Brent Bozell makes an interesting observation about the timing of Michael Richards' meltdown that I hadn't caught:

On the very day that Fox announced it was withdrawing both the O.J. book and the TV show, news emerged that another Hollywood has-been, comedian Michael Richards, went on a screaming frenzy at the Laugh Factory, using the N-word against two black men heckling from the audience.

It's also worth noting that Richards (just last week, though it seems like it was ages ago, doesn't it?), and now this week, Danny DeVito, were both caught by something I dubbed the Internet Immortality Thesis at the start of the month.

(Which seems like a lifetime ago, after the election, Thanksgiving, OJ, Richards, DeVito, the new Bond movie that was actually pretty good for a change...wow, what a long strange month it's been!)

At dinner tonight, I overhead the couple at the table next to ours discussing Danny DeVito's drunken appearance on The View, with the husband telling his wife, "Hey, just download it off YouTube--that's where I saw it". In the past, a celebrity could drink himself blotto in Johnny Carson's green room, stumble through an appearance, and be pretty much assured that unless he really said something divisive, it was on the air and done. (This really worked if you were a liberal politician and said something idiotic, drunk or sober.) And even in the era of VCRs, so what if a handful of people taped it?

Today, YouTube and the Blogosphere have changed all that, and in an era of demassified individual publishing, the safety net that the liberal mass media provided its favorite sons no longer exists. That doesn't mean that entertainers such as Richards and DeVito won't still make fools of themselves from time to time--that's pretty much the main role that celebrities play in today's culture these days. But it should make them pause for thought.

Just ask Senator Kerry--and former Senator Allen.

Update: Related thoughts from Carol Platt Liebau; Hugh Hewitt observes that the Boston Globe is still protecting Kerry, after all these years.

I have a lengthy review of the latest incarnation of Cakewalk's Sonar PC-based multitrack recording program, over at Blogcritics.

Near the end of the piece, I tried to give a brief preview of the multimedia of the very near future: 64-bit computing. While Sonar 6 works great with good ol' Windows XP Professional, it's also compatible with the 64-bit version of Windows XP. One big, big advantage of 64-bit computing? Currently, Windows XP supports up to four gigs of RAM.

64-bit Windows supports a whopping 128-gigs of RAM, and the 64-bit computing in general apparently has a theoritical limit of 16 exabytes! (Insert bug-eyed emoticon here.)

Of course, 200 years from now when we're beaming people up and storing their data in the pattern buffers, we'll wonder how mankind got anything done with a pitiful 128-gigs of RAM. But for the next decade or so, that sounds like a potent future for home multimedia creation. Needless to say, though--Hollywood won't be happy.

In a pair of his trademarked FAQ lists, Dean Barnett looks towards the future, both near term and far. He explores the not-so-rosy future of The Baker Commission; and the legacy of President Bush--of which the jury's still out.

ABC writes, "Iranian Weapons Arm Iraqi Militia".

Wow, there's a shocker, huh?

Update: Tammy Bruce asks an intriguing question:

Could it also be the Establishment Media, now that the Dems are in charge, are keen to provide support for staying in Iraq or even striking Iran? Hmm...

I'm not sure how much I agree with that hypothesis, but as David Keene notes, the left would be wise to avoid being blamed by history for yet another bugout, as when an earlier Democrat-controlled Congress, given cover by a liberal media much more powerful (not to mention omnipresent) than it is today, cut funding on support for the South Vietnamese in the mid-1970s.

TigerHawk is taking credit for being the source of the well-linked Mark Steyn/Ralph Peters Thunderdome rumble this weekend, adding:

Read TigerHawk today to anticipate the intramural blogospheric struggles of tomorrow.

Fair enough!

Andrew Sullivan's worst nightmare is soon to come true, as Tom Maguire writes:

Is America ready for a Mormon leader who is pro-life and believes that "marriage should be between a man and a woman"? We'll find out soon enough--Harry Reid becomes Senate Majority Leader next January.

It's gobsmacking!

Well, this was inevitable, wasn't it?

Michael Richards is getting support from someone who knows exactly what he's going through - Mel Gibson.

Gibson, infamous for his anti-semitic invective after being pulled over for drunk driving, tells Entertainment Weekly, "I feel really badly for the guy. He was obviously in a state of stress. You don't need to be inebriated to be bent out of shape." Ain't that the truth!

Regarding Richards' fate in the media, Mel added, "They'll probably torture him for a while and then let him go. I like him." Of course he does.

Looks like Kramer can count on work in a Gibson flick. Perfect pairing.

And Disney will be more than happy to promote the heck out of it.

When it's a war by proxy. And as the Professor writes, "they're the proxies of Iran and Syria. These people are not our friends".

Something that NBC, in their quest for ratings and a Cronkite moment of their own, obviously either don't understand, or are willing to distort for ratings and their apparent hope for not just the president's scalp, but those of thousands of innocent Iraqis as well.

Update: Speaking of wars by proxy, let's add Saudi Arabia to the equation, as well.

Gene Expression has some really interesting stats on Europe and belief.

(Via The Corner.)

James Webb, class all the way:

The Washington Post reports that at a recent White House reception for freshmen members of Congress, Senator-elect James Webb tried to avoid President Bush. He declined to stand in a presidential receiving line or to have his picture taken with the president. Eventually, however, Bush found him and asked him how his son, a Marine, was doing. Webb responded, "I'd like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President." Bush said, "That's not what I asked you; how's your boy?" According to the Post, Webb "coldly" replied "That's between me and my boy, Mr. President."

The Hill adds this charming detail:

Webb confessed that he was so angered by this that he was tempted to slug the commander-in-chief, reported the source, but of course didn’t. It’s safe to say, however, that Bush and Webb won’t be taking any overseas trips together anytime soon.

Kudos to President Bush for making the extra effort to seek him out, knowing that the ill-tempered Webb would more than likely self-destruct. But Power Line notes that Webb's more than willing to change his mind about a president, should the situation require it:

Webb seems to get off on disrespecting presidents. In 1997, he said:

I cannot conjure up an ounce of respect for Bill Clinton when it comes to the military. Every time I see him salute a Marine, it infuriates me. I don't think Bill Clinton cares one iota about what happens in a military unit.

However, when Webb needed Clinton's help, he brought the man whose administration he had called "the most corrupt in modern memory" to help him raise funds. Webb explained his about face by claiming that 9/11 had wiped the slate clean.

Thus, if Bush cared, he could take solace in the knowledge that if the wind changes, so too will the attitude of the erratic opportunist from Virginia.

Allah writes that he's just tossing the base some red meat to momentarily placate them:

Smells like something Webb’s people planted in order to give the Kossacks something to moon over before, in a gesture of scorn and contempt, he spits out their collective schwanz and goes maverick on them.

Jim Webb: the Joe Lieberman of 2012!

Me? I'm just happy he didn't ask for his rifle, as another rootin-tootin' reactionary ex-vet did a couple of years ago before meeting the president.

Update: George Will has some further thoughts.

...But you can't take him out of the actor who brought him to life so vividly, by making actor and character appear inseparable (not to mention insufferable). Danny DeVito, who hasn't had a hit movie since, arguably L.A. Confidential nearly a decade ago, really knows how to spread the holiday cheer in promoting his latest film, Deck The Halls:

Danny DeVito seemed drunk when he went on an anti-Bush tirade on ABC’s The View on Wednesday. DeVito recounted how he last visited the White House during the Clinton years, warmly noting that "the place was, had that kind of Clinton feeling, you know," before denigrating President Bush as "numb nuts" (or something like that — ABC bleeped over the last part of that word).

DeVito then began what was supposed to be mimicry of Bush, making a variety of weird sounds and facial expressions. It’s impossible to really capture DeVito’s performance in words (he’d admitted he’d been up partying all night with George Clooney), so I’ve posted a short video of one of his more explosive moments. [Click over to view the clips--Ed]

After his Bush-bashing, DeVito then asked the panel what they thought about "the hat trick last week — Rumsfeld, the House and the Senate," referring to the Democrats’ election victories and Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld’s stepping down. DeVito announced how he reacted to the news: "I took my clothes off."

Now that's how to sell a family-friendly Christmas movie to its Red State target audience!

In his podcast interview on The Glenn & Helen Show (which yes, I tuned into largely because of this headline--thanks Allah!), Orson Scott Card said:

What does being liberal have to do with opposing or supporting the war against terror? Our enemies in the war against terror are so anti-liberal, that you would think it would be liberals leaping to protect the world from these monstrous ideologies. Everything that they accuse the Christian right of being, Al Qaeda is. And the Christian right, generally speaking, isn't. But they can get all exercised about the pernicious, evil influence of Christianity in America, without thinking that, oh, maybe we could find it useful to oppose, with force, as has been required of us, the forces of radical Islam. It's just regarded as being unrelated, when it is related. And then the things that are not related, they treat as if they were. It's just maddening.

Victor Davis Hanson explores what happens when a civilization is too exhausted to continue:

Our current crisis is not yet a catastrophe, but a real loss of confidence of the spirit. The hard-won effort of the Western Enlightenment of some 2,500 years that, along with Judeo-Christian benevolence, is the foundation of our material progress, common decency, and scientific excellence, is at risk in this new millennium.

But our newest foes of Reason are not the enraged Athenian democrats who tried and executed Socrates. And they are not the Christian zealots of the medieval church who persecuted philosophers of heliocentricity. Nor are they Nazis who burned books and turned Western science against its own to murder millions en masse.

No, the culprits are now more often us. In the most affluent, and leisured age in the history of Western civilization--never more powerful in its military reach, never more prosperous in our material bounty--we have become complacent, and then scared of the most recent face of barbarism from the primordial extremists of the Middle East.

What would a beleaguered Socrates, a Galileo, a Descartes, or Locke believe, for example, of the moral paralysis in Europe? Was all their bold and courageous thinking--won at such a great personal cost--to allow their successors a cheap surrender to religious fanaticism and the megaphones of state-sponsored fascism?

Just imagine in our present year, 2006: plan an opera in today's Germany, and then shut it down. Again, this surrender was not done last month by the Nazis, the Communists, or kings, but by the producers themselves in simple fear of Islamic fanatics who objected to purported bad taste. Or write a novel deemed unflattering to the Prophet Mohammed. That is what did Salman Rushdie did, and for his daring, he faced years of solitude, ostracism, and death threats--and in the heart of Europe no less. Or compose a documentary film, as did the often obnoxious Theo Van Gogh, and you may well have your throat cut in "liberal" Holland. Or better yet, sketch a simple cartoon in postmodern Denmark of legendary easy tolerance, and then go into hiding to save yourself from the gruesome fate of a Van Gogh. Or quote an ancient treatise, as did Pope Benedict, and then learn that all of Christendom may come under assault, and even the magnificent stones of the Vatican may offer no refuge--although their costumed Swiss Guard would prove a better bulwark than the European police. Or write a book critical of Islam, and then go into hiding in fear of your life, as did French philosophy teacher Robert Redeker.

And we need not only speak of threats to free speech, but also the tangible rewards from a terrified West to the agents of such repression. Note the recent honorary degree given to former Iranian President, Mohammad Khatami, whose regime has killed and silenced so many, and who himself is under investigation by the Argentine government for his role in sponsoring Hezbollah killers to murder dozens of Jewish innocents in Buenos Aires.

Read the rest. And don't miss the rest of the Orson Scott Card podcast. You'll hear many of the themes that we've addressed in various posts over the years here repeated and amplified brilliantly by Card, who sounds like a terrific interviewee.

Update: In regards to the above YouTube clip, which I found the other day on the Pajamas homepage, Libertas writes, "Hey, Hollywood, Over Here…":

We’re coming up on a new year and I’m sure you’re all set to shoot your 1,008th film about American imperialism, your 257th film about AIDS, your 912th film about Southern bigotry, and your 100,632nd film about the Hollywood blacklist. And I don’t want to stop you, but how about telling this story about Iran hanging 4,000 people only because they’re gay? I’m sure you’re buried under development ideas about the plight of gays and lesbians not being able to marry in a country happy to offer civil unions, but in the country lead by a man Mike Wallace found charming they’re actually hanging people for being gay.

Why should Hollywood take a chance on an untested plot like that? Especially when Hollywood's longstanding obsessions are still burning up the box office.

No, that wasn't the catch phrase from Buckaroo Bonzai. Tim Blair explores the "HOT! Er, I mean, warm. Er, climate changed" pinup calendar released into the environment by the self-proclaimed “ecobabes” of California's Sonoma County.

Update: "Pirelli's position as the babes calendar is not under threat here."

In Opinion Journal, Om Malick explores the importance of software platforms:

A couple of years ago, in the days before YouTube, a short video clip spread like wildfire on the Internet. It showed the fourth richest man on the planet, Steve Ballmer, the chief executive of Microsoft, doing a crazy jig onstage at a conference, screaming "developers, developers, developers." Truer words have never been spoken--or repeated. Without "developers," Microsoft would not possess its desktop monopoly or billions of dollars in profits.

Those developers are the little platoons of software programmers and product-inventors who turn operating systems (like Microsoft's Windows), Internet browsers (Firefox), game devices (PlayStation) and much else into something more than themselves--into "platforms" upon which a whole economic ecosystem rests. It is impossible to imagine Dell Computer's success, or that of Intuit Corp. or even Electronic Arts (the videogame company) without the platform that Windows constructed with the help, so to speak, of Microsoft. Windows is but one example of many software engines that have propelled mega-billion-dollar industries and created wealth beyond compare. Just as the internal combustion engine led to the formation of the modern automobile industry and ended up driving so much else in the economy (think only of steel and gasoline), invisible engines are now powering the vast postindustrial economies in which we live and work.

Such is the persuasive thesis of "Invisible Engines," by David S. Evans, Andrei Hagiu and Richard Schmalensee. The authors document the rise of platforms, outline the strategies by which they are developed and marketed, and offer little-known details about popular devices--Sony's PlayStation, Apple's iPod, Palm Treo--that have become essential aspects of our modern lives.

No wonder the American left and the EU want/wanted to topple Microsoft and long for the 1950s--or at least the 1970s, when things were so much simpler at the tail end of the industrial revolution rather than its information-based demassified successor.

Mickey Kaus has some thoughts on lazy journalism:

Many analysts say that "analysts say" pieces are the laziest form of journalism, because the "analysts" usually just happen to say what the journalist himself would say if the rules of journalism permitted him to do so without putting the opinions in the mouths of "analysts." Meanwhile, analysts who might say something else get ignored. But at least "analysts say" pieces, analysts say, should quote some analysts saying the things the analysts are supposed to have said. Otherwise the impression is overhwelming that the journalist who wrote the thing is just spouting off. According to observers.

Indeed, as some say in the Blogosphere.

Allah writes, "Fox News just broke in to say that [Alcee] Hastings has confirmed he won’t lead" the House Intelligence Committee. The Professor writes, "That's bad news for the GOP, but good news for the Democrats, and the country".

We're still in the preseason, but that's O for 2 for Speaker-to-be-Pelosi, incidentally.

Update: In a post titled with a variation of Mickey Kaus's great "Alcee Ya!" pun, Paul Mirengoff of Power Line writes, "Pelosi reportedly is still resolved to deny the chair to her adversary Rep. Jane Harman, who was in line for the position and (for a Democrat) would not have been a bad choice. So Pelosi still has an interesting decision to make."

Meanwhile, Alcee has his "You won't have Nixon to kick around any more" moment.

Back in my college days, I would have signed up for this course in an Old Milwaukee second. Cathy Young writes:

Maybe the next frontier in the academic battle against all varieties of oppression should be "drunk studies." Why not an academic program championing the idea that "alcohol abuse" is an artificial construct based on the mainstream culture's oppressive notions of what constitutes appropriate and inappropriate consumption of alcohol? "Drunk studies" could tell us that the stigmatization of drunkenness stems from the Western valorization of such dubious values as self-control, rationality, and obedience to social norms, and reflects a pernicious fear of rebellion against inhibitions and authority. Of course, it would also question conventional wisdom -- supposedly based on scientific evidence, but really rooted in anti-drunk bias -- about the deleterious health consequences of alcohol abuse and the dangers of drunk driving. After all, the goal of "drunk studies" would be to empower drunks!

Glenn Reynolds suggests the perfect professor to helm the course; Ann Althouse has some thoughts on the just-as-ludicrous actual course that inspired Young's proposal.

Incidentally, if the courses that Young and Althouse discuss ever got together for a chat, this would have to be the food of choice at the interdepartmental meetings!

James Lileks, a resident of the Minneapolis area, has an exceptionally good idea for a story:

Back to work now; more tomorrow, including a discussion of the piece in the local paper about the background of that fellow who was kicked off the plane last week. I mean, given the questions and peculiarities of some of his associations, I am certain a full accounting is forthcoming.

Because I can’t see any reason why such a piece wouldn’t be written.

Ergo, I’m certain it’s en route.

Quite certain.

Absolutely dead-bang positive.

Really. I also expect that a reporter will have called the hotel where the conference took place, found out who was in the adjacent room, contacted a representative of that organization, asked for a recap of what they heard, and ran the assessment past a newly prominent local politician who was in attendance to see if it squared with his recollection. Said politician would also be asked about the deplaned imam’s connections, regardless of whether this seemed like recrudescent Islamophobia, because these are crucial issues –

Sorry. Got the vapors for a moment. All better now.

It's truly sad when an individual citizen of a major metropolitan area can't get the attention of anyone at the apparently extremely impersonal major metropolitan newspaper that services his area, and is forced to write these things on his blog. But then, these local Minneapolis citizens also couldn't attract the attention of that same newspaper either, despite some chance encounters a few years back with at least one of its columnists.

I'm sure it's all just a coincidence, mere synchronicity, as is the original story itself, of course.

The National Football League has long been known as a copycat league. When one team has enormous success, every aspect of its program is scrutinized by other NFL teams to see what worked, and what can be adapted to level the playing field.

After the 1985 Chicago Bears went 15-1 in the regular season and blew out the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XX, their ultimate team weapon was exposed by several other teams in the late 1980s, who would utilize it themselves for its talismanic powers:

Behold! The really, really, really cheesy team rap video.

WARNING: The management of Ed Driscoll.com, Pajamas Media, the National Football League, Ditka's Steakhouse, and Refrigerator Perry are in no way responsible for the psychic damage that clicking on the above link and watching all three videos back to back can potentially cause. Proceed at your own risk!

In Iraq that is. Is the name Jamil Hussein about to join Adnan Hajj in the ranks of journalistic infamy bogosity? Gateway Pundit notes that AP has relied on him "at least 10 times since April of this year".

Meanwhile, Allah writes, "See-Dubya wants to know (a) who is Qais al-Bashir and (b) why is his byline on (almost) every AP story that quotes phony police captain Jamil Hussein?"

The Dallas Cowboys cut Mike Vanderjagt today, who is either "the most accurate kicker in NFL history", if you ask him, or "that idiot kicker", if you ask former teammate Peyton Manning. They're replacing him with Martin Gramatica, who's had his own cases of the yips in recent years.

The Cowboys enter the Meadowlands, Bill Parcells' old stomping grounds this Sunday, to play the New York Giants, which is known--not the least of which, to Parcells--as a temperamental location for kickers late in the season.

James Taranto explores the Mark Steyn/Ralph Peters smackdown yesterday and writes, "Think about this: Peters is predicting a rebirth of European fascism, possibly including genocide--and he's the optimist of this pair".

"Poll: Kerry Ranks Low With Voters". Who knew?!

In more serious Election 2008 news, Jim Geraghty writes:

Over in the New York Sun, I've started a new feature, a weekly or so update on the early goings-on in the 2008 presidential race. Yes, early as it seems, the strategic moves and jockeying have begun already, and there is news to cover.

Update: More astonishing news just in, here.

Power Line's Scott Johnson has the perfect location to hold the meetings, if America wants to negotiate with Iran and Syria.

Jonah Goldberg compares troop morale in Vietnam and Iraq and writes:

There are lots of stories, many heartbreaking, about family hardships, soldiers missing their homes, battle stress and the like. But they don't "feel" like stories coming from another Vietnam. Lord knows the press is looking for these kinds of stories. And yet we do hear a lot from troops about how they want to see this through and how they don't want this to be another Vietnam (i.e. they don't want to see America turn its back on the Iraqis the way it did on the South Vietnamese). Maybe I'm missing something(s), but as far as dogs that don't bark go, this is a pretty big dog.

Meanwhile, the New York Times has advice for Senator Kerry--or something like that.

(For an earlier media dog that didn't bark, click here.)

Update: Elsewhere, Patterico looks at the sources that Big Media uses for its Iraq stories and writes, "It’s very sobering to realize that much of the news coming out of Iraq is completely unreliable".

Another Update: Charles Johnson writes:

Curt at Flopping Aces has received confirmation from CENTCOM that “Iraqi police Capt. Jamil Hussein,” cited as a source (often the only source) in a long string of media articles about murders and atrocities in Iraq (including the recent report of 6 people burned alive), is not a police officer, nor is he employed by Iraq’s Interior Ministry.

Paging Mr. Hajj, Mr. Adnan Hajj to the white courtesy phone, please.

Betsy Newmark writes:

Jonathan Chait, who first came to many people's attention by writing about all the ways he hated George W. Bush, now comes out in the Los Angeles Times with the argument that Iraq is such a mess right now that we should just bring back Saddam Hussein and have him impose order. Sure, he's a murderous dictator and all, but he'd know how to stop all the killing in Iraq.

It's usually a safe bet that the Times of both coasts will back The Man With The Mustache.

Update: Related thoughts here and here, found via The Anchoress.

Another Update: Orrin Judd retorts, "White South Africa was safer too", but I'm not sure if that would phase the L.A. Times all that much. This is a paper which only last year was singing the praises of North Korea, after all.

And The Road To Utopia was pulled from theaters some time in 1946. But, as Michael Barone writes, all of the "Progressive" economic plans of the incoming Democrat-controlled Congress head Back To The Future. Whether the final destination is Europe of the 1970s, or the American "Rust Belt" economy of Ike and Truman's years is what's being debated.

But as Barone writes, there is a Third Way (to coin a phrase) available to them:

One interesting proposal by [Clinton aide Gene Sperling] is for a "universal 401(k)," which would give all workers tax-sheltered savings accounts, funded by employers and employees. One option is to give low earners tax credits, perhaps even refundable tax credits, for their contributions to the accounts. Over time, this would increase low earners' wealth accumulation -- progressive redistribution. But it would also tend to transfer funds from the federal treasury to individuals, from the public sector to the private sector -- not the direction Democrats usually want to go.

It's a proposal that looks a lot like the Social Security individual investment accounts George W. Bush called for, and Democrats scorned. It would be ironic if this turns out to be the major progressive achievement of this Democratic Congress.

And it may just be the most viable.

Update: Rowan Callick explores how the election is playing overseas.

Tammy Bruce spots the "Most Idiotic, Contradictory Headline of the Day"; meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt explores the mindset of those who write them.

The Independent's Mark Hooper writes:

It's been an extraordinary few months for Hollywood's A-list actors: embarrassing outbursts, drunken tirades and - here's the real issue - their films tanking spectacularly at the box office. Are we witnessing the last generation of true movie stars?

* * *

The isolated incidents with major stars hint at a much larger truth: the business of movie-making is undergoing a major shift, one that will be felt a long way from California. The reality is stark and impossible to ignore. Box-office figures are down: the returns from 2005 - due to high-profile flops such as The Island and Kingdom of Heaven - were the lowest for 15 years. DVD sales, so lucrative during the past few (omega) years, have flattened. Piracy is rampant: according to industry experts, illegal copying now accounts for $1.3bn annually in lost revenue in the US alone. All the while, the stars want more money for their performances. In 1995, the average cost of making and marketing a movie was $54.1m; by last year, it had spiralled to $96.2m.

* * *

So, what does this mean for the stars? Film magazine Premiere recently claimed that we are witnessing the demise of "the last unironic movie-star generation".(omega) Certainly, Russell Crowe and the rest had better get used to considerably deflated salaries. In another high-profile case, 20th Century Fox and Universal clashed with the mighty Peter Jackson, Oscar-winning director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, over wage demands - the Jackson-produced Halo, based on the video game of the same name, has since been halted.

At this point, do I even need to say it?

In the middle of the Anchoress's extensive highlights of weekend Blogospheric action, she has a particularly good round-up of posts bringing readers up to speed on Mitt Romney. She writes that Romney is "going to have a long row to hoe if he is serious about a bid for the White House", and I agree--he will:

Ann Althouse is giving Andrew Sullivan a dressing down and she’s staying on the subject with a second post. I think this is very interesting and bears watching. Ann Althouse is demonstrating for all the world to see, what a classical liberal looks like. She reads Sullivan’s disappointing thrust on Mitt Romney’s religion, and she notes the unsurprising secondary parries in the press, and she is properly angry that a man’s religion is clearly being used to cast suspicion and doubt upon both his motives and his morals.

Once upon a time, the people who identified themselves as liberals would get upset to see someone attacked for their religion. Now, the people who call themselves liberal (or who staunchly identify themselves as conservatives, although with a clear leftist bent) seem to be embracing a very different mindset. It’s time to either take back the world “liberal” or find a way to distinguis “classical liberals” from the pack. I like Althouse’s righteous anger here - and her warnings about the very dangerous game that is being played with religion by people who should know better - and urge you to read what she is saying, even though I am not yet on board with Mitt Romney.

And btw, Betsy Newmark predicted all this, (and so did I) a long while back. We predicted this behavior from the press, and others. Mitt’s going to have a long row to hoe if he is serious about a bid for the WH. Meanwhile read the link to Betsy, who wrote smart about Mitt’s future trials and tribulations back in 2005.

Instapundit notes - quite rightly - that Mormon Harry Reid does not have to endure all this scrutiny…basically because he is a Democrat and therefore must be above reproach, with no dubious ambitions at his core.

Sullivan also once understood media double standards. But that was an awfully long time ago.

Michael Richards' long, slow road to show-biz redemption continues with an entirely fictitious and satiric appearance on Chris Macaca's, err Chris Matthews' Hardball.

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

Update: Back in the real world, Richards continues to make the media rounds, this time with Jesse Jackson. Note though, there are no references in the AP piece to Jackson's own gaffes.

Another Update: Dubbing it "a cultural moment to hang above America’s fireplace", Hot Air has a brief audio clip of Richards' appearance on Jackson's show.

The Chicago Tribune notes, "Stores revert to 'Merry Christmas'--Wal-Mart leads way, backing off from 'happy holidays'".

That's great to see, and it's a direct response to the amount of complaints that filtered up through the Blogosphere and online forums last year. It's also further proof of something that Jonah Goldberg wrote last year, which the midterms confirmed:

Galloping toward the center is nothing new in American politics. The parties have always regressed to the mean. The center of gravity is in the, uh, center. What's changed is that the center has — finally — been moving an eensy bit to the right.

And perhaps it's also a small sign that the 1970s might be slowly--ever, ever so slowly--be receding into the distance.

Hopefully many more brick and mortar chains will follow suit. As I wrote last year, there's absolutely no excuse for any large Internet retailer for not doing this, of course.

Update: Mary Katharine Ham spots another difference between Christmas retailing this year and last.

The Anchoress links to an essay by CBS's Dick Meyer titled "Land Of The Fake" and adds:

Why are we so willing to endure fakery that has become so commonplace it is predictable? Why do we reward politicians for it? (Did anyone really believe Pelosi when she said “Impeachment is off the table?” Then why do so many pretend to?) Why do we embrace it within ourselves, body and soul? What is the root cause of our willingness to surround ourselves with it? Some will say “it began with the first cult which became the first religion - that fakery doomed us to this day.” Others might suggest that the “damn the truth, print this headline” Pravda mindset that has impacted the whole world in one way or another has set the stage for our current acquiescence into the land of make-believe and spin. Some, of course, will blame the Clintons. Everyone else will blame Bush, who, standing atop a pile of rubble or holding the shield of a fallen cop before a joint session of congress - may have (along with Rudy Giuliani) managed the last authentic moments in our political memory.

A year and a half ago, I explored very similar territory in a piece for The New Partisan titled "M For Fake", inspired by a review DVD of Orson Welles' last movie, F For Fake. In the late 1930s, Welles was a man who began his ascension to superstardom when he gave America the first fake radio news broadcast that many believed to be accurate. Today, at the dawn of the 21st century, even before Meyer's former CBS colleagues descent into their own fakery, Blogospheric debunking of the mainstream media's excesses has become a 24 hour activity.

Television news rooms in particular love fakes: I noticed last week while clicking channels in my South Jersey hotel room that CNN trotted out Al Sharpton to comment on Michael Richards' on-stage meltdown--despite the fact that Sharpton is staggeringly damaged goods himself on the issue of racial taunting. The legacy media had a complete case of amnesia when John Kerry ran for the White House of his early '70s Winter Soldier radical chic past. Cindy Sheehan's lie that President Bush never met with her after her son was killed was ignored by virtually all journalists once she began camping out in Crawford in August of 2005, because it would damage her claim to Absolute Moral Authority, to borrow Maureen Dowd's now infamous phrase. And, as The Anchoress herself notes, journalists tossed Bill Clinton's attacks on Saddam Hussein (and their own as well) right down the Memory Hole even before Saddam was captured hiding in a hole of his own.

Perhaps the ultimate example of media fakery leading to media accolades is Michael Moore. Moore's chicanery in the editing room--widely documented at the start of his career--is completely ignored by today's left. As Mark Steyn reminds us in the introduction to his reprint of his 2002 review of Bowling For Columbine, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Moore along with Oliver Stone, were dubbed "well-known cranks, regarded with considerable distaste even on the Left" by Slate's Jacob Weisberg.

Less than three years later, Senator Bob Graham (D-FL) told The New York Times "There might be half the Democratic Senate here,'' at the Washington premiere of Fahrenheit 9/11. Shortly thereafter, Moore was sitting next to Jimmy Carter in Carter's luxury box at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. (And incidentally, Stone's reputation--at least amongst the left in Hollywood boardrooms--was itself sufficiently revived a year later: Paramount's brass pegged him to helm World Trade Center and its $63 million production budget).

I don't think he knowingly intended to do so, but seven decades ago, Welles set a pattern for obtaining media stardom: pull a stunt so outrageous in its fakery that it captures the media's attention--and then do everything you can to stay in the media's eye. Because they'll forget (or ignore) how you got yourself onto the map long before the general public does.

Libertas askes, "Is there anyone in Hollywood with the moral courage to cry, 'What about the Iraqi people?'" and finds one man willing to make a difference: George Clooney.

In 1999, at least:

Of all people, George Clooney starred in a film called Three Kings, that savagely criticized the tragic consequences of Bush I encouraging the Iraqi people to revolt against Saddam after the Gulf War - but then doing nothing to help them. What changed? Are the Iraqs less human today? In less peril? And how in seven years did abandoning the Iraqis suddenly become okay to the liberal establishment? Who’s the liberal now, George? Or, has ‘liberal’ devolved into opposing anything a conservative stands for even at the cost of innocent life?

It would be very tempting to respond with a terse "yes", but that wouldn't be quite accurate. But there's a reason, of course, why Joe Lieberman found it necessary to run as an independent this year, as Democrats "progressed" further and further to the left of mid-century Truman/JFK/LBJ-style moderate liberalism.

On paper at least, the Democrats did tack a bit back towards the center with the help of such candidates as Webb, Schuler, pro-lifer Bob Casey, Jr., along with Lieberman’s decisive win. But it's too early to tell if they'll make any difference at all in the philosophy of the party as a whole, or if they were, as one commentator recently dubbed them, crash test dummies--mere cannon fodder on the way back to future.

As Glenn Reynolds writes, "If you're in London, Jackie Danicki could use your help with a photo identification".

Tim Blair waits until halfway through an essay on the glowing, err, growing demand for nuclear reactors, and writes:

Hey, we're 400 words gone here and still no mention of Chernobyl.

For nuclear energy opponents, the Chernobyl meltdown is an argument ender - who could possibly argue that nuclear energy is safe following the radiation-caused deaths of so many people?

(Not so many as you'd think, by the way - according to the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, only 50 deaths can be directly attributed to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.)

Of course, Chernobyl was more an example of Soviet blundering than of nuclear dangers.

If we relied on Soviet-era data as a general safety guide, we'd probably be forced to outlaw flight.

Aeroflot wasn't exactly a typical example of a modern airline. Between 1953 and 1994 the Soviet national carrier managed to kill 6895 people in 127 accidents.

If you've got the risk-taking gene, you won't get off on living next door to a Western nuclear reactor; you'll get off by getting on an Aeroflot Tupolev Tu-154, scheduled to arrive nose-first in the frozen dirt outside Moscow.

Please enjoy the terrified screams of your fellow passengers.

Never mind nuclear power - communism turns even simple construction work into a festival of blood.

When Australian racing driver Glenn Seton visited the new Formula One track built a few years ago in Shanghai, he was alarmed by the stories he kept hearing of how many workers had been killed during its construction.

Many more, it goes without saying, than were killed at Chernobyl. If Chernobyl is a warning regarding nuclear energy, why isn't Shanghai a warning not to build grandstands and chicanes?

Well, it probably is, for someone like former Vice President Gore, who view the internal combustion engine as merely one cog in a new Final Solution, after having spent the bulk of the 1990s riding behind a fleet of black Secret Service Suburbans inside his own White House limo.

As for the rest of us who aren't immediately horrified by the thought of nuclear power's increasingly viable future, don't miss this recent Popular Mechanics article on the topic.

Update: Steven Den Beste emails:

Admiral Rickover was given a tour of a Soviet nuclear submarine. He happened to be carrying a film dosimeter. Later when it was developed it showed that he'd been exposed to more radiation during that brief tour than he had been in all the years he led the American nuclear submarine program.

Meanwhile, Jim Geraghty writes that the more things change in Russia, the more they stay the same.

Scott Johnson of Power Line looks at a Clinton-style apology "for offenses he had not committed to those who had not suffered them" from Dartmouth's athletic director concerning the--gasp!--American Indian name of another(!) college's hockey team, and writes:

Dartmouth has now managed to distinguish itself on the national stage for its political correctness. Adjusted for degree of difficulty, this is an almost unbelievable accomplishment. Surely some kind of award is in order.

Fortunately, there is one.

As someone recently said about the midterms, "The Republicans lost and the Democrats won for the same reason--they distanced themselves from their base. "

Recent comments strongly suggest that the Democrats would be wise to keep that distance.

In his review of Borat, Jonah Goldberg writes:

Cohen undoubtedly shot thousands of hours of footage, and he picked the funniest bits, not the most representative ones. Even so, as Christopher Hitchens noted recently in Slate, most of the Americans — save for some cranky feminists — are polite to a fault with Borat. One southern lady takes her guest to the bathroom to explain how to use the toilet and toilet paper — only after Borat has brought a plastic bag full of what those tools are intended to deal with. Do we really believe the French would be even more accommodating?

Meanwhile, Borat’s more conservative defenders hail the film’s allegedly implicit critique of political correctness. But this is a hard case to make when Borat’s victims are almost all demons in the politically correct pantheon (Christians, rednecks, et al.). Borat never visits, say, Muslims who might sincerely return Borat’s high-fives for Jew hatred.

Betsy Newmark and Charles Krauthammer agree:

As Krauthammer writes, with rising numbers of anti-Semitic violence in Europe and Middle Eastern leaders like Ahmadinejad openly calling for the end of Israel, do we really see the seeds of a new Holocaust coming from barflies in Arizona.

In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez says that the "descendants of the same ones that crucified Christ" have "taken possession of all the wealth in the world." Just this month, Tehran hosted an international festival of Holocaust cartoons featuring enough hooked noses and horns to give Goebbels a posthumous smile. Throughout the Islamic world, newspapers and television, schoolbooks and sermons are filled with the most vile anti-Semitism.

Baron Cohen could easily have found what he seeks closer to home. He is, after all, from Europe, where synagogues are torched and cemeteries desecrated in a revival of anti-Semitism -- not "indifference" to but active -- unseen since the Holocaust. Where a Jew is singled out for torture and death by French-African thugs. Where a leading Norwegian intellectual -- et tu, Norway? -- mocks "God's Chosen People" ("We laugh at this people's capriciousness and weep at its misdeeds") and calls for the destruction of Israel, the "state founded . . . on the ruins of an archaic national and warlike religion."

Yes, but that would require an artist truly willing to make a statement, instead of being trapped, in his own way, by the paralyzing hand of political correctness.

As God is my witness...

(Via another radio institution from Ohio.)

Update: More Thanksgiving multimedia fun, here.

It's a race to the bottom in a special NASCAR HamNation!

One recent trend in the music software industry is the creation of development blogs, which, at their best, allow for interactivity with readers, describe new features of an upcoming product, and of course, build promotional interest before its launch.

Two recent development blogs have been for TC-Helicon's Harmony4 plug-in, which we reviewed in a lengthy post that was a recent Blogcritics' Editors' Pick of the Week, and Cakewalk's upcoming Project5 Version 2.5. We discussed an earlier version of Project5, here.

Cakewalk is also promoting their products via YouTube, such as this explanation of their Sonar recording program's ability to work with the 64-bit version of Windows, and its benefits:

As Hugh Hewitt discussed a couple of years ago in Blog, there's no reason why any industry couldn't adopt either of these promotional ideas to introduce new products to the marketplace--and there's no doubt, smarter companies will increasingly be doing just that.

David Brooks believes that the era of The Big Book that shapes discussion about society and where it's going is no more. Nick Schulz disagrees, and over at TCS Daily, counters with a list of recent books that have shaped the national conversation--including one by Brooks whose meme was so significant, we named a whole category after it.

I truly appreciate the kind words of Hugh Hewitt, who wrote on Tuesday:

New media start-ups looking for new media talent to steal would be well advised to start with Ed Driscoll, who has the best Michael Richards' round-up here.

Hugh, the check's in the mail, but I do want to mention that there's a boatload of traditional, long-form, dead tree writing in the past, present and future, besides the blog, podcast, and online stuff.

But those new media start-ups looking for talent to steal--or at least commission--are welcome to email, by clicking here.

Found via The Corner, Mick LaSalle of The San Francisco Chronicle has an interesting list of who has been the coolest man in the world over the last 70 years or so. Strangely enough he includes Keith Olbermann on his list. Maybe it's just me, but a barrage of spittle-flecked submoronic Godwin's Law violating monologues seems to violate all reasonable definitions of coolness, but other than that, it's an interesting, if frustrating list. I'd add the following names to it:

1959: Cary Grant, after making his most iconic film, North By Northwest, and still the very definition of suave at age 55.

1960: Miles Davis, who not only looked ultra-cool in his sharp Italian suits, but who ushered in The Birth of the Cool in the early 1950s, and was making his most enduring music as the 1950s ended: Porgy & Bess, Kind of Blue, and Sketches of Spain.

1964: Sean Connery at the height of Bondmania. What more need be said?

1968: Steve McQueen at the height of his stardom--the personification of cool.

1969: Joe Namath. He guaranteed it--and with the Jets' win brought instant parity between the upstart AFL and old school NFL. But he traded his coolness in on pantyhose and a motorcycle movie with Ann Margaret.

1972: Robert Evans, the man who pulled the strings behind The Godfather, from commissioning Mario Puzo to write the book for Paramount in the late 1960s, to hiring Francis Ford Coppola to direct the movie. Married to Ali MacGraw (until a year later, when she ran off with McQueen), and with enough clout--and chutzpah--to ask Henry Kissinger to stop by the Godfather premiere party for a photo-op on his way out of the country to negotiate the Vietnam War peace talks. And get it.

1973: Jimmy Page, whose band was both selling more concert tickets than the Rolling Stones, and who could--for a time--outplay most rock guitarists and look the coolest doing it. Like Evans and Miles, his time at the height of cool was brief, and drugs help would shorten each man's reign.

Needless to say, LaSalle's list is very incomplete. But it's a reasonable start.

Thomas Sowell writes, "This country needs to be able to draw on its best people from every walk of life and from every part of the political spectrum. But the nation is not going to get them if going to Washington means seeing the honorable reputation of a lifetime dragged through the mud just because someone disagrees with you on a political issue":

But the nation is not going to get them if going to Washington means seeing the honorable reputation of a lifetime dragged through the mud just because someone disagrees with you on a political issue.

Our confirmation hearings for federal judges have become a circus and a disgrace. Nominees who have fought for civil rights, even in the days when that was a risky thing to do in the South, have been pictured as "racists" just as a political ploy to keep them from being confirmed.

Washington has become a political meat grinder where character assassination is standard procedure. Clever and glib people say "If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen." But the far larger question is whether the country can afford to repel people who are desperately needed but who may have too much self-respect to let political pygmies smear their character.

We need to attract allies abroad as well as Americans at home. Yet too many in the media are as ready to trash our allies as they are to trash Americans whose politics they don't like. It is a great game to some. But it is a dangerous game to play when the country is facing unprecedented threats.

Washington, and by extension, the mainstream media, is a world of endless payback for past aggressions, and the cynicism of those who play the game most aggressively increases exponentially daily. If 9/11 and Saddam Hussein couldn't stop that cycle, I don't know what can.

Altman was 81, and while he was an innovative director who pushed the overlapping dialogue technique that Orson Welles helped pioneer in Citizen Kane to new heights by combining it with improvisation, his talent came with a lot of baggage, as I wrote in a long post at the start of the year.

A.K.A., the Completion Backwards Principle: Neo-Neocon has some thoughts on Charlie Rangel's latest call to bring back the draft.

In an article for The American, his own dramatically retooled magazine for the American Enterprise Institute, publisher James K. Glassman writes of James Webb, "Billed as a moderate, the new Virginia senator sounds more like an old-school leftist":

Webb was widely portrayed as a centrist in a race in a state that has voted Republican in every presidential election since 1964. But such terms--left, center, right--mean less and less. Virginia Postrel, in her superb 1998 book The Future and Its Enemies, distinguished between dynamists, who, with realism and enthusiasm, welcome the opportunities of a new world of technology and global exchange, and advocates of stasis, like Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan, who fear and rail against the changes.  Writing in the journal under the headline "Class Struggle," Webb reveals himself to be a member of the latter group--a chip-on-the-shoulder populist whose framework of analysis is an obsession with class and power relationships.

Or as Jacob Weisberg recently dubbed them, "The Lou Dobbs Democrats".

Read the rest of Glassman's essay.

We've frequently referred to the Mobius Loop that is the late 1960s and early 1970s. When it will end, no man can say. But in retrospect, this has to be where it begins.

Glenn Reynolds recommends a couple of hardware compressors for pumping up the volume of podcasts, and while those are both admirable products, I'd suggest a more software-based solution for PC-based recording: a mastering plug-in with a loudness maximizer, and first class noise reduction software.

The latter is, arguably, even more important than a compressor or the mastering software: I've heard a number of noisy podcasts, and in the months I've been doing the Pajamas Blog Week In Review podcast, I've done everything I can to tame that noise, which is inherent in telephone recordings. The Soundsoap Pro software samples the background noise of a recording, then filters it, and adds a noise gate to further reduce ambient sounds (such as hiss, hum, and ground loops) between audio. It's not going to make a telephone sound like a $3,000 condenser microphone, but it will go far towards enhancing the quality of any recording.

Bob Owens writes that it's deju vu all over again in the War On Terror.

Question: now that Michael Richards has resorted to drastic measures to jumpstart his flagging career, will he be rewarded as other Hollywood stars have been? A confessional mea culpa to Oprah or Diane Sawyer? A heavily promoted movie distributed by Disney? A recording contract? Or merely a talk show on HBO or MSNBC?

While past performance is no guarantee of future results, based on seemingly accepted Hollywood standards, the (show business) world is his oyster.

Update: Career resuscitation begins--and as The Malcontent writes:

And then, shortly after the interview, I saw an ad for Mel Gibson's Apocalypto on television for the first time.

Well played, Gibson. Very well played, indeed.

Apropos of nothing, for someone who is apparently as damaged goods as Gibson is these days, I spotted numerous billboards for Apocalypto driving through Philadelphia yesterday.

Another Update: Ann Althouse writes:

Coincidentally, just last night I happened to catch the scene from the movie "Lenny" where Lenny Bruce (played by Dustin Hoffman) spouts racist epithets directly at people in his audience before mellowing into an explanation about how if we'd only use these words all the time they'd lose their force. Richards, however, never mellows... and Bruce's theory was a new theory when he tested it out, not a long-argued, tried, and failed one.

Ann adds that "The stupidest part of Richards' performance" on Letterman "was when he shifted from admitting to his own rage to talking about needing to get to the bottom of rage generally, including the rage that takes nations to war".

Read the whole thing, as they say in Tom's Diner.

At least, presumably, from the point of view of the newspapers themselves: Power Line asks, "Is Your Newspaper America's Worst?"

Not surprisingly, there are lots of nominees.

Mark Steyn writes that Condi Rice recently told Cal Thomas that she thinks that the average Palestinian is an educated, peaceful chap looking to better himself through higher education. As Steyn writes, "Cal Thomas asked a shrewd followup: 'Do you think this or do you know this?'"

Rice replied twice to Thomas, "I think I know it":

So many of our present woes are due to thinking we know things. In the case of Palestine, however, it requires an almost absurd suspension of disbelief. When Condi Rice speaks of an "educated population" with a "culture of civil society," I'm sure we've all met Palestinians like that, in Montreal and Los Angeles and London--everywhere except Palestine. In Gaza, as I note in my book, the median age of the population is 15.8 years. Count back 15.8 years and you come to early 1991. In other words, a huge swathe of the population have spent their entire life in the depraved death cult of the post-Oslo Arafatist-Hamas squat. Not much of a "culture of civil society" there. Not much evidence that many of them "just want a better life." Au contraire, given the choice between "a better life" and blowing up Jews, quite a big chunk of the teenage and twentysomething males in Gaza would regard the latter as a lot more fun.

How could a smart woman like Dr. Rice be so misled on this point? No doubt she's seen all those Palestinian spokespersons--Saeb Erekat, Hanan Ashrawi--who've filled up the CNN and BBC airwaves decade in, decade out. No doubt she's met many soft-spoken "Palestinian intellectuals"--the territories' principal export, one might easily believe, given from the number who've turned up in CBC interview chairs over the years. But they don't speak for their people.

A few months after 9/11, I visited the Muslim slums of France. They're ugly dehumanizing places, and obviously I would rather have been hosting Steyn One on One with Jacques Chirac at the Elysée Palace. But in the last four-and-a-half years those alienated anonymous "youths" (as the papers refer to them) have been a central fact of French life--whether lobbing Molotov cocktails into police stations or torching buses and leaving passengers with third-degree burns. That's the reality. And everything Chirac and de Villepin and even Sarkozy have proposed has been a delusion: like Condi Rice, they thought that they knew. But the rioting youths knew better.

As Steyn concludes, "The problem is not a lack of leadership, but the leadership's lack of followers".

Driving around Philadelphia yesterday, KYW news radio (1060 AM) had two primary lead stories at the top of each half hour report around 5:00 and 6:00 PM: Donovan McNabb's season-ending injury, and Charlie Rangel's more-or-less annual going nowhere draft proposal. And on CNN's Headline News right now, this seems to be the dominant story.

Normally, journalism's silly season is in late August. But it looks like it's full force on the weekend before Thanksgiving. And while that doesn't speak kindly of Big Media or what it thinks its audience wants, there is a silver lining to it all, of course.

Update: Or as K-Lo puts it, "You Know It's Thanksgiving Week When In 2006, Seinfeld's Kramer gets a top Drudge link."

Another Update: Tammy Bruce adds:

Rangel is using the Kerry theory about our military--it's a bunch of poor, stupid people who have no other choice in life. He, like Kerry, simply cannot grasp the fact that you have raised children who love this country, that we have young people who join up because they care about this nation and want to serve. That notion is so foreign to the Left Elite they don't even consider it. The first lesson to draw from this is Kerry's attitude about our troops does indeed reflect the Dem Elite attitude in general.

Tom Maguire wrote that Kerry himself actually claimed that staying incognito after his infamous gaffe was the key to the Democrats' victory in 2006. And certainly their keeping Rangel under wraps as much as possible until after the election was wise as well.

George Will writes that liberal Republican-In-Name Only Mike Bloomberg may be seriously considering running for the White House, and has a track record that might warrant consideration:

The unemployment rate (4.1 percent) is the lowest on record, and the city's credit rating is at the highest level ever. With crime down 20 percent since Bloomberg took office -- after a 57 percent reduction during the Giuliani years -- the FBI rates this as the nation's safest large city, which is one reason for the sharp increase in applications to Columbia University and New York University. Welfare caseloads, which numbered 1.1 million a decade ago, are fewer than 400,000. In 2005, the percentage of high school students graduating on time was the highest since the city began keeping that statistic in 1986. Bloomberg credits his crusade against smoking with the decline in heart attacks that has helped make the life expectancy of city residents higher than that of the rest of the nation.

But why would voters pick Mike when they can choose the man who actually did revitalize Manhattan?

Robert Bidinotto writes that Casino Royale does "for 007 what 'Batman Begins' recently did so brilliantly for that superhero".

That's great to hear--and long, long overdue.

Richard Miniter (who was superb on this week's Blog Week In Review), takes the pulse of the GOP.

Meanwhile, Condi Rice sounds like she's caught a bad case of State Department-itis.

(Sorry for the hit & run, telegraph style posts. I'm in the San Jose American Airliness Admiral's Club, getting ready to visit family in New Jersey for Thanksgiving.)

"CBS Editorial: Midterm Election Losses A GOP Scheme To Elect Bush 41 In 2008".

More conspiracy silliness debunked here: "Diebold is Stealing an Election! Wait, What? It's Not Diebold, You Say?"

Milton Friedman: tennis hustler.

In a post yesterday, I noted that we can't count out the MSM and its power. But the new media is making remarkable strides. In the latest Blog Week In Review, Austin Bay interviews fellow Pajamahadeenites Andrew Marcus and Richard Miniter on their use of tiny videocams to cover the midterms. And Miniter in particular discusses covering Washington--where the mindset concerning the Internet is very much like Larry King's--for an online new agency.

Or not: Steven Malanga expalins why a Democratic Congress won’t help New York.

Fox new commentator Bill O'Reilly urges his viewers to boycott Fox's "If I Did It" interview with O.J. Simpson, and dubs it a milestone in the decline and fall of western civilization. And it's tough to argue with him--it really does seem like it's Anthony Burgess's world these days, we're just living in it.

Man of no appearance spotted at Detroit airport...with a $79,000 flash wad for incidental travel expenses and a laptop PC with information about nuclear materials and cyanide on its hard drive.

But hey, isn't that what you're packing for your Thanksgiving trip to visit the folks?

Hugh Hewitt quotes from an op-ed by the L.A. Times' Tim Rutten and writes:

Vast numbers of former readers simply don't trust the Los Angeles Times to report the news, either in a timely fashion, or fairly. They believe that the staff of Los Angeles Times is in fact attempting to influence them, and not via the editorial page. Rutten's acknowledgement of his understanding of the paper's role is what trial lawyers like to call an "admission against interest." The rise of WSJ.com and new media has undermined the monopoly that allowed the Times to grow arrogant and ideological, and now there will be no reclaiming of the old influence born from trust until a complete housecleaning occurs, and there is no sign of such a sweep ever starting much less finishing in time to save the brand.

Cathy Seipp writes that the L.A. Times' current solution is to look east--and while we all love Annie Hall, this is one instance where New York talent isn't necessarily superior.

I have a review of the Polk I-Sonic tabletop entertainment system, in the latest dead tree edition of The Robb Report's Home Entertainment magazine, conveniently available at your local Borders or Barnes & Noble--the information sources so simple to use, even Larry King can operate them!

Elsewhere, my Blogcritics article on harmonizer plug-ins for PC recording programs--technology that's probably a little over Larry's head--is an Editors' Pick of the Week--thanks guys.

"John Edwards buys Playstation 3 from Wal-Mart...after bashing Wal-Mart"!

Betsy Newmark and Denis Keohane have a spot-on observation regarding San Francisco's banning of JRTOC. Betsy writes:

Denis Keohane makes the great point that the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy that so many object to is not the policy of the military, but part of a law voted upon by a Democratic congress and signed by a Democratic president. Congress has the power to write regulations for the military and they did so. And Nancy Pelosi was one of those representatives who voted against the bill before voting for it. Keohane points out that the San Francisco school board would never vote to ban Nancy Pelosi or Bill Clinton from coming to speak in their schools, yet they'll ban a program that students are benefiting from. He has this final request of soon-to-be Speaker Pelosi:

Congresswoman Pelosi: As you may shortly be third in line of succession as Commander in Chief of our armed forces, could you please take a moment to inform some of your constituents back home in San Francisco that our military is subordinate to civilian rule, and that punishing them for adhering to law that you and the Congress passed and a Democratic Presdent signed is inappropriate?

That would be a fantastic Sister Souljah moment of centrist triangulation, but that doesn't sound like Speaker-to-be Pelosi's style.

As I wrote yesterday, the anti-military views of San Francisco's "Bobos In Paradise" are cultural, not geographical, of course. In The New York Sun, Manhattanite Amy De Rosa describes observing them up close and personal on the Upper East Side.

Newt Gingrich writes that President Bush has a choice to make:

The election results pose two enormous strategic choices for America. First, the obvious outcome of a Democratic-controlled Congress and a Republican White House is the need for bipartisan cooperation in order to get anything done. The key question is: Which kind of bipartisanship will emerge? Will there be a Ronald Reagan approach to bipartisanship which appeals to the conservative majority of the House? Or will there be an establishment bipartisanship which cuts deals between liberals and the White House?

That proved to be a two-edged sword for his father, who was able to (barely) achieve a majority to approve the liberation of Kuwait, but at the cost of raising taxes, with first fueled the minor recession of 1991, and then created a cudgel for the Democrats to use against him in 1992.

Glenn Reynolds has lots of links; economist Larry Kudlow has some thoughts.

As Glenn writes, "It's hard to say that someone has been plucked untimely at the age of 94, but it feels that way."

Update: Mark Steyn, who was scheduled to share a National Review panel with Friedman this week, adds:

He was the principal economic influence on President Reagan, Mrs Thatcher and other leaders determined to reverse the ill-effects of Keynesianism in the west, and through them he became equally influential in post-Soviet eastern Europe. He was one of the most important figures of the age, and, had the Republican Congress understood why, they might still be in power.

Exactly.

Over at Real Clear Politics, John McIntyre has another Republican election postmortem, and some (rather upbeat) thoughts on where the GOP goes from here.

(Via the prophetic Austin Bay.)

Meanwhile, Ex-marks the spot! Click on the above link for Mary Katharine Ham's bipartisan dysfunctional ex-girlfriend theory of American politics.

Bryan Preston of Hot Air has a long, detailed post analyzing how Republicans lost the midterms:

What cost the GOP its majorities in Congress and statehouses? Nancy Pelosi and her wing of the Democrats are running around as though the elections validated their hard left view of the war and the world, but according to James Carville’s Democracy Corps, this election did no such thing.

What cost the GOP its power? Iraq? Foley? Look at page 6 of Democracy Corps’ post-election report. The GOP’s fortunes fatally cratered in the Fall of 2005, and were recovering ever since minus a couple of blips this year. What happened in the Fall of ‘05?

Katrina. That storm turned out to be the hurricane that changed history.

As Preston writes, "Combine 9-11 and Katrina, and the Bush administration has had to deal with two of the worst disasters in American history, one brought on by foreign aggression that was years in the making, and one the wrath of nature."

Near the start of the media's wretched Katrina coverage, which had painted the Superdome as the site of numerous rapes, and had fictitious snipers shooting at rescue helicopters, Mickey Kaus presciently noted that, "In short, Katrina gives [the media] a way to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq." And they milked it for all that it was worth. Preston adds:

There’s a lesson in all of this, that’s an old one but an important one to remember: Demagoguery wins, and more so when it comes in the middle of a horrific disaster. Also, lies do indeed travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. By the time the story of New Orleans buses surfaced (only to be buried by the AP and ignored by the national media), the disaster had been framed as a Bush failure and the damage was already done. The media’s later mea culpa did nothing to change the basic narrative that already had a life of its own.

Which confirms something that Peggy Noonan wrote in August:

The other day ABC News's Internet political report, The Note, argued that President Bush, in his then-upcoming veto statement and other presentations, had better be at the top of his game if he wants his party to hold on to Congress in 2006. "[Mr. Bush] is going to need to be focused and impressive, not easy pickings for the Rich-Krugman-Dowd-Stewart axis."

As I read I nodded: That's exactly true. What was significant is that The Note did not designate as Mr. Bush's main and most effective foes Pelosi, Dodd, Reid, Biden, et al. Mr. Bush's mightiest competitors are columnists and a comedian with a fake-news show.

This is one reason the media is important. (Not "are important." Language evolves; usage changes; people vote with their tongues. It's not the correct "return to normality"; it's the incorrect "return to normalcy." It's not "the media are" it's "the media is." People see the media as one big thing.)

One big reason the media is important is that they change things. And they lead. On 9/11 itself it was the media--anchors, reporters, crews sent to the scene, analysts--that functioned, for roughly 10 hours, as the most visible leaders of the United States. The president was on a plane; the vice president was in the bunker and on the phone. It was on-air journalists who informed, created a seeming order, and reassured the public by their presence and personas and professionalism.

So they're important. But very recently it seems to me they're important because it is from the media that Mr. Bush's most effective opposition--attacks on his nature and leadership, attacks on his policies--comes. Among the Democrats an op-ed columnist has more impact than a minority leader.

It is common wisdom that newspapers are over. But when the most powerful voices against a powerful president at a crucial time are op-ed jockeys, newspapers are not over. Or perhaps one should say paper may be over, but news is not.

Rich Lowry has further election postmortems, here.

Update: Related thoughts on Republicans and the media, from a Hollywood (conservative) perspective.

Another Update: Dr. Helen explores the psychology of the big-screen TV:

My patients, regardless of political party, often come in and parrot to me the news they hear on tv without question. You know, the Dems are great, the Republicans evil and such. When I watched the news just now with Nancy Pelosi and Wolf Blitzer, it seemed that they were right in my media room, talking to me personally. TV encourages people to think by linking images in their brains. Are these images stronger and more persuasive on a big screen with high def like the new ones out than they were on the smaller less clear ones? Now that tvs are getting cheaper and cheaper as well as bigger and clearer, will the emotions of viewers become even easier to manipulate? And if so, how will that play out in a medium that is captured by the liberal media? As tv's get bigger, clearer, and cheaper, will we start to see blue everywhere?

That sounds like an environment tailor-made for a story like Katrina, which, while, as Kaus noted, was a way for the media to "to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq", also had a similar fog-of-war type environment. It gave the media the opportunity to craft the most lurid stories possible, along with enormous amounts of plausible deniability afterwards.

Whilst currently located thousands and thousands of miles away in Turkey, Jim Geraghty has managed to take a pretty accurate snapshot of Washington, and the political retreads poised to--for lack of a better word--grace the stage in 2007:

And if you think the sole fallout from Trent Lott’s reappearance in the Senate GOP leadership is going to be just “a few bad headlines and a little disgust” … well, I think the word “macaca” can refute that notion. With Lott’s return to leadership, all of the GOP’s outreach efforts to African-Americans that were already sputtering after Katrina just collapsed. What’s more, the GOP just alienated millions of non-aligned soccer-mom-type voters whose sole mental picture of Lott are his comments about Thurmond and his stammering, ham-handed efforts at damage control afterwards. (Yes, the Democrats’ procedural wizard, Robert Byrd, was a Klan member (from one kind of a wizard to another, huh?) and yes, it’s unfair that the media gives Byrd a free pass. Deal with it. Life is often unfair, particularly in Washington, and particularly when dealing with the media.) Every time Lott plays a key role in a vote in the coming two years, we will see or hear the words “Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott, who offended many African-Americans in 2002 with comments that appeared to endorse segregation, said today that…”

By comparison, had the GOP Senate caucus gone the other way, the sentences would read, “Senate Minority Whip Lamar Alexander, who in 1996 demonstrated an unhealthy level of enthusiasm for red and black plaid, said today that…”

I don’t say this as a huge fan of Lamar Alexander, but simply to note that he doesn’t come into the job with enormous amounts of baggage that a hostile media and political opponents will utilize at every opportunity. In a media environment such as this, you don’t give your opponent a stick to beat you over the head with.

Of course, our friends on the other side of the aisle may be about to elect House Majority Leader Murtha (Fund's article is a must-read) and House Select Intelligence Committee Chair Alcee Hastings, who was impeached as a judge and convicted for bribery. So our great nation is getting the worst of both worlds.

Unfortunately, it's tough to argue with that.

As we've mentioned before, "San Francisco has the lowest percentage of households with children among the 50 largest U.S. cities", as an article linked by Michelle Malkin today notes. And the city is not going to increase those numbers when its Board of Education just cancelled its 90-year old Junior ROTC program. Astonishingly, even the city's mayor, Gavin Newsome, agrees:

"You think this is going to help keep families in San Francisco?" the mayor added. "No. It's going to hurt."

Indeed it is.

Related: Of course, the views of San Francisco's politicians are cultural, not geographical, as James Taranto illustrates in this item from his latest Best of the Web Today column:

Yesterday we noted that Jill Abramson, managing editor of the New York Times, had remarked that "people are always surprised when I tell them that we sell a lot of subscriptions at West Point." Many readers wrote us to explain why this is. Here's one of them, Rob Munden:

Cadets are required to subscribe to the New York Times (fees deducted from your account, no alternatives given), and unless things have changed from the late '80s when I was there, plebes [freshmen] are required to be conversant with every story on the front page and front page of the sports section before first formation (i.e., early). It's a memory-skills development technique, with a side benefit of forcing everyone to learn about what is going on in the world in a broad sense. As an upperclassman, it was helpful to be able to identify and isolate the bias in the news--and to be given so many opportunities to do so. It's a lifetime skill I'm sure you've no doubt developed, being scrupulously nonpartisan.

It's quite one thing to subscribe to the Times when you have a choice; it's quite another to use forced subscriptions to justify your popularity. Legend has it that in the wake of one of the cheating scandals at West Point the Times called cadets "humorless, uptight and driven," and in response, cadets hung a banner asking "How can a newspaper without comics dare to call anyone humorless?" I'd be surprised if more than 10% of cadets support the Times editorial board position on anything.

Adds reader Malcolm Cole, another West Point alum: "Even back in the 1980s we knew of the leftist slant of the Times and asked our superiors why we had to read the New York Times, since it wasn't very pro-military. The reply often was: 'It's good to know what the enemy is thinking.' "

Actually, I doubt the Times' publisher would argue with that.

Trent Lott returns to GOP leadership? Alcee Hastings back? George McGovern?

Of course--it's America Recycles Day!

That's the headline on Robert Bidinotto's latest post; considering whom the Republicans just named as Senate minority whip, I'm afraid its title may be apt.

But then, as Dean Barnett writes, "Is it just me, or is it becoming increasingly apparent that the Republicans and Democrats are determined to engage in a two year dumb-off?"

Update: Michelle Malkin adds:

"Just when the MSM focus had fixed on the Democrats' culture of corruption and business-as-usual, along come Beltway Republicans to remind us of how lame the GOP leadership is."

She dubs it "Another GOP Maalox moment".

When Hollywood producer Jack Woltz crossed Don Corleone by refusing to put Johnny Fontane in his latest movie, he wound up with a horse's head in his bed.

When Alene Ammond, an anti-tax and property rights activist, and "registered Republican who considers herself an independent" according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, crossed The Mob That Whacked New Jersey one too many times, she wound up with a pig's head on her doorstep.

Luca Brasi could not be reached for comment.

Sister Toldjah would like to introduce you to the new Senate Majority leader.

Meanwhile, as the Washington Post attacks Jack Murtha, including mention his 1980 ties to Abscam (those Swift Boaters!), Betsy Newmark writes, "Gee, wouldn't it have been nice if the Post and the Pennsylvania papers had aired these stories before the election, but I guess that would have interfered with the whole 'Republicans are the only corrupt party' around message."

Update: Ed Morrissey adds:

When Murtha shivved Hoyer in June with his announcement, we noted the hubris of Democrats squabbling over leadership positions that they had not yet earned. Now we see the hubris of a Speaker-elect who thought she could re-order her political caucus without considering the views of other members. She's already less than popular with the Congressional Black Caucus (which also may explain the decision by Rangel and Maxine Waters to support Hoyer), and she can hardly afford to alienate many more Democrats if she expects to win election as Speaker.

Matt Drudge has a blurb on his site, but no link to the source document yet:

CBS EVENING NEWS DOWN OVER YEAR AGO... For the first time since Katie Couric became anchor, CBS EVENING NEWS is down compared to a year ago, falling 4% from 8.069 to 7.758 million last week among total viewers, and the program also declined 9% among adults 25-54 from last year's 2.2 to a 2.0 rating last week... Developing...

Mickey Kaus's theory as to why CBS wooed Katie in the first place seems increasingly sound; and stories like these certainly aren't helping CBS's reputation--and their ratings.

Update: Meanwhile, Dan Rather, enjoying his retirement on Mark Cuban's HD channel goes on Comedy Central and delivers comedy gold:

COLBERT: What is Dan Rather reporting?”
RATHER: Dan Rather is reporting, hopefully, quality news with integrity. I hope it will be news with guts and spine.

Schadenfreude: Ted Baxter always claimed that he started on a small 5,000 watt radio station. Rather's ending his career on its television equivalent.

Pollster Frank Luntz has some excellent suggestions for the GOP if they wish to return to power:

The future must be better than the past. The 1994 Contract With America wasn't a political gimmick. It was a clearly articulated agenda that addressed the day-to-day problems and concerns of average Americans. It was tough on spending, tough on taxes, tough on welfare, tough on crime--tough on all the things Americans wanted less of so that they could have more of what they really wanted: freedom and security. Several dozen members begged their leadership to offer a new Republican contract in 2006 because they sensed, correctly, that the party had lost its focus on the future and was interested only in defending the present. The response? Silence. The next leadership team needs to remember that no vision means no votes.

The mood of this country has changed since 2004, and because of it, some have already written off Republican chances for recapturing the House and Senate in 2008. The question Americans will be asking is whether Republicans learned anything from this election. The answers will determine the future of the GOP: that of a phoenix or a pariah.

The lack of an updated Contract, and the silence over Rumsfeld until immediately after losing suggests a GOP that has essentially been playing prevent defense, since about the time that Social Security reform was tabled. As any NFL coach will tell you, in a tight game, that's usually a recipe for defeat.

Did Time magazine deliberately ignore the advice of one of their photographers to write a photo caption that was deliberately anti-Israel? According to the photographer himself, they did.

As a November surprise goes, they're about ten days too late. I'm not holding out much hope of America doing much about this now, except possibly holding lots of intense negotiations on the subject of discussing additional negotiations.

Maybe Mark Steyn's next book should be titled "Israel Alone".

Last week, Glenn Reynolds wrote, "Say what you will about the elections, but I think the Democratic Congress is going to bring us a lot of comic relief."

Tough to argue with that!

Update: "Do not taunt Happy Fun Speaker Pelosi"!

Update: Mickey Kaus spots the Murtha Mobius Loop:

Of course, [the] more Murtha thrashes around like a frantic whale, the more attention he attracts--and the more he puts Pelosi's rep on the line, and the more he makes her pull out all stops to help him. See this Corner analysis.

Thrash on, Jack!

At TCS Daily, Josh Manchester explains "Why Intellectuals Love Defeat".

(And it's hardly a new phenomenon.)

Some bleeding edge high-tech home music stuff over at Blogcritics, where I have a lengthy review of two harmonizer plug-ins for PC-based recording. The first is Audio Damage's Discord4, which recreates the classic Eventide H910 Harmonizer (remember Bowie's "Fame...fame...fame...fame...fame swirling up and down in pitch? That was the Eventide Harmonizer). The second is TC-Helicon's sophisticated Harmony4, which is specifically designed for vocals and create up to four independent lines of harmony from a single vocal.

Why is Nancy Pelosi endorsing Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Okinawa) over the seemingly more moderate Steny Hoyer? Pork plays a big, big part of it, as Ed Morrissey explains in a post well worth your time.

Mark Steyn explains why, shortly before the midterms last week, the US didn't suffer the equivalent to the Madrid subway bombing--an 2004 Al Qaede attack carefully timed to occur shortly before that country's elections:

The enemy aren't a bunch of simpleton Pushtun yakherds, but relatively sophisticated at least in their understanding of us. We're all infidels, but not all infidels crack the same way. If they'd done a Spain -- blown up a bunch of subway cars in New York or vaporized the Empire State Building -- they'd have re-awoken the primal anger of September 2001. With another mound of corpses piled sky-high, the electorate would have stampeded into the Republican column and demanded the U.S. fly somewhere and bomb someone.

The jihad crowd know that. So instead they employed a craftier strategy. Their view of America is roughly that of the British historian Niall Ferguson -- that the Great Satan is the first superpower with ADHD. They reasoned that if you could subject Americans to the drip-drip-drip of remorseless water torture in the deserts of Mesopotamia -- a couple of deaths here, a market bombing there, cars burning, smoke over the city on the evening news, day after day after day, and ratcheted up a notch or two for the weeks before the election -- you could grind down enough of the electorate and persuade them to vote like Spaniards, without even realizing it. And it worked. You can rationalize what happened on Tuesday in the context of previous sixth-year elections -- 1986, 1958, 1938, yada yada -- but that's not how it was seen around the world, either in the chancelleries of Europe, where they're dancing conga lines, or in the caves of the Hindu Kush, where they would also be dancing conga lines if Mullah Omar hadn't made it a beheading offense. And, as if to confirm that Tuesday wasn't merely 1986 or 1938, the president responded to the results by firing the Cabinet officer most closely identified with the prosecution of the war and replacing him with a man associated with James Baker, Brent Scowcroft and the other "stability" fetishists of the unreal realpolitik crowd.

Whether or not Rumsfeld should have been tossed overboard long ago, he certainly shouldn't have been tossed on Wednesday morning. For one thing, it's a startlingly brazen confirmation of the politicization of the war, and a particularly unworthy one: It's difficult to conceive of any more public diminution of a noble cause than to make its leadership contingent on Lincoln Chafee's Senate seat. The president's firing of Rumsfeld was small and graceless.

Still, we are all Spaniards now. The incoming speaker says Iraq is not a war to be won but a problem to be solved. The incoming defense secretary belongs to a commission charged with doing just that. A nostalgic boomer columnist in the Boston Globe argues that honor requires the United States to "accept defeat," as it did in Vietnam. Didn't work out so swell for the natives, but to hell with them.

And that does seem to be the incoming strategy du jour, doesn't it? As Glenn Reynolds writes, acquiescing to a retreat from Iraq is "the sort of thing that could make the Republicans a minority party for the next 40 years, and deservedly so".

Over at the Chicago Boyz blog, Steven Den Beste spots a contrast in post-election reactions:

2000, Democrats: "We wuz robbed!"
2002, Democrats: "We wuz robbed again!"
2004, Democrats: "We wuz robbed yet again!"
2006, Republicans: "Bummer. Oh, well, we'll do better next time."

Read the rest. Apropos of nothing, I love this line on his own blog, where Steve writes: "1984 -- A user manual for lefties; a warning for the rest of us."

On the bright side, at least Ingsoc comes with a pretty bitchin' soundtrack though. (In a fine example of synchronicity in action, I'm actually listening to it right now.)

That's the headline of this UPI article. Something tells me that British authorities aren't going to start here, however.

...by totally ignoring it on their splash page. And once again, as with Memorial Day, the Dogpile seach engine does commemorate it. As I wrote back in May:

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

Yesterday, Go Daddy, the Internet registraton Website celebrated the Marines' 231st birthday with a tribute so patriotic it would have caused tubercular blue state veins to pop throughout Google's boardroom if an employee there had proposed it.

For Pajamas' Veterans' Day round-up, click here.

(On the hand, Google's silence is far more admirable than this quote from the Australian Age's Terry Lane.)

Update: Found via the Corner, the Canadian version of Google celebrates Remembrance Day. But I guess that would have been far too jingoistic for the boys in Mountain View.

First the good news: like lots of other people, the 49ers are fleeing San Francisco (though maybe the Pelosi pork machine will get them to reconsider), heading south down Route #101 to nearby Santa Clara, where they intend to build a modern stadium to replace the rapidly aging Candlestick Park. Naturally, local San Francisco officials are responding the only way they know how, by attempting to bully the team:

Democratic Assemblyman Mark Leno said he is looking into introducing a bill that would prohibit professional sports teams not based in the city from using San Francisco in their names unless authorized by the mayor and board of supervisors.

"The name San Francisco has cachet all over the world as a No. 1 destination spot," said Leno, who represents the part of San Francisco where the Niners play their home games. "I don't think San Francisco's name should automatically be able to be used by a franchise that is not located in the city."

Something tells me the NFL's team of lawyers will win that battle.

Now the horrible news: 74-year old ex-Niners legend Bill Walsh is battling leukemia:

"I'm positive, but not evangelistic," the 74-year-old Walsh told The (Santa Rosa) Press Democrat and The Sports Xchange Web sites. "I'm pragmatically doing everything my physicians recommend, and I'm working my way through it."

Walsh said the cancer first was diagnosed in 2004, but he feels better since a series of blood transfusions in the past month.

"The worst phase was three or four weeks ago. I've come back dramatically since, and I'm better," he said.

I hope he's right--and hopefully all football fans' thoughts and prayers are with him, whatever their thoughts on the Niners themselves are.

Jack Palance dies at 87.

The New York Times reports:

On a recent trip to New York City, Russell Crowe was asked by reporters why he had dropped out of negotiations to star in a new movie being directed by Baz Luhrmann and produced by 20th Century Fox.

A rally in September sought benefits for TV writers. The squeeze is also affecting actors and producers.
The Academy Award winner, never one to mince words, suggested it was, in part, the money. “I do charity work, but I don’t do charity work for major studios,” Mr. Crowe said.

It seems the needy are not the only ones in Hollywood with their hands out. Movie and television studios, facing escalating budgets, rampant piracy and the uncertain future of new media, are demanding concessions from talent. But as actors, directors and writers feel the squeeze, many are not happy about it.

Worse, the tension is not likely to ease soon. As studios are set to begin contract negotiations with talent in January, all sides are girding for battle.

Hollywood is in the midst of a strategic shift. The average cost to make and market a movie has skyrocketed — to $96.2 million last year, from $54.1 million in 1995 — while lucrative DVD sales have flattened. Major film studios are fending off illegal piracy, which industry executives say accounted for $1.3 billion in lost revenue in the United States last year.

The growth of new media threatens to undermine traditional businesses, while studios are flummoxed about how to take advantage of the new opportunities they represent. And movies and TV also face tough new competition from video games and online social networking sites. Even cellphones have become a favorite diversion among the young.

Why, it's like The Era of Big Cinema Is Over, or something!

Tomorrow is Veterans' Day, but many are observing today: Mary Katharine Ham salutes the Marines, who celebrate their 231st birthday today. And over at Hot Air, Michelle Malkin salutes the Doolittle Raiders of World War II (whom we mentioned briefly in a different context last year).

Meanwhile, the Washington Times looks at the surviving warriors of an even earlier war:

Scrawny but determined to fight in World War I, Howard Ramsey scarfed down banana after banana to bulk up enough to enlist. Today, he is still feisty at 108.

At 16, Frank Buckles lied about his age so he could go to war against the Germans in France. Now 105, he still runs his West Virginia cattle farm.

The son of former slaves, Moses Hardy and his segregated unit battled the enemy in horrific trench combat. Now 112 or 113, he says the only doctor he needs is Dr Pepper.

These remarkable "doughboys" -- and about two handfuls more -- are members of an increasingly fragile fraternity, relics of a world-changing conflagration little remembered today.

Once they stood 4.7 million strong: American farm boys, factory hands and tradesmen itching for adventure, all called by their country to fight "the war to end all wars."

Now, when the 88th anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I arrives tomorrow, there won't be enough surviving U.S. veterans of that defining conflict to fill a platoon.

When 2006 began, an unofficial roster of known remaining American WWI veterans listed only about two dozen names. Eleven months later, those ranks have dwindled to 12, Scripps Howard News Service has confirmed. Perhaps a dozen more, who joined the armed forces after Armistice Day and served in the immediate aftermath of the war, are still alive.

I'm thrilled that a few of the old boys are still alive. At the start of the week, James Lileks mentioned a Harold Lloyd film from the late 1920s that had Lloyd interacting with a guy who was a Civil War vet still alive in the 1920s--and apparently the actor who played him was just that in real life. So the idea that a few WWI vets are still alive in the first decade of the 21st century isn't all that surprising, in one sense.

Update: Turner Classic Movies remains the crown jewel in the media empire that Ted Turner started and one of the most watchable channels on cable. Not surprisingly, they'll have a variety of great movies tomorrow honoring World I, War II, and--because it's Hollywood, afterall--honoring the troops who served in Vietnam, if not the cause itself.

"If you make the most of it and you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Jackson."

Update: Related thoughts here.

In USA Today, Jonah Goldberg places the midterms into perspective:

Now that the midterm elections are over, and the GOP has lost the House and possibly the Senate, the Republicans like the referendum spin after all. This was just a year to throw the bums out, they say, and a few scandal-plagued bad apples cost the barrel a whole bunch. Meanwhile, the Democrats insist that voters made a bold "choice for change," whereas before, change merely meant "not Bush."

Now change means whatever Pelosi, Reid, New York's Sen. Charles Schumer and Co. want. This is a major bait and switch. If I tell my waiter, "I don't want to eat this hamburger," I've made a choice for change. That doesn't mean I've automatically embraced whatever he brings me in its place. A moldering pottage of road-killed badger is no less change than a steak. But it's not necessarily what most diners have in mind.

Republicans will have a tougher time winning the spin war, not because they have the worse argument, but because they have a worse environment to make it in. America has been moving to the right since at least 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan. Since then, the GOP has seen its power and popularity grow as a result, albeit not in perfect tandem. Bill Clinton beat the first George Bush largely because he ran as a centrist Democrat. When he wavered in his centrism, the increasingly conservative electorate punished him with the 1994 Republican takeover of both the House and the Senate, which lasted until this week (not counting the 2002 switch in the Senate caused by the defection of Vermont's Sen. Jim Jeffords). And, of course, in 2000 and 2004, George W. Bush won back to back elections. In other words, the GOP was due for a shellacking, and any shellacking would seem like a sea change. But in a historical sense, this week's shellacking was a bit lacking.

Since the direct election of senators (i.e. the past nine relevant midterm elections), the average losses in a president's sixth year have been 34 House seats and seven Senate seats. By that standard, the Democrats came up just shy of average. Republican losses in the Senate in 1986 were worse, but few now remember those elections as a national repudiation of conservatism. Yet that's how we're supposed to interpret this week's news. That's hard to do if you look at the candidates who put the Democrats over the top.

Sen. Joe Lieberman's win in Connecticut was hardly a victory for the progressive base.

If Sen. George Allen of Virginia loses, it will be partly because he contracted a terrible case of Dukakisitis — a debilitating disease that causes the victim to run cartoonishly awful campaigns — and because Democrats threw in former Republican Jim Webb, a gun-toting, big-military, anti-affirmative action, right-leaning populist type who quit the Reagan administration as secretary of the Navy because it wasn't hawkish enough.

In Pennsylvania, Democrat Bob Casey unseated Sen. Rick Santorum because he's a nominally pro-life Democrat. Indeed, according to data collected by the leftwing Media Matters for America, 16% of the Democratic candidates in the most competitive races described themselves as "pro-life."

There are other telling indicators. A Fox News election day poll suggests that perhaps a third of supporters of the gay-marriage ban on Virginia's ballot voted for Webb, while similar bans passed in several other states as did a ban on racial preferences in Michigan. Shortly before the elections, one in five self-described independents were "very enthusiastically" voting Democratic.

'Fat and lazy'

These are hardly indications of a sudden lurch to the left in American politics. The GOP got thrown out of office because it got fat and lazy and because Democrats — with the help of a transmission-belt media — convinced a lot of voters that they could simply change the channel on the war by voting for "change."

The great irony is that the best thing in the world for the Republicans — though perhaps not the country — would be if the Democrats actually believed their spin and tried to act on a mandate that isn't there. Given the underlying historical trends in conservatism's favor, that would ensure another victory in 2008 for the GOP — as the party of change.

I'm not at all positive that this is merely a two-year timeout, particularly in the Senate, where, as I understand it, far more Republicans are up for re-election in 2008 than Democrats. But on the other hand, immediate post-election actions such as this and this make it sound like it's back to the radical chic 1970s for Democrats, and not towards the center, where the bulk of the electorate seem to be.

Update: More here:

Sen. Evan Bayh, a veteran Indiana Democrat, said Tuesday’s election was a vote against the status quo and not an affirmation of his party’s agenda.

In an interview Bayh, a potential 2008 presidential candidate, said most Americans don’t really know what Democrats stand for, Gannett News Service reported.

“And if we serve up a highly partisan, ideologically extreme, Democratic version of what they just voted against, we’re not going to do very well.”

Gee, you think?

Another Update: Charles Krauthammer adds, "This is not realignment":

As has been the case for decades, American politics continues to be fought between the 40-yard lines. The Europeans fight goal line to goal line, from socialist left to ultra-nationalist right. On the American political spectrum, these extremes are negligible. American elections are fought on much narrower ideological grounds. In this election the Democrats carried the ball from their own 45-yard line to the Republican 45-yard line.

The fact that the Democrats crossed midfield does not make this election a great anti-conservative swing. Republican losses included a massacre of moderate Republicans in the Northeast and Midwest. And Democratic gains included the addition of many conservative Democrats, brilliantly recruited by Rep. Rahm Emanuel with classic Clintonian triangulation. Hence Heath Shuler of North Carolina, antiabortion, pro-gun, anti-tax -- and now a Democratic House member.

The result is that both parties have moved to the right. The Republicans have shed the last vestiges of their centrist past, the Rockefeller Republicans. And the Democrats have widened their tent to bring in a new crop of blue-dog conservatives.

Not surprisingly, I agree with that last paragraph. But Betsy Newmark is quick to add that while that sounds good on paper, it's probably not going to work out anywhere near as smoothly in real life:

This may all be quite true. But that doesn't mean that the liberals who are in the leadership of the Democratic Party won't be in control and they certainly aren't going to suddenly become moderates just because the victory was narrow. Can you see John Conyers or Charlie Rangel holding back on all that they have wanted to do for the past 12 years just because of a narrow victory? That would be the biggest surprise of all from this election.

Nancy Pelosi has her work cut out for her, but unlike the last 12 years, as Speaker of the House, she'll be given lots and lots of room for error by the legacy media.

For the latest Blog Week In Review podcast, Austin Bay was going to quote from a segment from my night-of-the-election post near the start of the show, and then called to ask me shortly before taping the show if I wanted to read it myself. Why not? So in addition to the usual production duties, I also have a cameo apperance, before some exceptional, immediately-after-the-election thoughts from Glenn Reynolds, Eric Umansky, and Austin himself.

George McGovern, tanned, rested, and ready to speak to Congress!

There is no escape from the 1970s--and from Muggeridge's Law, the inability of a writer of fiction or satire to compete with real life for its pure absurdity.

That's one of our blog categories that should fill up rapidly over the next two years or so; as Glenn Reynolds wrote yesterday, "Say what you will about the elections, but I think the Democratic Congress is going to bring us a lot of comic relief".

There's a certain amount of gallows humor to be found here, as well.

Update: Not surprisingly, Ed Morrissey isn’t too thrilled by the sudden reappearance, like bell-bottom cords and tie-dyed peace symbol T-shirts, of the bard of 1972:

McGovern was proven spectacularly wrong on Viet Nam in the last half of the 1970s, when Congress' failure to come to Saigon's aid allowed our ally to collapse in 1975. That set off a round of atrocities that took the lives of millions in Southeast Asia and brought a flood of refugees to America. Now he wants to repeat the same strategy in Iraq, in an area of vital strategic importance, and the new Democratic majority hangs on his every word. The Democrats learned nothing about global security over the last 30 years, and they're about to prove it all over again.

Meanwhile, is President Bush going wobbly in response? That's a recipe for Republican disaster in 2008, as Glenn Reynolds notes.

Regarding the post-Saddam policing of Iraq, Orrin Judd writes, "the better strategy would have been to withdraw from Iraq quicker and do Syria and North Korea, moving from victory to victory".

On one level, I agree completely--but once you've toppled the regime, then what? Do you leave it to the citizens of that nation to clean up the mess afterwards? And certainly the press, which has consistently portrayed post-Saddam Iraq in the blackest of terms, would paint even bleaker pictures if that were the strategy. So I don't see what the alternative is to staying in Afghanistan and Iraq and providing as much support as we can for their (very) fledging democracies. As Victor Davis Hanson said today:

You know, right after we had gone to war for almost four years in Europe, and then suddenly, the American people were told hey, wait a minute, you can't really come home, because you've got four hundred Soviet divisions, and these guys are just as bad as Nazis, so here we go again. They weren't up to that until about three or four years, until they took it seriously. So I think it's going to be a very hard problem. That's why I don't really, I don't understand the hysteria about Rumsfeld. I can see the political...public relations problems, but Rumsfeld basically said we don't want to be in Vietnam like '64-'71. We want to be in Vietnam like '72-'73, where we have air support, commandos, and a light footprint. And I don't think people, for all the criticisms of Rumsfeld, are going to do anything differently than what he was doing. There is nothing to do different.

Which may be why:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - President Jalal Talabani said Thursday that he had been assured by Democrat congressional leaders during a recent visit to Washington that they had no plans for a quick withdrawal of U.S. forces.

On the other hand, if I were the head of one of the remaining nations in the Axis of Evil, I'm probably sleeping even better than I have been, after Tuesday's election.

Update: Ed Morrissey writes that Martin Fletcher of the Times of London boldly goes where the Times of New York wouldn't dare to tread--he talks to our troops in Iraq:

Fletcher reports that the troops also fear the impact of the new Democratic Congress on the war. They see the elections and the sudden departure of Rumsfeld as an ominous turn in domestic support, not without reason. Many of these men have built relationships with Iraqis, especially in the new security units, and will have bonds of friendship with the Iraqis that will be left in the lurch in the event of a precipitous withdrawal.

It seems to me that any effort to "support the troops" ought to at least involve their input. If they do not see Iraq as a lost cause, then they are right to wonder why so many Americans back home do. While the military will and should remain under civilian leadership, the fact is that the perspective of the soldiers and Marines on the lines have been woefully underreported in the American media, and it's somewhat embarrassing that we have to turn to a British newspaper to discover this unease at the change in Pentagon leadership.

But not at all surprising.

At first glance, I think this is a result of the usual post-election loss deck chair rearranging rather than Bill Maher's show-biz hypocrisy, but there’s no additional detail to go by at the moment.

Will Michael Steele replace him?

The Cranky Professor links to an excerpt from a recent Washington Post article on tattoos and piercings:

"I told her I was thinking of getting one on my nose, but she said, 'No more piercings,' " Funderburg recalled. "I know my mom thinks it's a form of mutilation, but it's not. It's a matter of self-expression." The only downside of her eyebrow ring is that she had to remove it for her job, which has a no-facial-piercings policy.

He replies:

It's mutilation AND self-expression. What's so hard for the young to understand about that? I love the anecdote about the girl catching her belly-piercing on a slamming car trunk. Me, if I were in med school I'd be going into piercing-hole-reconstructive-surgery, along with tattoo removal. There's going to be a lot of work in the future.

Indeed^TM. And this post seems like an opportune time to refer back to one of my favorite quotes on the subject from the good Doctor Dalrymple.

Found via the Professor, Popular Mechanics has an online piece titled, "Rumsfeld Reaction: 4 Policy Battles That Could Shape Our Military".

There seems to be two takes on Donald Rumsfeld's resignation/walking the plank. On the one hand, there's the "Brilliant Timing!" strategy, which Mario Loyola of National Review sides with:

What's interesting about the timing is that this morning we woke up to a new Democratic congress, and by the time of the evening news everyone was talking about the new secretary of defense. Another suspiciously well-timed blockbuster announcement from the White House.

On the other, there's the "are you kidding me?!" timing, of which Dean Barnett is a proponent of:

In my travels through America’s ranking conservative circles the last few months, it is no exaggeration to say that the only praise I ever heard regarding Donald Rumsfeld came from my own mouth. As unpopular as Rumsfeld had become in liberal circles, he was even less well liked in conservative circles where his brusqueness and arrogance were not just the stuff of legend but were experienced first hand. Frequently.

So I was stunned when President Bush told the nation a week before the election that Donald Rumsfeld would be remaining through the end of his term. First, this hadn’t squared with what I had heard from insiders who tend to be reliable in regards to such scuttlebutt. Second, this seemed like a maladroit play since the only conservative I knew who really wanted Rumsfeld to stay was me. While I was flattered that the White House would go to such lengths to ensure my enthusiastic support (perhaps they saw how I had personally sunk the Allen campaign with a few withering phrases), the gesture really wasn’t necessary.

Thus it was a bizarre coda to the election season when the President “resigned” Rummy yesterday. If he was going to deep-six the SecDef, it would have made a lot more sense to do it a few months earlier and signal a “new direction” in Iraq (however bogus or fanciful) to a country that genuinely pined for one. Moreover, if he was going to fire Rummy the day after the voting was done, why did the President alienate undecided voters by falsely declaring his intention just days earlier to go to the mattresses on behalf of his beleaguered Pentagon chief?

It makes no sense. There’s not enough lipstick in the world to preetify this pig of a political move. The White House’s political operations seem to be perpetually stuck in Katrina-mode, and that’s not good news for any of us.

On the upcoming Pajamas Blog Week In Review this week, Glenn Reynolds posits that the fifth anniversary of 9/11 would have been perfect timing for Rumsfeld's resignation to be announced, with both a historical event for cover, the chance for a positive spin put onto it, and the ability for Republican candidates to hit the stump discussing the new approach to Iraq that Dean mentions above. Throwing him overboard yesterday, makes President Bush look small, as Mark Steyn is noting to Hugh Hewitt today, even as I'm typing this, paraphrasing the remarks he wrote on his Website yesterday:

To fire him mere hours after the polls closed makes the President look small. I'm reminded of when Harold MacMillan fired some of his closest cabinet colleagues 45 years ago, and Jeremy Thorpe stood up in the House of Commons and wryly remarked: "Greater love hath no man than to lay down his friends for his life."

Update: Here's a parody of a Rumsfeld interview, in which the hologram of Rumsfeld himself parses the "Political Jujitsu" theory:

Nobody saw this move coming yesterday. Nobody was prepared. It was a brilliant shifting of weight. Yesterday was supposed to be the Democrats big day. They were all going to wear new suits and dresses and give speeches congratulating themselves and talking about how they were going to fix the country. Instead all the news programs spent that time speaking about my resignation and today all the print media will be talking about me and my successor. The Democrats can't even complain because they have been practically begging for my resignation. By the time this dies down - nobody will want to look at their new suits or pretty dresses and they sure won't want to hear their flowery speeches because the time would have been well past that. The bonus is that the Main Stream Media doesn't even see how they were used. Brilliant move by the President.

ALR: But Mr. Secretary are you saying your tenure as Secretary of Defense was ended simply to control news cycles?

Rummy: Goodness no. When all is said and done I will be the longest serving Secretary of Defense in history. All Secretaries of Defense step down. This just happened to be the right time for me and if the President was able to time the announcement to take the wind out the sails of some blowhards well then that's just gravy. The important thing to me is that our brave men and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan are honored and protected and I think this resignation helps with those ends.

ALR: Again Mr. Secretary I apologize but I don't follow your reasoning.

Rummy: Well Chris you understand the process involved here correct? It will be a few months before Bob Gates even gets his confirmation hearing. The administration will be able to use the confirmation hearings and my farewell tour to reinforce the case of what we are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Read the rest. When the memoirs and the latest Bob Woodward-style inside looks start coming out in the ensuing years, months, or heck, weeks, based on quickly the media moves these days, I'll be curious to know the real reason.

More: "GOP furious about timing of Rumsfeld resignation".

Last week, during the discovery that a heretofore virtually unknown conservative religious figure was gay, I wrote:

And after the Foley scandal, I suspect the American public is somewhat inured to the now seemingly routine gay outing (which is a tacit form of gay bashing, after all) by the liberal media.

Here's yet another example:

As NewsBuster Brad Wilmouth reported, comedian Bill Maher was on with CNN’s Larry King Wednesday night saying some rather outrageous things. Beyond his derogatory comments about President Bush, Maher told King: “A lot of the chiefs of staff, the people who really run the underpinnings of the Republican Party, are gay.” When King pressed Maher for names, Maher said, “Ken Mehlman” (video here).

King then questioned Maher’s sincerity: “I never heard that. I'm walking around in a fog. I never...Ken Mehlman? I never heard that. But the question is...”

Maher answered: “Maybe you don't go to the same bathhouse I do, Larry.”

Now, according to the Huffington Post – which has video of both segments here – when CNN replayed this show, it cut out this part. Makes one wonder why.

Given that it ran yesterday, I question the timing, as the left is apt to say. If Maher wasn't just pulling a name out of his hat, this would have ran during the run-up to the elections, when gay outing and name dropping is considered more than acceptable by the media and Democrats.

Update: Video here.

Two of the most significant events of the 20th century happened on this day in Germany, separated by six decades: Kristallnacht and the fall of the Berlin wall. At Townhall, Rabbi Hanoch Teller writes:

The accurate translation of Kristallnacht is “Crystal Night,” and Field Marshal Hermann Goering, who had just been charged with implementing the Reich’s Jewish policy, intended to use this connotation to ridicule the victims. Like so many other Nazi perversions of language (Sonderbehandlung, “special treatment” referring to gassing victims; Euthanasie, for mass murder of retarded and physically handicapped patients) this term was meant to be a cynical appellation that would free the victims of any sympathy and reinterpret murder, arson, robbery and plunder into a glistening event marked by sparkle and gleam.

History books refer to Kristallnacht as the beginning of the Holocaust. This is akin to saying that the burning of the Reichstag is what was responsible for Hitler becoming Germany's unchallenged Fuhrer. Such oversimplification conveys an ignorance of history and aborts the chance for the proper lesson to be learned.

Nearly seven decades is adequate time to soberly reflect, and set the record straight. Auschwitz did not evolve from the Wannsee Conference, which did not evolve from The Nuremberg Laws, which did not evolve from Versailles humiliation.

The eventuality of the Holocaust was inescapable regardless of Kristallnacht. Once the dynamics of hatred were engaged, annihilation was inevitable. The Nazis sought a “Final Solution” to the “Jewish problem” and they had the might, the determination and the requisite ruthlessness for its execution.

The Nazis attempted to portray Kristallnacht as a spontaneous eruption of German hatred for the Jews. Alas, nothing happens overnight; hatred festers, it doesn’t metastasize.

After World War II, East Germany replaced one Evil Empire with another, and in 1961, the Berlin Wall went up to physically divide Berlin's free and unfree halves. On November 9th, 1989, it was "breached", to borrow a word from this BBC article:

The Berlin Wall has been breached after nearly three decades keeping East and West Berliners apart.

At midnight East Germany's Communist rulers gave permission for gates along the Wall to be opened after hundreds of people converged on crossing points.

They surged through cheering and shouting and were be met by jubilant West Berliners on the other side.

Ecstatic crowds immediately began to clamber on top of the Wall and hack large chunks out of the 28-mile (45-kilometre) barrier.

It had been erected in 1961 on the orders of East Germany's former leader Walter Ulbricht stop people leaving for West Germany.

Since 1949 about 2.5 million people had fled East Germany.

After 1961, the Wall and other fortifications along the 860-mile (1,380-kilometre) border shared by East and West Germany have kept most East Germans in.

Many of those attempting to escape have been shot dead by border guards.

A couple of years ago, Steven Hayward excerpted the opening to the follow-up to his magisterial first volume of The Age Of Reagan:

"Virtually the entire foreign policy apparatus of the U.S. government," Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson recalled, tried to stop Ronald Reagan from saying "Tear down this wall," including Reagan’s Secretary of State George Shultz and the new National Security Adviser, General Colin Powell. "Some Reagan advisers," the New York Times reported without naming names, "wanted an address with less polemics." The State Department and the National Security Council persisted up to the last minute trying to derail it, including one meeting between Powell and White House communications director Tom Griscom that participants say was "tense and forceful." Reagan had to intervene against his own advisers. Ken Duberstein, serving then as Reagan’s deputy chief of staff, has offered different accounts of how the conversation went, but the gist of it was like this—Reagan: "I’m the president, right?" Duberstein: "Yes, sir, Mr. President. We’re clear about that." Reagan: "So I get to decide whether the line about tearing down the wall stays in?" Duberstein: "That’s right, sir. It’s your decision." Reagan: "Then it stays in."

Fittingly, a large slab of the wall is on display at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California:

Read More »

Dick Armey, who along with Newt Gingrich, was one of the headmasters of the Class of '94, puts the election into sharp perspective: "I've always wondered why Republicans insist on acting like Democrats in hopes of retaining political power, while Democrats act like us in order to win."

Read the whole thing.

Update: Bill Whittle emails Glenn Reynolds:

Over in Tim Blair's comment section, a guy named Dave S. said this:

"The Republicans lost and the Democrats won for the same reason -- they distanced themselves from their base. "

That's the sentence of the year, in my opinion.

Hey, you got conservative demography on my pop culture! Hey, you got pop culture on my conservative demography! Actually, it's two, two, two great tastes in one! Or, actually, maybe three: Michael Graham, the author of the exceptional Redneck Nation combines Mark Steyn and Borat:

What Borat mocks is tolerance itself. Borat screams anti-Semitic rants or roams into a woman's dining room with a baggie of his own feces, and the first reaction of the good, multicultural Americans around him is to find a way to accommodate, to understand, to (as one clueless woman in the film did) be fascinated by our cultural differences.

Watching Borat, we begin to wonder if there are any Americans who haven't achieved total PC wussification. What we want is what Mark Steyn wants: for someone with the cultural confidence to stand up and say, "What the hell's wrong with you, boy?" and throw Borat out on his ear. Three cheers for intolerance!

One day in the near future, some city council in San Francisco or Detroit will consider allowing sharia courts. Normal Americans who, alas, would never read a book like America Alone will glance at the nightly news and see earnest Muslims insisting that all women--not just Muslims-- must cover their heads in public places. And these post-Borat Americans will laugh. "What is this, a put-on?" they'll wonder.

The Islamists will be laughed out of the room. Western civilization will be saved. All because a couple of funny guys were willing to tell the truth.

Proving yet again that, in comedy, timing is everything.

Read the rest.

Is John Bolton and The Moustache Of Doom about to join Rumsfeld on the golf course?

Just overhead on Rush Limbaugh. It's also up on Drudge, along with the blinking gumball light.

"Details emerging", as Matt is wont to say.

Update: Robert Gates is in--and that detail is already in Wikipedia!

The Anchoress writes:

1) Nancy Pelosi will not be the Speaker of the House. Partly because she’s too far to the left, partly because she really doesn’t “play” well to the ordinary folks who will not want to watch her on Russert week after week, and mostly because she’s not going to be two heartbeats away from the presidency where if - God forbid - something were to happen to Bush and Cheney, she would become the first female president of the US. Oh, no. There’s no way Hillary’s gonna let Nancy sit in that chair for two years and possibly get the “First Woman POTUS” gig to which she, Hillary, has felt entitled to (and been groomed for) for the last 30 years. Uh-uh. I expect Rahm Emmanuel will get the job. And I think he’ll be a whole lot smarter than to suggest Alcee Hastings for anything.

2) Foolish GOPers will actually think the Dems will “share” committee responsibilities if the Senate ends up 51-49 Dem.

3) Of course impeachment proceedings are on the horizon. In hour 101. Right after they raise taxes and start the paperwork to redeploy our troops. You didn’t really think Pelosi meant it when she said it was off the table, did you? Conyers will slam those papers down the day Congress reconvenes.

I disagree only with the notion that Pelosi won't become speaker; there's been too much media hype for it not to happen. (Rich Lowry posits that the real battle will be for majority leader.)

But as I said a couple of posts ago, it isn't the most favorable environment for her to operate in. It's worth noting what a sinkhole for the far left the Ned Lamont campaign was: Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton both appeared on his platform, Teddy Kennedy pledged his "enthusiastic support", and the Daily Kos and Netroots threw everything they had against Lieberman, and yet...Lieberman emerged a huge winner last night. That doesn't sound like an outcome that Cindy Sheehan, Kennedy or Pelosi would approve of.

Update: Austin Bay agrees:

The big race in 2006 was Lamont versus Lieberman. Joe Lieberman won. That’s a warning to Nancy Pelosi and Co. If they go “nutsroots-Lamont Left” they will squander their victory. Ed Driscoll suggests 2006 is a race-to-the center. Lieberman has carved out one the strongest personal political position in America. For Joe, November lemonade from the lemons of August.

Joe Lieberman is this man. Nancy Pelosi had better pay attention.

"But will she?", A regular participant of Austin's Blog Week In Review podcast asks.

Very, very early take--and certainly not written in stone: Rudolph Giuliani, a centrist Republican who's hard on crime, and definitely not a September 10th man, seems likely to be the instant frontrunner in the GOP.

Update: More ultra-early 2008 predictions here.

Both of these media predictions seem like relatively safe bets in the coming year.

Update: As does this.

Another Update: This seems a bit of a stretch, though.

The Democrats have won control of the House, and as of right now, it looks like the Senate as well. On the other hand, they won several of their races with Republican-lite candidates such as James Webb (if Webb does indeed pull it out), and as Glenn Reynolds writes, "Huh. Pro-war Lieberman -- targeted by antiwar types on that issue -- wins. Chafee -- who was much more anti-war -- loses". So you can't quite call it back to September 10th. And in individual states, some very conservative bills have passed as well.

Always the optimist, Hugh Hewitt looks at the good news for Republicans in today's results:

Hillary's path back to the White House is much more difficult with her party in the majority in the House, and much much more difficult if the Senate falls to Harry Reid's command as well. Clarity as to her party's fecklessness will be back within the first six months, and the GOP frontrunners --Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney-- do not have to serve in the almost certain to be paralyzed Senate.

The Beltway-Manhattan media elite is now stuck "covering" Democratic majorities. Sure, they will go easy on them, but it is much more difficult to cover for a majority than a minority.

And it is a wonderful day for new media, especially talk radio. For two years we have had to defend the Congressional gang that couldn't shoot straight. Now we get to play offense.

I am concerned for the country that the Democrats have won, but the Republicans are indeed going to find this sojourn in the minority a potentially very good thing.

If the GOP adopts and refines the tactics the Democrats have used for the past four years all will be well two years hence, and perhaps even better than well.

Just as long as they don't adopt their tone.

Last year at this time, Jonah Goldberg preciently wrote:

Behold: We have entered the Age When Dinos and Rinos Rule the Earth. See them battle each other for absolute dominion!

Though this might sound like a cool monster mash of the "Mechagodzilla versus Godzilla" variety, it's a good deal less exciting and more depressing, like a taste test between 2% milk and soy milk. What we are witnessing is the dawn of the boring phase of the Great Republican Realignment, and it promises to have liberals and conservatives alike going bonkers.

I should back up. Dinos, of course, are "Democrats in Name Only." Rinos are their GOP counterparts. Nobody actually ever admits to being a Republican in name only. Rather, these are epithets used to describe politicians of insufficient ideological purity or partisan backbone. Think David Gergen without the smoldering sexual intensity. Or, if you can't, think moderates, squishes, apostates, New York Times-pleasing "mavericks," centrists, and all the others who want to "get beyond labels" or get a standing ovation from the Brookings Institution.

Galloping toward the center is nothing new in American politics. The parties have always regressed to the mean. The center of gravity is in the, uh, center. What's changed is that the center has — finally — been moving an eensy bit to the right.

If you go by the bills that won, and the candidates that won, that sounds correct--several individual conservative Republican candidates didn't win--but most far left anti-war types like Ned Lamont didn't clean-up, either. As Jonah mentioned in his recent TCS podcast with me, Democrats win when they move towards the center (just ask Bill Clinton), and right now, the center is where the action is. That doesn't sound like an environment that will be smooth sailing for a quintessential San Francisco Democrat like Speaker Pelosi over the next two years, but we'll see.

Update: "The GOP lost. Conservatism prevailed".

More: Kevin McCullough writes:

Make no mistake... America IS a center-right nation and election night 2006 confirms this!

No I'm not smoking anything...

And yes it will come back to haunt democrats in the days to come.

More centrism here; this is downright conservative--though not very libertarian.

Meanwhile, Second Amendment stalwart Dave Kopel writes:

I do not disagree that the Democratic gains in Congress will, on the whole, be harmful for the economy, and extremely dangerous for the war against Islamofascism.

Nevertheless, the class of pro-gun Democrats who will be joining the House and the Senate includes some who will eventually become party leaders, and who will help move the Democratic party back towards its traditional position of respect for the civil liberties of the American people. A very constructive development, in the long run.

Update: "Radio Equalizer" Brian Maloney writes, "Rather than being won by Democrats, this election was lost by Republicans". Tom Delay agrees.

More: "Even Charlie Rangel admitted that people didn't vote for Dems because they're liked, but as a protest against the current situation."

The L.A. Times reports that Dean Baquet, their editor, was forced to resign "at the request of the publisher after he refused to agree to further cuts of his editorial staff":

Times Publisher David D. Hiller, who took over from Johnson one month ago, and Baquet had a series of conversations last week in which Hiller made plain that cuts are on the way. Baquet repeated his position that he would not oversee further reductions. He said such cuts would harm the paper's ability to cover the world, national affairs and a huge and diverse local community.

Hiller, who spoke briefly to the newsroom after Baquet, said there will be no layoffs this year but warned of future cutbacks companywide.

"This is, I think, one of the, if not the, greatest papers in the country," Hiller said.

Wow--that could be one of the saddest commentaries on the current state of Big Media I've ever read.

John Kerry is predicted to be the next president of the United States in 2004!

In other early polling data, "Remember: As goes Guam, so goes Guam".

Elsewhere, Allahpundit (caffeine be upon him tonight) will be tracking returns throughout the night.

Mickey Kaus asks, "What does it tell you about a political party if in a year of epic disaster for their opponents the best they can hope for is a 51-49 majority in the Senate?"

Meanwhile, in Opinion Journal, Arthur C. Brooks picks up on a theme that Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayward discussed with me in our TCS Daily pre-election podcast:

By all rights, the Republicans left in Congress after this election should be able to pool to work in one minivan. Instead, they are probably facing a 10% setback in House seats--hardly a disaster by midterm election standards. What's more, many of the Democrats at the vanguard of today's political "revolution" are not exactly left-wing zealots. Robert Casey, who leads incumbent Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, opposes abortion rights. On issues of gun control and immigration, Senate candidate Harold Ford of Tennessee sounds like a Republican. James Webb, who seeks to unseat Virginia Sen. George Allen, actually used to be a Republican. The lesson is that Democrats can win modestly if the Republicans implode, and preferably if they look more or less like Republicans. This is hardly a mythic victory for the American left; indeed, the larger cultural picture--in which the election is but a minor political datum--remains strikingly bleak for American liberalism.

Read the rest for Brooks' thoughts on why that is; this sort of over-the-top fearmongering and hyperbole is a big reason, in my book.

I voted an hour ago in my California suburb, and once we got past a brief glitch where they listed as inactive, despite having voted in 2004, things went perfectly smoothly. The electronic voting machine was simple and easy to use, and generated a paper receipt stored in the machine as well, in case its CPU crashes.

But a Hugh Hewitt reader is reporting very different results from the electronic voting machines in Pennsylvania.

In a separate post, Hugh writes, "Rick Santorum is going to have to pay for many lawyers"; the Election Law blog currently has an "Orange" alert for the chances of election litigation nationwide.

Update: Whoops--guess I spoke too soon about how smoothly things were running in California--I blame Haliburton. Or Diebold. Or maybe Kinko's.

Related: Over at Tech Central Station today, Glenn Reynolds reminds us "Why We Should Worry More About Vote Fraud":

As I write this, nobody knows how the elections will turn out. That hasn't stopped some preemptive claims of fraud, though:

Pelosi cautioned that the number of Democratic House victories could be higher or lower and said her greatest concern is over the integrity of the count -- from the reliability of electronic voting machines to her worries that Republicans will try to manipulate the outcome.

"That is the only variable in this," Pelosi said. "Will we have an honest count?''

Hmm. I thought there was also the variable of how the voters decide to vote on Tuesday. Pelosi seems to regard that as a foregone conclusion, though the polls have been wrong before.

But this sort of talk -- destructive and self-serving as it is -- merely underscores a point I've made before: An election system that is less than transparent is one that's open to conspiracy theories and fear of fraud, whether or not fraud is actually present. And I've heard quite a few other Democrats echoing Pelosi -- and quite a few Republicans speculating that a Democratic Congress will ride in on a wave of votes from dead people and illegal immigrants. That sort of thinking seems much more common among respectable members of both parties than it was a few years ago, and I think there's reason to fear it's getting worse.

For four years now, Prof. Reynolds has been a vocal proponent of paper ballots over electronic voting machines, and here's yet another vote in their favor: ripped paper's a lot cheaper to replace when a frustrated voter blows a gasket and takes it out on the voting booth:

In Pennsylvania, a would-be voter was arrested at a polling place in Allentown, where election workers said he smashed an electronic voting machine with a paperweight.

Authorities didn't know what caused the outburst. "He came in here very peaceably and showed his ID, then he got on the machine and just snapped," volunteer Gladys Pezoldt told The Morning Call of Allentown.

The machine's screen was damaged and it was not immediately clear if votes recorded on the machine could be retrieved. Police said the man faced charges of felony criminal mischief and tampering with voting machines.

Or as my wife just said to me, "Great--we have 'going postal', 'road rage', and now 'touchscreen rage'".

On The Other Hand: Paper has its flaws too, of course.

Kesher Talk has a round-up of election day links, including a photo of an old friend from 2005. Tim Blair confirms my first thoughts after examining the sign she's holding up in front of the White House:

Please do as the Mercedes lady demands. Congress will function superbly under the control of an efficient German automaker.

Hey, they definitely turned Chrysler around. But if that's all that's needed to run for office, Lee Iacocca would have been president long ago.

No, we don't have any early poll numbers. But we do have a report of a poll worker in Kentucky who's been charged with assault for "for allegedly choking a voter and pushing the voter out the door", according to AP.

I was just on Tammy Bruce's radio show discussing this incident, gallows "humor" at Newsweek, and other election day craziness--which Michelle Malkin is documenting throughout the day; and Instapundit will no doubt be posting about as well.

On a North Carolina news show this morning, Dan Rather defended his infamous Texas Air National Guard story--and the documents--as being "absolutely true". [Update: Audio added to original post.]

I wonder if the host asked him about page 175 of The Thornburgh Report. To which Dan could probably simply reply, "'Scuse me while I whip this out", I suppose.

Man, when liberal Slate--of all Websites--published an essay titled, "Dan Rather: The anchor as madman", they knew of whence they spoke.

I'd love for someone interviewing Rather to ask him his thoughts of the actions of President Bush's 2004 opponent while he was in the reserves in the early 1970s.

Update: Another familiar face from 2004 checked in as well this week.

The Anchoress, Fausta, and (of course) Pajamas are loaded with links to keep you busy while waiting for the voting machines--whatever kind they are--to open.

And in the exact opposite of those posts--Bill Whittle is back with another long, long post, with very, very few links: he's written 8,497 words; read every one of them.

Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt writes:

I will be up early looking for the first wave of Beltway-Manhatten media machine reports of doom for the Republicans and waves for the Democrats.

Don't believe a word of it.

And there will be many, many early words tomorrow, and no doubt, more than a few exit polls (real or imagined, ala 2004's election day) leaked, despite the networks' best promises to the contrary.

Brendan Miniter writes, "Regardless of the outcome of today's elections--and recent polls show races tightening in favor of Republicans--if the GOP wants to be competitive on the national stage, it will have to first find a way to become competitive again in the Northeast".

Related thoughts, here.

Glenn Reynolds writes, "Remember when Oprah was pro-war?"

Heck, I remember when Rosie O'Donnell was pro-war.

In his syndicated Newhouse column, James Lileks takes a snapshot of the country on the eve of a midterm election:

Pick any era, and you'll find doubt and worry about the world we leave to our children -- if it's not women demanding the right to vote and smoke, it's perpetual stagflation and global cooling.

Somehow we muddle through. The muddling seems tougher now because of those Deep National Divisions you hear about daily, like Coke vs. Pepsi. Mutual distrust has never been greater. The left believes the right would build Heathen Conversion Processing Centers in every state if it could. The right believes the left wants to declare the Boy Scouts a hate group if they don't offer a merit badge for presiding over a gay marriage.

Boil it all down, though, and you get two different views of the future that differ from the sort of disputation we've had before. One is based in the virtues America held in the past: hard-workin', church-goin', gummint outta my hair. The other is based in the virtues Europe displays today: the warm bath of socialism, the bromides of multiculturalism, the distaste for nationalism, and an icky-icky revulsion toward landing a fist on the jaw of the barbarians.

If the left gains power again, it had best seek its roots in the virtues the right has professed, because the example the left loves fares poorly. The end result of European multiculturalism is the burned bus in a Paris suburb; the end result of European socialism is structural unemployment, the dole, and the belief that an eight-week vacation walking around a Spanish beach in a Speedo is a natural right of man; the end result of European secularism is empty churches, shrinking populations and the sincere belief that the culture of resurgent Islam can be mollified by writing a check and assuming the fetal position.

The end result of European experience with war is a defense apparatus that couldn't fight Operation Paper Bag; the end result of European nationalism is the belief that bureaucrats in Belgium must be vested with the power to regulate cheese. It's quite lovely, except when it has to defend itself or stand for something.

The end result is a population that regards the theoretical possibility of polar bears dropping through thin ice as a greater threat to humanism than an Iranian bomb dropping on Tel Aviv. If the EU decreed that for the sake of Gaia the living Earth, crematoria should be used to decrease the surplus population, they wouldn't have to shove people on the trains; millions of enervated Europeans would clamber aboard as volunteers. Save the bears!

It takes concerted effort over time to reshape a culture, and in this sense we're way behind. One midterm election won't change the world. As Europe has shown us, it takes 40 years to sap a culture of its strength and self-confidence. On the other hand, we have their good example; we could probably cut that down to 20.

And speaking of Europe, Tammy Bruce writes that it's traveling back down a dark road it's already been down once.

Update: Lileks' latest Quirk is devoted to his preferred method of voting:

There are several methods of voting. 1: the touch-screen machine, which I hate. Never used one, but I don't like the idea -- and besides, wouldn't you see hundreds of fingerprints over the button for the most popular candidate? Wouldn't this be a form of campaigning, in an odd way? 2: the big fill-in-the-ovals-neatly ballot, which I don't like for two reasons: the plastic booths are always flimsy, and I feel like I'm voting in a Port-A-John that's been married to a TV dinner tray. The fill-in-the-oval requirement brings back Iowa Basics test anxiety, too.

No, I prefer the old giant mechanical booths. You closed a curtain behind you, and beheld a row of switches; you felt as though you could control the giant flaming head of Oz from there. When you pulled the lever -- Ca-CANK -- you could feel your vote shooting off to the great tabulation brain in City Hall. Now an optical reader whisks away your ballot with prissy haste, as though you've soiled it.

Could we vote on bringing the old machines back?

Got my vote--I much prefer those machines as well. They were in use in the southern New Jersey town I grew up in until I left the area in the mid-1990s; I wonder if they still are.

Oh, that liberal media: making a quick detour through the endlessly debunked Lancet report, here's Newsweek's Christopher Dickey on tomorrow's elections:

You remember President George W. Bush smugly telling The Washington Post in January 2005, “We had an accountability moment, and that’s called the 2004 elections.”

Another accountability moment is coming. Sunday was judgment day for Saddam, who probably will hang. Tuesday will be judgment day for Republicans. What will happen to them afterward, well, we’ll have to wait and see.

Is Dickey sorta...kinda...almost...but..not quite...tacitly implying that he'd like to see Republicans hanged? Because that seems to be the obvious inference in stringing those last three sentences together. I suppose that's why he--or his editor--titled it "Hanging Judgments".

Funny--I thought Newsweek only saved the real red meat for the international editions.

(Via Hot Air.)

On The Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal Website, James Q. Wilson asks, "What ever happened to patriotic reporters?", and first exmines what World War II would have looked like if it were filtered through the mindset of today's reporters: "After President Truman authorizes dropping the atomic bomb on Japan, many newspapers urge his impeachment." Then Wilson explores how today's reporters developed that mindset in Vietnam, shattering several myths and conventional wisdom about the coverage of Vietnam prior to around the time of the Tet Offensive, along the way.

Finally, Wilson concludes, "Most of what I have said here is common knowledge", and it will be if you're a regular reader of this blog and others in the Pajamasphere. But the read the whole thing, nonetheless. It's a great round-up of how the elite media got its contempt for America on, and how that impacts the nation itself, both home and abroad.

Update: This is DNN!

Another Update: Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, adds that when it comes to Iraq, "What [Americans] constantly get on television and newspapers is a failure narrative. They hear body counts, they don't hear about successes."

"This is What Peace in Iraq at Saddam's Time Looked Like".

But how evil could he have really been? All the networks told me that Saddam won his last election with a 99.96 majority!

(Unless there was news they kept to themselves, of course...)

Betsy Newmark writes that Baron Hill, Democratic candidate for Indiana's 9th district, was caught lying about being drafted by the New York Giants, and holding his high school's record for the 100-yard dash:

Granted that someone's athletic record isn't relevant to their potential service in the House. But there is something very fishy about someone who puffs up his own biography with an easily checked fact. I guess it's better than Joe Biden plagiarizing someone else's biography, but it still rubs me the wrong way and I'm not even a sports fan.

I guess he didn't realize how easy it is to check these things with Al Gore's invention.

Update: Speaking of dodging a draft--or not.

Tammy Bruce illustrates the covers that Newsweek ran on all of its international editions in early October, versus the cover it ran on its US edition. But then, this isn't the first time that one of their international covers was far more anti-US than its domestic version.

Incidentally, having two faces for your domestic versus international product is also a trait that Newsweek shares with CNN--despite Wolf Blitzer's protestations to the contrary.

BDS strikes Vanity Fair again. Back in March of 2005, I linked to a Weekly Standard piece by Noemie Emery in which she noted that the magazine's rampant case of Bush Derangement Syndrome was hurting its circulation:

ON MARCH 6, THE Drudge Report noted the fact that newsstand sales for the magazine Vanity Fair had plummeted by 22.5 percent during the last half of 2004, attributed by the editor to three successive covers that showed pictures of . . . men. What Drudge did not cite is the parallel fact that this slide tracks exactly with the mutation of the magazine from a great escape read of the guilty-pleasure variety, the place to go for fatuous film stars, Princess Diana, and society murders, into a Bush-bashing rag of the fiercest variety, one that at times last year seemed almost possessed.

After rapidly shedding readership, it's now trashed its credibility as well, as Ed Morrissey notes:

National Review Online has a symposium of people quoted in a press release by Vanity Fair that purported to show neoconservative abandonment of the Iraq war. VF had agreed not to release the artice before the midterm elections, but in a bit of dishonesty, repackaged quotes out of context in order to build interest in the article. Now, the sources of those mangled quotes strike back at VF.

I'd say the people quoted have every right to feel betrayed, but isn't this sort lying about a story now understood as par from the course by the elite media, and a huge reason why they've earned their drive-by media sobriquet?

Morrissey concludes:

The article has much more, especially in conveying a sense of betrayal and abandonment of ethics at Vanity Fair. All of them had been told that their interviews would not be published until January, and more than one of them said they raised their concerns about their words being taken out of context before agreeing to the interview. Vanity Fair, it seems, has much more interest in partisan politics than in honest analysis and journalism -- which is hardly surprising, given the track record to which Michael Ledeen alludes.

Read the rest--and be sure to read Ed's commenters, as well.

Related: Responding the Washington Post's admission that their coverage of the Allen-Webb race leaned just a trifle in Webb's favor (with 92(!) stories referring to "macaca" as of mid-October), John Hinderaker writes:

Has this election cycle represented the high water mark of liberal media bias? I'm not sure; there hasn't been anything as out of bounds as the 60 Minutes document forgery. But day in and day out, I have the sense that the current cycle might set a new standard. The liberal media are determined to drag the carcass of the Democratic Party across the finish line, come Hell or high water.

For the media, it's a just a stepping stone on the path to 2008 and Hillary's epochal inauguration. For the rest of us, it's just a path on the road to 2014.

Update: Michael Steele tells the Washington Post to "eat it".

NOTE (Friday, December 29, 2006, 8:15 PM PST): For those finding this page today via Google, Technorati, and other search engines, and seeking a round-up of links regarding the immediate details of Saddam's execution, click here. The post below dates from November 05, 2006.--Ed

That's the headline that's currently up on Drudge. Three years prior, immediately after Saddam was captured, Mona Charen wrote "Savor it":

Savor it. Adolf Hitler deprived the Allies of the satisfaction of executing him. Josef Stalin died in his bed. Pol Pot died of natural causes. But Saddam Hussein, that vicious, depraved worm of a man, was plucked from his rathole. Ah the great warrior. The author of the Mother of All Battles. The man who claimed he would drive the "invaders" from Iraq. The man who forced thousands of Iraqis to sacrifice their lives so he could continue his squalid and luxurious spree in his many palaces.

This modern-day Saladin (another of his conceits) didn't even have the courage to kill himself in the end, but submitted meekly, with an offer to "negotiate."

There was a time in our history when such a triumph for our forces would have engendered universal applause and deep gratification in America. But we are not living in such a time. For liberals, no U.S. success is an unmixed blessing, and I don't mean this in the short-term political sense — "This will hurt Howard Dean's campaign" — though that is clearly true, but also in a more philosophical sense.

Read the rest--it's remarkably prescient in light of today's news.

More here and here.

Update: In a continuously updated post, Pajamas reports:

Saddam Hussein prefers to be executed by a firing squad, according to Fox News, as he feels befits his status, and feels that hanging is for “common criminals.”

It's the moustache on the left syndrome again: The Nazis said exactly the same thing when they were sentenced to hang in Nuremberg.

Another Update: Heh.

Back in August of 2004, I wrote that Senator Kerry was "Built For A 1972 Media".

Austin Bay updates the meme: "John Kerry’s simply not ready for the YouTube world."

Read the rest.

John Kerry: Uniting the troops, as always.

(And uniting the media, of course.)

Mary Katharine Ham is calling for you: "There are so many fun and exciting Republicans just waiting for you to call them."

Found via Libertas, Ann Althouse has a couple of YouTube clips of a surrealistic interview of Billy Graham by Woody Allen from the late '60s or very early '70s. As Libertas writes:

With all the acrimony and right against left and poisonous debate going on during this election season, I thought I’d pass on this very charming clip of Woody Allen interviewing Billy Graham. They’re both very funny and obviously enjoying each other’s company though they agree on little. (Letterman could learn something from this.)

Looking back at how Woody has sabotaged his career on numerous occasions, it seems hard to believe we once took him seriously as an intellectual. So it's not at all surprising, at this point in time, to note that Graham certainly holds his own with Woody, but the clip is a reminder of how funny the Woodman's original comedic persona was, until he caught Jerry Lewis disease, and became sclerotic and dour. (Or as Eugene Levy's Bobby Bittman character used to say on SCTV, "As a comic in all seriousness...)

Ever since the success of the Republicans' Contract With America in 1994, I've long wondered why no one has repeated the concept. Finally, one party has...

Compare and contrast two different approaches by the media to a November surprise. First up, Michael Medved writes:

Today’s media obsession involves the apparently disgusting behavior of one Ted Haggard, who just resigned as President of the National Association of Evangelicals. Four days before an election, we don’t talk about the startling new unemployment figures (the best in five years!) or progress against North Korea (winning concessions no one expected). Instead, we’re treated to excruciating detail about a pastor from a Colorado Springs mega-church who admits that he purchased methamphetamines and received massages from a gay prostitute.

Isn’t the partisan agenda utterly transparent in the intense attention focused on this story? Very few Americans had ever heard of Haggard before the scandal broke yesterday; he is in no sense a household name. He is not a candidate for any public office, nor has he played an especially visible role in this election. Had these charges been made against a liberal pastor, or an atheist activist of any stripe, it’s hard to believe that cable news networks would cover the story as if it were deeply significant?

The purpose of the Haggard focus is to remind everyone of Mark Foley, the media “Golden Oldie” from a few weeks ago. The cherished theme – that Republicans and conservatives only pretend to honor morality, but actually behave horribly in their private lives – gets big time re-enforcement from Haggard’s heinousness. Just as the Foley Fiasco managed to stop Republican momentum a month ago, so the tawdry Ted-stuff is supposed to stop the current surge toward the GOP in key races across the country?

It may work, alas, even though the media bias emerges as ugly and undeniable.

I guess it could work--but as Medved writes, "Very few Americans had ever heard of Haggard before the scandal broke yesterday; he is in no sense a household name". I certainly had never heard of him until today (and neither had the otherwise omniscient Professor). And after the Foley scandal, I suspect the American public is somewhat inured to the now seemingly routine gay outing (which is a tacit form of gay bashing, after all) by the liberal media.

The Haggard story contrasts nicely with a self-inflicted gaffe by someone who is a household name, and the media's efforts to downplay it as much as possible. Newsbusters writes:

Inured as we are to MSM bias, this one was still stunning. A leading MSM member uses the airwaves to scold Democrats for being insufficiently loyal to a leading party light.

Former Bush Chief of Staff Andy Card was Matt Lauer's guest on this morning's 'Today.' Matt was intent on wangling from Card an admission that the Kerry comments were a mistake:

Lauer first offered his personal analysis: "He made a joke and he said he blew the joke and it sounded as though he questioned the intelligence of U.S. troops in Iraq."

He then demanded of his guest: "Look me in the eye and tell me with even a fraction of your heart you think John Kerry meant to question the intelligence of U.S. troops in Iraq."

Uhh, OK, Matt--here you go.

Update: Maybe Matt should read this.

P.J. O'Rourke once wrote a well-known book titled Parliament of Whores, but Minnesota's attorney general appears to be taking the title just a little too seriously, Power Line writes:

Here in Minnesota, Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty is locked in a tight re-election battle against Attorney General Mike Hatch. By any normal standard, Pawlenty's record is fantastic, and he is a highly talented politician who should have no trouble gaining a second term. But this year, it's not easy for any Republican running in a state like Minnesota.

Hatch has been around for a long time, and he reminds me a bit of Richard Nixon. Hatch is reasonably able, but seems ill-suited to politics. He is not very likable, frankly, and seems to struggle constantly to restrain his volcanic temper. Yesterday, Hatch may have doomed his long-cherished hope to become governor when, in a burst of anger, he called a reporter from the Duluth newspaper a "Republican whore."

As John Hinderaker adds, "I just realized I forgot to explain the title of this post. The reporter whom Hatch called a 'Republican whore' is a man. If it had been a woman, the race would be over".

Those Shirts, or some enterprising blogger with a Cafe Press account could have a lot of fun with Hatch's hiccup.

Mickey Kaus frequently refers to the Feiler Faster Thesis, which describes the impact that the high speed of the Internet has on conventional wisdom.

I'm very much in agreement with this Reuters piece on its corollary, a piece titled, "Politicians beware--Internet prolongs blunders". While the article mentions both Kerry's and George Allen's gaffes for balance, I think the subject of the piece has more impact on the left than the right. For some background on why this is, here's something I wrote in 2004:

Kerry's massively invented narrative ("swashbuckling Swift Boat lieutenant"--as Steyn describes him--turned brave defender of soldiers' rights) was built to survive the glancing scrutiny (if you can call it that) of a 1972-era media that consisted of three TV networks with half hour evening news shows, and a few liberal big city newspapers, all of which were staffed with journalists more or less largely sympathetic to Kerry's leftist anti-American beliefs.

But between the Swift Boat Vets and the Blogosphere, there are far too many people examining Kerry's story, and his "reporting for duty" edifice has crumbled.

Is that fair? We'll, we're deciding if we want the man to have the key to the most powerful arsenal ever assembled. If he can't survive the scrutiny of the Blogosphere, who James Lileks recently described as an "obsessive sort with lots of time on their hands", is he someone who should be trusted with this power?

And as I just mentioned in the previous post, it's a lot easier to shift your opinions on matters such as Iraq when you're dealing in a dead tree medium, rather than one with hyperlinks and search engines. Or as Hugh Hewitt recently posited to ABC's Mark Halperin:

HH: I think my giant unified field theory here is that liberal media has destroyed the necessity of the left having to debate, having to reach a message across, because you guys have always papered over the weakness of their arguments. And so, in essence, by creating an echo chamber, and by allowing them to get away with saying silly things, you’ve destroyed the incentive to be smart and facile.

MH: I agree.

Curiously though, there's one "blunder" that's been prolonged by the Internet; that--oddly enough!--the Reuters article omits.

Can't imagine why.

The New Criterion has an interesting review by Ronald Radosh of Myra MacPherson’s new book on leftwing journalist Izzy Stone:

Even the reviewer in the October 23 issue of the Nation, the film critic John Powers, acknowledges that “Stone’s true failing was his tardiness in grasping the full monstrosity of actually existing Communism, especially Stalinism.” As he sarcastically points out, Stone’s “tiger eyes that could spot the threat to liberty in the footnotes of a Congressional report couldn’t clearly see the meaning of show trials, slave labor, and class-based mass murder.” Powers boldly writes for today’s “progressive” readers of the magazine, that Stone, “faced with one of the most tyrannical political regimes of his lifetime, got things so badly wrong that another man might have died questioning his own judgment.”

To borrow from something that Mark Steyn once wrote about Hollywood leftist Dalton Trumbo, Stone got one of the great moral questions of the 20th century wrong. But then, so did Stone's contemporaries and modern-day followers, as Radosh writes:

By the time he died in 1989, the once outcast and radical journalist I. F. Stone, fondly called “Izzy” by all who knew him, had become an icon. The blurbs on the back of Myra MacPherson’s new look at Stone’s life are from the likes of journalistic establishment dons like Craig Unger, Helen Thomas, Richard Reeves, and others—all of whom try to tell us that, were he alive, Stone could wake up today’s “lapdog” reporters.[1] He would, as Thomas writes, “lead our country to its greatest ideals again.”

That quote from Thomas and her identification with Stone speaks volumes about her, of course. Watching the twists and turns that Saddam Hussein has taken in the American media--from being properly condemned when President Clinton was in office, to being almost lionized as a way to score points against President Bush (and now back again on election eve) shows how fluid the truth is to today's journalists. That they learned such moral flexibility from an earlier generation of writers such as Stone and Walter Duranty illustrate just how shoddy "history's first draft" can be at times.

I have no idea what that headline means, but here it is, the latest Blog Week In Review:

Prelude to a Power Change? Perhaps. Panelists Tammy Bruce and Glenn Reynolds analyze the 2006 midterm election, dissect Senator John Kerry’s “botched joke” and focus on the Internet Governance Forum which was held in Athens, Greece this week.

Austin Bay moderates; Ed Driscoll produces. Brought to you by Volvo USA.

As Glenn writes, if you buy a Volvo, tell 'em we sent ya!

The Pajamas Blog Week In Review election preview podcast should be up later today at this link. If the anticipation is too much for you and you need an additonal 10ccs of pre-election political podcasting while you're waiting, tune into my interview with Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayward over at TCS Daily, or this podcast with Lorie Byrd of WizBangBlog.com, John Hawkins of RightWingNews.com, Scott Elliott of ElectionProjection.com and Richard Ross of ConservativeswithAttitude.com.

(Found via Betsy Newmark.)

Hugh Hewitt interviewed Victor Davis Hanson today, and asked him about these photos of University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann's Halloween party, which Democracy Project describes thusly:

University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann threw her annual Halloween costume party at her home Tuesday night. Among the guests was Saad Saadi, who came dressed as a suicide bomber, complete with plastic dynamite strapped to his chest and a toy automatic rifle. Worse, Gutmann posed with Saadi!

An obvious question: would Gutmann have posed with a guest--or even allowed him into her house--if he'd dressed as Adolf Hitler or a Nazi SS officer? A KKK member?

But in modern liberal circles, posing as a Palestinian suicide bomber (see his kefiya) is just fine. After all, he mainly tries to kill innocent Jews.

Hanson replied to Hewitt:

Well, I saw that, and again, I think it's emblematic of this endemic problem on the left, that they don't really see that we're in a war, they don't really see that there's a moral difference between suicide bombers and people who try to deliberately kill people, and people in the war who have collatoral damage by accident, when they try to target terrorists. So I mean, it's a problem we're having, these Fraudian slips. John Kerry didn't mean to slur soldiers, but he has a problem. And when he makes a mistake, and he makes a gaffe, that's the type of things that comes out. It reveals a deep-seated distrust, just like Kennedy, just like Jay Rockefeller, just like Senator Durbin, just like all of these people when they have these outbursts, and they lapse into sort of a stream of consciousness. What you expect to come from them is a 1960's deep distrust of the United States socio-economic and military system. And then they do silly things, such as President Gutmann, who was provost at Princeton University, allowing a picture of her with a suicide bomber. They just don't have the same antenna that most of us do.

As Hugh writes on his blog, "As reaction to these photos builds, please reserve your anger for the adults, not the stupid kid". (And he has since apologized for his actions; see the end of the Democracy Project post.)

This wasn't an isolated incident on Halloween, though. As I noted yesterday:

Karl Rove's mind control rays somehow caused the attorney and former Democratic candidate for governor of Maine who was behind the November Surprise of 2000 to wear an Osama bin Laden mask and toy guns and hand grenades on the side of the road in Maine, where he was promptly arrested.

For a sense of a decadent, dissipated culture which turned a blind eye to the horrors happening even then in their own backyard, it's worth re-reading this superb article by Jonathan Last which compared liberal elites in English universities in the 1930s with today's left in America.

I was only mildly surprised yesterday that Senator Kerry expresses no remorse over his Radical Chic phase in the early 1970s; I wonder if those who've professed admiration for today's terrorists will be any better able to genuflect on their own allegiances in a decade or two.

This just in: there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but our releasing of the details of Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program could benefit Iran.

If that doesn't sound internally consistent to you at first glance, you're not alone. But that seems to be the big November surprise from The New York Times, which Jim Geraghty makes sense out of. Certainly more sense than Times does; as Geraghty writes:

I think the Times editors are counting on this being spun as a "Boy, did Bush screw up" meme; the problem is, to do it, they have to knock down the "there was no threat in Iraq" meme, once and for all. Because obviously, Saddam could have sold this information to anybody, any other state, or any well-funded terrorist group that had publicly pledged to kill millions of Americans and had expressed interest in nuclear arms. You know, like, oh... al-Qaeda.

The New York Times just tore the heart out of the antiwar argument, and they are apparently completely oblivous to it.

The antiwar crowd is going to have to argue that the information somehow wasn't dangerous in the hands of Saddam Hussein, but was dangerous posted on the Internet. It doesn't work. It can't be both no threat to America and yet also somehow a threat to America once it's in the hands of Iran. Game, set, and match.

Read the whole thing.

As John Stephenson writes, "The New York Times confirms that in 2002 Saddam Hussein’s 'scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away:'" Which hands a nice "See I told you so" moment not just to President Bush, but to to Rick Santorum, though it may be too late for his campaign to benefit from it.

Update: Ed Morrissey adds, " So I Guess The FMSO [Foreign Military Studies Office] Documents Are Legit":

This is apparently the Times' November surprise, but it's a surprising one indeed. The Times has just authenticated the entire collection of memos, some of which give very detailed accounts of Iraqi ties to terrorist organizations. Just this past Monday, I posted a memo which showed that the Saddam regime actively coordinated with Palestinian terrorists in the PFLP as well as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. On September 20th, I reposted a translation of an IIS memo written four days after 9/11 that worried the US would discover Iraq's ties to Osama bin Laden.

Read the rest.

More: If--and that's a big if--this story does indeed occur before the election, hasn't the Times rather nicely paved the way for it?

"Glenn, you describe a man that's simultaneously trapped in the past, and simultaneously stuck on stupid. Is that a fair assessment?"

"Yeah".

--Austin Bay and Glenn Reynolds, discussing the American military's favorite senator, in this week's Pajamas Media Blog Week In Review podcast, coming tomorrow.

Update: Tammy Bruce, the third participant in this week's podcast, and one of the great Bellicose Women, to borrow from one of Glenn's phrases, is not at all surprised at this development, though Senator Kerry probably would be.

In his Halloween Bleat this week, James Lileks wrote:

“Who’s Dave Barry?” asked the tall charming orange-haired witch neighbor. She didn’t know. Which is fine, but I was a bit surprised; I thought everybody knew Dave. I thought it would be like not knowing who Jack Benny was in 1948, but of course the days of the monoculture are long gone, and the individual stratum of our culture have so many rewards of their own there’s no incentive to cross the streams, to put it in Ghostbuster terms. I try to inhabit as many streams as I can, though. There’s a range of narrowcast XM channels I visit just to absorb the room tone. There’s a NASCAR channel, for heaven’s sake. Auto racing on the radio would be like golf described via semaphore flags, but some people like it.

When there was a monoculture, newspapers did their job admirably. But these days, the culture is remarkably demassified, to use one of Alvin Toffler's favorite words (and mine, whenever I reference Toffler)--but newspapers aren't. Which is why a photo like this can run around the world via the Internet, be seen by everyone, and make, apparently, one newspaper, and not coincidentally, one of the few outliers that don't fit into the one-size-fits-all elite media worldview that ABC's Mark Halperin recently analyzed for Hugh Hewitt.

But then, this isn't the first time that newspapers avoided news when it didn't fit their worldview.

During the 2004 presidential campaign, I often wondered what Senator Kerry thought of his Winter Soldier days, and the infamous speech to the Senate Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in April 1971 in which he said American troops "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan".

Did he look back on those statements and the pain they caused both soldiers who were still fighting in Vietnam, and those returning home in the early to mid-1970s as a horrible mistake? A byproduct of a misbegotten Radical Chic past, in much the same way that someone like David Horowitz now views his own misadventures of the same period? As I suspected back then, the answer is, of course not:

On Imus this morning, Senator Kerry resurrected his 35 year old slander on Vietnam era veterans:

Incidentally, when you say I have done something in the past I have told the truth in the past. I have never done anything except tell the truth. And I'm not going to take anybody's comment to suggest that somehow my telling the truth was a mistake. The American people rely on the truth, and when I came back from southeast Asia, I told the truth, and I am proud that I stood up and told the truth then, and I have told the truth about Iraq every single step along the way.

And in an attempt to apologize for his remarks on Monday, Kerry issues the classic "I'm sorry if you misinterpreted remarks" style non-aplogy apology, and then sticks the shiv in--once again--at the end:

As a combat veteran, I want to make it clear to anyone in uniform and to their loved ones: my poorly stated joke at a rally was not about, and never intended to refer to any troop.

I sincerely regret that my words were misinterpreted to wrongly imply anything negative about those in uniform, and I personally apologize to any service member, family member, or American who was offended.

It is clear the Republican Party would rather talk about anything but their failed security policy. I don’t want my verbal slip to be a diversion from the real issues. I will continue to fight for a change of course to provide real security for our country, and a winning strategy for our troops.

If I was the president, or a Republican House or Senate candidate running for election next week, I'd love to know what Senator Kerry feels is failed about America's security policy: considering the fears of the nation immediately after 9/11, our ability to avoid another attack of that size on our soil is far from purely a matter of luck.

California is one of the least business-friendly states in the union, yet somehow, Silicon Valley still exists as a hub of entrepreneurship. Virginia Postrel explains why.

A few years ago in the NFL, the league resorted to stopping beer sales in the fourth quarter to keep rabid fans in places like the Cleveland Brown's Dawg Pound calm. Short of taking away obsessed political junkies' cable TV and cable modem access, I'm not sure what the solution is to this week's burgeoning fourth quarter political lunacy. It's much like what occurred during the endgame of the 2004 election:

Yesterday, a crazed nut tried to rush George Allen's campaign staffers. And Karl Rove's mind control rays somehow caused the attorney and former Democratic candidate for governor of Maine who was behind the November Surprise of 2000 to wear an Osama bin Laden mask and toy guns and hand grenades on the side of the road in Maine, where he was promptly arrested. (Halloween prank gone awry? No, I don't get it either. But I guess it's better than the weird duck-billed fishing hat he was photographed wearing in 2000.)

But they all pale into significance when compared to The Fresca Smear.

Update: Speaking of the one fourth quarter incident that probably could have been avoided through judicious Fresca banning, these fellows have a response that's well worth reading.