I have a review of this impressive suite of recording plug-ins, from the folks that brought you the Antares Auto-Tune program, over at Blogcritics.

Yesterday, I dusted off a John Leo op-ed from two years ago, in which he wrote, "We seem to be in the midst of a campaign to take down high-profile conservatives":

William Bennett went down too, for his over-the-top slot-machine gambling. He did it himself, of course, but the only moral rule always observed in Las Vegas casinos is Thou Shalt Never Reveal How Much the Heavy Roller Hath Lost. That rule was somehow suspended in Bennett's case. The total amount of his losses, $8 million, was somehow fed to the media. Curious, no?

I think I must have inadvertently put the hex on Bill Bennett last night. Today, as you no doubt already know, he was attacked out of context for remarks he made on his radio show. As Nick Schulz, my editor at Tech Central Station writes:

Bill Clinton claimed while he was president that he wanted to have a "national conversation on race." Perhaps he was being sincere. But it's plain from recent events that hardly anyone else in this country really, truly wants to have a "conversation" on this topic. If the mindless, knee-jerk reaction to Bennett's remarks -- including from places like the White House -- is any indicator, no one has any interest in an honest discussion of race.

Perhaps it's nothing new, but we live in a time where uncomfortable truths -- even challenging questions -- are to be shouted down and, if possible, driven from the public square. Harvard University's Larry Summers discovered this recently. Now Bill Bennett is on the receiving end of this same idiotarian nonsense. America is the worse for it. Thank goodness some liberals were honest enough to defend him. Let's hope others see fit to do the same.

Jeff Goldstein also has a great take:

For those of you who wish to dismiss this kerfuffle as the consequence of a soundbite culture about which Bennett, as a political pro, needs to be more cognizant, let me remind you that the way we find ourselves in a soundbite culture to begin with is that we’ve traded context and original intent for brevity and the kind of resignification that comes when an editor decides what to show us is representative of an original utterance. Part of this is the nature of the media beast; which is why it is so important that we be able to trust those who are doing the initial interpreting for us.

Trust the media beast? Sorry, it's going to be quite a while before I do that again.

Here's two otherwise unrelated posts which demonstrated how limited speech can be these days on campus. First up, Stefan Beck looks at "God and Man at Dartmouth":

Yesterday I wrote on NRO about a recent (actually, ongoing) dust-up at Dartmouth College. The short form is this: Noah Riner, the president of the student body, gave a convocation speech to the class of '09. The speech mentioned Jesus--and all hell broke loose:

Surely nothing as banal, as reliably soporific, as Riner's address could rankle anyone. Surely people didn't even listen to these things. As it happens, I couldn't have been more wrong. The bored work in mysterious ways, and a number of Dartmouth students saw the speech as a fine occasion for an attention-grabbing moral tantrum. The Daily Dartmouth's "Verbum Ultimum" allowed that "Riner had every right, as a member of a community that values the freedom of speech, to speak freely about what matters to him." But he chose an "inappropriate forum" — perish the thought — and "[preached] his faith from a commandeered pulpit." Clearly, Riner is corrupting the youth of Hanover. Somebody fetch the hemlock.

Meanwhile, Evan Coyne Maloney writes that the words "hunting terrorists" are now apparently verboten at Bucknell:

Two words. At Bucknell University, that's all it takes to get dragged into the President's Office for a half-hour discussion of word choice. And these aren't offensive words, at least not out here in the real world. But Bucknell apparently has a different definition of what is and is not acceptable.

On August 29th, the Bucknell University Conservatives Club sent out a campus-wide e-mail announcing an upcoming speaker: Major John Krenson, who had been in Afghanistan "hunting terrorists." Those two words--"hunting terrorists"--resulted in three students being called to Bucknell's Office of the President by Kathy Owens, the Executive Assistant to the President.

According to the students, when they arrived at the President's Office for the meeting, Ms. Owens held up a print-out of the offending e-mail and said "we have a problem here," telling the students that the words "hunting terrorists" were offensive. For the next half-hour, the three students were given a lecture on inappropriate phrasing.

(When contacted, Ms. Owens did acknowledge that the meeting took place, but refused to answer any questions about what transpired. She did not deny the account of the students.)

Last year, while collecting footage for my upcoming film Indoctrinate U, I noticed that the campus was plastered with flyers that screamed "vagina" in large block letters. Although some people might find these flyers offensive, it is protected speech at Bucknell--as it should be--but apparently the phrase "hunting terrorists" is not.

(Perhaps someone should remind Bucknell's administrators that the American soldiers who are "hunting terrorists" are fighting the very sort of misogynistic thugs who would gladly stone a woman to death for talking about her vagina in public.)

For years, Bucknell has denied that it has a speech code, the speech-stifling regulations that many schools use to punish political speech they don't like. But if Bucknell isn't in the business of restricting free speech, then why did these students have to spend 30 minutes listening to criticisms of the phrase "hunting terrorists"?

Most students I know would prefer not to spend their time defending their speech in front of highly-placed university administrators. By taking this action, the Bucknell administration is sending a signal to students: say only those things we approve of, or we will hassle you. The long-term effect will be that students will think twice before engaging in political speech that they know will be unpopular with the administration.

Long ago, in an education system far, far away, college was a place where vocabularies were expanded, not compacted. But then to some on the left, it's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.

Debra Orin writes that Congressman Charlie Rangel (D-NY) has an advanced case of BDS--and it's getting the better of him:

Read More »

...and the Blogosphere no blogger: Pete Townshend is serializing his upcoming novel by posting chapters on his own blog.

(Which, in perfect synchronicity, I discovered whilst burning my copy of 30 Years of Maximum R&B, a laser disc of live performances by The Who, to DVD-RW.)

One of the great Freudian slips of all time was uttered by the New York Times' former editor Howell Raines a few years ago, concerning the Times' push for greater diversity in the newsroom:

"This campaign has made our staff better and, more importantly, more diverse."

But how diverse is the culture of the typical newsroom? On Hugh Hewitt's Thursday show, Mark Steyn had some fascinating comments on the monolithic groupthink that pervades the legacy media:

I was once, a couple of years back, I was talking to a couple of journalists in New York, and they were asking whether I was going to be back in town for something. I said I wouldn't be able to, because I was going hunting. And they were stunned. Their jaws hit the floor.

HH: Yes, stunned.

MS: Now millions of Americans own guns. Millions of Americans are evangelical or Christian. Millions of Americans oppose abortion. But how many of those millions of Americans would find kindred spirits in the average New York Times or Washington Post or CBS Newsrooms?

HH: Exactly. When I was at the Columbia School of Journalism last week, I quizzed a group of students, sixteen, how many owned a gun? None. How many had been to church in the last month? Three. How many voted for Kerry? All but three who were not American citizens. It is an intake valve that is permanently stuck on left of center. And as a result, that's what happens to the media.

What's the cure? Tough to complain about groupthink looking over the profiles that have been going up over the past few weeks over at Pajamas Media. Any consortium that includes David Corn, Tammy Bruce, Baldilocks and myself, well...

To paraphrase Howlin' Wolf, and his prodigies, the Rolling Stones, got media diversity if you want it.

The Michael Moore-ization of the Democratic Party appears to be proceeding apace. Of Roger & Me, Moore's first "documentary", I wrote last year:

Back when I was a film junky, I also remember reading an article in England's Sight and Sound magazine (hardly a bastion of conservatism) that exposed many of the lies in that film as well, which put Moore on the map. Not the least of which was the film's premise: Moore wore a silly cardboard cartoon "PRESS" badge whenever he visited GM, thus ensuring that he'd never meet with Roger Smith--because if he did, there'd be no movie.

Byron York writes that Judge Ronnie Earle, Tom DeLay's bête noire, is in the process of starring in a pseudo-documentary of his own that's planned as an inversion of Moore's concept:

For the last two years, as he pursued the investigation that led to Wednesday's indictment of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Travis County, Texas prosecutor Ronnie Earle has given a film crew "extraordinary access" to make a motion picture about his work on the case.

The resulting film is called The Big Buy, made by Texas filmmakers Mark Birnbaum and Jim Schermbeck. "Raymond Chandler meets Willie Nelson on the corner of Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue in The Big Buy, a Texas noir political detective story that chronicles what some are calling a 'bloodless coup with corporate cash,'" reads a description of the picture on Birnbaum's website, markbirnbaum.com. The film, according to the description, "follows maverick Austin DA Ronnie Earle's investigation into what really happened when corporate money joined forces with relentless political ambitions to help swing the pivotal 2002 Texas elections, cementing Republican control from Austin to Washington DC."

"We approached him [Earle], and he offered us extraordinary access to him and, to an extent, to his staff," Birnbaum told National Review Online Thursday. "We've been shooting for about two years."

DeLay's indictment yesterday is a prerequisite of the film: As Orrin Judd concludes, "One hates to be too cynical, but it's pretty basic: no indictment, no movie".

Meanwhile, Bryan Preston of Junk Yard Blog writes:

You want a conspiracy, I'll show you a conspiracy. The mid-terms are a year out. We now have House Majority Leader Tom Delay indicted by one of the most partisan prosecutors in the US. We have the Senate Majority Leader under fire for a stock sale. We have the abuse of Maryland Lt Gov Michael Steele's SSN to get his credit report--no doubt a fishing expedition to find dirt to fling at him when he runs for the Senate. All of this is going on at the same time, and while in Florida Rush Limbaugh is fighting off a partisan invasion of privacy and prosecution meant to bring him down.

This is starting to look like a concerted effort to criminalize Republicans out of office while silencing our pundits.

I'm not sure how much I agree with Bryan's conclusions, and I think John Hawkins makes some great points about DeLay's inability to trim governmental pork, but Bryan's post was a strong reminder of something US News & World Report's John Leo wrote back around this time in 2003, a year before a national election with even higher stakes:

We seem to be in the midst of a campaign to take down high-profile conservatives. The gay lobby did a job on Dr. Laura, in effect getting her new TV show canceled and portraying her as a hater for holding the traditional Judeo-Christian view of homosexuality. She is brusque and blunt, but no hater. There is plenty of testimony on the record about her kindness to gays and the help she gave to PFLAG, Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. But the gay lobby took her down anyway.

William Bennett went down too, for his over-the-top slot-machine gambling. He did it himself, of course, but the only moral rule always observed in Las Vegas casinos is Thou Shalt Never Reveal How Much the Heavy Roller Hath Lost. That rule was somehow suspended in Bennett's case. The total amount of his losses, $8 million, was somehow fed to the media. Curious, no?

John Fund, the very talented conservative journalist, got the treatment as well. He was smeared as a wife-beater. Eric Alterman, the liberal commentator, helped clear the air with a piece in the Nation headlined, 'Who Framed John Fund?' Alterman's question for the left was this: Who do we want to be, people who try to destroy opponents or people who act on principle? It's a good question for the right, too, and for everyone now poised to jump into the Limbaugh case.

As I wrote back then:

Perhaps, having gotten a taste of the politics of personal destruction in Washington, the press need fresh kills, and are expanding their hunting grounds to include any figure whose opinions they disagree with.

And evidently, the political left appears to be following their media colleagues with a similar tactic: if you can't beat 'em at the ballot box--you take 'em to court.

The Anchoress links to several bloggers in this post, including Neo-neocon's thoughts on how Gandhi's pacifism would have permitted the Holocaust (something that would come as no surprise to George Orwell, of course), and my own look at Hollywood's box office slumps of today and twenty years ago.

Just to tie those two seemingly disparate threads together, here's a link to 1983's "The Gandhi Nobody Knows", undoubtedly one of the most incredible film reviews ever written.

In the post below, P.J. O'Rourke said, "I don't think that a person is left wing or right wing according to whether or not they are compassionate". Tammy Bruce is someone to whom that adjective certainly applies, and is finding herself, like many of the writers associated with Pajamas Media, with opinions that transcend those on both the far left and the far right. Her profile is currently attop the Pajamas Media homepage, and it includes this amazing quote:

In 1998 I took Bill Cosby's wife to task for saying her son's killer was "taught by America to hate black people." Here you had a woman from one of the richest couples in the world -- a person whose family has really experienced the love of the American people -- making an outrageous claim. My calling attention to that was forbidden, and as a result I lost my radio gig at a previous station I worked for. There's a reticence in dealing with racial issues because of racist attitudes that in many cases emanate from the black elite. The real racism is not what Mrs. Cosby imagined, it is in allowing the left to continue to condemn people of color to the ghettos of victimhood and marginalization.

Now that's a soundbite.

(And to be fair, while I don't know anything about his wife's current opinions, Bill Cosby does seem to get the message these days.)

It's probably over a decade old, but I just tripped over this quote from P.J. O'Rourke, and think that both the question and its response speaks volumes about contemporary American politics:

You seem to take a distinct relish in propagating the image of yourself as a son-of-a-bitch Republican. Yet much of your writing is distinctly humanitarian in places... "Well, both of those things are true. People on this side of the Atlantic get confused about political conservatism. It is not an excuse for selfishness. I don't think that a person is left wing or right wing according to whether or not they are compassionate. A lot of people on the left, especially the more po-faced ones, have worked that angle. Lots of people are right wing because they're selfish, there's no doubt about that - I can't defend that, I can only point out lots of people are left-wing because they're selfish too. The Hilary Clinton world-view is bossing people around on the basis of a supposed virtuousness - "I care more than you care - therefore I'm going to boss you around." If they couldn't operate that system, then no other system would suit."

The rest of the interview's amusing as well, especially the punchline of O'Rourke's story about the late Hunter S. Thompson.

Back in late June, at the beginning of Hollywood's summer slump, I wrote:

I wouldn't have as much of a problem with any of the post-9/11 films, if there was some balance. Nobody begrudged Hollywood producing anti-war films like Paths of Glory or All Quiet On The Western Front (both superb pictures of course, especially the former), as long as we were also getting Casablanca and 30 Seconds Over Tokyo. Even as late as the 1980s, Hollywood could gave its audiences both Platoon and Cruise's own Top Gun.

Speaking of the mid-1980s, Hollywood screenwriter Craig Titley, whose credits include Scooby-Doo and Cheaper by the Dozen, looks at some interesting similarities between Tinseltown's box office slumps in 2005 and 1985:

Let’s fire up the Flux Capaciter, program our DeLorean time machine for 1985, and go in search of lessons to bring back to the future.

Like the bizarre series of similarities found in the Lincoln/Kennedy assassinations, the box office “assassinations” of 1985 and 2005 share some eerie similarities and coincidences.

Both slumps began in a year following the November re-election of a president who was despised by the coasts, the media, and Bruce Springsteen. Both of these re-elected presidents liked to wear cowboy hats and boots. Both presided over ambiguous, hard-to-define wars: the Cold War, the War on Terror. During both campaigns the who’s-who of hip Hollywood actors (who now probably need hip replacement) such as Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, Jane Fonda, Barbara Streisand and Ed Asner came out in support of their guy (hint: not the one in the cowboy hat).

The cowboy candidates, then and now, had Chuck Norris. During both campaigns, Bruce Springsteen took a tour on the road to encourage people not to vote for the guy in the cowboy hat. The “bad guys” in the world--Godless Russian commies in the 80’s; Our-God-4-Allah-ya Islamic Terrorists in the 00’s--also didn’t want the guy in the cowboy hat to win. But they didn’t particularly care for Springsteen either.

It doesn’t take Doc Brown to see that the national landscapes preceding the B.O. slumps were as alike as two Rob Schneider movies.

There are also similarities in the reason given for the slumps. The Hollywood-Know-It-Alls in the panic induced by both the Slump of ’85 and the current Slump of ’05, were quick to finger all the new-fangled home entertainment technology as the culprit. In 1985 videocassettes, VCRs, Commodore home computers, and Ms. Pac-Man were allegedly sucking us away from theaters. In 2005 DVDs, plasma screen televisions, chat rooms, and “Destroy All Humans” are supposedly doing the job. In 1985, this proved to be untrue as Hollywood rebounded and had some of the best years of its life in the tech-filled decades to come. It’s untrue now as well.

So what caused the slump of ’85? And what is causing the Slump of ‘05? The eerily similar political climates preceding the slumps have led some to suggest that moviegoers who liked the guy in the cowboy hat were holding a grudge against Hollywood by staying away from the multiplexes. After all, even in a landslide election, the nation is pretty much evenly split between the reds and the blues.

Publicly picking a side is bound to alienate you from half of everyone. If just a small percentage of these moviegoers turned their backs on Hollywood, it could have a devastating effect on the bottom line.

Read the rest--Titley's diagnosis and his prescription are both spot-on.

(Found via Libertas.)

In Liar's Poker, Michael Lewis' brilliant, Plimptonesque look back at his mid-'80s tour of duty with Salomon Brothers, Lewis wrote that when necessary, he and his fellow bond traders would "jam" bonds down their customers' throats. These were typically corporate bonds with lower yields or credit ratings, and Salomon's sales managers would encourage their salesmen to use as much verbal force as appropriate to make a sale. As Lewis wrote:

"I had made the mistake of trusting a Salomon Brothers trader. He had drawn on the pooled ignorance of myself and my first customer to unload one of his mistakes. He had saved himself, and our firm, $60,000. I was at once furious and disillusioned. But that didn't solve the problem. . . . Bellyaching would. . . make me look a fool, as if I had actually thought the customer was going to make money on the [bonds]. How could anyone be so stupid as to trust a trader? The best thing I could do was pretend to others at Salomon that I meant to screw the customer. People would respect that. That was called 'jamming.' I had just jammed bonds, albeit unknowingly, for the first time."

Beginning, arguably, with Walter Cronkite's calling the Tet Offensive a military failure, the mainstream media has had a long history of jamming news stories--frequently with a poor credit rating of their own in terms of their honesty attached to them--down their audiences' throats, rather than living up to their self-proclaimed motto of being objective and unbiased.

That's what CBS tried to do last year with a story that ultimately boomeranged so badly against them, it was dubbed "Ra^therGate", complete with superscript "th", to remind readers of Dan Rather and producer Mary Mapes' folly.

Lewis would occasionally refer in Liar's Poker to the out-of-touch "ozone layer" of Salomon's management, clueless as to what their salesmen and traders needed to succeed. The quotes yesterday from Mapes and Rather are a reminder at just how clueless the ozone layer of CBS' then-management was. As for Rather's what's-the-frequency remarks, Duane Patterson has fisked them within an inch of their life. To the point where he feels sorry ("Elder Abuse" is the name of Duane's post) about deciphering the mutterings of a now aged man who for decades has made Ted Baxter seem like Edward R. Murrow.

But let's take a look at Mapes' classic quotes, including this one, describing her "incredulous" reaction to the response of the Blogosphere, and Internet forums like Freerepublic.com, to the 60 Minutes II show that she built around forged documents:

Within a few minutes, I was online visiting Web sites I had never heard of before: Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, Power Line. They were hard-core, politically angry, hyperconservative sites loaded with vitriol about Dan Rather and CBS.

Has any individual, or any organization, ever been called "hyperliberal" by any reporter or anchorman at CBS?

Is Mapes aware that she's ceding half her show's potential audience by tossing aside the complaints of the Freepers, the Lizardoids, the readers of Power Line, and by extension, everyone else who considers him or herself a conservative? Is she aware of out of touch she makes herself sound, when she claims she hasn't heard of any of these sites, three quarters of the way into an election year dominated--even before Ra^therGate--with Internet and blog-oriented stories?

And you cannot claim to have an anchorman who is free of bias and not "loaded with vitriol" when you let him go on the air and say things like this, in an editorial-masking-as-reporting was delivered seemingly as "the first draft of history" to millions of Sunday viewers watching the second half of NFL doubleheaders--viewers of all political persuasions, not the readers of The New Republic or The Nation, where Dan's editorializing would have been perfectly appropriate and right at home with its bias.

But that was back in November of 2000. Let's return to Rather's producer's words from this year concerning her efforts last September:

Our work was being compared to that of Jayson Blair, the discredited New York Times reporter who had fabricated and plagiarized stories.

Yes, that's precisely right.

This is the one instance where Mary is spot-on, and she has no idea how accurate she is about the connection with another big media fabulist who masqueraded as a reporter. As Mark Steyn writes:

Yes, the US media is overwhelmingly "liberal" but it's also slow, dull, arthritic and bureaucratic. Hence, Ms Mapes' bewilderment at how the rest of the world managed to identify within seconds the obvious fakeness of her documents despite the "months" of "analysis" CBS devoted to them.

What Mary and Dan still don't seem to understand is that when you try to jam news stories these days via the press or television, there's now a whole nation of citizen journalists--some who are amateurs, some who are pros, many of whom are bloggers, but some simply members of online forums--who are examining your efforts, and determining whether they're fair, or you're trying to play liar's poker with us.

Update: Welcome readers of Hugh Hewitt and his producer, "Generalissimo" Duane. Please look around; we're sure you'll find plenty of other posts you'll enjoy.

First up, by way of Vodkapundit, here's Ralph Peters in USA Today on "the true symbols of the War on Terror":

The greatest social revolution in history is underway all around us: The emancipation of women. Advanced in our own society, elsewhere the battle for women's rights lies at the heart of colossal struggles over the future of great religions and civilizations.
The Washington establishment would shrink from any such claim, but the Global War on Terror is a fight over the social, economic and cultural roles of women. The core issues for the terrorists are the interpretation of God's will and the continued oppression of women. Nothing so threatens Islamic extremists as the freedom Western women enjoy.

Equal partners

The sudden transition of women from men's property to men's partners in our own country unleashed dazzling creative energies. In the historical blink of an eye, we doubled our effective human capital — and made our society immeasurably more humane. Our half-century of stunning economic growth has many roots, but none goes deeper than the expansion of opportunities for women.

But such unprecedented freedom threatens traditional societies. Behavior patterns that prevailed for millennia are suddenly in doubt. Relationships that granted males the power of life and death over female relatives have disappeared from successful cultures. Defensively, the failing cultures left behind cling harder than ever to the old ways amid the tumult of global change.

The true symbols of the War on Terror are the Islamic veil and the two-piece woman's business suit.

The math is basic. No civilization that excludes half its population from full participation in society and the economy can compete with the United States and its key allies. Yet Middle Eastern societies, especially, have dug in their heels to resist change. Some, such as Turkey, Pakistan and Iran, have tumbled backward.

Islamist terrorists have formed the last, great boy's club, meeting in caves and warning girls to stay out — or, in the case of the 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, demanding that women be kept from his grave to avoid polluting it. Their vision offers women fewer rights by far than those enjoyed by the wives of the prophet Mohammed. They are women-hating sadists for whom faith is an excuse. Their fears are primal.

What does The New York Times think of Peters' take?

JIDDA, Saudi Arabia, Sept. 27 - The audience - 500 women covered in black at a Saudi university - seemed an ideal place for Karen P. Hughes, a senior Bush administration official charged with spreading the American message in the Muslim world, to make her pitch.

But the response on Tuesday was not what she and her aides expected. When Ms. Hughes expressed the hope here that Saudi women would be able to drive and “fully participate in society” much as they do in her country, many challenged her.

“The general image of the Arab woman is that she isn’t happy,” one audience member said. “Well, we’re all pretty happy.” The room, full of students, faculty members and some professionals, resounded with applause.

Last year, then-Times ombudsman Daniel Okrent rocked the newspaper industry when he finally admitted the obvious:

Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?

Of course it is.

Charles Johnson writes, "The New York Times would like us to know that Saudi women are perfectly happy living inside black sacks, unable to drive cars or even leave the house without a man’s permission".

On what planet is that acceptable to any liberal society--no matter how you define the L-word??

In Tech Central Station, Ilya Shapiro writes that "Like the bedraggled patriarch in My Big Fat Greek Wedding who can't make sense of why his daughter would ever want to leave the fold, Europeans cannot for the love of Zeus understand why the world does not pay constant homage to their clear superiority":

This European descent has very little to do with growing anti-Americanism -- that is but a symptom -- and everything to do with the inability (and unwillingness) to grapple with the internal contradictions of the European economic and social models. Look at Europe's two latest political debacles, the EU constitution and last week's German election. French voters rejected the former because they feared it would force them to change their anachronous ways, while their German counterparts punished both a socialist chancellor who deigned propose modest reforms and a would-be successor who wanted the country's economic policies to make economic sense.

Shamefully, the European Union's constitution did not fail because citizens blanched at a retrenchment of sclerotic Eurocracy (quite the opposite). Appallingly, Gerhard Schröder's biggest losses were to the unreconstructed communists and other disaffected leftists -- for whom even the existing labor and tax laws are too "Anglo-American."

To repeat what has become an unfortunate cliché, Europe is dying -- literally (in terms of population) and figuratively (in terms of living standards, social cohesion, and economic growth). The United States meanwhile, while not without its own problems and pathologies, is prospering.

Robert Kagan identified the trans-Atlantic divergence in his prescient Of Paradise and Power, a sort of "America is from Mars, Europe is from Venus" approach to geopolitics. The United States sees itself as idealistic, man's last best hope for freedom -- a freedom worth fighting and dying for. Europe, pacifistic and cynical, wants nothing more than to conduct business as usual (under America's protective umbrella) -- and send diplomats to bargain with terrorists and tyrants.

The latest issue of American Enterprise magazine goes further, by detailing this rift at the socio-economic level in a series of stories on "Red America, Blue Europe." As Karl Zinsmeister shrewdly writes:

"The irony is that for all their insistence on portraying the U.S. as a land of fired workers, poverty, and economic insecurity, it is now Europe where unemployment is twice as high and four times as deep, where immigrants and the young have far fewer openings, where the ladder of upward mobility has fallen to pieces."

Mark Steyn recently summed up Europe's demise thusly: "The hyper-rationalism of post-Christian Europe turns out to be wholly irrational: what's the point of creating a secular utopia if it's only for one generation?"

John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk were two jazz masters who only played together (in Monk's quartet) for five months in 1957. For almost 50 years, there were no commercial recordings documenting the pairing. That all changed today, according to Zan Stewart of Newark, NJ's Star-Ledger:

The release this Tuesday of the quartet's stunningly vivid, deeply musical performance at Carnegie Hall on Nov. 29, 1957 -- to be issued as "Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall" on Thelonious Records, distributed by Blue Note Records -- is a bona fide marquee jazz event.

The CD is presented in startlingly clear, you-are-there audio, as a jazz master, his disciple -- a jazz master-to-be -- and their cohorts, bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik and drummer Shadow Wilson, play with emotion, passion, depth and blazing-hard swing on several of Monk's superb originals and one pop standard.

Monk, then 40, and Coltrane, 31, both jump-started their careers in that band. Monk, a founder of modern jazz, had returned to prominence with the Five Spot gig (he had had his cabaret card, necessary to play in most New York nightspots, revoked from 1951-57). Coltrane, known for his work with Miles Davis from 1955-57, had recently quit both heroin and drinking. Both men were creatively revitalized.

Their portion of the concert -- a benefit for the now-defunct Morningside Community Center in Harlem that also spotlighted Ray Charles, Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, Billie Holiday and others -- consisted of two sets, approximately 25 minutes each. The sets are complete on the CD, save a fade toward the end of the last number of the second set.

The setlist included the opening Monk ballad, "Monk's Mood," a mix of tenderness and ardor; the bustling "Blue Monk," with romping improvisations from the leader and his saxophonist; the majestic "Crepuscule with Nellie," dedicated to Monk's wife; and the evergreen "Sweet and Lovely," outfitted with an arrangement where Coltrane again unleashes streams of notes, unveiling a style that was later dubbed "sheets of sound."

Throughout, Monk the pianist is stunning, playing with dynamism, invention and commanding sound, a performance that should forever silence those who have said he was not a top-rate pianist, or that he lacked technique.

How this recording -- originally taped by the Voice of America (the U.S. Government's international multimedia broadcast service) but apparently never broadcast -- was unearthed is a story that unfolded gradually.

Read the rest.

(Also on Blogcritics.)

I'm serving as the crash test dummy beta-beta-tester of the Pajamas Media blogger ads. So if the site looks or acts funny, it's probably as an unintentional result of that.

Of course if the actual writing on the site is funny--then it's an intentional byproduct of its owner and his skillful wordplay...

As Glenn Reynolds once wrote, "Bush's ability to drive his opponents stark, raving bonkers is almost supernatural".

One of the ways that the president drives the media insane is by simply ignoring them--the very worst thing you can do to a preening ego amplified by megawatts of network superhype. As Congressman Peter King (R-NY) told Chris Matthews yesterday:

Chris, you won't give me a chance to answer the questions. Just because the president doesn't watch you on television, it doesn't mean he's not doing his job. You know, Franklin Roosevelt wasn't hired to listen to radio accounts of D-Day. You're hired to do the job, and the president can do his job without having to listen to Chris Matthews or Andrea Mitchell or Tim Russert, or any of the others.

Duane Patterson writes:

Thud. Matthews hits the canvas hard after the knockout blow by King. The ref waives off the fight. The doc is in the ring hovering over Matthews. The smelling salts come out. Matthews spent the rest of the segment in a stupor, trying to regain composure, repeating Halliburton over and over again with his speech still a little slurred.

Congressman King, very nice line. Probably the line of the week. You have made Lt. Gen. Honore' proud.

Chris Matthews, you should know what is coming next. You are stuck on stupid!

Ouch.

As Wizbang notes, unlike the San Francisco Chronicle, the members of the Conservative Undergound forum know how to use Google.

As I noted earlier this year, the long tail of the Internet (which includes both one-man blogs and several thousand member forums) is a concept that the mainstream media simply does not understand. "They've never worried about the tail, ever", Hugh Hewitt once told me. "And now they've got the tail just eating them, all day, 24/7."

Update: Found via Instapundit, Clayton Cramer explores the Moby angle, adding:

It makes you wonder, doesn't it, if the reason that the left is so focused on calling Bush a liar has something to do with projection? This crowd can't be bothered with telling the truth about even something as trivial as their party affiliation.

Indeed, as The Blogfather would say.

Obviously, Joe Namath, at age 62, is entirely too old to quarterback. But evidently, at age 41, Vinny Testaverde isn't. Broadway Vinny spent last season in a stopgap role at the Dallas Cowboys after Quincy Carter was released, and is apparently poised for similar service back at his old team, the New York Jets, to replace Chad Pennington, who's out for the season with a shoulder injury.

The Anchoress has some thoughts on artificially-created media phenomenon, and what happens when they've outlived their usefulness:

I can’t think of anything that seems to destroy people’s mental health faster than a few weeks or months of uncritical, gushing media hype. Think about the people you see in the news, day after day, gathering unconditional praise and coverage from the press. They lose themselves, lose their minds, and they are rarely ever the same after the adulation stops. In fact, I can only think of one person who got caught up in the destructive swirl of relentless positive press reportage and managed to find his way back to sanity, and that would be Sen. Joe Lieberman, and perhaps - I am only saying PERHAPS - his faith has something to do with his re-bound.

The rest of them, once courted, feted, promoted, celebrated, hyped and carried by the press have a very difficult time of it.

Sen. John Kerry, a truly terrible presidential candidate, cold, stiff and barely articulate had months and months of uncritical love. Months of the press never asking him a single difficult question, months of the press scurrying to fight his battles, discredit his critics and pat him on the back after soft-ball interviews. He had the press basically promising him a 10-15% advantage for their coverage - a promise which it does seem they delivered on.

When he still lost, and lost soundly, and all of the microphones and cameras went away, he couldn’t seem to believe it. After a nearly silent 20-year career in the Senate during which he did little more than write bills recognizing special days for special people, Kerry was suddenly opining on everything, calling press conferences and issuing statements, and yet the press was not loving him as it had. They barely noticed him. He was back to being a “local paper” story instead of a national figure. He hasn’t been the same, since.

Sen. John McCain discovered he could make the press “love” him by criticizing his party and not merely working with the opposition but shoving his metaphorical tongue down their metaphorical throats. He became the media darling of 1999 and 2000, with endless magazine covers, endless gushing interviews with Katie and Diane and Oprah, endless furrowed-brow talks with Ted Koppel. The “Maverick” became the only acceptable sort of GOP candidate and - for many in the press - a palatable alternative to Al Gore, who was becoming problematic, what with Buddhist nuns, controlling legal authorities, Clinton-fatigue and spots of embarrassing exaggerations regarding his personal life and his “inventiveness.”

When the press reluctantly left McCain behind to cover the actual GOP candidate, McCain was smart enough to realize that all he ever had to do to call them back and bask in the warmth of their klieg lights was to step left-and-lively, and he has done it ever since. He cannot stop himself. Those lights, those microphones, those headlines and all that unequivical approval - it’s heady stuff to a guy who crashed 3 planes.

Al Gore - well, what can be said about poor Al Gore? Told by the press, over and over, that he was gyped, even after a consortium of papers did themselves concede that he lost in 2000, he seems like a gas leak in search of a pilot light. But he’ll always have Paul Krugman.

I cannot even imagine what will happen to any Clinton for whom the uncritical praise ends.

And now, we see Mother Sheehan - an utter media creation who burnished her genuine tragedy with an ability to cry-on-cue, but who has long-since overplayed the “grieving mother” hand and become all about preening and performing for the camera. Yesterday people losing lives and livelihoods to a storm were mere peons interferring with her scheduled adulation. Today she got herself arrested, smiling the whole while and still quite certain that the constitution which guarentees her the right to self-destruct in an endless loop on CNN, is a constitution that is not worth dying for.

Can a posing session for Playboy be far behind? [Shudder--Ed] That’s where all the sad she-clowns go when they’re usefulness has ended, isn’t it?

Once again, repeat after me - it is amazing how much destruction is wrought because of a need to feel loved.

One of the great things about blogs commenting on the media is that they reveal how much news is manufactured, rather than neutrally reported.

Last year, Charles Krauthammer coined his "Pressure Cooker Theory" for the explosion of hatred from the left, after an all-too-brief respite in the culture war after 9/11:

The loathing goes far beyond the politicians. Liberals as a body have gone quite around the twist. I count one all-star rock tour, three movies, four current theatrical productions and five best sellers (a full one-third of the New York Times list) variously devoted to ridiculing, denigrating, attacking and devaluing this president, this presidency and all who might, God knows why, support it.

How to explain? With apologies to Dr. Freud, I propose the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release.

The hostility, resentment, envy and disdain, all superheated in Florida, were not permitted their natural discharge. Came 9/11 and a lid was forced down. How can you seek revenge for a stolen election by a nitwit usurper when all of a sudden we are at war and the people, bless them, are rallying around the flag and hailing the commander in chief? With Bush riding high in the polls, with flags flying from pickup trucks (many of the flags, according to Howard Dean, Confederate), the president was untouchable.

The Democrats fell unnaturally silent. For two long, agonizing years, they had to stifle and suppress. It was the most serious case of repression since Freud's Anna O. went limp. The forced deference nearly killed them. And then, providentially, they were saved. The clouds parted and bad news rained down like manna: WMDs, Abu Ghraib, Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, Joe Wilson and, most important, continued fighting in Iraq.

Stripped of his halo, the president's ratings went down. The spell was broken. He was finally once again human and vulnerable. With immense relief, the critics let loose.

A very large component of what President Bush's critics let loose with have been non-stop comparisons of President Bush with Adolf Hitler, and America in general with Nazi Germany. Both of which are disgusting examples of moral equivalence that are subtle--and sometimes not so-subtle--forms of Holocaust denial, which Jonah Goldberg noted when the first "Bush=Hitler" ads appeared courtesy of Moveon.org in late 2003:

I don't say this because I feel a passionate need to defend George Bush. I would make the exact same points if Al Gore were president. I would make the exact same points if anybody running for the Democratic nomination were president. This has nothing to do with partisanship. It has to do with the fact that such comparisons are slanderous to the United States and historical truth and amount to Holocaust denial. When you say that anything George Bush has done is akin to what Hitler did, you make the Holocaust into nothing more than an example of partisan excess. Tax cuts are not genocide, as so many Democrats have suggested over the years. (For example,. during the Contract with America debate, Charles Rangel complained that "Hitler wasn't even talking about doing these things" that were in the Contract with America. In other words, the Contract with America was in some way worse than what Hitler did. At the end of the day, that is Holocaust denial.)

"Darn those Republicans" does not equal "Darn those Nazis." The Patriot Act is not the final solution. The handful of men in Guantanamo may not all be guilty of terrorism, but it's more than reasonable to assume they are. And no matter how you try to contort it, Gitmo is not the same thing as Auschwitz or Dachau. There are no children there. You don't get carted off to Cuba and gassed if you criticize the president or if you are one-quarter Muslim. And, inversely, there was no reasonable justification for throwing the Jews and the Gypsies and all the others into the death camps. The Jews weren't terrorists or members of a terrorist organization. To say that the men in Guantanamo — or any of the Muslims being politely interviewed by appointment — are akin to the Jews of Germany is to trivialize the experiences of the millions who were slaughtered. Even if you think Muslims are being unfairly inconvenienced, when you say they are the Jews of Nazified America you are in essence saying the worst crime of the Holocaust was to unfairly inconvenience the Jews.

Since shortly after this blog started, we've been documenting the many examples of Godwin's Law violations as they've occurred, but it took until today for us to give them their own category. If your stomach is up to the task, click here and start scrolling to read its archives.

(Of course, I can understand if you'd rather not. Seeing all those examples of horrendous equivalence one after the other is enough to make anyone want to turn his head away from the verbal carnage.)

Update: For even more examples of the left's Reich Stuff, check out The Brothers Judd's "Obligatory Nazi Reference" archives.

Sadly, he's not the second coming of Carnac. But frequent Iowahawk guest-blogger Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi is back to remind us that war is hell--especially when "you're getting a daily enema from infidel Tomahawks"...

Her dream comes true: Cindy Sheehan was arrested today in front of the White House. Mary Katharine catches AP selectively revising updates to the story.

Meanwhile, John Hinderaker writes:

I may be wrong about this, but I don't think it is wise for Sheehan to go out of her way to cultivate associations between her anti-war protest and similar events in the 1960s. I really don't think that images of her being carried away by policemen, hobnobbing with Communists, marching with Joan Baez and Jesse Jackson, etc., are helpful to her cause. I think such actions will cause light bulbs to go on in many Americans' heads as they realize, "Oh, she's one of those!"

Hinderaker also notes a glaring exception to the media's otherwise careful framing of her photographs.

As Mickey Kaus notes, it was nice of the New York Times to level the playing field, by putting its bloviating columnists (and its stuffed moose toys) behind a pay-to-read firewall called TimesSelect:

Conservative kf reader D.A. emails to say she has stopped "enjoying the failure of TimesSelect" and now worries that it is failing too quickly--that soon the NYT will pull the plug, restoring the reach and influence of the paper's predominantly liberal columnists. ... D.A. suggests that

Republicans and right-wingers should sign up now and pay for it, just so NYT management think it's a success and keep it going.

The conservatives could inspire themselves with the thought that they were in essence paying to erect a barrier between the NYT's would-be opinion-shapers and a public that might all-too-easily have its opinions shaped. ... Once the Times columnists' "status as megapundits" has slowly ebbed away,

Then, and only then, Karl Rove can give the word and everyone will stop subscribing to TimesSelect. It won't matter then if the embargo comes down, because people will have gotten along fine without their daily dose of the NYT's correct enlightened thinking.

P.S.: A few days ago I jokingly called for replacing TimesSelect with "TimesDelete," a service that would allow readers to pay to silence their least favorite columnists. D.A.'s email has made me realize how misdirected this proposal was. TimesSelect doesn't need to be replaced by TimesDelete. TimesSelect is TimesDelete! The Times has taken the columnists people are most willing to pay for and removed them from the public discourse on the Web.

And perfect timing--as a whole host of citizen journalists are coming soon to a browser near you!

As Stephen Hayward explained in The Age of Reagan and David Frum in How We Got Here, in 1970, fresh off of championing civil rights for Americans, and then condeming those of the Vietnamese via the anti-war movement, the left turned, in great numbers, to focusing on environmentalism, taking then-needed reforms to extreme measures as an anti-business cudgel. "The 'snail darter' gambit", as Steven Den Beste dubbed it three years ago:

Someone planning to build a dam on your favorite river? Want to stop them? Find yourself some obscure fish living in that river and then get it declared an endangered species. Is the snail darter really all that important? Hell no. It was never about the snail darter. It was about opposing development.

Trying to force someone to stop logging? Wood is good; wood is useful; wood is consumed by this nation in immense quantities. It's not clear that the way it's being harvested now is the best there could be, but that's not what our friends really want. What they want is a complete stop to logging.

If they say "Stop the logging!" they'll get ignored. They've tried that for years. Then they discovered some magic words: "Spotted Owl." (And then a miracle occurred...)

Found via Power Line, the Wall Street Journal looks at the movement's natural consequences, in a piece titled, "The Lawsuit That Sank New Orleans":

After Hurricane Betsy swamped New Orleans in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson stroked its citizens ("this nation grieves for its neighbors") and pledged federal protection. The Army Corps of Engineers designed a Lake Pontchartrain Hurricane Barrier to shield the city with flood gates like those that protect the Netherlands from the North Sea. Congress provided funding and construction began. But work stopped in 1977 when a federal judge ruled, in a suit brought by Save Our Wetlands, that the Corps' environmental impact statement was deficient. Joannes Westerink, a professor of civil engineering at Notre Dame, believes the barrier would have been an "effective barrier" against Katrina's fury.

All this was reported in the Los Angeles Times on Sept. 9. The reactions of environmental advocates and federal agencies show why we would be a lot safer if the federal government did a lot less.

Speaking for environmentalists, the Center for Progressive Reform called the charges in the Los Angeles Times "pure fiction" because the judge stopped construction only until the Corps prepared a satisfactory environmental analysis. The Corps instead dropped the barrier in favor of levees that were less controversial, but which failed. So, the Center argues, fault lies with the Corps' bumbling rather than with the environmentalist lawsuit.

That's not fair. The Corps cannot stop a project, conduct a lengthy study, go back to court, and then be sure it can pick up where it left off. Large federal projects ordinarily cannot proceed unless executives and legislatures at several levels of government agree on the same course of action at the same time. That's why litigation delay can kill necessary projects. However responsibility is apportioned, but for the lawsuit, New Orleans would have had the hurricane barrier.

But the snail darter was saved! C'mon--which is more important??

Update: Hugh Hewitt writes:

Louisiana wants $40 billion in Army Corps of Engineer projects. Whatever the final cost, it will be in billions, and the Senate Republicans should insist that as part of the package, reforms in the federal Endangered Sprecies Act --similar to this that are poised to pass the House-- be included in the appropriation so that the notoriously expense-increasing and private property rights destroying ESA not delay or increase the costs of these projects or other Corps projects across the country. A simple tightening of deadlines widely abused by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service when the Corps "consults" with that agency under the ESA would be a huge step forward.

I agree.

In contrast to Oliver Jones, there's no moral equivalence amongst Poland's voters, who oust the nation's former Communists in parliamentary elections today. As Jayson of PoliPundit quips with tongue-in-cheek, "I’m blaming Walesa, Reagan, and the late Pope for the fact they even have elections in Poland."

Indeed, to coin an adverb.

Via Norman Geras, here's Oliver Jones, in England's far left Guardian:

Compassion is putting yourself in the other person's shoes and feeling sympathy. It does not require affection. One might feel compassion for Hitler, Stalin or Saddam on learning about their appalling childhoods (like most famous dictators, they lost a parent before the age of 14), or even for George Bush (who had a beastly time), but still hate them for what they did.

Evidently, Oliver forgot the atrocities of National Socialism and international Communism in the 20th century. Or as Jonah Goldberg wrote in January of 2004, during Moveon.org's "Bush=Hitler" ads, the first big salvo in what's becoming a now seemingly endless cycle of moral equivalence by the left:

I don't say this because I feel a passionate need to defend George Bush. I would make the exact same points if Al Gore were president. I would make the exact same points if anybody running for the Democratic nomination were president. This has nothing to do with partisanship. It has to do with the fact that such comparisons are slanderous to the United States and historical truth and amount to Holocaust denial. When you say that anything George Bush has done is akin to what Hitler did, you make the Holocaust into nothing more than an example of partisan excess. Tax cuts are not genocide, as so many Democrats have suggested over the years. (For example,. during the Contract with America debate, Charles Rangel complained that "Hitler wasn't even talking about doing these things" that were in the Contract with America. In other words, the Contract with America was in some way worse than what Hitler did. At the end of the day, that is Holocaust denial.)

"Darn those Republicans" does not equal "Darn those Nazis." The Patriot Act is not the final solution. The handful of men in Guantanamo may not all be guilty of terrorism, but it's more than reasonable to assume they are. And no matter how you try to contort it, Gitmo is not the same thing as Auschwitz or Dachau. There are no children there. You don't get carted off to Cuba and gassed if you criticize the president or if you are one-quarter Muslim. And, inversely, there was no reasonable justification for throwing the Jews and the Gypsies and all the others into the death camps. The Jews weren't terrorists or members of a terrorist organization. To say that the men in Guantanamo — or any of the Muslims being politely interviewed by appointment — are akin to the Jews of Germany is to trivialize the experiences of the millions who were slaughtered. Even if you think Muslims are being unfairly inconvenienced, when you say they are the Jews of Nazified America you are in essence saying the worst crime of the Holocaust was to unfairly inconvenience the Jews.

As Norm Geras wrote:

OK, so help me someone. I mean with the 'even'. Oliver James doesn't really think George Bush worse than Hitler or Stalin or... Saddam, does he?

A typo? Carelessness? Too many dinner parties? I'm at a loss.

Nowhere near as big as the one Oliver's having.

The very essence of what my "Return of the Primitive" category is all about is on display in this illustrated, must-read post by Baron Bodissey.

(Via Roger L. Simon.)

John Hawkins grabs his field glasses, to help you identify the four main species Of Democrats.

I'm rather partial to the Old School crowd, myself.

By the way, while Debbie Schlussel does give away spoilers in her post on Flight Plan, be sure to at least scroll to the update of the article, to check out Jodie's dream project: rehabilitating the reputation of Leni Riefenstahl.

No, really! Whitewashing Leni Riefenstahl's place in history was only a matter of time I guess, as all the films airbrushing Che's reputation are becoming old hat.

Just watching the ads for Jodie Foster's Flight Plan, I've felt underwhelmed--there just doesn't seem to be any "there", there; certainly not enough to bother spending $9.00 or so on a ticket.

Debbie Schlussel (via Charles Johnson) writes that actually, it's more of the same "beating around the bush" for Hollywood and the War on Terror.

Whenever I submit the text of a magazine article, I end with three pound symbols (# # #), to tell the editor that he or she's reached the article's end.

The alternate symbol is "-30-", which was once used as the name of a Jack Webb movie, in which My Man Friday played a big city newspaper editor.

30 is also about the number of people who showed up to wage war on the War On Terror in Washington DC today, led by Cindy Sheehan, fresh off her equally not ready for primetime performance in the Big Apple.

Confederate Yankee counts the numbers in DC:

The AP, Washington Post, and other news sources gleefully mentioned Cindy Sheehan's march on the White House this afternoon. With the exception of Reuters, however, they were all more than willing to forego this little tidbit of information:

Mrs Sheehan was joined by about 30 supporters in her march down Pennsylvania Avenue to deliver a letter to Bush urging him to pull the troops out of Iraq.

That's all, folks. I count 29 people. This is her entire protest party. Including Cindy.

Just as the -30- symbol tells an editor, the key phrase is "That's all, folks".

Update: Charles Johnson notes judicious use of photo cropping by the MSM to hide the miniscule size of the "rally".

Wondering why gasoline is $3.00 or more a gallon?

The fault of our high energy prices lies not in ourselves, but in the stars--of the left.

Incidentally, Power Line notes that Senator Clinton is "Bemoaning the fate of the porcupine caribou resident in ANWR", A.K.A., America's Vast Pestilential Wasteland.

Update: Here's some advice for government on what not to do, courtesy of James Glassman, Tech Central Station's head honcho.

Update (9/22/05): Welcome readers from The Political Teen!

I know Jonah Goldberg dreams of the days when we lance volcanos with, as Dr. Evil would say, frickin' lasers, people. But I didn't realize, until Greg Hanke sent me a link to his post, that NOAA, the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, is bombarded (so to speak) every year with requests to nuke hurricanes.

Man--I like Sterling Hayden as much as the next guy, but still!

If you're one of the folks who wish that someone would go all Strangelove on Katrina and Rita, Greg and NOAA both explain why that would be a spectacularly bad idea.

Neo-Neocon, with a Magritte-inspired apple carefully placed to protect her identity, is the subject of the current profile on the Pajamas Media homepage.

Her blog is well worth checking out--it's fast becoming a daily stop for many. (Like myself!)

Really fascinating interview with Theodore Dalrymple, to promote his new book, Our Culture, What's Left Of It.

To place the modern culture of millions of middle and lower middle class people in America and Europe into context, compare Dalrymple's comments with this look at day to day life in New York, circa 1939.

Update: Found via Armavirumque, Christy Davis has a similar look at England at the turn of the 20th century.

Meanwhile, here's a flashback to a long recent post of ours, included as part of Willism.com's "Carnival of the Classiness". It builds on Theodore Dalrymple's trenchant comments on the evils of modern architecture, as it's applied to public housing.

(Totally unrelated article, but this late fellow also seemed to be bucking for a Darwin Award himself. Either that, or he was a huge fan of Joyce Kilmer...)

A few times earlier this year, we've noted the sense of nostalgia that permates many big city newspapers. UPI explains one of the reasons behind it:

Three of the most prestigious newspapers in the United States, the New York Times, Boston Globe and Philadelphia Inquirer, announced job cuts Tuesday.

The New York Times Co., which owns the Times, the Globe and a number of other newspapers, said that 500 jobs would be eliminated across the company. The total includes 45 editorial jobs at the Times and 35 at the Globe, Editor & Publisher reported.

Philadelphia Newspapers, which owns the Inquirer and the Daily News, announced that it would try to eliminate 100 editorial positions through buyouts. The plan calls for a cut of 25 in the Daily News' 130-person editorial staff and 75 from the 500 at the Inquirer.

At the same time, the company plans to hire advertising sales people.

"We have to grow our advertising revenue," Joseph Natoli, the company's publisher and president, told E&P.

The Times said that details of its job cuts have not been worked out, although executives expect a mix of layoffs and buyouts.

Like most other newspapers, the Times Co. and Philadelphia Newspapers have been hit by declining circulation and ad revenue as both readers and advertisers turn to the Internet.

Where they discover Dan Rather's New Journalism Order.

Related thoughts from Mark In Mexico.

Update: John Hinderaker of Power Line also weighs in:

As life-long newspaper junkies, we take no pleasure in the industry's current crisis. Apart from anything else, we web-based commenators need newspapers to produce the raw material for our commentary. But my sympathy for the Times, the Globe, the Chronicle, et al. is tempered by the knowledge that there is a path to solvency, which I think would likely succeed, but that they would never consider: stop being so liberal. Wouldn't you think that with newspapers nearly everywhere sliding inexorably downhill, just one might consider whether its readers--or former readers--were trying to tell it something? Like, we're not interested in supporting far-left nonsense?

But no. They would rather go broke than abandon their reason for being, which is, with only a handful of exceptions, promoting the Democratic Party.

Would moderating their hard-left politics help stop the financial bleeding? It's hard to say for sure. But don't you think that if they were motivated mainly be economics, just one of our major liberal papers might try it?

This is a question for Hollywood and the broadcast TV networks as well.

It's not as bad as Ted Turner pretending that North Korea is nothing but pizza and fairytales, but Charles Johnson observes the New York Times leaving out several key details of Cindy Sheehan's visit to New York, New York.

While the post below has an audio clip of Ted Turner's bizarre comments about North Korea to Wolf Blitzer, Shadow TV.com has the video. Click here for part one, here for part two.

In some sort of thankfully rare harmonic convergence of idiocy, two television news veterans simultaneously go coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs, as Hugh Hewitt notes. First up is Dan Rather:

I am going to have to ask the Columbia Journalism School folks about the "new journalism order." Before long, Rather will be blaming the Bilderbergers for the forged docs.

Of Captain Dan The (now retired, thank God) Newsman, Roger L. Simon writes:

'Honest' Dan Rather comes back from the dead to set us straight in an 'emotional' speech about the media at Fordham Law.

"It's been one of television news' finest moments," Rather said of the Katrina coverage. He likened it to the coverage of President Kennedy's assassination in 1963.

"They were willing to speak truth to power," Rather said of the coverage.

I'm not even going to comment on that bizarre statement, but you've got to hand it to Dan. If most of us had been caught lying like he had on national television, we would have moved to South America by now.

Speaking truth to power is certainly a concept that Ted Turner has never heard of. Whether it's Cuba, the Soviet Union, or Iraq, Turner's never met a totalitarian regime he didn't want to prop up with sympathetic coverage.

And these days, North Korea is no exception. One man's Hell on Earth is another man's fun vacation getaway, as Ted describes Kim Jung Il's rotting death trap of a country to Wolf Blitzer, who walks a thin line between being absolutely incredulous, but respectful towards the man who founded the network that employs him:

Read More »

Two men are talking as they drive in car.

Jules: Okay, so tell me again about the porn.

Vincent: Okay, watcha wanna know?

Jules: Porn is supplied for free by the Danish government now right?

Vincent: Yeah, it's free, but it ain't 100 percent free. I mean, you can't just walk into a...videostore, pick up a Ron Jeremy move, and just start bukakking away. I mean, they want only want you to watch it in your home or certain designated places.

Jules: And those are nursing homes.

Vincent: Yeah. It breaks down like this: earlier this year, the Danish government released a report stating that sexuality is an integral part of life for the elderly and the disabled. It recommended that caregivers help elderly residents satisfy their sexual needs. The staff in the nursing home in the Danish capital have been broadcasting pornography on the building's internal video channel every Saturday night for several years. And if videos and dirty magazines don't relieve the tension, residents can ask the staff to order a prostitute for them.

Jules: Oh man, I'm going, that's all there is to it, I'm f***in' going!

Vincent: I know, baby--you dig it the most! But you know what the funniest thing about Europe is?

Jules: What?

Vincent: It's the little differences. I mean, they got the same s*** over there that they got here, but it's just, it's just theirs is a little different.

Jules: Example?

Vincent: All right. Well you can walk into a movie theater in Odense, and buy a beer. And I don't mean just like no paper cup, I'm talking about a glass of beer. And in Hedeby, you can buy a beer in McDonald's. And you know what they call uh...watching porn and getting laid by hookers in a nursing home?

Jules: They don't call it watching porn and getting laid by hookers in a nursing home?

Vincent: Nah man! They got their own morally relative euphemisms, they wouldn't use language like that over there.

Jules: Then what do they call it?

Vincent: They call it "caregivers helping elderly residents satisfy their sexual needs"!

Jules: Caregivers helping elderly residents satisfy their sexual needs?

Vincent: That's right.

Jules: (laughs) What about the hash bars?

Vincent: I don't know, I didn't go into Amsterdam.

I noticed Newsweek's cover yesterday when I saw it on the supermarket checkout stand. As Howard Kurtz describes it:

The fact that most of those left behind in the New Orleans flood were poor and black is being treated by the press as a stunning revelation -- "A National Shame," as Newsweek's cover put it.

Actually, Newsweek itself has no shame, and they certainly aren't lacking in chutzpah, either: he who writes fake-but-fake Koran in toilet stories and puts American flags into garbage cans on magazine covers has no business trying to mau-mau collective guilt out of the rest of America.

Meanwhile, Ed Morrissey has additional thoughts on the media's decade-long lack of coverage of New Orleans' crushing poverty:

Kurtz wants to know why these stories don't get news coverage -- stories like poverty and race, and political appointments gone awry. I think he already knows the answer: most news media do not have the energy or resources to devote to stories that complex or long-term. Even newspapers, which supposedly exist to give more depth and analysis to the news, too often only go after the most superficial of stories, because those can get efficient handling. A reporter can quickly go over the details of the extant issue and then drop it for the next big issue of the day. Poverty and race have too much complexity for any serious treatment, and lower-level political appointees bore readers until they screw up. Columnists supposedly should take up the slack, but the columnists have the same problem as the newspaper regarding the subject matter and a much larger obstacle in terms of resources.

How will this resolve itself? The blogosphere will probably provide the solution. People who find these subjects fascinating will devote themselves to researching them and documenting their findings, and journalists might use the blogs themselves as resources. Beltway blogs already give closer scrutiny to midlevel appointees than the media does, and again, reporters with a sense of survival will eventually learn to nurture that kind of research and the blogger who performs it.

In the meantime, however, the holier-than-thou reaction to the supposed novelty of Bush addressing race and poverty looks more like hypocrisy coming from the nation's newsrooms. If poverty has slipped off the radar screen, they need to start reporting honestly and intelligently on the issue.

Don't hold your breath.

The Anchoress has a long and well thought-out vaguely Freudian analysis of President Clinton's latest utterances, which lambast his successor, who's relied on Clinton (along with Pappa Bush) to help spearhead disaster recovery efforts after both Hurricane Katrina, and the Indian Ocean tsunami last December:

Actually, [in the past] President Clinton has tiptoed around the tactic of lambasting, sharply criticising or launching a “withering” attack against President Bush, several times. He has simply had the sense to do so tentatively, and discreetly - inserting a sly dig at Davos, a mild remark in Rio. This weekend, bouyed by campaign-trailish coverage and the sort of wonky gasbag-fest we know always energizes him, Clinton simply decided to get off his tippy-toes and step lively.

Some of this was predictable. The extreme left of the Democrat Party has grown into a fuming beast that needs constant feeding as it stomps around its cage, waiting to be unleashed. Because Mrs. Clinton is planning a run at the White House, she and her husband are simply shoveling at them the same Triangulation Kibble they used to feed the left (and the center) in 1991 and 1992 - except that this time the ingredients are reversed: this time Bill Clinton is the Hard Left Outside while Hillary is the Deeply Moderate Center. Same food, different packaging; it is a particularly useful recipe for both Clintons because his “centrist” credentials, and her “leftist” credentials are so firmly in place, that no matter how the ingredients are mixed, the same multitudes are fed, and things even taste the same.

All of that is so predictable, it’s almost boring. Bill and Hill are smothering us again, gearing up for another leg of their endless campaign. What’s on Channel 38?

In another way, yesterday’s unloading was simply Bill Clinton doing what he has always done. He serves not God, nor country, nor the simple dignity of an Office quite worthy of respect. What he does serve is his own towering ambition, and his other, sadly insatiable (and ultimately destructive) need - his need to be loved.

The Anchoress links to this passage from Generation Why:

Does this mean Bill Clinton is admitting he bombed Iraq to deflect attention away from his personal legal troubles? Because if the danger in Iraq presented “no real urgency” then how should these quotes be interpreted?

What follows are a series of quotes by Clinton on the dangers of Iraq--quotes that were echoed by the media and the rest of the left up until the dime was turned in mid-2003. As Generation Why asks, "Is he lying now or was he lying then?"

Or is it simply Clinton's renowned postmodernism, which would make Oceania proud?

Update: Chris Lynch has a large round-up of Blogospheric reaction. He's been linked to by InstaPundit, thus ensuring that, as Chris says, "more people will see Clinton's comments in context now".

Indeed.

I hadn't heard of All Things Beautiful until I did a vanity Technorati search over the weekend, but I can't help but like any blog that puts me via a single post, in the same company with John Roberts and Cary Grant:

Roberts' dress code is entirely based on Cary Grant in his favorite movie. Therefore, the man clearly has - 'Integrity'

Number two, he is a born Leader.....of fashion. According to Cathy Horyn of the New York Times, we have a welcomed return of the black tailored suit, the very style that Roberts favors.

The subject of American aesthetics (see interesting article by Edward Driscoll), and inherently men's sense of fashion, still largely rests on Integrity. The quality of being honest, and having strong moral principles, moral uprightness. Roberts is known to be a man of integrity: w