"Carterpalooza" was the headline that Jay Nordlinger gave to his 2002 roundup of our 39th president's most infamous moments since leaving office. Steve Green of VodkaPundit has numerous additional examples and writes:

Look. I've got a computer. I have an internet connection. I know how to use Google – we could go on like this all day and all night. And even then, we'd only cover Carter's career as an ex-President.

Indeed--to borrow a now copyrighted Blogospheric phrase.

The Wall Street Journal notes that Connecticut's governor is about to do much to increase the state's coffers--the state of Florida, that is:

Florida Governor Jeb Bush ought to send his counterpart in Connecticut, Republican Jodi Rell, a thank-you note with a box of chocolates and a ribbon tied around it. Last month Ms. Rell marked her first anniversary as Governor by signing into law a tax bill that might as well be called the "Palm Beach Economic Development Act."

The law requires that any resident of the Nutmeg State with an estate of more than $2 million pay a death tax of up to 16%--merely for the privilege of dying in Connecticut. The legislators in Hartford hope that the tax will raise $150 million in revenue each year--money that will come in only if the legislators in Hartford are also planning to build a Berlin Wall around the state.

Otherwise, expect a stampede of retirees and family businesses out of Connecticut into the many states without a death tax, such as Florida, which has a constitutional prohibition against estate taxes. Thanks to the Connecticut death levy, a successful small business owner with a $10 million estate can save about $1 million by packing up and heading south.

There are already thousands of high-income Connecticut residents with second homes in Florida or other warm-weather Southern states, so changing domiciles is easy and relatively costless. "The Connecticut legislature can't seem to comprehend that it is taxing away the very wealth-producing people that this state is dependent upon for an economic revival," says economist Dowd Muska of the state's Yankee Institute think tank.

As the article notes, there are 19 other states with their own estate taxes. A recent addition to the roster has been Washington State, thanks to its newly elected governor:

In Washington state, Democratic Governor Christine Gregoire, riding high on her disputed 186-vote victory in last November's elections, linked arms with the Democrat-controlled legislature and overturned a ballot initiative approved by 67% of voters in 1981 that had outlawed a state estate tax. Now Washington imposes a 19% death tax, among the most onerous in the nation.

Wow, and here I thought a plurality of three million votes wasn't a mandate!

Glenn Reynolds links to Matt Drudge's latest update on Helen Thomas's meltdown after being caught saying that "I'll kill myself" if Dick Cheney announced he'd be running for the presidency. Drudge reports that "White House press doyenne Helen Thomas is plenty peeved at her longtime friend Albert Eisele, editor of THE HILL newspaper in Washington, D.C.":

Thomas said yesterday at the White House that her comments to Eisele were for his ears only. "I'll never talk to a reporter again!" Thomas was overheard saying.

"We were just talking -- I was ranting -- and he wrote about it. That isn't right. We all say stuff we don't want printed," Thomas said.

But Eisele said that when he called Thomas, "I assume she knew that we were on the record."

"She's obviously very upset about it, but it was a small item -- until Drudge picked it up and broadcast it across the universe," Eisele said.

Still, he noted that reporters aren't that happy when the tables are turned. "Nobody has thinner skin than reporters," Eisele said with a laugh.

Glenn adds, "This kind of turnabout will only get more common, of course".

It will. But Thomas's meltdown--staggeringly ironic, as it comes from someone who spends her days praying for (and preying upon) similar gaffes from the president and his press secretary--is only the latest in a string of examples of reporters who specialize in playing "gotcha games" with their interviewees, and acting like hypocrites if the tables are ever turned.

Read More »

Frank Martin writes:

Now that the cause is lost, America is pulling troops out of occupation duty. The foreign policy established by a President that many once considered being illegitimate and has inflamed many countries including former allies to break publicly against the nation, is finally at an end.

Later in his post, Frank notes that this increasingly controversial war:

resulted in an occupation and a rebuilding of a foreign nation at unprecedented levels. The long term occupation of a sovereign nation by foreigners who didn’t speak the language didn’t understand the culture, who before they occupied their nation exposed it to a ferocious bombing, killing hundreds of thousands of its civilians, then placing their nations leaders on trial and executing them for their crimes.

As I've written before, I'm only surprised that it took so long for the pullout to finally happen.

Read the rest of Frank's post. As BizzyBlog writes, it's a "home run".

There have been numerous books on the horrors of Nazi Germany's Holocaust. And both Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, from 1973 and Anne Applebaum's Gulag from 2003 have exposed the horrors of its Soviet inspiration.

But both of those regimes have been cast aside, to borrow President Reagan's phrase, on the ash heap of history. In contrast, North Korea's concentration camps and that totalitarian nation's multitude of other horrors continue, unabated, to this very day.

In a recent review, Orrin Judd looks at The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag, written in 2000 by Kang Chol-Hwan, who, as the title of his book implies, spent a decade, beginning in 1977, trapped as a prisoner inside of North Korea's nightmarish Yodok concentration camp. One reassuring sign: in contrast to President Ford's embarrassing rebuff of Solzhenitsyn, Orrin links to a Washington Post article which notes that President Bush met with Chol-Hwan earlier this year.

In her post on choosing a new acronym for the Global War On Terror (or GWOT for short), Lorie Byrd writes, "WW4 is possibly most accurate, but what happened to WW3? Vote at The Astute Blogger."

I'm not sure if The Astute Blogger was making an astute homage, but in his brilliant essay last year titled "World War IV", Norman Podhoretz explains the history behind what he calls World War III, and what most of us called the Cold War.

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting review of a new book on diversity gone askew in law schools:

Dan Subotnik once went to his dean and asked to teach a course on race and the law, a subject to which he had devoted a great deal of his own scholarly effort. Teaching a course about something you know is a time-honored method of refining your ideas and, not least, of educating the young. But the dean turned him down. Why? He claimed that Mr. Subotnik's message would be unduly dismissive of racism, amounting to, as the dean put it, "get over it."

While the dean's decision may have been unfortunate for Touro Law School, where Mr. Subotnik is a professor, it was an excellent one for the rest of us because it prompted "Toxic Diversity" (New York University Press, 335 pages, $45), a thoughtful critique of identity politics in the nation's law schools. These days "critical race studies" and feminist jurisprudence are a routine part of law-school scholarship, and much of it is devoted to discovering in the law those white, male power structures that have become an obsession throughout our universities.

* * *

Mr. Subotnik argues that critical race theorists and feminists often publish dubious articles and books that ignore the relevant facts in an effort to deliver an unrelenting message of victimization. He wants to hold these scholars to the same standards by which other legal scholars are judged. That they are sometimes not speaks volumes about the double standards that plague all institutions--not only universities--when ethnic identity and gender become in themselves a criterion of judgment, even an axis upon which the institution turns.
Double standards are deeply embedded in the scholarship, too, according to Mr. Subotnik. Racist speech by whites, for instance, is treated as evidence of racism in whites, while racist speech by minorities is evidence of racism . . . in whites: It is either "justified" or part of the warped sensibility that the governing power structures have imposed on persons of color. Meanwhile, the facts that normally support arguments are treated loosely. One of the first African-American law professors recently lamented that his "colony" was at "risk" because law schools showed "little interest" in replacing black professors when they retired. But in the decade before he wrote those words African-Americans had risen to 7.8% of the legal professoriate, up from 4.8%, casting doubt on his central claim.

And then there is the neglect of social statistics. Many critical race theorists, for example, view efforts to discourage illegitimate children as an assault on the African-American community, where illegitimacy has recently run to more than 60% of newborns. But the theorists refuse even to acknowledge the data showing illegitimacy to be a major cause of crime, poverty and disorder there. By contrast, distinguished scholars outside the legal academy, like Harvard's Orlando Patterson, have written eloquently about the blighted lives that result from families without fathers. Mr. Subotnik sees such law-school myopia as typical of the way that critical race scholarship tends to celebrate any conduct that violates middle-class values, never mind the costs.

Mr. Subotnik's critique of feminist scholarship is less sweeping but no less shrewd. He focuses on claims that paradoxically impugn the fortitude and resilience of women. There are more than a few feminists who argue, for instance, that law schools need to change their ways because certain practices, such as the Socratic method of aggressive classroom interrogation, make female law students uncomfortable and cause them to lose their identity. Mr. Subotnik believes that feminists who make such arguments are reviving the stereotype by which the 19th-century Illinois Supreme Court dismissed women as unfit to engage in the "hot strifes of the bar."

Some of the same feminist scholars also call for the elimination of testing for admissions and hiring because tests do not take into account, among other things, "emotional intelligence." As Mr. Subotnik wryly wonders: Why should we pay attention to such soft academic speculations and not take seriously the comments of Bill Gates, who says that winning in business is all about I.Q.?

Read the rest, which also describes the book's flaws, but concludes that it's still well worth reading.

Dan Riehl of Riehl World View is not happy with how Google ranks some of its searches:

For the longest time now, if you place the term Natalee Holloway into Google - the first link up has been to a Kuroshin article entitled "F@ck Natalee Holloway".

If someone is paying their own way on the Internet and not breaking the law, I don't support censorship and Kuroshin is free to write or host whatever they want. I have no complaint with their site and have been seeing the link forever.

But given that Google has a reasonable amount of control over their search mechanisms and subsequent results - there's simply no excuse for the same old tired, insulting and, frankly vulgar link to be sitting at the top for every school kid who might do a search on Natalee Holloway without safe search on.

I don't care how someone feels about the issue - whether it is over-covered, or not - that's a fair point. But there is absolutely no reason for what is now a Major Public American corporation to continue a situation potentially so insulting to many Americans for so long.

He has contact information for Google, incidentally.

Confederate Yankee has some related thoughts, in a post titled, "My One and Only Post About Natalee Holloway"--and with a little luck, this post is likely to be mine as well.

One last item in Posner's otherwise interesting essay begs questioning, but I figured I'd break it off into a separate post, as its not really germaine to his main points about the Blogosphere. At least twice, he refers to the Swift Boat vets, at one point writing, "Conservatives were unembarrassed by the errors of the Swift Boat veterans".

I wonder if the New York Times' editors inserted that line, as it's become a cliche on the left. But which errors are Posner referring to? He doesn't say. You can argue back and forth about Kerry's Purple Hearts until you're purple in the face yourself, but the core element of the Swift vets anger was with the infamous "Winter Soldier" speech that Kerry delivered to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on April 22nd, 1971, while he was still in the US Naval Reserves. Unless you want to go into fullblown Foucault-style postmodern dissembling, it's tough to argue with a speech that's been in the Senate records--including audio tape--for almost 35 years.

And then there's Kerry's "Christmas in Cambodia" invention--which is also in the Senate records, and also thanks to Kerry himself.

In his Insta-linked essay in the New York Times, Judge Richard Posner touches upon a number of points that we've addressed here in the past:

The rise of the conservative Fox News Channel caused CNN to shift to the left. CNN was going to lose many of its conservative viewers to Fox anyway, so it made sense to increase its appeal to its remaining viewers by catering more assiduously to their political preferences.

Yup. As I wrote last year:

As William McGowan noted in Coloring The News, by drinking the PC Kool-Aid in the late 1980s, the press pretty much assured that this would be their tone. In their fear to not offend anybody--save for, as "Pinch" Sulzberger was quoted as saying, "white, heterosexual males"--they've also completely lost their moral compass.

What's interesting though, as a commenter on Charles Johnson's site noted, is that since this tactic has alienated much of the American public (based on the latest Pew Report), their primary readers are increasingly, exclusively the left. And they either had to have seen this coming, or be clueless as to the unintended consequences of the direction that they set out in. So as not to alienate their remaining readers, it becomes increasingly more important to keep them in the liberal cocoon. And the cocoon narrows that much more--on both the readers and the press. But hey, stay quiet, and you'll be OK!

For somebody the left considers a dummy, this guy is sure on to something.

More Posner:

So why do people consume news and opinion? In part it is to learn of facts that bear directly and immediately on their lives - hence the greater attention paid to local than to national and international news. They also want to be entertained, and they find scandals, violence, crime, the foibles of celebrities and the antics of the powerful all mightily entertaining. And they want to be confirmed in their beliefs by seeing them echoed and elaborated by more articulate, authoritative and prestigious voices. So they accept, and many relish, a partisan press. Forty-three percent of the respondents in the poll by the Annenberg Public Policy Center thought it ''a good thing if some news organizations have a decidedly political point of view in their coverage of the news.''

Exactly. As Posner notes earlier in his essay, that's exactly what our newspapers were like prior to the rise of the big three TV networks and the newspaper consolidations of the post-War World II era. The Internet has allowed a return to that past form, as James Pinkerton once noted.

Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave is full of examples of past forms being reborn via high tech. In the past, disseminating information required owning, or having access to a printing press (and a means of distribution), or a radio or TV station, none of which were cheap to acquire. These days, anybody can go to Blogger.com and start a blog--and according to Technorati, 14 million people have, returning us to the era of one-man pamphleteers, but with a twist: hyperlinked together, it's possible to check sources, find new writers whose viewpoints might match your own, and network with others in an astonishingly easier fashion.

Back to Posner:

A serious newspaper, like The Times, is a large, hierarchical commercial enterprise that interposes layers of review, revision and correction between the reporter and the published report and that to finance its large staff depends on advertising revenues and hence on the good will of advertisers and (because advertising revenues depend to a great extent on circulation) readers. These dependences constrain a newspaper in a variety of ways. But in addition, with its reputation heavily invested in accuracy, so that every serious error is a potential scandal, a newspaper not only has to delay publication of many stories to permit adequate checking but also has to institute rules for avoiding error - like requiring more than a single source for a story or limiting its reporters' reliance on anonymous sources - that cost it many scoops.

But it's possible to recover from errors--indeed, the history of the Times in the 20th century is bookended by the fabrications of Walter Duranty in the 1930s, and the fabrications of Jayson Blair, beginning shortly after his employment in the late 1990s. Somehow, it has maintained a large subscriber base, even with those obvious and well-known lies. Not to equate Matt Drudge's errors with the willful and frightening lies of Duranty, but he too has maintained a huge readership, despite some of of his rush-to-upload scoops not checking out. Posner touches on this in a couple of paragraphs later:

What really sticks in the craw of conventional journalists is that although individual blogs have no warrant of accuracy, the blogosphere as a whole has a better error-correction machinery than the conventional media do. The rapidity with which vast masses of information are pooled and sifted leaves the conventional media in the dust. Not only are there millions of blogs, and thousands of bloggers who specialize, but, what is more, readers post comments that augment the blogs, and the information in those comments, as in the blogs themselves, zips around blogland at the speed of electronic transmission.

This means that corrections in blogs are also disseminated virtually instantaneously, whereas when a member of the mainstream media catches a mistake, it may take weeks to communicate a retraction to the public. This is true not only of newspaper retractions - usually printed inconspicuously and in any event rarely read, because readers have forgotten the article being corrected - but also of network television news. It took CBS so long to acknowledge Dan Rather's mistake because there are so many people involved in the production and supervision of a program like ''60 Minutes II'' who have to be consulted.

The charge by mainstream journalists that blogging lacks checks and balances is obtuse. The blogosphere has more checks and balances than the conventional media; only they are different. The model is Friedrich Hayek's classic analysis of how the economic market pools enormous quantities of information efficiently despite its decentralized character, its lack of a master coordinator or regulator, and the very limited knowledge possessed by each of its participants.

In effect, the blogosphere is a collective enterprise - not 12 million separate enterprises, but one enterprise with 12 million reporters, feature writers and editorialists, yet with almost no costs. It's as if The Associated Press or Reuters had millions of reporters, many of them experts, all working with no salary for free newspapers that carried no advertising.

Well, no--not millions. In his Blog book, published late last year, Hugh Hewitt wrote that there were 7,000,000 Weblogs that Technorati tracked, and about 50,000 of them were updated daily. Technorati's latest numbers double that seven million figure; it's safe to assume that those 50,000 blogs that update daily have doubled as well.

Big difference though: AP, Reuters and the New York Times are all built on the assumption that "sure, for decades, we've been near monopolies on information, but you can trust us because we're large institutions"--and the second half of that statement has increasingly been proven a specious argument. In contrast, one-man blogs have to earn their reputations solely on their readers' judgement--and will fairly quickly lose them, if their writers fumble too far off the mark. (Notice how quickly Andrew Sullivan's stock, at least on the right-hand side of the Blogosphere, fell last year.)

Along similar lines, some have called for voluntary standards, or the equivalent of a Better Business Bureau-style of blog overseer. But even that isn't as good a check on standards as the collective marketplace itself. As Alan Greenspan wrote 40 years ago:

"To paraphrase Gresham's Law: bad "protection" drives out good. The attempt to protect the consumer by force undercuts the protection he gets from incentive. First, it undercuts the value of reputation by placing the reputable company on the same basis as the unknown, the newcomer, or the fly-by-nighter. It declares, in effect, that all are equally suspect…Second it grants an automatic guarantee of safety to the products of any company that complies with its arbitrarily set minimum standards…The minimum standards, which are the basis of regulation, gradually tend to become the maximums as well…A fly by night securities operator can quickly meet all the S.E.C. requirements, gain the inference of respectability, and proceed to fleece the public. In an unregulated economy, the operator would have had to earn a position of trust..."

"Protection of the consumer by regulation is thus illusory. Rather than isolating the consumer from the dishonest businessman, it is gradually destroying the only reliable protection the consumer has: competition for reputation…Government regulations do not eliminate potentially dishonest individuals, but merely make their activities harder to detect or easier to hush up."

I'm sure lots of others will have their own thoughts on Posner's essay--which of course, is another sign of the strength of the Blogosphere--as James Lileks once said, it's a conversation, not a lecture.

In the New Criterion Roger Sandall looks at the best documentary you've never seen:

Can anyone doubt that the next documentary blockbuster will be American Gulag: Inside Uncle Sam’s Camps, from Michael Moore? There must be a dozen scripts already circulating in Hollywood with similar titles, and now that Amnesty International has weighed in, surely it’s only a matter of time before a new example of creative filmmaking will be breaking attendance records nationwide.

So let me suggest a way of dealing with the inevitable agonizing over Gitmo and Abu Ghraib. Get hold of a video of Marina Goldovskaya's film about the genuine article, The Solovky Power: Evidence and Documents, and sit your friends down for an in-depth look at the real, original, death-through-labor Soviet archetype, where something far worse than the occasional mistreatment of Korans occurred. This distinguished film will enable everyone to get their historical bearings; moreover, it is a standing rebuke to those who would recklessly trivialize a name, and a system, that may have cost 2.7 million lives.

By strange good fortune The Solovky Power was recently shown in Los Angeles. At 7:30, on Wednesday April 13, students at the UCLA School of Film and Television, living and working in the shadow of Hollywood, were brought face to face with actual zeks—men and women who had survived ten, twenty, and up to thirty years confinement on the Solovetsky Islands, 150 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle in the White Sea, with the slogan “Freedom Through Work!” over the gate.

One can only wonder what the audience made of it. Many film students would be unable to name the year of the Bolshevik Revolution; while historically, most students planning careers in documentary stand politically to the left of the Hollywood Ten. While it’s possible that those at the UCLA School of Film and Television are better informed than most, I think it would be safe to say that an searching examination of the real Gulag, showing how Stalin’s labor camps were already up and running in 1923, accompanied by interviews with the dictator’s victims, was a campus experience that for California was something new.

Read the rest.

Hugh Hewitt posts that he would be happy to discuss his memories of working with Supreme Court nominee John Roberts with a reporter from the Washington Post--if she was willing to interview him during his radio show:

The subject didn't matter to me. I had my assistant call back and say fine. She could interview me. Only one condition: The interview had to be conducted on air, live, during my broadcast. Would she please call the show line at 3:06 Pacific?

I had a similar request from a New York Times reporter for a similar interview a couple of days back. I made the same offer. He didn't respond.

Amy Goldstein did respond. She declined. My assistant relayed that Ms. Goldstein didn't want her story "out there" before it ran.

Fine, I thought. But then I got to thinking: Isn't journalism supposed to be in the public interest? If Goldstein wants information from me, and I am willing to give it to her, isn't she putting her own interests in a "scoop" or an "angle" ahead of the public's by refusing to conduct an interview she thought would be useful in the first place? And isn't she going forward with a story she knows may well be unnecessarily incomplete because she doesn't like the fact that her questions and my answers would have been on the record?

I of course want my listeners to get a chance if not to see the sausage that is MSM "news" being made, at least hear it being ground fine. I had hoped to compare whatever I was able to provide Ms. Goldstein with whatever it is that she publishes on the subject. Interesting all around, no?

But she declined to conduct the interview she requested. How interesting to note that the Post is willing to use sources that insist on anonymity, but not sources that demand transparency.

I'm not sure if I'd want to interview somebody for an article on the air myself. But on the other hand, I'm not out to play the same kinds of gotcha games that the legacy media have specialized in since the days of Watergate.

Update: Roger L. Simon writes that he'd like to employ a level of transparency on the Pajamas Media site similar to what Hugh discusses above. It would be a remarkable contrast to big media's approach to interviews and journalism, as one of Roger's commenters highlights:

[The MSM] will never do it unless the market forces them to do it. If they printed or allowed their web site to carry the entire interview it would take away their most prized weapons. The ability to take partial qoutes and tailor them to the narrative that they are weaving.It would also take away their ability to play the "He said this but this is what he really meant" trick of taking the person being interviewed words and interpret the "true" meaning. The press has fallen in love with the ability to treat the news as a historical novel. Lets face it, it is harder to be a great reporter when you can't play a little bit with the facts.

Well, it's definitely harder to play at being a great reporter when you can't play with the facts.

Last August, arguably the month of the 2004 presidential race, we posted on President Bush's promise to phase out US troops in Germany after sixty years there. The Financial Times reports that "The US army said on Friday it would hand over 13 of its German bases to Berlin, some perhaps as early as next year".

Wow, you mean he wasn't bluffing? Go figure.

Note: My wife Nina has been insanely busy for the past couple of months, and a very big part of her workload has been handling the legal aspects of Pajamas Media. As such, she's retired her own Weblog, but will be posting a few items here from time to time--Ed

Ladies! Have You No Respect For Yourselves?

There, that feels better. But excuse me. If a woman spends 30 to 60 (or more) minutes getting ready to go out, trying to look her best for the event and her partner, and he spends 1.78 seconds putting sandals on over the socks he’s worn for three days (along with the rest of his clothes), then something is seriously out of balance with the respect they are showing each other.

Oh, you say, he didn’t sleep in those clothes for three days, that’s a very expensive and intentional look. Nina, you just don't understand contemporary men's fashion.

Then excuse me again. But that’s worse. So it’s not that he’s just careless, sloppy and was playing video games till she had been standing at the door for ten minutes. It’s actually that he spent money trying to look like he doesn’t care about wherever they are going together. So he is working hard to dress in a way that says "this is an important event for her, but neither she, nor the event is important enough for me to give a damn." Yes, that’s worse than just being a slob.

When a man says once "I love you in short skirts" the woman, even liberated, professional, assertive women, go out and have all of their skirts shortened (ok, I know not all women, but a lot). When a woman says "wow, you look gorgeous in that suit" the one time in five years he gets dressed up, does he look for more places to wear a suit. Nope.

A male friend of mine actually once said "there was this guy in college, he always got dressed up.... and he always got, you know, lucky."

Well duh.

There's no doubt women go for the rough and tumple, Lady Chatterly's tilling the soil gardner type. But slovenliness and rough physicality do not need to go hand in hand. It is possible to do both--urbane sophistication and brute physicality. That is if you care for your partner and wish to show her some respect. And that is, if you have enough respect for yourself that you believe you can do both. I think many guys just don't have enough self-confidence to pull it off.

And for those of you who don't know - my husband dresses, as Manolo would say "Super Fantastic."

Well, at least he tries to.--Ed

In a post about Alfred Hitchcock's great Rear Window a few years ago, James Lileks wrote:

Jimmy Stewart does a nice job playing the stupidest man in the world, i.e., a man who does not want to marry Grace Kelly and spend his 40s photographing New York and beautiful models.

In an obituary that first ran in The Atlantic a couple of months ago, Mark Steyn looks at the man who did marry her, Prince Rainier of Monaco, who would live for two more decades after Princess Grace's tragic death in a 1982 car crash:

the men who fancied breaking the bank at Monte Carlo had moved down the coast to Cannes and elsewhere and the bank itself was near broke. The Societe des Bains de Mer, which ran the casino and hotels, reported huge losses that year. Next, the Société Monégasque de Banques et de Métaux Précieux, which held 55% of Monaco’s reserves and much of the Grimaldi fortune, went bust. Aristotle Onassis, who served as the young Rainier’s eminence Greece, thought a marriage into movie-star glamour might restore the Principality’s fortunes, and sounded out Marilyn Monroe, to no avail. Then, while in the neighborhood for the Cannes Film Festival, Grace Kelly was taken to the palace for a photo shoot and Rainier made his move.

It worked out well. His bride embarked on the usual charitable activities associated with Royal consorts but with the benefit of a much livelier Rolodex: throughout the Sixties and Seventies, old chums like Sinatra and Bob Hope turned Monegasque fundraising galas into the touring version of the starrier Friars’ Club roasts. Tourism and development followed. Monaco is a small town of 30,000 people, mostly tax exiles but with about 6,000 Monegasques to play the role of Rainier’s loyal subjects. As land was reclaimed and skyscrapers loomed over the fishing boats, Monaco’s stellar princess gave her husband a cachet denied to such other mini-me Euro-royals as the Grand Dukes of Luxembourg and Liechtenstein.

Princess Grace missed movies and Rainier gave her permission to return to her old job for Hitchcock’s Marnie. But his people found the idea vulgar and demeaning, and so High Society remained the House of Grimaldi’s last on-camera performance until Princess Stephanie’s husband made his film debut with Miss Bare Breasts of Belgium. By then, Rainier was old, stooped and exhausted; his princess was dead; and his children seemed determined to return the family name to its seedy antecedents. He made his dilapidated casino kingdom briefly romantic and, when he couldn’t maintain the romance, he had the satisfaction at least of knowing he’d made Monaco bankable again. But the 13th century family curse came along for the ride and in the end it broke the man at Monte Carlo.

Hollywood's cache has fallen mightily since the days when Kelly was the ultimate Hitchcock blonde. Is there any comparable celebrity today whom a European royal would look to marrying in order to restore luster to his or her fading crown?

James Taranto concludes his tripartite retrospective on the first five years of "Best of the Web Today" with a focus on last year's wild election ride.

Citizen Smash weighs in with other military bloggers on FX's new Over There series:

It was like a bad Vietnam movie, filmed in what was clearly the Mojave desert filling in for Iraq. I even spotted a Joshua Tree in the background.

Simple, stereotypical characters. Not much depth. Unrealistic battle scenes, with poor understanding of fire & manuever tactics. Too much inane chatter. Anachronisms abound, including a Vietnam era "Huey" MEDEVAC helicopter.

Bottom line: total crap.

Found via Glenn Reynolds, who suggests that Maybe Hollywood "should try just reading more blogs from Iraq. Might produce some better story ideas".

What--and say something positive about the war? Diversity only goes so far in Tinseltown.

Steve Green (who gains bonus street cred for his admiration of debonair William Powell), highlights exactly what's gone wrong with Hollywood, by examining, of all things, the trailer for Rob Schneider's Deuce Bigalow: European Gigalo:

The trailer for "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigalo" had been up for a couple days, but I just couldn't bring myself to click on the link. Rob Schneider is not now nor has he ever been funny. It's not that I don't enjoy lowbrow stuff - far from it. Give me a couple beers and some Three Stooges, and I'm a happy man.

But Farrelly Brothers-style comedy just isn't funny. There's enough humor in the human condition as is, that I find it impossible to laugh with (or even at) characters who don't behave like real human beings, responding to impossible situations.

Case in point: "There's Something About Mary." The hair gel scene is empircally not funny. Semen doesn't just hang there, and women don't grab random blobs of "is that hair gel?" off of people's ears, then apply to their own hair without so much as a mirror. You want funny? Watch Bill Murray's flower-golfing scene in "Caddyshack."

But back to Deuce Bigalow's European Vacation or Whatever.

Finally, I succumbed to my Watch All the Trailers Rule, and loaded it up. There wasn't so much as a grin to be had. Halfway into the trailer, for reasons I don't understand, a fat American woman in a bad dress is shown speaking practically to the camera. She says "Give thanks to America for bringing freedom to Iraq" or words to that effect.

And then a brick flies in from off camera and hits her in the face.

I know Hollywood doesn't approve of the Iraq campaign. I don't expect serious debate in a Rob Schneider movie - and if there was some, I'd hold it in contempt. But just what the hell is going on here? Making a political statement with a thrown brick? That's supposed to be funny? That's supposed to have a point?

That's in a Rob Schneider movie?

What the hell?

I know the audience for these films - young folks without enough real-world experience to appreciate just how funny real-world behavior can be. I know, because I used to be one of them. We all were once: It's called "youth."

So it's come to this: Hollywood now feels the need to propagandize - with a brick! - in a summer teen flick. Or maybe "need" is giving too much credit. Maybe "audacity" is a better word for it. Whatever the case, at least we know where they stand.

Me, I'm not standing anywhere. I'm sitting in front of the laptop computer - having earlier tonight attacked my desktop monitor with a brick.

As I feel like I've written innumerable times already this year, I wouldn't have a problem with this sort of thing, if Hollywood was releasing a wide variety of product, to appeal to both those who are pro-freedom and pro-liberation, and those who are anti-war and/or anti-Bush.

But when everything comes with the same mindset and worldview attached to it, is it any wonder that they're losing audience-share? The same thing has crippled the news industry as well. If your mindset is exactly that of the New York Times, then great, you're good to go. But for the rest of us....well, like Lucy and Charlie Brown, you can only pull the football away so many times, before you give the game away.

With Weblogs, there's a blog for every mindset and attitude--and if there isn't, that's probably reason enough to start one. But that doesn't seem to be the case with Hollywood these days. Maybe, at some point in the future, just as the right side of the Blogosphere competes with the MSM, and Fox News competes with CNN, there will be widely available alternatives to Hollywood's product.

But until then, we'll keep wondering why they keep doing the stuff that Steve describes above, and hopefully, they'll keep wondering why they're losing money.

Via Hugh Hewitt, military bloggers Argghhh!!! and Blackfive have posts on the new cable war drama Over There, which make the show sound even more craptacular than its ads imply.

California Yankee writes, "North American Muslims Issue Fatwa Against Terrorism".

In a somewhat related item, James Lileks has some thoughts on the CAIR spokesman that Hugh Hewitt had on his show on Monday and Tuesday.

Update: Well, so much for the good news. (Via Charles Johnson.)

The second part of James Taranto's three part retrospective of the first five years of the Wall Street Journal's "Best of the Web Today" column is online, focusing on the moral equivalence that's been the mark of a few elements of the fringe far right, but a growing component of much of the post-9/11 left:

Filmmaker Michael Moore explains on his Web site that his first reaction was to think the terrorists should have killed more Republicans:

Many families have been devastated tonight. This just is not right. They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC, and the planes' destination of California--these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!

Why kill them? Why kill anyone?

Andrew Sullivan quotes Jerry Falwell as telling his fellow televangelist Pat Robertson: "I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way--all of them who have tried to secularize America--I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.' " Robertson's reply: "Well, I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted their agenda at the highest levels of our government." The mirror image of the Falwell-Robertson calumny is a press release from the Madison, Wis.-based Freedom From Religion Foundation, which declares: "The terrorist disasters of September 11 may well have been the ultimate 'faith-based initiative.' "

It's worth noting that Falwell and Robertson both apologized, and that both remain fringe figures of the American right. Moore, on the other hand, did not apologize, as far as we remember; he did quietly remove the offending passages, and later the entire Sept. 12 posting, from his Web site. Much of the Democratic establishment later embraced Moore, as we noted recently: He had an honored seat next to former president Jimmy Carter at the Democratic Convention, and when his agitprop film "Fahrenheit 9/11" had its Washington debut, then-senator Bob Graham of Florida observed that "there might be half of the Democratic Senate here."

Reuters' immediate post-9/11 equivocating--"We all know that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter...To be frank, it adds little to call the attack on the World Trade Center a terrorist attack"--is also discussed.

Hugh Hewitt has the perfect gift for the judge who has everything--except common sense. He's suggesting sending Neville Chamberlain-style umbrellas to Judge John Coughenour, the federal district court judge in Seattle, Washington who awarded a sentence 22 years in jail--only 22 years in jail!--to "the millenium bomber", Ahmed Ressam, caught with a trunk full of explosives on his way to blow up LAX on December 31, 1999. As Hugh writes:

The 5.5 years Ressam has already spent in jail counts against the sentence, and he could get an additional 3 years off for good behavior. He could be out by the time he hits his 53rd birthday, before 2020 rolls around.

Swell.

You would think that a president who stays physically fit through exercise, and a Supreme Court nominee and his family who are thoughtful enough to dress themselves carefully on the most important day of their lives would be good things.

You would think that, that is, unless you were the L.A. Times or the Washington Post, as Tammy Bruce, former president of the Los Angeles chapter of NOW writes.

(Via Charles Johnson. See also this related and terrific (relatedly terrific?) James Lileks Screeeeeed post.)

In Tech Central Station, Patrick Hynes writes that it's time to put the Bully Pulpit to work:

President Bush needs to learn a lesson his father never did. Unless a president -- especially a Republican president -- talks constantly with the American people about the economy, he will be seen by the public as doing nothing about it. This is especially true when the news is filtered through a hostile press corps. And while doing nothing about the economy may at times be the best way to strengthen it, this view is not shared by the majority of Americans.

There is another problem, as well. President Bush's hallmark initiative this year was supposed to be Social Security reform. The public perception is that these efforts are going nowhere. This is a big problem for the administration because President Bush has built his push for Social Security reform on the idea that the system, and therefore Americans' retirement security and the nation's long-term fiscal health, is staring down the barrel of a crisis. President Bush toured sixty cities in sixty days (and even more, subsequently) in a campaign to convince Americans of this crisis and sell his plan to fix it. Unfortunately, while the majority of Americans is still unsure of the cure, a growing majority has come to acknowledge the disease. According to a mid-June CBS News poll, fully 92% of Americans believe Social Security is either currently in a "crisis," currently in "serious trouble," or currently in "some trouble." Moreover, 57% of respondents think Social Security's problems are "so serious they need to be fixed now." The president has exhausted his political capital convincing people their economic future is doomed.

Of course, President Bush's political opponents are always available and willing to poor-mouth the economy. When he first entered Washington, all the talk was of recession. That ended quickly, but Democrats clutched on to the budget deficit, caused of course by President Bush's tax cuts "for the rich." Then it was unemployment; the worst economy since Hoover, they told us. But the jobs situation improved during the 2004 campaign, so the "disappearing middle class" became the freak-out du jour. The president won the majority of middle class votes, so that wouldn't do. So the falling dollar would have us all standing in soup lines in our barrel-and-suspender ensembles. But then the dollar rose. So today it's income inequality and the trade deficit with China that spells certain doom. In an economy so big and so diverse, some grim-sounding statistic will always pop, some indicator will always lag. And a minority party, desperate for power, will only too gladly exaggerate their meaning.

The White House has to speak with the American people about the state of the economy honestly, soothingly, confidently… and constantly. But time and circumstance is not on their side. Just as the Iraq War has kept President Bush from talking about the economy for the past several months, the next couple will be consumed with talk of Judge Roberts, the trial of Saddam Hussein, the CIA leak case, and the 2005 off-year elections. It may be 2006 before President Bush gets another opportunity to tout the strength and dynamism of the U.S. economy.

Communicating an optimistic vision for our shared economic future has become too low a priority for the Bush administration. And that is the real crisis.

The alternative is to let the mainstream media project its usual bias and negativity on the health of the economy, which it did all too well to his father, as Lorie Byrd accurately remembers:

in 1992...the Bush recovery was described as the worst economy in 50 years until the day after the election, when it became known as the Clinton recovery.

I remember that vividly--I don't think any group has collectively turned on a dime that quickly since the days of Dalton Trumbo.

This history of Pete Seeger by Howard Husock in the current issue of City Journal is a might too conspiratorial in tone for my tastes, ("America’s Most Successful Communist" is its title), but it's still quite an interesting read. It makes a nice double-feature with this October 2000 piece by Brian Doherty in Reason on the current-day heirs to Seeger's legacy in pop music.

Of course, music--even pop music--can be a surprisingly abstract thing, and audiences are often unpredictible in terms of how they adopt songs, and find a meaning in them that's very, very different from their authors' intentions, as Husock notes at the conclusion of his article:

Happily, some have embraced the Popular Front’s legacy in ways that Seeger probably didn’t anticipate and wouldn’t likely approve. In March, a crowd in Taipei, several hundred thousand–strong, sang “We Shall Overcome” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” as part of a protest against forcible annexation by mainland China—and the prospect of Communist Party rule.

Like the "Velvet Revolution" in Eastern Europe, that's somewhat reassuring.

James Taranto is celebrating the fifth anniversary of his "Best of the Web" column with the first of a three-part history, which runs from the column's debut in 2000, through 9/11. Taranto's column isn't really a blog per se, but it definitely serves as a great guide to the events of the day--with (as a colleague of Taranto's put it) "a whole sui generis arch style thing" going on, to boot.

Maps of the Middle East are surprisingly fluid: Mercedes and BMW "accidently" forget to include a country on their maps of Middle Eastern dealers, despite the fact that it's existed since 1948. Meanwhile, Tony Blair mentions a country in his latest speech that doesn't.

Now you see 'em, now you don't!

The same folks who brought you such diverse fare as It's A Wonderful Life In 30 Seconds (And Re-Enacted By Bunnies) and Pulp Fiction In 30 Seconds (And Re-Enacted By Bunnies) now brings you...The Rocky Horror Picture Show In 30 Seconds (And Re-Enacted By Bunnies)!

Don't miss the bonus "Time Warp" video at the end. It's just a jump to the left!

In the new issue of City Journal, Harry Stein looks at conservative cartoon strips from "Little Orphan Annie" in the 1930s, to 21st century Blogspheric hit "Day By Day".

For more on the the latter strip and its author, click on our 2003 piece in Tech Central Station.

I have an article on blogs and business in the August issue of CE Pro magazine. The CE in CE Pro stands for custom electronics professionals, such as home theater installers and "smart home" designers. It's not on the Web yet (except for industry subscribers), but if it goes online for the general public, I'll definitely link to it here.

Needless to say, I think blogs are a tremendous tool for any business to communicate to with its customers. I interviewed Phil Melton of Reliegh North Carolina's Audio Advice, which added a Weblog to its site last year. I was only mildly surprised that he follows InstaPundit and other folks in the Blogosphere.

It's sort of coming full-circle for me: I contributed several articles ten years ago to CE Pro's earlier incarnation, Custom Home Electronics, and its original editor, Mary Ann Giorgio, was a huge help in shaping those early efforts. She later went on to edit Audio/Video Interiors, the first home theater magazine, originally started in 1989, where I was proud to also contribute articles.

(Not sure where she's working now. Mary Ann, if you ever do a Google "vanity search" and see this post, drop me an email. You were the best!)

Using the model of Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave, unions and organized labor are classic "Second Wave" models from an era of mass-production, mass-consumption, mass-industry, and mass-men. As Bryan O'Keefe notes in Tech Central Station, this Second Wave force has done little to keep up with Third Wave market dynamics:

Many organized labor leaders and their allies are furious over the decision Monday by the Service Employees International Union and the Teamsters to part ways with the AFL-CIO and form their own labor federation. While SEIU and the Teamsters are two of the largest unions, the vast majority of the 50 other AFL-CIO unions are not considering disaffiliation. Their leaders openly question why, in the face of declining membership and an unfavorable political environment, SEIU President Andrew Stern and Teamsters President James Hoffa would want to divide the house of labor. What happened to brotherhood and solidarity, they ask?

Working in unison might be fine, but it can also be overrated. In fact, competition might be exactly what America's labor movement needs if it wants to survive in the 21st century. Competition has helped to make business more dynamic and to evolve with changing times. It might also have the same effect on a labor movement stuck in the past.

Being stuck in the past wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing if what worked before was working now. That's hardly the case though with current AFL-CIO leadership which lives in a time warp. Fifty years ago, almost one-third of the American workforce was unionized, while today that number stands at a paltry 12.5 percent. Big labor has done little to change with the new globalized economy and American workforce. It's like having a company use the same business plan for 50 years, even as profits go down the tubes. If Stern's comments Monday are sincere, then he understands that the status quo isn't going to work anymore. "Unions are bound to the past. We need new initiatives," Stern said at the press conference announcing his union's bolt. He later added, "It's not the 1930s anymore."

Even those of us that don't agree with Stern's liberal union ideology can appreciate his ability to think outside the box and come up with new approaches that involve more than over-the-top rhetoric. And, who knows, some of his ideas might just work. For starters, Stern doesn't sound like an old-school, fist-pounding labor leader -- rather, he talks thoughtfully about issues like globalization and how unions can evolve in a way that's compatible with the new economy, while attracting younger workers.

Stern's rhetoric has been a turn-off for other leaders in the labor movement who are wedded to the past. In a magazine article this past January, Thomas Buffenbarger, President of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, blasted Stern as somebody who wants to make unions more like corporate America. ''He's trying to corporatize the labor movement. When you listen to him talk, it's all about market share. It's about loss and gain. It's about producers and consumers,'' Buffenbarger said. "I think he's enamored of all the glitz and hype of the Wall Street types. He must be a fan of Donald Trump. I think he wants his own TV show.''

But what Buffenbarger bristles at as corporatizing the labor movement can also been seen as a desire to modernize. And modernizing has worked well for Stern's SEIU during his tenure. While labor membership declined overall in the last ten years, Stern's union grew by 900,000 members, mainly on the strength of his leadership and novel ways of approaching unionization.

Stern also deserves credit for finally asking tough questions about labor's relationship with the Democratic Party. He rightly argues that labor needs to focus on organizing and getting its own house in order, not just electing Democratic politicians. "We just can't rely on elected officials to change workers lives," Stern said yesterday. This echoed comments Stern made his earlier this month when he boldly stated, "We can't just elect Democratic politicians and try to take back the House and take back the Senate and think that's going to change workers' lives."

Stern has also advocated more competition in the political realm. While still donating most of its campaign cash to Democrats, SEIU was the biggest contributor to the Republican Governors Association last year. Competition in this sense might also lead to more legislative success for unions. Corporations figured out a long time ago that it was beneficial to donate and court friends in both political parties, while unions stuck to the same, dated model of donating almost exclusively to Democrats. It's no surprise then that business has accomplished more in Congress.

Of course, this type of talk in the upper echelons of the labor movement is heresy, which finally led to yesterday's dramatic split.

Meanwhile, a Wall Street Journal op-ed notes also that "Being a wholly owned subsidiary of the DNC" isn't working out for "Very Old Labor".

Monty Python's Flying Circus once had an episode featuring BBC TV News broadcasts proprietized for parrots, gibbons, and wombats.

Coming soon: history books written from the perspective of animals.

No word yet if Peter Singer will be writing their introduction.

Update: And speaking of Monty Python, here's news for cows, featuring an interview with Ward Churchill! If anchorcow Barbara Bovine's nom de hoof rings a (cow)bell, she first popped up here.

Over the weekend, it was reported that Pennsylvania's Lt. Gov. Catherine Baker Knoll crashed the funeral of a Marine killed in Iraq. As Glenn Reynolds wrote:

IN THE VERDICT, PAUL NEWMAN VISITED FUNERALS to hand out his business card and try to boost his flagging career. Apparently, he's not the only one to try this approach: "The family of a Marine who was killed in Iraq is furious with Lt. Gov. Catherine Baker Knoll for showing up uninvited at his funeral this week, handing out her business card and then saying 'our government' is against the war."

After the bits hit the fan via local Pennsylvania news sites and the Blogosphere, Michelle Malkin writes that Baker has issued her apology in a personal letter to Sgt. Goodrich's wife....sent as a press release and containing the usual boilerplate:

Sergeant Goodrich’s service was beyond the call of duty. If my regard for his family’s grief was seen another way, it is thoroughly regrettable. The fact that you have been offended deserves and receives my most profound apology.

I will continue to support our troops in my role as Lt. Governor and support our President as an American. That I somehow conveyed an impression that was interpreted as other than that will forever be saddening and upsetting to me.

It's the old, "if you were offended, I'm sorry" routine, that Dick Durbin sampled from, on his way to a slightly better, if no less believable apology. Who, me do something wrong? Never! But I'm sorry if it was percieved by you that way, poor sod.

But Knoll's original line during the funeral--As I wrote above, Knoll was quoted as saying "our government" is against the war--has deeper implications for the Rendell administration that she serves within. As Dennis Prager wrote earlier this month:

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This can only mean trouble. Mark Levin writes:

Is John McCain about to do for interrogations what he did for political speech? No senator or group of senators can possibly have the information, knowledge or strategic perspective of a president and his advisors on security issues facing the nation especially during war, which is why the framers empowered the president as commander-in-chief. But now McCain, having thoroughly screwed up the financing of federal elections, is on to his next subject -- interrogating detainees.

I have no problem with Congress's constitutional oversight authority, but legislatively spelling out the circumstances and conditions of interrogations, which McCain and others are now seeking to do, is a completely different matter. And past Congress's have understood this. Issues arise during war that do not lend themselves to broad legislative mandates. Frank Church sought to micro-manage the CIA, and I would argue it helped lead to 9/11. We don't need or want a committee of 100 -- along with federal courts now -- dictating war functions.

We can debate this in more detail elsewhere (including separation of powers issues), but I want to raise the issue here, in truncated form, because it's now front and center.

Via Michelle Malkin.

Amongst other things I scan there, every once in a while, I do a search of Google News to see if there's any word on a release date for The Beatles' Let It Be on DVD.

Apparently, it's finally coming out in September:

Beatles "Let It Be" Film Coming To DVD

July 15, 2005 2:59 p.m. EST
Douglas Maher - All Headline News Staff Reporter

Denver, CO (AHN) - The Toronto Sun reports today that the long-awaited release of The Beatles swan song "Let It Be" film is on its way to DVD.

According to an interview with Bob Smeaton, who directed the "Beatles Anthology", the DVD will be in 5.1 sound along with tons of lost and bonus features.

No word on whether or not the legendary "roof top" performance above Apple Studios will be on the set. Fans have petitioned for decades to have the entire performance released in its original form. The original Naga recordings will be on the DVD version of "Let It Be", which itself has not been on home video for over two decades.

The Naga recordings were only discovered during a 2003 police raid of a bootlegers home in the Netherlands. They had been missing since the early 1970s. The DVD is due in September.

More here:

The Beatles Let It Be Heads to DVD

by Paul Cashmere
20 July 2005

The Beatles documentary Let It Be is finally going to be released on DVD.

Apple Records, the company started by The Beatles to produce their music, will release the Let It Be DVD in September.

The disc will also include bonus footage not seen in the movie.

The Let It Be documentary was meant to track the recording of The Beatles in the studio but instead captured the disintegration of the band.

However, the footage is legendary.

The now classic Beatles rooftop appearance was part of the movie. The scene was recently recreated by U2 and was also sent up in the Simpson's Barbershop episode.

Let It Be was produced by Neil Aspinall and directed by Michael Lindsey-Hogg.

It features songs such as Don't Let Me Down, Maxwell's Silver Hammer, Two Of Us, I've Got A Feeling, Oh Darling, One After 909, Across The Universe, Dig A Pony, I Me Mine, For You Blue, Besame Mucho, Dig It, Get Back and Let It Be.

Needless to say, I'm excited by these announcements--my 25 year old VHS copy of Let It Be is looking worse for wear these days. I just hope these aren't false alarms; we've been down that (long and winding) road before.

Also posted (with a slightly different lead) at Blogcritics.

"Neville Again" was the punch line of a Mark Steyn piece in the Telegraph last year on how Europe has returned to the Neville Chamberlain-style appeasement which marked the 1930s. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Pete Du Pont agrees with that assessment:

Simply put, Old Europe's thinking today is that of 1930s, when the Oxford Union voted "under no circumstances [to] fight for King and Country," and British PM Neville Chamberlain believed appeasement should be the policy and "peace in our time" the goal. Winston Churchill had the better understanding: "You ask what is our aim? I can answer that in one word, victory at all costs, victory in spite of terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival." He was talking of Hitler and Nazi Germany, of course, but without victory there will be no survival against Islamic terrorism either.

Du Pont adds:

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Steve Green finds solid reporting in a in a New York Times piece on the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, the innocent man shot by the London police (after acting very, very suspiciously). But it's sandwiched between paragraph after paragraph of liberal boilerplate. Steve concludes:

There's a larger point here, and it's this: the press takes stories like this one, and reports them like this, and then wonders why we don't think they're on board with this war. They wonder why we're watching Fox News. Say what you will about Fox's many faults, but at least FNC acts like an American company during wartime. Meanwhile, the NYT is doing its damnedest to paint Tony Blair's Britain as a fascist police state.

Thanks for the help, fellas.

Ironically, the vision of Blair's England that Peter Hitchens sketches in The Abolition of Britain and by Theodore Dalrymple in Our Culture, What's Left Of It is much, much closer to the far left, transnational America that the Times--or at least Pinch Sulzberger--is trying to empower. But ironically, despite Blair's solid Labor/leftist/liberal credentials, apparently, anybody's who was against Saddam Hussein is suspect in the Times' book.

...Except of course, for the Times, themselves.

Maybe it's been up for years, but I just discovered, via John Hawkins, that Bernard Goldberg has his own Website.

No word yet if Donny Deutsch will be making a suprise cameo there.

Back in January we looked at the left's increasing love of nostalgia, trying to put the chic back into its radical chic past. Roger L. Simon writes:

nowhere on the planet that is more completely a bastion of stodgy ultra-traditionalist liberal/leftist thought than the UK's Guardian, which has not varied one micro-millimeter from the 1968 weltanschauung for the last, well, thirty-seven years.

Mister, we could use a man like Che Guevara again!

James Lileks looks at Tom Tancredo, the Republican congressman from Colorado, who put his Slim Pickens-sized shoe in his mouth last week:

One step forward: A group of British imams issued an honest-to-Allah fatwa against suicide bombers. According to the clerics, terrorists are not acting in the name of true Islam and will ride a hot, slick razor blade straight to hell. Good; more, please.

Alas, there's also one step back: In the same news cycle Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., mused on a radio show about his preferred response to a nuclear attack on America: bombing Mecca.

No doubt Osama bin Laden did a jig after hearing that. As a recruitment tool, it's better than learning that George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon are running to Canada to get married.

Tancredo's supporters could say we need a few fellows who sling the loose talk, the better to concentrate the mind of the enemy on the swinging noose. After all, the foreign press is one of those places where the term "American congressman" actually commands some respect. What's the harm?

Plenty. Bombing Mecca to revenge the acts of maniacs is like nuking the Vatican to protest the pedophilia scandal in Boston. The idea appeals to those whose nuanced study of Islam makes them conclude it's better to alienate 1 billion people than defeat a fraction of the same group. It appeals to those who believe that Islam is a metal shard that cannot be absorbed and must be removed, preferably by blowing up the body. And burying the remains in pig skins! That'll learn 'em!

It's the mirror image of the politically correct conceit that holds Islam blameless for the terrorists who act in its name, as if there's nothing in the Quran but sweetness and light toward the infidel. Both groups are wrong; both groups' misapprehension of the situation will get the rest of us killed.

Tancredo gets points for facing the grim question: How does one respond to a nuclear event on American soil? The horrible imperatives of war demand that you respond, lest anyone get the idea that the United States is just a dead carcass propped in the corner, food for any jackal.

You could hit the nations that have concluded it's still safe to kill Americans. Iran comes to mind. Syria still seems gripped with a nagging case of the Stupids. Our dear bosom friends the Saudis still spread that old Wahhabi lovin' all across the globe and here at home. But do we really want to incinerate Tehran? You'll probably find more people in Tehran who dearly love America than you'll find in San Francisco.

It's come to this: Some say we have to destroy Islam in order to save it. Or us. Whatever.

But just imagine nuking Tehran 10 months after an attack, after the CIA concludes Iran helped with the bomb that was dropped on us. ("Sorry about the WMD thing, but this time you can trust us. If we're wrong, well, we'll all take early retirement. Seriously.") The world would see it as coldblooded murder. The world, for once, would be right.

Either way, as Lileks writes in his conclusion:

Tancredo is a popular fellow on the right for his immigration stance, appealing to those who find Bush deaf and clueless on the issue. Providing he apologizes, this incident shouldn't discredit his concerns over border security. After all, if that nuke doesn't come in by cargo container, it'll be hauled over the southern border.

But if he wants to be president? Roll the anti-Goldwater daisy-picking holocaust ads, and goodbye to all that.

Or simply cue appropriate footage from Dr. Strangelove.

On his newly remodeled blog, Hugh Hewitt looks at the damage control--or lack thereof--that Tancredo's been doing since his initial remarks.

Power Line has a letter written by Captain's Quarter regular Dafydd ab Hugh on David Souter's background and nomination, and why the chances are very good that John Roberts won't be Souter Part Deux.

Dafydd's comments on the liberalism of the first President Bush, who nominated Souter, are spot-on as well.

Mark Steyn unloads a corker on the pitfalls of multiculturalism in The Australian:

The Age's editor Andrew Jaspan still lives in another world. You'll recall that it was Jaspan who objected to the energy and conviction of certain freed Australian hostage, at least when it comes to disrespecting their captors: "I was, I have to say, shocked by Douglas Wood's use of the 'arsehole' word, if I can put it like that, which I just thought was coarse and very ill-thought through ... As I understand it, he was treated well there. He says he was fed every day, and as such to turn around and use that kind of language I think is just insensitive."

And heaven forbid we're insensitive about terrorists. True, a blindfolded Wood had to listen to his jailers murder two of his colleagues a few inches away, but how boorish would one have to be to hold that against one's captors? A few months after 9/11, National Review's John Derbyshire dusted off the old Cold War mantra "Better dead than red" and modified it to mock the squeamishness of politically correct warfare: "Better dead than rude". But even he would be surprised to see it taken up quite so literally by Andrew Jaspan.

Usually it's the hostage who gets Stockholm Syndrome, but the newly liberated Wood must occasionally reflect that in this instance the entire culture seems to have caught a dose. And, in a sense, we have: multiculturalism is a kind of societal Stockholm Syndrome. Atta's meetings with Bryant are emblematic: He wasn't a genius, a master of disguise in deep cover; indeed, he was barely covered at all, he was the Leslie Nielsen of terrorist masterminds - but the more he stuck out, the more Bryant was trained not to notice, or to put it all down to his vibrant cultural tradition.

That's the great thing about multiculturalism: it doesn't involve knowing anything about other cultures - like, say, the capital of Bhutan or the principal exports of Malaysia, the sort of stuff the old imperialist wallahs used to be well up on. Instead, it just involves feeling warm and fluffy, making bliss out of ignorance. And one notices a subtle evolution in multicultural pieties since the Islamists came along. It was most explicitly addressed by the eminent British lawyer Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws, QC, who thought that it was too easy to disparage "Islamic fundamentalists". "We as western liberals too often are fundamentalist ourselves. We don't look at our own fundamentalisms."

And what exactly would those western liberal fundamentalisms be? "One of the things that we are too ready to insist upon is that we are the tolerant people and that the intolerance is something that belongs to other countries like Islam. And I'm not sure that's true."

Hmm. Kennedy appears to be arguing that our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people's intolerance, which is intolerable. Thus the lop-sided valse macabre of our times: the more the Islamists step on our toes, the more we waltz them gaily round the room. I would like to think that the newly fortified Age columnists are representative of the culture's mood, but, if I had to bet, I'd put my money on Kennedy: anyone can be tolerant of the tolerant, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti masochists. Australia's old cultural cringe had a certain market rationality; the new multicultural cringe is pure nihilism.

Needless to say, read the rest.

Update (1/15/06): The above link to Steyn's article in The Australian has expired, but full text available here.

Troy Aikman, Michael Irvin and Emmitt Smith, were the famed "Triplets" who brought three Super Bowl trophies to the Dallas Cowboys in the 1990s. (And thanks to Irvin's antics, a fair amount of infamy as well.) Fittingly, they're being inducted into the Ring of Honor that circles the luxury suites at the Cowboys' Texas Stadium on Monday night as a trio, September 19th, at halftime.

That game is the Cowboys' home opener against the Washington Redskins, the Cowboys' historic nemesis, against whom the Triplets wreaked such havoc in the mid-'90s. Cowboys owner Jerry Jones is giving up three separate very big paydays by inducting them as a group, rather than risking that one man being seen (especially by the NFL's Hall of Fame committee) as more deserving than the others by going in first.

No word yet if the Triplets will come running out at halftime from a tunnel with a bobbing inflatable Cowboys helmet festooned with Levitra ads and oozing dry ice...

Not very much, writes Orrin Judd in his review of Thomas Frank's book of the same name.

England's leftwing Guardian has sacked Dilpazier Aslam, their "sassy" moral equivocator, and, as Scott Burgess noted ten days ago on his Daily Ablution blog, a self-professed operative of the radical Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir.

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