Ed Morrissey writes that the New Republic is praising President Bush's efforts in the Middle East:

In fact, as [TNR'S Martin Peretz] concludes, the greatest irony about George Bush and the Middle East is that history may show that one of the most conservative administrations in ages (Peretz' opinion) managed to be the first to actually spread liberalism throughout a region most liberals thought to be hopeless.

Wouldn't be the first time, actually.

"Former national security adviser Sandy Berger will plead guilty to taking classified material from the National Archives", AP reports, adding, "The charge of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material is a misdemeanor that carries a maximum sentence of a year in prison and up to a $100,000 fine."

I love this bit:

Many Democrats, including former President Clinton, suggested politics were behind disclosure of the probe only days before the release of the Sept. 11 commission report, which Republicans feared would be a blow to President Bush's re-election campaign.

I guess for AP, it doesn't matter that a former national security advisor was caught with classified documents in his trousers (And possibly other things...), what matters was the motive behind investigating him.

"Pope John Paul II was given the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church late Thursday night as his health deteriorated, a Vatican source has told CNN."

Terri Schiavo, dead at age 41.

The Corner has a tip for how to decipher some of the pronouncements by the media.

Mark Steyn places the last week and a half into sharp perspective in England's Spectator. (Use Bugmenot.com if asked for a password.)

Update: Jim Geraghty has some thoughts (and lots of links) on how ugly and circus-like the last couple of weeks have been:

The Elian mess was bad. But somehow, this all seems much nastier. Marked by more out-and-out hate.

Maybe it’s me.

No, that seems like a fair assessment.

Via Steve Green, Rich Karlgaard explains what makes Silicon Valley politics tick.

For one primer as to how it got that way, check out this Tom Wolfe essay on Robert Noyce, the founder of Intel, who's mentioned at the beginning of Karlgaard's piece. And this mid-'90s classic by Virginia Postrel on how the weather shapes the Silicon Valley mindset--one that's very different, from, say, Boston--is also well worth reading.

Oh, and what the heck, using Postrel's Future and its Enemies model, here's my piece from Tech Central Station on the difference between Silicon Valley Dynamists and Hollywood Stasists.

Orrin Judd has had several recent posts that have highlighted the darkest aspect of what the Terri Schiavo drama could portend: that Germany's obsession with euthanasia, and eventually wholesale assembly line-style slaughter in the 1930s and 1940s, actually pre-dated the rise of the Nazis, just as anti-Semitism was present long before as well. The Nazis simply stoked both ideas and then perfected the dark technology to carry them out.

This is actually consistent with much current historical thinking about pre-WWII Germany. In the past, most historians viewed the Nazis as a strange alien virus that subverted the will of the peaceful and enlightened Germans, as Orrin himself wrote a few years ago:

When it comes to popular history on the Nazi era, a subject about which very little deviation from the norm is tolerated, the one book that you'll most often see cited is William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. A perfectly acceptable relic of its time, this book treats Hitler and the Nazi Party as complete aberrations, imposed on a slumbering Germany by a freakish set of circumstances. This view, understandable in a liberal West which finds it necessary to aver "it couldn't happen here" and which found it necessary to rehabilitate Germany into a worthy Cold War ally, has prevailed for the better part of sixty years now.

Current thinking seems to be quite different: as Ian Kershaw described in his two-volume biography of Hitler (full disclosure: I haven't read Vol. 1 yet), Hitler was accepted quite enthusiastically by the bulk of the German people, at least until the invasion of Russia went south.

Scientists in particular led the way for much of Germany's culture of death, as Mark P. Mostert noted in the fall 2002 Journal of Special Education:

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Tim Blair notes that the world--and Boston--is doomed in the next few years.

Meanwhile, even before that happens, Palestinian scholar Ziad Silwadi has given the US only two more years before the kaboom--the earth-shattering kaboom "a great sin will cause a huge flood in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans".

Which means that life won't imitate art--it will imitate a really, really cheesy Kevin Costner film.

The horror. The horror.

(That was Coppola, dude!--Ed Hey, it's hard enough to end these things.)

I think this is a video produced by 1970s Euro-disco musicians called The Tommy Seebach Band.

I do know that it's the very definition of suck-tacular.

You were warned...

(Thankfully, Zladko was right around the corner to revolutionize not just videos, but pop music itself.)

In the Wall Street Journal, Bridget Johnson has an essay titled "Red Dusk", in which she writes that it's time Hollywood gave up its love affair with communism:

What feature films have showed the true nature of communism? There was "The Killing Fields," showing families torn apart, cities emptied, forced labor, bones littering the Cambodian landscape. Adding to the authenticity was its star, Oscar-winner and real-life survivor Haing S. Ngor, who would have been summarily executed had his intellectual background been discovered by the Khmer Rouge. As a cinematic achievement, it ranks as one of the best films of all time. As a historical testament, it shows that communism had nothing to do with betterment of the masses but stripped away everything that comprised the individual. Though this film should be required high-school viewing, not much else springs to mind that could counter the effects of pro-Marxist cinema.

I'll bet the big studio execs have never thought--or cared--to do a big-screen adaptation of "The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression," by Stephane Courtois, et al. The book's 1997 publishing in France touched off a firestorm of controversy--mostly from offended French commies--and it stands as an astonishing comprehensive account of what this political ideology has wreaked on mankind in less than a century. The film version of this 800-plus-page account would be excruciatingly long and painful--too long for a 32-ounce soda and too nauseating for popcorn. So since Hollywood is all about franchises now anyway, the book could be adapted into several movies, each covering a corner of the globe and that region's own unique suffering under communism.

How about a film on the Soviet Union, beginning with Lenin and the 1917 revolution, droning on to Stalin's purges with hundreds of thousands executed by firing squad, and millions forced from their homes or carted off to labor camps? We'd see Soviet bloc countries strangled under communist rule, Berlin divided with concrete and snipers, Nicolae Ceausescu destroying historic Bucharest. We'd see Soviet terror exported with the scorched-earth policy in Afghanistan.

Red China would make a stellar film that lacks a happy ending--for now. Viewers would see Mao Tse-tung turn the colorful Chinese culture into a gray, bleak "worker's paradise" steeped in hunger and executions. We'd see the Great Leap Forward to devastating famine, murder and destruction in Tibet, women forced to abort their children, and the blood of student demonstrators spilled on Tiananmen Square. Complete the Asian film series with the "re-education" by terror in North Vietnam, the Maoist insurgency in Nepal that has killed thousands, and the hellish nightmare that is North Korea.

Some brilliant young director would have to tackle Africa's woes under communism, such as the starvation in Ethiopia under Mengistu Haile Mariam. And we can't forget the Latin American films, highlighting Peru's Maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) terrorists. And, of course, add a stark motion picture on the fall of Cuba--to be directed by anyone but Oliver Stone--that, though bloody and tragic, can end on a slightly lighter note (and an ovation) with Fidel Castro's fall down the stairs last October.

It's worth noting that Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley wrote an article with an almost identical theme for Reason five years ago.

My take? It will never happen--at least not in my lifetime. TV's gotten a little closer: HBO's Stalin (starring a heavily made-up Robert Duvall in the title role) showed us the evils of the man, and their production of Robert Harris's Fatherland was a thinly-disguised parable on the moral implications of our period of detente with the Soviet Union--even if its filmmakers didn't know it. The British production of Harris's Enigma tacetly highlighted the Katyn forest massacre (where the Soviets shot and buried over 4000 Polish service personnel at the start of World War II), but there's just no way that Hollywood will ever do a big-budget theatrical film that focuses squarely on the evils of the Soviet Union.

One reason why, as Billingsley's article details, is that Hollywood has its own alternate view of history to protect: that the 1950s blacklist of admitted communist screenwriters like Dalton Trumbo was the single greatest evil ever perpetrated by mankind. And their deep-seated view that former Warner contract player Ronald Reagan was, as Clark Clifford famously described him, "an amiable dunce"--even as he looked for ways to win the Cold War in the years before he became president.

For Hollywood to portray communism as evil would be to look deeply into its own soul--and question much of its last 60 years. As I said, it won't happen.

Although I'd love to be proven wrong.

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

Update: Betsy was nice enough to link to my piece, along with an addendum in which she offers some ideas for Hollywood:

The more I think about it, the more it seems like Hollywood is missing out on some great possibilities. And they wouldn't have to all be downer stories. What about a romance taking place against the backdrop of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rest of the Iron Curtain? How about a movie about some of the brave Soviet writers who risked everything to publish their samizdat literature? Or life in Romania leading to the fall of Ceausescu? Some actress who wanted a great Oscar-wortby role should commission a movie based on the life of the great poet, Anna Akhmatova. What a great movie of courage and suffering her life would make.

Once Hollywood finishes cranking out a spate of films about our brave boys in Iraq that match all of their great World War II films, they'll get right on those, I'm sure.

Johnnie Cochran died yesterday of a brain tumor. Jim Geraghty has a good recap of what his 15 minutes of fame meant to America:

Here's news that shocks me — Johnnie Cochran dead at 67.

Hard to believe the O.J. Simpson trial was a decade ago. It feels more like ancient history. Was all of American news obsessed with one salacious celebrity murder trial for an entire year? Did race relations really get torn asunder over one abusive ex-jock? In retrospect, what the heck had gotten into us?

Actually, in light of other recent media obsessions - the Michael Jackson trial, the Scott Peterson murder case, and even the Schiavo controversy... we can conclude that the U.S. media, in particular the cable news networks, love covering court cases. Even though the only visual is usually the suspect walking in and out of the courthouse, it works, as Michael Jackson has found a way to turn even that routine into an unpredictable spectacle, weirder than a David Lynch movie.

The thing is, covering salacious trials are cheap, easy, and full of what many news producers think is "human interest" i.e. — the same tearjerking schlock they added to the Olympics a few years ago. Real news - like a bunch of guys overseas plotting to kill us, or the spread of democracy in the Middle East - is hard, expensive, and complicated to cover.

Sorry, I've got Don Henley's "Dirty Laundry" playing in my head...

I think that's exactly right--and one of the reasons why the long drawn-out set-piece type stories like the Terri Schiavo case and its wall-to-wall 24/7 coverage by cable feel to many like the calm before the storm of another 9/11 or Oklahoma Federal Building bombing.

Howard Kurtz notes that college faculties tilt remarkably to the left.

(Also just in: sun sets in west, rises in east!)

In other collegiate news, Betsy Newmark writes that Princeton (home of Peter Singer and Cornel West) has seen quite a drop in donations this year.

She also notes that at Harvard, home to the man who sent West packing to Princeton, and who's now under-fire from its remaining professors for daring to say the bloody obvious, a poll finds that student satisfaction ranks near the bottom of a group of 31 elite private schools.

Strange days for academia. Of course, this still ranks as the strangest indeed.

Ward Churchill spoke in San Francisco on Friday; his most ardent supporters wore chicken hats on their heads.

Say what? Just click, and it will all be come clear. Nuts, but clear.

When Douglas Kern created the chickendove meme for Tech Central Station last month, I never thought it would catch on so quickly. I also like this comment on Charles Johnson's blog:

Looking at this, I remember a comment from Uncle duke in Doonesbury years ago when Bush I was in office. "I stopped taking drugs years ago. Who can tell the difference?"

And how!

Update: Not sure if it's included in this videotape--it may have been commercially released before Churchill spoke last week. Maybe the next the volume.

This past August, I linked to a story about an Esquire author who was struggling valiantly to shrug-off the deeply engrained case of Bush Derangement Syndrome that permeated much of the New York publishing and magazine world--and only got worse as the election neared. Back then, I wrote:

Magazines like GQ , Vanity Fair and Esquire, published out of New York (you know, one of the two cities where 9/11 happened), are built around an assumed sense of New York Times-style elite liberalism that's a very different mindset than that of most of its readers in "flyover country". Maybe someday they--or their advertisers--will figure this out. (Or at least figure out that at least half their readership doesn't think of John Kerry as a "political badass".)

In the Weekly Standard, Noemie Emery writes that Vanity Fair's advanced case of BDS finally caught up with the magazine last fall:

ON MARCH 6, THE Drudge Report noted the fact that newsstand sales for the magazine Vanity Fair had plummeted by 22.5 percent during the last half of 2004, attributed by the editor to three successive covers that showed pictures of . . . men. What Drudge did not cite is the parallel fact that this slide tracks exactly with the mutation of the magazine from a great escape read of the guilty-pleasure variety, the place to go for fatuous film stars, Princess Diana, and society murders, into a Bush-bashing rag of the fiercest variety, one that at times last year seemed almost possessed.

In the July issue (out early in June), readers looking for their quick fix of high life and low morals were startled instead to read a hatchet job on Bush's female appointees and relations, a glowing account of Iraqi insurgents ("mothers, teachers, and seasoned warriors"), and a big wet kiss bestowed on former counterterror-chief-turned-Bush critic Richard Clarke. Subsequent issues featured an attack on Don Rumsfeld (by a media critic!), an even larger wet kiss bestowed on Joe Wilson (the publicity-hound spouse of outed spy Valerie Plame), attacks on the role of the church in the culture, claims that Bush's indifference had caused 9/11, claims that Bush's agriculture department had poisoned small children, an unreadable rant about the horrors to come should Bush be reelected, and a hilariously indignant and one-sided account of the Florida recount that only Al Gore could take seriously.

By September, in order to get at the good stuff--like the tale of an heiress who dropped dead in a health club--one had to wade through no less than four Bush-bashing pieces, including the editor's letter, two different pieces decrying the neocon chickenhawks, and one very long story depicting the president as a dark reading of HenryV--a born-again wastrel and drunkard who led his country to eventual ruin via an ill-advised war. Every month, the magazine found new ways to kvetch about the president. Bush dodged the draft! Bush was mean to John McCain in the 2000 primaries! Bush stole the election in Florida, and--watch out for those touch-screens!--is planning to steal it again. No one can really know what causes a rise or fall in magazine sales, and it is always possible that large numbers of readers were so repelled by the sight of Jude Law (cover boy on one of the poor-selling issues) that they fled screaming. But it also seems likely that not a few readers took a quick look at the table of contents, and dropped the thing back in its rack.

The new Vanity Fair is a story the old one might have wanted to cover, as it points up an interesting trend: The really fierce strains of anti-Bush feeling come less from established political sources than from what might be called the "glitz-based community"--people connected to Hollywood, fashion, or celebrity media, who produce diversions and lifestyle advice. At the shallower end of the pool of arts and intellect, they tend to produce the facile and transient; they make TV shows, or write them; make clothes, or write about them; try to become, or failing that tend to the needs of, celebrities.

I used to read GQ, Esquire, and to a lesser extent, Vanity Fair fairly religiously in the 1980s. I'd start reading them again, if I thought their coverage would be a bit more balanced. In the past, Manhattan's magazines (and newspapers) were cognizant of having a fairly diverse audience, including their flyover country readers, and didn't try to obviously preach to them.

Of course, in the past, liberalism didn't tilt as far left as it does today, either.

Edward Feser explains how to mix religion and politics, and reminds us that the two are not matter and anti-matter:

It will not do either to try to justify the liberal double standard concerning religion by regurgitating tired and tiresome clichés about religion's tendency to lead to wars, persecution, Inquisitions, Crusades, Galileo's house arrest, etc. For one thing, most of those who appeal to such clichés know very little about the actual history of the Inquisition, the Crusades, or the Galileo episode, and about how beholden the simpleminded popular image of these events is to Reformation and Enlightenment era polemics rather than to serious and objective historical inquiry. For another thing, the body count generated by such committed metaphysical naturalists and secularists as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and other acolytes of the Marxist counter-religion is far higher than anything even the most fanatical jihadist has been capable of.

Finally, it is no good either to suggest that since we live in a pluralistic society, religious believers ought to keep their convictions off the table where public policy is concerned. For this point cuts both ways. Traditional religious believers have far more in common with each other, after all -- at least on questions concerning abortion, euthanasia, sexual morality, and the like -- than they do with secularists, and they are more numerous then secularists, at least in the United States. So why, if we are going to play the "pluralism" card in the first place, shouldn't the secularists be the ones required to keep their deepest convictions to themselves and out of the public square? And if it is legitimate to mix secularism and politics, pluralism notwithstanding, how can it be any less legitimate to mix religion and politics?

This is not to deny that the fact of pluralism poses a serious political problem: it does, and I frankly confess that I have no idea how to solve it. But then, neither does the liberal, whose favored "solution," as I have argued elsewhere, basically amounts to the proposition that all views in a pluralistic society can be tolerated only so long as they submit themselves to the liberal's own idiosyncratic and highly contestable conception of justice. That this peculiar brand of liberal intolerance ought to be regarded as superior to the religious variety is a proposition the liberal seems strangely uninterested in trying to justify. Perhaps he bases it on faith.

Not a light, easy read, but well worth it.

He'd remember to fasten his seat belt:

Forty-nine people aboard a Taiwanese flight to Japan were injured Monday evening when the plane encountered sudden turbulence over the Pacific Ocean.

The incident occurred aboard Ever Air Flight 196 around 6:11 p.m., immediately after a flight attendant announced that the aircraft would soon begin its descent and the captain turned on the seat belt signs, the Mainichi Shimbun reported Tuesday.

The plane, bound for Japan's Narita Airport from Taipei, was flying at an altitude of almost 33,000 feet.

Some passengers who had not fastened their seat belts were thrown against the ceiling or the floor. Parts of the ceiling and walls were damaged, and baggage stored in overhead compartments was scattered on the floor.

About 20 minutes later, the aircraft, an Airbus A330-200 jet with 251 passengers and 16 crew members aboard, made an emergency landing at Narita Airport.

The 49 injured people, including nine crew members, were rushed to the hospital by ambulance.

Talk about flying the unfriendly skies!

The Mudville Gazette debunks the source of much of the hysteria from the left regarding Terri Schiavo.

And yes, I'm aware that there's been plenty of hysteria from the right as well. I've tried not to blog this topic into the ground, if only to not add more to the swirling vortex of noise. But I do think this is a good tangential point:

The Democrats' embrace of post-election denial was painfully obvious to everyone who saw it. Most observers turned away wincing, hoping to spare them some shred of dignity. Now in the Schiavo case the specter of the Boogeyman of Jesusland rises up again and folks from all over are eager to believe. The left again, of course, but they are eager to believe virtually anyone or anything that trots down the pike under the banner of notBush. But for others there's a different sort of catharsis involved. Having sided with the powers that be for so long they need redemption, they must do something - perform some act of contrition to show they aren't becoming that way. Kicking an imaginary Boogeyman from Jesusland seems like a fine tonic for those who still haven't completely come to accept that whether one is a progressive or an entrenched zealot or something in between has nothing to do with degree of religious faith, any more than one's degree of gullibility does.

Speculation about a 'fracturing coalition' of libertarians and conservatives then follows.

To blame the political abuse of the "religious right" for the prolonging of the drama surrounding Terri Schiavo is to ignore the fact that responses to the case are no doubt the most personal of feelings, coming from some deep well of the human soul where politics can't reach. Whether you're for or against sustaining Terri Schiavo's life is no predictor of your demographic; political, religious, geographic, or otherwise. For most the decision is tough. Perhaps more so for those who'd say "let her die". It's hard for fundamentally decent, caring people to reconcile their humanity with letting someone starve to death, so it helps to create a Christian boogeyman that they can oppose. Starvation is certainly preferable to what the Boogeyman from Jesusland has in store for her, after all.

Read the rest. And for some background about how we got to this point, click here and follow the links.

(Via Hugh Hewitt, who seemed surprisingly cool and moderate this afternoon--particularly when many of his callers weren't--at least for the 45 minutes or so I was able to listen in.)

Update: In a related post, Betsy Newmark writes:

It's strange how the media portrays this all as a GOP action and seems to ignore how the Democrats voted for this. In a way, it is the media that is striving to portray it along political lines. Maybe that is because they are most comfortable with looking at events through a political prism instead of any other way to look at an event.

Update: More here.

Power Line has good news about Iraq; a topic that Glenn Reynolds notes is apparently unfit to print in The New York Times.

It must be Jim Geraghty, who's posted lots of cool photos from his new home: Turkey. Just keep scrolling.

Joe Gandelman, the Blogosphere's Moderate Voice, links to this interesting post by Steven Donohue, an 18 year old college student, who laments the demise of popular culture by the baby boomer generation.

It's kind of ironic, because my father frequently lamented the demise of the popular culture of his day (the 30s through the 1960s) by the baby boomer generation as well.

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Interesting convergence of views from Mark Steyn and Andrew Stuttaford. First up, Mark Steyn on the difference between America, England and Europe on religion:

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Happy Easter!

(Oh, and the New York Times wishes you Happy Easter as well. Glad to see them following Peggy Noonan's advice.)

As I wrote the day after Janet Jackson's Super Bowl "Nipplegate" wardrobe malfunction:

Perhaps with Madonna's success in mind, MTV decided it needed to shock--really shock--people. Instead, ultimately, it merely anesthezied them. And once Madonna released her Sex book, shocking the masses was pretty much passe, anyhow.

Speaking of Madonna and passe, just click.

A yawn, an eye-roll, and a softly muttered "whatever" are sure to follow.

It's fascinating to read of the large minority of both Russian and German citizens who want to relieve their totalitarian past. It just seems bizarre to me that they'd want to go back.

But actually, it's not that bizarre, all things considered.

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This is the kind of cast I'd like to work with. They're sweet, you can yell at them, even bite their heads off, and they never utter a word of complaint!

Caption This! has lots of fun with, well, photo captions. Just keep scrolling.

(Found via Young Pundit.)

Michelle Malkin notes that big media watchdog Howard Kurtz is falling down on the job when it comes to smoking out the actual source of the recent claimed-to-be-Republican memo on Terri Schiavo. Why? Well, as Michelle writes:

All Kurtz has to do is ask ABC News and his colleagues at the Post whether their sources told them the memo was written or circulated by Republicans. Unfortunately, it appears that Kurtz (perhaps mindful of who signs his paycheck) didn't even bother to ask these basic questions.

She credits Power Line for predicting it would be thus.

(What's with the "thus"?--Ed I dunno, I thought it sounded kind of classy.)

Steve Conover of The Skeptical Optimist is looking for ideas for his leisurely drive down the California coast this spring.

It's an obvious one, but you could do far worse than a "trip to nowhere" and a surprisingly first class dinner or lunch on the Napa Valley Wine Train.

(Found via Villainous Company.)

Ed Morrissey writes that Dan Glickman, the new president of the MPAA, and probably someone who would consider himself part of the "reality-based community", has a problem with, well, reality:

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Ace of Spades goes deep, deep inside the VRWC to examine the "Top Ten Exposed 'Republican Talking Points'".

Earlier this week, Steve Green had some thoughts on GM's many problems. In an article titled, "GM: It's Worse Than You Thought" Forbes writes that it is indeed, worse than you thought. Columnist Jerry Flint (that rare man who looks good wearing an ascot) says that the situation reminds him of the early days of World War II, when the BBC would seem to be regularly announcing, "And now, news of fresh disaster":

Vice Chairman Bob Lutz was quoted in the March 24 edition of The Wall Street Journal as saying GM could "phase out" Pontiac or Buick if such "damaged brands" fail to improve. "I hope we don't have to do that," he was quoted as saying at a conference. Lutz has been in the industry too long to be suckered into this kind of quote. Whether he meant to or not, he has put the divisions in play. What critics don't understand is that the best thing GM has is its dealer force. You kill the dealers if you kill such well-entrenched nameplates as Pontiac and Buick, and you kill GM. It's that's simple.

As somebody whose father was a partner for decades in a large suburban Chevrolet dealership, this is bad news for GM indeed.

For the past few years, CNN has had a track record of dissing blogs on their Website, even as those same blogs were fact checking CNN within an inch of its life (see: Jordan, Eason).

They've since moved on to dismissing them on the air as well, as Patrick Ruffini writes:

I have to say, I find most cable news segments on blogs to be just incredibly dumb.

By far the worst offender is CNN's Inside Politics, and its' "Inside the Blogs" segment. How do they report on the fun, exciting, technologically-savvy world of blogging? By having two on-air reporters read printouts from selected blogs to each other. Bloggers' opinions are treated as a world onto themselves. No critical comment is ever made. The worst part is that it's disturbingly similar to way viewer e-mail is presented on air: uncritically, as just another voice in a loud cacophony, and oh! -- aren't we special for airing our viewers' e-mail and blogs?

If you think segments like this are a good thing, ask yourselves this: would David Brooks and Paul Krugman be treated like this? When their writings are put on air, it's to make news, it's to challenge politicians on a statement they just made. Bloggers should strive for the same level of credibility and influence. It's all too easy for MSM to think of the blogosphere as the yapping chihuahua, as a world onto itself with its own internal validity, but with little or no impact on the real world of commentary and opinion.

In contrast, Patrick notes:

MSNBC's Connected Coast to Coast at least gets it somewhat right, by putting bloggers on air, encouraging real cross-pollination and news-making from blogs to cable news.

That's a start at least.

This is terrific. As is its predecessor, which is even funnier.

Man-oh-man, am I glad I didn't go to this San Jose restaurant for dinner tonight.

(As Mark Steyn noted last fall, strange things happen when it comes to Wendy's and chili. I think it must be the Bermuda Triangle of fast food entrees.)

In God's Coach, his 1990 tell-all history of the Tom Landry-era Dallas Cowboys, Skip Bayless wrote that Randy White, the Cowboys' Hall of Fame defensive lineman, started bulking up on steroids in the mid to late 1970s. He quotes White as saying he started using them after lining up against the Pittsburgh Steelers' hulking offensive linemen. "Man", White said, "I'd look across the line at those Steelers with their sleeves rolled up on those huge arms, and well, I had to do something. I figured they were using steroids too."

Former Buffalo Bills linebacker Jim Haslett, who's now head coach of the New Orleans Saints said yesterday that it was actually the Steelers of the 1970s that introduced the rage for 'roids into the NFL:

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Radly Balko writes, "In an effort to get 'get tough' on drunken driving, lawmakers are not only needlessly carving into our civil liberties, they're actually making our highways and roads more dangerous than they were before":

"Americans are more aware than ever before of the dangers of drinking and driving," [a press release issued last week by the National Transportation Safety Board] begins. "Few realize, however, that drunk driving fatalities continue to rise -- and that thousands of them are caused by extreme or repeat offenders known as "hard core drinking drivers."

The study goes on to point out that these "hard core" offenders account for 40% of traffic accidents but account for just 33% of drunk driving arrests.

It's actually worse than that. If we look at "fatalities" instead of "accidents," drivers with a BAC above .10 account for 77% of the alcohol-related body count. And the average BAC in fatal accidents involving alcohol is .17. Put another way, motorists with very high blood-alcohol levels account for an increasing percentage of highway fatalities, but a decreasing percentage of arrests.

Clearly, we're allocating limited law enforcement resources toward the wrong pool of offenders.

Yet the first bullet point in the NTSB's "Recommended Model Program" for dealing with hard core drunken drivers is "frequent and statewide sobriety checkpoints" -- the very policy that in all likelihood is responsible for the uptick in traffic fatalities to begin with.

And as these policies continue to erode highway safety and spike fatality statistics, lawmakers will inevitably use those very statistics as justification for not only continuing and extending the same bad policies, but for passing even more laws aimed at stripping drunk driving defendants of criminal protections, and at restricting the sale, marketing, and consumption of alcohol.

No wonder there's an increasing backlash at MADD.

The Supreme Court has rejected the Terri Schiavo case.

It's apparently down to Florida's Gov. Jeb Bush, but his options are rapidly dwindling as well.

Update: Ed Morrissey has updated information in a post succinctly titled, "All Over But The Dying".

Jami Bernard suggests, "This time, miss 'Congeniality'".

Last fall, we linked to numerous examples of voter fraud and intimidation coming from the left side of the aisle. It looks like some of the chickens are slowly coming home to roost.

Ed Morrissey links to an ABC News report that says that "Five East St. Louis Democrats were charged in a scheme to buy votes in November's election in a federal indictment unsealed Wednesday."

Morrissey adds:

It sounds like their co-conspirators cut a deal in order to reduced their jail time, which means they're looking to find bigger fish to fry. The seven committee members fit that bill, but it wouldn't surprise me if the investigation doesn't stop there. Stay tuned.

There was so much weirdness happening last fall, that I would have been surprised if there weren't at least some repercussions from it.

Is the media trying to cook the books once again? Power Line (not surprisingly) is on the case.

Update: More here at PoliPundit.

Another Update: Speaking of which, Lori Byrd says she loves the above title. Nice to get something out of all those years of listening to Frank Zappa...

Meanwhile, Will Franklin has an extensive amount of links within a long, detailed post about this latest memo controversy.

One More Update: Welcome Michelle Malkin readers. Michelle asks, "Did the MSM learn nothing RatherGate?" Power Line succinctly responds: "yes". Which is why Glenn Reynolds writes that, "ABC joins the list of networks that have broadcast bogus memos".

Jeff Brokaw writes, "These are scary times for college-bound kids with actual working brains, and for their parents. I.e., those who are not looking to get brain-washed by aging liberal hippies":

You shouldn’t have to pretend to be an America-hating radical lefty, just to avoid pissing off your professors. Nor should you, as a normal student or as an esteemed University president, have to pretend that women are identical to men in every way, just to avoid pissing off touchy feminists and their sisters-in-arms.

The fact that some kids feel they must do exactly that is a big problem all by itself, without even addressing the actual damage done to our kids by these people.

On the flipside, Stefan Beck of The New Criterion says that exposure to such hardened leftists is actually a plus for incoming conservative college kids:

As I've written before on this blog, the predominance of these blue-state academics on campus is a problem--but hardly for conservatives. It is a problem for liberal students. These poor specimens must often retreat like turtles from debate, because they know nothing of conservative positions--except from their professors' testimonials, which rely on dilution or caricature. Meanwhile, conservatives are given every opportunity to "know the enemy," and they can test and strengthen their own opinions in the process. They ought to be thanking their instructors for providing a daily object-lesson in enemy S.O.P.

Of course, there are always those kids in the middle: I was fairly apolitical when I arrived at college--in today's times, where public school is politicized seemingly from kindergarten on, I wonder how many of today's kids arrive at universities that way.

There's little in this UPI article that will be of news to our long-time readers. But it definitely confirms a number of trends we've been discussing over the past three years:

"There is a democratization of media going on before our eyes," said Scott Anthony, co-author of "Seeing What's Next" (Harvard Business School Press, 2005), and a partner in Innosight LLC in Watertown, Mass. "A small number of people used to determine what was, or was not, newsworthy. Now, it is an online collective that says this is interesting, or not interesting, news."

Anthony said this is an example of "disruptive innovation" in the media business, which has a parallel to the rise of the personal computer back in the late 1970s.

"Disruptive innovation uses relatively cheap, relatively simple technologies to give people what they want," Anthony told The Web. "Look at the early days of the computer industry. Back then, Digital Equipment Corp. looked at the (personal computer) and saw no reason why anyone would want one in their home -- but people were delighted with product."

Anthony predicted that 20 years from now, there will be an entirely new industry based on blogs. [I thought 2014 was the target date--Ed] Just a few years ago, he noted, when eBay was launched, it was selling novelty items, such as Pez candy dispensers. Today, it is a major retail force that even sells automobiles.

"The established media companies are going to have to deal with the blogs," Anthony said. "This pattern of starting simply and expanding will have profound effects. Thirty years ago, Digital Equipment had delighted customers, and sound management principles, like listening to their customers, but the wave of change caused by the PC overwhelmed them."

Kind of ironic: this latest wave of change will overwhelm the PC.

(Since it was found in a post that Steve Green titled, "Linky Love", it's only fair to credit him for the link.)

Had a fun telephone interview with Hugh Hewitt earlier today on the subject of blogs and small to medium-sized business for an upcoming article (details to come). As I told him, when I first read Blog, I was quite surprised at what a business-oriented book he had written.

Expect many, many small businesses to incorporate weblogs into their marketing strategy--if only to get themselves into their clients' consciousness more frequently (to generate additional sales and referrals), while saving a fortune on postage.

Mark Steyn wonders, "What's the point of utopia if it's only for a generation?"

Downfall, the new German-produced film about the last days of Hitler, is playing this week at The Village cinema, and Nina and I saw it earlier tonight.

DANGER! SPOILERS AHEAD!! DON'T READ IF YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT WORLD WAR II AND/OR YOU'RE PLANNING TO SEE THE MOVIE!!! AHH-OOOGA!! AHH-OOOGA!!!

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Eric Felten of the Wall Street Journal looks at Bobby Short:

For those who never had the chance to see Bobby Short in person, he will probably be best remembered for his cameo performance in "Hannah and Her Sisters." Woody Allen's character drags his coke-snorting date to the Café Carlyle. And there is Bobby Short, the urbane antidote to nihilism, singing Cole Porter's "I'm in Love Again."

I was lucky enough to hear Bobby Short twice. The first time was a decade ago, and frankly, the evening was nearly a disaster. I hadn't made a reservation--Mr. Short was at the Café Carlyle every night for months on end, after all, and I was taking my date to the late show at that. How crowded could it be? Crazy crowded.

The discreet application of cash to the maitre d's palm assured a table. We sidled into a dim banquette and, cocktails in hand, settled in for what I expected would be a low-key performance. Wrong again. Backed with bass and drums, Mr. Short launched into a song. His arms flew up from the keys and into the sort of triumphant gesture gymnasts make when they stick a landing. His voice was a raspy clarion, hoarse from a lifetime of belting it out. The abandon in his voice was also on his face: Mr. Short's sheer exuberance was as blinding as a stadium's worth of klieg lights.

Ever since then, I had wanted to hear Mr. Short again, and got the chance last November. My friend, saxophonist Loren Schoenberg, has led the little big band that backed Mr. Short for the last several years. He was as much a fan as a fellow musician: "My parents took me to hear Bobby when I was 13," Mr. Schoenberg says. He invited me to come up to New York to see Mr. Short from a different vantage point, by sitting in with the band. At 80 years old, Mr. Short was every bit as electrifying as he had been when I first saw him. Entering the packed room to an ovation, Mr. Short didn't coast for a second--he sold every song. I remembered Mr. Short's grin from seeing him 10 years before; what I noticed this time, sitting in the band, was the way he put that same smile on the faces in the audience.

When I saw Bobby Short in 2001, he must have been 75 or 76 years old. He looked almost desperate for the audience's approval--and rejoiced once he realized he'd earned it with that night's performance. This from a man who had been playing at the Carlyle--and for presidents--for nearly 40 years.

Schoenberg, Short's band leader, suggests it was because his boss became famous relatively late in life. Whatever reason, it was supremely infectious.

After reading the story below and its immediate predecessor, with its sympathetic look at North Korea, this is somewhat welcome news.

To be honest though, just as when their east coast namesake changed editors, I'm not expecting miracles.

Update: Welcome Columbia Journalism Review Daily readers.

The L.A. Times, which earlier this month had nothing but kind words to say about communist North Korea, looks at a financially struggling rest home for aging communists--in downtown Los Angeles!

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Betsy Newmark writes:

Gee, the French have discovered that they can't rescind the laws of economics. There law mandating a 35-hour work week didn't spur employment and just ended up hurting lower income people who needed that extra income. Funnily enough, employers didn't leap to pay the same salaries for 35 hours that they had paid for 39 hours. People found, quelle horreur! that they were earning less. And employers didn't run out and hire more people to pull up the slack, especially with all the state-mandated benefits that any employee must receive.

Who knows--maybe they'll be able to leave the seventies soon.

Ryan Sager and John Fund have some thoughts on how Campaign Finance Reform was sold to the American public and Congress. Sager writes:

There are dozens of stories -- literally dozens -- to be done on this scam. It is massive in terms of its scope -- especially in terms of who is implicated.

Let’s just say it is next to impossible that straight-talker John McCain didn’t know exactly what was going on.

Will anyone call him on it?

Will The New York Times touch this story with a ten-foot poll?

They have a responsibility to.

Of course. And they'll give it exactly as the same kind of prominence as they have the UN's Oil For Food scandal.

Update: Meanwhile, Ed Morrissey has a few thoughts about the other half of the McCain-Feingold duo.

Jim Geraghty (now blogging in Turkey far, far, far from the madding crowd) is praising Jonathan Klein of CNN, the man who gave the Blogosphere its pajamas.

In between playing and working this weekend, I tried to keep up with the Terri Schiavo case, mostly via Fox News on my hotel's cable TV and the Blogosphere. I think that this piece by Herb Meyer in The American Thinker has the right take: in many ways, the Schiavo case is the second coming of Elian Gonzales:

In each case, the victim is under the legal control of a man who is no longer living with the victim, who in fact has run off with another woman and fathered her children, and who no longer plays an active role in the victim’s life. In Terri’s case, this is her husband. In Elian’s case, it’s his father. Moreover, in each case there are people willing and able to care for the victim – Terri’s parents; Elian’s relatives in Miami. Yet in each case, the man with legal control insists that the victim be harmed – Terri killed, Elian shipped back to Castro’s Cuba.

Numerous pundits made the case in late 2000 and early 2001 that by shipping Elian back to Cuba, Bill Clinton paved the way for Al Gore's narrow defeat in Florida, which puts double pressure--at least symbolically--on Republicans on this issue.

Update: James Taranto asks, "What kind of husband is Michael Schiavo?":

Why do those of us who aren't right-to-life absolutists side with Mrs. Schiavo's parents, who want to keep her alive, over her husband, who wants her dead? It's a fair question, and it raises another one: What kind of husband is Michael Schiavo?

According to news reports, Mr. Schiavo lives with a woman named Jodi Centonze, and they have two children together. Surely any court would consider this prima facie evidence of adultery. And this is no mere fling; a sympathetic 2003 profile in the Orlando Sentinel described Centonze as Mr. Schiavo's "fiancée." Mr. Schiavo, in other words, has virtually remarried. Short of outright bigamy, his relationship with Centonze is as thoroughgoing a violation of his marriage vows as it is possible to imagine.

The point here is not to castigate Mr. Schiavo for behaving badly. It would require a heroic degree of self-sacrifice for a man to forgo love and sex in order to remain faithful to an incapacitated wife, and it would be unreasonable to hold an ordinary man to a heroic standard.

But it is equally unreasonable to let