Virginia Postrel has a great post on how content and aesthetics drove the launch of radio in the late 1920s and 1930s. Long before the Web--heck, long before television, radio was the new technology of the pre-World War II era. We take it for granted today, but how remarkable it must have seemed when it first debuted.

(Woody Allen, before auguring his career into the ground, did a wonderful job of capturing that era with Radio Days.)

Inspired by my quip that George Galloway in his red Big Brother tights looks like some strange bloated Teletubbies on acid moment (yes, that is redundant, I know), the apply named Slapstick Politics "humbly offer the photographic proof of this connection".

The horror. The horror.

More here and here.

John Ruberry, the Illinois-based Marathon Pundit was kind enough to permalink us, writing some prose that was entirely too kind in the process, and we wanted to thank him.

Click over to his fine blog early and often.

The prepared text of President Bush's State of the Union address is online, here.

Glenn Reynolds has a list of live bloggers; in a shocking turn of events, Stephen Green is booze blogging the speech, replacing his trademark vodka with "a nicely icy gin martini with my patented 'confetti twist' of lemon".

Michelle Malkin writes, "CNN is reporting that Capitol Police arrested Sheehan after she unfurled an anti-war banner inside the House chamber".

Like Dennis Rodman, Cindy's the consumate self-promoter.

Meanwhile, K-Lo notes two mentions of the phrase "Radical Islam", which means, thankfully, "CAIR didn't write this speech"--much as they wanted to.

And Betsy Newmark writes:

It's so funny to see what lines the Democrats have decided that they won't applaud for. Having military decisions made by the military and not by politicians in Washington is apparently something that they oppose and won't applaud.

Because that worked so well for LBJ and Robert McNamara during Vietnam.

Update: Robert Byers looks at what he called "Zen Politics: The Sound of One Party Clapping".

Update: Mark Steyn writes, "Nancy Pelosi's Not Wrong". Now there's a sentence you won't see me type very often.

One More: Jonathan Last has a round-up of "The Best and Worst of SOTU '06" (subtitled, "Putting the trivial back into politics"--and taking it out of show business, I guess) with this tidbit:

Best Howard Dean moment: Democrats erupting in applause when the president began a sentence saying, "Congress did not act last year on my proposal to save Social Security . . ."

Michael Graham notes a missed opportunity for Bush to lob one out of the park had he planned for that applause.

Jason Apuzzo of Libertas examines the New Hollywood Triviality:

You may remember George Lucas. Some thirty years ago he made a little film called Star Wars that revolutionized filmmaking, inspired a new generation of filmmakers, and saved Hollywood's finances. Lucas recently revolutionized filmmaking again by pulling Hollywood kicking-and-screaming into the digital age. In 2005, he made a little independent film called Star Wars Episode III that was the year's box office champ, received some of the warmest reviews of Lucas' career, and successfully rounded out the most popular and influential film series in movie history.

George's thanks for all this? Star Wars Episode III got one nomination this morning -- for Best Makeup. Lucas wasn't nominated for Best Director, although George Clooney was for Good Night, and Good Luck. Star Wars' Ian McDiarmid, playing the deliciously wicked Chancellor Palpatine, wasn't even nominated for Best Supporting Actor.

So sorry, George Lucas. If your film doesn't get us angry at Bush, Oscar just doesn't care. Why? Because we're now in the era of film as social activism, The New Triviality.

The Trivial film, you see, is merely an occasion for social activism or celebrity posturing. For example, on accepting a Golden Globe for his role in Syriana, George Clooney used the occasion to make an untoward crack about Jack Abramoff. A friend of mine angrily remarked that the comment had "nothing to do with the film" for which Clooney was being honored. I politely demured. "It has everything to do with the film," I said. Why?

Because Syriana, as its creators proudly admit, is really just a 'platform.' Just as Hollywood views films like "Lord of the Rings" as 'platforms' from which to sell merchandise, so too are films like Syriana or Good Night, and Good Luck or The Constant Gardener now viewed as 'platforms' from which to sell politics, to pontificate about the world we live in. After all, there really is no 'point' to a film like Syriana unless it's to enable a George Clooney to deliver political cheap shots on TV during awards season. He does it in the film, so why not on TV?

Of course, all of this Trivializes the cinema -- turning it from an art form into something much smaller, more polemical. That's why this year's Oscar nominees are truly films for the era of the iPod, with its 2-inch video screen. These new films make 'points' but constrict the imagination into something trite and pedantic - something with which we're supposed to be edified, rather than entertained.

"Gee, I never knew that about pharmaceutical companies exploiting the African underclass. I'm so glad I saw The Constant Gardener." "Heck, I never knew America has 5% of the word's population but accounts for 50% of the world's military spending! I'm really glad I caught Syriana." "Boy, I never knew the history behind the first sexual harassment lawsuit. I'm so happy I saw North Country."

It is apparently no longer enough for audiences 'merely' to enjoy a film. Enjoyed Star Wars or Harry Potter this year? Too bad. Together those films made $1.7 billion worldwide, but they didn't indict the global right-wing conspiracy of oil-homophobia-pharmaceuticals so together they received only 2 Oscar nominations.

Meredith Blake of Participant Productions recently stated that her company had repeatedly turned down films that were "creatively fantastic but found to be socially falling short."

"Socially falling short"?

If you love the movies, these words should chill your spine. They indicate that movies are becoming smaller, more partisan, more ...Trivial.

Indeed. As I wrote yesterday:

How a slate of leftwing political movies such as Good Night and Good Luck, Syriana, The Constant Gardener, The Interpreter, and Munich could be greenlighted for release last year is beyond me, unless Hollywood in mid-2004 assumed that a Kerry win was inevitable, or after he lost, decided to put the celluloid shiv into Red State audiences. Why anyone thought these films would make money is utterly astonishing. But, to build on Michael Barone's recent op-ed, the Hollywood left is currently as stuck in the 1970s as liberal politicians are.

Want the ritual of movie-going to return? Give mass audiences moves they'll want to see.

They won't win any awards, merely keep Hollywood afloat.

Virginia Postrel has a great post on how content and aesthetics drove the launch of radio in the late 1920s and 1930s. Long before the Web--heck, long before television, radio was the new technology of the pre-World War II era. We take it for granted today, but how remarkable it must have seemed when it first debuted.

(Woody Allen, before auguring his career into the ground, did a wonderful job of capturing that era with Radio Days.)

The San Francisco Chronicle has a profile of Dave Barry, who tells the newspaper that "Newspapers are dead":

Several years ago, Barry created the blog www.davebarry.com. It features typical "Barryisms," odd news stories sent in by ubiquitous "alert readers," columns, and a recurring feature called "A Fine Name for a Rock Band." (Most recent submission: Loincloth Outrage.)

"About five years ago, I went to the Herald and I told them, 'I've got this blog and maybe you'd like to run it,' '' Barry said. "And they said, 'It's a what?' But then they had a committee meeting or something and now they want everybody to have a blog. They want the security guard to have a blog."

Barry's blog has taken off like gangbusters, and like podcasts, blogs are the Next Big Thing in journalism. More and more newspapers are offering blogs covering everything from the local sports scene to the business world. (See The Chronicle's "culture blog" and others at sfgate.com.)

So it's clear that although there may be doubts about the future of the newspaper industry, there are directions in which it can expand and thrive. The future is digital.

It has to be said, however, that Barry is not optimistic. A little more than a year ago, he announced that he was taking a sabbatical from his column, and has now decided to make the break permanent. The reason, he stresses, was not that he had a lack of faith in the industry, but that he was ready to move on. Still, he has grave doubts about the future of newspapers.

"It has to start with the kids," he said. "My son is 25. He's been around newspaper people all of his life. He doesn't get the paper. That's the first problem. The second problem is: We can no longer compel people to pay attention. We used to be able to say, there's this really important story in Poland. You should read this. Now people say, I just look up what I'm interested in on the Internet."

Meanwhile, Arnold Kling asks, "Is Blogging a Fad?"

He doesn't think so, and I don't either--but with one caveat: individual self-publishing on the Internet is not a fad--but it's possible its form could change radically in the coming years. I picked up the February 7th issue of PC Magazine to read on a flight to L.A. last week--and wide swatches of the issue are devoted to its cover story: video on the Web. It's entirely possible that within a few years, Blogs could be supplemented by much more dynamic multimedia formats. But in a way, that just proves Kling's argument. There will still be millions of blogs, just as television didn't eliminate movies, and didn't eliminate radio--and the 'Net hasn't eliminated any of those mediums either. (Pace Dave Barry, it's a fairly safe prediction that any metropolitan area with a large number of commuters will have dead tree newspapers of some sort for decades to come--but they probably won't have the same level of prominence they once took for granted.)

According to Louis Wittig, Albert Brooks' new Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World is much more of a bust than its title suggests:

With his characteristic inclination for meta-comedy, Brooks plays himself: a neurotic comedian drifting through Hollywood. Because its first few choices passed, the State department drafts Brooks to fly to India with a pair of handlers (John Carroll Lynch and Jon Tenny) to compile a 500-page report on what makes the Muslim world laugh.

Isn’t India mostly a Hindu joint? Brooks the character gets a non-answer from State and, promised a medal for his service, bolts for the subcontinent. Brooks the writer/director owes his audience an explanation for this geocultural disconnect. What he eventually provides goes a long way to explaining why his movie doesn’t go anywhere.

Brooks’s slow, artificially uncomplicated scenes punctuated with Seinfeldian dialogue don’t work as well here as they have in his previous films. With the title (which caused Sony Pictures, its original distributor, to drop it as it was too incendiary) and the subject matter, Brooks sets his viewers up to expect something more than the single-minded self-deprecation he delivers.

Once he’s settled in New Delhi, Brooks picks up a pointless Indian assistant, Maya (Sheetal Sheth). She takes notes as he randomly stops Indians on the street and assaults them with jokes. He subjects an auditorium full of stone-faced Indians to his old stand-up routine. (This is the one moment when Brooks’s meta-comedy comes close to delivering. In interviews he’s said that part of his motivation for making the movie was unifying different cultures through laughter. Ugh. But having American audiences watching, though not laughing, at an Indian audience that’s watching, though not laughing, at Albert Brooks, is a clever put-on.) He meets with Al Jazeera executives and is offered a part in their new sitcom, That Darn Jew.

For as far and as wide and as aimlessly as he wanders, though, nowhere does Brooks the character or Brooks the director remember that the whole production was supposed to have something to do with Muslims. At no point does he seek out an imam, or a halal butcher, to entertain. The Indian and Pakistani governments can’t figure out what he’s up to either, and after their spies overhear him innocently tell an Iranian that it’s okay to bomb, he’s whisked out of the country to strains of “America the Beautiful.”

Looking’s last five minutes, where Brooks’s wife toasts her returning spouse as “the Kissinger of Comedy” lays out the earnest cluelessness of Americans that, the audience realizes, Brooks has been trying to make the center of the movie all along. Again, clever, but not funny — just vaguely confusing.

I had to chuckle though, when I saw last night that the film was billed at the Camera 7 multiplex in Campbell as simply "Looking For Comedy", implying the theater was--for a mystifying reason that I certainly can't figure out--afraid to run the whole title, even though there was plenty of room for it on the theater's large signage.

Somewhere, I know Theo Van Gogh is enjoying the irony.

Ed Morrissey and Betsy Newmark have some thoughts on Colleen Rowley, a former Time "Person of the Year" who is now running for Congress against Representative John Kline of Minnesota. As Morrissey writes:

She has descended far into the fever swamp during her brief yet notorious campaign to unseat Mr. Kline. When last CQ heard from Ms. Rowley, she had just missed her chance to draft off of Cindy Sheehan's momentum in Crawford, Texas. Rowley had trekked down to her campout just as Sheehan gave up on her protest. Unfortunately, she has resurfaced to start her campaign -- and in doing so, she decided to depict the Marine Corps veteran as a Nazi:

This is the nadir of Democratic demagoguery, referencing anyone with whom they disagree as a Nazi. This slur is especially egregious when directed at a man who served his country faithfully for 25 years in the Marine Corps and then for two terms in Congress. No one disputes anyone's right to disagree with Rep. Kline's positions, but to call the man a Nazi goes beyond political debate and into character assassination.

Rowley later took the picture off the website but never issued an apology or even an acknowledgment that it had been posted. Fortunately, others did a screen grab of the site before the cowards at Rowley's headquarters went into full retreat. If Minnesota Democrats have any sense of honor and respect, they will call for the immediate withdrawal of Rowley from the race. She disgraces not just the Second District but all of Minnesota with this kind of campaigning.

The many violations of Godwin's Law over the last three years or so become numbing: when I first saw the screen grab of Rowley's slanderous Photoshop exercise, I thought "ho-hum, another Republicans are Nazis slur, here we go again". And that same numbing effect works in reverse, making it an ad hominem that becomes all the more easier to use. But as Jonah Goldberg wrote shortly Dick Durbin's Springtime For Gitmo meltdown:

Hitler holds our fascination because of his singular villainy. But this shouldn’t crowd out our ability to make distinctions. Hitler is supposed to define the outer limits of evil, not the lowest threshold.

Exactly.

Update: More here and here.

Judge Alito is now Justice Alito, voted in, as Paul Mirengoff writes, on fairly straight party lines, 58-42.

Ed Whelan of National Review Online's Bench Memos blog has some thoughts on the aftermath of what John Hinderaker dubbed "The Filibust":

By pushing a filibuster vote upon their fellow Democrats, John Kerry and Teddy Kennedy have achieved quite a bit already. Among other things:

1. Absent the filibuster effort, lots of attention would mistakenly have been focused on whether Judge Alito would reach the filibuster-proof level of 60 votes on final confirmation. If he were to fall short of that, the media would proclaim that the vote level sends a warning shot that another nominee like Alito could be filibustered. By forcing an actual vote on cloture, Kerry and Kennedy have deprived the Left of this pretend-filibuster argument. The starting point now for analysis of the politics of any subsequent nomination is that a nominee like Alito can expect to receive more than 70 votes on cloture.

2. Kerry and Kennedy have turned the wrath of the Left against those 19 Democrats (nearly half the caucus) who voted for cloture. (Byron York quotes one angry, obscene diatribe from DailyKos.) I don’t see how this is going to help red-state Democrats. If only Kerry and Kennedy could have been uniters rather than dividers . . . .

3. By using the filibuster weapon against a nominee whom the public rightly recognizes to be superbly qualified, Kerry and Kennedy have undermined Democrats’ future use of that weapon. Crying wolf isn’t a good way to build credibility. (Of course, the Left hopes to show over time that Alito is a real wolf, but I have much greater faith in the public’s ability to recognize good judging.)

As Mirengoff writes, the vote changes the "rules" for confirming Supreme Court Justices:

Under the Alito rule, Senators will vote against highly qualified nominee for no reason other than that they expect the nominee to rule contrary to their preference on major issues. Under the Alito rule, the president's party, in effect, must control the Senate in order for the president to have top-notch nominees of his choice confirmed. When the the president's party doesn't control the Senate, only compromise nominees acceptable to both parties can expect to be confirmed.

It was objectionable for the Democrats to have changed an understanding of the Senate's "advise and consent" role that has worked reasonably well for 200 years, or so. The new approach will probably produce more mediocre Justices, selected not for their intellect, fairness, or other judging skills, but because they haven't offended anyone. But the process is not irrational, and in some ways it makes more sense than its predecessor in a world where the Court exercises as much power as it now does. In any case, the important thing is to have one set of confirmation rules that applies to both parties. Thanks to the Dems, we now have a new set.

If in four, eight or 12 years, there's a Republican minority in the Senate and a Democrat in the White House, it will be interesting to see if another Ruth Bader Ginsburg would be swept in with a 96-3 vote.

James Lileks explores the final frontiers of "progressivism" and media bias.

Details here; much more via Google News.

In "Best of the Web Today", James Taranto writes:

That's Easy for You to Say!
"Humuhumunukunukuapuaa Dethroned in Hawaii"--headline, Associated Press, Jan. 28

I'm sure AP's headline was vetted by The Law Firm of Hungerdunger, Hungerdunger, Hungerdunger, and McCormick.

From virtually its inception in 1997, I've enjoyed The Digital Bits Website, which does a tremendous job of tracking down rumors and release dates for upcoming DVDs. I even interviewed Bill Hunt, its editor, for a couple of articles in the late 1990s. And speaking of Hunt, he writes today:

Now then... if you're in the Hollywood area tonight, I'm going to be participating in a panel discussion at the Creative Artists Agency (CAA). Sponsored by the Northwestern University Entertainment Alliance and hosted by producer David Zucker (Num3ers), the event is called Film & TV & DVD: The Next Generation. Here's the description:

"Have we reached the tipping point? Is the ritual of movie-going drawing to a close as the speed in which new DVD titles reach store shelves increases? Has the filmmaker's craft been diminished or enhanced by ‘extras’ and ‘uncensored cuts’? And as the size of televisions grow and the era of downloads and on-demand explode, where will these trends ultimately deliver us? Hollywood Armageddon or a New Genesis?"

"The ritual of movie-going" is dependent upon providing product that audiences want to see on a big screen. And since Star Wars' release in 1977, it's been conditioned that if you give them big budget, effects-laden, relatively apolitical fare, it will turn out in droves to be blown away by the action on the big screen. Certainly, Philip Anschutz, executive producer of The Chronicles of Narnia and 2004's Ray Charles biopic isn't betting that the ritual of movie-going drawing to a close--he's betting some serious contrarian money on just the opposite. And he's got it to spend, with Narnia and Ray having earned a collective $353,078,995 at the American box office.

For background material to use in my recent post about Robert Altman, I pulled out my copy of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind. I have to laugh at the tunnel-vision of the filmmakers of the 1970s (and to a certain extent, Biskind himself, as he chronicles their rise and cocaine-laden fall). Sandwiched between blockbuster crowd-favorites of the 1960s such as Dr. Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia, The Sound of Music and The Dirty Dozen and then the Star Wars, Star Trek and Indiana Jones movies (not to mention the bulk of Steven Spielberg's first twenty years of filmmaking), they don't understand what an aberration their late '60s to early '70s films were. Much as I love some of the darker movies of the 1970s (such as M*A*S*H, Taxi Driver, Chinatown, and The Conversation), while all of these films were critics' darlings, its always been popcorn fare that's kept Hollywood afloat.

How a slate of leftwing political movies such as Good Night and Good Luck, Syriana, The Constant Gardener, The Interpreter, and Munich could be greenlighted for release last year is beyond me, unless Hollywood in mid-2004 assumed that a Kerry win was inevitable, or after he lost, decided to put the celluloid shiv into Red State audiences. Why anyone thought these films would make money is utterly astonishing. But, to build on Michael Barone's recent op-ed, the Hollywood left is currently as stuck in the 1970s as liberal politicians are.

Want the ritual of movie-going to return? Give mass audiences movies they'll want to see.

The Only Republican in San Francisco suggests that "calling a group of people racist is the new racism".

Read the whole thing.

Mary Katharine Ham and Andy Roth of the Club for Growth are compiling a list of newspapers across the countries with conservative editorial pages.

Not surprisingly, it's a faily short list so far, but feel free to post or email them suggestions to add to it.

Orrin Judd links to this astonishing passage by Michael Kinsley:

Obviously the party that has lost the White House, both houses of Congress, and now the courts needs some new ideas and new energy. But it seems undeniably true to me—though many deny it—that the Republicans simply play the game better. You're not supposed to say that. At Pundit School they teach you: Always go for the deeper explanation, not the shallower one. Never suggest that people (let alone "the" people) can be duped.

OK, it's not all that astonishing. Kate O'Beirne recently noted another example of this phenomenon in her interview with Kathryn Jean Lopez:

Lopez: In 1977, Jean Stapleton, hanging out with Bella Abzug announced that Edith Bunker would support the ERA "if she understood it." Does that pretty much sum up what the feminist establishment thinks of many American women?

O'Beirne: The modern feminist movement has never enjoyed the allegiance of a majority of American women and that condescension represents feminists' explanation when confronted with the evidence. The rest of us are too stupid to recognize our oppression. One of the most celebrated feminists you'll meet in the book dismisses the surveys reporting that married women are happier than single women by attributing their contentment to being "slightly mentally ill."

Or as Orrin writes, "Nothing has served the Democrats worse than their insistence over the last twenty-five years that the rejection of liberalism and return to power of conservatism are a fluke and as soon as people wake up the stars will realign themselves".

Back in July, Anne Applebaum noted:

In 1949, when George Orwell wrote his dystopian novel "1984," he gave its hero, Winston, a job at the Ministry of Truth. All day long, Winston clips politically unacceptable facts, stuffs them into little pneumatic tubes, and then pushes the tubes down a chute. Beside him sits a woman in charge of finding and erasing the names of people who have been "vaporized." And their office, Orwell wrote, "with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one sub-section, a single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records Department."

It's odd to read "1984" in 2005, because the politics of Orwell's vision aren't outdated. There are still plenty of governments in the world that go to extraordinary lengths to shape what their citizens read, think and say, just like Orwell's Big Brother. But the technology envisioned in "1984" is so -- well, 1980s. Paper? Pneumatic tubes? Workers in cubicles? Nowadays, none of that is necessary: It can all be done electronically, especially if, like the Chinese government, you seek the cooperation of large American companies.

Evan Coyne Maloney writes that on the Chinese version of Google, Tiananmen Square has gone down the memory hole.

Michael Barone explores a theme we've discussed here numerous times over the past couple of years:

Do you ever get the feeling, while listening to the political debate, that we're stuck in the '70s? The 1970s, that is, that slum of a decade which gave us the worst popular music, the ugliest hairstyles and clothes, and the most disastrous public policies of the 20th century.

Why yes, I do. I most definitely do.

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

In the old days of the Internet (many, many moons ago, my son--'round about, say, 1999), vanity searches ruled the Internet (that's how I ultimately discovered InstaPundit, and ultimately, the then-budding Blogosphere, back in 2001, just before 9/11). These days, vanity editing is apparently the in-thing among the really cutting-edge digerati:

The staff of U.S. Rep Marty Meehan wiped out references to his broken term-limits pledge as well as information about his huge campaign war chest in an independent biography of the Lowell Democrat on a Web site that bills itself as the "world's largest encyclopedia," The Sun has learned.

The Meehan alterations on Wikipedia.com represent just two of more than 1,000 changes made by congressional staffers at the U.S. House of Representatives in the past six month. Wikipedia is a global reference that relies on its Internet users to add credible information to entries on millions of topics.

Matt Vogel, Meehan's chief of staff, said he authorized an intern in July to replace existing Wikipedia content with a staff-written biography of the lawmaker.

The change deleted a reference to Meehan's campaign promise to surrender his seat after serving eight years, a pledge Meehan later eschewed. It also deleted a reference to the size of Meehan's campaign account, the largest of any House member at $4.8 million, according to the latest data available from the Federal Election Commission.

Betsy Newmark and Will Collier have further thoughts.

Google is impersonating Austin Power's Dr. Evil, according to the Riding Sun blog:

I can't seem to find the link for this one; I think it was on a Rooters website somewhere. But I just read a shocking news report: In the wake of its decision to censor its Chinese search results, Google is changing its corporate motto from the original "Don't be evil."

The new motto, according to unnamed company sources, is: "Be semi-evil. Be quasi-evil. Be the margarine of evil. Be the Diet Coke of evil — just one calorie; not evil enough!"

With its customized splash page, Google is celebrating Chinese New Year today (as are my neighbors--a fair amount of fireworks have been going off since last night); too bad Christmas and Easter are considered passé by the Diet Coke of evil.

Mark Steyn writes about the two clarifying moments in politics last week:

Joel Stein (no relation) of the Los Angeles Times took a lot of heat last week for coming right out with it and saying that he didn't support the troops and that it was a humbug phrase that he and his anti-war comrades shouldn't have to use as cover for their position. Good for him. He's right. It's empty and pusillanimous, the Iraq war's version of "But some of my best friends are Jewish . . ." If you're opposed to the mission, if you don't want to see it through, if you're supporting a position whose success would only demoralize those serving in Iraq and negate their sacrifice, in what sense do you "support the troops"? Stein ought to be congratulated for acknowledging that he doesn't. We armchair warmongers are routinely derided as "chickenhawks," but Stein is a hawkish chicken, disdaining the weasel formulation too many anti-war folks take refuge in.

The Palestinian elections were similarly clarifying. The old guard -- Yasser Arafat's Fatah cronies -- had their own take on the "But some of my best friends are Jewish" routine. For years they insisted, at least in the presence of Americans and Europeans, that they were in favor of a "two-state solution" -- Israel and Palestine living side by side -- at the same time as they supported and glorified and financially subsidized suicide bombers and other terrorists. Insofar as their enthusiasm for a two-state solution was genuine, it was as an intermediate stage en route to a one-state solution.

Hamas, by contrast, takes a Joel Stein view: Why the hell should we have to go tippy-toeing around some sissy phrase we don't really mean? Hamas doesn't support a two-state solution, it supports the liquidation of one state and its replacement by other, and they don't see why they should have to pretend otherwise. And in last week's elections for the Palestinian Authority they romped home. It was a landslide.

As is the way, many in the West rushed to rationalize the victory. The media have long been reluctant to damn the excitable lads as terrorists. In 2002 the New York Times published a photograph of Palestinian suicide bombers all dressed up and ready to blow, and captioned it "Hamas activists." Take my advice and try not to be standing too near the Hamas activist when he activates himself.

Steyn adds:

So what happens now? Either Hamas forms a government and decides that operating highway departments and sewer systems is what it really wants to do with itself. Or, like Arafat, it figures that it has no interest in government except as a useful front for terrorist operations. If it's the former, all well and good: Many first-rate terror organizations have managed to convert themselves to third-rate national-liberation governments. But, if it's the latter, that too is useful: Hamas is the honest expression of the will of the Palestinian electorate, and the cold hard truth of that is something Europeans and Americans will find hard to avoid.

We concur.

The Manolo, he love the monkstrap shoe for the man of the mystery:

Where the fashion for the men is concerned, the Manolo he is the traditionalist. Men should wear well-polished, good quality feetwear, which should distinguish itself not with the outré color, or the hand-tooled cat leather, but with the high quality of the material and the workmanship, and with the classical, elegant line of the shoe itself.

Thus the Manolo he would recommend to his “downtown” friend the black monkstrap shoe from the Bally called the Breda.

The monkstrap shoe it is the ever so slightly eccentric shoe. Indeed there is the faintest whiff of the mystery about the man who wears the monkstrap. This man he is not the uptight man of business, instead he is free from such mundane concerns, and yet there is still the admirable personal restraint. He is slightly old-fashioned, but in only the best sense, as being one who does not abandon tradition at the first blush of the new.

The Ed, he cannot help but agree, merely adding that the suede monkstrap--while it takes a certain amount of time to perform the scoping of its retail location--is one of the best forms of this classic shoe with the faintest whiff of the mystery.

An Israeli reader of Real Clear Politics agrees with the gist of my post last night on Hamas's electoral victory.

(Via Architecture And Morality.)

Update: Glenn Reynolds compares Hamas to Windows ME. Well, they do both tend to crash and explode quite a bit.

After the left lost ground during the 2002 midterm elections, prominent Democrats such as Al Gore floated a bizarre meme that the mainstream media was dominated by the right wing--which must have been pretty amazing news to editors at Reuters, AP, The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as producers at ABC, CBS, and NBC, where at the time, Dan Ra^ther, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw still ruled the airwaves. (Not to mention CNN, PBS, and NPR, and the Columbia Journalism School.)

In contrast, nobody floated the vast right wing media conspiracy theory after the 2004 election--and for good reason. The mask had dropped, completely, and permanently.

But this is a meme with legs--it's back! Only this time, instead of coming down from on high in 2002 from men like Gore and Tom Daschle, it's bubbling up from the left side of the Blogosphere, as the Washington Post recently discovered, and as Tim Russert, Chris Matthews, Katie Couric and Aaron Brown, none of whom are exactly favorites of the right (with the arguable exception of Russert, who cut his teeth working Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan) are finding out.

As one blogger wrote, on the weekend in 2004 that the New York Times came out of the closet:

If you find yourself arguing that the major news media do not lean liberal, then you almost certainly have identified yourself as being to the left of the mainstream news media and well to the left of the rest of your fellow Americans. Which is fine.

I'm not sure if I agree entirely with the conclusion Paul Jaminet reaches, but the contempt that the MSM now finds from both sides of the aisle is quite a unique development--and it will be fascinating to watch how it all plays out.

In any case, seventy years after its creation, how's that one-size fits all mass media concept playing out these days?

While the consensus is that Ariel Sharon is unlikely to recover sufficiently from his very severe stroke to re-enter politics, his legacy his secure: for better or worse, he's radically reshaped the Palestinians' relationship with Isreal.

First, as Mark Steyn wrote, Sharon's most important decision was giving the Palestinians the space to create their state:

It was my National Review colleague David Frum who came up with the clearest assessment to date of the Israeli strategy: “Could it be that Sharon is calling the bluff of Western governments and the Arab states? By creating the very Palestinian state that those governments and those states pretend to want but actually dread Sharon is forcing them to end their pretense and acknowledge the truth.”

The Frum thesis sounds right to me. In Britain since July 7th, political figures have twisted themselves into pretzels trying to explain how suicide bombers in London are somehow different from suicide bombers in Tel Aviv – unwilling, even as the double-deckers are exploding across Bloomsbury, to abandon their fetishization of the Palestinian cause, and unable to see that in an ever more Islamified continent the Europeans are the new Jews. Maybe an Islamist statelet on the Mediterranean will concentrate even European minds.

This then is the audacious gamble of the Gaza withdrawal: the best way to demonstrate that the Palestinians are undeserving of a state is to force one upon them. It’s a dangerous move, but in a tough neighborhood there aren’t any other kinds.

And did that gamble payoff? In one sense, absolutely perfectly, as Emanuele Ottolenghi explains:

What victory does to Hamas is to put the movement into an impossible position. As preliminary reports emerge, Hamas has already asked Fatah to form a coalition and got a negative response. Prime Minister Abu Ala has resigned with his cabinet, and president Abu Mazen will now appoint Hamas to form the next government. From the shadows of ambiguity, where Hamas could afford — thanks to the moral and intellectual hypocrisy of those in the Western world who dismissed its incendiary rhetoric as tactics — to have the cake and eat it too. Now, no more. Had they won 30-35 percent of the seats, they could have stayed out of power but put enormous limits on the Palestinian Authority’s room to maneuver. By winning, they have to govern, which means they have to tell the world, very soon, a number of things.

They will have to show their true face now: No more masks, no more veils, no more double-speak. If the cooptation theory — favored by the International Crisis Group and by the former British MI-6 turned talking head, Alistair Crooke — were true, this is the time for Hamas to show what hides behind its veil.

As the government of the Palestinian Authority, now they will have to say whether they accept the roadmap.

They will have to take control over security and decide whether they use it to uphold the roadmap or to wage war.

There will be no excuses or ambiguities when Hamas fires rockets on Israel and launches suicide attacks against civilian targets. Until Tuesday, the PA could hide behind the excuse that they were not directly responsible and they could not rein in the "militants." Now the "militants" are the militia of the ruling party. They are one and the same with the Palestinian Authority. If they bomb Israel from Gaza — not under occupation anymore, and is therefore, technically, part of the Palestinian state the PLO proclaimed in Algiers in 1988, but never bothered to take responsibility for — that is an act of war, which can be responded to in kind, under the full cover of the internationally recognized right of self-defense. No more excuses that the Palestinians live under occupation, that the PA is too weak to disarm Hamas, that violence is not the policy of the PA. Hamas and the PA will be the same: What Hamas does is what the PA will stand for.

And just as Jimmy Carter has already done, Europe will tie itself into knots trying to excuse and justify their actions.

There's a huge downside though: while Hamas's victory makes the Middle East situation much clearer, it's also gotten much, much more dangerous. Between the Hamas-led Palestinians and an Iran that's steaming rapidly towards The Bomb, (with a leader who makes Sterling Hayden's General Jack D. Ripper seem like a model of cool, logical reasoning), check your calendar: no matter what the date printed on it says, 1939 is getting closer.

(H/T: Roger L. Simon.)

Update: Neo-Neocon writes, "Hamas wins--and now we get to see if they can make anything run on time". Meanwhile, Tim Blair adds, "Elections in the US are sometimes won in the Bible belt. This may the first election on earth to be won by the suicide belt".

John Hawkins has a graph comparing the cost of Operation Iraqi Freedom as a percentage of GDP with previous wars America has fought:

The chart was prepared by Robert Whaples, professor of economics at Wake Forest University. Bowyer then calculates the cost of the Iraq war as a percentage of America's GDP and finds it to be the second cheapest war we've ever fought -- 2% GDP cost-to-date versus 1% GDP for the 1st Iraq war. You remember that one - the one we didn't finish.

Indeed^TM.

Arnold Kling has a piece in TCS Daily that I wish I had written myself, titled "Stuck on 1968". I probablly would have chosen 1972 as the year I'd pick to set the Mobius Loop for, but that doesn't negate how spot-on Kling's thesis is. I'd quote from it, but I'd end up pasting in the whole article.

IOW, RTWT, as those post-'68 acronyms go.

Update: Tangentially related thoughts from Hugh Hewitt.

Hugh Hewitt had Karl Rove on his show today, who said:

We have had two strains in American politics. We've had the strain of bipartisanship in foreign affairs, particularly in the decades of the 40's and the 50's, and 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's. That has obviously frayed somewhat. We've also had a tradition of internationalist strong Democrats: Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy. You know, the hyperventilation by some Democrats can be chalked up to having lost an election or political aspirations. But I'm at a loss to explain why so many Democrats seem intent upon focusing their energies and efforts upon hatred of this president, rather than staying focused on the principal responsibility that all in government, and all in the public life of our country have, and that is to sustain the country in a time of war.

In February of 2004, just as the election year was gathering steam, I wrote:

Arguably beginning with Hillary Clinton's "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy" quip in early 1998, why have so many conspiracy theories been coming from the left?

Dr. Sanity answers the question in the first of a two-part post titled, "The Political Paranoia of the Left":

Even if, hypothetically, every single justification for the war would be eventually proven not to have any basis ( and this is already demonstrably impossible); it would still not validate the absurd claims on the part of the left who, in characteristic paranoid fashion, have come up with all sorts of conspiracy theories and paranoid fantasies that connect dots in a much more irrational and delusional manner than what they accuse the President of doing.

The President simply acted on facts that were accepted at the time (even by the people now accusing him of lying); and responded appropriately to a real threat that had materialized on his watch and resulted in the murder of 3000 American citizens. The paranoia of the left can be seen in their attempts to undermine his actions by resorting to ridiculous connections that simply don't compute-- just as fluoridation being a plot of the communists didn't resonate with reality; neither does Michael Moore's fictional documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11, make the paranoid case for some underlying conspiracy.

While there is merit in debating how best to go about achieving our objectives in the war in Iraq and the GWOT; believing that terrorism is a conspiracy cooked up by Bush and Co. to consolidate power and institute (take your pick) a fascist state; a theocracy; or both; is simply a paranoid fantasy that consoles those of the liberal left who cannot cope with their loss of power and influence.

The hallmark of the paranoid individual and the paranoid style is constant anticipation or expectation of either attack or personal betrayal. Paranoia finds causal connections everywhere and in everything; for them, nothing is coincidental. They can develop complicated conspiracies about innocuous behaviors and seemingly irrelevant events. Their paranoia makes them constantly on guard, searching for hidden motives and meanings in everyone else's behavior. (Just go check out the Democratic Underground, where these fantasies on every action or inaction on the part of the Bush administration are immediately converted into conspiracies and plots). The tragic death of a reporter -- Bush et al had him killed because he knew too much. Osama's most recent tape -- a Rovian plot to show how frightened we should be. And so on.

Paranoia can be conceptualized as "rationality in the service of the irrational." Once fixed on a particular idea or explanation -- no matter how bizarre or irrational; the paranoid person looks for evidence to validate their prejudices. It is almost impossible to change their minds. Their entire concept of themselves is tied up with the paranoid idea or conspiracy. If it did not exist, or was proven to be untrue or false-- then they would need to question their underlying assumptions and ideas--and those are what usually form the foundation of who they believe themselves to be.

For example, a belief that one is important enough to be the subject of a determined (and often vague) FBI or CIA plot may be frightening, but is likely to be vastly superior to accepting that you have a severe and lifelong psychiatric disorder.

It is far easier to disregard reality; and/or to simply incorporate the person who tries to disabuse you of your idea or conspiracy into the complex paranoid fantasy itself, rather than deal with the trauma of a disintegrating self.

When setbacks occur, or when something goes wrong in the life of the paranoid, they will prefer to believe that another person or group is to blame, rather than accept any personal responsibility.

Needless to say, be sure and read the rest (including Part II)--if the voices in your head allow it, of course.

Update: Somewhat related thoughts about that mindset, here. (Don't miss the punchline!)

Senator Kerry calls for fillbustering Alito--apparently after Senate minority leader Harry Reid said there would be no fillibuster.

On the other hand, John Podhoretz says: Bring. It. On.:

That's what I want to see. A filibuster. Led by John Kerry. Standing there. On the Senate floor. Talking for 22 hours, like Mr. Smith. Except that Mr. Smith was played by James Stewart and John Kerry will be played by John Kerry. Even before his voice gives out, there will be mass suicides on the floor of the Senate. Kind of like when Ted Stryker talked about his breakup with his girlfriend Elaine.

Surely he can't be serious!

The Weekly Standard and Tinkerty Tonk look at the religious faith of the hardest of the hard-core Gaia worshipers.

Count us as a fellow skeptic, as well. Or as Julian Simon once said, "excuse me, I’m not dressed for church.”

Update: Gaia must have been smiting me: I posted this and then went to lunch, only to find multiple copies of this post on the homepage--a whole 'nother kind of recylicing I guess.

In his latest syndicated column, Jonah Goldberg writes:

A wave of pious indignation and table-thumping has spread across the nation's editorial pages over the freedom to search for Internet porn. Don't get me wrong: I think you do have the right to search for porn. But it is interesting to see what gets people's First Amendment gag reflex going. The Baltimore Sun, for example, warns that a "witch-hunt" for search-engine abusers might be around the corner if Google cooperates with the government.

Maureen Dowd, the reigning scribe of unthinking liberalism, recently wrote in the New York Times that Dick Cheney — whom she calls "The Grim Peeper" — is trying to turn America into a "police state." "I don't like the thought of Dick Cheney ogling my Googling," Dowd writes without rhyme or reason.

It was a silly column, even for Dowd, but it does capture a certain level of both the legitimate fear and the outright paranoia out there.

Partisanship is obviously part of the equation. For instance, the heretofore-unknown disease of Cheneyphobia seems to be reaching epidemic proportions. It seems to cause some people to believe that the vice president of the United States has superhuman powers and that he is capable of personally reading hundreds of millions of e-mails while listening to thousands of hours of phone conversations and — simultaneously — scanning trillions of web searches.

Robert Kuttner, writing about a different controversy in the Boston Globe, shows serious symptoms of the affliction when he writes, "Google plus Dick Cheney is a recipe for undoing the liberties for which the original patriots of the American Revolution bled and died."

On the narrow point about Dick Cheney, this is all a bunch of nonsense. The Department of Justice is in a lawsuit with the ACLU over the Child Online Protection Act, which is designed to help prevent kids from being exposed to online porn. The law ran afoul of the First Amendment, according to a lower court, and the Supreme Court asked for additional information pending its final decision on the matter. The Department of Justice asked Google, as well as MSN, Yahoo!, and Time Warner (AOL's parent), to provide data on their search engines from a one-week period. (The Associated Press scarily refers to the request as a "White House subpoena," as if the White House could actually issue subpoenas.) No personal information was asked for and none has been given. Everyone but Google complied, because there's really no reason not to. Google, however, sees itself in a very idealistic light and has decided to stand on principle against the government, prompting huzzahs from all the predictable sources.

But the same crowd celebrating Google's decision has generally been quiet about, for example, public health surveys that ask doctors to report all sorts of really private information (anonymous, of course) for epidemiological purposes. If you're going to consider it a grotesque infringement on personal liberty for the government to find out that some anonymous person Google-searched "lesbian love goats," [nice self-reference for us old school G-File fans--Ed] you'd think you'd also be upset by the National Institutes of Health cataloging how many people fitting your description have had prostate exams in the last year. The intrusion is at least as serious, but because no one imagines that Dick Cheney cares about your prostate — yet! — the First Amendment thumpers don't offer a peep.

But there is a larger issue here worth considering. It has become something of an article of faith that technology is always on the side of liberty. In the old Soviet Union, the Xerox machines were chained up at night in order to prevent unauthorized photocopying. (Of course, they weren't called "Xerox machines" but "Glorious People's Photostatic Replicator" or "Trabant Machine" or some such.) The Soviet authorities recognized that information technology was the enemy of totalitarianism. Freedom of the photocopier was not only freedom of the press, but freedom to communicate, which lies at the core of all liberty.

The Internet age has seemingly confirmed this. In China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other oppressive regimes, Internet usage is severely policed because the free-flow of information is seen as a threat to the regime.

And ironically, companies such as Google are more than willing to cooperate. Google's original corporate motto was famously "Don't Be Evil". But as Publius writes:

It looks as if there is a limit to that. Google will resist the U.S. government, but won’t stand up in any way to China? Judging by its actions at home, one would think Google to be a pioneer in bringing access to information and resisting attempts from governments to repress it or monitor it. This says that isn’t the case, and it makes me wonder — just a little — what its motivation is to resisting the U.S. government and giving in to the Chinese. Perhaps they should change their motto to, “It’s just business.”

As I wrote back in October, when Google was more than happy to shaft Taiwan on behalf of China:

Half the cars in Google's parking lots probably have the ubiquitous Silicon Valley "FREE TIBET!!" bumper stickers. Too bad that Google's current ozone layer of management doesn't seem to want to symbolically free Taiwan.

Or, most damning of all, China itself.

Much more, here, including a few contrarian views, as well.

Mark Steyn has some thoughts on the Artist Formally Known As The King Of Pop:

For all his wretched songs, it's the impenetrability of Michael Jackson that fascinates. Let's take it as read that the default mode of a celebrity is weird. Why wouldn't it be? Nobody treats them normally except in respect of their abnormalities. For example, a couple of years back, Jacko visited Britain accompanied by Omar Bhatis, a 12-year-old boy who came first in a Michael Jackson look-alike contest in Norway. If you checked into the Saskatoon Econo Lodge with a prepubescent look-alike wearing matching white gloves and surgical masks, the gal at the front desk would give you the fish eye and buzz the house detective. But at the Dorchester in London it's not a problem -- if you're a pop star.

There are some rare exceptions to the celebrity-weirdsmobile rule: by the time I met Frank Sinatra, no one had treated him normally for half a century yet he was the most non-abnormal superstar you could imagine -- stable, grounded, real friends, three kids who all turned out cheerful and well balanced, several wives all of whom speak very highly of him, as do most of the one-night stands. But, other than that, the A-list celebs are the latter-day equivalent of Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria or the loopier Ottoman sultans, the ones it wasn't safe to leave alone with sharp implements. Certainly, mere royalty can no longer expect such deference. A visitor from planet Zongo who caught, say, ABC's Diane Sawyer interviewing Barbra Streisand and some surly BBC hack interviewing the Prince of Wales would have no doubt which was the regal personage. When I try to visualize Michael Jackson being "normal," I think of my friend Don Black, lyricist of Born Free and Diamonds Are Forever and also Jacko's first big solo hit, Ben. Don's married to his childhood sweetheart Shirley -- they grew up together in the East End of London -- and he's famously one of the sanest men in showbiz. Michael used to go round and see them at their pad in Hollywood and Shirley would put on a nice cuppa tea for him and Michael would make some fey zonked-out observation and Don would respond with one of his old London music-hall gags and they'd play snooker with Don's teenage boys. And you realize that, in the end, even for the most famous and famously damaged celebrities, wackiness is a choice.

Meanwhile--speaking of wacky lifestyle choices--Jackson and Blanket were recently spotted wandering around Bahrain, in togs that suggest that they're perhaps rehearsing out of town for the Saudi Arabian roadshow version of Some Like It Hot.

So as he flies the blue lady of the skies into the sunset, we say "aloha, 5 O'clock Charlie" and return to our duties. Let me remind you the Weblog is open 24 hours for your dining and dancing pleasure.

Back in September of 2004, Norman Podhoretz wrote an incredible--and incredibly long--piece for Commentary titled, "World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win". (If you haven't read it, click on over. We'll be here on Monday when you're done.)

Just as, in retrospect, the end of World War I signaled the beginnings of World War II, Rachel of the Tinkerty Tonk blog explains how what Podhoretz dubbed WWIV grew out of its predecessor struggle as well.

Marathon Pundit writes that Chutch has met his match:

LA Weekly has an article on Nasdijj, a Native American author. Or is he?

In what LA Weekly is calling a Navahoax, it seems that Nasdijj has some things in common with Ward Churchill, he's an F-Troop Indian.

A fraud.

Although Nasdijj goes beyond Ward Churchill; he created a completely new persona for himself.

According to the LA Weekly and others, Nasdijj is actually Tim Barrus. He's got a few other things in common with Ward--born around the same time, 1950 for Barrus, 1947 for Churchill. Both come from blue-collar Midwestern families.

Both Barrus and Churchill have genealogies that go back many generations, and include no American Indian ancestors. And both men viciously insult their detractors.

Of course Nasdijj/Barrus seems to have something in common with James Frey, too. Frey fooled Oprah, and whatever his name is tricked the New York Times, which honored his The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams as a 2001 Notable Book.

As I noted last year in a piece titled "M For Fake", there does seem to be a lot more charlatans running around these days, huh?

(Via Pajamas.)

In a recent essay in Commentary, Joseph Epstein asks, "Are Newspapers Doomed?", and proceeds to list a whole host of reasons why things are looking grim for the Fourth Estate these days.

As does