Division of Labour links to an interesting graphic tracking the relocation of Katrina survivors.

Sadly I'm a day late, but allow me to send a belated happy 34th to Nolan Bushnell's Pong. Nobody knew it then, but we'd never look at our TVs the same way again.

The Manolo illustrates that Kiwi Parade Gloss polish can be used for more than just shoes...

Linking to a photo of a sleeping transient, Architecture And Morality's "Corbusier" writes that if it's not one thing, it's another in France:

I found this image via the Drudge report. The reuters caption reads as follows:

People walk past as a homeless person takes cover from the cold on a Paris sidewalk November 28, 2005, as six homeless have died in France since the arrival of winter temperatures. French authorities have raised their weather alert in 31 departments and asked for increased vigilance to the homeless in Paris.

If it's not a major heatwaves that kills the elderly in France, it's now an extreme coldspell that kills the homeless in France. The message is clear: If you are on the fringe of helplessness don't expect your government to save you from the whims of nature. We hear constantly of the great French social model, but I must admit my ignorance on how this system is supposed to protect its most vulnerable. I get the feeling that this system favours the vast middle, who go about their lives taking care of few things on their own while letting the state make the most important decisions for them. As for those who are unable, either by age or by mental incapacity, to take charge of their own lot, they're rather seen as an inconvenience for the happy middle. The photograph clearly illustrates the nature of the French happy middle, going about their day to day lives in their gently pleasant ho-hum way, willfully ignoring the few that are not part of their content state of being.

This picture is not unique to France, nor is the idea of society's weakest being more vulnerable to neglect and death all that new. Such a scene can be found all over the world, and almost makes one wonder whether it is a natural state of affairs within human society. But for a country that loves to boast to everyone who will listen about its culture of humanity and of equality, such scenes of homelessness belie the rhetoric.

Not to mention the many scenes of nocturnal automobile immolations that have dotted the Parisian landscape this fall. Of course, 13 years ago French pundits assured themselves that they'd never have to face anything like the L.A. riots, "mainly because France is a more humane, less racist place with a much stronger commitment to social welfare programs."

More from the great Claudia Rosett on the UN, this time on her home turf, the Wall Street Journal. She writes that the UN may be getting ready to shred the documents that make up the archives of the Paul Volcker's investigation into their uber-corrupt Oil For Graft Food program.

Pajamas Media now has RSS feeds for both its top stories, and the Best of the Blogs links. Click here to add them. (As I just did to My Yahoo page. And speaking of which, just click here or follow the link on the sidebar to add this site to your My Yahoo page, as well.)

Hugh Hewitt writes:

The best laugh of the day comes via a letter from 24 Democratic Congressman bemoaning the paper's cancellation of Bob Scheer's ravings. Dennis Kucinich posted it at the Huffington Post. Before you think, "Good for the Times for dumping the crazy," ask yourself if there has ever been a columnist for the paper whose column --if cancelled-- would elicit a protest from two dozen conservative members of Congress? There is of course no such columnist, and never has been. In fact, there isn't a single high profile center-right writer identified with the Times in any capacity other than syndicated columnists. But the Times cheerfully indulged Scheer all these years, and then in a vain attempt to cover its quality control firing of the around-the-bend Scheer, tossed the only conservative on Spring Street, cartoonist Michael Ramirez, over board at the same time.

What a disaster the Tribune Company has on its hand: It knows it must win back center-right readers to survive, but it lacks the guts to try to do so boldly, and its Ramirez-move steps on its big anti-MoveOn.org gesture.

Glenn Reynolds has several additional links highlighting the L.A. Times' obtuse nature.

Dr. Sanity has some thoughts on denial. Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin looks at projection.

Claudia Rosett writes:

The most notorious of the recent UN power grabs was Oil-for-Food, which began as a limited and somewhat ad hoc relief program, but turned into the biggest scam in history for the simple reason that the UN tapped right into the oil wells of Saddam Hussein’s UN-sanctioned Iraq – effectively dipping its cup right into the world oil market. Once that happened, getting relief to the Iraqi people became a sideshow to doing business with Saddam. The idea was that the UN would supervise Saddam, ensuring he sold oil only to buy relief goods for the Iraqi people. For its administrative pains, the UN Secretariat collected 2.2% of the revenue on every barrel of oil sold by Saddam, totaling $1.4 billion over the course of the seven year program. Member states that supported Saddam got lucrative business from him, with the eager but confidential approval of the Secretariat. What followed was oil-for-fraud, oil-for-palaces, oil-for-weapons, kickbacks for Saddam, payoffs to businesses and politicians, and, allegedly, bribes to assorted UN officials surrounding Kofi Annan. None of that was disclosed to the public at the time, and far too little has been disclosed since, by this same UN now proposing itself as the keeper of the Internet information society. We know it today only because President Bush finally put together a coalition outside the UN, and over UN protest, to topple Saddam -- and in so doing, exposed a lot of dirty laundry, not only Saddam’s, but the UN’s.

Oil-for-Food was the kind of fiasco that should have humbled the UN. But with the Oil-for-Food scandal high in the headlines, Annan rolled out another proposal this year that has the potential to be even worse -- unimaginable though that might seem. This one was his plan for global taxation, in which he wants the world’s wealthiest nations to pledge an automatic .7% of their annual gross national income for aid – much of that, presumably to be administered by the UN. Never mind that decades of UN-run aid programs have done more to prop up and bail out tyrants than to help the impoverished people living under them – since UN aid is generally funneled through governments, and it is basically despotic government that keeps people poor. For the UN, the big effect of Annan’s global tax plan would be to provide a steady gusher of billions straight into the coffers of the same UN Secretariat that administered Oil-for-Food. That plan was shot down by the U.S. at Annan’s “reform” summit this past September. But it is only down, not out. That number, the .7%, persists in UN rhetoric. It is the germ of a plan, and the UN has been playing with similar, smaller, and perhaps more feasible plans of similar kind. A tax on airlines. A tax on… well, that brings us back to the internet.

The danger by now is that the UN has two powerfully motivated interest groups, the censors and the taxers, both gunning for control of the net. And the UN has already sprouted a bureaucracy, complete with Prepcoms, to organize the next summit, and the next. The takeover bid failed in Tunis, but with enough time and persistence, it could very well happen.

So, what’s a blogger to do? For people who care about freedom and value the internet for all the right reasons, the best answer I can see is to fight back with the best weapon you’ve got— the truth. It helped air out CBS. Indeed, it is on blogs that much of the best UN coverage can be found already. We need more. If it’s information the UN wants to talk about, let’s start with a lot more information about the UN itself. Find it, post it, The more daylight, the better the chance that the UN will have to either shut itself down, or clean up its act—and back away from the internet.

Don't hold your breath waiting for the first two options coming true anytime soon.

Betsy Newmark catches Moveon.org firing up their airbrushes:

That ad from Moveon.org that used a picture of British soldiers in it wearing shorts purporting to be American soldiers missing their families for the holidays has now been altered.

They have photoshopped in some long pants. Compare the picture as it was yesterday. And if you click on the video, you'll see that they haven't yet been able to change the film.

Apparently, they couldn't tell what an American serviceman looks like, but thinks that they can photoshop their message and fool people. You be the judge of the sincerity of their concern for those servicemen.

Indeed^TM.

Update: James Taranto writes:

We're not even sure what the point of this deception could be. Perhaps MoveOn's dishonesty is simply pathological.

Well, yeah.

Another Update: Michelle Malkin writes that the ad has been pantsed pulled.

Right Reason, a weblog with some stellar writers on the topic of philopshical conservatism, has an interview today with Roger Scruton, the author of The Meaning of Conservatism:

I wrote The Meaning of Conservatism in 1979, during the last year of a failing Labour Government, when the Conservatives were in the process of choosing a new leader (Margaret Thatcher), and also looking around for a new philosophy -- or rather any philosophy, having subsisted to that point without one. I was teaching in the University of London, and had begun to take an interest in political thought. I was surprised to discover that the politics department of my college library contained largely Marxist or sub-Marxist books, that major conservative thinkers like Burke, de Maistre and Hayek were hardly to be found there, and that the journals were all uniformly leftist. Academic political science was in the style of the New Left Review, with a strong leaning towards the idiocies of 1968, a sneering contempt for England and its heritage, and a witch-hunting tone towards the opposition, which it dismissed as middle brow, middle class, and racist.

At the same time I was troubled to discover that the Conservative Party had no principle with which to oppose this kind of "resentment politics," other than the Free Market. I wanted to remind people that there really is a tradition of conservative thinking in politics, that it is wiser and deeper than the left-liberal orthodoxies of the day, and that it is not reducible to free market principles, even if it contains them.

It should be added that I would not have written the book, had I not been commissioned by Ted Honderich, then politics editor at Penguin and also a University colleague, who was desperate to find someone, somewhere, however feeble, to defend the conservative position. Without The Meaning of Conservatism, the intellectual left -- whose ideas, emotions and very existence depends upon a stance of opposition -- would have had nothing to oppose. Hence the book’s appearance caused a huge sigh of relief among my colleagues, who were at last able to hate again.

And they do so need someone to hate.

Two recent articles look at the prime movers behind Hollywood's great 1954 movie, On The Waterfront. Harry Stein writes of Elia Kazan, its director:

As a chief villain in the blacklist myth, Kazan got his due and then some when the Motion Picture Academy announced in 1999 that it would at last award the sickly 89-year-old filmmaker a lifetime-achievement Oscar. The firestorm that followed split Hollywood between those who insisted that Kazan should never be forgiven and those who argued that honoring his artistic work wasn't the same as excusing his testimony.

None defended Kazan's actions a half-century earlier. What put Kazan beyond redemption wasn't simply his cooperation with HUAC. He could still have won forgiveness. But far from repentant, Kazan was defiant. The day after his HUAC appearance, he took out a New York Times ad entitled, almost regally, "A Statement by Elia Kazan." "I believe that communist activities confront the people of this country with an unprecedented and exceptionally tough problem," it read. "That is, how to protect ourselves from a dangerous and alien society and still keep the free, open, healthy way of life that gives us self-respect." Kazan then briefly recounted his youth in the communist movement and the contempt that he came to have for the totalitarian mentality that he'd seen firsthand.

Waterfront's screenwriter, Budd Schulberg also saw the totalitarian mentality first hand--when he arrested Leni Riefenstahl:

Years before he wrote "On the Waterfront," before that film brought him an Oscar, and before he earned the ire of many colleagues by testifying during the Hollywood communist witch hunt, writer Budd Schulberg had the distinct honor of arresting Leni Riefenstahl.

He was in Germany, assembling a film to be used at the Nuremberg trials as evidence against the Nazis. Riefenstahl, the legendary director and propagandist for Hitler, knew where the skeletons were. So Schulberg, dressed in his military uniform, drove to her chalet on a lake in Bavaria, knocked on her door, and told the panicked artist that she was coming with him.

"I tried to calm her down," says Schulberg, 91, remembering in a thin, dry voice an episode more than a half-century distant. But he needed her to identify the seemingly endless gallery of faces on film that he had been collecting. So, very much against her will, he drove her to Nuremberg in an inelegant open-air military vehicle, and listened to a sad and defensive argument that would define the rest of her life, and that no one would ever believe.

"She gave me the usual song and dance," he says. "She said, 'Of course, you know, I'm really so misunderstood. I'm not political.'"

(H/T: Brothers Judd)

Wonder if this scene will be in the Jodie Foster's recently announced biopic in which she attempts to resuscitate Riefenstahl's reputation, much like Hollywood's recent string of pro-Che and Castro movies. And if so, which artist will she portray more sympathetically: Schulberg or Riefenstahl?

Neo-Neocon looks at far, far leftwing former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who ever since his days in LBJ's administration, has never met an enemy of the US he hasn't felt sympathy for:

One can argue that even dictators need defense attorneys, and that is most certainly true. It's a nasty job, but somebody has to do it. And yet someone is already doing it; Clark's lamentably eager services are hardly needed.

Yes, Clark never met a dictator he didn't like, and this has been the case for decades. And yes, Clark is probably the most extreme leftist alive today who actually held a position of power in a Presidency--in his case, that of Lyndon Johnson, under whom he served as Attorney General.

Why am I interested in all this? It's what so often grabs me, intrapersonal political change. So my question about Clark is: how did what originally seems to have been a relatively mainstream guy end up esposing views that put him in the running with Noam Chomsky? Did something happen to change him? Or was he always like that, despite having served in the Johnson administration?

After doing a bit of research, I've got some ideas about it, and my answer is "yes" and "yes." Yes, he was always more or less like that; and yes, he became even more so as a result of his experiences during the Vietnam era.

Neo adds:

In some strange and dreadful alchemy, it seems that those suffering peasants of postwar China, those blacks who were disenfranchised (and worse) in the American South, and those who died in Vietnam, have morphed over the years in Clark's mind into the dictators and war criminals who arouse his sympathies now. It's quite a journey.

Read the rest and follow the links to see how he got there.

Steve Green reminds the MSM about this pesky little thing called inflation:

Oooooh, it must be time to panic:

The price of gold rose above 500 dollars an ounce for the first time for 18 years, propelled by strong buying from investment funds.

Gold hit 502.30 US dollars in overnight Asian trade before staging a retreat during European trading hours. The price was the highest since December 14, 1987 when it had touched 502.97 dollars.

Well, not really. Adjusted for inflation, gold today would have to cost over $830 an ounce, in order to match 1987 prices.

But remember: Just because the story is fake, doesn't mean it isn't accurate. A 60% difference is practically a rounding error to most people, right?

I don't have a problem with folks who like to keep a small portion of their portfolio in a gold fund for diversity sake. But serious gold bugs are in a perpetual Chicken Little mode.

Either that, or they've bought into the talk radio cliche that it's always a good time to buy gold. As James Lileks once wrote:

I’ve been listening to talk radio for 15 years, and I can now tell you the sum total of what I’ve learned:

This is an excellent time to buy gold.

Market’s up? An excellent time to buy gold. Market’s down? An excellent time to buy gold. Mars Rover discovers that the red planet is composed mostly of gold? A wonderful time to buy gold.

Well, it rounds out your stable long term conservative slow growth investment in home heating oil futures, another talk radio favorite.

Pajamas Media examines the layoffs at the moribund L.A. Times, or as Hugh Hewitt recently called it, "The Least Read Editorial in America".

The recent Super Bowls have had some surprisingly close action on the gridiron, but let's face it: the ancillary "entertainment" is invariably craptacular, even when it doesn't involve a wardrobe malfunction.

Breitbart.com reports that this February, the Rolling Stones will be getting the nod to perform there:

The Rolling Stones will take a brief break from touring to perform at the Super Bowl halftime show.

The rock 'n' roll greats will go on stage during the game Feb. 5 at Ford Field, the NFL said Tuesday.

"We are thrilled to perform for millions of fans at one of the most exciting and highly anticipated sporting events of the year," the band, which earlier in the day announced its European tour dates, said in a statement.

The Rolling Stones are currently touring North America to promote their latest album, "A Bigger Bang."

The NFL has a history of getting top acts for its halftime show.

Last season, the primary entertainer was former Beatle Paul McCartney.

That followed Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" in the 2004 game during a performance with Justin Timberlake.

Considering that Mick is 62, that's one nipple (well actually two) that I hope we won't be "accidentally" seeing in a couple of months.

Ian Schwartz of The Political Teen has video of a petulant Mike Wallace who believes that "Karl Rove will not permit [President Bush] to sit down with me". Ian adds that Wallace "acts as if it is President Bush’s duty to meet and be interviewed by him".

Gee, I can't imagine why Bush would not want to appear on CBS, can you?

And it's not like Wallace is attempting to find anything that would actually be, you know, news. As Jay Rosen wrote last year, the traditional MSM is all about The Gotcha, especially when it comes to administration whose views they, seemingly to a man, oppose:

Read More »

The role of Howard Cosell will be played...Arlen Specter?!

PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- Sen. Arlen Specter has accused the NFL and the Philadelphia Eagles of treating Terrell Owens unfairly, and might refer the matter to the antitrust subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Specter, who chairs the Judiciary Committee, said at a news conference Monday in Harrisburg it was "vindictive and inappropriate" for the league and the Eagles to forbid the star wide receiver from playing and prevent other teams from talking to him.

"It's a restraint of trade for them to do that, and the thought crosses my mind, it might be a violation of antitrust laws," Specter said.

The Eagles suspended Owens on Nov. 5 for four games without pay for "conduct detrimental to the team, and deactivated him with pay on Sunday after the suspension ended.

Arbitrator Richard Bloch said last week the team's actions were supported by the labor agreement between the league and the NFL Players Association.

"The arbitrator's decision is consistent with our collective bargaining agreement, and it simply enforced the terms of the player's contract," NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said.

Some legal experts disagreed with Specter's view.

"To have an antitrust violation, you have to have a contract or conspiracy in restraint of trade," said Robert McCormick, a law professor at Michigan State University.

Matthew J. Mitten, director of the National Sports Law Institute at Marquette University, said, "We're in the labor arena, not antitrust."

Specter emphasized that he was "not a supporter of Terrell Owens."

"I am madder than hell at what he has done in ruining the Eagles' season," the Pennsylvania Republican said. "I think he's in flagrant breach of his contract and I believe the Eagles would be within their rights in not paying him another dime or perhaps even suing him for damages."

But Specter said, "I do not believe, personally, that it is appropriate to punish him (by forcing him to sit out the rest of the season). He's not committed a crime, he's committed a breach of contract. And what they're doing against him is vindictive."

Jesse Jackson and Ralph Nader also jumped on the publicity gravy train earlier this month.

I don't recall any similar sort of kerfuffle when Tampa Bay imposed the same basic decision on Keyshawn Johnson two years ago. What makes Owens' situation any different, except that, if anything, his disruptive hijinks have been that much more bizarre?

Update: Power Line also notices the strange troika that Senator Haggis finds himself in.

Another Update: "Specter backs off threat to investigate Terrell Owens' treatment". Pass the Glenfiddich!

This is the headline of an article from Friday's San Francisco Chronicle:

BERKELEY
Mao debunkers defend their book
Critics call it effort to discredit communism

After over 100 million killed, one certainly hopes.

(For our earlier looks at Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's Mao book, click here and through the links on this post.)

Denny Hastert renames the capital's "Holiday Tree":

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert has told federal officials that the lighted, decorated tree on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol -- known in recent years as the "Holiday Tree" -- should be renamed the "Capitol Christmas Tree," as it was called until the late 1990s.

The Capitol's senior landscape architect confirmed the name switch yesterday for The Washington Times.

"It was known as the 'Holiday Tree' for several years and just recently was changed back to the 'Capitol Christmas Tree.' This was a directive from the speaker," said Capitol architect Matthew Evans.

"The speaker believes a Christmas tree is a Christmas tree, and it is as simple as that," said Ron Bonjean, spokesman for the Illinois Republican.

The Capitol tree, traditionally overshadowed by the White House's "National Christmas Tree," was renamed a "holiday tree" several years ago, according to the Capitol Architect's offices, in an effort to acknowledge the other holidays of Kwanzaa and Hanukkah -- although no one seemed to know exactly when the name was changed or by whom.

Calling a Christmas tree a Christmas tree has become a politically charged prospect in jurisdictions across the country -- from Boston to Sacramento and in dozens of communities in between.

"It's a growing problem," said Jared N. Leland, spokesman and legal counsel for the Becket Fund, a District-based legal and educational institute. "Celebrating the season with Christmas trees ... and leaving them named 'Christmas' is simply recognizing the religious nature of people. Christmas should be able to be called Christmas."

(Via Mary Katharine Ham.)

Business Week looks at "Cyber Monday, Marketing Myth":

Do a Google search on "Cyber Monday," and you get as many as 779,000 results. Not a bad haul for a term that was created just a week and a half ago to describe the jump in online shopping activity following the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. While Black Friday is the official kickoff of the traditional retail season, the story goes, online retail really takes off the following Monday.

Just one problem: It's not true, at least for many online retailers. Contrary to what the recent blitz of media coverage implies, Cyber Monday isn't nearly the biggest online shopping or spending day of the year. It ranks only as the 12th-biggest day historically, according to market researcher comScore Networks. It's not even the first big day of the season.

For most online retailers, the bigger spending day of the season to date was way back on Nov. 22, three days before Black Friday. What's more, most e-tailers say the season's top spending day comes much later, between around Dec. 5 and Dec. 15.

Maybe someday Business Week can also tell me what day marks the end of what it describes as "the traditional retail season"--it's nowhere to be found in this article.

In terms of geopolitics, it's utterly astonishing what a powerful president George W. Bush has been, even going back as far as the late 1990s.

Err, come again?!

James Taranto catches this classic groaner in the Times of London:

Simon Jenkins, a columnist for London's Sunday Times, comments on reports that President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair toyed with the idea of bombing al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based TV network:

That Blair and Bush should have discussed bombing the Al-Jazeera building in Qatar is hardly surprising. They agreed to bomb the headquarters of Serbian television during the Kosovo war.

Well, color us impressed. Who knew President Bush was already conducting foreign policy back in 1999, when he was still governor of Texas?

CBS did, buddy, that's who!

As Glenn Reynolds noted in May of 2002, two years before CBS's obsession would reach full err, maturity with Mary Mapes and Ra^therGate, the Tiffany Network filed this astonishing report, piped in fresh from the Twilight Zone:

FREUDIAN SLIP? Better visit this CBS story fast because they'll probably fix this:

The Washington Post said Saturday that a top-secret briefing memo presented to President Bush in 1998 focused on efforts by Osama bin Laden to strike at targets in the U.S.

Um, President who in 1998? I've been pretty hard on the Bush Administration over this -- and especially on the lame spin the Administration is offering -- but this just might suggest that some other people have a bit of an agenda.

Charles Krauthammer has written several times that BDS can cloud judgment--it also seems to frequently have astonishingly negative effects on memories as well.

(Although, to be fair, chronological lapses are the least of its issues.)

James Lileks beams back a report from that alternate universe where Teddy Kennedy wears a sleeveless gold command jersey, John Kerry has a goatee and Fu Manchu, and Nancy Pelosi bares her midriff (whoops--sorry for implanting that image in your brain): what would happen if we bugged out of Iraq.

The L.A. Times calls for--surprise!--a mammoth government bailout of America's Big Three auto manufacturers. In contrast, Bill Quick says market forces should be left to do their thing:

No, you must let them collapse. They are the automotive equivalent of Terry Schaivo - dead husks that need to be buried, not embalmed in a living death. One of the reasons that the American auto industry is in such sad state is that decisions are influenced by the moral hazard generated by a governmental policy of "too big to fail."

This sort of thing emboldened the automakers to accede to outrageously exorbitant union demands, particularly in the area of pensions, because they knew that these monumental unfunded liabilities would be picked up by a politically sensitized government unwilling to accept the sort of awful publicity that involves taking money out of the mouths - or retirement accounts - of seniors and other pensioners.

The business of capitalist business in productivity engendered by creative destruction. Nature's law of tooth and fang has nothing at all on capitalism's law that the market will destroy the weak and clear the way for newer, stronger businesses to take their place.

If Ford and GM are too weak to survive without government help, let them fail. Something newer, better, and stronger will replace them. Count on it.

I agree.

Calvin Coolidge will be eternally misquoted as saying that "The business of America is business", but one thing he actually did say, when asked, near the end of his administration, about its greatest accomplishment, "I think it would have to be, minding our own business."

Would that modern politicians thought the same way when it came to meddling with the marketplace.

Jonah Goldberg looks at crazed fight for the center of politics, and its accompanying language disconnect:

Behold: We have entered the Age When Dinos and Rinos Rule the Earth. See them battle each other for absolute dominion!

Though this might sound like a cool monster mash of the "Mechagodzilla versus Godzilla" variety, it's a good deal less exciting and more depressing, like a taste test between 2% milk and soy milk. What we are witnessing is the dawn of the boring phase of the Great Republican Realignment, and it promises to have liberals and conservatives alike going bonkers.

I should back up. Dinos, of course, are "Democrats in Name Only." Rinos are their GOP counterparts. Nobody actually ever admits to being a Republican in name only. Rather, these are epithets used to describe politicians of insufficient ideological purity or partisan backbone. Think David Gergen without the smoldering sexual intensity [Heh--Ed]. Or, if you can't, think moderates, squishes, apostates, New York Times-pleasing "mavericks," centrists, and all the others who want to "get beyond labels" or get a standing ovation from the Brookings Institution.

Galloping toward the center is nothing new in American politics. The parties have always regressed to the mean. The center of gravity is in the, uh, center. What's changed is that the center has — finally — been moving an eensy bit to the right.

* * *

This anti-Bush huffing and puffing has been caused in part by an overreaction to the Iraq war and liberal terror over losing the courts. But much of the rage can also be traced to an overcompensating bitterness over small differences. In much the same way the Marxist English professor is suddenly deeply troubled by the slightly less Marxist ideology of the colleague who unfairly got a better office, many liberals are more angered by the fact Republicans are running the government than they are about Republican policy. It just seems wrong! Republicans don't even like government!

This isn't to say there haven't been some big victories for the conservative wing of the GOP over the last five years. Tax cuts, judges, John Bolton, the blocking of the Kyoto Protocol and watching Dan Rather dismantle himself like a robot ordered to put himself back in the box: good times, good times.

But you know, when tectonic plates smash into each other, there are earthquakes and, after that, it's slow inexorable grinding, with little chunks breaking off of one side and then the other now and then. That's where conservatives are now: the slow, grinding phase.

If you average out the spikes in the political Richter scale, the trends have been obvious for more than a decade: The Democrats are becoming a minority party. The 1990s saw them hemorrhage power in the House, Senate, state legislatures, etc., even as Bill Clinton moved his party to the right on many of its core issues. Even this month's Democratic election victories are at best preservations of the status quo. In Virginia, the winner of the governor's race was a nominally pro-life Dino replacing another Dino. These centrist Democrats understand that listening to the base of their party would be electoral suicide. Not exactly champagne wishes and caviar dreams for the crowd at the Nation.

And we aren't drinking out of slippers here on the right either. Bush is a lame duck, Social Security reform is dead, the dreams of the revolution come up only when we gather around the campfire to sigh about what might have been. The Rinos are in charge now. Drilling in ANWR was pulled from the House appropriations budget, tax-cut extensions in the Senate were crushed in deference to the fearsome clout of ... Olympia Snowe. Even on judges, the power players are the Gang of 14 centrists and Rinos like Arlen Specter. It was Specter, not Kennedy, who gave John G. Roberts Jr. the toughest questions during his hearings.

The most depressing prospect is that this will be the status quo for years to come. Liberals will shriek about GOP radicalism and conservatives will whine about the lack of it. And we'll all have to make do with 2% milk.

And assuming, for the sake of argument, that we don't wake up to President Hillary on Election Tuesday of 2008, it's a safe bet that the next GOP president--possibly Giuliani or McCain--is going to be more of a centrist (in other words, a RINO) than President Bush is perceived to be.

With a 4-7 record this year, it's not all that surprising that the Detroit Lions fired head coach Steve Mariucci and some of his assistants today. "Mooch" is the first coaching casualty of the season--no doubt several more will be joining him by early next year.

On Saturday, Cris Carter wrote that if Mariucci was to get the axe, team president Matt Millen should join him:

Everyone is talking about Steve Mariucci being fired as the Detroit Lions' head coach, but team president Matt Millen should be mentioned in the same breath.

Millen hired Mariucci, who was Millen's second hire since taking over the franchise in 2001. He also drafted the talent, selecting a wide receiver with a first-round pick the last three years. So Millen has to shoulder some of the blame, too, for the Lions' disappointing 4-7 season.

I don't see Mariucci keeping his job after the season. But if he goes, Millen doesn't deserve to stay, either.

He's still there for now--it will be interesting if that holds true 'til next September.

On the Left Coast, Hugh Hewitt looks at "The Least Read Editorial in America", also known as The L.A. Times. 3000 miles away, Pamela of Atlas Shrugs (H/T Donald Sensing) has visual proof that life support is needed for The Gray Lady.

Update: Speaking of legacy medias, Chris Anderson, who coined the brilliant Long Tail meme, says that "The TV broadcasting business stinks".

Scott Adams of "Dilbert" fame explains all you need to know to toss logic to the wind as you seek fame and fortune on your way to become a True Superstar Internet Commenting Machine.

(Via Dr. Helen.)

In Tech Central Station, James Pinkerton compares and contrasts Hugh Hefner and Maureen Dowd:

Indeed, one might suspect that Dowd is getting close to exactly what she wants. She is the best-known and best-paid "sob sister" in America today. If not everything she writes turns into gold, her words are still worth their weight in silver, and that's plenty lucrative.

So when she writes, in her opening, "I don't even understand what I don't understand about men" -- don't believe her. In fact, she understands men full well. In her book, she cites her own mother as a lifelong authority on males; she recalls the late Peggy Dowd telling her, "Women can stand on the Empire State Building and scream to the heavens that they are equal to men and liberated, but until they have the same anatomy, it's a lie." Indeed, going further, the elder Dowd observed of modern times, "It's more of a man's world than ever. Men can eat their cake in unlimited bakeries."

And by "bakery," Maureen's mom meant the cookie factory, a.k.a the cheesecake factory. That is, contemporary society, in which men and women wheel and deal themselves sexually -- although as Dowd would be the first to profess in print, the most successful sex-wheelers are men.

We might, for example, consider Hugh Hefner, who founded Playboy magazine the year after Dowd was born, back in 1953. More than any other individual, Hefner changed the name of the game, from patriarchy to anarchy. Bygone institutions such as chaste courtship, followed by marriage, might have oppressed women in various ways, but they oppressed men, too -- or at least men felt oppressed by the need to get married before they could have sex.

"Hef" helped to change all that, not only making sexy pictures readily available, but through the articles -- honest! -- in the magazine, too. Beginning in 1962, he began publishing "The Playboy Philosophy," which captured, and then accelerated, the budding libertinism in the culture. As Hefner wrote of the "playboy" ideal:

"He can be many things, providing he possesses a certain point of view. He must see life not as a vale of tears but as a happy time; he must take joy in his work, without regarding it as the end and all of living; he must be an alert man, an aware man, a man of taste, a man sensitive to pleasure, a man who -- without acquiring the stigma of the voluptuary or dilettante -- can live life to the hilt. This is the sort of man we mean when we use the word playboy."

Those were heady years, indeed, for the young and the restless, when The Pill was becoming common, when a semi-Rat Packer President sat in the White House, when Lenny Bruce shocked and stunned the squares, even as liberal lawyers sought to expand one-narrow definitions of "privacy" to include anything that consenting adults might wish to consent to.

But of course, "consenting adult" has proven to be a synonym for "cookie," or "cheesecake" -- which Hefnerians love to graze upon, without having to stick around and stake a legal and binding claim. Women were liberated from the need to get married, but in a different way, men were liberated from the need to get married, too.

Which, focusing on the bottom rungs of society, is the subject of this profile of Theodore Dalrymple, in Canada's National Post:

Dalrymple's father, a communist and a businessman, worried about humanity's future but didn't like people and couldn't enter an equal relationship with anyone. This left Dalrymple permanently suspicious of anyone selling grand schemes. More important, his parents fought a long silent war over his head. They never spoke to each other in his presence and "created for themselves a kind of hell on a small domestic scale, as if acting in an unscripted play by Strindberg." For a long time Dalrymple pitied himself. Finally he decided, "One's past is not one's destiny, and it is self-serving to pretend that it is." He decided if in the future he became miserable, it would be his own fault.

The single parents he has treated often are at fault -- and they know it. They also know they will not be censured. When discussing social issues it is forbidden to blame "the victims," and women burdened with fatherless children automatically become victims, therefore not responsible for their acts.

He has learned that men who carelessly impregnate women know perfectly well the consequences. "They all know that they are condemning their children to lives of brutality, poverty, abuse and hopelessness." Yet many do it often. Government, by its (unavoidable) decision to provide some support for children, "absolves the men of all responsibility. The state becomes the child's father, reducing the biological father to the status of a child."

He has treated many young women who know "it is both foolish and wicked" to have children by a man without considering whether he could be a good father. His female patients repeatedly choose men who are obviously bad candidates for fatherhood, being some combination of unreliable, drunken, drug-addicted, criminal or violent. In his telling, it sounds as if evolution has gone into reverse, females selecting the males least likely to collaborate in successfully perpetuating the species. They consider transitory pleasure more important than the human beings they create -- not the banality of evil, says Dalrymple, but "the frivolity of evil."

But even Dalrymple faults society. Elite opinion-makers (the "mandarins" in his subtitle) have created an easygoing culture that tolerates just about anything. It abandons traditional values without replacing them and then wakes up surprised to find that millions of young people don't much care about the civilization that makes life bearable.

Go figure.

Update: Kevin Murphy has some thoughts on MoDo and Hef.

Mark Steyn looks at but one example of how political correctness is killing Hollywood:

I stopped to buy the third boxed set in the "Looney Tunes Golden Collection." Loved the first two: Daffy, Bugs, Porky, beautifully restored, tons of special features. But, for some reason, this new set begins with a special announcement by Whoopi Goldberg explaining what it is we're not meant to find funny: "Unfortunately at that time racial and ethnic differences were caricatured in ways that may have embarrassed and even hurt people of color, women and ethnic groups," she tells us sternly. "These jokes were wrong then and they're wrong today" -- unlike, say, Whoopi Goldberg's most memorable joke of recent years, the one at that 2004 all-star Democratic Party gala in New York where she compared President Bush to her, um, private parts. There's a gag for the ages.

I don't know what Whoopi's making such a meal about. It's true you don't see many positive images of people of color on "Looney Tunes," but then the images of people of non-color aren't terribly positive either (Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam). Instead, you see positive images of ducks of color, roadrunners of color and tweety birds of color. How weirdly reductive to be so obsessed about something so peripheral to these cartoons that you stick the same damn Whoopi Goldberg health warning on all four DVDs in the box. And don't think about hitting the "Next" button and skipping to the cartoons: You can't; you gotta sit through it.

A Hollywood that's ashamed of one of its few universally acknowledged genuine artistic achievements is hardly likely to come up with any new artistic achievements. As the instant deflation of that Whoopi cushion reminds us, the movies are now so constrained by political correctness the very act of storytelling is itself endangered. That's something slightly more ominous than the feeble limousine liberalism many conservatives blame for the alleged box-office slump.

In Brian Anderson's recent essay on Hollywood's woes, he illustrated multiple examples of Steyn's last point in action:

Liberal interest groups...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.”

Orrin Judd has written on numerous occasions that "all comedy is conservative". But as Steyn notes, most story-telling designed to appeal to a mass audience is profoundly conservative when compared to the leftwing PC sensibilities that drive so much modern Hollywood thinking. Once again, it isn't that America as a whole has moved to the right, it's that coastal elites have continued a seemingly endless 35-year march in the opposite direction.

Something has to give--while Hollywood will survive in some form thanks to TV and foreign revenues, if I owned a chain of movie theaters, I'd be rather nervous about their future.

Speaking of the Gipper, in his great "A Time For Choosing" speech, he famously said:

No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this Earth.

Betsy Newmark--who as a teacher, knows of what she speaks--notes that public school programs will also expand to fill all available space.

And then some.

Earlier this month, I uploaded a bunch of photos I shot of the new Air Force One exhibit at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California. SoCalPundit has also photoblogged the exhibit--it looks like the weather cooperated with him much better than it did with me!

He also has some fine shots of the library itself. (It's tricky to shoot in there, since the library curators don't permit flash.)

Just in time for the Holiday That Dare Not Speak Its Name, Tammy Bruce has a great cartoon.

(Via Lorie Byrd.)

When Jodie Foster announced she was planning to shoot a biography about Leni Riefenstahl, whom Foster was quoted as saying has been "libeled so many times" about the dark deeds of her role in the Nazi Party, I wrote:

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.

In a similar vein, Dean Esmay has some thoughts on Prussian Blue, the Neo-Nazi answer to the Olsen Twins we looked at yesterday:

There's apparently a significant kerfuffle over two 13-year-old singers who are gushy about Nazism, and I find myself strangely unable to get excited about it. Not because I have anything nice to say about Nazism, but because I've been watching the entertainment industry speak endearingly of vile totalitarian ideologies for most of my life.

This is the same entertainment industry that lionizes Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. The same industry that made heroes out of the mass-murdering Sandinistas. That to this day pretends that the McCarthy era in America was nothing but one long paranoid nightmare wherein nobody, not even people like Alger Hiss, Julius Rosenberg, or Harry Dexter White, was guilty of anything but being a bit too liberal.

Some of these people still can't admit that Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson, and Mary Travers were communists for God's sake.

A couple of years ago I was in a Denny's when I spotted a kid wearing a bright blood-red shirt with a big yellow hammer and sickle. I wanted to walk over to him and slap him in the face. But instead I shrugged. He was 21 or 22 at the oldest, maybe more like 18 or 19. He couldn't possibly have known the depths of the evil his shirt represented. The Soviets, when they invaded Afghanistan, murdered a million innocent Afghans. This out of a country of only 6 or 7 million people. That was going on as recently as the 1980s. You think those Afghans today would find Nazi chic more offensive than Communist chic?

I also, a year or two before that, got into an argument with a friend in his early 20s who actually thought I was "melodramatic" when I pointed out that Stalin had killed, by the most conservative estimates available, about 20 million people in cold blood. (Others place his body count over 60 million.) Yet you can go around the world and find restaurants, drinks, and music that extols the virtues of him and communist dictators just like him.

It's all sick of course. Depraved even. If I were Jewish I'd be particularly stung by "Prussian Blue." If I were Ukranian or Chinese or Vietnamese or Cambodian or Afghan, on the other hand, maybe it would all seem just sadly familiar. Hitler not so bad? Why not? Next up: pop songs about the glories of the Laogai!

By all means, let's kick around "Prussian Blue." Let's especially kick around their parents and their producers. These 13 year old twits likely have no idea what they're talking about, but the adults in their lives have no such excuse. But while we're doing it, let's remember all the other cases of covering up for, even romanticizing, hateful totalitarian ideologies. I think we'd be doing more good in the long run that way.

It can't hurt, but as all of the examples that Dean includes in his post illustrate, it's asking far too much of the entertainment industry to be that self-policing.

(H/T: Murdoc Online.)

I felt pretty cynical about the hope that Brian Anderson expressed for Hollywood in his recent City Journal essay, but hey, maybe he was right after all, when he noted:

Guess what: ever more Americans are shunning Hollywood’s wares—and disgust with Left Coast politics, both on and off screen, clearly plays a part. In a time of declining moviegoing, what gets people out to the theaters, it turns out, are conservative movies—conservative not so much politically but culturally and morally, focusing on the battle between good and evil, the worth of heroism and self-sacrifice, the indispensability of family values and martial honor, and the existence of Truth. Hollywood used to turn out a steady supply of such movies—watch just about any film from its Golden Age of the thirties and forties—and it still makes them once in a while (sometimes thanks to off-screen lefties like Steven Spielberg). We may soon see a lot more of them.

Narnia is due out next month; and Michelle Malkin links to this Times of London article that says that Bruce Willis is planning to make a film about the heroes of Deuce Four, (the battalion that won the battle for Mosul) based on the reporting of embedded journalist/blogger Michael Yon:

ANGERED by negative portrayals of the conflict in Iraq, Bruce Willis, the Hollywood star, is to make a pro-war film in which American soldiers will be depicted as brave fighters for freedom and democracy.
It will be based on the exploits of the heavily decorated members of Deuce Four, the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry, which has spent the past year battling insurgents in the northern Iraqi town of Mosul.

Willis attended Deuce Four’s homecoming ball this month in Seattle, Washington, where the soldiers are on leave, along with Stephen Eads, the producer of Armageddon and The Sixth Sense.

The 50-year-old actor said that he was in talks about a film of “these guys who do what they are asked to for very little money to defend and fight for what they consider to be freedom”.

Unlike many Hollywood stars Willis supports the war and recently offered a $1m (about £583,000) bounty for the capture of any of Al-Qaeda’s most wanted leaders such as Osama Bin Laden, Ayman Al-Zawahiri or Abu Musab al- Zarqawi, its commander in Iraq. Willis visited the war zone with his rock and blues band, the Accelerators, in 2003.

“I am baffled to understand why the things I saw happening in Iraq are not being reported,” he told MSNBC, the American news channel.

He is expected to base the film on the writings of the independent blogger Michael Yon, a former special forces green beret who was embedded with Deuce Four and sent regular dispatches about their heroics.

Yon was at the soldiers’ ball with Willis, who got to know him through his internet war reports on www.michaelyon.blogspot.com. “What he is doing is something the American media and maybe the world media isn’t doing,” the actor said, “and that’s telling the truth about what’s happening in the war in Iraq.”

A lot can kill a film production before it gets off the ground (hey, how about that blockbuster cinematic version of Atlas Shrugged, huh?!), but hopefully this one will actually be made. As a member of the Pajamas editorial board is apt to say, Faster, Please.

Update: Lorie Byrd and Betsy Newmark have some thoughts as well.

Via Justin Hart of Right Side Redux, here's Victor Davis Hanson:

A bewildered visitor from Mars would tell Washingtonians something like: "For twelve years you occupied Saddam's airspace, since he refused to abide by the peace accords and you were afraid that he would activate his WMD arsenal again against the Kurds or his neighbors. Now that he is gone and for the first time you can confirm that his weapons program is finally defunct, you are mad about this new precedent that you have established: Given the gravity of WMD arsenals, the onus is now on suspect rogue nations to prove that they do not have weapons of mass destruction, rather than for civilization to establish beyond a responsible doubt that they do?"

So much of this attitude is caused by something Jonah Goldberg once dubbed "hypocrophobia":

Feminists demanded that "something" be done about the Taliban's treatment of women for years. Conservatives scoffed. But when the Bush administration saw fit to liberate the women of Afghanistan — for reasons larger than merely their freedom — feminists drew circles in the floor with their open-toed shoes and grumbled about how they didn't like war. But I guarantee you if Bill Clinton had unleashed the 10th Mountain Division on Kabul to ensure reproductive choice for Afghan women, Gloria Steinem would have done cartwheels.

Exactly. For the left, what matters far more than America's success is who will get the credit for it.

Last month, we linked to an exceptional essay by the Weekly Standard's Jonathan Last, who compared the attitudes of the modern American left with those of England's during the period between World Wars:

In 1933, the Oxford Union - a debating society and one of the strongholds of liberal elite opinion - held a debate on the resolution "this House will in no circumstances fight for king and country." The resolution passed. Margot Asquith, one of England's leading liberal lights, wrote that same year, quite sincerely: "There is only one way of preserving peace in the world, and getting rid of your enemy, and that is to come to some sort of agreement with him. . . . The greatest enemy of mankind today is hate."

Churchill disdained the new liberalism, mocking one of his opponents as part of "that band of degenerate international intellectuals who regard the greatness of Britain and the stability and prosperity of the British Empire as a fatal obstacle. . . . " So deep was this liberal loathing of empire that even as the first shots of World War II were being fired, Churchill's private secretary, Jock Colville, witnessed at a theater "a group of bespectacled intellectuals" who, to his shock, "remain[ed] firmly seated while 'God Save the King' was played."

These elites could see evil only at home. The French intellectual Simone de Beauvoir did not believe that Germany was a "threat to peace," but instead worried that the "panic that the Right was spreading" would drag France, Britain, and the rest of Europe into war. Stafford Cripps, a liberal Labor member of Parliament, feared not Hitler, but Churchill. Cripps wrote that after Churchill became prime minister he would "then introduce fascist measures and there will be no more general elections."

In an important sense, the British Empire's strength failed because its elite liberal citizens stopped believing in it.

As I wrote back then, "Reading passages such as these, it's obvious that a worldview such as Teddy Kennedy's or Cindy Sheehan's is nothing new". This passage from a 1941 essay by George Orwell truly hammers the same point home, and with only a handful of changes is directly applicable to the current American reactionary left:

The stagnation of the Empire in the between-war years affected everyone in England, but it had an especially direct effect upon two important sub-sections of the middle class. One was the military and imperialist middle class, generally nicknamed the Blimps, and the other the left-wing intelligentsia. These two seemingly hostile types, symbolic opposites--the half-pay colonel with his bull neck and diminutive brain, like a dinosaur, the highbrow with his domed forehead and stalk-like neck--are mentally linked together and constantly interact upon one another; in any case they are born to a considerable extent into the same families.

* * *

But the general weakening of imperialism, and to some extent of the whole British morale, that took place during the nineteen-thirties, was partly the work of the left-wing intelligentsia, itself a kind of growth that had sprouted from the stagnation of the Empire.

It should be noted that there is now no intelligentsia that is not in
some sense 'left'. Perhaps the last right-wing intellectual was T. E.
Lawrence. Since about 1930 everyone describable as an 'intellectual' has lived in a state of chronic discontent with the existing order.
Necessarily so, because society as it was constituted had no room for
him. In an Empire that was simply stagnant, neither being developed nor falling to pieces, and in an England ruled by people whose chief asset was their stupidity, to be 'clever' was to be suspect. If you had the kind of brain that could understand the poems of T. S. Eliot or the theories of Karl Marx, the higher-ups would see to it that you were kept out of any important job. The intellectuals could find a function for themselves only in the literary reviews and the left-wing political parties.

The mentality of the English left-wing intelligentsia can be studied in half a dozen weekly and monthly papers. The immediately striking thing about all these papers is their generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion. There is little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never expect to be in a position of power. Another marked characteristic is the emotional shallowness of people who live in a world of ideas and have little contact with physical reality. Many intellectuals of the Left were flabbily pacifist up to 1935, shrieked for war against Germany in the years 1935-9, and then promptly cooled off when the war started. It is broadly though not precisely true that the people who were most 'anti-Fascist' during the Spanish Civil War are most defeatist now. And underlying this is the really important fact about so many of the English intelligentsia--their severance from the common culture of the country.

In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during 'God save the King' than of stealing from a poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British. It is questionable how much effect this had, but it certainly had some. If the English people suffered for several years a real weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they were 'decadent' and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage from the Left was partly responsible. Both the NEW STATESMAN and the NEWS CHRONICLE cried out against the Munich settlement, but even they had done something to make it possible. Ten years of systematic Blimp-baiting affected even the Blimps themselves and made it harder than it had been before to get intelligent young men to enter the armed forces. Given the stagnation of the Empire, the military middle class must have decayed in any case, but the spread of a shallow Leftism hastened the process.

It is clear that the special position of the English intellectuals during the past ten years, as purely NEGATIVE creatures, mere anti-Blimps, was a by-product of ruling-class stupidity. Society could not use them, and they had not got it in them to see that devotion to one's country implies 'for better, for worse'. Both Blimps and highbrows took for granted, as though it were a law of nature, the divorce between patriotism and intelligence. If you were a patriot you read BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE and publicly thanked God that you were 'not brainy'. If you were an intellectual you sniggered at the Union Jack and regarded physical courage as barbarous. It is obvious that this preposterous convention cannot continue. The Bloomsbury highbrow, with his mechanical snigger, is as out-of-date as the cavalry colonel. A modern nation cannot afford either of them. Patriotism and intelligence will have to come together again. It is the fact that we are fighting a war, and a very peculiar kind of war, that may make this possible.

And to a certain extent, once Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, it did create a grudging unity between the far left in England and America and the rest of each nation--although in England, the dissipation would return almost immediately after the end of the War, and in the US, about 35 years later.

More and more I do my DVD shopping at Amazon, but the Digital Bits DVD review site has a tip to a pretty nifty Best Buy exclusive:

Best Buy has got a very special deal going on. If you buy the King Kong: Two-Disc Collector's Edition there, you get the tin packaging version... bundled with BOTH Son of Kong and Mighty Joe Young, AND a set of 5 additional poster art collector's postcards (different from the ones included in the tin), all for just $33.99! It's a great deal, and it gives you everything you want as a Kong fan DVD-wise. Just FYI.

It's listed as sold out on their Website, but I just picked up a copy at my local Best Buy.

The Bits also has a great interview with film historian Robert A. Harris on what a bear (so to speak) Kong was to restore before it could be released onto disc. I'll let you know if it was worth it at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Jerry Goldsmith died on July 22, 2004, at age 75. In 1999, he said he scored 175 films--and looking back at his career, there’s some terrific and memorable work and more than a few pieces that appear to have been done strictly for a paycheck.

Of course, any composer who’s written that many soundtracks is bound to have a few skeletons in his closet. In the “strictly for a paycheck” category, I’d nominate the “Barnaby Jones” theme, and 1988’s eminently forgettable “Rent-a-Cop”, which featured Burt Reynolds and Liza Minelli. But the all-time stinker has got to be 1981’s “Inchon”, which featured an aged Laurence Olivier under an inch of waxwork makeup as General Douglas Macarthur. The film’s $44 million budget came from Rev. Tsung Yung Moon--yes that Rev. Tsung Yung Moon, he of the Moonies. There is no music that could elevate that bomb.

But despite those misfires, Goldsmith has become a permanent part of movie history because of four great scores: “Patton”, “Chinatown”, “Planet of the Apes”, and “Star Trek: The Motion Picture”.

That last title was far from a great movie, but Goldsmith’s theme became a big part of pop culture seven years after the film was released at Christmastime in 1979. Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek’s creator, who produced “Star Trek: The Next Generation” for TV in 1987, liked Goldmith’s “Star Trek” movie theme so much that he recycled it and tacked it onto the first 16 bars or so of Alexander Courage’s original theme from 1966.

Blaster Beams and Echoplexed Trumpets

Goldsmith wasn’t afraid to use unique instruments, effects and genres in his scores. For “Star Trek: The Motion Picture”, Goldsmith used an instrument called “The Blaster Beam” for an deep metallic percussive “sprrrrrrrong!!!!” effect. The Internet Movie Database describes it as being “15 feet long, incorporating artillery shell casings and motorized magnets. It was used as part of any scene featuring V'ger.”

In his 1968 score for “Planet of the Apes”, Goldsmith merged primitive instruments and dissonant 20th century classical composing techniques to create an atmosphere that’s simultaneously primitive and futuristic. 1974’s “Chinatown” had a subtle jazz influence with its prominent muted trumpet. And in later years, Goldsmith used synthesizers along with traditional orchestral instruments in several of his scores.

Perhaps the best-known effect Goldsmith used was the Echoplex, a piece of electronic gear designed in the 1960s, which created delays and echoes (hence the name) via a spool of analog tape in the unit. Compared today’s digital effects, it’s remarkably crude, but a few die-hards, such as famed electric guitarist Jimmy Page, still cling to it.

Goldsmith used it for arguably his most important (and most emulated) score: “Patton”. Specifically, the echoed trumpets used in several key scenes, most famously the scene were General Patton (played by George C. Scott) visits an ancient cemetery where countless young men over thousands of years had been buried, and more would soon be joining. Goldsmith’s Echoplexed trumpets highlighted both the magnitude of war in our history, and its costs--and reminded the audience that Patton was simultaneously a brilliant field commander, and a man who believed in his own reincarnation.

The Internet Movie Database has a list of films and TV series that Goldsmith scored that are available on DVD--and you could have a far worse weekend of movie viewing than renting “Planet of the Apes”, “Patton”, “Chinatown”, and “Star Trek: The Motion Picture”, to experience Goldsmith at his best. As for the rest? Who knows--maybe one day a season or two of “Barnaby Jones” will be out on DVD as well. (Let’s hope “Inchon” does not return!)

Resource Links

Jerry Goldsmith Online: A well-done fan site, with much more additional information about the composer.

The Internet Movie Database: Goldsmith’s page has links to all of the films and TV series he wrote for.

An Interview with Goldsmith: Interesting discussion from the late 1990s, on Goldsmith’s oeuvre.

(From my August 2004 Electronic House newsletter.)

More and more I do my DVD shopping at Amazon, but the Digital Bits DVD review site has a tip to a pretty nifty Best Buy exclusive:

Best Buy has got a very special deal going on. If you buy the King Kong: Two-Disc Collector's Edition there, you get the tin packaging version... bundled with BOTH Son of Kong and Mighty Joe Young, AND a set of 5 additional poster art collector's postcards (different from the ones included in the tin), all for just $33.99! It's a great deal, and it gives you everything you want as a Kong fan DVD-wise. Just FYI.

It's listed as sold out on their Website, but I just picked up a copy at my local Best Buy.

The Bits also has a great interview with film historian Robert A. Harris on what a bear (so to speak) Kong was to restore before it could be released onto disc. I'll let you know if it was worth it at some point in the not-too-distant future.

In Asharq Al-Awsat, which dubs itself "The leading Arabic international paper", Amir Taheri writes:

The idea of a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq has been built into the entire project from day one. It was on that understanding that the Iraqi people chose not to fight for Saddam, thus allowing the coalition to win a rapid and easy military victory. That fact created a moral contract between the people of Iraq and the US-led coalition as co-liberators of the country. The Iraqi people’s part of the bargain was not to prevent the dismantling of the Ba’athist machinery of repression and war and to welcome the chance to build a new political system. The coalition’s part of the bargain was to protect Iraq against its internal and external enemies until it was strong enough to look after itself.

In the general election and the constitutional referendum held this year, the people of Iraq formally endorsed that contract. The coalition, for its part, must continue to honour that contract until new Iraq feels strong enough to bid farewell to its liberators.

That moment could come as early as next spring. But it could also take another year or two. My understanding of the situation in Iraq today is that the bulk of the coalition forces could be safely withdrawn within the next year.

The insurgency, which has already lost the political battle, is set to peak out in terms of the violence it is still capable of triggering against the Iraqi people. And if the recent performance of Iraq ’s new armed forces in a series of operations in two Western provinces is an indication, the Iraqis will be able to manage the insurgency on their own for as long as it takes to finish it off ..

What matters, however, is that it is up to the people of Iraq and its coalition allies to decide the moment an the modalities of the withdrawal It is a judgment that no outsider could make .. Those who opposed the liberation and those who have done all they could to undo it have no moral right to join that debate.

Indeed.

Pajamas Media writes that Teen People came this close to singing the chorus to "Springtime For Hitler":

According to Media Orchard, a public relations blog, "Teen People came close to publishing a story on the white-supremacist singing duo Prussian Blue that did not mention the words 'hate,' 'supremacist' or 'Nazi.' The writer had agreed with the teen duo's mother not to use these terms, but instead the more palatable "white pride." Media Orchard then goes on to add, "And you thought my "Anderson Cooper Interviews Hermann Goering" post was an exaggeration? Blogging Baby is also relieved that Teen People has killed a forthcoming article about the 13 year-olds, who pen paeans to "Rudolf Hess, man of Peace" and wear t-shirts featuring a smiley-face Hitler. "It seems someone at the pub (Time Inc., Teen People’s publisher, blames it on the omnipresent "junior staffer") assured the twins they would avoid using the terms "hate", "supremacist", and "Nazi" in the write-up. (But apparently, comparing the duo to the Olsen twins wasn’t off-limits.)"

It's Anthony Burgess' world, we just live in it, when the left can compare an American president to Hitler seemingly daily, but a liberal magazine can't be bothered to call an actual pro-Hitler singing duo Nazis.

(Maybe Jodie Foster can direct their music videos.)

I wrote several articles for Audio/Video Interiors; it was the original home theater magazine, and inspired by Architectural Digest. So it's reasonably safe to say that I love high-end interiors and exteriors. But if you ever catch me uttering anything along the lines of this astonishing quote discovered in a recent issue of Arechitectural Digest by ShrinkWrapped, a blogging psychoanalyst, well, send me off to a psychoanalyst:

"Once we got the house, I didn't need my therapist anymore. And when it was finished, we invited her over, and she liked the renovation. She found it very beautiful. She approved."

I suppose it's somewhat less potentially dangerous than plastic surgery--though infinitely more invasive to the wallet.

(Via Roger L. Simon.)

Glenn Reynolds writes:

A USEFUL COLLECTION of urban legends about the Iraq war. (Via Rand Simberg). Also, here's a look at the New York Times' shifting editorial positions on Iraq. It's almost as if partisan politics are behind them.

Heh^TM.

Update: Don Surber rounds up several quotes from Democrats in Congress during the run-up in 2002 and writes, "The left was sure he had WMD. It did not care. It opposed disarming him. To complain about the lack of WMD today is hypocrisy".

Not to mention dishonest.

Guest-blogging for Hugh Hewitt, Mary Katharine Ham (whom I had the pleasure to meet last week in DC when we live-blogged the Senate), looks at "The story that launched a thousand Leno/Letterman jokes".

Wizbang looks at the holiday who's primary symbol Must Not Be Named--at least in English.

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, my local Albertson's Supermarket is happily advertising Freshly Cut Christmas Trees, however.

Update: Michelle Malkin has more on the War On Christmas. And this post is a good place to replay something I wrote last week:

As I noted in my post about the OSM launch, New York Times fashion contributor Elizabeth Hayt thinks we're in midst of a conservative theocracy. But it's been ten years since the GOP took control of Congress, they've held the Senate for most of that period, and January will mark five years of President Bush in office. Meantime, the gift shop inside that theocratic GOP-controlled Senate sells festive "Holiday" ornaments. To place on your non-demoninational winter solstitial temporary interior tree.

That's a theocracy? Only to a woman who just knows she's this close to being fitted for a burka with GOP elephants printed on it. (Probably made of polyester, too.)

Another Update: Don Surber has a bit of good news from California.

Stephen Moore profiles the man who just might be the next president of the United States, and finds--not surprisingly--some disconcerting elements in his worldview:

On a broader range of economic issues, though, Mr. McCain readily departs from Reaganomics. His philosophy is best described as a work in progress. He is refreshingly blunt when he tell me: "I'm going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated." OK, so who does he turn to for advice? His answer is reassuring. His foremost economic guru is former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm (who would almost certainly be Treasury secretary in a McCain administration). He's also friendly with the godfather of supply-side economics, Arthur Laffer.

But Mr. McCain is no antitax supply-sider himself. He grandstanded against the Bush capital-gains and dividend tax cuts and even co-sponsored an amendment with Tom Daschle to scuttle the reduction in the highest income-tax rates. Why? "I just thought it was too tilted to the wealthy and I still do. I want to cut the taxes on the middle class." Even when I confront him with emphatic evidence that those tax cuts have been an economic triumph and have increased revenues, he is unrepentant and defends his "no" vote by falling back on class-warfare type thinking: "We have a wealth gap in this country, and that worries me."

It is here in my conversation with the senator that the McCain economic philosophy starts to come into vivid focus. Throughout our chat he has referred to Theodore Roosevelt in almost reverential terms and glows when I ask about him. He calls TR "my hero . . . and one of our greatest presidents," and at one point he excitedly searches through his briefcase and pulls out a book that he is reading on the famously tumultuous election of 1912. That was when TR bolted from the Republican Party (which Mr. McCain concedes was "a mistake") and formed the Bull Moose Party to dethrone William Taft. When I mention TR's trust-busting (which was mostly counterproductive economically), Mr. McCain really comes to life, exultantly points his finger in the air, smiles and cries out: "He called the trusts 'the malefactors of wealth.' "

And in this very moment it becomes clear to me that John McCain aspires to be a modern-day TR. The similarities are unmistakable: Both were war heroes, mavericks within their own party, reformers and defenders of the little guy.

But here in a nutshell lies the danger of the McCain view of the world. Where some see the vast virtue of entrepreneurial wealth-generators and job-producers, he too often sees "robber barons." He seems forever in search of the next Joe Camel, Charles Keating, Ken Lay or Jose Canseco (Mr. McCain has been a prominent crusader against steroids in baseball).

* * *

He views himself, I believe, as a kind of modern-day Robin Hood, a defender of the downtrodden and tormentor of the bullying special interests, which is endearing and unquestionably a big part of his broad political appeal, but often leads to populist and parasitic economic policy conclusions like higher taxes on the rich and attacks on "huge oil profits." He wants to be the caped crusader against corruption. The buzzword for the McCain Straight Talk Express in 2008 will be reform: "I want to reform education, reform Medicare and Social Security, reform lobbying and campaigns. Reform immigration. Reform. Reform. Reform."

When I ask him about America's remarkable income mobility, he responds, "Yes, but I keep seeing the thousands of faces of those poor people who were left behind in New Orleans," as if this was a failure of capitalism, not a failure of government. And with this, he gobbles down the last bite of his unpretentious lunch--a hot dog and chips--shakes my hand warmly, and sprints off to his next appointment to clean up whatever the latest mess is in Washington.

I come away believing that if I'm ever in a knife fight or in a foxhole, there is no one I'd rather have next to me than John McCain. Whether he's someone who should be steering the rudders of the American economy is a different issue altogether.

Indeed^TM--although hopefully with Gramm and Laffer as advisors, he wouldn't screw things up too badly.

Speaking of the Manolo, he writes:

Here for the Black Friday are the Manolo’s political beliefs, summed up in the following short statements

Read the whole of the thing--the Ed is in the complete of the agreement on all of the items on the list, especially items five and six:

5) The clothes they are important. They say important things about your identity, even if you pretend that they do not.

6) The fashion it is not the nuclear rocket brain surgery. One does not need the grounding in the theoretical sciences to know how to dress well.

For men, I'd start here.

Update: Julie Fredrickson of Almost Girl writes:

Fashion, more than many arenas, is one of contradictions and half efforts and half starts. My theory is that because fashion tugs so firmly at the core of our own identities as an industry it manifests those contradictions in ways that other areas do not. Toothpaste, despite all marketing to the contrary, does not say as much about us as our clothing. Image, expectations, and ideals all manifest themselves through the aesthetics we project. Clothing makes the man they say, but only because image has the power to convert, cajole, and seduce in a way that other consumer products do not. A large TV can only impress if others come to your house. Clothing is the armour we wear in society, in many ways it is our public persona.

For guys, it's even more so--as Oscar E. Schoeffler, the former fashion editor of Esquire once 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".

Amy Alkon observes life imitating The Manolo:

Don't miss [Elizabeth Snead's] account of [Aaron] Sorkin, Dowd, and the shoes:

Sorkin admitted he often thought of Dowd while writing witty banter for actresses. And he did tell a funny, if slightly embarrassing, shoe fetish tale about Dowd, whom he met during the first season of "The West Wing” when he was shooting scenes in Washington, D.C.

“I wrote an off-screen character who was a powerful, highly feared female columnist for the New York Times. One of the White House staffers had inadvertently made a joke about her shoes and was afraid that the administration was going to suffer if he didn’t apologize.”

To thank Dowd for being “a good sport” about the thinly veiled reference, Sorkin sent her a slew of expensive shoes from Barneys the day the show aired.

“She liked them a lot,” recalled Sorkin. “But she told me that because she sometimes covers Hollywood in her column, to accept the gift was unethical. But she didn’t give back the shoes. What she has done, and this was five or six years ago, is, every once in a while, she will just give me cash. Forty, sixty, one hundred dollars … It’s not clear to me how giving me cash makes the ethical picture less murky, but it was terribly important to Maureen that this be done right and this is her version. She just gives me cash.”

“It’s gonna take me to the year 2030 to pay off those shoes,” confessed Dowd, still smiling, albeit not quite as sweetly.

Dowd says she needs a man. Do we know if the Manolo is single?

(Via Pajamas Media.)

Found via Power Line, Midge Decter (whom I briefly met earlier this year in Washington, DC) has some thoughts on the beginnings of America's culture war:

The first and most important thing of all for any real understanding of the nature of America’s cul­tural war is the fact that it has been going on not merely since the period identified by the name of “Vietnam” but for about a century and a half. That clash of ideas and attitudes that made such a deal of noise in the 1960s and 1970s—and which has con­tinued more quietly and more deeply in recent years—is in fact no more than a particularly gaudy episode in a very old conflict.

I like to say that this conflict began on July 8, 1839. Why that day in that year? Obviously, histor­ical developments can never really be dated quite so neatly, or neatly at all, especially where such developments have to do with culture. Anyway, I am, of course, being somewhat facetious.

S