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:
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.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):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.
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:"Undoubtedly!", Taranto quips.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."
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.We'll see.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.
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."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.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.
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.As a famous conservative/liberal/libertarian tireblogger once said...Heh.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.
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.They're absolutely right. And as the Professor writes, "Nice to see people noticing".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.
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!'"
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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?Today, Jayson Javitz of PoliPundit, in a post titled, "Law of Unintended Consequences" writes: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.
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.The elephant in the room that this article doesn't mention, of course, are those religions which encourage suicide.* * *
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.
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.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: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.
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.As Paul Mirengoff of Power Line notes: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.
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.Update: The quake is now listed at 9.0 in magnitude by the US National Earthquake Information Center.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.
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."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.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.
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.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: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.
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?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.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.
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:
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?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.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.
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?
No, I mean that seriously. Just. Don't. Do. It.
Trust me on this.
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 RatherGate 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.In Wednesday's New York Times, Nicholas Kristof writes: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."
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.Gee, there's a thought.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.
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 wonder if this means an announcement will be soon.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 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.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?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.
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?