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 this post by Mark Tapscott:

Judging by the results of the non-scientific survey that has been running in the right-hand column of this blog for several weeks, it looks like The New York Times will be the big circulation loser for 2006 with 46 percent of the respondents checking the Gotham paper's box.

Second is The Los Angeles Times at 22 percent , while running third is The Philadelphia Inquirer at 11 percent. Biggest surprise is the low number of survey takers giving the nod to The San Francisco Chronicle, which lost an amazing 16 percent of its subscribers last year.

My personal pick is the Knight-Ridder Newspapers-owned Inquirer, which, along with the Philadelphia Daily News, has suffered staggering circulation, advertising and editorial staff losses for several years. The weakness of these two dailies is a major reason why Knight-Ridder is viewed by many industry observers as a prime takeover target.

Of course, there's one very obvious cost-cutting method available to them, but it'll take activating the industry's equivalent of the Doomsday Machine: take the paper out of the newspaper business.

Or, the Passion of the Cliché:

Here's Kanye West as Christ.

Scroll down to see Morgan Spurlock (master of the Super Size Me silliness) as Christ.

And here's George Carlin in Jesus' chair at the Last Supper.

I'm sure someone who wanted to poke around Google for a while could find numerous additional examples of celebrities-as-Christ. I don't know who to blame more: the celebrities themselves, or art directors looking to get a quick photo and wrap up the cover or profile.

As Glenn Reynolds wrote, "If Kanye West had balls, he's pose as Mohammed, instead of Jesus. But he doesn't. Efforts to be controversial have become so predictable. Yawn."

I know Mort Sahl once said, if you're going to identify, identify, but doesn't this level of narcissistic posing start to get old after a while?

Update: Quick question: is there a Jesus cover in Joel Stein's future?

In The Australian, Mark Steyn explains yesterday's Canadian election results and Stephen Harper, Canada's new Tory prime minister to those readers Down Under:

John O'Sullivan, a former editor of National Review and Thatcher's long-time adviser, observed that post-war Canadian history is summed up by the old Monty Python song, "I'm a lumberjack and I'm OK", which begins as a robust paean to the manly virtues of a rugged life in the north woods but ends with the lumberjack having gradually morphed into some transvestite pick-up singing that he likes to "wear high heels, suspenders and a bra" and "dress in women's clothing and hang around in bars".

I'm not saying Canadian men are literally cross-dressers - certainly no more than 35, 40 per cent of us are - but nonetheless a nation that in 1945 had the fourth-largest armed forces in the world has undergone such a total makeover that it's now a country that prioritises the secondary impulses of society - government health care, government day care, rights and entitlements from cradle to grave - over all the primary ones.

As I said, Scary Stephen's no Ron or Maggie. But as a young man in the '80s he was spurred into politics by his clear understanding - unlike most so-called Canadian "conservatives" - that his country had missed out on Thatcher-Reagan economic liberalisation. Essentially, he's a political economist with a libertarian streak: he thinks that if you leave taxpayers with more of their money they're more likely to spend it in ways that do more social good than letting the government disburse it.

My kind of guy--though I don't want to know what he wears under his Brooks Brothers suit!

Last March, when I reviewed Downfall, the superb German-produced film on the final days of the Third Reich, I wrote:

While Hitler and Goebbels are two of history's most evil men, their women were also warped in their own unqiue ways: Downfall depicts Eva Braun as being almost as manic-depressive as Hitler (although given to more subdued mood swings rather than Hitler's alternating boiling rage and zonked-out depression); and there is no more evil mother than Magda Goebbels.

(Somewhat astonishingly, this book, which I found at the top of a Google search when double-checking how Magda spelled her full name, claims that her fascination with Buddhism lead her to believe that killing her kids would be fine: they would all be reincarnated back to a better life.)

Neo-Neocon has written a two-part post analyzing Magda Goebbels' life spent in the circle of absolute evil, and her terrifying final decisions.

It's not a job I'd wish on anybody, but let's pretend for a moment that you're the editor of the Los Angeles Times. Your paper has a very bad image problem--it spent 2005 running articles on the joys of L.A. nursing homes for geriatric communists, and praising North(!) Korea. Needless to say, the paper is hemorrhaging red ink.

But it's a new year. Plenty of time to make a fresh start. So how do you jump-start things in 2006?

By running an op-ed smearing American soldiers, that's how! ("I think it's probably ok to question Joel Stein's patriotism", the Professor writes. And how.)

As one of Roger Simon's commenters notes, every day Karl Rove must wake up and thank God at how deranged his opponents are--it makes his life so much easier.

Update: Related thoughts from Neo-Neocon, who profiles Joan Baez, yet another member of the left permanently stuck in 1972:

The article quotes Baez during a recent Somerville, Massachusetts performance:

"When did we get so old?" she cried, to huge cheers.

Well, speak for yourself, Joan, I'm nowhere near as old as you. So there!

But on a more serious note, my answer to Joan might be: when we stopped changing and learning. When we got stuck in a 60s mentality that didn't take into account new information. When we placed on our cars bumper stickers such as yours, reading (according to the Guardian article): Iraq is the Arabic for Vietnam

Ah, Vietnam! Those were the days, my friend, we are determined that they'll never end. Here's Joan again:

If they're honest with themselves, says Baez, veterans of the peace movement, of the war itself or of any great struggle for social change must admit that for all the woes they suffered, there is a terrible anticlimax when it ends. "Afterwards looking back, it is inevitably the high point of your life. You know that from soldiers, who tell their story over and over. I've heard that even the Vietnamese were depressed."

Even the Vietnamese were depressed. But maybe, just maybe, they--unlike you, Joan--were/are depressed not because the glory days are over, but because the Communists won.

Indeed.

Update: In sharp contrast to the Joel Stein, Greyhawk of The Mudville Gazette looks at Kay Lebowitz of the Maine Troop Greeters:

Kay Lebowitz, 89, has such severe arthritis that she cannot shake hands. So she hugs every Marine and soldier she can. Some of the larger, more exuberant troops lift her off the ground.

"Many of them tell me they can't wait to see their grandmother," she said. "That's what I am: a substitute grandmother."
<...>
"When the flights are going over, it's heart-breaking," Lebowitz said. "But when they're coming home, it's heart-warming."

Read the rest.

I TiVo’ed an interesting documentary on Pete Rozelle on the NFL channel last week. For those who aren’t fellow NFL junkies, Rozelle was the NFL commissioner from the early sixties to the late 1980s, during whose reign the NFL merged with the rival American Football League, resulting in the Super Bowl.

About halfway in, the documentary features a sportswriter who says that he once told a group of NFL owners that once a day, they should kneel in the direction of Rozelle and thank him for the millions his business acumen put into their pockets.

Rozelle passed away in the mid-1990s, but the consumer electronics industry should probably give him daily thanks as well, at least this time of the year: how many big screen TVs, TiVos, and other pieces of home theater gear are sold in January, the post-Christmas month that used to be dead for big-ticket retailers, in anticipation of the Super Bowl?

My wife and I host an annual Super Bowl party in which about 20 to 30 people stop by and partake in all sorts of munchies. The party invariably breaks down into two groups: the hardcore football junkies who inhabit the den with me, and the casual viewers who remain close to the food in the kitchen (the game is also on in the kitchen, just not on a 50-inch screen with surround sound).

The food and the game are taken equally seriously: at halftime during Super Bowl XXXVIII, no one saw Janet Jackson’s mammarian protuberance escape; we were all in the kitchen noshing in anticipation of the second half of the game.

Over the years, we’ve used the Super Bowl as an excuse to upgrade the electronics in the media room: several years ago, I installed new cabinetry to house all the equipment; the 50-inch JVC rear projection followed us home around this time last year after I wrote a piece on HDTV on the cheap for PC World in late 2004 and had some idea of what to look for.

This year, I finally gave in and bought a new A/V receiver, to replace the Pioneer Elite unit I bought in the late 1990s, about five minutes before new inputs were required for DVD-Audio/SACD players, and the Dolby EX surround sound technology was launched. (Its debut film was the little-known art house sleeper, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. You may have heard of it.)

I try to buy the most full-featured receiver I can afford; partially because it’s such a bear to hook these beasts up. There’s a moment near the end of Goldfinger where James Bond is trapped within the bowels of Fort Knox with a ticking atomic bomb, and is finally able to open the case.

Prior to its opening, he thinks he’ll be able to defuse it. Afterwards, his eyes bug out for just a moment as he finds it absolutely crawling with miles and miles of indecipherable wiring.

Other than worrying about blowing up Kentucky, that’s pretty much how I felt on Saturday night, after lugging the big cardboard box containing the receiver home from my local strip mall's big box retailer.

On one level, it’s easy to pull out the old receiver: just yank out the wires, and then the receiver itself. But I wanted to document all of the wiring--and if there weren’t the miles of it that 007 encountered, there’s certainly a good several hundred of feet of it--plus, I wanted to remove any cabling rendered superflous by the new unit. While many of the leads had already been labeled, not all had--and I tried to remedy as much of that as possible with the handy-dandy Brother P-Touch.

Eventually I extracted the old receiver, and set-up the new one enough to watch TiVO and DVDs again; the rest took a little while longer.

It’s a lot of work--and much of it down in the cramped space between the rear of the cabinet and the wall. Hopefully I won’t have to repeat the process for another five or ten years. And even if the game is a blowout (we’re due, after several years of reasonably entertaining Super Bowls), I know the sound and picture will be pretty killer.

Well, he would have if my father was actually online. At the height of the first round of Internet fever in 1998, I gave my parents (who live on the opposite coast from me) a WebTV box, but they were just utterly mystified; eventually they asked me to turn it off--telephone worked just fine, enough with this newfangled Web and email stuff. (I've tried explaining Pajamas Media to them; the results are something akin to a verbal Mobius loop: much repetition, little knowledge imparted.)

In any case, it's a good thing that my dad, who's in his mid-80s, isn't reading this:

I don’t care much for Bing Crosby’s singing. He was the proto-Elvis; didn’t matter what he sang, he could just turn it on when required. The amount of sincerity and bemusement is absolutely equal in every example, and it all strikes me as artifice. I like his persona; some songs are fine. You can’t write the history of pop music in the 20th century without spending a day on “White Christmas.” But overall: meh. Then again, given the quality of the other male voices in this 1938 playlist, I understand the appeal – to contemporary ears he was much more genuine than the other guys, most of whom seemed like happy manikins with oily hair parted severely in the middle, crooning drivel over a clockwork orchestra.

My dad is the ultimate Bing Crosby fan--until his health slowed his collecting somewhat, he worshiped Crosby much like you or I spent our teens worshipping the Beatles or Zeppelin. He's collected the LPs--and the '78s, and the sheet music, and the books--and played or stored them in his Jurassic proto-home theater.

He's also been interviewed once or twice for Crosby biographies. So he'd regard Lileks' above paragraph as pure heresy. But fortunately, just as all hope is lost, Lileks managed to redeem himself:

Except for Count Basie. The exception to every rule, that man.

I know my dad certainly wouldn't argue with that.

Minor housekeeping note: after having to delete trackbacks in August of 2005 because they were bringing my previous Webhost's shared server to a crawl, and then changing Webhosts this fall, (to Livingdot.com, recommended by Movable Type and I can see why: their customer service is superb), trackbacks are back, at least for now. If the signal-to-spam ratio becomes too skewed, I may turn them off, but they're working for now.

Mel of Em Two, a Web design house, both taketh and giveth the trackbacks: she did the emergency surgery to delete them when my former Webhost essentially held my site hostage until they were removed, and she reinstalled them yesterday. If you need a great Weblog designer, or just this sort of routine maintenance, stop by her site--and tell her we sent ya.

Apparently, it's not on oxymoron anymore. I haven't been following the Canadian elections as closely as I probably should have, but Glenn Reynolds and Michelle Malkin are loaded with links, including to some who are live blogging the election returns tonight.

Meanwhile, Publius Pundit (found perchance via Pajamas, if you'll pardon my persnickety alliteration), reviews the pros and cons of the results so far.

Update: In an essay uploaded shortly after midnight on election Monday, John Tabin of The American Spectator takes stock of Canadian anti-Americanism, and its new prime minister:

Canadian anti-Americanism may be broad -- a 2003 SES Canada Research poll showed only 13% of Canadians wanting Canada to be more like the U.S.; a 2004 Ipsos-Reid poll found that 82% believe that President Bush is not a friend of Canada -- but it isn't deep. An SES/Buffalo University poll in 2005 showed that a majority of Canadians want closer relations with the U.S. on security, antiterrorism, and energy policy. Canadians don't want to be Americans, but they do want to be American allies. The Grits have made this tough over the years, with periodic anti-Bush and anti-American outbursts from the back and front benches.

The Tories won't have that problem. Though [Stephen Harper] has made pains to distance himself from the perception of excessive deference to Washington, even writing to the Washington Times to dispute an op-ed characterizing him as "Mr. Bush's new best friend internationally," the fact is that he'll be the most pro-American Canadian Prime Minister in a long time. He may not send Canadian troops to Iraq, but he has praised the U.S. for pursuing democracy there and would stand with the U.S. (and Israel) in international disputes where his predecessors would stand against us. In a dangerous world, the good guys are about to gain another strong leader. And that's bad news for the bad guys.

Sounds good to me.

Another Update: Channeling Doug and Bob McKenzie, VodkaPundit has mixed emotions about the election results ("Canada's election was so screwed up, all I could think of was SCTV"), but National Review's John O'Sullivan writes that tonight's election may signify the beginnings of a longer-term trend in Canada:

A good but not great night in Canada. The Tories will form a minority government, but one with a more precarious plurality in parliament [What is it about Canada that brings out the alliteration?--Ed] than looked likely from the polls. The Liberals are beaten and out but not humiliated. The Quebec separatist party has done worse than expected but still dominates the province. And the leftist New Democrats improved their position but failed to break through dramatically. In Canada's four-party system that gives the Tories the government for something less than a full term.

What's going on? Well, if Canada were a single individual, we would say that he (or maybe she) wanted to commit to the Tories but had developed cold feet at the last minute. This is exactly what happened one year ago but this time there was slightly more willingness to move rightwards. On that basis, the Tories will probably win a majority in a couple of years as the nation gets used to seeing the untried Tories in the Cabinet--and the roof fails to fall in.

No, that's not the new album by Pete Seeger, although he'd most certainly approve of the idea. Arnold Kling looks at how deeply watered down Marxism has seeped into so many American political debates:

Folk Marxism looks at political economy as a struggle pitting the oppressors against the oppressed. Of course, for Marx, the oppressors were the owners of capital and the oppressed were the workers. But folk Marxism is not limited by this economic classification scheme. All sorts of other issues are viewed through the lens of oppressors and oppressed. Folk Marxists see Israelis as oppressors and Palestinians as oppressed. They see white males as oppressors and minorities and females as oppressed. They see corporations as oppressors and individuals as oppressed. They see America as on oppressor and other countries as oppressed.

I believe that folk Marxism helps to explain the pride and joy that many people felt when Maryland passed its anti-Walmart law. They think of Walmart as an oppressor, and they think of other businesses and Walmart workers as the oppressed. The mainstream media share this folk Marxism, as they reported the Maryland law as a "victory for labor."

The folk Marxist view of Iraq is that the United States is the oppressor, and the groups fighting the United States are the oppressed. At the extreme, Michael Moore and Ted Rall have made explicit statements to this effect. However, even reporters in the mainstream media who are not openly supporting the enemy take this folk Marxist view when they refer to "the insurgency."

If you think about it, the forces fighting America in Iraq consist of former oppressors and would-be future oppressors. But because America is a rich, powerful country, the folk Marxist instinct is to romanticize ("insurgency") the real oppressors and to demonize ("occupation") the real liberators.

I am not saying that only a folk Marxist would oppose the way we went to war in Iraq or the way that the war has been conducted. However, I would say that it is striking that the basic narrative of the war coming through the mainstream media is folk Marxist. This is particularly true in Europe, where the folk Marxist view of America's presence in Iraq appears to be broadly and deeply held.

Read the rest, including the antidote to folk Marxism: folk-Locke-ism.

Roger Ailes, who certainly knows a thing or three about the news business, lists his five favorite books on the topic.

The books he chose date back to the mid-1960s. How has the industry changed then? Ailes writes:

Compared with the troubled New York Times of today, the newspaper Mr. Talese describes here--in his inside history of the Times from the postwar years through the 1960s--seems to exist in a golden age. Yes, we see the clash of giant egos and the infighting over everything from the coverage of the Kennedys to the appointment of a theater critic. But who, back then, could have imagined the Jayson Blair scandal or a deteriorating Times culture that allowed it to happen? When I was growing up, people thought: If it's in the Times, then it must be true. Who thinks that now?

The people who pay to subscribe to TimesSelect, I suppose...

Orrin Judd links to an article in The Scotsman on the rapid growth of that nation's public sector:

SCOTLAND's private sector has entered outright decline in the face of the relentless expansion of the public sector, according to official data obtained by The Scotsman.

Businesses have shed 17,000 jobs over a period where the government and its various agencies have hired 24,000 more staff - the exact reverse of the trend promised by Jack McConnell, the First Minister.

The CBI has warned Mr McConnell that his avalanche of government spending is now hurting the economy by squeezing out companies.

An unpublished survey of Scotland's labour market by the Office for National Statistics has found 707,000 people are now employed by the government - almost one in three jobs in Scotland. Such a ratio is rarely seen outside Scandinavia.

Meanwhile, Mark Steyn looks at the rapid decline of the Scottish population:

For example, consider the following headline from the Scotsman the other week: "Teaching jobs in doubt as pensioners set to outnumber pupils by 2009."

This was a story by Peter MacMahon, the paper's "Scottish Government Editor", and it begins thus: "Scotland's demographic time bomb will explode in three years, when the number of pensioners north of the Border overtakes the number of children in school, the Executive has been warned."

Seems straightforward enough: the country's demographic death spiral is accelerating faster than expected. And, as far as the Scotsman is concerned, the alarming thing about this development is that it could put cushy state teaching jobs "in doubt".

For crying out loud, man, get a grip. It puts every job "in doubt". It puts the continued existence of your country "in doubt". And it means the Scottish National Party is going through the motions: nobody needs a Scottish nation if there are no more Scottish nationals. See you, Jimmeh? Not for much longer.

Indeed, the remarkable feature of contemporary Scottish nationalism is that it has achieved all the features of a failed nation state without achieving the status of a nation state. "Teaching jobs" are the least of it. And doubtless the unions will see to it that, even when there is only one wee scrawny bairn left in the whole of Scotland, platoons of teachers will still be manning abandoned elementary schools across the kingdom. The jobs-for-life public-sector employee stood on the burning deck whence all the boys had fled.

With half the annual births it had in the 1950s and a population on the brink of falling below five million, Scotland has become a minor member of the axis of extinction: Germany, Japan, Russia - once great nations now recording net population loss. In its general approach to economic reality, not to mention the physical health of its population, Scotland is closer to the Russian end of the picture than to the German-Japanese end.

"The Axis Of Extinction" is a typically brilliant turn of the phrase from Steyn, although it runs the risk of reducing his blockbuster essay on the topic into merely a soundbite.

Don Feder looks at this year's Golden Globe awards:

All of the Golden Globe winners were box office flops. Before the ceremony, Brokeback (The Marlboro Man meets The Bird Cage) had earned an anemic $36 million – compared to $587 million for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, released at about the same time.

None of the agit-prop epics beloved of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (which picks the Golden Globes) made it into the top 50 box-office grossers. Two barely made it in the top 100 – The Constant Gardener (#74) and Syriana (#91). I’m not counting Walk The Line, which was apolitical.

The Sisterhood of The Traveling Pants, Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, and Kung Fu Hustle all were more popular with moviegoers than Brokeback Mountain (#102).

Hollywood would rather make a message movie ("Please hold the line for Michael Moore") that loses money, than a smash hit that touts faith, family, or America. The entertainment industry so-called loves to sneer at popular tastes and actually takes pride in honoring films the public pans.

And their directors.

Must be something in the air today: if George Galloway's hijinks weren't enough, Harry Belafonte violates 57 varieties of Godwin's Law. Hugh Hewitt has the details; once again, The Political Teen has the video.

(Some background on Belafonte, here.)

Update: Betsy Newmark adds:

The mere fact that this guy can go on TV and spout this nonsense is proof that he's wrong. Do you think that someone could have gone public with such criticism of Hitler and not have been arrested by the Gestapo? Not only isn't he not arrested, but he wins an award from AARP and gets to be all over the TV. (Though, AARP has issued a press notice that they want to disassociate themselves with some of Belafonte's more asinine statements. The funny thing is that before they gave him that award Belafonte had already made his offensive comments to call Colin Powell a house slave, but that, apparently, wasn't enough to stop them from recognizing him with an award.)

For a look at how dissent in the Third Reich was treated, click here.

Another Update: David Warren is writing about the Canadian elections tonight, but the gist of this passage could apply equally well to CNN and the rest of America's legacy media:

In short, the Internet has broken the stranglehold the Liberal Party had over sympathetic media, and created an information environment in which you had better be darned sure what you are saying is the strict truth, because there’s an army of fact-checkers out there. Moreover, an army that cannot easily be intimidated by off-the-record threats from Party lawyers, or made to desist by peer pressure. For even when (as we saw in the delayed release of Gomery testimony) a legal ban on publication can be obtained, the information simply passes through electronic space across the border, and we can all read the banned material on such sites as Captain’s Quarters from the USA.

It's much, much tougher to drop an ad hominem attack on TV these days as well, because, as Warren wrote, there’s an army of fact-checkers out there.

Watching this clip of George Galloway, Saddam's favorite politician, and washed-up eighties gender-bender/plastic surgery junkie Pete Burns (whose 3 minutes and 15 seconds of fame coincided with MTV favorite "You Spin Me Right Round, Baby") prancing around the set of the British "reality" series Big Brother in matching red and blue tights is somewhat akin to watching an episode of Teletubbies--and has that same slow-motion car crash feeling: it's horrific, yet frighteningly hypnotic at the same time.

Much like the previous clip of Galloway in action: pretending to be Blofeld's cat, cuddling up to the lap of one-time Alberto VO5 queen Rula Lenska rather than Saddam.

Update: Glenn Reynolds writes, "If this picture doesn't finish off George Galloway's career, I don't know what will".

Once again, James Bowman goes to the movies so you don't have to, reviewing this week's piece of Michael Moore-style agitprop from Hollywood, Why We Fight:

The recent fuss over the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping on the phone conversations of suspected terrorists is only the latest of many indications that the media are still in love with the idea of Watergate and of themselves as fearless scourges of the powerful and unearthers of scandal at their expense. The movies are even more dazzled by this mythology. But where journalists have to retain at least some sense of the unreality of their Woodward-and-Bernstein fantasies in order to function in the real world, in Hollywood, as I may have mentioned before, it’s always 1974. Just look at Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight, a documentary about — if you can believe it — that hardy perennial of left wing propaganda and paranoia, the Military-Industrial Complex.

Ah, that takes me back! Once again I seem to smell the heady blend of marijuana, tear gas and self-righteousness of my youth. Those under 50 may not know that "Military-Industrial Complex" is an expression coined by President Dwight Eisenhower in his farewell address of 1961 to express his sense that relations between Pentagon procurement officers and defense contractors were too cozy — to the detriment not of the workers and peasants of the world but of the American taxpayer. But within a few years, the term took on a life of its own and became a favorite bugbear of the most radical elements in the anti-Vietnam war movement. For them it served as an emblem of their paranoid sense of the vastness and potency of the evil war-making engine which they opposed and whose existence seemed to have been confirmed by a Republican President. Thus, the US war-machine took on a mysterious agency of its own, to the point where it was thought to dream up unnecessary and immoral wars only to justify its own existence.

The idea was politically naïve, to say the least, suitable only for college kids newly radicalized by the anti-war movement and in search of a grand theory to explain to themselves the unique wickedness of American foreign policy during the Vietnam era. Yet, miraculously, it seems to have been resurrected in Mr Jarecki’s film, which cheekily takes its title from a series of Frank Capra documentaries made for the troops during World War II. Capra, of course, was acting as a propagandist on behalf of the allied war effort. Mr Jarecki is acting as a propagandist for, well, the other side — which, as you may have noticed, is not Nazi nor even Communist anymore but Islamic jihadist. But if we have learned anything over the last 40 years it is that the "peace movement" is permanently and unalterably against America’s wars, no matter who the enemy. So all the clichés of ‘60s leftist agitprop can be trotted out again as if they had never been heard before — as if nothing had changed and the good old MIC could be assumed to be responsible every time Americans went to war.

You will have gathered that I don’t agree. But even if I did agree and were looking at the movie just as a movie, I would have said that the problem with Why We Fight is that it offers too many answers to the implied question of its title. For besides the Military Industrial Complex, we are offered oil, "economic colonialism" — one of Mr Jarecki’s talking heads, Charles Lewis, explains this in all seriousness as "imposing" free markets on people in other countries — "imperial" ambitions or (Chalmers Johnson) an "imperial presidency," Think Tanks, and "capitalism" (Lewis again), though the most radical scions of the left would say, I suppose, that capitalism is just the Military Industrial Complex writ large. The same goes for "powerful corporate interests." Finally, Mr Jarecki offers us the opinion of that notable geopolitical thinker, Dan Rather, that we have in today’s America "a miniature version of what you have in totalitarian states."

Sure you do, Dan — in the same way that a policeman arresting a criminal is a miniature version of what you have in totalitarian states. "Totalitarian" by definition means big, as is implied by the presence of the word "total" in it. A little version of big is a contradiction in terms — literally nonsense.

Nahh--it's merely an emotional truth.

Dan Rather:

From where I sit, too many people want to advance their own partisan agendas and cast it as "news."

Ted Baxter--not to mention Malcolm Muggeridge--call your office!

Update: Speaking of Dan Rather, Austin Bay recalls a memorable 1980 course he audited at the Columbia School of Journalism, in which he sat next to "Dan Rather, Jr". (Via Hugh Hewitt.)

"Hannah Arendt had it right", Patrick Moynihan once told an interviewer. "She said one of the great advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive."

Glenn Reynolds writes:

I'LL BE ON "RELIABLE SOURCES" ON CNN at about 10:30 (Eastern) today, talking about Abramoff, Murtha, etc.

UPDATE: Ian Schwartz has the video. Most striking to me is the bit at the end, where Jill Zuckman of the Chicago Tribune says that Murtha's war record is a fair story, but one that should have been reported by a legitimate news organization, not Cybercast News Service, which she calls a "right wing part of the blogosphere." I'm guessing if the Chicago Tribune had been on the story first, CNS would have foregone its own investigation . . . .

Looks like Zuckman can also do a pretty good job of questioning motives as well. (Not to mention not understanding where the Blogosphere ends and the rest of the Web begins. Or is it a case of any Website we find to be scary is "a right wing part of the blogosphere"?)

In his Weekly Standard column, Hugh Hewitt visits Columbia University's graduate school of journalism:

On my first day at Columbia's graduate school of journalism (CSJ), the poster boy for all that has come to plague elite American media--former CBS anchor Dan Rather--took to the podium at Fordham Law School to denounce the "new journalism order." On day two, the New York Times Company announced a cut of 500 employees from its already pared down workforce of 12,300. (The company employed 13,750 as recently as 2001.) On that same day Knight-Ridder slashed its Philadelphia papers' editorial staff by 75 positions at the Inquirer and 25 at the Daily News. "I get 50 calls a day about the crisis in journalism," Lemann deadpanned when I posed the "crisis" question. "Only 50?" I thought.

Read the whole thing, as post-reformationists are wont to say.

Betsy Newmark writes, "Uh oh! The EU is discovering some basics of economics - if you pass a lot of regulations and make it difficult for companies to operate, they will leave and go elsewhere".

California's learning that lesson the hard way as well.

Update: Power Line has more.

Another Update: Ed Morrissey writes that even in the Great Blue North, anti-Americanism has its limits.

Tim Blair links to a terrific article by John Birmingham in the Sydney Morning Herald titled, "It'll be all right on the night--Political correctness has crippled the left's sense of humour". It ties together themes we've been exploring since the early days of this blog: about a year after its launch, we wrote back in May of 2003:

Orrin Judd has a theory that all comedy is conservative. I agree with that to a certain extent, but it's definitely true that at some point on the leftward curve, humor seems to be anathema--there's just too many shibboleths that risk offending. With the PC movement allowing anyone and everyone to claim victimhood, it's got to be tougher to write a funny script in Hollywood. And increasingly, Hollywood's obsessions (anti-war, vegetarianism, Scientology, an obsession with race, rococo sexual politics and of course, bashing anyone whose politics are to the right of Jerry Brown) aren't playing well out in the heartland.

Perhaps that explains why Mel Brooks' Broadway version of The Producers was set in the past, and the Austin Powers movies makes fun of the '60s and '70s--humor was allowed back then. Or why My Big Fat Greek Wedding, about a traditional Greek family whose daughter is marrying a spineless WASP who believes in many of those same Hollywood trends I just mentioned) was such a hit.

In his SMH piece, Birmingham writes:

By establishing an exclusion zone around a whole category of topics that are ripe for exploitation by comics because of the very tensions they create, the left abandons the field to the enemy and often confuses itself over just who are its friends and who are its foes. Silverman, for instance, is often cited as an example of toxic conservatism, and yet her skewering of identity politics is as dangerous to reactionaries as to anyone. Likewise the creators of South Park, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, were excoriated by some critics for their pitiless treatment of Hollywood liberals in Team America: World Police, as well as racking up black marks for the unholy trinity of racism, sexism and homophobia. Yet Team America remains one the sharpest satires of the war on terrorism so far released, while South Park offends everyone eventually.

The stand-out feature of Parker and Stone's work, indeed of all successful comics, whatever their medium or subject matter, is confidence. Confidence that their joke is inherently funny, even if millions of people refuse to agree. And confidence of course is a defining characteristic of the right in its resurgent form. To read Mark Steyn on the Islamisation of France, for instance, is to encounter a man speaking the unspeakable and doing so with an unshakeable self-assurance. But it is also to witness a comic genius at work, sharpening an already finely honed wit to a razor's edge on the rock-hard noggins of his enemies.

The left, on the other hand, has indulged for so long now in the guilty pleasures of relativism, protected by a value system that says discussion of certain topics is off limits, that any sense of confidence they might have had at one time has now entirely disappeared. And with it their sense of humour.

It's like the old joke. How many angry feminists does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: that's not funny!

By all means, read the whole thing.

The atomized culture giveth and taketh away. While it's allowed M-For-Fake hucksters such as Michael Moore, James Frey and Ward Churchill to hawk their wares, it's greatly diminished the power of the mass media as a whole, and thus greatly diminished the power of hucksters such as Mary Mapes and Jayson Blair.

Peggy Noonan has a great essay titled, "Not a Bad Time to Take Stock", coming on the 25th anniversary of the Gipper's first inauguration, 11 years of GOP control of Congress, and since then, an increasing diminution of the power of the liberal media. But one of the paragraphs rang especially true for me:

We are in a time when the very diminution of the importance of network news leaves some old news hands to drop their guard and announce what they are: liberal Democrats. Nothing wrong with that, but they might have told us when they were in power. The very existence of conservative media--of Rush Limbaugh, of Fox, of the Internet sites--has become an excuse by previously "I call 'em as I see 'em/I try to be impartial" journalists to advance their biases. Actually, it's more Fox than anything. The existence of a respected cable network that is nonliberal and non-Democratic (or that is conservative, or Republican, or neoconservative--people on the right have polite disagreements about this) is more and more freeing news outlets, encouraging them actually, as a potential business model, to be more and more what they are. Is this good? Well, it's clearer.

This is something I wrote about several times over the past two years, beginning in February of 2004 with a post that collected several media figures going on the record about their biases, and in April of 2004, when I first interviewed Bernard Goldberg for TCS Daily:

in the past, media elites denounced any claims of a liberal bias in the news with a shrug and a "who, us? We're not liberals. We're not leftwing. We're objective and neutral. No biases here!" More and more, as we'll shortly see, the media are going on the record (Brock, Gore and Franken, notwithstanding) that it leans pretty heavily towards the left.

This new topsy-turvy world may have been ushered in by Bernard Goldberg, the author of two best-selling books, Bias and Arrogance. Goldberg built on the still ongoing spadework by the Media Research Center to document the leftward tilt of the media. Then the Blogosphere essentially had its grand opening on September 11th, when several million Americans who couldn't log onto the Websites of CNN, The New York Times and the Washington Post, instead began checking out alternatives whose servers weren't blown out from too much traffic. These newcomers to the Blogosphere stayed there, and often put down roots themselves, as the media trotted out its clichés of Quagmire! Failure! Evil imperialism! The brutal Afghan winter! Remember the Soviets!

Shortly thereafter, in December of 2001, Goldberg released his first book, Bias. When I spoke to him in early April of 2004, he told me, that coming from a liberal journalist who had been in the media since 1967, first with CBS, and now HBO, "I think that Bias made the issue far more mainstream than it was before. I think that before that, the complaints came from almost exclusively from conservative places, like talk radio and the Media Research Center."

EdDriscoll.com: following tomorrow's trends today, and only occasionally referring to ourselves in the third person in the process.

(Via Mary Katharine Ham.)

Daniel Henninger explores how the spirit of 1968 has taken us to James Frey, Oprah Winfrey's favorite author, whose best selling A Million Little Pieces has been proven to be a million little lies.

But as Henninger writes, Oprah stands by her man, as do thousands of her fans:

Much support for the book on Ms. Winfrey's Web site comes from persons recovering from addiction or from family members; all found solace in "Pieces." Drug and alcohol hells are bad places to be, with no common solution. The road out is often arduous, and one is hard put to gainsay what works for these folks. That said, Oprah's site also carries many unforgiving comments from these same people. "What good would a book of lies do," one of them asks, "for someone who's trying to learn to live without them--who's trying to be honest and stand up for maybe the first time in their lives?" Another said it contradicted Oprah's "essential message: to live in truth of ourselves." Oprah's loyalists are a lot more interesting than they are often given credit for. One woman, the wife of an alcoholic, cut to the chase: "James Frey lied. He is accountable for his actions." Or used to be.

The reaction among writers has been as intense, with most of their criticism hammering at the publishing industry's greater willingness to erase the line between fiction and fact. Doubleday issued what one might call a businesslike "net-net" version of the new, saleable world of false facts; it referred to the power of the book's "overall reading experience." The publishers argue, and some writers support them, that the consuming public's changing tastes are forcing these category changes. Publishers are simply following the market.

In this view, fiction or even traditional nonfiction isn't providing the hyper-real narrative many people now crave from an assembled memoir like "A Million Little Pieces," no matter that it has been proven a fraud, or at least a fraud as formerly understood. But perhaps this suggests some people can't handle the truth anymore, so they'd just as soon be lied to so long as the lies fit their belief system, such as belief in the power of personal "redemption."

* * *

What's a fraud now--and what's something else--has become a question worth pondering. We live in a world of reality TV shows, of newspaper photographs and fashion photos routinely "improved" by the computer program Photoshop, of nightly news that pumps more emotion than fact into its version of public events such as Hurricane Katrina, hyper-real TV commercials manipulated with computers, the rise of "interpretive" news, fake singers, fake breasts, fake memoirs. Morris Dickstein of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York described this world as "always at the edge of falsehood" and so people come to tolerate it "as part of the overall media buzz of their lives."

He's right. But there is a political dimension to this, which many of what are no doubt politically liberal writers upset at James Frey and Doubleday ought to consider. Before all this, most people operated from a common personal standard, a broadly held superstructure of right and wrong, integrity and dishonesty, which they probably learned in Sunday school. You can see and hear it in hundreds of old Hollywood movies. "The Maltese Falcon," written by Dashiell Hammett, a Communist, is full of this moral tension and resolving clarity.

We all know those widely shared categories were broken and blurred the past 38 years, leading to terrible political fights between social conservatives and liberal liberators over disintegrating standards of personal behavior. Welcome to what it has wrought: The mass marketers and their accepting publics are skipping past the politics and simply pocketing the value added in the new controlling value--whatever "works" for us personally, no matter how meretricious. It's hardly James Frey's fault that the culture really is in a million little pieces.

Ever since the creation of the phrase "false consciousness" by Friedrich Engels, (Karl Marx's main man), atomizing the shared culture has been a goal of the left. And truth be told, postmodernism has been doing a great job of it over the last twenty years or so.

(H/T: The Anchoress.)

Stephen King's PR firm's certainly not winning friends or influencing people with their latest book promotion efforts: cell phone spamming.

In the Philadelphia Inquirer (of all places), NRO's Jim Geraghty looks at incremental gains in the Global War On Terror:

Small steps such as hajj pilgrims' doubting a fiery sermon, an attack on bin Laden's religious authority, and unveiled women may not grab our attention like horrific suicide bombings in Iraq. But they are signs that in a grand ideological battle, the Western values of freedom, religious tolerance, and women's equality can win over Muslim minds. Day by day, Islamist fundamentalism is losing ground.

Just ask this guy.

Michelle Malkin delivers the bad news to the L.A. Times. Their namesake on the east coast isn't exactly catching fire in the stock market, either.

As Michelle writes, Jeff Jarvis has a series of excellent strategies for newspapers who'd like to begin turning things around. Will either paper listen before the path to 2014 becomes a reality?

(Nahh, probably not. But economics may force them to eventually implement much of the Jarvis Plan.)

CNN's Jack Cafferty boldly goes where Cronkite has gone before.

As I wrote in October of 2004 about Uncle Walter, "I'm not sure if this is Michael Moore's legacy or not. Maybe it's Oliver Stone's. But at least since Stone's wild JFK film in the early '90s, the left has become incredibly susceptible to over-the-top conspiracy theories". If anything, the fever swamps got worse in 2005, not better, as this astonishing photo caption today illustrates.

David Boaz of Reason asks a great question:

Remember all those news stories in 1993 about how the nomination of former ACLU lawyer Ruth Bader Ginsburg to replace conservative Justice Byron White on the United States Supreme Court would "tilt the balance of the court to the left?"

Of course you don't. Because there weren't any.

In the past three months, the major media have repeatedly hammered away at the theme that Judge Samuel Alito Jr. would "shift the Supreme Court to the right" if he replaced retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

According to Lexis/Nexis, major newspapers have used the phrase "shift the court" 36 times in their Alito coverage. They have referred to the "balance of the court" 32 times and "the court's balance" another 15. "Shift to the right" accounted for another 18 mentions.

Major radio and television programs indexed by Lexis/Nexis have used those phrases 63 times. CNN told viewers that Alito would "tilt the balance of the court" twice on the day President Bush nominated him. NPR's first-day story on "Morning Edition" was headlined "Alito could move court dramatically to the right."

Now maybe all this is to be expected. Alito is a conservative, he's been nominated to replace a centrist justice, and he probably will move the Supreme Court somewhat to the right—which is probably what at least some voters had in mind when they elected a Republican president and 55 Republican senators.

But note the contrast to 1993, when President Bill Clinton nominated the liberal Ginsburg to replace conservative White. White had dissented from the landmark decisions on abortion rights in Roe v. Wade and on criminal procedure in the Miranda case, and he had written the majority opinion upholding sodomy laws in Bowers v. Hardwick. Obviously his replacement by the former general counsel of the ACLU was going to "move the court dramatically to the left."

So did the media report Ginsburg's nomination that way? Not on your life.

Not a single major newspaper used the phrases "shift the court," "shift to the left," or "balance of the court" in the six weeks between Clinton's nomination and the Senate's ratification of Ginsburg. Only one story in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer mentioned the "court's balance," and that writer thought that Ginsburg would move a "far right" court "toward the center."

The only network broadcast to use any of those phrases was an NPR interview in which liberal law professor Paul Rothstein of Georgetown University said that Ginsburg might offer a "subtle change...a nuance" in "the balance of the court" because she would line up with Justice O'Connor in the center.

No one thought that some momentary balance on the Court had to be preserved when a justice retired or that it was inappropriate to shift the ideological makeup of the Court. And certainly no one had made that point during 60 years of mostly liberal appointees from Democratic presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson—even as they replaced more conservative justices who had died or retired. But suddenly, we are told by senators, activists, and pundits that a nominee should not change the makeup of the Court.

Assuming there are no changes to the current tone of the legacy media in the coming years, it'll be fun to watch how they tut-tut reactions from the right, when the next Democrat president picks a Supreme Court nominee and conservatives fear that he'll tilt the balance back to the left.

New for 2006, there must be some new, mutant strain of the flu that travels via Weblog. I had it last week, now Roger Simon and James Lileks have caught the bug.

Remember kids! Wash your hands after clicking on each blogger's posts!

Err, wait a second...

In a case of fish meeting barrel, P.J. O'Rourke reviews Dog Days, the new novel by Ana Marie Cox, the Novelist Formerly Known As Wonkette.

It's a case of shooting fish in a barrel, and O'Rourke has plenty of ammo to use up. I found it via Frank Martin, who highlights this paragraph by O'Rourke:

Creative writing teachers should be purged until every last instructor who has uttered the words "Write what you know" is confined to a labor camp. Please, talented scribblers, write what you don't. The blind guy with the funny little harp who composed The Iliad , how much combat do you think he saw?

Spot-on.

There's a line spoken by James Bond in Goldfinger that I never could figure out: during his briefing with M and Col. Smithers, the character who hands Bond a gold bar to bait Goldfinger, Bond sniffs a decanter of brandy and rolls his eyes, prompting M to ask what's wrong with it. Bond replies, “I’d say it was a 30-year-old Fine indifferently blended, sir. With an overdose of Bon Bois.”

Say what? Fortunately, this well-written Website explains all:

For those of us who don’t speak brandy, Cognac can be made with grapes from six different growing areas within the Cognac region, with each area distinguished by its soil. Fine (or Fins) Bois and Bon Bois are two of these areas. Grapes from these two areas are not considered to be as high in quality as those from the Grande Champagne or Petite Champagne areas, hence 007’s remark.

Glad we cleared that up! The site also explores every drink from every Bond book and movie, including the Vesper, a potent 007 variation on the Martini, which I've made a couple of times myself.

In a recent post which ties together several Hollywood-related topics we've looked at here, James McCormick of Albion's Seedlings writes that Hollywood movies now essentially come in two flavors only:

Edward Jay Epstein, previously known as a writer on political events, has crunched the numbers and written a book on Hollywood like none seen before. Part introduction to film making, part-history, part-economics, “Big Picture” describes the studio system of the first half-century of the film business as it reached its peak of power and simplicity in the late 1940s. Before the era of television, theatres and creative talent were owned by a handful of studios. The product was cranked out on Hollywood back-lots at minimal cost. The cheaper the film, the more profit at the studio’s theatres across the nation. Post-war restrictions by foreign governments meant the foreign market was a significant but only small portion of studio profit. Theatre tickets and concession sales were the goal.

With a captive weekly domestic audience over 100 million, studio films (mixed with a package of newsreels, cartoons, serials, “trailers”, and B-films) were relentlessly adult oriented without being “adult” in content. The only exception, and indeed the only Gentile movie mogul of the time, was Walt Disney. He was convinced that kids were the market.

Flash forward sixty years … after the anti-trust legislation which forced studios to divest their theatre chains, after the appearance of television and the catastrophic drop in cinema attendance, after the anti-trust legislation which forced TV networks to divest their production houses (quickly scooped up by the movie studios), after Disney began minting money with character merchandising deals, after the appearance of home videotape players (VCRs) and video stores, after the appearance of DVDs and the big-box retail stores, after the resurgence of foreign appetite for Hollywood films … the world is entirely different.

Now the Hollywood film industry is dominated by six huge entertainment companies (Paramount, Fox, Sony, Warner Bros. Disney, and Universal). Each integrates broadcast, pay- and satellite TV networks under one umbrella. Some have theme parks and publishing companies. Each has vast merchandising ties with fast-food, music, Internet, and clothing companies (if they don’t actually own those companies). All have monopolistic foreign distribution subsidiaries that can shuffle money between branches to minimize taxes. These giants spent $18 billion dollars in 2003 to create and promote of 80 films around the world, and were rewarded with $6.4 billion in cinema revenue. A net loss of roughly $11 billion.

How Hollywood turns that $11 billion from scary red to perpetual black is part-and-parcel of why your average movie experience is nonsensical feast of noise, pyrotechnics, computer-generated image (CGI) special effects, inane celebrities, and supernatural bulls**t. It’s why dialog is at a minimum, the endings are happy, the movie running times are under 128 minutes, the popcorn is insanely salty, the ratings are usually PG-13, and every plot line requires lots of car chases, monsters, and explosions. Nonetheless, only a tiny handful of the films you see in the theatres will actual make money during theatrical release (known as “current production”). The handful of films that will gross more than a billion dollars follow a similar formula:

“All of them:

1. are based on children’s stories, comic books, serials, cartoons, or, a theme park ride.
2. feature a child or adolescent protagonist.
3. have a fairy-tale-like plot in which a weak or ineffectual youth is transformed into a powerful and purposeful hero.
4. contain only chaste, if not strictly platonic, relationships between the sexes, with no suggestive nudity, sexual foreplay, provocative language, or even hints of consummated passion.
5. feature bizarre-looking and eccentric supporting characters that are appropriate for toy and game licensing.
6. depict conflict – through it may be dazzling, large-scale, and noisy – in ways that are sufficiently non-realistic, and bloodless, for a rating no more restrictive than PG-13.
7. end happily, with the hero prevailing over powerful villains and supernatural forces (most of which remain available for potential sequels).
8. use conventional or digital animation to artificially create action sequences, supernatural forces, and elaborate settings.
9. cast actors who are not ranking stars – at least in the sense they do not command gross-revenue shares.”

In one word, “Spiderman” … in two words, “Harry Potter” … in four, “Lord of the Rings.”

This formula must now also accommodate the domestic tastes and governmental concerns of the eight major foreign markets for Hollywood films that contribute as much or more to profits than domestic income (which includes Canada). In order of financial importance, they are Japan, Germany, Britain, Spain, France, Australia, Italy, Mexico. While the rest of the nations of the world contribute their share to Hollywood wealth, the design and formulation of films is driven only by these eight foreign countries.

Hold on a minute, though. The formulaic kid-bait and toy franchising represented above is only occasionally represented at awards time. Wasn’t last night’s Golden Globes a festival of gay and transsexual awakening? Yes, indeed it was. For part of the emotional cost of making bilge for children from 8-80 is a deep ennui amongst the creative and management talent that feeds the “sexopoly” – the six-company beast. In order to boost morale and acquire prestige, studios, stars, and directors also participate in making movies of interest to them and those they admire. The result is a number of films that will certainly lose money in the cinemas, have only a small chance of recouping costs in DVD or during free TV broadcast, but which will appeal to the creative talent which otherwise is engaged in making merchandisable blockbusters. Make a blockbuster, get an “art-house” film, and maybe an Oscar, as a reward.

According to Epstein, the former studio system of the mid-twentieth century has morphed into the entertainment giants who focus on being financial clearinghouses for the lucrative home entertainment market (games, toys, DVDs, TV broadcast). All else is financially trivial. WalMart, through its loss-leader DVD sales, is now the largest single customer for Hollywood. And the eight foreign nations listed above provide more income that the US/Canada market. Giving the customer what they want drives the film business.

What's missing from this formula? "The complete absence of civic culture", writes McCormick:

The movies made for kids and adolescents are, by design, denatured and created in the form of over-simplified hero tales. And the “art house” loss-leaders created to placate Hollywood’s egomaniacs are about individuals casting off the cultural, moral, and sexual constraints of their societies to find personal liberation (sound familiar?). Since the merchandising blockbusters must satisfy the international market, the “hero tales” transmit little more about American culture than US teens are good with guns. And the “art-house” films are mostly about outdoing the rest of the world in the denigration of Anglosphere domestic culture and sanctifying appropriate victims.

Or as Mark Steyn recently wrote, "the movies are now so constrained by political correctness the very act of storytelling is itself endangered. That's something slightly more ominous than the feeble limousine liberalism many conservatives blame for the alleged box-office slump."

Hugh Hewitt interviewed CNN's Ed Henry, who, when asked who he voted for in the 2004 election, hung up rather than respond. As Hugh writes:

This is a box canyon for MSM, and one which the allegedly "objective" reporters hate to enter because they know, going in, there's no way out. If they admit to voting for Bush, they will be mocked or scorned by their elite media pals who are overwhelmingly on the left and the way left. If they say Kerry, the public gets a marker that matters. if they refuse to answer, they appear like Henry or Hiltzik to be shifty and untrustworthy about a question most Americans presume to be fair and easy to answer, and about which most political Americans are very open --bumper stickers and yard signs and online registries of campaign contributions etc.

But MSM refuses to talk about its collective and deep problem of deep, numerical imbalance in its ranks between left-wingers and everyone else.

This imbalance forces MSM types to cover their ears and hum, pretending not to hear the question or not to see the problem.

Why does Henry refuse to answer a question about the obvious imbalance on a show hosted by Bill Maher and featuring George Mitchell, David Gergen and David Dreier discussing the Alito hearings?

Why not admit that crazy old Jack Cafferty is not just reflexively left but incoherently so?

Because they think this gives the game away?

In fact the denial is far more damning, an indictment not jts of the ideology of the mother ship and the news business generally, but, crucially, of their own untrustworthiness as a reporter.

If a reporter cannot see obvious things or will not comment on the most glaring of facts, how can they be trusted to get any story right?

If they won't be candid about uncomfortable subjects, why should anyone trust their candor on any subject?

Mr. Henry hadn't read key cases, didn't report on key issues such as Teddy's embrace of a parody as a serious article, didn't want to judge any charge/counter-charge.

It appears as though he thinks he's sort of a play-by-play announcer who doesn't have an opinion of the game underway.

But every great play-by-play announcer does in fact have opinions --thousands of them, in fact, on the judgment and skills of every man or woman on the field. They don't obviously root for an outcome, but they are experts on the actual events unfolding.

MSM is rooting, for the left, and the public knows it. It refuses to report or opine much of anything that might detract from their hoped for result. Whether incompetence or ideology is the main factor doesn't matter so much as they undeniable reality that both are at work.

It's impossible to read all of the events of the 2004 election and not conclude, as Newsweek's Howard Fineman and Evan Thomas did, that the core components of the legacy media have a leftward bias. I actually thought the New York Times did themselves a world of good by coming clean and admitting theirs; it avoids so many embarrassing incidents such as Henry's.

And it's a telling response: if reporters or media organizations are accused of racism or homophobia, they'll move extremely quickly to repair the damage--look at how fast Gene Shalit kowtowed to GLAAD (possibly under pressure from NBC's lawyers) regarding their perception of his Brokeback Mountain review. This isn't an attempt to equate bias with either of those issues. But it is telling that the vast majority of attempts to discuss how the media and its reporters are perceived by at least half of their viewing audience are quickly rebuffed or pooh-poohed.

Since the Fox News Channel receives the majority of conservative eyeballs desiring news from their TV sets, this seems like the perfect time for CNN to announce, "Look, if you're a conservative, you've got Fox to watch. We're the channel for those who didn't vote for Bush".

Like the Times' admission, that would be at least a first step in admitting who your desired viewers are: in targeting your audience, you've got to be prepared to lose audience: you can't be all things to all people, and there's no point, when my satellite box has 500-odd channels available, in doing so.

Update: Jack Kelly has some related thoughts. (H/T: The Anchoress.)

The Cassandra Page has a run-down of 54 media errors in 2005 and uses a very Trekkie-friendly analogy (none of those in the Blogosphere, right?) to summarize the media's continuously obfuscatory performance last year:

No matter how the humans tried to fight the alien creatures, they could not trust their own observations. The illusions were too powerful and too constant. The humans did not know if their own efforts were successful or not, because the aliens could create illusions that masked the results of the humans' attempts to liberate themselves. One of the Enterprise crew finally summarized the situation as follows:

"Their power of illusion is so great we can't be sure of anything we do . . . anything we see."

Funny enough, I've always assumed that one of the reasons why "The Cage" failed as the first Star Trek pilot was that its subtext was implicitly anti-television, especially with lines such as:

When dreams become more important than reality, you give up travel, building, creating; you even forget how to repair the machines left behind by your ancestors. You just sit living and reliving other lives left behind in the thought records.

No wonder NBC's executives felt compelled to reject the pilot: if that quote doesn't do a splendid job of describing the average television viewer, I don't know what does.

Which, in a way, brings us back to Cassandra's post. Don't miss it.

(Oh, and don't miss Lie #1 of 2006, either.)

In an op-ed in the New York Post, Nicole Gelinas, City Journal's contributing editor, writes that New York City--and State--needs Wall Street these days far more than Wall Street needs New York:

For most of its 213-year history, the NYSE didn't have to worry about the competition. Much like the city itself, it drew strength from its role as a central meeting place for the exchange of information. But today information is everywhere — and much that was once done on an exchange floor is now done faster and cheaper over computer networks.

New competitors to the NYSE spent the 1990s and early 2000s investing in technology that puts intense pressure on traditional markets. The NYSE had much to lose if it failed to adjust radically.

But it had one option available to it that's not available to New York City or the state: buying a piece of the competition. Its members have approved a merger with one of those upstart electronic trading firms, Chicago-based Archipelago.

What will happen to the 1,000 NYSE employees and the 3,000 people who work on the exchange floor for other firms? NYSE evolution means more cost-cutting automation — and that means fewer middle-class jobs in New York. Indeed, the NYSE recently announced a layoff of 60 middle-income staffers.

The NYSE's merger isn't the beginning of a trend — just another milepost in an ongoing one. Over more than two decades, a diverse array of business lines on Wall Street, from stock brokerage to stock trading to debt and equity underwriting, have had their profits ground down to razor-thin margins by technology, competition and regulation. What's left are just a few spectacularly profitable lines and many low-margin businesses — and an industry that can no longer afford armies of mid-level employees in Gotham.

Wall Street's first cost-cutting target, back in the '80s, was the back office. Today, it's moving higher-end jobs out of town. Investment banks now headquarter some sophisticated trading operations in northern New Jersey — staffed by employees who earn mid-six figures and more.

Worse, more of these jobs are moving farther away. Where Wall Street created thousands of jobs in Jersey in the '90s, now investment firms are moving further afield in their bid to keep costs down.

JPMorgan Chase announced in early December that it would create 4,500 new securities-industry jobs in Bangalore, India, by 2007, joining UBS (with 500 jobs there) and Goldman Sachs (750). Twenty-five years ago, most of those jobs would have been created in New York; 15 years ago, perhaps half, with the rest going to places like New Jersey and Florida.

What's left on Wall Street? Mainly the highest-level, highest-paid industry stars. In Manhattan, the securities industry has fewer workers, each of whom earns more money — because ones left are mostly those whose productivity can justify the high cost of being here.

This evolution is in part good for New York. The city is a perpetual magnet for top global talent, and the securities industry is increasingly dependent on that talent as it jockeys to create and trade exotic new products.

But even when profits are up spectacularly in New York, middle-class jobs won't be — meaning fewer openings for New Yorkers in an industry that once offered vast opportunities to those who wanted to work their way up from the bottom.

New York City and the state, like the NYSE, must work harder to keep much of the business they once took for granted — and attract new business.

Gelinas has some suggestions for Mayor Bloomberg and Gov. Pataki in this regard that are well worth reading. As her article hints, as the years progress, technology and telecommuting could become an increasingly powerful tool for businesses wishing to keep local governments somewhat more at bay. I did a piece for TCS Daily on the first anniversary of 9/11 about how quickly Moody's, the bond ratings firm, was able to leverage technology to get back to work after 9/11, when their headquarters building, located just a few blocks from the WTC, became uninhabitable. If such a business can change gears so quickly under those kinds of conditions, imagine what they could do if they wanted to relocate during a non-emergency.

Last fall, Nissan announced they were leaving Los Angeles for a more hospitable business climate in Nashville, Tennessee. Technology now allows almost any business to relocate pretty much anywhere its executives wish. This will begin to create new opportunities for those regions wishing to spur growth through low taxes and favorable business environments--and provide additional incentives for confiscatory cities and states to rethink their strategies, lest they risk additional loses.

Somehow Hollywood just keeps finding ways to make their upcoming Oscar Awards in March as politicized as possible. First there are the films in competition for the main awards, which include such Red State favorites as Syriana, Good Night, and Good Luck, Munich, and Brokeback Mountain. Then there's the choice of Jon Stewart from Comedy Central's Daily Show as the host.

And for the piece de résistance, as they say in Old Europe, last week, it was announced that the Academy will be awarding an honorary Oscar to Robert Altman.

Yes, the same Robert Altman who said in 2002:

This present government in America I just find disgusting, the idea that George Bush could run a baseball team successfully--he can't even speak! I just find him an embarrassment. I was over here [Britain] when the election was on and I couldn't believe it -and I'm 76 years old. Then when the Supreme Court came in and turned out to be a totally political animal, the last shred of any naiveté that was left in me has gone. When I see an American flag flying, it's a joke."

And of course, like everyone else in Hollywood in 2000, also said, "If George W. Bush is elected president, I'm leaving for France."

Didn't quite happen, of course.

On the one hand, Altman actually is a very innovative director: he took overlapping dialogue, something that Orson Welles helped pioneer, to a new level, lending an impressive verisimilitude to his best films. His films are typically built around theater-like ensemble casts, rather than the typical Hollywood formula of one or two leading men and an army of mostly featureless extras.

But unlike Steven Spielberg or George Lucas at the heights of their careers, it would be unfair to accuse of Altman of actually having his finger on the pulse of a nation he so clearly loves. If you study the box office returns of his many films over the years on the Internet Movie Database, he's had only three major hits in the course of a movie career that's into its fifth decade: M*A*S*H in 1970, Nashville in 1975 (at least I remember it as a hit--there's no box office info on its IMDB page) and Gosford Park in 2001. For the most though, Altman's career has sustained off his name, not his bankability.

In Easy Rider, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind writes that in the late '70s, "the Star Wars profits made it possible for [then-20th Century Fox studio head Alan Ladd Jr.] to shelter Altman during the second half of the decade". When his infamous 1980 version of Popeye crashed and burned (nearly permanently ruining Robin Williams' cinematic career in the process), Altman was effectively done in Hollywood for most of the 1980s, producing quirky, theatrical, very low-budget films (such as Secret Honor, a one man show starring Philip Baker Hall as Richard Nixon). Only the modest success of The Player in 1990 brought Altman back into Hollywood's good graces.

But in terms of cultural impact, M*A*S*H of course, was Altman's biggest hit, and still arguably his best film. Despite its filmmakers' best intentions, it's not anti-war as much as it's the original anti-idiotarian movie. (Somewhat like Hollywood's later uneasy relationship with Tom Clancy, it didn't hurt that Richard Hornberger, the author of the book it was based on, was a conservative Republican who, like Hawkeye Pierce, served in Korea, but unlike Altman or Alan Alda's later take on Hawkeye, was firmly on the side of the freedom during the Cold War.)

Speaking of Alda, of course, M*A*S*H is remembered even more fondly for the TV series it inspired. I remember reading an interview once with Larry Gelbart, who created and originally produced the M*A*S*H TV series, and he said that he met Altman at a party once and asked him why he hated the series. Altman told him it was largely because he didn't participate in it financially. Which is why, on his director's commentary on the M*A*S*H movie DVD, Altman is astonishingly harsh to a TV series beloved by millions and millions, no matter what their views on war are:

I didn't like the [TV] series, because that series to me was the opposite of my main reason for making this film. And this was to talk about a foreign war, an Asian war that was going on at the time. And to perpetuate that at the time for 12 years. And no matter what platitudes they say their little messages and everything, the basic image and message is that the brown people with the narrow eyes are the enemy. So I think that series was a quite a racist thing. I didn't approve of it, I don't like it, and I thought it was the antithesis of what we were trying to do. But most people don't even know that this film exists. If you polled the world, they'd say, oh, that was that series with Alan Albert, or whatever his name was.

The M*A*S*H TV series, particularly in its later years was certainly, explicitly anti-Korean War--and of course, anti-Vietnam War. But it's tough for me to look back on it (and I've watched it endlessly in reruns) as being racist.

But maybe one reason why Fox didn't involve Altman in the series was because of his uncompromising geopolitical mind:

I mean, all of the level of the humor and the jokes in the film M*A*S*H are very crude. It was loaded with sexist and bathroom jokes and low humor. But our attitude was nothing was as obscene or as low humor as the destruction of these young men. And these guys--what's the point trying to put 'em back together again and then send them out to be blow up again in some war that nobody, that was strictly a political situation. Our security was never endangered, we were never in danger of being attacked. It was all terror that people like Joe McCarthy and the general rightwing set-up.

Joe McCarthy died in 1957. While there's no doubt Democrats have moved much more to the left than their point on the political compass in the early to mid-'60s, it's rather amusing to consider JFK and LBJ as part of the right wing--and certainly not as Altman conceives them, with the ghost of McCarthy and Nixon lurking behind every corner.

More Altman, also from the M*A*S*H director's commentary:

I remember speaking at a college--oh, I remember an auditorium with about 5000 or so people in Wisconsin, and somebody got up and said, "Why do you treat women the way that you do--you're a misogynist!"

I said, well, I said, I don't treat women that way. I'm showing you the way that I observed that women were treated. And that is the way that women were treated, and still are treated. And especially when you get into these army situations, where you've got males with egos with 14-year-old development.

As opposed to Hollywood, that enlightened bastion of equality. Where sexism, chauvinism, and especially males with 14-year-old egos are all parts of a dimly remembered past. Just ask Warren Beatty.

The New York Times once called Altman's M*A*S*H, "the first American comedy to openly ridicule religion". And not coincidentally, this was the one area where the M*A*S*H TV series, for the most part, did refuse to tread, for fear of upsetting both the sponsors and censors. Ironically, all things considered, the Father Mulcahy character in the TV series was probably treated far better than he would be if a M*A*S*H-like series were being made today.

And far better than Altman's M*A*S*H movie, which had Donald Sutherland's Hawkeye and Tom Skerritt's Duke Forrest character openly mocking Frank Burns' prayer as childlike. Altman's response?

There were some religious people and groups who got after us, and they said, oh, we shouldn't treat the Catholic chaplain this way, and blah, blah, blah. You know, the usual, the usual.

That's the spirit, Bob! As I said, Hollywood has made a truly inspired choice to cap-off a year in which they effectively told anybody whose views are to the right of Howard Dean's to just stay home.

So how will they top it? Well, coming later this year is Altman's next film: the movie version of A Prairie Home Companion written by Garrison Keillor. The day after the 2004 election, Keillor told a Chicago audience:

"I'm trying to organize support for a constitutional amendment to deny voting rights to born-again Christians," Keillor smirked. "I feel if your citizenship is in Heaven-like a born again Christian's is-you should give up your citizenship. Sorry, but this is my new cause. If born again Christians are allowed to vote in this country, then why not Canadians?"

Blah, blah, blah. You know, the usual, the usual.

Speaking of Sigmund, Carl And Alfred, here's an article and two blog posts with some interesting psychological takes.

First up, in the middle of a longer piece on the negative impact that Maryland's legislature singling out Wal-Mart will have to the state's economy as a whole, Arnold Kling looks at confirmation bias:

Chances are, you will look for some errors in my reasoning, so that you can dismiss everything that I have to say. All of us tend to read this way. We overlook flaws in the arguments of sympathetic writers, and we go all-out to find the flaws in arguments of others. In psychology, this double standard is known as confirmation bias. What it means is that we tend to seek support for what we already believe, rather than to seek out information that might undermine our beliefs. Confirmation bias helps to account for the persistence of disagreement.

Meanwhile, in a post titled, "Identification With The Aggressor", Dr. Sanity looks at just that, or as it's commonly known today, Stockholm Syndrome. (Read the whole thing, as all the cool psychbloggers say...)

And finally, Neo-Neocon looks at those who think Bush lied concerning WMDs in Iraq, and debates the problem of the false negative vs. the false positive:

They are both bad. But in the case of self defense, the false negative is, as Callimachus points out, a good deal more dangerous, if one is looking at it from the point of view of the need to prevent a threat from becoming a reality.

In the case of the "Bush lied" or "Bush cherry-picked the information" people, however, they seem to act as though a false (or partly-false) positive is far worse than a false negative would be. Is this because they feel this country is so invincible that they don't believe any threats are real? Or is it because, in their hearts, the most important thing is to keep their own hands clean? Or is it some combination of the two? Sometimes it even seems to me as though they think the function of prewar intelligence was to have acted as defense attorney for Saddam---to make sure he was considered innocent till proven guilty.

Actually, I'm probably being too kind to them--or, at least, to some of them. For a certain number, if in fact Bush's intelligence-gathering had been guilty of a false negative rather than the false positive that appears to have been the case, they'd be saying the false negative was worse, instead (just look at the 9/11 Commission for examples). The bottom line seems to be, at least for some, that whatever Bush happens to have done is defined as worse--false negative or false positive. And unrealistic perfection is the standard by which he is to be judged.

In this respect, those who act this way are very fortunate to have been out of power during these trying post-9/11 times. As such, they have the wonderful luxury of constant Monday-morning quarterbacking. They get to criticize errors, whether those be of the false negative or the false positive variety. They get to pretend they had nothing to do with the situation that built up to those errors, such as 9/11. They get away with being altogether vague about what they could do differently to prevent such errors, if they were in power. Or, if they are specific, they get the luxury of knowing that, at least for now, their suggestions will not be tried and found wanting in the field of reality (this is always true of a party out of power, by the way).

And, most importantly, they get to enjoy whatever the Bush Administration may have actually done to prevent further attacks on this country, and thus to have preserved their right to speak out in any way they see fit. And this, of course, is as it should be.

Indeed^TM.

Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt eschews Freudian theory for a extraterrestrial assumption as to the reason why so many of the usual suspects appear extra stuck-on-stupid this week.

In a post titled "Autos-da-fé", Theodore Dalrymple writes that when it comes to France's existential woes, no exit is in sight:

The more the rioters rioted, the more cars they burned and the more écoles maternelles they wrecked, the higher rose the stock of the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy. His characterization of les jeunes as racaille, scum, proved especially popular. Polls now suggest that 70 percent of French adults would vote for him in a presidential election. Whether he has any solution, other than fierce repression when necessary, to the intractable social problem created by mass immigration from North Africa and the welfare state (to which the French remain fiercely attached), is an open question.

Driving to the Netherlands, I was surprised by how much the political atmosphere there had changed. Not long ago, the Dutch seemed insufferably complacent, regarding the rest of the world de haut en bas, as if it had not yet reached Dutch levels of enlightenment and generosity. It is amazing what a couple of assassinations can do. The Dutch are now the only people in Europe who are thinking, and thinking hard. It is as if they had awakened from a pleasant but unrealistic daydream.

To my amazement, the Dutch Ministry of Justice asked me to give a talk. The audience proved intelligent, respectful, but not supinely uncritical. Such a thing had never happened to me in my native Britain. Of course, the French riots were on Dutch minds. Could such a thing happen there? Probably not. For one thing, the Dutch had presciently demolished their high-rise housing projects a few years ago.

In the audience was a young immigrant who told me that he had relatives in the banlieues of French cities. A cousin had his car burned by les jeunes, but told him over the phone that if losing his car helped improve conditions in the banlieues, it would have been worth it. I have no doubt that the young man reported accurately what his cousin said. In reply, however, I wondered whether the generous decision of French insurers to compensate the owners of the 9,000 burned cars, despite the fact that all policies exclude civil disturbance, had something to do with his cousin’s broad-mindedness over his loss.

The insurers’ decision amounts to a de facto tax on French drivers—unless the companies pay the compensation out of their profits, which seems unlikely.”

As Dalrymple adds, "The message to the rioters, therefore, is: 'You burn, they pay".

Update: Sigmund, Carl & Alfred have some related thoughts on Europe.

Last April (not on the 1st, thankfully), while Ward Churchill was first bursting onto the public scene, we linked to a Soxblog piece on what we described as "the strange case of Jacques Pluss, a former adjunct professor at Farleigh Dickinson University who sounds like he's been in the audience for 'Springtime for Hitler' long after its opening night".

After writing about Pluss, I had subtracted all thoughts of him from my mind, until reading a post by the Blogfather with the above title. Pluss is now claiming it was all for research:

Last March, Jacques Pluss was fired from his job as an adjunct professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University soon after it came to light that he was a prominent member of the National Socialist Movement of the United States. This weekend, in an online essay titled "Now It Can Be Told: Why I Pretended to Be a Neo-Nazi," Mr. Pluss purports to reveal his true intentions in joining the white supremacist group: He did it all for scholarship.

Well, that's better than saying you were just following orders, I guess.

Read the rest on Workplace Prof Blog, who writes, "I lack the necessary wit to come up with the trenchant quips crying out to be made for this entry. Suggestions in this regard are most welcome". Feel free to help him out in his comments section.

Just keep scrolling for some pretty cool photos: Jim Geragthy of National Review Online's TKS blog visits the "set" where the climactic scenes of a well-known Steven Spielberg/George Lucas movie were shot.

Dr. Helen debunks an article on MSNBC.com that's little more than a press release for homeless advocates, and in contrast, has some typically cogent thoughts on what actually is their current state in the US.

Orrin Judd links to Martin Luther King's epochal December 5th 1955 speech to the Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, and writes:

Dr. King's peculiarly American genius [was his] appealing to the democratic and Judeo-Christian ideals of his countrymen, summoning them to finally fulfill the promises of the Constitution and the Bible. The simple demand that Americans act more American and more Christian was simply brilliant.

Indeed. Happy MLK Day.

Update: Michelle Malkin and Debbie Schlussel note that many elites seem to have forgotten key details of Dr. King's message.

Another Update: More here, including video.

As with Ferguson and Steyn, a new column by Michael Barone is best read in conjunction with another piece--David Brooks' equally timely "Losing The Alitos". Both do a tremendous job describing the cultural environment of central New Jersey in the late 1960s as a microcosm of America as a whole during that tumultuous period. Barone writes:

In his opening statement to the Judiciary Committee, Judge Samuel Alito told the senators where he comes from. First, Hamilton Township, N.J., the modest-income suburb of Trenton, where he grew up.

"It was a warm, but definitely an unpretentious, down-to-earth community," he said. "Most of the adults in the neighborhood were not college graduates. I attended the public schools. In my spare time, I played baseball and other sports with my friends. And I have happy memories and strong memories of those days, and good memories of the good sense and the decency of my friends and my neighbors." All positive memories.

Then Alito described Princeton, "a full 12 miles down the road," where he attended college. "And this was a time of great intellectual excitement for me. Both college and law school opened up new worlds of ideas." Still all positive. But then he sounds a negative note: "But this was back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was a time of turmoil at colleges and universities. And I saw some very smart people and very privileged people behaving irresponsibly. And I couldn't help making a contrast between some of the worst of what I saw on the campus and the good sense and the decency of the people back in my own community."

To some of the senators, this must have seemed a jarring note. For them, universities like Princeton are places where young people are trained to renounce the racism, sexism and all the other evil -isms that are thought to be endemic in places like Hamilton Township. But Alito, a man of the highest intellectual ability and deep learning, sees the contrast another way. Witnessing radicals shut down a college and bomb university buildings, he saw the left-liberalism of the campus as an attack on one of civilization's highest institutions. And he did not think that campus radicals had higher moral standing than the middle-class people among whom he had grown up.

The late 1960s and early 1970s were a time of cultural conflict, a battle between what I have called the beautiful people and the dutiful people. While Manhattan glitterati thronged Leonard Bernstein's apartment to celebrate the murderous Black Panthers, ordinary people in the outer boroughs and the far-flung suburbs of New Jersey like Hamilton Township were going to work, raising their families, and teaching their children to obey lawful authority and work their way up in the world.

The glitterati in the 1970s seized and still hold the cultural commanding heights of our society -- the universities, the media, the Upper East Side of Manhattan and the Westside of Los Angeles. But, as the success of Sam Alito shows, they have not entirely won the hearts and the minds of the people. [That may be the understatement of a still quite young century. And God help the country if they ever do--Ed]

I recently traveled through both Hamilton Township and Princeton. The contrast between the million-dollar-plus homes and fancy shops of Princeton and the modest-to-downright- depressing neighborhoods and strip malls of Hamilton Township was stunning. So, too, are the voting figures. Princeton voted 76 percent for John Kerry in 2004. Hamilton Township voted 49.3 percent for George W. Bush and 49.8 percent for Kerry.

Power Line has already highlighted just how damning the next paragraph is, though naturally, few who it is aimed at will be ready to accept its message:

Our universities today have become our most intellectually corrupt institutions. University administrators must lie and deny that they use racial quotas and preferences in admissions, when they devote much of their energy to doing just that. They must pledge allegiance to diversity, when their campuses are among the least politically diverse parts of our society, with speech codes that penalize dissent and sometimes violent suppression of conservative opinion. You can go door-to-door in Hamilton Township and find people feeling free to voice every opinion across the political spectrum. At Princeton, you will not find many feeling free to dissent from the Bush-equals-Hitler orthodoxy.

It's interesting that Sen. Edward Kennedy tried to charge Alito with racism and sexism because he once belonged to an alumni group critical of Princeton. Evidently in Kennedy's mind, dissent from campus orthodoxy is prima facie evidence of bigotry.

Are there many Ivy League professors who would disagree with him?

Update: Joe Gandelman (found via Steve Green) has some very much related thoughts.

Hot on the heels of Mark Steyn's foreshadowing of Europe's future over the next few decades comes this look by Niall Ferguson at a possible future of the Middle East on much more immediate scale: next year.

Arthur C. Clarke once said:

'I make a spectrum of possibilities, and they include what I think might happen and what I hope won't happen. I'm always quoting the writer Ray Bradbury: “I don't try to predict the future, I try to prevent it.”'

Orwell would have been glad to have known that, as the famous Apple commercial once said, 1984 didn't resemble 1984 (at least in the west). And no doubt, both of the above writers will be quite relieved if their predictions don't bear fruit as well.

After the Bears/Panthers football game ended, KTVU, the local San Jose Fox affiliate, reported that a "'Suspicious Object" had been found at SFO. Of the reports currently on Google News, this FoxReno report seems to have the most details:

SAN FRANCISCO -- A security checker in the American Airlines section of San Francisco International Airport Terminal 3 Sunday detected a 'suspicious object' on the x-ray machine, forcing the evacuation of the surrounding gates and delaying at least three flights.

SFO spokesman Mike McCarron said the incident began at 12:49 p.m. and quickly was elevated from the supervisor to the police to the bomb squad.

The entire terminal was not evacuated, but Checkpoint E was closed down and the surrounding gates. The evacuation had impacted three American Airlines flights.

"As a result," McCarron said. "Most American Airlines flights have been impacted. We are moving approximately 300 people for the gate area."

The spokesman said that the person whose luggage contained the 'suspicious device' had been questioned, but was not a suspect. It was not known how long it would take before the gates and security points were reopened.

According to the TV news report, the object was detonated or neutralized by the bomb squad in some sort of water tank, if I understood them correctly.

Update: More details here:

Part of a San Francisco International Airport terminal was evacuated for several hours Sunday after a suspicious item was found in a piece of luggage, officials said.

A baggage screener in the American Airlines section of Terminal 3 "noticed a suspicious item" in a passenger's carryon bag around 2 p.m., said airport spokesman Mike McCarron.

Authorities would not say what exactly was found in the bag, but San Francisco police Lt. Bill Darr said "there were items, articles inside the carryon luggage that did resemble components of a possible device."

Two men and a woman, all from South Carolina, were detained for questioning, authorities said. They were headed on a flight back to South Carolina through Dallas.

The immediate area around the security checkpoint was evacuated and at least three afternoon flights were delayed as a bomb squad investigated, McCarron said. Officers destroyed the bag with a water cannon.

The terminal fully reopened at 5 p.m.

Meanwhile, KTVU has a video feed of SFO spokesman Mike McCarron detailing the security checkpoint shutdown.

In Part III of his series on how the Long Tail has caused the death of the blockbuster album, Chris Anderson writes that on Friday, Musicland, which operates more than 800 stores under the names Sam Goody and MediaPlay, filed for bankruptcy.

Musicland blames their woes on "a diminishing music and movies marketplace, growing competition from big box retailers and the increase of music downloading". And I think they've got a point. I find I've been buying the vast majority of my music either from Amazon, which combines low prices, no taxes, and no shipping costs with their "all you can eat" shipping plan, or the local Borders, where I'll often pickup a CD, a book, and/or a magazine. It's much more inviting shopping experience than any Sam Goody's I've ever been in. And unlike any Sam Goody's, its coffee bar and WiFi makes it a great Third Place.

Goody was a great model from the late '70s to the early '90s, which, perhaps not coincidentally, was when I did the bulk of my shopping there. But both retailing in general and the music industry specifically changed radically in the ensuing years, and Goody didn't.

Peaktalk writes that Canada's liberal media is ready to eat Canada's wobbling liberal government for lunch:

One of the key factors in this ongoing federal election campaign has been the extraordinary about-face of the Canadian mainstream media.

This week seemed to be the worst in the backlash. We have been treated to the extraordinary sight of the Toronto Star, the Liberal bastion for as long as I've been alive, treating Martin with pure venom. The CBC, the voice of the government, is not letting up either. They openly question Liberal claims in nearly all their stories, and we were treated this week to the vision of Peter Mansbridge (host of the National) absolutely grilling Martin on the military ad. And of course we have the Globe and Mail endorsing Harper - unthinkable even six months ago.

Meanwhile, in the US, like Elvis Costello, Pennsylvania's state government wants to bite the hand that feeds them--and apparently wants to bite that hand so badly.

Over on the Weekly Standard's Weblog section, Daniel McKivergan writes:

It's easy to forget that the resolution authorizing force to kick Saddam out of Kuwait barely passed Congress. It's easy to forget that Iraq had passed frequent International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections designed to ensure its compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or that its Manhattan Project-sized nuclear program went undetected by US intelligence. It's also easy to forget just how skilled Saddam became at deception post-Osirak.

And, McKivergan adds, today it's easy to ignore how closely Iran is following Saddam's playbook to procure their own nuclear bomb.

Welcome readers from Pajamas' new Mondo Hollywood blog!

David Brooks explains how the Democrats slowly went off the rails in his latest New York Times column. On the Times' Website, It's hidden behind the self-defeating TimesSelect firewall, but the whole text can be found on the New London, CT Day (found with about five minutes worth of Googling). Growing up about 20 minutes south of Judge Alito's hometown of Trenton New Jersey, there's much here I can relate to:

Read More »

The Manolo, he offers the sound advice, as per the usual per:

Manolo says, recently the Manolo he has been hearing much talk about the Russian Valenki boot as being the next Ugg, the next ugly boot to be the big trend.

Here, allow the Manolo to nip this in the bud.

If you are the shuffling, toothless, 100 kilogram Russian babushka with the head scarf then by all the means, wear the valenki. If you are not the Russian granny then, in the opinion of the Manolo, you have no business wearing the Valenki.

Trust the Manolo, nothing says, Comrade, I have in my soviet-era apartment stockpiled 500 rolls of the low-quality toilet paper like the Valenki.

Do not be the babushka, do not wear the Valenkis.

Hard to say which is sillier--the Manolo's typically pithy blogging-as-performance art-writing, or the dreadful boots he's writing about.

Perhaps the answer, it is simple: read the Manolo, avoid the Valenkis, repeat the dosage.

In the mail on Friday was a galley edition of Glenn Reynolds' upcoming An Army of Davids book. It's a great read and a terrific topic, and I'll have lots more to say about it in the not too distant future.

(And chances are, if you have a blog, so will you...)

Michelle Malkin has a glum-sounding post about Iran, with lots of links, and adds:

My simple question: Do Americans understand the gravity of the situtation? I fear not. Once again, we are ill-served by a short-sighted, narcissistic, Bush-deranged news media far more interested in playing "gotcha," selling fish-wrap, and serving as Democrat Party adjuncts than keeping readers/viewers informed of the world's biggest threats.

Indeed, as those in the new media are wont to say.

150 years or so before England began to provide such rich fodder for Theodore Dalrymple, Benjamin Disraeli was inventing modern conservatism.

Somehow I missed this superb article by David Gelernter in the Weekly Standard when it ran almost a year ago. If you haven't seen it, it's well worth your time, both for its look at Disraeli himself, and for Gelernter's insigts into the differences between the modern left and right today.

Sorry for two days without posts--I awoke Thursday morning with a nasty case of stomach flu, and spent all of Thursday, and almost all of Friday in bed. I seem to get this every four or five years or so right around January, whether I need or it or not.

As sick as I felt, there were no hallucinations involved in my ailment, at least until Friday night, when I felt well enough to stagger over to the PC, and turn it on, only to see this.

Sweet smokin' Judas.

This Telegraph op-ed compares Galloway's appearance of the Britain's Celebrity Big Brother TV show to TS Eliot's "The Waste Land":

Watching Celebrity Big Brother is like guiltily opening a letter addressed to your wife. Big Brother is loathsome voyeurism. You must bear that in mind to retain sanity.

Viewers should wear surgical masks, spread a black-plastic rubbish sack over the sofa cushions, and wash their hands after switching off. If viewing becomes habitual, consult a psychotherapist.

So what was George Galloway, an intelligent, educated, extremist politician, doing there? What possessed him to plunge into this foul paddling pool? It might sound pretentious, at least to BB fans, but his fate is exactly described by T S Eliot in his poem about modern nihilism, The Waste Land.

Eliot begins with the plight of the Sibyl of Cumae, who, in return for a sexy night with Apollo, was given unending life without unending youth. She shrivelled. "With my own eyes I saw the Sibyl hanging in a jar at Cumae," says Trimalchio, as quoted by Eliot, "and when the boys said to her, 'Sibyl, what do you want?' she replied, 'I want to die.' " That is how it feels to watch Celebrity Big Brother day and night for 10 days.

Heck, I felt like that after watching one 45 second clip--and by then, it certainly wasn't the flu talking.

It's been quite a week for the far left and the fairer sex, hasn't it? On one side of the pond, Teddy Kennedy and co. make Mrs. Alito break down in tears. On the other, George Galloway experiences his inner Garfield on the pumps of (yes, really! I didn't know what happened to her after that one commercial 25 years ago either!!) Rula Lenska.

Glenn Reynolds writes that "2006 is already shaping up to be a weird year". Well, Muggeridge's Law posits that there is no way that a writer of fiction can compete with real life for its pure absurdity. And considering that he created it over 40 years ago, there was no way he could predict just exponentially absurd life would eventually get.

Pretty amusing essay in TCS Daily which looks at "The Lure of Crap Cars":

Crappy Renault Fuegos and barely creeping General Motors EV1s are fascinating affronts to our own common sense. How, we ask ourselves, could so many engineers, designers and decision makers spend so many hours, so much money and so much mental capital and still make such horrendous mistakes?

Sometimes it’s because of a kind of blind, desperate pride. Thus, Cadillac, over-reacting to an “energy crisis” and down-sizing like hell in the early 1980s, really thought it could blow one past the consumer by infusing the rapidly diminishing prestige of the Caddy name into a lowly Chevy Cavalier. Beginning in 1982, Cadillac “management” stuffed the “Cimarron” with leather, festooned it with “gold packages,” hung it with “driving lights” and luggage racks and vinyl cladding, and tried to sell it at twice the price of the pedestrian Chevy it so closely resembled. It took Cadillac until 1988 to finally give up in embarrassment.

Or as a Forbes journalist once dubbed reports from General Motors, "And now, news of fresh disaster".

Libertas reports that the first Narnia sequel has been greenlighted for production.

While the sequel will no doubt print at least as much money as the first title, these folks certainly won't be happy with this news.

Pajamas reports that the end is near for the 35mm format: Nikon UK is winding down production of their 35mm cameras.

I have a bunch of 35mm how-to books I purchased in the mid-80s (along with a bitchin' Minolta Maxxum 7000 and an assortment of lenses), which just yesterday, I pulled off my bookshelves to free-up space for newer titles. I guess I was just foreshadowing the inevitable.

Decision '08 has free advice for any potential Supreme Court nominee who will invariably have to respond to Teddy Kennedy, the left's answer to Terry Gilliam's Bridgekeeper character (in more ways than one...) from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

I first titled a post "The Desire Named Streetcar" back in October of 2003, after seeing it used in an Arizona Republic op-ed (found via Reason's Hit & Run blog). Glenn Reynolds writes that it's now the title of a Cato Institute policy analysis paper.

And anything whose opening paragraph reads...

The nation’s mass transit system is a classic example of how special interests prevail over the needs and interests of voters and taxpayers. Total inflation-adjusted subsidies to transit—buses and trains—have more than doubled since 1990, yet total ridership has increased by less than 10 percent. Train ridership has dropped dramatically, while automobile use has skyrocketed.

...is well worth reading. Among other things, the paper explores the answers to an obvious question about mass transit: if medium density cities such as, for example, San Jose (in my backyard) want to expand mass transit, why not buy busses? They're infinitely more flexible than light rail passenger trains, since they can go anywhere there's a road. But that would be too logical--and ironically, too cheap and easy, compared with the expense of building a light rail system:

A transit agency that expands its bus fleet gets the support of the transit operators union. But an agency that builds a rail line gets the support of construction companies, construction unions, banks and bond dealers, railcar manufacturers, electric power companies (if the railcars are electric powered), downtown property owners, and other real estate interests. Rail may be a negative-sum game for the region as a whole, but those concentrated interests stand to gain a lot at a relatively small expense to everyone else.

Hence, the title.

Jonah Goldberg writes that Senate hearings to approve conservative Supreme Court nominees have "a whiff of a show trial" to them:

Amid all the country club decorum, there's a whiff of a show trial to these proceedings. The aim isn't to illuminate; it's to catch Alito saying something that will sound damning in an endlessly replayed sound bite. Hence the relentless campaign to get nominees to spill their guts on hot-button issues. When Justice John Roberts was in the hot seat, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., declared into every camera in the USA — including the security cams above ATMs — that Roberts' lack of a paper trail required he divulge his views more. Now, Schumer argues that Alito's enormous paper trail obliges him to be even more responsive than Roberts was.

The reason behind all this lies in a greater deceit: the idea that the court is primarily a legal institution at all. That notion is as outré as leather piano-key neckties. Sure, it still does the wonky stuff, but the court's primary mission has been transformed. Americans have grown comfortable with the idea of judges deciding not merely tough legal questions but the tough moral and political issues as well. Why so many people think a bunch of lawyers are the best qualified professionals to answer profound moral questions is beyond me. Is it really the case that lawyers are better qualified to decide when human life begins or when it should end than are legislators or, for that matter, bus drivers?

In a sense, the no-holds-barred approach is entirely justified because we've invested judges with so much power. And with the stakes so high, politics alone determines who sits on the bench. Having lost at the polls, liberals are desperate to keep the courts on their side. This is why they are touting Sandra Day O'Connor as Babylonian King Hammurabi reincarnated, though her rulings were widely recognized as intellectually incoherent and inconsistent. Who cares about that, so long as you come out "right" on abortion and affirmative action?

Indeed, liberal jurisprudence is driven by results. The judges on the left side of the Supreme Court regularly scan around the globe to find precedents where they can't find them at home. The "living constitution" is just a fancy phrase for "making it up as you go along."

In one area, however, liberals are right (though they will change their position when a liberal is nominated). Alito, like all nominees, should be more forthcoming about his views. If we're going to have judges rule like unelected monarchs, we should at least know what they think before they get on the throne. But in a better system, the bench wouldn't be a throne in the first place.

Meanwhile, a reader of NRO's Corner suggests that "Mrs. A crying was the little Jackie Roberts moment of Alito's confirmation process. He gave his dad instant credibility, and Mrs. Alito put her husband over the top".

If that's the case, the left will no doubt complain about emotion over substance. But which side has consistently championed emotions as the driving force of their politics?

I do remember one thing: it took hours and hours, but by the time I was done with it, I was so involved, I didn’t know what to think. Robert Fripp visited the Microsoft campus recently to record possible new sounds for a future version of Windows.

Jonah Goldberg looks at Kate O’Beirne's new book, Women Who Make The World Worse:

The great sin of feminism, like all identity politics, is its narcissism. Feminists honestly believe they are speaking for all women; I think this way, I am a woman, I must represent all women. This is, of course, nonsense. For example, you wouldn't know from the conventional public debate over abortion that roughly half of American women are generally opposed to abortion. A large majority of women oppose the NARAL party line of abortion on demand. John Kerry won the overall women's vote by 3 points but lost the white women's vote by 11 points. (This is particularly ironic since self-identified feminists are overwhelming white.)

When presented with this sort of evidence, feminists trot out various arguments trying to demonstrate that conservative, or otherwise un-feminist, women don't understand their own interests. This is a vestigial Marxist argument known as "false consciousness." If women only understood the truth, the way feminists do, they would agree with feminists. If you doubt the persistence of nostalgic Marxist thinking in feminist rhetoric, check out the reader reviews of Kate's book at Amazon.com. You'll learn that Kate is a self-hating woman and a fascist doing the work of her knuckle-dragging male paymasters. Anyone who's met Kate (or actually read her book) knows this is nonsense on stilts. A successful and independent-minded career woman and proud mom, she's equal parts Joan of Arc and mentoring den mother.

In the broad mainstream of American life, feminism has become an anachronism with as much relevance as, say, Fabian socialism. But, institutionally, feminists punch well above their weight. Like their brothers and sisters in the New Left, they succeeded in their long march through American institutions, transforming them in profound ways. Many of the changes wrought by the first generation of feminists were important and valuable. But those battles were won a long time ago, and yet the would-be revolutionaries won't lay down their weapons or change their very stale talking points, casting age-old progressive schemes, and newfangled feminist ones as essential tools in the battle against "discrimination." And women who don't get on board aren't "authentic" women, just as black conservatives aren't really black.

Or as Kathryn Jean Lopez recently asked O’Beirne:

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."

It's an easy game of rhetoric, of course: you could say that the woman O'Beirne is referring to has a case of allodoxaphobia herself.

Don't want to seem caught in a Tule Fog? Then stop by Mondo Alito, where it's all Alito, Alito the time!

(I know...I know.)

Glenn Reynolds and Helen Smith's next InstaPodcast is online, featuring an interview with Evan Coyne Maloney on independent documentary production.

There's a priceless tip for anyone who wishes to do with Maloney has done contained within the podcast: when Evan was preparing for his first documentary, he rented a large, very professional-looking camera to shoot it, even though the sort of small camcorder you can purchase for a few hundred dollars at Best Buy would have done much the same thing. But having a cameraman following him with a bulky piece of hardware in his mitts would make him look far more like A Serious Professional Documentarian than any tiny camera.

Maloney is doing yeoman work opening up what I dubbed "The Culture War's Newest Front" when I interviewed Brian Anderson for TCS Daily about his South Park Conservatives book last year:

With some measure of parity achieved in the media, what's the next front in the culture war? Academia of course, which is where Anderson chooses to end "South Park Conservatives" (before an index and a volley of footnotes, including -- full disclosure time -- me, for this TCS article).

Anderson's ultimate objective isn't to achieve some sort of ideological reversal, where conservatives dominate campuses in the same fashion that the left currently does. Instead, he's trying to ensure that academia "isn't a machine for left-wing political advocacy". Anderson says that students "are trending to the right on issues from how to view capitalism to attitudes about abortion and many view campus PC orthodoxy with abhorrence -- which is why so many of them love South Park."

Anderson concedes that reforming academia is going to be a long slog. "Changes are only just underway, and the prospects for any quick turnaround somewhat remote".

You know colleges have a problem when a man in a San Francisco audience can say to Tom Wolfe at a lecture to promote his fictional account of on-campus PC run amok, "Mr. Wolfe, I'm a father, and my daughter is going off to college. I don't mind if you lie to me, but tell me it's not going to be Sodom and Gomorrah U".

How could a correction of sorts play out in the next few decades? Last month, one of Mark Steyn's readers emailed him concerning the Red States and collge indoctrination:

Demographics of blue state composition no doubt do indicate falling numbers. However, red staters continue to send their children to universities for indoctrination. They, too often, come out of those institutions as blue staters, even if they return to red states. This, in my opinion, counteracts the demographic trends.

Steyn replied:

There is a degree of truth in that. However, the loathsome propagandizing of the educational establishment rests in large part on the fact that the academic elites have a political party whose beliefs are broadly the same. The 2010 census will further reduce representation in the north and east and transfer it to the south and west, and so will the 2020 census, and after that, unless they change, the academy will risk becoming a kook fringe unsupported by either party, increasingly abandoned by parents, and less and less able to justify their huge public subsidies.

If what Steyn predicts becomes a reality, then Evan's documentaries (and the groundwork laid by books such as Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons, and the granddaddy of 'em all, William F. Buckley's God And Man At Yale) will have succeeded in their ability to point out the wild hypocrisies of modern day college.

As I said, it's a long slog, but it's not an impossible one: would anybody five years ago have predicted the way in which a new medium would bring Dan Rather's career as a network anchorman to its ignominious conclusion?

Biden hits the campuses, looking for co-eds:

I've learned now, any advice I give...when you become parents, whatever school you want your child to go to, don't mention it. And so I had been pushing Princeton, and this magnificently attractive, intellectually and physically, beautiful young girl, was a sophomore, was showing us around, and I figured we've got a lock now. My son is going to really be interested, and I know Senators aren't supposed to say things like that, but if he hadn't been interested, I would have been worried.

Via Hugh Hewitt, who, along with Ed Morrissey and Michelle Malkin, have got lots of Alito coverage and links. (Don't miss this one.)

Update: Joe really knows how to work the audience.

Gerard Vanderleun lists Amazon.com's#800-numbers, which are seemingly impossible to find on Amazon's own Website.

A commenter on Gerard's blog points to this site, which documents how to find a human at otherwise almost entirely-automated #800-customer support lines.

James Bowman watches Terrence Malick's The New World so you don't have to.

The other is carnies. Circus folk. Nomads, you know. They smell like cabbage, or so Austin Powers tells me.

Oh, and one other thing: public speaking, a fear that Dr. Helen explores in her latest post.

I took numerous courses on video, audio, and film production in college. Sadly, I can't recall any professors like these, who explain the basics of video podcasting in an extremely enjoyable (not to mention PG-13 or R rated) fashion.

(Via the Egoist blog.)

AP reports that "Police defused an explosive device" found in the bathroom of a Starbucks at 1401 Van Ness Ave in San Francisco on Monday. No one was injured:

Authorities were called around 1:15 p.m., after an employee reported finding something suspicious in the store's bathroom. About 100 people were evacuated from the store and apartments above it, and the street was closed to traffic, said Sgt. Neville Gittens.

"This was a good device. If it had exploded, it would have caused injuries or damage," said Gittens, who would not describe its size.

Once the device was disabled at about 2:10 p.m., police allowed people back into the apartment building and reopened the street. The store, located at a busy city intersection, remained closed Monday evening while authorities investigated.

Seattle-based Starbucks declined to provide further details.

In 2003, police said the windows of 17 Starbucks stores were clouded with glue and some of the door locks were jammed. Vandals also posted phony notices purporting to be from Starbucks management announcing the company's intention to abandon some of their San Francisco stores to make room for more locally owned coffee houses.

This local CBS report adds, "Gittens said police are following 'some pretty good leads' but have not yet identified any suspects. He said the Starbucks had not received any bomb threats".

As the AP report above hints, Starbucks has been under near-constant threat from anti-globalists in Seattle and other large urban cities. While most of their action has involved rioting and the odd smashed Starbucks window, a separate faction of the anti-global crowd was also responsible for a bomb which destroyed a Paris McDonald's in 2000, killing a 28-year old breakfast shift worker.

But please note this is pure speculation and that anything's possible, including simply a disgruntled employee.

Update: Michelle Malkin has some thoughts as well; one of her readers adds:

Once again, left-wing terrorism and violence gets a pass in the MSM. The [San Francisco Chronicle] was equally coy when left-wing terrorist groups like ELF exploded devices at Emeryville's Chiron headquarters. But if a right-wing anti-abortion group placed a pipe bomb at a Planned Parenthood office, you wouldn't see such vague "vandals" descriptions.

Which is another example of how the liberal media cocoon actually does their main readers a disservice: by playing down eco-terrorists and WTO vandals instead of vigorously condemning them, it makes it that much easier for conservatives to lump the whole lot together with the rest of the left.

Late Update (1/15/06): Well, this story's taken a turn for the weird: what police and reporters suspected was a bomb, actually was a flashlight owned by a homeless man with apparent drug issues?!

Tim Graham writes that little has changed at CBS:

CBS started its "Public Eye" weblog in the wake of the Dan Rather fake-memo fiasco as "an opportunity for our audience to hold CBS News more publicly accountable." But the interview Vaughn Ververs posted today with new "Evening News" executive producer Rome Hartman sends an odd signal. Hartman feels compelled (or perhaps sincerely believes, however odd that sounds) to state than Dan Rather remains one of "the great figures of the [CBS] news division." Is this really a "new era" at CBS?

This line came as Ververs tiptoed around CBS's plans to name a new anchorman to replace interim man Bob Schieffer. "We’ve all seen the stories speculating about who might be the next anchor of the 'Evening News.' Without going into personalities, how important is that position in today’s environment?"

Hartman replied: "I think it’s really important because that person is, to a greater degree than anyone else, the face of the broadcast and I think people care about not just the content of the stories but who they get their news from. I do think it’s a big deal. Whether it’s more or less important than it used to be, I don’t know. When I think about CBS News, my first thought is about the quality and vibrancy of the reporting. But I also think about Walter Cronkite, I think about Edward R. Murrow, I think about Dan Rather, these are the great figures of the news division. And I think about Bob Schieffer now. The tenor and the tone and just the way you kind of receive your news changes depending on who the anchor is.”

And how imaginative his writers are.

With the Soviet Union thankfully dead and buried, Russian cosmonauts and their families are now free to express their religious faith--and do so in a big way, including a handsome new Russian Orthodox church near the Baikonur Cosmodrome, long the home of the Russian space program.

Found via NRO's Corner, which notes that if you scroll down a bit through the MSNBC story, you'll also see "an unforgettable clip of a smiling U.S. astronaut in one of the Russian service modules, showing an icon on the module wall".

Nice way to start the year: the Dow Jones hits 11,000 today for the first time since prior to 9/11.

This could be something to keep in mind this year.

Herm Edwards is officially the new coach of the Kansas City Chiefs.

Edwards has several ties to the Chiefs' organization, but Peter King of Sports Illustrated is none-too-happy about the way he was able to void the remaining two years of his contract: "The question now is not whether another team will be torn asunder by a coach who feels he's underpaid. It's when".

I've heard this one before--but has Osama bin Laden taken the big dirt nap?

It takes Brother Michael two relatively lengthy paragraphs of his new NRO piece "One Moment in Time" to get to this:

And, according to Iranians I trust, Osama bin Laden finally departed this world in mid-December. The al Qaeda leader died of kidney failure and was buried in Iran, where he had spent most of his time since the destruction of al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The Iranians who reported this note that this year's message in conjunction with the Muslim Haj came from his number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, for the first time.

Of course, we've all heard this song before. But one day it's going to be true, right? Why not now?

I'd like as much proof as possible--especially after he believing that he probably died in December of 2001, only to see him return in a de facto 2004 John Kerry October Surprise campaign ad with his dialogue seemingly written by Michael Moore.

Hugh Hewitt proposes some excellent questions to be asked of any would-be majority leaders and whips.

Remember that awesomely stupid piece in 2002 about an Olive Garden restaurant that Lileks took apart like a surgeon?

Well, now where know where the European journalist who wrote it wound up working...

The Professor and Dr. Helen go multimedia with a nifty halfhour podcast (playable on most any MP3-compatable PC) featuring Michelle Malkin and musician Audra Coldiron.

(I'd say how much I enjoyed it, but I guess I can't, as "conservatives don't like personal audio players".)

Remember the "Five O'Clock Charlie" episode of M*A*S*H? Where a pathetic North Korean pilot flew overhead daily in a rickety prop-driven plane to drop what look like a one pound bomb that invariably landed miles from the ammo dump near the 4077? There was a scene in that show where the visiting general looks at the ammo dump and says to Henry Blake (and I'm paraphrasing): "Henry, it's classic: store the ammo near hospitals, where it's less likely to be attacked by the enemy. We learned it from the Germans in World War II." To which Hawkeye quips, "What, we're taking advice from the losers now?"

That seems to be the strategy behind the poster created to promote this Bloodrayne movie, which I've been seeing everywhere on billboards. It's obviously based on the poster to promote Jennifer Garner's Elektra movie from last year. The look, the background, even the costume is virtually identical. And I can certainly understand Hollywood wanting to associate a new film with a blockbuster to subliminally alert a potential audience that hey, if you liked that film, have we got a movie for you!

But in this case, there's just one problem: Elektra tanked at the box office: Shot for a budget of 43 million dollars, it barely grossed half that at the theaters.

Of course, judging by the poor reviews on the IMDB, Bloodrayne looks like it'll need all the help it can get: it will probably be an infinitely bigger bomb than anything Five O'Clock Charlie could hope to drop.

In her 2004 profile of Lionel Chetwynd, the writer and producer behind Tom Selleck's moving portrayal of General Eisenhower during the immediate period leading up to D-Day, Cathy Seipp wrote:

Now in his early 60s, Chetwynd is a longtime naturalized American citizen who was born in England and raised in Montreal. He'd remembered from Canadian regimental history that of the 4,400-odd Canadians sent to Dieppe, about 3,600 were killed. Although they knew it was basically a suicide mission, not one man failed to report for duty. Chetwynd asked one of the old soldiers in his regiment, Sgt. Gordon Betts, why.

"My generation had to figure out what we were ready to die for," Chetwynd recalled Betts telling him. "You kids don't even know what to live for."

Many years later, when Chetwynd was a successful Hollywood writer specializing in historical dramas, he told the Dieppe story during a Malibu dinner party — as a sort of tribute to the men who died there so people could sit around debating politics at Malibu dinner parties. One of the guests was a network head who asked Chetwynd to come in and pitch the story.

"So I went in," Chetwynd told me, "and someone there said, 'So these bloodthirsty generals sent these men to a certain death?'

"And I said, 'Well, they weren't bloodthirsty; they wept. But how else were we to know how Hitler could be toppled from Europe?' And she said, 'Well, who's the enemy?' I said, 'Hitler. The Nazis.' And she said, 'Oh, no, no, no. I mean, who's the real enemy?'"

"It was the first time I realized," Chetwynd continued, "that for many people evil such as Nazism can only be understood as a cipher for evil within ourselves. They've become so persuaded of the essential ugliness of our society and its military, that to tell a war story is to tell the story of evil people."

But apparently, only if they're liberal democracies such as America, Canada, or Israel. And speaking of Hollywood's portrayal of the latter, Bookworm (found via Betsy Newmark) writes:

Terry Gross also asked [Munich screenwriter Tony Kushner] about the fact that Mohammed Daoud -- who masterminded the massacre -- was offended that Spielberg didn't ask him for advice. Kushner said that he and Spielberg consulted Palestinians other than Daoud. Showing his Leftist sensibilities, Kushner acknowledged that this is an Israeli movie, though, and it can't give full measure to the "history of Palestinian suffering." Since this is the usual Leftist talk, we know that he's not thinking of the history of fellaheen suffering at the hands of the Jordanians, or at the hands of Arab leaders who, in 1948, made a conscious political decision to keep the fellaheens displaced so as to retain their victim status. Or their suffering at Arafat's hands after he embezzled several billion dollars aimed at alleviating their primitive living conditions. Or their suffering now at the ends of the terrorist factions that populate their communities, and kill those who don't conform politically or socially.

Kushner raises another relativistic point that is common on the Left, and that I think also demands some attention. He points to the fact that the movie's terrorists are "absolutely recognizable as human beings." In this regard, he thinks that "art makes an important contribution to the discussion."

Kushner's argument exemplifies something common on the Left -- the inability to call Evil by its name and to ignore the trappings in which an evil person may deck himself. While police profilers may need to know if a killer loves dogs or opera, since each bit of knowledge may increase the odds of capturing him, those loves don't make the killer any less evil. (If you're thinking of Hitler at this point, so am I.)

In the same vein, Kushner says that the Palestinian actors hired for the movie were afraid that the Palestinian killers would be presented as "terrorists without any souls." But isn't that what they were? They kidnapped innocent people, bound, and slaughtered them. That's a soul-less act. The fact that not all Palestinians are terrorists without souls doesn't acquit the killers of that charge. While it's hard to imagine a Hollywood movie that shows Nazis as fun-loving guys (the hilarious "Springtime for Hitler" scene in The Producers being the only exception), modern Hollywood just can't proceed without doing a psychiatric analysis of its politically correct killers, and then concluding that their vile acts are all because of psychic damage the received at the hands of . . . (fill in the blank here with white males, rich people, Israel, Jews, imperialism, oil companies, etc.).

As I said, Tony Kushner does not show up as a bad guy in this interview. He shows up as an intelligent man who is so mired in self-created moral complexities that he doesn't recognize evil when he sees it.

Let's face it: the writer isn't omniscient: it's not like he can know everything--especially outdated bourgeois concepts like truth, lies, good, evil, et al. Besides, "if you start with an ax to grind, then you write a bad play or movie."

I'm writing an article in which I might quote a famous aphorism by Russian space pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. But if I do a Google search on "Tsiolkovsky" and "Cradle", it's amazing how many variations I get on it:

"Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever."

"Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot remain in the cradle forever."

"The Earth is the cradle of the mind, but we cannot live forever in a cradle".

"Earth is the cradle of humanity but one cannot live in the cradle forever"

"The earth is the cradle of mankind - one cannot remain in the cradle forever"

"The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever"

And that's just a sampling from the first page of the Google search. I wonder what's the closet English translation to what Tsiolkovsky actually wrote?

I guess all of the variations are a combination of translating a quote from Russian to English, along with people typing quotes from memory (which is how Bogie's "Play it, Sam" became "Play it again, Sam!" and other movie quotes become misheard and paraphrased), plus filtering old quotes through whatever the current PC-filtering requires (replacing "mankind" with "humanity", for example).

I wonder how many other famous quotes from history have become similarly mangled over time, much like the famous E Plebnista...

Over at NRO's Corner, Tim Graham writes:

GLAAD's Hollywood police are ticketing NBC's Gene Shalit for inappropriate reviewing of "Brokeback Mountain." He has landed somewhere to Rod Dreher's right, apparently.

Was I the only person who read this and thought, "Holy cow--Gene Shalit's still alive??"

Yeah, probably. Oh well.

In a gimlet eye, Ted Kennedy reflects back on the halcyon days of the Goldwater Presidency.

Update: Jonah Goldberg helpfully clarifies the issue for the good senator:

Note: in this universe Goldwater was never President, alas. And in the parallel universe where he was, Sam Alito would still have been 14 years old at the time.

That's all perfectly true, but the real question is: would President Goldwater have worn a goatee or a sleeveless gold lame' shirt in that universe?

Another Update: Tim Blair points to a recent op-ed in which Kennedy "described Mao’s collected thoughts as '"the official Chinese version of Mao Tse-tung’s Communist Manifesto"'.

Well, I suppose power could grow out of the barrel of a fine doublewood-aged single-malt Scotch...

Early on Friday, I linked to Lee Harris's article on Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his Holocaust denial. Harris wrote:

We in the West have already rewritten a great deal of history in the name of cultural tolerance and diversity. But are we prepared to deny the truth of the Holocaust in the name of the same principles?

Yet, if you think about it, why not? After all, if different cultures can have different values, why not let them write different histories? Who’s to say whose history is right anyway? Are not Muslims entitled to their own interpretation of the historical past, like everyone else? What gives the West the right to impose its own ethnocentric interpretation of history on the rest of mankind? If the West insists on forcing Muslim to accept that the Holocaust really occurred, isn’t this a form of “historical” imperialism?

You see here the slippery slope upon which the West has so frequently lost its footing of late. Let us hope that, in this one instance at least, it is prepared to dig its heels in and stand firm.

When I linked to Harris' article, I wrote, "Thanks to Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, European and American multiculturalists are about to face their gravest test". I think I started to write "American multiculturalists in academia" but opted to keep it short.

Looks like I shouldn't have. Charles Johnson writes:

Dr. Abdullah Muhammad Sindi, a US-based Saudi professor of political science who has taught at UC Irvine and Cal State Pomona agrees wholeheartedly with the Holocaust denial of Iranian president Ahmadinejad.

And he’s teaching American students.

Be sure to read Sindi's own words on the subject.This is a Kerry-like Global Test for American academia as to whether or not someone who views the Holocaust is a myth should be allowed to continue to teach.

Think they're up to the challenge? Sadly, me neither, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

Update: Dr. Helen writes:

Have you noticed that as time goes on and people start to forget the horror of tragedy that the mind tends to rewrite the past? Perhaps this is human--for example, a family member dies and we rewrite their life to fit into our own scheme of how we feel about our own lives. If Dad was a fairly pleasant guy, we might overstate how cruel he was to keep ourselves from grieving. But on the other hand, if Dad was downright cruel and abusive, we might rewrite history in our minds to make him out to be a good guy. Either way of thinking puts our mind at ease and gives us the opportunity to feel virtuous about ourselves. In the case of these Muslim leaders with dementia times two, we have a case where they use the denial of the Holocaust as a tool for provoking sympathy from the West and anger in their followers in the Mideast. What better way to further their cause. But can we really allow them to use the bodies of six million corpses to make a political point?

Who in Europe--or academia in general in the case of Sindi--will stop them?

Hugh Hewitt writes that legacy media meltdowns such as Nick Coleman and Michael Hiltzik signify that we're entering "the second of five stages of old media death":

I really don't feel any need to respond to being labeled an "ignorant partisan trope" by a largely unknown blogger no matter where he has a desk. I have been attacked by much more serious people and for much more serious reasons, and dismissed those slams as similar cries for attention and traffic. If Hiltzik wants attention and traffic, he should earn it, not borrow it from successful bloggers like Patterico who earned their respect, and did so without the tremendous built in advantages of the vast resources of the Tribune Company.

The reason I write about this at all is because it is the latest example of a growing volume of MSM attacks on NM, which don't matter as to their substance --they have little-- but rather do underscore that old media has figured out that are getting flayed daily by new media, and that they are bleeding out circulation and credibility as a result.

We are now in the second of five stages of old media death. First there was denial, and now there is anger, with Hiltzik's childish tantrum just the most obvious of many similar outbursts. Soon there will be bargaining --I'll be nice to you if you are nice to me-- and then depression and acceptance.

And then, perhaps, MSM will get back to putting out non-agenda driven news from a balanced newsroom, transparent in its ideological biases, and full of young and talented graduates as opposed to tenured and bitter time-servers.

I suspect that will be a very long time coming, though of course, I'd hate to be as optimistic about the legacy media's health as Arthur Schlesinger was about the Soviet Union's long-term prognosis in 1982.

Tim Blair is rounding up, month-by-month, the most important--and more often, the most astonishing--quotes from 2005.

While this year has only just begun, Michelle Malkin has a videoclip that may well end up making many Blogosphere highlight reels in 2006: a soldier who confronts Democrat Congressmen Jim Moran and John Murtha at a town hall meeting in Arlington, Va.:

"Yes sir my name is Mark Seavey and I just want to thank you for coming up here. Until about a month ago I was Sgt Mark Seavey infantry squad leader, I returned from Afghanistan. My question to you, (applause)
"Like yourself I dropped out of college two years ago to volunteer to go to Afghanistan, and I went and I came back. If I didn't have a herniated disk now I would volunteer to go to Iraq in a second with my troops, three of which have already volunteered to go to Iraq. I keep hearing you say how you talk to the troops and the troops are demoralized, and I really resent that characterization. (applause) The morale of the troops that I talk to is phenomenal, which is why my troops are volunteering to go back, despite the hardships they had to endure in Afghanistan.

"And Congressman Moran, 200 of your constituents just returned from Afghanistan. We never got a letter from you; we never got a visit from you. You didn't come to our homecoming. The only thing we got from any of our elected officials was one letter from the governor of this state thanking us for our service in Iraq, when we were in Afghanistan. That's reprehensible. I don't know who you two are talking to but the morale of the troops is very high."

Moran - who is one of the few congressmen supporting Charlie Rangel's call to restore the draft - responded quickly: "That wasn't in the form of a question, it was in the form of a statement. But, uhh... let's go over here." And he took the next question.

Cutting and running quickly, as Michelle notes in her transcription of Sgt. Seavey.

In the New York Times' recent reactionary grumble on the growing power of the Blogosphere, Katharine Q. Seelye wrote:

Individual newspapers and television stations generally reach a wider audience than individual blogs, and Mr. Eggers touched on this lopsidedness when he explained on his Web site why he was reprinting Mr. Kirkpatrick's e-mail messages: "It's the only remedy commensurate with the impact you enjoyed with your original piece."

But the power of blogs is exponential; blog posts can be linked and replicated instantly across the Web, creating a snowball effect that often breaks through to the mainstream media. Moreover, blogs have a longer shelf life than most traditional news media articles. A newspaper reporter's original article is likely to disappear from the free Web site after a few days and become inaccessible unless purchased from the newspaper's archives, while the blogger's version of events remains available forever.

And this poses a big problem for a medium previously quite comfortable with reshuffling history to suit its version of a narrative whenever it was politically expedient to do so. (The past is infinitely malleable, Winston.)

In what is promised to be a five part series, three parts of which are currently online, Marc Schulman has a long, detailed look at The New York Times' shifting editorial stance on Iraq. Part One begins by noting:

Except for a brief period during 1994, The Times’ editorial position was distinctly hawkish during the Clinton presidency. At no time did the Times express any doubts regarding the credibility of intelligence information pertaining to WMD. Throughout this period, the paper’s editors insisted on an aggressive UN-directed inspection regime, which was their preferred means to disarm Saddam’s Iraq. They frequently made note of Saddam’s efforts to thwart the inspectors, and insisted that Iraq must fully cooperate before the sanctions implemented at the end of the Gulf War should be lifted. The Times’ objective was the elimination of Iraq’s WMD, not regime change. Bringing democracy to Iraq was not a topic in its editorials.

Notwithstanding their preference for inspections, the editors did not shy away from advocating the use of air strikes – including unilateral American air strikes – if the obstacles constructed by Saddam made it impossible for the U.N.’s inspectors to fulfill their missions. The Times endorsed every U.S. military operation ordered by Clinton. None of the editorials insisted that the U.S. must obtain Security Council approval before undertaking a military action, nor did they require that military operations – unilateral or multilateral – be authorized by new Security Council resolutions.

When the editors criticized the Clinton administration, it was for being too dovish, not too hawkish.

And then, for some reason, it changed! Hypocrophobia strikes deep. Or as Mickey Kaus wrote a couple of months ago:

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

Meanwhile, Stephen F. Hayes looks at Saddam's Terror Training Camps:

THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials.

And will all quickly go down the collective Memory Hole of the New York Times and the rest of the legacy media, another inconvenient fact that just doesn't support the current narrative.

Update: Jeff Goldstein has some thoughts on postmodernism, the infinite malleability of facts, and the legacy media.

Chris Anderson writes that this is the decade the blockbuster album died. I'd say that reflects as much on the poor content of today's CDs as it does the impact of file sharing and the Long Tail, but be sure to check out the graph that accompanies his article.

Last June, I dubbed Arnold Schwarzenegger, "Gray Davis With Better Pecs" after Arnold went RINO with his global warming rhetoric.

With his latest budget-busting intiatives, Carol Platt Liebau writes that Arnold is aping an even earlier Democrat governor of California--Pat Brown:

If he keeps it up, every big spender in the state will be thrilled; once again, the taxpayers will be left holding the bag. As Arnold Schwarzenegger discards his “ersatz Reagan” identity and morphs into an “ersatz Brown,” it’s worth remembering that when his new political role model left office, only 2.2 percent of the state’s general fund was devoted to debt service.

But for the new Arnold, the history is immaterial. It’s always been clear that the governor wants to do something “big” — but last night it became apparent that, if the plans are ambitious enough, the particulars (and the principles) don’t really matter.

No wonder Hugh Hewitt uses Dylan's "I used to care, but things have changed" as his Arnold lead-in tune.

Two years ago, Bernie Lincicome, a sports reporter at the Rocky Mountain News began his look at the anti-youth movement in NFL coaching by quipping, "Hello, Marv? Buffalo Bills calling".

He was more right than he could have known: while at age 80, Marv Levy won't be returning to coach the team he took to four Super Bowl appearances in the early 1990s, he is being brought in as their new general manager:

Shortly after being introduced as the Buffalo Bills' general manager, Marv Levy decided to come clean about something that happened the last time he interviewed for a job with the team.

Levy acknowledged that he fudged on his age when landing the Bills' head-coaching position some 20 years ago.

"Mr. Wilson maybe doesn't know this, but way back when I was first hired in 1986, I was 61 years of age," Levy said Thursday, referring to Bills owner Ralph Wilson. "It sounded too old, so I lied and said I was 58."

The Hall of Fame coach had nothing to hide upon his return to Buffalo where he enjoyed his greatest success in leading the Jim Kelly-led Bills to an unprecedented four straight Super Bowl appearances in the 1990s.

Referring to himself as "an 80-year-old rookie," Levy eagerly accepted the challenge of resurrecting his beloved team that's coming off a 5-11 season and missed the playoffs for the sixth straight year.

"My enthusiasm is unbounded," said Levy, who becomes the NFL's oldest front office executive.

And then came the first of many jokes.

"They say two things happen when you get older. One is you begin to forget things," Levy said, before pausing. "And I can't remember what the other one is right now."

Later, when asked if he believed he had the physical stamina to do the job, Levy put his hand to his ear and said with a smile: "Would you repeat that question?"

But don't let his age fool you.

"The age factor means nothing to me," said Levy, noting he runs 3 miles five times a week. "I'm old enough to know my limitations and I'm young enough to exceed them."

That, however, didn't prevent the 87-year-old Wilson from getting into the act, introducing Levy by saying: "I'm very proud to bring some youth to this organization."

Smiling, Wilson added: "With me and Marv, you can nickname us in the pro football world, the Two Golden Boys."

Wilson and Levy -- with help from then-Bills GM Bill Polian, now the Indianapolis Colts president -- were golden once before. Wilson is betting it can happen again, hiring Levy a day after firing team president and general manager Tom Donahoe for failing to build a playoff contender during his five-year tenure.

Levy's hiring provides Wilson a trusted confidante and a respected presence to an organization that, at times, alienated fans under Donahoe.

"We're bringing Marv back so that he can bring a stability to the Buffalo Bills," Wilson said.

With a 112-70 record, Levy is the winningest coach in Bills history and was inducted to the Hall of Fame in 2001. Since retiring in 1997, Levy has worked mostly as an NFL broadcaster while living in his native Chicago.

Levy will be responsible for the Bills football-related decisions. He will also act as a mentor for coach Mike Mularkey, who was retained despite struggling in his second season.

As Lincicome's article implied, the NFL's an interesting place: while the average player's professional lifespan is quite short, those who can successfully make the transition to coaching and the front office can often work deep into their golden years. Witness the careers of Levy, Parcells, Schottenheimer, Vermeil, the late Sid Gillman and George Halas, et al.

Over four years ago, on the weekend before 9/11, John Podhoretz explained a big reason why modern movies by and large stank: it's the writing, stupid, to paraphrase James Carville. During Hollywood's golden era, moviemakers knew that while they could craft iconic images, they weren't the best source of original narratives:

So they tend to steal their stories from elsewhere. And in the first half-century or more of the movies, that meant they turned to other media for material — to books and theater, primarily, and to the kind of stories they told. Novels and plays derive their power entirely from character and plot. Add a strong visual storytelling sense to a strong narrative line, and you have something wonderful and new.

But something happened around 1950. Movies increasingly began to draw their inspiration from other movies. The young French directors of the famous late '50s "new wave" were inspired by hack Hollywood filmmakers, not by Shakespeare or Balzac or Dickens. In the 1960s, their American stepchildren burst forth: Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Brian De Palma, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorcese, Steven Spielberg, and others.

These men could do things with a camera nobody had ever been able to do. They had seen every movie ever made and had broken those movies down frame by frame, turning themselves into the Noam Chomskys of film — the world's foremost experts on the grammar of visual storytelling.

They brought a new snap and dazzle to film. When that was combined with both a new freedom in subject matter and new technological developments, the medium became exciting again, in the late '60s and early '70s — in a way it hadn't since the advent of television. And the movies they turned out earned more money than anyone had ever dreamt possible.

The problem was that all these brilliant moviemakers knew was the movies. They weren't well-read — most of them didn't attend college, or if they did, they studied only film — and they didn't seem to feel at all humbled by their own ignorance. As a result, they understood classical storytelling only through the bastardized versions offered by Hollywood. It was like fourth-generation xeroxing. Stories and characters grew weaker as their original sources grew increasingly distant and hazy.

These guys were genuinely gifted filmmakers with something fresh to offer. But the Hollywood they created has proved sadly hospitable to ignoramuses and illiterates who have far less talent, and whose influences are the fourth-generation xeroxes — and maybe not even that. Directors like Michael Bay, who made Pearl Harbor, were raised watching television commercials and sitcoms, and seem to have derived all their knowledge of the world from these two stepchildren of popular art.

Movies today are awful because Hollywood no longer knows what a good plot is, what an interesting character is, or what genuine conviction is when it comes to telling a story.

If you think that the events of real life, spun into motion literally just days after Podhortez's article ran, would give Hollywood a fresh infusion of exciting stories to tell, well, you're not living in Movieland, according to James Bowman:

To understand why, we have to go back to the Copernican revolution in movie-making that took place in the 1970s. Then film-makers, led by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, managed to break free of their audience’s traditional expectation that movies would look like life. Partly because of the growing youthfulness of their audience, but partly too because of that audience’s media savvy — by the time of Jaws or Star Wars anyone under 30 would have been watching television all their life — the old tricks and conventions by which previous generations had been persuaded to regard the movies as looking real wouldn’t work anymore. Spielberg and Lucas responded by letting the audience in on the trick: that is by glorying in their artifice and indebtedness to other films rather than discreetly hiding these things. No more were movies expected to look like life; instead they were expected to look like other movies. When the Indiana Jones series began in 1981 with Raiders of the Lost Ark, its tag-line, ‘The Hero is back’, was understood by everybody to mean the movie hero. That’s why it was set in the 1930s and its villains were Nazis. It was supposed to look like one of the Saturday morning serials of the age in which it was set, only with incomparably superior production values.

At first this kind of allusive, post-modern movie-making resulted in a very entertaining product and nobody noticed any very worrying side-effects of the breaking of the link between reel and reality. Most critics and film-makers continue to be unconcerned, because po-mo playfulness is such a good deal for them. The reputation of Quentin Tarantino among cinéastes has not suffered — has in many quarters been enhanced — even as his movies have become ever more cartoonish. Only in movieland could Uma Thurman bloodily dispatch scores of armed assailants as she does in Kill Bill, Volume 1, but then what’s wrong with living in movieland? We have been doing it for 30 years now.

The trouble is that movieland is beginning to colonise even movies that are trying to be serious and grown-up, especially those dealing with politics, government, diplomacy and military life. When Superman (Christopher Reeve) told Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) ‘I’m here to fight for truth, and justice, and the American way,’ she replied with a laugh: ‘You’re going to end up fighting every elected official in this country!’

The joke made no sense unless the audience understood that, in movieland, all politicians were vicious and corrupt, especially those involved in any way with national security. By the 21st century, even alleged documentaries like Fahrenheit 9/11 and The Corporation were set in movieland, because audiences had learnt to expect not new insights or even much in the way of new information from movies, but a confirmation of what they already knew or thought they knew about where the world’s villainy comes from. That’s why the 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate, which purported to deal with the terrorist threat, ignored the actual terrorists and made the bad guys a large multinational corporation and its agents and hirelings in government. Hollywood’s latest fictional treatment of the war on terror, Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana, starring George Clooney and Matt Damon, does exactly the same thing, putting forward the bizarre contention that the major threat to the progressive forces of democracy, economic liberalisation and women’s rights in the Middle East comes not from terrorist jihadists but from — you’ll never guess — the CIA in cahoots with Big Oil. After all, the CIA, the Pentagon and large American corporations have been the home of Hollywood villainy for 35 years, right up there with Nazi Germany.

Nobody expects movieland to change just because the world does, not even those who may be dimly aware of America’s perilous efforts to bring democracy to Iraq over the last three years. Interestingly, at least as recently as True Lies (1994), it was still possible for Arab terrorists to appear as movie villains, but post-9/11 it is not. There have been in the last couple of months two movies released in America that are sympathetic to Islamic jihadist suicide-bombers (The War Within and Paradise Now) while movies like Gunner Palace or Jarhead portray American soldiers as victims — either of their leaders or of the military culture itself. It’s hard to remember the last time we saw an old-fashioned flick in which we’re meant to cheer the Yanks as they biff the enemy. Obedient to the old maxim, perhaps, Hollywood prefers to stick with the devil it knows, and boy does it stick!

And of course, it doesn't help matters that Hollywood is so tied to the victim mentality that it's dramatically funneled down the choices of who the bad guys can be, as Edward Jay Epstein recently noted:

Why don't the movies have plausible, real-world villains anymore? One reason is that a plethora of stereotype-sensitive advocacy groups, representing everyone from hyphenated ethnic minorities and the physically handicapped to Army and CIA veterans, now maintain liaisons in Hollywood to protect their images. The studios themselves often have "outreach programs" in which executives review scripts and characters with representatives from these groups, evaluate their complaints, and attempt to avoid potential brouhahas.

Finding evil villains is not as easy as it was in the days when a director could choose among Nazis, Communists, KGB, and Mafiosi. Still, in a pinch, these old enemies will serve. For example, the 2002 apocalyptic thriller Sum of All Fears, based on the Tom Clancy novel, originally had Muslim extremists exploding a nuclear bomb in Baltimore. Paramount decided, however, to change the villains to Nazis residing in South Africa to avoid offending Arab-American and Islamic groups. Yet, even if aging Nazis lack any credible "outreach program" in Hollywood, they can no longer be credibly fit into many contemporary movies. "The list [of non-offensive villains] narrows quickly once you get past the tired clichés of Nazis," a top talent agency executive pointed out in an e-mail. "You'd be surprised at how short the list is."

For sci-fi and horror movies, there are always invaders from alien universes and zombies from another dimension, but for politico-thrillers, the safest remaining characters are lily-white, impeccably dressed American corporate executives. They are especially useful as evildoers in foreign-based thrillers, since their demonization does not run the risk of gratuitously offending officials in countries either hosting the filming or supplying tax and production subsidies. The "Mission Impossible" franchise replaced the Russian and Chinese heavies that populated the TV series with, in Mission Impossible 2, a WASPish-looking financier who controlled a pharmaceutical company that unleashed a horrific virus on the world in the hopes of cashing in on the antidote. Here, as in other movies in this genre, businessmen's killings are not just figurative. Unlike other stereotype-challenged groups, CEOs and financiers, lacking a connection with the studios' outreach programs, have become an essential part of Hollywood's new version of the axis of evil.

No wonder the notion of the virtuous crusading trial lawyer is a Tinseltown staple (Erin Brockovich, and virtually the entire John Grisham back catalog): Hollywood's reliance on them for script vetting means that studios will be trapped in Movieland for quite some time to come, even as they wonder why their domestic box office continually spirals downward.

James Lileks describes his thoughts on Mark Steyn's stunning new essay to Hugh Hewitt:

I don't like to think that these things...but in the back of my mind, I know that I've already written Europe off. And it's a very strange feeling. It's almost as if I've just regarded them as a lost cause, and I'd like to see it before it goes, and I'd like my daughter to go there before Notre Dame is deconsecrated. But it's just a very peculiar feeling, saying well, all right, we've lost Europe.

Thanks to Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, European and American multiculturalists are about to face their gravest test, Lee Harris writes:

Up until now, it was unnecessary in the West, outside of Germany and Austria, to pay serious attention to those who disputed the historicity of the Holocaust: they constituted a tiny fringe group, and dismissing their views had little political risks or consequences. They could simply be shrugged off as quacks, at best, and crypto-Nazis, at worst. But this recent wave of Holocaust denial is not coming from a statistically insignificant potion of the West; it is coming from Muslim leaders with popular followings, and what is even more troublesome, it is not being challenged by others in the Muslim community. As the head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center said, "The problem is that so far in the Arab world, very few leaders are willing to tell their own people that they have to understand that the Holocaust did take place” -- a statement that is putting it very mildly, indeed.

Are we dealing here with simply two different but equally legitimate points of view of what happened to the Jews under Nazi Germany; or are we dealing with a new ideological virus, and one that is on the verge of spreading like an epidemic?

We in the West have already rewritten a great deal of history in the name of cultural tolerance and diversity. But are we prepared to deny the truth of the Holocaust in the name of the same principles?

Yet, if you think about it, why not? After all, if different cultures can have different values, why not let them write different histories? Who’s to say whose history is right anyway? Are not Muslims entitled to their own interpretation of the historical past, like everyone else? What gives the West the right to impose its own ethnocentric interpretation of history on the rest of mankind? If the West insists on forcing Muslim to accept that the Holocaust really occurred, isn’t this a form of “historical” imperialism?

You see here the slippery slope upon which the West has so frequently lost its footing of late. Let us hope that, in this one instance at least, it is prepared to dig its heels in and stand firm.

"Hopeful" and "Digging in its heels" certainly aren't words I'd use to describe modern Europe.

Update: Neo-Neocon sees a glimmer of hope in, of all places, The Guardian.

At the very end of December in 2004, Nick Coleman of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune surprised a lot of folks in the Blogosphere when he wrote his infamous screed attacking the boys at Power Line as (among other things) "Extreme bloggers [who] are so hip and cool they can make fun of the poor and the disadvantaged while working out of paneled bank offices."

This year, as Patterico writes, "You know you’ve arrived when an L.A. Times columnist compares you to a dishonest, totalitarian Stalinist apparatchik".

Michael Hiltzik of the Times definitely gets bonus points for taking a fresh slant with the Stalinist angle--because, let's face it, that whole Hitler thing was done to death in 2004.

But a point that one of Glenn Reynolds' readers made during the Coleman meltdown holds true with Hiltzik's:

One of the nation's leading papers now has an opinion writer who has picked a fight with a leading blog. It's practically incidental that the columnist appears to be losing. One of the rules of politics is that you try not to give your adversary any publicity, unless you have to. You don't mention the fellow's name. Even just a year ago, no one in the MSM would have entered into a debate with a blogger. Today, Coleman seems to feel threatened enough by Powerline that he has to attack them. How much does that say about the extraordinary growth of the Internet - and bloggers - as sources of news? To me, it seems that we've reached another major marker of the decline of the MSM.

I'm not sure if Hiltzik's ad hominems count as a major marker themselves, but they do mark a curious flipover, as readers increasingly talk back to their newspapers via blogs, and as those same newspapers continue to go from attacking the powerful, to attacking their readers.

Update: Chris Anderson, the creator of the great Long Tail meme writes:

Q: How can you tell when an industry is on the rocks?

A: When insiders and analysts start to lose their temper in public.

And usually, it doesn't take an industry analyst to discover who or what their vitriol is aimed at.

Another Update (1/06/06): Tom Maguire and Cathy Seipp have much more on Hiltzik. Meanwhile, Independent Sources adds up the yay and nay comments on Hiltzik's own blog and concludes:

Hiltzik had the home court advantage and still got clobbered. Worse, in our opinion, he came off as trite, hypocritical and elitist. If he stuck to writing “business” articles we wouldn’t have a problem with him. Alternatively, if he was in the Editorial section of the paper where it appears he’d really prefer to be, we would also have no gripe with his right to editorialize to his heart’s content. We’re open-minded, he might even change our point of view on a particular topic. However to do that he’ll have to do a far better job than what he did in attacking Patterico and Hewitt.

Indeed.

In his syndicated Newhouse column, James Lileks explores the left's bad news is good news mindset:

To the left, the booming economy is a slug on a hot tar roof. Iraq is another Vietnam -- 48,000 casualties to go, God willing. Half the welfare budget has been diverted to subsidize solid-gold walking sticks for the rich, secret agencies are planting cookies in your Web browser, and somewhere in Texas a theater owner is intentionally understating the opening night grosses for "Brokeback Mountain."

Bad news is good news. Everything's going to hell, but at least they're smart enough to catch the whiff of brimstone. (Secondhand brimstone. There ought to be a law.)

But what if the worst doesn't happen? That would be worse than bad. That would mean all those bumper stickers they put on their cars had no effect whatsoever. What if people don't Question Authority, Visualize World Peace, speak truth to power, or rotate during cooking? What if letters to the editor don't end up in CIA files? What if subversive college students are ignored? What if the dark night isn't descending after all?

However will they go on?

Didn't 2005 answer that question?

Hollywood's 2005 box office woes has its new year's hangover. According to the L.A. Times, Jon Stewart will be hosting the Oscars this year, to ensure that the show is even more politicized than last year's, and probably with similar results in the ratings, as the Times article foreshadows:

But the barbed political humor of his nightly show on Comedy Central figures to make Stewart a perfect fit for the Oscars, especially in a year when many contenders--including "Brokeback Mountain," "Good Night, and Good Luck, " "Crash," "Munich," "Syriana" and "The Constant Gardener"--feature political and social themes.

Stewart will reportedly take at least a week off from "The Daily Show" to prepare for the Oscars, though hosts often spend far longer preparing for the task. Billy Crystal, in particular, often took a couple of months to plan, shoot and assemble his opening film and craft his song medley.

None of those films lit up the box office in 2005, and if Stewart bombs out as a performer, the Times has already supplied his ready-made excuse.

Update: Scott Ott "reports" that Old Hollywood will have a rebuttal to its four-hour love fest this year:

Just hours after the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences named Comedy Channel news anchor Jon Stewart to host this year’s Academy Awards show, the White House announced that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been tapped to deliver the GOP response.

The Oscars Rebuttal Show, part of ABC-TV’s commitment to fairness, will attempt to refute and debunk the anti-Bush administration remarks that naturally flow from Mr. Stewart and his colleagues as they give little golden statues to people who make up stories and who pretend to be other people.

The White House expects to receive equal time for Mr. Rumsfeld to present the Bush administration perspective, raising concerns about the septuagenarian’s life expectancy and stamina. Insiders say that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will be waiting in the wings as Mr. Rumsfeld’s understudy.

Mr. Stewart, host of The Daily Show, a parody news program, is perhaps best known for telling CNN’s Tucker Carlson: “I’m not going to be your monkey,” when Mr. Carlson challenged Mr. Stewart to be funny on Crossfire.

A spokesman for the Academy, in announcing the emcee deal today, said, “Now, we know whose monkey Jon Stewart is.”

Heh.

Sure, it's easy pickin's, but Tim Blair ably fisks Anderson Cooper--and Jonathan Klien--over CNN's coverage of the West Virginia mining disaster with one hand tied behind his keyboard.

Meanwhile, the Boston Herald notes, "Mining report is a disaster story for AP".

Update: Ed Morrissey writes:

The USA Today headline speaks volumes about the sad state of today's American media in on-the-spot recording when it states, "Media forced to explain inaccurate reports on tragedy" -- and we're forced to ask, "Which tragedy?"

Ed also links to a post by Lorie Byrd of PoliPundit on why we won't get any explanations about Katrina reporting.

Another Update: Hugh Hewitt also takes a swing at CNN, on a different topic:

Moments ago, a CNN newsreader referred to Jose Padilla's "ordeal," and to the "woes" of those detained at Gitmo. This is the language of implicit injustice, and whoever is writing copy for the talking head is an agenda journalist of the first order. I wonder if he, she, or they think Daniel Pearl underwent an ordeal and suffered woes, and if so, how to distinguish between his ordeal and woes and those of terrorists. Or does language fail CNN copy writers when it comes time to judge the justly imprisoned from the innocent?

Maybe Saddam's still writing their copy.

Ed Morrissey looks at Palestinian gratitude:

After having their daughter give her life in a misguided attempt to assist Palestinians in keeping their weapon-transit tunnels open, Rachel Corrie's parents might have labored under a perception that the Palestinians might have some gratitude for their sacrifice ... or at least prove themselves worthy of her death on their behalf. Instead, to show just how civilized they can act when they have their own territory, members of the ruling Fatah faction tried to kidnap the Corries as they also blew up part of the Gaza-Sinai border, killing two guards.

* * *

It now looks like Ariel Sharon may have struck the most devastating blow against Palestinian statehood by allowing them to have Gaza all to themselves. Sharon, who may be dying at this very moment, gave the world a fishbowl for the Palestinians to demonstrate the endgame of their nihilism. They have now made a ruin of Gaza, attacked Egypt, kidnapped the parents of one of their own folk heroes, and turned the territory into a gangland instead of a state. Egypt has yet to respond to the murder of its guards, but one doubts that Cairo will react with brotherly love to a government that it insisted be given this golden opportunity to prove it could run Gaza as a state.

Even the PA now admits that the statehood project has been a catastrophe and that its failure has little to do with Israel, according to The Scotsman. The Palestinian people have used democracy to repeatedly validate a mandate for war. The political factions involved in the territories have refused to disarm. The Palestinian Authority, an oxymoron if ever there was one, has proven itself impotent without the old terrorist Yasser Arafat at its head. The lack of law and order has reduced the entire area to little more than a free-fire zone and terrorist's delight -- and the only authority that could possibly control the violence has no more incentive to intervene, thanks to decades of scolding for providing that service without any recognition of its necessity.

If Sharon passes away tonight, he can go with a satisfaction of forcing the Palestinians themselves to prove themselves unworthy of the world's concern.

In-friggin'-deed.

Update: Stephen Green writes:

His last battle was to create a new party to carry on his sensible policies after he passed from the scene. But for the first time in his long and storied life, Sharon abandoned the fight before it was won. Sharon's life is probably ended, and his political life certainly is. With that, Israel's security may have become as uncertain and Sharon's future is already settled.

Read the rest.

Another Update: What happens next? Omri Ceren looks at the main players in Israeli politics.

I'm in the process of reading two books I recently bought from Amazon as sort of post-Christmas gifts to myself: Googie Redux: Ultramodern Roadside Architecture by Alan Hess, and The Pan Am Building and the Shattering of the Modernist Dream by Meredith L. Clausen. Googie, which I know James Lileks is a big fan of, was a somewhat informal designation for modernist commercial architecture of the 1950s and '60s. As this superb Website explains, Googie grew out of a Los Angeles coffeehouse by that name, and came to dominate roadside architecture: the original McDonald's and Jack in the Box restaurants (not the versions seen today, as we'll discuss in a moment) were Googie; the building at LAX that currently houses the Encounter Restaurant (which I posted about a couple of months ago) was Googie. It was playful stuff, designed to give the stern shapes originated by Bauhaus boys like Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius more curb appeal--and hence entice motorists to pull over and stop in.

In his book, Alan Hess notes that in 1969, Ray Croc dumped the original Googie-styled McDonald's restaurant design for the more traditional looking mansard roof buildings we see today (he kept the originals' iconic golden arches on the new buildings' signage), and Hess uses that year, and that gesture as one of the demarcation points that traditional modern architecture had come to an end.

And he's certainly got a point: in addition to Ray Croc discarding Googie forms, it was also the year that Mies and Gropius died. Manhattan's Seagram building, on Park Avenue, has long been considered one of Mies's great successes (and one of my favorites, which was partially why I chose it for the unofficial Pajamas pre-launch party that grew like Topsy). In contrast, as Meredith Clausen notes in her book, very few obituaries of Gropius mentioned his involvement in the Pan Am building, just down the block. Ironically, during the Pan Am building's planning and construction, Gropius saw it as the bookend to a career that included the founding of the Bauhaus in the 1920s. But even before Pan Am was completed, it became the Building That New Yorkers Love To Hate, as a mid-1980s New York magazine cover story dubbed it, complete with wrecking ball smashing into the building. And indeed, there was good reason to loathe the beast: Pan Am (since renamed in the 1980s for current owner Met Life), dwarfed handsome Grand Central Station with its towering bulk, cut Park Avenue in half, and was--and is--considered ugly and brutal by the vast majority of New Yorkers.

And despite all that, as the Pan Am book notes, it will probably never be torn down, as it's a larger building than current Manhattan zoning laws allow for office buildings on its size lot.

If Googie made modernism fun, Pan Am made many people come to hate modernism. And if these are the sorts of topics you enjoy exploring, check out Architecture and Morality's "Carnival of the Architects and Urbanists".

(In it, we're listed as "multifarious blogger extraordinaire Ed Driscoll", and naturally, a nifty piece of textural embroidery like that richly deserves its addition to the rotating "What They're Saying" board on the sidebar.)

The Anchoress (whom some say is a terrific blogger, and we concur; although we're not sure why we're using the royal we and addressing ourselves in the third person in this nested parenthetical) writes:

My personal choice: “some say…” Used continually by Katie Couric, David Gregory and oh, basically anyone in the press who wanted to advance their own personal opinion or the general concensus of the fourth estate: “Some say President Bush is trying to undermine our civil liberties,” “Some say Iraq is a quagmire,” “Some say America is a world-bully,” “Some say if only the Kyoto treaty had been recognised…”

Just once, I would like to hear a politician come back with, “WHO says? WHO exactly SAYS, Katie, David, Tim, etc”

To which they'd probably reference anonymous sources. But then, some say they always do.

Good to see: the Pajamas mothership changed to a more blog-oriented format today, with lots more content available on the homepage at any one time.

Roger L. Simon has several links, and writes that Haaretz is probably the best place to keep up to date on Sharon's condition.

The Haaretz lead story sounds particularly grim:

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suffered a "significant" stroke with "massive bleeding" in his brain late Wednesday night, according to a Hadassah University Hospital official, and Sharon's authority has been transferred to Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

In a brief statement outside the Jerusalem hospital, Dr. Shlomo Mor-Yosef said Sharon had suffered "a significant stroke," adding that he was "under anesthetic and receiving breathing assistance."

A few minutes later, Mor-Yosef emerged to say that initial tests showed Sharon had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, or bleeding inside his brain. Addressing reporters in English, Mor-Yosef said Sharon had "massive bleeding and was being transferred to an operating theater."

Channel 2 TV said Sharon was suffering from paralysis in his lower body. Analysts on local TV stations said his life could be in danger.

Watch for a repeat of this, if Sharon passes away.

Update: Omri Ceren is living blogging the news on Sharon.

Another Update: "Type and you shall receive":

...a radical Palestinian leader in Damascus, the Syrian capital, called Sharon's health crisis a gift from God.

"We say it frankly that God is great and is able to exact revenge on this butcher. ... We thank God for this gift he presented to us on this new year," Ahmed Jibril, leader of the Syrian-backed faction Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, a small radical group, told the Associated Press.

Lovely.

Speaking of transformative media, Glenn Reynolds writes:

First the Katrina reporting fell apart. Then there was the whole wolf fiasco. Now there's the misreporting of the trapped-miners story.

If bloggers had made these kinds of mistakes, Big-Media folks would be pointing them out as evidence that the blogosphere can't be trusted. But where were all those editors, filters, and fact-checkers?

And those were just in the last four months (the latter stories that Glenn links to were just in the last couple of weeks). Makes you wonder how many other stories the media got wrong before there was a Blogosphere--no wonder so many in the MSM despise it.

Update: Regarding the mining disaster and media meltdown, Sissy Willis writes, "The rumor spread, the church bells rang, Anderson Cooper & Co. fanned the fires, and there you were with a community of potential mourners believing in miracles and set up for a horrific letdown."

Another Update: Much more from Tim Blair.

One More: Great quote from Jeff Jarvis:

in our age of instant news and ubiquitous communication, the public sees this process as it occurs. It’s not the news that’s live; it’s the process of figuring out what to believe that’s live.

In an open letter to Old Europe (will Old Europe write back? Possibly; no doubt in that condescending looking down the bifocals on the edge of the nose tone it's famous for), Steve Green writes:

There's another Holocaust brewing, and I don't mean your parlor-room talk about how America is killing brown babies for oil. Besides, we aren't the ones who committed the first Holocaust – that was your doing. What we're trying to do is prevent another one, and we'd like to think that you guys might be a little sensitive to that sort of thing. "Go forth and sin no more," and all that.

Well, here's your chance to right a wrong.

Looking at your atrophied militaries, maybe that's too much to ask. So instead, how about if you could provide a little multinational moral support to the endeavor? Then again, we've all seen what counts as moral backbone in Brussels and Paris and Berlin – so let's set our sights a little lower. How about you guys just sit back and shut the hell up while the pros do what needs to be done?

You guys have failed. As of right now, Iran can produce yellowcake. As of shortly after right now, Iran will have nukes. As of yesterday – thanks in no small part to Old Europe – Iran already has missiles capable of reaching Israel.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not some chickenhawk cowboy who wants to bomb the snuff out of Iran. I think there's still some slim chance that diplomacy might still work. But – and let's speak frankly here, as friends – your brand of diplomacy just won't cut it.

Your kind of diplomacy gave chemical weapons technology to Saddam Hussein. Your kind of diplomacy sells jet fighters and stealth-defeating radars to whoever has the cash to buy them. Your kind of diplomacy is the same kind of diplomacy you used to coddle a certain German tyrant 70 years ago.

Well. In the age of nukes, that kind of diplomacy just won't cut it.

Read the rest.

And speaking of Spielberg's Munich, Jonah Goldberg weighs in, here.

Pardon me while I go a little Mcluhan.

Someone (and naturally, I can't remember whom) once said that the best art transforms how we perceive the art that came before it. New media forms can have that effect has well. The populist tone of Fox News dramatically transformed how millions view other television networks, and if anything, the Blogosphere has impacted how we view the legacy media as a whole. (The very phrase "legacy media" defines the shift.)

/McLuhan

Bill O'Reilly appeared on David Letterman last night. I haven't watched O'Reilly regularly since his debut, but I have to give him credit: his mere appearance and willingness to hold his positions brought out the ill-informed MSM talking points in Letterman. Or as Ace of Spades wrote:

My friend Steve actually was in an argument with a college hippychick one time, and she said, "Well, I may not know all the (finger quotes) 'facts' but I just feel that..." At least she was 19 and not 87, or however old Letterman is.

Heh.

Update: Charles Johnson compresses into three words what I spent a whole paragraph attempting to define: The Letterman Emergence.

Bill Quick has some thoughts on what's to come this year.

Numbers one and five won't exactly help you sleep more soundly tonight.

...Well, not exactly; sadly, I haven't been back since 2000. But because I am so very, very cool, I had an article in the December edition of England's Computer Music magazine on using technology to improve lead vocals. It's not online, but if you're in the US, it's the issue that's currently on the shelves at your local Borders or Barnes & Noble--that's where I picked up my copy tonight.

I haven't been blogging as much lately about home recording because of all the Pajamas-related stuff that went on this fall here at Casa de Ed, which pushed that particular hobby of mine temporarily somewhat in the background. But I'm eager to get back to it this new year, if only for its theraputic value, and to not allow whatever meager music and recording skills I've honed off and on over the last 20+ years to go to waste. And as an offshoot, look for additional music-related articles online and on dead tree, from time to time this year as well.

Mark Steyn sounds positively Spenglerian in his essay in the New Criterion and Opinion Journal titled, "It’s the demography, stupid", but it's hard to argue with his conclusions (or his premises, for that matter). Here's how he kicks off the piece:

Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the western world will survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most western European countries. There’ll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands— probably—just as in Istanbul there’s still a building called St. Sophia’s Cathedral. But it’s not a cathedral; it’s merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the west.

One obstacle to doing that is the fact that, in the typical election campaign in your advanced industrial democracy, the political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much all parties in the rest of the west are largely about what one would call the secondary impulses of society—government health care, government day care (which Canada’s thinking of introducing), government paternity leave (which Britain’s just introduced). We’ve prioritized the secondary impulse over the primary ones: national defense, family, faith, and, most basic of all, reproductive activity—“Go forth and multiply,” because if you don’t you won’t be able to afford all those secondary-impulse issues, like cradle-to-grave welfare. Americans sometimes don’t understand how far gone most of the rest of the developed world is down this path: In the Canadian and most Continental cabinets, the defense ministry is somewhere an ambitious politician passes through on his way up to important jobs like the health department. I don’t think Don Rumsfeld would regard it as a promotion if he were moved to Health & Human Services.

What does a nation where "the secondary impulses of society" are its primary focus look like? Why, very much like The Great White Blue State to the North, as Ginna Dowler, guest-blogging for Pieter Dorsman (whom I met briefly during Pajamas' launch week) writes:

One of the things that has struck me most about the recent election campaign is how...insular it is. Aside from a brief discussion of military procurement, and a smattering of sniping about Harper's supposed support for the Iraq war not one party has discussed actual foreign policy.

Which is both sad, and not at all surprising.

Because big things are happening in the world, and Canadians don't really seem to care about them at all. Or rather, they care in an abstract fashion. Because these world events seem to have no relationship with our daily lives. With the exception of recent immigrants, we seem to view foreign affairs purely through the lens of how Canada "matters" on the world stage. Afghanistan only matters in any because we actually have troops there.

Discussion on the Iraq war, while vitriolic, is also detached. Our opinions are philosophical - we know they don't matter. Canadians have an opinion on George Bush, but they mostly hate him because he is "stupid", and because of knee-jerk reactions to the Iraq war. We are secure in our opinions, because our opinions have no consequences.

This struck me again while reading the transcript of Robert Kaplan's discussion with Hugh Hewitt. On China, for example, Canadians are bizarrely optimistic. All we seem to see are the trade issues. How can we sell to China, will China hurt our competitive advantage etc. There is no discussion of China an entity - no analysis of the threat an emerging China poses on the world power stage.

Which seems insanely short-sighted, given China's emphasis on establishing themselves as a Great Power, in every possible way.

Yet we criticize the Americans for being insular, for being unsophisticated. Kaplan also made a great comment (which Jay Currie also noted), regarding the so-called red-neck middle Americans.

One of the things you see in Iraq, you see all these soldiers, Marines, private contractors, and they're all from the South, the greater South, the Mid-West, the Great Plains. And they all e-mail their families every single night about what's going on. And so people in other parts of the country are far more cosmopolitan and sophisticated about what's going on in Iraq now, than people on the two coasts of California and New York.

Having spent time in the last few years travelling to so-called "Red State" places, I can confirm that in, say, your average manufacturing facility, a good proportion of the employees have a close relative serving in the US military, and they get these email updates. A connector assembler in Springfield MO knows a great deal about the situation on the ground in Baghdad - more than the average New York sophisticate, and far, far more than nearly all Canadians.

That's not at all surprising, as this paragraph by Steyn illustrates:

This isn’t a deep-rooted cultural difference between the Old World and the New. It dates back all the way to, oh, the 1970s. If one wanted to allocate blame, one could argue that it’s a product of the U.S. military presence, the American security guarantee that liberated European budgets: instead of having to spend money on guns, they could concentrate on butter, and buttering up the voters. If Washington’s problem with Europe is that these are not serious allies, well, whose fault is that? Who, in the years after the Second World War, created NATO as a post-modern military alliance? The “free world,” as the Americans called it, was a free ride for everyone else. And having been absolved from the primal responsibilities of nationhood, it’s hardly surprising that European nations have little wish to re-shoulder them. In essence, the lavish levels of public health care on the Continent are subsidized by the American taxpayer.

He's writing about Europe, but that whole paragraph applies works equally well around the 49th Parallel.

Update (1/4/06): Not surprisingly, a number of bloggers have commented on Steyn's piece: follow the links here.

Betsy Newmark, Roger L. Simon, and the Pajamas mothership (the Motherpajamaship?) link to this New York Times article by Katharine Q. Seelye on the Times'--and therefore, the rest of the MSM's--hatred of the Blogosphere. Here's a sample:

While some say they are learning to accept the new interactivity, they also worry that the view of many bloggers - that reporters should post their raw material because they are filtering it through their own biases - ignores the value of traditional journalistic functions, like casting a wide net for information, coaxing it out of reluctant sources, condensing it and presenting it in an orderly way.

Jamie McIntyre, CNN's senior correspondent at the Pentagon, said the traditional skills of sifting through information and presenting it in context were especially vital now because there were so many other sources of information.

"With the Internet, with blogs, with text messages, with soldiers writing their own accounts from the front lines, so many people are trying to shape things into their own reality," he said. "I don't worry so much anymore about finding out every little detail five minutes before someone else. It's more important that we take that information and tell you what it means."

What I find fascinating about articles such as this how reactionary they are, something I noticed back in October:

It's weirdly ironic--despite the fact that they're in the news business, the media are often the last to spot a realignment of their own industry. Witness how the Big Three networks never expected cable TV's rise in the early to mid-1980s, the first in a series of (to borrow Alvin Toffler's word), demassifications. The next was Rush Limbaugh and talk radio's rise during the same period the following decade, equally unexpected. Witness how Matt Drudge took newspaper journalists all by surprise, even though he shouldn't have: the Internet had existed since 1969, the World Wide Web, which runs on it, since the early-1990s, and it was due for a media celebrity of its own. And others were destined to follow, as Weblogs make self-publishing a breeze.

Call 'em what you will-- mass media, the liberal media, the MSM--they had literally decades to prepare for an era in which they were no longer the only game in town, but instead, they demonized each new player on the scene, until the new players literally outnumbered the old ones, as I wrote early last year:

And yet, as radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt notes in his new book, Blog, underneath those well-known sites, there are about seven million more weblogs, according to a report done by the Pew Research Center (and also independently by myself, simply by crunching a few numbers). Technorati, the blog-oriented search engine, tracks over five million of them. Surveys show that less than 50,000 of them are updated daily, but as Hewitt observes, that's "the sleeper fact" of these reports. "From the big bang of blogging", Hewitt writes, "50,000 new virtual newspapers had been born."

In comparison, as of 1998, there were 1,489 daily "dead tree" newspapers in the US. Just to get a scope of what 50,000 daily newspapers means in terms of readership, let's look at a hypothetical weblog that's riding near the end of the tail. If it only has 100 readers a day, and there are 50,000 blogs with similar quantities of readership, that makes for a whopping 5,000,000 total readers. Five million readers would make weblogs the second largest newspaper group in the nation, behind Gannett, just ahead of Knight-Ridder and with twice the readership of The New York Times Co.

Instead of adopting to this new era, you get more of the same from the increasingly reactionary liberal media--more complaining that they're no longer the only game in town, and increasingly hostile rhetoric towards their competitors.

Update: Hugh Hewitt looks at the Times article and writes, "Meloncholy is the best way to describe the air of the piece's pro agenda-journalism slant. Like a buggy maker's sighs as the cars that first annoyed then disturbed finally became not a nuisance or a challenge but an eclipse":

I described bloggers as sherpas to Soledad O'Brien a year ago when on a book tour for Blog. A year later and the New York Times still doesn't seem to udnerstand that while readers/viewers do indeed "want someone who can quickly and succinctly tell you what you need to know," they don't want it to be any of the hard left agenda journalists of the Times or its other sisters in elite MSM journalism. Rather, the reliable sherpas of the blogosphere are leading folks through the mountains of new information that build each year.

Perhaps by January 2, 2007 the New York Times will have gotten around to admitting that its reputation as a reliable reporter of facts was lost long before Jason Blair and has never been recovered, that Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman are jokes among most center-right Americans and a good portion of the left as well, that Valerie Plame has always been a non-story, that leaking of top secret surveillance programs of al Qaeda conducting surveillance on it sagents in America etc etc etc was the problem, not the rise of a new information network.

Readers took to the new information highway not because it was there, but because it was better. Until the old roads are repaired, they won't be coming back except on those occasions where there isn't any alternative.

Indeed. (As all the cool usurpers of the legacy media are wont to say.)

Another Update: TigerHawk has some related thoughts.

One More: Michael Medved writes that 2005 was the year the public lost confidence in big media--and not coincidentally, big media lost confidence in itself:

Hurricane Katrina highlighted the biggest story of 2005 — but that story had nothing to do with flooding or destruction.

Hysterical news accounts, initially exaggerating dead victims by a factor of more than 10 to one, demonstrated the irresponsible nature of U.S. media.

Similarly, news coverage of the Iraq war always emphasizes the negative, downplaying all positive developments. More and more in 2005, the public distrusted mainstream media — with opinion surveys showing journalists even less trusted than politicians.

Hiring of new anchors — even including Katie Couric — won't win back confidence of a public highly suspicious of supposedly fair-minded network stars. At the same time, the sharp box office decline in Hollywood shows disillusionment following the leftist, highly partisan role of the entertainment industry in the recent election.

When historians recall developments of the year just passed, reduced confidence in all forms of mass media will look like one of the most significant changes.

Of course, it wasn't just the entertainment industry that was leftist and highly partisan in 2004, but the MSM as a whole, and the public's lack of confidence in 2005 reflected a Faustian bargain that didn't pay off.

At age 43, this may very well be Doug Flutie's last season, one that was spent backing up Tom Brady in New England. If so, how cool is this to go out on?

For 21 years, Doug Flutie's career has been defined by one play. Now the "Hail Flutie" has its historic bookend.

The 43-year-old Patriots backup converted the NFL's first successful drop kick since 1941, making an extra point in the fourth quarter of the Miami Dolphins' mostly meaningless 28-26 victory Sunday over New England.

"I think Doug deserves it," said usually dour Patriots coach Bill Belichick, who broke into a wide smile when his sprightly quarterback split the uprights off one bounce. "He is a guy that adds a lot to this game of football, has added a lot through his great career -- running, passing and now kicking.

"He's got a skill and we got a chance to let him use it, and I am happy for him. First time since '41," said Belichick, a football historian who last month brought out a leather helmet in his media session. "It might be 60 years again, too."

According to the Pro Football Hall of Fame web site, the league's last drop kick for points was on Dec. 21, 1941 -- two weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor -- when Ray "Scooter" McLean converted for the Chicago Bears to beat the New York Giants 37-9 in the NFL championship game.

"Flutie might have been there the last time it happened," placekicker Adam Vinatieri joked.

As Flutie said after the game, "if that ends up being my last play, it wouldn't be bad."

And how!

In The Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens quotes from Tony Kushner, the screenwriter of Steven Spielberg's Munich:

Kushner [is] the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright brought in by Mr. Spielberg to rework the original screenplay by Eric Roth. Mr. Kushner (who, like Mr. Spielberg, is Jewish) believes that the creation of the state of Israel was "a historical, moral, political calamity" for the Jewish people. He believes the policy of the government of Israel has been "a systematic attempt to destroy the identity of the Palestinian people." He believes that responsibility for making peace between Israelis and Palestinians lies primarily with the Israelis, "inasmuch as they are far more mighty." He believes Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is an "unindicted war criminal."

Or as Kushner recently said, not intending to be ironic, but unintentionally summing up Munich to a 'T', "If you start with an ax to grind, then you write a bad play or movie."

Indeed^TM.

Via Roger L. Simon, who describes Munich as "almost laughable at times and the end of the movie crosses the line into a virtually incoherent grand guignol of sex and mayhem that approaches opera bouffe", adding, "When it comes to a movie about the problems of revenge, I would skip this mish-mash and go rent John Ford's The Searchers".

For more examples of how grinding axes turned into grinding movies, Mark Steyn has a terrific round-up of Hollywood's Year To Forget.

James Lileks writes that he never trusts odd-numbered years; Paul Mirengoff of Power Line writes that 2005 was "an up-and-down year in which the MSM ignored the 'up'":

Duncan Currie sees 2005 as a good year for democracy. It's too early to know whether the progress made in the Middle East this year will be the start of something big but, says Currie, "if the coming decades do in fact witness a democratic reformation in Middle Eastern politics, historians will likely trace its roots back to the events of 2005--namely, to the purple fingers of Iraqi voters."

In many other respects, 2005 was an up-and-down year. Gas prices went up and then they went down. President Bush's approval ratings went down and then they went up. The estimated death count from Hurricane Katrina went way up and then it went way down. The temperature of the Plame investigation story went up and then it went down. The level of violence in Iraq went up and down, but overall the security situation improved significantly due in major part to the fact that tens of thousands of Iraqi security forces now effectively participate in the security effort. Highly publicized danger areas (the road from the airport to downtown Baghdad, the Haifa road, Sadr City) became relatively safe, and thus no longer highly publicized. The MSM also failed to report on the substantial progress the U.S. made in training Iraqi security forces, and President Bush waited far too long to fill the void. The public hasn't turned fundamentally against our action in Iraq, nor does it necessarily want a timetable for the end of our involvement -- it simply (and reasonably) wants evidence that we're making progress. Once the administation finally figured that out, the tide began to turn back in its favor.

The economy, by contrast, did not have an up-and-down year. Economic growth (including job creation) was robust and continuous except for a brief period following Hurricane Katrina. The MSM, which had harped on poor job and other economic performance reports earlier in the Bush administration, choose to ignore the economic success story of 2005. President Bush is planning to start telling that story too, which could help turn the tide further in his favor.

Meanwhile, Patterico looks at the L.A. Times' down and nearly out year, and Michelle Malkin looks at the MSM's War On Blogs.

Regarding the latter, Betsy Newmark adds:

Touch, touchy, aren't they? Well, blogs are no different from the rest of the media. Some are good, some are partisan, and some are no good. However, many are written by people with expertise who comment knowledgeably about events. Why shouldn't journalists want to read commentary from experienced lawyers and law professors, for example, when questions come up concerning the law? Haven't you ever wondered where journalists get the so-called experts that they use to quote in stories and often to validate what they really want to say themselves? Lots of time, they're just calling around to universities and other journalists to get a likely name. Or they're searching around on the web trying to find the name of a likely-sounding expert. Or they're returning to someone they've used or seen before, someone about whose positions on a question the reporter already has a pretty good idea of. Why should such an "expert" be any more reliable than any lawyer or professor who operates his or her own blog?

And when it comes to politics, you don't need much of any special expertise. What expertise do reporters or TV pundits offer except that they have been observing politics for a long time? For some of the more partisan pundits, you can almost see the talking points that they've received from the DNC or the RNC before they went on the TV? Well, why should that make them considered some sort of political expert more so than someone who sits at home, watching C-Span and reading as much of the news as he or she (or I) can? With the Internet and Lexis-Nexus, any Average Joe can offer up do-it-yourself political analysis just as well as any "expert" called into a cable news studio for a two-minute interview.

It seems to me that the big advantage that professional journalists have is that they are being paid to get out in the field and ask questions to research a story. That's why having a blogger like Michael Yon or Bill Roggio actually go out to Iraq and report back via a blog is such a threat to regular journalists. Of course, it seems that half the time, journalists don't seem to be asking the right questions or pressing for more of an answer. How many times have you watched one of the Sunday talk shows and seen a politician not answer a question and then seen some big foot reporter like Tim Russert just drop the ball?

That's why I think that journalists and bloggers should embrace each other as a grand symbiosis of information and insights. There are things that journalists can do that we in the blogosphere live off of. If they weren't publishing their stories every day, what would we blog about? I don't want the MSM to go away; I just want it to improve. And there are ways that good journalists can use the blogosphere. If I were a journalist getting ready to interview a politician, I'd check out blogs on both sides of the spectrum. See what each side is hot about. Also, if I was a journalist, I'd be using a tool like Technorati to see what bloggers are saying about stories that I wrote. I'd discard whatever I thought was just ideological bombast. But, there are many kernels of insight in all that blogging. And a journalist could get some insights of different ways to look at events that he or she might lack while staying within the bubble that exists as journalists and politicians talk to each other every day. They might find that the so-called conventional wisdom is just a bunch of other bubble-people talking to each other and holds very little wisdom.

Of course, the smearing of the Blogosphere by the MSM is nothing new--we documented a decade's worth of attacks on citizen journalism back on July 4th.

Update: As I was saying...

We opted not to go out for New Year's Eve; "that's when all the amateur drinkers are on the road", as an old friend of mine used to say. So we stayed in and had caviar, foie gras, champagne and Martinis. And no risk of being pulled over by MADD, PETA, or the San Jose PD.

At about 11:55, we turned on Dick Clark, but he sounded absolutely awful--I'm very glad to see him making great strides recovering from his stroke, but his speech was astonishingly slow, slurred, and and painful: Dick Clark's Sclerotic New Year's Eve is not my idea of fun TV. So we watched Regis watching the ball drop in Time Square, instead.

Afterwards, when I lived in the South Jersey, I remember WHYY, the Philadelphia PBS affiliate would always run old black and white 1950s Dragnet episodes and Nixon's Checker's Speech to ring in the new year. The San Jose PBS affiliate ran something from the other side of the political spectrum, but it was equally as arch in its own way: Roger Waters performs Pink Floyd's The Wall live from the Berlin Wall, from back in 1990. The Berlin Wall, of course, fell no thanks to him--and thanks to The Wall, (especially the movie version), Waters is one of the few people of any political persuasion to go on record opposing Britain's entering World War II, making him the English left's answer to Pat Buchanan's own brand of isolationism and Nazi appeasement.

It's not that there isn't good music here: my old college rock band used to do killer versions (if I do say so myself) of "Run Like Hell" and "In The Flesh", and "Comfortably Numb" is also a great song. But there's a reason why Time magazine dubbed The Wall "The Libretto for the 'Me Decade'".

I lasted through about 15 minutes of The Wall until its own pretentiousness and sense of narcissistic doom finally reminded me of one of my Christmas gifts, still sitting as yet unplayed: the box set edition of Bruce Springsteen's Born To Run, which packages a remastered version of the knockout 1975 album, which landed Springsteen simultaneously on the cover of Time and Newsweek, along with a making of DVD, and a DVD of a 1975 Springsteen concert from the Hammersmith Odeon on the E Street Band's first trip across the Big Pond.

It was that last disc I decided to pop into the DVD player, and it was well worth it: seeing Springsteen at his peek so quickly after the craptacular excesses of The Wall was an illustration of everything that was wrong and right with rock and roll in the 1970s.

As for the former, there was the inevitable orchestra, conducted by Michael Kamen, who seemed ubiquitous before his death in 2003. Seriously: if you needed a movie soundtrack, or an orchestral score for a rock group, or an MTV gig where, say, Aerosmith was backed by an 80-piece orchestra, Kamen was your man. Plus, there were scads of session musicians, and an enormous set. Comfortably Numb? No, it was all employed to produce absolutely soul-crushing music to remind us that we should all be as miserable as Roger Waters, zillionare rock superstar.

In stark contrast, the E Street Band that took the stage in 1975 were six everyday guys who looked like they were wearing low rent clothes borrowed from Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets: all enormous lapels and manmade pastel fabrics, except for Springsteen himself, who looked like Skeeter the mechanic, topped with Michael Nesmith's ski cap. In place of a set the size of, well, the Berlin Wall, they pounded a tiny stage playing their hearts out, with a palpable joy and electricity. Springsteen's Glory Days (to coin a song title) wouldn't last of course--by the end of the 1980s, he had temporarily broken up the E Street Band, and his work slowly became almost as politicized as Waters'. Even before all that, to be honest, I liked Springsteen in small doses; I'm much more of a Who, Zeppelin, Beatles, and Stones kind of guy when it comes to my rock, but by God, he was on during this concert and you could feel it. I guarantee you, the audience walked out of the Hammersmith Odeon after Springsteen's show feeling much more alive than those who saw The Wall.

Not a bad way to start the New Year's, all things considered. And thank you for sticking with us for another year of pixelated action, as we enter our fourth year in our little corner of the Blogosphere.