're not: stasis is a way of life for the conservative left.

Fortunately, the issue may be a moot point in the Senate, thanks to the growing Republican majority there.

Senator Kerry, on March 19th, talking about the snowboarding collision he had with a Secret Service agent assigned to protect him while he was having a photo op in Idaho's Sawtooth National Recreation Area:

"I don't fall down. The son of a bitch knocked me over!"

SANTIAGO, Chile Nov 20, 2004: President Bush stepped into the middle of a confrontation and pulled his lead Secret Service agent away from Chilean security officials who barred his bodyguards from entering an elegant dinner for 21 world leaders Saturday night.

Several Chilean and American agents got into a pushing and shoving match outside the cultural center where the dinner was held. Bush noticed the fracas after posing for pictures on a red carpet with the summit host, Chilean President Ricardo Lagos and his wife and first lady Laura Bush.

Abandoning the other three, Bush walked over to the agents, reached through the dispute and pulled his agent from the scrum.

The president, looking irritated, walked away with the agent. The incident was shown on APEC television.

"Chilean security tried to stop the president's Secret Service from accompanying him," said White House deputy press secretary Claire Buchan. "He told them they were with him and the issue was resolved."

Scott Ott "reports" that Tom Daschle tried to filibuster his own departure from the Senate.

Certainly would have been keeping in character!

For the one percent of you who haven't seen the rumble in the stands of the Pistons/Pacers NBA game last night, here's the video.

Expect ESPN to be analyzing this fight and its implications for the next six months.

Jonah Goldberg writes that even after President Bush's victory at the polls, he gets the same treatment from the press--that he can do nothing right, even when he does exactly what they've been carping for:

Frank Martin has the 2008 Republican ticket for president all lined up and ready to hit the campaign trail.

(But please, give me until next fall to recover from this election, huh?)

I have a review of the new DVD release highlighting this 1970 concert, over at Blogcritics.

New York's legendary Museum of Modern Art reopens to the public tomorrow (or today, depending upon which time zone you're in) after being closed for several years for an extensive remodeling and renovation. If you can't make it there on Saturday, The New Criterion has a sneak preview.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I spent many, many hours at MOMA--Nina and I even had our wedding reception there in 1998. But this new version sounds like a very, very different museum.

Charles Krauthammer brilliantly places it into context: Arafat's goal wasn't merely the creation of a Palestinian state, but the destruction of Israel:

That was the theme of his entire life. Yes, he signed interim deals to get a foothold in Palestine. But that was always with the objective of continuing the fight from a better strategic position. It was never to conclude a lasting compromise or real peace with Israel.

That is why he died so far from his promised land. This promised land was never the West Bank and Gaza. Arafat founded Fatah in 1959 — eight years before Israel even acquired these territories. His objective then, and until the day he died, was a Palestinian state built on the ruins of an eradicated Israel.

Bill Clinton was astonished when Arafat rejected the offer of a West Bank and Gaza state, turning down the opportunity to be its George Washington. Americans never understood that Arafat saw himself completely differently: as an anti-imperialist revolutionary in the mold of Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong and Fidel Castro. Like them, his motto was "revolution unto victory." Total victory. No half loaf. And given Israel's stubborn refusal to die, Arafat's cause became sustaining the struggle — the revolution — indefinitely, almost as an end in itself.

Sotheby's is auctioning the world's largest bottle of wine tomorrow:

On November 20th Sotheby's auction of Finest and Rarest Wines will include The World's Largest Bottle of Wine, which holds over 173 standard bottles - the equivalent of 1200 glasses - of wine. The creation of this gigantic Bordeaux-style bottle of 2001 Beringer Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley, was conceived by Beringer Vineyards & Morton's, The Steakhouse, and is to be soldto benefit Share Our Strength, one of the nation's leading anti-hunger organizations. A sister bottle will make a coast-to-coast tour of 27 of the 61 Morton's restaurants in the United States, celebrating the restaurant's 25th anniversary. This masterpiece of glassmaking art was certified by Guinness World Records and measures 4.5' tall and 4.5' around.

(Via Blogdex.)

One of the reasons why the far left are so depressed (as my friend "Dieter" demonstrated last night), is because on Election Tuesday, for a few hours, they felt the race was in the bag, as a result of seriously out-of-whack exit polls, which sources say were leaked by the Kerry Camp.

(In contrast, I for one spent the afternoon election Tuesday preparing to welcome our new snowboarding overlord. And was ready to remind him that as a trusted member of the Blogosphere, I could be helpful in rounding up others to toil in his wife's underground white raisin caves.)

But as PoliPundit writes, it turns out that exit polls have "leaned significantly Democrat in every race since 1988".

Iowahawk "reports":

The retail industry received another shake-up today as Sears Holding Corp. (NYSE: S), the parent company behind the recent merger of Sears and Kmart, announced the acquisition of embattled European cheesemaker France (NASDAQ: FROG). The buyout deal, estimated at $2.7 billion, will position Sears/Kmart/France as the world's third largest retailer and 15th ranked military power.

But can Sears turn their new asset--a perennial underperformer--around?

Tom Wolfe spoke yesterday in San Francisco, at the Herbst Theatre, an early 1930s, 916-seat auditorium. He was introduced by Michael Lewis, who began by describing a visit to New York in 1989, shortly after Liar's Poker was released.

"Tom Wolfe really loves your book", his agent said.

"Oh suuuure, he does", Lewis replied to his agent, who said, "No really, he does. And he'd like to meet you for lunch".

"Well, I'm staying at the Algonquin. Tell him to give me a call", Lewis told him.

"The next day, the phone rang. And a voice said, "Hi, I'm Tom Wolfe. I really loved Liar's Poker. Where do you want to meet for lunch?"

George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Brian Eno, Mick Fleetwood, Stanley Kubrick and the cast of South Park all meet for swinging postmodern shindig in my latest Blogcritics post.

And you're invited, too!

Interesting post by David Bernstein, who makes it sound as if "Likudnik" is the latest nudge nudge, wink wink word to replace "neocon" as a subtle anti-Semitic epithet by the left.

Why not a solid mahogany USS Reagan model?

The detail and craftsmanship is impressive--as is the price: $999.00

Hugh Hewitt writes that "Time magazine can--should--must name George W. Bush "Man of the Year." So they probably won't.

By the way, note who's on the panel. Hugh Hewitt includes a link to a blog post by Andrew Sullivan:

I just got back from a fun luncheon for Time magazine, where a panel of me, Al Sharpton, Brian Williams, Alessandra Stanley and Coleen Rowley (the 9/11 FBI whistle-blower)

Time is nothing if not contemptuous of Henry Luce's original audience, and the tastes of Manhattan and the left side of the Beltway would love nothing more than to amuse themselves with the idea of successfully insulting George W. Bush and his red state supporters.

* * * Why would anyone expect Time's editors to escape from the fevers that have swept the left this year, fevers which have only grown worse post-election? To do the obvious thing and recognize 2004 as a year of Bush would be in some way to capitulate to the obvious center of gravity of American sentiment, and the left would rather talk insanely about secession than capitulate.

Of course, as Jonah Goldberg notes, Time has long passed its freshness date.

Update: Tim Graham also noticed the diverse panel that Time assembled to help make their choice:

Most of those are yes, Kerry-loving media liberals (this year including Sullivan), but...Al Sharpton? How on Earth does everyone have to include this guy in their little plans? Is he really an objective journalist at heart? No. He's still a Tawana-fraud-pushing, violence-urging, racial-ambulance-chasing embarrassment. Time should try a more reputable POY judge -- Anna Nicole Smith, or the host of "Fear Factor," or someone responsible for messing up the flu vaccine.

"I'd rather be judged by 12 than carried by 6."

Why on earth is the Target department store chain taking aim at the Salvation Army??

Hugh Hewitt has details and contact information for Target.

Update: For more Blue State-style buffoonery, James Lileks has some thoughts on the ACLU's ongoing war against that most evil of American enemies...the Boy Scouts.

In addition to being linked to by the Blogfather, and my three pieces in PC World, I also have a review of the Sirius Sportster portable satellite radio in Digital World, the magazine-in-a-magazine that's bundled with PC World. And I also have a review of Unledded, from Jimmy Page & Robert Plant, in this months' Vintage Guitar. It builds on some of the material that Kevin Shirley, who engineered the DVD, told me for Blogcritics.

Ed Driscoll: on the Internet, at your local supermarket's magazine rack--and beyond!

Cliff May of National Review makes a great point:

The MSM is going on and on about President Bush filling his Cabinet with people who “agree with him” – that is to say people who share his vision and are eager to implement his agenda.

Instead, they say, he should be hiring people who disagree with him, people with different visions and other agendas.

This is particularly curious coming from the MSM (“mainstream media” for those who don’t speak blogian). Why? Because the publishers and seniors editors of the complaining publications -- do they hire people who disagree with them? Do they hire conservatives and evangelicals and other such characters as editors and reporters?

No, of course they don’t. And they never would. Not for all the chardonnay in France.

“People don’t realize that by voting Republican, they voted against themselves,” she says. Of Iraq in particular, she adds, “I worry that some people are entertained by the idea of this war. They don’t know anything about the Iraqis, but they’re angry and frustrated in their own lives. It’s like Germany, before Hitler took over. The economy was bad and people felt kicked around. They looked for a scapegoat. Now we’ve got a new bunch of Hitlers.”

Allow Dennis Miller to rebut that astonishing bit of crystalline logic:

The Left is so busy saying John Ashcroft is Hitler, and President Bush is Hitler, and Rudy Giuliani is Hitler that the only guy they wouldn’t call Hitler was the foreign guy with the mustache who was throwing people who disagreed with him into the wood-chipper.

Almost forgot--if you did vote Republican, remember, Linda doesn't want you in her audience. Or doesn't want to be in the same audience with you. Or something like that. Because music is a universal force for good, helping to change the world and bring people together. Except for eeevil, eeevil, icky Republicans.

Check out the photograph and description over at Power Line, and then check out Captain Ed for his thoughts.

For more fun chemical warfare thoughts, PoliPundit has an interesting connect-the-dots theory regarding the anthrax scare from shortly--very shortly--after 9/11 and possible Iraqi involvement.

Update: Looks like they're actually tubes designed to test for the presence of Sarin. Of course, why the "insurgents" would feel the need to test for such a thing is an interesting question...

Jim Litke of AP looks at ABC's stunt to promote their Desperate Housewives series by starting Monday Night Football yesterday with Nicollette Sheridan frolicking in a nothing but a towel (and apparently losing even that) with Terrell Owens of the Philadelphia Eagles.

Just as with CBS's NippleGate (man, thank God Dan Rather wasn't involved in that), the networks are doing the equivalent of "cheat and retreat": knowingly going outrageously over the top with their raunch and then mock-apologizing for it afterwards.

Wonder if Michael Powell will come down as hard on ABC as he did with CBS after the Super Bowl in January.

Update: More here, and here's Michael Powell's initial take.

Here's Michael Moore on April 14th.

Here's Chris Matthews, last night.

(And of course, they're both unconsciously parroting "Pinch" Sulzberger of the New York Times.)

And the left wonders why Americans don't trust them to defend the country?

To paraphrase that eminent archeologist Dr. Henry Jones, Jr., "Tranzis--I hate those guys".

(Via InstaPundit. And yeah, I know--but it's too good a line not to spoof. Background here.)

Have I got a bartender for you!

(I wonder if the Subservient Chicken stops there for a frosty one?)

David Brooks, and Joseph Bottum of The Weekly Standard weigh in on Tom Wolfe's latest novel.

After my own casual experiment of not watching the presidential election on TV this year, and after a year of crazed TV news reporting, culminating in Ra^therGate, I decided to do this month's "Ideas For Every Room" newsletter for Electronic House on yet another reason why a PC belongs in your media room or home theater.

It looks like advertisers are agreeing with me: Internet ad revenues are soaring, as more and more people (especially men, interestingly enough) tune out TV networks in search of content on the Web.

TV as a device isn't going anywhere, but in a trend that George Gilder first spotted over a decade ago, more and more it's going to be an interactive device for playing back entertainment (sports, movies, and music-oriented content, whether it's via DVD or TiVo'ed off the networks), rather than for simply a device for passively pumping the media's biases into our brains. But when Dan Rather is disgraced (how badly? Well, I reflexively started typing the HTML superscript command when I got to the "th" in his name just now), Tom Brokaw booed at college football games, and ordinary folks come up to Peter Jennings and say this...

Well, the handwriting is on the wall for the big three's national TV news coverage.

(On the other hand, if Fox wants to put together a nightly news show for their TV network, they've got a pretty darn good chance of cleaning up in flyover country. And the infrastructure is already there: make Brit Hume the anchorman, let James Brown (no, not the Godfather of Soul--this James Brown) do the sports, and presto!--instant ratings and advertising revenue machine.)

Update: Great line by James Lileks:

Oh: one more thing. The Administration is clearing the decks for the second term. Out with the old & tired, in with new ideas, etc. How’s about the mainstream media does the same? Burn up half the deadwood, ease the ossified elements off the stage, bring in new writers and editors and announcers and producers. If they can do it at State, they could do it at CBS.

Yes, yes, I know. The State Department is just that. But CBS is the news.

Update: Talk about not learning your lessons. This article in the Sacramento Bee describing a recent post-election meeting of TV news bigwigs sounds like they have their heads completely buried in the sand about what just happened this year. On the other hand, the original dinosaurs never understood the concept of extinction, either.

Update: More here on the Sac Bee story. Also, check this out:

Fox News and the Internet emerged as new leading sources for election news, finds a Pew Research Center post-election study of 1,209 voters. Overall, 21% say they got most of their election news from Fox, compared with 15% for CNN and 13% from NBC.
Those who cite the Internet as a main source of campaign news rose to 21% from 11% in 2000 and 3% in 1996. Those who say they got any campaign news online rose to 41% from 30% in 2000.

Voters are increasingly troubled by what they see as unfair treatment of the candidates. This year, 40% of voters thought Bush was treated unfairly, up from 30% in 2000; 31% said Kerry was treated unfairly, up from 24% who faulted Al Gore's coverage in 2000.

Update: Professor Bainbridge looks at a member of the media who gets it--and one does not.

Insta-Update: Welcome readers of Glenn Reynolds' MSNBC blog!

Junk Yard-Update: If you've heard the original, this is a riot.

It's really fascinating watching the Blogosphere change and evolve. Back in the late '90s, I associated Weblogs with online personal diaries. Then came September 11th and the ascendancy of InstaPundit and other political and current events bloggers (like me)!

But as I've written before, a Weblog is just a platform--anybody can blog about anything.

Witness Manolo, the purveyor of what looks to be a mighty fine Weblog about...shoes.

And why not? Frankly, I'm surprised there aren't more fashion-oriented blogs. (Or maybe there are, and I'm simply not aware of them--which wouldn't be very surprising. Here's another one, by the way.)

Now if I could just find a decent pair of suede monkstraps in a size 12D...

(Found via Technorati.)

Patrick Ruffini is back in the Blogosphere under his own name, after his Herculean efforts in helping to re-elect the president.

Welcome back!

Back in 2002, Garrison Keillor smeared newly-elected Norm Coleman of Minnesota. In mid-2004, he released a book called Homegrown Democrat: a Few Plain Thoughts from the Heart of America , which demonstrated the warm feelings he plainly thought about the people who make up the heart of America.

The day after the elections this month, Keillor again demonstrates his superior tolerance and willingness to accept a diversity of ideas and opinion.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International, which once ran TV ads featuring celebrities toasting freedom, demonstrates their new-found contempt for the idea. (Note the poster in that above link. I read it as moving beyond believing the idea that "Bush=Hitler". That poster is implying that America=Nazi Germany. Gee, nice, Amnesty.)

Paul Mirengoff of Power Line places these sorts of temper-tantrum-like actions into context:

Liberals don't want to give the public much credit even when it elects Democrats, and this fact reinforces my thesis. The liberals attributed Clinton's win in 1992 to "the economy, stupid" coupled with "Bubba's" ability to connect with rednecks. If they viewed Clinton's win in 1996 as the result of anything more uplifting, I guess I missed it. Compare this to the way Republicans talk about Reagan's victories or Bush's recent triumph. All of this suggests that leading Democrats don't hold the public in contempt because they are now the minority party; rather they are now the minority party because they hold the public in contempt.

Update: David Limbaugh agrees, writing:

Voters can usually detect counterfeit peddlers of faith and morality. For candidates to resonate in this area they have to do more than talk. They must show they truly believe in what they're selling. But it's more than that. In the end, it ultimately turns on what they're selling.

For presidential candidates to garner the conservative Christian vote — which is the block of voters we're mostly talking about here — they can't get too far by just promoting any issue and wrapping it in the language of morality.

Update: Charles Eklund has some advice for Keillor:

Keep talking.

Keep pushing the Democratic Party further away from the life experiences of the average American. Keep demonizing group after group. Gun owners, small business people, the professional middle class and now Christians. Run 'em off, tell 'em the Democrats can get by without their sorry arses.

See if that's the way to win elections.

I dare ya.

Here's a headline (complete with trademark police siren) you don't expect to see every day, even on Drudge:

FEDS TO PUT RADIO ANTENNAS ON MEDICINE BOTTLES
Food and Drug Administration and drug makers are expected to announce an agreement Monday to put tiny radio antennas on labels of millions of medicine bottles to combat counterfeiting, abuse and fraud... Developing...

Quick as a, well, ninja, our next national threat emerges from the shadows.

(Yes, that's a very sexyful reference in the title, if I do say so myself.)

Well, quite a bit, actually. And liberal blogger Michael J. Totten writes that until the left starts assembling a coherent approach to the subject, they risk being out of the White House for a very long time.

I'd like to think that back in 2002, I was a couple of years ahead of the curve, when I wrote about the coming growth of city-wide Wi-Fi wireless Internet connectivity.

Tim Cavanaugh of Reason looks at the (many) downsides of cities doing the job themselves, rather than private enterprise.

Here's James Carville in November of 2002, after Republicans made gains in Congress and retook the Senate after briefly losing control thanks to Jumpin' Jim Jeffords:

Here's James Carville today, on Meet The Press.

Hopefully James will keep this bi-annual streak going...

Well, PC World that is, where I have an article on "HDTV on the Cheap", as well as a couple of computer reviews, in the December issue. They're all online (hence the hyperlinks), but don't let that stop you from picking up a hard copy or three of the magazine.

Over at Blogcritics, I have a first look at The Billboard Illustrated Home Recording Handbook, due out next month.

Somehow, The New York Times manages to invoke Godwin's Law in a review of The Polar Express, a Christmas movie:

It's likely, I imagine, that most moviegoers will be more concerned by the eerie listlessness of those characters' faces and the grim vision of Santa Claus's North Pole compound, with interiors that look like a munitions factory and facades that seem conceived along the same oppressive lines as Coketown, the red-brick town of "machinery and tall chimneys" in Dickens's "Hard Times." Tots surely won't recognize that Santa's big entrance in front of the throngs of frenzied elves and awe-struck children directly evokes, however unconsciously, one of Hitler's Nuremberg rally entrances in Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will." But their parents may marvel that when Santa's big red sack of toys is hoisted from factory floor to sleigh it resembles nothing so much as an airborne scrotum.

Merry Christmas, all you simple hicks living in the Red States, from the enlightened, compassionate elites at the Times!

(Via a comment posted on VodkaPundit.)

James Glassman has 10 modest suggestions to help save the Democratic Party.

And the beauty of them is--at least a few are sure to be adopted!

Larry Kudlow delivers some righteous pro-Israel smackdown on Pat Buchanan:

Last night on MSNBC's Scarborough Country, I had to take my friend Pat Buchanan to the woodshed. He made the most extraordinary moral equivalence between Yasser Arafat's murderous terrorism and the post-WWII Israeli battles for independence against Britain, that were led by Menachem Begin, and other Jewish freedom fighters. There is no moral equivalence. The Israeli homeland concept, rooted in Biblical history, was always based on the principles of freedom and democracy. Yasser was always a totalitarian.

The former was always a just war, the latter an unjust war. As I told Buchanan, you may as well equate Yasser Arafat with the colonists in the American Revolution. They fought hard, sometimes resorting to terrorism, but their cause of freedom and democracy was just. Next thing you know, Buchanan will morally equate Yasser Arafat with George Washington. This is fruits-and-nuts stuff. And Bill Buckley was absolutely right, years ago, to blast Buchanan, in a long essay in NR.

Jonathan Last comes, surprisingly, to praise Senator Kerry, not to bury him, in his Weekly Standard column. Over at his blog, he writes:

My argument is that Kerry was a pretty good candidate who ran a flawed campaign. He was the probably the best option on the table for Democrats and, although he lost, he didn't wreck the party, and by the way, it probably isn't entirely his fault. I know, faint praise.

But I'd like to further posit that I don't know if it's going to be possible for any Democrat to win the White House with the crazy Michael Moore left hanging like an albatross around their neck. In order for the Democrats to become a viable national party again, they're going to have to excommunicate the rabid, nutball left. And that's going to require a pretty ruthless political mind.

Can a Democrat pull that off? Let me just say this, if Bill Clinton had been running in 2004, he wouldn't have had a Sister Soulja moment--he would have a Michael Moore moment.

(Via Power Line.)

Great National Review (On Dead Tree) cover.

Update: More heh, in a New York Post classic.

And now, the rest of the Arafat story, which AP somehow forgot to report today.

Keep it in mind when Jimmy Carter gets misty-eyed at Arafat's funeral.

Update: Tom Gross explains the Lady Di treatment that the press is giving Arafat.

Update: Jeff Jacoby looks at Arafat the Monster.

Yasser Arafat has assumed room temperature. In true AP/NYT-style, the original second paragraph had the most astonishing and nauseating bit of moral equivalence that I've read in a long time:

Yasser Arafat, who triumphantly forced his people's plight into the world spotlight but failed to achieve his lifelong quest for Palestinian statehood, died Thursday at age 75.

He was to the end a man of many mysteries and paradoxes -- terrorist, statesman, autocrat and peacemaker.

By the way, good thing he died in time for his funeral. It would have been quite rude of Yasser to have outlived it.

For a fairer--and by that I mean harsher--assessment of Arafat's legacy, check out Helle Dale in today's Washington Times.

The Professor summed up Arafat's death in two eloquent words: "Good riddance".

Update: Via Bela The Dog, here's the original text of the AP copy. I guess the Times replaced it with their own in-house (and only slightly less fawning) obit.

Another Update Obviously, the paperwork was really slowing things down...

My review copy of Peter Gabriel's upcoming Play DVD arrived from Warner Brothers. Expect a review on Blogcritics in the not-too-distant future.

And the copy I purchased of Ike: Countdown to D-Day, with Tom Selleck as General Eisenhower arrived as well, via Amazon.

I think Gabriel's a better singer and songwriter, but Ike sure knows how to plan a more spectacular road show...

SamaBlog yesterday.

Rush Limbaugh today.

Talk about the speed of the Blogosphere!

Update: Rob Sama is not a happy man right now--and I doubt I'd be either if I was in his shoes.

The New York Times calls outgoing Attorney General John Ashcroft "controversial", yet conveniently forgets that they're the ones who fueled the controversy.

Helle Dale of The Washington Times doesn't mince words when it comes to the World's Oldest (and possibly already deadest) Terrorist.

And when I say there is none, I do mean that there is a certain amount: here's 89 examples worth from this year alone.

In the mail today was the annual National Geographic catalog, just in time to begin shopping for what James Lileks would call "The Holiday That Dare Not Speak Its Name".

Tell me--what does this cover suggest to you?

Considering that catalog's headline is "Dare To Explore", is it just me, or are these two bears, you know, exploring, much like Willem Dafoe and Greg Kinnear in Auto-Focus? I can just picture a Gary Larson-like caption underneath along the lines of, "Dude, I've heard of being hung like a bear, but...damn!" And so on.

Maybe that wasn't National Geographic's intent, and my mind is in the gutter. But I'd like to think that somebody at NG thought about that possibility when they were laying out the Christmas Holiday catalog this year.

« Close It

The legacy media are just waking up to the fact that there are now people treating them with about as much compassion as they've treated the American public over the last 50 years. And not surprisingly, they don't like it.

Douglas Kern writes:

Former CBS News correspondent Eric Engberg has written a diatribe bemoaning the performance of bloggers during the 2004 presidential election. It's an uncommonly terrible article, even by CBS standards.

This is a classic.

I was listening to a doctor treating Arafat on the radio saying that they had no idea--no idea at all!--what was wrong with him. None at all!

Which lends even more credence to this bit of speculation.

36 years after breaking up, Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker are reuniting for a series of shows at the Royal Albert Hall in London next year.

Rumors that Viagra and Geritol will be sponsoring the shows are premature, however...

John Hawkins has post-election advice for both the Republican and Democratic parties.

Michael Barone has a perceptive analysis of the 2004 election, including the role that media bias played:

Four years ago, I wrote that this was a 49 percent nation. In the 1996, 1998, and 2000 House elections, Republicans led in the popular vote by 49 to 48 or 48.5 percent; the 2000 presidential election was a 48-to-48 percent tie. Americans seemed evenly divided, mainly on cultural and religious lines. In 2002 that changed a bit: Republicans won the House vote 51 to 46 percent while Bush's job approval hovered around 65 percent.

This year his job rating has hovered around 50 percent or below. He has been the target all year of vicious and biased coverage from old media, many if not most of whose personnel saw their job as removing this scourge from the presidency. The 60 Minutes story about Bush's Air National Guard service, which was based on obviously forged documents, is only the most egregious example. Old media have headlined violence in Iraq and reported almost nothing about positive developments there; they highlighted the charges of self-promoter Joseph Wilson and spoke nary a word when they were proved bogus; they have given good economic news far less positive coverage, studies show, than they did when Bill Clinton was in office.

Yet the results of this election closely resemble the 2002 House results. Bush beat Kerry 51 to 48 percent; the popular vote for the House appears to be about 51 to 47 percent Republican. Voters knew the stakes--polls showed majorities thought this was an important and consequential election--and both candidates had plenty of opportunity to make their cases.

Speaking of which, check out this quote by Carole Simpson of ABC News:

Really perceptive short essay by Libby Sternberg about how the left's claims of "nonjudgementalism" masks a hardline moral absolutism.

Howard Kurtz writes that it's time to "Let the Explaining Begin!", and includes a good explanation of the immediate post-election period:

Jonah Goldberg of National Review says, "There are three or four days after every election where the clay is still malleable and everyone wants to pound it before it hardens into conventional wisdom. There's this furious battle for everyone to impose their own meaning on the election returns." The less glamorous reality, he says, is that "Bush got more people to the polls and no one thought he could."

CBS News has an article titled, "Howard Dean considering bid to chair Democratic Party".

Of course! After losing the presidential election by three million votes, let's nominate a guy who won one state in the primaries: his home state of Vermont, and that only after he had bowed out of the race with a mighty YEAAAARGHHH!!!!

Incidentally, I'm not a real Dean hater. Despite his voodoo chile freak-out scream back in January, there's something kind of likeable about the guy--and as, I think Mark Steyn wrote (but I can't find the exact quote), Dean was somewhat of a moderate trying to pass himself off as a wild-eyed leftist; Kerry was a wild-eyed leftist trying to pass himself off as a moderate.

On the other hand, quotes like this and this don't demonstrate much of a sensitivity towards the moderate middle. We're I a Democrat, I'm just not sure if I'd want Dean to lead the efforts to rebuild my party.)

Update: Found the quote--it was by Steyn, and it does involve Dean, but the second half of the equation wasn't Kerry, it was Wesley Clark:

But this is no time for a Democratic candidate who feels your pain. Democratic activists want someone who feels their anger, and Mad How the mad cow was pretty much invented by the somnolent Gov. Dean to fit that bill.

So I would say Howard Dean is a sane man pretending to be crazy. Whereas Mr. Clark gives every indication of a crazy man pretending to be sane.

This post by the New England Republican is a pretty good round-up of who benefitted--and who didn't--last Tuesday. Unlike its New York Times equivalent, it doesn't take a cheap shot at the Swift Vets, who finally have some closure after being screwed 35 years ago in the Senate.

Jay Nordlinger collects some delicious anti-Bush quotes from both Hollywood and the legacy media:

Years ago, at the Oscars, Sally Field said, "You like me, you really like me!" Well, I now say, "They hate us — they really hate us." I'm talking about the Left, and the media elite, of course, and the "us" is . . . Bush supporters.

Long before Tom Wolfe started releasing big honking 700-page novels, he was the absolute master at the 3000 to 5000-word non-fiction magazine article. His potent writing style was perfectly suited to covering the wildness of the 1960s and 1970s, as a sedate post-World War II America started going crazy with hippies, protestors, dropouts, love-ins, bed-ins, be-ins, et al. His 1976 book, Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine, collected several of them, including "The Intelligent Coed's Guide To America", an article based on a lecture at a Midwestern university where Wolfe was one several speakers who all flew-in via O'Hare airport. Also on the panel was a Paul Ehrlich-style "ecologist" who saw the world ending in the year 2000, because pollution would destroy a key ion element in the atmosphere, which would cause our bones to decay. (As today, there were so many eco-terror doom and gloom fantasies going around back then.)

After mock-fearing that the women of Wolfe's Lexington Avenue would be walking around like deboned "denim and patent-leather blobs", Wolfe has a brilliant passage featuring a student attending the seminar asking a question of the ecologist:

Not if you're Karl Rove, at least. Jim Geraghty writes:

Ha ha ha, Karl Rove! You may have beaten the best effort the Democrats and the left could throw at you, and shown that New York Times columnists haven't the slightest clue of what the American people want in a president, but you'll never get into Maureen Dowd's Kool Kids Klub! So there!

Some people get irritated when they see depressed and angry left-of-center columnists like Paul Krugman or Maureen Dowd stamping their feet and throwing around insults in print. I don't. Folks on the right should enjoy this; it's a sign that they are spent. They have nothing left, no true silver linings, no reasons for optimism, no compelling arguments.

Congratulations to Glenn Reynolds, who has a new nephew: "William Glenn Uti Reynolds! Nine pounds, three ounces, 21 1/2 inches. We grow 'em big".

Back on August 1st, we wrote:

In many TV sit-coms and comedy movies from the 1960s through the early 1980s, you'll see the cliché of the wealthy country club Republican, ala Nelson Rockefeller. Jim Backus' blue double-breasted blazer-wearing Thurston Howell III character was an example of this; David Ogden Stiers' Major Charles Emerson Winchester on M*A*S*H (ironically, Winchester was a Boston Brahmin, like Senator Kerry) was another.

George H.W. Bush's image was very much in that mold. But he interrupted a flip-over that began with President Reagan's self-made aw-shucks folksy style and continued with George W. Bush's cowboy boots-wearing, BBQ-loving manner and the Texas twang of his voice.

It highlights an interesting trend in politics over the last 25 years:

The shift of the Republican party as now being associated with "the little guy", the average man--who might be a blue collar guy, or he might be a self-employed high tech entrepreneur. But either case, he's working hard to get by and better himself. In contrast, the Democrats are now very much the party of the elite: ambulance chasing trial lawyers (including John Edwards himself), often big business, foreign interests, the media, academia, and most dramatically, Hollywood.

Update: Cassandra of I Love Jet Noise has some additional thoughts and links about Sowell's article, and where the big money in politics goes.

Laura Ingraham writes that Reagan is smiling today.

Jonah Goldberg look at how the Democratic party, post-JFK, has continued to move further and further to the left of the American people--with disastrous results.

Update: Nice piece of symmetry, as Jonah writes in his column:

The conventional wisdom is right: Democrats have a values problem. At the national level, they can't talk about them convincingly. Even Rahm Emanuel, a former Clinton staffer and now a Democratic congressman, explained to the New York Times, "people aren't going to hear what we say until they know that we don't approach them as Margaret Mead would an anthropological experiment."

The Times does not blame the [Islamofascist killers of Theo van Gogh], but the Dutch government, which did not have a plan for winning the peace. Clearly they need a Prime Minister Kerry.

Once again, the Times provides supporting evidence for my theory that the left regards people as the right regards animals, and government officials as the right regards people. Imagine a zookeeper who acquires lions for his zoo, but fails to properly segregate the new lions from the lambs. No one would blame the lions for murdering the lambs; they would simply be living out their nature. We would blame the zookeeper. The problem would not be lion immigration, but a failure to plan for a smoother transition to a more diverse zoo.

AP reports that "a 25-year-old man from Georgia who was apparently distraught over President Bush's re-election shot and killed himself at ground zero", the grounds of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan.

I wonder if Michael Moore, et al, will realize that the intense climate of hate that they ginned up has real-world consequences that extend beyond the actual election?

(Via Charles Johnson.)

Charles Krauthammer coined the term "BDS" for Bush Derangement Syndrome, a debilitating mental condition that transforms otherwise perceptive, intelligent people into drooling, raving lunatics when talking or writing about President Bush.

For the next few weeks, watch for a spin-off: Rove Derangement Syndrome, as otherwise intelligent people absolutely crack-up while discussing the president's chief campaign consultant.

Incidentally, note that the author uses the legacy media mantra of "the Swift Boat Veterans' now totally discredited version of John Kerry's Vietnam service". Totally? Prove it.

(Via PoliPundit.)

Update: Jazz Shaw, who calls himself "The Reluctant Republican", writes that I think that Rove is "peachy". Let's just say that I'm happy that President Bush was re-elected, and that I think that Rove is certainly no worse in the pantheon of political consultants than James Carville, who was lionized by the media for helping return a Democratic president to the promised land, after 12 years of Presidents Reagan and Bush. Carville had to make a minor recession after seven years of continuous growth seem like it was the second coming of soup lines and Hoovervilles in order to get Bill Clinton over the top. If that's acceptable to the press (and they were eager and gleeful to help), then we shouldn't be seeing wild-eyed freak-out Rove-is-the-anti-Christ articles such as the one I linked to above for his helping get Bush #43 re-elected.

Interesting interview with a lawyer who's a "moblogger"--a mobile blogger.

There's been speculation that one of the reasons that Tom Daschle lost his midnight before election Tuesday lawsuit against John Thune (a nice foreshadowing of actually losing the election) is that Jon Lauck, the proprietor of the Daschle V. Thune weblog was in the courthouse with a Blackberry blogging the judge's decision in real time.

(Via the wife.)

The red and blue county-by-county map that USA Today published after the 2000 election is even redder looking in 2004.

David Frum and IsraelInsider speculate that Arafat may be dying of AIDS.

Shades of The Fountainhead:

A judge should order the destruction of two condo towers being built for an oceanfront resort that carries the name of Donald Trump, according to a lawsuit filed by a Miami architect who claims the billionaire and a hotel developer took his design.

E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post should talk to his fellow columnists and media stars more often. Because it would stop him from typing embarrassing lines like this:

An administration given to hubris will have to be checked by institutions outside what is likely to be a compliant Congress. This is no time for the independent media to be intimidated by trumped-up charges of liberal bias.

Trumped up?? Heck, these days, the legacy media itself is almost eager and gleeful to admit that it's biased to the left. Didn't Dionne get the memo?

Even after he lost, Evan Thomas's Newsweek refers to the man with the Magic Hat as "Lincolnesque".

Had the situation been reversed, would they have used that word to describe the outgoing president, a man who brought "scary" democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq?

And while the Newsweek piece is a pretty good "behind the scenes" article, note that its author still hasn't figured out President Bush's "strategery" in dealing with the press:

Somehow, though, the long-awaited Bush collapse wasn't happening, at least not yet. Iraq seemed to be in flames. At a press conference in mid-April, Bush told a reporter that, try as he might, he just couldn't think of a mistake he had made since 9/11. The press and the chattering classes hooted in derision. But Bush actually went up in the polls. Most voters seemed to like the president's show of resolve. Kerry was baffled. He said with a sigh to one top staffer, "I can't believe I'm losing to this idiot."

Wonder if Kerry--and the press--still think that Bush is an idiot?

Of course they do.

Update: Would you be surprised to learn that Kerry camp asked the networks not to call Ohio (and the race) until they told them to?? Buried in a New York Times article about Tuesday night is this tidbit:

Back in 1970, Stanley Kramer, who by then had assembled a string of very liberal, but enjoyable and generally on target "message films" decided to make one about college rebellions. Hence the title: RPM, short of "Revolutions Per Minute". Get it? Get it?! (It was written by Erich Segal, who would shortly have more success with another campus melodrama: Love Story.) It starred Anthony Quinn as a liberal professor and Gary Lockwood as one his disaffected and protesting students who rebels, goes on strike, you know the drill.

It was a terrible film, and of course by then, the sixties were over.

And if they were over in 1970, they're really over 34 years later.

Of course, that hasn't stopped about 85 students at Boulder High School in Colorado from holing up in the school library today. According to AP, "they're concerned about the direction the country is headed and refusing to leave until they've met with leaders from the Republican Party".

How sixties.

Somebody needs to remind the left that the sixties are really over, because since 9/11, they've been wallowing in more nostalgia than any conservative Republican ever did: the peace symbols, the tie-died clothes, the bell-bottoms, and now the desire to move to Canada, etc.

Jonah Goldberg looks at the stunning success (cough, cough) that was the 2004 youth vote.

The South Park guys have some thoughts as well.

Jim Geraghty is breathing easier this week:

Anybody else feel like a ten-ton weight has been lifted from his shoulders? Anybody else feel like every muscle had been tensed and clenched for about two months, and a steadily increasing vice-like pressure had been squeezing him, day by day, as the election approached? Just me? Boy, since that last debate, I just wanted the race to end. Just vote and get it over with.

It's compare and contrast time: first, here's a quote from a November 4th online chat with Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker, a magazine that's named after an American city in which Islamofascists tried twice in the space of eight years to bring down its tallest building, and succeeded with their second attempt in September of 2001:

Germantown, Md.: Do you believe the president will strive for unity? Or will he skew more hard right?

Seymour Hersh: in my view, he's got his mandate and he's going to carry on with his mantra -- bringing democracy to the middle east. pretty scary.

As I wrote in my marathon "Election Reflections" post last night, the past week and a half has been a series of almost daily October surprises from the left:

By the time Halloween rolled around, it felt like daily October surprises: NYTrogate last Monday (and Tuesday, and Wednesday and...); Al Jazeera pulling Osama out of a hat on Friday, 60 Minutes' oldie-but-a-goodie body armor story on Sunday, and I think the Times had some sort of other anti-Bush story on Monday. (The bogus early returns Tuesday afternoon was the final October surprise. But that's a whole other post, as this one is going into extra innings.)

The early polling numbers are some of the most eagerly anticipated, if highly inaccurate, data on election day, and are widely distributed. Perhaps that was what the Kerry campaign was banking on.

According to at least three sources, one inside the Kerry campaign, and two outside of it, but with ties to senior Kerry advisers, some of the "early polling numbers" were in fact direct reports from Kerry campaign or Democratic Party operatives on the ground in such critical states as Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin. According to a Washington lobbyist with knowledge of the numbers, the numbers were packaged together so as to appear to be exit poll results. They were then scrubbed through several sources to land in the lap of sympathetic bloggers who these operatives believed would put the numbers up with little question.

Some of the numbers claimed to be exit polling data that showed Kerry with a 8-1 voter ratio. As soon as the numbers hit the Internet, panic set in.

"It was awful," says a Republican House staffer. "You just felt sick when you saw the numbers."

Within an hour, the real exit poll numbers began to leak out, and while they were considerably better for Bush, they continued to show him lagging three to four percentage points behind the Democrats across the major electoral map, with a two-point disadvantage in the national, popular vote.

"Actually when the real numbers came out, they made us feel a bit better," says the House staffer, who was on the road in Nevada working for the Bush campaign. "Compared to what we had seen earlier, it made us think we had a clear shot, since we knew the early numbers tended to be bad for Republicans in the past."

Still, the disinformation campaign spread a pall over Republicans in Washington for several hours. By 3 p.m., senior Bush campaign operatives were putting out word that things were looking considerably better for Bush in Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Florida. By 6 p.m., some Washington insiders were already hearing that Florida and Ohio were winners for Bush, based on campaign internals. From there, the road to victory was much smoother.

Kerry has been shown to have lied to the media numerous times--besides the head fake on who his veep nominee would be to embarrass the conservative New York Post, Kerry's "Magic Hat" story was delivered courtesy of The Washington Post. He never came clean with the media over his radical post-Vietnam past. And it all ends with bogus exit polls which were put out by his campaign and gobbled up by the networks and numerous Internet sites on both sides of the aisle like free crack to an addict.

While all of this is going on, you have to wonder about the legacy media and their almost masochistic pleasure in knowing that they're being used by a guy in their party who has a shot at the White House--and one that they don't really like. They knew full well that Kerry wasn't the second coming of JFK or FDR, but that didn't stop them for going to bat for him.

Someone should link to a series of articles by the press (and by somebody like Andrew Sullivan who jumped onboard once Kerry got the nomination) and compare their mostly sober assessments of the guy early in the primary season, to the media's rock groupie-like worship and their hagiographic articles once he got the nomination. The change in tone would be pretty staggering to see.

My jaw literally dropped reading this stuff, which I found via Glenn Reynolds, who has some photos of San Francisco liberals calmly displaying their well-known compassion and tolerance for diversity.

Time magazine, in their newest issue:

How the President laid a trap for Kerry on Iraq after the Democratic Convention:

After the Democratic National Convention, when Kerry was seen as a more plausible Commander in Chief, the Bush team planned to bait Kerry by inserting into every speech Bush’s question, "My opponent hasn’t answered the question of whether, knowing what we know now, he would have supported going into Iraq." Some on the Bush team feared Kerry wouldn’t take the bait, TIME reports. Bush adviser Mary Matalin tells TIME, "We weren’t sure he would do it. We thought we might see the strong closer everyone had talked about." But three days later at the Grand Canyon Kerry responded to a reporter who posed Bush’s question, saying he believed even now it was right to authorize the use of force. "We couldn’t believe that he went for it," says White House communications director Dan Barlett. Barlett answered a message on his Blackberry asking if Kerry had given the campaign a gift. "Yes, and my boss it about to open it," he replied. They crafted a speech in which Bush lampooned Kerry’s "new nuance" concluding with the mocking compliment "I want to thank Senator Kerry for clearing that up."

NewsMax.com reports:

Hours after the election returns showed that a Bush win was inevitable, Rev. Al Sharpton told a reporter for the Black Press USA Network: "Let’s all head to the airport and get out of the country."

Nicholas Stix has a good piece there titled "Media Stars Refuse to Concede Election; Denigrate Evangelicals; Deny Bush a 'Mandate'", which mentions us:

Blogger Ed Driscoll had come up with the most though-provoking explanation for Memogate/Rathergate: That Dan Rather wasn’t merely inflicting his own bias on the public, but serving his viewers’ bias, as well. Driscoll noted that with the greater diversity the new media have given us, moderates and conservatives have deserted the ranks of CBS News viewers for outlets like Fox News, leaving behind a hard, leftwing core. Thus, do Rather and his CBS colleagues feel constrained to play to their base. The same explanation may shed some light on Rather’s refusal to grant that the President had won Ohio, and thus re-election.

Saturday Night Live's parody of the 1988 presidential debates between the elder George Bush and his Massachusetts liberal opponent:

George Bush: Let me sum up. On track, stay the course. Thousand points of light.

Diane Sawyer: Governor Dukakis. Rebuttal?

Michael Dukakis: I can't believe I'm losing to this guy!

In the biggest fight of his charmed life, John Kerry swung between bewilderment and anger when things didn't go his way on the campaign trial.

"I can't believe I'm losing to this idiot," the Massachusetts Democrat sighed to a staffer when President Bush's poll numbers surged in April.

Everybody else has been recipe blogging, so I thought I'd join in the fun, courtesy of my wife, who shares her late grandmother's recipe for potted Hungarian chicken aka Chicken Paprikash.

This will actually be referenced in a fun upcoming Electronic House newsletter, incidentally:

Yes, I'm still alive. I really wish I had been able to provide the same wall-to-wall coverage of the election that others provided, but I had an article whose deadline was Wednesday, which meant I had to spend much of Tuesday finishing it. So in between polishing and rewriting the thing, and then after I was done, I alternated between Steve's site, Glenn's site, PoliPundit, The Corner and Free Republic.com (not contributing--just reading the threads as the members updated the site as anything--and I mean anything--broke.) And I hit refresh on those sites like one of those lab rats in front of a machine that distributes cocaine-laced pellets at regular intervals. Or some other, more articulate analogy.

Frank Martin and Orrin Judd have some thoughts in anticipation of election Tuesday.

"A member of the Harvard Law School admissions committee recalled that the real reason Mr. Kerry was not admitted was because the committee was concerned that because Mr. Kerry had received a less than honorable discharge they were not sure he could be admitted to any state bar. "

--Thomas Lipscomb, New York Sun

Michael Moore is proud--proud!--that Osama Bin Laden quoted one of his films in Friday's videotape. And he's happy that Bin Laden looked healthy and prosperous.

Which I take to implicitly mean that he's happy about this. Which is a nuanced, if fairly consistent extension of his initial take.

(Gee wonder who he'll be voting for tomorrow?)

Update: Megan McArdle has some additional thoughts.

The Two Steves (Den Beste and Green), note that Kerry has picked up two foriegn endorsements that will cause him, as Green writes, to sweep the Bay Area.

(Not that that wasn't a foregone conclusion.)

Insert usual day-before-election disclaimers here. But this doesn't sound like something a campaign that knows it's ahead would do.

But it is on par with other actions from Democrats this fall.

There's a poll for everybody today, but there's quite an interesting number buried in today's CBS poll, which predicts a three percent victory by President Bush, but even larger number amongst early voters:

ALREADY CAST A BALLOT: WHO DID YOU VOTE FOR?

Bush: 51%
Kerry: 43%

Tim Cavanaugh of Reason looks at the twilight of the liberal hawks:

Thus, in late 2002 and early 2003, we found such luminaries as Christopher Hitchens*, Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Fred Kaplan, Kenneth Pollack, Fareed Zakaria, Jeff Jarvis, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Ignatieff, and many others arguing for the expenditure of American lives and treasure in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

These days, none of those luminaries can summon a kind word for the president who acted in accord with their own arguments....This is a neat arrangement of responsibility by the liberal hawks: All the blame falls on the president, none on themselves. Bush's former supporters channel what is now the overwhelming conventional wisdom that the administration (in the person of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld) failed to provide a large enough force to run the country adequately. Leave aside the question about just how large a force would be adequate, given that even under the current deployment the armed services are strained to meet their commitments and relying on callups of the Individual Ready Reserve to fill manpower gaps. Ignore for a moment how 300,000, or 500,000, or a million, non-Arabic-speaking troops would prevent, for example, an insider from helping massacre 50 Iraqi police recruits. Under any conditions, the liberal hawks' brand of armchair generalship is stunningly glib.

Still, the inadequate-force objection might hold water if the liberal hawks had supported the war for the same reason the majority of Americans apparently did—a sincere belief that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed an immediate threat to the United States. This would have made the invasion a straightforward conquest of a lethal foe, in which case a vast and overwhelming force, and all the sacrifices that conquest demanded, would be not only justified but required, with the assumption that the postwar situation would involve suppression of the local population and military rule of the conquered enemy.

But the liberal hawks, by and large, did not emphasize (and in some cases did not even believe) the weapons of mass destruction argument. They supported the forward strategy of freedom, which had at its base the notion that postwar Iraq would be capable of self-sufficiency. If you took seriously the idea that the United States was liberating the people of Iraq, then the Rumsfeld doctrine of minimal force was the only one that made sense. If keeping Iraq on life support meant committing a vast occupying force indefinitely, then clearly Iraq wasn't a very good test case for the democratic experiment.

* Update: Hitchens is (more or less) still in the pro-Bush camp, at least.

Insta-Update: Glenn Reynolds writes:

It's unusual for me to find myself agreeing with Cavanaugh on the war, but I think he has this right. I thought that things were bad enough to justify going to war. I thought that other war supporters did, too, and that in supporting the war they understood that war means, well, war. Some, however, have made rather abrupt changes in position: Mark Steyn refers to them as "moulting hawks." I just hope that people settle down and focus on what's important after the election.

Power Line writes:

The arguments that Democrats make in opposition to any efforts to reform our voting procedures often approach perilously close to the claim that Democrats, at least, have a Constitutional right to commit fraud. That seems to be the case in Ohio, where, following a bizarre Sunday night hearing, federal Judge Susan Dlott held that it is unconstitutional to have poll watchers in that state. Judge Dlott thus substituted her opinion for that of the Ohio legislature, which has enacted statutes that provide for poll watchers.

Update: It looks like the Ohio Supreme Court has overruled Dlott. Very interesting turn of events.

Update: PoliPundit has more.

The Washington Times explains the obvious.

(Via The Blogfather.)

Jeff Greenfield's early-1990s advice for uninformed voters remains as valid today as it was then.

Of course, if you'd like to get informed about background of the candidate the legacy media is explicitly backing, but doesn't seem bothered to explore, start here and keep scrolling.