Happy New Year!

(A little early, but between New Years' Eve dinner being ready, and the cable modem being down, I'm taking off the rest of the year. See you in 2006!)

My wife gave me a 20-gig iRiver MP3 player for Christmas, which I'm happily loading up with all of my favorite tunes, and having a blast playing.

At least, I thought I was, until I read that I actually hate it:

Conservatives don't like personal audio players. Seventeen years ago, Allan Bloom inveighed against the Walkman, arguing that clapping on the headphones was a selfish, narcissistic manoeuver, in which teenagers sealed themselves into a "nonstop ... masturbational fantasy". This year, in "The Age of Egocasting", conservative writer Christine Rosen argued that iPods and MP3 players had accelerated this cultural erosion even further: iPod users had devolved into such navel-gazing twits that they don't even notice where they're going, and miss subway stops. Personal audio players, conservatives worry, are the ultimate statement that the individual is paramount; the world around us can go screw itself, because we're not even paying attention.

Of course we hate MP3 players! That's why NRO, James Lileks and TCS Daily have all been experimenting in one form or another with podcasting. Heck, some of us knuckledraggers on the right even know how to make our own music to play on them!

Hate 'em? We hate 'em as much as we hate Weblogs!

Seriously though, blogger Elemenohpee has the best rebuttal to this strawman argument:

Okay, I don't really consider myself conservative, but for the sake of this argument, let's say I am. I also know that a big chunk of my vast and highly intelligent readership is conservative. How many of you hate MP3 players? How many of you own an MP3 player? Does anyone hate hate the idea of personal choice, especially personal choice in music players?

Also, liberals are behind plenty of movements to restrict choice of various kinds. Seattle just passed a referendum to ban smoking not only in bars, restaurants and other private businesses, but also within 25 feet of any door, window or ventilation opening. Liberals are the most vociferous opponents of educational policies such as school vouchers and charter schools meant to give parents more choice in what kind of education their kids get.

Indeed. In the 50th Anniversary issue of National Review, Lawrence Lindsey described Milton and Rose Friedman's seminal Free To Choose thusly:

Their 1980 book Free to Choose successfully instigated a revolution in public policy because it offered conservatives both a rhetorical weapon and a legislative program. Until then, the Left had a clear advantage on both scores. Rhetorically, the Left promised compassion and equality and packaged them with programmatic action in the form of ever more government power. Those opposed to an ever larger and more intrusive state were thus forced to defend hard-heartedness and inequality, and to oppose legislative change.

The Friedmans changed all this. First, they gave us the word “Choice,” the rhetorical power of which is enormous in our consumer-driven society. The Left suddenly became Anti-Choice, at least after the point at which a child is born. They are against parental choice in where the child is educated. They are for limiting choice in what medical care the child may receive when he is sick, and philosophically opposed to the idea that his parents should be able to spend some of their hard-earned dollars on better care. More broadly, they are against giving the individual a choice in how to spend a significant portion of his earnings, preferring that the state make those choices. They are against choice in how most individuals invest the major source of their retirement savings, again believing that the choice should be made by government. Rhetorically, the Left no longer has an emotive advantage: Thanks to the Friedmans, the rhetorical cleavage on most issues becomes one between “pro-choice” and “pro-government.”

But it is in the programmatic realm that Free to Choose is most empowering to those who support limited government. Conservatives in government had traditionally been the side opposing change. At a minimum this put us on the wrong side of the legislative ratchet. If we lost, individual freedom was further eroded by state power. If we won, all that happened was that things didn’t get any worse. After Free to Choose, the Right became the agent of legislative change. In the quarter-century since its publication, the posture of the Left has become so defensive that the phrase “reactionary liberalism” is now in vogue.

Now, I may not be too crazy about what you play on your MP3 player--and you may not be too crazy about what I play on mine (although you might be surprised by some of my choices). But I don't think there are too many folks on the right getting worked up about people listening to iPods, iRivers or other devices.

(Via Matt Rosenberg.)

James Glassman (who beneficently publishes my articles at TCS Daily) writes that despite what the MSM would have you believe, "overall, 2005 was a damn good year. Celebrate!"

When the final figures are in, it is almost certain that our Gross Domestic Product -- the single best indicator of economic progress -- grew by more than 3.5 percent once again in 2005, compared with about 1.5 percent for the Euro Zone (the part of Europe, mainly Germany, France and Italy, that uses the euro as currency). U.S unemployment is 5 percent, compared with rates twice that high in Europe.

We are creating net new jobs (that is jobs gained minus jobs lost) at a rate of 2 million a year. Inflation is low, and the stock market -- unless something dire happens this week -- will rise for the third year in a row.

Further good news is that, Europe excepted, the rest of the world has enjoyed superb growth this year, and the U.S. has provided much of steam for the global engine. Yes, this means that we have a large trade deficit, but we can afford it. Our economic strength has boosted the value of dollar, and we’re attracting gouts of investment cash from around the world.

Globally, 2004 and 2005 were the two best years in a row since the 1970s. Latin America will grow more than 4 percent; China, about 9 percent; India, nearly 8 percent. Even Japan, which has been in the doldrums for more than a decade, is back on track.

“This sustained and broad-based economic growth is a pleasure,” writes Martin Wolf in the Financial Times. “It is also something of a surprise.”

After all, hurricanes in 2005 caused $100 billion in damage in the United States. There was a terrible terrorist attack on the London subway. Iraq has been rough going--though not as bad as we are led to think. A recent pre-election survey in Time magazine found 71 percent of Iraqis saying that “things are going very well” or “quite well” in their lives and that, by a margin of 6-1, next year will be better for their country.

There are threats in America: imminent investment tax hikes, a looming crisis with Social Security and Medicare, terrorism and protectionism. But overall, 2005 was a damn good year. Celebrate!

Meanwhile, Mark Trumbull of The Christian Science Monitor writes that "what the Census Bureau calls 'material well-being' abounds for regular folks today in ways that Louis XIV--for all his palaces, silk stockings, and ruffled finery--could barely have imagined":

In case there was any doubt, a study has confirmed that Americans have a lot of what economists know, technically, as stuff.

The computer has surpassed the dishwasher as a standard household appliance. The poorest Americans have posted a sharp rise in access to air conditioning. The richest Americans still own the most cars, but they are choosing to own slightly fewer of them than they used to.

These census findings, released earlier this month, were true even before gifts piled up under trees this past week.

These nuggets provide a glimpse of American lifestyles that isn't captured in the raw data of monthly economic reports. At a time of concern about the standard of living for future generations, the study offers hopeful signs of tangible progress, even as the pace of income growth has slowed in recent years.

It's only one piece of the overall picture of economic progress and doesn't resolve the question about future generations. But it confirms that what the Census Bureau calls "material well-being" abounds for regular folks today in ways that Louis XIV - for all his palaces, silk stockings, and ruffled finery - could barely have imagined.

True, most of us don't have an entourage of fawning servants, and while US homes have expanded in square footage they hardly rival Versailles. But modern appliances, in many ways, are robotic servants who sometimes break down but have yet to stage an organized revolt.

Or as Thomas Sowell wrote a few years ago, it's "Hard Times for Envy".

Who will have the honor of First Post of the Year in 2006 at NRO's Corner? Vote early and often!

Gateway Pundit has a startling graph on the declining Iraqi body counts, and wonders why there's a media blackout.

Well, he doesn't really wonder why--I suspect he knows the answer as well as anybody.

Steve Feinstein looks at bias by omission.

Via Betsy Newmark, who writes:

I was watching a discussion on C-Span last night of four veterans who had come back from serving in Iraq and they were unanimous in their condemnation of how the press has covered the situation there since the embedded reporters left in 2003. I'd like to see one of those countless symposia where journalists sit around thumb-sucking and talking about their awesome selves conducted in front of an audience of veterans from Iraq. Let them defend their coverage to the people that they've supposedly been covering.

It would probably go something like this.

Meanwhile, in a very much related article, Victor Davis Hanson writes:

Third, our affluent society is at a complete disconnect with hard physical work and appreciation of how tenuous life was for 2,500 years of civilization. Those in our media circus who deliver our truth can't weld, fix a car, shoot a gun, or do much of anything other than run around looking for scoops about how incompetent things are done daily in Iraq under the most trying of circumstances. Somehow we have convinced ourselves that our technologies and wealth give us a pass on the old obstacles of time and space — as if Iraq 7,000 miles away is no more distant than Washington is from New York. Perhaps soldiers on patrol who go for 20 hours without sleep with 70 pounds on their back are merely like journalists pulling an all-nighter to file a story. Perhaps the next scandal will be the absence of high-definition television in Iraq — and who plotted to keep flat screens out of Baghdad.

The result of this juvenile boredom with good news and success? Few stop to reflect how different a Pakistan is as a neutral rather than as the embryo of the Taliban, or a Libya without a nuclear-weapons program, or a Lebanon with Syrians in it, or an Iraq without Saddam and Afghanistan without Mullah Omar. That someone — mostly soldiers in the field and diplomats under the most trying of circumstances — accomplished all that is either unknown or forgotten as we ready ourselves for the next scandal.

Precisely because we are winning this war and have changed the contour of the Middle East, we expect even more — and ever more quickly, without cost in lives or treasure. So rather than stopping to praise and commemorate those who gave us our success, we can only rush ahead to destroy those who do not give us even more.

Indeed^TM.

Update: No wonder the MSM talks down the economy--just look how their stocks have performed this year, and over the course of the decade since 9/11.

Last night, I linked to Paul Mirengoff's look at the Mobius Loop-like nature of the modern left. For a reason why, Scylla & Charybdis get Siggy with it, breaking out the Freud:

"Cognitive Dissonance" is the obvious* answer to Mirengoff's fascination over the "Forever Young" attributes of the 60's Dem generation. Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon which refers to the discomfort felt at a discrepancy between what one already believes, and incoming information. If the new information doesn't match up with existing beliefs, then something has to give way. Until it does, mental discomfort manifests.

Read the rest.

(Via Charles Johnson.)

Jason Apuzzo writes a powerful--and surprisingly positive--review of Steven Spielberg's Munich. Apuzzo describes the film as three-quarters of the blockbuster pro-War On Terror flick that Hollywood should have cranked out at least a dozen of since the fall of 2001, done in only by a poor ending dominated by the ham-handed equivalence of Tony Kushner's writing:

I would ask fellow conservatives to take a closer look at this film, and not go overboard in attacking it. Munich is not Fahrenheit 9/11, not by a long shot. Examine what Spielberg is doing here cinematically - especially in the delineation of character through action, rather than verbiage - although some of the verbiage in this film is quite good. Ask yourself who you’re sympathizing with, rooting for - and who, on the other hand, you’re led to despise or reject as inhuman. I think Spielberg is in greater agreement with you than you’re being told by some conservative critics. And calling Munich ‘anti-Israel’ is about as fair as calling The Passion ‘anti-Semitic.’

It’s extremely important for conservatives not to endlessly cry “wolf,” decrying every film that comes down Hollywood’s pipeline as liberal propaganda. [I tried to warn people earlier in the year about this with respect to Star Wars, and also Spielberg’s War of the Worlds - neither of which were as ‘politically engaged’ as some made them out to be.] Frankly, there’s enough genuine propaganda as it is - we don’t need to drag Spielberg’s film into the mire, as well. He doesn’t deserve it - and frankly, I wish we had someone on the conservative side who was as skilled and passionate on this subject.

To the liberals out there, who were so eager to embrace this film as the ‘Oscar frontrunner’ just a few weeks ago, I’d ask: did you really get the film you wanted, here? Did you like that scene when the PLO terrorist admits to Avner why the Arabs really support the Palestinians? And did you like the way that terrorist was escorted around by KGB handlers? And by the way, where was Halliburton in all this? Or Exxon? Or ‘American Imperialism’? Or Nixon’s Plumbers?

Given the present state of Hollywood, which has drifted further and further left - and become terminally unserious - I think Spielberg is basically to be commended here. If nothing else, he’s crafted the richest and most entertaining spy thriller in years. He would’ve been wise to let the film end where Hitchcock would’ve ended it: before the interminable speechifyng and hand-wringing starts. He also should’ve reigned-in his screenwriter, whose political passions get in the way of good drama.

Had he done those things, Spielberg might’ve had a classic on his hands. As it is, he’s still made a surprisingly substantive and sincere film for the times. That’s a far sight better than what the rest of Hollywood is doing.

By all means, read the rest.

We've written a few times about the left's stuck-in-the-1970s Mobius Loop-like state. Two posts today help illustrate just how pervasive it is.

First up is Roger L. Simon, who looks at the tens of thousands of gallons of ink the media spilt over an isolated incident such as Abu Ghraib, or inventing similar incidents out of whole cloth where none exist, while virtually ignoring the hundreds of "honor murders" committed each year by Muslims in the Middle East:

There is a deep psychological disturbance in our mainstream media, a kind of willed need to ignore the world around them. It probably was, more or less, forever thus, but modern communications, specifically the internet, have brought this willed ignorance to the surface as never before. And yet the MSM continues in the same direction, even in the face of seeming economic failure.

Sheryl and I were discussing this phenomenon this afternoon with our friend Gerard who reminded us of the obvious. Many of these media outlets that keep ignoring what is happening in the world while trumpeting every US failure are increasingly playing to niche audiences in our society. They have no real interest, financial or otherwise, in the truth - or in the future of humanity, really (that last is my observation).

Meanwhile, Paul Mirengoff of Power Line asks, "Who will be the last Democrat to lose for a mistaken narrative?"

Vietnam and Watergate are seminal events for almost all liberals my age. Vietnam taught them to distrust the use of force by our military, and to despise leaders who aggressively use military force in the name of the national interest. Watergate confirmed that a leader who projects military force overseas for that purpose can be expected to usurp power at home.

These "lessons" were rejected by most baby-boomers even at the time of Vietnam and Watergate. And despite the dominance of Vietnam and Watergate-obsessed boomers in academia, subsequent generations have found the lessons even less worth learning.

The Democratic party, however, has not just learned the lessons, it has internalized them. And to its great detriment. The electoral tide turned against the Democrats during the Vietnam era, and hasn't turned back. One can argue that the Vietnam/Watergate syndrome -- fear of the exercise of American power based on profound distrust of our military, our government, and our motives -- is the main cause of the decline of the Democrats.

Many liberals seem not to dispute this. In fact, they acknowledge the "failure" of most Americans to embrace "harsh truths," and see this as further evidence that something is wrong with our country ("what's wrong with Kansas?"). We witnessed this phenomenon quite vividly last November following the defeat of John Kerry -- perhaps the purest messenger of the Vietnam/Watergate lessons. Like some conservatives of the past, many liberals seem to relish their minority status as a badge of intellectual superiority.

At the same time, most liberals long to be vindicated in the public mind. If Americans were belatedly to embrace the lessons of Vietnam and Watergate, this would simultaneously confirm liberal superiority and restore liberal dominance.

Liberals look at Iraq, "torture," and now domestic spying, and can taste full public vindication. And therein lies their problem. If Iraq is Vietnam, it will soon enough confer great political advantage on the Democrats. But the Democrats (Hillary Clinton aside) are psychologically incapable, after so long in the wilderness, of "letting the game come to them." Or perhaps they understand that Iraq is not Vietnam. Thus, they overreach -- being too quick to compare Iraq to Vietnam, to eager to insist that we are failing there, and too quick to cry foul over domestic spying that targets mass murderers, not Larry O'Brien and Daniel Ellsberg. And the public recoils.

It's not surprising that the failure of many liberals to have learned anything truly new since 1974 constitutes a huge political disadvantage. But I'm fascinated by the ways in which this failure continues to confound them.

It was President Clinton who promised a bridge to the 21st century, and Bob Dole who countered--unsuccessfully, of course--with his own "bridge to the past". And yet, as I wrote at the start of the month, it's now the left who finds themselves living 30 years in the past. What does that hold for their future? Here's but one possible scenario. Here's another, more shorter-term look.

Chris Weinkopf has a great profile of Philip Anschutz, the man who brought you The Chronicles of Narnia this Christmas:

Anschutz is a spectacularly successful oil/railroad/fiber-optic/sports/entertainment magnate. He is also an evangelical Christian and father of three children who got so fed up with the tawdry state of Hollywood fare that he decided to get into the business himself by launching two film companies. He has spent a reported $150 million to $200 million to turn the first book in Lewis’s beloved Chronicles of Narnia series into one of the biggest film releases of this holiday season. The plan is to eventually translate all seven books into high-quality films.

* * *

A few years ago, Anschutz started gobbling up movie-theater chains, a move that had industry analysts baffled. Cinema attendance had been in steady decline for years, and the survivors were in cutthroat competition with each other, as well as with cheap DVDs and digital cable that had audiences staying home. Experts had declared the business all but dead.

Anschutz disagreed. During the 1990s, he had bought old railroads cheaply, then coaxed a golden new revenue stream out of them by selling rights-of-way for new fiber-optic lines alongside his trackbeds. Now he saw the same technological innovation—fiber optics—giving movie houses a fresh hold on profitability. He poured more than $700 million into buying three theater chains that had filed for bankruptcy: United Artists, Regal, and Edwards, giving him control of 6,273 screens, or 18 percent of the market, the country’s largest string of cinemas.

Anschutz’s master plan is to convert all of his theaters to digital technology—eliminating the cumbersome celluloid film reels that have to be shipped across the country, manually operated, then shipped back. If theaters could simply download their films as computer files and then project them through computer-controlled routers, there could be large cost savings. This scenario is especially practical for Anschutz, given that his company, Qwest, already owns a significant chunk of America’s backbone of fiber-optic lines. (High-resolution films require large telecom “pipes” to travel from locale to locale.)

Taking a higher road

But Anschutz’s big movie gamble is based on more than just fresh technology. The cause of declining ticket sales, Anschutz reasons, isn’t just the ease and convenience of home viewing. It’s also the deteriorating content of Hollywood’s products—which are too often vulgar, violent, sexualized, dark, and depressing. For many American families, especially religious ones (who are a much bigger fraction of the population than entertainment executives have ever acknowledged), the movie theater is no longer a pleasant or even safe place to bring children. This major bloc of the market has been ignored by Hollywood.

Producers have “misread what audiences want,” says Craig Detweiler, professor of mass communications at Southern California’s Biola University. “Audiences have proved more discerning of quality than Hollywood expected.” Thus, the repeated syndrome of movie elites underestimating the public appetite for higher quality and family-friendly entertainment, while overestimating the appeal of R-rated dross. (See “Stupid Hollywood,” SCAN, TAE, July/August 2005.)

Enter Anschutz, the man who’s made billions by spotting missed economic potential. In his Hillsdale speech, he asked: “Is this preponderance of R-rated films simply—as we hear so often—a response to the market? I would say not, considering that of the top 20 moneymaking films of all time, not a single one is rated R, and of the top 50, only five are rated R—with the remainder being G or PG.”

While conservatives have groused about Hollywood’s cultural pollution for decades, Anschutz is putting his money where his convictions are. “You need to bring your own money and be willing to spend it,” he told the audience at Hillsdale. “Otherwise, Hollywood doesn’t see you as a serious player.”

Anschutz’s aim is not to promote a political agenda, but to make good movies. His two film companies are “not political in any way,” concludes Govindini Murty, an actress, screenwriter, and co-director of the Liberty Film Festival. “They hire liberals and conservatives. Art is their foremost priority, making movies that everyone in the public can enjoy—not niche movies only for young males, or people on the extreme left or right.”

In other words, Anschutz’s companies are targeting the vast mainstream audience that Hollywood has increasingly alienated over the last four decades. This is no charity exercise. Anschutz is looking to make a buck—lots of bucks, actually. As author and film critic Michael Medved puts it, he’s “testing in a wonderful way…the theory that it is possible in Hollywood to do well while doing good.”

Worldwide, Narnia has grossed $261,978,192, according to Box Office Mojo. Meanwhile, Mary Catherine Ham looks at the box office returns of what, for Hollywood, qualifies as more traditional, conservative fare.

In the American Enterprise magazine, Kelly Jane Torrance asks, "Will 2005 be seen as a watershed year for conservative books?"

It certainly looks like it. And not just because conservatives seem to have beaten liberals in sales (although liberals did very well, at least when it comes to the most overtly political books).

Amazon.com has posted a list of the Top 50 bestselling books of the year. At Number 21 is Mark Levin’s Men In Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America. Two places down is The FairTax Book by syndicated radio host Neal Boortz and Congressman John Linder (R-GA).

Liberal books—by which I mean polemics, as it’s probably the case that most of the books on the list, like novels, were written by liberals—didn’t fare so well. In fact, the highest one on the list was Jim Wallis’s God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It at Number 13. But the book, as noted in the subtitle, takes liberals to task almost as much as it does conservatives.

100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (And Al Franken Is #37) by Bernard Goldberg, author of the bestselling Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News, made the cut, at Number 27. But Al Franken’s own The Truth (with jokes) didn’t.

How did these books sell so well? After all, conservative books weren’t getting glowing reviews in the New York Times or the Washington Post. The authors of The FairTax Book, for example, advocate replacing income taxes with a national sales tax. The New York Times reviewer declared, “No reputable economist of any political stripe would support it.” But his very next sentence was puzzling: “The honest truth is that replacing the current tax system with any system that raises the same amount of revenue (as Boortz and Linder claim their plan does) may make us better off, but only by redirecting our resources away from dealing with complex filing requirements and improving our incentives to work, save and innovate—not by creating the kind of free-lunch miracle suggested here.” Sounds pretty good to me—but I guess I’m not a “reputable economist.”

The New York Times didn’t even review Mark Levin’s Men In Black. But books like these found an audience anyway. By 2005, conservatives had learned to market their ideas without having to rely on the mainstream press that historically hasn’t been sympathetic. Regnery, the conservative publisher of Men In Black, has created bestsellers primarily by preaching to the choir. The company’s public relations firm markets directly to conservatives through talk radio and television hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and Sean Hannity. It worked for Men In Black and found particular success before last year’s election with the influential Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry.

The New York Times itself took notice. The annual Year in Ideas issue of the Magazine declared that “Conservative Blogs are More Effective.” Writer Michael Crowley of The New Republic says “what really makes conservatives effective is their pre-existing media infrastructure, composed of local and national talk-radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, the FOX News Channel and sensationalist say-anything outlets like the Drudge Report—all of which are quick to pass on the latest tidbit from the blogosphere.” It’s this same network that has made books by, for example, Michelle Malkin, so successful—and it doesn’t hurt that she has her own blog as well.

As Patrick Ruffini noted this past February, during the astonishingly low-rated Oscars broadcast:

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.

What's curious is that shortly after 9/11, the left began copying these alternative networks with an infrastructure of their own, launching Air America to compete with Rush Limbaugh, Al Gore's Current television network as a sort of alternative to Fox, and so on.

At some point, it must be puzzling to the boys in the Manhattan skyscrapers why they can't please either side: the conservatives whom they tried to shut out, and the modern left, to whom the mainstream media isn't nearly leftwing enough.

The traditional components of the MSM will soldier on for quite some time of course--but it must seem strange to no longer always be able to control the arguments--or introduce all of the new ideas.

As usual, life imitates The Simpsons. In an episode titled, "A Fish Called Selma", washed up actor turned infomercial spiv Troy McClure once admitted that he wasn't quite like you or I:

"Gay? I wish! If I were gay they'd be no problem! No, what I have is a romantic abnormality, one so unbelievable that it must be hidden from the public at all cost."

Maybe not for long--it's an affliction that seems to be catching:

An unusual wedding ceremony was held in the southern resort town of Eilat on Wednesday, as Sharon Tendler, a 41-years-old Jewish millionaire from London married her beloved Cindy, a 35-years-old dolphin, Israel's leading newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported Thursday.

The groom, a resident of the Eilat dolphin reef, met Tendler 15 years ago, when she first visited the resort. The British rock concert producer took a liking to the dolphin and has made a habit of traveling to Eilat two or three times a year and spending time with her underwater sweetheart.

"The peace and tranquility underwater, and his love, would calm me down," the excited bride said after the wedding.

After a years-long romance, Tendler decided to embark on the highly unusual path of tying the knot with her beloved dolphin. Last week, she approached Cindy's trainer Maya Zilber with the extraordinary request.

Zilber accepted the challenge and "talked the idea over with the fellow," who apparently consented.

'I'm not a pervert'

And so on Wednesday afternoon, the thrilled bride, wearing a white dress, walked down the dock before hundreds of astounded visitors and kneeled down before her groom, who was waiting in the water.

Cindy, escorted by his fellow best-men dolphins, swam over to Tendler and she hugged him, whispered sweet nothings in his ear, and kissed him in front of the cheering crowd.

After the ceremony was sealed with some mackerels, Tendler was tossed into the water by her friends so that she could swim with her new husband.

"I'm the happiest girl on earth," the bride said as she chocked back tears of emotion. "I made a dream come true, and I am not a pervert," she stressed.

Say, were Aquaman and Sub-Mariner invited to the wedding?

Theodore Dalrymple, call your office. Your next article just wrote itself!

(Via the Brothers Judd.)

Update: Welcome Corner readers! If this is your first time here, please look around, you should find lots of stuff you'll enjoy.

The Anchoress has a good post on the recent announcement that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty, and that Upton Sinclair hid his knowledge of their crimes in order to do his antediluvian Free Mumia!!!/Free Tookie!!! impersonation. The announcement of Sinclair's letter prompts Jonah Goldberg to add:

So which leftwing martyr/icon is left? Sacco & Vanzetti were guilty. The Rosenbergs: guilty. Hiss: guilty. Margaret Mead: liar. Rigoberta Menchu: liar. Duranty: liar. Kinsey: liar. Upton Sinclair: liar. I.F. Stone isn’t looking too hot (lied about America often, loved totalitarians, might have taken KGB money).

Martin Luther King Jr. — small flaws aside — is still looking good. But Bobby Kennedy is only a useful leftwing hero if you don’t look too closely. Ditto JFK. Jesse Jackson’s going to look awful to historians.

Who’s left?

Well, we'll always have Al Sharpton.

But seriously, the Anchoress adds one more name to Jonah Goldberg's list:

There’s always John Kerry, greatest war hero, ever. Still waiting for the general, free release of those military records, aren’t we? Why yes, yes we are.

Of course, for a few of their admirers, the fact that many of these "icons" were actually guility, or had definitions of the truth more elastic than Reed Richards, simply adds to their radical chic hip cache.

The more they stay the same, as this quote illustrates:

I found in traveling around the world that a great many people . . ., apparently well educated and sophisticated, were convinced that the people of the United States were in the grip of terror and that free speech and free press no longer existed here. They believed that the United States was fomenting a third world war and would presently start it, with Armageddon consequences for everyone else, and that the government of the United States smashed without mercy anyone who dared to oppose even by oral protests this headlong rush toward disaster.

These people could "prove" their opinions by quoting any number of Americans and American newspapers and magazines. That they were able to quote such American sources proved just the opposite, namely that we do continue to enjoy free speech even to express arrant nonsense and unpopular opinion, escaped them completely.

--Robert Heinlein, 52 years ago.

Over Christmas Eve dinner, my wife and a couple of friends and I discussed the growing amount of firsthand reporting in the Blogosphere, including Iraq the Model's real-time reporting for Pajamas on the Iraqi elections. I mentioned that such efforts are having an impact beyond the Blogosphere. For example, when the Miami NBC affiliate reported the story of a Chalk's seaplane crash last week, the first photo to accompany the story was taken not by a professional reporter or photographer, but someone who simply happened to be on the scene with camera-equipped cell phone.

One friend sardonically quipped that eventually, we're going to start seeing people sending photos from their cell phones from inside a plane as it goes down.

Fortunately, that latter half of that equation wasn't an issue for blogger and licensed private pilot Jeremy Hermanns, but on a recent Alaska Airlines flight when the cabin accidentally depressurized, he was able to document the event with his cell phone camera and later, blog about it.

Linking to him, the Blogfather exclaims, "Now that's blogging", and notes that Jeremy's apparently earned the wrath of Alaska Airlines' employees, who apparently don't appreciate his efforts to document a flight gone wrong.

Alaska also apparently doesn't understand how increasingly common Jeremy's efforts will be in the coming months and years, as more and more people acquire cheap digital cameras, camera-phones, and of course, blogs.

Jonah Goldberg watched Tim Russert interview recent Jurassic legacy media retirees Tom Brokaw and Ted Koppel and writes that Russert, often a sharp interviewer, turned into "Larry King on Prozac when interviewing his colleagues":

A thick cloud of nostalgia hung over the set. Why couldn't politicians trust journalists like in the good old days? Why must we have a sound-bite political culture? Why don't politicians follow the agenda set by media muckety-mucks?

Such nostalgia is understandable given the culture these men grew up in. In the post-World War II era, television journalism was almost a quasi-governmental institution. There were only three networks, and their news broadcasts set the national debate and drew the nation together in a way that had never happened before. Eventually, the establishment felt entitled to this arrangement. They forgot that this system was the unintended offspring of WWII and the Cold War and the advent of television. Before TV, American journalism was more boisterous and less revered.

Today's technological glitz notwithstanding, we are returning to the norm, and the guild-mentality consensus we've "enjoyed" this last half-century is evaporating and will likely never return.

When asked to name an underreported story in '05, Brokaw suggested the downsizing of General Motors. Well, GM is a good illustration of what's happening to the elite media. One of the main reasons GM is in such trouble is that it has never won the allegiance of post-WWII consumers. The "greatest generation," as Brokaw calls them, loved their Oldsmobiles, and they've been buying GM cars for 60 years. But that generation is dying, and GM's antiquated products (and pensions) are killing it in a more competitive environment in which young consumers couldn't care less about Oldsmobile.

Young people feel the same way about those evening-news broadcasts. Fewer than 10 percent of viewers of the major network news shows are under the age of 34. The average viewer is over 60. Haven't you noticed that all of the ads are for adult diapers, denture cream, and Viagra? [Why, yes I have--Ed] There's nothing wrong with that, but it's a sign that the old system cannot last.

Meanwhile, the one institution that has been immune to the media's prying eyes is now being scrutinized itself — not by a journalistic priesthood but by bloggers, independent media, and consumers. Rather than embrace the new era, which recognizes that the elite media's power qualifies them as worthy of scrutiny, the elite media circle the wagons. As Ted Koppel asked at the end of Meet the Press, "When are you getting to the tough questions? Come on, Tim."

Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt observes their counterparts in the legacy media's dead tree division taken in by an April Fool's Joke.

(Of course, that's far from the first time such a thing has happened.)

It's a boy! Meet Preston Davis Green, the newest member of the VodkaPundit family.

And fortunately just in time, another member of the Blogosphere has written the guide to child-rearing...

Neo-Neocon looks at the recent story about the FBI's monitoring Muslim sites for radition and writes it's the story that has everything:

Let's see: (1) anonymous and totally unidentified sources as the conduit for all the information, check; (2) accusations of religious profiling, check; (3) vociferous Council on American-Islamic Relations protests, check; (4) spilling of the beans (by those anonymous sources) on a classified program designed to protect us from terrorists, check.

And (5), the article that Neo links to is from Reuters, who has never met a terrorist freedom fighter it didn't admire--and occasionally, invite to its office parties.

Of course, as Mickey Kaus noted, there's been some interesting blowback to these sorts of stories: "Another spy scandal and Bush will be at sixty percent."

Mary Katharine Ham and La Shawn Barber write about the very recent--as in 1966--origins of Kwanzaa. Ham describes a news story on Kwanzaa cut in half by an editor who decided it to play it as safe as the New York Times covering Woody Allen or John Kerry:

I was asked to do a story on a local Kwanzaa celebration when I worked at a newspaper a couple years ago. Between second grade and then, I had figured out that Kwanzaa was created about the same time as Nancy Sinatra's career. But I didn't know about Karenga until I started Googling.

Then I found the Front Page Magazine article linked above, written by Paul Mulshine, a columnist for the Newark Star-Ledger. After I clicked on it, I almost wished I hadn't.

I had planned to do the dutiful, fluffy Kwanzaa story. I had planned a sprinkling of history, some winning photos of 6-year-olds, and quotes lauding the act of gourd-painting as a path to cultural awareness. I had it planned.

Paul Mulshine threw off my plan, and I knew I was in trouble. In trouble because I couldn't, in good conscience, leave all the bad stuff about [Ron] Karenga out of a story about the holiday he created. In trouble because I knew this would cause problems with my editors.

I called Mulshine, who was nice enough to do an interview with me and send me some of his sources, so that I could have some back-up when my editors asked me about it. I called Karenga and left a message on his machine, but never heard back from him.

I interviewed the teachers and students involved with the Kwanzaa celebration. I got all the gourd-painting quotes I needed, but I also asked what they knew about Karenga and his unsavory past. They knew nothing about it. I asked if they knew why Kwanzaa used Swahili terms when most American slaves came from thousands of miles away from anywhere Swahili was spoken. They didn't know. Many of them didn't know the holiday was created in California in 1966, just as I hadn't.

In the end, I compromised. I wrote 10 inches of fluffy holiday story. The childrens' Kwanzaa artwork was beautiful and deserved to be spotlighted, no matter what kind of man Karenga was. But I also wrote 10 inches on Karenga. Nothing too graphic. I didn't get into the specifics of the torture. I didn't list every one of his misdeeds. But I thought a little of that was important to the story, especially since it seemed no one knew anything about it.

The next day, I picked up the paper. My 20-inch story had become 10 inches long overnight. Can you guess which 10 inches they cut?

This paper never cut for space. It rarely edited a word I wrote. As a result, a 10-inch cut was conspicuous, to say the least. And indefensible. And in this case, expected.

My editor and I had a civil conversation about it, the conclusion of which was something along the lines of, "well, you just can't write stuff like that. Just because...you just can't."

Just another mile-marker in my journey out of the newspaper business.

And another mile-marker on the road to the Blogosphere--and beyond.

Betsy Newmark writes:

As you might remember from your history books, Sacco and Vanzetti were two Italian anarchists who got caught up in the Red Scare of the 1920s and were accused of the murder of a paymaster and security guard for a warehouse. At the height of the Red Scare, they were convicted in a very questionable trial. After much hoopla with lots of support for the two men from the intelligentsia of the day, they were executed in 1927. This incident is always cited in the history books as evidence of what unreasoning fear and injustice stalked the land during the Red Scare after WWI and during the twenties. Two innocent men were executed simply because they were immigrants and endorsed an unpopular ideology. One of their most vigorous supporters was the muckraking novelist, Upton Sinclair.

Well, a California collector has found a 1929 letter written by Upton Sinclair proclaiming his knowledge that the two men he so strongly defended were actually guilty.

Betsy adds:

So, of course [Sinclair] decided to stay silent and let his public and allies all go on thinking that two innocent men had been put to death. Apparently, his position among other like-thinking leftists and his readers was more important.

This isn't the last time that leftist intellectuals have rallied to the cause of someone they feel has been unjustly sentenced by the government. Think of Alger Hiss. Jim Bass is thinking about the Free Mumia movement. And, of course, witness the latest brouhaha over Tookie Williams. The pattern of guilt being secondary to the political outcry and demagoguery continues.

AKA, "differently authentic", or whatever the folks who practice moral relativism are calling "fake but accurate" these days.

There's a certain amount of this L.A. Times article by John Horn titled, "Hollywood should rewrite own script" that should sound awfully familiar to anyone who regularly scans our "Hollywood, Interrupted" archives. For example:

You can't even fool some of the people some of the time

In an age of instant text messaging, studios no longer can hide a movie's stink with marketing. Within hours of "The Perfect Man's" opening, Universal's box-office business returns started declining; the Hilary Duff movie actually managed the rare feat of selling fewer tickets on Saturday than on Friday.

Heck, I wrote about texting's apparent effect on box office two and a half years ago. Later, Horn writes:

The coasts are toast

For quality movies to perform well, they must appeal across the nation, not just to the coastal cognoscenti. The ultimate financial success of "Brokeback Mountain" will be determined not by its Arclight take but by its returns from places like Salt Lake City's Broadway Centre Theatre.

Back in May, at the start of what was traditionally the summer blockbuster season, I wrote:

the New York Times recently ran an article wondering why Hollywood's box office is down this year. Could it be because of efforts similar this in so many other films over the last 15 year or so, sure to alienate moviegoers in, what after the 2000 election was dubbed the Red States--flyover country where films need to make the bulk of their money in the US to be a hit--have started to take their toil?

Of course, that comment by Horn about Brokeback and Salt Lake City tacitly brushes upon, but fails to address head-on the 800 pound elephant in the room: how much Hollywood's efforts last year to alienate the Red States ultimately paid off. As I tried to make plain in my TCS piece earlier this month, that's far from the only reason why Hollywood took it in the shorts this year--but it's a big part of it.

Another reason is pure narcissism. Check out the quote that ends the article:

Nobody knows anything

Screenwriter William Goldman's famous admonition about Hollywood's brainpower (or lack thereof) rarely proved so accurate. A documentary about penguins sold more tickets than Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn's "The Interpreter." Golden Globe voters failed to nominate Steven Spielberg's "Munich" for best picture. Turned down by nearly every studio, "Sideways" collected five Oscar nominations and won one trophy for Fox Searchlight. Paramount's "The Longest Yard" remake grossed more than "The Legend of Zorro," "The Dukes of Hazzard" and "XXX: State of the Union" combined. Given all that, it's fair to wonder if such 2006 movies as "Poseidon," "Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction," "The Omen 666" and "The Santa Clause 3" are part of the solution ... or part of the problem. "Da Vinci Code" producer Brian Grazer says that even though he's "optimistic" about the year ahead, he can't predict audience tastes or Hollywood's future. "I only make movies," Grazer says, "that are interesting to me."

But then, that's been Hollywood's problem all year, hasn't it? To a great extent, they only made films that were interesting to them. Maybe it's time to consult the audience, and see what it wants to see for a change.

Two essays appearing today are a reminder that it's possible to be cultured, enjoy all the benefits of western civilization, and have no compunction about tearing it down.

First up, Lee Harris asks, "Am I anti-American enough to win the Nobel Prize?"--and thankfully, he's not:

Here, it seems to me, I have a real problem on my hands. In my book Civilization and Its Enemies, I actually defended America, kind of, as I have done in a number of articles for Policy Review and right here at TCS. Thus I have foolishly left one of those awkward paper trails that nominees to the Supreme Court have so much trouble explaining away to unsympathetic Senators, and this does present quite a serious obstacle to my Nobel Prize aspirations. Can I really expect the committee to give the prize to someone who has said nice things about America, even in his dotage?

But that is precisely why I decided to go ahead and publish my acceptance speech now, because that way I could make it clear to those guys in Sweden that I know exactly what kind of thing they are looking for in a Nobel Prize laureate, which is fanatic, frothing-at-the-mouth, virulent anti-Americanism of the most vicious kind.

You see, by reading my speech ahead of time, the committee would realize at once that they were dealing with a man who could spew as much bile and hatred against America as their previous choices for the prize have done, and that way they would jump at the chance of awarding me the prize, with the added plus that they wouldn’t have to bother about actually wading through my books and articles.

You don’t really think that the committee actually read Harold Pinter’s plays before giving him the prize? If The Caretaker is pointlessly boring and tedious in English, one can only shudder to think how it must come across in Swedish. No, they probably called him up and said, “Listen, this year we’re down to you and Maureen Dowd, and since we can’t give it to an American, it’s gotta be you. So, can you give us a really vicious attack on America?”

Now anyone who has read Mr. Pinter’s acceptance speech knows how well he came through for the committee, and, I must confess, that it has set a standard that will not be easy to surpass. Indeed, its effect on me was downright daunting. How could I top that?

Meanwhile, Mark Steyn looks at this fall's French rioters and wryly observes, "Don't Worry, They've Got Baseball Bats":

Hold it right there for a minute. That’s how we define “assimilating” into western society at the dawn of the 21st century? If a fellow deals a little coke while wearing pants with a gusset located at calf height while singing along to the re-mix of “Slap Up My Bitch”, we say, hey, he seems to be fitting in very nicely? No need to worry about him getting any wacky ideas down at the madrassah, he’s an impeccably secular pluralist Peugeot-torcher.

It’s true that the rioters look rather less foreign than, say, the stern young men in the mosques of Peshawar or the training camps outside Jalalabad. But, on the other did, so did Mohammed Atta and his 18 confreres. They were very well “assimilated” by Clichy-sous-Bois standards. If you recall, in the days after 9/11 a flurry of all-American cocktail waitresses, lap-dancers and prostitutes popped up to say they remembered Mohammed and Marwan and Majed and the rest of the gang chugging vodkas, groping strippers, renting porn videos – just like fully assimilated citizens of advanced western democracies. They were said to have patronized, inter alia, Shuckums of Hollywood, Florida, Cheetah’s of San Diego, the Pink Pony of Daytona Beach, Nardone’s Go-Go Bar of Elizabeth, New Jersey, none of which rates a mention in even the racier suras of the Koran. And none of which prevented the guys from drinking up, leaving a tip (lousy, according to the gals), and flying their planes into the Twin Towers on Tuesday morning.

The July 7th London bombers were also impeccably assimilated: they ate fish’n’chips and loved cricket. Omar Sheikh, the man believed to have masterminded the beheading of Daniel Pearl, is, in fact, an Englishman, educated at an English public (ie, private) school and the London School of Economics. And so it goes: somewhere right now far away from these shores, there’s a guy sitting in a Yankees cap, wearing a Disney T-shirt, listening to Britney Spears – and plotting to bomb America.

The two are not mutually exclusive. They never have been. The Merry Widow was both the biggest smash on Broadway and Hitler’s favourite operetta. In a not entirely persuasive attempt to humanize the old KGB hard man, Yuri Andropov was widely touted as a Glenn Miller fan. The world’s former Numero Uno Commie, China’s Jiang Zemin, could hardly attend a state banquet without getting up and singing Elvis’ “Love Me Tender”. Saddam Hussein is not just assimilated with western culture, he’s eerily assimilated with National Review’s back page columnist: The old Baathist mass-murderer and I share the same favorite singer – Frank Sinatra. If you dialed up Amazon.com’s “We have recommendations for you!” CD page, Saddam’s and mine would be identical. Even more unsettling, we share the same favorite candy – Britain’s “Quality Street” chocolates, especially the big gold-wrapped toffees the shape and size of the old English penny.

As Steyn writes:

There’s no contradiction between a liking for western pop culture and a loathing of western civilization. Merely the latest in a long tradition, Mahmoud Khabou, the 20-year old unemployed son of Algerian immigrants in Clichy-sous-Bois, understands more clearly than the media that jihad is by no means incompatible with conventional forms of western delinquency. Asked by a reporter to name his heroes, he replied, “Osama bin Laden and Rodney King.”

YARGB, which is short for "Yet Another Really Great Blog" has an interesting post titled, "Munich is an Unwitting Indulgence in Nihilism":

Somewhere along the line, Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner bought into the absurd myth that much of the Arab terrorism of the past fifty years is the inevitable blow back response of Palestinians whose land and heritage were allegedly stolen by Jewish imperialists . Munich is their recently released creation---and it is an appalling piece of work. Based on the highly questionable book by George Jonas, Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team, this film is far too long and exhausting. It is often boring. A group of four assassins are sent on a mission, to kill one by one, Palestinians suspected of collaborating in the massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes during the 1972 games held in Munich. These misfits soon wonder if they are morally any better than their pursued quarry. The latter often come across as warm and fuzzy human beings doing the best they can. There is even a ridiculous scene where the Israelis and the Palestinians inadvertently spend the night together. It suggests that a little love and understanding will bring about peace. The violence of the terrorists would cease if only the Israelis were more open to dialogue. Throughout of the film, the recurring theme is that violence is ultimately useless in fighting terrorism. It will probably even make things far worse. Needless to add, the creators of Munich are also indirectly commenting on our post 9/11 existence.

Spielberg and Kushner, to be kind, are unwitting nihilists. The logical conclusion of their morally equivalent premise is that the defenders of Western Civilization values are little better than their attackers. We have no one to blame but ourselves for allowing our elected leaders to exacerbate the tensions. Violent responses to terrorism must give way to improved communication and good will. After all, our disregard of the rights of the Third World’s citizenry got us into this mess. Is this bizarre perspective an anomaly? Not in the least. Both men are mainstream representatives of the leftist ideologues who control the Democratic Party in the United States and the Labor Party of Israel. Such individuals and their cohorts have to be defeated politically. They may mean well, but their ideas turned into actual policies are dangerous. This movie is a not so gentle reminder of how crazy the Left is in the early part of this century. If they are not hindered, there may not be a next one. The stakes are truly that high.

I'm not sure how unwitting the nihilism in Munich is. It's not all that new a development either--in 2000, Thomas Hibbs documented Hollywood nihilism in its many forms (benign in the form of the show that Hibbs takes his title from, and otherwise in most cinematic examples) in his fascinating book, Shows About Nothing. He spotted its presence as far back as the 1991 remake of Cape Fear.

When I wrote my article earlier this month for TCS Daily, space requirements caused me to leave this quote from Hollywood, Interrupted co-author Andrew Breitbart on the cutting room floor. Andrew told me Hollywood movies these days essentially come in two flavors: the relatively apolitical big budget shoot-'em up or sci-fi movie, and the movies Tinseltown makes when it wants to Make A Statement--and win at Oscartime:

But then you have the Oscar/Sundance/Miramax axis. And that’s the type of film that is done on the cheap by Hollywood standard that tends to be the message movie, that conveys perfectly where Hollywood is intellectually and artistically. If you were to isolate that type of movie over the last ten years, you would see that what Hollywood is elevating is nothing sort of nihilism. Whether that be American Beauty, or even a Syriana, what you see are movies that pretty much… These people long ago put America on trial, and found America, and its underlying consumer-oriented culture to be guilty. And this is their way of, on the other hand producing it, and on the other, looking for immediate artistic penance.

And of course, Munich's screenwriter Tony Kushner has also long put Israel on trial, as the New Republic's Leon Wieseltier noted in his review earlier this month:

All this is consistent with Tony Kushner's view that Zionism, as he told Ori Nir of Haaretz last year, was "not the right answer," and that the creation of Israel was "a mistake," and that "establishing a state means f***ing people over." (If he really seeks to understand Middle Eastern terrorism, he might ponder the extent to which statelessness, too, can mean f***ing people over.) When Avner's reckoning with his deeds takes him to the verge of a breakdown, he joins his wife and child in Brooklyn and refuses to return to Israel, as if decency is impossible there. No, Kushner is not an anti-Semite, nor a self-hating Jew, nor any of those other insults that burnish his notion of himself as an American Jewish dissident (he is one of those people who never speaks, but only speaks out). He is just a perfectly doctrinaire progressive.

Indeed--and it's rather strange modern definition of "progressive" when it means a path towards nihilism.

Or has that always been its definition?

Betsy Newmark asks:

If you got into [journalism] to make the world a better place, how do you match that attitude up with noninterference when it comes to being in a situation where your personal intervention may help an individual?

Read the whole thing.

Interesting attempt to bridge the left/right divide by Tim Blair and the readers of his blog. Be sure to read the comments.

Mary Catherine Ham looks at Google's riduculously subtle Non-Demoninational Winter Solstitial December 25th splash page greeting:

I'm going to get just a little "War on Christmas" on you. I didn't want to be bitter-blogger yesterday, so I left it alone, but did anyone see the Google logo yesterday? Here's what they gave us to commemorate the birth of Christ and the first day of Hannukah.

As a friend of mine said, "because everyone knows the true meaning of Christmas is that cats and mice should work together to industrialize." Heh. Yep, I'm pretty sure that's in there-- Book of Jerry, Chapter 5. Look it up.

It's not that I'm angry about this, but I do feel like Google goes from looking sensitive to looking downright silly when it just pretends Christmas isn't there at all, while commemorating other holidays. Just silly.

Or, maybe they're just going for a really subtle "lion lay down with the lamb" thing. Very subtle.

Of course, Google could have let its users choose what they'd like to see on December 25th.

Michelle Malkin rounds up the most Unhinged 2005 video moments.

Posting will no doubt be a bit sparse on Christmas day, and any posts on Sunday will appear under this one. In the meantime, let me take this opportunity to wish everyone:

A Very Merry Christmas!

Color me unsurprised:

This isn't the first year religious groups have taken on retailers who say "Happy Holidays'' instead of "Merry Christmas.'' But a retail analyst says it's been one of the angriest.

Britt Beemer, the chairman of the consumer research firm America's Research Group, says a growing number of consumers are aggravated when stores instruct their employees not to say "Merry Christmas.'' A survey by the group found that a quarter of those polled said they'd walk out of a store that gives the more neutral greeting. Those surveyed also say retailers aren't spending as much on lavish Christmas displays as they used to.

This year, the American Family Association gathered more than 500,000 signatures asking Target to include Christmas in its promotions. Stores such as Sears and Wal-Mart faced boycotts.

Big business is never going to appease the left; it might as well try to please the majority of its customers.

There's a very simple solution for online retailers, of course.

AP reports:

The congregation of First Emmanuel Baptist Church drove from Baton Rouge, Houston and other points far and wide on Christmas, then walked past collapsed buildings and piles of storm wreckage to worship in their old church for the first time since Hurricane Katrina.

"This means everything. We've come home," said Lila Southall, the minister's wife. "My house is gone but I'm still home for Christmas."

Incidentally, tomorrow is the one year anniversary of the much deadlier Indian Ocean tsunami.

Update: "Asia marks one year to the day since tsunami hit, sweeping away 216,000 lives".

Tomorrow night's edition of Monday Night Football will mark its last broadcast on ABC, before it moves to cable's ESPN next year, which also owned by Disney:

From its inception, ABC's "Monday Night Football" was a risky experiment that defied American sports tradition. From Howard Cosell's pontification to Don Meredith's down-home songs to Dennis Miller's arcane analogies, it dominated TV viewing in homes and bars across the nation.

The broadcast was a hodgepodge of personalities and indelible images, defining moments and follies, eye-popping on-the-field performances and the kind of impromptu silliness that only sheer boredom can create.

In short, it was exactly what ABC Sports boss Roone Arledge hoped it would be.

It was theater.

Television sports reaches the end of one era and the beginning of another Monday night when ABC signs off on its prime-time weeknight coverage of the NFL for the final time and hands off to sister network ESPN.

The 555th Monday night game on the network is itself of little consequence: The dismal New York Jets play the New England Patriots, who already are playoff bound but have no chance to improve their position.

The series switches networks next season, when ESPN begins paying $1.1 billion per year for Monday night rights in an eight-year deal.

"'Monday Night Football' is the premier property in sports television," ESPN president George Bodenheimer said. "All the players get up for it. All the teams watch. It's a national showcase. To be able to transition it to ESPN is an honor."

There was no ESPN when ABC began its MNF run on Sept. 21, 1970, with the Jets playing at Cleveland. It was the beginning of 36 seasons of one of television's most valuable franchises, a compelling three hours that became the longest running prime-time sports series in TV history.

Read More »

Two from the United Federation of Planets: first up, remember this one, from the early, funny years of Saturday Night Live?

And second, this was a geeky little bonbon I wrote for the last page of the December 2004 issue of Electronic House magazine:

Read More »

Ed Morrissey writes:

For those who keep insisting that Saddam had no WMD and no way of producing them, The Hague has some embarrassing news. It convicted Saddam's supplier, Dutch businessman Frans van Anraat, to 15 years for selling Saddam the chemicals used to kill at least 5,000 Kurds in Halabja, among others.

Read the rest, as this will no doubt join the rest of the items about Iraq in the media and the left's collective Memory Hole.

Need a last-minute Christmas gift idea? PC World reviews "The 50 Greatest Gadgets of the Past 50 Years".

(My wife says any poll without this is bogus, though.)

James Bone, the London Times journalist insulted by Kofi Annan during a press conference, responds:

AS A journalist, I expect my share of verbal abuse. But it is not everyday that I have my professionalism impugned by the world's top diplomat on global TV.

The advantage is that I have not felt as young for years as I do now that Kofi Annan has described me as an “overgrown schoolboy”. The disadvantage — rather more serious — is that the UN Secretary-General continues to refuse to respond to the still-unanswered questions about his role in the Oil-For-Food corruption scandal.

For months journalists were told that the UN could not answer any questions because the scandal was under investigation by the Volcker inquiry. Since the Volcker panel issued its last report in October, the UN has refused to answer any questions because it says the matter has already been investigated. Yet the inquiry raised more questions than it answered, the most important being: what did Kofi Annan know and when did he know it?

Indeed.

(Via Pejman Yousefzadeh.)

Look out: Tim Blair is channeling Molly Ivins.

Mark Steyn has, I think, the definitive look at The War On Christmas, placed into the larger context of the left's War On Culture:

One December a few years back, I was in Santa Claus, Indiana, and went to the Post Office – a popular destination thanks to its seasonal postmark. “Merry Christmas!” I said provocatively.

But Postmistress Sandy Colyon was ready for me. “A week ago,” she said, “I’d have had to say ‘Happy Holidays’, but we’ve been given a special dispensation from the Postmaster-General allowing us to say ‘Merry Christmas’. So Merry Christmas!”

That’s “Christmas” at the dawn of the third millennium – a word you have to get a special memo from head office authorizing the use thereof. In America, most executive honchos would rather not take the risk, instructing the staff to eschew any mention of the C-word in favour of “Happy Holidays!” – the all-purpose inoffensive greeting that covers Hannukah, Kwanzaa, Eid, the Third Wednesday after Ramadan, hippy-dippy solstice worship, West Bank Suicide Bomber Appreciation Day and any other festive occasion you’ve lined up for the general vicinity of late 2005/early 2006.

For US columnists, the end-of-year column bemoaning the fanatical efforts to expunge all Christmas traditions from public life has become an annual Christmas tradition in itself. And, happily, there’s no shortage of contenders for silliest Santa suit. Last Christmas, to pluck at random from just one state, the annual trip by one New Jersey school district to see Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” was cancelled after threats of legal action. At another New Jersey school, the policy on not singing any songs mentioning God, Christ, angels, etc, was expanded to prohibit instrumental performances of music that would mention God if any singers were around to sing the words. So you can’t do “Silent Night” as a piano solo or Handel’s Messiah even if you junk the hallelujahs.

But let’s not obsess on New Jersey’s litigious secularists. In Plano, Texas, in the heart of God-fearin’ Bush country, parents were instructed not to bring red and green plates and napkins for the school’s “winter” parties, as red and green are colours with strong Christmas connotations and thus culturally oppressive. In Massachusetts, in the heart of Bush-fearin’ country, the mayor of Somerville issued an apology for accidentally referring to the town “holiday party” as a C-------- party.

This year the Christmas crowd pushed back, complaining to Wal-Mart and other big retailers about what’s become a perversely ostentatious aversion to the C word. The malls still have to sell stuff which at least prevents them retreating too far into the more extreme manifestations of cultural self-abasement. At the average American schoolhouse, no such restraints exist and the average “holiday concert” is now an hour of torture for even the most self-consciously tolerant parents, forced to endure a mélange of cat-strangling multiculti dirges. Jesus, Mary and Joseph long ago got the heave-ho from the grade school, but the great secular trinity of Santa, Rudolph and Frosty aren’t faring much better. “Frosty The Snowman” and “Jingle Bells” are offensive to those of a non-Frosty or non-jingly persuasion: they’re code for traditional notions of Christmas. The basic rule of thumb is: Anything you enjoy singing will probably get you sued. At my children's school, like most others, the holiday concert’s “celebrate diversity” anthems are parceled out entirely randomly: one year you might get the Hannukah song, the next the traditional Hutu disemboweling chant. But the thing to remember is: it would be offensive to inflict “Deck The Halls” or “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” on any hypothetical Hutu in attendance, but it’s not offensive to inflict hot Hutu hits on bewildered moppets.

Read More »

In a rare Friday night/Saturday morning post (depending upon which time zone you're in), James Lileks has an MP3 of the NBC radio news broadcast for December 25th, 1944. There's only a brief mention of Christmas in the middle of it, otherwise, it's "Bad news, straight, no chaser", as James writes. But there's no moral equivalence, no attempt to portray one man's Nazi as another man's freedom fighter. No attempt to portray our breaking of the Germans' Enigma codes as This Week's Crime of the Century by the president.

In other words, you know the broadcaster is rooting for America to win the war, unlike much of today's media.

(Man, I sound as grim as NBC's announcer. Fortunately, Lileks has much more Christmassy stuff on his site, between today's and yesterday's posts.)

PBS's Nova TV series is doing a year-end round-up on January 10th. Sounds like some interesting stuff, interspersed with a fair amount of PC editorializing.

The Hotline has a round-up of events in the Blogosphere titled, "12/22: The Year Of Blogging Dangerously".

Gee, why does that title ring a bell....?

It'll come to me sooner or later.

(Seriously--it's a great megapost. Even if the title is strangely... hauntingly... familiar.)

"Japan joins Germany and Italy in the ranks of countries where a decline in population has already set in".

Russia's population has seen better days as well--and by far, that nation leads the world in one grim statistic: suicides.

Meanwhile, back here in the US, Betsy Newmark has "more evidence that the next census will not be good news, on the average, for blue states".

As Mark Steyn wrote this past spring:

When I've mentioned the birth dearth on previous occasions, pro-abortion correspondents have insisted it's due to other factors - the generally declining fertility rates that affect all materially prosperous societies, or the high taxes that make large families prohibitively expensive in materially prosperous societies. But this is a bit like arguing over which came first, the chicken or the egg - or, in this case, which came first, the lack of eggs or the scraggy old chicken-necked women desperate for one designer baby at the age of 48. How much of Europe's fertility woes derive from abortion is debatable. But what should be obvious is that the way the abortion issue is framed - as a Blairite issue of personal choice - is itself symptomatic of the broader crisis of the dying West.

Since 1945, a multiplicity of government interventions - state pensions, subsidised higher education, higher taxes to pay for everything - has so ruptured traditional patterns of inter-generational solidarity that in Europe a child is now an optional lifestyle accessory. By 2050, Estonia's population will have fallen by 52 per cent, Bulgaria's by 36 per cent, Italy's by 22 per cent. The hyper-rationalism of post-Christian Europe turns out to be wholly irrational: what's the point of creating a secular utopia if it's only for one generation?

Karl Rove implicated in identity leak scandal.

(This was the reporter who broke the case...)

The Indianapolis Colts are 13-1, won their division, will have home field advantage throughout the playoffs, and may very well advance to the Super Bowl.

But this story puts all of that into stark perspective:

The 18-year-old son of Tony Dungy, head coach of the top-ranked Indianapolis Colts football team, was found dead on Thursday in Tampa, police said.

A spokeswoman for the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office said deputies were called to James Dungy's apartment at about 1:30 a.m. by his girlfriend. They were unable to revive Dungy and he was taken to a hospital where he was pronounced dead.

Dick Bailey, a spokesman for the Hillsborough Medical Examiner, said an autopsy to determine the cause of death will not be completed until Friday at the earliest.

The St. Petersburg Times quoted Bailey as saying that Dungy's death was "apparently a suicide."

Asked by Reuters about whether it was a suicide, Bailey said, "I know of nothing to conflict with that," adding that the cause of death would not be conclusive until the autopsy was finished.

Tony Dungy, in his 10th season as a National Football League head coach, directed the Tampa Bay Buccaneers from 1996 until he was fired after the 2001 season. He turned the Buccaneers from perennial losers into winners that made the NFL playoffs four times in six years.

After he was fired following a playoff loss in January 2002, Dungy was immediately hired by the Colts.

This season the Colts won their first 13 games before losing last Sunday at home to San Diego. They play at Seattle this Saturday.

Colts team president Bill Polian said that assistant head coach Jim Caldwell has temporarily stepped in for Dungy:

"The thoughts and prayers of everyone in this building are with Tony and (wife) Lauren, their children and their extended family,