For those musicians in the audience--or those laypersons interested in home recording in general, I thought I’d explain how I put the Pajamas Podcast theme song together.

The first step was booting up Cakewalk Sonar, my primary recording program. I then began to fire up various software synth applets and started experimenting.

A couple of months ago, Cakewalk introduced their Rapture software synthesizer, which contained a variety of sequencer patterns. These are pre-programmed riffs designed to unfold as the musician holds the key or keys down. Play one note and get ten--or a hundred. That certainly appeals to me!

Apparently, one of the programmers at Cakewalk is a big Blade Runner fan, as both Rapture and Project 5 Rev 2 have contained patches strongly reminiscent of the sound Vangelis invented for that seminal movie. In the case of Rapture, there was a sequence patch inspired by the Vangelis’ sequencer on the film’s end titles. I knew I wanted to start with that as the “music concrete” to build the theme around, so the first step was experimenting to find a tempo that the patch sounded best at (about 110 beats per minute).

The next was to find a drum pattern that sounded nice against the sequencer. I have a collection of various drum loops, mostly from Sony’s Acid Loops series. One of their more offbeat (heh) drum collections is called “Zero Gravity Beats”, and a pattern from that disc matched up nicely with the Blade Runner sequencer.

I knew the theme wasn’t going to be much longer than 30 second at most, so I laid down 30 seconds of the Blade Runner sequencer in A--which meant programming one long A note, and the sequencer would automatically chug up and down in its pattern, always returning to that note.

I then decided to craft a simple chord sequence in that key, and found another sequencer pattern in Rapture that sounds great as a sustained chord. It would hold the chord for almost a bar, and then play a sequence of notes as it trailed it off. So I played a series of simple acending chords in the key of A: A major, B major, C#minor, D major, E major, returning to A.

With two layers of synths burbling away, I figured some electric guitar would sound great for contrast, so I dusted off my Gibson 1959 Les Paul reissue, and fired up Line6’s aging but still very functional GuitarPort, which allows me to plug in an electric guitar’s standard quarter-inch guitar cable via its floor pedal into the computer’s USB port.

I chose GuitarPort’s “Brit Hi-Gain” patch, which convincingly models a late 1960s Marshall stack--the perfect amp for a fluid, lightly distorted Les Paul lead sound.

I then improvised a few melody ideas on the Les Paul and eventually, started recording them. The final lead line is the best of two takes spliced seamlessly together.

I then edited the drum loops, pasting in various drum rolls and cymbal crashes to the give the aural impression of a drummer reacting in sympathy with the lead guitarist.

Sometimes ideas that are clichés are useful because they just can’t be beat, so I launched Zero-G’s Nostalgia software synthesizer and found its recreation of the infamous Fairlight “Orchestra 5” patch. I say “infamous” because it seemed that every recording MTV ran in the mid-1980s had one or twenty orchestra hits from this patch. Frankie Goes To Hollywood seemed to have based their career on it.

But that was twenty years ago, and orchestra hits seemed like a useful way to kick off and end the song, so I dropped in a few hits: one at the start, and a couple at the end.

Then I added a simple Fender bass part using another software synthesizer. I chose a very conventional bass sound to contrast with all of the non-conventional synth sounds in the frequencies above it.

Since it was the lead instrument and would feature prominently in the mix, I wanted to give the Les Paul a slightly more fluid, modern sound, so I fired up Izotope’s Spectron processing applet, and ran the guitar their “Sweet & Sour” patch, which processed the guitar with a light combination of delay, filtering and smearing, that’s a tad more exotic than the typical chorus or flanger patch.

Izotope’s effects typically sound great, but are very processor-intensive. So a track with one of their treatments on it usually won’t play in time with the rest of instruments. To offset this, I first cloned the original Les Paul track and then muted its original version. Next I processed the cloned track with Spectron. I used the original track as a guide to visually slide the new version backwards in time so that it lined up with the old track.

The song was beginning to take shape, but it didn’t seem quite done yet.

the chord sequencer part served as a nice counterpoint to the start of the lead guitar part. But as the piece progressed, I decided to introduce a second guitar part to add a little additional excitement. So I took off the Les Paul and plugged my Fender 1952 Telecaster reissue into the same GuitarPort patch and played some simple licks, in a higher register than the Les Paul’s lines. It was also on the Tele that I played the bent, heavily vibrato-ed A note that i mixed in under the first orchestra hit.

After listening to the track as it stood, I wanted some interesting noise or effect to subtly begin the tune before the first orchestra hit went “boom!”. I rifled through my collection of Acid Loops from Bill Laswell’s collections, and found a nifty tape rewinding effect--it was part of a collection of DJs scratching records and creating other hip-hop/techno licks. The symbolism of the podcast starting with a tape rewinding seemed irresistible, and even if nobody “got” the effect, it at least added some subliminal ambient weirdness to create some subtle initial tension, resolved when the actual instruments enter.

Finally, I mixed everything down to a stereo .Wav file adding some subtle reverb on most of the instruments to bind them together, and processed the entire track with Izotope’s Ozone mastering applet, to give it all a nice professional sheen.

If that sounds like a lot of work, well, a lot of it is based on tried and true techniques I’ve either learned or developed over several years. The whole thing from start to finish took an evening--a very pleasant evening indeed, as I find music recording to be an extremely rewarding hobby.

Hope you liked the finished result--please tune in each week to the podcast it was created for!

Jane Jacobs, who wrote the hugely influental The Death and Life of Great American Cities (see our posts here and here for more) in 1961 has passed away at age 89. Orrin Judd has an extensive write-up of her life and career.

AP reports that Ricky Williams will sit out another NFL season, after violating the NFL's substance abuse policy for the fourth time:

The suspension represents a financial blow for Williams, who owes the Dolphins $8.6 million for breaching his contract when he retired in 2004. His return last season was motivated partly by the need for a paycheck, and that may be a reason for him to return in 2007.

Drugs versus millions of dollars and superstardom. It would seem like an easy tradeoff for most men, but Ricky apparently can't put the demon weed (and/or other substanced banned by the NFL) on hold until he retires.

Wrong side of the aisle, but otherwise, this was an easy prediction:

While I think Snow is a great choice myself if he does indeed accept the position, expect an endless amount of "Snow Job" headlines from first leftwing bloggers, and eventually the legacy media.

And here's the first!

Seriously though, assuming all the rumors are true, it's going to fun--I think--watching Snow sparring with the White House press corps. As a journalist himself, hopefully he'll know what not to say, which is half the job's role.

Update: John Hinderaker writes, "It's Tony Snow!":

The White House announced tonight that Fox News radio host Tony Snow will be the new White House press secretary, replacing Scott McClellan.

Tony is one of the world's nice people. He is also a close student of the news, and I think he's been known to read our site from time to time. His congeniality and media background will buy him some popularity with the reporters who cover the White House. But essentially all of them are partisan Democrats, so that good will will last for about a week. What the White House really needs is someone who can push back aggressively against the liberal tilt of the media, and make the administration's case directly to the people. Tony Snow is equipped to do this, I think; the question is, will he?

I think he might. Even a few nice, "You don't really mean that, do you Helen?" sort of jibes of the type that Ari Fleischer was a master at, might be enough to begin to (a) shake up the White House press corps again and (b) make them look even more like highly-partisan fools with a lead pipe tone when they react by sticking their claws into Snow and his classic nice guy Teflon delivery.

Such gestures will also continue, and ideally, accelerate the pattern of The Bush Thesis of legacy media decertification that Jay Rosen first named back in 2004. As Rosen described it, it was a wildly postmodern theory: deliberately turning the rapacious instincts of the press back onto themselves to discredit a hostile liberal media, and provide endless material for conservative pundits and the Blogosphere, all of which--on paper, at least--makes the president look better in the process. (It helps to have coherent, logical policies popular with your base of voters, of course.) And unlike his ineffectual immediate predecessor, Snow seems to be ideally suited to resuming the strategery, increasingly important as mid-term elections loom closer.

Found via Power Line, Thomas Joscelyn lists the top ten reasons behind what he calls "The New McCarthyism":

My new Daily Standard column, which builds on my blog posts concerning the whole Mary McCarthy matter, is now up. While there is some doubt surrounding the exact reasons for the CIA's termination of Mary McCarthy at this point, there is no doubt that the media has been quick to lionize her. On Sunday, for example, The New York Times ran a ridiculous piece that argued McCarthy had an "independent streak" because she challenged the Clinton administration on its decision to destroy a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant named al-Shifa.

I say that the Times piece was ridiculous because the Old Grey Lady left out or spun nearly every salient fact surrounding the matter. Now, I realize that the strike on al-Shifa was controversial. Many public commentators to this day insist that the strike was a mistake. Christopher Hitchens made this argument for Slate yesterday. But, as I point out in my Daily Standard piece, the public discussion of the events in August 1998 has been quite lacking. The New York Times, in particular, has made no real attempt to understand the facts of the matter.

Here's but one item on Joscelyn's list:

Much of the criticism of the al-Shifa strike centers on a soil sample taken outside the facility that purportedly contained traces of EMPTA, a precursor used in the production of VX nerve gas, which is a particularly nasty weapon. If you read the Times account you would think that this was the strongest, or even the only, piece of evidence used to justify the strike.

That's not the case. As I recount in my piece, President Clinton authorized the intelligence community to discuss the multiple threads of evidence used to justify the strike. One thread, in particular, was more important than the others. The NSA intercepted communications between the father of Iraq's chemical weapons program, Emad Al Ani, and the plant's management. Thus, the soil sample was not the only, nor even the strongest piece of evidence used.

As Joscelyn concludes:

These are 10 quick facts concerning August 1998. There are dozens more. It takes willful ignorance to pretend that none of this happened.

Read the rest.

Jim Geraghty is right on the money:

Dear Republican lawmakers,

Please take this idea (eliminating the federal tax on gas and diesel for sixty days) and run with it. Take the support of Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey and argue that this is bipartisan and make the Democrats vote for or against temporary tax relief for American drivers. If everyone votes for it, then great. Let the Democrats argue that they thought of it first. All the voters will remember in November is that gas prices dropped 18 cents a gallon (unleaded) and 24 cents a gallon (leaded) and that a GOP Congress and a GOP president got it done.

Just some free advice.

Hugh Hewitt also agrees that this is an idea that truly needs to be implemented--let's see the left put their cards on the table.

Spain apparently isn't content to merely rent Planet of the Apes on DVD; they want to live it out in real life:

The Spanish Socialist Party will introduce a bill in the Congress of Deputies calling for “the immediate inclusion of (simians) in the category of persons, and that they be given the moral and legal protection that currently are only enjoyed by human beings.” The PSOE’s justification is that humans share 98.4% of our genes with chimpanzees, 97.7% with gorillas, and 96.4% with orangutans.

The party will announce its Great Ape Project at a press conference tomorrow. An organization with the same name is seeking a UN declaration on simian rights which would defend ape interests “the same as those of minors and the mentally handicapped of our species.”

According to the Project, “Today only members of the species Homo sapiens are considered part of the community of equals. The chimpanzee, the gorilla, and the orangutan are our species’s closest relatives. They possess sufficient mental faculties and emotional life to justify their inclusion in the community of equals.”

It's a mad house. A mad house!

Theodore Dalrymple recently explored the boorish behavior of modern Londoners:

The argument goes something like this: formality is etiquette, and etiquette is a manifestation of an unjust, class-ridden, patriarchal society. The rejection of etiquette and the formality it entails is therefore a sign that one is on the side of the angels, that is to say, of the egalitarians. Modern egalitarians, at least in Britain, do not content themselves with the kind of abstract or formal equality before the law that allows any amount of difference in wealth, status, taste, and sensibility; they demand some progress towards equalization of everything, including manners.

Of course, egalitarians are just as attached as everyone else to their own material possessions and wealth and have no real intention of forgoing them by radical redistribution, at any rate, of their own money and possessions. The struggle for equality—of the actual rather than the formal kind—has therefore to be transferred to fields in which it will cost the egalitarian nothing, or nothing material and financial.

What better way to prove your egalitarian credentials than by adopting the supposedly free and easy, utterly informal manners of those at the bottom of the social scale? The freer and easier the better, for such informality demonstrates another quality beloved of, and praised by, intellectuals: a superiority to the dictates of convention. Thus you can never be quite informal or unconventional enough.

In Britain, this has led in short order to the rejection of the most elementary of social rules. Young Britons now appear to think, for example, that the function of empty seats on trains is as a receptacle for their feet. (Why they should be the footweariest generation in history is a mystery, unless their behavior is considered as a deliberate challenge to convention.) A passenger who draws the attention of a young adult to the anti-social presence of his feet upon a seat will be met either by a torrent of abuse or, if the person doing it is better-educated, by moral self-justification. The last time I said anything about it, the young woman in question, by no means unpleasant, pointed out that her feet were clean, she having first removed her shoes, and that therefore she was within her rights. I was left searching for a Cartesian point from which to prove beyond all possible doubt that putting your feet up on seats in trains was wrong. It is a wearisome business trying to prove from first epistemological principles in every instance of minor public misconduct that it is morally wrong, especially when every failure to make the case is a justification for further such misconduct. It is strange how egalitarianism results in a rabid form of individualism, an angry individualism without worthwhile individuality.

Young women patients of mine who came from middle-class homes would routinely put their feet on the chair in which they were sitting in my consulting room. Patients chewed gum while speaking to me or ate snacks and drank soft drinks from cans (leaving them on the floor beside the chair when they had finished) as I inquired about their medical histories. A friend of mine, a doctor, told me how one of his patients had made her social arrangements for the evening on her cell phone while he was performing a gynecological examination on her.

This excess of informality is very undignified and unattractive and results in a society constantly on edge, even in the smallest of interactions.

As Glenn Reynolds notes in his rejoinder to Daniel Henninger in TCS Daily, the absence of manners in today's society impacts the Web as well (how could it not?) and it's been a long time coming:

The "let it all hang out" ethos predates TCP/IP. And cable TV and hip-hop were around long before the Internet had much effect on American culture. And the truly defining moments of culture-shift are pretty old, too: Black-power salutes at the 1968 Olympics, the appearance of televised cursing on Norman Lear's All in the Family, the abandonment of court decorum at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. And it seems to me that it's pretty hard to blame the Internet for what's on TV now, too. Instead, it seems to be a general cultural phenomenon -- the same thing that has people attending church, or dining out, in shorts and flip-flops. Disinhibition isn't just for the Internet. It has become general, and the notion of behaving better when in the public eye has taken quite a beating. Henninger's focus on the Internet misses the point: His own examples suggest that if people are behaving badly on the Internet, it's because they're behaving badly everywhere.

Henninger seems -- like a lot of newspaper people these days -- to be focusing on problems with the Internet not so much because the Internet is a problem, generally, as because it's a problem for, well, newspaper people. The newspaper industry is sinking financially, and the Internet is getting blamed not only for that, but for anything else that's handy. That's too bad, though, because once you strip away the paranoia and FUD-spreading, Henninger has something of a point. Political discourse, of course, has been going downhill since, well, about 1968 too. (Or maybe 1967, with Barbara Garson's scurrilous play, MacBird, which featured a necrophile LBJ exulting over JFK's assassination.) Not that we ever enjoyed the kind of golden age that some social critics today might imply, but people certainly did, in general, maintain a degree of decorum, or respect for office, that vanished with the generalized hatred of LBJ and Richard Nixon. And things have certainly gone downhill since, if that's possible.

In my own corner of the media world, the blogosphere, things seem to have gone downhill too, with personal attacks, efforts (sometimes successful) to get people fired, and worse becoming more common. It's reached the point, in fact, that bloggers on the left and right are actually talking about how to raise the tone.

I'm very much behind that effort. Name-calling isn't argument, and in fact personal attacks get in the way of actual argument. They encourage division and ideological cocooning: You might not mind a site that calls your ideas wrong or dumb, but you probably won't spend much time visiting sites that call you, personally, evil.

But you don't get over name-calling by engaging in name-calling, and that's basically what Henninger is doing. Things were better before those unwashed types got to share in the public square. Bloggers, Henninger implies, are unfit for public discourse. But there's another name for bloggers: readers. And more-than-usually interested readers, too. Newspapers are losing readers while dissing bloggers. Or, more accurately, newspapers are losing readers while dissing readers. Go figure.

Indeed^TM.

As I wrote in TCS Daily back in February, there's been an explosion of self-produced video on the Internet recently. The latest example is Michelle Malkin's Hot Air, which combines very professional-looking DIY video and a blog--stop by there today.

CNN is reporting that Tony Snow "is likely to accept the job as White House press secretary, succeeding Scott McClellan".

Jay Stephenson has some thoughts. While I think Snow is a great choice myself if he does indeed accept the position, expect an endless amount of "Snow Job" headlines from first leftwing bloggers, and eventually the legacy media.

If Hillary gets in, can we expect Larry King to be offered the same gig in 2009? And while we ponder that, here's an example of staggeringly bad political press management.

An interview is just an interview. But a good cigarette is a smoke.

David Mastio links to Arthur Schlesinger Jr's op-ed in the Washington Post yeasterday and asks, "Which source is a more reliable repository for historical fact":

A) An op-ed in the Pulitzer-winning Washington Post written by noted historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

or

B) The Wikipedia written by some guys on the Internet

For a dead-tree guy like me, it is surprisingly debatable.

In an op-ed attacking President Bush published in today’s Washington Post, Schlesinger states, “However, both Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, veterans of the First World War, explicitly ruled out preventive war against Joseph Stalin's attempt to dominate Europe.”

Ahem, while it is true that President Truman fought bravely in Europe during World War I. Not only did Eisenhower never fire a shot in anger during the war to end all wars, he spent the war assigned in the states.

If the Washington Post and Schlesinger want to stick by the claim that Eisenhower is a World War I veteran, then our current President Bush is a Vietnam veteran. Just like Ike, Bush was assigned in the states during Vietnam and just like Ike President Bush volunteered to go.

If I were one of those guys who's always going on about media bias, I might note how odd it is that Schlesinger and the Post would feel the need to buff the military credentials of Eisenhower in order to make President Bush look bad.

Of course, Schlesinger's done far greater buffings of reputations from time to time.

In the middle of defending Michael Hiltzik's cover version of The Who's Quadrophenia ("Is it me, for a moment?"), fellow L.A. Timesman Tim Ruttten writes of Hiltzik's critics:

They don't want an unbiased news media, they want a press that reflects their bias.

What unbiased news media is that? Tim apparently never got the memo in 2004.

Update: Writing in the Philadelphy Inquirer, Hugh Hewitt, who was mentioned, along with other conservative commentators by Rutten in the above linked piece, (and has had at least one on-air run-in with Hiltzik) notes:

Each morning, we awake to new mountains of information. Bloggers are the new Sherpas, leading their readers through those various ranges. Newspaper reporters and editors are the old Sherpas. Lots of folks - especially liberals and elites - still like the old Sherpas. The mainstream media - MSM - are populated overwhelmingly by left- and hard-left-leaning writers and editors, and few people even bother to argue the point anymore. American newspapers are not unlike American car companies: Market dominance made them lazy and uninterested in their customer base, and a lot of that base slowly melted away, even before the new media arrived. When blogs and talk radio and cable arrived and offered a choice to news consumers long disgusted with biased product, remaining center-right readers began to bolt.

Shouldn't journalists like Hiltzik and Rutten look for the root cause of their readers' frustration and ponder seriously, "why do they hate us?", before lashing out?

After all, one man's blogger is merely another man's freedom of information fighter.

Earth Day is a solemn occasion for most Bobos in search of Gaia's paradise--which means it's absolutely made for Mark Steyn to point out that the emperor is bereft of (hemp-made, PETA-friendly non-animal fiber) clothes:

Environmentalism doesn't need the support of the church, it's a church in itself -- and furthermore, one explicitly at odds with Christianity: God sent His son to Earth as a man, not as a three-toed tree sloth or an Antarctic krill. An environmentalist can believe man is no more than a co-equal planet dweller with millions of other species, and that he's taking up more than his fair share and needs to reduce both his profile and his numbers. But that's profoundly hostile to Christianity. [Spot on--Ed.]

Oh, and here's my favorite -- Dr. Sue Blackmore looking on the bright side in Britain's Guardian:

"In all probability billions of people are going to die in the next few decades. Our poor, abused planet cannot take much more. . . . If we decide to put the planet first, then we ourselves are the pathogen. So we should let as many people die as possible, so that other species may live, and accept the destruction of civilization and of everything we have achieved.

"Finally, we might decide that civilization itself is worth preserving. In that case we have to work out what to save and which people would be needed in a drastically reduced population -- weighing the value of scientists and musicians against that of politicians, for example."

Hmm. On the one hand, Dr. Sue Blackmore and the bloke from Coldplay. On the other, Dick Cheney. I think we can all agree which people would be "needed" -- Al Gore, the guy from the New Yorker, perhaps Scarlett Johansson in a fur-trimmed bikini paddling a dugout canoe through a waterlogged Manhattan foraging for floating curly endives from once-fashionable eateries.

Read the whole thing, for it is terrific.

Meanwhile, Power Line shares the thoughts of climate scientist Fred Singer on Vanity Fair's Green issue:

Today is Earth Day – and also the anniversary of Lenin’s birth. How appropriate! The Reds have morphed into Greens. In the old days of Marx and Lenin, capitalism used to oppress the working class; now it despoils nature. The new religion of environmentalism is on full display in the “Green” issue of Vanity Fair (May 2006), the magazine of conspicuous consumption. So amidst the ads for diamond-studded $10,000 watches and super-powered $100,000 SUVs you find paeans of praise for the moneyed “defenders of the environment.” The irony of it all seems to have escaped the editors.

Like Claude Rains in Casablanca, I'm shocked; shocked!

Update: Tim Blair goes in search of species that are abso-farging-lutely guaranteed never to become extinct--pious celebrities and media elites. Here's a sample:

Over to you, Annie Leibovitz:

I wish that all of nature’s magnificence, the emotion of the land, the living energy of place could be photographed.

So do I. Especially using the megalitres of chemicals that Leibovitz must have churned through during her photographic career. So natural!

Heh, Indeed. Read the whole thing.^TM

Or least one small critter.

I'm sure I'll be alienating Cosmo Goldberg and Jasper Lileks next too...

It's the Pajamas Podcast, dude! Don't miss it.

With the first Blog Week In Review safely ensconced on the server buried deep within Pajamas HQ, I'm off to Dallas for about a week, starting here. Watch for regular posting to resume tonight or tomorrow.

This past February, Larry Kudlow wrote:

In case you didn’t see it, Barron’s published a great story called,“Revolution on Wheels”. Basically it makes the point that taxes matter to folks in choosing where to live.

“Quietly, without banners or raised fists, they are packing up their families and belongings and moving from high tax states like California and New York to lower-tax locales like Florida, Nevada and Texas.”

Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder says over the past five years, 1.2 million people moved out of the ten highest taxed states, while an almost equal number, 1.3 million, moved into the low tax states. “It’s a stealth migration, and it’s one of the biggest, most significant yet least recognized movements of the population in American history,” says Vedder. “People are voting with their feet to say that taxes do matter.”

Today, Drudge links to an AP article titled, "Census: Americans Are Fleeing Big Cities":

The Census Bureau measured domestic migration - people moving within the United States - from 1990 to 2000, and from 2000 to 2004. The report provides the number of people moving into and out of each state and the 25 largest metropolitan areas.

The states that attracted the most new residents: Florida, Arizona and Nevada. The states that lost the most: New York, California and Illinois.

Among the 25 largest metropolitan areas, 18 had more people move out than move in from 2000 to 2004. New York, Los Angeles and Chicago - the three biggest metropolitan areas - lost the most residents to domestic moves. The New York metropolitan area had a net loss of more than 210,000 residents a year from 2000 to 2004.

Curiously, the T-word is never used by the author.

Deroy Murdock reviews United 93:

As we bicker over Donald Rumsfeld’s job security by day and obsess over American Idol by night, writer-director Paul Greengrass offers a harrowing reminder of what’s in play on Earth today.

In a film of devastating emotional power, Greengrass traces that morning’s mounting horrors. This is no PC film crafted by moral relativists in Malibu. As soon as Universal Studios’ logo fades to black, a man quietly prays in Arabic. He holds a small Koran in his palms while sitting atop a motel bed. “It’s time,” one hijacker announces, and their murderous journey begins.

United 93 should bury for good the absurd cliché that violent Muslim zealots are “cowards.” Rather than watch their knees knock together like castanets, the four al Qaeda agents on the doomed flight are focused and ruthless. When a cockpit screen announces, “Two a/c [aircraft] hit World Trade Center,” the al Qaeda agents celebrate. “The brothers have hit the targets,” says pilot Ziad Jarrah. “We’re in control,” replies hijacker Saeed al Ghamdi. “Thanks be to God.”

Behind them, ordinary Americans who had been eating omelets, knitting, and perusing travel guides quickly discern that their plane is a missile, and they mount a plan to retake it.

Read the whole thing. As Murdock writes, "Too soon? This story never stopped."

Not even Toffler could have predicted this. There's a secret laboratory buried deep within the basement of the Los Angeles Times building chockablock filled with advanced technology heretofore unknown to man. It apparently allows journalists there to replicate themselves--at least on the Internet. Hugh Hewitt also has details.

Update: "And it raises the question: how many more mainstream media journalists are using sock puppets on blogs?" I'll bet it's a surprisingly high percentage.

Another Update: Also buried within the L.A. Times' basement is a time machine. It's usually on the fritz, but every once in a while, it accurately predicts the future. Back in 2004, then L.A. Times editor John Carroll wrote surprisingly presciently of "The Wolf in Reporter's Clothing":

What we're seeing is a difference between journalism and pseudo-journalism, between journalism and propaganda. The former seeks earnestly to serve the public. The latter seeks to manipulate it.

The propaganda technique that has invaded journalism is of a particular breed. It springs not from journalistic roots but from modern politics — specifically, that woeful subset known as attack politics.

In attack politics, the idea is to "define" one's rival in the eyes of the public. This means repeating derogatory information so often that the rival's reputation is ruined. Sometimes the information is true; sometimes it is misleading; sometimes it is simply false. A citizen who enters politics these days must face the prospect of being "defined" by smear artists equipped with computers, polls and attack ads.

And pseudonyms, Hugh Hewitt adds.

In his introduction to the published script of Full Metal Jacket, Michael Herr wrote of Stanley Kubrick, "It's nice to get a call from a culture hero, especially when you have so few".

Never got to interview Kubrick, but I just got off the phone after a great 45-minute interview with Alvin Toffler, for a future TCS article and podcast. It was the first time I spoke with him since the week after 9/11, several months before this blog went up.

In 1980's The Third Wave, Toffler predicted so many of the trends that impact the Blogosphere: the break-up of the mass media and the assembly line, the inability of the education system (not to mention government itself) to keep pace with changes in the private sector, and the whole prosumption movement, aka The Army of Davids. His new book, due out next week is Revolutionary Wealth; don't miss it.

Tim Blair writes that Morgan Spurlock's idiotarian classic has supersized McDonald's business:

Since 2003, according to the NY Times, revenue for McDonald’s “has increased by 33 percent and its shares have rocketed 170 percent.”

Maybe the Times should hire Spurlock and pray for the same results...

Andrew McCarthy has some thoughts on Monday's Pulitizers:

These awards unmistakably announce that organized journalism, a.k.a. the mainstream media, is embarked on its own version of the al-Arian defense for Dana Priest, James Risen, and Eric Lichtblau. These are the reporters who, along with their powerful newspapers (respectively, the Washington Post and the New York Times), took it upon themselves to decide what national-security secrets were not important enough to keep confidential in wartime — notwithstanding that those secrets (viz., how our intelligence community houses high-level al Qaeda detainees and how it searches for potential terrorists operating within the U.S.) are designed to keep Americans from getting killed by the enemy.

Sami Al-Arian, who finally pled guilty to supporting terrorism and will be deported, proved very hard to convict (indeed, for years he was essentially impossible to indict) in large measure because he ingratiated himself with powerful government officials throughout the 1990s. Down the road, predictably, his defense — regardless of what the evidence showed about his ties to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a barbaric terror organization — was: How bad a guy can he really be if he has access to high-level political actors who certainly don't seem to be treating him like a terrorist?

With these Pulitzers, organized journalism is inoculating its operatives the same way: How can this reporting, which reveals national-defense secrets critical to wartime intelligence gathering, be deemed treasonous or otherwise against the public interest? After all, pillars of journalism like the elite writers, editors, and academics on the Pulitzer committee have recognized it with these coveted awards? This ups the ante to a degree commensurate with the prestige of the award.

As expertly explained in an important essay by Gabriel Schoenfeld in the March 2006 issue of Commentary, the publication of at least some of the stories the media have chosen to honor may be felony violations of the federal espionage act, which proscribes the revelation of certain national defense secrets, including signals intelligence (which is at the heart of the NSA-surveillance program disclosed by Risen and Lichtblau in December 2005). If you buy that we are at war (and 150,000 young Americans in harm's way would suggest to some that we are), if you buy that we are confronting an enemy hell-bent on murdering as many of us as possible (as nearly 3,000 dead in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the wreckage of Flight 93 would seem to attest), this kind of reporting is not praiseworthy; it is incomprehensible.

Yet, to criticize, let alone to indict, the conduct of the reporters and their newspapers, you must now rebuke the entire community that has lauded them. A community which still profoundly influences the public narrative of events, and which has just sent you a patent signal that they intend to fight you every step of the way.

A similar example used to be: "How can Yassir Arafat be thought a terrorist? Why, he's a Nobel Laureate!" And if organized baseball had a similar award right now, you can bet they'd give it to Barry Bonds, who is being investigated for steroid use, etc.

It's an old strategy, but all the latest incarnation does is cheapen the Pulitzers. Once an award — any award — is politicized, it no longer has any claim on being about excellence.

I'm not sure how much I agree with how sweeping that last sentence is (conservative organizations hand out a fair share of awards, too), but on the other hand, I could also simply add:

See also: Awards, Academy.

That was the title of a Woody Allen movie made during his brief "earlier, funnier period". It's also a euphemism for the segment of the environmental movement that's caused energy prices to skyrocket in the US, as the Washington Post's Anne Applebaum notes:

The problem plaguing new energy developments is no longer NIMBYism, the "Not-In-My-Back-Yard" movement. The problem now, as one wind-power executive puts it, is BANANAism: "Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything." The anti-wind brigade, fierce though it is, pales beside the opposition to liquid natural gas terminals, and would fade entirely beside the mass movement that will oppose a new nuclear power plant. Indeed, the founders of Cape Wind say they embarked on the project in part because public antipathy prevents most other utility investments in New England.

Still, energy projects don't even have to be viable to spark opposition: Already, there are activists gearing up to fight the nascent biofuel industry, on the grounds that fields of switch grass or cornstalks needed to produce ethanol will replace rainforests and bucolic country landscapes. Soon the nonexistent "hydrogen economy" will doubtless be under attack as well. There's a lot of earnest, even bipartisan talk nowadays about the need for clean, emissions-free energy. But are we really ready, politically, to build any new energy sources at all?

Ed Morrissey has some thoughts on that last question.

McClellan was no Ari Fleischer, but John Hinderaker thinks he's done "a capable job". Hinderaker mentions that Tony Snow is a possible candidate--and given his extensive media background, that certainly makes sense, though like McClellan, I'm not sure how aggressive he'd be at pushing back against the rapacious Washington press corp.

Unlike, say, these fellows, also rumored to be in the running.

Update: An oft-ignored--and for good reason, too--segment of America weighs in, here.

John Lennon once called the blues "a chair", since all popular music sits upon it: jazz, rock and roll, funk, all the way to rap. And much of the lingo that the early blues musicians created to describe their music--as well as their instruments--derive from words dating back to the 19th century and even earlier.

Knowing a little bit about this language and its history, it seemed obvious that really uncovering these terms and their derivations requires a fair amount of musicology and research. Which is why I was intrigued when a book titled The Language of the Blues was sent to me in galley form late last year. Released in January, with a forward by New Orleans’ legendary Dr. John, Debra DeSalvo's new book is a glossary of blues terms and their background, ranging from "alcorub" to "zuzu". She discusses how she came to write it, and the role that Dr. John played in shaping the book, in our podcast today. You can click here to listen to it, or visit our Apple iTunes site. (In either case, no iPod necessary to listen to it; virtually any PC's media player will play this MP3 file.)

Debra is a journalist who’s written for publications ranging from the Village Voice to Yoga Journal to a variety of music magazines. She's also a musician herself, and it’s her music you hear at beginning and end of today's podcast. You can hear MP3s of several of her songs—as well as find out more details about her new book, by visiting her Website.

Last year, Hillel Halkin wrote:

The scary thing is that once again, 50 years after the Holocaust, the Jews have so many enemies. And make no mistake about it: They are dangerous.

Nor are all of them primitives out of the Middle Ages. Some are very suave, very cultivated gentlemen. They wear three-piece suits and they speak with Oxonian accents and they say things like "bloody nuisance" and "spot on." Some are even leaders of the Anglican Church.

And at least one is a leftwing former US Senator.

Hugh Hewitt compares and contrasts how the MSM views dissenting former US generals with dissenters drawn from their own ranks:

Why are MSMers Broder and Dionne willing to assign such great credibility to a half dozen generals (out of at least 4,700 and perhaps as many as 7,000 retired gerenals and admirals) when there is no evidence that they have credited similar insider criticism of their own business, say from Bernard Goldberg, John Stossel and Michael Medved to name just three MSM-insiders turned MSM critics.

Or to put it in graphic terms...

Update: More here.

In his syndicated column, James Lileks raises some entirely tongue-in-space helmet concerns about NASA's proposal to implement Frank J's Realistic Plan For World Peace:

In another baseless act of unjustified aggression, the United States has announced plans to launch an attack on the moon.

NASA says it will crash a rocket into innocent Luna in 2009, looking for water. It will hit the poor rock so hard that we will see the explosion here on Earth. Good Lord, why not put Pennzoil stickers on the rocket for that NASCAR touch, and launch the strike when the moon's in a crescent phase so we can infuriate the Muslim world?

This is so typical. So American. We're not content destroying this planet -- we have to go out of our way to ruin the moon with phallic-shaped devices. Why don't we drill for oil in the pristine Venusian swamps while we're at it? Sure, it's a barren, poisonous deathscape -- but a decent nation would spend billions to put caribou on another planet, just to make sure it's never exploited for its natural resources.

If you're not spending sleepless nights worrying whether the batteries on our Martian rovers may leak and contaminate the water we think we found, you're just not paying attention.

To return to the immediate crisis: Why the moon? Lunarians were not involved in 9/11. Don't tell me: That's where Saddam hid the WMD, or got some yellowcake. In any case, it's a distraction from the failing economy, what with jobless rates hitting a new low ... no, that's not it. It's a distraction from the American casualties in Iraq, which have been falling for five straight months ... hold on, we'll get it.

Ah! It's a cover for the United States' devious plans, revealed by super-patriot Seymour Hersh, to nuke Iran. The anti-moon missile goes up, falls on Iran, we say "my bad," and that's the end of that chapter.

Listen up: If George W. Bush wants to go to the moon, then going to the moon is wrong. The MOON is wrong.

Hey, he wouldn't be the first person to come to that conclusion.

In February, I wrote that Robin Givhan is the Washington Post's last line of defense:

Givhan is called in whenever the GOP scores an advance: her columns--a combination of Sigmund Freud and Alan Flusser--have ripped apart newly nominated Supreme Court Judges Roberts and Alito, and shortly after the 2004 election, Cheney himself. She's not so much the Doomsday Machine as a sartorial kamikaze: from Hell's Bloomingdale's, she stabs at thee!

And her hit pieces have made her a big hit amongst her fellow members of the legacy media. The result? Well, as Betsy Newmark puts it, "Gimme a break! A Pulitzer for Robin Givhan?!"

Betsy calls Monday's awards "the Pulitzer equivalents of the Nobel Peace Prize for Jimmy Carter". I think that's spot-on. Be sure to read the rest of her post.

Well, here's something you don't read every day: Hollywood superstar promises to eat his newborn baby's placenta.

Somehow, in some form, this will show up in a South Park episode, guaranteed.

Update: "No word yet on whether it's tastier than Marmite. But, then again, how could it not be?"

The Transportation Security Administration detained a US Marine last week...because they detected gunpowder on his boots on the flight that took him back into the world from Iraq:

The Transportation Security Administration bagged a terrorist in Los Angeles International Airport Tuesday, or so they thought. Daniel Brown's name came up on their no-fly watchlist, so they dragged him into interrogation and grilled him, despite the protestations of Brown and his fellow travelers, who swore they could vouch for him.

The others in Brown's party went on their Northwest Airlines flight to Minneapolis-St. Paul, where they waited on a bus at the airport. You see, the detained man was Staff Sergeant Daniel Brown, USMC Reserve, and he was traveling with the other members of his Marine Reserve Military Police unit, which was heading home to Minnesota from eight months of combat in Iraq. The Marines were in full uniform and all, including Brown, had travel orders and military identification cards.

After attempts to stonewall under claims of "security," TSA spokesmen finally admitted that Staff Sergeant Daniel Brown was placed on the no-fly list, and ultimately detained, because they had detected gunpowder on his footgear -- not on this flight, but on a prior flight, which earned Brown a permanent place on the TSA's mysterious terrorist lists.

The footgear that had been exposed to gunpowder? Brown's combat boots, and the occasion of that flight was after his return from his first combat tour in Iraq. Gee... a combat Marine in Al-Anbar Province being exposed to gunpowder.

Exposure to gunpowder isn't something the TSA knows a lot about. Hey, who are you gonna believe, this here watchlist or your lyin' eyes?

Ultimately, the TSA screeners figured out that Brown really was a Marine, and no threat to his fellow passengers, and let him board a later flight. When he deplaned at MSP, his unit's bus was waiting -- his fellow Marines in it.

Marine 1st Sgt. Drew Benson explained why. "We don't leave anybody behind. We start together, and we finish together." All 26 Marines waited for Brown -- even though their families were waiting for them at a scheduled welcome-home bash at Fort Snelling.

Brown's mother Terry was glad they did. "They all come back together... no matter what it takes and I think that's very important," she told WCCO-TV.

Frequent TSA critic Richard A. Altomare, Founder and Chairman of the Coalition for Luggage Security -- and a former marine -- said, "I'm proud that Sergeant Dan Brown's Marine unit refused to report to their post until the 'man left behind' was permitted to get on a passenger plane. This TSA's bloated bureaucracy with documented insensitive treatment of countless Americans really rings home a need to dismantle their growing airport agency before all American freedoms are lost -- since now even the United States Marines can't help us."

Back in 2003, the Washington Times' James Bovard explained the origins of the TSA's informal motto:

In the wake of September 11, the federal mentality toward airline customers is best summarized by the informal motto posted at the headquarters of the TSA air marshal training center: "Dominate. Intimidate. Control." But it takes more than browbeating average Americans to make air travel safe. Airline expert Michael Boyd aptly observed: "The TSA is a poorly focused, unaccountable Washington political bureaucracy geared to screen for objects, not for security threats."

And too inept to distinguish a Marine from a terrorist. Maybe some of the seniors at UC Santa Cruz should apply there after graduation.

(Via Mark Steyn.)

As I wrote back in February about the press as Victorian Gentleman, the media frequently discards stories that don't fit the narrative they've constructed, something that John Leo also spots:

In the orthodox narrative line, [Joe] Wilson is the truth-teller and the Bush is the liar. But Wilson was not speaking truthfully when he said his wife, Valerie Plame, had nothing to do with the CIA sending him to Niger. And it obviously wasn't true, as Wilson claimed, that he had found nothing to support Bush's charge about Niger when he (Wilson) had been told that the Iraqis were poking around in that uranium-rich nation.

Testifying before the Senate intelligence committee, Wilson said that the former prime minister of Niger told him he had been asked to meet with Iraqis to talk about "expanding commercial relations" between the two countries. Everybody knew what that meant; Niger has nothing much to trade other than uranium.

Hitch put it even more succinctly: "Sorry everyone, but Iraq did go uranium shopping in Niger".

In his "Happy Warrior" column in a recent issue of National Review, Mark Steyn wrote, "If I were a Palestinian, I’d occasionally wonder what I had to do to get a bad press".

Sadly, it will take much more than this to derail the Palestinian PR machine--or their cash machine.

Update: More at Pajamas HQ.

In a column titled "Environmentalism and the apocalypse", Cathy Young writes:

The most contentious recent battle between creationists and evolutionary biologists is not the debate about the newly discovered ''missing link" between fish and land animals. Rather, it is a bizarre incident that involves predictions of doomsday and charges of encouraging terrorism. At bottom, this conflict is not about religion versus science but about the clash of two religions.

It started early in March when Eric Pianka, an ecologist at the University of Texas who was named Texas Distinguished Scientist of 2006, gave a speech at a meeting of the Texas Academy of Sciences, filled with dire warnings about the fate of humanity and the earth. About a month later, Forrest M. Mims III, chairman of the Environmental Science Section of the Texas Academy of Science, posted an article about the event in a Web magazine called The Citizen Scientist. He asserted that Pianka advocated the death of more than 5 billion people from a virus for the cause of saving the planet -- to enthusiastic applause from the audience.

Mims's allegation, picked up by a local Texas newspaper, The Seguin Gazette-Enterprise, caused quite a stir on the Internet and a flood of angry e-mails to the Texas Academy of Sciences and the University of Texas. Meanwhile, William Dembski, a philosophy professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a leading champion of intelligent design, proudly announced that he had alerted the Department of Homeland Security to a possible Pianka plot to infect people with a deadly virus.

Meanwhile, many scientists, academics, and liberal bloggers have rallied to the defense of Pianka, who, they say, was not advocating apocalypse but simply delivering a warning about the disastrous consequences of humanity's profligate ways. They see him as a victim of a smear by creationists (Mims is also an intelligent design proponent) who want to portray mainstream science as evil and by right-wingers who want to portray liberal academics as loony extremists.

But while Pianka's critics may be seriously biased and lacking in credibility, this does not quite get Pianka himself off the hook. No, there is no reason to believe that he advocated actively bringing about an epidemic that would kill billions of people. Rather, he asserts that because of overpopulation, we are on the brink of a major epidemic that will wipe out 80 to 90 percent of humanity. And he seems to regard this as a good thing.

Read the rest.

(Via Tim Blair.)

Most Monday's are pretty rough, but today--as you're no doubt well aware--is tax day. You can get some idea of where your state taxes are going by listening to my podcast with Steve Malanga of City Journal on New Jersey's fiscal insanity.

It made this week's Carnival of the New Jersey Bloggers, where you can find lots more coverage of my old home state.

Glenn Reynolds has a lengthy update on Yale's favorite Big Terrorist On Campus, Rahmatullah Hashemi.

In The Vision of the Anointed, Thomas Sowell wrote of the "mascots of the anointed", of which Hashemi surely must be--along with Mumia Abu Jamal--among the most wretched.

Update: Compare and contrast Yale's fawning treatment of Hashemi with Ohio State's treatment of another man who is also from a less modernized culture.

I guess Burlington Coat Factory is finally out of Che T-shirts: Brent Baker of NewsBusters spots a New York-based correspondent for NBC displaying a serious case of Communist Chic. And note that his producers apparently didn't mind him going on the air in this rig:

Tim Vincent, the Britain-born New York correspondent for Access Hollywood, sported a hammer and sickle T-shirt on Friday's show as he stood in front of NBC's Rockefeller Plaza complex and introduced a piece on American Dreamz, the movie takeoff of American Idol. Though he wore a jacket over the red shirt with the symbol of the regime which murdered tens of millions and oppressed hundreds of millions more for decades, a gold hammer and sickle was clearly visible inside a red star. The gold-outlined red star, sans the hammer and sickle, matches the Soviet's Red Army emblem. I don't get it. Is this some kind of cool statement with thirtysomethings, elite New Yorkers or Brits? Or is it just part of some promotion for an upcoming movie?

As Baker writes, "Imagine the proper outrage that would explode if he had worn a Nazi swastika".

Well, it would certainly sell in the Hong Kong market. But if Vincent really wanted to get a rise out of viewers in Manhattan and Hollywood, he'd wear one of these shirts.

Update: Reporters--even Hollywood gossip reporters--with lingering cases of Communist Chic should read about Hao Wu or Charles Lee.

Another Update: Noting that Steven Spielberg will be an official consultant “in culture and art for the creation of the spectacular ceremonies” for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, Jason Apuzzo writes:

Imagine for a moment if back in 1936 Joseph Goebbels had called up director John Ford for a little help stage-managing the Berlin Olympics. Ford, of course, would’ve turned such an overture down - but seventy years later, well, Hollywood’s a lot more accommodating toward tyrannical dictatorships!

Indeed they are.

In these rough and uncharted times, travel abroad--even to Europe--can be precarious at best. In order to avoid the dreaded International Incident in the dortoir continental, New England Republican has some important travel tips all Americans could benefit from.

TigerHawk writes:

I don't blame Comedy Central, or Border's Books, or the world's media organizations, for refusing to depict Mohammed out of fear of retaliation. Their job is not to defend freedom of speech, but to earn profits for their stockholders. Acting as a fiduciary, I would make the same decision. But let us not tolerate these same organizations claiming that they also support freedom of speech. They are lying when they say they do, because in order to defend freedom of speech, you have to be willing to protect speech against the inevitable threat of violence.

But watch both of these organizations quickly return to patting themselves on the back for how much they do support freedom of speech, and how hip and transgressive they are--in exactly the same way that movie industry superstars believe they're on the cutting edge of controversy as well.

Why yes that is me in today's "Day By Day" cartoon. Of course, in those carefree days, we wore our maskies... (Sorry, just channeling lines from a earlier dystopian parable.)

Chris Muir, who draws the Blogosphere favorite "Day By Day" cartoon (and whom I interviewed a few years ago) emailed on Saturday night to tell me that my recent TCS Daily article on video and the Blogosphere inspired his latest satire. Needless to say, I'm thrilled--not to mention utterly astonished and surprised--to be immortalized by Mr. Muir's brilliant pen.

Happy Easter!

La Shawn Barber reminds us that “He Is Not Here; He Has Risen!” Meanwhile, with Passover running concurrently with Easter this year, Neo-Neocon posts "In celebration of freedom: Passover and beyond", which references both Holidays:

It's the holiday season, and one of those rare years when Passover and Easter come close together, as they did during the original Easter. So I get a twofer when I wish my readers "Happy Holidays!"

In recent years whenever I've attended a Seder (as I did last night), I've been impressed by the fact that Passover is a religious holiday dedicated to an idea that's not really primarily religious: freedom. Yes, it's about a particular historical (or perhaps legendary) event: the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. But the Seder ceremony makes clear that, important though that specific event may be, freedom itself is also being celebrated.

Offhand, I can't think of another religious holiday that takes the trouble to celebrate freedom. Nations certainly do: there's our own Fourth of July, France's Bastille Day, and various other independence days around the world. But these are secular holidays rather than religious ones.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Update: The Brothers Judd have reprinted seemingly dozens of archived Easter-related posts. Just keep scrolling.

When a paper as sympathetic to the left side of the aisle as the Washington Post begins a profile of someone on the left like this...

In the angry life of Maryscott O'Connor, the rage begins as soon as she opens her eyes and realizes that her president is still George W. Bush. The sun has yet to rise and her family is asleep, but no matter; as soon as the realization kicks in, O'Connor, 37, is out of bed and heading toward her computer.

Out there, awaiting her building fury: the Angry Left, where O'Connor's reputation is as one of the angriest of all. "One long, sustained scream" is how she describes the writing she does for various Web logs, as she wonders what she should scream about this day.

She smokes a cigarette. Should it be about Bush, whom she considers "malevolent," a "sociopath" and "the Antichrist"? She smokes another cigarette. Should it be about Vice President Cheney, whom she thinks of as "Satan," or about Karl Rove, "the devil"? Should it be about the "evil" Republican Party, or the "weaselly, capitulating, self-aggrandizing, self-serving" Democrats, or the Catholic Church, for which she says "I have a special place in my heart . . . a burning, sizzling, putrescent place where the guilty suffer the tortures of the damned"?

....you know you may have a problem.

Orrin Judd reminds us that "Rage Is A Tough Sell In America", an emotional state that Gerard Vanderleun recorded a literary snapshot of last month, when he wrote "Growl", disguised as "Gerard Allen Van der Ginsberg". And Betsy Newmark has an exceptional post today in which she places O'Connor's rage into context alongside the thoughts of both Hugh Hewitt and Dean Barnett of the Weekly Standard on how the Blogosphere has negatively impacted the left's tone.

Update: Paul Mirengoff of Power Line has some thoughts on the article's rather silly "it's mostly the fault of the right--especially Newt Gingrich" subtext.

Another Update: Tim Blair analyzes the sociopsychological ramifications of the photo chosen by the Post of O'Connor.

One More: One of Tim's readers has his own insightful analysis of the photo:

That picture is clearly a hatchet job though, and a deliberate one. Wide angle lens (I’m guessing 25-28mm), low camera placement, and a “Dutch tilt” of about twenty degrees to the right (look at the line of the bookshelves in the background; if the camera were held level, that line would be level too). It makes her look like something out of Mr. Arkadin.

These are all tricks film folk use to give the impression of insanity, or of a world gone mad. Often used in the genre of psychological suspense by directors like Welles, Kubrick, Polanski, Reed. We may think it’s the approriate treatment in this particular moonbat’s case, but it’s hardly objective news gathering, is it.

I like how the photog told what’s-her-name that he couldn’t open the curtains because he wanted a truthful, objective photograph, and then feigned disappointment when “that one” was chosen.

Heh. Indeed.

Just because we agree with their point of view in this one case doesn’t mean the media has stopped their habit of lying about everything.

That last sentence isn't something I'd write, but from the photographer choosing that angle and composition, to the editor choosing that photo, it was all carefully planned. Could the Post have commissioned this article as payback--or were they simply inspired by--the far left's recent meltdowns over the Post's Deborah Howell and their (as it turns out rather brief) employment of Ben Domenech?

Living out the scene in last week's South Park in which the townspeople vote to bury their heads in the sand rather than face the issue head-on, the European Union plans to make Islamic terrorism disappear. Not the actual use of guns, knives, explosions and burning Peugeots in furtherance of terror, of course. Simply the actual words, "Islamic terrorism". And Islamofascism will be going away as well--not al-Qaeda (that's what the continental dormitory has America for)--just the word "Islamofascism".

As Syme once said to Winston, did you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?

(Of course, other religions have had their language impacted by the EU as well, which has never met an edict it didn't like. Last year, the EU announced that Christ's name must be spelled with a lower case-C, err, c, and Jews be capitalized when referring to nationality, but when referring to the religion, spelled with a lower-case "j".)

Update: Jeff Goldstein is absolutely spot-on:

We control words. They should not control us. And when words are controlled by our intent, those who take issue with their own particular misinterpretations of our intent can no longer claim that the fault lies with the utterer—the practical implications of which are that we no longer have to twist ourselves into knots trying to prevent giving offense by self-censoring our criticisms.

This puts the onus of “tolerance” on the listener, who is forced to accept valid criticism as a product of free expression. No one has a right not to be offended. And in fact, in our country, the First Amendment is meant to protect the right to offend, within reason.

By reasserting the locus of meaning linguistically and philosophically with the person responsible for formulating the meaning, we can begin to reassert the essential tenets of classical liberalism, which resist collectivism and wills to power by re-establishing the individual as the focus of liberty.

Going in the other direction—which we’ve been doing for the last nearly 40 years—only leads to the kind of totalitarianism that favors those who wish to control us through a control of our expression.

Read the whole thing.

Another Update: Heh^TM.

Referring to the comments that come out of Hollywood about Iraq, John McCain once quipped that if "Washington is a Hollywood for ugly people, Hollywood is a Washington for the simpleminded." Jonah Goldberg notes that the Deep Thinkers in Hollywood often have a tough time understanding Washington:

A common theme in Hollywood's treatment of politics is the notion that people with "bad" ideas are also bad people (to its credit, West Wing occasionally resisted this cliche, though usually to demonstrate that decent conservatives have the capacity to learn how wrong they are).

Of course, this view is shared by many people outside of Hollywood as well. The problem is that it just doesn't jibe much with reality.

As anyone who's spent time in D.C. can tell you, asininity, egotism, and rudeness are fairly evenly distributed across the ideological spectrum. Some of the biggest jerks in Washington can be found spouting progressive nostrums about caring for the poor and the downtrodden. Similarly, some of the conservatives constantly invoking the Christian imperative to love one another can be found figuratively whacking their interns about the head with a hardcover edition of the New Testament for not properly trimming the crusts on their sandwiches.

The thing is, Hollywood already knew that about the religious conservatives. Showing "moral majority" types as closeted bigots, perverts, and hypocrites is a grand cinematic pastime. What seems unfathomable to many liberals in Hollywood is that many religious conservatives are in fact decent, pleasant people and that nastiness is almost an entirely independent variable from ideology. Man-of-the-people Michael Moore is a notoriously nasty boss, while "virtuecrat" Bill Bennett is famously fun to work for.

The refreshing thing about Thank You for Smoking is that the most likable character is the most "evil" — by liberal standards at least. Tobacco lobbyist Nick Naylor, played by Aaron Eckhart, is a charming rogue who loves his son and doesn't apologize for his line of work. He never "sees the light" at the end of the movie, as Michael Douglas does in Falling Down when he realizes that, as an angry white male, he actually must be the villain. Rather, Naylor upholds a virtuous distinction Hollywood liberals consider sacrosanct when it comes to sex, but reject out of hand almost everywhere else: Something can be good — in this case, less smoking — without justifying government intrusions.

What's even more difficult for Hollywood to grasp is that government can't simply do whatever it chooses to do. Which is why, in Hollywood's Washington, speeches are usually a substitute for action. Douglas announces in The American President that we're "gonna get the guns" — i.e., all handguns in the United States — and that's supposed to settle the issue right there, hooray! In Dave, Kevin Kline announces he's simply going to give every American a job because having a job is just so darn nice and good. Never mind that government-guaranteed employment is neither a new nor a particularly good idea. You could look it up.

In reality, the reason so little gets done in Washington is not because "bad" people are stopping the good people. It's because different groups of people have different definitions of what's good and what's bad. And even when they finally agree on something, its effect may well be negligible, unforeseen, and slow to materialize. That's dull stuff for a movie, but not a bad way to run a country.

Or as P.J. Rourke once said, "Let us compare Congress to the Justice Department's case against Microsoft. No one is trying to break up the House of Representatives because it's been too succesful".

Virginia Postrel looks at the New York Times' assumption of guilt--or at least graft--towards their freelancers, and writes, "Wow, I'm Glad I Quit the Times"

"The Times should just quit using freelancers if they hate us so much. After all, they have a building full of people making much more money.

* * *

Besides, my brand is, if considerably less financially valuable, then also less sullied than the Times's. I don't act ethically for their sake, but for mine. Their assumption that they're ethically slumming when they use freelancers is insulting.

She has a reprint of the Times' questionnaire.

Given the Times' ever sinking earnings reports and stock price, it sounds like she's getting out just in time.

Spike (and no, I don't mean the MTV video director) would have had loads of fun with this news:

Tehran, 14 April (AKI) - Iran's hardline president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has apparently been incensed by an anonymous text message suggesting he does not wash enough. Ahmadinejad has taken legal action over the offending text, has fired the president of a phone company and has had four people arrested and accused of colluding with the Israeli foreign intelligence service, Mossad, the anti-government website Rooz Online reports.

On the other hand, it sounds like the Iranian people are doing a pretty good of supplying their own underground humor, which is great to hear.

Ace of Spades links to a report by the Alliance Defense Fund which sums up the poor mental health of the modern academy:

Officials at the Ohio State University are investigating an OSU Mansfield librarian for “sexual harassment” after he recommended four conservative books for a freshman reading program. ADF has demanded that OSU cease its frivolous investigation, yet the university is pressing forward, claiming that it takes the charges “seriously.”

“Universities are one of the most hostile places for Christians and conservatives in America,” said ADF Senior Legal Counsel David French, who heads ADF’s Center for Academic Freedom. “It is shameful that OSU would investigate a Christian librarian for simply recommending books that are at odds with the prevailing politics of the university.”

Scott Savage, who serves as a reference librarian for the university, suggested four best-selling conservative books for freshman reading in his role as a member of OSU Mansfield’s First Year Reading Experience Committee. The four books he suggested were The Marketing of Evil by David Kupelian, The Professors by David Horowitz, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis by Bat Ye’or, and It Takes a Family by Senator Rick Santorum. Savage made the recommendations after other committee members had suggested a series of books with a left-wing perspective, by authors such as Jimmy Carter and Maria Shriver.

Maybe Mark Steyn's prediction for the future of American universities really will come true--sooner than even he predicted:

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.

Couple the charges at OSU--the very definition of frivolous, if the ADF article is accurate--with what happened at UC Santa Cruz this week, and it's a damning portrait of the current low state of higher education.

(Via Instapundit.)

(Why does that sound like an Ian Fleming title?)

A reader of Power Line who is a former intelligence officer places classified information released by both Presidents Reagan and Bush into context:

Reagan's release of this information, while undoubtedly a significant international political coup, also provided the American public with a very thorough explanation of the situation. It also greatly embarrassed the Soviet Union, demonstrated their ineptness, and, although I doubt Reagan considered this when he released the information, it was yet another Cold War victory that eventually led to the collapse of that Evil Empire some six years later.

As Jack Kelly wrote in his April 11, 2006 column appearing on RealClearPolitics: "Presidents are authorized to declassify sensitive material, and the public benefits when they do." Political hacks like Joe Wilson and Richard Clarke in concert with very biased anti-administration media organizations run a dangerous bluff when they espouse positions publicly that they know to be untrue, but that fit their political agenda. They bet that certain information won't be declassified and they look like fools when it is released.

Of course, that's an awfully low bar, even for the MSM...

Reuters reports that The Beatles are "set to join online music revolution".

That's great news. Now if we could just get Apple to finally release Let It Be on DVD...

For the podcast I recorded on this week before taxes are due, I interviewed City Journal's Steven Malanga about a state whose taxes and spending seemed out control.

But for his podcast this week, James Lileks takes The Diner where no Outer Party member has gone before: to the very terminus ad quem of the confiscatory state.

Steve Green puts Hillary in the White House in 2008 in two easy steps:

So my advice to the Republican Party is this. Do whatever you can, and quickly, to pass some kind of sane immigration reform that Democrats and Independents can all live with. If you don’t, then you’re in trouble. History doesn’t actually ever repeat itself, except when it does. Assuming a Secure Borders guy did no better than Ross Perot in 1992, he could easily tip the entire Southwest, and bits of the South, over to the Democrats. That’s a recipe for defeat.

My advice to the Democrats is this: Obstruct in Congress a very little, and do bunches of nothing a whole lot. Then sit back and watch as the Republicans splinter over security issues.

Read the whole thing.

In early March, Jim Geraghty wrote that America had reached was in its post-tipping point phase:

In the USA Today poll, when asked, “Which comes closer to your view about Arab and Muslim countries that are allies of the United States?” 45 percent of respondents said, “trust the same as any other ally”; 51 percent said they trust these countries “less than other allies.”

That’s a remarkably honest poll result. Let’s face it, Americans have been told since kindergarten not to judge ethnic and religious groups differently from one another; now slightly more than half are willing to come out and say, “you know, I just don’t trust those guys as much as I trust others.”

Welcome to Post-Tipping Point politics. There is no upside to doing the right thing – which is to emphasize, as one blogger put it, that there is a difference between Dubai and Damascus. There is tremendous political upside to doing the wrong thing, boldly declaring, “I don’t care what the Muslim world thinks, I’m not allowing any Arab country running ports here in America! I don’t care how much President Bush claims these guys are our allies, I don’t trust them, and I’m not going to hand them the keys to the vital entries to our country!”

A month and a half later--as both the Cartoon Wars and Iran's attempt to build The Bomb have both progressed that much further--even worse polling numbers are spotted by CBS:

Although Americans believe they are better informed about Islam than they were five years ago, a new CBS News poll finds fewer than one in five say their impression of the religion is favorable.

Charles Johnson helpfully rewrites that lead for the Tiffany Network:

Just a second; let’s fix that first paragraph.

(LGF) Americans are better informed about Islam than they were five years ago, and a new CBS News poll finds fewer than one in five say their impression of the religion is favorable.

That’s better.

CBS seems to be constitutionally incapable of considering that there might be unfavorable views because Americans are better informed, not “although” they “believe” they’re better informed. Mainstream media has been cramming multiculturalist doublethink about Islam down the public’s throat ever since September 11, and it’s pretty revealing that in spite of this ongoing effort we still see a growing negative perception.

And it's further proof that the MSM has lost control over any sort of national dialogue.

Update: Of course, having lost control over a monopoly, a feeling of smug superiority and ideological purity can emerge, because it helps avoid the introspection required to understand your current predicament:

What's with the "although"? ...that one word implies that the writer is morally superior/smarter than 4 out of 5 Americans. Which of course they do.

And CBS has certainly demonstrated that arrogance numerous times in recent years, of course.

Andy Rooney: "I have this ancient view of CBS News as a paragon of journalistic virtue, and that time is gone."

Well, it's been gone for quite some time--of course, how long it's been gone is still Rather open to debate.

In his latest Impromptu, Jay Nordlinger writes:

The CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, is defending his decision to kowtow to the Red Chinese. According to this article, he said, "We believe that the decision that we made to follow the law in China was absolutely the right one."

A nice line: "to follow the law." I wonder whether Schmidt considers some laws too brutal or unjust to be worth the trouble. And I wonder whether he considers any lawmaking body — e.g., the PRC — unworthy of respect.

Schmidt also said, "I think it's arrogant for us to walk into a country where we are just beginning to operate and tell that country how to operate."

Oh, is that it? It's arrogant not to bless the oppression by some people of other people? Is there any regime Schmidt would feel unarrogant about criticizing? And even if you can't do anything about oppression — do you have to cooperate with it?

I also love these particular words: "tell that country how to operate." We're not talking about a "country"; we're talking about a Communist dictatorship that seized power 60 years ago and has hung on ruthlessly.

Finally, Schmidt said, "There are many cases where certain information is not available due to local law or local custom."

I really love that "local law or local custom." When I hear the words "local custom," I think of native dress or dancing, or perhaps arranged marriages. Schmidt is talking about a vicious police state!

Beautiful. Just beautiful. And here am I, a booster of business (and incessant user of Google).

Aren't we all?

Why on earth is '80s superstar Lionel Richie (of all people) shilling for Muammar Gaddafi?

The Return of the Primitive was the title of an Ayn Rand book on the post-McGovern left. I borrowed it to use for my category on some of the more extreme examples of the flight from reason that's an ongoing part of much of today's society.

There's a review of Henry T. Edmondson III's John Dewey & the Decline of American Education by M.D. Aeschliman, professor of education at Boston University in the new "dead tree" edition of National Review (subscription required, sadly). Aeschliman explains how mass education itself was made primitivist in the early decades of the 20th century, rather ironically by a movement that dubbed itself "progressive":

Quentin Anderson has described Dewey’s resulting “child-centered,” primitivist “conception of the school” as “the most extravagant and nationally influential of his fantasies.” This school is a present-oriented, limited-literacy, “experiential” tool for the “reconstruction of society.” As close, critical observers such as W. C. Bagley, Arthur Bestor, and Glenn have asked, when did Dewey or his disciples ever consult parents or elected officials to ask whether they thought that their children and future citizens should be dragooned into this utopian project? And, as Diane Ravitch and E. D. Hirsch have noted, the 80-year dominance of Dewey’s “Progressive” ideas — almost indelibly institutionalized in the world of teachers’ colleges, teachers’ unions, and certification procedures — has been a gross failure in terms of the educational levels and competences of our public-school graduates. “Standards-based” education reforms at the state level and the bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, whatever their defects or difficulties, are well-warranted responses by parents, citizens, and legislators to generations of scholastic decline that have left many of our children and young adults not only functionally incompetent and quasi-illiterate but also vulnerable to an unprecedented tide of polluted cultural effluvia. The “child-centered school” has helped give birth to an infantile culture — one that threatens the very capacity of the American republic to retain and convey its economic accomplishments, social decencies, and civic self-understanding.

Like many thoughtful and liberally educated critics of Dewey, Henry Edmondson is puzzled and depressed at how widespread and long-lasting his influence has proved to be, given the turgid, confusing quality of both his thought and his prose, his logic and his rhetoric. Even admirers of Dewey have conceded the opacity or obscurity of his literary style: Both William Heard Kilpatrick and Sidney Hook started their own academic careers by trying to communicate Dewey’s thought to others, recognizing how badly he needed such help. (The experience of having to read large quantities of his prose has been compared to sawing wide logs with a dull saw and to taking a slow subway train to hell.)

Edmondson’s critique of Dewey is useful, clear, and brief. He rightly sees Rousseau’s primitivism as a major influence, and he rightly distinguishes Dewey from Jefferson, whose reputation and lineage Dewey was eager to claim as his own. Like E. D. Hirsch, but at more length, Edmondson is eager to show how decisively Dewey departs and differs from the heritage of Jefferson and the other Founders on the questions of the centrality of literacy and history in the American K–12 curriculum: Dewey and his disciples and allies promoted “hands-on” experience and “social studies” as against literacy and the study of history.

In addition, Dewey’s promotion of what he called “social experimentation leading to great social change” was a working out of Whitman’s social, psychological, and sexual radicalism and egalitarianism. Dewey decently defended Trotsky against the Stalinists in the late 1930s — perhaps his finest hour — but his own version of the need for “permanent revolution” has had more long-lasting and insidious effects than Trotsky’s, creating a climate and expectation for novelty, change, and experimentation in American public education — uncritical “neophilia” and what Frederick Hess has called bogus “policy churn.” Dewey slandered a wide range of more conservative or traditionalist education-policy thinkers and critics as “fundamentalists” obsessed with a fruitless, retrograde “quest for certainty” (the title of his 1929 book). In this regard he is the father — as that agile nihilist Richard Rorty has seen — of our contemporary “postmodern” deconstructionists, with their attacks on “foundationalism” and “logocentrism.” But some of the most powerful and enduring criticism of the whole “Progressive” movement of which Dewey is the patron saint came early from thoughtful liberal-traditionalist Columbia Teachers College professors such as W. C. Bagley and Isaac L. Kandel. Kandel protested the illogical riot of Whitmanian “experimentation” in what Diane Ravitch calls his “classic” study, The Cult of Uncertainty (1943). A Jewish immigrant writing in a dark time, Kandel knew that Dewey’s influential denial of history, traditional learning, and moral common sense in teacher training and the schools was a new form of barbarism. We are living with its consequences.

In addition to all of the points that Professor Aeschliman makes above, as Alvin Toffler has noted in several of his books, most recently, in his upcoming Revolutionary Wealth, the current K-12 education system is designed to prepare children for the rigid conditions of factory life: reporting for work in a central location early, performing repetitious tasks in a rigid hierarchical structure, etc. It's certainly not designed for life in an Army of Davids world.

"MTV To Air Pope-Bashing Cartoon in Germany, With Crucifixion-Mocking Ad"

"Comedy Central Censored Mohammed"

Update: Michelle Malkin has lots of links on this topic, and has even opened her comments section for discussion.

Another Update: This is what the fuss is all about? Sheesh--Viacom really should be ashamed of themselves. (Update to the update: Apparently, it's a fake: "Shouldn’t Muhammad look like a Family Guy character and not a South Park one? I’m thinking Photoshop here…”)

One More: Welcome to Dhimmidy Central!

Last One For Now: Cartoonist Thom Zahler writes:

The episode was built around a network and the free speech/Mohammed hypocrisy. Mohammed's appearance in the cartoon was of him handing off a football, purposefully tame. That's when the "Comedy Central won't air this part" popped up. Then, in the cartoon, the Muslim extremists react by making their own offensive cartoon, including the images of Jesus and Bush defecating on themselves and the American people.

That, to me, is the brilliance of it. They knew Comedy Central wouldn't air Mohammed, but would air the Jesus/Bush images. They not only called out their network's callowness, they illustrated it, and further showed how Americans DIDN'T riot upon seeing those images. Unless there was a story I missed this morning.

South Park has a rep for being vulgar, and fairly well deserved. But, more often than not, they don't do it for shock value but to make a point, as this episode did.

Interesting; my wife made pretty much this same point to me over dinner when I mentioned Viacom losing its nerve.

Click here to see a pretty big swatch of the episode.

In her review of Bush Country, John Podhoretz's 2004 book, Carol Devine-Molin wrote of what Podhoretz described as "one of the defining moments in Dubya's young life":

Podhoretz also cites one of the defining moments in Dubya's young life, when, at the age of 18 at Yale, the university's "rock-star-famous chaplain" William Sloane Coffin denigrated his father who just lost a Senate election. Coffin stated, "Oh yes, I know your father. Frankly, he was beaten by a better man." Apparently, the young George W. Bush said nothing, but Barbara Bush stated years later: "You talk about a shattering blow. Not only to George, but shattering to us." Podhoretz believes that this incident helped situate "George W. Bush at odds with the Eastern Establishment," and was instrumental in his decision to move back to Texas.

Roger Kimball explores "The rancid radicalism of William Sloane Coffin", reflecting on Coffin's death yesterday at age 81:

William Sloane Coffin, acting from his position as a civil rights leader, chaplain of Yale University, and member in good standing of the American WASP aristocracy, did a great deal to legitimize this form of illegitimacy and illegality. His example helped to convince a generation that the law was dispensable when it conflicted with duly ratified liberal sentiments. That these sentiments should seem to be invested with the authority of religion made them all the more appealing to anyone seeking to enhance his sense of moral election. Like many Sixties radicals, Coffin regarded civil disobedience as a form of no-fault political theater. One broke the law in as noisy a way as possible, and then one was hauled off to jail, generally for a token sentence. The willingness to endure jail (which radical activists rarely did for more than a few hours before their lawyers arrived to bail them out) was supposed to legitimize the illegality. But as George Kennan's noted in "Rebels Without a Program" (1968). "The violation of law is not . . . a privilege that lies offered for sale with a given price tag, like an object in a supermarket, available to anyone who has the price and is willing to pay for it."

Kennan is an especially noteworthy critic in this context because he, too, was deeply opposed to U.S. involvement in Vietnam. But he understood, as the Coffin did not, that in a democracy illegality is not a justifiable brand of political opposition. And he also understood that, even when one disagrees with specific policies, one's country continues to exercise a legitimate claim on one's allegiance, a claim that cannot be disposed of in a fit of self-righteous bravado.

Needless to say, read the whole thing.

Update: James Taranto compares Coffin's deplorable behavior with a comment by Justice Sam Alito during his confirmation hearing:

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.

That's something we posted about as well, back in January. And as Taranto notes, "it reminds us of our own experience with smug campus liberals, at a third-tier Western university in the late 1980s. One wonders if it ever dawns on these people what effective recruiters they are for the political right".

Frankly, I'm pretty sure that that's one vision that rarely occurs to the anointed.

Do the writers at Time magazine have perpetually furrowed brows? Or is that how they want their readers to look?

In any case, be worried. Be very worried.

Betsy Newmark looks at the Duke lacrosse story:

When the Duke lacrosse story first broke, people wondered if the story would follow the storyline of Tom Wolfe's I am Charlotte Simmons or Bonfire of the Vanities. It now seems to be leaning more towards the latter with the evidence for the prosecution getting shakier every day.

Read the whole thing.

As I mentioned last week, I thought that Steven Malanga's article, "The Mob That Whacked Jersey", on the Garden State's run-away tax and spend fever was a surprisingly universal cautionary tale. It does a terrific job describing what can happen when a state loses its bearings and fiscal discipline, and it's remarkably timely, as April 17 looms ever closer. And it builds on the material in his recent book, The New New Left: How American Politics Works Today.

I had a great interview with Steve on Tuesday, and after a little editing, it's become our latest podcast.

(No iPod required of course; virtually any PC media player will play an MP3 file. And yes, it's entirely coincidental that our first two podcasts are with guys named Steve. We'll do everything we can to break this cycle with the next one...)

Back in February, I wrote about the newspaper as "Proper Victorian Gentleman", choosing which elements to play up and which to ignore completely based on how it fits the overall message they were trying to convey:

To easily see the Victorian Gentlemanly style in action, pick up a copy of a paper like the San Francisco Chronicle. (Or scroll through their Website of course, but it's even more obvious "on dead tree".) Read their coverage, of say, the protests outside the gates of San Quentin during Tookie Williams' execution. Then peruse the photos of the same event at Zombietime.

John Hinderaker of Power Line spots the Victorian Gentleman at theme at work with The New York Times and ANSWER during the mass illegal immigration rallies yesterday:

International A.N.S.W.E.R. passed out thousands of mass-produced, yellow and black signs with exactly the same message. You can see them prominently displayed in our video footage from New York. Here, though, is what I think is even more interesting. At either of the two New York Times pages linked above, you can also link to the Times' own video of the New York demonstration. Take a look at it.

Look at the sea of yellow and black, International A.N.S.W.E.R. signs. They vastly outnumber all other signs and banners. They are the dominant visual image of the New York demonstration. It is inconceivable that the Times' reporters could have failed to note the prominent role played by A.N.S.W.E.R. in running the demonstration, or the dominant role played by that group in equipping the protesters with signs. Yet the organization's role was not acknowledged by the Times, or, to my knowledge, by any other newspaper. Why? The Times' reporters were obviously aware of A.N.S.W.E.R.'s prominent involvement, and thirty seconds' worth of research would have disclosed the fact that the group is an unabashedly Communist organization. It wouldn't have taken much more than that to learn that A.N.S.W.E.R.'s National Coordinator has said that illegal immigration can be the "catalyst for a broader class struggle, even possibly a revolutionary struggle."

Now, I'm not suggesting that most of those who carried A.N.S.W.E.R.'s signs in yesterday's demonstrations sympathize with, or are even aware of, that group's extremist agenda. But isn't A.N.S.W.E.R.'s role newsworthy? Isn't it something that newspaper readers need to be aware of, to get a balanced picture of the demonstrations?

The Times doesn't think so. The Times made the editorial judgment that you're better off not knowing who was responsible for that sea of yellow and black signs so clearly depicted in their own video. Because, when mainstream media organizations start referring to "mischievous toddlers," it's not hard to figure out whose side you're supposed to be on.

Which illustrates pretty well, I think, why we need citizen journalism.

Of course, the Times was rather reluctant to discuss ANSWER's background in 2003, as well.

Mary Katharine Ham writes:

I recently had a conversation with a liberal friend about the economy. I noted the many, many straight months of job growth despite natural disasters and high energy prices, to which my liberal friend replied, "yeah, but what kind of jobs are they?"

This is what kind of jobs they are.

Of course, one of the huge drags on the economy is out of control taxes and spending, especially by Blue State governments. I just had a great telephone interview with Steven Malanga of City Journal about his new article on New Jersey's fiscal profligacy. Watch for that podcast to go online, later this week.

The new issue of City Journal is online, and Mark Steyn has an essay in it.

You know what to do next: click here.

Update: Further proof that the clock is ticking.

After a rough period in the mid-"naughts", the economy is coming back to life, showing signs of strength. But for a reason that I just can't fathom, the American media stubbornly refuses to report the details...

...Of the Iraqi economy, that is. (As well as America's own, of course.)

Brendan Loy brings us up to speed with the latest on the upcoming film about Flight #93, including a link to its Time magazine feature story.

Frank J.'s brilliant 2003 "Realistic Plan For World Peace" comes another step closer to implementation.

Update: Elsewhere, Glenn Reynolds turns Cruz Bustamante's MEChA-madness on its head: "Annex Mexico?"

Jennifer Roback Morse looks at Bush #41's gift that keeps on giving, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the ramifications of which continue to spiral out of control, especially for small business owners:

Alpine, California, is a peaceful rural community that lies at the foothills of the Viejas Mountains, east of San Diego. Bordering the Cleveland National Forest, this friendly village hardly seems a likely setting for a show-down over free enterprise, disabled rights and lawsuit abuse.

Mike McKany, owner of Alpine Liquor, received a letter informing him that he was being sued for three counts of violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). He was informed that three different aggrieved customers were suing him for damages of $10,500 each. The letter, from attorney Theodore Pinnock, offered him the option of settling if he called that day. The attorney offered to begin negotiating down from the $10,500 for each count, as long as the first payment was received by the following Monday.

McKany was puzzled by the alleged violations. Two years ago, California Lottery officials had assured him that he met the requirements of the ADA. His business had to be in compliance with ADA as a precondition of being allowed to sell California lottery tickets. The suit alleged that Alpine Liquor’s restrooms were not handicapped accessible. The liquor store doesn’t even have a public restroom. Pinnock’s letter claimed that McKany’s business did not provide disabled parking. But his parking lot does have disabled parking.

But Mike told me by phone that his disabled customers don’t even use the designated handicapped parking spot. Instead, they pull right up in front of the store, where Mike, his father Joe, or another employee can easily see them. Doing business in such a small town as Alpine, Mike knows his regular customers. Most of his disabled customers never have to get out of the car, since somebody usually hops out of the store to help them.

So Mike wondered about these customers who were complaining that his business was inhospitable to disabled people. He looked up their names on the Internet. He found that at least one of them had an address in El Cajon, 15 miles away. Kind of a long way to go to the liquor store.

As it happens, at least thirty other Alpine businesses received identical letters from the same attorney with equally inapplicable complaints. This particular attorney, Theodore Pinnock, who has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair, has a reputation around San Diego County. Last year, he sent 67 letters to businesses in the historic town of Julian, alleging violations of ADA accessibility requirements. At that time, he demanded between $2,500 and $4,000 in attorneys fees from each of the businesses. Business owners in Julian got to the point that they dreaded the approach of anybody in a wheelchair.

The business owners of Alpine have decided that they aren’t going to take it lying down. But they have discovered that complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act is not a black and white issue. Businesses often don’t know whether they are in compliance. Besides, the state of California has its own accessibility rules, which are not always consistent with the federal requirements.

This uncertainty creates a loophole large enough for disability lawyers like Theodore Pinnock to drive their motorized wheelchairs through. Vague legal requirements leaves every business owner vulnerable to the threat of a lawsuit. For many small businesses, settling is more cost-effective than fighting, even if they are really in compliance.

This is banana republic governance. Make laws no one can comply with. Enforce the laws at random. Favor your friends by selectively looking the other way.

As Virginia Postrel wrote in 2004:

Bush's fiscal legacy is expanding Medicare, just as his father's regulatory legacy was the Americans With Disabilities Act. It's amazing how much damage those Bushes can do by being nice.

There's a lot about both men to be admired, but governmental restraint, unfortunately, isn't one of their better traits.

And the gaming of the ADA by trial lawyers lends further credence to Michael Barone's warning that America risks a slow--and seemingly inevitable at times--decent into an economy that seems more like French socialism than American dynamism.

Last December, one of Mickey Kaus's best ironic juxtapositions illustrated just how tightly the liberal cocoon envelops the New York Times:

We all have our bubbles: From the NYT's Wednesday columnist pages--

OP-ED COLUMNIST W. Won't Read This

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: December 14, 2005
Never ask a guy who's in a bubble if he's in a bubble. He can't answer.

To continue reading this article, you must be a subscriber to TimesSelect.

But Dowd is a columnist, and some columnists are pay-to-read, unlike bloggers, whom anybody can read...right?

Not if you're blogging for the Times--which traps its bloggers in the TimesSelect bubble as well, as Ann Althouse notes:

Stanley Fish has a blog...

And he's blogging about Scalia. Don't you want to link to it? But you can't! The NYT has put Fish in an aquarium: on TimesSelect, which makes him irrelevant in the great oceans of the blogosphere. Sigh.

You know, over the months that TimesSelect has limited access to its key writers, I've started to skip over columns as I scan through the paper in the morning, making quick decisions about which articles to read. Maybe Maureen Dowd said something provocative, but if I can't engage with it by blogging about it, I don't even take the trouble to find out what it is.

But this Stanley Fish blog is just crazy. It's a blog. But you can't link. By having blogs, the Times seems to want to say we're cool. By making them unlinkable, it's saying we're clueless. But maybe they want their subscribers to stay out of the linked-up blogosphere and wade around in the Times blogs. Stay here, in our safe domain -- our clean, well-lit aquarium -- with our approved bloggers. Of course, we riffraff bloggers, in wanting to link, are trying to send them more readers and to get a lively conversation going.

Please, don't send us more readers. Don't talk about us.

Whoops--I guess I should have honored the Times' request.

Related: Jeff Jarvis notes that "Times Public Editor Byron Calame can make anything dull… including blogs".

Power Line is still collecting video of the pro-illegal immigration marches today.

Here's one fellow who probably won't be contributing many images: his digital camera was smashed during the Dallas march.

Update: These photos from the illegal immigration march in Rochester, NY probably won't make AP or Reuters any time soon.

Another Update: Byron York checks in from the DC rally:

By the way, I looked for Brian Becker, the veteran organizer for the neo-Communist group International ANSWER, which has been involved in some big immigrant events. I didn't see him, and one rally staffer I spoke to seemed anxious to suggest that ANSWER had no role in this particular gathering. However, there were a lot of yellow "Amnistia -- Full Rights for All Immigrants!" signs, which were produced by what is called the ANSWER Coalition.

There is no involvement of ANSWER here. Absolutely none, and when I say none, I mean there is a certain amount, more than we are prepared to admit...

One More Update: Michelle Malkin and Ian Schwartz each have photos from the DC rally.

In the early days of this blog, we looked at England's appalling crime rate and the PC sensibility that enables it. Mary Madigan of Dean's World writes today that little has changed there.

After the 7/7 bombings last year, we noted that British police were forced to stop random immigration checks on Tube passengers several months before the bombing and wrote, "So much for the London equivalent of the Broken Windows theory of crime prevention".

The American Spectator notes that the Broken Windows Theory has made all the difference in the world in England's soaring crime rates and the comparatively low rates in Manhattan:

American and British criminologists have long been puzzled and angered by the fact that Britain seems to have learnt nothing from the experience of New York in successfully reducing crime.

The big drop in virtually all types of crime in New York has generally been attributed to the zero-tolerance policy associated with Mayor Guiliani. Now Britain, far from adopting zero-tolerance, looks like it's adopting a policy of not prosecuting many serious crimes at all. This is the subject of an official Home Office directive to all British police forces. British police have now been told that instead of arresting a range of serious criminals, they can be let off with a caution.

The Home Office says offenses that may now be dealt with by a caution include burglary of a shop or office, threatening to kill, actual bodily harm, and possession of Class A drugs such as heroin or cocaine if police decide a caution would be the best approach.

Other crimes including common assault, threatening behavior, sex with an underage girl or boy, and car theft should normally be dealt with by a caution, if the offenders admit their guilt but have no criminal record.

London and British crime rates have been increasing for years. Recently total crime rates for London have been estimated at about seven times those of New York for a slightly smaller population and some authorities suggest these figures have been minimized. England and Wales are now accounted by some estimates as the most dangerous places for crime in the developed world.

New York and London have populations of 8 million and 7 million respectively and comparable police budgets, though New York has about 40 percent more police actually on the beat. British papers retail many incidents of British police, rather than preventing crime, being kept busy "celebrating diversity" and prosecuting politically incorrect remarks and behavior (large amounts of money and court time have been spent by the Crown Prosecution Service on cases of children who have made politically incorrect remarks in school playground fights, for instance).

If Rudy doesn't make a run for the White House in 2008, maybe he should go after Tony Blair or Ken Livingstone's jobs. God knows England needs him.

4Pundits, via InstaPundit, explore "Ann Coulter's 666 release".

Since all the cool kids seem to be doing their own Podcasts these days, I figured it's time to join in on the fun. And speaking of cool, our first interview is with the King of Cool himself, Stephen Green, the proprietor of VodkaPundit.com, "The Best Free Booze On the 'Net", as Roger Simon would say. So without further ado...

Click here for the first EdDriscoll.com Podcast! (No iPod required for listening--virtually any PC audio player will play an MP3 file.)

Future Podcasts will go live about once a week or so (probably with an emphasis on "or so").

For the technical wonks out there, this was recorded with Cakewalk's Sonar 4.0, via the JK Audio Inline Patch that Glenn Reynolds mentioned in his first Podcast for the telephone recording, and an ancient Shure SM58 microphone, both of which ran into an M-Audio Delta 66 audio card and breakout box.

I played all of the instruments on the intro and outro music, with the exception of the drums, which Mick Fleetwood sat in on (more or less). And the final Podcast mix was processed with Izotope's Ozone mastering software to give it a nice professional sheen.

...Or so we hope. Let us know what you think!

Last night I quoted the Luigi Vercotti-like ravings of the New York Post's Jared Paul Stern, who was caught telling a potential blackmail victim, “We know how to destroy people". I commented:

The one saving grace that many have is Weblogs, which at least create some opportunity to get another side of the story out, when the media decides to fire all of its guns as once (see: Rather, Dan, for but one of many examples).

Jeff Jarvis agrees:

We are witnessing the last growl of the unbridled power of the press. Some in the press would like to think — but would not be stupid enough to brag — that they could “destroy people” for a living. And though they certainly can cause headaches for people in the spotlight, the odds of fatality go down by the day as there are more and more means of response. Now the targets can turn the tables on the journalists. I’ve seen reporters go ballistic when their emails to sources or transcripts of their interviews are published on blogs. Well, tough. What’s good for the goose is now grist for the gander. Accidental billionnaire Mark Cuban is the master of using his blog and email to show how the sausage is made and many more are following his example. Transparency works two ways.

And they do go ballistic.

John Hinderaker of Power Line notes that ANSWER is planning another round of pro-illegal immigration marches tomorrow. He's encouraging readers to bring their camcorders, and is promising to run the most newsworthy footage on Power Line Video. Which sounds like a good thing: if last month's coverage by the L.A. Times is any indication, there will be all sorts of aspects of this story overlooked by the legacy media.

Given that he was once dubbed, "the conservative choice for a difficult and perilous time", does America really want a politician this obsessed with religion to be even considering another run for the White House?

Michelle Malkin discusses the case of John Hehman, an NYU student chased into the path of an oncoming car in Harlem by thugs heard to be yelling (depending upon the source) "Get the white boy!" or "Get Whitey!":

If John Hehman, may he rest in peace, had been black and his assailants had been white, you'd know his story by now. But the races were reversed and his murder has been relegated to a footnote by the p.c. New York Times and the rest of the national MSM. (Compare the NYTimes' coverage of Hehman with this NYTimes story of a local white-on-black attack last year.)

Local media are filling in the details.

And it's a good thing they are too--just as Jesse Dirkhising's death was largely ignored by the elite media in early 2001 because it didn't fit the template of acceptable stories, the Times article on Hehman that Michele links to really is a footnote--it runs a scant 220 words, less than a third longer than this short blog post.

Update: More at Rhymes With Right.

Pamela of Atlas Shrugs reminds us that today is "the three year anniversary of the day Saddam Hussein fled Baghdad and his atatue was toppled. It was a great day for Iraq and a great day for America".

Indeed^TM.

Meanwhile, via Power Line:

Investors Business Daily provides a good, albeit not exhaustive, summary of what we've learned so far from the Iraqi documents released pursuant to Project Harmony. But wait--aren't all these documents being "leaked"?

James Taranto has some thoughts on that topic.

Update: Judith Weiss of Kesher Talk also has some thoughts. (Via InstaPundit, who has additional anniversary coverage.

Another Update: 1000 reasons why removing Saddam was right: "Iraqis Find 8 Mass Graves Containing 1,000 Bodies, Kurds Say".

And there's no doubt, that the elite media certainly do know how to destroy people--it's a huge part of their job. It's just rare that they come out and say it in such a straightforward fashion--or, as Austin Bay notes, that they threaten someone so directly:

The allegations are serious– that an NY Post gossip columnist was shaking down (blackmailing?) people who appeared in his column. (The Times article says the columnist was a part-time employee. Seems the fellow also sells shirts.)

Here’s the choice quote (and the one Drudge features):

In that meeting, the person involved in the investigation said, Mr. Stern spoke of Page Six’s power.

“We know how to destroy people,” Mr. Stern said, according to a person reading a transcript of the meeting. “It’s what we do. We do it without creating liability. That’s our specialty.”

Mr. Stern is Jared Paul Stern, the Post’s Page Six gossip columnist.

Celebrities (for example, movie stars) may disparage gossip columns, but they rely on gossip to hype their movies and keep their names “in play” between movies. Journalism is increasingly tabloid and the line between “gossip column” and reporting is often nil. Several years ago I heard the term “gossip column” applied to Washington Beltway political columns. Indeed, what’s the difference between a column based on political leak or innuendo and a column based on celebrity leak and innuendo — the subject matter is allegedly different, but the techniques are strikngly similar.

Exactly. The one saving grace that many have is Weblogs, which at least create some opportunity to get another side of the story out, when the media decides to fire all of its guns as once (see: Rather, Dan, for but one of many examples).

Update: Welcome readers from the Pajamas Mothership; click here for a follow-up post.

Davids Medienkritik writes that Spiegel Online, "that great German Rosetta Stone of media objectivity, has just located the source media-political corruption in the United States":

They've just uncovered another massive Bush administration conspiracy and struck a further blow for journalistic integrity. They've exposed the corruption of the media "anti-elite" and identified an online power vacuum filled with dangerous right-wingers who threaten truth, justice and the German way.

And who is to blame? Bush and the Bloggers. Who else?

In two recent articles, bloggers are characterized as corrupt, partisan, paid-off and out of control. And since no one in Germany currently fits that description, our friends at SPIEGEL have bravely set out to warn German readers of the grave dangers of the American blogosphere.

The first article, entitled "Buyable Bloggers: Sweating Swingers," was authored by none other than Marc Pitzke, SPIEGEL ONLINE's master of the profound. His prime example of what he labels "buyable bloggers" is Andrew Sullivan, of whom he writes:

"Bloggers pride themselves as the anti-elite of the media branch. But the upstart revolutionaries (Revoluzzer) have long since begun to come to terms with corporations. There have already been mergers between the once sworn enemies (Todfeinde).

New York - "Time" Editor in Chief Jim Kelly sent out the invitation, and the crème de la crème of the press scene danced in. Shoulder to shoulder they pressed into Kelly's apartment, beer bottles and cocktail glasses in abundance: Bill Keller, the lord of the "New York Times," Hendrik Hertzberg from "New Yorker" CNN ratings savior Anderson Cooper and others.

The guest of honor was someone else: Andrew Sullivan, the conservative-gay-Catholic-HIV-positive blog pioneer, who after five years of fighting alone on the internet sold his online flare-ups (Web-Wallungen) to "Time."

The "Time" -Sullivan merger is one of the first marriages between established media and their supposed sworn enemies, the bloggers. Sullivan collected a license fee of an unknown amount. And Kelly hopes that Sullivan's "unmistakable, individual voice" represents the beginning of a "blog community at Time.com.""

Unfortunately, the author is both wrong and completely out of his league. Andrew Sullivan may be an avid critic of major media, but he also possesses a journalistic resume that flat out dwarves Marc Pitzke. Furthermore, many successful bloggers have worked or are currently working in traditional media. To say that bloggers are the "sworn enemies" of the mainstream media establishment is an ignorant, sweeping generalization that could only have been made by someone with no real understanding of the blogosphere. To further characterize bloggers as "buyable" purveyors of "gossip" and "acidic commentary" reflects little more than a cheap attempt to smear new media.

Via Tim Blair.

For a more cogent and less sweaty and swinging, but not sugercoated look at the state of the Blogosphere, check out the latest post by Jim Geraghty.

Betsy Newmark speaks truth to Pinch, debunking a hoary old cliché about the Vietnam War, race, and casualty figures that both a New York Times reporter and implicitly, his editor fell for.

The American Enterprise magazine reprints a 2000 essay by
John D. Fonte, in which he wrote that America has just big of an assimilation problem as it has with immigration. Which isn't surprising, as the two go hand-in-hand:

At any conference on immigration these days, someone will typically rise and quote Henry James, Henry Adams, Henry Cabot Lodge, or some other old Anglo-Saxon fuddy-duddy worrying circa 1900 that immigrants would never assimilate to American life. The speaker will then ridicule the designated Henry, remind us he was wrong, and declare, "We have been through this debate before, but today’s immigrants will Americanize just as they did in the past."

This is good sport, guaranteed to get a few laughs. But it is grossly misleading. For the fact is, today’s assimilating forces are much different than those that prevailed in the early twentieth century. To put things simply: It’s not 1900 anymore.

During our earlier immigration wave one century back, we had self-confident patriotic elites in politics, education, business, religion, and civic associations who insisted that new immigrants Americanize. Now, we have diffident and divided elites who are either actively promoting anti-Americanization policies such as "multiculturalism" or doing little to encourage assimilation. In 1915, Democrat Woodrow Wilson and Republican Theodore Roosevelt explicitly and forcefully called for the "Americanization" of new immigrants. In 2000, Democrats and Republicans alike talk mostly of "diversity," rarely if ever of "assimilation" or "Americanization."

Back then, the federal government promoted Americanism and individual rights. Now it promotes ethnic consciousness and group rights. Group preferences in employment that were originally designed for black Americans who had suffered historical discrimination now include special treatment for most newly arrived immigrants from Latin America and Asia, and for non-citizens as well as citizens.

Back then, the United States had control of its borders. Now the Immigration and Naturalization Service estimates that every year the number of illegal immigrants grows by 275,000.

And speaking of immigration, Mickey Kaus is all over the action in the House and Senate yesterday.

"You've got to get up early if you want the scoop," Becky Stuart, a Favre family personal assistant is quoted by AP as saying. Favre will hold a press conference 8:30 a.m. EDT tomorrow morning at his charity golf tournament in Tunica, Miss.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if Favre announces his retirement. But that's just a pure guess on my part, based on the dreadful season he and the Packers had last year.

Update 4/8/06 8:07 AM PDT: Or not. Yahoo calls it a "Play-Action Faked": At his press conference Favre insisted that he still hasn't made up his mind yet.

Steven Malanga paints a grim, but I think accurate portrait of New Jersey's woes:

For more than a century and a half, New Jersey, nestled between New York City and Philadelphia, offered commuters like Thannikary affordable living in pleasant communities. Wall Street tycoons, middle managers fleeing high-priced Gotham once they’d married and had kids, and immigrants who settled first in New York but quickly discovered that they could pursue the American dream more easily across the Hudson—all flocked into the Garden State. Eventually, New Jersey’s congenial living attracted even corporations escaping New York’s rising crime and taxes. The state flourished.

But today Jersey is a cautionary example of how to cripple a thriving state. Increasingly muscular public-sector unions have won billions in outlandish benefits and wages from compliant officeholders. A powerful public education cartel has driven school spending skyward, making Jersey among the nation’s biggest education spenders, even as student achievement lags. Inept, often corrupt, politicians have squandered yet more billions wrung from suburban taxpayers, supposedly to uplift the poor in the state’s troubled cities, which have nevertheless continued to crumble despite the record spending. To fund this extravagance, the state has relentlessly raised taxes on both residents and businesses, while localities have jacked up property taxes furiously. Jersey’s cost advantage over its free-spending neighbors has vanished: it is now among the nation’s most heavily taxed places. And despite the extra levies, new governor Jon Corzine faces a $4.5 billion deficit and a stagnant economy during a national boom.

Unless Garden State leaders can stand up to entrenched interests—and the signs aren’t promising—the state may find itself permanently relegated to second-class economic status. New Jersey “could become the next California, with budget problems too big to solve without a lot of pain,” warns former Jersey City mayor Bret Schundler. “The old way of raising taxes to solve budget problems has been tried, and it’s done nothing but make things worse.”

It's a long-ish article, but well worth reading in its entirety as a cautionary tale.

In his review this week of Peter Jackson's 2005 remake of King Kong, James Lileks wrote:

If ever you find yourself in a flimsy gown standing on top of the Empire State Building under the crotch of a giant ape, screaming at the airplanes to leave him alone, your life has taken a wrong turn somewhere. Possibly at the 93rd floor. Possibly at 42nd street. Possibly at the point where you got on the tramp steamer to sail to the Pacific because you met a “movie director” on the street 45 minutes before. It all depends. There were signs along the way. But that standing-on-top-under-the-ape routine is the clincher, hon.

Lileks adds:

The New York scenes were good, and I wish they’d shown more; Times Square was not entirely accurate, but who cares. At least they showed the 30s in color, as opposed to the sepia-and-farina tones they usually use, as if FDR had confiscated all the primary colors...Well, I await the DVD, if only for the inevitable featurette about all the CGI magic they performed to bring 1930s Gotham back to life. From what I understand they built the entire city; it’s nice to know it’s sitting on a mainframe somewhere, waiting. Waiting for a much better movie.

And here it is!

(And yes, that's the last link to that particular film parody site for a while.)

Jeff Harrell of The Shape of Days attended last night's Celebrity Death Match Struggle between David Horowitz and Ward "Little Eichmanns" Churchill, where Chutch was heard to utter, "There is no truth". Jeff begs to differ:

If Ward Churchill were charged with a crime and spouted that “There is no truth” stuff in front of a judge, he’d be found incompetent to stand trial. The guy is nuts.

Either that, or he actually knows better and he’s just talking to hear himself talk. Which is fine if he wants to do it on the radio or a talk show or on a blog. But in front of a room full of impressionable kids? That’s reckless endangerment of a minor, man.

There is objective truth and that truth is this: The best way to debate Ward Churchill is to give him a microphone and let him go.

Mary Catherine Ham has additional links, including to Cam Edwards, who has a very funny write-up of the event:

Random observation: you could ski off of Churchill’s chin. He’s a very handsome guy, in a 60’s-counterculture sort of way. I’m sure he got a lot of co-eds in his younger days. Horowitz, on the other hand, looks like a bearded Larry David (from Curb Your Enthusiasm). He’s funny, he’s not throwing bombs. He just makes the point that academics exist in a vacuum, and “in a democracy, academic freedom is important because the purpose of education is to open minds, not to indoctrinate them”. It’s about “how to think, not what to think”, which I absolutely agree with.

Churchill says he went to Elmwood Grade School in central Illinois! Quick blogosphere… someone find his report card! Churchill also just said he got a two weeks detention for voting socialist in a mock election. Okay, now I think we really DO need to find his report card.

“Ward seems to be very inquisitive, but he keeps poking Mary Sue with his ginormous chin and making her cry. Also, he voted socialist. I think you should send him to Red China. Sincerely, Mrs. Beasley”

8:40 p.m.- I am now reminded why I hated college. This, at least for now, is not a debate. It’s a lecture. And I hate being lectured to.

Maybe Jim Geraghty’s right. Maybe we’re all just so lowbrow now that I’m waiting for, hoping for the train wreck to occur. Someone throw a chair at Ward Churchill! Someone throw a tomato at David Horowitz! Food Fight!!!!

Hopefully the University of Colorado has Ward on Double-Secret Probation these days.

Update: Horowitz and Churchill appeared afterwards on Hannity & Colmes; Expose The Left has a video clip.

Another Update: Cam Edwards wrote about that Horowitz "looks like a bearded Larry David". Gregg Hanke provides the "Separated At Birth" for David's debating partner. Hey, hey; my, my!

In the 1950s, Mies van der Rohe was fond of saying that "architecture is not a cocktail"--that it has certain rules, and unlike a Martini, you don't mix up a new style whenever you feel like it.

Similarly, one would assume that for a city mayor, the law is not a buffet where you can pick which laws appeal to you, and ignore those that don't.

But that seems to be exactly the principle that San Francisco's Mayor Gavin Newsom operates from. Two years ago, Newsom ignored California's ban on gay marriage, only to eventually be slapped down by California's state supreme court. Today, he saying that the city "will not comply with any federal legislation that criminalizes efforts to help illegal immigrants", as the Baltimore Examiner puts it.

In 2004, Glenn Reynolds wrote of Newsom's attempt to end run California's gay marriage ban:

Newsom would deny others the right to violate a law he believes in, but feels free to violate the law himself when he chooses, even though his sole claim to legitimacy as a government official comes from the law.

It's not civil disobedience when it's done by someone who controls the machinery of government -- it's usurpation, even when it's in a cause I agree with.

Given the recently demonstrated hostility of San Francisco's governing powers to America's Second Amendment, its military, and the nation's religious freedoms, maybe this blogger has it right, that if "San Francisco intends to ignore federal laws then they should lose all federal funding":

Every federal agency that has a S.F. office should close and that includes the post office. The same goes for every other city which chooses to follow San Francisco’s lead on this or any other federal law. Being American means that along with the benefits, rights and privileges come responsibilities, the first of those responsibilities is abiding the laws of the United States. Cities and even states have no more right to pick and choose which laws they will obey than the people themselves do. San Francisco understands this well enough when it enforces it’s own local ordinances so they have no excuse for thumbing their noses at state or federal laws.

But as Newsom learned two years ago, nothing of the sort will happen. He's appears to be free to thumb his nose at the law with impunity--something the rest of us are most certainly not.

(Of course, all Newsom's preening may be for naught: "Senate Vote Shelves Immigration Bill".)

Update: Sister Toldjah has some thoughts as well.

Another Update: "Seriously, saw Frisco off into the sea already. It's a pretty city, but so is Seattle-- we may still be able to save them if we start now".

Tim Blair spots a whole new definition of freelance journalism:

A New York Post Page Six staffer solicited $220,000 from a high-profile billionaire in return for a year’s “protection” against inaccurate and unflattering items about him in the gossip page, the Daily News has learned.

In two 90-minute meetings, characterized by a shocking breach of ethics, Jared Paul Stern, a fixture on the city’s gossip scene who also edited Page Six The Magazine, asked for a series of payments from Ron Burkle, the managing partner of Yucaipa Cos., a conglomerate with interests in supermarkets, celebrity clothing lines, and media.

We can guarantee you that not a single supermarket will get done over for fifteen bob a week...

City Journal's Stefan Kanfer takes aim at Hollywood's "blame the audience" reasoning why the horrid Basic Instinct 2 bombed:

Paul Verhoeven, director of the first Basic Instinct, made in 1992, avers that politics in the U.S. of A. have taken the fun out of eros. Indeed, insists the Dutch native, “anything that is erotic has been banned in the United States. Look at the people at the top. We are living under a government that is constantly hammering out Christian values.” Scenarist Nicholas Meyer (Fatal Attraction; The Human Stain) agrees. “We’re in a big puritanical mode. Now it’s like the McCarthy era, except it’s not ‘Are you a communist?’ but have you ever put sex in a movie?”

On which planet do these gentlemen live? It is difficult to determine from their remarks. In an epoch when XXX rated videos are available at the local DVD store, when the Internet contains countless pornographic sites, when surveys show that more Americans hear suggestive language than ever before, when celebrities promote oral sex for teenagers, when nudity and semi-nudity are a part of prime time programming, it is impossible to reconcile the opinions of Messrs. Verhoeven and Meyer with the facts of life.

Still, we must congratulate them for their originality. It used to be fashionable to hold the Jews responsible for everything that went wrong. Blaming Christianity is a new one.

Heh^TM.

Unlike the 'Starting From Zero' philosphy that fueled the far left of the 1960s, Jonah Goldberg writes that "Howard Dean's scream notwithstanding, today's liberalism is a lot of slide-rule wonkery. The smartest and most passionate thinkers of American liberalism are more actuary than revolutionary":

So where are the real radicals today? Who are the folks who want to rethink the status quo and truly liberate the masses? Pretty much where they've always been: on the libertarian right. Witness Charles Murray's exciting new book, In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State. It's an elegant little tract that makes a sustained, sober, and fact-driven case for scrapping the whole calcified edifice of the welfare state.

Under Murray's plan, all transfer payments would vanish, from Social Security and Medicare to corporate welfare and agricultural subsidies. In exchange, every low-income American over the age of 21 and not in jail would get $10,000 a year from the government. And everybody else would still get at least $5,000 a year from Uncle Sam. The only hitch is that people would be required to take out a minimal health insurance policy, and the tax code would stop favoring companies that offer health insurance.

In a flash, the working poor would be richer. Work even for a half a year at minimum wage, and the extra $10k would put you above the poverty line. The whole bloated, nannying welfare state would be a memory. Market forces would finally be introduced to the health-insurance industry, driving down the absurdly high price of health care. Women who choose not to work so they can raise their kids would get the full $10,000 no matter how much their husbands earned, supporting families more than the current system and with less paperwork. Charities and local communities would be revitalized, enjoying a flexibility denied to traditional bureaucrats. Those who wanted to walk on the wild side would get pocket change to do so but would have to live with the consequences. The old problem of subsidizing out-of-wedlock birth would become an anachronism.

Obviously, removing all government safeguards, particularly for the severely disabled, is hardly going to satisfy everyone. But at least Murray is thinking big, while liberals scoff at the idea that the welfare state isn't permanent. And that's the point: The liberal imagination is weighed down by the leaden status quo. In 1955, William F. Buckley Jr. defined conservatism as "standing athwart history yelling, stop!" That was when history was said to be on the side of collectivism and the state. Now that the market seems to be driving history, the Left is standing athwart it, occasionally burning a Peugeot or two, yelling, "Forget liberty, give me my perks."

TCS Daily recently featured a podcast of Murray discussing his idea.

Back in February, Paul Berger, whose blog is titled An Englishman In New York, was surprised at how ubiqituous the greeting "How are you?" seems in the Big Apple. To place the phrase into some sort of historical perspective, I linked to David Gelernter's wonderful City Journal retrospective from the mid-1990s of Manhattan mores on the cusp of 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.

As I wrote back then:

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.

If anything, the situation is even grimmer in modern England, as the great Theodore Dalrymple observes:

A problem arises, however, when all such rules, arbitrary as some of them might be, are eroded to the point of total informality. The culture of any society becomes graceless in the absence of all formality, a development that is peculiarly evident in my own country, Great Britain. Here, gracelessness has become, by a peculiar ideological inversion that has occurred in my lifetime, a manifestation of political virtue. My father’s view of the whole matter of manners has triumphed all but completely.

The argument goes something like this: formality is etiquette, and etiquette is a manifestation of an unjust, class-ridden, patriarchal society. The rejection of etiquette and the formality it entails is therefore a sign that one is on the side of the angels, that is to say, of the egalitarians. Modern egalitarians, at least in Britain, do not content themselves with the kind of abstract or formal equality before the law that allows any amount of difference in wealth, status, taste, and sensibility; they demand some progress towards equalization of everything, including manners.

Of course, egalitarians are just as attached as everyone else to their own material possessions and wealth and have no real intention of forgoing them by radical redistribution, at any rate, of their own money and possessions. The struggle for equality—of the actual rather than the formal kind—has therefore to be transferred to fields in which it will cost the egalitarian nothing, or nothing material and financial.

What better way to prove your egalitarian credentials than by adopting the supposedly free and easy, utterly informal manners of those at the bottom of the social scale? The freer and easier the better, for such informality demonstrates another quality beloved of, and praised by, intellectuals: a superiority to the dictates of convention. Thus you can never be quite informal or unconventional enough.

Carol Platt Liebau, from whom I found Dr. Dalymple's article, adds:

With that observation, Dr. Theodore Dalrymple skewers the dumbing down of etiquette in this country (and his own native Britain), associating it as something akin to a liberal disease. He also goes on to point out -- quite rightly -- that exquisite manners are certainly not a function of money. In fact, I was brought up to believe that good manners were nothing more than a matter of kindness: When in doubt, do the gracious thing, and chances are that it would be the "proper" thing. Manners are, in short, a set of rules by which civilized people can live together in harmony.

With the abandonment of any formality in dress, conversation and so much more, we are all the poorer. Many instinctively feel this -- it's one reason, I believe, for the popularity of Jane Austen novels and other similar materials . . .

Finally, for the Anglo response to Gelernter's look at Manhattan 67 years ago, Christy Davis has a somewhat similar look at England at the turn of the 20th century.

Update: Welcome City Journal readers! Please look around; I'm sure there's much here that you'll enjoy.

Found via The Professor, Thomas Dolby reveals his current musical arsenal:

I have never calculated the cost of all this gear. If someone is feeling industrious, please add it up and post it here. I’ll tell you what though, it’s a lot of kit for the money when you consider my first Fairlight cost $120,000 in 1982 and did a hell of a lot less.

Just to put into perspective how drastically the cost of musical equipment has lowered--and how far the technologically has advanced--you can put a Fairlight synthesizer into your PC not for $120,000...but for $180.

Ed Morrissey parses Cynthia McKinney's Durbin-esque "apology" for slugging a Capital Hill police officer, and isn't very impressed:

If that's the complete statement, it falls a little short. She says that the incident should not have resulted in "physical contact," but that became necessary on the part of the police when she refused to stop after blowing through the checkpoint. She should have apologized for striking the officer outright and not hiding behind this weasel-word construction. Nor, do I note, does she apologize for accusing Capitol Hill police of racism and racial profiling. She gave the minimal apology possible to try to get the story off the front pages.

Once again, we have an egotistical blowhard demanding that everyone cater to her whims and smearing people who refuse to submit to her bullying. I suspect that the deafening public silence from the Congressional Black Caucus disguised some pointed advice from them to McKinney to shut the hell up before she undid years of work highlighting real racism in law enforcement.

It shouldn't work, but it probably will; the story will quickly fade unless the grand jury decides to press charges anyway, and at some point we'll hear her colleagues demand that we "move on". I give it three hours.

Meanwhile, appearing on Hugh Hewitt's radio show today, Mark Steyn agrees that McKinney's apology is a "kind of weasel phrasing of words":

This is another thing I joked about, actually, with the border guy yesterday, that basically, she gets asked for I.D., and she slugs the official. And then she accuses him of being a racist. The reality of the situation is that if this is a republic of citizen legislators, then they do not have the right to demand the kind of privileges that ordinary citizens do not have. So if we have to produce cards and I.D., and stand in line, and have the right documentation, then so should Congressmen and Senators, and secretaries of this, and secretaries of that, and ambassadors, and all the fancy pants people. You know, one of the most loathsome and unlikeable things about John Kerry was when he was running for president, was his whole 'don't you know who I am' attitude whenever he met a little person. And I don't think that...unfortunately, there's too many Senators and Congressmen for them all to pull the 'don't you know who I am' routine?

HH: Okay, so we're not expecting her to really get down and apologize. Do you expect her to be prosecuted?

MS: Well, I would hope she's prosecuted. You know, I don't think you have a real legislature unless they are bound by the same rules as us.

HH: Well put.

MS: I remember during the 2000 campaign, standing at the toll booth on I-93 in New Hampshire, as Al Gore's motorcade came roaring through without stopping, and you know, little old ladies jumping out of the way and scattering, because he didn't want to pay the 75 cent toll. Sorry, I don't care if he's the Vice President. You don't legislate laws for us that you're not bound by. And if it's the law that you have to produce I.D. to get into the United States Congress, and to its grounds, and to its buildings, then she has to do it with everybody else.

One would hope.

Marc Cooper writes:

My hat off and big appreciative hug to Les Moonves, that singular visionary and defender of modern journalism, who has made the courageous selection of Katie Couric to anchor the CBS Evening News. This should dispel any lingering cynicism about the integrity of the news division over at Murrow's old network. Ed must be cheering loudly from his grave.

Indeed^TM.

Update: "If I were Les Moonves, I wouldn’t quit my day job and go into human resources".

The San Jose Mercury (via the WaPo) notes that "Blogging's rise causes workplace issues":

The number of bloggers continues to grow, but the number of workplace policies explaining the company's rules on blogging remains anemic. And that can cause a lot of workplace angst for both management and workers.

Although there are no real statistics on how many people have been fired for something they wrote on their personal Weblogs, the stories keep coming:

A reporter in Dover, Del., was fired earlier this month for offensive postings on his personal blog.

He was just added to the list. Remember ``Washingtonienne,'' the intern who embarrassed her bosses on Capitol Hill when she described sexcapades with unnamed staffers? There was also ``QueenofSky,'' a Delta flight attendant who was fired after she posed provocatively (she meant for it to be funny, she said) in her uniform. A Microsoft employee was canned after he posted a picture that included Macs the company had purchased. And of course there is blogger Heather Armstrong, who was fired in 2002 from her Web design job for writing about work and colleagues on her site, Dooce.com. That's where bloggers get the now-popular term, to be ``dooced'': to be fired because of one's blog.

According to a survey done by the Society for Human Resource Management in July, 85 percent of companies do not have a written policy that provides employees with guidelines on what is acceptable to write about in a personal blog, while 8 percent do.

I asked my wife to jot down some very easy to follow rules to avoid problems in the workplace. (Please note that this isn't legal advice, merely the blogging equivalent of jotting on a cocktail napkin):

1. Remember that your work computer belongs to your employer, your work time belongs to your employer i.e., don't blog from work.

2. Read your employment agreement. Morality clauses or non-disparagement clauses etc. might limit what you might otherwise say.

3. Know what is confidential information and don't post it. In some states theft of a trade secret is a crime, in addition to being just plain wrong.

4. Ask your employer what their policy is about blogging that in no way reflects on the company. Double edged sword. It is the most professional and upfront thing to do. But if you are told that they do consider what you write outside the work area to be relevant to your employment (which I doubt they would) then you can't claim "who knew"

5. Remember that in most states employees owe their employer a "duty of loyalty" Can't you think of something else to blog about other than whining about work?

And as Jonah Goldberg might say, remember to keep all nudity tasteful and essential to the blog. What employer can complain about that...?

The Anchoress writes:

It is chilling, adrenaline-pumping and necessary.

But not pleasant. My hands were shaking by the end of the trailer. It’s going to be tough to watch.

But then again, The Passion of the Christ was tough to watch too. And I watched it 5 times.

I only watched The Passion once. But that's more than I've seen most of Hollywood's recent product. Unless I read of some sort of Reuters-style moral equivalence arbitrarily dropped into United 93 by our cultural superiors in Tinseltown, so far it's shaping up to be another must-see as well.

Much more on United 93, here.

Update: Ben Shapiro writes:

During World War II, moviegoers were constantly treated to newsreels depicting the damage at Pearl Harbor, along with current events on both the Pacific and European fronts. Hollywood churned out hundreds of World War II pictures, the vast majority pushing for further American involvement in defeating Germany and Japan and celebrating the heroism of men and women involved in the war effort.

Since Sept. 11, by contrast, TV news channels specifically dedicated to explaining current events have stopped showing the Sept. 11 footage. We're told that the news media censors such horrible pictures out of sensitivity to the families of the victims. At the same time, the media pleads for more pictures of body bags coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq. Apparently, sensitivity only extends as far as the media's antiwar agenda. Meanwhile, Hollywood has been silent about Sept. 11 and the War on Terror, other than to claim that war in the Middle East is driven by thirst for oil ("Syriana") or that President Bush is a war criminal ("Fahrenheit 9/11"). Chances are that Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center" will follow in the footsteps of such artistic misinformation.

It is about time Americans were reacquainted with the cost of complacence. It is about time Americans were shown the face of our enemy -- it is time we were reminded what they fight for, so clearly visible in the burning towers, the plummeting bodies and the exploding airplanes of Sept. 11. Accurate depictions of the bravery and evil that we saw on Sept. 11 are necessary.

Unless of course, you're the industry that makes its nut producing depictions of bravery and evil.

Peggy Noonan raises an interesting question about Katie Couric's being hired by CBS for their evening news broadcast:

The rise of Katie Couric to the "Evening News," however, raises an interesting question, and may be suggestive of the media environment of the future. I am not referring to the fact that Katie's a woman and will be the first to "fly solo," as everyone is saying. It's not 1967, and she's not replacing Walter Cronkite, who counted. We're all happily used to women bringing us the news.

It's this. The evening news shows have traditionally had an air of greater formality than the morning news, where the parameters for comment and personal views were understood to be broader. They have two hours to fill, not 23 minutes, of course personal views emerge. Ms. Couric's on-air comments the past decade have led many people to understand that her political and cultural beliefs are pronounced [And how!--Ed], rigid, and part of her public presentation of herself. And that this is true in a way that does not apply to the beliefs, whatever they are, of Bob Schieffer, Brian Williams and Elizabeth Vargas. (Yes, Dan Rather also consistently signaled and declared his views, but in the end that contributed to his ouster.)

Is the appointment of Katie an acknowledgement by CBS that it doesn't feel it has to care anymore about political preferences, that the existence of Fox News Channel has in effect freed up the network broadcasts to be what you and I might call more politically tendentious and they might call edgy? In a fractured media environment where everyone can have a voice, why wouldn't the broadcast networks take the new freedom as new license? After all, if America is one big niche market, liberals make up a big niche.

I'm wondering how the network news divisions are viewing the lay of the land. The answer will tell us something about the future American media environment.

Well, we've already looked at ongoing efforts by Hollywood and the newspaper industry to tweak their product for their primary audience. And Richard Posner theorized last year that Fox News freed-up CNN to shift to the left. Why should the over-the-air TV networks be the exception?

Although it does create a huge opportunity for an iconclast that wants to cut against the grain...

While Glenn Reynolds scores an impressive coup by podcasting an interview with the Senate Majority Leader, Confederate Yankee is none-too-happy with his performance on illegal immigration. Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt puts it simply: "No Fence? No President Frist".

Update: Michelle Malkin adds, "If this is what Sen. Frist thinks Americans 'expect' and 'deserve,' the GOP is in for a very rude awakening in November".

If it actually airs, that is--The Officers' Club writes that South Park is about to air those cartoons, if Viacom doesn't get the willies first:

From what I could gather from the cliffhanger ending [of this week's episode], South Park creators Matt Parker and Trey Stone have forced Comedy Central to stand at the same crossroads that hundreds of newspapers and periodicals across America stood at not a month ago. Next week they will guest star Mohammed in all of his animated glory, and they have let Muslims know in advance that it's a-coming.

Comedy Central has a choice. They can either stand by their longtime stars in Parker and Stone, or succumb to cheap threats from petty thugs. Should Comedy Central make a decision endorsed by the First Amendment, I will be glued to my tv next Wednesday at 10pm.

Over to you, Sumner Redstone!

Well, this was inevitable, I guess...

Update: Welcome readers of Steven Den Beste's Chizumatic blog!

Congratulations to Ed Morrissey of the exceptional Captain's Quarters blog for being selected as The Week magazine's 2005 Blogger of the Year!

For a flashback to our look at Power Line's being named 2004 Bloggers of the Year by Time magazine, click here.

InOpinion dubs Kevin Phillips "Nixon's Dick Morris":

Before anymore op-ed editors run another column by Kevin Phillips, you have to read this takedown from Slate.

Every time you run an op-ed by Phillips with the ID that he is a "Republican strategist" or Republican anything, you have to know that you send your conservative readers around the bend. The readers that don't simply leave will trust you less.

Phillips left the Republican party when I was a baby. Calling Phillips a Republican is like describing former Texas Senator Phil Gramm as a Democratic politician.

Betsy Newmark concurs.

Roger L. Simon writes:

Determined somehow to prove that an anchorman (or woman) is still a relevant profession in 2006, CBS has named Katie Couric, in the words of their press release, "Anchor and Managing Editor of The CBS EVENING NEWS WITH KATIE COURIC." Note the nearly (or actually) pathological narcissism of the title, undoubtedly negotiated to death by a team of lawyers, which elevates Couric to equal billing to the news itself. It's almost as if CBS were acknowledging that this was not going to be the truth, but only the "world according to Couric," a field day for deconstructionists. The desperation in this choice and in the need to preserve the role of "Anchor" itself is palpable.

I prefer the 2015 news model myself, rather than the Voice On High paradigm, no matter how perky she seems.

I have a feeling my mom will love watching her at 6:30 PM though, which makes perfect sense: she's absolutely in the right demographic for Katie's audience.

Beginning with this post in 2004, we've referenced several times how reactionary the American Far Left can appear. But it seems like America's Left has nothing on their riotous Gallic counterparts.

In RealClearPolitics, David Mastio writes that it's impossible for the media not to have an axe to grind when they cover environmental topics:

Next time you read a magazine cover story like the one Time just published ("Be Worried. Be VERY Worried. Polar Ice Caps Are Melting ... More And More Land Is Being Devastated ... Rising Waters Are Drowning Low-Lying Communities... The climate is crashing, and global warming is to blame") you should remember one little fact: U.S. media companies, including Time Warner, donate more to the environmental movement than any other industry. Companies like The New York Times, Gannett, Tribune, ABC, CBS and NBC have donated more than a half-billion worth of ad space since the 1990s to raise money for some of the nation's most extreme environmental groups. And yes, that was billion with a B.

To put that number in perspective, America's media companies donate more to environmental groups every year than the much-feared Olin Foundation's spent annually in its effort to build the institutional foundation of the conservative movement.

Via Mastio's InOpinion blog.

Update: Nope, no bias here, either:

Brent Baker finds a new twist on the Couric story: Her replacement is an anti-war protester:

On the Monday, August 30, 2004 edition of the ABC daytime show [Meredith Vieira] quad-hosts, The View, the former CBS 60 Minutes reporter told viewers that she attended the Sunday anti-Bush protest held in New York City on the day before the Republican convention opened, insisting: "I didn't go anti-Bush or pro-Kerry. I'm still so upset about this war and I'm so proud I live in a country where you can protest." She showed a photo of herself marching with her pre-teen daughter and her husband, Richard, who was the senior political producer at CBS News for most of the 1980s. Behind her in the photo: A protest sign featuring a “W” with a slash through it.

Earlier in 2004, she declared of the Iraq war: "Everything's been built on lies. Everything! I mean the entire pre-text for war." And, with war impending in March of 2003, Vieira argued that anti-war protests "should be consistent and repeated every day, I believe."

As I've written before, I'm happy to see this sort of stuff come out. Everyone has biases--it's only the MSM that works so diligently to pretend they don't exist.

Another Update: "Apparently, when you’re as big as the Ad Council, you start to think that a 'great dialogue' is a one-way street".

Just click.

(Via The Brothers Judd.)

Betsy Newmark, herself a teacher, notes:

Teachers unions were furious at John Stossel's ABC program, Stupid in America, that blamed them for a lot that is wrong with public education and advocated for more choice in our system. They said that he didn't know how hard it is to teach because he's not a teacher and that his eyes would be opened if he taught for just a week. They challenged him and he said he'd love to do it and they could pick the school. For some reason, they chose a school that has some choice in getting in and for which students have to submit a portfolio in order to attend. It sounds like a school with fewer of the problems that Stossel was highlighting in failing schools. But Stossel was game and they set up a class that he would teach. But it all fell through. That's a shame. It would have been an interesting experiment and good television.

As Stossel writes:

Too bad. Letting cameras into schools would be a good thing. Taxpayers might finally get to see how more than $200,000 per classroom of their money was being spent.

I wonder why the union even made the challenge. I suspect the UFT didn't expect me to say yes. When I turned out not to be easily intimidated, the teachers' union and the government school monopoly folded. Perhaps there's a lesson there.

But I wasn't trying to call a bluff. I wanted to accept an invitation. I'd like 20/20's cameras to see me struggle to be a good teacher.

I wonder what else our cameras might see.

Probably more than they would at a NASCAR race.

Hugh Hewitt calls it "a home run" for the conservative governor of the very liberal Massachusetts; David Cohen of the Brothers Judd isn't so sure.

Update: Don Singleton fisks a gushing New York Times article on the Romney plan, which notes, "businesses with more than 10 workers that do not provide insurance will be assessed a fee of up to $295 per employee per year". Don replies:

It does not matter whether they can afford to buy health care for their employees or not. I bet we find a lot of small businesses with 10 to 20 part time workers firing half their staff and having nine employees working overtime.

Or converting them into indepedent contractors.

A year ago, Myrna Blyth, the former editor of Ladies Home Journal wrote of Katie Couric:

Andrew Lack, former president of NBC, described Katie, during the good times, as a "fist in the velvet glove," while for years her staff has called her "Katie Dearest." Bryant Gumbel, who was considered the heavy when they were Today Show co-anchors once complained, "I've had one assistant for 18 years. Somebody who shall remain nameless went through five in five years. I had one makeup and hair person the whole time I was at NBC. Somebody who shall remain nameless went through three or four." Katie has also pushed out several of Today's executive producers, sending one packing just last week. The show has had four top producers since 2001. Here-Today-gone-tomorrow has now become a career path at NBC.

When I was a magazine editor, in my personal dealings with Katie I found her both demanding and petulant. But the stress of crashing ratings has obviously made her inner Cruella de Vil — always there under the surface — emerge full-time. Alessandra Stanley writes, "Lately her image has grown downright scary: America's girl next door has morphed into the mercurial diva down the hall. At the first sound of her peremptory voice and clickety stiletto heels, people dart behind doors and douse the lights."

And now those clickety stiletto heels click down the street to CBS. Jonah Goldberg has some thoughts on this phase of Katie's career:

There is nothing the press likes to talk about more than the press, so we can be sure we will be hearing about Couric's career move ad nauseam. Much will be made about Couric the Female Pioneer who has finally broken the glass ceiling for female news anchors (though Connie Chung did briefly co-host CBS Evening News). Others will find even more evidence that it pays to be a conventional knee-jerk liberal in the mainstream media. Most media critics, however, will focus on the inside-baseball stuff like ratings and staff musical chairs at the various networks. You can be sure that TV writers will form something of a Manhattan Project to discuss her hair, clothes and level of perkiness once she starts reading a TelePrompTer every night.

But one thing few people invested in the glamour and seriousness of big-league television news will say is what a sham the whole enterprise is. Broadcast journalism is one of the only fields in American life where the job gets demonstrably easier the higher you go. Or, to be more fair, the parts of the job that have to do with what everyone thinks of as "journalism" get easier and easier, and in some cases the journalism simply vanishes altogether.

Consider how the respected television analyst Andrew Tyndall defines the job of news anchor. The job has two parts, he told the Washington Post. First, they have to read the TelePrompTer. The second part involves "sitting behind the desk when there's a crisis."

In England, at least they're honest about calling television news readers what they are: television news readers. But that's never been the case in the US, as television writer Burt Prelutsky once observed:

You can go back to Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, John Chancellor and Walter Cronkite. We treated them all with a deference that was totally out of proportion to the work they did.

It does seem that nowadays, it's mostly those who are actually in the business who still employ that same level of deference. The rest of us have moved on--and in the case of television news, often simply turned the TV off.

Update: The Political Pitbull has much more on Katie, including a link to an American Digest post that suggests that NBC is releasing unflattering photos of Katie as a parting shot now that she's leaving.

That sort of thing seems to be SOP at NBC these days.

Update: More Katie-related snark here.

The Manolo, he present The Manolo's Food Blog!

Remember ANSWER, the Communist anti-Semitic, pro-Saddam organization that was responsible for the bulk of the protests in American cities in 2002 and 2003, prior to our liberation of Iraq? Guess what, dude...they're back!

This morning's Washington Times reports the astonishing--to me, anyway--news that last week's massive pro-illegal immigrant demonstration in Los Angeles was organized by International A.N.S.W.E.R. We've written about International A.N.S.W.E.R. a number of times; for example, here. It is a Communist organization and a front for the Workers World Party. The Workers World Party has been around for quite a while. It is one of the last unapologetically Stalinist organizations in the world; it supported the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. More recently, the WWP and ANSWER have supported dictators like Saddam Hussein and North Korea's Kim Il Jong.

These same groups organized or participated in most of the major demonstrations against the Iraq war; the fact that Communist organizations were heavily involved in the antiwar movement was, for the most part, an unreported story.

I once did some research to try to find out who is behind the Workers World Party. I obtained the government forms that it filed. Those forms are not required to identify donors, so, while I could infer that the WWP is kept afloat by donations from a few wealthy donors, I couldn't tell who they were. The individual named on the documents did not return calls asking for more information.

This is a project that is still well worth doing. I imagine that if a trained investigator--a reporter, say--exercised some persistence, it wouldn't be hard to find out who is behind these radical organizations. For some reason, though, mainstream reporters seem remarkably incurious about this subject.

Go figure. Of course, as James Lileks wrote back in 2003:

The idea of investigating who’s behind a peace rally doesn’t occur to [the MSM] because they’re not inclined to think there might be anything unsavory about the organizers.

How could there be? They’re for peace. And most people in most newsrooms know someone who’s involved in the peace movement - an old friend, a neighbor, someone from church. (Yes, reporters go to church.) Everyone in the paper has read a dozen stories of Spunky Grandmas going off to march for peace. Even if Peace in a specific instance might have perilous repercussions, Peace in General is surely a concept we can all uphold. There’s no more reason you'd investigate the advocates of peace than you’d investigate a food shelf.

And if the food shelf turned out to be run by anarchists who think grocery store workers should seize control, smash the cash registers and open the doors to the poor - well . . . it's a idealistic notion that means well, but it’s not typical of food shelves in general, and if we lead with that fact, people might not give to food shelves, so let's just call them "advocates for the co-op grocery movement."

You really want to lose the argument with these people? Point out that the peace-rally organizers are Communists. I’ve noted this odd phenomenon for years; you can be indifferent to Communism, you can be an actual Communist, and no one will really care, but opposition to Communism will really make some people suspicious.

* * *

Nowadays, if you point out that someone’s a Communist, you might well be accused of - dum dum DUMMMM - McCarthyism. The term has morphed from its original meaning. It no longer means falsely accusing someone of being a Communist. It now includes correctly identifying someone as a Communist, or ascribing a taint to someone because they don’t reject the Communists in their midst. (I’ll admit there’s a significant difference between the two.)

Back to today, where Sean Hackbarth writes:

It was bad enough many protesters proudly waved Mexican flags. With such love of their homeland you'd think they'd want to return. I now know the protests are organized by a group that hates freedom and calls you a racist if you oppose them. My sympathy is wearing thin, and I'm pretty liberal when it comes to immigration. Americans who think there are too many people coming into the country will reject the massive protests by anti-American, totalitarian sympathizers. That will only harden their stance pushing Congress to a more hardline position. A fence will go up, people will be deported, and businesses will be punished. ANSWER will blame racism when they should look in the mirror.

The signage from the L.A. rally certainly gave me a sense of deja vu from 2003, even before I know that the answer was ANSWER.

Student reporters at the College of New Jersey's Signal campus newspaper (where I wrote a story or two, way back when), discover that things aren't all that rosy in their chosen profession, as they witness up close and personal Big Media distorting a story. (In this case, the disappearance of student John Fiocco.):

We at The Signal have gotten to taste the sweet delicacy known as misquoting. The Times of Trenton, in a story on Monday, implied that a member of our staff believed the College administration had been responsible for removing inserts we had placed in last week's print edition. Likewise, The Trentonian claimed that one of our staffers asked "if a killer is loose on campus," at last Friday's press conference.

Neither of these claims is true. While our own staff replaced the inserts because they were no longer up to date, and the question at the press conference was somewhat more elegantly phrased, rational explanations and legitimate questions don't sell newspapers.

The talking heads of the 24-hour news cycle have even picked up on the Fiocco case. Greta Van Sustren discussed the case with shamed ex-LAPD investigator Mark Fuhrman last week on her FOX News television program.

The Signal staff was even naive enough to accept an invitation to appear on Nancy Grace's show on CNN Headline News Monday night. We hoped it would give members of our staff the chance to do something good, something that almost no other news outlet had done thus far - present the facts, and give us, as students, an opportunity to elucidate the effect the rampant media speculation has had on our campus.

But we were duped. Instead, the show took this missing persons case and came up with conspiracy theories. A forensics "expert" said that he was almost sure that Fiocco was pushed headfirst down the trash chute. Other panelists surmised that Fiocco could have been hazed or drugged before getting pushed down the chute.

Our staff, standing in the rain outside Loser Hall, was given five seconds of camera time to answer simple questions about where freshmen live on campus and the size of the trash chute. They were forced to listen to conjecture rather than speaking from their own knowledge of the case.

It was clear that no one on the show had done their homework: during a commercial break, our staff members told the CNN reporter that was standing with them that there had been no official confirmation from police that Fiocco had ever been in the trash chute. He responded like he'd had no idea.

Grace herself was no better - asking loud questions about how a landfill worked and agreeing with every caller's own personal theories about the case. She even insulted one of her guests who refused to speculate on the case, saying that we, as human beings, have "the biggest brains in the universe," and that we should use them to draw conjecture.

But conjecture has not helped to find John Fiocco's whereabouts, sensationalism has not aided investigators in figuring out what happened to him that night a week and a half ago when he was last seen, rumors have not helped his family and friends deal with the grief that is now their gravity.

These things have, however, left many of us at The Signal wondering if we're pursuing the right profession, because the more we've witnessed, the more it seems like this field we have believed so fervently in requires the sacrifice of something far too precious: our humanity, our souls.

Welcome to the MSM, kids.

In the past, the complaints of the student reporters wouldn't leave campus. But the Blogosphere gives the opportunity for much, much wider dissemination, where the Signal reporters' experiences can be compared with those of millions of other consumers of Big Media.

While the conventional wisdom is that America is a repressed puritanical backwater compared with the swinging overseas film market, Galley Slaves finds a "most interesting nugget" buried in the coverage of Basic Instinct 2's spectacular crash and burn at the box office:

Despite the market downturn, "9 1/2 Weeks" and "Wild Orchid" scribe Zalman King is still penning erotic thrillers, including retro-sounding titles like "Nasty Girls Save the World." But he admits that the appetite for the genre has taken a hit, and he blames the international market.

"Korea used to be a big erotic thriller market (in the '80s and '90s). Japan, too. You used to be able to cobble deals together based on those markets, but it has become more difficult," said King, who also produced "9 1/2 Weeks" alongside Damon. "There used to be a way to finance erotic thrillers if you had the right cast based on the foreign market. The foreign market doesn't support it in the way that it used to. They are now embracing more mainstream fare."

Jonathan Last suggests, "Maybe the problem is the rise of the Christian Right in Korea and Japan. If Paul Verhoeven acts quickly, those countries can still be saved!"

Heh^TM. Elsewhere in the the bukkake-like explosion of media coverage on BI2's failure, Scott Ott gets off one of the best shots:

At the box office this weekend, Ice Age 2 clobbered Basic Instinct 2 hauling in $70 million dollars, compared with less than $3 million for the Sharon Stone movie. One film is about a prehistoric creature’s struggle to survive and find love, the other is the animated sequel to the movie Ice Age.

Ouch!, as Bill Murray would have said, back when he was reviewing movies for Weekend Update.

Tim Blair spots Frank Gaffney being interviewed by Tony Jones of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, who, as Tim writes, "confidently deploys the 'Saddam had no WMD' argument":

TONY JONES: Except for the fact as it turns out—I’m sorry to interrupt you there—except for the fact as it turns out, he didn’t have any?

FRANK GAFFNEY: No, it doesn’t turn out at all that he didn’t have any. It turns out we haven’t found what he had. But what we did find, what the Iraq Survey Group did find, is plans to use the in place dual-use manufacturing facilities once sanctions were lifted to put chemical and biological agents in aerosol cans and perfume sprayers to be shipped to the United States and Europe. That was the plan for terrorist activity that we have confirmed was in place under Saddam Hussein’s regime. You haven’t heard a great deal about it. Perhaps it has not been reported adequately enough to the Australian people or, for that matter, to the American people. But it’s true. That’s the kind of thing that prompts me to say I believe it was absolutely necessary to prevent Saddam Hussein and his terrorist allies from being able to operate as they would have been, had we not liberated and country. By the way, I happen to think it’s a great thing that we’ve liberated the country. I very much regret the loss of life that’s continuing there. I think it’s incumbent on all of us, and we’re grateful for Australia’s help on this, to prevent that further blood-letting. At the hands of a minority of people who clearly don’t want the Iraqi people to enjoy freedom or security.

TONY JONES: Let’s move on ...

As Thomas Sowell writes in his latest op-ed:

Even institutions that are set up to pass on facts -- the media, schools, academia -- too often treat facts as expendable and use their strategic positions to filter out facts which go against their own preconceptions.

Let's move on...

Is NBC planning to stage a "news" story? Michelle Malkin has the details, and loads of links.

No word yet if Mary Mapes is now on NBC's payroll.

Update: Did NBC's news department just screw the network's sports division, which collects millions of dollars in revenue covering NASCAR?

Another Update: ...Or was it simply NBC in toto wanting to give NASCAR "a goodbye kiss" as the Professor suggests:

Hmm. A couple of readers say that this is NBC's last year of sharing in NASCAR broadcasts, after which the consortium will be to Fox, ABC, and ESPN. Is NBC trying to give NASCAR a goodbye kiss? Apparently, its coverage was poorly received: "Ratings for NBC's coverage, like those for Fox's, have consistently increased throughout the six-year contract. But NBC has often gotten a tepid or worse response from many die-hard racing fans, some of whom have complained that the network appeared to lack passion for the sport. . . . The network didn't believe the package was as valuable as what NASCAR was asking for it. When the new deal was announced in December, published reports said the agreement was for a total of $4.5-billion, or 61 percent higher than the previous deal signed in 2000." More here.

And reader Eric Hall offers a new assignment: "Dateline NBC ought to take some Christian-looking people to Riyadh and see how things work out. Don't forget the bikini-clad sister."

Heh, indeed^TM.

In any case, I can't wait to see how this story plays out--and if the truth is actually known.

Betsy Newmark, who links to an insightful essay by Dennis Prager, and Thomas Sowell's The Vision of the Anointed (which is currently in heavy rotation on my dead tree playlist), explores the bilious anger of the progressive, non-judgmental, enlightened left. Don't miss this Salon piece as well, in which the denizens of the Huffpost audition for Michelle Malkin's next book.

Michelle Malkin has more, although it's still not known if Delay is resigning from his seat immediately, or simply withdrawing from the congressional race in November.

Tammy Bruce writes that she has been arguing "for years now that the destruction of humanity, literally, is the actual agenda, conscious and unconscious, of Leftists worldwide":

They have become progressively ugly and hateful politically and otherwise because they hate themselves and consequently project that hate, as Malignant Narcissists do, back onto humanity as a whole. Their frustration at the rejection of their agenda (history at least has taught us something) that they bother less and less with sugar-coating their nihilistic rage.

Leftists, manifest as radical conservationists, feminists, animal rights extremists or political hacks, all base their politics in how evil Man. In other words, that humanity is the overriding problem. I note in my new book, The New American Revolution, that every act of state-based mass-murder and genocide has been perpetrated by leftist and fascist governments. Why? Because historically the Leftist worldview has always been the same because it's rooted in the same self-loathing leftist politics.

Their politics alone speak to this agenda to demonize Man, while their MalNarness has become more and more obvious over the years. Now, as the Left becomes more and more desperate, we've all seen their ugliness emerge with fewer control, fewer concerns about masking their true intentions.

Tammy looks at Dr. Eric R. Pianka, named the 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist, who recently gave a speech to the Texas Academy of Science in which he advocated "the only feasible solution to saving the Earth is to reduce the population to 10 percent of the present number" via the airborne Ebola virus--a slow and horrific death for anyone infected.

Astoundingly, his audience gave the speech a big Standing-0.

Last September, we linked to a brilliant post over at the Gates of Vienna blog on the “Coalition Against Civilization”, a bunch of folks who like to hand out bumper stickers that read "Visualize Industrial Collapse!" and instruction manuals on how to achieve just that.

Naively, I never thought I'd see someone go them one better--or at least so quickly.

Basic Instinct 2 grossed a paltry $3.2 million at the box office this weekend (against a budget estimated to be at least $70 million), only reaching number ten on the Box Office Mojo weekend chart--which isn't at all surprising, considering the film's dreadful reviews.

So should we praise Americans for having the good taste to spot a bomb and avoid it--or is it because we're in the puritanical dark ages?

Paul Verhoeven, director of the first "Basic Instinct" (which scored $353 million worldwide) as well as the widely ridiculed "Showgirls" (now regarded as something of a camp classic), attributes the genre's demise to the current American political climate.

"Anything that is erotic has been banned in the United States," said the Dutch native. "Look at the people at the top (of the government). We are living under a government that is constantly hammering out Christian values. And Christianity and sex have never been good friends."

Scribe Nicholas Meyer, who was an uncredited writer on 1987's seminal sex-fueled cautionary tale "Fatal Attraction," agrees, noting that the genre's downfall coincides with the ascent of the conservative political movement.

"We're in a big puritanical mode," he said. "Now, it's like the McCarthy era, except it's not 'Are you a communist?' but 'Have you ever put sex in a movie?'"

Of course--that explains all of the burqas and hajibs I see covering women on DirecTV's #500 and (especially) #600 series of movie channels on a Friday night--or at the newstand on the covers of such prudish magazines as...Maxim, FHM, Playboy, Penthouse, etc.

It's also worth noting that Sharon Stone has had very, very few hit movies since the first Basic Instinct struck gold in 1992. But somehow, like a lot of A-list talent in Hollywood, being bankable no longer has much to do with being bankable.

Update: John Hinderaker sounds like he agrees with my take:

Apart from the obvious humor value, here are two more or less serious observations: One, what gives with people who say American culture is "Puritanical"? Are they writing from prisons in Albania where they've been confined since 1956? Do they not own computers with internet connections? Do they avert their eyes when they go past magazine racks in airports? Don't they have cable TV?

Here's another theory: maybe Hollywood is indeed so depraved that the normal American culture, sex-drenched though it may be, looks Puritanical by contrast. Scary, if true.

Two: the film directors quoted in this story are presumably not idiots, yet they say things--it's the Bush adminstration's fault when sexy movies fail, since sex has been "banned"--that are obviously stupid. Why? Perhaps because in their world, equally stupid attacks on President Bush are not unusual. Several prominent Hollywood figures have recently suggested that Bush orchestrated the September 11 attacks. Blaming the President for everything from global warming to terrorism is, I think, commonplace in film-industry circles. So maybe it made sense for them to think that they could blame President Bush for the fact that people aren't flocking to see Basic Instinct 2 without getting laughed at.

As George Clooney said, "we are a little bit out of touch in Hollywood every once in a while. I think it's probably a good thing".

This is good to see: John Stephenson notes that the Moussaoui jury has concluded that the al-Qaeda terrorist is eligible for the death penality.

Update: Where does the case go from here? Andy McCarthy looks at "Phase II" of the Moussaoui trial.

Michael Ledeen takes the pulse of religious hatred amongst America's Blue State elites:

We’re living at a moment when hatred of religion and of religious groups is gathering momentum. Perhaps this is a reaction to the global religious revival that has been underway for two generations, but whatever its roots, it is now so common that hardly anyone notices (except, paradoxically, when it’s directed against Muslims). Some attention was given to the singularly intolerant action taken by the local regime in St. Paul, Minnesota, barring public displays of bunnies during the Eastern season. And then, to the near-total indifference of the journalistic hunting pack, in late March the San Francisco City Council, angered by Catholic opposition to gay adoption, unanimously approved a resolution that read:

It is an insult to all San Franciscans when a foreign country, like the Vatican, meddles with and attempts to negatively influence this great city’s existing and established customs and traditions, such as the right of same-sex couples to adopt and care for children in need.

One could almost see the torch flicker at John F. Kennedy’s gravesite across the Potomac, and one had a great impulse to yell very loudly in the fine words of Oriana Fallaci, who lies in pain in Manhattan, snarling back at the cancer that has taken over her body:

How come that, in a country where 85 percent of the citizens say to be Christian, so few rebel to the ludicrous offensive which is going on against Christmas?!? How come that so few protest when your Caviar Left speaks about abolishing Christmas holiday, Christmas-trees, Christmas-songs, the same expressions Merry Christmas and Happy Christmas?!?

That’s the sort of anger that comes from a self-described "religious atheist" like Oriana, who knows that if anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism spread again, it is only a matter of time before they will come for people like her.

As indeed they have already, with their legal briefs and their anti-hate-speech codes, dragging her off to the latest version of the Inquisition for the sin of apostasy against the Church of Political Correctness. San Francisco, under cover of "existing and established customs and traditions," bans free speech. The little reichs of San Francisco, St. Paul, and Paris ban free religion. And "top professors" at Harvard and Chicago take off after the Jews.

No wonder Ayman al Zawahiri and his buddy, the Ayatollah Khamenei, think we’re going to be an easy prey.

Read the whole thing.

Nick Schultz, my editor at TCS Daily, has some thoughts on today's global warming hysteria:

The alarm bells are ringing louder than ever in global warming circles. An impressive amount of ink has been spilled to scare you in to thinking that the planet is doomed if we don't do something about climate change, and soon.

As alarmists flood the media with scare stories, however, they are distracting the public from the economic and practical realities that will determine planetary health. And they are doing so just as some less heralded news reports demonstrate that the alarmists' prescription for our ailing planet is failing badly.

But first, the alarm bells. Consider:

This week Time magazine has a "special report" on global warming with the cover blaring "Be Worried. Be Very Worried."

Australian alarmist Tim Flannery has a new doomsday book out "The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What I t Means for Life on Earth."

The Washington Post recently featured a front page article about melting ice in Antarctica.

ABCNews recently attacked skeptic scientists such as the University of Virginia's Pat Michaels.

A cover story in the New Republic this month attacked the popular writer Michael Crichton for his skeptical views on catastrophic anthropogenic climate change.

The New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert recently published a book with the telling title "Field Notes From a Catastrophe."

And the Advertising Council and Environmental Defense have just launched the first "public awareness" campaign on global warming.

Phew. That's considerable output in just a few weeks. And later this year Al Gore has an alarmist documentary he has produced coming out called An Inconvenient Truth so expect the bells to keep tolling.

According to Time, "the global climate seems to be crashing around us," and that "this is precisely what [scientists] have been warning would happen if we continued pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, trapping the heat that flows from the sun and raising global temperatures." Time points to heat waves, floods, storms fires and glacial melts as evidence that we've reached a "tipping point" and says "scientists have been calling this shot for decades."

Time is right about scientists issuing warnings for decades. It just hasn't always been about global warming. Three decades ago, as Rich Karlgaard of Forbes reminds us this week, Newsweek magazine was warning not about global warming, but about global cooling. And the rhetoric was just as alarmist then. According to Newsweek at the time, "There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically...with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth."

The flip-flop on global cooling/global warming or "climate change" as it's now called, to straddle all contingencies, is something that George Will explores in his latest column:

While worrying about Montana's receding glaciers, [Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer], who is 50, should also worry about the fact that when he was 20 he was told to be worried, very worried, about global cooling. Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976) warned of "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation." Science Digest (February 1973) reported that "the world's climatologists are agreed" that we must "prepare for the next ice age." The Christian Science Monitor ("Warning: Earth's Climate is Changing Faster Than Even Experts Expect," Aug. 27, 1974) reported that glaciers "have begun to advance," "growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter" and "the North Atlantic is cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool." Newsweek agreed ("The Cooling World," April 28, 1975) that meteorologists "are almost unanimous" that catastrophic famines might result from the global cooling that the New York Times (Sept. 14, 1975) said "may mark the return to another ice age." The Times (May 21, 1975) also said "a major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable" now that it is "well established" that the Northern Hemisphere's climate "has been getting cooler since about 1950."

In fact, the Earth is always experiencing either warming or cooling. But suppose the scientists and their journalistic conduits, who today say they were so spectacularly wrong so recently, are now correct. Suppose the Earth is warming and suppose the warming is caused by human activity. Are we sure there will be proportionate benefits from whatever climate change can be purchased at the cost of slowing economic growth and spending trillions? Are we sure the consequences of climate change — remember, a thick sheet of ice once covered the Midwest — must be bad? Or has the science-journalism complex decided that debate about these questions, too, is "over"?

About the mystery that vexes ABC — Why have Americans been slow to get in lock step concerning global warming? — perhaps the "problem" is not big oil or big coal, both of which have discovered there is big money to be made from tax breaks and other subsidies justified in the name of combating carbon.

It's also worth noting that global cooling/warming/changing began in the early 1970s, as did virtually every issue that obsesses the modern left. No wonder it's the decade we can never escape from.

Michael Barone writes:

Let's say you were part of a group designing the news media from scratch. Someone says that it would be a good idea to have competing news media -- daily newspapers and weekly magazines, radio and television news programs. Sounds like a good start.

Someone else says that it would be a good idea to staff these news media with people who are literate and well-educated. Check. Then someone says let's have 90 percent of the people who work for these organizations be from one of the nation's two competitive political parties and 10 percent from the other.

Uh, you might find yourself saying, especially if you weren't sure that your party would get the 90 percent, maybe that's not such a good idea. But that's the news media we have today.

Surveys galore have shown that somewhere around 90 percent of the writers, editors and other personnel in the news media are Democrats and only about 10 percent are Republicans. We depend on the news media for information about government and politics, foreign affairs and war, public policy and demographic trends -- for a picture of the world around us. But the news comes from people 90 percent of whom are on one side of the political divide. Doesn't sound like an ideal situation.

Of course, a lot of people in the news business say it doesn't make any difference. I remember a conversation I had with a broadcast news executive many years ago.

"Doesn't the fact that 90 percent of your people are Democrats affect your work product?" I asked.

"Oh, no, no," he said. "Our people are professional. They have standards of objectivity and professionalism, so that their own views don't affect the news."

"So what you're saying," I said, "is that your work product would be identical if 90 percent of your people were Republicans."

He quickly replied, "No, then it would be biased."

Which echoes an exchange that conservative filmmaker Lionel Chetwynd had with reporters during a press conference for his Showtime docudrama, DC 9/11:

Question: "You did contribute to [Bush's] campaign?"

Chetwynd: "Yeah, the limit was $1,000... Would it make a better film if I'd given $1,000 to Gore?"

Question: "Yes."

Chetwynd: "Why?"

Question: "Because it would show less potential bias."

Via Hugh Hewitt, who's Painting The Map Red, to avoid welcoming "Speaker Murtha, Majority Leader Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid".

In his terrific National Review cover essay on the poor current state of Hollywood, released just before last month's Oscar Awards, Mark Steyn wrote that "Hollywood prefers to make 'controversial' films about controversies that are settled, rousing itself to fight battles long won":

Go back to USA Today’s approving list of Hollywood’s willingness to “broach the tough issues”: “Brokeback and Capote for their portrayal of gay characters; Crash for its examination of racial tension . . .” That might have been “bold” “courageous” movie-making half-a-century ago. Ever seen the Dirk Bogarde film Victim? He plays a respectable married barrister whose latest case threatens to expose his homosexuality. That was 1961, when homosexuality was illegal in the United Kingdom and Bogarde was the British movie industry’s matinee idol and every schoolgirl’s pinup: That’s brave. Doing it at a time when your typical conservative politician gets denounced as “homophobic” because he’s only in favor of civil unions is just an exercise in moral self-congratulation. And, unlike the media, most of the American people are savvy enough to conclude that by definition that doesn’t require their participation.

What happens when Hollywood makes a movie that's actually about a controversy from this decade? It offends delicate Blue State sensibilities!

(And they are delicate: these are the same audiences that caught the vapors when Mel Gibson armed his sons in The Patriot and predicted that his Passion of the Christ would launch a new pogrom. Does Mel have a hand in United 93?)

Here's Newsweek's look at the reaction the trailer for United 93 is receiving amongst coastal elites:

If movie trailers are supposed to cause a reaction, the preview for "United 93" more than succeeds. Featuring no voice-over and no famous actors, it begins with images of a beautiful morning and passengers boarding an airplane. It takes you a minute to realize what the movie's even about. That's when a plane hits the World Trade Center. The effect is visceral. When the trailer played before "Inside Man" last week at the famed Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, audience members began calling out, "Too soon!" In New York City, where 9/11 remains an open wound, the response was even more dramatic. The AMC Loews theater on Manhattan's Upper West Side took the rare step of pulling the trailer from its screens after several complaints. "One lady was crying," says one of the theater's managers, Kevin Adjodha. "She was saying we shouldn't have [played the trailer]. That this was wrong ... I don't think people are ready for this."

When a Salt Lake City movie theater pulled Brokeback Mountain in early January, AP was happy to give the last word to the spokesman of a Utah-based gay rights advocacy group:

Mike Thompson, executive director of the gay rights advocacy group Equality Utah, called it disappointing.

"It's just a shame that such a beautiful and award-winning film with so much buzz about it is not being made available to a broad Utah audience because of personal bias," he said.

But confronted with a story that really is "ripped from the headlines", as TV's Law & Order would say, the message becomes, "I don't think people are ready for this".

But isn't giving American audiences stories before they're ready for them a big part of what Hollywood has been all about, since, oh, about 1968? As George Clooney babbled at the Oscars:

"I would say that, you know, we are a little bit out of touch in Hollywood every once in a while. I think it's probably a good thing. We're the ones who talk about AIDS when it was just being whispered, and we talked about civil rights when it wasn't really popular. And we, you know, we bring up subjects.

Well, they, you know, brought up this subject. Only to watch Blue State audiences actually live out--nearly verbatim!--something that James Lileks noted a year ago, when Hollywood was still afraid to touch a story that was already four years old at that point:

This isn't to suggest that the cineplexes should be stuffed with two-fisted jingoist anti-Muslim hatefests instead of sensitive necessary comedies about slackers who tour the wine country. But this disinclination to face hard facts is mystifying.

Another producer of another upcoming 9/11 drama says they won't show planes hitting the towers because, "We're not ready for it yet." We're babies. Please take the scary pictures away. Tell me the fairy story about Maboto again, Daddy. [Maboto was the fictional African nation where the terrorists from the pro-UN fable "The Interpreter" were based.--Ed]

Bruce of Gay Patriot writes that "This movie is in fact long overdue":

Again my friends, offending the liberal sensibilities and ostrich mentality is also long overdue. The Democrat Party and their collaborators at the TV network news divisions have tried to bleach from our memories those horrific images of 9/11/2001. I thank God that director Paul Greengrass and Universal Pictures have the guts to show some of our American heroes during the hours of our nation’s darkest day.

I saw "Flight 93" on the A&E Network and it was enraging, enthralling, horribly sad, and wonderfully uplifting. This is an American story that must be told. I hope to be first in line on April 28 to see United 93.

Surely, George Clooney agrees.

Because the controversy over the Mohammad cartoons doesn't appear to be going away anytime soon (just ask Borders), I decided to create a new category to tie all of our related posts on the topic together.

Eventually, I'll go back and include other cartoon-related topics in this category, including coverage of the South Park TV series and Brian Anderson's related South Park Conservatives book. But for now, as you'll see if you scroll to the beginning of the category, it begins, appropriate enough, with A Word From Piglet...

Charles Johnson writes, "Irony, Thy Name is Borders":

In an advertisement for a book festival called Wordstock, sponsored in part by Borders Books, here’s your moment of exquisitely timed irony: Ad sponsored by Borders Books: “Never met a banned author I didn’t like.”

And you go right on believing that, old sport!

Michael Kinsley, Dan Riehl, and Roger L. Simon each weigh in on the state of objectivity in the news today. It's worth noting that the rise of an "objective", as opposed to overtly partisan news media coincided with the peak of mass media--when there were only three television networks, one or two big city newspapers, and very little of what we would call talk radio. This also largely coincided with the period when the New Deal was the dominant paradigm for both parties.

That would slowly change beginning in the 1960s and '70s, when get-along Rockefeller Republicans were replaced as the center of power in the GOP with National Review/Goldwater-style conservatives (culminating of course, in President Reagan's election in 1980) and the New Deal/Great Society Democrats simultaneously self-immolated over Vietnam and were replaced by the Hard Left during the period of 1968 to 1972 (culminating in George McGovern's disastrous presidential run, and his lasting influence to this day).

But from, I guess, about 1933 until Walter Cronkite's anti-war turn in 1968, the "objective" mass media worked reasonably well with the mass political conscious of America's organization men. But the rise of niche magazines, cable television, and especially the Internet, has signaled the end of that sort of groupthink. And yet, somehow, the idea of a neutral media is still being taught in journalism school. A couple of years ago, Stefan Sharkansky described what a truly "neutral" journalism model would look like:

"Neutral" journalism would give equal time to those who argue that slaves were happier than free blacks, that homosexuals should be executed or that Communism works well in practice. Fortunately, that's probably not what the [Seattle] Times has in mind. Meanwhile, newspapers that pretend in earnest to be "neutral" have given rise to the varieties of journalism that inspired us to launch this blog in the first place. The Times would have more credibility if instead of flogging the conceit of "neutral reporting" it simply acknowledged its reporters biases and also extended its "commitment to diversity" to broaden the diversity of opinions in its newsroom.

So obviously, all reporters have some standards they work from, or they couldn't report the news. And yet, this idea that standards are optional can cause a great deal of hand-wringing for many journalists. This past week, Hugh Hewitt interviewed Michael Ware of Time magazine, who draws few distinctions between Saddam Hussein and al-Zarqawi, and the US in Iraq, and can say, with a completely straight face, "I wouldn't have a clue, you know?" when asked by Hugh if the Russian people were better off under Khrushchev than they were under Stalin.

Which brings us to John Green, the Good Morning America producer who was suspended from ABC for a month for an email in which he wrote that "Bush makes me sick". In late March, I wrote:

Why? It's merely in-line with the bias others at ABC have recently expressed. And, as Roger L. Simon wrote today, "In fact, it's good viewers of ABC are informed of the opinions of those producing the network's shows. It gives those viewers much more ability to evaluate what they are seeing."

I agree. Besides, doesn't Green know that it's OK to express your bias these days (as indeed, others at ABC have already done?) Or that the need to claim impartiality is merely a temporary holdover of a relatively brief phase from the mid-20th century, when the mass media needed to justify news being disseminated by three networks (originally radio, and later TV) and one or two big newspapers per city?

Update: Mark Steyn tells Hugh Hewitt that Green's email reveals the groupthink that dominates ABC (with the possibly sole exception of John Stossel--who, as a libertarian, has his own differences with President Bush, but very different ones than the rest of the gang at his network):

you know, a lot of people make me nauseous, but I wouldn't put it on an e-mail, because I wouldn't assume that everyone who saw that e-mail agreed with me. What is reveals is that what the media think of as their impartiality is in fact rather a bland assumption that they all think the same way. And that's what's revealing about this, that he knew he could send that e-mail to all his chums at ABC, and that they would all agree that Bush makes them puke. And the difference is, you know what I think, and I know what you think. And why doesn't...I'm happy that this has come clean, that Bush makes him puke.

HH: Yup.

MS: That's great. Now if he can only say where ABC, where the network thinks Bush makes us puke, that would be one step to a kind of greater honestly and straightforwardness in dealing with the public.

The Internet--and especially the Blogosphere--allows anyone who's paying attention to track record admissions of bias, and alter his or her viewing habits accordingly. (I've altered mine a lot since acquiring broadband in the late 1990s, and discovering the Blogosphere in 2001--I watch very, very little TV news these days. I'm not alone, but I think that's somewhat of an extreme reaction.) That a newspaper or television network thinks that people aren't noticing bias--and in the case of bloggers documenting it-is either pure naivety or disingenuousness of the first order (or both).

In other words, Kinsley's right: this is the Twilight of Objectivity, but it was a surprisingly brief era to begin with.

Ed Morrissey writes that Al Franken can go on The Today Show and "joke about how exhausted [Andrew] Card has become after five years of 18-hour days, seven days a week, but God forbid anyone