Back in the old days (ask your parents or grandparents), immigrants adjusted to the culture they were migrating to. But that's a rather fuddy-duddy way of looking at things, as Kofi Annan explains:

The offensive caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad were first published in a European country which has recently acquired a significant Muslim population, and is not yet sure how to adjust to it.

Staggeringly, Newsweek agrees with Kofi, Roger L. Simon notes:

I don't know if there is a more fuddy-duddy publication than Newsweek (unless it's Time). Now they are tut-tutting those Europeans who have the temerity - in the post-cartoon riot world - to be concerned with protecting free speech and other Enlightenment values through new immigration standards that encourage assimilation. Not surprisingly the Newsweekies title their article The End of Tolerance, meaning Europe's, of course, not those Sharia-bound Muslims whose tolerance is legendary. Here's how the authors (there are three) sum it up near the end:

Until such double standards can be abolished and a new equality established, Europe's new toughness will feel like forced integration. "It's a form of creating a second-class citizenship," says Tariq Modood, director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship in Bristol. "All the burden of change is placed on the immigrant."

Oh, I get it. It's time for those atheistic Dutch and Danish to meet their Islamic guests mid-way. They should be half-misogynist and half-homophobic. Is that the kind of culture Newsweek really wants? Of course not. They're just lying phonies and poseurs. They continue, slightly further on:

It's an open question whether Germans, Dutch, or Danes will ever truly accept a multiethnic, multireligious "Germanness," "Dutchness" or "Danishness."

Open question? Maybe so, but I'll tell you a closed question - whether Saudi Arabia could ever accept Germans, Dutch or Danes living among them. Or sanctimonious Newsweek writers, for that matter. Enough already.

Well, maybe not: In Canada's Western Standard, Mark Steyn reminds the big Blue State north of the 49th Parallel that "History Swings Both Ways":

Bruce Bawer's new book, While Europe Slept, is an instructive read in that regard: he's a gay American who moved to Holland because it was more open and tolerant than his repressed uptight theocratic native land yet in the end he was driven out of the Netherlands by a--what's the phrase? --"rising tide" of gay bashing and other forms of homophobia from the ever more culturally confident young Muslim men who now dominate urban life up the European coast from France through Belgium to Scandinavia. It's not a good time to be a gay man in Europe.

The question is whether Canada will prove more like the Continent and succumb to creeping Islamification or more like America and resistant to would-be encroachments? Which would you bet on?

Which would Newsweek?

Update (3/1/06): Welcome readers of Tim Blair! Be sure to look around the rest of the site; we hope there's much you'll enjoy here.

...and "literally tens of people each day willingly volunteer to submit themselves to my hits and missives"--Confederate Yankee gets profiled by the Washington Post.

Do they drink Dewar's south of the Mason-Dixon?

(Speaking of which, greetings, between flights, from the Admiral's Club at D-FW Airport!)

I'm waiting for my flight to board, but this is too much fun to ignore:

In 2003, Krauthammer famously wrote:

It has been 25 years since I discovered a psychiatric syndrome (for the record: ``Secondary Mania,'' Archives of General Psychiatry, November 1978), and in the interim I haven't been looking for new ones. But it's time to don the white coat again. A plague is abroad in the land.

Bush Derangement Syndrome: the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency -- nay -- the very existence of George W. Bush.

Now, I cannot testify to Howard Dean's sanity before this campaign, but five terms as governor by a man with no visible tics and no history of involuntary confinement is pretty good evidence of a normal mental status. When he avers, however, that ``the most interesting'' theory as to why the president is ``suppressing'' the 9/11 report is that Bush knew about 9/11 in advance, it's time to check on thorazine supplies.

When Rep. Cynthia McKinney first broached this idea before the 2002 primary election, it was considered so nutty it helped make her former Rep. McKinney. Today the Democratic presidential front-runner professes agnosticism as to whether the president of the United States was tipped off about 9/11 by the Saudis, and it goes unnoticed. The virus is spreading.

It is, of course, epidemic in New York's Upper West Side and the tonier parts of Los Angeles, where the very sight of the president -- say, smiling while holding a tray of Thanksgiving turkey in a Baghdad mess hall -- caused dozens of cases of apoplexy in otherwise healthy adults. What is worrying epidemiologists about the Dean incident, however, is that heretofore no case had been reported in Vermont, or any other dairy state.

Krauthammer's tongue was somewhat in cheek when he wrote the above passage. I'm not at all sure the same is true over at the Gray Lady, when one of its reporters writes this:

Renana Brooks, a clinical psychologist practicing in Washington who said she had counseled several White House correspondents, said the last few years had given rise to "White House reporter syndrome," in which competitive high achievers feel restricted and controlled and become emotionally isolated from others who are not steeped in the same experience.

She said the syndrome was evident in the Cheney case, which she described as an inconsequential event that produced an outsize feeding frenzy. She said some reporters used the occasion to compensate for not having pressed harder before the Iraq war.

"It's like any post-traumatic stress," she said, "like when someone dies and you think you could have saved them."

Well, to be honest, it's not like any post-traumatic stress. Just ask the great Dr. Krauthammer.

Well, more like The Road To Mt. Laurel: I'll be traveling to visit my parents in South Jersey today, posting is going to slow down a bit--although hopefully not stop entirely--this week.

Lots of archives below to scroll through in the meantime--and of course, loads more blogs await via the Pajamas logo on the right.

Pieter Dorsman of Peaktalk tries to break "The Silence of the Left":

Cathy Seipp - who also runs the excellent Cathy’s World blog - had an interesting column up in the LA Times yesterday built around the notion that:

“ … one of the great paradoxes of our time is that two groups most endangered by political Islam, gays and women, somehow still find ways to defend it”

While a somewhat sweeping generalization, it goes to the heart of the Fortuynist argument that the groups that benefited most from the liberalization of our society in the 1960s and 70s, probably are least aware of what they stand to lose if radical Muslims and their western appeasers are allowed to embrace and implement a new social agenda.

Seipp’s claims sparked a sharp rebuff from Gabriel Rotello on the Huffington Post where he countered by compiling a list of notable gays and women who have taken on the excesses of radicalism in our midst. That of course is a fairly superficial way of addressing the issue as anyone can come up with a list that contains Sullivan, Bawer, Manji, Hirsi Ali and the late Fortuyn. But it doesn’t address the core of the issue and therefore Rotello largely misses the point.

The fact that the focus is on these few brave individuals that speak up and who now in some cases have to live under police protection proves Seipp’s point: it is the left at large that has been silent. Where is that mass movement, where are the rallies, those concerted efforts that characterized women’s and gay movements from the 1960s onwards? And it is not just gays or women: there is a string of left-wing causes which always managed to find a joint umbrella under which it protested the free west’s accomplishments, think of the “women against nukes” or the various “animal rights” groups. I grew up in a country that was in the vanguard of this leftist revolution and which as a result spawned a political and media establishment that was firmly rooted in the values of this post-war social and cultural revolution.

This is certainly far from a new phenomenon: in his recent essay on H.L. Mencken, Fred Siegel dubbed Menck an "Anarcho-Authoritarian" for his pro-German attitudes World War I:

Part of the reason it's so hard to make sense of Mencken is that he was, paradoxically, an anarcho-authoritarian. He agreed with the American Civil Liberties Union on the importance of free speech. But while that organization, under the influence of principled men such as Felix Frankfurter, argued for such freedoms on the grounds that "a marketplace of ideas" (to use Justice Holmes's term) was the best method of arriving at the truth, Mencken supported it in order to shield superior men like himself from being hobbled by the little people. For the same reason, Mencken was a near anarchist when it came to America, but an authoritarian when it came to the iron rule of the Kaiser and General Ludendorff. We are more familiar with anarcho-Stalinists such as William Kunstler, who had a parallel attitude toward the United States and the Soviet empire, but it was Mencken who blazed the trail down which Kunstler and his ilk would travel.

More recently, the issues that Dorsman focuses on in his post, the "women’s and gay movements from the 1960s onwards", as he puts it, are, at least in the US, far more trends of the 1970s than they were of the sixties, which was dominated, at least until 1968, by a relatively benign FDR/Great Society liberalism, until it morphed into something far more punitive.

As a result, the anarcho-authoritarianism that Siegel described, while it may be a mouthful of an expression, was definitely at work in the 1970s, particularly in Hollywood. Tinseltown simultaneously celebrated liberal sexual mores in its 1970s movies, while simultaneously championing societies would happily through anyone caught committing such actions into the gulag. One of the peaks of this mental schism was the 1975 Oscars, as James Webb noted in 1997:

There is perhaps no greater testimony to the celebratory atmosphere that surrounded the Communist victory in Vietnam than the 1975 Academy Awards, which took place on April 8, just three weeks before the South’s final surrender. The award for Best Feature Documentary went to the film Hearts and Minds, a vicious piece of propaganda that assailed American cultural values as well as our effort to assist South Vietnam’s struggle for democracy. The producers, Peter Davis and Bert Schneider [who plays a role in David Horowitz’s story—see page 31], jointly accepted the Oscar. Schneider was frank in his support of the Communists. As he stepped to the mike he commented that "It is ironic that we are here at a time just before Vietnam is about to be liberated." Then came one of the most stunning—if intentionally forgotten—moments in Hollywood history. As a struggling country many Americans had paid blood and tears to try to preserve was disappearing beneath a tank onslaught, Schneider pulled out a telegram from our enemy, the Vietnamese Communist delegation in Paris, and read aloud its congratulations to his film. Without hesitating, Hollywood’s most powerful people rewarded Schneider’s reading of the telegram with a standing ovation.

Scott Fitzgerald once said, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function". Not entirely paradoxically, he expressed that thought in "The Crack-Up".

Lawhawk reminds us that today is the 13th anniversary of the first attack on the World Trade Center, when a bomb was detonated in its parking garage. Six people were killed in what was the first major act of of Islamofascist terrorism on American soil.

The cost of the bomb? A mere three hundred dollars for the 1300 pounds of chemicals involved.

While Mark Steyn in the Chicago Sun-Times is focusing on the death of Europe, the Chicago Tribune, its cross-town rival, explores the death of blogs. The Trib ends its story on a much more rational note, but first tolls the expected bells of doom:

Gallup finds only 9 percent of Internet users saying they frequently read blogs, with 11 percent reading them occasionally. Thirteen percent of Internet users rarely bother, and 66 percent never read blogs. Those numbers, essentially unchanged from a year earlier, put blog-reading dead last among Gallup's measures of 13 common Internet activities. E-mailing ranks first (with 87 percent of users doing so frequently or occasionally), followed by checking news and weather (72), shopping (52) and making travel plans (also 52).

If this sounds to you like a perennial theme for big media, you'd be right. Here's what I wrote for TCS Daily right around this time two years ago, in response to a similar story on CNN.com, back when there were "only" five million blogs for Technorati to follow, as opposed to the 28.9 million they track today:

The Pew Internet and American Life Project, in a study released Sunday, found that somewhere between two percent and seven percent of adult Internet users in the United States actually keep their own blogs.

Let's examine those numbers a little further! As I wrote on my own Weblog about the story, the numbers tell a very different story than its slant.

According to one study, there are 146 million adult Internet users in the US alone. The article claims that between two and seven percent of those Internet users keep blogs. If we round that number to five percent, it means that there are 7,300,000 Weblogs in the US alone. And that's a lot of Weblogs!

This is the sort of cynical, "glass half empty/glass half full" story that bloggers love to parse, and many Weblogs had a field day with it. Scott Ott, the humorist whose Scrappleface Website is a Blogosphere favorite (in January of 2003, Ott coined the brilliant "Axis of Weasels" meme that later graced the cover of The New York Post), put things into sharp perspective. In one of his typical satiric news articles, he wrote that if only about two percent of Internet users actually write Weblogs, it means that there are more bloggers writing, than people reading USA Today (whose circulation is 2.6 million), The New York Times (1.6 million) or The New York Daily News (805,000).

Ott doesn't mention CNN, but since the article most prominently appeared on CNN's Website, it's probably worth noting that in the US, CNN's typically daily viewership is only about 450,000 viewers. (The Fox News Channel, the cable news ratings leader, gets an average of 799,000 viewers during their broadcasting day.)

Of course, if I were CNN, I'd be worried about having, in a manner of speaking, all of my viewers, and then some, owning Weblogs.

Fortunately, the author of the Trib article begins to pull up on the controls about halfway through the piece, but not before more alarm sirens go off:

The pixels hadn't faded on Gallup's downbeat report when Slate.com columnist Daniel Grossman chimed in with another requiem, "Twilight of the Blogs." Grossman says: "There are troubling signs--akin to the 1999 warnings about the Internet bubble--that suggest blogs have just hit their top." Among those signs: too much corporate money trying to buy into what could be a fad (including Time Warner paying a reported $25 million for Weblogs Inc.). Is too much money chasing not enough revenue? As Grossman aptly notes: "In the end stages of any investment mania, the clueless and the greedy flood in."

Even if blogging flops as a business and doesn't attract more readership, many bloggers will still have loyal followings.

That last sentence is exactly right--in fact, it sounds very much like something I wrote last November when Pajamas Media first launched, amidst the height of the bi-partisan epidemic of Pajamas Derangement Syndrome that seemed to sweep through the Blogosphere, during the brief period that PJM was known as OSM:

The funny thing is, living in Silicon Valley, I watched lots of dot.coms crash and burn, interviewed their staffs for magazines, and had lots of friends who had signed up for all-too-brief tours of duty. And my wife has served as attorney for more than a few start-ups. I’ve also written for a surprising number of start-up magazine ventures that didn’t make it past their first year. (Not to mention writing some of the first articles for National Review Online’s nascent Financial section, some of the first pieces for Blogcritics, and starting a blog three and a half years ago, back when you still had to explain to everyone what the heck a frickin’ blog was.

You don’t have to do that any more. Thanks, Ms. Mapes! Thanks Mr. Klein!

But do I think that OSM is a sure bet? No, of course not. And I’ve never drunk the Tony Robbins-ish Kool-Aid that makes you believe that you must not think any bad thoughts at all or you’ll ruin all that positive thinking. Will OSM succeed? I don’t know--and more importantly, the members of the Complainy-American Community who’ve bitched, moaned and pecked at its ankles for the past few months really don’t know. (Jealousy and paranoia make for a bitter cocktail when mixed together.) But what’s the downside? If OSM fails, it’s not going to be the Internet equivalent of the wreck of the Penn Central: this is as demassified a business as possible, which will make long-term casualties virtually nil: Roger, Charles, Glenn, Michelle Malkin and the other "Names" aren't going to lose their massive readership. Nor will anybody else involved in the project. Do you care whether your broker works for Smith Barney or Paine-Webber if he’s been doing great work for you for a decade?

The Trib piece ends:

So blogging has a future, however indefinite. At least till Al Gore invents the Next Big Thing.

And even that's pretty bulletproof, as I noted as recently as this past week, when I explored a possible video-oriented future for blogs at TCS. To borrow from something I posted here last month, it's possible the form of blogging could change radically in the coming years, but individual self-publishing on the Internet--or, pace Al Gore, whatever its successor is called--is here to stay for a very long time, indeed.

Mark Steyn's latest Chicago Sun-Times essay begins on an utterly chilling note:

In five years' time, how many Jews will be living in France? Two years ago, a 23-year-old Paris disc jockey called Sebastien Selam was heading off to work from his parents' apartment when he was jumped in the parking garage by his Muslim neighbor Adel. Selam's throat was slit twice, to the point of near-decapitation; his face was ripped off with a fork; and his eyes were gouged out. Adel climbed the stairs of the apartment house dripping blood and yelling, "I have killed my Jew. I will go to heaven."

Is that an gripping story? You'd think so. Particularly when, in the same city, on the same night, a Jewish woman was brutally murdered in the presence of her daughter by another Muslim. You've got the making of a mini-trend there, and the media love trends.

Yet no major French newspaper carried the story.

This month, there was another murder. Ilan Halimi, also 23, also Jewish, was found by a railway track outside Paris with burns and knife wounds all over his body. He died en route to the hospital, having been held prisoner, hooded and naked, and brutally tortured for almost three weeks by a gang that had demanded half a million dollars from his family. Can you take a wild guess at the particular identity of the gang? During the ransom phone calls, his uncle reported that they were made to listen to Ilan's screams as he was being burned while his torturers read out verses from the Quran.

This time around, the French media did carry the story, yet every public official insisted there was no anti-Jewish element. Just one of those things. Coulda happened to anyone.

As James C. Bennett wrote three years ago:

The modern world was first carried forward by two great civilizations. The Anglosphere was one. The dynamic industrializing culture of 19th century Continental Europe, to which the spark of the Judaeo-Christian encounter was so important, was the other. That culture committed suicide in the '30s. Perhaps its successor is not the revival of that culture, but rather its zombie.

In considering the Holocaust, most attention has been given to its direct victims, as is appropriate. However, we must also consider that it was a form of self-administered lobotomy for Continental European culture.

Lobotomy? More like slow-motion suicide.

Update: Roger L. Simon explores a possible "French Wake-Up Call":

To protest a horrible racist murder, an estimated thirty-three thousand people, including ministers from opposing parties, marched in Paris today. This may not equal the crowds they muster for a transit workers strike, but let's hope this marks a new resistance to racism and anti-Semitism in France.

I hope so too, but it's tough to be optimistic about Old Europe's long-term prognosis.

Another Update: Power Line has numerous photos of the protest.

One More: Alexandra von Maltzan has lots more links and info.

First it was fluoridated water that was the root of all evil, originally for the Birchers, more lately for the Naderites. Then there was California's infamous Dihydrogen Monoxide panic of 2004. Nowadays, another liquid asset is cause for alarm, writes Tim Blair:

So, you like the bottled water, huh? Well, thanks for killing the planet, you landfill-clogging, petrochemical-burning, guzzle-mad Gaia haters!

As one of Tim's commenters adds:

To paraphrase Sir Humphrey, “Environmentalists like to panic, they need activity. It is their substitute for achievement.”

Heh. Personally, I've always thought W.C. Fields had the right attitude towards water...

Speaking of Hollywood movie icons, did you know that Tom & Jerry was a Zionist conspiracy? Professor Hasan Bolkhari, Iranian “mass media expert” and cultural advisor to the Iranian Education Ministry, explains it all.

Which of course, begs the question: What Would Bugs Bunny Do?

Update: More from the cartoon kingdom: "Why Mommy Squirrel Is a Democrat", Power Line's Podcast interview with artist Jeremy Zilber.

Jeff Goldstein imagines a conversation between Billy Jack and Cindy Sheehan: one's a b-movie icon of the 1970s; the other simply left her mind there.

Baron Bodissey looks at extremists of the past and present.

CBS fires up the airbrushes again, altering the frontpage of a newspaper for their 48 Hours Mystery news magazine.

Paul Berger, a self-described Englishman In New York, seems somewhat surprised by, as he calls it, The Greeting:

I have spent the past month doing research work in the city. It’s the longest I have spent in an office environment since my days booking hotel rooms in London six years ago. I’ve adjusted to the commute. I’ve adjusted to the lack of sunlight. And I’ve adjusted to eating lunch out every day. But I’m still struggling with the office greeting.

Not content with “hello” I’ve noticed many people prefer the “how are you?”. By the time I have answered “fine” we have already passed each other and the opportunity for me to return the question has gone. This leaves me feeling selfish and somewhat egotistical since I am spending my days telling everyone I am fine but never managing to inquire as to their wellbeing.

I have resolved for today, and next week, to pop the question first.

How are you--or as it's normally enunciated, at great speed, how'r'ya! is a derivation of slightly more complex greeting, as David Gelernter wrote in a absolutely terrific City Journal article ten years ago. Gelernter's piece is an almost archeological look at what life was like in New York in 1939, as America's Depression slowly but inexorably gave way to her entrance into World War II:

Nineteen thirty-nine lived in an " ought" culture. We inhabit more of a "want" culture, a desire-not-obligation culture. One of the most obvious and important consequences of the slow death between 1939 and today of American civic religion—the coherent, deeply held set of shared beliefs and ideas that bound Americans into one community—is the sweeping aside of its oughts.

The ought culture made itself felt in many ways. For example: 1939's daily experience was assembled to a far greater extent than ours out of countless small rituals—pieces of formulaic behavior that you enacted not because you feel like it, necessarily, but because it was expected of you. Because it is the proper thing, and you ought to do it.

A middle-class dinner or even breakfast of the 1930s might involve an entire family seated at table with the males in ties and the maid scurrying about. The ritual of each child's planting a breakfast kiss on seated mamma's cheek was sufficiently well known to have been included in movie scenes not evidently intended to be farcical. Hats have rules: a gentleman of course removes his when speaking to a lady on the street, removes it when a lady enters an elevator (unless the elevator is inside an office building or a store); replaces it when he steps off into the corridor. He lifts his hat as a gesture of politeness to strangers and lifts it more emphatically when he performs an outdoor informal (versus an indoor ceremonial) bow.

Nineteen thirty-nine's polite conversation is scripted and therefore ritualized to a much greater extent than ours is. "Under all possible circumstances, the reply to an introduction is 'How do you do?'" ("The taboo of taboos is 'Pleased to meet you.'") When the need arises, one says "I beg your pardon"—never, ever, "Pardon me," which is a barbarism. It goes without saying that first names are to be used only under the proper, restricted circumstances (never among strangers), and that "sir," "madam," or "miss" is an appropriate form of address.

Read the rest of Gelernter's article--while many of the buildings in Manhattan remain the same, the ubiquitous "how are you" that Berger's encountering is one of the last remnants of an "ought" culture that, depending upon your perspective, is either long since passed, or in the latter stages of twilight.

Evan Coyne Maloney has some thoughts on Dana Milbank's stunt of appearing on the Chris Matthews show last week in a hunter's orange safety vest and ski cap, and the somewhat tepid response of the Washington Post's ombudswoman:

How about admitting that opinion sometimes sneaks into the writing of even the most earnest "objective reporter"? How about doing away with the labels "reporter" versus "columnist"?

This discussion goes to the very heart of the problems that plague the modern news media. Outlets insist that their "reporters" are objective, while "columnists" aren't held to the same supposedly-stringent rules of objectivity. But what distinguishes a "reporter" from a "columnist"? If you look through many newspapers, you may have a hard time figuring out which is which. Even the Washington Post and WashingtonPost.com don't seem to agree how to categorize someone like Milbank. If two sides of the same news organization can't figure it out, how can they expect the reader to understand the distinction?

I don't think Milbank's the bad guy here. His situation is merely the result of the unrealistic set of rules and assumptions that govern the modern newsroom. Milbank's just being Milbank. If you read him regularly, you see the same kind of snarky--dare I say blog-like--attitude in his writing that you see on display when he mocks the Vice President by donning day-glo hunting gear on a national news program.

So, maybe it's time for the establishment media to rewrite its rules. The existing environment doesn't seem to lead to a very good product, and it's preventing people like Milbank from doing the sort of work that they so clearly ache to do.

I agree. (Although I'm not sure how much I'm actually looking forward to journalists going on TV dressed like Floyd R. Turbo...) The continued effects of the "mass with class" era of American newspapers are stifling journalism. When there was only one or two big city newspapers and three TV networks for the vast majority of Americans to turn to for their news, this was, arguably, a reasonable institutional tone. But between the Blogosphere, TV programming such as The Daily Show (honest Gov. Blagojevich, it's satire!) and talk radio, the universally bland tone of newspaper journalism only hurts itself.

The "New Journalism" of Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese and others in the 1960s was one attempt to update the tone of longer-form reporting. It's happening today anyhow, thanks to the Blogosphere; but maybe it's time for newspapers themselves to jump on board, much like the British media's long history of wild diversity of attitude and opinion.

Vital Perspective has photos and video from the pro-Denmark, pro-freedom of speech rally in front of Washington's Danish embassy.

Update: More photos at VodkaPundit, including sightings of Hitch (who conceived this shindig) and Andrew Sullivan.

Another Update: More photos and links, here.

More: Ian Schwartz has video of Hitchens' speech to the crowd. (Via InstaPundit.)

Yasser Arafat had an infamous habit of saying one thing in English, and something much worse in Arabic. The Davids Medienkritik blog ("Politically incorrect observations on reporting in the German media" is their slogan) discovers that Der Spiegel has a similar style, running roughshod over the German translation of a recent interview with US Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Karen Hughes, right down to the caption under the photo of Hughes:

Bush-Freundin Hughes: "Ein wunderbarer Führer"

As a commenter on Medienkritik's site note:

"Führer" is rarely used in contemporary Germany in the context of German politicians (or businesspeople). The slant in the SPIEGEL quote ("Ein wunderbarer Führer") is obvious for Germans, in particular for SPIEGEL readers. No way you would call a German politician "ein wunderbarer Führer".

Don't miss Davids Medienkritik's gallery of loaded Der Spiegel covers, as well.

(Via Ace of Spades.)

One of the better of the seemingly ubiquitous Brokeback video mash-ups:

Via the Corner, where there are links to additional Brokebackian silliness, and an article about the growing backlash to the Brokeback backlash. The recent essay by John Birmingham in the Sydney Morning Herald, on the ability of political correctness to cripple the left's sense of humor is well-worth revisiting in response.

I think I'd prefer James Bond's Astin Martin DB5, or maybe even the Batmobile itself. But the Manolo has definitely found the wheels of his dreams, in a size 97-triple-D.

Tammy Bruce has some thoughts on the recent sentence a German court passed on a man who was so incensed by the Islamofascist London 7/7 bombing that he decided to...well, he decided to do this:

The 61-year-old man, identified only as Manfred van H., was given a one-year jail sentence, suspended for five years, and ordered to complete 300 hours of community service, a district court in the western German town of Luedinghausen ruled.

Manfred van H. printed out sheets of toilet paper bearing the word "Koran" shortly after a group of Muslims carried out a series of bomb attacks in London in July 2005. He sent the paper to German television stations, magazines and some 15 mosques.

Prosecutors said that in an accompanying letter Manfred van H. called Islam's holy book a "cookbook for terrorists."

As Tammy writes:

Uh, yeah. His is an opinion that is based in the facts as he sees them. It's funny how Germany is obsessed with keeping Nazi theory from re-emerging, and in the process they're doing exactly what the Nazis did--punish those who do not confirm or dare to challenge the status quo.

Welcome to 1934.

Elsewhere in a Europe that seems obsessed with turning back the clock to the Bad Old Years, a Dutch lawmaker proposes forced abortions to stop "Unwanted Children":

Alderman Marianne van den Anker of the Leefbaar Rotterdam (LR) party says the forced abortion and contraception would reduce the incidence of child abuse.

Van den Anker has two children and is the official in charge of the city's health issues. [...]

Van den Anker said Antillean teenage mothers, drug addicts and those who are mentally disabled should be forced to have abortions and use contraception if they are having sex.

Nothing like a little eugenics to complete the 1930s picture.

Daniel Henninger writes that when it comes to politics, it's Tex Avery's world, we just live in it:

Witnessing the political reaction this week to the administration's Dubai ports-management decision, the phrase that insistently called out from memory was the title of a famous essay by the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "Defining Deviancy Down." One would not have thought it possible, but Washington's political class is defining our politics down.

After nearly seven days of elevating the Cheney bird-hunting accident to the level of a national crisis, now comes this week's flap over managing the ports. To be sure, the matter of secure U.S. ports trumps the hunting of quail as an affaire d'état. But it was the strikingly low quality of the politicians' commentary and behavior that attracted notice.

Within hours, if not minutes, Sen. Hillary Clinton and Rep. Robert Menendez announced "emergency" legislation to "ban foreign governments from controlling operations at our ports." No matter that most of the current operators of our ports are from Denmark, Britain and, uh-oh, China. Chuck Schumer: "It's hard to believe that this administration would be so out of touch with the American people's national security concerns." Yes, that is hard to believe.

Once the match was put to the ports decision in Washington, the bonfire spread quickly to the governors' mansions. New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, until recently a U.S. senator, told Ron Insana he was filing a federal lawsuit to thwart the move because the roads near the Port of Newark are "the two most dangerous miles in America." They are? Maybe he should put warning signs on the Jersey Turnpike.

What we have here is the dawn of the new Yosemite Sam school of national politics. Put any news event in front of our politicians now--Hurricane Katrina, Terri Schiavo, Dick Cheney's quail or this week the ports--and like Bugs Bunny's hair-triggered nemesis they'll start spraying the landscape with wild remarks and opinions decoupled from what is knowable about these events. Wait to learn the facts--as almost alone, Sen. John McCain, suggested? Why bother?

As Henninger notes, it's a tripartite issue: Republicans, Democrats, and the media are all responsible for creating the Looney Tune world of Washington.

Henninger writes, "in our jacked-up media age, first impressions--false or true--becomes powerful and hard to alter". And the conventional wisdom is that the Blogosphere has done the most since the development of 24 hour cable news to jack up the speed that first impressions are formed. So it's been quite fascinating to watch the second, and even third opinions form regarding the Dubai port control issue. That's a level of thoughtfulness that's absolutely impossible in, say, television news, and is nearly almost as rare in newspapers as well.

There's a curious flip-over that occurs in any celebrity's career when he or she comes out as a member of the left. On the one hand, the fullblown brass ring of Schwarzenegger/Bruce Willis/Mel Gibson-level megastardom becomes much more difficult to obtain, because you've given audiences in red state middle America a great reason to avoid your movies. On the other, your career is set: you'll never not each lunch in this town again, to mangle the title of the late Julia Phillips' famous tell-all.

Take for example, Rob Reiner, whom Hugh Hewitt has been hammering all week. (Click here and just keep scrolling.)

Just in time for Christmas, his latest film, Rumor Has It was released, starring Jennifer Aniston of Friends fame. Two months later, it's grossed a paltry $42m in domestic box office.

Hey, everybody's entitled to strike out now and then, especially with a public as fickle as ours. But if you look at the box office returns of Reiner's movies on IMDB.com for literally the last decade, the last time he directed a film that grossed higher than its budget in the US was the leftwing-lovefest The American President in 1995, and even then, just barely. (About three million over its $62m budget, according to the IMDB. George Lucas and James Cameron don't even get out of bed unless they know their films are going to gross a few hundred million dollars.) And yet somehow, a studio manages to assign Reiner a film to direct every couple of years.

Wonder why? Tim Cavanaugh explains, in his 2002 article for Reason:

From merely being another Hollywood player, he has now become a quasi-governmental official - Chairman of the California Children and Families Commission - with a leadership role in disbursing $700 million in annual tobacco tax revenues. This is just the latest feather in the cap of the successful director, producer, actor and intellectual beacon (to Hillary Clinton during her village-taking days). It's common to marvel at how far Reiner has risen above early typecasting as Mike "Meathead" Stivic, the sanctimonious mooch responsible for so many of Archie Bunker's most painful hours on the TV classic All In the Family. (You can track Reiner's rising profile by how his relationship to Prop 10 is described in the press; while early reports called him the "driving force" or "inspiration" behind the measure, the Chronicle now designates him the law's "author.")

On closer inspection, though, it's not always easy to see the difference between the freeloader who lectured Archie on women's lib and overpopulation while helping himself to the Bunker groceries (a practice that no doubt contributed to the Hollywood triple threat's relentless supersizing), and the tiresome busybody who can't stop haranguing us with obscure data points like the fact that smoking is bad for you and that children should be fed and changed on a regular basis.

More alarmingly, the fully grown Reiner has access to a fridge far more capacious than Archie's, and his motivations have grown, if anything, more narrowly personal. In describing his motivations for Prop 10, the Meathead consistently describes how his adherence to the first-three-years cult came out of therapy after the breakup of his first marriage. "It's no great revelation that my early experiences as a child informed my relationship to others," the son of funnyman Carl Reiner confides to Horizon magazine.

It's quite a leap, however, to extrapolate from a tough Hollywood childhood to a wholesale belief in the early-years theory, "enriched" learning environments, a half-decade window of mental "hardwiring," and the efficacy of pumping Mozart into the uterus. The early-years assumption has taken some knocks in recent years, most notably the publication of John T. Bruer's The Myth of the First Three Years, which argues that cognitive development occurs throughout life, and that much of the effort spent on French for tots could more profitably be spent addressing the more basic needs of kids. Rather than addressing the Bruer argument, early-years proponents have typically shifted emphasis, cautioning readers against "taking to heart [the book's] negative messages" and redoubling calls for Early Head Start and other dubious attempts to pump babies up. Since everybody agrees infants and toddlers need attention, why ask what type of attention?

That close-enough-for-rock-n-roll attitude informs Prop 10's other plank - reducing smoking through excise taxes. California, whose per-capita cigarette consumption is the second lowest in the nation, was a poor test case for this method, as well as a poor source of tobacco-based revenue. Prop 10 funds are parceled among California's 58 counties according to birthrate. Los Angeles County's ambitious program is a direct result of its population's fertility; other counties, according to the Chronicle are having a harder time getting such efforts off the ground in the face of declining tobacco revenues.

Reiner is the poster-child for what so many in Hollywood yearn to achieve: not just politicizing entertainment, but using entertainment as a stepping stone to actual political power.

That the product that got him there fails to make a profit these days is as irrelevant as whether or not his social programs work in California. Reiner has no clout at the box office, but plenty in studio boardrooms: he's guaranteed to direct Hollywood films with tens of millions of dollars in budgets as long as he wants.

Update: Rob's fan comes out swinging in his defense.

I received a nice email this morning from Mickey Kaus on the TCS Daily article about Web video--and a reminder that he has his own v-blog, where he debates issues with Pajamas' own David Corn.

A year from now, if I do a sequel to this piece, no doubt there'll be lots more joining them. If I was a network TV producer, I'd be scared. Or, as I wrote in the TCS piece, hopefully smart enough to start co-opting the burgeoning Videosphere.

When two men of such diverse viewpoints as Bill Bennett and Alan Dershowitz agree, it's worth noting:

So far as we can tell, a new, twin policy from the mainstream media has been promulgated: (a) If a group is strong enough in its reaction to a story or caricature, the press will refrain from printing that story or caricature, and (b) if the group is pandered to by the mainstream media, the media then will go through elaborate contortions and defenses to justify its abdication of duty. At bottom, this is an unacceptable form of not-so-benign bigotry, representing a higher expectation from Christians and Jews than from Muslims.

Exactly.

Of course, by Harvard standards, the two would probably on the same page, as Dershowitz noted to Hugh Hewitt:

"In America, I am left-center, but certainly closer to the left. And on the Harvard arts and sciences faculty, I would be on the extreme right."

Which speaks volumes towards the intellectual diversity in academia.

Update:Ed Morrissey is much more optimistic about the repercussions of Dershowitz and Bennett's op-ed than I am:

The utter failure of the press to inform its readers and to defend free speech and open criticism has been remarked several times on this blog, but this effort by Dershowitz and Bennett will have major repercussions for the media in the politics of the day. We saw this coming with the media's love affair with the McCain-Feingold Act, in which Congress basically bribed the media with an exemption to the near-ban on political speech they imposed on almost everyone else. Once someone sells out, it becomes much easier to convince them to do it again.

When leading lights from across the political spectrum rise up to condemn the media for their cowardice -- I can find no other word -- the media can no longer hide behind a partisan analysis of the critique. They have exposed their own pusillanimity, and all Dershowitz and Bennett do here is shine a light on it.

And this will change...what, exactly? The press have been, in their own way, Victorian gentlemen probably since the end of World War II, and the great consolidation of city newspapers began their march, replacing a wide variety of opinion and vigorous muckracking with "Mass With Class". The media knew they were no longer operating in a vacuum during the 2004 election (Drudge, Fox, the Blogosphere, et al), yet a self-described "objective" media paraded its bias and their limitations for all to see. Why should this latest example change anything?

The press is what is. I'd rather help build alternatives than call for reforms from within at this late date.

James Taranto frequently likes to refer to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer as being "intelligent as a post". Sometimes it seems fiiting though.

Here's how yesterday's story on University of Washington's recent attempts to block a memorial to legendary alumnus Gregory "Pappy" Boyington begins:

After rejecting a memorial to Marine Corps fighter ace Gregory "Pappy" Boyington, a University of Washington alumnus -- and feeling the sting of talk radio, television commentators and the e-mail-sending public -- UW students may now back a tribute to all former students who have received the Medal of Honor.

A resolution calling for students to recognize five Medal of Honor recipients has been submitted to the student government, and it will probably be considered next week. Student government leaders briefly discussed the issue at a meeting Tuesday night.

The university itself, which received hundreds of e-mails about the rejection of a memorial to Boyington, is also trying to cool public tempers that student leaders raised when, among other things, some questioned whether the university should honor a Marine who had killed people or another rich white man.

At no point does the article comment negatively on the racist (not to mention sexist and classist) "another rich white man" slur, or even mention that the late Boyington was actually half-Sioux Indian--which is pretty ironic for a newspaper published in a town that was itself named after an American Indian chief.

And as the Paradosis blog notes, Boyington wasn't exactly rich, either, despite having actor Robert Conrad portray him every week in the mid-1970s on NBC:

Also, clearly, the student who made the racist statement never met him because I will tell you that you could not mistake the Sioux in him. And while he did write a best-selling book (best selling authors are a dime a dozen), he was never really a rich man...rather he spent most of his last days wandering through Air Shows reliving the glory days, never in any grand luxury that I saw. He seemed a very nice man, who despite his personal problems did some extraordinary things to help defend freedom and defeat tyranny and injustice.

It sounds a bit like the late Boyington is still doing just that, today.

Tim Blair: master of the punchline.

Just to tie our two major themes today together, Pajamas Media has several videos, featuring Roger L. Simon interviewing key figures on Iraq's WMDs and the recordings Saddam made before his fall in 2003.

Don't miss them.

There's a horrible pair of before and after photos on Free Republic.com of the damage done in a bombing of a 1,200-year-old Shiite shrine, which reduced it to rubble. Hugh Hewitt has links to several other sources for details. And Glenn Reynolds writes:

If Danish cartoons could create riots worldwide against the defamers of Islam, you'd think that bombing of mosques would create anti-terrorist marches all over.

Since the majority of the cartoon riots appear to have been organized top-down, sadly, I doubt too many spontaneous anti-terror protests will begin.

But I'd love to be proven wrong.

One reason why women in particular should consider launching videocasts of their own on the Web: to break the peroxide apartheid of cable TV.

(And no, this does not mean I think Virginia Postrel should change her hair color if and when DynamistTV goes live.)

If I'm responsible for inspiring what is to come, then all I can do is to apologize profusely to America in advance: "And we have HughTV on the way, so Ed is once again ahead of his time".

As that cryptic hint implies, Hugh Hewitt, and Duane, his producer are being very secretive as to what the final product will look like. But one fellow closely associated with the project seems to have smuggled out a single frame of the test footage.

"As you surely realize", James D. Miller writes, the Lawrence Summers controversy at Harvard "mirrors the fight over the Mohamed cartoons" in the press.

Read the whole thing.

Update: Related thoughts from Mark Tapscott.

In his Spenglerian magnum-opus "It's the Demography, Stupid" essay last month, Mark Steyn wrote:

This ought to be the left's issue. I'm a conservative--I'm not entirely on board with the Islamist program when it comes to beheading sodomites and so on, but I agree Britney Spears dresses like a slut: I'm with Mullah Omar on that one. Why then, if your big thing is feminism or abortion or gay marriage, are you so certain that the cult of tolerance will prevail once the biggest demographic in your society is cheerfully intolerant? Who, after all, are going to be the first victims of the West's collapsed birthrates? Even if one were to take the optimistic view that Europe will be able to resist the creeping imposition of Sharia currently engulfing Nigeria, it remains the case that the Muslim world is not notable for setting much store by "a woman's right to choose," in any sense.

The left's embrace of Islamofascism is, at least on the surface, little different than their reactionary embrace of the Soviet Union in the 1970s: it's the old "The Enemy Of my Enemy Is My Friend" meme, but starring the Alec Guinness of Lawrence of Arabia, rather than the Alec Guinness of Dr. Zhivago. (I was going to say Omar Sharif, but he's too much of a good guy in both movies.)

In the New York Observer, Bruce Feinstein takes the moral equivalency it to its natural conclusion: meet the New York Times' new Ombudsmullah: Ali bin-Zabar!

His first headline will undoubtedly be:

Is The New York Times A Sharia Newspaper?

Of Course It Is

(Via Power Line.)

As a follow-up of sorts to the TCS piece earlier today on video and the Blogosphere, I have a review of Adobe's Premiere Elements 2.0 video editing program, over at Pajamas Theater 3000. (I wrote about its previous version for PC World last year.)

If you're looking for cheap ($100) software to edit camcorder tapes to upload them to the Web or master them to DVD, this could be a great program to quickly get into the video game.

For quite a while now, Adobe's Premiere Elements DVD-authoring program has managed to combine a variety of attractive features at an extremely affordable price--it streets for about a C-note. All of which makes the program suitable for a wide range of applications and users. It's certainly easy enough for beginners to plug in a camcorder and transfer and edit their first DVDs, but it's powerful enough to create some surprisingly professional looking finished discs.

However, as I wrote in PC World last year, there were several areas where the program lacked horsepower, especially when compared with more full-featured programs (not the least of which is Premiere Elements' own big-brother, Adobe Premiere).

Several of these areas have been rectified with version 2.0, which we'll address in a moment. But first, an overview of the basic concepts of the program and the minimum horsepower a computer needs to run it.

Minimum Requirements

With a program like Premiere Elements, it helps to have a fairly speedy computer and a fair amount of RAM. Adobe recommends running the program on a Windows XP PC with an Intel Pentium 4, M, D, or Extreme Edition or AMD Opteron or Athlon 64 and 256 MB of RAM; anything beyond those minimums would be all the better. I used a machine with 2.5 gigahertz Pentium 4 and a gig of RAM, and the program ran very smoothly.

A FireWire card and a FireWire-equipped digital video recorder are both fairly essential elements for getting the most out of Premiere Elements; the program is tailor-made for them. (If your PC lacks a FireWire card--as mine did until earlier this year--installing such a card is a breeze; for most computers, only a screwdriver is necessary.) Having both of those components will make importing video a surprisingly seamless task.

Essentially, the DV camcorder and Premiere Elements merge into one component. Pressing fast-forward, play or rewind on Premiere Elements' GUI sends those commands to the DV camcorder, which responds accordingly. And another button on the GUI will capture the camcorder footage and import into the PC and into Premiere Elements. (And of course, if your camcorder has A/V inputs, a conventional VCR can be connected to it, and then via the FireWire cable, video can also be input into Premiere Elements).

A new feature of PE 2.0 makes the program compatible with camcorders and PC's supporting the USB 2.0 standard. Otherwise, it's possible to import video via a video-USB interface such as Pinnacle Systems' Dazzle 150, or a comparable device.

PE's Great GUI

Once data is imported, Premiere Elements' graphical user interface is extremely intuitive, and makes editing, then inserting special effects a snap.

Premiere Elements stores all of a project's video in its media window. These elements can then be dragged and dropped into the program's timeline, where they can be edited and modified.

By clicking on "File" then "Interpret Footage", it's possible to set the aspect ratio of any clip stored in Premiere Elements. This is useful both to ensure that all of a project's footage is in the same aspect ratio (whether it's 4X3, 16X9 or 2:1, all of which are supported by PE), or to customize your DVD for a specific play-back format.

This is highly useful, especially for projects with a disparate variety of sources. Premiere Elements works with video in a wide range of formats, which include DV, AVI, MOV, MPEG/MPE/MPG and WMV.

The program also allows for a reasonable amount of straightforward audio editing. It won't make you give up Cakewalk's Sonar, or Steinberg's Cubase, but for many applications, it can get the job done. Premiere Elements accepts a variety of Windows-supported audio formats including WAV, AVI, MP3, and WMA. So it's possible to have a background song from an MP3, sound effects in WAV, and the dialogue in the default Windows Media format from the video it was recorded with--or in any other combination. (PE 2.0 will import Dolby Digital AC-3 files, but exports them as stereo. Adobe still appears to want keep surround sound the province of its full-blown version of Premiere.)

The Timeline: Premiere Elements' Nerve Center

Whether working with video, still photos, or some combination of the two, photos and video are edited and conformed via Premiere Element's timeline window, which is where the bulk of the work in the program is carried out.

The timeline has a time stretch tool, making it easy to adjust the duration of a shot, either by dragging it forward and slowing it down, or by right clicking on the shot and typing in a percentage number for its speed. 100 percent is normal speed, a smaller number speeds it up (by reducing the frame count), a number greater than 100 percent slows it down, and a negative number reverses the shot's motion.

Premiere Elements also works with BMPs, GIFs (including animated GIFs), JPEGs, TIFFs, PSDs, and other still photo formats, which allows the program to create a slideshow on DVD, for those producing, for example, a wedding production that combines professional videography with still photos shot by the attendees. To create a slideshow, simply insert still photos (such as gifs or jpegs) into the media window, and then click it's "MORE" command, which brings up a dropdown window. Click on "Create Slideshow". A dialogue box will allow you to adjust the duration the images display.

Menu Templates Now Allow For Motion Video

If all of this makes the program sound like a very user-friendly program for someone new to video editing you're absolutely correct. But the new menu templates included with the program make it even more useful to professionals who wish to use it as an element (pardon the pun) of their trade.

While PE 1.0 had a variety of extremely serviceable menu templates they were silent and static; their lack of audio and motion video was an obvious defect, which version 2.0 corrects. It includes several menus with either or both, in addition to the previous static templates.

What's the bottom-line on PE 2.0? With its street price of $100 or less, Adobe's Premiere Elements Version 2.0 packs a surprising amount of bang for the buck, even when compared to its full-featured $700 big brother, Premiere Pro.

Daniel Rubin of the Philadelphia Inquier's "Bling" Weblog pays homage to the mystical Church of Chuck Norris Worship.

If Charles Bronson had lived longer, or been born a decade younger, he'd probably be enjoying similar sorts of encomiums today.

Or not: There's no equivalent Stallone-mania these days, is there?

No, not sexy--sexist, as the great Spinal Tap riff goes: Riding Sun and Newsweek document how Europe's economic policies are holding women back.

Which seems only fair--Europe's economic policies are holding everyone there back.