Outstanding British blogger Don Surber writes on the New York Times' $648 million loss in the fourth quarter of 2006, and the rapidly shrinking value of its subsidiary paper, the Boston Globe:

If the Sulzberger family had given young Pinch $700 million in dollar bills to burn to his heart’s content over the last 14 years instead of allowing him to by the Boston and Worcester newspapers, the family would be ahead by some $148 million today.

Glenn Reynolds declares the situation a hopeless quagmire, and immediately calls for a Pinch of a retreat.

Caroline Glick writes:

In the world of international diplomacy few issues receive more wall-to-wall support than the notion that it is essential to establish a Palestinian state. Leaders worldwide are so busy speaking of how essential it is for a State of Palestine to be founded that none of them seems to have noticed that it already exists.

This state was officially founded in the summer of 2005, when Israel removed its military forces and civilian population from the Gaza Strip and so established the first wholly independent Palestinian state in history. Israel’s destruction of four Israeli communities in Northern Samaria and curtailment of its military operations in the area set the conditions for statehood in that area as well.

And so it is that as statesmen and activists worldwide loudly proclaim their commitment to establishing the sovereign State of Palestine, they miss the fact that Palestine exists. And it is a nightmare.

"By creating the very Palestinian state that those governments and those states pretend to want but actually dread", David Frum wrote in 2005 of what would ultimately be Ariel Sharon's final legacy before his massive stroke, "Sharon is forcing them to end their pretense and acknowledge the truth".

And the truth, as Glick writes today, is that "Palestine exists. And it is a nightmare".

Oh, that liberal media:

Conservative bloggers sometimes exaggerate and write that so-and-so "slammed" the troops, and then you follow the link and read the comments in context and find out they're not that bad — usually it's a garden-variety criticism of how the war is being managed or, at worst, a "botched joke".

And then you read the Washington Post's William Arkin.

The late Katharine Graham once described her paper as "Mass With Class". Even with the media infinitely more demassified as a whole than its heyday, the mass of the Post is certainly still there, at least.

But regarding the latter element of Ms. Graham's equation, as John Hinderaker of Power Line writes, "The peril of newspaper blogs is that a reporter might say what he actually thinks before an editor catches up with him and makes him stop".

Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt adds, "The Washington Post's William Arkin Gets His Reply".

Molly Ivins died today at age 62. Her 1999 book Shrub was one of the early templates for what Charles Krauthammer would dub BDS four years later, as Andrew Ferguson wrote in 2004:

Shrub, by the Texas journalists Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose, was granddaddy to them all. Published in 1999, it stands even now as the template for the Bush critique. In his great essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," the political scientist Richard Hofstadter remarked how political paranoids in early America--the anti-Masons, for example--were alarmed from decade to decade by the same chimera: They convinced themselves that they saw, operating just beneath the surface of the national life, "a libertine anti-Christian movement, given to the corruption of women, the cultivation of sensual pleasures, and the violation of property rights." Now, of course, the paranoids are bewitched by the mirror image: In Bush and his followers they detect, in place of a libertine anti-Christian movement, an uptight pro-Christian movement, given to the "virtue" of women rather than their corruption, the denial of sensual pleasures instead of their cultivation, and--perhaps most shocking of all--the preservation of property rights rather than their violation. Times do change. The earlier American paranoids imagined their enemies in drunken orgies and were horrified; today they see them at prayer--and they're still horrified.

Shrub bears all the marks of Texas progressivism. The carefully shaded accounts of Bush's stint in the National Guard and of his failed career as a businessman--accounts that have been plundered and plagiarized by nearly every anti-Bush book since--jump with class resentment. The then-governor's professions of religious faith are viewed with alarm and suggestions of primitivism. Dark, controlling forces move just offstage. Hidden agendas slither beneath the surface of the governor's policy proposals. The contradictions of the standard Bush critique are fully ventilated, and never acknowledged. In Austin not long ago I mentioned to Lou Dubose, Shrub's coauthor, that as admirable as the book is in many ways--it is a genuinely masterful polemic--a reader can never reconcile the contradictions in its portrait of Bush. Is he a dim bulb or a rascal--an ideological revolutionary or a go-along, get-along pol--a feckless rich kid or a cold-eyed manipulator? Dubose laughed. "Yes, to all of the above," he said.

DUBOSE IS TOO SKILLED A REPORTER, and Ivins too high-spirited a polemicist, for Shrub to come off as unrelievedly dark. There's even a grudging affection for its subject lurking in there somewhere; "He's such an affable fellow," the book concludes. "It's not Bush hatred," Dubose told me, smiling. "It's more liberal condescension, which is a much finer quality."

Indubitably. Ivins was also accused of plagiarizing fellow author Florence King and others.

"Less than 24 hours after telling Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki ‘Go forward. We are all with you.’, and with rapidity that would make even Janus blush, U.S. Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, returned home to declare ‘What is happening in Iraq is chaos."

Find Law reports:

NEW YORK-Israelis and other foreign nationals can pursue claims in U.S. courts accusing the Jordan-based Arab Bank of promoting Palestinian suicide attacks by funneling Saudi money to bombers' families, a judge ruled.

In a written decision in federal court in Brooklyn, U.S. District Judge Nina Gershon upheld a lawsuit Monday filed under U.S. law that gives non-U.S. citizens access to courts in order to challenge violations of international laws or treaties.

Lawyers for Arab Bank had asked Gershon to toss out the suit, arguing that U.S. courts lacked proper jurisdiction.

Though the judge dismissed portions of the suit, her ruling still allows thousands of suicide bombing victims and their families to seek unspecified damages, said a plaintiff lawyer, Michael Elsner.

"Today was an incredible victory for victims of suicide bombing attacks and other acts of violence in Israel and an important lesson to banks and private individuals that aid and abet acts of terrorism," he said. "They may be held civilly liable in the United States, even if those acts occur outside the United States."

Arab Bank spokeswoman Phyllis Cuttino says the bank "abhors terrorism".

Of course they do.

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing Syd Mead, the production designer of Blade Runner, and prior to that a visionary illustrator for Detroit and US Steel, on Harrison Ford's flying car.

This fellow is working to make it a reality:

YAVNE, Israel — Rafi Yoeli has an unconventional solution to saving people from burning high-rises or rescuing soldiers trapped behind enemy lines: a flying car.

Yoeli already has gotten a rudimentary vehicle off the ground — about three feet — and hopes to see a marketable version of his X-Hawk flying car by 2010.

Although his dream might seem far-fetched, Textron Inc.'s (TXT) Bell Helicopters is taking a serious look, teaming with Yoeli's privately held Urban Aeronautics to explore X-Hawk's potential.

Think of the people trapped in the World Trade Center. Think of ground patrols in Iraq blown up by roadside bombs. Think of New Orleans residents stranded on rooftops after Hurricane Katrina.

X-Hawk and its smaller version, Mule, might one day offer the same capabilities as helicopters, but without the serious operating limitations — such as exposed rotors — that helicopters face in urban terrain.

If Yoeli's invention makes it to the US, California--or at least several of its cities--will immediately ban it, of course.

Boston's CBS affiliate reports:

Police are investigating four suspicious devices found at four separate locations throughout Boston.

Officials are telling WBZ the devices are similar to the one found this morning in Sullivan Square attached to a beam supporting I-93 north.

The four locations for these devices are the Boston University Bridge, Longfellow Bridge, Tufts New England Medical Center, and the intersection of Stuart and Columbus Streets.

WBZ has learned Boston police removed an item from the Boston University Bridge but they would not elaborate on exactly what the item is. Officers have since cleared that scene.

Charles Johnson adds, "Boston police now say all of the devices are ‘hoax devices’—and one of them contained a picture of a man ‘flipping the bird’ to police".

Apparently, up to to ten "hoax devices" have been discovered so far.

Update: Charles adds that "It’s turning into an ‘oh brother’ kind of day":

The latest news: the “devices” were part of a hare-brained advertising campaign by Turner Broadcasting, promoting the animated show “Aqua Teen Hunger Force.”

That must explain why I could have sworn I heard Ted Turner muttering something about the people of Boston being "thin, and they were riding bicycles instead of driving in cars"...

Another Update: More details here.

One More: Somewhere, Orson Welles is laughing his head off over this incident.

Paul Wolfwitz: president of the World Bank, clad in a beautiful navy Savile Row suit, single-breasted, cuffed trousers...and photographed leaving a holy spot with extremely holey socks.

No doubt, he'll shortly be getting more than he'll know what to do with from friends and well-wishers. And every man who's had to take his shoes off at TSA line will be sympathizing with him.

Did CBS reporter Lara Logan use video footage shot in Iraq by Al-Qaeda? And if so, how did it arrive in their possession? At the end of a lengthy and detailed post with extensive video analysis, Bryan Preston writes:

I sent Public Eye an email with a link to this post. Their “I can assure you” line won’t cut it after Rathergate. Hopefully they understand that, and why, and will address my investigation with some rigor. Even if they can refute my findings, that would be better than their asking us to just trust them. They haven’t earned that trust. Thoroughly examining how and where Logan obtained that video would go a long way to building some trust, though.

Definitely RTWT, as the people who debunked Dan Rather and Adnan Hajj are wont to abbreviate.

No post titled "The Final Countdown" would be complete without this infamous YouTube moment in which the singer--such as he is--sounds like he really is warbling the above title.

Back around 1988, I watched Ted Danson, then at the height of his fame as the star of Cheers appear on a late-night infomercial pitch for an environmental group. He ended the half-hour advertisement with his saying that "we only have ten years to save the world's oceans". (That's a paraphrase, but as close as I remember the line.)

It's a reminder that, with the exception of Hollywood's greatest Greatest Generation-era stars (Cary Grant, Bogie, The Duke, Coop), Bill Whittle's Lou Grant Effect is inviolable. Having a beer in Sam Malone's bar while he recounts his glory days with the Sox sounds like infinitely more fun than listening to the doomsday prognostications of someone paid to recite lines written by others, with his performance calibrated by someone else.

But since the freshness date has long expired on Danson's dire warning, and the oceans are, near as I can tell, all happily present and accounted for, there have been numerous additional Doomsday Countdowns, which always seem to run for a decade for some reason. Al Gore started his a year ago, and yesterday, aging man-child Leonardo Di Caprio and several accompanying B-list actors and musicians announced theirs.

As Glenn Reynolds writes, "Ten years to save the planet: Let's start by banning private jets."

Here are two extremely environmentally conscious sources who could immediately put their Boeings where their mouths are, and retire their privately-owned jumbo jets for Diet Cokes and a tiny bag of peanuts on Southwest.

Anytime now, fellas; we're waiting...

And while we're waiting, James Lileks has some very much related thoughts: "It’s a peculiar inversion: the height of civilization now consists of undoing the plug, not connecting it."

Update: In 2005, I looked at the number of businesses leaving California for a pro-business climate and wrote, "Will the last person out of California please turn out the lights?"

No need to--California Assemblyman Lloyd Levine (D-Pluto) is going to do it for us.

Virginia Postrel recently wrote "California legislators are never without new ideas for regulations and bans"; sadly, that streak sees absolutely sees no sign of abating.

Another Update: Libertas asks, where are the big boys?

Wouldn’t you feel better if it weren’t boy-men trying to save the world? They couldn’t talk Bruce Willis or Russell Crowe into this nonsense? I’m sorry, but I’m just not comfortable leaving the fate of the planet to Leo, Orlando, and Josh.

If things are really as bad as Hollywood wants us to believe, shouldn’t any action that pollutes unnecessary to human survival cease? Like movie making? You can’t scream armageddon while moving forward on another Focker sequel. You just can’t.

No, you really can't. If the earth really is doomed in ten years, then movie making--mere entertainment that no one outside of Beverly Hills needs to survive--should be stopped immediately, to prolong the environment as long as possible by eliminating all of its accompanying chemicals and pollution.

Joe, we hardly knew ye!

Update: Meanwhile, Biden's original target, before he shot himself in the foot, carries some pretty extensive baggage of his own, apparently.

More: Will Al Gore jump into the fray on Oscar night? That's what Donna Brazile, his former campaign manager is speculating.

Another Update: Betsy Newmark asks:

Now that Drudge has picked up on this interview, I have to wonder if the media will pay half as much attention to this gaffe by Biden as they do to Republican gaffes. Will the Washington Post run as many stories on it as they did on George Allen saying macaca? Will every story about Biden and his resolution against the war have comments about Biden, the man who spoke so demeaningly of Barack Obama? Will this be taken as some sort of verbal expression of what Biden really thinks about blacks? Will reporters tie together these other racist-tinged gaffes that Biden has made and draw some grander generalization? Or will it be laughed off by all the reporters who just think that Joe Biden is such a nice guy?

As Betsy adds, "I think we know the answers to these questions". Sadly, yes.

According to SurveyUSA, Jim Webb's statewide approval ratings in Virginia are 42% approval, 47% disapproval. My Election Analysis adds, "Approval ratings are below 50% in all geographic areas of the state, 45%-44% approval among independents. This stands in stark contrast to other members of Webb’s freshman class, all of whom are still basking in the afterglow of their recent election".

Maybe it was the tacit suggestion to nuke Iraq in his rebuttal to the president's State of the Union address that did it...

Err, no that headline isn't quite what it sounds like at first glance: Austin Bay, host of Pajamas' Blog Week In Review podcast, has an excerpt from his new pamphlet in a recent edition of the L.A. Times.

(Bugmenot works well of course, if you'd like to read the article without registering.)

Some comments on the limits of bipartisanship and cultural sensitivity from Mary Katharine Ham.

Related thoughts from Patterico.

Update: Further cultural sensitivity spotted. Meanwhile, Debbie Schlussel shares polite, sensitive reader mail.

"New York Times public editor Byron Calame (aka The Empty Suit) has publicly admonished the Times’ chief military correspondent, Michael Gordon, for saying he thinks the US can win in Iraq."

Given its publisher's worldview, I'm surprised that the Times' would have a reporter positive about US victory in the first place.

Speaking of anti-war biases and worldviews, here's some background on Richard Engel, the NBC journalist who assembled the report that Glenn Reynolds and Hot Air have linked to.

Update: Heh^TM.

John Podhoretz breaks down Hillary's bizarre statement over the weekend that "The president has said [Iraq] is going to be left to his successor. I think it is the height of irresponsibility, and I really resent it."

(Note the tacit assumption that she resents it because she assumes she'll be that successor. Not to mention the complete discard of the often-expressed concept that the GWOT will be a multi-generational war, much like the Cold War. (As Pappa Podhoretz has written.))

Podhoretz writes that Hillary resentment is "actually an interesting, even thought-provoking, formulation":

It's rare to hear questions about difficult policies discussed in terms of personal resentments, but perhaps this is one of the areas where Hillary Clinton will blaze a new presidential trail.

Imagine, for example, that President Bush had given a speech a few days after 9/11 declaring he really resented the fact that Bill Clinton didn't kill Osama bin Laden before Bush became president.

Or that President Bill Clinton, in the wake of the slaughter of 18 American servicemen in Somalia in 1993, informed Americans about his real resentment of George Bush the Elder, who sent those servicemen into Somalia at the tail end of his administration.

Really Resenting doesn't have to begin and end with foreign policy and military matters. President George Bush the Elder could have made public his profound resentment at the consequences of the Reagan tax-reform bill on the real-estate market, whose crumbling value in the late 1980s led to the recession that helped do Bush the Elder in.

For that matter, Ronald Reagan could have spent 1982 expressing resentment at the recession caused by the necessity of choking off the stagflation of the Carter years. And on it goes.

Now, of course, what Hillary means here is that since Iraq is "Bush's war," it's not cricket of him to let it go on past the conclusion of his presidency. The war is supported by no one but him, its presumed failure is solely his fault and his responsibility - and he should get it off the next president's plate.

Or as Steve Green noted a couple of days ago, Harry Truman must have really resented inheriting World War II from FDR, because in short order, he "nuked the crap out of Japan and brought our boys home already".

Podhoretz notes that that latter element could have been a feature, not a bug, for the early days of the "the most uncompromising wartime President in the history of the United States":

Strange. You might think that if the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq in 2009 is unnecessary, the new president might take great relish in being the person to bring them home immediately. Under those circumstances, Hillary could begin her presidency as a hero, at least to her own voters.

What's more, if the war is going badly during the presidential campaign next year, with troops still in Iraq, the entire campaign will revolve around the question of how soon after Bush leaves office the big Bug Out can commence.

In any case, welcome back to the 1990s, where it's always about Bill and/or Hillary.

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

Wow, maybe it is 1968 all over again: Jack Webb is back, and this time, he's on the side of Truth, Justice, and the Techno-Rapping Way, baby!

Alas, it's not the Blogosphere's Stephen Green. But Radio Equalizer has the full details.

As the old proverb says: Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Give a man a fish recipe named after a murderous communist revolutionary who bizarrely wound up a pop culture T-shirt icon, and he'll post it on Allrecipes.com.

As Glenn Reynolds notes, "It's still 1968. And always will be, apparently." Hey, I understand--my dad hung on to the past with his Crosby records; the geriatric left clings to the past via its Crosby, Stills & Nash records.

In Human Events, Jack Langer writes:

“Hey hey, Uncle Sam! We remember Vietnam!” chanted one former flower child from the stage. The problem is, the youth don’t remember Vietnam. The old radicals are thus trying to entice the young into a movement that revolves around the sacred memory of events in which today’s young people played no part. The youth are essentially being asked to become second-class citizens in this movement, having to bow to the superior wisdom of those who fought the reactionary opposition back when it really mattered.

But the attempt to make the current war into a replay of Vietnam is failing quite dramatically. What’s missing is the key element that provoked many of the old radicals to oppose the Vietnam War in the first place: the draft. It wasn’t really the war per say that a lot of them opposed; it was the prospect of themselves actually having to go fight it. Lacking that impetus, the younger generation seems distinctly unimpressed by the urgency of ending a war fought so soon after the 9/11 attacks.

What do the old radicals have left to offer the youth? Socialism. One can understand the attraction of this credo back in the 1960s, when its American adherents only had the millions of victims of the Soviet regime to contradict their assertion that socialism would provide a positive alternative to capitalism.

But now, we know of the atrocities of a whole new set of postwar socialist regimes in China, Cambodia, Romania, and countless other places -- including Vietnam -- as well as the final collapse of most socialist governments and the turn toward capitalism of nearly all the remaining socialist regimes. Younger activists may have the Iraq War to fight against, but they need something to fight for -- and with socialism, their older role models are not offering them anything appealing.

The '60s radicals say they want a revolution, but how often are revolutions successful without any young people? Trotting out a nervous-looking Jane Fonda -- as the Washington rally organizers did -- may excite the old radicals, but the few younger ones on hand seemed distinctly unimpressed. The attraction of spending hours sculpting giant paper mache puppets and creating makeshift bongos out of water jugs for use in antiwar rallies will only go so far. Without a more creative goal than socialism, the youth are unlikely to follow their aging forebears to the barricades any time soon.

Language such as this is a reminder that there's a whole new way to P.O. dad these days.

While I driving around this afternoon, I caught the tail end of Hugh Hewitt's interview with Minority House Leader John Boehner, and Dean Barnett's call into the show immediately afterward. Over the weekend, Dick Cheney said, "I believe firmly in Ronald Reagan's 11th commandment: Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican, but it's very hard sometimes to adhere to that where Chuck Hagel is involved". That also applies to Hugh and Dean's immediate reaction to Boehner's recent proposal as well:

What did Boehner do to get us so riled up? Boehner, not wanting to be left in the dust of all this resolution hoo-ha, is proposing a benchmark measuring device that he will put forward in a congressional resolution of his very own. Boehner kept insisting that his only motive in cooking up yet another offering for the already-crowded “Meaningless Resolution Buffet” is to help the White House.

Sensing the implausibility of Boehner’s contention that he was from the Congress and was there to help, Hugh asked Boehner what effect he thought his resolution would have on the enemy. By way of an answer of sorts, Boehner spoke for a while but didn’t address the question.

If Boehner thought Hugh wouldn’t notice that he didn’t answer the question, he had another thing coming. You don’t get those degrees from Michigan Law School at the bottom of a Cracker Jack Box. Hugh asked his question a second time – what effect will the resolution have on the enemy? Again, Boehner spoke for a while without answering the question. Hugh asked a third time. Yet again, Boehner declined to directly answer the question.

SO WHAT ARE WE TO MAKE OF THIS? Two possible scenarios – one is that Boehner knows damn well what this will do for the enemy and yet he still wants to pass the resolution for political reasons. The other scenario, and frankly I find this one both more likely and more chilling, is that Boehner has never even considered, not for one second, the effect his resolution will have on the enemy. Hugh’s question caught him off guard and without an answer because to him, it seemed like a non-sequitur.

As Dean writes, "Such is the nature of the political vacuum that our politicians dwell in. While Boehner may not have considered what effect his resolution will have in the enemy, I would bet he spent extensive time figuring out what effect it will have on the political landscape".

You can't make it anywhere: Air America loses Santa Cruz, one of Nothern California's twin cities (the other being Berkeley) permanently stuck in 1968.

It has to be a slow news day when this is the current top story on Drudge.

And they're not afraid to use it. Fortunately, they've been "Busted" by Michael Totten, because odds are, the legacy media wouldn't bother to point it out.

(Via Charles Johnson.)

Ed Morrissey explores political graffiti in Washington DC, writing that during Saturday's anti-war anti-Bush protests, the police looked away as government buildings were defaced with spray paint:

The First Amendment does not allow people to deface government property, regardless of their motivation. The police did exactly what they should not do -- made a political decision about enforcing the law instead of holding everyone equally accountable for their actions.

The people have the right to assemble and demonstrate for the widest range of purposes and policies, as long as they do not include incitement to riot, the violent overthrow of the United States, and as long as they obey the law. The police are supposed to maintain order and enforce the law. Having police stand around watching while a crowd deliberately violates the law and damages public property not only allows a mob to offend the community, but also demonstrates a lack of will that only encourages more law-breaking -- if not at this demonstration, then at the next. Regardless of political orientation, the police have to serve as a nonpartisan guard against abuses by unruly mobs, and apparently the Capitol Police are simply not up to the job.

Laughably, the DC police chief tries to paint this as a victory, especially the fact that he roused Capitol Hill workers to clean up the graffiti. A victory would have had the offenders cleaning it up while under arrest. Instead of issuing self-serving rationalizations, Chief Morse ought to issue an apology to Washington DC, and perhaps consider adding his resignation to it.

Sounds good to me; that's an absolutely pathetic performance.

On the other hand, Betsy Newmark argues that, "Of course, what the protestors wanted was just the sort of confrontation that was denied them. In that sense, the policy succeeded". Though she adds, "But have we really reached the point that we must surrender control of federal policy to vandals so that we don't have bad TV pictures of spray-painters getting arrested?"

Much like pre-Giuliani Manhattan, I'd say DC reached that point a long time ago.

In the 1920s, Le Corbusier put himself on the map as an avant-garde architect by famously referring to the home as "the machine for living in". But this machine analogy by Japan’s health minister is in a class of its own!

We frequently decry the business CEO who puts the goal of short-term profits ahead of the long-term viability of his company (see: Penn Central, or Detroit, in the mid-1970s). TigerHawk writes that Democrats desperately want to put short term failure ahead of the long-term viability of the entire nation itself--or at the very least, it's credibility:

New York Senator Chuck Schumer seemed to give away the game -- at least implicitly -- on "Meet the Press." He quite obviously does not want the next election cycle to be "about" Iraq. One gets the sense that this sentiment is even more pronounced among the Democrats who will be vying for their party's presidential nomination. It is easy to see why: the problem of Iraq will be nothing but trouble for leading Democrats. The party activists who hold sway during the primary season will demand that candidates embrace the so-called "anti-war" agenda without reservation, but if Democrats do that too enthusiastically they will remind voters that their party has been all about defeat since 1972. Since none of them want to be caught in that Liebermanesque trap, leading Democrats are desperate for Iraq to be off the table by next fall.

From the perspective of Democratic political strategy, the worst possible result would be partial success -- for conditions in Iraq to improve significantly and palpably, but not decisively. That would guarantee that Iraq would remain a central theme in the 2008 campaign, not just as fodder for attacks on Republican "incompetence," but as a problem to be solved in the future, and that would be a nightmare for the leading Democrats. This is the reason, I believe, why at least some leading Democrats are so obviously willing the surge to fail.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times runs a piece titled, "Was 9/11 really that bad?" with the subhead, "The attacks were a horrible act of mass murder, but history says we're overreacting".

In other words, with a flourish of the omnipresent Copperhead Conjuction, it's The Return Of The Son Of Stay Quiet, And You'll Be OK.

Or as Mark Steyn puts it:

The American left has long deplored Bush's rhetorical reliance on such vulgar conceits as "good" and "evil." But it seems even "victory" is a problematic concept, and right now the momentum is all for defeat of one kind or another. America is talking itself into willing a defeat that has not (yet) occurred on the ground, and would be fatally damaging to this nation's credibility if it did. Last year Arthur M. Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times, gave a commencement address of almost parodic boomer narcissism, hailing his own generation for their anti-war idealism. Advocating defeat first time round, John Kerry estimated America might have to relocate a few thousand local allies. As it happens, millions died in Vietnam and Cambodia. And the least the self-absorbed poseurs like Sulzberger could do is occasionally remember that the world is about more than their moral vanity.

The open defeatists on the Democrat side and the nuanced defeatists among "moderate" Republicans seem to think that big countries can choose to lose small wars. After all, say the "realists," Iraq isn't any more important to Americans than Vietnam was. But a realpolitik cynic knows the tactical price of everything and the strategic value of nothing. This is something on an entirely different scale from the 1930s: Seventy years ago, Britain and Europe could not rouse themselves to focus on a looming war; today, we can't rouse ourselves even to focus on a war that's happening right now. Read 100 percent of the Democratic presidential candidates' platforms and a sizeable chunk of the Republicans': We're full of pseudo-energy for phantom crises and ersatz enemies, like "global warming.''

Or as Julia Gorin wrote last year, "Freud called it displacement. People fixate on the environment when they can't deal with real threats".

Arnold Kling writes, "how would history have been different had television been available in the 18th century but not in the 21st century, rather than vice-versa? Second, where does the Internet fit in?":

In the eighteenth century, the newly-independent United States held a Convention in order to bring its Articles of Confederation up to date. This contentious, deliberative process resulted in one of the most significant documents in human history -- our Constitution.

In our century, we have seen attempts at historic Constitutions in the European Union and Iraq that so far have failed. The EU produced a bloated document filled with politically correct phrases embodying an unworkable vision, mercifully not yet ratified due to an outbreak of rebellion by voters in the Netherlands and France. The Iraqi Constitution failed to pacify key interest groups, and as a result it has been shattered by insurgents and armed militias.

What if the Constitutional Convention of the 18th century had been held in the media environment of today? My guess is that the outcome would have been somewhere in between what we have seen in Europe and what we saw in Iraq.

By the same token, had the European Constitution been written in a media environment dominated by the written word, perhaps it would have been a humbler, simpler, more pragmatic document. Perhaps if Iraq were not under the glare of television, the suicide bombers and terrorists would not have nearly as much impact on the public mind, there or in the United States, and the forces of peace could prevail.

The Internet has dramatically accelerated the balkanization of mass culture, a trend which was already beginning in the 1970s. Television and print news are increasingly a medium for the elderly--"newspapers are for people who remember newspapers", as Vanity Fair's Michael Wolff recently wrote. And with Hollywood doing everything it can to diminish its power as the last mass medium, oddly enough, politics, and the shared interest in what comes out of Washington, is one of the last unifying elements of popular culture.

Ruth Wisse explores what she calls the growing "gliberalism" of American universities:

Recent surveys confirm that university faculties have been tilting steadily leftward, but I think it is wrong to assume they have been tilting toward "liberalism" as is commonly assumed. Liberalism worthy of the name emphasizes freedom of the individual, democracy and the rule of law. Liberalism is prepared to fight for those freedoms through constitutional participatory government, and to protect those freedoms, in battle if necessary. What we see on the American campus is not liberalism, but a gutted and gutless "gliberalism," that leaves to others the responsibility for governance, and arrogates to itself the right to criticize. It accepts money from the public purse without assuming reciprocal duties for the public good. Instead of debating public policy in the public arena, faculty says, "I quit," but then continues to draw benefits from the system it will not protect.

The national and international crisis may eventually pull the elite universities into action, but by then, gliberalism will have done its damage.

In I Am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe, through the eyes of his eponymous student from tiny Sparta, NC, famously writes in astonishment at the trend in American universities since the 1970s towards the co-ed bathroom.

If that sounds extreme, consider the movement towards the opposite direction in Aussie campus facilities spotted by Tim Blair:

The successful integration of Muslims into the broader Australian community continues apace:

A row has erupted over Muslim-only washrooms at La Trobe University that can be accessed only with a secret push-button code.

Apparently most Australian universities provide Muslim-only prayer and washrooms for students. Shouldn’t they be called multiversities?

Think of it as a school-sponsored return of Separate But Equal.

Update: More "gliberalism" spotted from a not-at-all surprising source: Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But what do they think about Justice Ginsburg's comments at Harvard?

Kirsten Powers writes on "The New Intolerance: Atheism"; Jules Crittenden explores its cozy relationship with a centuries older intolerance: "I’m pretty sure when the Islamic revolution comes, Greek communists don’t get second-class citizen dhimmi status."

Ed Morrissey writes, "There's something about the Davos economic summit that drives American leftists to slam their own country while abroad", first Eason Jordan in 2005 and now this year--shocker!--Senator Kerry. And don't forget Bill Clinton praising Iran's Mullahs for their progressive(!) politics.

And speaking of Senator Kerry, with the 2008 elections looming, Hot Air asks, Batter Up in Massachusetts?

To borrow from Woody Allen in Manhattan, behold: Reuters--the castrating anti-Zionists!

Between Vent, Blog Week In Review, and now Mary Katharine Ham's latest HamNation video, I guess it's multimedia day in the Blogosphere. MKH writes:

The distance between the communities "defended" by environmentalists against development and the communities themselves is often large, both philosophically and literally. Filmmakers and journalists, Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney have made a documentary that highlights these environmental battles and the exaggerations, fibs, and sometimes outright lies that keep some of the world's poorest cultures from developing. "Mine Your Own Business" is an entertaining, moving and sometimes humorous look at a side of the environmental movement we don't often see—the dark side.

McAleer traveled to Rosia Montana, Romania several years ago to cover a story for the Financial Times—the story of Toronto-based mining company Gabriel Resources forcing people from their homes, planning an environmentally destructive mine, and ruining the pristine countryside of that remote Romanian village, all against the wishes of its residents. Only, when he got to Rosia Montana, he found a different story.

"I pretty much found that everything the environmentalists were saying was either false, exaggerated, or just a plain lie," McAleer said in a telephone interview Monday.

Residents told him they had sold their land for good money. Mining company representatives told him they planned to clean pollution left by now-deserted state-run mines that were built before environmental standards were in place and modernize housing and plumbing for residents. Locals told him the pristine rivers were actually running with cadmium and zinc.

Environmentalists claim that 80 percent of the people of Rosia Montana are opposed to the building of the mine. When McAleer and his wife toured the streets and homes of Rosia Montana, they found many who spoke in favor of it, and who wondered why so many outsiders were interested in stopping it (a letter signed by the people of Rosia Montana is here).

As I wrote in 2006:

Last year, Matt Welch described a similar sentiment amongst equally leftwing and reactionary tourists to Cuba:

this common sentiment has always irritated the hell out of me. Oh, the crumbling, no-longer-beautiful houses! Ah, the lovely two-feet-deep potholes, and rickety Chinese bicycles (because the 50-year-old Chevys and 30-year-old Ladas don't work, and at any rate there's no gas). How people can derive pleasure from evidence of the suffering of innocents is beyond me, and few sights are more unseemly to my eyes than seeing a Lonely Planet-waving travel snob whine about how some current or formerly misgoverned hellhole has been "ruined" by all that yucky reconstruction, material success, and (worst of all!) tourism. Oh how pretty! The baseball players make $20 a month, and they live on a prison, but at least there's no annoying electronic scoreboard!

Val Prieto, who frequently blogs on Cuban issues at his own Babalu Blog dubs it "Omnipotent Tourist Syndrome".

Sort of like the propagation of SARS, it appears to be spreading beyond travelers to one nation, into a global meme. And it's worth noting that a variation of it was the dominant theme of the 2002 U.N. Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, where numerous Gulfstream Transnationalists such as California's own Jerry Brown urged--for the sake of the global environment, if not local civilizational ruins--that the Third World remain as backward and shackled as possible.

Recently, the Libertas film blog explored the one-meme-fits-all state of documentaries and wrote:

Brave would be a documenatry filmmaker who took the Jesus Camp approach to Islam; who took the Iraq in Fragments approach to what we’ve done right in Afghanistan and Iraq: who took the Inconvenient Truth approach to extremism in the environmental movement. That would be diverse. That would be provoking. That would be brave.

That would get you blacklisted.

By Hollywood, yes. Fortunately, there are increasing alternatives, a topic explored, coincidentally enough, in this week's Blog Week In Review.

Dude, it's back! The return of Pajamas Media's Blog Week In Review podcast:

Eric Umansky and Glenn Reynolds exchange views on the “shake out” in Web 2.0 start-ups and President Bush’s State of the Union Speech. Are Google and Yahoo gobbling up the Web? Find out. Austin Bay hosts and asks the questions. Ed Driscoll produces. Eric and Austin also discuss the benefits of civilian universal national service.

Brought to you by Volvo USA.

Tune in here.

"Who needs journalism when you've got booty and disco beats?"

Michelle Malkin, whose Hot Air Website produced a series of first class videos shot on location in Iraq, checks in on Big Journalism's state-of-the-art online video efforts.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon's brewing first scandal is dubbed "Ban Ki Panky" by an InstaPundit reader.

Read the whole thing.

In between offering helpful tips to harried air travelers, Robert Bidinotto links to this quote by David Frum:

The day will come, and probably soon, when American liberals and the American left will wake up to the fact that...on domestic issues Bush was "one of us." Much as they disliked Bush's foreign policies, cultural style, and political methods, he actually had more in common with them on domestic issues than he did with his own political base.

Wouldn't be the first time that's happened.

I guess this means that nobody can accuse James Webb as being soft on terror.

Update: Related thoughts from TigerHawk. Meanwhile, does this imply that Webb's tacit threat is working?

(Nahh, probably not.)

I missed this when it first ran, but it's a nifty piece of video journalism about an increasingly rare newspaper editor--a brave one:

Flemming Rose is an author and the cultural editor of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. He is the man principally responsible for the publication of the notorious Mohammed cartoons in that paper last year. On a recent visit to Washington DC, he spoke with Pajamas Media Washington editor Richard Miniter about the reality behind that controversy and its implications for Europe today.

If you missed it as well, click in and watch.

This report sounds like something Scrappleface would have written. But apparently, it's true, and if so, it proves, once again, Malcolm Muggeridge's immutable law: there is no way for satire to best reality for sheer absurdity:

SHANGHAI -- Next month, China will ring in the Year of the Pig. Nestlé SA planned to celebrate with TV ads featuring a smiling cartoon pig. "Happy new pig year," the ads said.

This week, China Central Television, the national state-run TV network, banned Nestlé's ad -- and all images and spoken references to the animal in commercials, including those tied to the Lunar New Year, China's biggest holiday.

The intent: to avoid offending Muslims, who consider pigs unclean. "China is a multiethnic country," the network's ad department said in a notice sent to ad agencies late Tuesday. "To show respect to Islam, and upon guidance from higher levels of the government, CCTV will keep any 'pig' images off the TV screen."

Suddenly, companies reaching out to China's booming consumer market have a pig problem. The edict has sent Nestlé and others [including Coca-Cola, apparently--Ed] scrambling to adapt to the last-minute rule change, altering spots that had included pigs.

Nestlé is now figuring out what to do with its ads, says its media-buying company MindShare, a unit of WPP Group. "We act in line with any requests that we receive from the authorities" about the content of ads, says Francois-Xavier Perroud, a spokesman for Nestlé.

Fortunately, one man is not afraid to keep his pigs flying!

Or, the Winter Soldier in winter: Senator Kerry apparently won't be running in 2008.

Jim Geraghty is certainly disconsolate.

Steve Green returns to the Blogosphere by live blogging the State of the Union speech--"Cocktail-enhanced, of course".

Cheers!

Update: Allah writes:

I’ve never understood the fuss, particularly given that it’s Bush. By my count, he’s delivered exactly four memorable speeches in the past six years and only one of them is still remembered fondly: the address to Congress after 9/11, the “axis of evil” SOTU, the “Mission Accomplished” speech, and the second inaugural address. We’re looking at an hour of energy-policy wonkery, global-warming alarmism, and shopworn bromides about how crucial victory in Iraq is. What’s left to say? If it’s worth watching at all, it’s only to see at which key phrases Hillary ostentatiously rolls her eyes.

Vodka and vermouth seem like a necessity at this point.

(Particularly to get through this, which Allah translates tersely as "lose faster".)

Michael Medved writes that brevity is the soul of wit, especially when it comes to the SOTU (note our use of four-letter acronym as time-saving gesture, only slightly offset by pedantic time-wasting quip afterwards!):

Let's face it: Most SOTU speeches are snoozers -- even when delivered by first class orators like Reagan and Clinton. All the departments of government contribute their own ideas during the preparation period, and expect some nod from the president. These stately, lumbering addresses provide pomp and grandeur and lots of opportunity for partisan applause, but only rarely can anyone remember what the president actually said.

If Bush kept his remarks to less than a half hour (including applause) rather than the customary hour-or-more, he'd throw the opposition and the media (often the same thing, by the way) utterly off balance. Rather than listing all his hopes and plans in the speech, he should sketch out broad visions -- and simultaneously release to the press and Congress far more detailed plans and proposals.

Speaking of throwing the opposition and the media utterly off balance, a couple of weeks ago, Hugh Hewitt asked a great question of White House Press Secretary Tony Snow: why are transcripts of key speeches released beforehand? Why not keep your opponents guessing as long as possible?

"It's simple: If the surge succeeds, then the president, the Republicans and the Democratic supporters won't learn any lessons. In the USA victory only makes you more arrogant".

Looks like punitive liberalism is alive and well these days--sometimes in the strangest places.

Ed Morrissey notes that the speech President Bush is giving tonight will be an attempt to achieve a Schwarzeneggerian triangulation with a suddenly left-leaning Congress--but at the strong risk of alienating Bush's conservative base, much as Arnold has already done in California.

Meanwhile, Jules Crittenden writes the speech that President Bush would never give, and more's the pity.

(Sorry for the lack of posting. I'm in the midst of quite an interesting project that, if it pans out, should be lots of fun. More details when and if things reach fruition.)

For the San Francisco 49ers, 1981 was the year of "The Catch" and subsequent beginning of their Super Bowl run in the 1980s. Yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle had a scary but fascinating article on the physical pain virtually all of the players on that year's team endure today, including wide receiver Mike Shumann, who provided the quote in the above headline. The article notes:

This snapshot of one championship team reflects the harsh reality for most former NFL players. Stand on the sideline during a game and you might wonder why the toll isn't worse. Television does not begin to convey the extraordinary size of pro football players, the freakish speed at which they move and the bone-rattling brutality of their collisions.

"When you're on the sideline, and these guys go past you, it's almost like a herd of horses," said Marc Safran, director of sports medicine at UCSF. "You feel like the ground really shakes."

At the start of the film North Dallas Forty, Nick Nolte's character is barely able to get out of bed the Monday after a big game. And he was portraying a wide receiver in his early 30s. Add 15 to 20 years, and the physically degenerating toll on a former player's body is even worse.

As I wrote yesterday, over to you, AP's Kathleen Carroll.

(Additional links here.)

Reviewing Dinesh D’Souza's new book, which attempts to implicate the cultural left for helping cause 9/11, Dean Barnett fires off a postmodern update to a classic Reagan riff:

While I’m tempted to compare certain precincts of the publishing industry to a crack whore that would turn any trick for money, that would be unfair to the crack whores of the world.

Power Line's Scott Johnson adds:

After I became aware of the learned critic John Simon in the late 1960's I saw him on one of the daytime television talk shows. Jacqueline Susann was the guest; the host was David Frost, and Frost was conducting a gushing interview with Susann about The Valley of the Dolls. Was this some kind of set-up? He turned to John Simon, sitting in the first row of the audience, and invited him to ask Susann a question or two. Simon asked Susann: "Do you think you are writing art or are you writing trash to make money?" (The interview degenerated into a memorable spectacle, as recalled in this remembrance of Susann by Abby Hirsch.)

Simon and Susann briefly exchanged comments and Susann then asked Simon if he'd read the entire book. Simon responded that he'd read only the first 40 or 50 pages, but that it isn't necessary to eat all of a wretched, putrid stew before you get sick and spit it out. That's how I feel about Dinesh D'Souza's new book, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11.

Taking a contrarian tack, James Lileks writes that there could be something to D’Souza's new tome, reminding us of the shocking lyrics of the hit song by the slatternly blonde video and pop star at the height of her career when Osama Bin Laden's chief mentor toured the United States.

Warning--turn speakers down; may not be safe for work!

As Bloomberg.com notes:

Bill Parcells retired as coach of the Dallas Cowboys, leaving the National Football League team with one year left on his contract and without a postseason victory.

Parcells's future had been in question since the Cowboys lost to Seattle in the opening round of the National Football Conference playoffs on Jan. 6. He had a 34-30 mark in four seasons in Dallas, never duplicating the success he had with three previous teams.

Parcells rebuilt the Cowboys' overall talent level after former head coach Dave Campo's three back-to-back 5-11 seasons. But as Bloomberg notes, he just couldn't produce a playoff victory, a massive disappointment from a coach with three Super Bowl appearances, two of which were victories. Parcells' four years with the Cowboys produced three out of four winning seasons, but during each of those years, his teams tended to fade in December, unlike his best Giants teams, which surged into the last month of the regular season--and beyond.

John Fund writes:

When politicians break their pledges not to raise taxes, they come up with the darnedest evasions. Take Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who wants to levy new charges on California doctors, hospitals and employers to help pay for his $12 billion health-care plan. "It is not a tax, just a loan, because it does not go for general [expenditures]," he told the Sacramento Bee last Thursday. "It goes back to health care."

A loan? The first reaction of many Californians was: What state office will I be able to go to and get my loan back--perhaps with interest? It's preposterous, for example, to characterize as a "loan" the 4% payroll levy the governor wants to impose on employers who don't offer health benefits. California's gas taxes are dedicated to transportation but no one would call them "gas loans." Property taxes go to local education. Are they not taxes?

* * *

All this, sadly, has led the governor into bizarre defenses about why he's not breaking his ironclad promise from last year's campaign not to raise taxes. Last year, he savaged Phil Angelides, his Democratic opponent, for proposing what he called a "job-killing health-care tax." In a memorable debate moment, the governor taunted Mr. Angelides: "I can tell by the joy in your eyes when you talk about taxes, you just love to increase taxes. Look out there right now and just say, 'I love increasing your taxes.' "

Yet whereas Mr. Angelides's plan would have spent $7 billion to require employers with more than 200 workers to provide health benefits, Gov. Schwarzenegger's new plan calls on employers with 10 or more workers to provide coverage or pay into a state fund, and would represent the second largest tax increase in California 's history. "The governor ended up dreaming up more taxes than ever popped in my head," a bemused Mr. Angelides told reporters this month.

Read the whole thing.

Tim Blair writes:

French darkeneurs plan an electricity-free earth-saving experiment:

We are asked to switch off all electricity from 7.55pm until 8pm on February 1 by L’Alliance pour la Planète, a grouping of 72 environmental organisations which includes the World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace and the Nicolas Hulot association. This is a call for a nationwide five-minute respite for the planet, and is intended to draw attention to citizens’ concern about energy consumption.

As Tim writes, "Don’t do themselves any favours with their advertising, do they?" Indeed they don't--their shirtless spokesprimitive is a scrawnier looking cousin of this vaguely remembered pitchman from the mid-1980s. Only this time, instead of pimping the Energizers, he's pulling the plug. And he wants his Gallic countrymen to do the same.

But still, it is all so simplisme. So bourgeois.

These fellows take such primitivistic gestures to their ultimate destination.

With 3:24 left in the NFC Championship Game and the score 39 to 14, to dig up and post this old chestnut:

Update: It's official.

Just back in the US from Iraq, Michelle Malkin writes:

Well, the Iraqi Ministry of Interior says disputed Associated Press source Jamil Hussein does exist. But at least one story he told the AP just doesn't check out: The Sunni mosques that as Hussein claimed and AP reported as "destroyed," "torched" and "burned and [blown] up" are all still standing. So the credibility of every AP story relying on Jamil Hussein remains dubious.

Note the photos that Malkin and colleague Bryan Preston took of those mosques, as well, on Michelle's site. (Video is apparently coming tomorrow.)

Over to you, AP executive editor Kathleen Carroll.

At the update of a lengthy post (with some thoughts on Bill Richardson's entry into the presidential arena, despite some possible early career baggage), Jim Geraghty posts some thoughts from John Podhoretz:

"The simple phrase Hillary used to announce her presidential bid yesterday - "I'm in, and I'm in to win" - is the best political sound bite in years... In any case, the Obama Moment has passed. This is not to deny Obama's formidable challenge to Hillary or the profound seriousness of his candidacy. But he's a little like the winner of "American Idol" going up against a rock superstar who has spent decades in the spotlight."

The recent renaming of Geraghty’s blog is also a sign that another Democratic presidential candidate's moment has definitely been eclipsed as well.

Geraghty’s post is titled "The First Hillary Argument Against Obama: His Glow Will Fade?" Last week before Hillary's announcement, Tammy Bruce spotted a couple of press photographers composing images that gave Obama an almost literal messianic glow.

As I mentioned last night to Tammy Bruce and her listeners, William Goldman, the Hollywood screenwriter, is fond of saying, "Every Oscar night you look back and realize that last year was the worst year in the history of Hollywood".

Similarly, I guarantee we’ll look back on 2008 as the ugliest presidential race in a very long time. The primary season and the run-up to the election is of course, a crucible, to allow the public to see how the candidates would react under extreme pressure. And if past performance is any indication of what to expect this year and next (and it is in this case, unlike stock markets and mutual funds), then the Clinton attack machine will be dusted off and fired up to take on all who stand in Senator Clinton's way.

It's tempting to translate that, on both sides of the aisle, as meaning the last person standing will also be the most effective fighter of terrorism. If Hillary wins, hopefully going on to be "the most uncompromising wartime President in United States history", as John Birmingham wrote in the futuristic novel that Glenn Reynolds is fond of quoting. But there really is little connection between the two arenas, as Mark Steyn writes today in NRO's Corner:

I’m not unsympathetic to the premise of Ron Rosenbaum’s argument — that, compared to the happy-face banality of John Edwards’ and Barack Obama’s public personas, there’s something rather appealing about Hillary Clinton’s naked viciousness. And, indeed, after Elizabeth Edwards remarked that Hillary’s life was less “joyful” than hers, it was hard not to warm to a woman so determined to confirm her joylessness that she’s prepared to have genial Mrs Edwards kneecapped in a dark alley and forced into an abject apology.

My problem begins when Rosenbaum expands the proposition to argue that, in a field of Democrat wimps, Hill’s the one to back to stick it to the jihadists. I yield to no-one in my respect for the Clintons’ ruthless brutal demolition of Newt, and that guy who succeeded Newt for 20 minutes, and Gennifer and Kathleen and all the rest. But there’s no evidence to suggest either Clinton has any interest in applying these techniques to tougher adversaries beyond these shores. There’s a world of difference between the politics of personal destruction and the geostrategic kind. Beating up breast-cancer survivors is no indication you’ll do the same to Ahmadinejad or Kim Jong-Il.

And that's also true if the Republican nominee actually beats the attack machine. In either case, brutally efficient past performance on the political battlefield is really no guarantee of equally strategic ruthlessness at the real thing.

Sorry Sam, but he who says he's "taking the first steps on the yellow brick road to the White House" on the day he announces has probably already just blown it. Not a smart way to define yourself to your enemies.

In contrast, this seems like a very, very smart move from someone who knows she'll have no problem building as a big a war chest as she wants:

Clinton becomes the first candidate to officially acknowledge that she won't accept federal matching funds for either the primary and the general election.

(Via Patrick Ruffini.)

Yet another marker on the road to the entirely synthetic pop star of the future.

Boy did I call this or what back in 2004?

"Hannah Arendt had it right", Patrick Moynihan once told an interviewer. "She said one of the great advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive."

Years ago, I read a library copy of The Devil's Candy, the 1991 book by Julie Salamon about the making of the movie version of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire Of The Vanities, in which Murphy's Law ran roughshod, beginning with the two most important elements of the movie: casting and writing. Of the former, John Frankenheimer once said, “If you cast the picture correctly, you have a whole lot of leeway. You can make mistakes in other aspects but pull it off with the right actors.” Regarding the script, legendary screenwriter Ernest Lehman has said, “bear in mind that a film production begins and ends with a screenplay”.

So let's cast Tom Hanks (in his first dramatic role) as a WASPy old money bond trader, Bruce Willis as a boozy English journalist, and Morgan Freeman as a character originally named Judge Myron Kovitsky, and originally intended for Walter Matthau or Alan Arkin.

And then let's have the screenwriters edit out all of class and racial conflict that made Tom Wolfe's book so deliciously attractive to millions of readers, and make the movie as politically correct and vapid as possible.

The Devil's Candy, which explores all of those Hollywood train wrecks as they happen, is a terrific read, and infinitely more interesting than Warner Brother's 1990 movie. But as Austin Bay's corollary to Murphy's Law goes, If it can go wrong, it already has and we just don’t know about it.” I finally bought a copy from Amazon this week, and just noticed something on the back cover of the softcover edition. It's the blurb from Kirkus Reviews:

Like watching a World Trade Center tower topple onto Wall Street.

As journalist/blogger Steve Silver noted in 2003:

This was written two years before the 1993 WTC bombing (in which the terrorists attempted unsuccessfully to collapse one tower into the other) and of course ten years prior to 9/11. DAMN.

Indeed--damn.

Worst kept secret on planet finally made public. Some minor details apparently still need to be ironed out, though.

Found via Tim Blair, Phil Boas of the Arizona Republic writes what happens when a religion confronts heretics:

If you’re wondering if there’s anything that frightens climate scaremongers more than falling ice shelves and flooding seaboards, there is.

Dissent.

Or as Jay Nordlinger once wrote about the late economist, Julian Simon:

He was at some environmental forum, and he said, “How many people here believe that the earth is increasingly polluted and that our natural resources are being exhausted?” Naturally, every hand shot up. He said, “Is there any evidence that could dissuade you?” Nothing. Again: “Is there any evidence I could give you — anything at all — that would lead you to reconsider these assumptions?” Not a stir. Simon then said, “Well, excuse me, I’m not dressed for church.”

I love that story, for what it says about the fixity of these beliefs, immune to evidence, reason, or anything else.

Update: More here.

Read More »

Speaking of anger, Columbia Journalism Review takes the to-be-expected shot at conservatives in the process, but to their credit, they aim the brunt of their grievances directly at the feet of the New York Times for their ridiculous "51% of Women Are Now Living Without Spouse" article:

What's going on here? Maybe the Times, with CBS mindlessly following, is just pandering to its imagined audience, among whom middle-class white woman living in the East Village of Manhattan must make up a large share. But this doesn't explain the galling negligence. It's moments like these when the paranoia of the right wing who sees the hand of liberal bias everywhere becomes understandable. Not that there is a conspiracy at work. Only that, if in the part of America where reporters live, being free from marriage is an unequivocally positive thing, this shouldn't mean -- as this article leads us to believe -- that this is the case for every woman in the country. For some, what the Times is describing as freedom feels, one can imagine, like a curse.

You don't say.

(Hey, maybe the Times was just sticking up for Condi--Ed. Oh, of course they were!)

Speaking of context, Peter Wood's terrific new book, A Bee In The Mouth: Anger In America Now does a great job of setting modern anger into historical context. Along the way, he references two very disparate films that reference anger. One is obvious: Return of the Jedi, with the Emporer's attempts to turn Luke to "the dark side" by having him tap into his anger and hate. (Or as James Lileks once put it, "we had Luke and Vader fighting as in the second movie, while the Emperor cackles and uses the words ‘join’ ‘dark’ ‘side’ ‘inevitable’ and ‘die’ in every possible combination".)

The other is an infinitely less obvious choice, which Wood admits "was seen by far fewer people, but I found it was mentioned again and again by people I talked to while working on the book": Jack Nicholson's seminal 1970 movie, Five Easy Pieces:

The movie depicts a trip home to his dying father by Bobby Dupea, a scruffy, disaffected oil rig worker who had been a child prodigy on the piano. Dupea, played by Jack Nicholson, gets angry at a waitress in a diner who refuses his order for an omelet with tomatoes instead of potatoes, and toast on the side. “No substitutions,” says the waitress, but Dupea proceeds to chart his own menu:

Waitress: I don’t make the rules.

Dupea: OK, I’ll make it as easy for you as I can. I’d like an omelet, plain, and a chicken salad sandwich on wheat toast, no mayonnaise, no butter, no lettuce. And a cup of coffee.

Waitress: A number two, chicken salad sandwich. Hold the butter, the lettuce and the mayonnaise. And a cup of coffee. Anything else?

Dupea: Yeah. Now all you have to do is hold the chicken, bring me the toast, give me a check for the chicken salad sandwich, and you haven’t broken any rules.

Waitress (spitefully): You want me to hold the chicken, huh?

Dupea: I want you to hold it between your knees.

The waitress then asks Dupea to leave (“I’m not taking any more of your smartness and sarcasm”) and Dupea dumps the table, water glasses and all.

The movie offers this scene semi-seriously as a battle between an uptight, rule-bound waitress and a man who has no patience for arbitrary rules. Dupea is not an attractive character, but we are meant to see his anger at the waitress in a light similar to the frustration that the ‘60s generation felt with the meaningless strictures of “the system.” Alienated from American society (“I move around a lot. Not because I’m looking for anything really, but ‘cause I’m getting away from things that get bad if I stay.”), Dupea seems to be granted a license by the movie to behave outrageously toward the waitress because of her unaccommodating attitude.

The scene became famous as a showpiece for Nicholson, who is himself famous for his bursts of destructive anger, but it has also become a cultural touchstone. For some, it is “the best waitress scene ever,” a memorable putdown of annoying waitresses. Nearly a thousand websites cast it in such approving terms. But when people brought it up in conversations with me about anger, the sentiment was the reverse. One woman told me that her sympathies were entirely with the waitress, who is humiliated while just trying to do her job. A male film critic mentioned the scene as the point where American movies began to celebrate gratuitous anger. Another woman brought it up saying she was appalled when she first saw the scene and remains puzzled that people think it humorous.

This scene is generally remembered more than the rest of the movie. In context, however, it is even more telling. Dupea isn’t really a working-class guy. He was born to wealth and was successful as a concert pianist, and his work as an oil rigger is just his personal quest for authenticity. The waitress, however, is the real thing: a woman with few other options trying to make a living at a tough job. So the restaurant scene really offers a privileged elitist who has the freedom to float among whatever social roles he pleases, raging against someone he regards as beneath him because she is so bound to the conventions of her job. She is a resident of the working class; he is merely a truculent visitor. But the movie essentially invites us to see things his way. We, the sophisticated audience, are asked to share in Dupea’s contempt for meaningless conventions, even if we squirm a little at his cruelty to the waitress.

As Wood concludes, Five Easy Pieces "gives us an early version of anger as an egotistic performance of the liberated individual displaying his superiority to the dumb conformists who are aggravating props in his drama". Both Jedi and Five Easy Pieces "look with seeming disapproval on the anger they portray, but make that anger look delicious."

(And that was long before blogging.)

As the cliché goes, when you hit bottom, quit digging. Actually though, Newsweek hit bottom a few times in 2005, but it doesn't seem to know it. All I can assume from this cover is that they would rather have Saddam back in power were it possible, but unlike the L.A. Times' Jonathan Chait, they don't quite have the nerve to say it.

The American media ran a fair number of "botched occupation" stories along remarkably similar lines in 1946; it's surprising how little changes in over half a century.

Newsweek's latest cover is both of an example of "The Spinal Tap Media" in action (this one goes to 11!), and it's also an example of how to create--or hype--a story by not providing context. Richard Nixon’s Watergate crimes sound even more heinous by not mentioning that earlier presidents committed similar acts. The “Bush Lied, People Died” stories sound scary when you don't provide the context that President Clinton pursued a similar policy of regime change in Iraq. And of course, blaming future insurgents on America’s presence in Iraq disregards thousands of years of Middle Eastern history.

But like 2005’s “Koran In A Can” fable, it makes for a great magazine cover though, I guess.

Update: Also in the "life was easier under Saddam" department, earlier tonight, NBC anchorman Brian Williams interviewed fellow NBC News correspondent Jane Arraf, "who joined NBC last year after eight years with CNN", according to Newsbusters. Williams said, "we get asked all the time where are the views of normal Iraqi families? And where's the good news we know is going on there?"

Arraf replied:

Arraf: "I'll tell you what I think is a piece of good news that's out there every day that's really hard for us to get at. And it's a picture I try to keep in my mind when things get really horrible, it is, when you wake up early in the morning, if you can be out on the streets, which we can't anymore, the sun shining, there are children walking to school, there are girls and boys, there are Iraqi girls who are walking to school, and it's that wonderful sign of resilience that is the fabric, the background of life there. Now, to go out and do that story, we would not only be putting ourselves in danger and our local people in danger, we'd probably be putting those children in danger because that is the nature of television. I worked under Saddam Hussein in Saddam's Iraq, and this is harder now than it ever was then."

I guess she still has to keep the news to herself.

Three of Miles Davis' greatest moments:

The very essense of cool--Kind of Blue's seminal "So What", with Miles and John Coltrane:

And from Porgy & Bess, "Summertime" and "Here Come De Honey Man", with Quincy Jones reviving Gil Evans' sublime arrangements:

This second clip was from 1991, only a few months before Miles passed away. Apparently it was a Herculean effort by Quincy Jones to get Miles to sign onboard to play his late-1950s music one last time, possibly knowing that the end was near, depending upon some of the conflicting reports by Miles' biographers. But in retrospect at least, the result is magnificent moment of closure for an incredible career that would eventually stray very, very far from its roots.

"Dinesh D'Souza might not like it...but this might be one way to see off Islamic fundamentalism".

I think I need more photos before I can fully get behind this. Maybe Reuters' recently fired photo editor might want to do some freelancing on this subject while he's looking for a permanent new gig.

Dean Barnett writes:

You remember George Lakoff, don’t you? Lakoff was the mastermind academic who officiously volunteered to help the Democrats remake America’s political terminology. I’m not sure any of the following can be laid at Lakoff’s feet, but his game was garden variety exercises in Orwellian stuff like referring to reckless government expenditures as “investments” or a troop surge as an “escalation” or surrender as “redeployment.”

But this time, they’ve gone too far. Yesterday on ABC News, Dianne Sawyer did a glowing puff piece on the new Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi may dress like she owns stock in Chanel, but worry not – according to Sawyer she’s “galvanized steel with a smile.” At one point in the interview, Pelosi talked about the Congressional Medal of Honor that was posthumously awarded to Jason Dunham last week. Here’s how Pelosi described Dunham’s heroism:

“I just had the privilege of meeting with the family of the young man who received the Congressional Medal of Honor. He jumped on a hand grenade and saved the lives of his other young people in his unit.”

I know the Democrats have developed as one of their pet Lakoffian tics the habit of describing our warriors as defenseless children. Thus, when Pelosi refers to Dunham as a “young man” and the men he saved as “other young people,” she’s merely falling into a bad habit.

But it’s a real bad habit; a truly offensive one. This is a matter of more than just mere semantics. Jason Dunham was a soldier. So, too, were the men he saved. They see themselves as warriors, and that’s what they are. The term “young people” is meant to demean them, and in Dunham’s case denies him the dignity that he has so completely earned.

And as James Taranto noted last Friday:

We've remarked frequently upon the tendency of war opponents to infantilize American servicemen--by demanding, for example, to know why President Bush hasn't "sent" his daughters to fight in Iraq, as if he had the power as their father to order them to enlist.

In truth, members of the military are adults who have made an adult commitment. They deserve to be respected for their maturity, not patronized as victims. It dishonors them to use their sacrifice as a political cudgel.

This infantilizing trend has been going on, probably since 9/11, but it really gained steam when the media created the Cindy Sheehan phenomonon and her "Absolute Moral Authority". I wrote about it in 2005, focusing on the Hollywood left, not surprisingly:

It's interesting to track the changing face of war veterans. When they returned home from World Wars I, II and Korea, the were young, brave professional men who served when their country needed them.

In the seventies, after Senator Kerry's "Winter Soldier" speech, the left defined them as war criminals who:

personally 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, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

And now? According to Hollywood, they're children. Check out the messages on the signs carried by Hollywood celebrities protesting in Crawford last week in these photos: "Bring Our Children Home" and "'Before One More Mother's Child Is Lost'--Cindy Sheehan".

To understand what a radical transformation this is for Hollywood, consider how the sixties, that most golden of decade for the left, fetishized youth culture. 1967's Wild In The Streets promulgated the notion of a 24-year old rock star millionaire who gets elected after first securing the vote for 15 year olds.

Well, 15 year olds still can't vote, but 18 year olds can, thanks to the 26th Amendment, signed into law in 1971. In 1966, Time magazine named those "25 And Under" as its "Man of the Year". "Don't Trust Anyone Over 30" was a cliché of the era, and heck, William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson's original 1967 novel of Logan's Run envisioned a whole society where the maximum age that could be reached was 21.

But that was then.

* * *

In the sixties, Hollywood sought to empower youth; well, a soldier who volunteers to serve his country, and in the process learns a battery of skills ranging from operating or repairing high tech machinery to operating weaponry the very thought of which would cause an NRA-hating actor to loosen his bowels is pretty darn empowered.

Too bad Hollywood can't see that. By the way, now that they're children again, shouldn't we raise the voting age? The driving age? Change the NC-17 rating to NC-25?

Regarding Barbara Boxer's related slur against Condi Rice last week, Mickey Kaus wrote:

Boxer's illogical detour allowed her to not-so-subtly advertise her motherhood in line with the reigning mommy-rhetoric of the Pelosi Era, in which "the gavel" is in "the hands of America's children."

The "it's all about children" meme must focus-group really well, because Democrats keep trotting it out (most famously to justify welfare payments for "children," even though it's adults who get the checks). I don't remember Mommyism winning any national elections, though--especially during a war.

Boxer also managed to leave the implication that if only her children were of the right age, they would of course be volunteering to serve their country in the military. I don't know Boxer's childen, but I'm skeptical.

It's common to call Democrats "The Mommy Party". Who could have imagined during the 1960s "Youth Movement" that they'd take the title so seriously?

Commentary magazine has added a new group blog, titled "Contentions". Click the link and give a look.

The Anchoress is none-too-thrilled by the media's paucity of Sandy Berger coverage:

Speaking of big lies: To me it is stunning and more than a little frightening that the press has zero curiosity as to what was in Sandy Berger’s pants. I mean, isn’t a story like this supposed to be red meat for these champions of “the people’s right to know”? Why, when the press was not satisfied with the volumes of pages submitted by the Bush campaign on the president’s TANG service, are they utterly satisfied with Clintonista, “nah, he didn’t take anything original, and this is just Sandy being Sandy” excuses (and a former president doing his uh-huh-huh chuckle, “oh, that’s just like Sandy, he always was sloppy,”). The press heard all that and tilted their head like overindulgent parents of a mop-topped toddler, sighed and said, “awwwwww…how cute.” Then they went back to screaming at those terrible usurping step-children, the Bushies, about…oh…Valerie Plame being outted by defendant-of-the-day Scooter Libby…um…I mean Richard Armitage (who never even consulted a lawyer about his outting her, btw, and will never need to, because he’s on the “right” side).

Yooooo-hooooo Mr. and Mrs. Mainstream Mediaaaaa…if you’re wondering why your credibility is lower than congress’ once you step out of your insulated little parties and coastal enclaves, this is why, in a nutshell: because you are willing to completely overlook anything - even the blatant theft of classified documents in what appears to be some sort of cover-up conspiracy regarding something done by a Clinton or Clintonian minion - and you’re not even discreet about it. Everyone - literally everyone in the world - knows that if Berger’s name was Rove or Rice or Hughes the story would never have disappeared - it would be a front-pager for the ages; Chris Matthews would dehydrate from all the mouth-foaming, Keith Olbermann’s head would explode nightly as he demanded not just imprisonment but death, death to all Bushies! There would be investigations and hearings - lots of hearings - CSpan would be the new A&E! The story would make careers! It would keep the red-inked press rolling in the black for years!

But Sandy Berger, “uh-huh-huh, that’s just old Sandy…stuffing classified documents in his drawers, ‘losing or inadvertantly’ destroying others, folding some of ‘em up and dropping them under a trailer at a construction site in the dead of night…uh-huh-huh, we love Sandy.”

Makes me want to puke, really.

Makes for great show tunes, however.

James Lileks remembers Art Buchwald.

Both Australia's Sunday Age columnist Terry Lane, and our own Garry "Doonesbury" Trudeau have fallen for the same press release put-out by an anti-Bush environmentalist group (are there any other kind?) that said...well, here's how Lane put it:

Here’s an amusing example of the divide between good and bad America. A recent press release from the organisation Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility draws attention to the fact that rangers in the Grand Canyon National Park are forbidden to answer visitors’ questions about the age of the canyon because the truth will upset Bush’s fundamentalist supporters. However, Bush’s National Parks Service refuses to withdraw from sale in the park bookshop a book that explains how the canyon was formed by Noah’s flood.

A former former national park ranger turned blogger began by using a little-known pre-Internet device called the telephone to check those claims:

A number of blogs have lambasted the National Park Service after Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) authored a press release claiming Grand Canyon National Park (GRCA) is under orders to "cater to creationists" and is not permitted to get an official estimate of the geologic age of the Grand Canyon.

I was skeptical, and after reading PEER's press release, I called the contact listed on the release. On January 3, I spoke with Executive Director Jeff Ruch who told me he talked with unnamed interpretive staff and park rangers. His complained mainly about lack of guidance for rangers on what to say when asked about the canyon's age. Ruch's comments seemed random and unfocused and his claims unsubstantiated. He focused on a book, Grand Canyon: A Different View, sold in the GRCA bookstore that offers a creationist view of the canyon's formation. Ruch stated that since 2003, GRCA has avoided releasing a draft from the geologic services division (I'm not aware of such a division) that gives guidance to park rangers. Incidentally, GRCA started selling the aforementioned book in 2003.

I received an email from GRCA staff which contained the NPS's official response. It reads in part,

"If asked the age of the Grand Canyon, our rangers use the following answer. The principal consensus among geologists is that the Colorado River basin has developed in the past 40 million years and that the Grand Canyon itself is probably less than five to six million years old. The result of all this erosion is one of the most complete geologic columns on the planet. The major geologic exposures in Grand Canyon range in age from the 2 billion year old Vishnu Schist at the bottom of the Inner Gorge to the 230 million year old Kaibab Limestone on the Rim."

Lane remains defiant, Trudeau appears silent (Jim Treacher offers an amusing parody response however), and as always, Greg Gutfeld is taking the issue in stride.

Like the many Plastic Turkey stories which have appeared since 2003 and the earlier Bar Code Scanner story involving Bush #41, how many people will believe the hype behind the initial claims and not know they're completely spurious?

Update: Jim Treacher emails to say that he wrote the post at the Daily Gut in addition to the Doonesbury re-captioning below it. We apology for the confusion; it's a problem of ophthalmology.

The Sporting News' Paul Attner writes:

He arrives at the Raiders' practice complex, frequently at night, after most everyone has left. His driver opens the door for him and starts the laborious process of getting Al Davis out of his car and into his office. The driver takes Davis' weakened legs and turns them toward the pavement, then pulls him up so he can put his hands on his walker. Then Davis moves through the dark, slowly, methodically, until he disappears behind the doors at the center of Raider Nation.

The man who once would show off his vigor at league meetings by having workout equipment delivered to his room has seen his body fail him these past few years, just as his franchise, the one he has controlled and manipulated for the past 43 seasons, likewise has deteriorated. The once proud and arrogant Raiders -- winners of three Super Bowls, the self-proclaimed "Team of the Decades" -- now are contenders for another title: worst franchise in pro sports.

And at the center of everything wrong about the team is majority owner Davis, at 77 increasingly frail yet still firmly in charge of every aspect of the operation, unwilling to step aside, unwilling or unable to move out of the past and deal with today's NFL.

Davis and the Raiders exist in a world unlike any in the league. He surely must have been angered by this season and its 2-14 ugliness. Yet until he fired coach Art Shell on January 4, the most visible sign of displeasure from Davis over the past few months came after a perceived slight to his team's legacy. NFL Network ranked the top 20 all-time Super Bowl winners; it placed the Raiders' 1983 champions 20th. Davis was outraged; the organization sent out e-mails to national media questioning how the network could not rate the team as perhaps the best ever.

It's a damning portrait of once great NFL lynchpin far, far past his prime, who's dragging his franchise down with him; and it's a great piece of writing. Well worth reading the whole thing, if you're a pro football fan.

Well, actually you can--like Donald Trump, for a surprisingly low $15,000, you too can have your own star on Hollywood Boulevard's Walk Of Fame.

Boy the food here is terrible--and such large portions, too:

Warner Home Video has just officially announced the DVD and HD release of a new unrated version of Oliver Stone's Alexander. The new version, called Alexander Revisited: The Final Cut, is some 45 minutes longer than the previous versions. Stone apparently wasn't happy with either the original theatrical version or the previous director's cut of the film. Says Stone of the new Revisited cut: "Over the last two years I have been able to sort out some of the unanswered questions about this highly complicated and passionate monarch -- questions I failed to answer dramatically enough. This film represents my complete and last version, as it will contain all the essential footage we shot. I don't know how many filmmakers have managed to make three versions of the same film, but I have been fortunate to have the opportunity because of the success of video and DVD sales in the world, and I felt if I didn't do it now, with the energy and memory I still have for the subject, it would never quite be the same again. For me, this is the complete Alexander, the clearest interpretation I can offer."

How bad was the theatrical version of Alexander? Normally, it's just the movie itself that studios want to edit down as much as possible before its theatrical release. In Alexander's case, it was the quotes from critics--Warner Brothers Dowdified them, often down to single-word blurbs, just to have something to put into the ads.

(In the US, Stone's $150,000,000 Alexander grossed only $34,293,771 during its theatrical run. Which, combined with the themes of so many of his movies and his own thoughts on the subject, made him even more of a slam dunk choice by Paramount to be given the helm of what would be his next project.)

Ever wonder what would happen if Lee Ermey wrote Wired magazine's "Jargon Watch" column? No, me neither, until now. Because that's the tone of Austin Bay's new pamphlet, Embrace The Suck, published by Adam Bellow's new Pamphleteer Press.

As Austin writes in his introduction:

Warrior slang accepts suffering as inevitable. It also says, “Buddy, you ain’t in this alone.” Take the acronym “MARINES.” The wry definition is “Many Americans Running Into Never Ending Shit.” (That addresses a “corps” identity issue.) The Operation Iraqi Freedom phrase “embrace the suck” is both an implied order and wise advice couched as a vulgar quip.

Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz went to war when he was 12 years old. Over the last two decades, critics have argued that his treatise On War is a bit dated in terms of theory. However, everyone with military experience agrees that Clausewitz understood “the suck.”

He called it “friction.”

“Everything in war is very simple,” Clausewitz wrote, “but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war.”

“Embrace the suck” isn’t merely a wisecrack; it’s a raw epigram based on encyclopedic experience. Face it, soldier. I’ve been there. This ain’t easy. Now let’s deal with it.

This pamphlet should be made an appendix of the AP Stylebook--nobody would benefit more from it than journalists. But at a mere $4.00 a pop, which includes both a physical hard copy, and an immediately downloadable PDF file while you're waiting for the mailman, there's no reason why you shouldn't pick up a copy yourself.

During their now-infamous "Picture Kill" scandal this past summer, Reuters quietly sacked "a top photo editor for the Middle East". (England's Guardian describes the man as "its chief photographer in the Middle East".) Charles Johnson writes:

In all of Reuters’ statements and reports on the incident, they’ve never mentioned that a “top photo editor” was also fired. Why were they secretive about this, and why won’t they release the editor’s name?

Good questions.

Piercing the veil of Timespeak, Jules Crittenden rewrites the New York Times' latest op-ed in much more down-to-earth terms:

The president’s decision hardly ends this egregious behavior by a leading pillar of the national press. We intend to keep it up. But among other things, the public needs to know why, for more than five years, the New York Times has consistently sided with America’s enemies.

This is because, even though we at the New York Times editorial board live in and around New York, scene of the most horrific and unprovoked attack on innocent American civilians ever, we still don’t see what the big deal is.

We consider this “War on Terror” … or more precisely, as the president says, “War on Turr” … to be a police matter that should be handled more or less as one deals with a common criminal.

Criminals are often socially disadvantaged young men, frequently with substance abuse problems, who come from broken homes where they were unloved and mistreated. We do not seek to punish such people. We consider it more effective to try to understand them. What are their social needs? What motivates them to rob us, pummel us, rape us, and murder us? Is it something we did? Is there something we can do that will make them less angry? We need to ask ourselves … why do they hate us?

Nor should we attempt to tap their telephones or read their email, because even the most reprehensible criminal has civil rights. Many, many, many civil rights. And in the case of international terrorists, who don’t always enjoy these rights, the observance of those rights that we consider to be important are incontrovertibly of greater importance than removing criminals from the global “street.” Thousands of innocent people may be regrettably taken captive, humiliated, blown up, decapitated, gassed or simply shot without respect for their civil rights. But the society that does not create a special class of civil rights for the people who commit these acts, when those people don’t enjoy the protection of the United States Constitution, because they dwell overseas or are targeted by legal law enforcement and intelligence actions, will be a society that is markedly less pleasant.

But it is more than that.

Just a Pinch more.

A huge component of the War On Terror is winning the war of words. And while the Bush administration has achieved laudable gains in the Middle East (just ask Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein--neither of whom are readily available these days for a quick media soundbite), they're definitely losing the battle of the airwaves. Or as Hugh Hewitt writes:

Want to kill all of the State of the Union’s impact? Tell everyone what is in it.

Want to build audience? Tell no one. Don’t even give a copy to the Speaker. Make her listen and react, and all the Congresspeople as well.

That’s point one. Now to the "follow up" that wasn’t.

Explaining why it is necessary to “surge” and why the sacrifice of American lives is not just noble, but necessary, requires a daily engagement by the Administration’s best communicators, and across the entire media spectrum. The center-right doesn’t much care what is said on Russert’s Sunday coffee clatch, and there is a good argument that independents don’t either. There is no mass audience anywhere, and no single appearance on a single show will do. The key message –the war can be lost in Iraq, with slaughter on a scale approaching Rwanda and immediate effects on American security—is not getting through or not being believed. Part of the problem is that in a shattered media environment, the Administration and the Pentagon, as well as GOP leadership on the Hill, are not making the case day-in-and-day-out. “Making the case” doesn’t mean the Sunday shows, by the way, or an op-ed here or there.

It means the Today Show, the O’Reilly Factor, Lou Dobbs and Jay Leno.

It means the Weekly Standard and the New Republic, and every paper’s D.C. bureau chief.

And it means, most definitely, the blogs, and not just on conference calls that allow the list to get checked off all at once.

And it means the entire Cabinet, and the deputies, and the White House staff. Ask yourself how many of these men and women you have seen or heard discussing the war in the days since the president's speech. Where's the sales force? And that is what it is, just as Reid-Pelosi-Clinton-Obama constitutes a sales force. Only difference: They are out-selling --out-persuading-- the Administration's team. By a lot.

A couple of years ago, Jonah Goldberg wrote:

One of the things which really frustrated me during the Clinton years was the way the White House was successful in portraying anyone who disliked – AKA “hated” – Bill Clinton as being unreasonable. The moment you described Clinton as a terrible president or a terrible man – or both – you were effectively written-off as “irrational.” Indeed, the phrase “irrational Clinton hater” was bandied around with the clear implication that the “irrational” part was redundant. Opposing Clinton was irrational, period.

Somewhere between those two extremes in public relations is a happy medium, one that would make poll results such as this much less likely to occur.

Update: Michelle Malkin boils it all down to a single analogy: "Bush administration = Lucy. Bush administration defenders = Charlie Brown."

In December of 2005, Umberto Eco wrote:

G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything." Whoever said it - he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.

And in environments that take "outrageous credulity" to its zenith--where anything is believed and everything accepted as just another lifestyle choice, is it any wonder that young men such as John Walker Lindh and Adam Gadahn turn to the polar opposite of that level of anarchy? If you compare their backgrounds and especially their parents' backgrounds, you'll see some remarkable similarities.

Or maybe it's Freudian: James Lileks once compared the boomer reaction to the 1950s as one long "Pissed at Daddy" gesture. Now that dad's put away his Bing Crosby records and become a Deadhead himself, Lindh and Gadahn have each both delivered the biggest "screw dad" gesture that they ever could.

("Leading British writer on terrorism and Islamism" Martin Amis puts a similar conclusion into much harsher language.)

A couple of years ago, I linked to a pair of articles that taken together, indicated that a fair number of modern Russians and Germans are nostalgic for their darkest periods--their 20th century murderous totalitarian past. In response, I wrote:

Part of the challenge of freedom is that it involves the messy vitality of individualism. And a big part of the attraction of totalitarianism is its order. Long before he entered the Oval Office, Ronald Reagan knew the Soviet Union was a third world economy hiding behind an enormous and powerful military. It's easy to look at millions of hulking men in black boots and assume that their force equals the sum total of a nation's vitality. And there's obvious order in those images (see: Riefenstahl, Leni).

They're seductive surfaces, even though what was under them was so rotten. And its obvious that even as the former Russian, East German--and even West German people and their leaders struggle with moving forward, their dark, but ordered pasts can be an awfully attractive alternative.

Ed Morrissey notes that such dark nostalgic sentiments certainly aren't isolated to the West, especially when there's a much more recently deposed totalitarian leftist and his orderly caked-in-blood abattoir to moon over.

There are two Hollywoods in 2007: there's one in which the public gets treated to, as Time magazine put it last week, "The Year of the 3quel", in which the biggest films are the third retread of a proven, if exhausted money-making franchise.

Then there's the artier side of Hollywood:

New York magazine already has said that this year's Sundance Film Festival, which opens Thursday, as "the most politically ambitious slate of films to date."

Libertas adds:

Read on and you’ll see that each and every film is to a one: liberal. Sundance is supposed to be a film festival. Not a film festival with a political point of view like the Liberty Film Festival or Out-Fest. Where’s the diversity? Where’s the diverse filmmaker voice Sundance beats it’s chest about championing?

Maybe Hollywood really does need its own Fairness Doctrine.

Dean Barnett's latest FAQs concerns a political class far more interested in their own short-term survival than the long-term health of the nation as a whole.

Of course, they're not alone in that regard.

Michael Medved writes, "On Tuesday, January 16th, 2007, the American people awoke to startling and disturbing news: for the first time ever, the majority of women in the country were living without a husband", according to The New York Times. However, as Medved notes:

That is, it’s not true.

The entire story (based on the work of one ax-grinding, irresponsible, agenda-driven journalist for the New York Times) has been cooked up from willful, blatant and shameful distortions. Amazingly enough, none of the most respected and purportedly responsible media authorities have taken the trouble to call him on it.

First, the truth—a truth that is easily accessible from the United States Census Bureau.

According to the most recent available figures (from 2005), a clear majority (56%) of all women over the age of 20 are currently married.

Moreover, nearly all women in this country will get married at one time or another. Among those above the age of 50 (a group that includes the celebrated Baby Boomers of the famously revolutionary ‘60’s generation), an astonishing 94% have been married at one time or another and some 79% are either currently married or widowed.

Even including the younger, supposedly “post-marriage” generation, and considering all women above the age of 30, some 61% are currently married and another 12% are widowed. In other words, nearly three-fourths (73%, a crushing majority) of all women who have reached the tender age of 30 now occupy a traditional female role as either current wives or widows – avoiding the supposedly trendy status of divorced, separated, co-habiting or single.

How, then, could America’s “Journal of Record,” the New York Times, possibly peddle the ridiculously distorted story that most females now count as unattached?

Reporter Sam Roberts begins his tendentious account with the following declarations: “For what experts say is probably the first time, more American women are living without a husband than with one, according to a New York Times analysis of census results. In 2005, 51 percent of women said they were living without a spouse, up from 35 percent in 1950 and 49 percent in 2000.”

This conclusion provided a shocking front-page headline (“51% of Women Are Now Living Without Spouse”) that gave rise to considerable cluck-clucking and tut-tting throughout the media echo-chamber.

So how could reporter Roberts read the same Census figures that any American can view (“according to a New York Times analysis”) and come up with such bizarre conclusions?

It’s all based on a fundamentally dishonest decision that Roberts never acknowledges in the entire course of his lengthy article. It turns out that in his analysis he chose to count some 10,154,000 girls between the ages of 15 and 19 as “women.” It should come as no surprise that this vast group of teenagers (yes, teenagers, most of whom live at home) are officially classified as “single.” In fact, 97% of the 15 to 19 year olds identify themselves as “never married.” The Census Bureau, by the way, doesn’t call these youngsters “women” – it labels them “females” (a far more appropriate designation).

Or as James Lileks put it, "So either Cletus Hogg of Prong Holler, West Virginia is handling the Times’ analysis, or the author is being disingenuous when he includes the 15 year olds in the unmarried pool". Lileks adds:

Since the story’s methodology is fubar, what’s the point? Lay some snark on marriage, add another questionable statistic to the pool of Things Smart People Know To Be So, give aid and comfort to the readers who see the prospects of marriage slipping away for good, and erode, ever so gently, the stature of a venerable but quaintly outdated institution. I imagine the tone of the piece would be different if a majority of men divorced their lives to throw some hose in the trophy-babe pool, and pronounced their new freedom from responsibility and duty a great revelation. Sure, my kids don’t get to come home for Christmas and have Mom and Dad and the old ornaments and traditions, but the other night I slept with a 20-year old on the other side of the bed, and I thought, I like this.

Is it just me? Am I nuts? Or would a Times piece by this author about surging rates of marriage – especially among the young – somehow communicate a sense of dread and regret, of oppurtunities lost?

But that’s not the most instructive thing about the story. No. The real story reflects on the newspaper industry, and it comes after the story’s conclusion.

Ariel Sabar, Brenda Goodman and Maureen Balleza contributed reporting.

It took four people to write and report that piece. Keep that in mind the next time you hear a tale about ruthless cutbacks in the newsroom.

Here's one statistic that's much tougher for the Times to cook.

Update (1/20/07): Columbia Journalism Review comes down hard on, as they put it, the Times' "galling negligence" and flawed methodology.

As James Taranto writes, "Pride Goeth Before the Fall":

'We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta. California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta,' [Gov. Arnold] Schwarzenegger, who played Hercules in his first film role, told legislators at the capitol. 'Not only can we lead California into the future . . . we can show the nation and the world how to get there.' "--Reuters, Jan. 9

"Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger asked the federal government Tuesday for disaster aid because of an ongoing cold snap that has destroyed nearly $1 billion worth of California citrus. . . . Visiting a Fresno orange grove, Schwarzenegger said he was asking the U.S. government for disaster status, which would allow California to seek aid from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Small Business Administration to offset losses to growers and other businesses."--Associated Press, Jan. 16

Tim Blair could have seen this one coming from miles away. (About 6,500 of them, between Australia and Sacramento.)

Update: The Gore Effect hits Hollywood!

Jonah Goldberg writes that "Disliking Brahmin Lurch isn’t just for right-wingers anymore. It’s as American as apple pie":

The simple fact is that John Kerry never should have gotten the nomination in 2004 anyway. He stumbled into it after tripping over the crater left behind by Howard Dean’s self-destruction. Democrats figured Kerry was the most “electable,” forgetting that electability is often cover for spinelessness and, in voters, is usually based on the hope that someone else will like the guy even if you don’t.

Quick: Ask yourself what Kerry has accomplished after more than two decades in the Senate. Kerry himself couldn’t even come up with a good answer to that. Even former Democratic National Committee chair Terry McAuliffe labels the Kerry campaign a case of “political malpractice.”

In 2008, the election won’t be a referendum on President Bush, and without Kerry’s advantage of being “not Bush,” renominating a dull-witted, gormless Boston aristocrat would be malpractice on the order of picking an accountant as your heart surgeon.

Democrats convinced themselves that Kerry was a war hero slandered by the Swift Boat Vets for Truth and Karl Rove. But the basic fact is that Kerry was a unique case. Fine, he served honorably in Vietnam. Good for him. But he returned home to disparage the troops and the United States and build a lifelong political career not on his service abroad but on his protest at home.

And, of course, the Democrats can still be the antiwar party without nominating an antiwar fossil. But if the Democrats want to throw us all on that briar patch, I can assure you Lee Atwater will be smiling somewhere.

Meanwhile, Tammy Bruce has some thoughts on Senator Barack Obama. As Bill Parcells would say, don't break out the anointing oil just yet.

Finally, Ed Morrissey looks at the real long shots:

One of the more amusing aspects of any presidential campaign is the people who believe they have a chance to win the nomination. This year, we already have one from each party. The Democrats have Chris Dodd, a man so non-descript that even his own constituents have trouble recognizing him. The Republicans now may have its own Don Quixote in Tom Tancredo, who announced the formation of an exploratory committee that will have to include windmills and some heavy-duty tilting:

As Ed writes, "Single-issue legislators rarely fare well when throwing their hats in the ring -- Bob Dornan springs to mind here -- and usually wind up as a laughingstock, and their issue marginalized".

Update: Or maybe Tancredo's just too liberal to succeed amongst the conservative GOP base!

Jules Crittenden has a handsome new upgrade to his blog's appearance. If you haven't stopped by in a while, take a look.

Claudia Rosett has some thoughts on the indictment of the man who ran the U.N.’s former Oil-for-Food program, Benon Sevan:

I called his Cyprus cell phone. Sevan answered, saying he couldn’t talk, because “I am in traffic, driving.” When I called back later, he said, “Talk to my lawyer, please” — and hung up the phone.

So begins the next chapter in this saga spawned by the U.N.’s lucrative and corrupt collaboration with one of the world’s worst tyrants, the late Saddam Hussein. Advertised as a U.N.-run relief program for Saddam’s U.N.-sanctioned Iraq, the 1996-2003 Oil-for-Food program devolved into a worldwide extravaganza of kickbacks, smuggling, and bribes, fortifying Saddam with more than $17 billion in illicit funds, according to Senate investigators.

The irony of most Oil-for-Food investigations to date has been that some of the worst offenders have never encountered any penalties at all. While authorities in democratic nations such as the U.S., Australia, India, and even France have been digging into alleged offenses by their own citizens, repressive governments in countries such as Russia, China, and Syria — all of which played big roles in Saddam’s graft-ridden Oil-for-Food business — have simply not bothered.

At the U.N. itself, which ran Oil-for-Food, and where Annan’s Secretariat collected $1.4 billion from Iraq to cover the cost of administering the program, not a single official ended up even fired. Sevan retired and has been collecting his full U.N. pension, despite allegations of bribery leveled against him in 2005 by Paul Volcker’s U.N.-authorized inquiry into Oil-for-Food. When I asked Annan’s spokesman last year if the U.N. had paid Sevan’s airfare and moving expenses back to Cyprus, the answer was not “no.” It was: “We do not usually disclose personal information on individual staff entitlements to the public.”

Rosett writes, "the U.N. now has a new secretary-general, South Korea’s Ban Ki-moon, who has been talking up his mission to 'Restore Trust' in the U.N. If Ban is serious, the way to start would be to call loudly and often for Sevan to return to New York and face justice". I doubt she's holding her breath waiting. And, of course, collectively, the MSM couldn't care less about this story, or moving it forward.

Allah writes, "Report: Castro’s life endangered by … shoddy Cuban health care. The irony, so sweet. So syrupy sweet".

But not entirely surprising.

In 2003, Rogert Scruton wrote:

By 1971, when I moved from Cambridge to a permanent lectureship at Birkbeck College, London, I had become a conservative. So far as I could discover there was only one other conservative at Birkbeck, and that was Nunzia—Maria Annunziata—the Neapolitan lady who served meals in the Senior Common Room and who cocked a snook at the lecturers by plastering her counter with kitschy photos of the Pope.

One of those lecturers, towards whom Nunzia conceived a particular antipathy, was Eric Hobsbawm, the lionized historian of the Industrial Revolution, whose Marxist vision of our country is now the orthodoxy taught in British schools. Hobsbawm came as a refugee to Britain, bringing with him the Marxist commitment and Communist Party membership that he retained until he could retain it no longer—the Party, to his chagrin, having dissolved itself in embarrassment at the lies that could no longer be repeated. No doubt in recognition of this heroic career, Hobsbawm was rewarded, at Mr. Blair’s behest, with the second highest award that the Queen can bestow—that of “Companion of Honour.” This little story is of enormous significance to a British conservative. For it is a symptom and a symbol of what has happened to our intellectual life since the Sixties. We should ponder the extraordinary fact that Oxford University, which granted an honorary degree to Bill Clinton on the grounds that he had once hung around its precincts, refused the same honor to Margaret Thatcher, its most distinguished post-war graduate and Britain’s first woman Prime Minister.

Via Maggie's Farm.

Dean Barnett explores the 24 phenomenon and concludes:

I would love if the country once again focused on terrorism and put aside Donald and Rosie for a spell, but if our political discourse has become so degraded that a TV fantasy drives the debate, we’ve got big troubles.

Indeed^TM.

The National Football League has announced that they will play a regular season game in England next year:

London will hold the NFL's first regular-season game outside North America this year, the start of a campaign to take American football to a global audience.

"There's great history of NFL football in London, and British fans have been great fans of football over the years," NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said Tuesday. "We're confident that this game is going be a great success in London and will be a great foundation to play more games there going forward."

The opponents have yet to be announced, but the Miami Dolphins and New York Giants are believed to be front-runners for the game. The Dolphins, but not the Giants, are one of six NFL teams the league identified as potential home teams; they would give up a home game in Miami to host the contest in London.

"They are two of the teams that have expressed an interest and we'll narrow it down to which two teams will generate the most enthusiasm for the fans in London and the broader U.K.," Goodell said.

The most likely venue is the new 90,000-seat Wembley Stadium, which will open this spring after years of delays. The other candidate is 82,000-seat Twickenham, home of English rugby.

The other day, I happened to be reading the Wikipedia page on NFL Europe, and the concept of professional American football is not catching on across the pond. NFL's European league--which once boasted two teams in England and one in Scotland--has contracted to the point where, essentially, NFL Europe is now NFL Germany. And I would think a huge part of their audience are the American servicemen stationed there.

As for the NFL itself, the players in the NFL hate the travel involved in these sorts of overseas games. Years ago, I read The Boys, Skip Bayless's look at the Dallas Cowboys' 1992 season when they won their first Super Bowl after Jerry Jones bought the team. There's a section in the book about the Cowboys playing a preseason game in Japan that year. Then-head coach Jimmy Johnson and the players bitched endlessly about the jetlag from having to fly umpteen hours, play the game, and then fly back and prepare for next week's game.

I guess playing overseas gets the NFL good press, and good television images. I'm not at all sure it's a good business decision, however.

I lived in New Jersey for over 30 years, so I'm happy to see Newark's Star-Ledger launch TV Jersey:

New Jersey needs a television station to call its own. Programmed by New Jerseyans, for New Jerseyans. TVJersey has no broadcast towers, no satellites. It doesn’t even have a studio. But it has you. And what you produce, we’ll promote. Just tag your videos on youtube with tvjersey, and we’ll find them. (We’re going to start using some other services soon.) We might find them even if you don’t. And you can always send us ideas and links at video [at] tvjersey dot com. Together, we’ll build the TV station we deserve.

And there's no reason why other sites can't join them, if Jersey-centric Websurfers detect a bias or tone they're uncomfortable with, or aren't happy with the site's amount of coverage. And speaking of which, hopefully TV Jersey will have plenty of South Jersey video coverage in addition to Newark and the rest of northern New Jersey.

While the project is being launched by a large metropolitan newspaper that's seeding the site's early video clips, there's no special sauce here. Anybody with a camcorder and editing software, along with a broadband connection for access to YouTube and Blogger.com could put something like this together for their region as well.

Update: Further thoughts from Jeff Jarvis; interesting comments as well, immediately below them.

What makes Glenn Reynolds' op-ed in the New York Times so much more surprising is that since 2000, material such as this sadly seems to be much closer to being par for the course:

A story you might be interested in: The New York Times published an editorial a week or so ago by Slovenian Marxist Slavoj Zizek ostensibly on the Saddam execution. It was a typically muddled affair, pieced together from earlier Zizek screeds. But it seems that the Times (and the IHT, whose op-ed editor Serge Schmemann told me that he hadn’t seen the original) edited out Zizek’s final sentence, which was published unexpurgated in both Sweden (Aftonbladet) and Spain (El Pais). And what was the offending line? “Which is another reason to ask: Who will hang George Bush?”

As Stephen Spruiell writes:

You can find the El Pais version reprinted on a number of Spanish-language anti-war web sites. Just search Slavoj Zizek and "¿Quién ahorcará a George W. Bush?"

I like how the New York Times sees nothing wrong with publishing these nutty rants, so long as a generous dose of white-out is applied to anything that might tip off readers to their true nuttiness.

Good to see the Victorian Gentleman is still doing his job in the MSM.

Brian Maloney writes that Zizek's editorial would play well with the listeners of Seattle's KIRO- AM.

James McCormick of The Chicago Boyz writes, "America will get the MSM it wants when America takes its national security as seriously as its football":

Most sports writers have an opinion. And certainly the local sports writers have an investment in communicating as much about their teams as humanly possible. Fan appetite for information is insatiable and where newspapers, TV and the Internet can’t satisfy it, fans will simply manufacture it themselves. Their passion is legendary.

Yet something still distinguishes sports media from the “current events” media — the MSM — that I usually read. Most of the sports media actually recognize that there are things that the coaches and players will not tell them. Never have. Never will. That the media do not require, and will not get, a briefing on all the details of a game plan, and certainly don’t need ongoing espionage operations to do a good job for their employers and readers. Coach Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots is legendary for his non-informative press conferences, yet sports reporters still line up to hear his words. One reason. His team wins, mostly.

Part of the “good guys” winning requires that the media play it straight. They can read between the lines all they want. They can dream up whatever schemes, plans, and strategies they think will prevail. They can interprete the slightest facial twitch or player limp in whatever way they want. But they cannot, must not, seek to betray confidences that would benefit the opposing team. A reporter who consistently attempted to sabotage the local team’s game plans would quickly be looking for work in a different discipline. Fans have too much invested in their teams to let that kind of behaviour continue.

Thus my broader view for the day — America will get the MSM it wants when America takes its national security as seriously as its football.

We don’t need “happy hacks” (to quote Mickey Kaus) but we do need media who recognize that they’ve got some skin in this game. That there are things that they do not need to know, immediately, under a system of representative government. That their role in life is not to undermine the effectiveness of the local team. Yes, we want to know the strengths and weaknesses. But winning the game … not exposing how the game is to be won … is what ultimately counts to the fans.

Indeed--right around this time two years ago, I made a similar analogy regarding the disparity between how the media covers sports versus how it covers national security. As Mark Steyn wrote yesterday, "Nations lose wars, not political parties — a point the parochial left seems unable to grasp"--and neither does its media.

"Oil-for-food kleptocrat Benon Sevan indicted in Manhattan", writes Allahpundit, although it's apparently largely for show, as Cyprus has no extradition treaty with the U.S. But still, it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy:

Benon Sevan was the man as close to the center of the Oil-for-Food Scandal as it is possible to be–and who is accused of taking bribes to look the other way and let Saddam exploit the system. He has retreated to Cyprus and lurks in an apartment he inherited from his aunt–an aunt who, he says, gave him the $140,000 that is accused to be a bribe from Saddam. An aunt who fell down the elevator shaft of this building and died when the story came to light.

Claudia Rosett has to be feeling pretty good right now. It's safe to say that she did more to push this story than any other American reporter, as most journalists to this day view the UN as sweetness, light, and Audrey Hepburn's UNICEF commercials.

Rosett had a legendary meeting with Sevan over Turkish coffee in his Cyprus apartment, and you can hear her recount the story to Austin Bay in a recent Pajamas Blog Week In Review podcast.

Glenn Reynolds' pro-gun op-ed is in today's New York Times.

In the immortal words of Carl Spackler:

To kill, you must know your enemy, and in this case my enemy is a varmint. And a varmint will never quit - ever. They're like the Viet Cong--Varmint Cong. So you have to fall back on superior intelligence and superior firepower. And that's all she wrote.

Jimmy Carter could not be reached for comment.

Update: Background on the original Killer Rabbit, here.

Michael Ledeen looks at insurgents, then...

I think that, for the most part, Americans’ knowledge of history comes from movies and television. It’s hard to deal fully with real history in either medium. Hardly anyone knows, therefore, that there was a vicious terrorist resistance to the occupiers of the Reich. Known as the “Werewolves,” they were, in the words of a fairly recent (2000) book on the subject, written by the Canadian historian Perry Biddiscombe:

...the Werewolves did considerable damage. Their…guerrilla warfare and vigilantism caused the death of several thousand people, either directly or through the…reprisals that they provoked. The property damage…equalled tens of millions of dollars.

Big numbers in that long-ago world, big enough to constitute an “insurgency” every bit as worrisome as the Iraqi version, at least early on. And it provoked a brutal repression, more brutal on the Soviet side of Germany—where they carried out an ethnic cleansing from the Central European satellites—but quite brutal on our side of the Yalta line as well.

...And now.

Read the whole thing.

I hope the man who wrote this never sees this, as it proves his point entirely.

As Mark Steyn has noted, the big dream of Europe, dating at least back to Napoleon, is a unification that sounds infinitely better than what the reality would entail. Fortunately, this didn't happen--it would have made the wreck of the Penn Central merger look like a slumber party.

Betsy Newmark writes:

Youssef Ibrahim reports in the New York Sun that the Saudi Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice has denied trademark protection to a Saudi businessman for a business that carried the English word "Explorer" because it has the letter X in it. And X resembles the cross and so must be banned. The businessman wonders sarcastically if the next to go will be the plus sign.

Scott Ott, call your office!

(Meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg ponders what will be banned next in a much closer region--Manhattan.)

Dean Barnett notes:

In my Saturday post on Peggy Noonan, I wrote that I agreed with Peggy that the President’s “frequent inability to communicate and his constant inability to persuade” was both an irritant and a major problem. For some reason, many commenters and a certain hysterical blogger seemed to miss that paragraph and thought that I declared criticizing the president to be strictly off limits – such people will have to learn to read more closely or others might begin to question their intellectual rigor and honesty. Regardless, the fact that the President at this point in time can’t get through to the American people is hardly debatable. However history remembers George W. Bush, it won’t be as The Great Communicator II.

Sadly, I agree--for a quick comparison, check out this clip of the Gipper in the early 1960s.

But Winds Of Change writes that on the other side of the aisle, today's media lacks the ability to communicate as well, except in shop-worn cliches that lack any sort of context:

Words like "neo-conservative," "civil war," WMD," "democracy," "treason" inhabit the core of the public discussion about Iraq -- and no two people who use them daily can agree on what they mean. Are 20-year-old Sarin gas artillery shells WMDs? Is Dick Cheney a neo-conservative? Is Iran a democracy?

Every 100 deaths in Iraq is a "grim milestone," by fiat of the media. It is the most overworked cliche of local journalism since, "Rain couldn't dampen the spirits/enthusiasm of _____ graduates of _____ high school during last night's commencement ceremony as they looked to the future and pondered the past."

It requires no thought or reflection. It treats round numbers as the definition of reality. This has been a media trope since the first shots were fired ("After days of intense searching by ground and air, U.S. forces on Saturday found the bodies of two soldiers missing north of Baghdad, as the toll of American dead since the start of war topped the grim milestone of 200 ..." -- Associated Press, June 29, 2003). I doubt anyone who wrote any of these headlines could explain to you why death number 3,000 was enormously more significant than death number 2,997. Certainly not to the parents of number 2,997.

Does it help you to know these numbers divorced from context? Are there not many Americans who would consider, say, every 1,000 abortions nationwide a "grim milestone?" Even if you set 1,000 battle deaths (not the AP's preferred 200) as the benchmark for "grim milestones," you had a grim milestone every five days during America's involvement in World War II with nary a "grim milestone" headline to show for it.

As Winds Of Change writes, "Orwell, thou should'st be living at this hour".

Update: Hugh Hewitt grades Tim Russert's performance on Meet The Press yesterday:

Tim Russert is by far the best of the MSM hosts, but that's just not saying much. Not asking four senior senators about Iranian forces in Iraq and Iranian weaponry killing Americans, and to leave largely unexplored the real possibility of post-withdrawal blood-letting on a scale that dwarfs the violence today and which returns Iraq to the violence on a scale of the worst days of Iraq is media malpractice. Imagine interviewing Stanley Baldwin in 1936 and finding time for one or two questions about Hitler, and then following with four MPs and discussing only Spain and Ethiopia, and not Germany.

The MSM is fixated on Bush, and not the war or our enemies. A decade from now --or even sooner-- the collapse of the media's responsibility to at least mention to the public the scale of the looming danger will be obvious.

Just think of it as the news they kept to themselves.

More: Related thoughts, here.

Meanwhile, AP illustrates Winds Of Change's charges perfectly, on a story that doesn't even involve Iraq (unless you're Alec Baldwin, of course).

Reynolds Wrap--that's the fabulous new in trend for men's fashion that's poised for outer space take-off on the runways of Milan this month!

Tinfoil, it's not just for hats anymore!

Power Line's Scott Hinderaker writes:

It is difficult to comprehend that Martin Luther King, Jr. was only 39 years old at the time of his assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968, or that the prospect of his death weighed so heavily on his mind. He seems too young to have accomplished so much, or to have maintained his judgment under such trying circumstances.

Meanwhile, Star Parker writes that she's "Thinking About Iraq on King Day":

The characteristic of greatness - whether we are talking about a great man or great art - is that it transcends time and place. It dips into that which is universally and eternally true and applies those truths to a particular moment and a particular place.

Re-reading, after many reads, Dr. Martin Luther King's words of Aug. 28, 1963, the famous "I Have a Dream" speech, his greatness rings clearer than ever.

Because King did indeed touch the heavens on that day and pull down kernels of eternal truths about freedom and the condition of man, those words of 40-plus years ago have relevance to our struggles today. They can serve as guidance in these difficult times.

Am I saying that King's message from 1963 can guide us in today's conundrums _ about our embroilment in Iraq, about the Middle East, about America's role in the world? Yes, I am saying this.

Read the whole thing.

Matt Drudge breathlessly writes:

As Washington continues to raise concerns about terror threats on The Homeland -- a recent CIA report outlined a scenerio of possible "series of explosions using 'low charge' nuclear weapons" -- Hollywood and FOX-TV are set to up the ante with the new season of 24!

Few outside of the 24 set know the exact details of the new season unfolding, but studio sources claim producers are pushing hard to take it radioactive this time -- and keep it there.

"Time to wake the country up!" a top FOX source told the DRUDGE REPORT over the weekend. "I do not think there has ever been TV done like this, the viewer is going to be completely riveted."

The source claims executives are prepared for any fallout from local municipalities that may be on the receiving end of plot turns and twists. How many cities 24 puts on 'nuke alert' is unclear.

FOX has set a highly-controversial espisode of 24 to air Monday night, opposite NBC's GOLDEN GLOBES.

In 2002, White House officials questioned the timing and release of PARAMOUNT's action movie SUM OF ALL FEARS -- a movie which depicts a nuclear bomb unleashed on an American sporting event!

One senior Bush official, who spoke to the DRUDGE REPORT at the time, claimed the movie crossed over the line of civic responsibility and commerce.

Developing...

To paraphrase something my wife and I used to tell a friend who took Star Wars waaaaay too seriously, "You do know it's just a TV show, right?"

Steve Frank wants to end monopoly cable in Simi Valley; Matt Sherman points out the dangers of a monopoly search engine (whose unusual job interview and hiring practices was the subject of a recent piece in England's Register).

In both cases, the free market is the best solution: satellite TV is a terrific way to end-run crappy cable service, and as Matt writes:

To be clear, I think Google should have 100% freedom (as they do now) to determine how sites appear on Google, and I think AT&T (and Verizon and Comcast and Sprint and Global Crossing) should have the same freedom to determine how data flows over their pipes. The consumer will make the call and direct their business accordingly.

The idea of telling Google how to run their search engine in the interest of "neutrality" is absurd, no? And yet neutrality advocates are making precisely that argument against companies that have much less influence than Google.

It is not a coincidence that Google is a big supporter of network neutrality regulation. It is in their financial interest to do so. They control a disproportionate share of the Internet user's experience, and they want to keep it that way.

I think most people would agree that regulating Google would not be in consumers' interests. If we want to continue development a free and rapidly evolving Internet -- from the physical network to information brokers like Google -- let's not tell the companies that comprise it how to do business.

Glenn Reynolds adds that this is yet another reason "to use multi-engine search services like Dogpile.com".

Update: Great quote concerning Google here:

To paraphrase an old comment about IBM, made during its 30 year dominance of the enterprise mainframe market, Google is not your competition, Google is the environment.

Read the whole thing.

The Technorati search engine currently tracks over 63 million blogs, which means there are lots of new blogs starting every day. Technorati's in-house slogan is that with that many weblogs, "some of them have to be good". But alas, many of their owners will also do very stupid things from time to time. Take a hint from a couple of guys (both coincidentally named Ed) who've been in the Blogosphere for a while. it's basic career advice, actually:

Work in a retail store? Don't post about famous customers walking in, no matter how much you despise them or their politics.

Update: Or the appearance of their spouses.

It's been unseasonably cold in the San Jose area, particularly at night, for the past few days. Tim Blair proposes two possible reasons why.

On Howard Kurtz's Reliable Sources show on CNN, Pam Hess of UPI asks the question about The Surge--and then explains why it's not being asked by other reporters (video here):

It's so much easier for us to cover this as a political horse race. It's on the cover of "The New York Times" today, what this means for the '08 election. But we're not asking the central national security question, because it seems that if as a reporter you do ask the national security question, all of a sudden you're carrying Bush's water. There are national security questions at stake, and we're ignoring them and the country is getting screwed.

But that's OK for the majority of the media, because the wrong people are in charge of the country right now. Or as Jay Nordlinger recently wrote:

I have a friend who, in a phone conversation last weekend, said the unsayable. Come to think of it, this friend makes a specialty of saying the unsayable. That is one reason he is invaluable.

He said, “The Democrats have to win in 2008 — I mean, the whole enchilada: House, Senate, and presidency.” You ought to know that my friend is a staunch conservative Republican. “Why?” I said. “Why do they have to win?” He answered, “Because that’s the only way they will be fully onboard the War on Terror. They won’t fully support it otherwise, because they will always be trying to trip up the Republicans. If you want the Democrats onboard the War on Terror, they have to be in charge. Period.”

Jonah Goldberg once described it as "hypocrophobia", the fear that the wrong people (I.E. Bush and Republicans) will get credit for rehabilitating the region, much as Ronald Reagan was able to get virtually all of the credit for defeating the Soviet Union, since most American liberals--on both sides of the aisle--decided during the Vietnam war that living with an expansive totalitarian regime was the only solution.

And sadly, I think the examples raised by both Nordlinger and Jonah have to be considered true, once you compare the astounding flip-flops that both the elite media and liberal politicians have made to reach their current mindset, compared to the positions they held in 1998.

Or to borrow from a post of ours from a few years ago, just listen for the Copperhead Conjunction.

Update: Jay Reding (found via Greg Tinti) writes:

That’s right — for the press, it’s irrelevant what information is the most important in determining the course of American policy — it’s all about bashing Bush. The Ahad-like fixation the President means we’re not getting the whole story. No one is questioning what would happen if we were to withdraw from Iraq. Even though that question is profoundly important for the future of this nation and the Middle East, it’s taboo because it’s politically incorrect to be asking such questions.

The media no longer cares about objective reporting, giving people the truth, or asking tough questions. It’s all about scoring cheap political shots and vapid celebrity news. The media is utterly broken, and for all the talk about how terrible Fox News is for actually reporting stories that might be perceived as friendly to the Bush Administration, the mainstream media is perfectly willing to distort the news or ignore crucial stories that don’t fit their ideological agenda.

I'm not at all sure it's that recent a development, to be honest. But the combination of extreme BDS amongst wide swatches of the legacy media, and the rapid growth of the Blogosphere and its ability to shed light on bad reporting simply makes it appear that way.

For years, scientists have pondered a crucial epistemological question: what consequences would result if the DNA of Howdy Dowdy and Charles Bronson were combined.

[Caine places sunglasses on face]

Now. We. Know.

[Cue Theme Song]

Read More »

More strange doings on the campuses of my home state. In 2006, I wrote:

What is it with colleges in the state I grew up in and The Reich Stuff, anyhow? Last year, Farleigh Dickinson had on its staff an admitted Neo-Nazi. Now Mahwah's Ramapo College is running an art exhibition featuring paintings that look like they're straight out of Joseph Goebbels' private collection.

Then there's this fellow, with a remarkably similar totalitarian bent and heads-is-tails worldview:

For twenty years, Grover Furr has been an English professor at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey, where he educates students in his peculiar worldview, which is an updated Stalinism and in which America is the world’s biggest oppressor and greatest terrorist state. While his academic expertise is English literature, he presents himself as an expert on communism, and scours academic forums like the Historians of American Communism net, defending Joseph Stalin and calling America’s role in bringing down the Soviet Empire a moral outrage. “Was there something morally wrong in trying to bring down the Soviet Union? I think the only honest answer possible is: Yes, it was wrong,” says Furr.

Not at all surprisingly, he has rather different opinions concerning Israel and those who seek to bring it down.

Katie Couric offers a silver bullet to critics of her editorializing the news (at CBS? Perish the thought!):

One of Ms. Couric’s innovations—or corruptions—of the form is that she occasionally offers up her own reaction to the stories that appear on her broadcast. A vestige of her chattier Today Show days, these frequent interjections are the subject of much deep thought and close analysis in the halls of CBS—and the subject of sniggering elsewhere in television news.

* * *

“I think that, probably it may be off-putting at times to some people who are used to a very, very buttoned-up newscast that doesn’t have much leeway for an occasional glimpse of personality, but you know, I try. I’ve always had the ‘less is more’ philosophy, believe it or not, but there are times when I think it’s personally fine. If people feel discomfort, maybe they should consider a suppository.”

Thus describing, with unintended irony, 75 percent of the advertising on the show, due to its increasingly elderly demographic.

Vanity Fair's Michael Wolff recently described the newspaper as "a medium for old people (newspapers are for people who remember newspapers)". Its putative would-be video successor is already in similar territory, even if it doesn't know it yet.

Update: Neo-Neocon has some thoughts on the print media's own repeated editorializing within otherwise straightforward news stories. Of course, as Michael Kinsley noted last year, for the legacy media, this is the "Twilight of Objectivity". Though I'd argue that they're already in the era of post-objectivity.

John Podhoretz corrects Matt Drudge.

Attempting to defend her much-publicized attack on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice due to Rice's lack of children Thursday, Barbara Boxer invoked one of the hoariest clichés in the political lexicon:

Asked if her exchange with Rice was, as some suggest, a personal attack, Boxer insisted it was not.

“I spoke the truth to power,'’ she said. “Condi Rice is in the room when George Bush decides to send 20,000 more of our beautiful men and women into the middle of a civil war.

“And I’m not going to apologize for making an extremely clear point,'’ she said.

As Allahpundit writes in response:

What bugs me is the self-congratulation. If one of the most powerful pols from the most powerful state in the most powerful country on earth can assume the mantle of “speaking truth to power,” then what’s left of “power”? Is that just a synonym for “Bush” now?

The phrase “speaking truth to power” sounds like something Marx or Nietzsche would have written (Nietzsche had his "Will To Power", after all) in the 19th century, but it's actually much more recent; it dates back to a 1955 Quaker pamphlet concerning the Cold War written by Milton Mayer. As Quaker historian H. Larry Ingle wrote here:

The phrase "speaking truth to power" goes back to 1955, when the American Friends Service Committee published Speak Truth to Power, a pamphlet ii at proposed a new approach to the Cold War. Its title, which came to Friend Milton Mayer toward the end of the week in summer 1954 when the composing committee finished work on the document, has become almost a cliche; it has become common far beyond Quaker circles, often used by people who have no idea of its origins. (One current example: Anita Hill entitled her memoir of her sensational charges of sexual harassment against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, Speaking Truth to Power.)

To speak truth to power sounds so much like an integral part of Quakerism that some modem Friends have simply assumed the phrase goes back to the seventeenth century rather than arriving late in the middle of ours. It reflects what many contemporary Friends would like to believe is the characteristic Quaker stance toward political authority, hallowed in practice if not the exact words. Yet in its origins it was a political statement, entitling an explicitly political document.

This document sheds further light on its 20th century development (scroll to the bottom of page 14):

Let me recall the origin of the phrase. According to Steve Cary, the phrase just came to Milton Mayer one day, as he was thinking about the pamphlet. Everyone on the drafting committee liked it and asked where it came from.

Milton Mayer thought he recalled it from some early Quaker writing, but no one subsequently found it, though Henry Cadbury made several attempts to find the phrase. In short, it would seem to have been original with Milton Mayer, though in sound and attitude it feels like an authentic expression of early Quakerism. It has its meaning for us, in part, because it is so concentrated and vivid an expression of an attitude toward government and other institutionalized forms of power. Surely it was the perfect title for a pamphlet challenging the behavior of the two antagonists of the Cold War. They represented raw, terrifying, unreflective and deadly power. What was called for to transform that power was bold and uncompromising truth.

Senator Kerry frequently claims that “dissent is the highest form of patriotism” was an aphorism written by Thomas Jefferson, instead of its actual origin as sophistry coined in the mid-1960s by an anti-World War II pacifist. Likewise, it’s fascinating to watch this simple phrase become a cliché that’s spread astoundingly far from its original--and apparently little-known--origin.

Update: Assuming deliberate satiric use of the above phrase in question is exempted, this seems a more than fair consequence if it continues to be used in the future.

I've always had a soft spot for Bauhaus architecture; there are a couple of photos of me on the site taken at Mies van der Rohe's epochal Barcelona Pavilion, and I own several pieces of his furniture. Mies was the last headmaster of Germany's famed Bauhaus design school, it was closed by the Nazis under his watch.

The founder of the Bauhaus was of course Walter Gropius, dubbed "The Silver Prince" by Tom Wolfe in From Bauhaus To Our House. Gropius and Mies would both wind up teaching and building in the US after the rise of the Nazis in their home country. "See-Dubya", guest-blogging for Michelle Malkin while she's embedded in Iraq, notes that the US embassy in Greece, shot at early this morning with an RPG rocket, ostensibly by Greek radicals, was designed in 1957 by Gropius. Gropius was a much better teacher than an architect, but it's not at all a bad looking design, but with its nearly all glass facade, as See-Dubya notes, it's extremely vulnerable to just the sort of attack it faced this morning.

Mies always liked to say that architecture was "the will of the epoch translated into space", but the epoch in which Gropius' building was built has passed, and in today's world of terrorism, US embassy buildings need to be much more fortified--and have much less glass--than this unfortunately outdated design.

Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central's faux-Reilly, interviews Judy Woodruff:

Stephen Colbert: "Now, you used to work for CNN. Now, you're doing this documentary, which sounds fascinating, for PBS. Is that– Is it– But, you've gone from, you know, an organization that clearly hates America to an organization that is proto, like, commie. Is it possible to go further left than "PBS on television?"

Judy Woodruff: "Now, no. Absolutely not. You know that's not true. No."

Colbert: "I do not not know that’s true. I do not not know that’s true? Yes. Bill Moyers is, like, got his Mao’s little red book in his back pocket, right? You're wearing a pink outfit."

Woodruff: "PBS is a god-fearing, America-loving organization. Just like CNN."

She has to be pandering to Comedy Central's audience and going for the laugh, because unless things at CNN have really changed since Ted Turner left, that's the funniest thing I've read in ages.

Newsbusters quotes Barbara Boxer's exchange with Condi Rice yesterday:

Sen. Barbara Boxer took an unseemly jab at Condi Rice yesterday.

Of all the members of the Senate, the one you might expect to be least likely to call attention to a woman's single, childless status for purposes of scoring political points would be Boxer. And yet it was the oh-so-broadminded senator from the Bay Area who did just that when Condi Rice appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday to defend President Bush's newly-announced Iraq plans.

In a segment narrated by ABC senior national correspondent Jake Tapper, today's Good Morning America highlighted Boxer's questionable comment, running a good-sized clip of the exchange.

Rice: "I can never do anything to replace any of the lost men and women in uniform, or the diplomats, some of whom . . . "

An interrupting Boxer: "Madame Secretary, please, I know you feel terrible about it; that's not the point. I was making the point about who pays the price for your decisions. Now the issue is who pays the price? Who pays the price? I'm not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old, and my grandchild is too young. You're not going to pay a particular price, as I understand, with an immediate family."

Whoah! Tapper noted that the exchange "seemed to many people to get a bit personal" a view echoed by the "Tough Words" of the screen graphic.

It's astounding that someone like Boxer, who has long championed sexual freedoms, should attempt to smear Rice as being somehow inferior because she made a career choice--as many driven professionals have--not to have children. Boxer's early career was, for a time, in Marin county, a stone's throw from San Francisco. And as James Taranto reported in 2005:

"San Francisco has the smallest share of small-fry of any major U.S. city," the Associated Press reports. "Just 14.5 percent of the city's population is 18 and under." The AP dispatch attributes the small number of children to high housing costs and Frisco's high prevalence of nonprocreative sexual orientations. Not mentioned is the Roe effect.

This is a trend in many very liberal enclaves, including much of Europe, as Mark Steyn has noted numerous times (not the least of which was America Alone) including this article, also linked to, here:

When I've mentioned the birth dearth on previous occasions, pro-abortion correspondents have insisted it's due to other factors - the generally declining fertility rates that affect all materially prosperous societies, or the high taxes that make large families prohibitively expensive in materially prosperous societies. But this is a bit like arguing over which came first, the chicken or the egg - or, in this case, which came first, the lack of eggs or the scraggy old chicken-necked women desperate for one designer baby at the age of 48. How much of Europe's fertility woes derive from abortion is debatable. But what should be obvious is that the way the abortion issue is framed - as a Blairite issue of personal choice - is itself symptomatic of the broader crisis of the dying West.

Since 1945, a multiplicity of government interventions - state pensions, subsidised higher education, higher taxes to pay for everything - has so ruptured traditional patterns of inter-generational solidarity that in Europe a child is now an optional lifestyle accessory. By 2050, Estonia's population will have fallen by 52 per cent, Bulgaria's by 36 per cent, Italy's by 22 per cent. The hyper-rationalism of post-Christian Europe turns out to be wholly irrational: what's the point of creating a secular utopia if it's only for one generation?

Meanwhile, Newsbusters wonders when AP went Victorian:

The Associated Press used this phrase to describe Boxer's slap: "Even Rice's status as a single woman was fair game." Single woman? In an age in which 30% of all children, and over 70% of black children, are born to single women, how oddly Victorian of the AP. Was this just a slip, or was AP reluctant to use the expression "Rice's status as a childless woman" because that would have cast Boxer in an even crueler light?

I've commented on the media as "the Victorian Gentleman", but that wasn't at all what I was referring to, of course.

(Video of Boxer's exchange, and Condi's Spock-like raised eyebrow response, here.)

Update: Greg Tinti explores the Chickenhawk-angle in the Boxer attack:

I think it's fairly clear that Boxer was just trying to tweak the tired liberal meme that argues that people without military service ("Faux Klingons") aren't qualified to make decisions concerning the military into a new meme that claims that people who don't have family members serving in Iraq aren't qualified to argue in favor of an escalation of the war. Of course, it's an incredibly stupid argument on its face since following Boxer's logic to it's inevitable conclusion would preclude her and many other members of Congress from making decisions about war and, really, anything else with which they don't have personal experience with or will be personally effected by.

For example, since Boxer does not live in the areas of the country hit by Hurricane Katrina and doesn't have any family members that were impacted by the Hurricane (I don't know if that's true, but for the sake of this argument, let's pretend it is), she is completely unqualified to make any decisions about how to help solve the problems effecting thee Gulf Coast.

So, in other words, too many people are focusing on the wrong thing. It's much more important, I think, to focus on the absurdity of Boxer's argument rather than trying to hopelessly prove that she intended to insult Condi personally, which, again, I don't believe she did.

More here.

Update: Tony Snow weighs in:

“I don’t know if she was intentionally that tacky, but I do think it’s outrageous. Here you got a professional woman, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Barbara Boxer is sort of throwing little jabs because Condi doesn’t have children, as if that means that she doesn’t understand the concerns of parents. Great leap backward for feminism,” Snow told FOX News Talk’s Brian and The Judge.

Spot-on, Tony!

It's legacy media a-go-go, as a dead tree publication damaged by the speed of the Internet and the Long Tail phenomenon checks in with an industry that's having similar woes. Time magazine explores the state of Hollywood and its annual box office concerns:

Coming to every theater near you on May 4: Spider-Man 3. (The first two films about the Marvel Comics kid with the gooey arms took in $1.6 billion worldwide.) Then on May 18, Shrek the Third. (Total gross of the first two chapters: $1.4 billion.) And a week later, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. (The first two earned more than $1.7 billion.) That's close to $5 billion for the six movies, not including the really easy money in DVD revenue. How big the bucks for Take 3 in each of the gigan-chises?

"The standards are sky high for this trio," says industry analyst Gitesh Pandya, editor of Boxofficeguru.com "At a minimum, each needs to break $300 million in North America to be considered a success, and they all have the potential to get close to $400 million. These films tend to do 60% of their biz overseas, so with worldwide b.o., DVD sales and TV rights, each film should earn at least $1 billion."

That "60% of their biz overseas" is the telling phrase that explains many of Hollywood's otherwise reasonably questionable movies. But why the obsession with sequels? For the same reason that England's Independent dubbed 2007 "The Year of the Comeback". Here's how Time magazine puts it:

In its pre-TV glory days, Hollywood made a few series--Andy Hardy, The Thin Man, the Bob Hope-- Bing Crosby Road comedies, and horror films with the whole Frankenstein family. But these were middling fare. The big-ticket items were singular sensations. Nobody made a sequel to Gone With the Wind, Casablanca or Ben-Hur. The industry didn't think in roman numerals until The Godfather, Part II in 1974. But with the triumph of special-effects fantasies like Star Wars, sequels became a smart way to print money. Now they are needed to turn bad years into good ones. The difference between the box-office slump of 2005 and the rebound last year can be attributed to one film: Pirates 2. That's why the trifecta of threequels is crucial to Hollywood's health.

Of course, as both Chris Anderson and Libertas have each recently noted, that "rebound" seems closer to what the stock market calls a "dead cat bounce". Libertas's "Dirty Harry" writes, "it took 10% more product to get that 5% revenue boost and 3% jump in customer buys", and Anderson adds:

Despite the box office record set by Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (which I just saw on DVD--great effects, but the movie makes no sense), Hollywood didn't have a blockbuster 2006. In terms of tickets sold, it was up just 1% from the dismal 2005 (corrected for population expansion, that's no growth at all), and still dramatically down from 2002-2004, which were the last good years before the DVD/home theater boom fragmented the audience even more than VHS had before.

Which is why these sorts of articles have become a perennial--last year around this time, Variety's Peter Bart wrote:

though everyone (including the studio chiefs) acknowledges that the business model is broken, the movies of summer '06 have to produce record numbers or heads will roll. Last summer the insiders could complain that movie attendance was sagging. No excuses this year.

Because the business model is indeed broken, Libertas has explored the new model that Hollywood recently created, which junks the Red States, except to use them to gin-up controversy. That puts even more pressure on the comebacks and threequels to perform: they're the few Hollywood films that will--probably--safely be free of overt politicking.

If that sounds like the makings of a downward spiral, that sounds like a safe bet to me. Hollywood as an industry isn't going away, but look for its content to become increasingly anemic in style. Or as screenwriter William Goldman once famously said, "Every Oscar night you look back and realize that last year was the worst year in the history of Hollywood".

Hot Air and Jim Geraghty have the early, very sketchy details.

Mark Steyn made a great point to Hugh Hewitt earlier today:

I think it would be useful for us to know what carnage we're inflicting on the enemy. And again, this was something that came up when I saw the President, because people were wondering why we don't release casualty figures for the other side. In other words, we only hear about the American troops who die, and Iraqi civilians who die, and he pulled a piece of paper from his side, and said that in some little bit of action that very morning, that I think it was something like 1,000 terrorists had been killed. Well, I think Americans would be quite heartened at the number of bad guys being killed by coalition forces in Iraq, and that it would be worth, actually, getting that side of the equation. There's no point in releasing a score if you're only giving one team's score.

HH: You know, I asked Tony Snow about that, and he said well, for example, in a recent month, 103 Americans had died, and more than 5,000 terrorists died. And he said we tend...the Pentagon doesn't like to put that out there. I don't know why not, Mark Steyn.

MS: No, I don't know why not, and I think it does make a big difference, because I think that actually tells you the scale of things. I mean, these people, they have no strategic goals other than demoralizing America out of the war, and out of the Middle East in general. And to do that, they're throwing huge numbers of men, basically they're adopting the sort of First World War trench warfare strategy, where you just send them over the top of the trench, and they get mown down, and they get mown down, and they get mown down, every day of the week. And I think it would actually be very demoralizing for the jihadist cause in the Middle East and beyond if the number of them who are just getting killed was actually out there.

It would be extremely demoralizing. But I guess it violates the White House's self-imposed "compassionate warmaking" rules.

The only other reasons that come immediately to mind is that the White House and/or the Pentagon is concerned about being accused of cooking the books by a media obsessed with Vietnam flashbacks who wouldn't believe the disparity between the numbers. Or found the idea of wholesale killing of terrorists distasteful. Because otherwise, this should be an essential part of most White Press or Pentagon briefings--and certainly was in all previous, non-compassionate battles.

Related: Strategy Page asks, "How's The War On Terror Going?"

Mickey Kaus writes:

Is it really an accident that all the UAW-organized auto companies are in deep trouble while all the non-union Japanese "transplants" building cars in America are doing fine? Detroit's designs are inferior for a reason, even when they're well built. And that reason probably as more to do with the impediments to productivity imposed by the UAW--or, rather, by legalistic, Wagner-Act unionism--than with slick and unhip Detroit corporate "culture."

P.S.: If Detroit can only be competititive when the UAW makes grudging concessions, isn't it likely the UAW will only concede enough to make GM and Ford survive, but never enough to let them actually beat the Japanese manufactures? I try to make this point here.

Read, and/or watch the whole thing; related thoughts here.

Long Tail author Chris Anderson checks in on Tinseltown's box office mojo (to coin a phrase):

Despite the box office record set by Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (which I just saw on DVD--great effects, but the movie makes no sense), Hollywood didn't have a blockbuster 2006. In terms of tickets sold, it was up just 1% from the dismal 2005 (corrected for population expansion, that's no growth at all), and still dramatically down from 2002-2004, which were the last good years before the DVD/home theater boom fragmented the audience even more than VHS had before.

You don't say.

Bay Area ABC affiliate KGO-TV notes:

There are new complaints that the San Francisco Police Department is mishandling the New Year's Eve attack on a Yale University singing group. Several of the young men went to the hospital with serious injuries. The I-Team first broke this story Monday.

There are questions about how police handled the case that night and how they're handling it today. This is blowing up into a national controversy about how San Francisco treated the best and brightest from Yale.

As well it should.

Larry Kudlow notes that the markets have reacted quite favorably to yesterday's speech. (The DJIA ended today up 72.82 points to close at 12,514.98.)

Jules Crittenden writes:

The Washington Post reports U.S. troops raided an Iranian consulate in Iraq and seized a number of Iranians suspected of aiding the insurgency. No doubt the Iranians will squawk about the violation of diplomatic immunity, incursion on sovereign Iranian territory, international law, blah blah blah. I encourage them then to raid our embassy and consulates in Iran. ...oh yeah, we don't have any. Remember why? This is an early indicator that the gloves are in fact off, which is the key component to success in this change of strategy.

Richard Fernandez dubs the action "A Downpayment on 1979.” A very small one, but welcome nonetheless. And interesting that it so quickly follows on this moment.

In and of themselves, these don't seem like big plays in the scope of the GWOT, they're each more akin to three yards and a cloud of dust, but it's good to see forward progress for a change.

Update: The Jawa Report reports on explosions--nuclear or otherwise-- being reported in the Iranian desert.

And speaking of which, Allahpundit asks, "Why has Iran’s nuclear program apparently stalled?"

Everything you wanted to know about The Surge, and more, in Dean Barnett's latest patented FAQ list.

Update: Glenn Reynolds adds:

As Barnett notes, though, this is not merely an increase in troops but also, and more importantly, a change in tactics. Will it be enough? I don't know. I have to say, though, that it's been amusing to see the same people who were recently demanding that Bush send more troops suddenly reverse and criticize him for . . . sending more troops. The question of troop numbers is one where reasonable people can and do differ, but that doesn't mean that lame political oppositionalism isn't recognizable as such.

Indeed^TM.

Another Update: Mary Katharine Ham has a bipartisan update on who's for and against the surge. Just for the record, I agree with Jonah Goldberg on the dubious notion of this Serge.

More: Not all in the Federation approve of Star Fleet Command's latest actions, however.

Meanwhile, Margaret Carlson appears to be forgainst the surge.

According to AP, "Fourteen members of an advisory board to Jimmy Carter's human rights organization resigned on Thursday to protest his new book, which criticizes Israeli policy in the Palestinian territories." That's in addition to Professor Kenneth Stein, who resigned from the Carter Center early last month.

A quarter century out of office, and Jimmy's still causing unemployment numbers to increase.

Update: Charles Johnson has more.

More: Here's the Carter Center councilors' letter of resignation.

Reuters can't win from losing--this time they're accused of faking the news by--wait for it!--Hamas.

When a news service begins to lose the trust of its target demographic, it's definitely time reevaluate.

Err, actually, I'm not--just the reverse, actually: spittle is not something I have to wipe off my monitor; bile does not bubble up from within. But in the mail was a review copy of Peter Wood's new book, A Bee In The Month: Anger In America Now. Wood's book has been the subject of a couple of very interesting pieces on NRO lately (one of which was by Wood himself). Watch for more on this topic in the not too distant future.

Alec Baldwin, as only he can, puts all the pieces together.

(Henry Hyde could not be reached for comment.)

Update: Heh.

Strange doings on both coasts: "Meteorite Lands in a N.J. Bathroom"; while on the left coast, "Choir boys jumped by San Fran punks after singing Star-Spangled Banner".

The former is an exceedingly rare event. Sadly, after flipping through Zombie's archives, and reading stories such as this, the latter isn't all that surprising.

(This would be an amazingly easy Sister Souljah opportunity for San Francisco's Mayor Gavin Newsome, and even Nancy Pelosi, but I won't be too surprised if they ignore it.)

For the past few months, I've been having a lot of fun playing with Roland's VG-88 guitar modeling system. It's a pedal board loaded with 260 different patches that a guitar player can dial through, much like a keyboard synthesizer player. Want your guitar to sound like a nylon string classical guitar? An acoustic or electric 12-string guitar? Jimmy Page's Les Paul? Eric Clapton's Stratocaster? A guitar synthesizer? All those tones are in there, and many more.

The product has been out for a while, but just for the heck of it, I knocked off a lengthy review for Blogcritics, which you can read by clicking here.

Pace Bernard-Henri Levy*, A Day In The Life of James Lileks.

Don't miss the special surreal, satirical appearance in the mise-en-scene of the Lileksian dreamscape by Margaret Thatcher, her bolt cutters, and a firehose....

Read More »

Tammy Bruce links to a Bloomberg article which quotes a freshman Democrat from Indiana:

Jan. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Representative Joe Donnelly, a freshman Democrat from Indiana, has a blunt message for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: Stick to a ``middle-of-the-road agenda'' or their party's control of Congress may last just two years.

If Pelosi "goes too far one way or another, we're not coming back,'' Donnelly says. He sees his party's victory in the November elections as less an endorsement of its agenda than a rejection of Republican rule: ``People just got real tired of this bunch, and they fired them.''

Donnelly's view reflects those of many of the 30 House Democrats elected in districts previously held by Republicans. Their fragile hold on their seats means they'll be pushing their new speaker, who represents heavily Democratic San Francisco, to limit confrontations with President George W. Bush and the Republicans over taxes, the war in Iraq, stem-cell research and abortion.

Sounds like a wise suggestion to me, but overreach by Pelosi and Reid seem, initially at least, to be the far more likely scenario.

Power Line's John Hinderaker describes the horrific plight of Nazanin Mahabad Fatehi, a 16-year old girl living in Iran and sentenced to death:

According to her account, Nazanin was with her sixteen-yeare-old niece and their two boyfriends when they were approached by three men who tried to rape them. The boyfriends fled, and Nazanin defended herself with a knife she carried in her purse. She stabbed one of the men, who later died. So far, at least, I haven't seen any version of the facts that differs materially from Nazanin's account.

Nazanin was prosecuted for murder and sentenced to hang. The verdict was apparently set aside by an ayatollah, and she is due to be retried tomorrow, January 10.

Hinderaker and Gates of Vienna wonder why newly elected Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN) and CAIR are strangely silent regarding her plight. Hinderaker writes:

One would think that just about anyone, in this country, anyway, would oppose a teenaged girl's being hanged for an act of self-defense. Yet, among those who raised a hue and cry about Saddam Hussein being "taunted" before being hanged for the murders of thousands, there has been a strange silence about Nazanin's case. It is a bit troubling that so far, all of the liberals who have weighed in at the Forum have been hostile to the idea of asking Ellison and CAIR to use their influence on Nazanin's behalf. Why is this, exactly?

Good question.

Remember when Arnold Schwarzenegger seemed like the opposite of Gray Davis? That was a long, long time ago. As was his speech at the 2004 GOP presidential convention, in which he claimed that in 1968 he was listening to Hubert Humphrey's Great Society-style proposals shortly after arriving in the US:

Everything about America seemed so big to me, so open, so possible.

I finally arrived here in 1968. What a special day it was. I remember I arrived here with empty pockets but full of dreams, full of determination, full of desire.

The presidential campaign was in full swing. I remember watching the Nixon-Humphrey presidential race on TV. A friend of mine who spoke German and English translated for me. I heard Humphrey saying things that sounded like socialism, which I had just left.

SCHWARZENEGGER: But then I heard Nixon speak. Then I heard Nixon speak. He was talking about free enterprise, getting the government off your back, lowering the taxes and strengthening the military.

(APPLAUSE)

Listening to Nixon speak sounded more like a breath of fresh air.

I said to my friend, I said, "What party is he?"

My friend said, "He's a Republican."

I said, "Then I am a Republican."

Mary Katharine Ham and Ed Morrissey have some thoughts on Schwarzenegger's disastrous health care proposal. And Mickey Kaus wonders if it could potentially cause collateral damage to fellow "Maverick Republican" John McCain's presidential aspirations.

Safe bet? Watch for this trend to accelerate.

Update: Much more here.

Mark Steyn's Atlantic obit for Oriana Fallaci is now online at his site. Here's but a sample:

Nevertheless, and with respect to Mr Hitchens, if there is a primer in how to write about Islam, that doesn’t seem to be getting us very far either. Who ya gonna believe? The President’s sappy “religion of peace” speeches or your lyin’ eyes? La Fallaci (as she styled herself) disdained what the French philosopher Alain Finkelkraut calls the west’s “penitential narcissism” and, in an age of absurd abasement, found many takers for her bravura rejection thereof. After all, if Muslims are so ready to take offence, you might as well give ’em some. The problem, after all, is not that the sons of Allah are “long shots” but that they’re certainties: every Continental under the age of 40 – okay, make that 60, if not 75 – is all but guaranteed to end his days living in an Islamified Eurabia. That being so, why not have some gleeful sport along the road to servitude?

Oriana Fallaci was, on the one hand, an unlikely Crusader. Petite physically if in no other sense, she was a feminist, a secularist, a leftist. On the other hand, who has most to lose? At a time when uncovered women are jeered at and intimidated when they walk through certain suburbs of Continental cities, La Fallaci might have expected the other divas to rally to the cause. Instead, such feminist warhorses as Germaine Greer managed to give the impression they found Islam a bit of a turn-on: here’s the patriarchal society they’ve been pining for all along. As for the secular elites of the west, insofar as there is a theocratic menace, it’s not the Wahhabis but Bush and the evangelicals with a bit of help from (as Harold Pinter put it) “Tony Blair as a hired Christian thug”. So the lioness in winter roused herself and sallied forth to save post-Christian Europe from itself.

Good luck with that. Of course, if anybody could have done it singlehandedly it was Fallaci, but naturally, Europe decided to sue instead of listen.

CBS/AP writes that "A U.S. Air Force gunship has conducted a strike against suspected members of al Qaeda in Somalia":

The targets included the senior al Qaeda leader in East Africa and an al Qaeda operative wanted for his involvement in the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in Africa, Martin reports. Those terror attacks killed more than 200 people.

The AC-130 gunship is capable of firing thousands of rounds per second [sic--Ed], and sources say a lot of bodies were seen on the ground after the strike, but there is as yet, no confirmation of the identities.

The gunship flew from its base in Dijibouti down to the southern tip of Somalia, Martin reports, where the al Qaeda operatives had fled after being chased out of the capital of Mogadishu by Ethiopian troops backed by the United States.

Once they started moving, the al Qaeda operatives became easier to track, and the U.S. military started preparing for an air strike, using unmanned aerial drones to keep them under surveillance and moving the aircraft carrier Eisenhower out of the Persian Gulf toward Somalia. But when the order was given, the mission was assigned to the AC-130 gunship operated by the U.S. Special Operations command.

If the attack got the operatives it was aimed at, reports Martin, it would deal a major blow to al Qaeda in East Africa.

Good. For some background on the AC-130 "Spooky" gunship, click here. And click here for its role (or lack thereof) in creating the infamous "Black Hawk Down" scenario in Somalia in 1993.

Update: More details via Mary Katharine Ham, sitting in for Michelle Malkin, and Austin Bay.

Another Update: Ed Morrissey adds:

The Ethiopians did us a big favor by dislodging the Islamists from Mogadishu. Once on the run, the US could bring all of its technological assets on line to track them, and the Air Force waited long enough for all of them to run into the trap. The Navy positioned the USS Eisenhower in the waters nearby Somalia just in case it finds even more targets to strike.

That hasn't stopped the Ethiopians, either. Their forces have surrounded an al-Qaeda base and may have overrun it by the time you read this post. Between the three forces, including those loyal to the Somalian transitional government, AQ in Africa is about to take a huge blow, perhaps even a fatal defeat.

It may have taken us a long time, but we do not forget. Let's hope that our attack took out these high-value targets and plenty of their followers to boot.

And John Stephenson is rounding up additional blogger reaction.

Found via Relapsed Catholic, Acidemic explores what made Charlie's Angels click as a 1970s TV phenomenon:

The structure of the show is brilliant in itself however...psychologically it's brilliant in a way that either today's industry HACKS have completely forgotten, or the else maybe times have changed. Nowadays all the Angels would have boyfriends, be obsessed with children, and getting married, cheating on each other, and on and on. Hunky guys would be dating the angels and we'd be supposed to identify with them and/or with the Angels.

In the TV show there is NO point of identification in the diegisis-- In the TV show no girl ever hooks up with a guy -- they're detectives and this is business. They are devoted to only one man, Charlie, whose face we never see, and so we never have to form an opinion on him, resent his success or envy him or aspire to be like him in the Hugh Hefner vein/

Also, there is rarely if any sexual harrassment, or suggestions of rape. Even when the angels are jailed and sent to work in a whorehouse they manage to avoid having to actually sleep with anyone. Thus as a young male viewer there is no anxiety over our perceived inability to defend them against our own sex.

See, we don't IDENTIFY with guys on the screen, that's the mistake they make today, guys COMPETE with guys onscreen, unless they earn our trust in an alpha male sort of way (such as Russell Crowe) or are portrayed as below our stature (like WilL Ferrell) they are our competition, a threat to our enjoyment (perfect example: Tom Cruise). Charlie takes us away from all that, that's why the one male who is allowed in the Angels lives is the symbolically neutered Bosley. A fun-loving endomorphic sort of a fellow, Bosley is competent and knows how to have a good time -- and a bit of a slob... he's more likely to eat all of Kelly's popcorn at the ice show ("Angels on Ice") then he is to fall for her.

I wrote much the same thing immediately after reading that Aaron Spelling had passed away in June.

Ed Driscoll.com: Tomorrow's Freudian pop culture semiotics, today!

Coming soon from Gibson: the Jack Bauer Kiefer Sutherland signature electric guitar!

Related: "Less Than A Week 'Til Jack Is Back".

Last week, I described my visit to William Randolph Hearst's San Simeon castle and its combination of church-inspired architecture and myriad of actual religious artifacts that Hearst had purchased from Europe after World War I and put on display for himself and his private guests. As I wrote, the combination of World War I followed by proto-socialists like the Bauhaus hitting the Control, Alt, Delete buttons on European culture created "a fire sale for someone on Hearst's enormous budget. If Europe was committed to destroying itself and starting over from zero, Hearst would buy the best of the past for his home".

Looks like Europe's fire sale on its religious past is continuing well into the 21st century. Or as Mark Steyn presciently wrote a year ago:

There'll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands--probably--just as in Istanbul there's still a building called St. Sophia's Cathedral. But it's not a cathedral; it's merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon Western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the West.

Maybe (and yes, I'm being somewhat facetious), Hearst really was onto something when he created his one-man private Disneyland version of Europe 80 years ago.

Jim Geraghty looks at a potentially fun slug match for the 2008 presidential election that could be coming: Rock'em, Sock'em John-Johns.

In other early dispatches from Making of the President 2008, Jim writes that Joe Biden has promised "to try to be the best Biden I can be".

Truly, no man is more qualified.

Update: Obama's presidential rites of passage continue--complete with swimsuit photos!

To add to former Times-ombudsman Daniel Okrent's famous 2004 article opening:

Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?

Of course it is.

Just ask Blue Investment Management, which the Times notes is "a New York fund company that is less than a year old, will limit their holdings to companies that donate the majority of their political contributions to Democrats", including--wait for it--the New York Times!

Update: Bill Hobbs has further thoughts.

Or not: AP applies the same template they apply to anti-war protests in America to pro-Saddam protests in Iraq.

(Orwell wouldn't be at all surprised, of course.)

Democracy Project writes:

Back when I was an exec at Crown Zellerbach, a Fortune 100 company, I told others that a buy-out artist could scoop up the company for pennies on the dollar of assets and cash-flow, break it up for sale, and pocket a hefty profit. I was poo-poo’d. After all, CZ was a 100-year old leader in the pulp & paper industry, although lately a laggard. In 1984, Sir James Goldsmith did what I predicted, to large gains. This was typical of the wake-up call delivered throughout American industry in the ‘80’s.

Today, the same tide of creative destruction is beginning to reach the shores of newspaper beaches.

They conclude:

Most newspapers are between the rock and the hard place: Keep churning out unreliable reporting that readers increasingly don’t buy, in order to maintain their ideological stranglehold on American news, or be bought out and otherwise be consigned to capitalism’s ash heap.

As I mentioned in the last post, it's not like nobody knew this day was going to arrive.

(Via the Manspace that is Maggie's Farm.)

Matt Drudge writes, "Threatened By The Internet, Time Magazine Slims Down":

TIME magazine, which has been coming out every Monday for over 36 years, hit the streets last Friday instead.

"I believe that getting the magazine on newsstands on Friday helps us set the news agenda," explained Richard Stengel, the managing editor.

NEW YORK TIMES media columnist David Carr takes the opportunity to rain on TIME's first weekend parade:

"At the end of the month, there will be significant layoffs at the magazine division... In the last six months, the huge rate base of Time magazine has been cut by almost 20 percent, the street date has been moved, and at the end of the month, the standard editorial model -- a centralized, well-paid cadre processing every bit of copy that comes in the door -- will be kaput..."

Carr explains: 'A tremendous amount of effort has been expended on TIME's new Web site, which makes its debut Monday."

Carr knocks the print magazine: "In its current state, a thin weekly on increasingly thin paper, TIME magazine is not much of a thing to behold."

Not that the New York Times is the picture of health of course, either financially or in terms of flawless journalistic credibility. The Feiler Faster Principle and the Long Tail of the Internet have both radically reshaped the media environment that both of these two old liberal warhorses compete in.

James Lileks once described how that world used to work:

The News was a venerable symbol of childhood’s World of Authority, like Life magazine and those boring but somehow important “White Paper” documentaries on TV. The news was handed down, not passed around. The news was bestowed, not shared.

The news wasn’t out there 24-7, swirling around, waiting for you to open a window; it came in predictable intervals in varying portions. The radio news in the morning came at eight, brought to us by Northwest Orient (gonnngggg) Airlines; nothing happened in the world for the rest of the day. Paul Harvey summed up the general pith of the global gist at noon, but he rarely broke news. (He will, nevertheless, outlast them all. Because he's radio.) The paper came at four. It was a careful, measured thing, having had all day to think about matters. Then came the evening news: black and white, bare sets, Authority Men in grey suits with black glasses and the sober look of judges who had left the robe at home for a day. Nothing happened for the rest of the night; the ten o’clock news managed to squeeze the entire world through the tiny aperture of All Things Fargo. The world, in general, kept its distance – thanks to Cronkite and the AP wire.

In this context, a Special Bulletin would make you soil your drawers. They didn’t break in for anything. When you heard the words “We interrupt this program,” the best you could hope for was an assassination.

The news was like oil – pumped from select locations, refined by a few big companies.

Unless you're in the demographic that's utterly frightened by the Internet (and you're not, since you're reading this), that's not at all how you get your news these days, is it?

Of course, it's not like these trends haven't been continuously predicted since about forty years ago. But as I've noted before, the mass media seems utterly resistant at times to new trends. But in the 1990s, as the rate of media change began to dramatically accelerate, the legacy media seemed to think that attacking newcomers to the information sphere was a better plan than actually preparing for the current environment.

Update: Related thoughts from Mickey Kaus:

Page C5: The NYT sells moneymaking TV stations to refocus on "synergies" between its struggling newspapers and "digitial businesses." .... "Synergies." Where' did I hear that word recently, in a media context? ... Now I remember. ... P.S.: Stock down 14%. Sell off of profitable assets. We're only just beginning to glimpse Pinch's visionary plan for victory! ...

In the meantime...

Speaking of the Long Tail and pop culture, accompanying the buyer's guide for DVD production and editing hardware and software in the latest "dead tree" edition of Videomaker magazine is my introduction to the topic.

And for those feeling really ambitious, don't miss the ongoing guide to shooting your own production that's been running at Libertas. Just keep scrolling through their "Put Up Or Shut Up" category.

(Previous thoughts on the topic here.)

Britain's Independent dubs 2007 "The Year of the Comeback", with Indiana Jones and Stallone's Rocky reappearing at your local multiplex, and inside your nearest hockey arena, The Police, and the best-selling Phil Collins, Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks line-up of Genesis. While it will be fun to see some of the old boys back in action, it's also a reminder of how the Long Tail has radically impacted mass culture. As Jonah Goldberg wrote a few years ago about American network TV and the proliferation of seemingly innumerable spin-offs of Law & Order, CSI, and other sclerotic video franchises:

The networks can't let go, because every time they cancel an established show, the viewers, particularly the younger ones, vanish. No one thinks it's worth investing in a new show. The rise in reality shows has been cited by many as a sign of creative exhaustion on the part of Hollywood

In an era where mass culture in toto has been fractured into dozens and dozens of niche markets, the same holds true for the movie and music world as well.

Allison Kaplan Sommer, Pajamas' Middle East editor writes:

Anyone reading the Sunday Times story and is waiting for the nukes to start dropping any moment can take a deep breath and relax. There are several reasons to doubt that such an attack is truly imminent or even imaginable.

First and foremost - one must consider the source of this story. The Sunday Times journalist in question Uzi Mahnaimi, is a controversial figure, who co-authored a book with Bassam Abu Sharif, former senior adviser to Yasser Arafat and PLO press officer.

While some may believe he has actual military sources in Israel who use him to leak stories that won’t make it past censors, others think he is used by foreign agents to push stories that embarrass Israel. Still others go farther, calling him unprintable names and charging that that despite the fact he works for a mainstream British newspaper, his sources makes Jamil Hussein look like the White House press secretary.

One thing is clear: Mahnaimi makes a regular habit of reporting that Israel is about to attack Iran. If his reporting was accurate, Iranian nuclear facilities would already be a smoking ruin – not once, but multiple times.

As the multiple examples that follow illustrate.

Charles Johnson writes, "An alert is in effect at the Port of Miami, after two Iraqis and a Lebanese man were found trying to slip past security in a cargo truck".

Further details and updates at Hot Air and Pajamas.

No, that's not an intense NFC/AFC interconference pro football game; it's an interesting comparison of two recent natural disasters of biblical proportions and the responses therein. Don't miss it.

(Via Maggie's Farm. And for an equally interesting comparison of regional responses to less severe natural disasters, flashback to this great Virginia Postrel article from the mid-1990s.)

Update: Speaking of Denver, they'll be having another Blogger Bash on February 16th. If you're in the area, don't miss it--as they say in their ad, You--Yes You! You Control The Bar Tab!

And speaking of which, sadly belated best wishes to VodkaPundit's Stephen Green--get well, and start blogging again, soon!

Another Update: "Seneca the Younger" of Flares into Darkness shoots out the Denver/New Orleans meme:

A few minutes Googling revealed that it was actually written about a blizzard in North Dakota, right after Katrina. I'm almost positive I got it by email then, although I haven't tried searching my email for it; in any case, it's in itself a bit of an exaggeration, since North Dakota (and Colorado) called out the National Guard, and ND also solicited and got a disaster declaration from the Federal Government. (The link it to a Snopes article; you can find details there.) On the other hand, while it's an exaggeration, it's got a touch of sense to it; there was no sign of the paralyzed dependency that we saw in New Orleans. We bitched about the snow, but we didn't ask where FEMA was to help people stranded in the snow.

As "Seneca" writes, "It's kind of interesting to watch it go past. It's very interesting when you think about the 'plastic turkey' and similar stories --- it's a demonstration of how a good story, a 'meme' propagates".

I'm reasonably sure the Blogger Bash is real, though.

As always, life imitates Monty Python--and even Mark Steyn isn't immune. The Pythons once began a sketch by having Michael Palin read the news...with a twist:

Good evening. Here is the News for parrots. No parrots were involved in an accident on the M1 today, when a lorry carrying high octane fuel was in collision with a bollard ... that is a bollard and not a parrot. A spokesman for parrots said he was glad no parrots were involved. The Minister of Technology (photo of minister with parrot on his shoulder) today met the three Russian leaders (cut to photograph of Brahnev, Podgomy and Kosygin all in a group and each with a parrot on his shoulder) to discuss a £4 million airliner deal ... (cut back to narrator) None of them went in the cage, or swung on the little wooden trapeze, or ate any of the nice millet seed yum, yum. That's the end of the news. Now our programmes for parrots continue with part three of 'A Tale of Two Cities' specially adapted for parrots by Joey Boy.

And now for something remarkably similar: Mark Steyn's latest column:

As part of this column's ongoing commitment to in-depth coverage of the issues that matter, we're pleased to present the first of a new series: Sheep In the News. Here are two headlines from the last week.

From the Wall Street Journal: "Ritual sacrifice? Not on my street, some Belgians say."

And from the Sunday Times of London: "Science told: Hands off gay sheep."

Read the whole thing. Just tell 'em 'Arold sent you.

Late last year, Claudia Rosett was interviewed on Pajamas' Blog Week In Review podcast; yesterday John Bolton was interviewed by Pamela of Atlas Shrugs, who posted the audio of Bolton here (found via Power Line's Scott Hinderaker, who previously made an astute Bolton/Moynihan comparison). Nobody knows their way better around the UN than those two, and both podcasts are well worth your time.

Matt Drudge breathlessly writes:

Israel has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran's uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons, the SUNDAY TIMES of London is planning to report, British media sources tell DRUDGE... MORE...

PAPER: ISRAEL PLANS NUCLEAR STRIKE ON IRAN

More power to them, but I wonder how much the Iranians learned from Israel's attack on Iraq's Osirak nuclear facility in 1981. As Daniel McKivergan of The Weekly Standard wrote last year, it's "easy to forget just how skilled Saddam became at deception post-Osirak".

And surely, Iran has learned from that moment as well. I can't seem to find a link to it, but I know I've read or heard others discuss the demassified nature of Iran's nuclear program, to prevent anything short of massive WWII-style bombing to dismantle the program via the air. But still, I can't fault the Israelis for trying, since we appear to be either engaged in incredible Cold War-style subterfuge to silently defuse the situation, or, more likely, fumbling the ball.

Update: If Ralph Peters' reading of the tea leaves is correct, this sounds encouraging.

Update: More here.

More: Glenn Reynolds writes:

The Israelis may decide to bomb Iran -- though it seems to me that way too many people are hoping they'll do so and thus spare the rest of us some tough decisions and tougher tasks -- but I'm pretty sure that if they do they won't leak it first. They didn't leak the Osirak raid, or the Entebbe plans, or . . . . Well, you get the idea.

I'm sure that they're making the necessary preparations in case they do decide to launch such an attack. It would be criminal not to. But that's not the same thing.

Exactly.

Well, eventually, at least. Kathy Shaidle writes:

There's plenty wrong with blogging: the fanboy kiss-assery; the me-too-ism; the wholesale adoption of clunky, unimaginative catch-phrases; the military "experts" whose firsthand experience under fire amounts to having yelled "You sunk my battleship" at their cousin in the rec room; the blogs that are nothing more than too-eager auditions for party hack employment; the rush to denounce unseen movies, unread books -- and to publicize outrageous incidents that turn out to be figments of someone else's imagination.

None of those real problems can, should or will be solved by some stuck up, dues-collecting, members-only acronym.

But look at how much the guild mentality has done for elite journalism!

Of NBC's Andrea Mitchell appearance tonight on O'Reilly, (aka Mrs. Alan Greenspan), Mark Finkelstein writes:

Mitchell on Chris Matthews: "I don't think he's a liberal thinker."

And later: "I don't feel there is bias in what we do at NBC News. And I don't think there's bias in CBS or ABC."

With due respect to Mitchell, whose scrappiness I admire, if someone won't admit that Chris Matthews is liberal, why should we believe her when she tells us it's raining?

Somebody needs to update Andrea's playbook. Mitchell's claims of universal objectivity actually harken back to a much older era--pre-Fox, pre-Internet, and, especially, pre-Blogosphere. Andrea, it's OK to admit your biases these days. Since 9/11, everybody else already has! (To be fair though, they often wait until retirement or close to it. Contrast Mitchell's defensiveness with the recent remarks of Thomas Edsall, formerly of The Washington Post. Or Bill Clinton's.)

(Video here.)

Update: Mitchell's obfuscations to O'Reilly are virtually identical in style to those that Leslie Stahl gave to Fox's Cal Thomas in 2003, one year before Dan hit the fan at CBS.

In my post back in August summing up Reuters' infamous "Picture Kill" moment and how they arrived at that point, I mentioned a 2005 Y Net News.com article which reported that terrorist Zakaria Zubeidi, the head of Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade in Jenin, who was both named as a key figure in organizing terror attacks on Israeli civilians, and also appeared--amazingly--in joke videos for Reuters' in-house consumption. But that's not the only terrorist that Reuters is close contact with:

"PESHAWAR, Pakistan (Reuters) - Taliban chief Mullah Mohammad Omar has added to the mystery over Osama bin Laden, saying he hasn't seen his ally and fellow fugitive since U.S.-backed forces ousted the Taliban from Afghanistan in late 2001.

"No, I have neither seen him, nor have I made any effort to do so, but I pray for his health and safety," Omar said in an e-mailed response to questions sent by Reuters.

The questions were relayed to Omar through his spokesman Mohammad Hanif, and a reply was received late on Wednesday."

As Newsbusters writes:

Okay - Reuters has email contact with Mullah Omar, Taliban chief, fugitive, terrorist, etc. and reports it as if it is no big deal. What the heck is wrong with this picture? Where did Reuters get the email address from - Omar's MySpace page? Has Reuters shared this email address with the authorities - i.e. the military hunting for terrorists? Or is the email addy for personal communication only. Which Reuters' employee was involved with the email communication?

Why do we continue to tolerate this blatant terrorist enabling so-called media organization? These journalists are responsible for "telling us the story" from the front of the war on terror. I just didn't realize it was only the terrorists' story they were interested in promoting.

After 9/11, and repeated incidents such as this one and with Zakaria Zubeidi, I'm not at all sure what other conclusion it's possible to come to. As I also mentioned in the long "Picture Kill" post, immediately after 9/11, it was Stephen Jukes, Reuters' global news editor, who infamously refused to label Osama bin Laden as a terrorist and uttered the now famous cliche (since adopted by CNN's senior editor for Arab affairs), "We all know that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter"--which itself is the Big Lie. Attempting to replace Israel’s liberal democracy with Sharia (for but one very simple example) isn't exactly my idea of freedom fighting.

Jim Geraghty writes:

Yesterday’s discussion of Barack Obama, and the Post story on his long-ago use of cocaine, brought some reader mail regarding Obama’s current habit of smoking cigarettes.

(By the way, the term “use” instead of “experimenting” is deliberate. Let’s avoid the term “experimenting” with drugs when it comes to politicians. If you’re not in a lab coat and using a Bunsen burner, you’re not experimenting. Otherwise, on New Year’s Eve I was “experimenting” with microbrews and whiskey.)

Ramesh Ponnuru adds:

I think Christopher Caldwell wrote something similar a decade ago in the New York Press when some Republican politician confessed to having "experimented" with marijuana. Yeah, he said—I paraphrase—I "experimented" too. But the first test wasn't under ideal conditions, so I had to repeat it a couple of hundred times.

And Geraghty also asks an interesting question: can a presidential candidate who "experiments" with cigarattes have a chance of winning these days? They're the most demonized vice of all, by the same "new puritan" left that would be Obama's biggest boosters.

As Ed Morrissey notes, Bill Cowher is stepping down after 15 years as head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, and deliverer of the fabled "One For The Thumb"--their fifth Super Bowl ring. Ed writes:

As a lifelong Steeler fan, this comes as an expected but still tough blow. Cowher embodied the Steelers persona: tough, tenacious, and smart. Few coaches fit their teams as well as Cowher did, which is why he lasted 15 years after getting the job when most coaches are still carrying Gatorade bottles for the players.

At 49, he's much too young to hang up his clipboard. He wants to spend time with his family before time runs out, and he's close to being too late for that. No one could blame him; the head coaching position has become a 24/7/365 job during the time Cowher has coached the Steelers. After 15 years of that kind of grind, a couple of years as a sabbatical seems reasonable enough.

I expect that Cowher will not retreat from football entirely, though. He will probably find work as an analyst with one of the networks, a job that will take significantly less of his time. He will need to stay connected if he plans to return to coaching at some point, and given his consistent success in Pittsburgh and his youth, that seems assured. It probably won't be with Pittsburgh, though, unless Cowher's replacement bombs -- and you can bet that whoever succeeds him will feel that pressure from the fans, the players, and the head office.

This fan will miss The Jaw on Sunday afternoons, stalking the sidelines. I'll miss the passion that Cowher always has for the game, and the obvious joy he took in it. Thanks for 15 great seasons, Mr. Cowher, and we hope you enjoy the time off.

Don Banks of Sports Illustrated believes that the Rooney family may have their successor to Cowher--only their second head coach since 1969--already lined up:

But when the news of [Cowher's ] departure from the Steel City fully sets in, and we wrap our brains around the idea that he has coached his last game for Pittsburgh, it's going to become quickly apparent that the future of the Steelers has been right there alongside Cowher for some time now. And that future is either going to look a lot like Cowher, as Steelers offensive coordinator Ken Whisenhunt uncannily does, or it's going to coach a lot like him, as no-nonsense assistant head coach/offensive line coach Russ Grimm does.

I'm not basing this on anything other than my gut and a little early tea-leaf reading, but my money is on the Steelers having a Grimm future. And by that I mean anything but gloom and doom.

In an organization that values continuity and consistency, and in a city where it has always been important to remember who you are and stick to that identity, Grimm offers the Steelers the most seamless transition to the post-Cowher era. The Rooney family doesn't have to wonder if Grimm would continue the commitment to the power-running game that has been the calling card of Cowher's 15-year tenure, and the connecting strand that has run through nearly all of Pittsburgh's successful teams in the past 30-plus seasons. That style suits Grimm from head to toe.

With Grimm, an old offensive guard who thinks like an offensive guard, what you see is what you get. He's about as fancy as a thumbtack, and about as likely to fall for the next offensive fad as he is to shave his bushy mustache and streak his hair pink. He's as straight forward as a drive block, and almost as subtle.

Grimm's football principles are rock-solid: Winning and an emphasis on running the ball go hand in glove. With Grimm in charge, there wouldn't be any need to refashion the Steelers roster to fit a new system, or wholesale changes on his coaching staff. It would be let's buckle it up and keep on going. I'm fairly sure he'd keep Dick LeBeau in place as the team's defensive coordinator, and keep right on playing the 3-4 defense that Pittsburgh has featured for years.

While Grimm might look like one of those Chicago fans from 'Da Bears skit of Saturday Night Live fame, he's a Pittsburgh guy, through and through. You might think that doesn't matter in this case, but you'd be wrong. It does in that town (How else do you think Dave Wannstedt got the Pitt job?) Grimm was an All-America center at Pitt, and was born in Scottsdale, Pa.

More even than most NFL club owners, the Rooney family is very conscious of what the Steelers mean to their city and the surrounding area. They like a head coach who reflects the image and toughness of their city and their blue-collar fans. Grimm isn't slick or particularly savvy in the way that some head coaching candidates package themselves. But he's a known quantity in Pittsburgh, and that's going to count for an awful lot in this case.

Whoever ultimately replaces Cowher, I'm assuming the Rooneys will be as patient with him as they've been with Chuck Noll and Cowher through the decades. In an era where the coach is usually immediately yanked if his team delivers a sup-par season, that level of continuity is exceedingly rare, and it's definitely paid dividends for the Steelers.

Back when I began learning how to play guitar in the fall of 1982, there were two guitar magazines: Guitar Player, and Guitar World. Guitar Player was more established; it started life in the late 1960s, first covering the psychedelic guitarists in its Bay Area backyard, then the Brit superstars of the 1970s (Clapton! Beck! Page! Frampton! Richards! Townshend! Et al.), but its heart seemed to be in the jazz world. A heroin and Jack Daniels-ravaged pipe cleaner-thin Jimmy Page with his Danelectro slung low bashing out “Kashmir” at 190 decibels may have been on its cover, but its heart was set on telling you how Howard Roberts fingered second inversion E flat 11th sharp suspended fourth chords at the sixth fret position.

Guitar World was (and is) Guitar Player’s upstart competitor, and it was looser, funkier. It loved rockers. It wasn’t trying to climb into the inner workings of the Tritone scale; it wanted to show you how to play the solo to “Stairway To Heaven”.

An early issue had Les Paul on the cover though, which had plenty of crossover value: my dad loved Les because he had played with Crosby; I loved Les because Page, Beck, Townshend and Keef all played his signature guitar.

As I may have mentioned before, back in 2002, after I interviewed Les myself in New York (for articles that appeared online in Blogcritics and Catholic Exchange and on dead tree in Vintage Guitar), I asked Les to autograph my battered copy of his 1983 Guitar World cover story, and he was delighted to do so. (Les will autograph anything--just search through eBay to see how many of his guitars he’s autographed over the years after his second Monday net set.) I made a color photocopy of that cover and framed it, as a reminder of the distance I travelled since when I began playing.

Flashforward to two weeks ago in Texas. While Nina and I were out Christmas shopping, we stopped in the Barnes & Noble in Waco, and I picked up the February issue of Guitar World. It’s out in December, so it has a Holiday-themed cover with Ozzy’s longtime gunslinger Zack Wylde on the cover dressed as Santa, and Billy Barty’s Mini-Me dressed as one his elves.

Oh, and it has three of my articles, which I wrote early this fall.

(Best. Christmas. Ever.)

There’s my history of Carvin, the San Diego-based guitar and amplifier builder, an interview with the fellows who designed and built this incredible Stratocaster variation, and a brief interview with actor Steven Seagal, who’s now dividing his time between Kung Fu-ing bad guys in the movies, and singing the blues. And owns something like 300 vintage guitars, including a superb “Black Beauty” Les Paul Custom from the mid-1950s, and at least two of the late Albert King’s Flying-Vs.

So if you see Santa and his favorite elf on the cover of Guitar World this month, look for me in there as well.

Has the ultimate undercover policeman surfaced? Bob Owens questions the timing of this AP story, and adds:

So it appears Jamil Hussein may be real. Good. that means there is a real person to question regarding 61 mostly uncorroborated stories provided as exclusives by Hussein to the Associated Press.

This includes the story that made him (in)famous, where Hussein and the AP claimed 24 people were killed--six by being pulled from a mosque, doused in kerosene, and purposefully burned alive, where the other 18 merely died in an "inferno" at another mosque under attack--during a series of four mosque attacks. In later AP stories, the four mosques trickled down to one, and 18 of the 24 dead mysteriously disappeared, without the Associated Press releasing a retraction or a correction.

I can hardly wait to see where this leads. Is "Jamilgate" over?

Heck no. It's just getting good...

With