Ward Churchill, whom we wrote about on Friday, is the University of Colorado ethnic studies professor who described the victims of the 9/11 attacks as 3,000 "little Eichmanns".

Charles Johnson writes that Churchill has "resigned his post as chairman (but not his professorship), and released a lengthy statement defending his vile essay".

Roger Kimball has some thoughts as well.

Two words--just two simple words: caffeinated beer.

Talk about immanentizing the eschaton: this really does sound like heaven on earth.

(Via Galley Slaves. And for the origin of Skittlebrau, click here.)

James Taranto has a full round-up of the Iraqi elections and their detractors, in his latest "Best of the Web Today" column.

The Professor looks at The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and dubs it "neo-Confederate secessionist":

Way back when the term "idiotarian" was coined, it was quite explicitly aimed at the idiots of the Left and Right equally. The idiots of the Right have been somewhat quieter lately, but they're no less idiots for that.

As Stephen Green notes, this is better--much better--than the original.

Imagine the howls of derision and gallons of black ink the New York Times would spill if Karl Rove was ever quoted as saying, "I hate the Democrats and everything they stand for”.

But only the Blogosphere seems to have picked up that Howard Dean, who may very well become the next chairman of the DNC, has said over the weekend, "I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for”.

No wonder Orrin Judd and Glenn Reynolds are wondering what happened to the more moderate-sounding New Democrats of the mid-1990s.

The Copperhead Conjunction is out in full force this weekend in the mainstream media.

* With apologies to Bob Eubanks.

Frank Martin is none-too-impressed by the 800-seat Airbus A380.

In happier aviation news, Glenn Reynolds receives an email from a reader who's apparently flying on the first-ever commercial flight with in-flight Wi-Fi.

Hopefully virtually all commercial planes will be equipped--or least those that do transcontinental runs. Five hours without broadband is brutal!

On Friday, Duane Patterson (Hugh Hewitt's "Generalissmo") blogged live from El Toro, California--where a new democracy was beginning to take shape.

"Nostalgie de la boue" is a French phrase for "nostalgia for the mud". As this site explains:

Problems--apparently with my ISP--prevented me from updating the Weblog for much of the day. The post below says it was posted at 10:32 AM. That's when I wrote it, but it didn't uploaded until just a moment ago.

Not sure what happened; but hopefully we're back in business.

Katherine Mangu-Ward has a lot of fun reviewing The Discovery Channel's Pompeii: The Last Day, which airs this Sunday.

Also airing this Sunday is See Arnold Run, which A&E has been advertising on National Review, InstaPundit, and other conservative, or conservative-friendly sites.

Cathy Seipp says that "It goes down easy, just like a lollipop", and its content has just as much nutrional value. "If you spent the recall sitting slack-jawed in front of some computer game instead of reading about the adventures of Arnold and company, you'll probably learn something from the movie.":

But you wouldn't have any notion that the recall involved issues other than possible groping and some vague glitches in the California dream. For the record, I'm pleased that Arnold won; or at least, pleased that Gray Davis is out. But I voted for Tom McClintock, who (unlike Arianna) was a serious candidate, got a respectable number of votes, and (also unlike Arianna) concerned himself during a state campaign with state issues, not foreign policy.

You wouldn't have any idea from See Arnold Run that McClintock was even in the race, though. He doesn't appear in the film, although someone playing Gary Coleman does. Gray Davis himself is only here for a moment, when Prochnow-as-Scharzenegger sees him on TV and mutters, "I'm bigger, stronger, greater!" Perfectly true, as it turned out. But there was more to the recall than that.

Either way, it's something to watch while waiting for next Sunday...

Update: This also sounds like quality Sunday viewing.

Christie Whitman believes that the core of the GOP should move back to its centrist mid-20th century Rockefeller roots. Patrick Ruffini compares and contrasts her re-election performance to another, more conservative Republican. (Who hopefully won't try to replicate this gesture by Whitman, incidentally.)

(Via PoliPundit.)

"Lawmakers Look to Tax Cosmetic Surgery"

Hey, they're looking at tax shopping bags--why should plastic surgery be all that surprising?

And politicians on the other side of the pond aren't afraid to imitate the odd Monty Python sketch as well when it comes to raising additional funds.

Five years ago, the Internet bubble peaked, and the lights would soon go out on hundreds, if not thousands, of ill-conceived Internet-based business ventures. But not before more than a dozen of them spent an average of $2.2 million for 30-second spots during Super Bowl XXXIV, which featured the St. Louis Rams and the Tennessee Titans.

Forbes has an amusing slide show of the ads that ran on that halcyon day--and where the companies that paid for them are today.

Almost exactly one year ago, Washington Post journalist Anne Applebaum wrote a terrific lead to a column about 2004's feminist kerfuffle of the century in academia:

Sometimes in the course of a great American debate there comes a moment when the big battle guns fall silent, the pundits run out of breath, and -- unexpectedly -- the long, bitter argument suddenly turns into farce

Update: For more academic farce, Roger Kimball has some thoughts on Catharine MacKinnon, tenured professor at the University of Michigan Law School, and founder of what has been dubbed "feminist fundamentalism", including the banning of all pornography, First Ammendment be damned:

Back in the late 1980s, when homelessness first began to appear on the media's radar, a cliche amongst leftwing politicians was that "we're all just one paycheck away" from being homeless ourselves.

Naturally, the media picked up and ran with that idea as far as they could, and any claim to the contrary--that homelessness was often as a result of mental illness, substance abuse, or both--was samizdat.

To read this detailed, link-filled, and nuanced (to borrow from Senator Kerry's vocabulary for a moment) post on Instapundit is to understand just what a quantum leap the new media is over the old. Click on over already, if you haven't yet read it yourself.

Matthew Davis of Flak Magazine looks at a 578-acre park in northwest Moscow known by its Russian initials, VDNKh:

It houses more than 80 pavilions and monuments originally designed to showcase the achievements of the USSR. Each one is devoted to a specific aspect of the Soviet Union: agriculture, economics, science, industry and hunting, to name a few. And of course, there's the cosmonaut pavilion.

The place is a theme park of ideology, a carnival of communism. VDNKh was designed solely to boost the glory of the State. Welcome to Soviet Disneyland.

VDNKh is lined with once-grand boulevards, fountains and statues, all adorned with the icons of communism. When Stalin had it built in 1939, it was open to all Russians as a kind of state-approved Soviet world's fair. Visitors would flock to the site for a day and be duly dazzled by the all-providing power of the State. Then they'd go line up for bread.

The years following the Empire's collapse saw a knee-jerk purge of all things Soviet [that's knee-jerk liberalism of the very best kind--Ed] from public spaces: streets were renamed, commemorative plaques were defaced, and hundreds of statues were torn down. Indeed, VNDKh is one of the few bastions of the Soviet State left that generations too young to remember the Empire can visit.

According to French journalist Jean-Marie Chauvier, Russians are jaded by the fact that most are worse off now then they were under communism, as the country is now run by a core of private oligarchs. Neo-Communist political parties have repeatedly tried to pounce on this. Glossing over the gulags, censorship and bread lines of the old system, they call for a return to the guaranteed security of Communist days. More and more people are listening.

I just read on the New Criterion's Weblog that Philip Johnson died yesterday at age 98. Johnson was a pretty good architect, but an astonishing impresario of architecture--he helped establish the Museum of Modern Art's architectural section, which he also ran for many years.

More importantly, Johnson (at left and in the background in this photo from my first National Review Online article in 2001) helped Mies van der Rohe escape the Nazis in the 1930s and emigrate to Chicago; and Mies would, for better or worse, make modernism--and specifically, his version of it--the dominant form of urban architecture in America from the end of World War II until the late 1970s.

Roger Kimball has a long, detailed and well-measured memoriam to Johnson--which showcases the highs, and the lows (and the lows were staggeringly low), of his long and checkered life and career.

I'm doing a review of Miles Electric, which is a new DVD highlighting Miles Davis' jazz/rock fusion performance at England's Isle of Wight, a Woodstock-style festival that held a half-million people.

Needless to say, I'll let you know when it's online. But while I was polishing the piece and inserting hyperlinks last night, I came across this quote in Wikipedia:

In 1987 Davis attended a reception in honor of Ray Charles at Ronald Reagan's White House. A Washington society lady, seated next to him, asked him what he had done to be invited. "Well," Davis replied, "I've changed music four or five times. What have you done of any importance other than be white?"

Tim Graham and Brent Bozell note that references to LBJ's attorney general, Ramsey Clark's latest gig (defending Saddam Hussein) seem to have gone down the memory holes at the New York Times and Washington Post.

Go figure.

Viking Pundit has a good test coming up early next month to see if how serious the Democrats are about moving forward, or remaining mired in reactionism.

(Via Lorie Byrd.)

Andrew Stuttaford has a nice, balanced memoriam in the The New York Sun to Ayn Rand; 2005 is the centennial of her birth:

Rand's nonfiction may have a greater claim to intellectual respectability, but it was the lurid, occasionally harsh, simplicities of her novels that would deliver her message to the mass audience she believed was out there. She was right. Her key insight was to realize that there was an appetite among Americans for a moral case for capitalism. In a restless age that believed in the Big Answer, neither historical tradition nor utilitarian notions of efficiency would suffice. Ayn Rand gave Americans that case, perhaps not the best case, but a case, and she knew how to sell it.

The establishment always disapproved. Critics sneered. Academics jeered. The publishers Macmillan turned down "Anthem" (1938), saying that Rand, a refugee from the Soviet Union, "did not understand socialism." Oh, but she did, and so did those millions of Americans who bought her books, books that played their part in ensuring that the dull orthodoxies of collectivism never prevailed here.

The last image in Mr. Britting's biography is of an exultant Rand speaking at a conference in New Orleans in 1981, the final public appearance of this magnificent, brilliant oddball. Her hosts tried to lure her there with the promise of payment in gold coins and travel in a private rail car.

Needless to say, she accepted.

Back in June, Michael Moore was the toast of not just one, but two towns: Hollywood and the left side of the Senate in Washington, DC. But today, since Fahrenheit 9/11 failed to accomplish its mission, he's simply toast. Moore's film is thoroughly ignored by the Academy Awards, and the left is completely silent about the snub. Jim Geraghty has some thoughts why; as does Roger L. Simon.

Just when you think San Francisco can't get any further into the loony thickets of political correctness and environmental madness run amok...it does.

George Bush, at least for today, is no longer Hitler in the left's eyes. Because today, according to Ted Turner, it's Fox News' turn to play Hitler:

Ted Turner called FOX an arm of the Bush administration and compared FOXNEWS's popularity to Adolph Hitler's popular election to run Germany before WWII.

Turner made the controversial comments before a standing-room-only crowd at the National Association for Television Programming Executives's opening session Tuesday.

His no-nonsense, humorous approach during the one-hour Q&A generated frequent loud applause and laughter, BROADCASTING & CABLE reports.

While FOX may be the largest news network [and has overtaken Turner's CNN], it's not the best, Turner said.

He followed up by pointing out that Adolph Hitler got the most votes when he was elected to run Germany prior to WWII. He said the network is the propaganda tool for the Bush Administration.

"There's nothing wrong with that. It's certainly legal. But it does pose problems for our democracy. Particularly when the news is dumbed down," leaving voters without critical information on politics and world events and overloaded with fluff," he said.

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

Over the weekend, Glenn Reynolds wrote:

The press did its best to ignore the Afghan elections. I suspect that, since that's not an option with the Iraqi vote, they'll be doing their best to portray it as a failure somehow. I also suspect that it won't work. One of the things that made press coverage so damaging in Vietnam was that it was the first time anyone remembered American reporters saying bad things about an American war effort. By now, hardly anyone is alive who remembers anything else.

Raymond Siller, who was Johnny Carson's head writer for 14 years until 1988, has a warm, yet honest memoriam in The Wall Street Journal.

And James Lileks wrote yesterday, "you didn’t want to live in an era where Johnny Carson wasn’t cool. And I hope we never do."

I'll second that.

I'm safely back in San Jose after a day spent in airplanes and airports, and my interview with Hugh Hewitt about Blog is online at Tech Central Station.

Interesting thread at the Les Paul Forum: is there a Pete Townshend-signature Les Paul electric guitar in the works from Gibson?

In the mid-1970s, Townshend began using (and frequently destroying) a series of specially modified Gibson Les Paul Deluxes as his main stage instrument.

I've written several times about what an influence Townshend was when I first began to play guitar and record music; and having seen this model guitar in action in the Who's classic midnight movie, The Kids Are Alright, I'll be very curious to see if this axe comes to fruition.

EdDriscoll.com: bringing you tomorrow's guitars based on yesterday's superstar axes today.

Or something like that.

To paraphrase "Thomas the Wraith's" comments, Woodward and Bernstein must be laughing their Faber Eberhards off over the Washington Post's breathtaking wartime coverage--of Iraqi men, their stroke material, and their moms.

Meanwhile, Iowahawk is in the field with his own exclusive battlefield coverage:

Today Hassan, reborn as "Mohammed al-Vader," has formed his own splinter cell to violently resist American occupation, and offers an apocryphal warning.

"Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed, occupiers," he says darkly. "The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force."

While she's much more of a footnote in history, especially when compared with Johnny Carson, it's worth nothing that Rose Mary Woods died, at age 87.

Orrin Judd has a few wry thoughts about President Nixon's secretary and her infamous right foot.

Just got to my hotel near the Philadelphia Airport and turned on the set to watch the Eagles/Falcons game, and heard that Johnny Carson passed away at age 79, of emphysema. USA Today has details, as does The Wall Street Journal, if you're a subscriber.

As a kid, it was always a treat when I could stay up to catch Carson; he always seemed cool and sophisticated, even if his sketch comedy could frequently be banal. He hosted the Tonight Show for three decades, an astonishing run for anyone in show business.

Scott Johnson of Power Line has some additional thoughts and links.

Update: For a less sentimental look, there's much truth in this brutally honest memorium by Terry Teachout.

And this paragraph by Jeff Jarvis about the era that Carson represented is certainly spot-on:

Carson also represented the golden age of America's shared experience in media. That era lasted about three decades, from the late '50s to the late '80s, when the three networks turned most cities into one-newspaper towns and we all watched the same thing. I don't regret that era dying; it means we now have more choice and choice equals control. But it was a unique time in our culture, when popular culture became a common platform, a common touchstone for Americans. We all got Johnny's jokes.

Interesting post on (the very appropriately titled, in this case) Legacy Matters blog about the emotional power of vintage sounds. Because we don't hear such sounds these days as flashbulb pops and the click-clacking of manual typewriters, they instantly conjure up nostalgic memories.

It sort of reminds me of the review I wrote in 2003 on film editor Walter Murch's book, where he discussed how important sound--and carefully choosing the right sounds--is for creating atmosphere in movies.

I haven't mentioned anything about President Bush's second inaugural, because (a) I've been traveling and (b) thousands of other blogs and news sources already have. But Jay Nordlinger has his usual pithy collection of Impromtus, with a timely inaugural theme.

Update: Patrick Ruffini also has lots of thoughts--and links--on the inauguration. Just keep scrolling.

Michael Rosen writes that Harvard's Lawrence Summers has won unlikely plaudits from conservatives by willing to upset the sacred cows of academia.

Power Line and Ruth Marcus also have some thoughts.

New Sisyphus fisks the New York Times' Thomas Friedman within an inch of his newsprint.

(Via Hugh Hewitt.)

Watching South Jersey get dumped with 10-inches of snow, I can't help but think of this classic piece by Virginia Postrel on how the weather creates very different mindsets in Silicon Valley and the East Coast.

I'm in a south Jersey hotel room watching snow--and lots and lots and lots of it--falling. The Philadelphia TV news shows are telling everyone, in case they couldn't figure it out for themselves, that snow--and lots and lots and lots of it--is falling. But they're also busy explaining what role it will play in Philadelphia Eagles' NFC Championship playoff game tomorrow against the Atlanta Falcons, happily interviewing local Eagles fans in green jerseys, and TV newscasters are frequently cheerfully yelling, "Go Eagles!" as they sign-off.

In other words, they're happily rooting for the hometown team.

I'm not really blogging at the moment, but I couldn't help noticing this: National Review is praising a PBS documentary--on Fidel Castro!

That's got to be some kind of progress for PBS; I hope it happens more often.

Sorry for the lack posts these past few days--I've been in New Jersey visiting my parents--and dodging what looks like it could be a tremendous blizzard. More on Monday--if not sooner.

Back in August, Kenneth Silber explained the definition and origin of the word "Fusionism" in Tech Central Station:

Like the man who's surprised to learn he's been speaking prose all his life, the fusionist is a political category whose members may operate without much awareness of their label. Fusionism is the idea, named and developed decades ago by Frank Meyer of National Review, that conservatism and libertarianism share a common agenda. Thus, the fusionist believes that conservatives and libertarians ought to be allies -- and indeed that their respective philosophies are largely or essentially combinable into a coherent body of thought.

Fusionism, whether going by that name or not, has long had both adherents and detractors on the rightward side of the American political spectrum.

(Via the man who fuses Weblogs, crushed ice, vodka, vermouth and olives.)

Steve Green has some thoughts on postmodern warfare.

Why is newspaper circulation tanking? Evan Cornog, publisher of The Columbia Journalism Review, writes, "Perhaps we should, to an extent, blame the readers".

Writing in Tech Central Station, Jay Currie begs to differ.

The Professor has a long post with lots of links about his home recording efforts, and that of others in the Blogosphere, including myself.

He links to my Blogcritics post on Cakewalk's Sonar; and I need to write an update for Blogcritics on this EH newsletter about TC-Helicon's PowerCore effects processor. The EH newsletters are limited to 500-600 words, and I'd like to write a bit more about what it can do, especially in terms of processing vocals.

I wrote on Sunday night that this is a golden age for football junkies. It's also a golden for home recording, especially if you're someone like me who remembers the "stone knives and bearskins" era in the 1980s.

Mark Steyn puts Prince Harry's Nazi dress-up moment in context:

Personally, I found the sight of the Prince of Wales climbing into the full Highgrove hejab for dinner with that bin Laden brother a week after the 9/11 slaughter far more disquieting: it seemed a rather more conscious act of identification than his son's party get-up. But a good indication of societal decadence is when it prefers to obsess over fictional offences rather than real ones.

I suppose it's possible that, should fate bring Harry to the throne, he'd turn into a Victor Emmanuel or King Carol of Romania and lend a constitutional figleaf to some Fascist regime. But worrying about a minor Royal schoolboy's alleged Nazi bent seems something of an indulgence at a time when the neo-Nazis get as many votes in Saxony's elections as Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democratic Party; when from Marseilles to Paris, Jews are being attacked and their homes, schools, kosher butchers, synagogues and cemeteries burnt and desecrated in a low-level intifada that's been going on so long the political establishment now accepts it as a normal feature of French life; and when the Berlin police advise Jews not to go out in public wearing any identifying marks of their faith. It's not just Nazi insignia you don't see in Germany these days; Nazi wise, the uniforms are the least of it.

Update: James Lileks (in a pretty brave column for a blue state newspaper) wonders what sort of reaction Harry would have received if he had been photographed "wearing a hammer and sickle or a Che shirt".

Two words. Just two simple words, and it's easy to see how far mankind has come.

Customized M&Ms.

Customized freakin' M&Ms!

The future is now--and I can only wonder if Van Halen's lawyers have begun to update their contracts to reflect this.

Back in April, I linked to these photos from Virginia Postrel's Website. On Martin Luther King Day, it's worth revisiting them.

John Leo explores the conventional wisdom of those in the blue state state-of-mind.

If James Lileks ever wants to update The Gallery of Regrettable Food, Hostess has given him a leg up on the project with--The Twinkie Cookbook!

The LA Times has an amusing, if over-the-top look at the temptations of swag that journalists face. (About which, Matt Welch has a great rebuttal.)

Astonishingly, Jeff of Beautiful Atrocities has somehow discovered one of my secret stashes of swagdom...

I'm watching the NFL Channel's Game of the Week, last week's Chargers/Jets game from the first round of the playoffs. I didn't deliberately program it; it just happened to be on the TiVo box because how I initially set it up.

But that's OK: watching this NFL Films presentation is a reminder that when they're clicking on eight cylinders, they're capable of producing visual poetry. Even forgetting what they're doing--showing highlights from a football game--it's dazzling filmmaking: perfectly matched cuts, rhythmically edited montages, great overlays of multiple sound sources (the announcers from the AM radio broadcast of the game, the mic'ed up players, the background score, crowd sounds, etc.) and on and on. The fact that they can get this stuff on the air in less than a week, as opposed to the weeks and weeks and weeks that many Hollywood films take for editing is also amazing. (I profiled NFL Films last year at Tech Central Station, incidentally.)

And that the NFL basically created their own cable channel to run these shows is the icing on the cake.

There's been a lot about pro football that's been frustrating these past couple of years, very little of which has anything to do with the games themselves (including, but not limited to Rush Limbaugh's controversies; NippleGate; the T.O./Nicolette Sheridan towel incident; the endless Levitra ads; Randy Moss's simulated mooning and butt wiping, etc.). But in terms of the quantity--and at its best, the quality of the content that's available, it's really a golden age for NFL fans.

Roger Kimball has a well-reasoned defense of leisure at its platonic best, over at "Armavirumque", The New Criterion's Weblog.

Steve Green looks at this week's Socioeconomic Trend of the Century, as discovered by Time magazine. Time has dubbed it the "Twixters", which sounds at first glance like a hideous experiment at the Frito-Lay laboratories gone wrong and only gets worse when you discover its actual description:

Everybody knows a few of them—full-grown men and women who still live with their parents, who dress and talk and party as they did in their teens, hopping from job to job and date to date, having fun but seemingly going nowhere. Ten years ago, we might have called them Generation X, or slackers [or "Steve" –Ed.], but those labels don't quite fit anymore.

The problem with young people these days... is old people. Specifically, their parents. Why, back in my day (really, I'm suffering a bad case of [Premature Old Fogey Mode] tonight) growing up was A Good Thing. By that I mean: being a kid was fine and all, but the really cool stuff was either reserved for adults or considered a special treat.

I have a piece on Spacecraft Films' encyclopedic DVDs of the Apollo program over at Tech Central Station.

Remember "Dieter", the fellow who spoke to Tom Wolfe in November about the red states of America like they were on another planet?

I had thought he was a resident of San Francisco. Actually, he appears to be a columnist for the Washington Post, as Tim Blair and Patrick Ruffini note.

For an earlier fisking of this out-of-touch "gorillas in the mist" style of journalism, check out James Lileks' classic "Notes From The Olive Garden" from 2002.

Update: Speaking of Lileks, he has a perfect summation of the WaPo article and the collective personality of the Blue State media it reflects:

Once upon a time the major media at least pretended that the heart & soul of the country was a porch in Kansas with an American flag. Now it’s the outlands, the Strange Beyond. They vote for Bush, they believe in God, they’d have to drive 2 hours for decent Thai. Who are these people?

Maybe what often bothers the Blue staters isn't the ire of the Maroonies; in the end, it's the relative indifference. We think of you, all right - just not as much as you think about yourselves. And probably more than you think about us. Take care; love, Red.

Power Line and Little Green Footballs have the details and some thoughts. They each link to this New York Post story.

The Post of course, is the chief conservative paper in Manhattan. It should be interesting to see if this story generates any traction at say, the New York Times or the rest of the legacy media it helps to drive.

Frank Martin speaks truth to power; no Hummels are harmed in the process.

Here's a highlight:

2. Mary Mapes did not get fired, She got a promotion. This is not the end of her career but the start of her ‘sainted victimhood’, where she will publish endless piles of books on the subject of the right wing cabal and appear breathless at fundraisers, while appearing thrice daily on Air America and NPR to opine on the latest great offence from the 'scabknucked bohunks' that inhabit the White House in the Bush Administration.

3. CBS news is toast. They would be better off selling the airtime back to the affiliates or to Ron Popeil. With it will go soon ABC and NBC Nightly News. They simply do not make enough money to justify their grotesque cost. When they do finally go away, not one of them will understand that when they started to sell opinion as actual news, that they lost all credibility in the eyes and ears of the viewers and they began to look elsewhere. What has totally surprised CBS is not that they went looking, but that they’ve found it. They've found it in the blogosphere.

4. People who look pretty and read from Teleprompters are not “reporters”. When people who read from telepromters refer to themselves as being a "reporter" our natural reaction should be to violently laugh and buckle over horizontally at the hips. "Reporters" are men like Sam Fuller, Ernie Pyle and William Shirer. There are no men like this today, the media's legal staff would simply not permit it.

Power Line compares Ra^therGate to Watergate, and says that Dan Rather's role wasn't comprable to Richard Nixon's--but to Ron Ziegler's!:

One of the eerie echoes of Watergate in the Rathergate affair is the four terminations -- of CBS News Senior Vice President Betsy West; 60 Minutes Executive Producer Josh Howard; Howard's deputy, Mary Murphy; and 60 Minutes producer Mary Mapes -- with which CBS has now sought to end the scandal. Dan Rather is not pulling the strings here; perhaps Rather himself is only a bit player like Ron Ziegler. Could it be that Moonves or Heyward, and not Rather, is playing the role of Richard Nixon in the Rathergate scandal?

Donald Luskin says there's "signs of life amidst the leftist graveyard known as academia", and posts an email that highlights a debate between a small-l libertarian economics major at a California university and his "very liberal" professor who "shares an office with an econ professor who is an avowed Socialist".

Meanwhile James Taranto writes:

If you're a college student fed up with heavy-handed leftism from the faculty, here's a chance to do something about it, and possibly end up on the silver screen...Evan Coyne Maloney, a young New York-based documentarian, is looking for students to help the full-length version of his film "Brainwashing 101."

Update: On the flip side, Jim Lindgren looks at two Nobel Prize-winning free market economists who were driven out of the University of Virginia during the 1960s for "being on the wrong side of history" back in those Galbraith-dominated central planning days.

Long, detailed post on Instapundit.com including comments by the Professor's readers from across the spectrum, on the implications of the shutdown of the Iraq Survey Group's search for WMD stockpiles.

This email helps to put the last ten years into perspective:

Was it the UN weapons inspectors or the US military that ascertained no weapons were in Iraq? It seems to me that many of the Bush administration's detractors are not only ignoring the fact that most people believed the weapons were there but that most people would still believe it if we had not invaded.

We discovered the true state of our intelligence failures because of this. And it seems obvious as well that if the weapons are not there now then they might not have been there in 1998 when Clinton launched Operation Desert Fox and bombed Iraq.

So, does that make him a war criminal? I do not pretend to know where the weapon stock piles ended up. They could be destroyed or buried in Syria for all I know, but I do know that if Clinton had answered these questions and dealt with these issues effectively a decade ago we would not be having this discussion now.

After all if Bush were really as dishonest as some of the Bush haters say he is he could have planted the damn things, now couldn't he?

Read the rest.

Today marks the 35th anniversary of the infamous party that Leonard and Felicia Bernstein held in their Park Ave. duplex to raise money for the Black Panthers. Also attending was Tom Wolfe, who wrote the event up for an article originally published in New York magazine, called "Radical Chic". Later that year, it would be published in book form, along with his "Mau-Mauing The Flak Catchers", another article about similar (if more low-rent) shenanigans on the West Coast.

You could make a pretty good argument (as I'm about to attempt) that "Radical Chic" was the most influential, or at least most significant, magazine article of the past forty years--and that it foreshadowed the next 34 years of American politics.

It helped that the timing of Wolfe's article and book was exquisite. 1970 was the apex between two key presidential election years: two years after far left anti-war protestors attempted to disrupt the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and two years before its 1972 equivalent, where, as Ben Wattenberg said back then, "there won't be any riots in Miami because the people who tried to riot in Chicago are on the Platform Committee."

As Wolfe tells the story, he was visiting his wife-to-be while she was working at Vanity Fair, and noticed an invitation on journalist David Halberstam's desk to a cocktail party and fundraiser to be put on by the Bernsteins to raise money for the Panthers. Wolfe was intrigued, and called the number on the invitation to RSVP. A voice on the other end took down his name and told him he was added to the list. He arrived, the Bernsteins had some idea of who he was from his New York and Esquire articles, and in plain sight, he pulled out his reporter's notepad and ballpoint pen, and began to jot down the evening's events.

"I was openly taking notes", he recently said, "but they just assumed that if I was there for New York magazine it was because I must have approved of what they were doing.":

I just thought it was a scream, because it was so illogical by all ordinary thinking. To think that somebody living in an absolutely stunning duplex on Park Avenue could be having in all these guys who were saying, 'We will take everything away from you if we get the chance,' which is what their program spelled out, was the funniest thing I had ever witnessed.

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.

This is an extraordinary moment for the Democratic Party.

Will Collier of Vodkapundit and his readers are enjoying the new remake of Battlestar Galactica.

The old series still emits enough of an enormous cheesy odor for me to want to stay as far away from the remake as possible. But then, I haven't been tuning into too many recent series anyhow.

One exception is CSI: Miami. I'm not a regular viewer, but unlike what Law & Order and its umpteen sequels have morped into, I haven't felt too many compulsive PC cringes while watching it--and the Miami Vice-style cinematography is excellent.

The Wall Street Journal writes, "A military jury has found Army Spc. Charles Graner Jr. guilty of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib". Subscription may be required to read the article, but here's the gist of it:

David Cohen writes a scathing rejoinder to a Slate piece that's critical of Michael Jordan almost entirely because Jordan's personality on the court wasn't flashy enough for the writer:

A couple of decades back, academia killed that great American art form, the short story. Plot, in the sense of something actually happening, went from a requirement of a good short story to taboo. Characters were to be limned, and the essential banality of modern American life, particularly in middle-class suburbs, must be illustrated, but nothing was to happen on penalty of scorn. As a result, the only good short stories today are genre stories, mostly science fiction or mysteries, and they aren't what they once were, either.

Now, apparently, the same aesthetic that killed the short story is oozing into Journalism. In fact, this piece is all aesthetic, which might be ok if it weren't a winding, mish-mash aesthetic that, in interior decorating, would be called "eclectic" if one were being polite.

If you've noticed the "Hollywood, Interrupted" category we created for our posts about, you know, modern Hollywood, it comes from the title of the book written co-written by Andrew Breitbart, whom Kathryn Jean Lopez has a great interview with today:

Hugh Hewitt has an interesting analysis of media critic Howard Kurtz's latest column--which itself was based on Howard Fineman's piece from earlier this week.

Power Line has an amusing post contrasting the two worlds of Molly Ivins.

She has a column this week where she tut-tuts President Bush for stating that Social Security could go broke by 2019 and that "the crisis is now".

I guess that's because for Ivans, the crisis was back in September:

As we march bravely toward oceans of red ink (leaving behind no problem for future presidents or future generations), we also face a looming crisis in Social Security.

OK, I know a few people have linked to it already, but this is another unintentional classic from Tina Brown:

When Peter Jennings is anchoring a breaking news story for ABC, he's a human hyperlink to the world, seemingly able to absorb and process information through the cheeks of his behind.

James Lileks has some thoughts on the Ra^therGate report.

Meanwhile, add Van Gordon Sauter, the former of president of CBS News, to the ever-growing list of journalists willing to go on the record that the media is biased.

In a long post titled, "Goodbye Times", Stanley Kurtz looks at the downward cycle--in terms of both business and journalism--that the New York Times has gotten itself in.

It feels as though it expands on a post I've wrote last year; it's another marker on the road to 2014.

Jonah Goldberg has some thoughts on "the El Savador option":

What united opponents of American policy in Central America was a vague sense that we were on the wrong side. They tittered at Reagan's declaration that the Contras were freedom fighters. They made movies that turned the leftists into the good guys in El Salvador. John Kerry, Pat Leahy, Tom Harkin, and other titans of international statesmanship actively worked against American foreign policy. "I see an enormous haughtiness in the United States trying to tell them what to do," Kerry said about American relations with the Soviet client Sandanista regime. He lent his name to support groups aiding the Communist-controlled regions of El Salvador.

I have no doubt that opposition to the "death squads" was also based on revulsion at some of their excesses. But there can be no doubt that they were also vexed that we were fighting Communists at all. Moreover, our special forces were not sent to El Salvador to train anybody to murder people. They were sent to help stop the widespread civil chaos and murder being perpetrated by others. They largely succeeded.

So I have to ask, would the Left oppose the "El Salvador Option" in Iraq if they didn't have a similar ideological hang-up about our efforts there? We're told that opponents of Iraq are part of the bipartisan consensus on fighting the war on terror, from which they claim Iraq is a distraction. Okay, maybe. But why then do opponents of the Iraq effort seem determined to ignore the fact that the most prominent leader of the "insurgency" has been hired as al Qaeda's man in Iraq?

Noel Sheppard of Tech Central Station examines the economy's robust performance in 2004.

Meanw