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 Mr. Schiavo have it both ways. If he wishes to assert his marital authority to do his wife in, the least society can expect in return is that he refrain from making a mockery of his marital obligations.

Taranto concludes, "The grimmest irony in this tragic case is that those who want Terri Schiavo dead are resting their argument on the fiction that her marriage is still alive."

Another Update: James Lileks also views Terri Schiavo's case as being similar to Elian's. Meanwhile, I don't know how well Michael Schiavo's ultra-overheated rhetoric in this article from today's St. Petersburg Times is playing to the public, but it's not winning me over to his side of the issue. Neither is this.

One More Update: OK, maybe it's not Elian Gonzales Part II. This InstaPundit post includes a letter from a reader who suggests that maybe it's the return of the Chandra Levy case.

And the calm before another 9/11-sized storm.

A friend in New York emailed me the news this morning; the great cabaret singer was eighty years old and died of leukemia. I had the privilege of seeing him at the Carlyle hotel on Manhattan's East 76th Street around 2001--he looked terrific, and even signed an autograph for me after the show, which I gave to my parents.

It's a cliché to write, "he'll be missed" when someone famous dies; and outside of his (or his music's) occasional appearances in a Woody Allen film, Short may have been too regional a phenomenon to translate nationally. But anybody who saw him perform live will certainly miss him, as this Bloomberg article notes:

His sophisticated cabaret act with interpretations of songs by composers like Rodgers and Hart, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington and Cole Porter made him a New York fixture and a member of the city's society circle.

``Bobby was fun, campy, and his air of elegance had to do with how he dressed, talked and his selection of music,'' Jack Sameth, who was executive producer at public television's New York- based WNET, said in a telephone interview. ``He was Eastside elegance and equaled Noel Coward's sense of playfulness.''

* * *

Time Magazine wrote that ``in an increasingly inelegant world, Bobby Short is the very symbol of elegance, style and an easier way of life.''

Newsweek magazine wrote: ``Like the songs he sings and plays, Bobby Short is a collector's item. And the people who collected him are legion, from the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Eugene McCarthy to Norman Mailer and Leontyne Price.''

Short's recordings included ``Songs of New York: Live at the Cafe Carlyle,'' ``Bobby Short Loves Cole Porter,'' ``How's Your Romance?,'' ``Jump for You,'' ``Nobody Else But Me,'' ``Piano'' and ``Speaking of Love/Sing Me a Swing Song.''

He was nominated for a Grammy in 2000 for ``You're the Top: Love Songs of Cole Porter,'' and in 1993, he was nominated for ``Late Night at the Cafe Carlyle.''

Short performed at the White House during the Nixon, Carter, Reagan and Clinton administrations. He also played with the Boston and New York Pops and with orchestras in major U.S. cities.

Short was named a ``living landmark'' by New York's Landmark Conservancy and a ``national living legend'' by the Library of Congress in 2000 as part of its bicentennial celebration.

He played himself in the films ``For Love Or Money'' with Michael J. Fox, and in Woody Allen's ``Hannah And Her Sisters.''

Just got back from a few days in Southern California. Watch for regular blogging to resume on Monday.

Oil may soon be pumping from America's Vast Pestilential Wasteland.

Ironically, expect much gnashing of teeth to shortly ensue, from the "No Blood For Oil!!!" crowd.

Hugh Hewitt says that Claudia Rosett should receive a Pulitzer Prize.

There's nobody more deserving--which, of course, places her odds somewhere over the moon.

Expect the Blogosphere to be a bit quieter than usual. Three quarters of its members will be here.

(Hopefully the finished film will live up to the trailer, which looks pretty darn amazing.)

Gee, here's a shocker: AP reports that a Minnesota man with a license plate that reads "TIPSY" faces DUI charges after being pulled over leaving a sports bar.

Via Joe Gandelman, who says the fellow "was not exactly a brain surgeon". No kidding!

(Speaking of feeling tipsy, sorry for the lack of posts today: I spent most of the afternoon at the dentist's office having major work done--and under enough gas and pain killers to knock out an elephant. I did have some great flashbacks as I was passing out of 2001: A Space Odysssey and The Empire Strikes Back, however...)

Thomas Hazlett, writing in the Weekly Standard, is praising Dan Rather--for helping sink the FCC's Fairness Doctrine in 1987:

Today, talk radio, cable TV networks, and Internet websites all benefit from the First Amendment's protection of electronic media. No single regulatory action advanced that constitutional shield further than the deregulation of broadcast content in August 1987.

Conservatives have been rejoicing over Rather's departure. A
glance at their own ranks, however, reveals a number of prominent organizations--the Eagle Forum, Accuracy in Media, and the National Rifle Association--that supported the Fairness Doctrine and petitioned the government to extend it. These conservatives got perfectly wrong what Rather got exactly right. Americans ought to clink their glasses one extra time, without irony, for an anchor who helped new networks take sail.

Wonder if Rather would do it again, now knowing what it helped to create?

When it comes to the media's conspiracy theories, everything can be blamed on Karl Rove. In an amusing assembly of clips, John Hawkins looks at merely the tip of the iceberg.

(Iceberg?! Did Karl sink the Titanic?--Ed I doubt it. What about the Lusitania? I dunno. Let's ask Cronkite!)

Libertas is an often interesting Weblog devoted to a conservative take on film criticism. (If only they'd do something about the white type on a black background--not easy on the eyes, and causes college-era flashbacks to viewing microfilms in the library!) But its proprietor, Jason Apuzzo, veers wildly off course when he writes:

People are obviously free to like or dislike [George Lucas’] films, as they please. But it strains credulity when conservative pundits - who, so far as I know, have never picked-up a camera, focused a lens, mixed a soundtrack, or coached an actor - proclaim that, actually, they know better about the public’s taste, and what makes for good popular entertainment.

This is the chickenhawk argument (which was already specious when it was used in an attempt to shut down the voices of pro-war proponents prior to the election in November) tarted up to apply to film criticism.

As Jonah Goldberg reminds us, he has picked up cameras and focused lenses--and produced documentaries for PBS. I'd venture that lots of conservative/libertarian pundits and critics have some sort of media background, and that's only going to increase as the cost of video equipment continues to drop. James Lileks has worked behind the camera as a newscaster, in addition to creating and editing his own videos. Glenn Reynolds has produced music, and his wife is a documentarian filmmaker.

But it doesn't make Apuzzo's argument any less specious if they hadn't. (Me? I copped a certificate in filmmaking many years ago from NYU, and was mixing audio this past weekend.) The role of the critic isn't to make movies (though lots have--Peter Bogdanovich started off life as a critic before becoming a director, and conversely, Roger Ebert wrote exploitation films for Russ Meyer before becoming the inspiration for Jay Sherman), it's to be a voice for his readers. If Goldberg, Lileks or Jonathan Last likes a film, chances are I will too, because I trust their judgment. I could care less what their background in media production is--because when I watch a movie, I'm not watching it to see which lens the DP chose--I'm watching it to be entertained.

Similarly, there are plenty of music critics who wouldn't know a Les Paul from a Slingerland snare drum if you put one in their hands, but that doesn't make their criticism any less valid--they're responding emotionally to a finished recording or a concert. And if it's somebody whose judgment as a listener I trust, I don't care what his background--or lack thereof--in music is.

Jeff Jarvis responds to Newsweek's knee jerk call for "greater blogger diversity":

When I was raised in this country, we were taught that it was a goal of our culture -- melting-pot nirvana -- to get to the point where race and gender didn't matter. Well, we've finally created a medium where that's possible. But now we're trying to make race and gender matter again. How crazy is that? That is, to paraphrase my West Virginia father [you see, I'm hillbilly, actually], bassackwards.

* * *

It's the voice that matters. It's the person that matters. It's the message that matters. Not the race or the gender.

I don't want to reduce these amazing people I'm meeting in this medium to a simplistic, one-dimensional definition.

Exactly.

Advantage Ed! Back in August, I wrote:

Kerry's massively invented narrative ("swashbuckling Swift Boat lieutenant"--as Steyn describes him--turned brave defender of soldiers' rights) was built to survive the glancing scrutiny (if you can call it that) of a 1972-era media that consisted of three TV networks with half hour evening news shows, and a few liberal big city newspapers, all of which were staffed with journalists more or less largely sympathetic to Kerry's leftist anti-American beliefs.

But between the Swift Boat Vets and the Blogosphere, there are far too many people examining Kerry's story, and his "reporting for duty" edifice has crumbled.

Is that fair? We'll, we're deciding if we want the man to have the key to the most powerful arsenal ever assembled. If he can't survive the scrutiny of the Blogosphere, who James Lileks recently described as an "obsessive sort with lots of time on their hands", is he someone who should be trusted with this power?

The 1972-style media seems to think so.

In an interview in the current issue of the American Enterprise magazine, John O'Neill says:

TAE: Were you surprised when Senator Kerry focused so much on his Vietnam record at the Democratic Convention in late July? How do you account for this when he clearly knew you were out there?

O’NEILL: I think he thought that he had good control over the mainline media, that they were sympathetic, that they would kill the story. And I think he was very confident that was the case with the New York Times and the three major networks and CNN, and that he could intimidate the portions of the media not already friendly to him. And so he thought the story would never come out. That had been his experience over and over again in Massachusetts.

TAE: Everything changed in early August, after your first ad.

O’NEILL: All of a sudden, Kerry and the media were faced with an ad that was actually showing. There was a time when they controlled the entire world of communications. That day is over.

We don't always call 'em right, but we're happy to see it confirmed when we do.

(Via PoliPundit and Michelle Malkin.)

Last November, a day or two after the election, we noted that President Bush wasn't handled with the same kid gloves by the media as his opponent:

The press threw everything they had at him. It seemed to begin in early February, when the gay marriage issue--egged on by the press with the hopes of discrediting a conservative president and even his wife--took center stage thanks to the Massachusetts Supreme Court. From there it was off to the races, including trumped up charges over Bush's 9/11-themed ads, the Abu Ghraib POW scandal; the partisan 9/11 hearing; and on and on.

* * *

By the time Halloween rolled around, it felt like daily October surprises: NYTrogate last Monday (and Tuesday, and Wednesday and...); Al Jazeera pulling Osama out of a hat on Friday, 60 Minutes' oldie-but-a-goodie body armor story on Sunday, and I think the Times had some sort of other anti-Bush story on Monday.

How bad did the mainstream media cover the year's events? As Charles Johnson writes, "It must have been really bad, if even the Columbia School of Journalism is forced to admit it". Reuters notes:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. media coverage of last year’s election was three times more likely to be negative toward President Bush than Democratic challenger John Kerry, according to a study released Monday.

The annual report by a press watchdog that is affiliated with Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism said that 36 percent of stories about Bush were negative compared to 12 percent about Kerry, a Massachusetts senator.

Only 20 percent were positive toward Bush compared to 30 percent of stories about Kerry that were positive, according to the report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

No wonder this event is already sold out.

Update: Somewhat related thoughts, here.

Another Update: Ed Morrissey adds:

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On Sunday, Saddam Hussein had WMD capabilities again.

It's not yet 5:00 PM on the east coast, so there's still time to Grey Lady to change her mind on the subject a few more times.

I visited The Village on Friday, and stopped by the neighborhood Borders, where I picked up the latest Guitar World. Its cover story was an interview with Jimmy Page on the making of Led Zeppelin's 1975 opus, Physical Graffiti, and I'm an easy mark when it comes to all things Zeppelin.

On the back cover is an advertisement containing a truly horrific photo of a guitarist named Kerry King of the heavy metal group Slayer. Photographed wearing a sleeveless black t-shirt, it's painfully visible that King has tattoos over his entire body, including his neck and otherwise bald skull. It looks (at least to me--who is someone who does not pretend to understand the Tattoo-American demographic) like the equivalent of Michael Jackson's self-mutilation, except that rather than employ plastic surgeons to do the job, King has had a gallon or ten of ink pumped under his skin.

Since so many heavy metal guitarists now contain bodies (and heads!) full of tattoos, I guess it's only fair that a new study finds that "Tattoo Ink May Contain Heavy Metals".

One nice byproduct of both the increasingly politicized Academy Awards show and the recent death of the always politicized Arthur Miller:

Mark Steyn gets to stick his shiv into both sacred cows.

I knocked out a quick review of the new DVD of Night Court's first season for Blogcritics.

Frank Martin writes that Michael Jackson has fallen victim to Howard Hughes' Curse: he believes himself to be a God-like entity, and has removed anyone who tells him otherwise from his inner circle:

Michael Jackson has done what Howard Hughes did, he surrounded himself with people who live to do one thing “Keep Michael Happy”, and when he started doing it, his fate was sealed, and it could only end badly and he has started his slide into hell and there is no going back to normality, He is now one of the living dead, and there is no redemption. We will watch his train wreck of a life and gawk at the horror that his life has become. There is no comeback, there is no second chance for the former 'King of pop'.

Sadly, that's probably true.

And it's too bad--like Hughes, Jackson was an immensely talented young man who enters middle age a parody of his former self. (And then some in Jackson's case, considering his wretched self-created--actually self-mutilated--physical appearance.)

Right Reason is a new group Weblog (with some contributors whose names you may recognize) devoted to the phillosphies that make up modern conservatism. Stop by today!

Ed Morrissey skewers this Newsweek article calling for greater diversity in the Blogosphere. Morrissey writes:

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David Wallace-Wells of Slate links to us, along with other bloggers who approved of the Spanish fatwa against bin Laden:

"Now We're Talking!" cheers self-described "classical liberal" and freelance journalist Ed Driscoll, who hopes that Spanish Muslims will inspire others to follow suit. "It's kind of ironic that they've just shown more backbone against bin Laden and al Qaida than Spain's voters as a whole last year," he adds.

Thanks for the link!

Man, linked to by the Kansas City Chiefs, and now Slate. We really get around these days.

Someone needs to tell Malloch Brown, the UN chief of staff, that rape is not "a recreational option" for the boys in the baby blue helmets:

In our case, our very underfunded peacekeeping missions, with soldiers stitched together from Bangladesh, Jordan, many other different countries, all under their own different commands and without the resources to give them the other recreational options, that the standards of behavior have not been modernized in the same way that has happened with the American or the British military, and we've now got to tackle that. (emphasis added)

As Betsy Newmark writes, "Ye Gods, repeat after me. 'Rape is not a recreational option.' It is a crime. Got that?"

It sounds like something Bart Simpson will be writing a 100 times on a blackboard when he hits puberty. Maybe the UN's chief of staff should, as well.

Meanwhile, Lance Frizzell, a Tennessee National Guard medical platoon leader currently stationed in Iraq has photographs of numerous good reasons to keep UN "peacekeepers" out of there:

I would hope we never allow UN "troops" around these innocents. It is tragic that our tax dollars fund the despicable, savage behavior chronicled here, here and here. Perhaps the saddest part is that this is the norm for UN "soldiers" wherever they go.

Indeed, as the man who first linked to Frizzell would say.

Update: More here.

Matt Labash of The Weekly Standard vists our neighbor to the north and dubs it "The Great White Waste of Time".

Fortunately, his column isn't.

(And yes, that's a Monty Python reference that only dogs can hear in this post's title.)

Update: Speaking of Canada, this new policy doesn't bode well.

My wife (who's a business attorney) has some thoughts on the recent decision involving Apple and bloggers: she feels most of the Blogosphere has the wrong take on the issue.

Deroy Murdock writes that three and a half years after 9/11, there's little or nothing happening on the site of World Trade Center.

Meanwhile a year after the Madrid train bombing, Spain's media is--surprise!--tossing its country's equivalent of 9/11 down the memory hole, just as the American MSM has done.

Update: Bill Roggio has some thoughts about how far we've come since 9/11 and Madrid.

The U.N. (yes that U.N.) is advertising on Right Wing News.

Strange days, indeed.

This is pretty cool! The Kansas City Chiefs' official Website runs a piece quoting from the 2002 article I wrote about Weblogs for SpinTech and Catholic Exchange:

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At least as far as Sweden's Ikea is concerned.

Ed Morrissey calls it PC madness doubling in on itself--and he's right.

Glenn Garvin of the Miami Herald writes that Dan Rather is Criswell (registration or Bugmenot required):

The panel couldn't find a single expert who believed in the validity of the documents on which Rather's story was based. Rather nonetheless declared victory: ''Although they had four months and millions of dollars, they could not demonstrate that the documents were not authentic,'' he bragged during an appearance on Late Show with David Letterman last month. The New York Times' motto is all the news that's fit to print; Rather was suggesting that that CBS prefers the more flexible all the news that is not proven false beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Rather's sad, shabby defense reminded me of The Amazing Criswell, a popular psychic of the 1950s whose predictions included Fidel Castro would be assassinated in 1970, New Mexico would be given back to the Indians in 1976, and the Atlantic Ocean would swallow most of Florida by 1979. Most infamously, he appeared at the end of a god-awful science-fiction flick about an alien takeover of the Earth called Plan 9 From Outer Space and demanded of the audience: ''Can you prove that it didn't happen?'' The final chapter of Dan Rather's anchor career was to turn his network into the Criswell Broadcasting System.

Hugh Hewitt writes that he's actually Ted Baxter:

Rather emerges in [Ken Auletta's New Yorker piece]–really—as Ted Baxter. The loutishness of everyone at CBS, but especially of the old, old guard assembled to take a whack at Dan as he went out the door is triply revealing –of Dan’s “stature” within the network; of his colleagues’ near uniform pettiness and self-absorption; and of the almost epic irrelevance of the entire television “news” process to public opinion.

Summary: Old men sniping at an old man, all of whom grew old as their once new medium became the definition of old media. Grumpy old men at that, and best kept away from reporters by their children.

(We've made the Dan as Ted Baxter analogy a few times as well, incidentally.)

But just as New Shimmer is both a floorwax and a dessert topping, why can't Dan be both Ted and the Amazing Criswell?

Actually, Slate (of all places) probably had the best Rather analogy: "Dan Rather: The anchor as madman".

California Yankee notes that Muslim clerics in Spain have issued a fatwa against Osama Bin Laden for last year's Madrid train bombing.

He makes a great point:

This is a very clever tactic. Short of bringing bin Laden to justice I can't think of a better way to honor those massacred at his bidding. American Muslims would have made a lot of points in the U.S., and helped the War Against Terrorism, had they done something like this after 9-11.

Indeed. Hopefully Spain's Muslims will inspire others to join them. And it's kind of ironic that they've just shown more backbone against bin Laden and al Qaida than Spain's voters as a whole last year.

I hadn't heard this Don Hewitt story about Rather before, but it's a classic:

After President John Kennedy was shot in Dallas in November of 1963, news organizations scrambled to get any kind of visual record of the event. Eventually, they found a man named Abraham Zapruder who had captured the event on film. A frantic betting for the film ensued between CBS and Life magazine. Before that, though, Dan Rather agreed to a suggestion from 60 Minutes executive producer Don Hewitt on an unusual way to acquire Zapruder's film:

"Dan Rather, new to CBS and our correspondent on the scene, phoned me from Dallas and told me that a guy named Zapruder was supposed to have film of the assassination and was going to put it up for sale. In fact, he eventually did, sold it to Life magazine for a reputed $600,000. In my desire to get a hold of what was probably the most dramatic piece of news footage ever shot, I told Rather to go to Zapruder's house, sock him in the jaw, take his film to our affiliate in Dallas, copy it onto videotape, and let the CBS lawyers decide whether it could be sold or whether it was in the public domain. And then take the film back to Zapruder's house and give it back to him. That way, the only thing they could get him for was assault because he would have returned Zapruder's property. Rather said, 'Great idea. I'll do it.' I hadn't hung up the phone maybe ten seconds when it hit me: What in the hell did you just do? Are you out of your mind? So I called Rather back. Luckily, he was still there, and I said to him, 'For Christ's sake, don't do what I just told you to. I think this day has gotten to me and thank God I caught you before you left.' Knowing Dan to be as competitive as I am, I had the feeling that he wished he'd left before the second phone call."

--Don Hewitt in his 2001 book, Tell Me a Story.

I had no idea Dan was such a swashbuckling guy!

Darren Copeland writes that Ward Churchill isn't the only person on the University of Colorado campus who has a problem with the truth.

Writing in the The Australian Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal says that while "the cliche is that journalism is the first draft of history", journalists have failed miserably at connecting the dots over the last 30 years or so:

Remember Japan Inc? If you were a semi-sentient consumer of news in the 1980s, it was hard to avoid the impression that Japan would soon overtake the US in global economic clout, if its corporations didn't just purchase the country outright. Chalmers Johnson, Clyde Prestowitz and other soi-disant experts pronounced sagely on the invincible Japanese model of industrial organisation, while the media supplied a diet of stories about how companies such as Sony or Honda remained world-beaters, year in and year out.

Now consider the amazing media about-face in recent weeks on Iraq. Before January 30, dateline Baghdad was dateline Gotterdammerung. Now it's dateline Democracy. Bombs are still exploding, but we aren't reading much any more about how we're losing hearts and minds or how Iraq is ethnically too fractious to have a meaningful democracy. Instead, the media connects the dots between elections in Baghdad and events in Beirut, Cairo and Ramallah, and talks about 1989.

It's right that they should do so. But we should also connect the dots between today's Iraq and '80s Japan. The myth of Japan Inc took hold because there was so little Western reporting to suggest that not all was well with the Japanese economy. So, when Japan's real-estate bubble burst and the economy flatlined for more than a decade, the world was caught unawares. The myth of an Iraqi quagmire took hold for similar reasons – the media was so busy telling the story of everything that was going wrong in Iraq that it broadly missed what was going right.

The cliche is that journalism is the first draft of history. Yet a historian searching for clues about the origins of many of the great stories of recent decades – the collapse of the Soviet empire; the rise of Osama bin Laden; the declining US crime rate; the economic eclipse of Japan and Germany – would find most contemporary journalism useless. Perhaps a story here or there might, in retrospect, seem illuminating. But chances are it would have been nearly invisible at the time of publication.

The problem is not that journalists can't get their facts straight – they can and usually do. Neither is it that the facts are obscure; often, the most essential facts are also the most obvious ones. The problem is that journalists have a difficult time distinguishing significant facts – facts with consequences – from insignificant ones. That, in turn, comes from not thinking very hard about just which stories are most worth telling.

As Stephens notes, part of the problem is that so often, the people who get the narrative right before it happens have opinions or ideologies that clash with the conventional wisdom of the media's mindset:

It is, of course, impossible to anticipate events, in Harold Macmillan's sense of the word. But none of the examples listed here belong in that category. Norman Podhoretz predicted the peace process would lead to war. Charles Wolf saw the hollowness of Japan Inc. Daniel Patrick Moynihan predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union. And George W. Bush understood, and said, that a free Iraq would serve as a beacon of liberty for the oppressed Arab world.

Steven F. Hayward used Moynihan as a Cassandra figure in Volume I of The Age of Reagan. Moynihan was almost always right--and almost always ignored by his own party. Speaking of the Gipper, author Peter Schweizer makes a compelling case that he staked virtually his entire post-Hollywood career--and obviously, his entire post-gubernatorial career on one premise. As Reagan told former Nixon national security advisor Richard Allen in 1978:

My idea of American policy toward the Soviet Union is simple, and some would say simplistic", Reagan told him, leaning back in his chair. "It is this: We win and they lose."

Imagine any reporter agreeing with anything that Reagan said. Or Bush #43. And we wonder why they can't get the narrative straight.

Get ready to start buying new versions of all your favorite movies! I have an article on high definiton DVD in the current issue of Smart TV & Sound. The dead tree version is at your local Borders or Barnes & Noble, the text is online, here.

So as he flies the blue lady of the skies into the sunset, we say "aloha, 5 O'clock Charlie" and return to our duties. Let me remind you the Weblog is open 24 hours for your dining and dancing pleasure.

Ra^therGate's Kevin Craver is live-blogging Dan Rather's farewell. (I'm on the West Coast, where the show is tape delayed until 6:00 PM Pacific Time.) He's got an amusingly appropriate "Ratherism" in his pre-game festivities.

(Via PoliPundit.)

I finally updated the "dead tree" articles list to take it beyond 2001. There's a gap much longer than 18 minutes during most of 2002 (and I know I churned out lots of material that year) that I have to fill-in, but at least the whole thing is no longer four years out of date.

Update: It's not 100 percent complete, but most of 2002's missing 18 minutes have been filled in.

Stefan Beck of The New Criterion writes about The New York Press's editor Jeff Koyen, who quit after being given grief because he green-lighted a piece gleefully awaiting the Pope's death.

"Free expression", Beck writes, "is our right, but we respect it and nourish it best not simply by using it, but by using it to good ends". It's something that's frequently missing in journalism these days.

Today is Dan Rather's swan song as anchorman on the CBS Nightly News. For a round-up of stories past and present about him, just start clicking:

Here's my first post on Ra^therGate, which leads to several other blogger's initial posts.

"The Dan Rather File", the Media Research Center's exhaustive multimedia round-up of Dan's more outrageous moments.

Uncle Walter's take on Dan's leaving.

Philip Chalk of the Weekly Standard writes that Dan Rather's career is bookended by falsified stories.

Here's an interview with tabloid reporter Mike Walker on his new book, Rather Dumb.

Jim Geraghty writes, "Finally, Dan's Farwell".

"The Year of Blogging Dangerously", my Tech Central Station piece. Naturally, Ra^therGate plays a prominent role in it.

And of course, for the complete Ratherpalooza experience, scroll the archives!

I have to remember to program my TiVo in time to record Dan's last show. But I certainly hope that videoblogs like The Daily Recycler put up video of Dan's syanora. I'm sure the Media Research Center will, especially if Rather goes out like this...

Did another New York Times reporter cook the books about his role in a story?

Jonah Goldberg's slogans will be appearing on select Starbucks coffee cups near you.

As somebody who has at times viewed caffeine the way that Keith Richards views smack, I am jealous of this on so, so many levels. (Actually, I think Jonah was a great choice, and I'll look for his imprint next time I pickup a Caramel Macchiato.)

Update: When I read Jonah's post in The Corner, I joked with my wife via IM that, "I assume they'll have 20 liberal quotes to counterbalance him. But it's pretty cool that they got Jonah to be their token conservative".

After clicking around their Website, I think I was pretty close with the numbers, actually.

Tangentially Related Update: Speaking of having the deck stacked against you, this certainly qualifies.

One More Update: Heh.

Last we heard from Uncle Walter, he was blaming Karl Rove for defrosting Osama bin Laden out of cryogenic suspension in the London basement of the Ministry of Defense (where he was kept alongside Austin Powers, Evel Knievel and Vanilla Ice) just in time to influence election Tuesday. In a short AP piece this week, Cronkite thinks that Dan Rather should have stepped down "a long time ago":

But Cronkite did not heavily fault Rather for his role in last September's discredited story about President Bush's military service. Rather anchored the "60 Minutes Wednesday" story.

"We all know he made a mistake by now," Cronkite said. "But would we have done much the same? I would not be sure that I wouldn't have followed my producers and accepted what they had to offer."

And that's the whole problem with the concept of the evening news anchorman, as Burt Prelutsky notes:

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Ed Morrissey has more on John McCain, including his background as one of the Keating Five, and some thoughts on why the Cablevision kerfuffle is "eerily reminiscent" of it.

Captain Ed is none to happy with "Mr. Clean", Senator John McCain, and I can't say I blame him:

Here we have a man who has done more harm to the First Amendment as anyone in the past generation, all the while scolding us on coordination of electoral efforts, and he's playing a shell game with Cablevision in order to gin up indirect payments to his staff. Davis claims that McCain didn't solicit the donations, but Davis did; according to his own account, he sought out the donation from Cablevision after hearing that they might be interested in funding The Reform Institute. Coincidentally, McCain starts writing letters and making phone calls on behalf of Cablevision shortly after the first installment gets cashed by Davis and the Reform Institute. Under the BCRA, this kind of activity would easily qualify as coordination if they had pulled off this stunt during an election. It may still qualify as a conflict of interest under federal law, and possibly an illegal campaign contribution.

John McCain sold out to Charles Keating fourteen years ago in the S&L scandals, and rebranded himself as an outsider and a reformer, blaming the system rather than himself for his actions. It now appears that McCain isn't the Mr. Clean he's sold to Arizona voters.

Like Claude Rains in Casablanca, I'm shocked. Shocked!

Hollywood screenwriter and opinion columnist Burt Prelutsky has a few thoughts on saving the Academy Awards. Here's a sample:

What would I do with the Oscarcast if Mr. Cates wisely stepped aside and handed the reins over to me? For openers, I’d stop trying to ride two horses headed off in opposite directions. So long as serious, mature movies are going to be nominated, the MTV audience isn’t going to be tuning in. No, not even if Britney Spears and Paris Hilton emceed the event in tandem. So I’d forget about trying to woo a young audience with a hip young host. All that does is alienate the older folks who tune in for the glamour, and because they actually have a rooting interest in the competition. It’s simply a mix that doesn’t work.

Next, I would get over the idea that the host has to be a comic. Just because Bob Hope was funny, there’s no reason on earth that the ringmaster has to crack jokes. If Bing Crosby had emceed the event for 20 years, would every subsequent host have to be a crooner?

On top of everything else, the show, as the Academy is always reminding us, goes out around the world. In most countries, I dare say, the one-liners, even if they were amusing, wouldn’t be understood. All those millions of foreign viewers never heard of the Gap. And as for Banana Republic, that’s where a lot of them live, not where they shop.

Heh.

Al Gore is apparently sitting out 2008.

Somewhere, Howard Dean is sighing, "If I've lost Playgirl, I've lost middle America!" Michele Zipp, their editor-in-chief admits (gasp!) that she's a Republican:

How could a member of the media who produces adult entertainment for women possibly side with conservatives from the red states? Zipp spells it out. “Those on the right are presumed to be all about power and greed – two really sexy traits in the bedroom. They want it, they want it now, and they’ll do anything to get it. And I’m not talking about some pansy-assed victory, I’m talking about full on jackpot, satisfaction for all.”

“The Democrats of the Sixties were all about making love and not war while a war-loving Republican is a man who would fight, bleed, sacrifice, and die for his country. Could you imagine what that very same man would do for his wife in the bedroom?” asks Zipp.

All I can add is that, hey, it's not your mother's GOP anymore. But it will be fun to watch radical feminists tear Zipp and her magazine alive over this admission.

Update: What hath Zipp wrought!?

The New York Times looks at Axl Rose (former frontman of the long defunct heavy metal superstars Guns & Roses) and his long, long, long awaited solo album, Chinese Democracy. Which, based on the Times' description, will probably arrive in Beijing before Axl's album arrives in your local Tower Records:

Mr. Rose began work on the album in 1994, recording in fits and starts with an ever-changing roster of musicians, marching through at least three recording studios, four producers and a decade of music business turmoil. The singer, whose management said he could not be reached for comment for this article, went through turmoil of his own during that period, battling lawsuits and personal demons, retreating from the limelight only to be followed by gossip about his rumored interest in plastic surgery and "past-life regression" therapy.

Along the way, he has racked up more than $13 million in production costs, according to Geffen documents, ranking his unfinished masterpiece as probably the most expensive recording never released. As the production has dragged on, it has revealed one of the music industry's basic weaknesses: the more record companies rely on proven stars like Mr. Rose, the less it can control them.

In a music industry that's evaporating before our very eyes, it's amazing to see that this sort of 1970s-style excess still goes on.

Betsy Nemark links to a Denver Post story about Phil Mitchell, another professor under siege at Colorado University. His crime:

Mitchell taught at the Hallett Diversity Program for 24 straight semesters. That is, until he made the colossal error of actually presenting a (gasp!) diverse opinion, quoting respected conservative black intellectual Thomas Sowell in a discussion about affirmative action.

Sitting 5 feet from a pink triangle that read "Hate-Free Zone," the progressive head of the department berated Mitchell, calling him a racist.

"That would have come as a surprise to my black children," explains Mitchell, who has nine kids, as of last count, two of them adopted African-Americans.

Then, Mitchell had the audacity to use a book on liberal Protestantism in the late 19th century. So repulsed by the word "god" was one student, she complained, and the department chair fired him without a meeting, he said.

The paper notes that Mitchell was eventually reinstated, "but was never able to teach in the history department again".

There's a key quote by Mitchell that sums up a huge difference between liberals the left:

"People say liberals run the university. I wish they did," Mitchell says. "Most liberals understand the need for intellectual diversity. It's the radical left that kills you."

Exactly. And it's further proof that liberals of the FDR, JFK, LBJ variety were essentially purged from power--and from academia--by the class of '72.

Update: Somewhat related thoughts on liberals, leftists and intellectual diversity, here.

Vermouth-infused Update: Dead-on-target thoughts, from Stephen Green.

In Blog, Hugh Hewitt gives some advice to businesses which are attacked by a blogswarm for perceived shoddy services or products. They might also want to check out this piece in Forbes, called, "Top Corporate Hate Web Sites".

I'm surprised that one of these sites didn't make the cut, but then the source of their hate maybe too regional to be considered.

Just click, already.

(Via Steve Green.)

Philip Chalk says that Dan Rather's career is bookended by falsified stories.

"We're not being sexist here," my friend insisted. "It's not that looks matter per se. It's just that beautiful women are always on the cutting edge of social trends. Remember how many beautiful women were in the anti-war movement twenty years ago? [They definitely weren't there two years ago--Ed] In the yoga classes fifteen years ago? At the discos ten years ago? On Wall Street five years ago? Where the beautiful women are is where the country is headed."

This Reuters report doesn't seem all that surprising, actually:

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AP reports that Governor Schwarzenegger says he wants to ban junk food in California schools.

A year after his bill passes, this story will be its follow-up.

Particularly if you're Bill Clinton praising Iran's Mullahs for their progressive(!) politics.

(Doesn't the prior Democrat ex-president have a trademark on that schtick?)

Jim Geraghty looks at Tom Toles, the Washington Post's "fearless editorial cartoonist bad boy", and his latest, particularly hard-hitting drawing.

Meanwhile, via Power Line, John Leo interviews "Dr. No", the sneering, negative voice of the press, since, well, Hunter S. Thompson's heyday, I'd say.

No wonder a strategy of de-certification sounds so appealing.

I was browsing through eBay when I came across a line of ties called, staggeringly enough, Infectious Awareables, Inc.

I'm not sure this is at all a good concept, and here's why. Imagine you leave work late for a singles' bar, meet someone cute, get to talking, hit it off, and she says, "hey, what an interesting tie!"

How well will a phrase like this go over? "Oh that? That's my Gonorrhea tie! I couldn't decide if the Herpes or the West Nile tie went the best with this suit, so I figured I'd play it safe and go with the ol' Gonorrhea pattern and a Windsor knot. Whatdya think?!"

Stick with Ralph Lauren, kids. Trust me on this!

(I wish I had known of this line when Steve Green was doing his "50 Words and Phrases Not to Use on a First Date" list. This would surely qualify.)

Jeff Jarvis watched Bill Maher interview Ward Churchill (who's about 14:58 into his 15 minutes of infamy) so you don't have to.

One of the more amusing elements of the week before the presidential election in November was how many anti-Bush Stories of the Century the press seemed to try to crank out simultaneously, in a sort of legacy version of a blogswarm. Most blogswarms are unified around the same story and amplify it, whereas the press's various twitterings last November had the opposite effect of canceling all their disparate stories out.

(It doesn't help the press that their opponent in the White House knows that silence is, more than often, bliss--hence his Rope-A-Dope strategery.)

Does the press have an obligation to keep investigating what was obviously a red herring in the first place? Jonah Goldberg looks at "What ever happened to The Most Important Story on Earth".

Hugh Hewitt points to this comment on Roger L. Simon's Weblog to put the L.A. Times' pro-North Korean piece into perspective:

Imagine if the LAT had printed this story in the 70's....... "South Africa Without the Rancor" As I was travelling in Kenya I came across this South African buisnessman. He did not want to give out his name. We talked of the current strain in relations between South Africa and the rest of the world. "The press is always so negative. Every story is bad, bad, bad. Every country has human rights problems, is your country perfect? We are just like everyone else, we marry, we love, we fight, were charitable. You can't impose your western standards on everyone, we are differnt and we should be allowed our own expression of government. We come from a tribal society and we have needed strong leaders and the idea of democracy is foreign to us. Our blacks have their own autonomous states within the South African structure and they really don't want independence or equality. Our blacks thrive under our strong leadership and Botha is really no different then any tribal king. It is the constant agression of the west that is the cause of friction between us"

If this crap was printed at the time the LA Times would have been forced to fire it's entire news division.

Hugh has other examples of the Times' pro-North Korean biases on his blog.

Update: He's also heard back from the author of the Times piece in question, and fisks her response within an inch of its life.

My latest Electronic House newsletter looks at the recent release of the first season of Miami Vice on DVD.

Bottom line: dynamite sound and music, but the picture could have been tweaked a bit more. Still, if you loved the series, you know that its first season was its best--and is well worth owning on DVD.

Power Line has some thoughts about Dan Rather's appearance on David Letterman earlier tonight, and Steve Green links to video and a transcript. Scott Johnson of Power Line writes:

My translation of Rather's take on the [Thornburgh] report is: "People have got to know whether or not their [anchor] is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook."

Like I said, heh.

How should CBS proceed in their post-Ra^ther period? Former Rather copywriter Peggy Noonan has some solid advice, all of which, of course, will be ignored inside Black Rock.

Frank Martin of Varifrank explains how and why he started blogging. Your humble narrator makes a cameo appearance.

Hugh Hewitt asks, "Have the Democrats already lost the filibuster fight?"

Incidentally, on Thursday afternoon, I listened to Hugh as I was driving, and he was absolutely smoking on his radio show--and for good reason, as he caught the L.A. Times entering Walter Duranty-land in their attempt to suck up to North Korea.

Betting against your country should be a bad thing, but it's become routine for the left. Here are three items in the past two days that illustrate it in action.

First up, Larry Kudlow on the New York Times and the economy:

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During the spring and summer last year, after the Madrid train bombing, we linked to several articles warning of strange signs pointing to a possible terrorist attack on an American railroad--more than likely in Amtrak's heavily travelled Northeast Corridor, especially since both parties' political conventions were based in that region. (New York and Boston.)

Today, Charles Johnson links to a piece from Reuters titled, "Report: Madrid Train Bombers Also Targeted New York". Charles also notes that "Spain waited eight months to tell the FBI and CIA about it."

Thanks, fellows.

Stefan Beck writes that the New Criterion's readers have been emailing asking where their send-up of the late Hunter S. Thompson has been. He replies that they've had a couple of reasons to not immediately come out (as we did) to bury Dr. Gonzo. One is that his prose had long become a parody of its self. (Beck sites, as many of us did when blogging about Thompson, how much he enjoyed Hell's Angels. But that was written nearly forty years ago.) Beck adds:

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In honor of Dan Rather's last full week as anchorman at CBS, the Media Research Center have selected his most infamous moments to highlight. What's fascinating to me is how a man in his 60s, who's been a television reporter for most of his adult life can say answer two decades of partisanship with lines such as:

“I’m all news, all the time. Full power, tall tower. I want to break in when news breaks out. That’s my agenda. Now, respectfully, when you start talking about a liberal agenda and all the, quote, ‘liberal bias’ in the media, I quite frankly, and I say this respectfully but candidly to you, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
— To Denver radio host Mike Rosen, November 28, 1995.

“I’m in favor of strong defense, tight money, and clean water. I don’t know what that makes me. Whatever that makes me, that’s what I am.”
— On the July 19, 2001 Imus in the Morning radio program simulcast on MSNBC.

“The test is not the names people call you or accusations by political activists inside or outside your own organization. The test is what goes up on the screen and what comes out of the speaker. I think the public understands that those people are trying to create such a perception because they’re trying to force you to report the news the way they want you to report it. I am not going to do it. I will put up billboard space on 42nd Street. I will wear a sandwich board. I will do whatever is necessary to say I am not going to be cowed by anybody’s special political agenda, inside, outside, upside, downside.”
— Rejecting CBS reporter Bernard Goldberg’s charge that CBS exhibits a liberal bias, March 6, 1996 New York Post.

I know that that sort of fascade of objectivity was neccessary in the days when there were only three national commercial television networks and one or two newspapers per city, but why should Americans believe that a guy gets to reach such an exhaulted position as network anchorman without having some thoughts as to which party he prefers?

Of course, it lends much credence to Peggy Noonan's take on Rather, which was largely formed over the period that Noonan wrote for him:

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