Douglas Kern of Tech Central Station says that colleges should have more speech codes--many more:

Big academia promulgates the illusion of free speech while quietly enforcing the de facto reality of opinion censorship. It's the worst of both worlds.

Like every good baby conservative, I spent my college years inveighing against academic speech codes that canted the sphere of acceptable public discourse to the far left. Naively, I assumed that the abolition of speech codes would inaugurate a new era of open, civilized academic discourse, free from artificially imposed bias. Ah, the bitter folly of youth! There was nothing artificial about that bias. Ridiculous speech codes were a symptom of deranged ideology, not the cause.

So let's stop playing five-card socialist stud and start playing five-card Texas Cultural Hold'em. Let's pull our smelly little institutional orthodoxies out in the open. Hey, big academia: you don't like social conservatives? Don't want to tolerate anti-feminist opinions, or reactionaries who reject rights for gay couples, or Neanderthals who question Darwin? Fine -- but say so directly. And be prepared to accept the consequences from alumni, bloggers, and taxpayers. The same goes for conservative schools, or schools supported with tax money squeezed out of conservatives. Don't want the Ward Churchills of the world to promulgate crypto-Islamicism on your time and your dime? Okay, but have the guts to put that rule in writing.

I hasten to add that I have no problem in principle with smelly little orthodoxies. I hold to quite a few of them myself, and some orthodoxies aren't so smelly. Every thinking person embraces a host of biases and prejudices with which to sort through a confusing, contradictory world. But I accept my prejudices. I don't conceal them. Quite the contrary -- I hold them up for public display and judgment. My "speech codes" are a matter of public record. Can Harvard say the same?

Had Harvard told its faculty from the very start that belief in the equality of the sexes was non-negotiable, reasonable people might have asked some probing questions: Why can't faculty members hold that view? What harm could come from such an opinion? Why does the pro-equality crowd fear even the possibility of open discussion of the subject? Open, fully articulated rules can be discussed, and accepted or rejected on their merits. But what good comes from a "speech code" that hides the preferences of the school under an unconvincing veneer of free speech?

Big academia suffers from the same problem of bias that afflicts the mainstream media. It's fine to be overtly politicized, but when you hide your biases behind a posture of perfect, disinterested neutrality, you insulate your biases from critical scrutiny. Behold the debacle of Memogate. Would CBS have behaved so recklessly but for its irrational certainty that its left-wing biases were nothing more than tough, objective journalism? Having concealed its prejudices for so long that it even fooled itself, CBS was rendered helpless when those same prejudices consumed its professional judgment. Harvard and Colorado know that helplessness well.

Having bashed modern pop culture six ways to Sunday tonight, it's only fair to look at one of the men who made the pop culture of the 1950s through the '80s great: Ahmet Ertegun, the man who founded Atlantic Records, and signed to his label at various times in their careers Bobby Darin, Ray Charles, John Coltrane, Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, and a million other musicians, many of whose CDs reside on my shelf and yours.

It's telling though, that when asked, "Who are the great talents in music today?", Ertegun immediate responce, that "There are still many great surviving talents", unintentionally reinforces something Jonah Goldberg wrote last year: that so much of today's pop culture is living off the good will of its past, rather than forging new bonds with its audience.

It's even more telling that when asked a leading question by his interviewer in Slate, "How do you feel about the U.S.-led Iraq war?", Ertegun doesn't launch into a Michael Moore-like spasm involving Haliburton, Bushitler, and the like--and that he's been known to talk things over with Donald Rumseld.

I have no idea what Ertegun's politics are, or if such conversations are routine, but it's tough to imagine a similiar exchange ocurring between Rumsfeld, and say, David Geffen.

(Via Frank Martin.)

In a piece titled, "Hollywood Shoots Itself in the Wallet", Patrick Ruffini has some thoughts on Zogby's poll that 75 percent of Americans tune out the Oscars:

That so many people view Hollywood through this political prism is pretty remarkable in a country where people are more interested in the latest with Nick and Jessica than in the condition of Social Security.

And yet: liberals get all pissy when conservatives decide to tune out institutions that don't represent them and create new ones -- just look at the sneering at "Faux News" and Rush and homeschooling and values voters. In Hollywood as in mainstream media, there is a price to be paid when an institution decides to leverage its prestige to push a political position where none is warranted; it's a price that is paid in viewership, influence, and profit -- in this case, a 30% falloff in viewers.

And BTW: I see Chris Rock just lost the other sixteen conservative viewers with his monologue... Nice!

Update: Not surprisingly, Hugh Hewitt also has some thoughts on the Oscars.

With his Che chic T-shirt, Carlos Santana seems to be implying that while he's happy to be attending the Academy Awards, he'd rather be off leading Cuban firing squads. (Here's a copy of the shot, since all photos will scroll off Yahoo after a while.)

As Jay Nordlinger once wrote:

Listen to what Lincoln Diaz-Balart, the Miami congressman, has to say about Che. I doubt the New York Public Library would trust it — but you can: "Guevara was an Argentinian loser who alleged he was a doctor even though he couldn't give a simple flu shot. What he was good at was killing people, and he became one of history's cruelest serial killers. He was Castro's primary henchman, murdering hundreds of innocent people without due process, usually finishing off the work of the mass-production firing squads with shots to the back of the neck. He was and will always be the most despicable, disgusting figure of the Castro killing machine, the foreigner who was made a serial killer of Cubans by Castro, and got great pleasure from his role."

Indeed, he did. Guevara, famous as he is — famous as his mug is — is little known. He was, as Diaz-Balart says, Castro's number-one revolutionary thug. He presided over those summary executions at La Cabaña — the old fortress that Guevara commandeered — and he very much enjoyed administering the coup de grâce. He also enjoyed parading people past El Paredón, the reddened wall against which the victims were killed. Viva Cristo Rey! ("Long Live Christ the King!") they would sometimes yell.

Remember this, too: Guevara founded the labor-camp system, in which countless Cubans — judged "deviant" by the regime — would suffer and die. This is the Cuban gulag; it is Che's legacy.

Update: Earlier this month, I wrote a piece for the Weekly Standard on a new Miles Davis DVD that was built around documentary footage of his appearance at the 1970 Isle of Wight music festival in England. Santana appears fairly prominently in new footage on the disc, to offer a rocker's take on Miles Davis' music. I left this bit about him on the cutting room floor, to keep the article a managable length:

There’s a classic “shut up and play” moment (to paraphrase the title of Laura Ingraham’s recent book), when Santana, discussing how incredible and wonderful and universal pop music of the 1960s was, says:

Isle of Wight was a pure result of consciousness-revolution music. “Hell no, we won’t go to Vietnam” and “we shall overcome”. The sixties—the late ‘60s, early ‘70s—was the most important decade of the 20th century.

Why?

Because it gave birth to questioning authority, particularly if it’s not enlightened by God. Are you listening, George Bush?

Is the president listening to God, or to Santana? If it’s the latter, to coin a phrase that’s probably been uttered a few times at the ranch in Crawford, the odds are slim and none, and Slim just left town. And both Santana and the DVD's director know it—but that doesn’t stop them from preaching to the choir and alienating half of the disc’s potential audience.

As the Professor would say, not for peace, merely on the other side.

(Post title via Frank Zappa, incidentally.)

So why is 75 percent of America tuning out the Oscars? Let's ask the South Park guys!

While I'm not a huge South Park fan myself (click here and then scroll down to read James Lileks' early take on it, which works for me as well), I'm glad that there's a show on that's willing to take on liberal shibboleths--and receive a huge cult following in the red states as a result.

Which is why Hollywood, Interrupted's authors interviewed Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the men who created the show for their book. They have a great take on why Hollywood has increasingly alienated much of Middle America. Here's but a small excerpt:

Back when perennial Oscar bridesmaid Bob Hope used to host the show, he'd quip, "Welcome to the Academy Awards--or as it's known at my house, Passover."

The Oscars aren't passing over Hope anymore--he's gone on to the great back nine in the sky, and increasingly, we're the ones doing the passing over, via our remote controls.

Found via PoliPundit, John Zogby claims that only one in four Americans will watch the Oscars tonight:

Oscar-viewing habits do have a lot to do with where a respondent lives, and where they line up politically. While four-in-ten (39%) Democrats say they will watch the Oscars, this drops to one-in-eight (13%) among Republicans. Unsurprisingly, political independents split the difference, with 22% planning to view the awards show.

"The Republican/Democrat split really isn't shocking," pollster John Zogby said. "This is the time when Hollywood liberals shine—the awards are dominated by them, and they are their most glamorous."

Tonight is that special moment for all conservatives when we get to be lectured on political views by good-looking morons that make $10 million for a few months work - no, I'm not talking about the UN Oil-For-Food Oversight Committee, but rather, the Oscars. The glamour, the glitz, the absence of Fahrenheit 9/11 - it should be a night to remember, at least until two seconds after it's over.

To make this year's ceremony more bearable, I'm going to be putting up Oscar-related posts throughout the day, then live-blogging the proceedings from the countdown show through the awarding of best picture to Million Dollar Baby, er, to whatever picture happens to win.

So stay tuned...if we stick together, maybe, just maybe, we'll all be around to see the dawn...

Update: Michelle Malkin has a round-up of Oscar-related links.

Another Update: More here, here, and here.

When it was obvious that a Monday Night Football game had become a rout during its classic original years with Howard Cosell, Frank Gifford and Don Meredith, Meredith would sing, "Turn out the lights, the party's over".

Mark Steyn writes that when it comes to Europe, while it's not quite time to sing "turn out the lights", the fourth quarter is rapidy approaching:

Many Americans wander round with the constitution in their pocket so they can whip it out and chastise over-reaching congressmen and senators at a moment's notice. Try going round with the European Constitution in your pocket and you'll be walking with a limp after two hours: It's 511 pages, which is 500 longer than the U.S. version. It's full of stuff about European space policy, Slovakian nuclear plants, water resources, free expression for children, the right to housing assistance, preventive action on the environment, etc.

Most of the so-called constitution isn't in the least bit constitutional. That's to say, it's not content, as the U.S. Constitution is, to define the distribution and limitation of powers. Instead, it reads like a U.S. defense spending bill that's got porked up with a ton of miscellaneous expenditures for the ''mohair subsidy'' and other notorious Congressional boondoggles. President Ronald Reagan liked to say, ''We are a nation that has a government -- not the other way around.'' If you want to know what it looks like the other way round, read Monsieur Giscard's constitution.

But the fact is it's going to be ratified, and Washington is hardly in a position to prevent it. Plus there's something to be said for the theory that, as the EU constitution is a disaster waiting to happen, you might as well cut down the waiting and let it happen. CIA analysts predict the collapse of the EU within 15 years. I'd say, as predictions of doom go, that's a little on the cautious side.

But either way the notion that it's a superpower in the making is preposterous. Most administration officials subscribe to one of two views: a) Europe is a smugly irritating but irrelevant backwater; or b) Europe is a smugly irritating but irrelevant backwater where the whole powder keg's about to go up.

For what it's worth, I incline to the latter position. Europe's problems -- its unaffordable social programs, its deathbed demographics, its dependence on immigration numbers that no stable nation (not even America in the Ellis Island era) has ever successfully absorbed -- are all of Europe's making. By some projections, the EU's population will be 40 percent Muslim by 2025. Already, more people each week attend Friday prayers at British mosques than Sunday service at Christian churches -- and in a country where Anglican bishops have permanent seats in the national legislature.

Some of us think an Islamic Europe will be easier for America to deal with than the present Europe of cynical, wily, duplicitous pseudo-allies. But getting there is certain to be messy, and violent.

Until the shape of the new Europe begins to emerge, there's no point picking fights with the terminally ill. The old Europe is dying, and Mr. Bush did the diplomatic equivalent of the Oscar night lifetime-achievement tribute at which the current stars salute a once glamorous old-timer whose fading aura is no threat to them. The 21st century is being built elsewhere.

Update: Captain Ed looks at just one of many examples of why Europe is a potential powder keg.

Another Update: Follow the link in this Power Line post for more from Steyn himself on Europe's future.

Joanne Jacobs writes that all too frequently these days, pushers supplying contraband are roaming the halls of American schools--who have only themselves to blame.

To paraphrase one of my favorite lines from Robert Altman's original film version of M*A*S*H, "Fair's fair, Colonel: if I call 3000 innocent casualties 'little Eichmanns', plagiarize art and punch a reporter, can I ask for ten million dollars from my employer, too?"

Robert Novak writes that America's red states are continuing to grow in size and power: growing populations equal growing power at the ballot box:

A projection by Polidata, a Republican-oriented political mapping and redistricting firm, shows population trends will make Republican-dominated "Red" states more influential in winning presidential elections and determining control of Congress after the 2010 census.

The new study forecasts that "Red" states will pick up a net six electoral votes, with Florida and Texas gaining three each. The "Blue" states carried by John Kerry, according to Polidata, will lose a net six electoral votes, led by New York's loss of two. Under this distribution of electoral votes, George W. Bush could have been elected last November without carrying Ohio.

This projection points to probable Republican control of the White House and the House of Representatives far into the future. It makes more urgent the contention by Howard Dean, the new Democratic national chairman, that his party needs to do much better in "Red" states.

(Via PoliPundit.)

Most sports fans remember Lynn Swann from his days as a Pittsburgh Steeler, where he helped his team win four Super Bowls in the 1970s, before retiring with a bust in Canton. But since he's recently announced that he's considering running for the governorship of Pennsylvania, Carpe Bonum looks at Swann's political views, and dubs them radical chic ultra leftwing surprisingly conventional, with the exception of the "vicious attack on bloggers" he once made:

The computer is a wonderful tool, but it should not be a way of life for everybody where you sit in front of the computer and you do nothing else.

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

In 1973, Hanna-Barbera contacted Hunter S. Thompson to guest star on Scooby Doo. For obvious reasons, the ensuing episode was simply too much for Saturday Morning kid's TV, and it never aired, remaining sealed in H-B's Burbank vaults.

Until now...

Update: This article about Thompson's death and its immediate aftermath would be a morbidly funny parody as well, except that it's real, sadly.

Mark Steyn was on C-Span Friday, in a wide ranging interview by Brian Lamb (and his call-in guests). For those with Real Player software, click here to view it.

(Via The Brothers Judd.)

Well, not exactly. However, Reggie Fowler, the multimillionaire entrepreneurial tycoon who is planning to buy the Minnesota Vikings from its current owner, the multimillionaire entrepreneurial tycoon Red McCombs, is currently having a bit of a fuss with the press concerning his resumé--which contains, shall we say, several items that have been slightly exaggerated:

"And now you know--[beat]--the rest of the story!"

Two articles today look at what was left out of Martin Scorsese's The Aviator. Harold Evans examines the brilliant career of Pan Am's Juan Trippe:

Everyone who sees the Oscar runaway nominee "The Aviator" will come away with a dark impression of the man Howard Hughes sees as his enemy--a plump Alec Baldwin playing Juan Trippe as the suavely conspiratorial head of Pan Am. The film deserves its acclaim because it captures the romantic and visionary spirit of risk-takers like Hughes who propelled America to new heights--but the image of Trippe as the bad guy has to be retrieved before it congeals in the popular imagination.

If you are one of the 3.6 billion who have flown on a 747, it's Trippe, not Hughes, who merits the raising of a turbulence-free glass. Mass international jet travel was Trippe's achievement. He deserves a movie of his own. Of course, the film is right that Trippe worked the Washington lobby to try and retain his prewar monopoly of international air services. Hughes, having acquired Trans World Airlines in May 1939, won that one, gaining permission to operate overseas in December 1945. But even before he went mad, Hughes never had the early vision that Trippe did. Even when LaGuardia was an amusement park, Trippe was more prescient than anyone, including his new best friend, Charles Lindbergh. Trippe was indeed a political operator, but was also the greatest creative force through four adventurous decades.

"Do you think if they asked a man if he was a Democrat or a Republican that he would refuse to answer on the grounds that his answer might incriminate him?" said Hughes. "The very fact that this man pleaded his constitutional privilege — that is his admission that he is not talking about politics. If you believe that the Communist party is in the same category as the Democrat party or Republican party, then I think I can answer you in this way: We are not fighting Democrats or Republicans in Korea."

* * *

As a businessman, Hughes didn't want to jeopardize box-office receipts. He believed that having party members employed at studios was a financial risk. By the time of the Jarrico case, however, he was beginning to find the idea of having someone supportive of the Soviet regime working for him disturbing on a more fundamental level that had nothing to do with money. "The public has begun to dislike — I should say, detest — not only Communism but Communists. It is beginning to recognize that they are traitors to our country, and to feel that they should be discouraged in every way," said Hughes during the trial. "The public is beginning to ask all who assist the Communists, in any way, why they are doing so, and to transfer some of its resentment to [those who help]."

Accused by a Boulder, Colorado TV reporter of plagiarizing, then selling, famous artwork depicting American Indians, academia's golden boy responds by taking a swing at the reporter's cameraman:

BOULDER, Colo. (CBS4) An exclusive report by CBS4 News indicates embattled University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill may have broken copyright law by making a mirror image of an artist’s work and selling it as his own.

Placing Churchill’s work beside that of renowned artist Thomas E. Mails and the two look like mirror images. But one is a copyrighted drawing. The other is an autographed print by Churchill.

When CBS4 News tried to talk to Churchill about a possible copyright infringement, we received an angry response.

“Get that camera out of my face,” Churchill said.

CBS4 News reporter Raj Chohan: “This is an artwork we’ve got called ‘Winter Attack.’ It looks like it was based on a Thomas Mails painting; it looks like you ripped it off. Can you tell us about that?”

That prompted Churchill to take a swing at Chohan.

Should he lose his tenure? Jim Geraghty has an interesting discussion on the topic, as does Glenn Reynolds.

Update: Watching the video again, Churchill took a (rather wussy) swing at the reporter himself, not his cameraman.

Last night, we linked to Jonathan Last's look at how Hollywood makes money even on films that bomb, which began with this trenchant observation:

A survey of the muck soon to be celebrated at the Academy Awards confirms William Goldman's sad truism: Every Oscar night you look back and realize that last year was the worst year in the history of Hollywood.

How can you spot a film that's deserving of the award? The man who created them uses this as his criteria: "One of the ways you can tell a Razzie", John Wilson says, "is that even if you're seeing it on an airplane, you think about walking out."

Heh.

CNN shows the final photos taken by a Canadian couple vacationing at Khao Lak, a Thai resort, when the tsunami hit on the day after Christmas:

John and Jackie Knill of North Vancouver, frequent visitors to the popular Thai resort, Khao Lak, were apparently on the beach when the tsunami hit December 26.

The couple disappeared and relatives say they were notified about a week ago that the identities of their remains had been confirmed.

Searchers later also recovered the couple's destroyed digital camera but were able to print photos from its memory card.

In a sequence of photos over the course of a few minutes, some curious onlookers are shown wandering onto suddenly exposed tidal flats, a sign of the impending tsunami. In one, a large wave appears to be breaking in the distance.

The pictures show that within minutes, the wave grows larger and some beachgoers begin to take notice.

"I don't know why they didn't run," their son Christian Knill told Global TV in Vancouver. "Either they knew they couldn't or they didn't know the power of the wave."

(One quibble: why the "apparently"?)

The first shot the couple took (linked to above) looks to me like just another set of ocean waves in the distance. Strictly from the appearance of it, there's no way on earth I'd know that trouble was on the horizon.

Radio man Glenn Beck has an assemblage of amateur camcorder videos of the tsunami on his Website, all of which is a reminder of how increasingly these days news is documented by everyday people with camcorders, digital cameras, and/or Weblogs, not just by those at the TV networks and wire services.

« Close It

Anthony Lane of The New Yorker goes Inside Deep Throat, so you don't have to.

Found via Jonathan Last, who calls it "a snort-your-coffee review". Personally, I had a couple of medium chuckles (plus a quick eye roll at the inevitable Republicans are Nazis reference that seems obligatory in most Manhattan-based publications), not a Danny Thomas spit-take, but you're warned that there's a possibility that beverages and monitors could interact.

Take appropriate precautions.

And the only prescription is more of the footwear!

Chris Muir catches Manolo fever, and the Shoe God himself achieves the immortality of the Weblogosphere. (And yes, it is incredibly easy to start talking like him; it's driving my wife nuts as I keep doing vocal impersonations of the Manolo's ultra-idiosyncratic writing style.)

Jonathan Last has a review of The Big Picture by Edward Jay Epstein, who argues that because Hollywood and its endless chain of national and international movie releases, along with related soundtrack, DVD releases, TV rights and merchandising deels is so profitable, it doesn't need to worry about making decent movies:

Robin Givhan of the Washington Post channels Sigmund Freud channeling Mr. Blackwell as she gives us her take on the semiotics of Condi Rice's stylish duds.

Update: On the other hand, as Tim Blair writes, "The never said that about Lawrence Eagleburger".

Can't argue with that!

Democratic Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Charles Schumer were jointly named "Porker of the Month" today by the non-partisan Citizens Against Government Waste advocacy group:

Democratic Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Charles Schumer were jointly named "Porker of the Month" Thursday by a citizens advocacy group.

The non-partisan Citizens Against Government Waste, which fights pork barrel projects in government, said the two made the designation because of the New Yorkers' pledge to oppose President George W. Bush's intention to end the government's $4.7 billion Community Development Block Grant program to curb spending.

The CDBG provides money to cities and towns for development, but the administration argues it is ineffective and redundant. In his 2006 budget proposal, Bush suggested taking the program from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and merging with similar, more effective programs under the Department of Commerce so that cities would need to list proposed projects in advance and compete for approval.

The advocacy group criticized Clinton and Schumer for saying the current program, rife with mismanagement and waste, is essential for development in New York.

Past grants to New York, it said, included $25,000 for a music conservatory in Westchester County, one of the richest in the state, and $500,000 for street improvement there.

UPI says that a hotel will built on the site of Adolf Hitler's Alpine retreat at the Obersalzberg in Bavaria:

OBERSALZBERG, Feb. 24 (UPI) — A Jewish leader in Germany has termed as tasteless a luxury hotel set to open March 1 on the site of Adolf Hitler's Alpine retreat at Obersalzberg in Bavaria.

Michael Friedman with Germany's main Jewish organization said the 138-room Intercontinental Resort Berchtesgaden is "tasteless and robs the place of its history," the BBC reported.

But Kurt Faltlhauser, Bavaria's finance minister, said: "There can be no covering up and absolutely no glorification of the Nazi regime."

The hotel has been built on the spot where Hermann Goering, the former Nazi air force chief, had his summer residence.

Guests will pay about $264 per night for a room.

Hitler developed Obersalzberg as a second seat of government for his regime after becoming German chancellor.

To be honest, when I saw the URL "PirateBallerina.com" show up in my referral logs, I thought it was one of Manolo's fans who found me via his link earlier today.

And, hey, of course it could be--but the actual site is a compendium of links to the Colorado moonbat himself, Ward Churchill. And well worth scrolling through.

The Pittsburgh Steelers' hall of fame wide receiver Lynn Swann is entering a new competition: running for governor of Pennsylvania.

He's certainly got a huge leg-up on name recognition, but I'm not sure how well he'll sell to Iggles fans. Fortunately, the Steelers and Eagles are in different conferences in the NFL, and rarely play each other, except in the preseason.

(Captain Ed notes one immediate upside: Cleveland Browns fan Hugh Hewitt "will have to learn to love the Pittsburgh Steelers. A perfect world will truly have arrived!" Heh.)

And this seems like as good a place as any to hang news about current NFL players: Randy Moss is apparently headed to Oakland, where his bad boy image makes him a natural. And Drew Bledsoe is definitely heading to Dallas, where he'll be reunited with Bill Parcells. The Dallas press have been loathing the idea (even before it was officially announced), but Bledsoe, at 33, probably still has a few decent years left, and is familar with Parcells' tough Lombardi-era style of coaching.

Stephen Schwartz writes that with the death of Hunter S. Thompson, the Baby Boom Era is officially over:

In yet another Oliver Stone moment, the Empire State's Congressman Hinchey puts all the pieces together for Sean Hannity. (Note: scroll to end of post for transcript.)

No word yet if Amelia Earhart was involved, though.

Update: this related post by the Blogfather is well worth reading. Here's an excerpt:

Has a new meme been born?

Meet Ward Churchill: Republican civil rights pioneer.

(For an update on Churchill himself, click here.)

Political guru Larry Sabato writes that Hillary's chances are overrated: she carries heap big baggage from her first tour of the White House with Bill.

Meanwhile, a possible opponent is looking mighty stylish in the Washington Post (and no, I don't mean John McCain).

(I wonder if the Manolo likes the boots?)

Update: It's official: Condi's kicks are Manolo approved. (And welcome to his readers, incidentally!)

Another Update: Steve Green has more from Sabato.

Back in 2002, during the early days of this blog, we reviewed Ridley Scott's film of Mark Bowden's great mid-1990s book, Black Hawk Down, especially the most important scene in the movie--and simultaneously, its most flubbed:

Charles Johnson has a pair of photographs which wonderfully remember what it was like to raise the flag in 1944--and in 2001.

Power Line has some thoughts on the former, incidentally.

It was late last August, so my memories today are a little hazy. And I think I was a bit stunned at the time by the high level of the fellow covert operatives in the room with me, but near as I can recall, this post by Tim Blair is exactly what transpired in the secret underground lair I was taken to blindfolded...

Update: I seem to recall this interactive device being used as well, but the secretary later disavowed all knowledge of its existence.

Jonah Goldberg and Fox's Eric Burns conclude that the odds are extremely high that Deep Throat was Hal Holbrook.

Whoops--let's try that again. Jonah and Eric conclude that the odds are extremely high that Deep Throat was a composite invented by Woodward and Bernstein's book editor to provide a more compelling narrative to All The President's Men--which certainly makes sense, when you read the details that Jonah includes in his column, which he ends by writing:

Watergate prompted a generation of preening journalists to lecture America from a pedestal. The least Deep Throat can do — or, the least the leading Deep Throat suspects can do — is to let us know if the journalists belonged on that pedestal in the first place.

Sorry for the lack of rich bloggity goodness yesterday--I had an article to polish and a newsletter to write, and by late afternoon, Nina and I were both feeling like we needed a break and decided to get out of the house for dinner. While northern California isn't in danger of washing into the Pacific like its southern counterpart, we've definitely gotten our share of rain this year. It's left us feeling a bit claustrophobic. Not Jack Nicholson in The Shining claustrophobic, but still.

So we did what any couple near San Jose would do. We went to the Village where Leo McKern is always interrogating Patrick McGoohan.

Say what? Read on.

Iraq's Shia News looks at Saddam Hussein's legacy of mass graves:

I just saw the headline on Drudge that Hunter S. Thompson blew his own brains--or what was left of them--out.

Gee, what a shocker.

No doubt, some of Thompson's early stuff was great, such as his Hell's Angels book. Tom Wolfe hailed him as one of the great new journalists in the early 1970s, and even prior to that, Thompson's rise to journalistic superstardom had already begun, thanks to his impeccable timing: a generation exploring pharmaceutical substances--in other words, popping drugs like they were jelly beans--needed a journalist with similar habits to iconify, and Thompson was only too happy to play the part.

Like William S. Burroughs, all that drug consumption eventually caught up with him of course, but not before he turned into a parody of himself. Sadly, with the exception of Wolfe himself, Gay Talese and possibly Michael Herr, time has not been kind to a lot of the heroes of the 1960s and '70s New Journalism period--they've really become parodies of their former selves: in addition to Thompson, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, and Jimmy Breslin all immediately come to mind.

One of Charles Johnson's readers catches Congressman Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) on audio tape during a public speech on the advertised topic of Social Security reform making a wild accusation straight out of Oliver Stone/Michael Moore-land. But then this has been a trend since 9/11 as the left has become increasingly conspiracy-obsessed as they seek to emerge from the political wilderness.

Update: Jim Geraghty writes:

In the course of research for a book proposal, I've been looking at the reaction of the far left of the Democratic party to 9/11. You probably remember a lot of it--Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, etc. The "well, we had it coming" voices were not that numerous in the fall of 2001... but what was interesting was how few mainstream or centrist Democrats were willing to denounce their ideological brethren.

Perhaps the most extraordinary change in American politics over the last few years is how comments that once would have seemed ridiculous, or silly, or way out there have now become fairly common sentiments in what was once mainstream circles.

Another Update: Gee, what a surprise--Hinchey's rant got zero coverage today in his district's newspapers. On the other hand, Charles Johnson will be on MSNBC tonight to discuss it with their viewers.

James Lileks once again reminds us that he's not planning to run for the Senate in '06, no matter who drafts him, and lists numerous reasons why. The last item--about having to live in Washington--certainly sold me:

If I could work from home here in Minneapolis and send out a lifelike robot to do my public appearances, that would be fine. Especially if the robot concluded news conferences by vaporizing a few impertinent reporters and walking through a stone wall before flying off; people like that sort of thing in a senator. I daresay 100 fearsome robot senators could make short work of North Korea, and the worldwide sales of licensed action figures would fund a dozen campaign cycles.

Barring that, no. I lived in D.C. in the '90s, and they were not happy years. Police helicopters, 24/7 car alarms, hopeless local government and that general big-city / East-Coast go-to-hell attitude toward you, the citizen taxpayer. And it's not even a real East Coast city. It's a training-wheels version for people who hope to move to Boston and really drain the joy out of other people's lives. Senators do not have to encounter the city's myriad problems, of course; they get chauffeured to the job, and they work in this imaginary world of marble and crisply saluting guards and innumerable oil paintings of men in britches shaking hands. It's a wonderful theme park. It's the only one in the country where the clowns think they're the management.

Mark Coffey of Decision '08 has some thoughts on who whens the Long Tail of weblogs compete with the mainstream media.

Speaking of which, Dave Johnston, writing from a new blog with a beautiful photo on its masthead of the Chicago skyline from Lake Shore Drive inward (love that city's architecture!) links to a piece on Weblogs in Salon from 1999, that could have been written this year. It sort of proves how little the legacy media has learned from its successors.

Roger Kimball looks at just how deep the roots in academia run when it comes to hiring professors like Ward Churchill.

Incidentally, like the collegiate equivalent of an NFL superstar being nominated to the Pro Bowl, Ward's off to the Aloha state to discuss "little Eichmanns" at the University of Hawaii.

Speaking of Pejman and the current state of the Democrats, he has an interesting piece on the duties of an opposition party, over at Tech Central Station.

Martin Peretz of the liberal New Republic magazine echoes many points that conservatives have been making about the modern face of liberalism--and indeed, he echoes more than a few themes we've illustrated here. His essay is titled, "Not Much Left", and frankly (if you'll pardon the pun), he's right: the Class of '72 has run aground, and conservatism has assimilated much of the rest of traditional liberalism's ideas. Additionally, George W. Bush has co-opted many of Bill Clinton's "third way" concepts, making many leftwing politicians look like sputtering hypocrites as they now bitterly oppose the very same ideas that they backed when President Clinton offered them in the 1990s (not the least of which were regime change in Iraq and Social Security reform).

It's a must-read piece. But will anyone in Peretz's intended audience heed his advice?

Update: Not surprisingly, Orrin Judd and Pejman Yousefzadeh have some thoughts.

Following on Michael Medved's piece in the Wall Street Journal today, James Bowman makes a great point about movies and politics in The American Spectator:

Don't make Nick Schulz (my editor at Tech Central Station) angry, as Al Franken recently did--unlike Franken, he can slice and dice an argument with surgical precision.

Tim Worstall of Tech Central Station uses the article I wrote for them earlier this month on the Long Tail as a jumping off point for a discussion on tax policy.

Betsy Newmark wonders why PBS is still receiving taxpayer funding:

I still fail to see why we need the government to subsidize TV when so many people have access to cable and when shows like Sesame Street and Masterpiece Theater could certainly find a home somewhere and be supported by advertising revenue.

Heck, it's there already, as I see reruns of Sesame Street, This Old House, Poirot (the short, eccentric Belgian detective, not the short eccentric Texan who was against NAFTA), Monty Python and other original and PBS-imported shows that PBS ran into the ground, every time I click through my DirecTV onscreen guide.

Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt, who is a former veteran PBS producer, has some thoughts on the network's woes:

The biggest problem is that PBS is indifferent to market forces, which allows everything to grow old and stale, for indifference to audience, and snail's pace programming innovation. It is your grandfather's network, and soon it will be your children's great-grandfather's network. Contrast any program on PBS with MSNBC's new Connected Coast to Coast, on which I appeared yesterday, and you'll see in an eye blink why PBS sheds viewers every day. MSNBC is trying to capture the energy of the new media and the news news cycle. PBS just slumbers on, confident that the claim that some folks in rural America don't have cable will forever protect it from reality.

In the Wall Street Journal, Michael Medved defends his decision to give away the surprise ending of Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby:

Underlying all of the assaults on those of us who have dissented from the near-unanimous praise for "Million Dollar Baby" is a tone of exaggerated horror that well-known conservatives could dare to question the work of a right-wing icon like Clint Eastwood, pointedly described by Frank Rich as "a former Republican officeholder" and "Nixon appointee to the National Council of the Arts." I would have thought that a willingness to criticize even a onetime political ally would demonstrate integrity rather than insanity, evincing our determination to evaluate films without fear or favor. On a similar note, I stand proudly by my harsh reviews of the violent movie excesses by a fellow Republican (and former actor) who currently serves as governor of California. Criticizing onscreen work by Mr. Eastwood (or Arnold Schwarzenegger) isn't the equivalent of indicting their character or politics, any more than my previous praise for, say, Tim Robbins as an actor or director amounts to an endorsement of his character or politics.

John Hawkins has a roundup of some of the new DNC chairman's more outré utterances.

Charles Johnson, linking to a piece in Front Page, writes that while "Colorado University professor Ward Churchill may have written and said some outrageous things", Northwestern University has on its faculty somebody who's done some outrageous things--a former member of the '60s far, far left radical group the Weathermen:

Kurt Andersen, the man who founded the satiric Spy magazine in the late 1980s, has a piece in New York magazine that InstaPundit linked to today. It's filled with dark invective and sarcasm aimed at not just President Bush, but virtually all Americans who live in the blank white spaces of the famous New Yorker cartoon illustrating how liberal Manhattanites and their L.A. counterparts view "flyover country". In that sense, it's yet another example of the sort of coarse tone that short-circuits so many recent leftwing pieces by making them virtually indigestable by anyone who doesn't already agree with the author's biases. But in the middle of all of his bile, Anderson gets something spot-on:

If partisanship makes us abandon intellectual honesty, if we oppose what our opponents say or do simply because they are the ones saying or doing it, we become mere political short-sellers, hoping for bad news because it’s good for our ideological investment.

A positive tone is a first step: any salesman will tell you that a spoonful of sugar makes the pitch go down that much easier with the intended listener. Loving your country (and not just the 23 square miles of Manhattan)--and internalizing that love, not just mouthing platitudes--is the next step on the long road back to respectability amongst voters in the flyover Red States, where Howard Dean has said he's going to try and do outreach. And I don't know how much he's up to either task.

National Review Online has added its fourth weblog (joining the Corner, TKS, and David Frum's blog), which they call "Beltway Buzz". Posting there is Eric Pfeiffer, formerly of the National Journal's "Hotline" daily briefing.

Mike Krempasky writes:

Today, for the first time in history, the word "blogs" was said on the floor of the Unites States Senate. And the context gets even better when you look at the legislation in question - the OPEN Government Act, as introduced by Texas Senator John Cornyn and some other guy from Vermont [Democrat Patrick Leahy--Ed]. The first significant reforms of FOIA in more than a decade are particularly designed to be internet and blogger friendly.

Hopefully C-Span has video; no word yet if Cornyn and Leahy were wearing their jammies on the floor of the Senate today.

Glenn Reynolds has a traffic camera update, linking to an article which says:

Red light camera programs in at least 19 cities across the country are likely to be shut down this year following actions taken by courts and legislatures in the past two weeks.

Will Collier of Vodkapundit has some thoughts on how the media can repair the damage of the back to back to back crises of the media, most recently Ra^therGate and Eason Jordan's serial soldier slandering, in a piece titled, "MSM, Heal Thyself":

James Glassman of Tech Central Station says that AARP needs to make up their mind when it comes to equity investing and retirement:

The President's plan will likely allow workers to put up to four percentage points of what they now pay in taxes into a small number of broadly diversified portfolios of stocks and bonds.

This is hardly radical. Half of American families already own mutual funds, and most AARP members are retirees who don't pay into Social Security anyway, so they won't be exercising the option. But those facts don't stop the AARP from painting a frightening picture that equates investing with casino gambling.

In one ad, labeled "misleading" by the nonpartisan watchdog FactCheck.org, the AARP shows a wild cocoa trading pit with the headline, "Winners and Losers are stock market terms. Do you really want them to become retirement terms?"

Another AARP ad features a man and woman considering the Bush plan and saying, "If we feel like gambling, we'll play the slots."

But the AARP is talking out of both sides of its mouth. It says that stock and bond investing is like playing a slot machine at the same time it promotes stock and bond investing by selling 38 mutual funds to its members and taking a cut from each sale.

As former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo) once said, "I never saw the AARP do anything that would hurt their business."

Among the AARP funds are far riskier choices than advocates of Social Security reform would ever offer to American workers: for example, a Latin American stock fund, a junk-bond fund, and a fund that holds shares of companies based in such highly volatile markets as Indonesia and Russia.

AARP Services, Inc., the lucrative business arm of the AARP, entered into a deal with Scudder Investments to sell mutual funds to its members as part of a special affinity program. According to a prospectus, Scudder pays AARP an annual fee for the use of its trademark that ranges from .05 percent to .07 percent of assets. That can come to a lot of money. One fund alone, Scudder Growth & Income AARP, manages $5 billion.

The hypocrisy is breathtaking. AARP's website carries solid information about how to invest wisely, but the organization's anti-Social Security ads make investing - even under the tough restrictions advocated by reformers -- look like a game for dumb suckers and out-of-control gamblers.

Forbes looks at a forgotten utility adult beverage, in a piece called "Blended Scotches We Love":

The big advantage of drinking blended Scotch is that it doesn't have to be taken seriously; you don't have to treat it with the ritualistic reverence that goes along with drinking single malts.

Rather, it's a comfortable, everyday drink--something you don't have to think too much about. Simply throw a handful of ice into a glass and add a good, blended scotch (and, perhaps, some soda). It's a drink you can enjoy it in the bar after work with your buddies or at a raucous party, and you won't have to concentrate on savoring all of its subtle nuances.

Senate majority leader Bill Frist has threatened to "go nuclear" to break the logjam that blocked President Bush's nominees in the Senate during his first term. Scott "reports" that Democrats have come up with a method to block even that...

...The Tantrum Rule!

I have a review of Rikky Rooksby's not yet released book, Bruce Springsteen: Songwriting Secrets, over at Blogcritics.

Back in June of 2002, we wrote about the sorry state of the Grammys' ratings and the recording industry in general in an early blog post.

Sadly, it looks like little has changed.

I can't help but think though--as I'm blogging this, I have my copy of Cakewalk's Sonar open, and I'm fiddling with a new composition. Given the amount of recording software that Cakewalk, Sony, Propellerhead and others sell, plus all the recording hardware that Fostex and Tascam sells, there's got to be some great stuff being made.

So why isn't it there when I turn on my radio?

(Probably for the same reason that the really interesting journalism and opinion is more and more in the Blogosphere, instead in the so-called mainstream media.)

Growing up, I never thought I'd become my father, forced to listen to older music because the recording industry essentially stopped producing music that appeals to me--but it looks like I'm not alone. As Glenn wrote back then, the Grammys' low ratings belie the theory that piracy is killing the music industry. If everyone were simply pirating new music that they enjoyed, they'd still tune in to watch their favorite performers in a free network broadcast.

I think this is another example where the long tail comes into play. The Blogosphere has revolutionized how news and opinion is delivered. Somehow, a similar method has to be developed to get the music being made by those in the tail out to listeners who will appreciate it. And I'm not sure if the newly reconstituted Napster, et al is the optimum delivery system.

Douglas Kern has a great new meme over at Tech Central Station. Behold, the chickendove!

Terry Teachout comes to bury Arthur Miller, not to praise him:

I wonder how much attention would now be paid to Miller if he hadn't married Monroe, and if the House Un-American Activities Committee hadn't made the mistake of subpoenaing him in 1956 to testify about his Communist ties (which were extensive, though he always denied having been an actual party member), thereby bringing about his citation for contempt of Congress when he refused to "name names." The one made him a pop-culture footnote, the other a liberal icon.

The irony is that the smartest critics of Miller's own generation, virtually all of whom shared his left-wing views, held his plays in a different kind of contempt. Back then he took his roughest beatings from the likes of Eric Bentley, Mary McCarthy, Kenneth Tynan and Robert Warshow, who found him heavy-handed and insufferably preachy. Tynan, for instance, wrote that "The Crucible" "suggests a sensibility blunted by the insistence of an outraged conscience: it has the over-simplifications of poster art." Bull's-eye.

* * *

Times have changed, and today's more stringently politicized critics and playwrights seem willing to overlook Miller's limitations because he thought as they do. "As a political figure, he was a progressive man, but never doctrinaire," Tony Kushner said last week. "There was a simplicity, and humbleness, and decency in his work." Some of this is true--Miller was "progressive," and his plays were simple--but if there was anything humble about him, it escaped my attention. He was a man of limitless self-regard who confused the state of Broadway with his latter-day inability to get his new plays produced there: "A new 'Crucible' could not be produced on Broadway today, nor a 'Death of a Salesman,' either. . . . Is this situation satisfactory for what purports to be the main stage of the richest country in human history?"

It will be interesting to see how long it takes for the fanfares to die away, and no less interesting to see whether any of Miller's plays outlive him. Most are already deservedly forgotten, but I expect that "Death of a Salesman" will continue to hold the stage, though not because it is beautiful or intelligent or provocative. It is, rather, sentimental, and sentimentality always goes over big in the commercial theater, so long as it's disguised as realism. More important, "Death of a Salesman" has a coarsely compulsive power that somehow manages to mask its aesthetic deficiencies, or at least render them momentarily palatable. That's the mystery of theater: It's all about what works, and like it or not, "Death of a Salesman" works. But it's no "Lear," just as Arthur Miller was no Shakespeare, and anyone who thinks otherwise is as lead-eared as he was.

Update: Betsy Newmark also has some thoughts on Teachout article, and leftwing Miller-worship in general.

If you open the paper and read that Christo, the modern artist covering Central Park in orange plastic wrap, had a massive coronary infarction, it's because The New Criterion's James Panero is comparing him to Thomas Kinkade, he of the paintings available at your local shopping mall.

They are cruel, cruel men at Armavirumque...

Last week, I quoted Roger Ailes of Fox News talking about CNN International, one of CNN's many spin-off channels:

Well, the best way to get distribution around the world is to be the BBC or Al Jazeera or CNNi, basically do -- if you watch it day in and day out, you can't find a whole lot good about America. Now, they have no obligation to do good stories about America, but they do have an obligation to have balance and context. And Al Jazeera simply doesn't. BBC doesn't. And CNNi is less offensive, but they don't do it much, either. And I think that context is critically important to the news.

Update: Geez, talk about radical chic: between Castro, Saddam and now this fellow, Eason's apparently never met a dictator he didn't like.

Vintage Guitar magazine often uploads originally print-only articles from previous months. This month, the article I co-wrote in 2003 about the Parsons/White Stringbender is online. It discusses how it was invented by Gene Parsons and Clarence White of the Byrds, and later used by numerous rock and country guitarists such as Jimmy Page, Albert Lee, Pete Townshend and others.

I knew there was a reason why my wife's '87 Toyota Land Cruiser (which looks similar to this one) got such incredible gas mileage; Frank Martin explains how.

To think--all those years learning the guitar, when I could have been playing this...

Charles Johnson speculates why the World Economic Forum hasn't released the tape of Eason Jordan's comments:

they don’t want the blogosphere to see an audience full of leading world journalists cheering and applauding Jordan’s vicious slander.

Well, Ed Morrissey, to be precise. On Friday, he presciently wrote:

the networks, which had yet to address the issue, now needed to report the resignation of the head of a news organization for a scandal they never reported to their viewers.

The NY Times delivers a comedy classic as it attempts to explain to its readers that a prominent CNN executive has resigned under fire:

Eason Jordan, a senior executive at CNN who was responsible for coordinating the cable network's Iraq coverage, resigned abruptly last night, citing a journalistic tempest he touched off during a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, late last month in which he appeared to suggest that United States troops had deliberately aimed at journalists, killing some.

A "journalistic tempest"? This is the first story to appear in the Times! Geez, fashionably late to a party is one thing, but fashionably late to a journalistic tempest?

Teresa Heinz drops "Kerry" from her last name.

Actually, I have a feeling she still might have done that right about now, had her husband won in November.

(Via The Corner.)

PoliPundit.com takes a look at Kim Jong Il...cinematic mastermind!

To paraphrase Monty Python, Will Collier of VodkaPundit writes that there's no arrogance in the mainstream media. And when he says none, he does mean that there is a certain amount.

Well, an enormous amount, actually:

We see you beind the curtain, Lovelady and company, and we're not impressed by either your bluster or your insults. You aren't higher beings, and everybody out here has the right--and ability--to fact-check your asses, and call you on it when you screw up and/or say something stupid. You, and Eason Jordan, and Dan Rather, and anybody else in print or on television don't get free passes because you call yourself "journalists."

You obviously don't like that reality, but it is reality, and you'd better start learning to live with it instead of tossing ad hominen insults at your critics.

We're not going away. Deal with it.

The long tail can also create what Hewitt calls "blog swarms", a spiraling vortex where one blogger picks up a story, then 10 or so of his fellow bloggers pick it up, and so on, as it continues to spiral outward. When this happens, the power of the tail becomes clear -- and it's caused major damage to the careers of Senators Trent Lott and John Kerry, anchorman Dan Rather, and to the reputations of the New York Times and CBS.

Despite this, Hewitt says, the tail of the Blogosphere is a concept that the mainstream media simply does not understand. "They've never worried about the tail, ever", he chortles. "And now they've got the tail just eating them, all day, 24/7."

But the MSM isn't likely to change its spots anytime soon, are they?

Update: The comments section in Will's VodkaPundit post is a must-read. Just keep scrolling.

And speaking of arrogance, Jordan's firing has launched the first of the inevitable McCarthyism charges as a backlash by big media. Assuming that CNN has viewed the tape of Jordan's comments and found it damning, those charges are a sort of offshoot of James Lileks' 21st century update to the definition of McCarthyism.

Jayson of PoliPundit writes that CNN's got a lot of work to do before it can compete again in the ratings game.

Jami Bernard writes that obsessive-compulsive disorder is the disease of the week at your local movie theater.

"Accountability...it's a brave new world! What could top that?"

This.

(Tip of the Trilby to Chris Muir for the heads up.)

Update: More here.

Glenn Reynolds has a link-filled round-up of Bloggers and journalists outside the Blogosphere commenting on Eason Jordan's resignation. He links to Ed Morrissey, who notes Jordan's serial history of military slanders, and writes:

the networks, which had yet to address the issue, now needed to report the resignation of the head of a news organization for a scandal they never reported to their viewers.

Update: First up on deck--the ol' Grey Lady herself.

Mark of Decision '08 has some thoughts on the role that blogs played in Eason Jordan's decision to ease on down the road:

When Dan Rather's document hoax broke, as in the Trent Lott remarks, the event did stay in the blogosphere for a time, but it was only when the public and media at large grew aware that action was taken. With Easongate, only the faintest of ripples had hit the mainstream; a handful of stories, yes, but certainly no national awareness to speak of outside of the blogging and media communities. CNN still doesn't have the story on their front page as I write this, nor does MSNBC. The New York Times does, in a sidebar; but what did you hear from the Times prior to today?

No, this one is different. This time it was the bloggers, and the bloggers alone, that pushed this man out. That will be heady stuff for some; it will scare the pants off of others...but what does it mean, really? Have we entered an era where our lives can be destroyed by a pack of wolves hacking at their keyboards with no oversight, no editors, and no accountability? Or does it mean that we've entered a brave new world where the MSM has become irrelevant?

I would argue that neither of those extremes is the case. What has been shown, though, is that the mass media, mainstream media, MSM, whatever you want to call it, is being held to account as never before by the strong force of individual citizens who won't settle for sloppy research and inflammatory comments without foundation, particularly from those with a wide national reach, such as Rather and Eason. If you are going to slander our troops or our president, you better have the goods...and I don't think that will just apply to liberal voices. Eason Jordan says he is quitting to avoid being 'unfairly tarnished' by the controversy, but it was precisely because he himself unfairly tarnished our fighting men and women, in a very public setting, that he no longer counts himself among the employed.

AP is reporting that CNN news executive Eason Jordan quits:

As you probably know by now, attorney Lynne Stewart was convicted for illegally assisting her client, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman (the man behind the first attempt to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993), in furthering terrorist acts.

Yesterday, Jonah Goldberg wrote, "It will be great fun to see who makes a martyr out of her".

First on deck, This is CNN!

Update: Meanwhile, the New York Times publishes a couple of love letters of their own to Stewart.

The Wall Street Journal (subsction required) says that, "After more than three decades and $29 billion, it'd be nice to think Washington could learn how to run a railroad. But it hasn't, so it is entirely fitting that in his Fiscal Year 2006 budget President Bush is proposing to eliminate all funding for the operating expenses of the federal railroad known as Amtrak unless significant reform takes place":

There's a new documentary about the important 20th century German-born architect called Mies van der Rohe: Regular or Super. It's a straightforward 60-minute biographic film that would be right at home on A&E or the History Channel, except for its annoying postmodern framing device.

For a film about a man who built some of the most important tall office buildings and apartments in North America, the filmmakers decided to use one of Mies's last and least important projects--a tiny Esso gas station he built near Montreal to book-end their documentary, and provide it its title.

I have a review of it online over at Blogcritics.org.

Jim Geraghty is none too pleased with Ann Coulter's comments to Larry Kudlow on CNBC last night. He writes:

Here we are, trying to convince journalists to pay attention to this story, trying to persuade them that Jordan’s comments warrant coverage, trying to get them to push Davos to release the tape, and Ann Coulter, in the very first comments of the very first television segment on this story, has to joke about how great it would be if the American military targeted journalists.

To use the metaphor of T.V. cops, as we bloggers try to build a public consensus that the tape ought to be released in order to clear the air, we need a little more Columbo, and a little less Sledge Hammer.

Hewlitt-Packard's CEO resigned yesterday after pressure from her board. Oddly enough, Forbes writes that there's a Davos angle here as well:

Fiorina probably could have bought time by following the board's suggestion of some months' back to name a chief operations officer, but insiders say she never wanted to give up the detail work. Problem was, she didn't want to give up the visionary stuff either, and so was flying to Davos to opine on global economics when, back home, fundamental decisions needed to be made about, say, the PC business.

She lost the trust of Wall Street by disappointing on too many quarterly results and being unpredictable. She lost the trust of the board by not giving her lieutenants clear enough authority or instructions. In the face of criticisms from both sides, and Fiorina unwilling to change, the board moved on her.

Jim Geraghty writes that EasonGate isn't another case of (as he quips), "The Pajamahadeen Ride Again". Nor is it another example of trying to prove that media is biased to the left. ("If you don’t believe the media is liberal, then this incident isn’t going to convince you", Geraghty writes.)

Instead, it's a case of conflicting points of view:

We’ve got two dramatically different interpretations here – the account of Rony Abovitz and Rebecca MacKinnon and Barney Frank, and the account of Eason Jordan. (Dodd’s statement appears to confirm Rony & Company but is brief; Gergen mostly confirms Rony but is sympathetic to Jordan; Richard Sambrook’s account is pretty close to Jordan’s.)

These accounts are so contradictory on so many key elements that one has no choice but to conclude one side is dramatically misrepresenting what happened.

The videotape that the Davos authorities are sitting on would solve this issue immediately.

Either Rony, MacKinnon, and Frank are passing on inaccurate accounts that will trash Jordan’s reputation, or Eason Jordan’s denial is a lie.

Glenn Reynolds looks at the long game versus the short game of CNN's stonewalling on Eason Jordan. Coming less than two years after their infamous "The News We Kept To Ourselves" admission, six years after their faked "Tailwind" report (that claimed that the US used nerve gas in Vietnam), many chickens are coming how to roost in Ted Turner's old henhouse, to stretch a metaphor far, far beyond its breaking point.

But this point by Jim Geraghty, which Glenn also links to, is key:

If the Davos organizers refuse to release [the videotape of Jordan's statement], and CNN refuses to call for its release, and the BBC refuses to call for its release, and every other news agency refuses to call for its release...

...then remember this, the next time the media gets up on a high horse about the public's right to know. Remember this the next time Dick Cheney has a meeting with energy executives. Remember this the next time reporters complain about Bush not holding enough press conferences, and not doing enough interviews. Remember this the next time they talk about the importance of a free press, and an informed citizenry.

Because it's all conditional. None of this applies when the situation includes a media executive says something in a big forum that he later realizes he doesn't want the public to hear. Then all of a sudden, none of this matters, because it's bad form for other news agencies to look into the story if he wants it to go away. "Bad manners, old chap. We journalists have to stick together."

Steve Green writes that Howard Kurtz finally has an article in the Washington Post about Eason Jordan, the man whose network also employs Kurtz as a host. Unfortunately, it sounds like it's too little too late, if you've been a regular reader of the various Weblogs who have been all over this story since early last week (scroll down for links to several of them):

Thanks to a heads-up from reader Fred Manzo, I've read Kurtz's piece -- and there's not one damn thing in it I hadn't already read in the last week. There's no "additional reporting" here that I can see. There's nothing new in Kurtz's news.

Kurtz is getting big bucks and WaPo-level prestige for giving us what the blogosphere had a week ago for free?

It's the long tail at work!

Update: Via Captain Ed (still no relation, but now permalinked on my links page), here's a link to Kurtz's article. And like Steve, the Captain is none too happy with it:

It took Kurtz over a week to finally get around to publishing this article on Eason's Fables. In that time, it appears that Kurtz did as little investigation as possible on Jordan. My readers and I found all of Jordan's earlier commentary within 24 hours, and we only have very limited access to Nexis and full-time jobs doing other things than media analysis. Worse than that, all of this information has been repeatedly presented on my blog -- in fact, it was all presented on my blog today, and we know Howard Kurtz read my blog sometime this afternoon. Why didn't Kurtz ask about his remarks in Portugal from three months ago, or about his identical accusations against Israel two years ago? Why didn't Kurtz press Jordan on the entire story? Only Kurtz can answer that, and I doubt he will have much more to say to anyone about Eason's Fables from this point onward.

Kurtz took the most superficial look at Eason's Fables possible, allowing both Kurtz and Jordan to reclaim some credibility while effectively closing the door on the story. We all know that Kurtz does better work than this. It's enough to make his readers -- myself an enthusiastic one up to now -- wonder if Mickey Kaus didn't get it right earlier today.

Michael J. Totten has an interesting piece in Tech Central Station about all of the post-9/11 protestors who march against President Bush in the bluest regions of the blue states. As his title implies, "They March for Themselves".

It's a very good piece, but there's a passage in it that caused me to do a doubletake:

I protested the Persian Gulf War back in 1991 when I attended the University of Oregon in Eugene. Every night I hit the streets with the rest of the university town's motley radicals. We carried "No Blood for Oil" signs. We flashed the peace sign (which I didn't then know also means "Victory") at the police who were -- I must say -- remarkably tolerant of our antics.

Maybe it's because I'm several years older and grew up in the '70s, when the afterburn of the 1960s was still remarkably present, but heck, I'm pretty sure that I knew the original meaning of the peace symbol before I was 10 years old.

Earlier today, I linked to a piece by Stefan Beck, who wrote, "I've always said that when universities hire left-wing profs exclusively, they hurt their avowedly liberal students most".

He may be more right than he knows.

Over at his MSNBC Blog, Glenn Reynolds writes:

The story's starting to take off, but some people still think that media folks are stonewalling to protect one of their own -- even though they'd be quick to jump on a similarly outragous statement by a public figure who didn't work for the media.
Will it be all over the news before the week is out? It's likely.

And if it's not, a lot of viewers will decide, again, that they can't trust the big media to tell them the whole story.

Stefan Beck of The New Criterion, who have been all over the Ward Churchill story, writes:

I've always said that when universities hire left-wing profs exclusively, they hurt their avowedly liberal students most. The right-wingers, we may safely assume, have been exposed to right-wing ideas, but the left-wing ones are receiving half an education, unless they go out of their way to supplement what they're taught. I tried not to complain about my professors' uniformly leftist bent--one way or another, I was getting both sides of the debate.

Nevertheless, if Ward Churchill had taught at my college, I'd certainly have complained. Why? Simple: a college education costs a lot. It's the one commodity that, despite being preposterously expensive, is subject to virtually no quality controls.

Update: Of course, if the whole collegiate gig falls apart for Churchill, there's always television to fall back on...

Barney Frank is talking. Howard Kurtz is not. (Needless to say, Jordan isn't either.)

John Hinderaker of Power Line writes, "This story is playing out in excruciatingly slow motion, but the ending has already been written: Eason Jordan is finished."

I'll believe it when I see it--and will the fellow who replaces him be any better? Incidentally, back in December, Roger Ailes told Brian Lamb that as bad as the main CNN cable channel can be, CNNi, their international feed, which Jordan helped to launch, is much worse--almost Al Jazeera worse. Of course, that's also good for business:

Well, the best way to get distribution around the world is to be the BBC or Al Jazeera or CNNi, basically do -- if you watch it day in and day out, you can't find a whole lot good about America. Now, they have no obligation to do good stories about America, but they do have an obligation to have balance and context. And Al Jazeera simply doesn't. BBC doesn't. And CNNi is less offensive, but they don't do it much, either. And I think that context is critically important to the news.

When I profiled Hugh Hewitt for Tech Central Station last month, Nick Schulz, who is TCS's editor, asked me to expand upon a concept that Hugh discusses in Blog: The Long Tail.

As I explain at the start of the piece, it was a term first coined by Chris Anderson of Wired magazine last year. As Anderson wrote, it's an example of how the Internet is impacting virtually all aspects of our culture--especially pop culture. And the Blogosphere is no exception.

This piece went through a few rewrites before Nick and I were both happy with it, and if I do say so myself, it's well worth your time to read.

I say! I think there's some sort of professional athletic competition taking place today!

Actually, I haven't been NFL-blogging as much this season as in years past, I guess because the election and its aftermath dominated my blogging up until the end of November.

But this is an amusing story from AP: Chuck Bednarik, who was the last real two-way player in football (I know Deion Sanders and other modern defensive players have played a little on the offense, but Bednarik played both sides of the ball for 60 minutes) and was on the Eagles' 1960 championship. He doesn't want the Eagles to win today. He wants his team from 45 years ago to remain the Eagles' last championship. Apparently, it's largely because he's miffed that today's plays make millions, and that Eagles' owner Jeffrey Lurrie didn't buy $1,500 worth of Bednarik's biography to distribute to the players.

I had no idea Concrete Charlie was such a sore winner.

Why yes, knowing that there are now more armed pilots than air marshals actually does make me feel more comfortable when flying. Hopefully at least one member of either group will be on my next flight--and yours.

(And hopefully this story will get wide play in the Middle East.)

Update: Glenn Reynolds and his readers say that it's more of a good news/bad news situation.

Check out EasonGate, the blog.

As Scott Johnson of Power Line writes, I hope we won't need it for long.

Rony Abovitz of the Davos Blog writes:

"Before Eason is stoned, are we sure that we are all without sin? Right wing bloggers: are you holding our leaders to the same standard of accountability that we are now holding Eason Jordan (see George W. Bush, reasons for invading Iraq)?

No one is about to "stone" Eason Jordan --he is catching hell for slandering the good men and women in uniform. That's all. You can't blast heroes as killers and walk off the field to a cocktail parties in Davos and pretend nothing happened. This isn't an ideological debate about whether it was wise to invade Iraq and whether 25 million Iraqis are better off today than they were two years ago, though they most certainly are. It is about whether a senior American news executive can slander the people who are fighting --and dying or being wounded-- and do so without consequence. Don't try and raise the issue to one of "blogosphere ethics." It isn't that at all. It is about what Eason Jordan said and the refusal --thus far-- of MSM to call him on it. It is solely about MSM ethics, or lack thereof.

Mark Steyn asks if you'd trust the U.N. with $64 billion of your own cash:

If I had $64 billion of my own money, I'd look after it carefully. But give someone $64 billion of other people's money to "process" and it would be surprising if some of it didn't get peeled off en route. Especially if that $64 billion gives you access to a unique supply of specially low-priced oil you can re-sell at market prices. Hire Third World bureaucrats to supervise the "processing" and you can kiss even more of it goodbye. Grant Saddam Hussein the right of approval over the bank that will run the scheme, and it's clear to all that nit-picky book-keeping will not be an overburdensome problem.

In other words, the system didn't fail. This is the transnational system, working as it usually works, just a little more so. One of the reasons I'm in favour of small government is because big government tends to be remote government, and remote government is unaccountable, and, as a wannabe world government, the UN is the remotest and most unaccountable of all. If the sentimental utopian blather ever came true and we wound up with one "world government", from an accounting department point of view, the model will be Nigeria rather than New Hampshire.

It's been a while since we've linked to PoliPundit, and they've got lots of new posts up. Stop by--and tell 'em we sent you!

(Or don't. Honest, it's OK with us, either way. No really!)

John Hawkins looks at Janeane Garofalo, her Nazi salute on cable TV, along with the far, far left in general and their cognitive dissonance.

James Panero of The New Criterion writes:

Churchill is an issue, Kirkland is an issue, but the real issue is the normativeness (can I use that word here?) of deadening rhetoric on college campuses. Why is it that it takes a public outcry and national media coverage to challenge tenured ideas? The process of academic review and administrative oversight should be analyzed more than anything. Not until colleges and universities begin to question their assumed role as political re-educators (rather than educators) will we begin to see the end of the Ward Churchills, the Kirkland Projects, and the spectacles that substitute for real learning. There will always be radicals and ideologues out there, but it doesn't mean that shrill thinkers deserve tenure-track jobs. I should think that freedom of speech still translates into a freedom from employing troglodytes.

Victor Davis Hanson lambasts the world's elites and their actions and slogans of the past three and half years.

Glenn Reynolds says that President Bush has an unlikely backer in reforming and privatizing Social Security: Franklin Delano Roosevelt!

Is Robert Byrd thinking of running again?

Patrick Ruffini looks at his odds and says that another Daschle-style upset is possible.

Will Collier of Vodkapundit has some thoughts about a couple of articles on the impending (practically a fait accompli) reign of Howard Dean as DNC chairman.

Update: This just in: Karl Rove denies any involvement, but says, "Dean's probably the best candidate and he may do a good job if he can overcome his name recognition"...

He was a solid character actor who appeared in numerous films and TV episodes, but he achieved screen immortality as Animal House's Dean Wormer.

Miles Davis' adoption of jazz/rock fusion in the late 1960s was his most controversial period. He helped invent the genre, but to this day, music critics are still divided as to whether or not the style benefitted him.

I have a review of Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue, over at the Weekly Standard's Website. It's a new DVD that looks back at this period, which culminated in Miles and his sidemen going from intimate supper clubs to playing for 500,000 hippies at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival in England.

For an earlier look at Miles' adventures in fusion, click here.

Glenn Reynolds has an update on the Colorado professor that's well worth reading. Start here and keep clicking for our previous coverage.

Yesterday was the centennial of Ayn Rand's birth. Via Steve Green of Vodkapundit, Cathy Young of Reason (which itself was inspired by Rand's writings) has a well-written and balanced appreciation of the Mother of Objectivism. It makes a nice double-feature with this more humorous and ironic but also well-measured recent piece by Andrew Stuttaford.

As Anne Applebaum once wrote about a completely different subject, "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".

This is one of those moments: replying to the cute but harmless idea of wearing purple ink on one's fingers to show solidarity with brave Iraqi voters, Air America's Janeane Garofalo issues a little symbolism of her own: the Nazi "Zieg Heil" one-armed salute.

Peter Robinson wrote yesterday that:

The Left is no longer in the position of mocking George W. Bush alone. To go on insisting that Iraq represents a debacle, they must mock human courage itself.

Update: Ironically, given Ms. Garofalo's profession, the quote of the day on the Internet Movie Database homepage is:

Neutrality does not exist in the face of murder. Doing nothing to stop it is, in fact, choosing. It is not being neutral.

Just for fun, I popped 1941's Citizen Kane into the DVD player tonight. During the "News On The March" segment at beginning, a journalist asks Kane (in a scene in the mid-1930s), "How did you find business conditions in Europe?"

"With great difficulty!" Kane guffaws.

Hasn't changed much, apparently.

Interesting timing of two stories back to back in the Washington Times:

Fortunately, no new cases of food poisoning have been reported...

In his Weekly Standard column, Hugh Hewitt writes:

William Voegeli has a piece in the Wall Street Journal called "The Endless Party", where he asks, "What do Democrats stand for? The real question is, what do they stand against?"

He makes several excellent points, but this passage is particularly telling:

I tacked a couple of updates to my post on Eason Jordan of CNN from yesterday. Click here to read them.

Jonah Goldberg begins his latest piece by writing:

The year is 2456. The human colonies on Mars have been invaded by giant, laser-visioned tree sloths bent on crushing humanity and forcing the survivors to work as slaves in the massive dung mines of the planet Slothnor. In a last-ditch effort to save our species from extinction, the brave humans launch a counterattack on the Sloths' home world. Le New York Times (headquartered in Paris since 2018) blares in a bold holo-headline "Disturbing Echoes of Vietnam Conjured by Earth Aggression."

O.K., I'm kidding. It would probably take a few weeks before the Times actually invoked Vietnam. Perhaps they'd wait until we got bogged down in the actual marshes of Slothnor to start bleating about "quagmire." Who knows?

(OK, OK, I'm almost done with the action figure riffs--honest.)

Betsy Newmark links to this Washington Times article, which begins:

Skeptics of President Bush's attempt to bring democracy to Iraq have been largely silent since Iraqis enthusiastically turned out for Sunday's elections.

Billionaire Bush-basher George Soros and left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore were among critics of the administration's Iraq policy who had no comment after millions of Iraqis went to the polls in their nation's first free elections in decades.

The Carter Center determined that the security situation in Iraq was going to be too dangerous to send election monitors, so the Atlanta-based human rights organization founded by former President Jimmy Carter posted its personnel in neighboring Jordan.

Or preferably the Bahamas.

Will Collier of VodkaPundit writes:

Remember the brain surgeon who tried to recover the deposit on the van used to bomb the World Trade Center back in 1992? His name was Mohammad Salameh, and for over a dozen years, he's held the title as the dumbest Islamic terrorist on record. Few observers believed that Salameh's breathtaking stupidity could ever be topped.

But little did we know that even dumber jihadis were out there. Ladies and gents, I give you... the G.I. Joe kidnappers.

"John Adam," supposedly an American soldier threatened with beheading, turns out to be a G.I. Joe knockoff. No, really. It's a doll. They captured a doll, and then posted a "ransom" picture so lame it wouldn't get so much as a chuckle on Fark.

Hey, you backwards-ass Islamofascist idiots--we're Americans. We have better special effects than that in our local TV commercials. In Mississippi. The only people dense enough to fall for that picture are Reuters reporters, and that's a Rather low standard for credibility, isn't it?

I wouldn't want to be in your piss-stained trousers when Scott Ott sees this one.

Update: I wouldn't want to be in your trousers when Will's partner in Stoli sees it, either.

We've been following Ward Churchill since late last week. He's the university professor who referred to the Americans killed in the 9/11 terrorist attack as 3000 "little Eichmanns". Today, Charles Johnson writes:

Hamilton College has canceled the panel discussion with Colorado University professor Ward Churchill—not because his monstrously inverted opinions deserve to be shunned, but because of alleged “threats of violence.”

Last week marked the death of Johnny Carson and the DVD release of the spectacular--and almost entirely computer generated--Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. I have some thoughts on how these two events, separated by a mere two days, represent Hollywood's past and future in my latest Electronic House newsletter.

In more serious news from the Middle East, Eason Jordan, the chief news executive of CNN has made a truly outrageous claim:

he knew of 12 journalists who had not only been killed by U.S. troops in Iraq, but they had in fact been targeted. He repeated the assertion a few times, which seemed to win favor in parts of the audience (the anti-US crowd) and cause great strain on others.

Update: Hugh Hewitt writes:

The other story here is whether big media will cover this incendiary charge by a major American media figure, or just let it pass as an embarassment they will not call attention to because of pofessional courtesy.

Update: Charles Johnson notes that this isn't the first time that a representative of CNN has said that US soldiers are targeting reporters.

Update: Welcome Hugh Hewitt readers. For our review of Hugh's new book Blog, click here.

Update (2/2/05): On Wednesday afternoon, I got the same letter that InstaPundit--and apparently everybody on Hugh Hewitt's list of bloggers discussing the story--received from CNN. I'm in agreement with the Professor's response:

Pardon me if I don't fully trust Jordan in light of his past behavior. And it sounds like there's more than just context involved. I'll believe it when I see the video, or a transcript.

Oh, and as Power Line notes, Captain Ed (still no relation) is loaded for bear on this story. Just keep scrolling.

When Matt Drudge first linked to this story, I thought the photo looked a little like a Hasbro GI Joe doll (sorry kids--action figure! Those distinctions were vitally important to us when we were nine or ten years old!)

At first I thought, nahh--it's just a blurry photo. But Drudge now has updated photos on his home page that appear that it is indeed a blurry photo--of a GI Joe doll action figure. And Power Line notes that other important posable plastic icons have gone missing as well...

Update: Jonah Goldberg explores the Connery option as a possible retaliation...

Update: James Taranto writes:

Based on the photos the Drudge Report has uncovered, we'd say this looks like the work of the archterrorist Muhammad al-Sluggo.

The captured toy story could be pretty significant. The terrorists need, more than anything else, to be seen as awesome, terrible figures. If they stop inspiring fear, they are finished. So the one thing they cannot stand is ridicule. I would think that by tomorrow, their pathetic effort to pass a doll off as a captured American soldier will have made them laughingstocks throughout the Arab world.

This doesn't mean, of course, they they won't carry off future atrocities, maybe spectacular ones. But, coming on the heels of Iraq's triumphant election, widespread perception of the terrorists as ineffectual figures of fun could well be another nail in their coffin.

By the way, have they carried off any successful attacks since Sunday's election? Not that I'm aware of.

Howard Dean wants to have an argument with the GOP. No he doesn't! Yes he does! No he doesn't!

(Via Galley Slaves.)