TCS Daily looks at "Who Killed the Electric Car?"

In a related article, TCS compares a broadband-speed Internet with a dial-up-rated Interstate Highway System.

Sweetness & Light reminds us of the New York Times' shifting position on fighting terrorism by routing out its finances with an op-ed written immediately after 9/11 that concludes, "If America is going to wage a new kind of war against terrorism, it must act on all fronts, including the financial one".

That's 180-degrees opposite from their current worldview, but then I guess if you flip-flop enough times, you become immune to the effects of whiplash. Meanwhile, Ranting Professors explains to Howard Kurtz why the Times has earned conservatives' wrath on this issue:

People are angriest at the Times because the Times went first. They broke the story. At that point the decision was out of the hands of the other papers -- it's just that simple. In fact, as Patterico points out (indeed as the Kurtz story mentions) once the Times posted their story, there really was no decision to be made by the other papers.

A few years ago, Bernie Goldberg documented in Arrogance how much the rest of the legacy media takes its lead from the Times--and has for several decades. Nice to see that even in an age of demassified media, some things never change amongst the walking Jurassic.

Update: In a new City Journal essay, Nicole Gelinas writes:

One of the New York Times’s justifications for exposing the Bush administration’s post-9/11 scrutiny of international banking transactions via access to Swift, the Belgium-based international banking-information system, is that the American people never gave the feds permission to snoop into banking records—even those of suspected Islamist terrorists. Thus, the Times must save the day by alerting us all. But there’s a flaw in this justification. When the Bush administration did ask the American people for permission to scrutinize banking records for terrorist activity, Congress practically shouted yes, without public objection.

Certainly not the Times', but hey, that was then, and this now.

Clive Davis links to Norm Geras, who writes:

As the old political saying has it, the Right looks for converts, the Left looks for traitors....

Clive notes that "This saying was new to Norm. And to me too".

And me three--the "old saying" I've heard was slightly different--well, it's about four years old, as the first time I heard it was in an August 2002 Instapundit post, where Glenn Reynolds wrote:

I disagree with the Christian bloggers on most of their core issues; probably the only thing we're in full agreement on is that the Catholic Church's behavior in covering up its sex scandal has been shameful. We're at odds on cloning, on abortion, and often on birth control and evolution, though the Christian bloggers aren't as unified on those last two issues. But they're always polite.

On the Left, though, we find all these pseudonymous name-calling bloggers whose specialty seems to be abuse aimed at those deviating from the party line. De Long isn't one of those, of course, but this line from his post bespeaks a certain tribalism: "There's still time for Kaus to return to his neoliberal roots."

As the old saying has it, the left looks for heretics and the right looks for converts, and both find what they're looking for. The effect is no doubt subliminal, but people who treat you like crap are, over time, less persuasive than people who don't. If people on the Left are so unhappy about how many former allies are changing their views, perhaps they should examine how those allies are treated.

The use of the word "heretics" sounds less charged to me than "traitors"--it least doesn't imply that if you don't follow orders, you risk being shot.

And certainly, much of the Kossites-versus-the-world/MSM-versus-Kos battles of the past couple of months have been all about exposing and expelling heretics--with both sides claiming ideological purity, even as the general public at large couldn't care less about the players or their issues.

Update: Somewhat related thoughts, here.

Pajamas has an extensive round-up of links.

On CNN/Money's Website, media analyst Paul R. La Monica suggests that it wedding bells may be in order for the Gray Lady, if she wants to survive:

Some day, hopefully sooner rather than later for New York Times investors, the controlling shareholders will figure out that it would be better off swallowing family pride and selling out.

And karmic justice and I know who the appropriate suitor would be!

(Yes, he already owns one New York City newspaper. If he added the Times to his Gotham stable, which paper would he chose to fold? Now that would be a fun decision to have to make. But either way, it's a win for New York!)

Update: Hey, a Wonkette-lanchette! For those of you clicking through, I hope you're not as satirically challenged as the writer of this post seems to have been.

Incidentally, here's someone else who's proposing a suitor for the Times. There's a very, very slight chance he's kidding as well.

I'll believe it when it finally happens, but according to a local Denver news channel's Website, "The University of Colorado announced Monday that it will dismiss controversial professor Ward Churchill".

Of course, to paraphrase (and use in an entirely different context) a line from M*A*S*H, Chutch is merely a symptom. The disease continues to run rampant throughout academia.

Update: Occidentality has a round-up of additional links.

Zaha Hadid is an Iraqi-born and British-based architect whose ideas are some of the most exciting I've seen in a long time. Blending modernism and expressionism, her works at least look like what the future I always imagined as a kid should resemble, unlike most bland postmodern designs.

According to this blog, she has an exhibit running through October in the Guggenheim, which incorporates her design for the kitchen of the future:

It's not quite Joan [sic] Jetson's kitchen, with the ability to relieve you from all the mundane kitchen chores like cooking or washing dishes, but I'd trade my kitchen in for one like this any day.

All it lacks is a replicator in which to say, "Tea, Earl Grey, hot".

(Via Technorati.)

A call for the Times to lose its White House access:

The president should match this morning’s tough talk with concrete action. Publications such as the Times, which act irresponsibly when given access to secrets on which national security depends, should have their access to government reduced. Their press credentials should be withdrawn. Reporting is surely a right, but press credentials are a privilege. This kind of conduct ought not be rewarded with privileged access.

It'll never happen, but by God, it would be fun to watch the meltdown in the house that Pinch built, if it ever did.

Mona Charen is now blogging; update bookmarks accordingly.

Well, actually, probably not, because the New York Times' Bill Keller is too cocooned to notice. But this post by Glenn Reynolds eviscerates both Keller's moronic defense of the Times' exposure of classified wartime programs...

Some of the incoming mail quotes the angry words of conservative bloggers and TV or radio pundits who say that drawing attention to the government's anti-terror measures is unpatriotic and dangerous. (I could ask, if that's the case, why they are drawing so much attention to the story themselves by yelling about it on the airwaves and the Internet.)

...And he explains the origins of America's press freedoms to boot. Or to paraphrase a man who surely must be one of Keller's heroes, these pixels were made for you and me.

Update: Boy, if you thought Keller's argument above sounds specious, wait'll you see the first draft! (Man, and I thought my first drafts were pretty sketchy...)

Jonah Goldberg writes"Enough with the TR worship!":

There's some good stuff in Karl Rove's piece on TR, but this strikes me as good a moment as any to just say it: Enough with the TR worship! TR was a great man, an amazing man, an inspirational man. But he was no conservative in the sense conservatives should emulate today. As Rove notes, TR said "I like big things." Well one of them was big government. He adored Bismarck's Prussia (as did Wilson). He subscribed to modern Darwinian racism (as did Wilson). He was a Progressive in every sense of the word and his politics are of a piece of the Progressive era, an era — contra many in today's Republican Party — conservatives should be loath to mimic. TR worship is a switchback tactic to glorify the intellectual and political heritage of the pre-Goldwater GOP. There is honor there, to be sure. But better to cherry pick the nice patriotic bits and leave the rest of the pile in the dustbin of history. The Weekly Standard was wrong — and flagrantly so in retrospect — to put TR (and "National Greatness") back on the conservative mantle. In the 1990s post-Cold War conservatives were wrong to speak glowingly of the Progressive era. And they are all wrong today when they try to find an escape clause from conservative skepticism toward big government by slapping the pseudo-intellectual feel-good label "progressive" to whatever it is they're looking to do.

That's something that Jonah explored further in his syndicated column.

Waaay back during the early days of this blog, in September of 2002, I spotted a Monty Python-like moment between UN weapons inspectors and Saddam Hussein's lackeys:

Charles Johnson writes that "Iraq officially says their declaration to the UN will claim they possess no banned weapons...[but] an anonymous Iraqi official threatens to use these non-existent weapons".

I think the Iraqis just unwittingly parodied a Monty Python sketch: "There is no cannibalism in the British Navy. Absolutely none, and when I say none, I mean there is a certain amount."

Power Line spots a similar moment occurring within Iran's efforts to acquire its own WMDs:

Over at Power Line Video, check out Mohsen Rezai, Secretary of the Iranian Expediency Council, as he discusses Iran's situation vis-a-vis the United States on Iranian television. He says that "Iran has achieved a great thing" by stalling off the United Nations, and offers an analysis of American power that includes the hoary "paper tiger" theme.

Most interesting is his discussion of Iran's nuclear program. He says that if the U.S. should invade Iran, the program could be moved to the desert where it might never be found. Should the U.S. bomb Iran, the nuclear program could be moved underground:

If Iran goes underground with its nuclear activities, the entire world will curse America and say, "What have you done? You have made the region unsafe, and achieved nothing."

But wait! If Iran's nuclear program is strictly for peaceful purposes, as its government claims, then why would taking it underground "make the region unsafe"?

There is no attempt to build nuclear weapons in Iran, absolutely none, and when I say that there is none, I do mean that there is a certain amount.

(But cannibalism is right out. Check out North Korea--on its own quest to launch nuclear weapons--for that. Seriously.)

Update: If the Pythons were still active, this would have made a great sketch as well.

Just saw on Drudge that Aaron Spelling died, at age 83. As his (no doubt largely pre-written) CNN obituary notes, Spelling produced a superfluity of fluffy hour-long series, hitting his peak in the 1970s, when he had an exclusive deal with ABC:

Spelling's other hit series included "Love Boat," "Fantasy Island," "Burke's Law," "The Mod Squad," "Starsky and Hutch," "T.J. Hooker," "Matt Houston," "Hart to Hart" and "Hotel." He kept his hand in 21st-century TV with series including "7th Heaven" and "Summerland."
He also produced more than 140 television movies. Among the most notable: "Death Sentence" (1974), Nick Nolte's first starring role; "The Boy in the Plastic Bubble" (1976), John Travolta's first dramatic role; and "The Best Little Girl in the World" (1981), which starred Jennifer Jason Leigh.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Spelling provided series and movies exclusively for ABC and is credited for the network's rise to major status. Jokesters referred to it as "The Aaron Broadcasting Company."

Success was not without its thorns. TV critics denounced Spelling for fostering fluff and nighttime soap operas. He called his shows "mind candy"; critics referred to them as "mindless candy."

As Todd Gitlin astutely observed in his 1983 book, Inside Prime Time, beginning with The Mod Squad, Spelling hit upon his primary formula: a group of young, photogenic leads, and somewhere in the background, a father figure who both provided the older generation with a reason to watch the show, and comforted them that the leads wouldn’t go too far off the beaten bath of societal norms. (Remember, we’re talking 1970s network television here, which was rather tame when compared to your average HBO series of today).

Spelling took that formula to its absolute peak with Charlie’s Angels, which built on The Mod Squad's trio of hip young leads, but replaced the sixties-era psychedelic drop-outs with three drop-dead gorgeous women fighting crime not in bell-bottoms and headbands, but very 1970s-style Nolan Miller-designed outfits. The Angels actually had two father figures to keep them out of trouble--the eunuch-like David Doyle on-camera, and above him on the crime fighting food chain, the perfect boss, voiced by the suave John Forsythe, but literally just off-screen. Thus, as Gitlin noted, every man watching the show could pretend that he was Charlie, and “the girls” worked for him.

As a television formula, it worked absolutely brilliantly, and the show was a huge ratings smash. It’s no coincidence that the peaks of both Johnny Carson and Spelling’s careers were in the same era; As Jeff Jarvis wrote when Carson passed away:

Carson also represented the golden age of America's shared experience in media. That era lasted about three decades, from the late '50s to the late '80s, when the three networks turned most cities into one-newspaper towns and we all watched the same thing. I don't regret that era dying; it means we now have more choice and choice equals control. But it was a unique time in our culture, when popular culture became a common platform, a common touchstone for Americans. We all got Johnny's jokes.

And, for better or worse, we all watched Aaron’s shows.

Thanks to Nick At Nite and its TV Land spin-off, insomniacs at least, are doomed to watch those shows into eternity. And if there's a God, He's forcing Spelling to as well, in Sisyphean penance.

The irony is that Spelling's probably enjoying them.

Update: Aaron Spelling: Straussian Neo-Con!

Last year, as Ward Churchill's antics helped to reveal how out of control much of the modern academy seems, Roger Kimball of The New Criterion wrote a powerful essay titled, "Retaking the university: a battle plan". As Kimball writes:

Many parents are alarmed, rightly so, at the spectacle of their children going off to college one year and coming back the next having jettisoned every moral, religious, social, and political scruple that they had been brought up to believe. Why should parents fund the moral de-civilization of their children at the hands of tenured antinomians? Why should alumni generously support an alma mater whose political and educational principles nourish a world view that is not simply different from but diametrically opposed to the one they endorse? Why should trustees preside over an institution whose faculty systematically repudiates the pedagogical mission they, as trustees, have committed themselves to uphold? These are questions that should be asked early and asked often.

In that effort, Power Line notes that Kimball is adopting his essay into a book, to be released in November. In the meatime, here's a sample of the piece it will build upon:

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In the Washington Post, Richard Moran has a column portentously titled, "Jon Stewart, Enemy of Democracy?". It begins:

This is not funny: Jon Stewart and his hit Comedy Central cable show may be poisoning democracy.

Two political scientists found that young people who watch Stewart's faux news program, "The Daily Show," develop cynical views about politics and politicians that could lead them to just say no to voting.

According to Wikipedia (and yes, take it for what it's worth), The Daily Show averages 1.5 million viewers nightly. If that's a million and a half young, underinformed cynics of college age (but I repeat myself in triplicate) who consider The Daily Show to actually be news and then decide not to vote, Stewart has done the nation a great service. We salute him.

(And besides, every once in a blue state moon, he's capable of broaching a topic avoided by real reporters who no longer care to do their jobs.)

Update: Allah agrees: "Making jaded hipsters less inclined to vote is really more of a feature than a bug, isn’t it?" Exactly.

Another Update: Ed Morrissey adds, "Poking fun continuously without ever taking responsibility to advance some rational agenda as an alternative amounts to a form of political cowardice". Exactly.

Ben Wattenberg, who served on the LBJ White House staff before becoming a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute compares and contrasts LBJ's war with President Bush's:

The central similarity is that both wars were defensive efforts against a global foe. We were right to fear the expansion of totalitarian Communism. We lost that battle — actually the South Vietnamese Army lost it two and a half years after we disengaged — but we won the war. Wars, after all, are won by the party that triumphs in the final showdown: The Soviet Union has disappeared, and its satellites deorbited. In Iraq, our foe is jihadism, which likewise seeks global domination. To think that they can’t achieve this against a technologically superior West is simply a failure of imagination: One terrorist with a smallpox virus might be able to wipe out half a population. Another similarity has to do with our domestic politics. President Lyndon B. Johnson lost no opportunity to explain why we were in Vietnam: from major speeches to arrival and departure statements for important visitors. I was on his staff from mid-1966 to the end, and at parties and dinners in Washington I would repeat the president’s rationale with gusto. Many times, people would respond, “Gee, I wish LBJ would explain it that way.” Sound familiar? President George W. Bush always talks about Iraq — yet we keep hearing the same line: “Why doesn’t he explain the war?” With the exception of one paragraph (on the “ownership society”) Bush’s Second Inaugural was entirely devoted to the rationale for the war. It’s worth reading: a magnificent speech, right in the American grain, one that will be remembered for as long as liberty is an issue on this planet. And the rationale has not changed.

Like Vietnam before it, the Iraq war is often blamed on “neoconservative” ideologues (or their counterparts then) which is to say, people who think the game of purveying liberty is worth the candle of commitment.

In both wars, critics asked: “What’s the plan? What’s the exit strategy?” And in both cases, the appropriate answer was: Dunno; we’ll have to play it by ear and see what develops in the fog of war.

In both wars, much of the media coverage was crazed. My Lai involved a few hundred people, Abu Ghraib fewer than that. But these events dominated news coverage, which tended to ignore the larger meaning of what was going on.

In both wars, we were told our actions would hurt us in the eyes of the world. And so they did. Unfortunate. But we ended up as the exceptional nation, Number One, more influential than any nation in history, the City on a Hill, hearing anti-American language which boiled down to “Yankee go home and take me with you.”

The basic truth about our mission in Iraq is the same as that about Vietnam: We’re doing something important and positive in the world.

Be proud.

Indeed.

The must be my day for podcasting: earlier today, an article I wrote on podcasting for the July issue of CE Pro, the home theater professionals' trade publication went live (subscription may be required). And while I'm in the middle of mixing and editing Pajamas' Blog Week In Review podcast (which should go live tomorrow, once I finish it and upload it to Pajamas HQ), over at TCS Daily, the first part of my two-part podcast interview with Michael Yon and Chris Muir went live. Click on over!

During his press conference today, Donald Rumsfeld fielded this exchange:

QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, there has been a lot made on Capitol Hill about these chemical weapons that were found and may be quite old. But do you a real concern of these weapons from Saddam's past perhaps having an impact on U.S. troops who are on the ground in Iraq right now?

RUMSFELD : Certainly. What has been announced is accurate, that there have been hundreds of canisters or weapons of various types found that either currently have sarin in them or had sarin in them, and sarin is dangerous. And it's dangerous to our forces, and it's a concern.

So obviously, to the extent we can locate these and destroy them, it is important that we do so. And they are dangerous. Anyone -- I'm sure General Casey or anyone else in that country would be concerned if
they got in the wrong hands.

They are weapons of mass destruction. They are harmful to human beings. And they have been found. And that had not been by Saddam Hussein, as he inaccurately alleged that he had reported all of his
weapons . And they are still being found and discovered.

It's amusing to watch the pushback from the left after Santorum's press conference yesterday. Beginning in mid-2003, the mantra began that Saddam had no WMDs--zip, zero, nadda. Or as Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said as recently as last week, "There are two things that don't exist in Iraq: cutting and running, and weapons of mass destruction."

Now the latest version being fielded is that, well, Saddam had them, but they were old, outdated. pay them no mind.

Of Senator Kerry's time in Vietnam, James Lileks once wrote, "The past was more malleable than you had ever expected." But if anything, that's even more true when it comes to Iraq than the Winter Soldier's salad days. Just look at Al Gore in 1993, and today.

Update: Evangelical Outpost notes correctly:

Opposition to the war has nothing to do with the lack of WMDs. It never did. We could find a nuclear bomb in Uday Hussein’s old apartment and John Kerry would still be gearing up for Winter Soldier II. Unless you dropped your moral compass off the side of a swift boat in Cambodia, it’s easy to see that the world is safer because we secured the one WMD that truly mattered: Saddam Hussein.

More important than the weapons that were found (or that have yet to be found) are the ones that will never be created by Saddam’s regime. Many Americans, however, still suffer from the delusion that the only way that Saddam could have been a significant threat was for him to have possessed stockpiles of WMDs.

Meanwhile, Shannon Love ressurects Hitchcock's McGuffin device to explain why Saddam's WMDs were ignorned or spun by the left.

Update: Ian Schwartz has a round-up of cable and Blogosphere opinion.

When Hollywood Reporter quotes Mike Wallace as saying that Dan Rather's depature from CBS was a "sad, bloody story," they had no idea how much metaphoric blood was on Dan's hands, according to The New York Observer:

Peter Boyer, the New Yorker writer and author of the 1989 book Who Killed CBS?, said, “Dan Rather is a creature of a strange, unrealistic, almost surreal arrangement that is so long past, and such an anachronism—which is to say three networks with a captive nationwide audience—that you wonder how he might psychically adapt to being part of the tiniest fraction of the most fragmented form of communication that exists. I don’t know. I guess that’ll be up to Dan and his shrinks in the future.”

Several long-term associates of Mr. Rather searched for the most appropriate analogy. “Is he Burt Lancaster to Tom Brokaw’s Jimmy Stewart?” asked one.

He is William Holden from The Wild Bunch, said another. Or Gary Cooper from High Noon.

“Dan is the lone gunfighter who squints into the sun, sets his horse into the wind and rides off to the next challenge,” said a third. “He’s had all these gun battles in the past, there’s a trail of bodies, but he knows he’s got it in him to rescue the townspeople. It’s just—well, he’s so f***ing alone.”

There’s a trail of bodies--and Dan, "the lone gunfighter" has plugged 'em full of lead during "all these gunbattles"? No wonder "he’s so f***ing alone"--look at his body count!

Geez. I thought violence on television was restricted to prime time--when did anchormen go from being overhyped newsreaders to trigger-happy gunslingers? Given the gunslinging image of the man in the oval office (who also made his mark in Texas before going national), and given what the Azlan/MEChA men think of the 19th century American expansion into the west, is this an anology the left really wants to use to describe one of its favorite television sons?

Update: As we discussed this story over lunch, my wife mentioned the binary world of television journalism--when it's going right, the anchorman is a gunslinging crusader (just to keep the analogies rendered anathema by PC correctness going) but if there's a problem? Well, as Walter Cronkite said last year:

Cronkite did not heavily fault Rather for his role in last September's discredited story about President Bush's military service. Rather anchored the "60 Minutes Wednesday" story.

"We all know he made a mistake by now," Cronkite said. "But would we have done much the same? I would not be sure that I wouldn't have followed my producers and accepted what they had to offer."

Hey, he's just a newsreader--it's the producer who writes the copy!

Which is true, as Tom Wolfe noted in 1980:

Read More »

James Lileks writes, "I am not susceptible to disaster scenarios":

I do not believe we have ten years to prevent the inevitable collapse of civilization. As long as I can remember I have been fed end-times scenarios – death by ice, death by fire, death by famine, death by smothering from heaps of clambering humans scrabbling for purchase on an overpopulated world, death by full-scale nuclear exchange, death by unstoppable global AIDS, death by a two-degree rise in temperatures, death by radon, death by alar, death by inadvertent Audi acceleration, death by juju. Doesn’t mean we won’t die of juju. But somehow we survive. The only thing I take away is a vague wistful wonder what it would be like to live in an era when things were generally so bad that the futurists spent their time assuring us it would be better. Say what you will about the past, but at least they had a future. All I’ve ever had, according to the experts, is a grim narrow window of heedless ignorance bliss followed by a dystopian irradiated world characterized by scarcity, mutation, and quite possibly intelligent chimps. You have no future. Oh, and don’t smoke!

Bah.

Oh sure--laugh it up for now. But what happens when the Doomsday Machine arrives?!

One of the most-quoted lines by Charles Krauthammer came from a 2002 column, which began thusly:

To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.

Peggy Noonan drafts a variation on this theme:

Democratic leaders in Washington are in a worse position than Republican leaders in Washington. Neither likes their base, really, and both think they are smarter. But the Democrats think, deep down, that their base is barking mad. The Republicans don't. They just think their base is a bore.

For some thoughts on the first half of Noonan's equation, click here.

Update: North Carolina seems to be taking Noonan's Law a bit too seriously, it seems...

Rick Santorum issued a press release today which reads as follows:

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA), Chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, joined Congressman Peter Hoekstra, (R-MI-2), Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, today to make a major announcement regarding the release of newly declassified information that proves the existence of chemical munitions in Iraq since 2003. The information was released by the Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, and contained an unclassified summary of analysis conducted by the National Ground Intelligence Center. In March, Senator Santorum began advocating for the release of these documents to the American public.

“The information released today proves that weapons of mass destruction are, in fact, in Iraq,” said Senator Santorum. “It is essential for the American people to understand that these weapons are in Iraq. I will continue to advocate for the complete declassification of this report so we can more fully understand the complete WMD picture inside Iraq.”

The following are the six key points contained in the unclassified overview:

• Since 2003 Coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent.

• Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq’s pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist.

• Pre-Gulf War Iraqi chemical weapons could be sold on the black market. Use of these weapons by terrorists or insurgent groups would have implications for Coalition forces in Iraq. The possibility of use outside Iraq cannot be ruled out.

• The most likely munitions remaining are sarin and mustard-filled projectiles.

• The purity of the agent inside the munitions depends on many factors, including the manufacturing process, potential additives, and environmental storage conditions. While agents degrade over time, chemical warfare agents remain hazardous and potentially lethal.

• It has been reported in open press that insurgents and Iraqi groups desire to acquire and use chemical weapons.

Why, it's like all this knowledge went down the memory hole or something!

Update: Not surprisingly, Ed Morrissey and Allahpundit have more.

Another Update: Santorum was on Hugh Hewitt's show to discuss this topic, follow this link to an eventual transcript. Meanwhile, here's a transcript of a press conference that Santorum and Congressman Peter Hoekstra (R-NY) held today.

Come to Los Angeles! The sun shines bright, the beaches are wide and inviting, and the orange groves stretch as far as the eye can see. There are jobs aplenty, and land is cheap. Every working man can have his own house, and inside every house, a happy, all-American family. You can have all this, and who knows... you could even be discovered, become a movie star... or at least see one.

Off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush, you can also meet a certain very prominent shoe blogger and his posse and spend a marvelous evening trading thoughts on the John Lobb, the New & Lingwood, the Prada, and the Hasselhoff...

Hollywood Reporter writes that Tuesday could be Dan Rather's last day at CBS. But it gets one detail of the debacle known as Ra^therGate exactly backwards:

Rather's position with the network had been strained after a September 2004 report he did for "60 Minutes Wednesday" that questioned President Bush's National Guard service during the Vietnam War. The report, which was prepared by producer Mary Mapes and only involved Rather minimally, was based upon documents that failed to live up to intense scrutiny.

The problem with the documents in question didn't require "intense scrutiny". Quite the contrary--it was immediately apparent to anyone who looked (who wasn't so invested in the story that it had to be--had! to! be!--true) that the documents were fake; intense scrutiny was only needed afterwards to confirm the obvious without a doubt.

Something that should have been applied to these documents before they were chosen to build a story around, not afterwards.

Opinion Journal goes in search of the base truths of modern art:

Once in a while a news story so speaks for itself that it threatens to put commentators out of a job.

In this year's summer show at London's Royal Academy of Arts, "Exhibit 1201" is a large rectangular tablet of slate with a tiny barbell-shaped bit of boxwood on top. Its creator, David Hensel, must be pleased to have been selected from among some 9,000 applicants for the world's largest open-submission exhibit of contemporary art. Nevertheless, he was bemused to discover that in transit his sculpture had gotten separated from its base. Judging the two components as different submissions, the Royal Academy had rejected his artwork proper--a finely wrought laughing head in jesmonite--and selected the plinth. "It says something about the state of visual arts today," said Mr. Hensel. He didn't say what. He didn't need to.

Meanwhile, James Lileks checks in on the state of modern architecture:

As for the building’s interaction with the street, well – it doesn’t have a great deal to say, other than “Damn, I’m blue.”

You'll be too, when you're done. But click anyway.

Back in 2002, when I suggested that the last person watching turn off the lights at MSNBC when she was done watching, I had no idea Connie Chung would take me so literally!

NOTE: The management of Ed Driscoll.com, YouTube, and Pajamas Media are not responsible for the psychic damage that clicking on the above link could cause. Click at your own risk!

(Via Hot Air.)

David Frum links to a New York Sun article that discovers the, err, inconvenient truth hidden in Al Gore's agenda:

For the watchdogs of Israeli influence in Washington, I have an inconvenient truth, indeed. You have a powerful new enemy. Forget the neocons and the regime change in Iraq. Now is the time for the self-appointed guardians of the national interest to look over the horizon and see the next operation the agents of the Jewish state in America are plotting.

Notice Al Gore. Yes, Al Gore: Huffington Post favorite, netroots royalty, the man who opposed the Iraq war before Juan Cole did. That Al Gore. He has flipped. The former vice president may have given a landmark speech in 2002 opposing the second Gulf War. But with his new movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore has just launched a campaign to bankrupt the Saudi royal family and the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Now Al Gore, of course, will say that his plan to put the house of Saud and heirs of Khomeini into penury is motivated out of concern for the shrinking polar ice caps and his fervent hope to insure that numerous
cities, many American, remain unflooded. But a clear-eyed observer need only ask whom all this altruism benefits to uncover the former vice president’s real agenda.

No, all of this greenhouse gases and carbon emissions mumbo-jumbo is cover for a Zionist-Likudnik-neocon plot. If the Gore plan catches on and American citizens start demanding engines free of fossil fuel and candidates
dedicated to overtaxing gasoline and forcing car manufacturers to meet European air quality standards, it will be worse than 20 Projects for a New American Century, 50 Weekly Standards, a hundred Charles Krauthammers.

Read the whole thing. And then click on this for the misdirection play that absolutely clinches it!

(And yes, I'm kidding about that last part. Or am I...?)

Slate has an at times fawning profile of Garrison Keillor this weekend:

Keillor's humor has always been a bit of a puzzle: What is its irony/sincerity ratio? Is he mocking Midwesterners or mocking the rest of us via Midwesterners? In 1985, when Time magazine called Keillor the funniest man in America, Bill Cosby reportedly said, "That's true if you're a pilgrim." A decade later, a cartoon version of Keillor forced Homer Simpson to assault his TV and shout, "Be more funny!" But judging Keillor by mainstream standards of comedy (compression, originality, edge) misses the point. He works hard to be unfunny in a very particular way. His humor is polite, understated, and deliberately anachronistic; it never breaks a sweat.

I don't know how much perspiration Keillor was generating when he spoke to a university in November of 2004, but it's certainly not my definition of polite:

“I am a Democrat—it’s no secret. I am a museum-quality Democrat,” Keillor said. “Last night I spent my time crouched in a fetal position, rolling around and moaning in the dark.”

Not one to shy away from speaking his mind, Keillor proposed a solution to what he deemed a fundamental problem with U.S. elections. “I’m trying to organize support for a constitutional amendment to deny voting rights to born-again Christians,” Keillor smirked. “I feel if your citizenship is in Heaven—like a born again Christian’s is—you should give up your citizenship. Sorry, but this is my new cause. If born again Christians are allowed to vote in this country, then why not Canadians?”

And in a 2002 piece for Salon, Keillor wrote of Norm Coleman, Minnesota's then-newly elected Republican senator:

Norm got a free ride from the press. St. Paul is a small town and anybody who hangs around the St. Paul Grill knows about Norm's habits. Everyone knows that his family situation is, shall we say, very interesting, but nobody bothered to ask about it, least of all the religious people in the Republican Party. They made their peace with hypocrisy long ago. So this false knight made his way as an all-purpose feel-good candidate, standing for vaguely Republican values, supporting the president.

In 2004, Keillor wrote the following passage about Coleman's voters:

...hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, see-through fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, hobby cops, misanthropic frat boys, lizardskin cigar monkeys, jerktown romeos, ninja dittoheads, the shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, cheese merchants, cat stranglers, taxi dancers, grab-ass executives, gun fetishists, genteel pornographers, pill pushers, chronic nappers, nihilists in golf pants, backed-up Baptists, Crips and Bloods of the boardroom...

Near his conclusion, Sam Anderson, the author of the Slate piece writes:

once Keillor's trademark simplicity begins to look complicated and unnatural—the paradoxes start tumbling out like herrings out of the pickle-barrel: His plainness seems pretentious, his anti-bombast bombastic, his anti-snobbery snobbish. This sense of affectation is why some people instinctively dislike such a likable entertainer.

Or maybe--just maybe--they simply dislike being dubbed hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, see-through fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, hobby cops, misanthropic frat boys, lizardskin cigar monkeys, jerktown romeos, ninja dittoheads, the shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, cheese merchants, cat stranglers, taxi dancers, grab-ass executives, gun fetishists, genteel pornographers, pill pushers, chronic nappers, nihilists in golf pants, backed-up Baptists, Crips and Bloods of the boardroom.

But hey, Keillor's humor has always been a bit of a puzzle, as the article notes.

As Tom McGuire writes, the New York Times "delivers a poignant look at Dan Rather's sunset":

The 74-year-old man with the Mets cap pulled far down on his forehead slid into a booth at a diner on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and ordered a glass of milk without so much as turning a head — so quietly, in fact, that it was hard to believe it was Dan Rather.

In place of the swagger that had served him so well throughout his 44-year career at CBS News was an obvious sadness that his tenure at the network was ticking down to an inglorious end. Mr. Rather complained that since stepping down as anchor of the " CBS Evening News" last year, in the aftermath of a reporting scandal, he had been ill used as a correspondent on "60 Minutes" and had been given virtually nothing at all to do for the previous six weeks.

Among the places he had sought solace, he said on a recent afternoon, was in "Good Night, and Good Luck," George Clooney's homage to Edward R. Murrow and the CBS News of old, a film that Mr. Rather said he had seen five times in theaters, most recently alone. [Is this Dan's equivilent of his fbete noire's talking to the paintings during Watergate?--Ed]

Mr. Rather's contract with CBS, and "60 Minutes," is not scheduled to expire until late November. But he said yesterday that he and the network were close to an agreement that would end his tenure early, and that he was seriously mulling a new venture that, at least initially, relatively few viewers would be able to see: he would develop and be the host of a weekly interview program on a high-definition television channel known as HDNet.

The offer, he said, had come directly from Mark Cuban, the unbridled owner of the National Basketball Association's Dallas Mavericks, who was a co-founder of HDNet in 2001.

Cuban, as the Times article notes, was also the producer of Good Night And Good Luck, which, as liberal journalist Jack Shafer noted in Slate, is riddled with errors and distortions.

But then of course, so is Rather.

As Betsy Newmark writes, "Maxine Waters reveals a bit of the truth", though rather inadvertently, of course:

In the debate yesterday over the House Resolution on the Iraq War and battle against terrorism, Maxine Waters, always entertaining, revealed the real reason why the Democrats were so upset. (Thanks to Laura Ingraham for posting the audio.) She got up on the House floor and said that many Democrats were going to be "trapped" because they would have to vote on this resolution and they don't want to have to pick a side and vote on it.

"And so, many Democrats are going to get trapped. Because they claim that in their districts they have half of their constituents for it, this war and half against it and they don't know what to do."

So in other words, if you add together to majority of the electorate that voted for President Bush in 2004, and the "half of [the] constituents" in Democrat districts that Waters refers to, the 256 in favor, 153 opposed vote yesterday sounds like, if anything, actually a smaller representation of what the national consensus actually is, despite post-voting waffling by Waters and others on the left.

Speaking of being trapped in a fashionable Mobius loop, Michael Barone explores how the war in Iraq is framed by the left:

Historians may regard it as a curious thing that the left and the press have been so determined to fit current events into templates based on events that occurred 30 to 40 years ago. The people who effectively framed the issues raised by Vietnam and Watergate did something like the opposite; they insisted that Vietnam was not a reprise of World War II or Korea and that Watergate was something different from the operations J. Edgar Hoover conducted for Franklin Roosevelt or John Kennedy. Journalists in the 1940s, '50s and early '60s tended to believe they had a duty to buttress Americans' faith in their leaders and their government. Journalists since Vietnam and Watergate have tended to believe that they have a duty to undermine such faith, especially when the wrong party is in office.

That belief has its perils for journalism, as the Fitzgerald investigation has shown. The peril that the press may find itself in the hot seat, but even more the peril that it will get the story wrong. The visible slavering over the prospect of a Rove indictment is just another item in the list of reasons why the credibility of the "mainstream media" has been plunging. There's also a peril for the political left. Vietnam and Watergate were arguably triumphs for honest reporting. But they were also defeats for America--and for millions of freedom-loving people in the world. They ushered in an era when the political opposition and much of the press have sought not just to defeat administrations but to delegitimize them. The pursuit of Karl Rove by the left and the press has been just the latest episode in the attempted criminalization of political differences. Is there any hope that it might turn out to be the last?

Err, not in the forseeable future. On the other hand, as Barone notes, trying to shove events into a pre-existing template has its downsides:

It has been a tough 10 days for those who see current events through the prisms of Vietnam and Watergate. First, the Democrats failed to win a breakthrough victory in the California 50th District special election--a breakthrough that would have summoned up memories of Democrats winning Gerald Ford's old congressional district in a special election in 1974. Instead the Democratic nominee got 45% of the vote, just 1% more than John Kerry did in the district in 2004.

Second, U.S. forces with a precision air strike killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, on the same day that Iraqis finished forming a government. Zarqawi will not be available to gloat over American setbacks or our allies' defeat, as the leaders of the Viet Cong and North Vietnam did.

Third, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald announced that he would not seek an indictment of Karl Rove. The leftward blogosphere had Mr. Rove pegged for the role of Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. Theories were spun about plea bargains that would implicate Vice President Dick Cheney. Talk of impeachment was in the air. But it turns out that history doesn't repeat itself. George W. Bush, whether you like it or not, is not a second Richard Nixon.

Add one more to the list, as Jonah Goldberg notes:

I don't think we can over-estimate the significance of the fact that Dan Rather will be leaving CBS. I don't see how you can interpret this as anything less than his firing over Memogate. Undoubtedly, in my mind, CBS felt in 2004 that they couldn't sack him on the spot because of how it would appear. His slow departure and temporary job-shuffling was a face-saving effort for both Rather and CBS. But, the delay doesn't discount the fact that if it weren't for Memogate, Rather would probably still be the esteemed anchor of CBS News. This constitutes a monumental triumph for the rightwing blogosphere and I don't think we should let it be obscured by the kabuki dance CBS put on to downplay their embarrassment.

And another example of Mobius loops coming full circle ad infinitum (sorry, just intertwining as many metaphors as possible), CBS is ejecting Rather to make way for Katie Couric, in much the same way Rather forced the issue for Walter Cronkite two decades ago.

Ian Schwartz asks, "Why Do The Dixie Chicks Hate America?". The answer (or at least the root causes of what is a surprisingly ancient and reactionary fashion now sclerotic, hard and covered with liver spots) is blowing in the wind...

See also this essay; scroll down for the history of another previously apolitical musician gone round the bend.

Update: Tammy Bruce writes:

since [Natalie Maines of the Dixies says] she "doesn't understand" patriotism, I have a short list of a few concepts which epitomize America and illustrate why we goofballs so love this country.

Read the rest.

Libertas reviews Warners' 260 million dollar Superman Returns:

here’s what I think of director Bryan Singer’s $260 million Superman Returns: I think it stinks. I think it’s a complete waste of your time and money. I think it’s a film made by idiots, for idiots - a film made for people whose standards have dropped so far, they don’t even remember what a good film was like.

It's hard to tell, but I'm guessing that's a thumbs down vote.

Superman, incidentally, has been updated a little:

Our new Superman, incidentally, doesn’t even stand for “Truth, Justice & The American Way,” anymore. Playing Daily Planet editor Perry White, Frank Langella tells us that Superman stands for “Truth and Justice …” and leaves it at that. The Superman Returns press materials tell me that Superman now stands for “truth, justice and all that is good.” “All that is good” is apparently the phrase of choice when “The American Way” sounds too - what? Imperialistic? Jingoistic? Symptomatic of Bush-style militarism? I’m not sure, exactly. All I know is this ‘American Way’ stuff is now apparently too edgy and controversial for a Warner Brothers product shipped to Peru, Pakistan and Malaysia. Don’t want to offend anyone!

Except the red states, of course. But they're expendable.

Look for it go online later today at Pajamas HQ, with another special guest sitting in for Glenn Reynolds this week. (I'm sworn to secrecy on this one...)

While you're waiting for it to go online, to other great audio files to pass the time: Mark Steyn's weekly visit to Hugh Hewitt (which is normally required listening for me on Thursdays, except we were taping the podcast at that time yesterday) and...the return of James Lileks' Diner, back after a fresh tank of bandwidth has been deposited in his account.

Update: It's up. Hey, I could have sworn it was Michelle Malkin who was sitting in yesterday. Apparently though, it was actually The Mommas And The Pappas...

Ed Morrissey writes:

If al-Qaeda in Iraq reads Western news sources, and their media-savvy but tactically insane recent communications suggest they do, they may soon decide that their operation has blown its cover completely. After an AQ associate dropped a dime on Zarqawi, they now have a much larger security breach than they knew:

Iraq's national security adviser said Thursday a "huge treasure" of documents and computer records was seized after the raid on terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's hideout, giving the Iraqi government the upper hand in its fight against al-Qaida in Iraq.
National Security Adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie also said he believed the security situation in the country would improve enough to allow a large number of U.S.-led forces to leave Iraq by the end of this year, and a majority to depart by the end of next year. "And maybe the last soldier will leave Iraq by mid-2008," he said.

Al-Rubaie said a laptop, flashdrive and other documents were found in the debris after the airstrike that killed the al-Qaida in Iraq leader last week outside Baqouba, and more information has been uncovered in raids of other insurgent hideouts since then.

He called it a "huge treasure ... a huge amount of information."

When asked how he could be sure the information was authentic, al-Rubaie said "there is nothing more authentic than finding a thumbdrive in his pocket."

Ed notes however, that a much more controversial method of obtaining additional information may be tried:

Prime Minister Maliki has a plan for the other native insurgents: amnesty. However, his proposal has a clause to which the US will plainly object, which allows terrorists who have conducted attacks on US forces in the past to walk free if they lay down their arms.

Read the rest.

Jonah Goldberg and Betsy Newmark have some thoughts on Al Gore's language--both in 1992's Earth In The Balance and this year's An Inconvenient Truth comparing global cooling (sorry, that was the 1970s), global warming, climate change, or whatever the expression du jour is, to the Holocaust. Betsy writes:

But, Goldberg asks, if addressing the crisis of global warming demands the same diligence and dedication that fighting the Nazis demanded, why isn't Gore proposing similar sacrifices today to fight global warming? For a start, they should be out there denouncing the movie Cars for glorifying the weapons of mass destruction that cars are in this global crisis. They should be campaigning against NASCAR. But, of course, they won't be doing these things because it would be political suicide. So, now we know where they draw the line. They'll talk a good game, but they won't actually propose anything or say anything that would offend potential voters.

Oh, I don't know--Arnold Schwarzenegger's been doing a pretty good job of taking his conservative base for granted, with all of his recent talk about global warming.

Update: Jonah debates Mark Schmitt of The Decembrist and the New America Foundation on this topic in a video podcast at Bloggingheads.tv.

Glenn Reynolds has a great post on mil-bloggers and their efforts in short-circuiting the legacy media's role in (inadvertently and otherwise) aiding terrorism:

Reader Michael Russo notes why this matters:

Reader Michael Russo notes why this matters:

Notice strategy number one for Al Qaeda based on the Zarquawi safe house documents:

"1. To improve the image of the resistance in society, increase the number of supporters who are refusing occupation and show the clash of interest between society and the occupation and its collaborators. To use the media for spreading an effective and creative image of the resistance."

Interesting that leveraging the western media before all else is (and presumably has been) Al Qaeda's top strategy. And s***ty how many people have bit hook line and sinker. I bet this will be head line news... or not.

Terrorism is an information war disguised as a military operation. The press plays a symbiotic role, and isn't willing to address that.

Just ask CNN.

Just had another appearance on The Tammy Bruce Show, this time to discuss Chris Anderson's concept of the Long Tail and how it impacts the Blogosphere, which I wrote about a while back for TCS Daily. Anderson's new book is due out early next month; you can order it now though from Amazon, which as I discussed with Tammy, is dramatically impacting the Tail as well.

Watch this space for more coverage on that topic, shortly.

Oh--and for the original T.A.M.I. Show with James Brown, click here. I think I covered the breakup of mass media reasonably well, but unlike James, my Electric Boogaloo is awfully rusty these days.

Vintage Guitar magazine looks back nostalgically at the Supro Thunderbolt guitar amplifier, a tiny amp with a roaring sound, one that's all over Led Zeppelin's iconic first album.

Debbie Schlussel notes that while Egyptian Culture Minister Farouk Hosni claims that his nation bans "any book that insults any religion", including The Da Vinci Code, there are definitely exceptions that he's willing to make.

Like Mein Kampf. Oh, and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, both burning up Egypt's best seller lists.

But hey, other than those...

Update: Not surprisingly, Iran's doing a fair amount of banning as well: Middle Eastern ban:

It is the second time in two years that Iran has prohibited a publication of international repute for failing to use the term "Persian Gulf" in its maps. In November 2004, it banned the National Geographic atlas when a new edition appeared with the term "Arabian Gulf" in parenthesis beside the more commonly used Persian Gulf.

Tehran believes in aggressively defending the historical term "Persian Gulf" against "Arabian Gulf," which it regards as a name dreamed up by Arab nationalists. While Iran dominates the eastern side of the waterway, the western shores are held by Arab countries.

Meanwhile, Betsy Newmark looks at more homegrown censorship.

Update: Egypt's Big Pharaoh has some thoughts on the banning of Da Vinci:

People downloaded the movie from the internet and passed it from one PC to the other. It was even uploaded to my company's shared network. Banning books and movies will do nothing except raise people's curiosity who end up doing everything to see the controversial material.

As Michael Medved noted last month, American Christians have only recently begun to understand that their getting up in arms about Hollywood's product is expected by Hollywood, and deliberately incorporated into its marketing plans.

Here's Reuters' world view, as James Taranto noted on September 24th, 2001:

Stephen Jukes, global news editor for Reuters, the British wire service, has ordered his scribes not to use the word terror to refer to the Sept. 11 atrocity. . . . "We all know that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word terrorist," Jukes writes in an internal memo. "To be frank, it adds little to call the attack on the World Trade Center a terrorist attack."

And from just this week...This is CNN:

CARL AZUZ, CNN STUDENT NEWS REPORTER: WordCentral.com defines terrorism as the use of a violent or destructive act to achieve a goal. Why is it so difficult for the international community to agree on a definition for terrorism?

OCTAVIA NASR, CNN SENIOR EDITOR FOR ARAB AFFAIRS: Well, I think for one, terrorism for one person is a freedom fight for another. And you know, the Arab world always talks about this, as they say the so-called terrorism, because they believe that - in Iraq, for example, many people are struggling against occupation, so in many ways they support that struggle against occupation but then they draw a line between those who are struggling. They want a free Iraq, they want the occupiers out and those who are pushing the envelope and crossing the line by terrorizing people. And when we say terrorizing people, in a sense, it's going after the innocent civilians, the unsuspecting civilians, taking hostages, beheading them. Committing acts that are totally unacceptable, even by the standards of a freedom fight. So, you know, if you think about it, "terrorism" is a subjective term depending on which side you are on.

Err, if such acts are "totally unacceptable", then why the scare quotes, the "so-called" obfuscating, and all of the dissembling?

Roger Ailes of Fox News once told C-Span's Brian Lamb that CNN's CNNi, their international feed, frequently is much more anti-American than the version of CNN that Americans watch--almost in Al Jazeera territory. On the other hand, as Ailes noted, CNNi's tone is also good for business:

Well, the best way to get distribution around the world is to be the BBC or Al Jazeera or CNNi, basically do -- if you watch it day in and day out, you can't find a whole lot good about America. Now, they have no obligation to do good stories about America, but they do have an obligation to have balance and context. And Al Jazeera simply doesn't. BBC doesn't. And CNNi is less offensive, but they don't do it much, either. And I think that context is critically important to the news.

I quoted Ailes early last year during the scandal that arose after CNNi's founder Eason Jordan was lying about American troops targeting reporters for assassination. Jordan's one shining moment as a journalist was coming clean with the American people in April of 2003 with the fact that Saddam Hussein had previously controlled CNN's news coverage of Iraq, after Hussein was toppled by American-led forces. But sadly, it looks like even after 9/11, even after Saddam's fall, even after years of terrorism that has killed and otherwise impacted far more Middle Eastern Muslims than Americans, little has changed in CNN's collective world view.

(Via Hugh Hewitt, who writes, "No Wonder the Iraqi Defense Minister Says 'I Hate CNN'".)

It doesn't hurt that it co-stars Gabriel himself...

The International Herald Tribune (owned by the New York Times) has this week's hell-in-a-handbasket poll:

As the war in Iraq continues for a fourth year, the global image of America has slipped further, even among publics in countries closely allied with the United States, a new global opinion poll has found.

In an effort to get as far ahead of the news cycle as possible, P.J. O'Rourke responded to this poll two years ago:

And the best thing about Americans recusing ourselves from global entanglements is that we will be loved again. Imagine a world where American manners and mores set the standard almost everywhere, where American fashions, American ideas and American lifestyles are universally sought out and copied. A world where people avidly listen to American music, eagerly watch American TV and movies, and try to imitate Americans in every way. Imagine a world where the U.S.A. is so admired that people by the millions want nothing more than to come to America and recuse themselves from global entanglements.

Imagine it--it's easy if you try...

With the Haditha story unraveling, it's time for the media's next drive-by smear of the Marines: "Hadji Girl". (Soon to be dubbed HadjiGate?)

Charles Johnson has both the video, and the story behind it:

We’ve been watching this develop, as earlier today the Council on American Islamic Relations sent out one of their infamous email alerts about an amateur music video of a song about a Marine lured into an ambush by a “Hadji girl.” At this point there’s no verification that the singer is a Marine, although it looks authentic.

And now, right on cue, mainstream media is parroting the completely bogus claims of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR).

The Associated Press version: Video on Marine killing Iraqis draws ire.

The BBC version: ‘Kill Iraqis marine song’ probe.

Both of these accounts repeat CAIR’s blatant falsehood, that the song in the video tells a story about a Marine killing Iraqi civilians.

It does not.

The BBC’s version:

The lyrics caught on video refer to the shooting of Iraqi civilians, especially children.

Yes, this is true. The lyrics refer to killings of children by Iraqi insurgents. Not by Marines. Both the BBC and the AP seem to have missed this minor detail.

The BBC goes on:

The four-minute song includes graphic descriptions of killings, real or imagined.

The horror! We would never want anyone to hear such things, except of course in every movie made for the last ten years.

Dressed in a green T-shirt and military style trousers and boots, a man sings: “I grabbed her little sister and put her in front of me.”

“As the bullets began to fly, the blood sprayed from between her eyes, and then I laughed maniacally.”

And what they don’t tell you: the people who kill the “little sister” in this darkly humorous song are — not the Marines — but her father and brother.

The mainstream media have really gone too far this time, in their smarmy rush to smear US troops, because their vile claims, based on information fed to them by an Islamist front group, can be checked. Here’s the video in question, for the record, so these lies don’t stand unrefuted:

Don't miss it. It's no great shakes as a song or performance (Lennon and McCartney's reps as master tunesmiths won't be diminished). But without the Blogosphere, this would be somewhat similar to how the legacy media treated the Swift Vets in August of 2004--with the media reporting their opinion of the story, but without providing links to readers to access to the underlying details; in this case the song's video and lyrics.

Lorie Byrd writes that for the elite media, assertion has essentially replaced truth--and it's safe to assert that that remains true with this story.

Writing about bias being inserted into a Washington Post story about President Bush's surprise trip to Iraq today, Ed Morrissey notes:

This war has afforded the American media with a number of opportunities to demonstrate their firm conviction that they are an objective system designed to discover and report the truth. Instead, they have repeatedly shown in ways small and large that they allow their personal biases to flow into their news reporting, underscoring the widespread knowledge that they ceased being objective decades ago.

And fortunately, for America--and Iraq--it's no longer 1972.

Futuramb Blog, published in Sweeden, uses my recent TCS Daily podcast interview with Alvin Toffler as a launching point on some thoughts about file sharing. He concludes:

And before you comment on this, yes I suspect that these thoughts are connected to Jeremy Rifkin’s book End of Work which I haven’t read (yet).

To paraphrase Pete Gent, don't bother kid, everybody gets unemployed in the end.

The New Criterion's Emily Ghods reminds us that September was the 50th anniversary of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita:

As The New Criterion’s summer intern, I happily make my debut into the world of blogs with a post about Vladimir Nabokov’s tragic nymphet. Last September marked the fiftieth anniversary of Nabokov’s Lolita, a novel that historically inspired the kind of controversy now only dreamed of by literary publicists. An indelicate and serious examination of pedophilia, a self-conscious attempt at psychoanalysis, and pedestrian invocations of Sigmund Freud seldom escape the excited repartee hovering around the Lolita imbroglio. This is all beside the point, but this is the world into which Lolita has aged, on to her golden years.

Meanwhile, Mark Steyn looks at "the standard by which were measured all subsequent political sex scandals" in his Atlantic obituary for John Profumo, whose moment of infamy occurred barely five years after Lolita's initial publication:

In other words, Jack Profumo was done in by the “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” moment. Whether or not President Clinton should have suffered the same fate for his finger-wagging, it would doubtless have been merely a temporary retreat before reemergence for a full-scale redemption-by-talkshow tour, doing the flawed-but-all-too-human shtick to Larry and Oprah, explaining how he’d conquered his demons and how you can conquer yours, too, with the help of his new self-help video, etc. The advance from Random House probably wouldn’t have been any bigger, but the book would have been at least partially readable.

John Profumo didn’t do any of that. There was no comeback, and no attempt at one. He accepted that his career was ruined and never sought public sympathy. As extraordinary as his downfall was, the aftermath was unique. On June 5th 1963 he resigned from the government, from Parliament and from the Queen’s Privy Council. Not long afterwards, he contacted Toynbee Hall, a charitable mission in the East End of London, and asked whether they needed any help. He started washing dishes and helping with the children’s playgroup, and he stayed for 40 years. He disappeared amid the grimy tenements of east London and did good works till he died. And, with the exception of one newspaper article to mark Toynbee Hall’s centenary, he never said another word in public again.

Read the whole thing.

Karl Rove won't be indicted by Patrick Fitzgerald causing CNN's Jack Cafferty to reach for the Prozac. Follow the round-up of links here for more details.

Meanwhile, Will Collier is questioning the dismissal's timing...

The Harold Stassen of the courtrooms loses another one:

US District Judge Frank C. Damrell Jr. dismissed a lawsuit brought by activist and atheist Michael Newdow seeking to have the words “In God We Trust” removed from our money.

Stop The ACLU has some more and some thoughts on both this case, and the left's war on religion in general.

Ben Roethlisberger, you just captured the Pittsburgh Steelers' elusive fifth Super Bowl, and their first in over two decades. Where are you going next?!

To the emergency ward after crashing into a car while riding a Suzuki motorcycle without a helmet:

Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger is in serious but stable condition and underwent surgery following a serious head injury he suffered this morning when his motorcycle collided with a car on Second Avenue near the 10th Street Bridge, police said.
Roethlisberger lost most of his teeth, fractured his left sinus cavity bone, suffered a nine-inch laceration to the back of his head and a broken jaw, and injured both of his knees when he hit the ground, police said.

"He is right now in the (operating room) undergoing some surgery from injuries he received in this accident today," said

Dr. Larry Jones, chief of trauma and burns at Mercy Hospital, Uptown. "He was talking to me before he left for the OR. He's coherent. He's making sense. He knows what happened."

Roethlisberger, 24, who was not wearing a helmet, collided with a Chrysler New Yorker at 11:15 a.m. and was thrown off his motorcycle, flying head-first into the car's windshield "with a pretty good force," said a veteran city police officer.

"Roethlisberger was talking and moving his arms and legs after the accident", the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review article notes, but this is clearly a devastating beginning to a team looking to repeat their championship.

Update: No word yet if Roethlisberger participated in this event for two-wheelers before his crash.

Another Update: Boy, when I wrote "Cycle Of Stupidity Speeds Up" this weekend, I had no idea what an eerily prescient headline I had written.

Al-Zarqawi's "Mom" has a blog:

Now it is time for the Bush one, cursed be he! to make level with me and with all the al-Zarqawi in the world, also in Jordan. It is time for the Bush to come outside. I get CNN so I know that 61 percent of Americans are on my side. They know they should have sent the Army of the Devil home long ago. If they had sent home the Army of the Devil then my son would be alive! He could make videos! He was very talented with lighting.

So I ask George Bush to come here to meet me. Is it so much for a grieving mother to ask? I also want to ask him: "Have you asked your daughters to enlist? Have you seen the movie Al Gore made? Did you think it sucked too? Have you got satellite TV in that ranch?" Because in Jordan we all have satellite TV. Did you see that unbeliever from Paraguay? I saw him and I prayed that the Merciful One would kiss him on the head. I also want him to stop using my son's name to justify the war and to get his own credit card. The idea that we have to "complete the mission" in Iraq to strike down my son is, to me, a bad idea for the future of my son. So is calling him "Zarq." Also "Al" is not a real name. But "Abu" is! Blessed be

My friends in the newspapers and in the CNN! I love you from the bottom of my burqa. I know I have the support of thousands of al-Qaeda. I am not alone! I have Janeane Garofalo, also a hairdresser named Zandoo. I need to find a publicist! Then I know I will never be alone. I would also like to do a commencement address of some kind.

That is why I will wait here at Crawford, Texas, until one of three things comes to pass. It is August 31 and the Bush returns from vacation! That is one! There are two more. Two, I get a ride in a new Hummer with a real American pool boy. Two! Three, I would also like to go to Six Flags or some such thing.

Via The Corner. Zarqawi's mother actually died in 2004, but if she hadn't, these days, I wouldn't have been at all surprised to see her blogging.

Life imitates Max Headroom: Max exposed the dangers of Blipverts 20 years ago. Today's headline, "Clear Channel Eyes One-Second Radio Spots".

Edison Carter could not be reached for comment.

I interviewed Hugh Hewitt on Friday concerning his new book, Painting The Map Red; it's the subject of my latest podcast. You can click here to listen to it; or tune in via our iTunes page. (No iPod required--virtually any computer can download and play an MP3 file.)

With primaries this past week in California and several other states, as well as the death of Zarqawi, it seemed like a particularly opportune time for an autumnal preview: the midterm elections, the role the Blogosphere will play in them, and the state of the Cleveland Browns, the NFL's perrienial powerhouse...

Maybe Somalia’s Sharia courts knew what was coming when it forbid viewing the World Cup.

(Via Tim Blair.)

Update: I wonder if we'll be hearing stories such as this coming out of Iran in a few years.

Mark Steyn looks at what he describes as a globalization success story:

Writing about the collapse of nations such as Somalia, the Atlantic Monthly's Robert D. Kaplan referred to the "citizens" of such "states" as "re-primitivized man." When lifelong Torontonians are hot for decapitation, when Yorkshiremen born and bred and into fish 'n' chips and cricket and lousy English pop music self-detonate on the London Tube, it would seem that the phenomenon of "re-primitivized man" has been successfully exported around the planet. It's reverse globalization: The pathologies of the remotest backwaters now have franchise outlets in every Western city. You don't have to be a loser Ontario welfare recipient like Steven Chand, the 25-year-old Muslim convert named in the thwarted prime ministerial beheading. Omar Sheikh, the man behind the beheading of the Wall Street Journal's Daniel Pearl, was an English "public" (i.e., private) schoolboy and graduate of the London School of Economics.

Five years after 9/11, some strategists say we can't win this thing "militarily," which is true in the sense that you can't send the Third Infantry Division to Brampton, Ontario. But nor is it something we can win through "law enforcement" -- by letting the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the FBI and MI5 and every gendarmerie on the planet deal with every little plot on the map as a self-contained criminal investigation. We need to throttle the ideology and roll up the networks. These fellows barely qualify as "fifth columnists": Their shingles hang on Main Street. And, even though the number of Ontarians prepared actively to participate in the beheading of the prime minister is undoubtedly minimal, the informal support of the jihad's aims by many Western Muslims and the quiescence of too many of the remainder and the ethnic squeamishness of the modern multicultural state provide a big comfort zone.

As Steyn writes, "it seems the true globalization success story of the 1990s was the export of ideology from a relatively obscure part of the planet to the heart of every Western city". Read the rest.

Mark Cuban, the billionare owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks and producer of such leftwing movies as Good Night, and Good Luck and The War Within, would prefer not to do business with the original legacy media:

Ive spent a lot of time thinking about the Newspaper and Magazine businesses lately. Not because I want to buy a company in either industry. I dont.

Im spending the time because Im looking for the best possible ways to promote the movies we distribute and HDNet programming.

Its expensive to advertise movies or TV shows in either newspapers or magazines. Very expensive Where entertainment is traditionally advertised, you guys know you got us, and it shows in your pricing. The pricing in the Movie and TV sections of print media is outrageous.

Which means that every single company in the entertainment business is looking for a way to never ever have to spend a nickel with you again. Our entire business knows we have to spend money with you now, but we are experimenting with every option possible to pull that money from you and spend it elsewhere.

Each of us is looking for the holy grail of promotion.
A way to leave you as a customer.

How scary is that ? A huge customer of your industry would prefer not to do business with you.

They're not alone.

Recently arrived review copies:

The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. Chris has been formulating his thesis online before releasing it in book form; we wrote about what his meme means for the Blogosphere last year, and will have more on the topic in the not too distant future.

The Frustrated Songwriter's Handbook by Karl Coryat & Nicholas Dobson. Is someone trying to tell me something?

Plug-In Power by Ashley Shepherd. Another book for home recording enthusiasts; a guide to all of the powerful sound-altering effects both built-into home recording programs, or available separately.

Led Zeppelin: A Story of a Band and Their Music: 1968-1980 by Keith Shadwick. I don't agree with all of the author's conclusions about specific tracks and albums (he really loathes In Through The Outdoor, which I thought was a remarkable album, particularly considering how far gone half the band was), but a good, authoritative look at the 1970's most influential band.

Betsy Newmark suggests a couple of curious omissions from Entertainment Weekly's list of "the most controversial films of all time". Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds wonders "Why They Hate Us":

I blame Hollywood. So do Muslim women, according to a Gallup survey:

The most frequent response to the question, "What do you admire least about the West?" was the general perception of moral decay, promiscuity and pornography that pollsters called the "Hollywood image" that is regarded as degrading to women.

No doubt antiwar Hollywood producers and talent will begin self-censorship at once to remedy this problem. Look for remakes of those wholesome Bing Crosby Irish-priest movies.

Oh sure, they'll be cranking those out by the dozens! Of course, if they actually did, the MPAA would slap a PG rating onto such seemingly family-friendly fare for all of the "controversial" references to God.

Despite 2006 being a midterm election, tensions seem to be running hot on the left. It's still five months from election day and we're seeing pranks such as this, which I don't recall appearing on the radar screen until until the fall of 2004.

(And as a much saner professor asks of the state that gave us Ward Churchill, "What is it about academics in Colorado"?)

Update: Michelle Malkin has much more--and of course, she literally wrote the book on this subject.

Iowahawk's most famous guest commentator checks in from beyond.

Update: the Z-Man writes that he can only get signals out from "some s***ty internet cafe [with] nothing but AOL dial-up", a sure sign that he really is in Hell. Maybe the slow dial-up speed is why today's Protein Wisdom interview with Zarqawi seems somewhat uninteractive...

TCS Daily (where I contribute from time to time), has streaming video of a terrific roundtable discussion from earlier this week on Hollywood versus capitalism. I'm just in the process of watching the first 15 minutes, which features an energetic Michael Medved discussing why Hollywood and its modern-day product is invariably anti-business.

Update: Do not miss Medved's Grand Unified Theory of Hollywood, about an hour into the program.

"Detox Clinic Opening for Video Addicts". We needed this in the 2600/Colecovision days, as badly as Elvis needed Hazelden.

PBS: We're not liberal, but Republicans have been gunning for us since 1972!

(With apologies to Del Preston.)

Stephen Frank has some thoughts on the California Primary and what it portends for November, including Gov. Schwarzenegger's re-election chances.

In the Wall Street's Journal's "Opinion Journal" spin-off, Jill Stewart writes:

let the reality show begin, starring the chastened movie star politician versus the unpleasant taxer. In a state where entire neighborhoods are rebuilt from the ashes of firestorms and earthquakes, nobody will be shocked if a remade Arnold Schwarzenegger comes roaring back.

Read the whole thing.

"PJM Sydney editor Richard Fernandez joins regulars Tammy Bruce and Eric Umansky in a spirited discussion of Haditha, the Canadian terror arrests and Internet click-through fraud. Moderator Austin Bay comments on Zarqawi’s death." Click here to listen.

This is great news as well, today.

Interesting take on how Z-Man's demise influenced the defeat of this bill:

Things looked very grim at the beginning of the week. What made the difference? Zarqawi didn’t hurt, for sure. If they got cloture in the Senate today, senators would have likely spent the next week debating the Akaka bill instead of the Defense-authorization bill. That would have looked great. Senators aren’t that blind.

Though the bar is set awfully low; as Mark Steyn recently quipped:

The present disenchantment south of the border arises in part because in Washington the alleged greatness of the "great men" has become entirely unmoored from the great questions of the day. It's like watching a sporting fixture where you can no longer tell what game they're playing.

Fizzbin, no doubt.

"This is the happiest news we've gotten in a long time"--Iraq the Model on Zarqawi's death, in Richard Fernandez's podcast interview from very early this morning. "One of the joys of waking up around 1 am EST", as Jim Geragthy quips, who also beat Drudge to the punch.

Richard sat in on yesterday's Blog Week In Review, which should also be online this afternoon.

Update: Heh, indeed.^TM

Another Update: Not the happiest news for all, of course.

One More: This fellow has all sorts of reasons to be unhappy with the news: "Jordan arrests Zarqawi's brother-in-law and an Al Jazeera journalist live!"

It's sabotage!

In his Strib column, James Lileks confesses:

I drink a can of diet soda per day.

Only one? Per day?!

Sheesh--and he calls himself a writer.

Hugh Hewitt looks at the MSM and the death of Zarqawi:

It isn't sad. It is predictable.

MSM has been trained by Democratic Party cues to view every development in the war through the lens of the political war on the Bush Adminsitration.

News is never "good," but "long overdue." Excellent political developments are mere flip-turns en route to another length of anti-Bush diatribe.

Here's the key analysis you won't here on MSM today: Had we not invaded Iraq, Zarqawi would not be dead today, but rather ensconced in some Baghdad safe house or larger encampment plotting more savagery. Had we not invaded Iraq, Saddam's decision menu today would be how much or little assistance to give Zarqawi, followed by the allocation of bribes to his various U.N. oil-for-food stooges, followed by succession planning with his mad-as-hatter sons.

And of course, there's no way, in the media's eyes for the president to win: "If he's too jubilant, he's a cowboy. If he's too subdued, he's being phony", notes Michelle Malkin, who adds, "Another reporter raised suspicions about why the White House waited too long to make its announcement (someone wants to relive Cheney's shooting incident)". And if it was rushed and turned out to be another red herring, there's be no end to those complaints.

On the other hand, it's not like such drive-by tactics are ratings winners; if they were, this man wouldn't be out of a job today.

Oxblog finds what it calls "the quote of the century". "According to the wife of French President Chirac, her husband claims":

We men are like the Cro-Magnon people of prehistoric times,” he once told me. “We’re always hunting and wenching. But, at the end of the day, we always go back to our caves. For my part I need this cave to feel at ease with myself. Without it I would be as unhappy as could be.”

So the French think of themselves as cavemen and look to Woody Allen to bring them nuance and sophistication?

Now it all makes sense.

We recorded the show yesterday to accomodate everyone's schedule, but Austin recorded an update this morning on Zarqawi's death and its implications for the War On Terror as a whole, which I cut into the top of the show. In the interim, you can read his thoughts on his blog.

Update: The Economist did one heck of a last minute update as well.

Peter Brookes writes that perhaps the most intriguing detail of Zarqawi's demise is that the end "came from tips given by associates":

This sort of "actionable intelligence" is critical in prosecuting an insurgency and, perhaps, most importantly shows significant discord in al Qaeda's ranks.

This means that every al Qaeda, every Sunni, every foreign jihadist insurgent leader will be looking over his shoulder in the days to come instead of concentrating on planning and executing attacks, wondering if there is a traitor in his midst-and his downfall is just around the corner.

Good.

As of the time of this posting, certainly sounds that way.

I wonder if he filed a last post at Iowahawk before the big sleep?

Getting ready for some Pajamarecording this afternoon, so blogging may be light. In the meantime, I leave you with the great Freddie King, who illustrates how the electric guitar should be played:

Don't try this at home with your Cox model airplanes, kids:

(Via The Big Picture.)

William Saletan of Slate goes "Among the Transhumanists":

Remember those kids who played Dungeons & Dragons and ran the science-fiction club in your high school? They've become transhumanists. Their resident immortalist, Aubrey de Grey, walks around in sneakers, a ponytail, and a 14-inch beard that he strokes like a cat. One of the CCLE officials at the conference calls herself Wrye Sententia; the other dresses like an LSD trip. This was the kind of conference where people talked about the Matrix the way Christians talk about the Bible, and where speakers apologized for their discomfort with piercings or tattoos.

Wow--so this is where the crew at Tower Records goes after work!

Last summer, after the London 7/7 bombings, I wrote:

We have met the enemy, and he is us--or at least an offshoot of multiple elements of 20th century far left worldviews, as two essays making their way through the Blogosphere today argue.

First up is a remarkable piece by David Brooks (made even more remarkable for where it's appearing--but then, this is far from the first time that the moderate Brooks has played an iconoclastic role at the house of Pinch). Brooks reminds us that terrorists are an offshoot of the 20th century modernist utopians who universally sought to immanentize the eschaton:

We have learned a lot about the jihadists, from Osama bin Laden down to the Europeans who attacked the London subways last month. We know, thanks to a database gathered by Marc Sageman, formerly of the C.I.A., that about 75 percent of anti-Western terrorists come from middle-class or upper-middle-class homes. An amazing 65 percent have gone to college, and three-quarters have professional or semiprofessional jobs, particularly in engineering and science.

Whether they have moved to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, England or France, these men are, far from being medieval, drawn from the ranks of the educated, the mobile and the multilingual.

The jihadists are modern psychologically as well as demographically because they are self-made men (in traditional societies there are no self-made men). Rather than deferring to custom, many of them have rebelled against local authority figures, rejecting their parents' bourgeois striving and moderate versions of Islam, and their comfortable lives.

They have sought instead some utopian cause to give them an identity and their lives meaning. They find that cause in a brand of Salafism that is not traditional Islam but a modern fantasy version of it, an invented tradition. They give up cricket and medical school and take up jihad.

In other words, the conflict between the jihadists and the West is a conflict within the modern, globalized world. The extremists are the sort of utopian rebels modern societies have long produced.

In his book "Globalized Islam," the French scholar Olivier Roy points out that today's jihadists have a lot in common with the left-wing extremists of the 1930's and 1960's. Ideologically, Islamic neofundamentalism occupies the same militant space that was once occupied by Marxism. It draws the same sorts of recruits (educated second-generation immigrants, for example), uses some of the same symbols and vilifies some of the same enemies (imperialism and capitalism).

As Brooks wrote, "In short, the Arab world is maintaining its nearly perfect record of absorbing every bad idea coming from the West. Western ideas infuse the radicals who flood into Iraq to blow up Muslims and Americans alike".

Austin Bay picks up this theme, explaining " Why Salafism is a utopian ideology":

This article from the Toronto Globe and Mail (hat tip pajamasmedia) provides an illustrative quote, from the now-defunct website of alleged terror conspirator Zakaria Amara:

…on July 28, 2003, Mr. Amara posted a statement claiming flags are nothing but a symbol of nationalism and segregation. (Punctuation and spelling are as they appeared in the blog.)

“I hate flags. I hate countries… I hate man made laws…. I hate nationalism with a passion… I love for the Sake of Allah and I hate for his sake…… When the islamic [rule] comes back… there will be no palisitne flag, no philipino flag… no pakistani, somali, american, or british flag… it will just be 1 flag,” he wrote, using the pseudonym “Aleph,” the first letter of the Arabic alphabet. He then posted an image of Arabic script followed by an English translation: “THERE IS NO GOD BUT ALLAH AND MUHAMMAD IS HIS FINAL MESSENGER…”

This week’s Creators Syndicate column ends with these observations:

Ike understood defeating the Soviets required sustained and steady U.S. leadership. The United States was the only free nation capable of organizing, facilitating and coordinating a global campaign against aggressive, imperial communist tyranny.

In the 21st century, defeating Islamo-fascism — another imperial tyranny and utopian ideology — will require the same sustained effort.

Indeed. As Austin concludes, while the far left and the Islmofacists have very different views of what the eschaton would look like, both claim to offer "paradise on earth" at the end of the rainbow.

And yet the 20th century gave the world numerous concrete examples of what that utopia looks like when true believers conquer the pragmatic masses: the Soviet Union and the gulag, Nazi Germany and its ovens, and Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, with their amputation squads. All define hell on earth, but that doesn't stop those who desire to recreate them.

California Conservative looks at yesterday's race for control of California’s 50th congressional seat; where Republican Brian Bilbray prevailed over Democrat Francine Busby. Busby's campaign will be footnoted by this incident, of which RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman says, "gave everyone a boost...Symbols or symbolic statements come to be what a candidate stands for."

It's one thing when your last minute hit comes from outside (for example, the drunk driving charge unearthed against candidate George W. Bush at the very end of the 2000 presidential race, and the daily October surprises from late 2004 the media threw at him, along with the surprise cameo appearance of Osama bin Laden or his Mini Me), but to shoot yourself in the foot in the last minute of a campaign is just idiotic. On the other hand, to paraphrase George Costanza, it's not a gaffe...when you believe it's true.

John Hinderaker of Power Line writes:

This morning, National Public Radio's Renee Montagne interviewed Toronto Mayor David Miller on the arrest of 17 terrorist suspects, who, it has now been stated in court, plotted to behead the Prime Minister of Canada. It would be hard to say whether the interviewer or the interviewee was more at sea. We got the usual cliches about Islam as a religion of peace, but it went way beyond that.Ms. Montagne expressed bewilderment as to how anyone could be radicalized in Canada, where social services are so plentiful. Mayor Miller shared her incomprehension.

I'm astonished by that as well.

Roger L. Simon writes, "Want to see some video much more interesting than Spielberg et al's latest? Try Pat Dollard - direct from Iraq". This is journalism--well, video journalism--at its most gonzo.

(With equally gonzo language and graphic images to boot. Don't say you weren't warned.)

Pearl Jam in 2003:

Pearl Jam plan to offset the estimated 5,700 tons of greenhouse gas emissions generated by the trucks, buses, airplanes and their fans' 1 million cars on their current world tour by purchasing 5,700 tons of carbon produced by the Makira Rainforest Conservation project in Madagascar.

Al Gore three years later:

the producers of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth are letting everyone know that they’re “teaming up to offset 100% of the carbon dioxide emitted from air and ground transportation and hotels during the production and promotional activities associated with the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, making it the first-ever carbon-neutral documentary.”

Believe it or not, yesterday, I was planning a tongue-in-cheek post asking if, like Pearl Jam three years ago, Gore has released sufficient CO2 into the atmosphere to counteract the enormous amount of jet-setting he and his entourage do to promote this film (pumping up its world-beating box office). Once again real life is always far stranger than any satire.

Neo-Neocon finds the elements that connect these three seemingly disparate activities.

Cathy Young writes that Israel is the unfair target of selective academic outrage:

In the 1980s, there was a concerted movement to make South Africa a pariah state because of its policy of racial apartheid. Today, a similar effort is directed at the state of Israel. A week ago, the anti-Israel campaign achieved two significant victories. Britain's National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education, one of the country's two leading educators' associations, voted for a boycott of Israeli academics and colleges unless they take a stand against Israel's "apartheid policy." On the same day, the Ontario division of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, the largest labor union in Canada, voted for a boycott of Israel because of its treatment of Palestinians.

The British Foreign Office condemned the teachers' boycott as "counterproductive and retrograde." The reaction from Israel was even stronger. The chairman of the Knesset Committee for Science and Technology, Zevulun Orlev, asked the British parliament to "decry the anti-Semitic and racist decision."

Anti-Semitic or not, the movement to boycott Israel is hypocritical, sanctimonious, and quite simply wrong. It is a shocking example of selective outrage. Yes, Israeli policies are a legitimate target for criticism, and even most of Israel's supporters will admit there has been ill-treatment of Palestinians. Yet no one is demanding a boycott of Russian academics over Russia's occupation of Chechnya, and the accompanying atrocities (which dwarf Israel's human rights abuses in the occupied territories). No one wants to boycott China because of the occupation of Tibet, the persecution of religious minorities, and other abuses by the Chinese regime. No one wants to boycott Saudi Arabia because of its misogyny and religious intolerance.

Partly, this double standard is rooted in the familiar leftist mentality that strenuously condemns bad behavior by Western or pro-Western governments while turning a blind eye to the far worse misdeeds of communist and Third World regimes. But the movement to boycott Israel is especially repulsive for several reasons.

Apartheid-era South Africa, whose pariah status also reflected a double standard, was at least a truly repugnant regime intent on preserving white supremacy. Israel is a flawed democracy intent on preserving itself in the face of forces intent on its destruction.

What's more, the anti-Israel boycott combines this anti-Western, anti-democracy bias with an element of "picking on the little guy." The British professors and the Canadian public employees are not boycotting American institutions because of the occupation of Iraq. Obviously, such a boycott would cripple any institution's ability to function. But lashing out at Israel as a proxy for America is something that can be done with minimal inconvenience.

Nor should anti-Semitism be discounted. British scholar Mona Baker, a leading champion of the boycott, has written that while other countries are guilty of abuses, singling out Israel is appropriate because "Zionist influence [that is, Israeli influence] spreads far beyond its own immediate areas of dominion, and now widely influences many key domestic agendas in the West... This is particularly obvious in the case of the United States, where Zionist lobbies are extremely powerful with both Congress and the media." An international Jewish conspiracy: a sadly familiar tune.

Read the rest.

Today's episode of Ed Driscoll.com is brought to you by the number six...six..six...:

Read More »

Three really interesting podcasts went online over the past couple of days:

Gerard Vanderleun of Pajamas has an interview with Mary Cheney, daughter of Vice President Dicky Cheney, on her role in the 2000 and 2004 elections. She was also on Hugh Hewitt's show yesterday (Radio Blogger has clips and a transcription), and is a great interviewee.

Glenn and Helen Reynolds interview James Lileks and Cathy Seipp on parenting then and now. (I interviewed James in the fall of last year; which makes for fun simul-reading while The Glenn & Helen Show runs.)

And finally, Michelle Malkin has a slickly produced video podcast documenting with chromakeyed photos BDS amongst the fashionistas, from Marc Jacobs' San Francisco storefront, to Johnny Depp's Che necklace on the cover of Rolling Stone. Then there's the Arafat-style kaffiyeh that Howard Dean was once spotted wearing on the 2004 presidential campaign trail. As Michelle mentions, the radical chic of thse fashion accessories unknowingly--or worse, knowingly--ties their wearers in with the very people who would put fashion models in burkas, and do far worse to someone openly gay such as Jacobs.

Just to tie it all together (though not with a kaffiyeh), as Cathy Seipp once said:

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

Not all do--as Mary Cheney herself illustrates. But anarcho-authoritarianism certainly runs deep.

Last year, we quoted veteran CBS producer Don Hewitt on Dan Rather. Immediately after the Kennedy assassination, Hewitt suggested that Rather, who had just come onboard with the network, punch out Abraham Zapruder and steal his now iconic home movie so that CBS could scoop the other networks:

"Dan Rather, new to CBS and our correspondent on the scene, phoned me from Dallas and told me that a guy named Zapruder was supposed to have film of the assassination and was going to put it up for sale. In fact, he eventually did, sold it to Life magazine for a reputed $600,000. In my desire to get a hold of what was probably the most dramatic piece of news footage ever shot, I told Rather to go to Zapruder's house, sock him in the jaw, take his film to our affiliate in Dallas, copy it onto videotape, and let the CBS lawyers decide whether it could be sold or whether it was in the public domain. And then take the film back to Zapruder's house and give it back to him. That way, the only thing they could get him for was assault because he would have returned Zapruder's property. Rather said, 'Great idea. I'll do it.' I hadn't hung up the phone maybe ten seconds when it hit me: What in the hell did you just do? Are you out of your mind? So I called Rather back. Luckily, he was still there, and I said to him, 'For Christ's sake, don't do what I just told you to. I think this day has gotten to me and thank God I caught you before you left.' Knowing Dan to be as competitive as I am, I had the feeling that he wished he'd left before the second phone call."

As I wrote back then, "I had no idea Dan was such a swashbuckling guy!" I also had no idea Rather would advocate the death of a fellow CBS colleague, either:

In "Lone Star," an unauthorized bio of Rather out this September, Alan Weisman writes that [Morley] Safer "has not been a friend of Rather's for years, since their days in Vietnam." The final straw came when Rather took over for Safer not long after Safer's jolting report about the burning of a Vietnam village by a platoon of U.S. Marines.

"When Rather replaced me . . . he went to a group of Marines and said, 'If I were you guys, I would have shot him.' Or words to that effect," Safer tells Weisman. "And that my report should never have gone on the air." Asked whether Rather had ripped his fellow newsman to cozy up with the troops, Safer bristles, "Who the hell knows why? Have I ever confronted him about it? No. Now we just have a polite relationship."

As Allah quips, "And just like that, he’s back in conservative bloggers’ good graces. Redemption, baby!" Heh.

Boy, when Slate's Bryan Curtis wrote an article immediately after Ra^therGate broke titled, "Dan Rather - The anchor as madman", he didn't know the half of it. Of course, I'm sure Morley told Dan immediately after the incident, "Dan, we were friends yesterday, we're friends today, and we'll be friends tomorrow. So tell me about it", before getting viscerally angry about it.

The anti-ACLU backlash appears to be both heating up--and getting bipartisan. Hey, I'm not crazy about all of their decisions myself, but geez, that's no reason to go Pete Townshend on your television set...

Last month, when I profiled Alvin Toffler's new book, Revolutionary Wealth, I wrote in TCS Daily:

The death late last month of John Kenneth Galbraith helps to illustrate just how much the American economy -- and indeed the world's -- has changed over the last four decades. Galbraith could plausibly write in 1967's The New Industrial State, that large corporations were immune to market forces.

To some extent, the Internet has restored that feeling amongst its biggest players. Drudge, Amazon, Google, eBay and a few others got there early, and each built unique business models that kept their customers more or less pretty happy over an extended period. And while the Long Tail is a growing phenomenon, by and large, the Internet has rewarded the early adopters who both got in before the dot.com boom/bust of 1999-2000, and weathered the storm. But lately, as Glenn Reynolds notes in his MSNBC blog, Google appears to believe it's as invulnerable to market forces as General Motors did in 1973:

Google has been a huge deal — its founders have become rich, its name has become a verb, and its influence is international.

Lately, though, I've been wondering if Google has peaked. The reason is that, for lots of different groups of people, Google's reputation as good guys has been stained. And I'm not sure what Google really has to bank on, besides a good reputation.

Google has come under criticism from people on the left — and right — for its cave-in to Chinese demands for censorship. From "don't be evil," Google's motto has seemed to be "don't be evil unless there's a really big market at stake."

They've also come in for criticism from people on the right for alleged censorship in Google News, with charges that Google is purging itself of conservative news sites. And many people complained that Google, which puts up special logos for all sorts of other holidays, didn't do anything to recognize Memorial Day.

That last point seems minor, but for some people it seems to have been the last straw. And it made me wonder if Google's position isn't rather vulnerable. People like Google and use it, but its competition — sites like Ask.com, Dogpile.com, and Clusty.com — is just a mouseclick away. Ask.com even has a pretty good substitute for Google News.

Lots of people don't like Microsoft — I like 'em fine, but then, I get a check from them every month — but if you want to switch from Microsoft to OSX or Linux you need a bunch of new software, and maybe a new computer. To switch from Google to Ask, you just type different letters (and fewer!).

Of course, it's not just search engines. Jeff Jarvis notes that Google's ad business isn't doing especially well, and says that the reason is trust. So what, exactly, does Google have that will protect it from a sudden shift in consumer sentiments? Is it a brand, or a fad?

Like New Shimmer, it could be both! It's a brand that, like a fad that has peaked, could very well find itself in number two--or worse--if a smarter competitor comes along.

Just ask Yahoo.

David Harsanyi of The Denver Post has some thoughts on global cooling/warming climate change hysteria:

So next time you're with some progressive friends, dissent. Tell 'em you're not sold on this global warming stuff.

Back away slowly. You'll probably be called a fascist.

Don't worry, you're not. A true fascist is anyone who wants to take away my air conditioning or force me to ride a bike.

Heh^TM.

In his classic 1977 book on selling, master automobile salesman Joe Girard wrote that when facing potential car buyers, "Political stuff I say nothing about, because politics is not something you can talk about with a customer without getting into trouble. If my own son were running for President, I wouldn't ware a Girard For President button to work".

That sort of thing used to be common sense in business. But as with so much of what used to be common sense, it seems to be dying away these days in our bluer alcoves.

Update: Conservative Princess, who combines "Right-wing extremism with impeccable fashion sense" (hey, extremism in defense of Brooks Brothers is no vice...) has some very much related thoughts.

Sometime last night, we went over the 1,000,000 visitor mark. I realize that the big boys (Glenn, Charles, Hugh, et al) do these kind of numbers in a week, but I'm very happy--and very grateful to folks like yourself who read this--that our little operation has had a million visitors stop by over the life of this blog, which originally started out in early 2002 kluged together via Blogger templates I hacked up myself, before Stacy Tabb polished things up considerably two years later. The million mark would have happened sooner, of course, if I had employed comments on the blog, but the clean-up work required would have no longer made this site fun.

And it would have happened sooner had my mom not turned off her WebTV box, but that's a whole 'nother story...

Libertas reminds us of the days when Hollywood still casted grown-ups, even in its silliest movies:

What everyone remembers most about the original The Poseidon Adventure, of course, is Shelley Winters - who, incidentally, was responsible for one of the film’s Oscar nominations (Best Supporting Actress). I haven’t seen the new film, Poseidon, and one of the reasons I haven’t seen it is because I’d heard that there was no Shelley Winters role. And quite frankly, I don’t know why anyone would bother re-doing The Poseidon Adventure without the Shelley Winters role.

In case you haven’t seen The Poseidon Adventure, or don’t remember it, Shelley Winters plays a heavy-set, middle-aged Jewish woman on her way to Israel to visit her grandson. Now, you can probably already understand from this description why no such character would appear in the remake today. To put it bluntly, contemporary Hollywood is not interested in heavy-set, middle-aged Jewish woman on their way to Israel to visit their grandsons. Hollywood is interested in selling films these days to 18-34 year old males - and if a film’s female characters don’t look like siliconized Amazons, the town basically isn’t interested. So there’s actually something special about watching Shelley Winters’ alternately hysterical and endearing performance from The Poseidon Adventure, because it’s simply the sort of thing you never see any more.

* * *

[Gene] Hackman’s intensity, especially in his ongoing rivalry with fellow passenger Borgnine, is what keeps the film going from a dramatic standpoint. Hackman was one of the great, idiosyncratic actors who emerged during the decade of the 1970’s. By today’s standards of course, Hackman doesn’t have a ’six-pack of abs,’ he has a weird comb-over, and his acting occasionally seems over-the-top - but nobody can match him in intensity. As in The French Connection, Hackman’s intensity occasionally even tips him over from being a good guy to behaving like a tyrant - but he’s certainly never dull. I can’t imagine that Josh Lucas, star of the new Poseidon remake, holds up very well by comparison.

* * *

The film that resulted from this collaboration between these two major studios is in my opinion one of the last truly great action films produced within the Hollywood system. The Towering Inferno came along at an interesting point in Hollywood history, when the technology of filmmaking had advanced to a point now recognizably ‘modern’ to us today (Star Wars was only 3 years away) - while at the same time there was still a great class of old-fashioned Hollywood stars around to match the great effects, to lend a human dimension to the spectacular proceedings. Today we have the great visual effects, but we don’t have the stars with personalities to stand up to them.

Of course, taken as a pair, along with the series of eco-doomsday movies Hollywood was then also simultaneously cranking out, these films marked the beginning of Hollywood's attack on modernity, virtually in lockstep with the McGovern-era left. In such a climate, we shouldn't be all that surprised that what remains aren't "stars with personalities", but an absolutely endless supply of child actors.

Back in November of 2004, I described how malleable technology makes music, building on concepts that Brian Eno discussed in the late 1970s. This somewhat droll twenty minute video does a nifty job of explaining how one six second 1969 drum loop on the b-side of a hit 45 ended up everywhere starting in the mid-1980s, from rap songs to Jeep Cherokee ads:

AllahPundit is praising Salon for risking the alienation of "80-85% of your readership in one fell swoop".

Update: Ian Schwartz has video of Kennedy on CNN earlier today:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared on CNN’s The Situation Room Sunday to discuss his article in The Rolling Stone charging the Bush administration and Republicans of stealing the 2004 election. First, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I find it extremely funny that a KENNEDY is accusing someone else of stealing an election. Secondly, Kennedy uses the Mary Mapes “standard” that it isn’t up to him to prove what he is saying is authentic. In other wards, when he was asked about his proof for several of the charges, he says that they haven’t yet been challenged so therefore it must be true.

Uh-huh.

In contrast to the fear and self-loathing at the New Yorker, The New York Post seems to get it: they're running an op-ed by British journalist Melanie Phillips explaining how London was transformed into Londonstan:

AFTER 9/11 plotter Zacarias Mous saoui was sentenced to life im prisonment, his family blamed - the British. Their son had had first arrived in London in the 1990s for an MA course in international business studies - and been radicalized and recruited for jihad at London's Finsbury Park mosque.

It was the British, his mother said, who turning a blind eye to the violence and spread of hate - and thus allowed this youth with a troubled and violent family background to be recruited to the cause of Islamist terrorism.

Leaving aside her complaint's self-serving aspect, she was undoubtedly correct.

Because British Prime Minister Tony Blair has been such a staunch friend to the United States, Americans assume that - unlike Europe - Britain generally is on side. They could not be more wrong. The dismaying truth is that Blair is an aberration in his own country. Instead of fighting radical Islamism, virtually the entire British political, intellectual and security establishment can't even bring themselves to name the threat.

Not to mention fly their own flag. As Phillips writes:

BRITAIN is the mother-ship for American values and the brand leader of English-speaking culture. The Londonistan mindset is being replicated in America: on campus, in the media and in official circles. If Britain goes down under this assault, the forces in America now holding back the tide of cultural immolation will be immeasurably weakened.

"Londonistan" is a threat not just to Britain, but to the whole of the free world.

That's a threat that everyone should worry about.

Excepting a certain "broad strata", of course.

Update: Just to further tie this post to the previous one, the BBC is running a gushing photo tribute to the fortunately very late Ayatollah Khomenei. In contrast, while meeting with Khomenei in 1979, Oriana Fallaci boldy and indignantly ripped off the chador she originally forced to wear in his presence, and told the New Yorker, "it did not take long to realize that in spite of his quiet appearance he represented the Robespierre or the Lenin of something which would go very far and would poison the world".

As I recall from the late '70s, the BBC, Reuters, the New Yorker, and the Washington Post and other liberal western media all seemed to have understood that at the time, but could use a refresher course these days.

Horseeathers has some thoughts on the New Yorker's profile of Orianna Fallaci:

Ever since 9-11 scared the hell out of this wordsmith class, the magazine has devoted itself to explaining that there is no real threat from totalitarian Islam, the misunderstood “other”, but instead the danger to the world emanates from the person of President George Bush. Like any shared delusional belief, the community of believers feels special, superior to the unknowing masses, and reassured. While radical Islam is battering at the gates, the New Yorker turns its collective gaze, every week, to the imaginary threats posed by the macho cowboy in the White House. No reason to be concerned about an enemy who declares war on America and sets about annihilating the infidels. Hey, it’s the evil Christian believer, the man who's clear about his gender, George Bush, who must be stopped. Soothing the anxieties of its readers is accomplished, not only by flattering their sense of moral superiority, but by applying childhood utopian fantasies to real dangers. Multicultural leftism is such a balm to the worried. No reason to fear a Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; after all, he is simply articulating a belief system shared by many. We have our own shared liberal faith, and its devil is W. and the Neo-Cons, not totalitarian Islam. Multiculturalism is a form of self flattery, a 'We are the World' incantation, designed to calm the frightened upper west side liberal.

Once upon a time, Orianna Fallaci was a heroine of the very same utopian left that now despises her. She wrote scathing assessments of Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon. Now however, she has become a Churchillian voice warning of the threat posed by totalitarian Islam, and has therefore become the target of former leftist allies. She has been especially scathing towards the appeasing, and cowardly politically correct responses of Western governments, media and intellectual elites. The New Yorker perfectly articulates every P.C. cliche, the denial of reality, the multicultural, appeasing attitudes she fears will lead to defeat of the West. This week the magazine sent its critic, Margaret Talbot, to interview Fallaci. While it is very interesting to hear Ms. Fallaci’s views, they are by now pretty familiar. The interview is most revealing though, of the status anxieties of the interviewer and her left-liberal assumptions. In place of thought, we have attitude, stance, tone. It is shot through with the interviewer’s smug condescension, as if she is engaged with a fascinating lower form of life, a curious specimen, full of animal spirits but lacking in proper attitudes, good taste and politesse. Ultimately it is Margaret Talbot trying to reassure herself that all is well in the insulated world of the New Yorker.

Nobody mention the crater at the intersection of Church and Vesey Streets.

Why are more and more publicly-held businesses going private? As the Journal explains, "Imagine: No Reg FD, no 10Ks, no Sarbox, no . . . ":

Sarbanes-Oxley has been the last straw for some, with its auditing and reporting requirements imposing major new costs, especially on smaller companies. This has already played a part in the remarkable slowdown in U.S. initial public offerings. Today's largest IPOs are taking place mainly on foreign markets, away from the reach of U.S. regulators. New York Stock Exchange CEO John Thain understands this as well as anyone, which is one reason for his $20 billion EuroNext purchase.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is promising Sarbox reform, though its recent noises suggest it won't exempt smaller companies from the rules. It might want to consider International Strategy & Investment Group data showing that 191 public companies--worth $146 billion in deal value--have gone private since June 30, 2002, shortly before Sarbox went into effect. Daniel Clifton, executive director of the American Shareholders Association, notes that the big spike came right after Sarbox's implementation, yet the dollar amount of the deals didn't rise equivalently--suggesting it was mainly smaller firms doing the exiting.

Mr. Clifton has also been studying the surging costs of regulation for public companies and has found that while in 1999 regulatory costs were about 4.8% of market capitalization, by 2002 the ratio was 9.9%. It has fallen some since. But these costs are a double whammy for smaller companies, which have fewer resources to devote to compliance costs. "It is also money that they can't use for the investments that they need to make to grow," says Mr. Clifton.

The relentless pressure of quarterly earnings is also a tyranny that some managers would prefer to avoid. Such targets have their uses in holding managers accountable. But even capable executives who fail to meet Wall Street expectations, or suffer an unexpected bump in the road, have to worry that they'll get hit with shareholder suits for even a temporary stock-price dip. It may not be a coincidence that, according to a recent survey from Booz Allen Hamilton, 15.3% of CEOs at the world's 2,500 largest public companies left office in 2005, many of them fleeing to private companies that can afford the luxury of a longer-run view.

Why should anyone care? All things being equal, it shouldn't matter whether corporations are choosing private or public equity; the more choice, the better. But it's troubling that the current trend is being driven as much by regulatory excess as market opportunity. U.S. capital markets have long been a national strength and a source of wealth creation. To the extent that broad shareholder ownership has also spread the wealth, it has been good for social mobility and boosted public support for free markets.
Whatever its other virtues, the private-equity boom is a signal that the regulatory pendulum has swung too far post-Enron. Congress might consider whether it really wants to turn U.S. public markets--long the envy of the world--into a second- or third-rate destination.

Sorry, I've used my quota of "Indeeds" today before having to pay royalties to the Professor. So...exactly.

Brendan Loy looks at the Toronto terrorist bust and writes of the details that--shocker!--Reuters chose to omit:

Michelle Malkin has a list of the would-be terrorists’ names. ThreatsWatch calls them “twelve adult Muslim jihadists and five juveniles…some of them second-generation Canadian citizens and some of them recent immigrants.” Canada’s National Post says they are “homegrown extremists…young followers of the al-Qaeda ideology.” The Star elaborates, calling them “Western youths who have never set foot in Afghanistan but allegedly were radicalized here, and who are thought to be potentially as dangerous as the cells that once took orders from Osama bin Laden. Western governments, including Canada’s, have repeatedly warned of this phenomenon and blamed recent attacks, such as last July’s bombings in London, as the work of such groups.” The Canadian authorities themselves called the plot “al Qaeda-inspired,” according to CNN.

Yet for some reason, Reuters didn’t see fit to mention any of that, or to specify whether the arrested terrorists are Muslims, or Arabs, or Islamists, or Al Qaeda members/sympathizers, or… anything. From the Reuters article, you wouldn’t know whether these guys are Osama bin Laden’s band of brothers, or a band of angry rednecks from Saskatchewan. Well, actually, maybe we do sorta know, because if they were angry rednecks from Saskatchewan, I’m sure Reuters would have told us that. But the fact that they’re members of the global Islamist terrorist movement? No, that’s not newsworthy. (The only reference to the global jihad is the second-last paragraph: “the Canadian Security Intelligence Service..[is] trying to keep track of ‘350 high-level targets’ as well as 50 to 60 organizations thought to be linked to groups such as al-Qaeda.” But that doesn’t tell us anything about these terrorists, the ones who have just been caught red-handed trying to blow sh*t up in Canada.) And all the “Oklahoma City” references, though sensible and relevant in context, might lead a reasonable person — if he was getting his news only from Reuters — to conclude that this wasn’t an Islamist thing, but rather an OKC-style plot by white extremists. (Then again, I suppose “reasonable people” generally don’t get their news only from Reuters, or particularly trust Reuters at all, precisely because of crap like this.)

Ladies and gentlemen, this is not political correctness; this is dangerous obtuseness. We need to know the nature threat we face, and although 99.9% of Muslims are not terrorists, 99.9% of the terrorists we need to be worrying about right now — including these bastards who wanted to take down a major building in Toronto — are Muslims. That aspect of their identity is an indisputably important, newsworthy fact, not because we want to smear all Muslims but because we need to know our enemy. Luckily, most news organizations have more good sense than Reuters, so we do know that these evil men are a homegrown arm of the global jihad, and not some band of Timothy McVeigh clones. But if Reuters had its way, we wouldn’t know any of that. This obscuration of newsworthy facts by a “news service” is shameful and indefensible — but alas, not surprising.

Indeed^TM.

Update: Glenn Reynolds wonders "what's cooking here in the United States"; Don Surber wonders if the near-simultaneous busts in Toronto and London "may or may not have prevented another set of digits -- 6/6??? -- from being associated with death and destruction".

Another Update: Meryl Yourish asks, "Do you think it’s time we stopped discussing root causes?":

Because the last time I checked, Canada was an obnoxiously multiculti, socialist-oriented nation replete with national healthcare and hate speech laws.

* * *

Does anyone doubt that we are truly in a global terrorist war? WWIV has been ongoing since before 9/11, but 9/11 was the day it was announced to the world.

We have a long way to go. And the Cindy Sheehans of the world are not helping.

No, and they never do--just ask Mr. Eric Blair.

Yesterday, Michelle Malkin had a fun video blog on her Hot Air site about the legacy media manufacturing news. And today, the London Times appears to be doing just that, with the photographs it chooses to accompany its Haditha story. As Allah Pundit asks:

How many Iraqis will be killed in the next few weeks and months by terrorists eager to make it look like American troops have perpetrated another massacre?

How many gullible media outlets will be only too eager to believe them?

We've been down that road too many times already.

Power Line writes of the Washington Post's Karl Vick, who has nothing but sweet kisses and bonbons for Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But then, the bulk of the western media--especially CNN--had rarely a discouraging word for Saddam Hussein and his frequent 99.96 percent "election" victories.

If Iran under the mullahs ends in the same fashion as Iraq under the Baathists, I wonder if any of the western media will be honest enough to write something like this immediately afterwards.

Update: Hey, who says the BBC doesn't have a sense of humor--an inadvertent one at least, as Rand Simberg notes:

[Jimmy Carter's] comments are significant, given that he was the president when US relations with Iran hit an all-time low.

As Simberg writes, "Some British reporter actually wrote this with a straight face, and some British and Australian editors actually printed it, again with no humor intended".

Chaps, it's time meet Jay Nordlinger.

What makes a hit movie a hit? I guess it isn't box office, according to this piece by the L.A. Times' Joe Horn on promoting the latest version of Superman to gay audiences:

But four of the movie marketing executives, all of whom declined to speak on the record, said gay "Superman Returns" interest presented two potential box-office problems. First, teenage moviegoers, especially those in conservative states, might be put off by a movie carrying a gay vibe; among some teens, these executives agreed, saying something "is gay" is still the ultimate put-down. Second, the attention threatens to undermine the film's status as a hard-edged action movie, making it feel softer, more romantic, and thus less interesting to young ticket buyers who crave pyrotechnics.

Though "Brokeback Mountain's" gay love story proved to be a Hollywood breakthrough, unequivocally selling a ton of tickets and winning three Oscars, it was essentially an adult drama, which courts a very different audience than the high-octane action crowd that "Superman" needs to attract.

* * *

In addition to drawing poor reviews and generating weak word-of-mouth, the studio's 1997 summer release "Batman & Robin" was criticized for having too much homoerotic appeal, including nipples on Batman's suit. George Clooney, the film's star, has joked, "I could have played him straight but I didn't. I made him gay."

The film barely grossed $100 million in domestic theaters, and Warners has said privately that "Batman & Robin" turned out so poorly that it nearly killed off the Caped Crusader franchise (the series was resuscitated with last year's "Batman Begins," a global blockbuster).

It's understandable that Hollywood considers 1997's Batman & Robin a bust--it was a truly horrendous movie that didn't make back its enormous $125 million budget. But while Brokeback was far cheaper to produce at $14 million, domestically, it's grossed $24 million less than Batman & Robin's $107 million--despite ticket prices being a third higher than they were nine years ago. But that doesn't stop the L.A. Times' Horn from cooing about Brokeback "selling a ton of tickets"--and thus running smack dab into what Mickey Kaus (who was virtually alone in pointing out Brokeback's middling-level success) dubbed the imaginary Heartland Breakout Meme.

Just out of curiosity: Given Bruce Wayne's lengthy affiliation with his "youthful ward Dick Grayson" (not to mention the camp 1966 TV series), I know Batman has long had a gay undercurrent. But when did Superman, last seen shagging Lois Lane, become a gay icon?

IowaHawk explores "The Two Minutes Snark" wherein the face of "Goldstein, the Enemy of the People" is used to whip practitioners of BlogSoc into a mindless robotic frenzy:

Winston had heard the whispered story of a terrible blog, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein was the author and which circulated clandestinely here and there. It was a blog with a weird title. People referred to it, if at all, simply as 'Goldstein.' But one knew of such things only through vague rumours. Neither the blog nor its contents was a subject that any ordinary Faculty member would mention if there was a way of avoiding it.

Indeed. (Whoops--that's from the frenzied climax of The Two Minute Heh.)

Richard Fernandez, Pajamas' Man In Sydney, interviews blogger Bill Roggio, who is reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan on that city's recent riots. As Glenn Reynolds writes, "Who says bloggers don't do original reporting?" (Somebody tell Gene Weingarten.)

And the latest Blog Week In Review is up, featuring Glenn, Eric Umansky of Slate, guest blogger and Advice Goddess Amy Alkon, and hosted by Austin Bay.

You can hear both podcasts, by clicking here.

OK, it's fun to work for a business with the quirky name of Pajamas Media, after Jonathan Klein of CBS (and eventually, CNN) snarled, at the height of the Ra^therGate scandal:

"You couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of check and balances [at '60 Minutes'] and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing."

But please, I really don't want to see a news service called Underpants Media:

Washington Post humor writer and journalist Gene Weingarten, who writes a regular commentary called Below the Beltway, gave a commencement speech to graduating journalism students at the University of Maryland.

In today's world, he says, it's getting tougher for journalism majors to find jobs, especially when "the public appears more and more willing to receive its 'news' online from nincompoops ranting in their underpants."

I want to congratulate you all upon your graduation from the University of Maryland College of Journalism, and wish you luck as you prepare to embark on exciting careers in telemarketing or large-appliance repair.

My point is, this is a challenging time for journalists.

And because you are word people, you understand that "challenging time" is a euphemism often used to describe disasters of epic proportions. For example, Richard Pryor was facing a "challenging time" when he ran down the street half-naked and on fire. [And like the legacy media's problems, Pryor's "challenge" was entirely self-inflicted--Ed.]

What are your challenges, specifically? Let us begin with, quote unquote, getting a job. Good jobs in journalism have become scarce as newspapers shrink and die, broadcast media fragment to smaller niche audiences and the public appears more and more willing to receive its "news" online from nincompoops ranting in their underpants.

As fellow Pajamahadeen Michelle Malkin writes:

Move over, Jon Klein. Washington Post "humorist" Gene Weingarten (that's pronounced WHINE-garten) wants to claim the MSM blog-haters' throne.

There's a lot of people ahead of him. Just get in line, Gene.

Michelle Malkin exposes the legacy media's dirty laundry--how news can be faked--with several clips from over the years, in her latest Hot Air video. She kicks off with the video from this story about, as Michelle calls her, Australia's answer to Katie Couric:

THE bitterness between ratings rivals Channel 7 and Channel 9 escalated after Nine's Today program yesterday was accused of setting up a shot to make a situation in East Timor look more dangerous than it was.

Channel 7 spokesman Simon Francis later sent to the media a clip of the segment, which aired yesterday morning.
It shows host Jessica Rowe interviewing East Timor taskforce commanding officer Brigadier Michael Slater.

"I'm wondering how you feel about your safety given that you've got armed guards there standing behind you, armed soldiers," Rowe says.

"Jessica, I feel quite safe, yes," Brigadier Slater says. "But not because I've got these armed soldiers behind me that were put there by your stage manager here to make it look good."

Good for him.

And speaking of Katie herself, she predicts that "the 'pretentious era' of the evening-news anchor is going to be a thing of the past". As Tim Graham writes:

The dictionary says one definition of "pretentious" is "Making or marked by an extravagant outward show." Didn't this woman just sit at the center of a wildly extravagant three-hour tribute to her greatness on Wednesday morning? And to get up the next day, and say this? This, from the woman who tries to do the tough interviews in the ridiculously serious cat's-eye glasses?

Even as their number of viewers both declines and ages, the pretentions of the big three TV networks and their cocooned newspeople will remain for quite some time. Personally, I'd rather fast-forward to how this story ends, and happily take as much of the 2015 model of news that's currently available.

Update: The "ridiculously serious cat's-eye glasses" play a big role in Ian Schwartz's own unique video tribute to Katie's last day on The Today Show.

The Chicago Tribune notes that the Akaka Bill is back--and is as odious as ever:

Long-stalled legislation to grant Native Hawaiians the same federal recognition and self-governance that most Native American tribes possess is scheduled to make it to the Senate floor amid charges that such a move would intensify racial tensions in the nation's 50th state and further strengthen a growing movement to secede from the United States.

"I have received assurances from the Senate leadership that a motion will finally be filed during the first week of June that would force debate and a vote on my bill," Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) said in an interview last week.

The Native Hawaiian Recognition bill, introduced in 1999 and known colloquially as the Akaka bill after the man who became the first Native Hawaiian to serve in the U.S. Senate, is by no means assured of passing. Indeed, the legislation faces an uphill battle, particularly after a federal civil rights commission recommended this month that the bill be rejected because it would be "discriminatory" to the majority of Hawaii citizens not of Native Hawaiian ancestry.

Gee, ya think?

Yesterday, we kicked off a post on an apparently growing trend towards racism in education with a link to Betsy Newmark's look at Seattle's public school system. Betsy has an update today:

Yesterday, I blogged about Seattle Public School's laughable racism policy. As I noted and the the Seattle newspaper reports today, they have now taken down their controversial description of racism and replaced it with another statement sure to rile people up. Part of that explanation had this sentence in it.

Our intention is not to put up additional barriers or develop an “us against them” mindset, nor is it to continue to hold onto unsuccessful concepts such as a melting pot or colorblind mentality.

So, apparently, the school system now thinks that Martin Luther King's plea for a society where his children could be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin is a rejected and unsuccessful goal in Seattle.

It shows how far we've come in our approaches to race these days that what was a noble statement by Martin Luther King over 40 years ago is today a sign of racism itself.

Just another day in Redneck Nation.

Mark Steyn's song of the week is "Camelot" by Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner. As Steyn writes, neither composer asked for the historical freight the song was forced to carry three years after their Broadway show first opened:

And then in November 1963 John F Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas. A few days later, the President's widow gave an interview to Life magazine, to another T H White – Theodore White, the political analyst. This is what she said:

When Jack quoted something, it was usually classical. But I’m so ashamed of myself— all I keep thinking of is this line from a musical comedy. At night, before we’d go to sleep, Jack liked to play some records; and the song he loved most came at the very end of this record. The lines he loved to hear were:

Don’t let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.

Once, the more I read of history the more bitter I got. For a while I thought history was something that bitter old men wrote. But then I realized history made Jack what he was. You must think of him as this little boy, sick so much of the time, reading in bed, reading history, reading the Knights of the Round Table. For Jack, history was full of heroes. And if it made him this way — if it made him see the heroes — maybe other little boys will see. Men are such a combination of good and bad. Jack had this hero idea of history, the idealistic view:

Don’t let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.

There’ll be great Presidents again — and the Johnsons are wonderful, they’ve been wonderful to me — but there’ll never be another Camelot.

Life came out on Tuesday. On Wednesday afternoon, Alan Jay Lerner, Kennedy’s classmate at Harvard, was crossing the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria, past the news stand. In headline letters above the masthead of The Journal-American were those lines from his title song. As he recalled it, “The tragedy of the hour, the astonishment of seeing a lyric I had written in headlines, and the shock of recognition of a relationship between the two that extended far beyond the covers of one magazine, overloaded me with confused emotions. I was so dazed that I did not even buy the newspaper.” At the time, Alan lived on 71st Street. He started to walk home, and was at 83rd Street before he realized he’d passed his block.

In his recent Commentary essay, (which we previously discussed here), James Piereson brilliantly noted that it wasn't just JFK's terrifying assassination that has had repercussions to this day, but how it was historically framed by his survivors:

Significantly, Mrs. Kennedy’s notion of Arthurian heroism derived not from Sir Thomas Mallory’s 15th-century classic Le Morte d’Arthur but from The Once and Future King (1958) by T.H. White (no relation to the journalist), on which the musical was based. White’s telling of the saga pokes fun at the pretensions of knighthood, pointedly criticizes militarism and nationalism, and portrays Arthur as a new kind of hero: an idealistic peacemaker seeking to tame the bellicose passions of his age. This may be one reason why Mrs. Kennedy’s effort to frame her husband’s legacy in this way was widely regarded as a distorted caricature of the real Kennedy and something he himself would have laughed at. Aides and associates reported that they had never heard Kennedy speak either about Camelot the musical or about its theme song. Some of Mrs. Kennedy’s friends said they had never even heard her speak about King Arthur or the play prior to the assassination.

According to Schlesinger, Mrs. Kennedy later thought she may have overdone this theme. Be that as it may, one has to give her credit for quick thinking in the midst of tragedy and grief—and also for injecting a set of ideas into the cultural atmosphere that would have large consequences. For not only did the Camelot reading of heroic public service cut liberalism off from its once-vigorous nationalist impulses but, if one accepted the image of a utopian Kennedy Camelot—and many did—then the best times were now in the past and would not soon be recovered. Life would go on, but America’s future could never match the magical chapter that had been brought to a premature end. Such thinking drew into question the no less canonical liberal assumption of steady historical progress, and compromised the liberal faith in the future.

Without intending to do so, Mrs. Kennedy had put forth an interpretation of her husband’s life and death that undercut mid-century liberalism at its core.

Earlier, Piereson notes how JFK's killer was similarly reshaped in the immediate aftermath of November, 1963:

Hence, when the word spread on November 22 that President Kennedy had been shot, the immediate and understandable reaction was that the assassin must be a right-wing extremist—an anti-Communist, perhaps, or a white supremacist. Such speculation went out immediately over the national airwaves, and it seemed to make perfect sense, echoed by the likes of John Kenneth Galbraith and Chief Justice Earl Warren, who said that Kennedy had been martyred “as a result of the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots.”

It therefore came as a shock when the police announced later the same day that a Communist had been arrested for the murder, and when the television networks began to run tapes taken a few months earlier showing the suspected assassin passing out leaflets in New Orleans in support of Fidel Castro. Nor was Lee Harvey Oswald just any leftist, playing games with radical ideas in order to shock friends and relatives. Instead, he was a dyed-in-the-wool Communist who had defected to the Soviet Union and married a Russian woman before returning to the U.S. the previous year. One of the first of an evolving breed, Oswald had lately rejected the Soviet Union in favor of third-world dictators like Mao, Ho, and Castro.

Informed later that evening of Oswald’s arrest, Mrs. Kennedy lamented bitterly that her husband had apparently been shot by this warped and misguided Communist. To have been killed by such a person, she felt, would rob his death of all meaning. Far better, she said, if, like Lincoln, he had been martyred for civil rights and racial justice.

Given her husband’s politics, Mrs. Kennedy’s comment might seem curious. For one thing, he had staked his presidency on mounting an aggressive challenge to Communism; for another, during his brief term in office the cold war had reached its most dangerous point in his confrontation with the Soviet Union over Cuba. From this perspective, it should not have been so jarring to learn that he was a casualty of the cold war. More significantly, however, the remark suggests that Mrs. Kennedy was already thinking about how President Kennedy’s legacy should be framed, and was sensing that the identity of the assassin might prove inconvenient in this regard.

"It is one of the ironies of the era", Piereson writes, "that many young people who in 1963 reacted with profound grief to Kennedy’s death would, just a few years later, come to champion a version of the left-wing doctrines that had motivated his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald". And perhaps, in order to justify this radical change in worldviews, invented the paranoid fantasies that drove Oliver Stone's 1991 movie, and continue to inspire the farther elements of the left today:

“We’ve been talking about Martin Luther King Jr this night. My son [Casey] was killed the same day he was killed, on April 4th. I don’t believe in any coincidences. Casey was born on John F Kennedy’s birthday. He was born on the day, and died on the day, of 2 people who were assassinated by the war machine in my country. ”

It's probably not entirely surprising that I don't agree with a few of the suppositions that Peter Beinart of The New Republic made when discussing his new book, The Good Fight : Why Liberals---and Only Liberals---Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again in his podcasted conversation today with Glenn Reynolds and Helen Smith. But I admire his efforts to try to return the modern left to pre-Camelot liberalism. Will anyone listen?

This version of The King James Bible is 2,208 pages long, and contains the foundation of western civilization's wisdom. The IRS's rules required General Electric to file a 24,000-page tax return, and presumably, next year's will be just as long, if not longer.

A couple of days ago, we linked to an article that reported that Menlo Park, right here in Silicon Valley, had its own version of Hollywood's Fight Club:

They may sport love handles and Ivy League degrees, but every two weeks, some Silicon Valley techies turn into vicious street brawlers in a real-life, underground fight club.
Kicking, punching and swinging every household object imaginable — from frying pans and tennis rackets to pillowcases stuffed with soda cans — they beat each other mercilessly in a garage in this bedroom community south of San Francisco.

Then, bloodied and bruised, they limp back to their desks in the morning.

"When you get beat down enough, it becomes a very un-macho thing," said Shiyin Siou, 34, a Santa Clara software engineer and three-year veteran of the clandestine fights. "But I don't need this to prove I'm macho — I'm macho enough as it is."

We at Ed Driscoll.com bring this exclusive video of one of the more extreme rumbles, smuggled out at great risk to one of our top-secret and omnipresent informants:

Please note: sensitive viewers should be prepared for the intense on-screen violence and geekiness.

Lee Siegel of The New Republic discusses "The Strange Genius of Oprah". It's tough to use the word "genius" about Oprah's advertising representatives at times, though.

(Via Maggie's Farm.)

Betsy Newmark links to a Wendy McElroy piece on cultural racism in Seattle public schools, and writes:

The Seattle Public Schools just bought themselves a heap of controversy by attempting to define racism. Their definition is laughably racist itself.

The systematic subordination of members of targeted racial groups who have relatively little social power in the United States (Blacks, Latino/as, Native Americans, and Asians), by the members of the agent racial group who have relatively more social power (Whites). The subordination is supported by the actions of individuals, cultural norms and values, and the institutional structures and practices of society."

Only whites are racist. They don't even recognize the possibility that preferring one race above another could involve seeking to elevate Blacks or Latinos over whites. Couldn't they have just used the dictionary? If so, they would have found a defintion that wouldn't have been so, er, race-based, such as this one.

The belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and that a particular race is superior to others.

They then get themselves into more trouble by trying to give examples of various types of racism.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles has a racially devisive school of its own. Michelle Malkin looks at a government-run public school whose founder and principal, Marcos Aguilar, was recently quoted in a self-decribed "an online journal that addresses educational conditions in Los Angeles schools" as saying:

We don’t necessarily want to go to White schools. What we want to do is teach ourselves, teach our children the way we have of teaching. We don’t want to drink from a White water fountain, we have our own wells and our natural reservoirs and our way of collecting rain in our aqueducts. We don’t need a White water fountain. So the whole issue of segregation and the whole issue of the Civil Rights Movement is all within the box of White culture and White supremacy. We should not still be fighting for what they have. We are not interested in what they have because we have so much more and because the world is so much larger. And ultimately the White way, the American way, the neo liberal, capitalist way of life will eventually lead to our own destruction.

This isn't all that new a development though--last year, we looked at separate but equal college graduation ceremonies, and way back in 2002, segregated college dorms.

Pinch Sulzberger of the New York Times recently personally apologized at a college commencement ceremony for the state of America; somehow I doubt though, that these decisions by academia were what he had in mind.

Update: La Shawn Barber has some related thoughts on this topic.

Following the death threat he received last week from an Reuters IP address, Charles Johnson adds a counter on his homepage to track the number of daily visits that address drops by his site.

Meanwhile, in another discussion of fear and loathing in the Blogosphere, Ace of Spades looks at Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom, who sat-in on Pajamas' Blog Week In Review last week, and writes:

Why Does The Unhinged Left So Hate Jeff Goldstein?

Goldstein is, strangely enough, one of the most reviled figures on the right of the blogosphere. LGF may get death threats from jihadists, but actual American lefties seem to despise Goldstein the most.

Read the rest.

Related Update: Drudge: "NY Dem Apologizes For Saying Bush Should Be Shot Between Eyes..."

Obviously if you're busy professional protestors like Greenpeace, you look for any shortcut you can to speed up your repetitive assault on modernity...