"DARPA sets goal for bionic arm by 2009". Sounds good to me: 2009 would be 40 years after DARPA invented the Internet (sorry Al), and ten years before the 2019 date the replicant-inhabited world of Blade Runner depicted.

Silicon Valley boasts "Geek Fight Club".

Because of how easy it is for smart White House press secretaries to look good bouncing off her screeds disguised as questions.

(Via Mary Katharine Ham.)

Update: Sister Toldjah tells you more.

Veteran liberal journalist Gregg Easterbrook rebuts Al Gore's new agitpropumentary An Inconvenient Truth; Robert Bidinotto rebuts Easterbrook:

Ah, but you see, Gregg, your counter-argument -- that human deprivation is unethical -- rests on the implicit premise that promoting human life is moral. That's a premise that Al Gore and his environmentalist buddies do not accept.

Spot-on indeed; related thoughts from Tim Blair.

John Stephenson links to the NY Times' summary:

Washington-area sniper John Allen Muhammad was convicted of six more of the killings Tuesday after a trial in which he acted as his own attorney and the prosecution’s star witness was his young protege and partner in crime, Lee Boyd Malvo.

Muhammad, 45, is already under a death sentence in Virginia for a killing there. The most he can get for the six Maryland slayings is life in prison without parole.

The jury took slightly more than four hours to convict him after a four-week trial.

The trial marked the first time Malvo testified against the man prosecutors say was his mentor and manipulator.

AllahPundit adds, "He’s already been sentenced to death in Virginia, of course; the maximum sentence in Maryland is life without parole".

You can win if you bring knife to a gunfight...if you're a Marine.

Clive Davis sings the praises of John Frankenheimer's 1966 movie, Seconds. Clive rates it as better than Frankenheimer's best-known film, The Manchurian Candidate; I'd list it as (pardon the pun) his second greatest movie, and arguably, Rock Hudson's best.

While the 1970s are thought of as a renaissance in American filmmaking, it helps to remember just how potent Hollywood could be when it wanted to, long before Coppola or Scorsese arrived on the scene. Early on in college, I perused the library's collection of 1960s issues of Sight & Sound, the influential British film journal, and was reminded what a great era in moviemaking that decade was. For a great look back at it, Ethan Mordden's 1990 book, Medium Cool, is certainly a fun read.

Related thoughts, here and here.

Update: The video above was simply floating around YouTube, but Michelle Malkin custom-produced her own video tribute, for her Hot Air site.

Memorial Day? What's that?!

Update: Found via the update to the Insta-post, Dogpile has a beautiful, and beautifully simple tribute on their search engine's homepage.

Another Update: Greg Gutfeld's young "niece" expresses the transnational worldview surprisingly well at the HuffPost.

One More: Google answered user email last year wondering why there was nothing commerating Memorial Day in perfect corporatespeak:

We have to balance this rotating calendar with the need to maintain the consistency of the Google homepage.

Furthermore, Google’s special logos tend to be lighthearted in nature. If we were to commemorate Memorial Day, we would want to express reverence, rather than mirth. This would be a particularly challenging design. We would not want to, in any way, create a graphic that could be interpreted as disrespectful. In light of the mail we have received about this, we are actively considering designs we could display on this day next year. We welcome any suggestions you may have.

So they had a year to put something together, and punted. Dogpile's illustration looks like it was knocked off by a Web artist in a couple of hours at most and looks perfectly appropriate to me; why couldn't Google do the same? (And yes, I know the answer.)

Late Update (5/30/06 2:16 PM): Welcome Corner readers! Please look around, there's much here we think you'll enjoy.

This time over British troop desertion levels, which its headlines claim is at record levels, even as the article below illustrates that it isn't. Follow the links, here.

Previous Beeb-brushing, here and here.

Update: More here.

In his latest Chicago Sun-Times column, Mark Steyn views the transformation of Congressional Republicans from their 1994 Contract With America days of holding government accountable to their aloof, elite worldview. Or as Steyn puts it: "Gingrich revolutionaries turn into arrogant elite":

Of all the many marvelous Ronald Reagan lines, this is my favorite: ''We are a nation that has a government -- not the other way around.''

He said it in his inaugural address in 1981, and, despite a Democrat-controlled Congress, he lived it. It sums up his legacy abroad: Across post-Communist Europe, from Lithuania to Bulgaria to Slovenia, governments that had nations have been replaced by nations that have governments.

But it's an important distinction for non-totalitarian states, too. For example, in May 2004 the then-Canadian government proudly announced that in the last month the country had "created" 56,100 new jobs. That's terrific news, isn't it? The old economic engine positively roaring away in top gear. But on closer inspection, of those 56,100 new jobs, 4,200 were self-employed, 8,900 were in private businesses, and the remaining 43,000 were on the public payroll. That's why they call it "creating jobs": 77 percent of new jobs were government jobs, paid for by the poor schlubs working away in the remaining 23 percent; the "good news" was merely an acceleration of the remorseless transfer from the dynamic sector of the economy to the non-dynamic. For too much of its recent history, Canada has been a government that has a nation. And across the pond the European Union is a government that has a continent.

As Steyn says, the self-imposed rulers of "Incumbistan" are a "government that has a nation".

John Kerry is back. And he has a hat!

(* Not to be confused with The Blogosphere Full Employment Act Of 2004.)

Update: John In Carolina has some thoughts as well.

With Memorial Day weekend upon us, it's worth flashing back to a 2004 post by The Mudville Gazette, which reprinted a series of quotes from B.G. "Jug" Burkett, who, in late 2003, received the Army's Distinguished Civilian Service Award. The award was presented to him by former President George H.W. Bush; few men have done more than Burkett to restore the good name of Vietnam vets, whom the public have often negatively branded as addled losers since the early 1970s and the efforts of a certain Winter Soldier and others. As Burkett has said:

Though I pointed out that many successful Dallas men, such as former Dallas Cowboy quarterback Roger Staubach, had served in Vietnam, to them, men like Staubach were the exceptions to the rule, the rare individuals who were not ruined by their war experiences. "Everybody" knew most soldiers who fought in Vietnam were reluctant draftees, poor minorities, or dumb cannon fodder not smart enough to avoid military service. When I told them that I - a financial adviser with undergraduate and graduate degrees from major universities - had voluntarily served in Vietnam, they looked at me in disbelief.
"You?" one said. "That surprises me. You seem so normal." Another corporate executive looked right past me - a man with short hair wearing a conservative suit - in his waiting room and asked his secretary, "Where's that Vietnam veteran who's here to see me?"

* * *

In the years after returning home from my military service in Vietnam in 1969, I watched the negative images of Vietnam veterans in movies like Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, and Platoon. I saw the stereotypes on bookshelves, in newspaper stories, on the TV news. By the Eighties, more than two decades after the fighting ended, there were reputedly hundreds of thousands of homeless Vietnam vets, most suffering from PTSD. On top of that, they suffered physical disabilities brought on by poisoning from the defoliant Agent Orange. The common refrain: More men had died by their own hand -- victims of suicide -- than had been killed during the decade of the War.
Still, the popular perception of Vietnam veterans as victims tortured by memories - drug-abusers, criminals, homeless bums or psychotic losers about to go berserk in a post office with an AK-47 - did not fit me or anybody I knew who had served in Vietnam, even those who had been horribly wounded or captured and tortured by the enemy. Certainly their lives were not always perfect, but their problems could not be attributed to their experiences in Vietnam. I brushed off the negative caricatures thinking, "That's not reality."

Sadly, all too often, it still is in Hollywood's eyes.

Have a better one: Warner Brothers is finally getting their act together and releasing Ridley Scott's super-duper, restored, updated, director's cut edition of Blade Runner on DVD, HD-DVD and theatrically as well.

I loved Blade Runner when it originally ran in 1983 (I think I saw it three times that summer), but--as often happens--it took a little time for the opinion of the public at large to catch up with mine...

Reuters isn't content to merely have terrorists drop by their office parties, now they're apparently threatening bloggers with death.

Meanwhile, Saddam's favorite member of Parliament isn't content to compare Tony Blair to Hitler, but to call for his assassination.

Not anti-war, merely on the other side, as the saying goes.

Update: Power Line has some thoughts on the Reuters incident; Ed Morrissey has more on Galloway.

Power Line's John Hinderaker writes:

This was the text of the email:

I look forward to the day when you pigs get your throats cut....

I would not, personally, consider that a death threat, although it's certainly an unpleasant message. We've gotten a lot worse from liberals, and I'm sure Charles has too. Nowadays, that's pretty much how liberals talk.

For what it's worth, that's not my definition of liberal.

This could very well be a historic first: I can't think of another podcast that combines the words "scone" and "nipple ring"--and certainly not within the same sentence, courtesy of special guest (sitting in for Tammy Bruce this week), Jeff Goldstein.

In other words, don't miss this week's Pajamas Blog Week In Review!

Update: Once a closely-guarded secret of anchormen everywhere, Jeff reveals the method of obtaining great-sounding Professional Pundit-Style vocals.

The L.A. Times wonders where Hollywood glamour went. Michael Medved and Frederica Mathewes-Green answered the Times' question even before the article was written.

Will Collier of VodkaPundit writes:

We're a long, long way from 2008, but I'm ready to make a prediction. All by itself, this statement will prevent Hillary Clinton from winning a single "red" state.

And no, surprisingly enough, it isn't this statement.

In late 2004, we noted that some economists believe that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2001 has caused a growing number of businesses to register with foreign stock exchanges rather than the New York Stock Exchange to avoid its onerous enforcement procedures. City Journal's, Nicole Gelinas writes that Sarbanes-Oxley could have negative consequences for the city of New York as well:

The New York Stock Exchange’s proposed merger with Paris-based Euronext, which runs four electronic stock exchanges in Europe, may seem like positive news for New York’s economy. Wouldn’t it be great for Gotham to have the world’s first global stock exchange headquartered right on Wall Street, as the NYSE intends? But in fact one of the NYSE’s key reasons for initiating the merger carries troubling implications for New York’s economic future.

Many corporate executives, particularly those heading up-and-coming entrepreneurial companies at home and abroad, now consider the New York market an obsolete place to do business, and they are flocking to exchanges in Europe instead. In 2005, the NYSE and the Nasdaq won only 28 new international listings, a modest 16 percent increase from the year before; by contrast, the two major European exchanges, the London and the Luxembourg Stock Exchanges, won 50 listings between them, more than double their new listings in 2004. The NYSE is reaching across the Atlantic just to stay competitive.

Europe is winning business that once went automatically to New York largely because companies find that the burdensome requirements imposed by America’s four-year-old Sarbanes-Oxley law simply aren’t worth the trouble. Sarbanes-Oxley (SOx), enacted in haste by Congress and signed by President Bush just months after Enron’s 2001 demise shook the financial markets, requires companies to jump through numerous hoops each year at the behest of government regulators. Companies of all sizes now must spend millions of extra dollars annually to ensure that they have adequate “internal controls” in place if they want a listing on a U.S.-based stock exchange. The Chicago-based Foley & Lardner law firm has estimated that for medium-sized companies, the “cost of being public” has risen 223 percent since 2002, due to these new rules.

SOx’s purpose is to minimize the risk of improper and inconsistent accounting practices, especially those that some managers employ to smooth over volatile quarterly numbers or to paint a falsely positive picture of their companies to investors. But because regulators haven’t spelled out exactly what they mean by good “internal controls,” company executives must guess, adding massive uncertainty to the cost of doing business. The law also forces companies’ chief financial officers to spend inordinate amounts of time shuffling through bureaucratic paperwork, instead of helping to map corporate strategy.

European and Asian companies that, like the vast majority of their American counterparts, already boasted rational accounting and auditing policies long before SOx understandably aren’t interested in spending all that extra money just to list in New York. And they’re finding plenty of willing investors abroad anyway. “Five years ago, most big companies seeking public financing felt compelled to list their shares in New York. Today, non-U.S. companies are finding markets like London and Hong Kong equal to the capital-raising task,” the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

As Gelinas writes, "Chuck Schumer, call your office", and work to fix this law.

We've linked a few times to this Website forecasting a fascinating, if troubling near future for the legacy news media in the coming years.

In a not entirely surprising development, Iowahawk has seen a very different future...

Here's Newsweek's Howard Fineman in January 2005, only a couple of months after the bruising presidental election cycle, in which a series of poor judgements by a biased and overreaching media culminated in Ra^TherGate:

A political party is dying before our eyes — and I don't mean the Democrats. I'm talking about the "mainstream media," which is being destroyed by the opposition (or worse, the casual disdain) of George Bush's Republican Party; by competition from other news outlets (led by the internet and Fox's canny Roger Ailes); and by its own fraying journalistic standards. At the height of its power, the AMMP (the American Mainstream Media Party) helped validate the civil rights movement, end a war and oust a power-mad president. But all that is ancient history.

Now the AMMP is reeling, and not just from the humiliation of CBS News. We have a president who feels it's almost a point of honor not to hold more press conferences — he's held far fewer than any modern predecessor — and doesn't seem to agree that the media has any "right" to know what's really going in inside his administration. The AMMP, meanwhile, is regarded with ever growing suspicion by American voters, viewers and readers, who increasingly turn for information and analysis only to non-AMMP outlets that tend to reinforce the sectarian views of discrete slices of the electorate.

Yes, I know: A purely objective viewpoint does not exist in the cosmos or in politics. Yes, I know: Today's media foodfights are mild compared with the viciousness of pamphleteers and partisan newspapers of old, from colonial times forward. Yes, I know: The notion of a neutral "mainstream" national media gained dominance only in World War II and in its aftermath, when what turned out to be a temporary moderate consensus came to govern the country.

Still, the notion of a neutral, non-partisan mainstream press was, to me at least, worth holding onto. Now it's pretty much dead, at least as the public sees things.

And with its death, Fineman has no problem greasing the skids for Al Gore's new movie about--what else?--global warming:

In Washington the other day, I got a chance to tell Al Gore something I’d meant to say for a long time, which was that I thought his real strength, his real contribution, was as an observer — writer, explainer, outsider — and not as a politician.

The new movie about him was evidence of that, I said. He gave me a blank, dismissive look, and an “umm” for a verbal response.

I’ve known and covered Gore for decades, so maybe his reaction was inspired by Groucho Marx, who always said that he would never join a club that would have him as a member. But I think the brusque reply carried a different message: don’t assume that I’m ready to be put out to that pasture just yet.

Gore has a certain aura of nobility about him these days — a mixture of rue, acceptance and lofty goals that makes him almost, well, endearing.

Compare that sort of fawning coverage with anything the MSM has written about President Bush from 2004 to today.

The Media Research Center compares the rough treatment that Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ received from the legacy media, versus the smooth sailing of the recent movie version of The Da Vinci Code.

It's also worth flashing back to 2004, to see how 23 critics viewed both The Passion and Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11.

Over at City Journal, Nicole Gelinas writes, "Despite Pataki and Bloomberg, the private sector is fixing lower Manhattan":

Seven World Trade Center officially opens its doors May 23 after an efficient two years of design and construction. Seven is a stunning piece of work. Just as important, it’s the first tangible evidence that lower Manhattan will triumph over 9/11, both architecturally and economically. Who built Seven? Not Governor Pataki or Mayor Bloomberg, but private-sector developer Larry Silverstein, who completed the 52-story tower while the pols dithered over 16 still-scarred acres across the street.

Silverstein could build Seven so quickly—replacing the office building of the same name he owned before 9/11—because it’s adjacent to the World Trade Center site, not part of it. Thus, Silverstein’s lease with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the bistate entity that owns Ground Zero, doesn’t govern the site. Free from the government “direction” that has overseen Ground Zero redevelopment, Silverstein did what he does best: he built.

And as the photos that accompany the article illustrate, Silverstein and his architect managed to overcome several sticky design issues, not the least of which was integrating Seven around a new Con Ed substation, replacing the substation destroyed on 9/11.

Jesse Macbeth, in-between scoring a shoebox full of Purple Hearts in Iraq and his first PBS and Playboy Channel specials (with a stopover behind the counter at the Tacoma Wendy's), is guest blogging at Iowahawk to reveal "The disturbing face of American empire".

A strange confluence of events this week involving the favorite sons of the town that Mary Tyler Moore and Bud Grant made famous:

Bob Dylan turns 65, but still sings like a man at least twice his age!

Prince voted "Sexiest Vegetarian", leaving James Taranto to remark, "An Excellent Reason to Eat Meat"--no kidding.

James Lileks can't decide which Star Fleet spacecraft to name his new Honda minivan after.

What it all means no man can say, but it's safe to say that Someday, A Purple Rain Is Going To Fall on the Diner.

(And in the meantime, man, I hope I can get lamb on pita there...)

Nikes and seersucker are two great tastes that shouldn't be anywhere near each other.

'The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,' he said. 'We're getting the language into its final shape -- the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we've finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words -- scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone.

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

Update: Of the Dennis Prager essay that the above passage links to, Dr. Sanity writes:

Praeger still refers to them as "liberals", a term I am careful not to use to describe the left. The classical liberal tradition is alive and well elsewhere--permeating both neoconservative and libertarian intellectual thought.

I try to make the same distinction whenever possible as well. And for the moment that most FDR/New Frontier-style liberals began to shed the last vestiges of classical liberalism, click here.

Austin Bay writes:

In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina I recorded a commentary for NPR’s Morning Edition that assessed the National Guard’s rapid response effort. I contended only the US could respond as quickly and successfully to the destruction of a major city. That commentary drew loads of flak.

However, according to Lou Dolinar at realclearpolitics.com the Katrina after-action reports demonstrate that the national media’s reporting (particularly television reporting) was impressionistic falderol, missing the big story of Katrina and missing the indicative details. National Guard units (from Louisiana and other states) and out of state responders got to critical areas in south Louisiana quickly and in force. They focused on search and rescue first– which is what they are supposed to do.

As Austin suggests, read the entire article.

Vanity Fair contributor Marie Brenner was recently quoted as saying:

[B]loggers often put forth the news with a partisan slant, she said, and "more and more Americans now receive their news through these partisan channels."

As opposed to the partisan channels of the legacy media itself.

Update: Jeff Jarvis has some prescient related thoughts:

At every journalism seminar like this, someone asks whether readers will trust a reporter covering an election after knowing how the reporter votes or what party she belongs to. I argue that the readers wonder and speculate about this anyway and so once it is out in the open, then the discussion can turn to the reporting: ‘Having said that I’m a liberal, now you can judge my work on its completeness, fairness, and accuracy.’ There is no agenda worse than a hidden agenda.

Of course, to be fair, it's not like Vanity Fair's agenda is all that hidden these days.

Orrin Judd has spotted the trailer for The Feel Good Hit Of Summer...3000 years in the making!

Update: Check out Must Love Jaws, a sort of Brokeback Shark Tale! And here's a profile of the guys who made those trailers:

These brilliant remixes are a persuasive argument that content owners could make a lot of money if they could find ways to let people play with their libraries of music, TV shows and movies legally.

I concur.

Lorie Byrd has joined the gang at Wizbang.

The Anchoress has some suggestions for Madonna, on how she could improve her rather worn-out stage act.

Update: The recipe for McDonald's Secret Sauce is still a closely-guarded secret, but the current formula for McRockStar isn't.

Related thoughts, here.

Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch has a theory about the balkanization of pop culture that I think is spot-on. I couldn't find the article discussing it (Lord knows I tried last night), but basically, it goes something like this: there's no one dominant pop culture anymore, it's been demassified, to borrow another societal critic's favorite word. If you take the average movie's domestic box office return, a $100,000,000 gross sounds impressive--until you realize that tickets average $10 a pop, which means that ten million people saw the movie. And 285 million Americans skipped it.

Case in point: The Da Vinci Code's weekend take: $77,073,388 means that 7.7 million people saw the movie on its opening weekend. But, according to James Maguire in his new book, Impresario, 60 million people tuned in to watch Elvis' debut on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1956. And that was in an era when the population was about 125 million less than it is today.

Which is why Mr. Nixon--er, Mojo Nixon that is--was right about Elvis.

Well, in some ways at least: Cathy Seipp explores the plusses and minuses of 2006 versus 1966.

In another post, she also has some thoughts of floppy breasted exhibitionist college professors, something that--I think--was less of an issue in 1966...

Update: Just to add to the first half of this post, Michael Barone writes, "we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that, in most important respects, our civilization is performing splendidly".

If Barone has any thoughts on floppy breasted exhibitionist college professors, clearly he's saving them for his next column.

ABC News names Charles Gibson to be sole anchor of World News Tonight; to compete against the Perky One.

The Wall Street Journal debunks a number of myths about Iraq and its liberation, and concludes:

These, then, are the urban legends we must counter, else falsehoods become conventional wisdom. And what a strange world it is: For many antiwar critics, the president is faulted for the war, and he, not the former dictator of Iraq, inspires rage. The liberator rather than the oppressor provokes hatred. It is as if we have stepped through the political looking glass, into a world turned upside down and inside out.

Indeed^TM.

Update: Somewhat related post, here.

Another Update: Hugh Hewitt suggests this piece by Ralph Peters as a follow-up read after the Journal article.

As NewsBusters asks, "Is Your Internet News Service Fair and Balanced?"

Pinch Sulzberger crucifies himself--for the sins of the world, but not those of his own paper.

Pinch went to work on his dad's paper the same time former editor Howell Raines did, in 1978. Over at Slate, Jack Shafer reviews Howlin' Howell's new memoir:

How wretched a newspaper was the New York Times when Howell Raines assumed the executive editor job in September 2001?

In his new memoir, The One That Got Away, which combines fish stories with newspaper recollection, he claims that the Times had been stinking up the joint since March 13, 1978. That's the first full day he spent in the Times newsroom, when he noticed its "habit of cruising through critical intersections on automatic pilot."

The Times was a "newspaper that liked to wear its dullness like a merit badge" doing "much of its journalism by the numbers." On some stories it revealed itself to be a "churning urn of underachievement." It possessed a "collective, institutional willingness to stand around and get scooped." It was "dull but worthy ... slow, tedious and self-important." Its "stolid pace" frustrated him; it was "selling an ossified product over and over again to the same people."

Read the whole thing as they like to say in the successor media.

Sports Illustrated's Peter King will be part of NBC's return to the NFL this year, as such, he was required to attend NBC's dog and pony show for advertisers at Radio City Music Hall this month. Here's a snippet of how it went:

Then we were ushered into the biggest green room ever, the bottom floor of Radio City, to wait to be taken out, show by show, to the stage. Saw Josh Lyman from The West Wing; Bradley Whitford's on a new show. Got a coffee next to the 40-Year-Old Virgin guy. Sat a row down from Regis Philbin and Donald Trump. Interesting world these guys live in. They sure do get cheered a lot.

The next day I was with Ebersol in an NBC seminar -- actually talking to my old pal Michaels -- when Ebersol got the news that floats boats in this arena. Grey's Anatomy, the Sunday-night ABC doctors/sex show (I'm sure that's not how it's referred to by the Hollywood press, though), was being moved to Thursday night. "To me,'' Ebersol said, "Grey's Anatomy is the only current hit show on TV that has the opportunity to be an even bigger hit. This is very good for us." Whatever you say, boss.

One other surprise: the emphasis on podcasts, the Internet, digital media. Seems like that's half of what NBC's doing, and I hear this network's not alone. "This is the year every major advertiser wants to know what you're going to do for them on the Internet,'' Ebersol said.

Blog away, world.

Nahh. I'd rather write articles on the subject.

David Mastio is planning to use his blog to catalog and help counteract the inevitable spread of astro-turfing that's sure to come this fall:

Election season is here and with it will come a flood of fake letters to the editor from “real people” in reality written by political campaigns and activists groups of the right and left.

America’s editorial page editors make a heroic effort to stem this tide every year, but hundreds of professionally-written plagiarized fakes sneak through, polluting one of the most popular features in newspapers. (Incidentally, for Internet triumphalists, letters to the editor are THE original interactive feature.)

Just for a change of pace, I am hoping that the blogosphere can work with the mainstream media to stop the practice this year, or at least raise the price.

Right now, the National Conference of Editorial Writers, uses a members-only list-serv to trade information about astro-turf letters. It serves to keep some letters out, but because it is private, letters fraud perpetrators pay no public cost and editors who aren’t NCEW members -- or don't have time to read the list-serv -- don’t find out about it.

So, here’s what I am proposing:

InOpinion’s blog is going to become a clearinghouse for letters fraud information through this fall’s election (we’ll decide on a permanent home for the Letters Fraud Project after the election). This is going to be a completely non-partisan effort – fake missives that I agree with are just as bad as ones I disagree with.

I am going to invest my own time to report on as many instances of letters fraud as I can. We’ll report on which organizations are doing it and provide links to the online tool they use to help their supporters plagiarize. Most importantly, we’ll provide emails and phone numbers for the leaders of organizations engaged in this deceit as well as the same information for important financial supporters of these organizations. We are also developing information on the technology and consulting companies that make a profit from deceiving readers. We’ll be exposing them as well.

Sounds like a great idea to me; David has some suggestions on how the Blogosphere can help.

It appears that American Christians have finally learned their lesson with Hollywood and the media. Here's Michael Medved a few months ago on Brokeback Mountain, in USA Today:

The publicity blitz surrounding Oscar front-runner Brokeback Mountain not only challenged stereotypes about gay relationships, it simultaneously cleared away persistent misunderstandings about the nation's Christian conservatives.

Instead of reacting with outraged calls for censorship or condemnation, the much-reviled minions of the so-called religious right have mostly ignored the movie, allowing it to collect every sort of honor with shockingly scant controversy. While derided by prominent liberals as “the Taliban wing of the Republican Party,” conservative Christian leaders have displayed a new sense of security and confidence, in dramatic contrast to the paranoid Muslim mobs that riot across the globe over a dozen disrespectful Danish cartoons.

This doesn't mean that cultural traditionalists in the USA have abandoned their principles and suddenly embraced the much-discussed “gay cowboy movie”: People who revere biblical strictures against same-sex relationships can scarcely commend a film that provides a lyrical celebration of a homosexual affair that wrecks two marriages.

Nevertheless, the publicists and activists involved in promoting Brokeback Mountain seem almost disappointed that religious conservatives have expressed so little indignation. No major organizations called for a boycott of the film, or threatened its producers, or made any serious attempt to interfere with those who might enjoy this artfully-crafted motion picture (it has become a modest commercial success). In the heartland of Evangelical America, Brokeback has generated more ho-hums than howls of protest (or hosannas).

Or as Mark Steyn wrote in his cover story on politicized Hollywood's recent box office woes and Oscar snoozefests, "The more artful leftie websites have taken to complaining that the religious right deliberately killed Brokeback at the box-office by declining to get mad about it".

Not surprisingly, Tim Rutten of The L.A. Times is left wondering where the big Last Temptation of Christ-style frenzy is over The Da Vinci Code:

The collective Catholic response to the book and film probably were best summed up by a Jesuit theologian who responded to an earnest radio interviewer's long and suggestive question this way: "I don't mean to sound obtuse, but are you asking me whether a novel is true?"

Meanwhile, media attempts to deputize the usual evangelical Protestant firebrands into one of those reliably copy-worthy anti-blasphemy posses also have been generally fruitless. You almost can hear frustrated assignment editors [you, like at the L.A. Times--Ed] and producers muttering to themselves: What's the matter with these guys? Don't they care that this cockamamie movie says Jesus had sex with Mary Magdalene? Can't they see this is another battle in the war against Christmas? Didn't they learn anything from those Muslims?

Speaking of which, so far, it's all quiet on the Borders as well--which, I supose is coming as both a surprise and relief to Borders' management, but is equally good to see.

Update: James D. Hudnall has a one word review of Da Vinci--an no, it does not contain eight letters.

Power Line links to an article in the London Times by William Shawcross:

Even those who were opposed to the invasion of Iraq should recognise that this is a whole new battle — between the values of a liberal civil society and nihilism, sometimes Islamic but always nihilism.

Not at all coincidentally, "the values of a liberal civil society and nihilism" are also the precise battle lines that have been fought domestically in the US culture war since the late 1960s.

Mark Steyn reprints his review of Wicked, Broadway's moral inversion of The Wizard of Oz and notes:

There’s a predictable pattern to children’s fables these days. A few years ago, I asked Tim Rice, who’d just written the lyrics for Disney’s Aladdin and The Lion King, why he wasn’t doing Pocahontas. “Well, the minute they mentioned it,” he said, “I knew the Brits would be the bad guys. I felt it was my patriotic duty to decline.” Sure enough, in the film, John Smith and his men are the bringers of environmental devastation to the New World, at least until Captain Smith comes to learn from Pocahontas how to “Paint With All The Colors Of The Wind”. Wicked is meant to be gleefully ironic, but there’s a sourness deep within and you can’t subvert the clichés of Oz when you’re mired in a political correctness quite as oppressive as latterday Disney and all the more stultifying because this is, supposedly, a show for adults. It’s Peta politics with a Dreamworks score.

Meanwhile, James Pinkerton cracks The Da Vinci Code:

Here at TCS, Stephen Bainbridge tallied up the various heresies that Brown conflated to help him with his story. All of which inspired The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan to declare, "I do not understand the thinking of a studio that would make, for the amusement of a nation 85% to 90% of whose people identify themselves as Christian, a major movie aimed at attacking the central tenets of that faith, and insulting as poor fools its gulled adherents."

That is an interesting question—why does Hollywood make movies that bash religion and other conservative verities? Whole books have been written about that topic, including Ben Stein's The View from Sunset Boulevard and Michael Medved's Hollywood v. America, but I think it's fair to say that this view is changing. The dominant movie culture may despise Mel Gibson, but the success of "The Passion of The Christ" made an impression -- about six hundred million dollars' worth.

In any case, the filmmakers weren't expecting the counter-attack from Christians; the slow-gathering criticism of the book has become a fast-and-furious critical crescendo against the movie. To which Howard & Co. adopted an interesting strategy: They tried to shrug off the fusillade -- it's only a movie, folks.

Star Tom Hanks, who has built his career on being Mr. Sincerity, is now the shrugger-in-chief: The film, he says, is "loaded with all sorts of hooey and fun kind of scavenger-hunt-type nonsense. If you are going to take any sort of movie at face value, particularly a huge-budget motion picture like this, you'd be making a very big mistake." And co-star Ian McKellen has called the book "a load of codswallop," although he couldn't resist adding, "I'm happy to believe that Jesus was married."

But if the people who made the movie won't stand up for their own movie, then it's hardly a surprise that critics have been emboldened to tear it down; the compendium site Rotten Tomatoes finds that some 80 percent of critics have dubbed it "rotten."

All of which are reasons why The Passion had a better opening weekend in the US, despite playing in 700 less theaters than Da Vinci.

Castro's doctor is at it again, repeating his annual statement that Castro will live to be 140. (Via Drudge, whose photo of the rapidly aging dictator belies his doctor's absurdities.)

As I wrote right around this time two years ago, if I was the personal physician to a murdering communist dictator and had a wife or family I wanted to protect, I'd probably say stuff like that, too.

(As to what Stalin was planning to do to his doctors, shortly before--mercifully for the world--dying, click here.)

Update: Heh^TM.

Jeff Jarvis goes dinosaur hunting:

So why do we need Time? New managing editor Richard Stengel explains:

Mr. Stengel said yesterday that in some ways, the Internet poses the same kind of challenge to newsweeklies that the plethora of competing newspapers posed to Time when Henry Luce founded it in 1923.

“In a similar way, people were looking for one source to speak with authority and explain the world, and in many ways, that’s still our mission,” Mr. Stengel said. “We can be your guide through the forest of confusing information.”

No, actually, I don’t want you to explain the world to me. A guide, perhaps. But I’m sorry, I just don’t see Time as the one source to speak with authority and explain the world. I am quite glad the days are gone when anyone thought they could be that one source.

Like I said, it's tough to be a Second Wave institution in a Third Wave world.

"A Fiendishly Simple Path To Republican Victory In '08".

The good ones always make it look so easy.

(Via Hugh Hewitt, who's spotted a marketing opportunity for a poster-sized version.)

Update: No doubt, this is just another small detail in the plan.

Related: The Gettysburg Address Power Point Presentation.

Roger L. Simon writes:

Today's editorial on the NSA in the LATimes is an example of why I no longer waste any time on the newspaper (Food Section excepted, of course). The drones at the LAT wrote the following:

The secretive NSA (an abbreviation, Washington wags say, for "No Such Agency") has overseen a domestic surveillance program whose existence is known only because of media reports and whose exact contours remain a mystery even to most members of Congress.

Apparently the fellas at the LAT have never read the best-selling The Puzzle Palace (copyright 1983! and all about the NSA) or heard of the Echelon program, which has been running through several adminstrations. All this "Ohmygod, whatistheNSAdoing?" nonsense is so much propagandistic crap. Anyone paying the slightest attention has known for years what the NSA's brief was. What are all those satellites supposed to be for,anyway? The level of hypocrisy in all this is staggering. If you don't want an NSA, say so. But the obvious question is - where have you been for the last several decades?

The NSA and Echelon, along with Harper's and Borders Books, will be among the topics discussed in the latest Pajamas Media Blog Week In Review podcast, which should be online la