Don't look now, but many well known celebrities are undergoing religious conversions--and not to Scientology or the Kabbalah:

Pinocchio, Tom Sawyer and other characters have been converted to Islam in new versions of 100 classic stories on the Turkish school curriculum.

"Give me some bread, for Allah's sake," Pinocchio says to Geppetto, his maker, in a book stamped with the crest of the ministry of education.

"Thanks be to Allah," the puppet says later.

In The Three Musketeers, D'Artagnan is told that he cannot visit Aramis. The reason would surprise the author, Alexandre Dumas.

An old woman explains: "He is surrounded by men of religion. He converted to Islam after his illness."

Tom Sawyer may always have shirked his homework, but he is more conscientious in learning his Islamic prayers. He is given a "special treat" for learning the Arabic words.

It used to seem amazing how unidirectionally multiculturalism flowed. Now it's expected.

Incidentally, I can't wait to see what sort of treatment The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged gets...

Daniel Pipes coined the phrase "Sudden Jihad Syndrome"; Hugh Hewitt identifies five deadly post-9/11 cases in the US with similiar anti-Semitic symptoms and writes that "transmission is easy, and the appearance of the violent derangement that anti-Semitic Islamist extremism produces is both sudden and deadly":

None of these five incidents is the sort of terrorist attack that we are most concerned about --the meticulously planned, coordinated attempt to cause spectacular devastation and casualties in the hundreds if not thousands. The London airlines bombing plot, like the London Tube attack, the Madrid rail attack, Bali resort bombing, and the Beslan school massacre are examples of this sort of terrorist atatck, and they rightly receive the bulk of Homeland Security's attention and analysis.

But isolated, single terrorist attacks are of great concern, and not just because of their real victims, but because of what they tell us about the spread of the hatred, and its potential to spread farther and faster than we ever dreamed.

It seems possible that we are close to a tipping point where so much anti-Semitic propaganda has been pumped into the world via new technologies and emboldened regimes and charismatic fanatics like Osama, Nasrallah and Ahmadinejad that the madness we would hope was confined to caves in Afghanistan and poor madrassas of Pakistan has in fact traveled far and at a furious pace, deep into France, now deep into London, and now we have to worry, deep into the United States.

It does not have to spread widely in American Muslim circles to provoke terrible violence by a few. There is no evidence of anything like the scale of Islamist hatred that consumes parts of France appearing in the U.S., but neither is it impossible that it will arrive here. What the five examples above underscore is that a segment of the Muslim population is susceptible to the deranging effects of anti-Western screeds from radical imams. That segment might be limited to the already deranged --the driver/killer in San Francisco and the shooter/killer in Seattle are both said to suffer from mental instability.

But the point is the segment exists, and individuals within it have killed.

What, exactly, triggered their violence?

Read the rest.

Ed Morrissey writes that Hillarycare-style healthcare is coming to California:

Previous California legislation on workers-comp protection and workplace regulation helped start an exodus of corporate headquarters for better business environments. Creating a whole new bureaucracy for health management and putting rationing decisions in the hands of bureaucrats may start a new exodus of healthy people looking for less-intrusive and less-costly tax regimes. Despite the long wait times for anything but primary care issues in single-payer nations such as Canada and the UK -- the latter of which has to destroy organs for lack of doctors to transplant them -- California wants to add to its already top-heavy bureaucracies and add more budget-busting entitlements to a budget that resembles science fiction.

Hillary Clinton tried to foist the same system onto the entire country, and the nation reacted by ending forty years of Democratic domination in the House. Perhaps the same result could come from this irresponsible social engineering project. When people start to understand that they just created a DMV for health care, California voters may just revolt against the entrenched Democratic power structure. Even the Democratic nominee for goverrnor won't endorse the Kuehl bill. Phil Angelides wanted to push more health-care mandates onto the private sector instead, a bad idea but nowhere near as disastrous as this.

Will the last business out of California please turn out the lights? Besides, another rolling blackout is due in.

Michelle Malkin and Bill Nienhuis wonder why lip gloss and hand cream are banned from commercial aviation flights--but handhend GPS units aren't.

How did Bill Clinton defeat President Bush #41 only a year after #41's poll numbers were briefly through the roof after the lighting-quick liberation of Kuwait? The media took a mild recession in 1990/91 and made it out to be The End Of The World--"The worst economy in 50 years". Bush #41's raising of taxes, breaking his "read my lips" promise on the campaign trail in 1988 didn't help matters, and created an atmosphere of distrust that led directly to Ross Perot entering the scene, creating the three-way race that allowed Bill Clinton to win the presidency without a plurality of the vote. Lorie Byrd remembers, as did I, the flipover in economic reporting that happened immediately afterwards:

in 1992...the Bush recovery was described as the worst economy in 50 years until the day after the election, when it became known as the Clinton recovery.

Bush #43 learned from his father's most obvious economic mistake and has cut taxes, leading to numerous years of ecomomic growth, once the post-NASDAQ bubble and 9/11-related downtown passed. But as Back Talk notes, once again....

You can learn more from a few informative charts than you can from reading the words of a reporter who has an agenda that is advanced, not by showing you the actual numbers, but by using bumper-sticker slogans to create the impression that things are "spiraling out of control." Oh wait, that's the phrase reporters use to characterize Iraq. Well, they don't use charts for that purpose, either (and for the same reason).

Gee, wonder why?

Paul Hacket violates Godwin's Law: "Video: Hackett calls Dan Senor 'Unterfuhrer'".

Joseph Stefano, the screenwriter of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, and co-creater of The Outer Limits died last week at age 84.

Mark Steyn on 9/11 conspiracy theorists:

When I was on the Rush Limbaugh show a couple of months back, a listener called up to insist that 9/11 was an inside job. I asked him whether that meant Bali and Madrid and London and Istanbul were also inside jobs. Because that's one expensive operation to hide even in the great sucking maw of the federal budget. But the Toronto blogger Kathy Shaidle made a much sharper point:

"I wonder if the nuts even believe what they are saying. Because if something like 9/11 happened in Canada, and I believed with all my heart that, say, Stephen Harper was involved, I don't think I could still live here. I'm not sure I could stop myself from running screaming to another country. How can you believe that your President killed 2,000 people, and in between bitching about this, just carry on buying your vente latte and so forth?"

Over to you, Col. de Grand Pre, and Charlie Sheen, and Alan Colmes.

Read the whole thing; tin foil hat optional.

Alex Beam writes that MIT's Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology Richard Lindzen "isn't a fake scientist, he's an inconvenient scientist. No wonder you're not supposed to listen to him."

Read the whole thing.

Libertas on Paramount's firing of Tom Cruise:

Stars of Cruise’s caliber - whatever you may think of them personally - do not fall off trees, and are not easily replaced. I’m reminded (painfully) of what happened to the Lakers after they traded Shaquille - who was also expensive to keep around. Shaquille is now wearing championship bling in south Florida while the LA Kobes (previously known as the ‘Lakers’) hope to reach the 2nd round of next year’s playoffs. So Redstone and his shareholders may feel like Big Men on Campus right now, but they may be asking themselves later why they traded their cash cow away while he was still young enough to do action films. Harrison Ford can’t, Arnold can’t, Willis usually won’t, and Mel Gibson’s mostly a director these days. Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington can kick ass when they feel like it, but neither can open a film like Cruise, and neither of them have shown Cruise’s good judgement (for the most part) in picking projects. Basically there are very few action stars of Cruise’s caliber left, and the new generation isn’t producing very many.

Back in 2002, Howard Kurtz looked at a different kind of script reader:

As the 70-year-old Rather, 64-year-old Jennings and 62-year-old Brokaw head into their sunset years, the programs will no longer be shielded by their prestige.

"When Brokaw, Jennings and Rather retire, it is a perfect time for these corporations to decide their newscasts are no longer worth it," said Ken Bode, a former NBC correspondent who teaches at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. "Unless something dramatic happens, inevitably, the network newscasts are gone."

If that happens, it would be the biggest change in news consumption in the half-century history of television, an erosion caused in part by the striking failure of these programs to attract viewers younger than 50. Thus, they have the same problem plaguing "Nightline" -- an aging audience that is gradually dying off.

This is prediction is off only slightly--the network news isn't going away: it's simply remaining as legacy programming for an aging generation that doesn't understand the Internet--but, like the superstar-driven era of Hollywood, its impact is being rapidly diluted by a Long Tail of options.

A Mr. W. Smith wrote in his analog blog 22 years ago:

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.'

Today, Charles Johnson spots doublethink in action:

Watch as reporter Rob Roth says a witness heard the suspect refer to himself as a “terrorist,” then without taking a breath tells us this was not an act of terrorism.

Oceania, Eurasia, etc.

Update: Occidentality writes:

Ed Driscoll and Hugh Hewitt are both picking up on the possibility this may be an anti-Semitic hate crime. Two of the victims were pedestrians outside a Jewish center in San Francisco. Without dismissing the possibility, if this were motivated by anything other than narcissistic stress, it was probably general anti-Americanism, as his behavior suggests he was looking for any target possible, not Jewish targets in particular. As I said earlier, however, it's pathetic that Americans are reduced to reading news accounts the way the citizens of the Soviet Union once did: all tea leaves, no facts.

With Pravda, Soviet citizens relied on samizdat to spread the truth. In contrast we have Samizadata--and loads of other of blogs as well--to endrun monolithic news sources.

Of course, it's also a reminder of this quote:

As a famous Soviet dissident joke put it: "In the Soviet Union, the future is known; it's the past which is always changing."

Amazing how relevant it remains, long after the Soviet Union's demise.

Here's something to look forward to from the evening news--Glenn Reynolds writes that he can foresee "faked video of professional quality becoming a commonplace political item in the pretty near future":

the evidence of recent weeks is that journalism is rife with fakery, and that we're seeing more of it now mostly because it's easier to spot now that lots of people can examine the evidence and compare notes.

* * *

Context is key. And one of the lessons of these various affairs is that neither the photo, nor the purveyor of the photo, should be given unquestioned authority. Instead, we have to think for ourselves, and make up our own minds. Because it turns out that we can't trust, well, much of anyone.

You can hear me discuss these issues further with bloggers Charles Johnson and Dean Barnett on this TCS Daily podcast. And yes, that's really us -- not faked voices. Trust me.

Hey, if I could have afforded his royalties, I would have loved to have photoshopped in James Earl Jones' voice for mine.

Update: In a related post, Betsy Newmark and Jeff Jacoby explore Photoshopped diversity in school textbooks: "when reality conflicts with political correctness, reality gets the boot", Jacoby writes.

Ward Churchill--airbrushed or otherwise--could not be reached for comment.

Elsewhere, Q and O looks at the most pliable medium of all--text--as AP truncates the quotes from Donald Rumsfeld's latest speech virtually to the point of Dowdification.

"For as long as there are those who believe, the plastic turkey will remain forever real!"

Hugh Hewitt has a round-up of links on Ohmeed Aziz Popal, who ran over 14 people in San Francisco on Tuesday; he advises his readers to be on the look-out:

Please keep an eye out for the first MSM mention you see that this may very well be another mass casualty attack on Jewish Americans, the second in two months.

Yes, I can hear the crickets chirping, too.

Update: The Anchoress hears the sounds of silence and writes, "This is becoming an appalling habit in the press and by politicians". Meanwhile, Charles Johnson explores one way that this habit may be backfiring.

Orson Scott Card writes:

Ann Coulter's new book (which I haven't read) has a grossly inaccurate title: Godless: The Church of Liberalism. It may be true that liberalism does not accept the same God as religious conservatives. But they are certainly not godless.

How can you tell who someone's god is? You look to see whose name they invoke as the cause of all things, good or bad. By that standard, the god of the devout Left is Global Warming.

Read the rest, for the "the Psalm of Al, from which the faithful constantly quote (King James Version)".

(Via Tim Blair who sees An Inconvienent Season just around the corner.)

Dean Barnett writes that the Gray Lady has a funny sense of what the word "unharmed" means:

Here’s the New York Times’ lede in its coverage of the Steve Centanni story:

JERUSALEM, Aug. 27 — Two journalists kidnapped in Gaza were released unharmed on Sunday after being forced at gunpoint to say on a videotape that they had converted to Islam. (Emphasis added.)

Interesting locution there, “released unharmed,” no? This comes from the newspaper that believes that a Christmas crèche or a prayer uttered before a high school football game is a violation of the highest order. And yet being forced to adopt another faith at the point of a gun doesn’t rise to the level of “harm” in the Times’ judgment.

Well, it's not like they were kidnapped in Augusta.

Besides, at least the Times considers Fox employees journalists--that's more credit than many other liberals are willing to grant.

Mary Katharine Ham has some thoughts on the latest writings and retouchings from Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell:

The mainstream media’s response to the allegations from blogs has been more along the lines of Greg Mitchell’s, editor of Editor & Publisher, a trade magazine whose mission it is to cover “all aspects of the North American newspaper industry, including business, newsroom, advertising, circulation, marketing, technology, online and syndicates.”

Mitchell’s response to accusations from bloggers—instead of answering the charges and refuting evidence—was to get very defensive, claim that “rightwing bloggers” were only attempting to smear photojournalists as a group, and then proceed to smear rightwing bloggers as a group for daring to point out the dishonesty of some photojournalists, and raise questions about how business is conducted in the Middle East.

The subtext of Mitchell's rantings about the starboard side of the Blogosphere isn't just that he loathes the bloggers on the right analyzing his work--it's that he's not too crazy about journalism itself about being accountable to rightwing readers in general.

Each blog that analyzes Big Media's faults has hundreds to a few thousand readers, and for the biggest blogs, tens of thousands--to hundreds of thousands--of readers, for the simple reason that although we joke that eventually, everyone will have his or her blog, for now, there are far more consumers than authors. And every one of those readers, and the people in their circles of influence, whether they're posting within Internet forums, or simply chatting while hanging around the proverbial office water cooler, is finding out just how smug the elite media feels, especially when it's asked to be accountable.

There was more than a hint of that same attitude in the response of the L.A. Times' Michael Hiltzik (he of the sock puppetry) to Hugh Hewitt last year:

HH: If you think the L.A. Times is healthy, and you don't know why it isn't, I can't help you. I really can't. You cannot heal what you cannot get...

MH: Well, luckily, I don't think we're not turning to you for our help.

HH: What was that?

MH: I said luckily, we're not turning to you for our help.

HH: Or to people who listen to me for subscriptions, right?

MH: Well, I guess not.

HH: All right. That's what I thought.

MH: All right.

HH: Michael, thank you for that last, late-arriving, but nevertheless much welcome burst of candor. If you're listening, the L.A. Times does not want you to subscribe.

Peggy Noonan reached a similar conclusion about CBS's decision to hire Katie Couric:

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

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

Does the tone of the editor of a major house organ of the American media also tell us about how news editors in general view the lay of the land?

If so, as I've said before, welcome to the Post-Objective Media.

Sent to my inbox this morning:

On September 13, 2006, CIO Magazine and HP will present the next edition of Change Artists. Hosted by NetworkWorld's John Gallant and broadcast live on the world-wide-web, Change Artists is a program that provides you with the unique opportunity to sit at the table with F500 executives as they discuss how changing technology impacts their business.

Don't miss out! Click on the link below, and sign-up to watch the next episode featuring CEO Tom Glocer and CTO Roy Lowrance of Reuters; the world's leading provider of financial market data, and operator of the well known Reuters news service. They'll discuss how Reuters has managed to ride the wave of change - from the telegraph to radio to the Internet, and they'll answer your questions live.

Will they be providing an introductory seminar on Photoshop Clone Tool techniques?

Maybe it's just me, but if I were the CEO of Reuters, I'm not sure if the phrase "Change Artists" is something I'd want associated with my company right at the moment.

I had already planned on interviewing promiment bloggers to get their thoughts on Stephen D. Cooper's new book, Watching The Watchdog: Bloggers As The Fifth Estate for TCS Daily. But when the Reuters "Picture Kill" scandal broke via Charles Johnson and his readers, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to focus in on that issue, along with the self-proclaimed oversight role the Blogosphere plays in regards to the self-proclaimed oversight role of the legacy media.

So I was very happy to round-up Charles himself, Glenn Reynolds, and Dean Barnett of Soxblog, HughHewitt.com and The Weekly Standard.com on a conference call to discuss the topic. In other words--don't miss this one.

Update (8/27/06): Bumped to top of page.

Tom Elia has some thoughts on Anousheh Ansari, the Iranian-born U.S. citizen who is about to become the world's first female space tourist three days after the fifth anniversary of 9/11:

As the grandson myself of an immigrant from what is now present-day Iran, I can't help but notice the irony in the fact that the first female space tourist is a US citizen from Iran, a country today under an extremist Islamist leadership that would rather keep its women veiled, uneducated, and under the thumb of 11th Century fanatics than to train them to create new medicines, advance new technologies, or generally improve the lot of its people, let alone try to send one of its own people (man or woman) into space.

It's an irony that speaks volumes....

Absolutely.

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

Ian Schwartz writes, "This looks like a case of awful timing more than awful taste; nevertheless, it’s going to be a night to remember for NBC, the Emmys and Conan O’Brien."

Not sure if that's the disaster movie reference I'd make, but there's no doubt that NBC has definitely hit an iceberg's worth of bad PR tonight.

Update: To borrow one of the left's favorite cliches, I question the timing of this, as well.

More: Todd of Deadline Hollywood Daily adds:

The very idea that tonight's Emmy showcast on NBC was so heavily scripted that neither the network nor host Conan O'Brien could change a word of the broadcast opener is absurd. After all, isn't that the reason they invented writers? C'mon, couldn't one television academy director, or NBC executive, or show producer, much less Conan, pipe up and say, "Uh, maybe starting with a plane crash comedy skit on the same day there was an actual plane crash might be in poor taste? Let's rewrite." But, noooooooooo. Host Conan O'Brien riffed off the ABC's series Lost which was all-but-ignored by the Emmies by starting the ceremony with a filmed comedy bit in which O'Brien was seen sipping champagne aboard a jetliner. "What could possibly go wrong tonight?" he says — before the plane crashes onto an island resembling the one in ABC's drama. Today, in Kentucky, a commuter jet mistakenly trying to take off on a runway that was too short crashed into a field Sunday and burst into flames, according to media reports, killing 49 people and leaving the lone survivor -- a co-pilot -- in critical condition. Really, is there even one person at NBC with a brain left in his head?

He's right--and as Greg Tinti noted in his above-linked post, that same point can also be made about Conan's "Faux News" jokes on a day when two Fox journalists were returned after two weeks in captivity.

Update: Welcome to those clicking in via Hot Air and its Drudge Report link--please look around; there's much here you may enjoy.

A Thought: Mary Katharine Ham writes:

The Kentucky plane crash happened at 6 a.m. There was plenty of time to alter the intro of the Emmys to something more respectful. It wouldn't have been polished and post-produced, but it would have been polite.

But it occurs to me that there's actually an innocent explanation. In Diamonds Are Forever, Blofeld quipped to Bond that if he destroyed Kansas, "the world may not hear about it for years", grimly foreshadowing the famous New Yorker cover depicting how its readers on imagined the heartland (a flat, depopulated void). Show business on both coasts is an astonishingly insular and myopic world; 9/11 was an event large enough to crack its bubble; a plane crash in the middle of America American killing 50 people just isn't enough to make a ripple.

And besides--since Johnny Carson's retirement, it's not like one really expects a talk show host or his writers to have their fingers on the pulse of the world outside of the taping studio, anyhow.

Jim Geraghty writes, "It gives me no pleasure to do this, but sometimes somebody tries to pull a fast one on you, and you just have to call ‘em on it":

I can understand that having Dean’s web guy on staff can create some headaches for a candidate for the Republican nomination. But that doesn’t excuse denials to direct inquiries that contradict the facts. Even a “no comment” or “I can’t talk about this because no decision on that has been made yet,” would have been fairer. Instead, I’m told that Mele is “offering free advice” when in fact it’s the other way around, that according to the Hotline account, McCain’s people “recruited” Mele.

The clients of Mele’s firm EchoDitto, by the way, include Air America Radio, Barack Obama’s Senate campaign, the Clinton Global Initiative, Democratic gubernatorial candidate John DeStefano in Connecticut, the campaign of Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm in Michigan, NoIraqDraft.com, Rock the Vote, PurpleOcean.org which is the online activism hub of the Service Employees International Union, and Rosie.com, the personal blog of Rosie O'Donnell.

I would urge reporters who deal with Straight Talk America to double check and verify everything that they are told; it is entirely possible that what you are told by the organization, on basic matters such as who is working for them, is completely false.

I'll let others remark about the irony of this coming from an organization with "Straight Talk" in its name.

Read the whole thing.

Breaking details at Pajamas Media, and Fox itself.

Last September, when Ted Turner had this infamous exchange with Wolf Blitzer...

WB: But this is one of the most despotic regimes, and Kim Jung Il is one of the worst men on Earth. Isn't that a fair assessment?

TT: Well, I didn't get to meet him, but he didn't look...in the pictures I've seen of him on CNN, he didn't look too much different than most of the other people I've met.

WB: But look at the way he's treating his own people.

TT: Well, hey. Listen, I saw a lot of people over there. They were thin, and they were riding bicycles instead of driving in cars. But I didn't see any brutality in the capitol, or out in the DMZ. We drove through the countryside quite a bit to down to P'annumjom and Kaesong. We traveled around. I'm sure we were on a special route, but I don't see...there's really no reason...North Korea's got enough problems with their economy and their agriculture. I think they want to join the Western world, and improve the quality of life for their people, just like everybody else. And I think that we should give them another chance. It doesn't cost us anything. They already have agreements, and then North Korea never posed any significant threat to the United States. I mean, the whole economy of North Korea is only $30 billion dollars a year. It's less than the city of Detroit. It's a small place, and we do not have to worry about them attacking us.

...I wrote:

Whether it's Cuba, the Soviet Union, or Iraq, Turner's never met a totalitarian regime he didn't want to prop up with sympathetic coverage.

And these days, North Korea is no exception. One man's Hell on Earth is another man's fun vacation getaway, as Ted describes Kim Jung Il's rotting death trap of a country to Wolf Blitzer...

And of course, as both Reuters and Octavia Nasr, CNN's senior editor for Arab affairs would say, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Stephen Spruiell of NRO's MediaBlog looks at Christiane Amanpour's recent documentary on Osama Bin Laden, airing, as Spruiell notes, just two weeks before the fifth anniversary of 9/11:

even the New York Times says that it's a little too "suffuse[d]" with "romantic awe" for the terrorist mastermind. That's sort of like Chris Rock telling you to tone down the swearing.

Good to see that even radical chic has some limits.

Betsy Newmark finds the story that's "got everything"--and then wonders why crickets are chirping in response.

Hitch could probably explain why. As could Jonah Goldberg.

Just finished listening to the really interesting Pajamas Politics Central podcast with Andrew Keen interviewing Marshall Poe, the author of a recent Atlantic article on Wikipedia:

“Wikipedia is really not an encyclopedia. It’s more like a dictionary. It has the definition, a kind of rough description, of the way we talk about everything. It’s not expert knowledge, it’s common knowledge.”

A while back, Robert McHenry of TCS reached a similar conclusion on "The Faith-Based Encyclopedia" that's also worth revisiting as you listen.

Update: "Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence".

Mary Katherine Ham writes, "I Had a Feeling This Guy Was a Sweetheart".

At least in China (which is nothing new there of course): China bans strippers at funerals.

Carol Doda could not be reached for comment.

Ray Nagin, class all the way:

On a tour of the decimated Ninth Ward, [New Orleans Mayor Ray] Nagin tells Pitts the city has removed most of the debris from public property and it’s mainly private land that’s still affected – areas that can’t be cleaned without the owners’ permission. But when Pitts points to flood-damaged cars in the street and a house washed partially into the street, the mayor shoots back. “That’s alright. You guys in New York can’t get a hole in the ground fixed and it’s five years later. So let’s be fair.”

Charming. As Allah writes:

A “hole in the ground.” “Fixed.” They were the tallest buildings in the United States, where nearly 3,000 died in a savage attack against our people on our soil. At least he got the length of time right without insulting the dead.

I’m fine with criticizing the politicians for dithering over rebuilding the Twin Towers, and especially fine with criticizing that monstrosity Trump called a “pile of crap” that was supposed to replace them. But calling Ground Zero a “hole in the ground” that’s still not “fixed” is, well, about par for the course for the king of the memorial motor pool.
But you know what? Nagin can be a total failure and run his mouth all he wants. It won’t matter. He still has a constituency that’ll back him no matter how many buses he leaves parked when the next storm hits.

Meanwhile, Real Clear Politics looks at "What the Media Missed" in its coverage of Katrina--which was plenty (when it wasn't inventing plenty of stories as well).

Betsy Newmark, Jonah Goldberg and Thomas Sowell diagram the clinical symptoms that make up Wal-Mart Derangement Syndrome, and how it's impacted Andrew Young--along with many others on the left.

Mark Steyn is sitting in for Rush Limbaugh today. You can catch his last hour here, and a rebroadcast will be online later today.

Found via LGF and the The Jawa Report:

"Sometimes it's fun to play backup editor. But we'd really just prefer you did your damn job."

Muggeridge's Law posits that there is no way that satire can compete with real life for its pure absurdity. But in the 1990s, NBC's Seinfeld sitcom certainly gave the law a run for its money. In episode #85, The Hamptons, the following exchange occurred:

George: I was supposed to see her. She wasn't supposed to see me.

Jerry: So what?

George: Well ordinarily I wouldn't mind. But...

Jerry: But...

George: Well I just got back from swimming in the pool. And the water was cold...

Jerry: Oh... You mean... shrinkage.

George: Yes. Significant shrinkage!

Jerry: So you feel you were short changed.

George: Yes! I mean, if she thinks that's me she's under a complete misapprehension. That was not me, Jerry. That was not me.

While Seinfeld is no longer a part of the NBC lineup, the spirit of the show obviously lives on at the network and its offshoots, as this MSNBC headline demonstrates:

Polar bear genitals shrinking due to pollution

Shrinkage could endanger animals with already low reproduction rate

Other than George--who knew?

And evidently, these guys apparently have already suffered significant shrinkage. Not to mention, significant airbrushing.

As Allah writes, Rightwingsparkle provides "a quickie intro to the blogosphere, both left and right":

It makes a good video update to my own primers on the Blogosphere over the years. Not to mention, RWS is far easier on the eye than your humble narrator.

As the Beautiful Attrocities blog noted last year, "In the future, everyone will be Hitler for 15 minutes".

Including the second year coach of a struggling NFL franchise:

Jets running back Kevan Barlow apologized to 49ers coach Mike Nolan for comparing him to Adolf Hitler in a newspaper interview.

Barlow, who was traded from San Francisco to New York on Sunday for a fourth-round pick, made his inflammatory comments to the Contra Costa Times in Wednesday's editions. Jets coach Eric Mangini said Wednesday he has spoken with Barlow, and the player is sorry for what he said.

"I thought his comments were inappropriate," Mangini said. "After he said it, he wished he could have those words back. But he can't. Kevan has already called coach Nolan to talk to him about that, which I think is important."

Barlow was upset with the trade, mainly because Nolan assured him he wouldn't be dealt. He told the newspaper Nolan was a "first-time head coach with too much power."

"He walks around with a chip on his shoulder, like he's a dictator, like he's Hitler," Barlow told the paper. "People are scared of him. If it ain't Nolan's way, it's the highway."

After making the comments, Barlow called back to say he didn't mean to make the comparison, blaming his outburst on his emotions.

"I was kind of harsh on him, saying he's a dictator. That's bad. Saddam Hussein is a dictator," Barlow said. "I was speaking on emotion."

Gee, you think? Of course, Barlow's far from the only person these days to equate someone whose authority he doesn't respect with the very definition of absolute evil.

Michelle Malkin has details, links, and a photo of Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig in captivity, but othewise looking relatively unharmed. She adds this:

Reuters, yes Reuters, covers the muted coverage and quotes an editor who rejects the "asking for it" attitude:

"I certainly resent any suggestion that reporters here would turn their backs on a colleague in trouble just because they work for a particular media outlet," wrote Dion Nissenbaum, Jerusalem bureau chief of McClatchy Newspapers, on the Poynter site.

Good. Tell it to Bob Laurence.

Indeed.^TM

Update: Jules Crittenden of The Boston Herald has some thoughts on Laurence's anti-Fox rant.

Via Tim Blair, "The 50 worst Australian band names of all time".

(And yes, I know my headline is an awful, awful, pun. Totally INXS.)

South Park evidently gets the last laugh: Paramount leaves Tom Cruise trapped in the closet.

Update: South Park really does get the last laugh: Matt Drudge notes:

On same day Cruise breaks with PARAMOUNT, 'SOUTH PARK' creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone ink two picture deal with -- PARAMOUNT...

For our 2005 TCS Daily look at Brian Anderson's South Park Conservatives book, click here.

Great moments in Drudge headline juxtapositions:

Bob Dylan says modern music is worthless...

TONY BENNETT: 'AMERICA IS CULTURALLY VOID'...

Or as Mickey Kaus asked this past weekend:

Why does the music they play in clothing stores sound so much better than the music they play on the radio?

Of course, if you don't like what you hear on the radio, you can always roll your own...

Related: Chris Anderson of The Long Tail fame asks, "What do people really want in music?"

I think it's a fairly safe bet that if you asked a typical newspaper columnist or television producer what he thought about competition in the business world, you'd get in response some variation decrying it as "cut throat" and "the worst of capitalism" and "only harming consumers". Which makes this email to media maven Jim Romenesko by San Diego Union-Tribune TV critic Bob Laurence on the topic of the kidnapping of Fox News reporter Steve Centanni and his New Zealand-based cameraman Olaf Wiig by terrorists in Gaza all the more disgusting:

I'd like to offer a couple of possible reasons for the lack of attention given to the kidnapping of the two guys from Fox:

One is that, sadly, they are far from the first to be kidnapped, injured or killed. They are, alas, only the most recent two of many. The kidnapping or targeting of journalists in Iraq isn't the story it once was.

Second, Fox has deliberately set itself apart from other news media. Starting at the top with Roger Ailes, the Fox sales pitch has been to deride other media, to declare itself the one source of the real truth, the sole source of 'fair and accurate' news reporting. As a result, there's not a reservoir of kinship or good will with Fox on the part of the rest of the news media. You can't keep insulting people and then expect friendship when you need it.

They've made it a policy to keep a distance between themselves and the rest of the media, far beyond the usual competitive spirit, so that's where they are: at a distance.

Or as the crank TV commentator snarled in the 1980 comedy Airplane!, "Shanna, they bought their tickets, they knew what they were getting into. I say, let 'em crash!"

Michelle Malkin adds:

First, it's "fair and balanced." Second, what news organization doesn't posit itself the best source of news in an aggressive media world? Third, Laurence and his ilk's inability to set aside contempt for, or envy of, a successful competitor during a crisis is a damning indictment that speaks for itself.

In 2004, leftwing blogger and Ned Lamont-champion Markos Moulitsas Zuniga achieved a fair amount of notoriety in the Blogosphere when, after four Americans were killed in Fallujah, he intemperately wrote:

Let the people see what war is like. This isn’t an Xbox game. There are real repercussions to Bush’s folly.

That said, I feel nothing over the death of merceneries. They aren’t in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them.

Kos has since, understandably, backpedaled from those dashed-off thoughts, but sadly, it looks like that spirit lives on in at least one corner of the liberal media.

Update: Don't miss Dan Riehl's thoughts on Laurence's spleen vent.

As Charles Johnson writes:

Andrew Bolt exposes a ridiculous Hizballah fauxtograph: Hezbollah sinks Australian warship.

Don't miss this one.

Mickey Kaus writes:

Edward Luttwak notes that:

6,821 Americans ...died to conquer the eight square miles of Iwo Jima.

That's more than twice the number of Americans who've died in the entire Iraq war. ... [Rationalization?-ed Perspective.]

More perspective, here.

Michael Medved writes that the subpar performance of Snakes On A Plane is a textbook example of his theory on R movie ratings in action. It makes particular sense given the audience that the producers should have been aiming for: the proverbial teenage male summer movie crowd:

According to many accounts, the producers of "Snakes" originally intended to make their film a PG-13 rated romp---a B-picture, shamelessly silly tale about slithering critters released in mid flight across the Pacific in order to bring down the plane and kill a key witness against a gangland kingpin. In fact, almost everything about the project suggested that it would squeeze box-office dollars out of boys between the ages of 12-and-15 like a giant boa constrictor -- but then the internet activists insisted on more racy content and an "R" rating, and the producers inexplicably followed their lead. The filmmakers went back for several days of new material--- including a scene of pot-smoking and steamy, bare-breasted sex in an airplane bathroom, and Samuel L. Jackson's notorious line: "Enough is Enough! I've had it with these mother%#@! snakes on this mother@#%! plane!"

They thereby got the R-rating they wanted, and lost the youthful audience they needed. As long ago as 1992, my book HOLLYWOOD VS. AMERICA included a groundbreaking study that showed that an R-rating hurts box office performance-- and makes it much less likely for adults-only fare to recoup its investment. More than a dozen major studies (by distinguished universities and savvy marketing firms) since my initial argument have all confirmed the phenomenon I observed: G, PG, and PG-13 films reliably and substantially outperform R - films at the box office.

The harsh rating (demanded by the bloggers and cultists who helped determine the final shape of the film) probably proved particularly punishing for this particular movie.

In other words, had Hollywood kept the film at PG or PG-13, it would have attracted its target audience in droves--but add the R-rating, and it means that teenage boys need to be accompanied by an adult--and I don't know about you, but the idea of mashing-up a gross-out horror movie with an otherwise non-descript air disaster movie gives me two big reasons to skip this film. (I worry enough as it is these days whenever I fly.)

Ace sounds like he agrees entirely with Medved's take, in language that we're censoring for our own typical PG-ish demographic:

Basically, Snakes On A Plane was juiced up with nudity and violence to satisfy a demographic -- fourteen year old boys -- who may see the movie, but they can't actually buy tickets for it, so their ticket sales go not to SOAP's tally but to some random PG movie that just happened to be playing at the same time.

To quote Otter from Delta House: Hollywood, you f***ed up. You trusted us.

Well, not all of us--I suspect I'm enjoying the film's post-mortems far more than I would the movie itself.

The New York Times runs its now seemingly annual article on Hollywood's summer of discontent. While the growth of the Long Tail will tend to decrease the number of blockbusters, it's not like Hollywood is without fault itself, as Mickey Kaus notes about Paramount's odd--to say the least--decision to hire Oliver Stone to be their director on World Trade Center:

But Stone apparently stuck to the script and didn't indulge in wacky-left conspiracizing--ed. Maybe they shouldn't have hired a director so wacky-left-conspiratorial he had to be tied down to a mediocre script lest he blame 9/11 on Michael Eisner!

No kidding.

Elsewhere, conservative film blog Libertas has a great moment in headlines: "Snakes on a Plane--the Howard Dean of Movies?"

In one sense, though, that's an incredibly cheap shot: with well over 1.5 million ticket buyers this past weekend, that's more than double the number of people who were constituents of Dean in Vermont!

Update: In contrast to Mickey Kaus, Hugh Hewitt is singing World Trade Center's praises. Just keep scrolling.

Ace makes a great point: in the past, the legacy media simply dismissed bloggers with a wave of their upturned nose. Today, they run polls in which they attempt to highlight their accuracy:

The very fact they now have to argue they're more accurate is, well, pretty big.

Before it was just assumed. Blogs were simply dismissed.

Now they have to do "studies" and write arguments to convince people they're more accurate.

Hey, would