Don Surber looks at the numerous quotes from Democrats praising Judge Alito. I do think that Chuck Schumer got a little carried away with himself, however...

In Tech Central Station, Imam Khaleel Mohammed writes that Saddam Hussein has gotten religion while under arrest, and therefore, should first be given a fair trial--and then sentenced accordingly:

Let us face a simple fact: different areas have different norms. In Iraq, as in the rest of the Muslim Middle East, a verdict of guilty on the charges of which Saddam is accused would bring an automatic death sentence. This contrasts with the situation at the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), where accused Serbian mass murderer Slobodan Milosevic and similar individuals are on trial. ICTY has its seat at The Hague, and the Netherlands will not carry out death sentences.

Let us face another fact: there is no lack of evidence against Saddam. It is doubtful the prosecution will need to produce any material that can be reliably challenged.

And let us face yet one more fact: Saddam, as he appeared the last time we saw him on 60 Minutes, has morphed into a devout Muslim, even interrupting an interview to complete prayer. Surely, as a sign of respect (albeit undeserved), we can allow that he be given a trial according to Islamic standards!

Why should Saddam not accept this, since he has challenged the authority of the present court? We can even go further and call for a tribunal consisting of Sunni and Shi'ite jurists.

Certainly defense lawyers must be allowed to question the evidence. But even though the criteria for testimony and evidence in Islam are far more demanding than in Western law, and unless we are living on some other planet, the evidence against him is overwhelming. If he is found guilty, the court may follow the Qur'anic law -- which, as any Muslim scholar, Shi'ite or Sunni, will confirm, calls for capital punishment.

The Iraqi people have suffered long enough under Saddam -- and their voice must be heard in dealing with their own. If any one body of Shi'ite or Sunni jurists disagrees with me, I will bow to their judgment. But I will not say that I am wrong.

Nor will I.

Neo-Neocon posts a photo of an astonishing advertisement promoting a hate-filled anti-Semitic Middle Eastern "seminar" (Iran's "World Without Zionism" conference) and writes:

Lovely [poster], isn't it? I mean that sincerely. One of the more pernicious aspects of much modern propaganda is its slickness and polish, its ability to appeal to the most sophisticated among us. This aesthetically pleasing poster is no exception--in fact, it's an excellent example of the genre.

Note how the conference and the poster focus on the word "Zionism," not "Jews." The old argument about whether one can be anti-Zionist and nevertheless not anti-Semitic keeps cropping up around the blogosphere and elsewhere. The comments section of the thread linked above at Gates of Vienna contains a good example of such a discussion.

I'm sure there truly are people who have objections to Zionism but honestly feel they have no objections to Jews themselves. But I'm just as sure that such people would have been hard-pressed to have explained where else the leftover Jews were supposed to go right after WWII, when Europe had killed so many of its Jews and was in the process of spitting out the exhausted survivors. Even the UN, that august body which in recent decades has been the very poster child for "anti-Zionism," voted at that time to partition Palestine and give the Jews their own tiny piece of land.

In the years since Israel's founding, the sophisticated propaganda which has over the last few decades managed to demonize it in the eyes of many has emboldened the Iranian mullahs. It is possible for them to speak quite openly of wiping Israel off the face of the earth, and trust that at least some will defend such a statement on the grounds that it's not technically "anti-Semitic," it's merely "anti-Zionist" (see this).

Poor, poor Hitler, so ahead of his time! If only the state of Israel had already existed when he offered his Final Solution, he could have phrased it in terms so much more acceptable.

If Robert Harris had set Fatherland in 2004 instead of 1964, he'd probably have described advertisements much like the one illustrated in Neo's post.

Pejman Yousefzadeh has some thoughts on Brent Scowcroft, whose comments on American foreign policy we highlighted last week:

The punditry world is abuzz with talk of a recent New Yorker article (no link available) by writer Jeffrey Goldberg, who has interviewed Brent Scowcroft, the former national security advisor for the Ford Administration and the Administration of George H.W. Bush. In a number of passages in the piece, Scowcroft takes on the current Bush Administration over the issue of Iraq, something for which he has earned applause from many Democrats and other Bush critics.

But when one reads the entire New Yorker piece, one finds that Scowcroft's critique is directed at foreign policy idealism in general. And it's a critique that should make Democrats jubilant over his attacks on the Bush Administration's foreign policy more nervous than they appear to be right now. Scowcroft's brand of foreign policy realism is shot through with contradictions and weak attempts at self-justification that should cause many realists to take issue with his arguments.

Consider that if Democrats capture the White House in 2008, they will look largely to foreign policy veterans of the Clinton Administration for guidance in constructing a new foreign policy strategy to replace that of the current Bush Administration. If so, then much of a new Democratic foreign policy will be based on idealist intentions and ambitions. Such idealism drove the intervention of the Clinton Administration into the crisis concerning the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, the political crisis in Haiti and the Clinton Administration's decision to take the first Bush Administration's relief operation in Somalia and turn it into a larger nation-building plan.

Brent Scowcroft thinks as little of this Clintonian idealism as he does of the Bush Administration's "neocon" foreign policy ambitions. In the article, Scowcroft backs the first Bush Administration's decision not to get involved in the breakup of the former Yugoslavia by saying that "there was only so much that the United States could do" about the breakup and the ensuing bloodshed. This puts Scowcroft in direct opposition to the Clinton Administration's foreign policy regarding the former Yugoslavia, as pointed out by Goldberg:

Richard Holbrooke, who negotiated the Bosnian peace accords on behalf of President Clinton, saw the [first Bush] Administration's reluctance to take effective action in Yugoslavia as a failure of realism. "When the Cold War ended, the Bush people concluded that our strategic interests were not involved," Holbrooke said. And they turned their back on Yugoslavia just as it fell to its death. They said they determined that it had no strategic value, but, as it turns out, the Balkans still had strategic value and an overpowering humanitarian case as well." A good foreign policy, Holbrooke believes, ought to "marry idealism and realism, effective American leadership and, if necessary, the use of force."

Scowcroft's brand of foreign policy cannot be reconciled with the brand practiced by the Clinton Administration. As mentioned in the Goldberg article, Scowcroft simply "would have proposed that we go to the Yugoslavs and say 'It makes no sense for you to break up. Economically, you're small as it is, but, if you're going to break up, here are the rules. Here are the rules, and we're going to insist on those rules.'" As Goldberg writes, the first Bush Administration was going to rely on hope that Yugoslavia would stay together, much as it urged former Soviet republics to avoid the dangers of "suicidal nationalism" in an August 1991 speech by President Bush that was dubbed the "Chicken Kiev" speech.

It's clear that Scowcroft's statements in the New Yorker article are not simply attacks against the current Bush Administration. Rather, they are a shot across the bow against the likely foreign policy ambitions of any future Democratic Administration that would emulate the Clinton Administration's foreign policy. So while Democrats may be pleased to see Scowcroft -- the former national security advisor for Bush the Father -- taking the rhetorical lumber to Bush the Son, they will have to contend with his critiques the next time they are given the chance to occupy the White House.

As Cindy Sheehan's recent comments highlight, the prospect of repeating the vigorous foreign policy of the Clinton 1990s won't make the Democrats' anti-war isolationist base happy.

Roger L. Simon has a look (literally, in the case of the Vanity Fair photo spread he posts on his site) at the shy, retiring Valerie Plame.

Here's another look (scroll down a bit for photo). And another.

The folks profiled in the article the previous post linked to are certainly brave, but far braver is the admission of Pajamas member Cathy Seipp, also based in Los Angeles. Just click.

(Via Instapundit.)

Brian Anderson, the author of South Park Conservatives looks at the ideology that dare not speak its name in Hollywood:

When a trendsetter like [producer Gavin Polone] (subject of a glowing 2004 New York Times Magazine cover story) can observe that “we live in a much more conservative country than the entertainment industry had thought it was, and it would be much smarter for them to move in that direction,” it’s a pretty safe bet that the new Hollywood establishment will indeed be very different from the one that it soon will replace.

But as Brian writes, in the meantime, expect more Bonfire of the Vanities-style PC rewrites from Hollywood such as these:

There’s a simple explanation of why Tinseltown churns out so many commercial duds. Elite filmmakers want to make moola, of course—and they still do, lots of it, though not nearly as much as they could be making. But giving the public what it wants isn’t their prime motivation. More important is their wish for recognition as artists from peers, critics, and the liberal elites, says Emmy- and Oscar-nominated writer and director Lionel Chetwynd, one of Hollywood’s most vocal conservatives. “And it has been true from the late sixties on that if you wanted to be seen as an artist, you have to be a liberal—you have to rail against the government, be edgy,” he adds. Having the right artistic vision can mean other social advantages, too. “Making something commercially successful and appealing to a broad public, like The Incredibles, is less likely to get a Rebecca Romijn look-alike to sleep with you than making dark, hard-hitting, critically acclaimed material like Million Dollar Baby,” says longtime Hollywood watcher Medved.

Further reinforcing Hollywood’s leftish leanings are liberal interest groups that monitor script content for “offensive”—read: politically incorrect—content. This pressure can utterly transform a film project, as Tom Clancy will tell you. In his novel The Sum of All Fears, Muslim terrorists explode a nuke at the Super Bowl. When Clancy optioned the book and the film went into development, the Council on American Islamic Relations got to work. The 2002 film villains: white neo-Nazis, not Muslim fanatics. Some Hollywood production companies actually have outreach offices that contact advocacy groups ahead of production to vet potential film scripts. “Keep in mind [that] one of the reasons why the FBI or the government or business are the villains is because everyone else has a constituency,” former Motion Picture Association head Jack Valenti points out.

The PC concerns, internalized in scriptwriters’ heads even before any advocate complains, can produce bizarre incoherence. Novelist and screenwriter Andrew Klavan’s True Crime is about an innocent white man on death row, railroaded because officials needed to prove that the death penalty isn’t racially biased. “The only one who figures this out is this politically incorrect journalist who can see through the B.S.,” Klavan relates. The gripping 1999 movie version, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood as journalist Steve Everett, transforms the innocent death-row inmate into a black man (played by Isaiah Washington). The movie works, even if it takes the anti-PC edge off Klavan’s novel.

But the screenplay leaves in a sequence depicting a black woman confronting journalist Everett for caring only about injustices against whites and not blacks—even though the movie now revolves around the reporter’s relentless quest to exonerate a wrongly convicted African American. “That scene no longer makes any sense,” Klavan laughs. “The screenwriter apparently found the original politically inappropriate.”

Even so, jolted by The Passion’s huge success, Hollywood seems to be catching on that it is neglecting a large part of its potential audience. “When something does nearly $400 million in U.S. box office, and it isn’t in English—it makes an impression,” says former Universal Pictures boss Frank Price. The New York Times reported in July that studios have hired “newly minted experts in Christian marketing” to help sell movies with religious or family themes to red-state America. After cold-shouldering Gibson when he shopped around The Passion—he famously had to finance it himself—the studios lined up for the chance to distribute his next movie, the Mayan-language Apocalypto, with Disney landing the deal.

Needless to say, read the rest; this is a superb piece--which sadly will be ignored by the people in Tinseltown who need to read it the most.

Update: Welcome City Journal readers! For most posts in a similar vein, scroll through our "Hollywood, Interrupted" archives. And for my interview this past summer with Brian Anderson, City Journal's senior editor, click here.

Glenn Reynolds looks at the Peter Lemon Moodring style of Judge Alito.

Update: In another tenuously syncronistic musical connection, Betsy Newmark notes that the judge's mother's name is Rose Alito. "Say it fast and you'll hear Bruce Springsteen singing in the background", Betsy writes. However, Jack the Rabbit, Weak Knees Willie, and Big Bones Billy could not be reached to confirm.

As you may have heard, President Bush nominated appeals court Judge Samuel A. Alito (born in my home state of New Jersey) to the U.S. Supreme Court today.

Which begs the question...what does National Review think about him?

Well, quite a bit if this post is any indication:

WITH ONLY SLIGHT EXAGGERATION: IT'S GO-TIME [Jonah Goldberg]
This is it. Back in June I wrote, "In Washington, conservatives and liberals are quietly loading up on drinking water, D batteries and extra ammo, in preparation for the coming battle over judges. Ralph Neas himself has been seen by the campfire carving notches into the stock of his rifle, muttering, 'Pain don't hurt.' No one knows when the fight's coming, but everyone knows it is."

Ever since, my prognostications seemed wrong. Roberts virtually sailed through. Miers didn't cause a split between right and left but between right and right. But now, this is the guy. Cokie Roberts said a senior Demcratic Senator has already denounced Alito as a "rightwing whacko" or words to that effect. Nina Totenberg called him "filibuster bait." Even now, federalist society and Naral types are running around town ducking their heads into barber shops and shoe shine parlors, shouting "it's on! It's on!" Those inside throw down their newspapers, haircuts unfinished, and race to the law libraries.

It reminds me of one of those scenes from "Any Which Way You Can" or "Caddyshack" where the buzz spreads that the big fight or the big match is on.

The seventh seal has been broken, the goat entrails point toward gotterdamerung, it's on.

The snowballs will be flying in DC and the all corners of the media (new and old) this holiday season.

And it's already started:

Chuck Schumer just argued that it is possible that Judge Alito, as Justice Alito, would roll back the achievements of Rosa Parks. That can only be understood as Schumer's belief that Judge Alito could find segregationist policies acceptable under the constitution. While it is undeniable that the nomination of Robert Byrd would have raised such a question, it is preposterous and indeed base to even hint at such a thing about a distinguished judge and public servant.

Schumer's argument for delay is as predictable as it is unpersuasive. Chairman Specter needs to knock down this nonsense today.

Jerk those knees, Chuck!

For the Blogsphere's take on Alito, Glenn Reynolds, Hugh Hewitt and PoliPundit have lots-o-links.

Michael Barone looks at the bottom of the perigee:

George W. Bush's administration has come through what many have been saying would be its worst week, and it has turned out to be -- well, if not one of the best, then one that is far more encouraging than most of the mainstream media expected.

Four events, or non-events, have put the administration in a position to make progress and advance the standing of the president and his party in public policy and in the public opinion polls.

Read the rest. And as John Hinderaker writes:

Having now read fifteen or twenty news stories about what a devastating blow the Lewis Libby indictment was to the administration, about how President Bush is "reeling" and the administration is "in turmoil," even "in crisis," and how Libby was a key and irreplaceable figure in the administration, whose departure is a serious blow because he played such a vital role, I couldn't help wondering: does anyone remember who Al Gore's chief of staff was when he was vice-president?

As soon as President Bush announces his Supreme Court nominee (possibly later today, or early in the week), the name "Scooter" will go back to being associated with Jim Henson and company. But I'd still like to see more forward progress, and less rope-a-dope with the MSM and other opponents.

Mr. E. Blair wrote in 1949:

Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs -- all had to be rectified at lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued, it was known that the chiefs of the Department intended that within one week no reference to the war with Eurasia, or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain in existence anywhere.

Glenn Reynolds looks a similar turning on a dime in real life:

One of the things I've noticed in the Judy Miller / Scooter Libby coverage is the development of a new history that's very convenient for a lot of the people peddling it. The new story is that:

1. We only went to war because of WMDs -- that was the only reason ever given.

2. Bush lied about those.

3. He told his lies to Judy Miller, who acted like a stenographer and reported them.

4. Everyone else gullibly went along.

There are lots of problems with this, beginning with the fact that it's not true. I've addressed much of this -- especially parts 1 & 2 -- in earlier posts like this one, this one, and especially this one. It gets tiresome having to repeat this stuff, but the new history, despite its falsity, is just too convenient for too many people to be stopped by anything as simple as the truth.

Or as James Lileks wrote about a similar bit of revisionist historical airbrushing in a Boston convention hall late last July, "The past was more malleable than you had ever expected."

Ed Morrissey writes:

What is it about frustrated members of the British royal family who, when unable to garner the throne for themselves, decide to campaign on behalf of genocidal nutcases? After being forced to abdicate the throne in order to marry Wallis Simpson, Edward Windsor flirted with the Nazis to such an extent that the British thought they might have to forcibly remove him from Spain. Churchill had to order him to the Bahamas to separate the Duke from German agents.

Now we have Prince Charles, the man who would be King if his mother would just let him, deciding that George Bush just doesn't understand how wonderful Islam truly is -- and wants to travel to the United States to deliver a lecture on the Religion of Peace^TM.

In the 1920s, the Duke of Windsor was one of the most influential dressers of all time (see above title), but as Ed notes, later became a dedicated follower of fascism, a trend that runs in the royal family beyond he and Charles. Prince Harry was spotted last year wearing a swastika armband to a fancy dress party, and as Mark Steyn wrote in response:

Personally, I found the sight of the Prince of Wales climbing into the full Highgrove hejab for dinner with that bin Laden brother a week after the 9/11 slaughter far more disquieting: it seemed a rather more conscious act of identification than his son's party get-up.

And even after not just 9/11 but London's own 7/7 bombing this year, little has changed in the worldview of the man who would eventually lead the Church of England.

Update: Related ironic Drudgery from Willisms. And Don Singleton rounds up additional Blogospheric reaction.

Another Update: Wow--hadn't heard this one before, but it's not at all surprising. Across The Atlantic writes:

[Ed] and others (me included), are deeply concerned about Charles and his blatant flirtation with Islam (Charles wants to do a lecture tour of the US about Islam).

What Ed and others haven’t yet noted is this:-

The oath taken by a British monarch during their coronantion currently contains the words “Defender of the faith”. This, of course, relates to the reigning King or Queen being head of the Church of England. Charles has let it be known that he would like the form of words to be amended to “Defender of the faiths.”

Hmmmmm.

When can we do away with this country’s royal family?

Hey, as long as they're seen and not heard, I like the monarchy. But then I like flipping through Ralph Lauren and Brooks Brothers catalogs. Both the catalog models and the royal family dress equally nicely--and sound equally vacuous when their mouths move.

Cartoon Network reminds its viewers that unless their politics are identical to founder Ted Turner's, the network doesn't want them in the audience:

Fans fearing that “The Boondocks,” the wildly scathing, racially charged comic strip, will lose its bite when it appears on television next week need not worry. Within the first 10 seconds of the new show of the same name, viewers will be offered the following Molotov cocktail of social criticism: “Jesus is black, Ronald Reagan is the devil and the government is lying about 9/11.”

Since its national debut six years ago, the strip, about two black children living in white suburbia, has slaughtered its share of sacred cows, eviscerating everyone from Condoleezza Rice and Strom Thurmond to 50 Cent and Ralph Nader. President Bush has been a frequent target. As a result, the strip has been suspended, banished to editorial pages and dropped from some newspapers (it currently appears in more than 300).

Trying to translate that incendiary spirit into great television will be a challenge, an expensive challenge at that. Cartoon Network pays Sony Pictures Television, producer of the series, an estimated license fee of $400,000 per episode. Add to that the millions the network has spent on marketing, including many billboards in New York and Los Angeles trumpeting the show’s premiere on Nov. 6 in the late-night “Adult Swim” block, and “The Boondocks” becomes the most expensive show the network has made.

(Hat tip: Charles Johnson, who is also responsible for the original bolding in the above text.)

Last January, Jim Geraghty noted the disparity in media coverage, focusing primarily on the news:

If you're a conservative, chances are you prefer Fox News. You often sense that the "mainstream" networks don't give a fair shake to your leaders, your party, your views, or your beliefs.

If you're a liberal, maybe you prefer your media to be a little more pugnacious — Air America, or the columns of Paul Krugman or Molly Ivins. But by and large, you find the mainstream media's tone and coverage choices to be preferable to Fox.

But if you're a liberal, or at least a non-conservative, your attention is the target of CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, and all the major-network news operations — basically, every one except Fox News. Fox will welcome you and tout their fair and balanced approach and their room for such liberal commentators as Alan Colmes, Juan Williams, and Mara Liasson, but by and large they're well-established as the network of choice for conservatives.

In the print world, the major newsweekly magazines, and almost every major city newspaper is clamoring for your attention if you're a non-conservative. In fact, most of the coverage is written from, and for, your viewpoint. You can read the New York Times nationally, or the Los Angeles Times, or Reuters wire copy. Both Chicago and Philadelphia have two major papers, neither of which is conservative. At the magazine rack, you have The New Republic, The Nation, The American Prospect, The Progressive, Mother Jones, Washington Monthly, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harpers, the post-Michael Kelly Atlantic Monthly, and Slate and Salon on the web. (This list isn't exhaustive, I'm just trying to give a sense of the breadth and depth.)

On the radio dial, you've got Air America, as well as much of NPR's programming.

That's a lot of media competing for the attention of the 49 percent.

Meanwhile, on cable, Fox News pretty much has the 51 percent to itself, unless you want to count Joe Scarborough, Dennis Miller, and about half the Capitol Gang.

It's a similar situation in print: You have a few conservative magazines, NR, The Weekly Standard, The American Spectator, and The American Conservative, as well as the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and some alternative newspapers like the Washington Times, the New York Post, New York Sun, Boston Herald, etc. The radio dial gives you a decent slew of options.

But by and large, the right-of-center "alternative" media outlets are courting the 51 percent, while the many more mainstream media outlets are courting the 49 percent.

Boondocks will be a write-off for Cartoon Network. It won't get any ratings in the heartland where most of TV's viewers are, but it certainly will get good press and buzz in New York and Los Angeles. much like Fahrenheit 9/11, of which Daniel Henninger wrote last year:

This is moviemaking for bicoastal cultural elites. They get to look down at the opposition, at "Bush," but they also get to feel superior to their own foot soldiers in the proletarian heartland.

The F-9/11 crowd now has a cartoon series to join its cartoon "documentary".

The New York Times article above quotes the show--and presumably Aaron McGruder, the creator of the comic strip it's based on, as saying, "Jesus is black, Ronald Reagan is the devil and the government is lying about 9/11". The New Yorker reported last year that McGruder claims he called Condoleezza Rice a mass murderer to her face at the 2002 NAACP Image Awards.

It's interesting to note, beginning probably with Oliver Stone, how many millions Hollywood is willing to pour into the coffers of ideologically like-minded guys who make Criswell sound like Solzhenitsyn, and who would never have gotten past a studio's front gates during the 1930s and '40s. Based on the number of conspirators in JFK, when Mick Jagger sang, "I shouted out who killed the Kennedys, but after all, it was you and me", Stone took him literally. Ted Turner recently told Wolf Blitzer that the only thing wrong with North Korea was that people "were thin, and they were riding bicycles instead of driving in cars". The afore mentioned Michael Moore believes that Iraq was nothing but pizza and fairytales until President Bush was elected, despite mass graves, a million casualties in its war with Iran, some killed via chemical weapons, its invasion of Kuwait, and President Clinton's attacks against it. Morgan Spurlock is mock-surprised that eating 5,000 calories a day at McDonalds made him fat. And so on. And don't get me started on all of the actors involved with this sentence censored by representatives of L. Ron Hubbard.

But really, for television--like the movies--which is more important? Actually making money, or keeping your friends in the cocoon-like echo chamber happy?

If you've been poking around Google Video, the latest edition to the Google search-opoly, you've undoubtedly come across some of the seemingly endless series of half-hour video interviews with veteran television industry pros which currently dominate the video footage on the search engine. This TechWeb article says that 75 hour-hour segments from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation:

Google Inc. on Wednesday said it has started offering free viewing of videotaped interviews with some of TV's biggest celebrities, as the result of a deal with the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation.

The Mountain View, Calif., search engine said the Foundation agreed to make its Archive of American Television interviews available, giving Google access to interviews with Alan Alda, Sid Caesar, Norman Lear, Steven Bochco and many other actors, writers, producers and directors.

As of Wednesday, 75 of the 284 films are available through Google Video. To get a listing of all 75 films, a person needs to enter the query "academy of television" into the Google Video search box. The Foundation's collection covers the last 75 years in television.

Among the other performers in the archives are Diahann Carroll, Ossie Davis, Phyllis Diller, Michael J. Fox, Andy Griffith, Robert Guillaume, Florence Henderson, Angela Lansbury, William Shatner, Dick Van Dyke, Betty White, and James Garner. Producers/creators include Carl Reiner and Dick Clark.

They're oddly hypnotic, if only because it's amazing to see how aging television veterans can talk endlessly about an industry that produces a product that's so ephemeral. And considering how much Hollywood loves to make movies about The Man abusing his employees (Hoffa, F*I*S*T, Norma Rae, North Dallas Forty, and this month's North Country all immediately to mind, and there are dozens more), to watch Dick Wolf (the producer of Law & Order, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Law & Order: SVU, and Law & Order: Elevator Inspectors Unit (to borrow a Simpsons riff) talk about his days producing Miami Vice. On his first day on the job, Michael Mann (the show's mastermind and executive producer) called him and asked him if he'd fired anybody yet. I'm paraphrasing, but this is reasonably close to what Wolf actually said (about 19 minutes into the video):

"No Michael, I just started!"

"Go down to the set and pick someone to fire at random. Show 'em who's boss right from the start!"

Geez--now that's nuanced and progressive management in action.

In New Delhi, bombs killed more than 50:

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Three powerful bombs tore through New Delhi markets packed with families and shoppers on Saturday ahead of the biggest Hindu and Muslim festivals of the year, killing more than 50 people and wounding scores.

Charred bodies, blood, glass and smoking debris littered the blast scenes as rescuers frantically pulled out the dead and wounded while thousands of shocked survivors milled around trying to find out what had happened to missing relatives.

Meanwhile, a passenger train derailed in South India, killing at least 110:

HYDERABAD, Oct. 29 (UPI) — Rescue workers, hampered by drizzle, resumed the grim task Sunday morning of recovering bodies from a wrecked train in South India.

At least 110 bodies had been pulled from the wreckage by Saturday night, NDTV reported, and another 20 were believed to remain.

The Delta Express derailed at 4:15 a.m. local time Saturday about 18 miles south of Hyderabad on a stretch of track that borders a reservoir, where part of a bridge had been swept away by high water. The engine and seven cars went off the tracks into the water.

Rescue workers used cranes to remove cars from the water and blowtorches to cut them open. Army, Navy and Air Force troops joined the rescue effort.

Continued heavy rain hampered the rescue effort.
Many of the passengers were on their way to family gatherings to celebrate Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, this Tuesday.

The article doesn't speculate on the cause of the derailment.

Want to see an amazing headline? Check out the one atop this Arab Times article:

Pakistan team to visit 'Israel'

I can honestly say, I've ever seen a sovereign nation's name in scare quotes before. I can only theorize the local editor put the quotes in the headline; the body copy from the Agence France Presse wire service doesn't contain them.

Last year, Steve Green (who's going trick-or-treating tonight dressed as an extra from Exit To Eden; no word yet if Robin Givhan will be critiquing his leather duds) wrote that for him, Halloween is the grown-up equivalent of Christmas.

He may be more right than he knows: these folks theorize that Jesus was born on October 31st.

(Found via the Corner.)

Maybe Volvos should start sporting a new bumper sticker, alongside the de rigueur NPR and "FREE TIBET!" stickers:

"This Car's Manufacturer Bribed Saddam Hussein,
And All I Got Was This Lousy Bumper Sticker!"

MOSCOW - A scathing report on corruption in the U.N. oil-for-food program for Saddam Hussein's Iraq drew widespread denials, terse dismissals and protestations of innocence Friday. But there were also pledges to investigate from some of the 2,200 companies cited and countries with citizens named.

Russian officials angrily alleged that documents accusing companies and officials in that country were fake, and the head of the nation's electricity monopoly called for the report's writers to be punished. But in a rare partial admission, Sweden's Volvo AB acknowledged making payments through an agent to Iraqi authorities but said it did not consider that bribery.

Of course.

As Roger L. Simon writes, "Don't tell the soccer moms"; but I think he just did!

Pop a 'lude, slip into your white polyester suit and gold chains, and break out the Bee Gees records, before you read this item from those dancin' freakazoids at the BBC:

A 76-year-old French woman with dyed red hair and a business-like look in her eye can legitimately lay claim to one of the most important inventions of the last century: the discotheque.

As Ace of Spades writes, "Ummm... maybe to Andrew Sullivan":

It's hardly any wonder the BBC reports the news the way they do when the staff considers strobe lights, velvet ropes, & I'll Tumble 4 Ya to be the zenith of Western civilization.

Apparently the disco just edged out radio & radar, penicillin, and, you know, human flight for the distinction.

Dr. Jonas Salk is said to be wearing a big Cat in the Hat chapeau and a necklace of glow-sticks wonderin' where all the love is.

Found via Steven Den Beste, who has his own list of which inventions from the previous century that changed the world:

Arbitrarily limiting myself to five, I'd say they were, in order:

1. Semiconductors
2. Synthetic polymers (i.e. plastics)
3. Heavier-than-air flying machines
4. Nuclear weapons
5. Antibiotics

That's based mainly on the extent to which they did, or will, change our lives -- whether for good or for ill.

I'm not sure if I'd rate those items in the same order, but it's hard to argue with Steve's list.

...Unless your name is Deney Terrio, that is.

...is give peace a chance.

Or as I wrote during the presidential election, "For a party of pacifists, Democrats can fight long, hard, and dirty when they want to".

Michelle Malkin has more, along with additional flashbacks (including photos) to the leftwing violence from last year's presidential race.

Betsy Newmark has some thoughts about Robin Givhan, the Washington Post's political-fashion reporter (there's a job that cried out for being created, huh?), a sort of cross between Maureen Dowd's snarkiness, Mr. Blackwell's fashion sense, combined with lots of dollar book Freudian analysis and the Post's usual liberal pieties:

You might remember Robin Givhan. She's the nasty reporter who commented quite snarkily on how Mrs. Roberts dressed her children just too perfectly in their pastel Sunday clothes to go to the White House when their father was nominated for the Supreme Court. And remember how critical she was of Dick Cheney's choice of jacket at the ceremony at Auschwitz? I guess his jacket distracted her from the heavy thoughts about the Holocaust she might have had otherwise. But one administration official she has approved of in a fashion sense is Condoleezza Rice. Givhan was just breathless on the Secretary of State's choice of black boots and the impression of sex and power. Apparently, Givhan approves if your clothes choice is reminiscent of The Matrix.

And, during the 2004 campaign, she felt compelled to agree with John Kerry that the Democratic ticket just had the better hair. She looked at the Republican hair do's and concluded: Yech!

"Fortunately", Betsy writes, "the American people don't vote based on such cosmetological criteria".

Prescient quote from the original P.J. media maven:

Something is happening to America, not something dangerous but something all too safe. I see it in my lifelong friends. I am a child of the "baby boom", a generation not known for its sane or cautious approach to things. Yet suddenly my peers are giving up drinking, giving up smoking, cutting down on coffee, sugar, and salt. They will not eat red meat and go now to restaurants whose menus have caused me to stand on a chair yelling, "Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, dinner is served!" This from the generation of LSD, Weather Underground, and Altamont Rock Festival! And all in the name of safety! Our nation has withstood many divisions - North and South, black and white, labor and management - but I do not know if the country can survive division into smoking and non-smoking sections.

--From Republican Party Reptile, 1987.

Frank Martin writes:

The single dumbest statement I have ever heard in regards to the "war in Iraq" was made to me today, and here it is:

“The Bush administration has destabilized the middle east and stopped the "peace process"...”.

Frank responds by running the numbers that illustrate just how bloody the Middle East has been, long before either President Bush was sworn in, and rightfully concludes:

The Middle East was never “stable”, unless you consider a concentration camp or charnel house to be the model of stability on which you refer. .

For the last 60 years, the Middle East has been a meat grinder into which tyrants and dictators have fed their own people with little or no concern for being held accountable so long as they remained the clients of the western world.

Which was also the prevailing "realist" policy of much of the west from in the 1960s and '70s when it came to the Soviet Union. Once President Reagan declared them an Evil Empire, the clock was ticking on their demise.

It's possible to see the contrasting worldviews in action in two Washington Post articles that both concern Brent Scowcroft, Papa Bush's national security adviser. First on deck, Richard Cohen:

About six months after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, George H.W. Bush's national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, went to Beijing and met with China's "paramount leader," Deng Xiaoping. Scowcroft said he communicated the president's unhappiness over the massacre, to which Deng essentially said, Mind your own business. "And I said, 'You're right. It is none of our business,' " Scowcroft tells Jeffrey Goldberg in the current New Yorker. This raises an obvious question: How many have to die before it is our business?

That question is at the heart of the dilemma now facing American foreign policy. Scowcroft is a famous realist. Not for him any grand, noble causes. He is parsimonious with American lives and treasure, and he vocally opposed George W. Bush's intention to go to war in Iraq. He found out this was a different Bush with a different foreign policy. The younger Bush's was infused with moralism.

Next up, Glenn Kessler:

Scowcroft, in his interview, discussed an argument over Iraq he had two years ago with Condoleezza Rice, then-national security adviser and current secretary of state. "She says we're going to democratize Iraq, and I said, 'Condi, you're not going to democratize Iraq,' and she said, 'You know, you're just stuck in the old days,' and she comes back to this thing that we've tolerated an autocratic Middle East for fifty years and so on and so forth," he said. The article stated that with a "barely perceptible note of satisfaction," Scowcroft added: "But we've had fifty years of peace."

As Frank notes above, it was the peace of the charnel house.

(Hat tip on WaPo pieces to the Brothers Judd.)

Kevin Aylward of Wizbang writes:

If the new Supreme Count nominee is announced Monday the Plame case will quickly be drained of any energy is still left after this weekends talk shows.

When the new nominee is announced the left is sure to raise a fuss. Assuming the Bush follows through on his campaign pledge to nominate a justice in the mold of Scalia and Thomas the right and the punditocracy will quickly engage as the did with Chief Justice Roberts nomination. In that case President Bush's poll numbers are sure to head upward as a energized base prepares for a confirmation battle of historic proportions. The reason Bush's poll numbers are so low now is that the Miers nomination has temporarily turned off a lot people who voted for Bush.

Turning all of the negatives of last week around is well within the reach of the White House. It all starts with the Supreme Court nominee...

As for Iraq, in case you've forgotten, we already won that war...

We've long won the war on the ground--but the real front in the battle is against the American media. And Victor Davis Hanson, not surprisingly, has some thoughts on how to break that quagmire:

In the last six months we have heard from various demagogues — though they are recognized as such due to their prominence in the media — that we were waging nuclear war in Iraq (Cindy Sheehan), that there was cannibalism in New Orleans (Randall Robinson), that George Bush and Dick Cheney should be shot (the novelist Jane Smiley) or executed (Al Franken). Alfred Knopf has published a book about the theoretical assassination of the president, and the Nazi slur is now commonplace in Democratic circles, where a Senator Dick Durbin or Ted Kennedy slanders American soldiers as akin to either Saddam’s torturers or even Nazis and Stalinists. The case needs to be made that we are seeing a new paranoid style — but from the Left, whose opponents are not to be out-argued, but rather deemed worthy of death or demonization as Nazis. The recent eclipse of George Galloway — due in no large part to Christopher Hitchens’ lonely and underappreciated pursuit of his perfidy — reminds us how hard these reprobates finally will fall.

All of these issues are interrelated. If the president can win the hearts and minds of the American people on one theme, the others will fall into play. The more the president talks of principle and values, the more he can do so with zeal, and yes, real passion and occasional anger.

The odd thing is that so far the conventional advice to the president — keep the discussion on Iraq only to U.S. national security, not the upheaval of the existing corrupt order; reach out to the Democratic Senate; curb your idealistic rhetoric with Syria or Iran; ignore shrill enemies; nominate someone that the opposition will not seriously object to — has only emboldened critics here and abroad. It is time to go back on the offensive, both for the idealistic legacy of the Bush presidency and the immediate future of his ideas in the upcoming 2006 elections. The American people, both pro and con, are more than ready for a great debate to settle these issues one way or another.

That's the next real battle--one that's long been ignored by the White House, partially as a result of the rope-a-dope strategy that was worked to help neutralize many of its opponents. But just as Ali eventually came out swinging against George Foreman after absorbing several rounds of punishment, sooner or later, as VDH notes, the battle for ideas needs to be fought by the White House.

Just click: The New York Times hits bottom, continues to dig.

We've been relatively free of Plame here, and the only scooters thus far have been in a recent review of Quadrophenia, but as you no doubt have heard, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, was indicted today by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald. As Glenn Reynolds writes:

Lying to a grand jury is serious, if true. The rest is Martha Stewart stuff. But this isn't the Libby-Rove-Cheney takedown that the lefties have been hoping for -- there's not even a charge of "outing" a covert agent -- and the very extravagance of their hopes will make this seem much less significant.

Neo-Neocon has some thoughts on what constitutes a feeding frenzy and writes:

Pundits and bloggers, known for the sharpness of their opinions--and, as with sharks' teeth, such sharpness is often a necessary part of the arsenal of such creatures--need to be careful that, in the group excitement of the fray, they don't end up destroying more than they intended.

Which is partially why Glenn adds, "If there's no more [than an indicted Scooter], this will probably do Bush little harm". Orrin Judd agrees, writing:

This wasn't an October that the president would have sought, but it ends up going as well as he could possibly have hoped on the 4 issues that had hurt him most.

Read Orrin's post for the list.

Meanwhile, Roger L. Simon writes:

It's obvious too that the Plame Affair is not at all about some minor not-so-covert CIA official, but about Iraq. It is a replaying of the war on other turf. The odd thing about this is that it has always struck me that Iraq could just as easily have been a Democratic Party war. Despite his present ultra-dovish position, Gore, who has often been a foreign policy hawk during his career, might easily have led the nation into the Iraq War had he been elected. His opinions now are dictated, in part, by his current constituency.

That's absolutely true--but who's driving the train? To turn your opinions on a dime for nothing more than partisan reasons is hypocrisy of the worst order--and speaking of which, the H-word is a topic Jonah Goldberg explores in his latest column.

CNN and Barbie agree: math is hard, especially when it doesn't produce the numbers you want. Daly Thoughts catches CNN spinning a recent poll on Harriet Miers. (You remember her, right?)

Of course, this is far from the first time that CNN's been confused by big numbers.

Austin Bay (recently profiled by Pajamas Media, where he's an editorial board member) writes:

October 2005: Peter Jennings has passed away, Al Jazeera is still with us -- though arguably less antagonistic since the Iraqi presidential election of January 2005. The terror war within Iraq continues to pit terrorist hell against democratic hope. A multitude of economic and governmental challenges linger.

But current combat in Iraq is not simply the result of slapdash postwar planning. The United States has two strategic goals that have taken years to mesh in terms of political, economic and military operations.

Goal One: engage Al-Qaida on military and political battlefields in order to destroy its claim to "divine sanction" and to "speak on behalf of Islam."

Goal Two: seed development of modern, democratic states in the politically dysfunctional Arab Muslim Middle East.

Achieving both goals defeats Al-Qaida. Goal Two is a multi-decade project. Reaching it requires sustained, courageous effort, but Iraq's January election and its constitutional process are signs of progress. Sensational carnage and "expert pessimism" dominated the international media's January election coverage. Despite the dour predictions, Iraqi voters responded, waving ink-stained fingers -- a terror-defying demonstration of political change. Al Jazeera didn't miss it.

Military defeat in Afghanistan dealt Al-Qaida's claim of "divine sanction" a hard blow.

However, smashing Al-Qaida's claim to act on behalf of "all Muslims" is far more complicated than killing or arresting terrorists. Undermining its megalomaniacal appeal meant exposing it as the inhuman, ungodly Mass Murder Inc. it is. The optimal outcome would be to expose Al-Qaida as a threat to Muslims and detrimental to the best ideals of Islam.

When Al-Qaida's zealots blow up trains in Spain or subways in London, those are attacks of their choosing conducted on "infidel terrain." The genius of the war in Iraq is a brutal but necessary form of strategic judo: It brought the War on Terror into the heart of the Middle East and onto Arab Muslim turf. In Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's theo-fascists have been spilling Arab blood, and Al Jazeera has noticed that, too.

Arabs have also seen the Iraqi people's struggle and their emerging political alternative to despotism and feudal autocracy.

Read the whole thing. As the man says, every last word.

Elsewhere, Teachout wonders if "schadenfreude" is becoming more popular. It's a word that does seem to get around in the Blogosphere these days, doesn't it?

A friend of Terry Teachout writes him about a recent dinner in a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Connecticut:

It was beautiful—everywhere the eye went it found something to delight it. Wright's big public rooms have found a ghastly afterlife in today's McMansions. He's not responsible for that, but he is responsible for the tiny kitchen, bathroom and bedrooms, the smoking chimneys, and the leaky roof—all traits, the owners assured us, of other Wright houses (they belong to a Wright homeowners' association).

I suppose the Parthenon would be drafty.

It's a pretty safe bet that the private homes designed in the 1920s by Le Corbusier, France's answer to Wright shared similar qualities. Of his post-'20s public work, we shan't speak much here, having dynamited it thoroughly only a couple of months ago.

Over at Tech Central Station, Ryan Sager has some thoughts on the Miers withdrawal:

The Harriet Miers nomination is dead. Long live the Harriet Miers nomination.

The political fallout from the Miers withdrawal will likely be minor. The Democrats will get a day of Snoopy-dancing, and conservatives will get a day of tearful embraces -- brothers and sisters laying down their arms. But the long-term impact on the judicial selection process is (at the risk of being optimistic) likely to be positive.

If nothing else, Miers has proved that the vaunted "stealth nominee" tactic is a game of Russian roulette -- not just for the Constitution and the American people years down the line, but for the president pulling the trigger in the here and now.

Sure, with the perfect, straight-A, spotless-attendance, gold-starred, shiny-haired, white-teethed, adorable-childrened, Reagan-White-House-tenured Judge John Roberts, you can get away with it. Conservatives have already forgotten how perplexed and disappointed they were by Bush's first Supreme Court pick. The sheer glint in his eye and unflappable competence calmed them like a cool, September breeze.

But there just aren't that many John Robertses in the world, with impeccable resumes and non-existent paper trails, both at the same time. Jokes about cloning John Roberts were made when he was confirmed. Now, conservatives are thinking of lifting Bush's federal-embryonic-stem-cell-research-funding ban -- if it might help the process along.

Bush found out that if you're going to eliminate from the selection process every serious and principled conservative jurist and legal scholar right at the outset, there's a pretty limited universe of qualified candidates to chose from. So limited, in fact, as to be virtually non-existent.

Now that Miers has left the stage, there is the risk that a petulant president will pick a nominee wildly unacceptable to his conservative base, but confirmable by the Democrats and some GOP moderates -- simply out of spite toward those who betrayed him ("I know it was you, Frum. You broke my heart!")

If he takes responsible counsel, however, he will begin looking at the serious conservative candidates (yes, likely women, such as Priscilla Owens, Janice Rogers Brown, Edith Jones or Edith Clement) and a serious confirmation process.

But aside from the immediate crisis, this entire episode should also make conservatives think a little harder about the twin ideas many of them had advanced about the judicial confirmation process in general: that a president is due a virtual rubber stamp on his desired nominee, short of massive ethical problems or utter incompetence, and that a nominee cannot properly be questioned on any matter that may conceivably come before the Supreme Court.

He's right--but only because of how important the Supreme Court has become in modern politics--especially to the left. It's "almost as if God has spoken", as that well-known theocon, Nancy Pelosi famously uttered over the summer after the Kelo decision came down.

When the stakes were a little lower--when the wasn't a culture war dividing the country and the Men In Black weren't our de facto rulers, cronyism wasn't much of a concern, as this recent Knight-Ridder piece makes clear:

Franklin Roosevelt regularly chose close associates to sit on the court, but none turned out to be an embarrassment. John F. Kennedy chose Byron White, a friend so close he used to participate in Kennedy family football games.

But three picks by Harry Truman rank among court watchers' worst, at least in the 20th century. Sherman Minton, Harold Burton and Chief Justice Fred Vinson all were close associates of Truman, but none left a favorable mark on the high court. The 19th century is replete with political cronies who had undistinguished careers on the court.

"The truth is that if you compare Miers, just on paper, to some of the political cronies who have wound up on the court, her qualifications put her square in the middle," said court historian David Garrow. "Thirty or 35 years ago, no one would have thought there was anything out of the ordinary about it."

But Garrow said Miers' nomination, coming on the heels of John Roberts' confirmation, makes her seem less impressive.

"She's following a 24-karat All Star onto the court," Garrow said, referring to Roberts' stellar credentials. "By comparison, she looks inescapably unqualified."

Let's hope the next nominee, whoever he or she is, won't appear that way.

That's the German translation of "For You", the message that was printed on the Berlin Wall--by the East Germans, for the benefit of their citizens imprisoned behind it. As Tom McMahon writes, hopefully we'll "never forget what a monstrosity Communism was in general, and the Berlin Wall was in particular".

(Via VodkaPundit, who writes, "This picture isn't exactly news, but it's sure worth remembering". Related thoughts here.)

Great quote by Mickey Kaus:

Pinch's overarching, original crime: Freeing a respected national newspaper to become an unashamed cocooning organ of New York liberal political and aesthetic prejudices (with a few exceptions, like Miller, that are slowly being corrected).

All of which poisons the well for the rest of America's me-too MSM, as I wrote last year:

the Times' reporting influences not just what you read in other papers, but what you see on TV as well. Many, many TV news stories begin as Times articles, which TV networks simply hand to their reporters and say, "craft a TV story out of this".

Maybe if journalism were decentralized...moved out of Manhattan...put into the hands of a diverse group of citizens, instead of dominated by one house organ. Now there's a thought.

Harriet Miers, in case you haven't heard, has resigned. As Glenn Reynolds writes:

She's to be commended for doing this. The White House made a dreadful error in nominating her, which it compounded by its ham-handed efforts in support of her candidacy, and this was perhaps the only way to ensure that it wouldn't be a complete debacle for the Bush Administration. Let's hope that they'll do better the next time around.

Indeed.

The legacy media has been using the cliché of "Grim Milestone" to describe the 2000 American servicemen killed in Iraq, but for these Bay Area far leftists, it's time to party like it's 1939!

(Via Charles Johnson.)

It's actually well over 5,000, but then, as Andrew Sullivan presciently noted early last year, for the left, it's as if 9/11 never happened. Nor the Iranian hostage crisis, the chemical weapons used by Saddam in the 1980s, the first Gulf War, the 1998 bombings of American embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania by al-Qaeda (on the anniversary of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait), nor President Clinton's attacks against Iraq in 1998 and the bipartisan support for the removal of Saddam Hussein until, well, until the 2004 presidential election began to loom near. Sample quote:

"The suffering inside Iraq can come to an end when Saddam Hussein's regime is replaced...And I hope -- and most of the world community hopes -- that this regime based on terrorism and atrocities against his own people will be replaced. Over time, we hope to achieve that result."

Donald Rumsfeld? Paul Wolfowitz? Dick Cheney?

Al Gore, in 1993.

So remember the mammoth protests and parties when American servicemen died under President Clinton's watch? Me neither. "It wasn't very hip" back then, as Janeane Garofalo would say (when she's not backing the man with the moustache.)

Update: Beyond The News has related thoughts--and a graphic well worth studying.

The Manolo has relaunched a new and improved blog for the men.

But I imagine it must feel quite a bit like this.

There was...Atari!

(You never know what strange flotsam and jetsam will turn up on Google Video).

Cinema historian and restoration expert Robert Harris looks at all of the work Warner Brothers is putting into getting the original (and still best) 1933 RKO version of King Kong ready for DVD release next month.

I'll definitely be glad to add it to my collection on the same shelf with RKO Production Number #281 from a few years later.

Californication spreads: a common cliche heard here is that the state government spends plenty of taxpayer money on welfare programs, but little on infrastructure. Which is why California has some of the busiest roads in the nation, in the worst shape.

In Tech Central Station, Vaclav Smil writes that the rest of the nation is heading that way as well:

An ancient dam about to collapse in Massachusetts; levees breached in Louisiana; a blackout blanketing millions of people across the country's most populous Northeastern region; repeated media references to the shrinking number of crude oil refineries; detours forced by collapsing bridges; ubiquitous flight delays. All of these are assorted tips of the Brobdingnagian iceberg of America's aging, crumbling, strained and poorly maintained infrastructure. Studying its massive dilapidation is a depressing endeavor; writing about it is not the media's favorite choice -- how can sewers, garbage dumps or bridges compete with witless celebrities or DC gossip?; mobilizing the needed investment for its upkeep is a thankless task (after all, legislators are voting for outlays that may be buried underground or located out of sight of 99.99% of people) -- and the job is never done.

And so the management of the country's immense infrastructure becomes repeatedly a victim of postponements, procrastination, corner cutting and outright neglect. Yet virtually everything that matters --- a country's economic performance, myriads of daily chores of a civilized society, basic personal satisfaction and safety, and (perhaps most importantly) a nation's long-term security -- depends on well-maintained, appropriately repaired, and periodically renewed infrastructures.

In its broadest definition this fundamental category includes the dense city networks of roads, bridges, tunnels, subways, water and sewer pipes, above- and below-ground electricity lines and telecommunication links. Urban landscapes are dotted with schools, recreation facilities, fire, transformer and water pumping stations, and contain wastewater treatment plants, railway and bus stops, airports and, when situated along rivers or coast, passenger and container and industrial ports. Outside the cities there are far-flung webs of interstate highways, railways, high-voltage transmission lines, crude oil, natural gas and chemical product pipelines and numerous electricity-generating plants, refineries, dams, reservoirs, levees, canals, shipping channels, water breaks, garbage dumps and sites for the disposal of toxic wastes.

Some of North America's vast infrastructure is relatively new, and much of it was originally well built and hence it has been smoothly functioning (out of sight and out of mind) for decades. But many infrastructures -- above all water mains, sewers, numerous bridges and dams, roads, railway and subway tunnels -- are truly archaic and they have been serving decades beyond their original life expectation and thousands of them are, literally, on the verge of collapse. Moreover, with so much of the nation's infrastructure built during the New Deal years of the 1930s, during the war years and during the decades of vigorous pre-1973 economic expansion, the number of badly aged structures will be increasing rapidly, often exponentially. For example, in 2004 Oklahoma had 135 bridges older than 80 years, but by 2015 that total could surpass 800.

The East Coast blackout in 2003, the 3000 killed in France that summer due to the heat, and the rolling blackouts in the years prior in California should have been wake-up calls, but obviously weren't. Smil writes, "The enormity of the problem calls for a grand strategy: I wish I could say that there will be no shortage of bold initiatives to bring it about".

In the quote above, Smil mentions 1973 as a bit of a cut-off date. One reason why infrastructures have stagnated of course, is the anti-modernism of the environmental left, which began early in that decade. Also in TCS, Henry I. Miller writes of the challenges to America's resilience:

In both the private and public sectors, resilience is crucial. The buggy-whip manufacturers had to adapt to supplying automobile components to Henry Ford's assembly line, or die; and the federal government achieved an historic success in World War II's Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bombs that ended the war.

In many realms, resilience is in short supply these days, however, and there is plenty of blame to go around. Politicians -- federal, state and local -- tend to be short-term thinkers, their purview often limited to the next election. Moreover, many of them are just not very smart, and they're particularly challenged in science and logic. The harsh truth is that there is little correlation between electability and problem-solving.

The nation as a whole would have been far more resilient to Katrina, had we located oil refineries in other parts of the country and markedly broadened our energy mix by constructing additional nuclear power plants. However, these efforts have been blocked by failures of both government and non-governmental lobbying groups. Nuclear energy has become the third rail of politics, and irresponsible radical environmentalists have prevented the construction of a single new oil refinery or nuclear power plant for decades. (And witness the seemingly endless acrimony over the creation of the nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.)

These activists detest the oil and coal-mining companies, they abhor nuclear power, and now they're even complaining about wind turbines killing birds -- so what do they approve of? Not long ago, a Greenpeace activist who knocked on the door of my home tried to convince me that the answer to our energy needs was to grow vast quantities of hemp. Hemp? I threatened to set the dog on her.

Mindless, anti-technology activism -- whether in NGOs or government -- is inimical to resilience. It jeopardizes our survival as individuals and our success as a society.

Exactly.

Between Condi and Chutch, it's obviously Photoshop day in the neighborhood. So let's look at the folks who pioneered the art of selective airbrushing: Stalin's Soviet Union.

Well, here's one liberal college's definition of gun control: got a reactionary radical chic professor coming whose entire look and mindset screams 1969 right down to his long hair parted in the middle, beret and AK-47?

Why not give him a fashion makeover? Bring him up to date. Into the 21st century! And airbrush that pesky ol' AK-47 right out of hands. There! Now he's all set to expose the kids to ideas that would been right at home at one of Leonard Bernstein's Black Panther fondue and Twister parties. (To borrow a great riff by Iowahawk.)

Back in February of 2001, I gave a brief, capsule history (as opposed to a long capsule history...) of HDTV in America in Nuts & Volts magazine, as the intro to a feature article whose text is sadly not available online:

In the US, HDTV began entering the public’s eye in the mid to late 1980s. This was the period when the nation was in awe of Japan. Remember when Hollywood cranked out films like Gung Ho, Black Rain, and Rising Sun? When the Japanese stock market was going through the roof? It was against this backdrop that the FCC made HDTV sound like a national emergency. As Jeff Taylor, the author of Reason magazine’s weekly email newsletter on technology and politics (www.reason.com) describes it, “This was the period when the Japanese were building great cars. They were building all of the consumer electronics. We used to lead the world in those areas. What are we going to do for technology? They’re going to do digital television, so we should do something about that. So that’s what got a lot of people in the FCC being very concerned about HDTV. So you have that whole backdrop of, ‘The government has to get involved or this is not going to get done right.’”

Unfortunately, the combination of government hearings, competition between the phone companies, the cable companies and the networks, and the general ramp up time that a new technology always faces, especially one designed to replace a very entrenched existing technology, meant a very, very long gestation period.

During which, in the mid-1990s, the Internet gave a tremendous boost to the phone and computer industries. So it was now doubly important that the television get HDTV off the ground.

If you noticed, one thing I haven’t mentioned is consumer interest, and feedback. As Taylor describes it, “At no part in this process, was anyone saying, ‘what about the average consumer out there who might want to look at this high definition television?’ I think that has been the missing link all along in that no one has tried to figure out if there is a market demand for this and how would you go about filling it if there was. So what we have is all of these different interests motivated by different things, trying to come up with a system that the general public may or may not want. This has taken up a better part of a decade now, just to get to the point where we just might start building things.”

By early 1998, HDTV antennas were starting to appear on skyscrapers, mountains and other locations with sufficient height across the US, along with early programming. Today, HDTV is firmly entrenched, and even with the deadline to discontinue all analog over-the-air broadcasting pushed back to 2009, Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) wants to fund digital converter boxes for those few remaining viewers, despite the seemingly universal prescence of digital and analog cable, and satellite TV.

In Tech Central Station, Glenn Reynolds writes:

I suppose that there are worse ways to waste the taxpayers' money -- I can't actually think of any at the moment, but given Congress's ingenuity I suppose that Ted Stevens and his colleagues probably could -- but this strikes me as pretty pathetic, especially when the government is laying off scientists for lack of money. Subsidizing TV and starving science seems like a recipe for something short of national greatness.

Meanwhile, technology is, as usual, passing Congress by. Because while the long-planned switch to HDTV creeps along, video technology is advancing by leaps and bounds in areas that, in what I'm pretty sure isn't really a coincidence, Congress hasn't managed to get its hands on yet. The result, widespread video podcasting, is likely to bring about something far more revolutionary than higher resolution commercial broadcasts: It might actually produce TV that people want to watch.

Podcasting is already big, with people producing "radio" programs for Internet distribution using nothing more than a computer and an Internet connection. Video podcasting will make producing and distributing TV programming nearly as easy. Podcasting and audio MP3 technology have demonstrated pretty clearly that in the audio world people care more about hearing what they want, when they want, than they care about super high sound quality. I suspect that video podcasting will demonstrate the same thing: a pretty good picture coupled with a show that you actually like is worth more than a stupendous picture coupled with a show you don't care about that much. And according to some people, the Video iPod is already good enough to ensure that video podcasting will be "huge."

If Congress cared about promoting video distribution technology, it could do a lot -- without even spending taxpayer dollars -- by reforming intellectual property law to make it easier on amateur producers and distributors. (Some general advice on that, from J.D. Lasica, can be found here.) That seems like a better enterprise than forking out taxpayer dollars to help buy set-top boxes, but one that's unlikely to materialize since it would involve making the entertainment industry unhappy.

On the other hand, I should probably be thankful that Congress doesn't seem to "get" the coming video revolution. As its behavior with HDTV has demonstrated, Congress isn't much good at helping new technologies along anyway, and it may well be that in these overregulated times technologies need to be fast, nimble, and below the radar to flourish. In the 21st Century, at least, Congress's biggest contribution to promoting the progress of science and the useful arts may sometimes be to overlook them until they've become a reality.

That Third Wave technology is advancing beyond the speed of a First Wave institution is a definite feature, not a bug.

National Review Online explores Annie Jacobsen's new book, Terror In The Skies:

Journalist Annie Jacobsen gained a certain degree of fame last year as the woman who wrote about the strange and frightening behavior of a group of Syrian “musicians” aboard a Northwest Airlines flight. She has now written a riveting book, Terror in the Skies: Why 9-11 Could Happen Again about what happened that day and in the months that followed. Jacobsen put her investigative skills to work, and discovered that the harrowing events that took place on her flight were far from an isolated occurrence. She ends her book with a warning: If our security system does not improve, another 9/11 is almost inevitable.

* * *

When Jacobsen decided to write about her experience aboard Flight 327, she was contacted by Dave Adams, the head of public affairs at FAMS. Adams insisted that the Middle Eastern men on her flight were “just musicians” from Syria. They’d been questioned by FAMS, the FBI, and the TSA. Their story checked out, Adams said, and none of their names appeared on the FBI’s “no fly” list. Given the evidence that terrorists had been trying to assemble bombs in airliner restrooms, why, Jacobsen asked, had air marshals done nothing about the Syrians’ bizarre behavior — much of it involving restrooms? “Our . . . agents have to have an event to arrest somebody,” Adams explained.

Jacobsen didn’t buy Adams’s “they were just musicians” story, and her gripping account of what happened on Flight 327 — “Terror in the Skies, Again?” — was posted on July 12, 2004, on WomensWallStreet. It exploded through the blogosphere, then the mainstream media, spawning intense debate. To some, Jacobsen was a courageous journalist exposing deadly flaws in America’s security system; to others, she was a racist, paranoid mommy with an overactive imagination. Jacobsen’s persistence in pursuing the story angered higher-ups in FAMS, and led to her testimony to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.

Astonishingly, Jacobsen writes, many of the federal agents who investigated the events of Flight 327 continued to insist that nothing unusual happened. In a sense, this was correct: These dry runs, or probes, apparently happen all the time. In the weeks after she posted her story, Jacobsen received more than 5,000 e-mails — including 250 from commercial pilots, flight attendants, and other airport employees who are forbidden by their employers to talk to the press about similar “incidents.” Gary Boettcher, president of the Coalition of Airline Pilots Associations, told Jacobsen that she’d likely witnessed a “dry run,” and that he’d had many similar experiences himself: “The terrorists are probing us all the time.” Mark Bogosian, an American Airlines pilot, said incidents like the one she described were a “dirty little secret” that airline crew members had known about for some time. Air marshals sent e-mails congratulating Jacobsen for bringing to light “something that had been going on since shortly after 9/11 and was being suppressed.” Many airline employees expressed outrage over security procedures that are lax, politically correct, and likely to lead to another 9/11.

As NRO writes, "It is a sobering and necessary book--one that ought to be read by anyone planning to fly the increasingly unfriendly skies".

Michelle Malkin wonders why USA Today photoshopped Condoleezza Rice's eyes to make her look, as Power Line suggests, like she's stepped off the set of an Omen movie.

One of Michelle's readers suggests it's a Photoshop sharpness filter run amok, but the rest of her face appears unchanged.

Update: USA Today has pulled the airbrushed photo and replaced it with a non-doctored version, along with a surprisingly lame explanation from the newspaper on the incident.

Another Update: Sissy Willis writes:

USA Today got religion in record time...Holding the media's feet to the fire by confronting them with the errors of their ways: It's one of the things the blogosphere does best. We notice there were 60 trackbacks to Michelle's original post -- most if not all in support of her thesis -- including technical explanations by Photoshop experts as to how the original image may have been doctored. Congratulations to Michelle and her army of seekers of wisdom and truth for not letting 'em get away with it.

Indeed, as the Blogfaddah would say.

...And not necessarily in that order, N.Z. Bear notes, as he catches Apple using Rosa Parks' image on their homepage and asks:

If you want to commemorate her life and achievements, fine, I guess. But slapping your corporate logo and slogan on the image is a bit over the top, no?

Apple's about the only company I can think of that can get away with this stuff...

Certainly two days after someone died, it seems a mite tacky.

Linda Chavez writes:

Few people in history can claim to have truly changed the world, and even fewer by one simple act. But Rosa Parks, who died this week at 92, did just that. On Dec. 1, 1955, she boarded a bus in Montgomery, Ala., and helped launch a revolution against bigotry and ignorance by refusing to yield her seat to a white man. She later said she was tired -- not physically so much as weary of putting up with second-class citizenship in a nation founded on the principle that all men are created equal. Mrs. Parks' defiance was one more nail in the coffin of Jim Crow, and the United States would never be the same.

It is almost unfathomable that barely 50 years ago it was illegal in many parts of the country for blacks to sit in the front of public buses, or eat at lunch counters or drink from the same water fountains as whites. Rosa Parks' protest inspired thousands of others to engage in civil disobedience against such tyranny. Soon, blacks and whites, Christians and Jews, old and young were taking to the streets to march against injustice and demand that this nation live up to its ideals. But the modern civil rights movement began with the Montgomery bus boycott sparked by Rosa Parks.

Read the rest--as Chavez concludes, "America is a better place for Rosa Parks. She will be missed by all who value freedom".

The Manolo explains some simple facts which so many in society--both high and low--have forgotten:

These inescapable facts obtain: that the clothes they are always necessary, and that others they will always judge us by them. These are the reasons why the Manolo he would have you dress with the purpose, to consider carefully what you would wear, and to think about the effect your clothes and how you wear them will have on others.

Of the course, this it does not mean that you must dress to please others, nor that you should follow the lowing herd, but rather that you should be conscious of the image you are projecting.

For the example, if you wish to project the image of carefree disdain for the high fashion, be aware that your dirty t-shirt of the Oakland Raiders, torn sweat pants, and flip-flops may not be conveying that exact message, may in the stead be saying to the by passer, “Cross to the other side of the street, lest this person’s disdain for personal hygiene and grooming infect you with the parasites.”

Manolo says, the fashion, it is not the nuclear rocket brain surgery.

There are the simple rules for dressing that can be used by anyone to maximize the assests and diminish the faults, and thus project the worthy image. Likewise, there are the ways and reasons to deviate from these rules that will thus project the pleasing counter image. But the central necessity for properly using, and sometimes ignoring, the rules of the fashion and the clothing it is to be thoughtful, to consider your choices carefully, and to be aware that you are always, always, always projecting the image, even when you think you are not.

Exactly. Or as Oscar E. Schoeffler, the former fashion editor of Esquire warned:

Never underestimate the power of what you wear...After all, there's just a small bit of you-yourself sticking out, at the cuff and at the neck. The rest of what the world sees is what you hang on the frame.

(From Alan Flusser's indispensable--well for us guys who care about these things--1985 book, Clothes And The Man.)

As Jonah wrote, one reason why a grab at guild socialism is an increasingly popular survival strategy for old media is their new-found competition. But even a formal or informal guild strategy can't stem all the ongoing hemorrhaging, which is why Bill O'Reilly paints a gloomy future for newspapers. That's not at all a surprising take from Bill given his biases, but he makes several great points:

Here's a story the print press doesn't really want to report -- many American newspapers are in big trouble. Earnings at The New York Times Company, for example, are down more than 50 percent this quarter, the Los Angeles Times has changed its editor and editorial director in the face of steep circulation declines, and scores of other papers are having major problems convincing consumers to buy their product.

There are a number of reasons for the depressing situation, pardon the pun. The Internet provides news efficiently, the decline of public education means fewer Americans care about what's going on, and people are very busy these days. Many of us don't have time to spend an hour reading the paper.

But the collapse of journalistic standards is another reason some have turned away from the press. Most Americans are not ideological junkies, craving their daily dose of political propaganda. Just give us the facts and some lively opinion based on the facts. The political jihadists who have taken over some newspapers are driving people away.

Here's an example. In the 30 days following Hurricane Katrina, The New York Times ran 53 columns criticizing President Bush on its editorial pages. Even Barbra Streisand might consider that overkill.

The Boston Globe, which is owned by The New York Times, has one conservative columnist and 10 liberal ones. So why would any conservative bother with the paper?

Over at the Washington Post, an editor named Marie Arana criticized her own paper saying: "The elephant in the newsroom is our narrowness. Too often, we wear liberalism on our sleeve and we are intolerant of other lifestyles and opinions ... if you work here, you must be one of us. You must be liberal, progressive, a Democrat."

So why would any Republican buy The Washington Post?

As Patrick Ruffini said in February on the night of the (astonishingly low-rated) Oscars:

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

For newspapers, the situation is even worse: it takes serious money to put together even a small, independent movie. But a blog? The only cash one need put out to get started is to buy the pajamas.

Matt Drudge once said, "Roger Ailes told me early on, you don't need a license to report. You need a license to do hair". Naturally, as Jonah Goldberg notes, most in Big Media would like that to change:

Many putative First Amendment voluptuaries defend their position against the most absurd hypotheticals. My favorite example (as some readers may recall) comes from the columnist Michael Kinsley. A "very distinguished New York Times writer" once told Kinsley that "if the Times ballet critic, heading home after assessing the day's offering of plies and glissades, happens to witness a murder on her way to the Times Square subway, she has a First Amendment right and obligation to refuse to testify about what she saw." Why? Because she's a member of the priestly caste.

Other than the obvious problems - that the First Amendment is not a blanket protection to conceal crimes, that nowhere in case law or in the Constitution itself has such a right been established - there's a sticky public policy problem. Who gets to be a journalist? That question is why federal shield laws are the camel's nose under the tent of journalism licenses. If everybody can be a journalist simply by pecking away at a keyboard, then tens of millions of bloggers, newsletter writers and coupon-clipper weekly editors are journalists. If that's the case, then such a sweeping right is unenforceable and dangerous. If, on the other hand, only some people get to be called "journalists," then we've got the makings of a trade guild here.

There's been some interesting economic research in recent years on the role of guilds (i.e., professional associations, including some unions, that work with the state to require licensing for people seeking similar occupations). Morris Kleiner, a University of Minnesota economist and visiting scholar at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, recently summarized some of his findings in The Wall Street Journal. Apparently, even though guilds don't lead to better or safer service, they're on the rise. Why? Well, one reason is that guilds have been very successful at persuading the public they're better for the consumer even though much of the time they're really better only for the members of the guild themselves. In states where a license is required to become, say, a hairdresser, salaries are higher by some 10 to 20 percent. This is partly because the licensing - the fees, the extra training, etc. - becomes a barrier to entry to others seeking employment. In states where strict state licensing isn't required, job growth is 20 percent higher.

The same dynamic would surely play out if elite journalists got their way. The resentment and vitriol aimed at bloggers and the "New Media" is palpable at journalism school symposiums and panel discussions. Is there any doubt that the key masters of any new state-sanctioned journalism guild would translate that animosity into higher wages for themselves and fewer opportunities for the untrained masses nipping at their heels?

This illuminates the fundamental problem with the "enlightened" media's fashionable pose on the First Amendment: It's anti-free speech for anyone without keys to the clubhouse. They want special rights for "real journalists." Well, special rights for some mean weaker rights for others. The editors of The New York Times rightly demand untrammeled opportunities to criticize politicians, but they want complex rules and regulations for everyone else - including other politicians! They think the First Amendment offers blanket protection to strippers "expressing" thems