Larry Kudlow writes that "The U.S. economy is hitting on all cylinders as 2004 passes into 2005. Ever since the election, stock markets have been on an upward tear, pointing to continued prosperity in the new year".

Kudlow also asks a good question: if the mainstream media refuses to report economic growth accurately, will anyone notice?

Kofi Annan swings into action on tsunami relief--after skiing in Jackson Hole, Wyoming for three days.

Charles Johnson wonders (for about a nanosecond) if Kofi will receive the same treatment the Washington Post gave President Bush earlier this week.

Guys, if you're going out tonight, take your wingman with you.

That is all.

Yesterday, I mentioned that we've been having some slow page loads.

It appeared to be caused by a glitch in the Technorati blog search engine link we have on the sidebar to the right. I've temporarily removed the code, and pages seem to be loading normally again. I'll restore it when things have calmed down there.

Here's a round-up of a few year-end stories on this, the last day of 2004:

Cathy Seipp looks at the wacky year of big media in general.

Thomas Hibbs says it's been a Passionate year for film.

Patterico notes that it hasn't been the best of years for the L.A. Times.

The Media Research Center has their awards online for "The Best of Notable Quotables For 2004".

PoliPundit looks at the year's highlights and lowlights.

Commentary has an extremely good overview of the both party's presidential races.

Jeff Jacoby looks at 2004 in terms of political hate speech.

Jonah Goldberg looks at 2004 from his own unique perspective; "really hot green women" from Star Trek make an alas, all too brief cameo appearance.

RatherBiased lists their "Top Ten Media Stories of 2004".

All of which taken together is why Hugh Hewitt recently wrote that the year "brought doom to legacy media". Meanwhile Power Line makes a point that we've been making for over a year now:

No one blog can cover everything and many blogs, such as ours, deal primarily in opinion. But one can envisage a blogosphere that readers rely on to obtain essentially everything they now get from a newspaper or a newscast. The basic facts of a story would come from links to news services. The analysis would come from specialized blogs or non-specialized blogs that happen to have expertise in the subject area. The op-ed type opinions would come from the opinion blogs. I actually think we're pretty close to having such a blogosphere, although that's clearly a matter for debate.

Thus, the blogosphere is likely to replace the MSM for a growing number of consumers. Many others will continue to check out the MSM, but regard it much more skeptically (that is, take it much less seriously) than they have done in the past. It will be up to the MSM to decide whether it wishes to respond to these developments by undertaking radical change.

Finally, Peggy Noonan notes the hubris of journalists who write big "year in review" stories in mid-December, on the assumption that it's going to be a slow month and all of the big events of the year can safely be wrapped up (you know, like me):

The biggest story of the year happened just as big-thinking journalists went on vacation after filing their "Ten Biggest Stories of 2004" pieces. Life has a way of surprising us.

I thought the other day of Harrison Salisbury, and his response when asked what he'd learned after a lifetime as a reporter. "Expect the unexpected," he said. And of course we do, in the abstract, but when a story like this comes along in the particular, with maybe 80,000 dead, maybe more, we are aghast. And should be. Call it the force of nature or the hand of God or both; call it geological inevitability or the oldest story in the world (life is tragic) reasserting itself on a broader-than-usual level--however you see the earthquake and the tsunami, it reminds you that man is not in charge.

I'm not sure if all that well remembered right now, but PoliPundit's quote of the year is sure to resonate...in about three or four years.

Yet another American icon died this week: swing jazz giant Artie Shaw, who was 94.

Andrew Peyton Thomas has a moving tribute to Reggie White at NRO.

Dana Stevens has a nice obit for Jerry Orbach in Slate. As does The Gothamist blog, which also has a fine collection of links.

Update: Flak's James Norton has a nice tribute to Orbach:

What's remarkable about Briscoe — really, about Orbach's portrayal of the part — is that he stands in such direct opposition to the archetypical American cop hero. An American cop is young, drives a sports car, smashes through doors, gets written off as a "renegade," bucks the system and gets laid more or less by accident — and by witnesses or suspects who really should have been left in their original pristine condition.

Briscoe walks and talks like a jaded Soviet-bloc refugee, minus the accent. He's a recovering alcoholic, sensitive about the sauce but never histrionic. In one particularly wrenching episode, his own daughter dies — a rare departure into the realm of the personal on a show driven by the all-powerful and overwhelming hand of impersonal plot twists and explorations of the legal code's gray areas.

Lesson? Perhaps none whatsoever. But maybe if a regular joe like Briscoe can drive a series like "Law and Order" into the TV stratosphere, there's a market for something a little more nuanced, a little darker and a little more genuinely human than the vast, empty, soul-eroding expanse of cable and network TV.

If pages are loading slowly today, it appears that Technorati is having problems synching with the site. Hopefully they'll have things resolved fairly soon.

As I've written here in the past, I was a huge fan of Woody Allen until "he went southern and started sleeping with his children", as Michael Graham, the author of Redneck Nation wrote. (Graham's another reformed Allenphile, incidentally.)

The death of Susan Sontag has James Taranto and a reader imagining how the New York Times' obit of the Woodman will read:

Reader Donald Pugh calls our attention to this probably unwittingly funny passage from the New York Times' obituary of Susan Sontag:

She was undoubtedly the only writer of her generation to win major literary prizes (among them a National Book Critics Circle Award, a National Book Award and a MacArthur Foundation genius grant) and to appear in films by Woody Allen and Andy Warhol; to be the subject of rapturous profiles in Rolling Stone and People magazines; and to be photographed by Annie Leibovitz for an Absolut Vodka ad.

Hmm, we can't remember his name right now, but it seems to us there was at least one other writer of her generation who won major literary prizes, appeared in films by Woody Allen and Andy Warhol, and was photographed by Annie Leibovitz for an Absolut Vodka ad. Oh but wait. The profile of that guy in Rolling Stone was merely fervent, not rapturous.

Pugh imagines this sentence from the Times obit of Woody Allen: "He was undoubtedly the only filmmaker of his generation to have season tickets to the Knicks and cast his live-in lover in several of his films before marrying her adopted Korean teenage daughter."

"Undoubtedly!", Taranto quips.

The Times' obit will probably be somewhere in that ballpark, if worded slightly more obliquely about Woody's adventures in the 1990s.

Victor Davis Hanson writes, "the problem with our Left is what killed the dinosaurs: a desire to plod on to oblivion in a rapidly evolving world". He's got some excellent suggestions that would bring them somewhere towards the middle--if they're willing to listen.

Meanwhile, back from Christmas vacation, James Taranto has a prediction:

There was indeed a heightened intensity to the Bush hatred just after the election, but it lasted maybe three days. It calls to mind the Helix Nebula: "The remnant central stellar core, destined to become a white dwarf star, glows in light so energetic that it causes the previously expelled gas to fluoresce." In other words, the Angry Left was flaming out.

Think about it. Michael Moore is now making a documentary about insurance (it'll be a blockbuster for sure). Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman has gone off to read an economics textbook. George Soros is nowhere to be found; for all we know he actually did join a monastery. And of course Susan Sontag has gone to the Great Cocktail Party Up in the Sky.

* * * It's hard to believe now how fearsome the Angry Left once seemed. This column never thought it was the stuff of a winning political campaign, but sometimes we felt as though our skepticism put us in the minority. We're sure we'll continue to hear from the Dowds and the Krugmans and maybe even the Moores and the Soroses; not even the fascist Bush regime can silence them. But the Angry Left will loom much smaller in 2005 than it has in many years.

We'll see.

Michelle Malkin has photographic proof.

(Via The Brothers Judd.)

First there was the "it's global warming's fault" story in Reuters. Now, The Washington Post invents another biased angle:

Bush's decision at first to remain cloistered on his Texas ranch for the Christmas holiday rather than speak in person about the tragedy -- showed scant appreciation for the magnitude of suffering and for the rescue and rebuilding work facing such nations as Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and Indonesia.

Betsy Newmark demolishes the WaPo's take:

Note the lack of specific proper nouns to put names to those critics of Bush. Instead you get these generic words like "complaints" and "skeptics." In fact, let me translate what these words mean in journo-speak. They mean "bored journalists sitting in Crawford with nothing to write about and ticked off at spending their holiday at a dinky town in Texas." A secondary meaning is "foreign service diplo-weenies who have despised President Bush since he took office and are happy to bash him for anything and everything."

This helpful translation service will help you read Reuters' report on Bush's announcement that, contrary to the implication that he didn't care about the disaster, the US has put together a coalition of nations to organize aid efforts to the region.

Guys, when you're dealing with a story of this magnitude, why not write the first draft of the news straight--and then after the dust has settled, things have calmed down and we can clearly examine who did what, draft the editorials and opinion pieces that offer your slant on how the various players performed.

Update: Charles Johnson and his readers also have some thoughts.

Jim Geraghty has an interesting post over at the (please fellas, rename it soon and get it over with, huh?) Kerry Spot at National Review Online. He's kicking around whether or not President Bush has a mandate in his second term and concludes:

When does the other guy have a mandate? We can quibble over just what percentage marks the threshold, but ultimately, he’s got one when you don’t have the votes to beat him.

I think that's reasonable. Jim's post begins with a quote from Howard Dean:

Since when is fifty-one percent of the votes a mandate by anyone’s definition? It’s ridiculous.

If it's ridiculous, why is President Kennedy the modern benchmark for Democratic presidents? He squeaked in with less of a total plurality in the votes than Bush received in Ohio alone--and while math was never my strong suit, I think the 49.7 percent of the vote that JFK received is smaller than President Bush's 51 percent. Plus, as some recent historians have noted, there was also quite a bit of electoral college strangeness associated with JFK's win.

But what modern Democrat would argue that he didn't have a mandate? Watch any of the numerous PBS documentaries on JFK and see if they ever say anything remotely along the lines of:

PORTENTOUS FICTIONAL NARRATOR: Kennedy, who barely won against Vice President Nixon, should have remained cautious as a president, in order to earn the trust of a deeply divided nation whose votes were split 50/50 for the two former senators. Instead, after using an imagined "missile gap" as a wedge issue against Nixon; once in office, Kennedy plunged the nation into a costly build-up of the nuclear arms race against the Soviet Union. He later cut income taxes in a scheme some would describe as "risky", and then further increased an already strained federal budget through dangerous incursions into Vietnam and an outrageously expensive manned space program.

It's not going to happen, because, to paraphrase Orwell, whoever controls history determines which president has a mandate. As Geraghty notes, just ask Time magazine.

The New Republic just buries Sean Penn's new film, the portentously titled (and apparently scripted, and cast, and acted, and...and....) The Assassination of Richard Nixon.

(Via Jonathan Last.)

On Monday, Tech Central Station posted my top ten list of Blogosphere moments of 2004: "The Year of Blogging Dangerously"

Today, Hugh Hewitt looks at the toll the Blogosphere has taken on the legacy media: "A Unified Theory of the Old Media Collapse".

Incidentally, because I know the "don't get too carried away with yourself" comments are coming for both articles, it's probably worth noting that what Hugh is mostly referring to is opinion. I don't think he expects--or even wants--reportage by the MSM to vanish anytime soon. The infrastructure is too entrenched, and often, most recently in the case of the Christmas earthquake and Tsunami, extremely beneficial. While Bloggers do report on and break news stories with increasing frequency, they can't do what a wire service, TV network, or big city newspaper can do: airdrop a hundred reporters simultaneously to cover a story from a multitude of angles.

But typically, those same wire services, TV networks and newspapers offer only one angle when it comes to opinion, and increasingly, try to blur reportage and political opinion.

And that's where the counterforce of the Blogosphere can play its most important role.

Update: Jonathan Last, Hugh's editor at The Weekly Standard has some thoughts on his own blog.

Susan Sontag died yesterday. Roger Kimball of The New Criterion has a brilliant essay on her long career as "The Dark Lady of American Letters":

Read More »

There's a reason why "buy low and sell high" is an investment cliché: because it's true. The best time to buy a stock really is when its price has cratered, and it has nowhere to go but up.

Steven F. Hayward, author of the magisterial two-part Age of Reagan has advice for the ultimate political contrarian: now's the time to buy donkey shares:

A few Dems understand that it is their product line that stinks. If the two parties were burger franchises locked in mortal competition like Burger King and McDonald's, one might suggest the Dems have decided to compete while staying closed for lunch, and refusing to offer hamburgers for dinner. Democrats are not seriously competitive on national security ("closed for lunch") in the way they were under Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy. (Or if they are open at all, they only offer chicken strips.) And their disdain for religion would be like McDonald's refusing to offer hamburgers to customers at dinner. Among Franklin Roosevelt's many religious utterances was, "Freedom of religion has no meaning to a man who has lost his God." A prominent Democrat who talks this way today risks being shunned; verily, we are seeing that freedom of religion has no meaning to a party that has lost its God.

If the Democrats could figure out a way to remedy these product deficiencies, the natural cycle of politics will create some opportunities for them to regain market share and the stock would become a table-pounding buy. Until they do, however, I would rank their stock as "speculative, for risk-tolerant investors only."

And no, Hillary Clinton doesn't look like the political equivalent of Carly Fiorina.

As a famous conservative/liberal/libertarian tireblogger once said...Heh.

For the first two years of its life, our blog ran on software provided by Blogger.com. It wasn't perfect, but it was quick and easy to set up, and got the job done.

How quick is it to set up? Via Hugh Hewitt, we find that there's already a South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Weblog, with news, ways you can help, and links to photos.

The New York Times writes:

For vivid reporting from the enormous zone of tsunami disaster, it was hard to beat the blogs.

The so-called blogosphere, with its personal journals published on the Web, has become best known as a forum for bruising political discussion and media criticism. But the technology proved a ready medium for instant news of the tsunami disaster and for collaboration over ways to help.

They're absolutely right. And as the Professor writes, "Nice to see people noticing".

And Todd Pearson notes:

Instapundit and the Moderate Voice, among others, are acting as traffic cops to get the wider blogosphere directed to the bloggers on site. It is truly fascinating to witness.

Indeed, to coin a phrase.

How bad and politically loaded has Reuters' coverage of the terrible earthquake and tsunami gotten? Almost as bad as this satire by Iowahawk:

Washington, DC - Pointing to the devastating weekend Indian Ocean tsunami that left over 24,000 dead, an international blue ribbon committee of climatologists and ecoscientists today issued a stark warning that man-made pollutants have increasingly "make water spirits angry."

The blunt conclusion prefaced a 2300 page meta-analysis of hundreds of scientific studies and computer models detailing links between human industrial activity and wrathful eco-deities. Entitled "Fire Bad: Fire Very Bad," the report warns that the planet faces additional catastrophies unless drastic regulatory action is taken to appease Earthen-furies.

"Unclean money devils anger sacred water spirit Tai-Waku," explained Martin Knudson of Scripps Oceanic Institute. "He now call angry to son the whale, 'make slap with anger-tails! Bring vengeance-surf to villagers!'"

Read More »

If you own an incorporated business in California, you might receive this very official looking--and very, very phony--form. My wife has details on her business and law Weblog.

Last week, James Lileks looked at the disparity in the coverage over the years at the Minneapolis Tribune, the predecessor to the newspaper that currently employs him.

Mark Gauvreau Judge performs a similar experiment by comparing Yuletide coverage in the 1953 and 2003 versions of the Washington Post.

Bruce Bartlett writes about the growing specialization of individual bloggers.

Since Bartlett's main interests are economics and tax policy, he highlights out a few blogs on both sides of the aisle that specialize in those areas.

Patrick Ruffini asks, "are we on the verge of a Dot Blog Boom":

We may be on the verge of a dot blog boom -- an echo of the dot com boom that gripped the markets in the late '90s. In the next two years, you'll see companies with the word "blog" in them go public on Wall Street. You'll also see their share prices come crashing down, but not before the irreversible forces of creative destruction are set into motion, creating vastly enhanced blogging technologies crafted by profitable dot blog survivors that make the medium a force to be reckoned with in corporate America.

Fortune magazine seems to agree with him.

(All of which begs the question: when Samizdata goes public, will they register on the London Stock Exchange rather than the NYSE to avoid Sarbanes-Oxley?)

We've got a ways to go to reach that point, of course. Whenever I query a magazine on the subject, or request a book title to review for Blogcritics, I still feel compelled to explain to whoemever I'm emailing just what the heck a Blog is. (Often by using my 2002 SpinTech piece as a guide). There's much less need for that (see my Tech Central Station piece for ten reasons why), but knowledge of Weblogs isn't universal yet. Compare them to conventional Websites: 99 percent of the American public knows what a Website is even they're not actually Web surfers. And of course, as James Lileks noted recently, nobody has to explain what AM and FM mean.

Weblogs haven't reached that point. Yet.

On Christmas day, we linked to a couple of items from Power Line and Mark Steyn on whether or not Christmas was vanishing in the US. Steyn wrote:

Every time some sensitive flower pulls off a legal victory over the school board, who really wins? For the answer to that, look no further than last month's election results. Forty years of effort by the American Civil Liberties Union to eliminate God from the public square have led to a resurgent, evangelical and politicised Christianity in America. By "politicised", I don't mean that anyone who feels his kid should be allowed to sing Silent Night if he wants to is perforce a Republican, but only that year in, year out it becomes harder for such folks to support a secular Democratic Party closely allied with the anti-Christmas militants. American liberals need to rethink their priorities: what's more important? Winning a victory over the kindergarten teacher's holiday concert, or winning back Congress and the White House?

In Britain, by contrast, the formal symbols remain in place: the Queen is still Supreme Governor of the Church of England, and the Archbishop of York still sits in the House of Lords. But, underneath all that, Christianity has collapsed, the churches are empty and the new Europe is as officious about public expressions of faith but without the countervailing balance of America's First Amendment protections.

Today, Jayson Javitz of PoliPundit, in a post titled, "Law of Unintended Consequences" writes:

The far left has been trying to litigate and browbeat religion out of the public arena for decades.

This piece, in the Washington Times, addresses whether the angry, hyper-separationists’ exhaustive efforts to “de-Christian-ize” the nation actually have resulted in a Christian revival.

Hmm.

Of course, it would not be unprecedented for the far left to suffer the law of unintended political consequences.

Just ask House Speaker Tom Foley. Or Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle . . .

In his classic "Chinese Restaurant" episode, Jerry Seinfeld quipped:

"This is bad, you don't know. The chain reaction of calls this is going to set off. New York, Long Island, Florida... It's like the Bermuda Triangle. Unfortunately, nobody ever disappears."

I think this Weblog has its own Seinfeldian triangle going on: today we were mentioned in the Miami Herald, and back in September we were mentioned by The Professor in the Wall Street Journal.

I'm not sure what counts as the third nexus though: maybe this Blogcritics piece which ran in the Staten Island Advance.

Now if I could just get some dinner before Plan Nine From Outer Space starts...

David Horowitz looks at the Dean (if you'll pardon the pun) of the Class of '72.

Reuters has a flash report from the land of the bloody obvious:

Depressed men and women who consider themselves affiliated with a religion are less likely to attempt suicide than their non-religious counterparts, according to new study findings.

* * *
Overall, men and women who said they belonged to a religion had a history of less suicide attempts than those who reported no religious affiliation, Oquendo and her team report in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Specifically, 48 percent of patients affiliated with Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism or other religion reported having attempted suicide, compared with 66 percent of those with no religious affiliation.

Religious patients also reported experiencing less suicidal thoughts than did their non-religious peers, despite similar high scores on assessments of depression and hopelessness.

The elephant in the room that this article doesn't mention, of course, are those religions which encourage suicide.

But that being said, as Jonah wrote a few years ago:

If you were to read any one of the stories I cited at the beginning of this column — men and women aren't the same, men dig sex while women like security, having two dads but no mom has an effect on the kids, etc, — to my great-grandmother, she'd say "I need a newspaper to tell me this?" (of course they'd have to be translated into Yiddish first). But today, and for the foreseeable future, we're gonna be treated to headlines that say, in effect, "Your Father Was Right: Bears Do Sh-t in the Woods."

Read his essay; he has some logical ideas as to why modern researchers have a Sisyphusian desire to reinvent the wheel.

Back in February, we linked to pieces by Radley Balko and Jonah Goldberg on a phenonomon that Balko dubbed "The Conservative Left". As Balko wrote:

You know, you sometimes get the feeling the day after the polio vaccine was invented, today's left would have run editorials lamenting the good ol' days, when we were a little more cautious about what swimming pools we jumped into, and expressing sadness that we'd now have no new stories about the afflicted overcoming their disability to inspire the rest of us.

I'm not kidding. They're that resistant to change. Every mill that shuts down is a "sign of our sad times." No matter that the new mill will do things better, faster and cheaper than the old one. New farming techniques grow more food on less land. But dammit, if there wasn't something romantic about the old-stye "family farm" that's deserving of government protection. Innovation isn't celebrated, it's excoriated for displacing some idealized vision of the way things once were. In matters of progress and dyanmism, the left is far more conservative than the conservatives are.

Few pundits are as respected on both sides of the aisle as Michael Barone, and he picks up the theme in his latest syndicated essay:

Once upon a time, liberals were the folks who wanted to change society. They thought existing institutions were unjust and that individuals needed protection against the workings of the market. They looked forward to a society that would be different.

To a considerable extent, 20th century liberals achieved many of their goals. Racial segregation was abolished. An economic safety net was constructed. Government issued regulations were set up to protect the environment. Few Americans want to undo these changes. But they may want others.

Looking back on election year 2004, I am struck by how many of the constituencies supporting Democratic candidates oppose, rather than seek, change -- how they are motivated not by ideas about how to change the future, but by something like nostalgia for the past.

As Paul Mirengoff of Power Line notes:

The Democratic party, [Barone] argues, is defined by 1930 era views on social security, 60s views on the state of race relations and the use of military force, and 70s views on feminism. Cosmetically at least, this state of affairs constitutes a reversal of roles from 1996 when the Democrats claimed they couldn't "stop thinking about tomorrow," while Bob Dole promised to be "a bridge to the past."

Contrast the Democrats' new found love of stasis, along with a remarkably smug elitism, to the efforts of The Accidental Radical. You get some sense of what may be involved in retooling liberalism (and the left hasn't even liked to be called liberal since at least 1988) for the 21st century.

Back in March, we noted that some economic writers felt that the Act was impeding growth in the US.

Is Sarbanes-Oxley also causing foreign companies to register with the London Stock Exchange rather than the NYSE to avoid its onerous enforcement procedures?

From the home office in San Jose, California, I have a top ten list of blogosphere moments over at Tech Central Station.

Your mileage may--and probably will--vary as far what should have made the list, but hopefully we'll find a few things we agree on.

Update: I accidently left out the name of Lorie Byrd of PoliPundit in item #2 of my article. She and the rest of the members of PoliPundit have a dynamite Weblog, and we apologize for the omission.

Another Update: Glenn Reynolds has linked to my article. Welcome readers who've arrived here from TCS.

Glenn also has a review of Hugh Hewitt's new book, which he describes as "the best book on blogs yet". Read the whole thing, to coin a phrase.

George Will looks at George Washington and December 25, 1776.

I don't know if Will writes his headlines, but I can't help but think that the use of "greatest" might be at least a subliminal comment on the subject of Tom Brokaw's Greatest Generation book.

Glenn Reynolds has lots of links, and notes that a tsunami warning system could have saved many. Meanwhile, John Derbyshire puts the tremendous deathtoll into perspective:

In Sri Lanka alone, 3,000 people are known dead -- a 9/11-size death toll, in a nation with one tenth our population.

Yesterday's earthquake was an enormous 8.9 on the Richter Scale. Strangely enough, central California had a 6.5-scale quake last year around this time.

Update: The Wall Street Journal (subscription may be required to view) lists some of the staggering details of yesterday's quake:

The quake struck in the Indian Ocean off the northern tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, and measured 8.9 in magnitude, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The tsunamis, created by the force of the quake, soared as high as 30 feet in some places and radiated out across the Indian Ocean before crashing ashore in at least eight countries.

Late Sunday, the unofficial death toll exceeded 10,000, according to the Associated Press. The countries hit worst were Sri Lanka, India, Indonesia and Thailand. Deaths and missing persons were also reported in Malaysia, Bangladesh, the island nation of Maldives and Somalia.

* * * The quake was the biggest recorded since a 9.2 magnitude earthquake hit Alaska in 1964 and the fifth biggest since 1900, according to U.S. Geological Survey officials. Seismologists said it was caused when tectonic plates shifted and tore along a 1,000 kilometer stretch of the seabed.

Towering waves cut a wide swath of death across the region. Hundreds of bodies were found on beaches along India's southern state of Tamil Nadu, and more were expected to be washed in by the sea, the AP reported officials as saying. In Indonesia, which suffered at least 4,000 deaths in the sparsely populated region of Aceh, bodies washed inland by the ocean were left wedged in trees.

Update: The quake is now listed at 9.0 in magnitude by the US National Earthquake Information Center.

My wife, a business--not trial--attorney, has an interesting post with cameos from Michael Moore and Erin Brockovich on her new Weblog.

The filmmaker, a self-styled "champion of the little man", would apparently like to inflict him with more lawsuits. Moore provided the seed money to a launch a corps of trial attorneys called The Center For Justice & Democracy, whose board includes Erin Brockovich.

It's not that surprising, I guess: Moore has said he's long hated small businesspeople.

Mark Steyn is loaded for bear--well, donkey actually--in his latest Chicago Sun-Times essay. He mentions the London Daily Mirror's infamous post-American election headline, "How Can 59,054,087 People Be So DUMB?":

Well, they're British lefties: They can do without Americans. Whether an American political party can do without Americans is more doubtful. Nonetheless, MSNBC.com's Eric Alterman was mirroring the Mirror's sentiments: "Slightly more than half of the citizens of this country simply do not care about what those of us in the 'reality-based community' say or believe about anything." Over at Slate, Jane Smiley's analysis was headlined, "The Unteachable Ignorance Of The Red States.'' If you don't want to bother plowing your way through Alterman and Smiley, a placard prominently displayed by a fetching young lad at the post-election anti-Bush rally in San Francisco cut to the chase: "F--- MIDDLE AMERICA."

Almost right, man. It would be more accurate to say that "MIDDLE AMERICA" has "F---ed" you, and it will continue to do so every two years as long as Democrats insist that anyone who disagrees with them is, ipso facto, a simpleton -- or "Neanderthal," as Teresa Heinz Kerry described those unimpressed by her husband's foreign policy. In my time, I've known dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts and other members of Britain's House of Lords and none of them had the contempt for the masses one routinely hears from America's coastal elites. And, in fairness to those ermined aristocrats, they could afford Dem-style contempt: A seat in the House of Lords is for life; a Senate seat in South Dakota isn't.

More to the point, nobody who campaigns with Ben Affleck at his side has the right to call anybody an idiot. H. L. Mencken said that no one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American people. Well, George Soros, Barbra Streisand and a lot of their friends just did: The Kerry campaign and its supporters -- MoveOn.org, Rock The Vote, etc. -- were awash in bazillions of dollars, and what have they got to show for it? In this election, the plebs were more mature than the elites: They understood that war is never cost-free and that you don't run away because of a couple of setbacks; they did not accept that one jailhouse scandal should determine America's national security interest; they rejected the childish caricature of their president and paranoid ravings about Halliburton; they declined to have their vote rocked by Bruce Springsteen or any other pop culture poser.

Steyn writes, "All the above is unworthy of a serious political party". It also helps to illustrate just how far liberalism has travelled in the days since 1972, when they abandoned moderate positions for those increasingly further leftward.

Since November, they've been given lots of free advice, which all boil down to,
move back to the center, folks. But as Steyn writes, the odds of that happening are slim and none--and Slim just left Berkeley.

John Hinderaker writes, "We are about to witness a major battle in the war against religion, as President Bush stands behind his nominations of conservative judges":

I'm looking forward to the Democrats' effort to explain to the American people why people of faith can't be appellate judges. It will be, I think, another nail in their coffin. After all, Democratic politicians, when they are running for office, have to pretend that they are constantly influenced by their own religious convictions; just recall John Kerry in the last election, or Bill Clinton carrying a Bible around for the benefit of Sunday morning photographers.

So: religion is undoubtedly under attack, but here in America, at least, the battle is going quite well. That doesn't mean that people of faith should let down their guard, and it certainly doesn't mean that we should be oblivious to what is happening around the world. In a number of countries, to be a practicing Jew or Christian is to risk death. But let's, for now, celebrate the fact that religious conviction is advancing, not receding, as a factor in American life.

Mark Steyn writes that in many respects, the left's assault on religion in American has strengthened the resolve of those of faith, not weakened them:

But every time some sensitive flower pulls off a legal victory over the school board, who really wins? For the answer to that, look no further than last month's election results. Forty years of effort by the American Civil Liberties Union to eliminate God from the public square have led to a resurgent, evangelical and politicised Christianity in America. By "politicised", I don't mean that anyone who feels his kid should be allowed to sing Silent Night if he wants to is perforce a Republican, but only that year in, year out it becomes harder for such folks to support a secular Democratic Party closely allied with the anti-Christmas militants. American liberals need to rethink their priorities: what's more important? Winning a victory over the kindergarten teacher's holiday concert, or winning back Congress and the White House?

In Britain, by contrast, the formal symbols remain in place: the Queen is still Supreme Governor of the Church of England, and the Archbishop of York still sits in the House of Lords. But, underneath all that, Christianity has collapsed, the churches are empty and the new Europe is as officious about public expressions of faith but without the countervailing balance of America's First Amendment protections.

Last year, I felt that Christmas was fading in popularity. This year, I feel a bit more reassured. Next year? It's about 340 days too soon to tell of course, but it will be interesting to see if stores and government, but local and national, have learned anything from the outcry this year.

M.E. Russell describes the missed opportunities of the movie version of Bill Cosby's Fat Albert.

(Via Jonathan Last.)

Posting will be pretty sparse on Christmas day. In the meantime, let me take this opportunity to wish our readers:

A Very Merry Christmas!

This is one father's way of punishing his unruly kids at Christmastime: he put all their toys up for bidding on eBay!

This is the 50th year that NORAD has tracked Santa to make sure he has a safe flight around the world.

There's a moving tribute to them here; Meanwhile Betsy Newmark notes that David Letterman and Paul Shaffer are in Iraq to entertain the troops on Christmas Eve. "Anybody here from out of town?" Letterman asked, adding "If I wanted to face insurgents I would've spent Christmas with my relatives."

"Faith is believing when common sense tells you not to. Don't you see? It's not just Kris that's on trial, it's everything he stands for. It's kindness and joy and love and all the other intangibles."

--From Miracle on 34th Street.

Tim Worstall of Tech Central Station would like some crystallized fruit for Christmas.

No really--it's a fun essay, and well worth reading.

This was a little bonbon I wrote for the last page of the December issue of Electronic House magazine. There's a scanned version of the article online here, but in case you want to cut and paste a segment of the text, the original draft I sent to the editor is included below:

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Talk about a tempest in a teacup (that's had a shot of Southern Comfort poured in it). I was clicking through the Internet Movie Database, when I came across this thread, which begins with an African-American moviegoer absolutely unloading on the upcoming remake of The Dukes of Hazzard.

Like all recent Hollywood big screen remakes of '70s TV shows, the finished product will of course, be somewhere between mediocre and craptacular, and quickly forgotten. But as the readers of the IMDB illustrated, adapting the Dukes presents a special challenge to its filmmakers, the Wall Street Journal reports (subscription may be required):

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Newspapermen should check out their competitors' works from time to time. For example, Dana Milbank of the Washington Post would have been better off reading James Lileks of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune before he wrote his piece.

Update: PoliPundit looks at more Scroogeness.

Another Update: The Post might also want to read The Grinch List, which has been updated for 2004.

If this site doesn't get you in the mood for Christmas, you've got a harder heart than I have.

(Via Carnivorous Conservative's bloggerific "Twas the Night Before Christmas".)

John J. Miller has a really interesting piece on Christmas trivia, which includes this tidbit:

What was the Star of Bethlehem?

Would you believe it's Jupiter? That's what one astronomer thinks. I find his theory plausible, and wrote about for NRO two years ago here.

Jupiter of course, was the destination of the spaceship Discovery in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film that Kubrick and co-writer Arthur C. Clarke intended (among many other things) to be an alternate look at man's relationship with God.

Kubrick himself told an interviewer the year after its release:

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And chances are, your stuff too, if you have a blog that's been linked to by Glenn Reynolds, Hugh Hewitt, or the Power Line guys.

Betsy Newmark and Dave Friedman have some thoughts on the implications of this, and how blogs are continously end-running the legacy media.

Speaking of the legacy media, incidentally, Hewitt and PoliPundit examine how they've botched important domestic and international stories.

No, it's a not a new blog devoted to one of Woody Allen's better films. They're discussing recipes of the classic drink on NRO's Corner.

This is a pretty good page on the history of the drink, which I like to mix with Maker's Mark.

This isn't my personal favorite, but for a variant, there's always my father's drink of choice: ever since I've been around, Dad has always ordered his Manhattans made with Seagram's V.O., and dry vermouth, poured up, with a twist of lemon. He's given many a waiter or waitress the evil eye for bringing it with a cherry.

Power Line links to several articles debunking The Motorcycle Diaries.

Yes, it's named after a piece of French artillery, but don't let that throw you: it's a champagne cocktail they really got right, and makes for a great holiday Christmastime drink.

Want to read a spiffy 21st century version of Dickens' A Christmas Carol?

There's so many to choose from!

No, I mean that seriously. Just. Don't. Do. It.

Trust me on this.

(Via Neutral Spirits Distilled From Mash Of Wheat Pundit.)

C-Span has video online of a great recent three-hour interview of Tom Wolfe by Brian Lamb, along with phoned-in questions from viewers.

Forbes has a sneak preview of next year's most desirable gadgets. 400-gig TiVos? Dual-core processors? Sounds good to me!

Brilliant James Lileks piece tracking the slow erasure of Christmas from the public--and print--space.

Back on November 8th, I wrote:

Once the press signaled very early on this year that it was going to play favorites--and really play them hard, it was very, very smart of Bush's team to simply ignore them, and end-run their messages past the legacy media. I don't know how much Bush and company could have predicted it, but it had the effect of absolutely driving the press mad, causing them to crank out absurdly biased piece after absurdly biased piece to the point where faked stuff like Ra^therGate started happening. Added all together with Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, the sheer weight of much of press' negative coverage simply canceled itself out in the public's eye.

Yesterday, Brent Bozell, linking to the Media Research Center’s Seventeenth Annual Awards for the Year’s Worst Reporting, noted:

2004 should be remembered as the year when the nation's media elite were so committed to the goal of turning President Bush out of office that some were willing to sacrifice their own reputations for it. Their supposed commitment to fairness and balance evaporated in the public mind.

EdDriscoll.com: Like Max Headroom, but six weeks into the future, not 15 minutes. And without the skinny new wave tie and the vinyl suit with the Joan Crawford padded shoulders.

I've linked a few times (most recently here) to this December 2002 essay by Jonah Goldberg titled "Hypocrophobia", his name for liberals' fear that they'll be taken seriously:

Feminists demanded that "something" be done about the Taliban's treatment of women for years. Conservatives scoffed. But when the Bush administration saw fit to liberate the women of Afghanistan — for reasons larger than merely their freedom — feminists drew circles in the floor with their open-toed shoes and grumbled about how they didn't like war. But I guarantee you if Bill Clinton had unleashed the 10th Mountain Division on Kabul to ensure reproductive choice for Afghan women, Gloria Steinem would have done cartwheels.

Amnesty International couldn't dispute the facts of the British dossier because the British dossier was, in fact, largely a reprint of information gathered by Amnesty International. So, it attacked the motives of the British government.

"There's no question that the regime has an appalling human rights record," Kamal Samari, a spokesman for Amnesty International, told the Washington Post. He admitted, for example, that the group had collected the names of as many as 170,000 Iraqis who had "disappeared." "But what we don't want to see for Iraq or any other country is that the human rights record is used selectively in order to achieve political goals."

What? . . . What!?

I could have sworn the whole reason Amnesty International existed was to make fixing human-rights problems a "political goal." When Amnesty talks of using the record "selectively," it means that the U.S. and its allies are being hypocritical by not taking a uniform line around the world on human rights. Ms. Khan complains, "Let us not forget that these same governments turned a blind eye to reports of widespread violations in Iraq before the Gulf War."

In Wednesday's New York Times, Nicholas Kristof writes:

One of the most conservative, religious, fascinating - and, in many ways, admirable - politicians in America today is Sam Brownback, the senator from Kansas who is a leader of the Christian right.

Sure, Mr. Brownback is to the right of Attila the Hun, and I disagree with him on just about every major issue. But 'tis the season for brotherly love, so let me point to reasons for hope. Members of the Christian right, exemplified by Mr. Brownback, are the new internationalists, increasingly engaged in humanitarian causes abroad - thus creating opportunities for common ground between left and right on issues we all care about.

So Democrats should clamber down from the window ledges, roll up their sleeves and get to work on some of these issues. Because I'm embarrassed to say that Democrats have been so suspicious of Republicans that they haven't contributed much on those human rights issues where the Christian right has already staked out its ground.

Gee, there's a thought.

Update: Wow, an InstaCornerLanche! Welcome readers of Glenn Reynolds and National Review's Corner. Jonah's description is a classic:

Ed Driscoll does the important, difficult, work of keeping Western civilization afloat by remembering what I wrote a long time ago and holding other columnists accountable to it.

Yes, that's our job here: doing the important, difficult, work of keeping Western civilization afloat...

--They all know the words to the theme from M*A*S*H, as Bill Murray once sang.

They also have very long memories, DJ Drummond writes at PoliPundit.com.

I saw Mary Beth Cahill, John Kerry's campaign manager, on C-Span on Sunday. And as The Kerry Haters recently noted, it's kind of staggering is that Cahill is still repeating that the Swift Boat Vets' charges were "disproved", as the liberal media keeps charging. Really? Christmas in Cambodia was discredited? That Kerry called his fellow soldiers war criminals in front of the Senate was discredited?

I'd love to know if Cahill is just saying that it is because she has to work with Kerry and other Democrats and doesn't want to risk alienating them, or if she really believes it, because that's what the liberal cocoon has told her.

Should a new high-end A/V receiver be under your Christmas tree?

Or maybe your kids would like a gas-powered, $50,000 Ferrari Testarossa go-cart or a $900 Lionel O-scale replica Pennsylvania Railroad Raymond Loewy designed GG-1 locomotive.

(Actually, I could go for the GG-1 myself, for my bookshelf. But not at $900. Oh, and too bad they don't make a version with the original classic Loewy specified sans serif typeface for the railroad name and number.)

Jim Geraghty of NRO's "Kerry Spot" has a bit of a scoop on the Dan Rather front:

A little birdie familiar with discussions at CBS News tells me that the network suits will announce Dan Rather's replacement the day they release the report into the fake memos.

I guess the aim is to distract from the bad news by creating two headlines instead of just the bad one. "REPORT FINDS CBS DIDN'T CARE WHETHER BURKETT WAS RELIABLE; BUT HEY, NEVER MIND THAT, THEY NAMED A NEW ANCHOR" or something like that.

Yeah, that will work. (Eye roll.)

I wonder if this means an announcement will be soon.

I probably could have written this essay in my sleep. But it would have meant letting out far too much of my inner geek, which I do my damndest to keep under wraps. (Believe it or not.)

(And the UFO box set hasn't "just been issued"--I've had my copy for almost a year now--but don't tell anybody.)

Update: Glenn lets his geek flag fly high in this post: "I, for one, welcome our new squeegee overlords".

Jack Newfield, a journalist who worked at the Village Voice, New York's Daily News, Post and Sun, along with writing ten books, passed away at age 66. AP's obituary for him lets this example of groupthink go by without comment--probably because its writer feels exactly the same way:

Newfield traveled with Kennedy during his presidential campaign and was present at the Ambassador Hotel when the candidate was assassinated on June 5, 1968.

His second book, "Robert Kennedy: A Memoir," came out the following year.

"Though it's really unknowable, I think that if Bobby had lived to be president we would have ended the Vietnam War much sooner, renewed the war on poverty; we would have had a totally different policy toward blacks than Richard Nixon had," Newfield had said in an interview.

So does he mean that Newfield thought that Bobby would never have passed affirmative action or invited the first black Americans to sleep in the White House as guests of the president?

Of course not. But it would have been nice for the obit writer to research the facts before choosing that particular quote.

(Yes, I just defended Richard Nixon. And yes, I do feel a twinge of embarrassment at having done so.)

Not surprisingly, Mark Steyn has lots of fun at the expense of global warming doomsayers.

Douglas Kern and a person only identified as "Absolutely Not Kern's Hippie Brother-In-Law" weigh the merits.

My take? I believe that Santa was a bipartisan, centrist kind of guy until about 1972.

Group gets permit to turn historic downtown Santa Barbara hotel into Reagan center:

The hotel will be transformed into the new Reagan Ranch Center, which will focus on bringing features from the remote ranch, where President Ronald Reagan signed the largest tax cut in U.S. history, closer to people downtown. It also will operate as a public memorial to Mr. Reagan and his legacy.

It's scheduled to open approximately one year from now. By which time, incidentally, Air Force One should be on display at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley.

Cafe Hayek describes a typical Cajun Italian German English Japanese Dutch Russian Guatemalan Jewish Christmas in America.

(Found via Tech Central Station.)

You know, reading articles like this make me think that Kofi Annan is taking the Oil-for-Food scandal seriously, and is as eager to end the corruption in the UN as Dan Rather is at CBS.

And really, that's all you can ask of them, right?

Brian Baldinger writes that owner John York has driven the San Francisco 49ers into the ground:

Near the end of my playing career, the 49ers flew me to San Francisco for a physical. This was in 1994, when the 49ers were a powerhouse and every player in the league would have loved to wear the red and gold.

I remember walking into their practice facility in Santa Clara. There were the Vince Lombardi trophies. There were lockers belonging to Steve Young and Jerry Rice. There was Bill Walsh on the practice field, no longer a head coach, but still The Man in the model organization in the NFL. I felt like I was on hallowed ground.

I felt much different when I visited the 49ers last week. From the fading "SF" on the awning atop the entrance to the practice facility to the absence of star players to the presence of a head coach who isn't wanted, it's a whole new atmosphere -- an atmosphere of defeat, despair and hopelessness.

Baldinger suggests that York finds the next Bill Walsh to run their team; Larry Beil goes one better: "Other NFL owners have encouraged York to sell the team, but he refuses".

An NFL team is the most elite franchise in the world to own, and if some of the other 31 members of the club are suggesting that you sell, you know you're really doing an awful job. Take their advice John.

Coming soon to Fox: The Exploding Zamboni!

Betsy Newmark links to this Washington Post article on using the courts to fight back against the disappearance of The Holiday That Dare Not Be Named Christmas. On the whole, it's pretty good and surprisingly balanced, but it seems like its author can't figure out how to end it. (Gee, that never happens to me!)

So it ends sort of unconsciously parodying itself:

Barry Lynn, executive director of the advocacy group Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said the "new strategy of the Christian Right is forced inclusion -- they take a secular display and demand that Christian symbols and carols be added."

Christian talk radio, Lynn said, is fueling a "huge movement saying there is a war against Christmas both by the government and by private business, which I think is nonsensical, because unless you live in a cave in America in December, you know it's Christmas."

So the executive director of an organization named Americans United for Separation of Church and State feels that it's "nonsensical" for Christians to feel that there is a "huge movement saying there is a war against Christmas". Despite the fact that he's the head of an organization that's named...Americans United for Separation of Church and State!

And the last paragraph is a classic:

But Anthony R. Picarello Jr., a lawyer with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which works for greater freedom of religious expression, said it is not easy to say which side is truly the aggressor. "If these Christmas pageants and displays have been done for a long time and now there's a push to exclude them, then it appears to be aggression from the left. If they haven't been done and someone's suing to add them, then it appears to be aggression from the right."

Wow, there's some decisive logic there: maybe it's aggression from the right. Maybe it's aggression from the left. Who knows! Way to dig deep, Washington Post.

Incidentally, despite linking to articles like this, I'm not that religious a person myself. But it's been interesting to watch the symbols and words associated with Christmas increasingly being forced under the radar in the past 10 to 15 years, despite what Mr. Lynn claims. Even though at least 90 percent of the country both celebrates Christmas and, not surprisingly, isn't in the least offended by it. Of course, as Peggy Noonan notes, there's a tremendous opportunity just waiting for the left if they're willing to denounce this trend.

Hugh Hewitt has some excellent suggestions for the legacy media on how they can best utilize the fellows at Power Line, now that Time has dubbed them Bloggers of the Year.

Hey, you could do worse--far worse--than ol' Merle.

I'm not even that familar with his music, and I know he'd certainly be a better choice than, say, New Jersey's former poet laureate.

Great, meaty post with lots of links, over at InstaPundit.com.

As I think someone in NRO's "The Corner" pointed out, with John Ashcroft gone, Rumsfeld has become the left's new whipping boy. (Check out Andrew Sullivan's staggering quote in Glenn's post.)

That's great to see--welcome to the Blogosphere!

(Found via InstaPundit.)

According to the photo on the Drudge Report, it's Dubya. And considering he survived everything that Time and the rest of the legacy media threw at him, he's earned it.

(Of course, Time could be setting Matt up for a last minute head fake.)

Update: Nope, it's President Bush. What's perhaps more interesting though, is this tidbit:

“Before this year, blogs were a curiosity, a cult phenomenon, a faintly embarrassing hobby on the order of ham radio and stamp collecting. But in 2004, blogs unexpectedly vaulted into the pantheon of major media, alongside TV, radio and, yes, magazines, and it was Power Line, more than any other blog, that got them there,” writes TIME’s Lev Grossman.

That's a tremendous honor for Power Line, and they certainly deserve it. (I'm sure Dan Rather would agree. Right Dan?) But it's damning with faint praise to write, "Before this year, blogs were a curiosity, a cult phenomenon, a faintly embarrassing hobby on the order of ham radio and stamp collecting".

(Just out of curiosity, how many ham radio and stamp collectors out in flyover country will decide--maybe even subliminally--to drop their subscriptions to the always condescending Time after that line?)

As I wrote two and half years ago:

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It's official--Christopher Lee is the coolest octogenarian on the planet (with the possible exception of Les Paul).

Los Angeles County completes the airbrushing of its history: its new non-religious seal officially goes into effect today, according to UPI.

Since it's intent on eliminating all traces of its Christian heritage, doesn't the name have to go as well?

Dennis Prager had an excellent column on the topic when the firestorm first erupted, back in June.

It's got Anne Archer and Joe Mantegna, fairly big name stars, but Hollywood doesn't seem to care.

The Internet Movie Database lists its take at the box office on its opening weekend--over a year ago--at "$0,000". But The Washington Times writes that since then, Uncle Nino, "an inexpensive, independently produced, PG-rated movie with a simple story about the importance of love and family has packed audiences of all ages into a single theater" in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

In February, it opens nationally, having finally landed a distributor--the same one that made hits out of a pair of otherwise rejected Hollywood films: My Big Fat Greek Wedding and The Passion of the Christ.

Meet Stanislav Petrov, the man who saved the world.

(Via Power Line.)

Update: Ever the contrarian, Orrin Judd writes, "Hard to believe there are still folks around who think Soviet equipment would have worked well enough to do much damage to anyone but themselves".

When I wrote my original post, I tried to invent a Dr. Strangelove angle, but really didn't want to stretch the analogy. But I hadn't noticed this:

The man who saved America -- and probably the world -- is living out his days on a measly pension in a dank apartment in a forlorn suburb of Moscow. He has a bad stomach, varicose veins and a mangy spotted dog named Jack the Ripper.

Hmmm...Are they sure the dog's middle name is "the" and not "D."?

Dave Barry has a few ideas that might just bridge the divide between the red, blue and Samoan states.

Samoan? Read on, McDuff...

(Via PoliPundit.)

The Dishonest Reporting 'Awards' for 2004 are online from HonestReporting.com, "Our fourth annual recognition of the most skewed and biased coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

(Via Little Green Footballs.)

AP reports that Christie Whitman "Warns Against Catering to Right".

Of course. Because all they did was elect her to governor in New Jersey in the early 1990s when Jim Florio, the state's Democratic governor, managed to alienate three quarters of the voters by simultaneously passing a major tax increase and gun grab. (I lived in New Jersey in the early '90s, and it seemed like half the cars on the road had "DUMP FLORIO" bumperstickers on them. I also worked for a very conservative boss at the time who thought that Whitman was the Great Right Hope.)

And then in early 2001, another call from the right came: President Bush made her his first head of the EPA.

No wonder Whitman doesn't want to cater to the right--it kept finding work for her to do!

This has to be a sign of a major shark jumping having just occurred.

"Eskimo Filing Against US Just Tip of Legal Iceberg"

All I can say, is that that's one coldblooded editor.

The Athens Georgia cabin that inspired the B-52s' mega-monster hit 1989 song "Love Shack" burned down on Monday, in a fire country fire officials declared "suspicious"--they haven't ruled out arson.

Osama bin Laden has another tape out; Arthur Chrenkoff writes, "bin Laden is moving one step further along the path of the great ideological - or at least rhetorical - convergence between the angry left and the angry Islamofascism...For Osama, version 2005, poverty is the root cause of terrorism. For the rest of us, we know it's Osama".

(Via Power Line, who dubs Osama "Just another whiney populist billionaire".)

If you're in an '80s sort of mood, put on your Wayfarers and roll up the sleeves of your unconstructed linen sportscoat, and check out my article on the Live Aid concert and its aftermath over at the Weekly Standard.

It goes nicely with (and in fact was inspired by) the recently released ten hour DVD of the event--which makes a great Christmas gift!

Update: Power Line's Scott Johnson (AKA "The Big Trunk") writes:

Ed's companion post linking to his Standard Online column is "Ed is the world, Ed is the children." Ed's post makes me wonder if there is any one of us at Power Line who might be able to fill Ed's shoes in the event of an emergency. I'll meditate on that over the weekend.

What can I say? I got very silly when I wrote that headline. Maybe I should try mending my ways Monty Python style:

"The BBC would like to apologize to everyone in the world for that last headline. It was disgusting and bad and thoroughly disobedient and please don't bother to phone up because we know it was very tasteless, but Ed didn't really mean it and he comes from a broken home and has a very unhappy personal life. Anyway, he’s a really very nice person underneath and very warm in the traditional journalistic way and please don't write in either because the BBC is going through an unhappy phase at the moment--what with its father dying and the mortgage and BBC 2 going out with men."

OK, scratch that idea...

Just got a review copy of In The Red Zone: A Journey Into The Soul of Iraq by Steven Vincent today from Spence Publishing. (Thank you.)

Vincent sounds like quite an interesting guy. He was quoted recently in Front Page as saying:

Suppression of the feminine—whether it be feminine sexuality, freedom or laughter—is the foundation upon which the death-cult of Islamofascism rests. Undermine that foundation, and the entire edifice, from al-Sadr to Zarqawi to bin Laden will collapse.

But for the West to encourage such an event, we must overcome our own fears of liberated women. By that I mean, the Left must discard a multicultural mindset that refuses to use Western standards to criticize other cultures, even when Western values—such as feminism--are clearly more beneficial to those cultures. As I describe in my book, one afternoon in Baghdad I listened to a group of Western anti-war activists complain that the American invasion of Iraq was an imperialistic attempt to crush the country’s native culture. When I suggested that some aspect of this “native culture” should be crushed—like forcing women to wear black sacks in blistering summer weather—one of the activists looked at me with a shocked expression. “But feminism has brought such destruction to the American family, do we want to wish that on Iraq?” And she was no post-feminist youngster, but a woman from the anti-Vietnam War days!

This—along with an unwillingness to support the Bush Administration in anything—explains in large part the silence of the Left as Islamofascists repeatedly violate their core beliefs of secularism, human rights and creative freedom (where are the outcries about the murder of Theo van Gogh? They come mostly from the Right). I remember my Iraqi friend Naseer telling me how impressed his mother was to see American women soldiers. His mom didn’t realize such gender equality was possible, or that women could interact so easily with their male counterparts—and millions of other women across Iraq are learning similar feminist lessons. The Left has got to accept one fact that has stuck in their craw since the Vietnam War: where the American military goes, so goes human freedom.

But the Right has to bite some bullets, too. Let’s face it: many of us prescribe for Iraq the very measures that conservatives detest about the 1960s—particularly when it comes to feminism, sexual freedom and rejection of patriarchal authority. So the Right—especially those on the religious right—have to accept the fact that once you let the feminine genie out of the bottle, the results are unpredictable and not always to a conservative’s liking. That means here in America, as well.

Communists, libertarians, leftists, neo-cons, Christian evangelists, Hollywood celebrities and NASCAR Americans ought to be able to rally at least one point: women must be free in the Islamic Middle East. It’s an issue that combines visionary idealism with hard-nosed, America-first realism. By uniting the progressive energies of the Left and the Right, the U.S.—I’d like to say the West, but Europe is too busy appeasing its Muslim minority--will exert the same sort of slow, steady, unyielding pressure against the misogynistic imams and shari’a-wielding ayatollahs that brought down the apartheid regimes of the antebellum south and South Africa.

National Review Online is excerpting Chapter Four of Vincent's book, beginning here.

Look for some thoughts from me in the (hopefully) not too-distant-future.

A new liberalism that's willing to fight Islamofascism? Don't count on it anytime soon, writes William Voegeli of the Claremont Institute.

James Pinkerton of Tech Central Station asks, "Is Google God? Maybe not, but it's way up there."

(With apologies to John Lennon, not to mention God Himself, for this post's title.)

Update: Peter Wood uses an only slightly more modest description of Google over at National Review Online: he likens it to the Great Pyramids of Egypt.

Just in time for Christmas, It's a Wonderful Life in 30 seconds, and starring bunnies.

(Everyone else will link to this in the next week, so why shouldn't I?)

Update: See what I mean? (And man, that was fast!)

Contribute to an online message board? Planning to?

I think there's something we can all learn from this.

San Francisco has always had a serious case of New York City envy. In 2006, they're planning on becoming New York, circa 1974.

Back in May, P.J. O'Rourke wrote that maybe America should become isolationist again:

And the best thing about Americans recusing ourselves from global entanglements is that we will be loved again. Imagine a world where American manners and mores set the standard almost everywhere, where American fashions, American ideas and American lifestyles are universally sought out and copied. A world where people avidly listen to American music, eagerly watch American TV and movies, and try to imitate Americans in every way. Imagine a world where the U.S.A. is so admired that people by the millions want nothing more than to come to America and recuse themselves from global entanglements.

As I wrote back then, "Hey--It could happen!"

Along similar lines, Suzanne Fields has an update from the Middle East:

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Video of a C-130 Hercules landing on an aircraft carrier.

Alina ''Mumín'' Salgado, 26, daughter of Alina Fernández, one of Fidel Castro's daughters in exile, pledged allegiance to the United States at a giant citizenship ceremony in Miami Beach on Wednesday.

Oliver Stone could not be reached for comment.

"Boldly going where no member of their party has ever gone before, key Democratic Party leaders embarked today on an historic fact-finding mission to Nascar".

Heh, as the man says.

Jim Geraghty bluntly responds to Peggy Noonan's Wall Street Journal essay (see previous post): "It will never happen, Peggy".

Ever since the election, Democrats have been trying to find a way to bridge the gap between the left and the right, and the blue states and the red ones. And to try to and erase the stigma, as Rod Dreher of The Dallas Morning News dubbed them, of being The Godless Party.

Peggy Noonan has an excellent first step:

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In an article titled, "The Year of the Blog" in The Weekly Standard, Hugh Hewitt looks at Newsweek's anti-Christmas/anti-Christian cover story:

Hit pieces like Meacham's targeting Christianity have become commonplace in recent years as magazine editors and book publishers have come to understand the size of the market for stories on faith, but find themselves staffed almost exclusively with skeptics of one degree or another--usually extreme skeptics. So the offensive article/book/documentary appears, sales skyrocket, and a few weeks later some angry letters to the editor follow which are shrugged off as way too little, way too late.

Hewitt adds, "That was then. The blogosphere is now", and explains how quickly Newsweek's story was shown to be one-sided and biased.

Warm, tolerant comedians on both college campuses and in Hollywood are working extra hard these days to help bridge the gap between the blue states and the rest of America.

This story doesn't surprise me all that much--it sounds like another example of Hollywood stasists versus Silicon Valley Dynamists.

I can't say I'm crazy about Absinthe--I've tried it (at least the non-wormwood-equipped Absente, and I think I have a bottle of similar-tasting Pernod sitting around), but the licorice taste isn't enough to make me want to give up gin, even to see the Green Fairy.

But Beautiful Atrocities says Absinthe is the new chic hooch these days.

In an essay on how bloggers helped defeat Tom Daschle, John Fund considers another way that they could transform online journalism:

Technology is moving so fast that there are now a growing number of video bloggers, or "vloggers," who look toward the day when they can produce original programming, bypassing the usual broadcast networks and cable channels. Dan Rather may have done more than legitimize the blogging community with his scandal. He may have helped accelerate a radical decentralization of media power that will turn bloggers into future anchors of their own mini-news programs.

I agree: by 2008, expect lots of one or two-man online TV stations--or at least bloggers with lots of multimedia content. And when they start to catch on as personalities, I'd be very, very scared if I was a TV producer.

(Of course, the smart producers will try to co-opt the best of them--and their audience.)

Glenn Reynolds, writing over at Tech Central Station says that thanks to the Internet, "another Hollywood storyline died this week. And good riddance".

Via Datacloud you can stream commercials for lots of products you bought in the 1980s, but probably wouldn't confess to today.

Oh, and a chance to see Kelly LeBrock in the shower.

James Lileks and Jay Nordlinger have some thoughts on the ever-diminishing use of the C-word.

A couple of interesting posts about the 1960 election, over at "The Corner". And for additional New Frontier-era electoral college wonkery, check out this John Fund piece from the Wall Street Journal last year.

For more up to date electoral college wonkery involving JFK Mark II (a poor, poor substitute for the real thing), Truman again defeated Dewey today, despite the last minute, last ditch wishes of some.

Even as it occurs in Maryland, writes Jim Geraghty.

Bruce Bartlett also has some thoughts on the subject.

Professor Bainbridge writes that "John Cornwell has recanted the charges he made against Pope Pius XII's conduct during the Holocaust".

Bainbridge writes that it would be nice if Amazon made some acknowledgement "of Cornwell's retraction of the very serious charges the book make".

Tim Graham says the same could be asked of CBS and Sixty Minutes.

I'm sure they will--right after the Ra^therGate report comes out.

I agree with the main thesis of this Dick Morris essay, but it does have this whopper in it:

Bookstores were filled in the past year with volumes on both sides of the struggle. Tatum O’Neal and Bob Dylan couldn’t get a word in edgewise as the likes of Richard Clarke and the Swift boaters dominated the best-seller list. Michael Moore — a man neither political party wants to touch — showed his incendiary film, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” to tens of millions with the complicity of liberal movie chains.

"A man neither political party wants to touch"? Say what?

Maybe after November 2nd Moore has become damaged goods as far as the DNC is concerned, but over the summer, it was quite a different story.

When Fahrenheit 9/11 debuted, the Senate had to practically close down because most of its Democratic members went to the screening. Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe endorsed it. The State Department invited grad students at Georgetown’s Department of Government to a screening that they (State) paid for. President Clinton and presidential candidate John Kerry endorsed it. And Jimmy Carter plunked Moore down next to him in his suite at the Democratic National Convention in late July.

If this article is true, now we know why former NYPD Commissioner Bernard Kerik withdrew his name from consideration as director of Homeland Security and broke out the nanny defense on Friday: had an affair with famed publisher Judith Regan!

Geez.

Lori Byrd of PoliPundit writes that she's amazed:

that Kerik would think that this stuff would not come out in a confirmation hearing considering the viciousness of congressional Democrats, especially after their recent losses. He should know that it is only Democrats that are allowed a free pass.

According to Drudge, New York's governor Pataki is working behind the scenes to be considered for for the job; Jim Geraghty looks at how this would impact the Empire State's governor's race.

As The Los Angeles Times notes, the electoral college is scheduled to meet today:

And you thought you were done with the 2004 election. Today the electoral college formally meets to reelect George W. Bush as president. Barring any last-minute surprises, the vote should be 286 for Bush, 252 for John Kerry.

It will be interesting to see if there are any last-minute shenanigans.

Nicholas Stix looks at Rathergate producer Mary Mapes, CBS News, and Chicago-style journalism.

(Meanwhile, James Lileks looks at a far more relaxing subject: Chicago-style architecture.)

Allow me to venture into Jonah Goldberg's territory here for a moment, because I've stumbled upon a blog post about one of the very few comic books I've managed to hang onto all these years. It features Batman meeting the Beatles, or the Rutles, or maybe the cast of a Cleveland dinner theater version of Beatlemania.

(And yes, because I have unlimited knowledge of all things '60s through '80s pop culture, that is an allusion to Ringo's Magic Christian in the title.)

Orrin Judd notes that when it comes to the media, some stem cells are more equal than others.

Jim Geraghty writes, "Lesson one from Meet the Press, there's no longer any doubt - Howard Dean is running for DNC Chair".

No doubt about it: he has bipartisan support.

Update: Heh.

Via Barry Johnson, we find George Will praising the liberalism of 1947:

In 1947, Americans for Democratic Action was founded by anticommunist liberals who, galvanized by the onset of the Cold War, were contesting with anti-anticommunists for control of the Democratic Party. The ADA, said one of its founders, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., believed that liberalism had been ``fundamentally reshaped'' by a ``historical re-education'' about the threat of Soviet totalitarianism.

Speaking of Schlesinger, his The Age of Roosevelt was the inspiration for Steven Hayward's brilliant first volume of The Age of Reagan, which is less a biography of Reagan than a conservative history of the 1960s and '70s. (It ends with Reagan beating Carter in 1980, which is where Volume II will begin.)

I've been rereading what Hayward wrote about the 1972 election, which is where the wheels really came off the Democratic Party: radical chic and punitive liberalism became the norm, to the point where McGovern compared Ho Chi Minh to George Washington in a Playboy interview, and his aides took to wearing upside down flag pins on their lapels.

This was a very different Democratic party from the New Frontier of JFK and LBJ's Great Society which, while was a little too big government for me (particularly as it ballooned under LBJ), had lots of redeeming qualities: they were patriotic; believed in strong defense at home; trying to spread democracy abroad; had a vigorous space program; and at least with JFK, willing to cut taxes.

It's an attitude that got Wilson, FDR, Truman, JFK and LBJ elected in the 20th century. But since 1972, it's been completely discarded by the Democratic party, even as they simultaneously wonder why the GOP keeps winning.

Update: Via Power Line, Roger L. Simon also has some thoughts on the Democrats' current state.

Another Update: Power Line's Paul Mirengoff writes, "the Democratic party's real problem may be that it's the captive of its baby-boomer wing, of which Michael Moore is only an over-sized manifestation".

Moral equivalence at its zenith: Michael Moore compares himself to Rosa Parks.

Why would CBS attack a leftwing blogger, as opposed to, you know, Power Line, Little Green Footballs, National Review Online--

--Or heck, InstaPundit himself, who has some very logical sounding conjecture on the subject.

Frank Martin writes, "Airlines--I'm your biggest fan, and even I don't like you. This is a problem".

Frank's got some excellent suggestions on fixing the problem--all of which will go sadly unheeded.

Barrie Maxwell looks at the storied career of David O. Selzneck, who produced a few little-seen low budget art house films during his career in Hollywood: King Kong, A Star Is Born, and The Third Man. Oh, and Gone With The Wind.

He also helped import Alfred Hitchcock to the United States to helm Rebecca in 1940. Hitchcock would eventually chafe at Selzeck's power, and once free of it, Hitch would plant a variety of in-jokes in his films at Selzneck's expense: that's why Raymond Burr's hair is white and curly in Rear Window, and Selzneck's self-applied middle initial was the basis of the seeming throwaway line by Cary Grant's Roger O. Thornhill character to Eva Marie Saint in North By Northwest.

Jim Geraghty, Orrin Judd, and John Derbyshire each look at the backlash against eliminating the word Christmas from public space. Geragthy writes:

Cam, Mike McCarville and others on NRANews are fired up about Oklahoma schools that are making sure no Christmas carols appear at the “Holiday Concert,” while songs about Hannukah or Winter Solstice are okay.

As one who is not threatened, and who in fact applauds the flourishing of faith in American life, I disagree with the school decision, but am more reassured than outraged. This reaction is based on my suspicion that the backlash to this hyper-political correctness will “move the ball” more in our direction than in theirs.

Is there any force in life that makes us more motivated than some screeching harpies demanding that we stop doing something because it offends them? Could anything spur folks to make publicly-visible expressions of religious faith on private property than some bullying hyper-sensitive litigious folk demanding a holiday-free zone?

Cautious corporations and advertisers may be quickly replacing their Christmas decorations with generic expressions of “Happy Holidays,” but I suspect ordinary citizens, having been challenged by someone with the audacity to issue fatwas on certain phrases, songs, and symbols, are going to defy this with ever-greater and holiday-specific expressions.

I agree--it's very strange (and frustrating) to watch each fall progress from Halloween to Thanksgiving, to "The Holiday That Dare Not Speak Its Name", as James Lileks ironically dubbed Christmas last year.

Josh Claybourne spots bi-coastal legacy media flipflopping on Senate filibustering.

Donald Lambro catches the legacy media pooh-poohing the nation's economic health and notes:

Adjectives such as "mediocre" or "lackluster" or "weak" or "sluggish" are being used in the business reporting columns to describe an economy that in fact is growing at about 4 percent, according to the U.S. Commerce Department's third quarter revision of the Gross Domestic Product. Since when is 4 percent GDP growth "mediocre" or "lackluster?" Europe is barely achieving 1-2 percent. They would be dancing in the streets in Japan if they had such growth.

Up since the election are the stock market, consumer confidence, retail sales and industrial activity. What is down is unemployment. Perhaps the best indication of how Americans measure the economy and their own financial situation, President Bush's job approval score is at 53 percent.

As Lambro writes, "Back to you, Dan".

Update: Speaking of a sluggish Europe, Power Line observes that in Holland:

The Dutch middle classes are leaving the country in droves for the first time in living memory.

The new wave of educated migrants are quietly voting with their feet against a multicultural experiment long touted as a model for the world, but increasingly a warning of how good intentions can go wrong.

And as Glenn Reynolds noted in 2002, "If Sweden were a U.S. state, it would be the poorest measured by household gross income before taxes".

Another Update: Victor Davis Hanson writes that for Europe, "gut-check time is coming".

Via InstaPundit, we find that Technorati, the blog search engine, tracks over five million Weblogs.

As Glenn writes, "That's rather a lot, really".

It is. But that's really not that big a surprise.

Back in March, a friend sent us a CNN story with the remarkably disingenuous headline, "Study: Very few bloggers on Net", which we had lots of fun debunking over at Tech Central Station:

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

Let's examine those numbers a little further! As I wrote on my own Weblog about the story, the numbers tell a very different story than its slant.

According to one study, there are 146 million adult Internet users in the US alone. The article claims that between two and seven percent of those Internet users keep blogs. If we round that number to five percent, it means that there are 7,300,000 Weblogs in the US alone. And that's a lot of Weblogs!

This is the sort of cynical, "glass half empty/glass half full" story that bloggers love to parse, and many Weblogs had a field day with it. 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), put things into sharp perspective. In one of his typical 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.

Hey, Max Headroom was only 15 minutes into the future. We're a good nine months sometimes!

Update:InstaLanche! Welcome readers of the Professor's site.

PoliPundit notes that Bernard Kerik has withdrawn his name from consideration as director of Homeland Security:

His friend and lawyer, Joe Tacopina, said that the reason was a discovery Kerik made when reviewing matters in preparation for his upcoming Senate confirmation relating to a nanny and whether proper social security and other taxes were paid properly. He said that Kerik had discovered the issue with the nanny himself, rather than a reporter finding it. Tacopina said that he was extremely disappointed that Kerik did not stay in and fight for the job, which he considers him to be the best person in the world for it, over such a minor matter. He said that Kerik did not want the attention of the President and those at the Department of Homeland Security diverted by what would be a political firestorm over the matter.

If the “nanny” problem is the only reason, it seems to me that it is a terrible loss for the country. I don’t think it was discussed on Scarborough Country, but I suspect that since immigration is so important to homeland security, that the issues relating to a nanny problem, if the nanny was an immigrant without proper social security or other papers, might have played into the decision. This is purely speculation on my part. I am sure we will hear the specifics soon enough. I really hope this doesn’t start another spate of qualified people not being considered due to “nanny” problems. The last time that happened the country ended up with Janet Reno. Yikes!

Yikes indeed, but "the nanny problem" sounds in the case like the political equivalent of a general falling on his sword: it's a way to quietly bow-out after failing in battle.

In other words, it's an orchestrated way for Kerik to save face in light of much bigger problems that would either block his nomination or embarrass the administration--or both.

Update: In a surprising move, his replacement has already been nominated. Seems like a very logical choice for the job, actually...

Another Update: Mickey Kaus has a similar take on The Nanny Excuse.

Jonathan Leaf wonders why Hollywood frequently casts women one to five years older than than the actors who play their sons (or son-in-law to be, in the case of The Graduate):

Laurence Harvey - 34, Angela Lansbury — 37
“The Manchurian Candidate” (1962)

Dustin Hoffman — 27, Anne Bancroft — 33
“The Graduate” (1967)

Robin Williams — 30, Glenn Close — 35
“The World According To Garp” (1982)

Colin Farrell — 28, Angelina Jolie — 29
“Alexander” (2004)

He wonders what messages that sends to women:

Whatever the reasons are for this practice, it isn’t good. It’s not only that it looks strange on screen. It’s also that it not so subtly sends more mature American women the message that if they don’t look young they don’t really matter.

As James Lileks recently wrote, "The season of nonsectarian joy and fellowship is finally upon us, as we prepare to celebrate the birth of the Baby Claus Tree".

If you're looking for gift ideas, I have a review of his new book, Interior Desecrations: Hideous Homes From The Horrible '70s, over at my Electronic House newsletter.

Samizdata's blogger's glossary credits James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal for inventing the term "Dowdified":

Dowdification

Used as noun or verb. The willful omission of one or more words so the meaning of the statement is no longer understood but that the statement suits the needs of the writer in launching an ad hominem attack whether or not the construction is truthful or grammatically complete.

Named after Maureen Dowd, based on her manufacture of a quote attributed to President Bush in her May 14, 2003 column (as first reported by Robert Cox on TheNationalDebate.com).

It looks like Hollywood has picked up on the practice.

In his wrecking ball-like review of Oliver Stone's Alexander, Brent Bozell notices that Hollywood has been forced to Dowdify critics' reviews to have something--anything--to put on movie posters and in TV ads:

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Darren Copeland has a modest proposal to curb Detroit-style violence in the stands.

My God, what a payroll list Karl Rove must have:

Liberal powerhouse MoveOn has a message for the "professional election losers" who run the Democratic Party: "We bought it, we own it, we're going to take it back."

If that's true, don't look for self-destructive hemlock like this to disappear from the left anytime soon.

The Wall Street Journal has a suggestion for Congress: fix the military's failed acquisition system.

Arnold Kling, with a little help from A.A. Milne, explains why the left should favor Social Security privatization (and the right should oppose it).

Via Power Line, Donald Luskin also some thoughts; no heffalumps were harmed in the making of his essay.

Great post on the topic, with lots of links covering a variety of angles, over at Instapundit.com.

Michael Crichton: hypocrite or contrarian?

Here's the current starting line-up for the presidential race in 2008:

On the right, we have Rudy Giuliani. On the left, Hillary Clinton.

Of course, this playbill is subject to change between now and then.

(Via PoliPundit.)

"Man Wanted for Assault With Burger".

(I hope PETA doesn't use this as an excuse to try to ram through anti-hamburger legislation. Although I suppose a Vegiburger could be just as dangerous in similiar circumstances.)

James Lileks has some thoughts on why Oliver Stone's latest mess-of-a-movie tanked at the box office.

For what it's worth, I liked Platoon (though not as much as Full Metal Jacket of course; long-time readers know of my excessive college-era Kubrick-obsession). I loved Stone's Wall Street and even liked JFK, even though I thought the supposed "docudrama" was total fiction. (OK--maybe not total fiction. I'm pretty sure the title character was based on an actual person.)

It was with The Doors that I first began to wonder if Stone was losing it. With Nixon, I was convinced.

However, while it shows burgeoning traces of the self-indulgence that would wreck his later career, this film will always be Stone's epic.

My latest Electronic House newsletter is online.

...And because I am so totally cool--it even comes with a link to tune I created using the products in question.

Don't try this at home kids.

Oh wait--yeah, give it a shot--it's fun!

This story sounds like it's time for B.G. Burkett to swing into action again.

Interesting essay in National Review Online today about the future of Amtrak by Iain Murray, who writes that he was part of the team "that privatized the British rail-infrastructure body, then called Railtrack, in 1996".

Check out this quote:

Yet, despite the sure knowledge that terrorists are only too ready to attack major transportation systems, as the attacks in Madrid demonstrated, Amtrak has repeatedly failed to allocate funds responsibly. As [Department of Transportation Inspector General Kenneth Mead] says, “Programming millions of scarce capital dollars for fixing long-distance sleeper cars when bridges that Amtrak owns are beyond their functional and economic lives and must be refurbished or replaced is unacceptable.” Ample evidence that Amtrak is more interested in trains than in infrastructure is provided by Amtrak spokesman Cliff Black, who told GovExec.com in reaction to the inspector general’s report that, “Asking Amtrak to maintain railroad tracks is like asking Greyhound Lines to maintain the interstate highways.”

Big, big difference: Greyhound doesn't own the roads its buses travel on. As I understand it, as part of the creation of Conrail (when the government merged Penn Central and half dozen or so other northeast railroads) in 1976, Amtrak was given ownership of the Northeast Corridor, the largely ex-Pennsylvania Railroad four track mainline that's the backbone of railroad travel from Boston to Florida.

Actually, of the two 1970s-era government-created shotgun railroad weddings, Conrail has been infinitely more successful: it was allowed to divest itself of unprofitable lines; designed to be eventually privitized; and eventually was, turning a profit in the 1980s and '90s as an efficient freight handler. In the late 1990s, its locomotives and rolling stock were merged into CSX Corporation and Norfolk Southern.

Too bad Amtrak didn't follow a similar route. But President Bush's second term is a golden opportunity to divest the government of this Nixon-era dinosaur.

In one of his rare non-"Best of the Web Today" columns, James Taranto explains how overturning Roe v. Wade could benefit Democrats.

Radley Balko asks, "What is the new heroin? What isn't?"

James Lileks fisks Clarence Darrow.

Private pilot (and superstar actor) Morgan Freeman has been grounded by the FAA for breaking altitude rules while preparing to land at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey.

This is a classic: Freeman says, "I'm being censored by the FAA and they're going to ground me".

'I'm being censored"--that phrase has to be on the tip of every actor in Hollywood: I bet Freeman would have uttered it if he had been pulled over by a trooper on the New Jersey Turnpike for speeding.

John J. Miller and Mark Molesky, the authors of Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America's Disastrous Relationship with France use ruthless elegance (and more than a hint of nuance) to review its New York Times review.

In the past, a reviewer's word was typically final. The new media allows anyone to fight back when wrongly criticized.

"Elegant" isn't a word that most people would associate with President Bush. Somehow, it's just not a Crawford, Texas-kind of word. But John Podhoretz admires how smoothly President Bush has cleared the decks for his second term:

There they all went, one after the other. They were given the dignity of a seemingly personal decision to set a new course for themselves. When Richard Nixon won his second term, he demanded letters of resignation from all political appointees — a decision that had a thuggish cast to it even though it was probably an effort to do exactly what Bush has done.

The one person who didn't quite get the message — Treasury Secretary John Snow — was given an unidentified push in the media by a senior official who said he was welcome to stay if he didn't stay very long.

Note also how Bush kept the news of his most controversial choice — the decision to keep Donald Rumsfeld on as secretary of defense — until after the cascade of pseudo-resignations.

The president has cleared the decks for his second term with surprising speed and even a dash of ruthlessness. You might think ruthlessness and elegance can't co-exist, but you would be wrong. Elegance has a ruthless clarity about it, just as Bush has a ruthless clarity about him.

Having earned political capital by his decisive victory last month, and putting into place a clean slate of cabinet officials, it will be very interesting indeed, to watch President Bush's second term.

One of the benefits of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine is that it's possible to set it to way, way, waaaay back, and see what was going on on the original mww.ceasar.gov web server, 2,004 years ago...

(Via Resurrection Song.)

Dennis Prager puts Blue America into sharp perspective in a must-read essay.

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

Terry McAuliffe uses the anniversary of Pearl Harbor as an excuse to slam the GOP.

In his 1990-ish biography on Woody Allen (published about 30 seconds before the name Soon-Yi because a household word), Eric Lax described Las Vegas as "a giant get out of jail free card" for entertainers because of its enormous salaries.

So why have Linda Ronstadt, and now George Carlin had some strange shows there? Carlin's meltdown sounds particularly bad:

Read More »

OK guys, if you say so.

On the other hand, it sure makes for a great headline!

This is also a telling stat:

At any given time, Democrats were 15 per cent more likely to be watching television than Republicans, with top Democratic programmes being game shows and celebrity court cases.

15 percent more likely to watching TV? That's not very surprising, actually.

Update: Almost forgot--one of the reasons why that stat isn't too surprising, is that we linked to a piece along similiar lines back in January. Meanwhile, Patrick Ruffini has some thoughts as well.

I view it as yet another reason why more and more people will be relying almost exclusively on (hopefully carefully chosen) Websites for their news.

Karzai defeats Dewey, too.

As Wes Roth writes, he's scheduled to be sworn in as the first democratically elected president in Afghani history tonight. And be received with a cough and a yawn from the American legacy media.

Orrin Judd links to an interesting article in the Denver Post about "Generation Jones":

For the uninitiated, Generation Jones is the large, heretofore lost, generation between the baby boomers and Generation X. Born in the years 1954 to 1965, Jonesers are not a small cusp generation that slipped through the cracks but rather the largest generation in American history, constituting 26 percent of all U.S. adults today. Mistakenly, they were originally lumped in with boomers for one reason only: their parents and boomers' parents happened to have a lot of kids.

But generational personalities come from shared formative experiences, not head counts. This original flawed definition of the baby-boom generation has become widely discredited among experts, which is partly what's given rise to the emergence of Generation Jones, a cohort with significantly different attitudes and values than those held by its surrounding generations.

Why the name Generation Jones? Among its many connotations is that of a large anonymous generation, like a Generation Smith or Doe. But the connotation that's perhaps most relevant for politics arises from the slang term "jones'": a craving for someone or something. As children in the 1960s, Jonesers were given huge expectations, during, arguably, the peak of post-World War II American confidence and affluence, and then confronted, as they came of age during the mid-to-late 1970s and early 1980s with a very different reality, leaving them with a certain pending, unrequited, "jonesin"' quality.

As Orrin notes, this generation (which he and I are both part of), "looks to start around the earliest point where kids would not have had to decide about going to Vietnam":

We watched the older kids make complete asses of themselves in the 60s and experienced the wreckage they'd made of the country in the 70s, then had Ronald Reagan ride in as a near savior in the 80s and enjoyed the Peace Dividend of the 90s. It hardly seems surprising that this cohort would be so attracted to the Reaganesque leadership of George W. Bush and repelled by the 60s throwback John Kerry.

Not sure if I'm crazy about the "Gen Jones" name, but I agree with the analogy.

Should the Iraqi elections be held on January 30th, the date that President Bush is aiming for? Mark Coffey--who, based on his blog's name has his sights aimed at another election closer to home--has some thoughts.

Truman defeats Dewey.

The left, which invented the manipulation of language to further its goals, now believes that Republicans win elections not because of their ideas--but because of the language they use to frame them.

Michael Ubaldi calls it for what it is: projection.

Macroeconomics: Virginia Postrel, William Bennett and Russell Roberts explain why the MSM is rapidly becoming a legacy media.

Microeconomics: Glenn Reynolds explains what it means for libel law when everyone is a potential pundit.

Update: Speaking of macroeconomics and the legacy media, Thomas Sowell notes a telling statistic:

During his long tenure as NBC News anchorman, Tom Brokaw took that program from last place among the big three broadcast networks to first place. But he had more viewers when he was in last place, more than 20 years ago, than he had in first place this year. That is because fewer people now watch NBC, ABC, or CBS News. Good!

Yes.

Cassandra, formerly of I Love Jet Noise now has her own blog.

And she's none to happy about having to fly the PC skies when she travels commercial.

Ben Stein writes of that elusive beast, the Republican in Hollywood:

Yet, we're here, meeting in smoky places, greeting and giving the secret sign in the fog out by Zuma Beach, more of us every day. And in the words of the Civil Rights song I used to sing when I marched for voting rights in Cambridge, Maryland, "We are not afraid. Deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome some day." Even in Los Angeles, even in Malibu, even in Hollywood. Tremble, Barbra, tremble. We are right outside your gates, with our truth. We are not afraid and we shall overcome.

Read the whole thing.

James K. Glassman explains how the world--or at least the financial world--works.

John Hawkins has the results, here.

I can't say I'm much of a NASCAR fan. I have nothing against it--and I followed auto racing as a kid--but since then, I'm strictly an NFL man.

But PoliPundit has an interesting post that the reaction of the red states to Dale Earnhardt's death in a racing accident back on February 18th, 2001 completely caught the legacy media by surprise. Had they paid attention to the amount of affection that pour out of red staters, they might have understood the culture war much better--and not have been surprised by the patriotism that emerged after 9/11, and the 2002 and 2004 election results.

Update: Almost forgot--yesterday I was surprised to see that here in Northern California, my local OSH (Orchard Supply Hardware), a hardware chain owned by Sears, is selling Dale Earnhardt Christmas balls, complete with his signature and trademark #3 painted on them.

Well, at least by a couple of bucks.

Yesterday, while my wife and I were out buying decorations for our Christmas tree, we drove through the local McDonald's drive-through for a couple of quick Diet Cokes.

I noticed my large drink wasn't as large as it used to be.

I thought they simply screwed up our order. The kids at the drive through are just that: kids, and they make mistakes.

Or maybe it wasn't. But just for fun, I thought I'd find out.

So today, while doing more Christmas shopping, I went back to the same drive-through and asked for "a Super-Sized Diet Coke".

The clerk on the other end of the microphone told me that "McDonald's doesn't do Super Size anymore".

There was nobody behind us, so I said "No thanks", and left. We're weren't "Lovin' it". So that's about $3.75 or so that McDonald's lost, thanks, I guess to Morgan Sporlock. And the evidence is overwhelming: new puritanism and political correctness kills business.

Three bucks worth, at least. But hey, maybe more: wonder if the local Burger King still serves large beverages?

...That a staggeringly brutal period of Soviet history began:

Seventy years ago on Wednesday, on Dec. 1, 1934, a shot rang out that killed not only the Communist Party boss of Leningrad, but also marked the start of a wave of mass repressions by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

Sergei Kirov, a Politburo member, was shot dead in a corridor in the former Smolny Institute girls' school about 4:30pm by Leonid Nikolayev, a former communist who not long before the assassination had been expelled from the party for "inappropriate behavior."

But it is now widely believed by historians that Stalin organized Kirov's slaying to get rid of a popular potential rival and as a pretext for a mass purge of the citizens of Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was then known, and the rest of the Soviet population.

Stalin hated the cultured city and the purges led by Kirov's successor, Andrei Zhdanov, centered on it. Tens of thousands of citizens were arrested and it has been estimated a quarter of the city was arrested, deported or killed over the next two years.

* * * But the first 14 victims were just the beginning of what is today called the Great Terror that cost millions of Soviet citizens their lives in the years before World War II.

Historians estimate that from Jan. 1, 1935 until July 1, 1941 (Hitler attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941) more than 19.8 million people were arrested, including 7 million who were summarily convicted, often by troikas of three NKD secret police officers, and shot.

And of course, the death machine that is Communism rolls grimly along today.

Via PoliPundit, Fred Barnes writes that the left (the press and Washington Democrats. But I repeat myself) still haven't figured him out.

Gee, who does that remind you of?

Barnes' piece makes a nice companion to "The Accidental Radical" by Jonathan Rauch (one of the few liberals who did figure him out), and Norman Podhoretz's "World War IV", which places the War on Terror into context alongside World Wars I, II, and III.

III? Read it--it's brilliant.

Remember Eliza, the 1970s program that mimicked conversations? It wouldn't pass the Turing test, but "she" was certainly fun to talk to.

Well, it's back--and boy, is it p.o.ed!

As The Astute Blogger writes (along with that attention-grabbing headline above), no, they're not Algerians--but they are Algeresque: they perflectly reflect Horatio Alger's values, especially Bernard Kerik:

Beginnings do NOT get any more humble than his: he is the son of a prostitute--who abandoned him; he was then adopted by the Keriks. He grew up on the tough streets of Paterson, NJ and was a high school drop out. He became an army MP in South Korea, a prison warden in NJ--got his GED, then a New York City street-cop on the beat, and then a fearless undercover narcotics detective, and then became one of the most highly decorated cops in NYC history, then the Commisoner of Corrections in NYC, and then NYC Police Commissioner--as Bush said: the same job once held by Teddy Roosevelt.

Now that's some background.

(Via PoliPundit.)

Meanwhile, for the definitive anti-Alger, check out this staggering passage from Michael Moore's Dude, Where's My Country.

The debate that Power Line and I had on comic books continues to grow into a neat little inter-Blogosphere discussion.

In addition to several follow-up posts from other bloggers, Jonathan Last of The Weekly Standard and his own Galley Slaves blog sent me a very nice email with the comment "Great blog you've got" (thanks!) and forwarding me a link to a Galley Slaves post and a story he did on the subject for the Standard, which reinforces my initial take: comic books have become a rampantly PC-zone, with Marvel's latest effort one the very rare exceptions.

Meanwhile, an Italian blogger has linked to it as well. This is how Bablefish translates his post:

Combat Zones.

Combat Will be called "Zones: True Tales of GIs in Iraq "the new series of comic strips published from Marvel Comics. The scenario of Combat Zones is written from Karl Zinsmeister, director ofthe American Enterprise magazine and envoy in Iraq in 2003. Powerline deepens the argument, but it underrates the accumulated advantage from the left American in the ' industry of the comic strip. In vent' years, they explain And Driscoll and Conservative English Major, the liberal have conquered of fact this new medium. A reason in more in order emphasizing that the last baby of the Marvel represents one meaningful radical change of direction.

(I could probably smooth it out better than the Babelfish software, but why risk further compounding any mistranslations?)

And perhaps most importantly, Michael Turner, the Power Line reader whose email kicked everything off, sent the fellows at Power Line and myself an email praising our efforts, and writing, "thanks for letting your readers know about that comic".

I'm happy to do my part--and I'm glad Power Line kicked off the debate with their initial post.

Even after I pretty much gave up my addiction with Law & Order, I'd still tune-in from time to time to watch Jerry Orbach do his thing. It must have been largely rote acting work for a guy who's career originally consisted of singing and hoofing on Broadway, but he was always fun to watch. And I'll be sure to catch an episode or two of Law & Order: Trial by Jury, the spin-off series that he, Bebe Neuwirth and Candice Bergen will be starring in next year. (And I'm sure to conclude, just as I did with L&O, that it's just more of the same PC policework. And just how did NBC become the L&O spin-off assembly line, anyhow??)

Orbach was recently diagnosed with prostate cancer according to AP; but according to his manager and producer Dick Wolf, he's making a swift recovery and will continue with the show.

John Derbyshire has a review of Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons. Meanwhile, The Economist uses Charlotte as a launching point to discuss the one punch Wolfe could be argued of pulling:

Mr Wolfe clearly exaggerates for effect (that's kinda, like, what satirists do, as one of his students might have explained). But on one subject he is guilty of understatement: diversity. He fires off a few predictable arrows at “diversoids”—students who are chosen on the basis of their race or gender. But he fails to expose the full absurdity of the diversity industry.

The Economist piece does a pretty good job of doing just that (at least in the thousand words or so available in an online article), and concludes:

This is profoundly unhealthy per se. Debating chambers are becoming echo chambers. Students hear only one side of the story on everything from abortion (good) to the rise of the West (bad). It is notable that the surveys show far more conservatives in the more rigorous disciplines such as economics than in the vaguer 1960s “ologies”. Yet, as George Will pointed out in the Washington Post this week, this monotheism is also limiting universities' ability to influence the wider intellectual culture. In John Kennedy's day, there were so many profs in Washington that it was said the waters of the Charles flowed into the Potomac. These days, academia is marginalised in the capital—unless, of course, you count all the Straussian conservative intellectuals in think-tanks who left academia because they thought it was rigged against them.

Gee, wonder what gave them that idea?

Update: Memeorandum has a nice Blogosphere round-up on the Economist piece.

Update: Speaking of "whatever gave them that idea"...

Victor Davis Hanson reminds us how far we've come from the dark days (and yes, they were very dark) of 9/11 and its immediate aftermath.

The legacy media won't tell you how much progress that's been made, so it's well, well worth reading the whole thing.

Speaking of never forgetting, Jonathan V. Last has some photos of something I've never seen before (naturally) in the legacy media: the spontaneous memorial that survivors and admirers of the brave souls on flight #93 put up in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

I'd like to think that in the coming decades, history will remember one of the most shameful twilight acts of the formerly mainstream media was to play down 9/11 and virtually toss it into the memory hole, in order to benefit their chosen presidential candidate.

Frank Martin has some excellent, common sense advice for CBS, now that Dan Rather is planning to hang it up--at least from the nightly news.

It's well worth reading; natually, like navigation advice proffered to the captain of the Titanic as the ship headed into the North Atlantic, it will all go unheaded by the folks inside Black Rock.

Update: Heh.

Michael Ledeen writes that time is rapidly running out on the left:

The hysterical reaction of the Western Left to the reelection of President George W. Bush is not just a primal scream from politicians and intellectuals deprived of political power. The violent language, numerous acts of violence, and demonization of Bush and his electorate — the same as that directed against Tony Blair in Britain, Jose Maria Aznar in Spain, and Silvio Berlusconi in Italy — portend a more fundamental event: the death rattle of the traditional Left, both as a dominant political force and as an intellectual vision.

For the most part, the Left only wins elections nowadays when their candidates run on their opponents’ platform (Clinton and Blair) or when panic overwhelms the political process (Zapatero and Schroeder). Under normal circumstances, leftists running as leftists rarely win, proving that their ideology — the ideology that dominated political and intellectual debate for most of the last century — is spent. When their ideas were in vogue, leftist advocates took electoral defeat in stride, as they were confident that their vision was far more popular — because far more accurate — than their opponents’ view of the world. History and logic were on their side. But no more. Incoherent rage and unbridled personal attacks on the winners are sure signs of a failed vision.

Read the whole thing.

Meanwhile, Jim Geraghty asks, "is time on the side of social conservatives", and has plenty of anecdotal evidence to believe that it is.

Heh.

Ricky Williams has apparently decided to hang it up for good, rather than try to return to the NFL after retiring a nanosecond before flunking a league-mandated drug test. AP writes:

The 1998 Heisman Trophy winner needed to let the league know his decision by Thursday so he could be moved from the retired list to the suspended list by the deadline. He would have served the suspension for the Miami Dolphins' final four games, starting Dec. 12 at Denver.

"Ricky Williams has declined to accept the terms of his reinstatement,'' NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said.

Those terms included a promise Williams would play next season and re-enter the NFL drug program immediately. He would have been tested on a regular basis.

"The NFL sought assurances that Ricky is indeed committed to playing,'' said Cornwell, who would not disclose exactly why Williams decided against the deal.

Dolphins spokesman Harvey Greene wouldn't comment, saying the matter is between Williams and the NFL.

Williams, 27, stunned his team by retiring shortly before Miami opened training camp in July. The Dolphins filed a lawsuit in federal court against the running back, seeking the $8.6 million an arbitrator ruled he owes the team for breaching his contract. Williams is fighting the decision.

He gave up the $5 million he would have earned this season, which would have been his sixth in the NFL, amid reports he faced suspension for substance abuse. He is now enrolled in a 17-month course at the California College of Ayurveda in Grass Valley, Calif., studying holistic medicine.

Williams has social-anxiety disorder and was a spokesman for an anti-depressant. He said marijuana helped him after he stopped using the anti-depressant.

He who flunks multiple drug tests should not be spotted spending time in Grass Valley...

Picking up on Marshall McCluhan's seminal mid-'60s pop-classic, The Medium is the Massage, Daniel Henninger of The Wall Street Journal looks at how television has created men like Ron Artest and Jeremy Shockey--and demands more and more sportsmen like them.

Brent Bozell has an essay in which he notes the remarkable timing of two national news anchors retiring almost simultaneously: Tom Brokaw yesterday, and Dan Rather in March.

Meanwhile, Peggy Noonan, who once wrote copy for Rather, has a remarkably sympathetic take about her former employer:

Read More »

Reuters reports:

Nearly half of Britons in a poll said they had never heard of Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in southern Poland that became a symbol of the Holocaust and the attempted genocide of the Jews.

That's staggering--but not all that surprising, to be honest. For the Blogosphere's take, click here. Jonah Goldberg's comments are particularly worthwhile.

Aaron Bailey has another use for the bottle of Smirnoff I keep in the freezer to make Vespers and Bloody Marys:

Unless you're the bah-humbug type who puts up a plastic Christmas tree, you know the annoying problem of dead pine needles on the floor. An Oregon man claims a splash of vodka in his tree's water prevents needle shedding. Some are skeptical, but I'm hoping it works. Now the question remains: What brand of vodka would my tree prefer?

Paging Mr. Green; Mr. Stephen Green to the white courtesy phone please...

My simple reply last night to Power Line's take on comic books has grown into an interesting cross-blog discussion. Start here, then follow the links.

Ever since he debuted in the mid-to-late 1990s on Fox, Bill O'Reilly's schtick has long been that he's for "the little guy", and yet he's defending multi-million dollar TV anchorman Dan Rather against--accurate--charges leveled by lots and lots of independent bloggers, who aren't making millions from their blogs.

Cathy Seipp is O'Reilled-up and wants to know what happened to the old O'Reilly.

My post about seeing Tom Wolfe speak in mid-November in San Francisco inspired Greg, a student at North Carolina State University to attend Wolfe's on-campus speech, as his tour to promote I Am Charlotte Simmons continues to cross the country--and Greg offers a very detailed report himself.

Greg notes that Wolfe referenced Nietzsche during the Q&A at NCSU, which sounds like he was riffing on some of the material he had collected in 2001's Hooking Up, especially his essay, "Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died", the same one that "Dieter" misinterpreted so fatefully.

Hugh Hewitt's Weekly Standard article is a further look at the Netherlands' Groningen Protocol.

John Hinderaker of Power Line writes that Marvel has hired a conservative author to write a series of comic books on the war in Iraq.

Hinderaker adds:

I like it--this is a medium in which the liberals will have a hard time competing.

Don't be too sure--I haven't bought a comic book in 25 years, but since around the 1980s I'd guess, it seems like the left has increasingly been ensconced there, making changes subtle (thanks to Harlan Ellison, oddly enough, you don't see BB guns advertised in the back of comic books anymore) and sometimes not-so-subtle.

Update: John at Conservative English Major confirms my take, adding, "But liberals haven't just made 'inroads' into comics. For the most part, they control the creative side of the industry":

There are a few conservatives working in comics (John Byrne, for example) but the "hot" writers right now are Mark Millar (an anti-American Scotsman), Alan Moore (great writer, but so left wing he's off the charts), Frank Miller (who makes fun of Ronald Reagan in his "The Dark Night Returns"), Peter David (go see his blog and scroll on down - he hates Bush with a passion) - etc. etc. I could go on and on, but comics are, by and large, written by liberals.

The examples that John gave don't sound very liberal to me--although as Dennis Prager wrote, liberalism and the far left have become essentially synonymous, especially as "punitive liberalism" became the law of the left.

Another Update: J.W. Hastings of The Forager has also entered into the fray with his thoughts:

I don't think I'd say they "control" any part of the industry. But I think it's pretty safe to say that most mainstream comics, even if they aren't explicitly liberal or political, are at least built upon generally liberal assumptions about politics and society, and that this has been the case at least since the early 1970s. And most mainstream comics are pretty solidly anti-Bush, just as Mark Gruenwald's 1980s Captain America comics were solidly (and blatantly) anti-Reagan. (In Superman, for example, Lex Luthor has been elected President of the United States, a riff on the liberal fantasy that President Bush is some kind of criminal mastermind). However, there's very little of what I'd characterize as full-fledged leftism in mainstream comics.

Geez, if that's typical liberalism in comics, I'd hate to see what they'd do with "full-fledged leftism".

Comics used to be a way to teach kids about responsibility (cue Stan Lee's "With great power comes..."--heck, you can finish the rest of the sentence yourself) and patriotism. But just as in modern Hollywood, they've become a way to try to pump leftwing ideas into impressionable brains.

Imagine a WWII-era Captain America being anti-FDR? And for the record, I wouldn't have wanted to see a 1990s version of Batman or Superman being anti-Clinton, either: I think comic books should be a no-politics zone, focusing on basic ideas of right, wrong, and fighting bad guys, whether they're criminals, Nazis, or Islamofascist terrorists.

Of course, since so much of post-McGovern liberalism is "seeing beyond black and white concepts of good and evil and morality", it becomes (a) increasingly more difficult to write simple stories where superheroes battle bad guys and (b) increasingly easier to make bad guys more sympathetic. It's also easier to experiment with stuff that Saturday Night Live used to parody: back in 1979, they did "What if Superman was a Nazi" as a gag; last year, we saw Superman defending Saddam Hussein and fighting for Josef Stalin.

National Review Online's Jim Geraghty and Nick Confessore of the leftwing American Prospect are in rare bipartisan agreement: Karl Rove's strategies could have the Democrats feeling increasingly boxed in. Confessore writes:

It's a good strategy: Hit the Democrats at their weak points and force them into a defensive crouch. Split them over controversial issues like abortion and gay marriage. Get them to defend the most unpopular incarnations of their interest groups. And so forth. Rove's strategy isn't designed to pass legislation that a majority of the country wants and is in the national interest. It's designed to destroy the competition, plain and simple.

If the Democrats play defense — if they try to split the difference, if they are reactive, if they simply try to slow or modify whatever George W. Bush proposes — they'll lose politically and, later, electorally, in 2006. So where's the counterattack? Forming a communications shop in the Senate minority leader's office is peanuts.

Geraghty adds:

Ignore Confessore's comment that the Bush agenda isn't "legislation that a majority of the country wants and is in the national interest." The more significant point is that the Democrats have two bad options here: Try to go on the offensive on these issues, and convince Americans that they like taxes, lawyers, gay marriage and abortion; or duck a fight on these issues and infurate and discourage their base voters.

I'm sure DNC Chairman Howard Dean will put together a winning strategy.

Exactly--just like he did on the campaign trail this past winter.

Timothy McSweeney scores an exclusive interview with...the guitar solo from "Stairway to Heaven".

(Such a nice, polite, well-behaved young guitar solo, too...)

It makes a nice companion piece to this debate between the deputy director of the National Association of American Horticulturists (NAAH) with Robert Plant, and this (serious) interview by Gibson with Jimmy Page about his legendary Les Paul electric guitar.

Oh, and my interview with one of Zeppelin's recording engineers, Kevin Shirley.

Part I: Social Security.

Part II: Society itself.

Batman and Robin? No.

Rowan and Martin? Nein.

Lennon and McCartney? Nyet.

Steve Green and Chris Muir are both back in action in the Blogosphere. Stop on by today--and tell 'em we sent you.