The Anchoress read a trivial-sounding blog post with Katie Couric's name on it, and responds, "I never thought I would say it, but I miss Dan Rather. I may not have agreed with him much of the time toward the end, but he had a curious mind, a willingness to ask questions and he possessed a voice and presence that conveyed…oh…gravitas."

Well, with the exception of his occasional "what's the frequency" freakouts, Rather did a pretty good of projecting the requisite gravitas on camera until he finally unraveled near the end, but Katie and Captain Dan are virtually identical in one respect: they're essentially actors who gets paid to put a dramatic intonation on dialogue that someone else has written for them. In Team America: World Police, the Janeane Garofolo wooden puppet (sorry for the redundancies) breathlessly shouts, "As actors, it is our responsibility to read the newspapers, and then say what we read on television like it's our own opinion"

Ironically, that's also a perfect description of the superstar anchorman or woman, as as Tom Wolfe noted in 1980:

Within the television news operations there’s such a premium put on not being a reporter. Everyone aspires to the man who never has to leave the building, the anchor man, who is a performer. The reporters are called researchers and are usually young women, and the correspondent on television is a substar, a supporting actor who prides himself on the fact that he doesn’t have to prepare the story. You talk to these guys and they’ll say, “Well, they sent me from Beirut to Teheran, and I had forty-five minutes to get briefed on the situation.” What they should say is, “I read the AP copy.” The idea is that as a performer you can pull together this news operation anywhere you go and the whole status structure is set up in such a way that you’re not going to get good reporters. Just try to think of the last major scoop, to use that old term, that was broken on television. I’m sure there have been some. But what story during Watergate? During Watergate there were new stories coming out every day. None were on television, except when television simply broadcast the hearings. The can do a set event. And that’s what television is actually best at. In fact, it’d be a service to the country if television news operations were shut down totally and they only broadcast hearings, press conferences and hockey games. That would be television news. At least the public would not have the false impression that it’s getting news coverage.

As television writer Burt Prelutsky wrote in 2005 as Dan was heading into the sunset, "Now, I’m not saying we should kill the messengers. I’m just suggesting it’s time we stopped canonizing them".

Found via Power Line, Mark Moyar, author of Triumph Forsaken, which Scott Johnson dubs a "revisionist Vietnam war history", is looking for war heroes in the New York Sun. Or to be more specific, he's looking to read about them in papers other than the New York Sun:

Neil Sheehan began his Pulitzer-Prize winning book "A Bright Shining Lie" by pronouncing the Vietnam War "a war without heroes." In the rest of the book, the Americans in Vietnam largely came across as fools, liars, criminals, or a combination thereof, with the exception of Mr. Sheehan and his fellow journalists, who were depicted as brave unmaskers of ineptitude and absurdity. Sheehan ignored the real heroism of many brave Americans — such as Marvin Shields, Carlos McAfee, Antonio Smaldone, and Steven L. Bennett, to name but a few — and many military victories, for American triumphs did not square with his claims about the war. He badly distorted press involvement in the war so that he and his colleagues, particularly David Halberstam and Stanley Karnow, could dodge the blame they deserved for promoting the disastrous coup against the South Vietnamese government in November 1963.

The Vietnam-era journalists began a tradition that today's press consistently upholds. We hear very little from most large press outlets about American heroes in Iraq and Afghanistan, men like James Coffman Jr., Danny Dietz, and Christopher Adlesperger, or about our military successes there. Instead of associating such names with these wars, Americans associate the words they hear most often from the press, like Abu Ghraib and Haditha. As in Vietnam, too, the shunning of heroes does not extend to the press's coverage of itself. Awards to journalists, both those who have spent time in Iraq and Afghanistan and those who have not, are considered worthy of lengthy news stories.

Publicizing American heroism and success is essential today for two reasons. First, it permits a nuanced view of Iraq and Afghanistan, one which cannot be discerned from the daily stories of sectarian murders and the photos of American troops who have just been killed. Second, American troops and the American people become more courageous and resolute when they hear of their countrymen's military heroism and success, past and present. In earlier times, Americans ingrained their traditions of heroism and victory into the country's youth through historical instruction. Today's history textbooks largely ignore America's military past, a reflection of the anti-military prejudices, lack of military experience, and cosmopolitanism that pervade the intelligentsia.

Most Americans outside of academia and the mainstream press, on the other hand, still understand the importance of military tradition, and they crave stories about valorous Americans at war.

The Sun's prominent Manhattan competitor inadvertently beclowned themselves when they wrote this on the same topic in 2005.

Update: Very much related thoughts from Daniel Henninger.

Rejoice, sinner! "Carbon atonement is no longer the exclusive preserve of the Malibu set -- with the Iowahawk EcoPals Network!"

Related (and less satiric) thoughts here. Meanwhile, Don Surber writes:

After reading the Editorialist’s coverage at the Washington Post of Al Gore’s overuse of electricity, I don’t want to hear about Republican hypocrisy ever again.

If Al Gore were a Republican, the story of his consuming 20 times the national average while lecturing the rest of us on cutting back on our energy use would be front page news from coast-to-coast. Late-nite comedians would have a field day. The editorial pages would puff up about Republican hypocrisy.

Instead we get excuses, excuses, excuses. . . .

As a proud member of the mainstream media, let me suggest that this double-standard — this refusal to hold Al Gore accountable for his actions which are contradictory to his words — only feeds the belief that the media is biased in favor of liberals — particularly born-to-the-manor, overfed, limousine liberals who consume 22,000 kilowatts of electricity each year in just one of his three homes.

As the Professor responds, "Well, look at the kind of people who own newspapers . . ."

Elsewhere, a look at crushing of dissent.

Roger Simon asks, "Does Dick Morris know?":

I find Dick Morris fun to listen to - he's witty and willing to go out on a limb. But is he right when he says that John McCain's campaign has already imploded? The Arizona Senator never even made a dent on the PJM poll, but I thought that might have had to do with the fact our readership doesn't much care for McCain-Feingold. The general public, however, is unlikely to know what McCain-Feingold even is. And yet they seem to be rejecting McCain. This could be in the area of pure instinct. People react to candidates on a primitive level that transcends issues.

Also, as Morris notes, overexposure is a big danger. Even Obama may already be overexposed. The trick to winning this endless election will be not peaking too early. Either that, or getting so far ahead everybody else just gives up. These are the dual strategies in long-distance racing and seem to apply here.

Mickey Kaus extolls the virtues of last-in=last out accounting in a presidential race:

Smart Tony Blankley piece on how the Faster (and Earlier) election process actually hurts challengers, eroding their traditional advantages. (They get stale quickly, for example. And if they show the beef--policy proposals--there's lots and lots of time to pick those policies apart, or for them to be overtaken by events.) ... The obvious solution, Blankley notes--echoing Emailer X--is to jump into the race late. Advantage, Gingrich and Gore. ... Actually, maybe Blankley's logic suggests a solution for McCain: He could let his campaign collapse, drop out, lay low for a few months ... and then jump back in at the end. The Rosie Ruiz Strategy. There's plenty of time for it. ... (True, it didn't work for Gary Hart in 1988. But McCain wouldn't be withdrawing because of a character-questioning scandal. He'd be withdrawing because Giuliani seemed fresher and more appealing--at the moment. By December, if Blankley's right, it would be McCain who seems fresh.) ...

It didn't do much for Ross Perot in 1992, as I recall, either. Although his proto-Rosie Ruiz stategy involved a much shorter timeout, and was accompanied by ravings of covert Republican operatives harrassing his daughter in Area 51 or something like that.

Meanwhile, Rand Simberg ponders if the Clinton campaign "is unaware of the Internet. Well, they shouldn't be (anyone recall the name Matt Drudge?), but I think they continue to underestimate its power, again, as I've noted in the past".

Well, the former solicitor general did call a James Cameron in California:

So, tell us about your interest in the historical Jesus.

Um, I guess I'm interested in Jesus, yeah. Where did you say you were from, again?

Christianity Today magazine.

Are you selling subscriptions or something?

No, we want to talk about your documentary.

What?

The one about Jesus' tomb.

Um, yeah, I think you have the wrong guy. I think you want the other James Cameron.

You're not James Cameron?

No, I am, but not …

… And your wife's name is Suzy?

Susanna.

Right. We found your number online. We figured the chances of you not being the filmmaker James Cameron are, like, a jillion to one. And you live in California, so that pretty much clinches it.

Heh. In a related post, Ed Morrissey writes on "How Discovery Channel Lost Its Groove" by backing Cameron's documentary:

Archeology involves a level of speculation, but the true scientists make sure to minimize it as much as possible -- and this documentary amounts to nothing but speculation.

Who will bear the brunt of this fiasco? James Cameron will go on to make more big-budget Hollywood movies, unless he's dumb enough to make another Terminator sequel. Simcha Jacobovici will continue with his "Naked Archeology" series on History International, an entertaining but usually unconvincing half-hour of pop archeology that presaged this disaster. Discovery Channel, however, will take a hit to its reputation for serious science.

I think that actually began to happen when they crafted this channel.

Last week I linked to Hugh Hewitt and Newsbusters' negative impressions of PBS's "News War" Frontline miniseries; as conservatives, it's not at all surprising that they'd have a beef with a PBS show. But while Jeff Jarvis is much closer to the demographic that PBS targets, he's also not very much impressed with their efforts:

I just watched the third part of Frontline’s News War and found it utterly unsurprising and profoundly disappointing. It delivered the obvious narratives it wanted to deliver: a war between mainstream media and the rabble of citizen bloggers, a cultural and quality line between old media and new, and a moral battle between the business and editorial sides of the news business, as illustrated by its lionizing of deposed LA Times editors John Carroll and Dean Baquet and its demonizing of Tribune executive and now LA Times publisher David Hiller. I was part of it, briefly, to fulfill their blogger-v-MSM storyline; here is more of what I said to them. I remain disappointed that they didn’t investigate the future of journalism, the opportunities and possibilities. Instead, they played the themes we have heard again and again, as if on a Top 40 radio station: tsk-tsking the tackiness, fretting about the news that the big guys are sure we need, evil Wall Street, looney citizens. I could sit down and fisk, as we say, all its cheap shots and lazy analysis and incomplete reporting but, frankly, I don’t find it worth the effort.

Meanwhile, Bill O'Reilly tells his viewers "journalism in this country is at a low point":

And it comes right before one of the most important presidential elections in history.

Much of the mainstream media now invested in promoting ideology at the expense of providing honest information.

* * *

We in the press have been granted special privileges by the Constitution. Those privileges are now being abused by corrupt editors and TV executives.

If "The New York Times" and NBC News can explain why they didn't cover the ACLU debacle, I'd like to hear it. If not, all Americans should turn away from them.

But they won't of course--at least not in numbers that generate any immediate attention from the legacy media, whose reaction to its slow erosion of viewers and readers ranges from surprising sanguinity to utter cluelessness. Which is why I've been wondering what--if anything--will happen as a result of what's been bubbling up for the last six months or so in the Blogosphere.

Frontline, which bills itself as "India's National Magazine" has a piece that Drudge is currently linking to, titled "Dangerous denial", with the following subtitle:

If all the people of the world had the same living style as the average American, the holocaust would have already visited us.

Of course, when it came to the real Holocaust, the world's most celebrated Indian was the very personification of "Dangerous denial", as Richard Grenier wrote in Commentary in 1983 as a mammoth rebuttal to the even-more-mammoth biopic then making the rounds:

Since the movie's Madeleine Slade specifically invites us to revere the "way out of madness" that Gandhi offered the world at the time of World War II, I am under the embarrassing obligation of recording exactly what courses of action the Great Soul recommended to the various parties involved in that crisis. For Gandhi was never stinting in his advice. Indeed, the less he knew about a subject, the less he stinted.

I am aware that for many not privileged to have visited the former British Raj, the names Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Deccan are simply words. But other names, such as Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, somehow have a harder profile. The term "Jew," also, has a reasonably hard profile, and I feel all Jews sitting emotionally at the movie 'Gandhi' should be apprised of the advice that the Mahatma offered their coreligionists when faced with the Nazi peril: they should commit collective suicide. If only the Jews of Germany had the good sense to offer their throats willingly to the Nazi butchers' knives and throw themselves into the sea from cliffs they would arouse world public opinion, Gandhi was convinced, and their moral triumph would be remembered for "ages to come." If they would only pray for Hitler (as their throats were cut, presumably), they would leave a "rich heritage to mankind." Although Gandhi had known Jews from his earliest days in South Africa--where his three staunchest white supporters were Jews, every one--he disapproved of how rarely they loved their enemies. And he never repented of his recommendation of collective suicide. Even after the war, when the full extent of the Holocaust was revealed, Gandhi told Louis Fischer, one of his biographers, that the Jews died anyway, didn't they? They might as well have died significantly.

America's would-be modern day Gandhi has a long record of using ridiculously exaggerated Holocaust metaphors (a trait that has since been acquired by his acolytes) to breathlessly describe his pet cause, as Jonah Goldberg noted last year:

In his 1992 book “Earth in the Balance,” [Gore] wrote that “today the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of glass shattering in Berlin.” He repeatedly refers to the unfolding ecological holocaust” and invokes Martin Niemoller’s famous quote (“When the Nazis came for the Communists, I remained silent; I was not a Communist. ... When they came for the Jews, I did not speak out; I was not a Jew. ...”) to label himself and other environmentalists “the new resistance.”

In “An Inconvenient Truth” and in interviews, Gore sticks to his guns. He quotes Churchill’s warning about the gathering storm of fascism and declares: “The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequence.”

And yet, as Betsy Newmark wrote when she linked to Jonah's post, "if addressing the crisis of global warming demands the same diligence and dedication that fighting the Nazis demanded, why isn't Gore proposing similar sacrifices today to fight global warming?"

For a start, they should be out there denouncing the movie Cars for glorifying the weapons of mass destruction that cars are in this global crisis. They should be campaigning against NASCAR. But, of course, they won't be doing these things because it would be political suicide. So, now we know where they draw the line. They'll talk a good game, but they won't actually propose anything or say anything that would offend potential voters. As Goldberg writes:

Once you compare a problem to the Holocaust — even remotely — you’ve lost your moral wiggle room. No politician, indeed no responsible person in this country, would endorse a comedic cartoon about genocide, never mind take their children to it. Give PETA credit. While it repugnantly compares the raising of chickens and cattle to Auschwitz, the organization at least has the courage of its convictions, and protests virtually everything that treats animals as anything less than people.

Environmentalists like Gore who invoke the Holocaust are too afraid to follow through. They want all the credit for denouncing what they consider a moral horror, but they’re unwilling to actually face the real consequences of their rhetoric. I don’t believe global warming is akin to the Holocaust. But if I did, I’d like to think I’d have more courage about it than Gore is showing.

Coulter was right about Gore's Edwardian digs:

“I kind of respect him more, it shows he is not stupid enough to believe all this global warming nonsense. He’s trying to get us to believe. Okay, fine, he may be a hypocrite but at least he’s not a moron.”

It's an "Inconvenient Hypocrisy" as Bill Hobbs writes, via Glenn Reynolds.

Update: Perhaps the Goracle isn't Gandhi, but another icon immortalized on the big screen:

It’s great that he’s using solar panels and all that, but notice he’s not disputing how huge his electric bill still is. What the hell is he doing in there? Is he a Terminator from the future and requires constant recharging? (That would explain pretty much everything.)

I blame Cyberdyne Systems.

Dr. Helen asks, "Have you noticed how differently those who criticize non-PC issues such as gun rights are treated by the media as opposed to those who dare to make a PC blunder such as saying something politically incorrect about a minority?"

I'd say it's a variation on Amon's Law.

Tammy Bruce writes, "USA Today Declares Republicans Not Part of 'the Country'".

I guess this is what David Weston of ABC meant in November of 2004 when he said that the media needed to send more foreign correspondents into the Red States.

Hugh Hewitt writes:

The GOP base has a trust issue with McCain, one that flows from the 2000 campaign, McCain-Feingold, the Gang of 14, the McCain-Kennedy immigration bill, the September 2006 derailing of the Republican end-game strategy. McCain is fading, and not because of his age or energy level, but because the GOP electorate has to absolutely believe that the next president will be as committed to victory as Bush has been. Senator McCain's avoidance of new media has been reinforcing the impression that he is unwilling to provide the assurances he needs to in order to regain the trust he has repeatedly broken with the GOP electorate over the years. There is time to turn that around, but Senator McCain is not making the effort, an effort that would begin by a relentless courting of the base rather than the Hardball/Meet The Press audience. Every week that Senator McCain delays launching that effort is a week in which the mayor and the governor gather more pledges and momentum. The big three could be the big two by Memorial Day.

No. There is another...

Meanwhile, Clay Waters looks at the New York Times' bad timing in light of today's assassination attempt on Cheney: "Today's NY Times Asks Why Is Cheney's Trip So Secretive?"

Update: John Hawkins shares his thoughts on the Democrats' current Big Three.

As Michelle Malkin writes, "We always hear 'Never forget.' But how many still remember anymore?" Lawhawk notes that yesterday was "the 14th anniversary of the first WTC bombing attack, which killed six and wounded more than 1,000 people". He has an update on where construction efforts to rebuild the WTC stand: "The Battle for Ground Zero, Part 219".

So says Ann Coulter about Al "Elmer Gantry" Gore. Glenn Reynolds writes:

Moralists are especially vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy -- ask any backsliding fundamentalist preacher. If Gore were less moralistic in his approach -- as he gains weight, he's even starting to look a bit like a younger Jerry Falwell -- the charges of hypocrisy would have less bite.

Roger L. Simon adds, "there's a deeper question beneath all this. Does hypocrisy count?"

Does it matter than Hollywood stars parade around in Priuses while keeping private planes and multiple homes that burn up who-knows-how much energy (in many cases enough to dwarf Al's)? Is it just that these people mouth off that raises our eyebrows or should they actually practice what they preach ?

Now I don't have a particularly Green Lifestyle, although I am thinking of buying a hybrid for my next car (primarily because I can't stand to stick another dollar in the Saudi gas pump) and the next time I build something I'll probably pay more attention to good window sealing (the code will probably make me do that anyway). But what's with Gore? How could he be so thoughtless and, yes, arrogant to go out there banging the drum for his film at the very time, according to public records, he increased his already sizable personal energy consumption. How embarrassing and how terrible for his cause. Maybe he doesn't really care about it at bottom - maybe it's all about him.

In the movie business you see a lot of that, a kind of narcissistic politics in which how you appear is so much more important than what you really are. It's as if there were two people - the private one bossing around the staffs while burning up more fuel than the Sultan of Brunei and the public one wagging a finger at the rest of us. Gore seems to have fit in well with these folks. In the long run, I suspect that doesn't augur well for the environment.

UPDATE: In Gore defense, the ex-veep apparently did purchase some "Green Power" chits for his manse. But I was just on the Steve Gill's Tennessee talk radio show where it was pointed out this is one of but three Gore homes - and no one seems to know how much time he even spends there. Plus... there's always the use of Gulfstreams, etc., to ferry Al to his next (well paid) global warming extravaganza. Who knows the total of his "carbon footprint" but it's probably bigger that 99.99% of humanity's. Still.. it's only hypocrisy. For the right cause, no problem. Right. Right?

Meanwhile, Tim Blair looks at a Hollywood celebrity who really does qualify for the latter half of Ann's equation. (Even if she did cause The Manolo to obtain the orgasm of the celebratory.)

Update: Welcome Tim Blair readers! Click here for even more Gore goring, as Al meets Gandhi, Jonah Goldberg, and even the Terminator.

Regarding the Oscars, Orrin Judd writes, "When we were kids everyone used to watch them--they used to celebrate the movies. Know anyone who still does now that they celebrate Hollywood's politics?"

Drudge has the early ratings:

ABC PULLS 27.4 RATING/42 SHARE IN EARLY OVERNIGHTS AT 'OSCARS'... MORE... IF NUMBERS HOLD, WOULD BE 3RD LEAST- WATCHED OSCARS, JOINING LOW 2006, 2003... MORE...

In 2006, Hollywood switched from a mass industry serving the public to a niche market for blue/green activists. It invented a strategy that junks the Red States. But every year flyover country gets to remind Hollywood that the loss is reciprocal, at least for one Sunday.

If the Drudge numbers are correct, at some point in the future, just as C-SPAN covers the bulk of national political conventions, watch for the Oscars to move up the dial, out of the over-the-air networks and into the realm of cable. Maybe E! or HBO could host them. Or Current TV.

Related:

Survey shows high ticket prices and poor film selections causing some to think twice about heading out to catch the latest blockbuster.

Do tell!

A theater owner in Spain has one solution; its arrival seems inevitable in the US.

Update: Outside The Beltway agrees:

Gore joins a growing line of liberal political activists to win major awards in recent years: The Dixie Chicks, Michael Moore, and Hillary Clinton come readily to mind in the “arts.” Then there’s Jimmy Carter and virtually every other recent winner of the Nobel Peace prize.

One wonders how long these awards will retain their credibility? It’s bad enough that actors and directors often win awards for mediocre late-career performances as a make-up for being snubbed for more deserving work over the years. But to so overtly use these awards to send a political message can’t sit that well with the majority of the country to whom that message is being sent.

Exactly.

(Via Jules Crittenden.)

Meanwhile, Libertas notes an inconvenient omission.

Nikki Finke: "In summary, it was the night that the Academy finally killed off what used to be its show-stopper of a movie awards":

By my calculations, Gore needs to reimburse the Academy and ABC for close to $3 million for this night's free and over-the-top political advertising. Just send the check directly to Obama, Al, since I know you and Tipper can't stand Bill and Hillary. By trying not to be controversial, Ellen delivered a truly forgettable performance. And that's far worse than being Chris Rock- or Jon Stewart-type awful.

* * *

Does the Academy realize they've got four hours-plus to remind audiences around the world that going to the movies is fun and not a chore like sitting through this show?

* * *

Exactly whose idea was it to let Jerry insult the theater owners who already are going out of business because of the lousy films Hollywood produces? What, you guys have a death wish?

Like I said...

In addition to Your Humble Narrator's interviews with Austin Bay and Adam Bellow, this week's Blog Week In Review podcast has hidden within it breaking news--The Manolo's first publication is due in March from Pamphleteer Press.

When William Goldman said,"Every Oscar night you look back and realize that last year was the worst year in the history of Hollywood", he probably had screenwriting on his mind, but Hollywood's songwriting isn't exactly going great guns either these days, as Mark Steyn notes:

What do these five songs have in common?

“The Way You Look Tonight”, “Thanks For The Memory”, “Over The Rainbow”, “When You Wish Upon A Star” and “White Christmas”.

Answer: They were all Academy Award-winning songs from the Best Song Oscar’s first decade.

And what do these five songs have in common?

“When You Believe”, “You’ll Be In My Heart”, “Into The West”, “Al Otro Lado del Rio” and “It”s Hard Out Here For A Pimp”.

Answer: They were all Academy Award-winning songs from the last decade.

Norma Desmond didn't know the half of it.

CBS does, as Reuters notes:

CBS Corp. will invest in virtual world content developer Electric Sheep Co., the U.S. television broadcaster said on Monday. hoping to expand its reach beyond the living room.

CBS will participate in a $7 million round of financing, which includes existing investors Gladwyne Partners.

Electric Sheep develops 3-D properties in virtual worlds like Second Life, an online society that allows players to create characters that exist in a world they help create.

"We believe that all these virtual worlds represent next generation communications platforms," CBS Interactive President Quincy Smith said in a phone interview last week.

Corporate interest in tapping virtual worlds to market brands and products have surged in recent months as marketers test new technologies to reach consumers who now split their leisure TV-viewing time with the Internet.

Electric Sheep, consultants and designers of properties in 3-dimensional virtual worlds such as Linden Lab's Second Life, have accumulated a portfolio of Fortune 500 clients that include Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, General Electric's NBC and Viacom Inc..

Reuters Group Plc is an Electric Sheep client.

Of course. How could they not be?

In between unctuous praise of "larger than life" Al Gore (and given his industry's collective backing of the man and his religious convictions, how could he do otherwise?) Tom Shales, The Washington Post's longtime liberal TV critic, absolutely buries this year's Oscars.

Rather ironic, considering that Shales has the exact politics that the film industry aims its product towards.

Update: Bipartisan consensus reached.

"I appeal to my colleagues in Congress to step back and think carefully about what to do next".

27 years too late, but Martin Scorsese finally cops an Oscar for best director and best picture, and Thelma Schoonmaker for best editor.

When I clicked on the IMDB page for Scorsese's next project, I thought jokingly, "Of course! He'll get Leonardo DiCaprio to star as the title subject".

Once again, Muggeridge's Law comes through, and I'm sure the actual picture will be a hoot.

Incidentally, the choice of a director's alter ego speaks volumes: Hitchcock had Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart. Scorsese has Leonardo DiCaprio, and seems as wedded to him these days as he was to Robert De Niro in both men's glory days.

"8:47 - At least Altman went quick unlike his films".

Gee, I don't know--he died annually at the box office since about 1971.

The Internet Movie Database is keeping a running tally of who's winning what on its homepage, if you're skipping the show like most Americans.

This just in: CBS cooks the books at Sixty Minutes. That's never happened before!

Hopefully Reuters, The New York Times, CNN, Newsweek, and Associated Press will combine forces to launch a full investigation.

As I said earlier today, I bet they’ve gone back to sleep in New York. I bet they’re back to sleep all across America.

Reuters has an interesting piece on Esmee Denters, an 18-year old resident of Oosterbeck, who's become the Dutch "It Girl" of YouTube:

Nearly 20,000 fans have subscribed to her YouTube channel to receive automatic updates, with about 200 added a day, putting her at No. 22 on the all-time most-popular list.

Denters has since traveled to the United States and met a veritable who's who of the music industry's leading executives, from Jason Flom to Antonio "L.A." Reid to Tommy Motolla. She has recorded demo tracks with Kelly Rowland and is fielding TV deals with Sony Pictures Entertainment.

As Reuters notes, "The obvious logical next step, then, is a record label deal, right? Not so fast":

"We may decide not to get together with a label," Denters said via phone, waiting for a flight from Los Angeles to New York for another round of meetings and recording sessions. "We may try new stuff. I've already accomplished so much on my own, we'd like to see what we can do with that."

Artists like Denters, emerging from the realm of user-generated media, have learned to tap the viral power of the Internet to do what acts a generation ago could only dream of -- build a grassroots following numbering in the thousands at very little cost or effort.

But being talented and building a fan base is only part of the equation. Artists who decide to go it alone must bear the full financial weight of the various aspects of a music career -- recording and production fees, distribution costs, marketing and promotion expenses and more.

These costs are falling in the digital age. Recording and production fees can be extraordinarily cheap, depending on the level of sophistication desired. Tech-savvy artists can further cut costs with a good laptop and ProTools.

Distribution can be done digitally through such firms as the Orchard or INgrooves, which take a flat percentage of each sale for their efforts. Physical sales can be handled by CD Baby at $4 a pop. There are a gaggle of online services designed to host commerce and promotional sites for unsigned acts as part of a "music social network," most notably PureVolume and Sellaband.com. Companies like Musictoday can serve as a one-stop shop for artists for Web site hosting and design, digital downloads, concert ticket sales, CD replication, fan club management, and merchandise sales and fulfillment.

For licensing, digital services like Rumblefish, PumpAudio and even some digital distribution firms like the Orchard promote their clients' work to advertising firms and film producers and charge only a percentage of the licensing fee in return. And since they've taken no recoupable advance, these artists get to keep all the proceeds.

In a TCS Daily piece back in 2003, I explored the war between Hollywood and Silicon Valley, particularly in the music industry, where so much can be done by a talented DIY-artist. These days, all of the technology visible here in Peter Gabriel's 1980-era studio easily fits into a PC with a good high-end sound card.

Because it's so much harder to achieve great visuals rather than great sounds, it will be a while before things level out in the movie industry. But fortunately, Hollywood's doing an excellent job of lowering their own standards, while technology on the grass roots level continues to become more and more powerful.

Update: NRO's Peter Suderman looks at American Film Renaissance, one attempt to level the playing field. It's a very good piece, but I'm not sure if I entirely agree with him when he writes:

Hollywood rarely markets its movies as explicitly “liberal films,” and, as the pageantry of the Oscars shows, the films themselves can be almost an afterthought. No, the movie industry may consistently pull the lever for the bluest of the blue state candidates, but the color it cares for most is green.

But only to a certain point.

As Allahpundit writes:

Tonight’s the night Hollywood takes a break from disclaiming responsibility for any of the culture’s ills to congratulate itself for having so much influence over the culture.

At 5:30 PM PST, the Libertas film blog will commence live blogging the Oscars; Hot Air has already launched their Oscars open thread, as has Tim Blair. And I can certainly sympathize with Allah who notes, "I haven’t seen a single movie on the long list of nominees so I couldn’t care less who wins".

Neither have I; and as recently as five years ago, I never thought I'd be saying that. That's always the risk of progressive politics: sometimes you progress so far in your search for Heaven-on-Earth, you alienate all of those you've left behind.

How bad has it become? Even Newsweek is complaining about the sucktacular level of Tinseltown's current product, but that should come as no surprise to our regular readers.

(Oh, and speaking of sucktacular, here's an oldie-but-a-goodie that has to be seen to be believed. Or not.)

So no live blogging here, but watch for updates from time to time, particularly if and when beclowning and becrowning occur to this prominent religious figure.

Update: Anytime--say hi to Mannix for me! (Scroll to 5:47.)

Gee, what a shock--Tim McGirk, the Jerusalem bureau chief for Time magazine writes:

Brace yourself. James Cameron, the man who brought you ‘The Titanic’ is back with another blockbuster. This time, the ship he’s sinking is Christianity.

As the Anchoress wrote this week, "We must be getting close to Easter" for these types of stories to start appearing.

Salman Rushdie could not be reached for comment.

Update: Much more from Bryan Preston.

Another Update: "So much for claiming there’s no war on Christianity. It’s been declared. War rages on".

Too bad newspapers won't explore the subject. They'd actually boost sales if they awoke from their Victorian slumber and quoted some of the players.

Most people believe the truth. But one fourth of the population is retarded. If they wanna believe we control everything with intricate plans, why not let them?

"Fidel I love you. We both have the same initials. We are both powerful men. And we both use our power for good."--Francis Ford Coppola.

Actually, they both use their power to substantially increase their own personal net worths. Except Coppola makes his by putting guns in his actors' hands, not in your back.

And of course, Coppola is far from the only person in Hollywood who loves Fidel.

(Via Maggie's Farm.)

In his Sunday Chicago Sun-Times column, Mark Steyn compares the zeitgeist of 9/19/1881 to five and a half years after 9/11/2001:

It's now accepted that Garfield died simply because of the amount of poking and prodding the doctors did with unsterilized instruments and grubby hands. Joseph Lister's ideas on antisepsis had become standard in Britain but not yet in the United States. Within three years of Garfield's death, Dr. William S. Hallsted opened America's first modern operating room at Bellevue: Today, if you suffered the president's wounds, you'd be home in three days. The metal detectors developed by Bell's successors are being used by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and air conditioning is a transformative technology: Look at the fastest growing region of the United States -- the so-called Sun Belt -- and imagine its growth without the cooled buildings that keep the sun at bay.

America is now five years on from an even more extraordinary event. How have the private and public sectors responded? With longer lines at the airport and the cutting-edge technological innovation of making you bend down and remove your shoes (and even your gel-filled bra) while bored officials wander up the line barking incomprehensible lists of prohibited fluids: that would be a state-of-the-art system for boarding the Mayflower. The government failures of 9/11? They've taken the Department of Bureaucratic Timeservers and renamed it the Agency of Homeland Patriotic Vigilance: same great service, new hat. The continuing torpor of State, the dysfunctions of the CIA are unthreatened by anything beyond the merest cosmetic reform. Minor border security changes such as requiring passports for travel to and from Mexico, Canada and the Caribbean take the best part of a decade to introduce; meaningful border security is scheduled for mid-century, though they won't say which one; as for support from the private sector, the Border Patrol's mission -- "prevent the entry of terrorists and their weapons into the United States" -- is so offensive that the NFL banned them from advertising in the Super Bowl program. "The ad that the department submitted was specific to Border Patrol, and it mentioned terrorism,'' NFL spokesman Greg Aiello told the Washington Times. ''We were not comfortable with that.''

When my book came out, arguing that the current conflict is about demographic decline, civilizational will and globalized pathologies, a lot of folks objected, as well they might: seeing off supple amorphous abstract nouns is not something advanced societies do well. You're looking at it the wrong way, I was told. Technocratic solutions, new inventions, the old can-do spirit: That's the American way, and that's what will see us through.

Well, OK, so where is it? The glamor boys of the moment -- Obama, Edwards -- run on watery pabulum from the easy-listening oldies playlist. Five years after 9/11, we're not looking ahead, we're looking back -- in the legislature, in the courts, in the media: Bush's "lies" about WMD, the Senate vote to authorize the "use of force" against Iraq, Joe Wilson's trip to Niger, Joe Wilson's self-leaking of his mischaracterization of his trip to Niger . . . rear-view mirror stuff, all of it, endlessly. On the dark shapes looming in the windshield -- Iran, Sudan and much else -- we operate ineffectually through yesterday's institutions, like the U.N. and the EU. Two billion dollars from American taxpayers go to the government of Egypt and in return they give Hezbollah's TV network a slot on the state satellite system. At the gas pump, we fund Hugo Chavez and the Saudi radicalization of Muslim populations around the planet. The obvious transformative technology -- an alternative to the global economy's oil dependence -- is as far away as it was on Sept. 10, and the Alexander Graham Bells of our day are busy inventing the ''self-repairing condom'' -- a marvel of nanotechnology to be sure, but not one with much strategic use unless you can supersize it and unroll it down every Wahhabi mosque.

Measure 9/11, 2001, against 9/19, 1881, and you will recognize the outpouring of grief -- ''The Sobbing Of The Bells.'' But in our time urgency and innovation are strangely absent: To modify Whitman, the slumberers decline to be roused.

To paraphrase just slightly an expatriate American saloon keeper at the start of December 1941, I bet they’ve gone back to sleep in New York. I bet they’re back to sleep all across America.

"Duct-Tape, Tranquilizers Part Of NASA's Plan For Mentally Unstable Astronauts In Space".

Yet another potentially hot story that the Victorian Gentleman won't be digging into anytime soon.

Jaron Lanier writes:

My Wikipedia entry identifies me (at least this week) as a film director. It is true I made one experimental short film about a decade and a half ago. The concept was awful: I tried to imagine what Maya Deren would have done with morphing. It was shown once at a film festival and was never distributed and I would be most comfortable if no one ever sees it again.

In the real world it is easy to not direct films. I have attempted to retire from directing films in the alternative universe that is the Wikipedia a number of times, but somebody always overrules me. Every time my Wikipedia entry is corrected, within a day I'm turned into a film director again. I can think of no more suitable punishment than making these determined Wikipedia goblins actually watch my one small old movie.

At least what Lanier is going through with Wikipedia is better than the off-and-on update that Beach Boy Mike Love's Wiki page seems to be undergoing at the moment. (After writing this post, I've checked Love's Wikipedia profile a few times this week. The A-word seems to appear and disappear quite frequently.)

(Via Charles Johnson, who spots further examples of what Lanier calls "Digital Maoism".)

It's Radio Free Ed! I'm turning the tables and hosting Blog Week In Review this week, interviewing Austin Bay and Adam Bellow. Tune in here.

As I wrote last month:

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."

A recent post on the Politico.com site describes the Governator thusly:

Schwarzenegger, a Republican who favors abortion rights, stem-cell research, gay rights and gun control, will give a speech at the National Press Club on Monday stressing the importance of centrism in American politics.

The irony is, Arnold's positions on most issues would be to the left of so many of the '68-era Humphrey.

Mark Steyn is spot-on, as always:

If you want to know why American newspapers are dying, plough through this Boston Globe snoozefest on political blogging until you get to this paragraph:

Meanwhile, most presidential campaigns have hired consultants to promote their candidates to bloggers. One candidate, former North Carolina Senator John Edwards, came under attack for allegedly insensitive statements that had been made by two bloggers he hired. They eventually resigned.

"Allegedly insensitive"? You’re referring to two foul-mouthed gals who call Christians "Godbags" and do semen gags about the Virgin Mary and sneer at stillbirths, and all you can say about it is "came under attack for allegedly insensitive statements"? That’s not the story, that’s the sound of the genteel Victorian matron discreetly draping chintz over the provocative piano legs of the story***.

Why would anyone pay money for anything so wan, weedy, wimpy, and washed-out? As long as major newspapers think this kind of prissy evasion is "good journalism", they’ll continue to bleed readers. Because no-one who enjoys reading can read sentences like that, and no-one you’re trying to convert will think it’s a pleasure worth acquiring.

(***Those piano-leg covering matrons are only apocryphal, unlike the "allegedly insensitive statements", which are plastered all over the Internet.)

Last year, I dusted off Tom Wolfe's Victorian Gentleman analogy to describe today's newspapers, so needless to say, other than the choice of analogical gender, I concur with Steyn's bleak assessment of modern American newspapers.

And for the very reasons the above story on Edwards' bloggers was diluted down to meaningless treacle, I wouldn't expect much coverage of this news item either, despite--maybe because of--its potential blockbuster implications.

Remember this 1993 AT&T commercial narrated by Tom Selleck? Pretty amusing to watch it again today and realize that all of the gee-whiz technology in the ad is either here now already, or particularly in the case of the clunky looking PDA/tablet computer with an AM-style telescoping antenna sending (oooooh) faxes from the beach in the last shot, already obsolete:

(Not sure which, if any, of these technologies were actually brought to us exclusively by AT&T itself, but still, it was a stylish look at the minor wonders of the near future.)

The proverbial picture that's worth a thousand words--and a trillion or so dollars.

In other news from the world of pop culture flotsam and jetsam, Kathleen Parker has an interesting take on last week's stereo trainwrecks. "Between hourly updates on the decomposing body of Anna Nicole Smith and the balding of Britney Spears, we can confidently declare that the Jerry Springerization of America is complete". (Indeed, when you add to them this element of the triptych):

At the same time we might recoil from these prurient displays, we're also involuntarily mesmerized. The human wrecks of Britney and Anna Nicole transcend the usual roadkill metaphor, however, because we're participants -- not just spectators, but also instigators.

We are the mirrors to their vanities.

For former child stars like Britney, who didn't get to develop a normal sense of self, identity comes from what is projected by the audience. What happens when the projection stops, or when it shifts from admiring to critical?

If you're Britney, apparently, you take out the shears and turn the rage on yourself.

Anna Nicole, who was without talent except the ability to attract our attention, existed only as an object. She posed; we ogled. But what happens when no one's looking? If you're Anna Nicole, apparently, you take more drugs and make a spectacle of yourself as a slurring, stumbling bimbo with her own reality TV show.

The parallel sagas of these two sad divas -- one dead and one self-destructing -- have the feel of reality TV that has spiraled out of control. Too much exposure. Too much celebrity. Too much attention -- if never enough.

The desperation that drove them both to extremes, and then to the brink, may have been born of the truth that reveals itself to all celebrities eventually: What the public giveth, the public also taketh away.

As William Conrad once stentorianly exclaimed over the images of Iron Eyes Cody, the great wooden non-Indian, "People start pollution; people can stop it". We project our cultural obsession with human disaster zones such as Britney and Anna Nicole infinitely into the future, but that doesn't have to be the case.

Peter Suderman writes:

Outside of a few independent artists, I don't typically care too much for rap and hip-hop. This Denver Post write-up, though, makes this PBS documentary about hip-hop and masculinity look pretty interesting. Certainly, there's a strong connection between rap culture and macho masculinity. Where else in modern pop culture is pure aggression so highly prized?

I think there's more to it, though, especially amongst the middle and upper middle class suburban kids who've popularized rap and its various derivative subgenres. A lot of it has to do with the fact that, in an odd way, it's rebellion music. Now that rock has become the domain of aging boomers and sensitive emo nerds, rap one of the few musical genre that has any hint of danger left in it. Now, in its MTV form, pureed and watered down for mass consumption, it's not too dangerous—but it's got just enough edge to make it a little bit thrilling for ornery teenagers.

The way it produces that edge is, I think, what's so interesting. Yes, you can talk about the violence and misogyny of the lyrics, and no doubt, that material is there. But mostly what mainstream rap sells is a sort of self-obsessed, luxury hedonism. It's about guns and drugs, sure, but it's often just as much about clothes, sex, cars, money, and conquering rivals, as if what these guys really want is to be gun-toting, moneyed yuppies. It's that sort of flagrant narcissism, I suspect, that makes the rap image so appealing to its suburban and exurban fanbase.

Sounds like the final triumph of Sonny Crockett. (Or, on the flipside of the very same coin, Tony Montana.)

Orrin Judd reminds us that the last laugh in the David Geffen versus Hillary dust-up may yet belong to the latter:

She'd have done better to ignore the bitching, but Ms. Clinton wins the exchange easily when she points out that Mr. Geffen is upset that the Clintons didn't spring a terrorist who killed federal officers.

More thoughts on the Geffen-Hillary-Leonard Peltier-Dowd-Obama panorama from Mickey Kaus, who's going to have loads of fun during the endless campaign to come.

"Photo reveals why Israel lost the war with Hezbollah".

Mary Katharine Ham puts it all into perspective:

You know, when you live in D.C. and among the blogs, it's easy to forget you're really weird-- that not everyone knows that Andrew Sullivan's dramatic shift from pro-war ideological conservative to strident war opponent based mostly on a single social-issue disagreement with the Bush administration may have lessened his credibility as a pundit.

Yep, you're weird. I was working on a special project this week, one of the topics for which was, "Do Pundits Matter?" so I took to the mall to find out. Aside from getting, err, questioned about our filming several times by mall security, all went smoothly for Katie and me, and we met many nice folks who, oddly, have no preference for Eleanor Clift or Tony Blankley.

Yeah, I couldn't figure it out either.

Wow, they don't even know that the refs (read: the powers that be at The Atlantic) seem to have called the fight between the Ali and Frazier of punditry.

Newsweek reports:

It's dangerous to make broad generalizations about TV versus film without sounding as though you're comparing apples and tubas, but let's do it anyway: television is running circles around the movies.

Later, they note:

This is supposed to be Hollywood's biggest moment of the year. It's Oscar time, in case you forgot. But anyone who actually wants to go see a movie this week will have a choice between Paramount's Eddie-Murphy-in-a-fat-suit comedy "Norbit" and Sony's comic-book adaptation "Ghost Rider," starring Nicolas Cage, which wasn't screened for critics—industry code for a movie so lousy that the best review it can hope for is no review at all. Soon it'll be summertime, and the annual march of the sequels will resume. "Spider-Man 3." "Shrek 3." The third "Pirates of the Caribbean." The fourth "Die Hard." The fifth "Harry Potter."

If that list excites you, there's probably a simple explanation: you're 12. But for everyone else, it's hard to shake the feeling that Hollywood has lost interest in us.

Boy, did I call this, or what?

There's an interesting passage in David Frum's How We Got Here. Actually, there are scads of interesting passages, which is why I've frequently referred to it here. Not the least of which is the book's thesis, neatly encapsulated by its subtitle, "The 1970s: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life--For Better Or Worse".

The 1970s was noted for ushering in an era of florid emotionalism, which replaced the previous generation's cool, crisp "Man In The Gray Flannel Suit" get-the-job-done professionalism. This was quite a surprising development, as most who forecasted the future (Alvin Toffler being a notable exception) took the reserved emotionalism of the mid-20th century, mated it with early number-crunching computers, and believed that the trend would last indefinitely. The anonymous jumpsuited figures that inhabit George Orwell's 1984, or George Lucas's THX-1138 illustrate that belief perfectly. But our future is very different from theirs. Ours is a world of over-emotionalism. But perhaps it wouldn't be wise to plot that trend indefinitely into the future, either, as Frum explains.

(There's a lot of material below, which I scanned from my copy of Frum's book. I'm eschewing the usual block-texting so that it wouldn't all be in blue italics. And apologies in advance for any typos or missing words created by the OCR process.)

Read More »

Peggy Noonan writes that only a Democrat could hurt Hillary Clinton, "and a Democrat just did", and as a result, David Geffen is about to experience the patented Clinton Attack Machine up-close and personal:

Mr. Geffen should be braced for a lot of bad personal box office--negative press, searching profiles, strained relations. We're probably about to see if the Clinton Machine can flatten him. Little doubt it will try. John Dickerson wrote in Slate this week of Bill Clinton's generously sharing his campaign wisdom: "Your opponent can't talk when he has your fist in his mouth." Among some Democratic political professionals this kind of talk is considered tough and knowing, as opposed to, say, startlingly belligerent and crude.

But the outcome of the Geffen-Clinton episode is worthy of watching because it is going to determine whether it is remembered as the moment in the 2008 campaign when it became clear you are allowed to criticize Hillary--or as the moment it became clear you are not.

Noonan concludes "Usually Mrs. Clinton is a tough little tank, but on Tuesday she seemed less large, less formidable. If only for a moment, less inevitable."

Update: Roger L. Simon agrees. "Maybe I'm reading too much into this here, but Geffen made his billions picking winners (The Eagles, etc.). He's made another judgment. He may be right".

Jonah Goldberg writes, "we’re all in favor of censorship; we just get clever about what we call censorship":

For example, unless you think profanity, violence and hard-core sex should be legal on broadcast television during the after-school time slot, you’re for censorship. We’re also all for criticizing bad behavior, bad language and the rest. But because we don’t want to think of ourselves as scolds or censors, we make ourselves feel better by calling our positions “common sense.”

The problem is that the definition of “common sense” is a moving target. What was once verboten is now commonplace and vice versa.

Marc Cherry, the creator of ABC’s Desperate Housewives, told an interesting story to a gathering of TV critics recently. Cherry had screened a scene for a network censor in which the character played by Eva Longoria beds her 17-year-old gardener. Afterward, she enjoys a post-coital cigarette. Cherry said the censor asked, “Does she have to smoke?” To which Cherry replied: “So you’re good with the statutory rape thing?”

And the answer is “yes.” Hollywood is good with the statutory-rape thing. But it’s not good with the smoking thing. And yet if I were to criticize Hollywood for the statutory-rape thing, the Hollywood crowd would whine about how I’m a prude and, ultimately, a censorious enemy of free expression. If I were to complain about the cigarette? They’d say, “Good for you.”

Read the whole thing.

The Washington Post's Len Downie attempts to play this tired cliche amongst the ever-decreasing number of media figures unwilling to admit their biases:

In our news gathering, we seek to be strictly nonpartisan and nonideological. We’re human beings, we make mistakes, but we do not set out to be, nor do I think we are, liberal. And judging from my e-mail traffic in recent years, the left is much more critical, and much more angrily critical, of our coverage than the right has been.

And this proves what exactly?

I can't say it any better than Ace:

Liberal media outfits do loves them their unhinged-leftist hate-mail. Because they use it again and again as proof positive that they must be reporting straight down the middle to incur so much wrath from the left.

Although Allah points out the speciousness (and convenience) of that claim, let's also note that most of the liberal media's criticism on the right comes from mainstream Republicans representing the great mass of right-leaning thought, whereas those who think the WaPo is a part of the Vast Right Wing Noise Machine are unabashed, unhinged lefties, "undecided" voters only the sense they're undecided between Ralph Nader and Hugo Chavez.

Which means that the criticism of the paper comes from the hard left and center-right, which means, in turn, the paper is somewhere in between. And what is in between center-right and hard left? Ah yes: establishment liberal. Which is what everyone who's not batshit crazy understands the WaPo is, its support of the Iraq War notwithstanding, and its quite-praiseworthy attempts towards true political balance notwithstanding. Yes, the WaPo is less blatantly agenda-driven than the NYT, but it is still, on the whole, establishment liberal, and its reporting reflects that deep institutional bias.

Read the whole thing, including Ace's paraphrase of the New York Times' Bill Keller, who understands that such criticism is designed to "'mau-mau' (his words) the media more towards the left, or at least prevent the media from making conciliatory moves towards the center to appease conservatives".

A few weeks ago, I wondered why so many eco-pocalyptic doomsday predictions are variations on "we only have ten years to save the planet"; Brent Bozell reminds us that Paul Ehrlich had a more elongated doomsday countdown in the late 1980s:

Go back to 1989 and 1990. Instead of NBC’s Katie Couric handing the microphone over to Al Gore to lament how Manhattan’s about to go underwater, the same NBC network handed its microphone and camera crew directly to left-wing “Population Bomb” author Paul Ehrlich, awarding him large chunks of air time to imagine America losing the nation’s capital and the entire state of Florida.

In May of 1989, Ehrlich claimed, global warming was going to melt the polar ice caps, causing a flood in which "we could expect to lose all of Florida, Washington D.C., and the Los Angeles basin...we'll be in rising waters with no ark in sight." Ehrlich didn’t give a time frame, but his panicked report clearly suggested doom around the corner.

The panic was necessary to sell an extremely harsh “solution” of “enormous, rapid change.” Ehrlich commanded that to forestall doom, the world needed to cut its energy use in half over 20 years. Industrialization needed to be dragged to a screeching halt, not only in America, but especially in the Third World. Ehrlich felt the next generation of Americans should be denied the Earth-strangling prosperity of their parents, saying the world’s ecosystems “cannot support the spread of the American lifestyle to the Third World or even to the next generation of Americans."

Ehrlich was back on NBC in January 1990 to sell his “inconvenient truth” line again. This time, he gave a more concrete timeline. Antarctica’s ice sheets were slipping, and then “we'll be facing a sea-level rise not of one to three feet in a century, but of 10 or 20 feet in a much shorter time. The Supreme Court would be flooded. You could tie your boat to the Washington Monument. Storm surges would make the Capitol unusable.”

It’s been almost twenty years, we never cut our energy use in half, and Florida is still above water, not to mention D.C. and Los Angeles. We have yet to tie our boats to the Washington Monument. But the media are still handing over their microphones and their accolades to panicky predictions, with no apparent expectation that anyone will ever question their accuracy in a decade or two. How many decades do we wait to question these predictions?

If "we" refers to the mainstream media, the answer is never. The history of faulty predictions is never raised, despite so many cries of Apocalypse-Just-Around-The-Corner (frequently by Ehrlich himself, of course) since 1970.

Sean B. MacFarland, the commander of America's 1st Brigade Combat Team tells Stars And Stripes:

“If you talk to these sheiks, they’ll tell you that they’re in no hurry to see the Americans leave al-Anbar,” he said.

“One thing Sheikh Sattar keeps saying is he wants al-Anbar to be like Germany and Japan and South Korea were after their respective wars, with a long-term American presence helping ... put them back together,” MacFarland said. “The negative example he cites is Vietnam. He says, yeah, so, Vietnam beat the Americans, and what did it get them? You know, 30 years later, they’re still living in poverty.”

Well, I'm not sure if it was the North Vietnamese who beat the Americans or the Watergate Congress, but otherwise that's absolutely spot-on.

Apparently the 73-year old Louis Farrakhan is ailing and "heading into what's billed as his final major address Sunday", speaking at the Detroit Lions' Ford Field, "after undergoing a 12-hour abdominal operation to correct damage caused by treatment for prostate cancer".

As Farrakahn explained to Ted Koppel in 1996:

Farrakahn believes Elijah Muhammad, the (by all accounts deceased) former leader of the Nation of Islam, is living on a spaceship circling the planet. Also, a few years after Elijah "died," the spaceship picked up Farrakhan and the two men had a nice chat with each other. Afterward, Farrakhan says the spaceship let him off near Washington, D.C.

The only major television journalist I've ever seen query Farrakhan about this stuff was Ted Koppel, host of ABCs "Nightline," in 1996. Koppel asked him about the spaceship stuff, saying, "It sounds like gibberish, but maybe you can explain it."

Farrakhan didn't back off. The spiritual leader explained that the huge spaceship is "over the heads of us in North America, and soon you shall see these (spaceships) over the major cities of America." This fact is being kept "above top-secret by the United States government."

Farrakhan didn't stop there. Offended at the "gibberish" remark, he fell back on some hard science: "And if it were gibberish, they made an awful lot of money, Mr. Koppel, on that movie called 'Independence Day' --- it flooded the theaters." Koppel conceded this point, but also alerted Farrakhan to the fact that "Independence Day" wasn't a true story.

Well, that's what they want you think...

I didn't watch the debut episode of Fox News' Half Hour News Hour, but Libertas writes, "The numbers are in and that thing you’re tasting now my friends, is victory:

How would you like to be Stephen Colbert right now? How would you like to be the media darling of 2007 who’s spent years building an audience only to get your behind waxed by the very first airing of a conservative comedy news show (On FOX!)? And how would you like to be Jon Stewart right now? How would you like to be the guy treated like the icon of all things funny and cutting edge only to find that the very first episode of a conservative comedy news show (On FOX!) almost waxed your behind? Methinks the lovers of irony aren’t enjoying this bit o’ it.

Read on for the actual ratings numbers.

Al Gore--or at least the reaction of his more crazed fans--proves my point from last night.

Julian Simon could not be reached for comment.

Update: More on the new Reverend Al's religious awakening: "He’s been designated as the Savior of the Planet"!

Smell The Glove--The Spinal Tap Media now has a trio of Spinal Tap Candidates:

In the words of Derek Smalls, Hillary and Obama are two distinct types of visionaries. Obama is like fire. Hillary is like ice. And Edwards, come to think of it, is kind of like lukewarm water. . . .

I pity the drummer for that group!

(And does this mean that Maureen Dowd would be Bobbi Flekman or Jeanine Pettibone?)

Update: Larry Kudlow suggests another movie analogy for the hurricane-like dustup: The Wizard of Oz.

Forget Al Qeada--Congressional Democrats are urging President Bush for a surge against his vice president:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday phoned President Bush to air her complaints over Vice President Dick Cheney's comments that the Congressional Democrats' plan for Iraq would "validate the Al Qaeda strategy."

Pelosi, who said she could not reach the president, said Cheney's comments wrongly questioned critics' patriotism and ignored Bush's call for openness on Iraq strategy.

"You cannot say as the president of the United States, 'I welcome disagreement in a time of war,' and then have the vice president of the United States go out of the country and mischaracterize a position of the speaker of the House and in a manner that says that person in that position of authority is acting against the national security of our country," the speaker said.

If that sounds familiar, it's not the first time that a prominent Democrat has asked the President to Make. It. Stop:

Early in 2004, after winning the nod as the Democrats' candidate for the presidency, John Kerry boldly shouted to President Bush, "BRING. IT. ON." But in August of 2004, Kerry ended up personally asking President Bush to...Make. Them. Stop--make the Swift Boat Vets stop attacking him. And you could argue that it was at this moment that Senator Kerry lost the election, because he couldn't bother to defend his record in the wake of his former colleagues reminding modern voters of Kerry's early 1970s duplicity while in the Naval Reserves. Instead, Kerry ended up whining about the Swift Vets' opposition to his candidacy to his primary opposition, the incumbent president, inadvertently increasing President Bush's stature as a result.

It's also reminiscent of the reactions by the left to one of Karl Rove's speeches in 2005, in which he said:

Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.

As Glenn Reynolds wrote back then, the left's high dudgeon responses "just provide an excuse for Republicans to repeat every single stupid or unpatriotic thing that every Democratic politician ever said. And there are a lot of those". And that list has only grown since exponentially.

At the start of the month, I pondered why the media appeared to be in the midst of some sort of Red Queen's Race to oblivion. Exploring the endgame of one of the moments that brought them there, Daniel Henninger writes, "The trial of I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby is the closest version of a Red Queen trial this country has had in a long time".

Where's Angela Lansbury when you need her?

Speaking of language and slang, the Word of the Year arrives early this year, courtesy of Tim Blair.

Over at TCS Daily, I have a profile of Austin Bay and his new pamphlet, Embrace The Suck.

Step back and watch a pair of amusing scuffles:

Round One: "Maureen Dowd Column Incites Hillary-Obama War of Words"!

Round Two: Academic Nerd Fight!

(Round Three was also originally on the bill, but it was over before it got started.)

I don't think anyone's proposing banning popcorn this week, so fire up the microwave and enjoy the fights.

On Jay Leno last night, Bill Maher fired off a rant against President Bush that would have been well at home in many Internet forums and chatrooms, including this passage:

"When people say to me, 'You hate America,' I don't hate America. I love America. I am just embarrassed that it has been taken over by people like evangelicals, by people who do not believe in science and rationality. It is the 21st century. And I will tell you, my friend. The future does not belong to the evangelicals. The future does not belong to religion."

Maher couldn't be more wrong: the future does belong to religion. But it will come in a few different flavors.

Update: Tammy Bruce appearing on The O'Reilly Factor, and the Anchoress, each respond to Maher’s hateful rhetoric.

Chris Sprow of The Chicago Sports Review writes

KC Johnson is a 38-year-old bowtie-wearing Brooklyn College professor with a Harvard degree. He has a passion for American history, and he enjoys the classroom. And due to his own peculiar mixture of annoyance and curiosity, he might be the most oft-cited source for those looking for coverage of what could formerly be called "The Duke Rape Case."

That it was ever dubbed "The Duke Rape Case" as opposed to "The Duke Investigation" or "Allegations in Durham" is part of why he exists as we know him. He's a common story in New York and Durham. Kurt Andersen has written about Johnson's work in New York Magazine, and calls him "heroic." The exceptional legal writer Stuart Taylor Jr. has written about him in Slate. Many others have, and some will surely follow.

And yes, old-media lovers, he's a mere blogger; a word that our Microsoft Word still holds in contempt, an underlined outsider.

My copy of Word doesn't--it only takes a keystroke to keep it up to date. Speaking of which:

He's also further evidence of how, even inside a newsroom, it's long not been a debate whether the "web logger" has changed modern journalism for the better, no matter how much it can sting us in the old school…To. Print. That.

Just because you come from the old school of dead-tree journalism doesn't mean you can't keep up to date with the new.

In the body of the interview, Johnson states:

there's a tendency among activist-left in the academy to just brand anyone who disagrees with them as a right wing-nut. It works, and it's hard for them to give up that stance. … Put it this way: before this case started I had never seen defending civil liberties as a right wing position.

As Glenn Reynolds rebuts, "It all depends on whose civil liberties, K.C."

Now available from Amazon!

Seth Gitell catches Wonkette in mid shark-jump:

It’s encouraging to read the kind of thoughtful, intelligent discussion of foreign affairs, I discovered on Wonkette today. Over the years, I have found that Wonkette has done an admirable job of dishing up a tasty mix of political gossip and Washington-based insight. Today, I visit the site to see what it has to say on John Edwards jaw-droppingly appalling remarks labeling Israel, in effect, the greatest threat to world peace. (In case you missed it, Peter Bart of Variety wrote the initial story here.)

Wonkette suggests, in response to critiques on NRO and elsewhere, that Edwards’ act of “stating the obvious” is impossible in today’s world and “requires taking your lips off Israel’s ass for a few seconds, and that’s fatal for any American politician with presidential ambitions. This isn’t because Jews get upset or Israel’s feelings will get hurt or anything. It’s because of batshit insane evangelical American Jesus Freaks who have to love and protect Israel so Jesus will come back and destroy it.”

Is Edwards' former campaign blogger now writing copy for Wonkette? As Tony Snow said today of blogs in general, "it's amazing, you get this wonderful imaginative hateful stuff that comes flying out".

Update: Dean Barnett adds:

John Edwards is now saying that he didn’t label Israel the greatest threat to world peace while speaking to an audience full of Jews. I’m willing to split the difference and agree that he misspoke. Even if he did in fact think that Israel is the world’s greatest threat to world peace, he never would say so out loud, especially since he pretty much has to run the table on the Jews after his choice in bloggers terminally alienated America’s Christians.

Jonah Goldberg thinks Edwards may have actually said that thing about Israel because “Edwards isn't very thoughtful about foreign policy.” I’ve gone to great lengths to make the John Edwards campaign my personal dominion in the right half of the blogosphere, so I must confess that I’m outraged by Jonah’s simplistic summation of Edwards’ thoughtfulness or lack thereof.

Edwards is a man who in his own mind and rhetoric has boiled a 21st century economy down to starving chimney sweeps and shivering street urchins. Not thoughtful on foreign policy? Compared to his positions on domestic policy, Edwards’ foreign policy thoughtfulness qualifies him as a latter day Kissinger!

Geez, don't let Christopher Hitchens hear that.

Buzz Aldrin writes:

On my last trip to the moon I didn’t get to stay the whole day and had to share my accommodations with another man. If I could go back, I would expect not only a larger room, but a longer moment to gaze at the stars and the cloudy blue ball that should only be mankind’s starter home.

As someone once said, "Man Must Explore".

The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz writes:

The reason these two [satellite radio] companies have 13 million subscribers willing to cough up $12.95 a month for something we all grew up thinking should be free is that commercial radio has self-destructed. . . . Really, can you think of an industry (okay, maybe American automakers) that has frittered away such huge advantages and sent its customers scrambling for alternatives?

Give me a second...it'll come to me...oh yeah, that industry!

Update: Hugh Hewitt agrees: "Howard is writing about radio but his critique is really applicable to all old media companies".

Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin and Tony Snow each note that new media formats have some inherent pitfalls as well.

Jacob Sullum writes:

"The days of Congress doing the bidding of the tobacco industry are over," Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., recently declared. "This long overdue legislation would give FDA broad powers to regulate tobacco products and protect Philip Morris."

Actually, Waxman said "protect public health," but I've taken the liberty of decoding the phrase for you.

Read the whole thing.

Always liked this song, a minor gem by Aimee Mann resurrected from long-lost MTV obscurity by YouTube, the infinite Internet repository for all things video:

There are two Americas: There's one in which it's perfectly acceptable to say that Israel is "the greatest short-term threat to world peace", and employ as one of your spokespersons someone who regularly sprinkles her public writing with the seven words that decades ago you couldn't use on TV--and then some.

There's another where neither of those examples is acceptable public discourse. I'm happy to be affiliated with that America.

Update: As with his campaign blogger scandal, Edwards is quickly backpedaling over this one as well.

Another Update: John Hinderaker writes:

I think that Edwards is unserious as a candidate. Another instance of this is his construction of a 28,000 square foot mansion with attached sports complex at the same time he's touring around, giving his "Two Americas" speech. I don't think a man who really wants to be President would do that. I think he enjoys being a celebrity; his wife is a leftist and he may be too; no doubt they enjoy the attention of lefties in Hollywood and elsewhere; and he's rich and needs to fill his days somehow. But I don't think he's particularly serious about being President, nor do I think he could mount a strong campaign even if he were.

There's a lot of truth to that. Running for the White House is Herculean task for anyone who enters the race, but someone on his second try should know both the territory and the pitfalls that much better. That Edwards has made two spectacular gaffes two weeks in a row is extremely telling. And as Michelle Malkin has written, his most damning criticism isn't coming from the right, but from the left.

Drinking Guinness with Christopher Hitchens and the Anchoress? Sounds good to me--I'll even bring the keg.

That's the headline on Bill Ardolino's interview with Iraqi Army soldiers.

The Iraqis are going to need them even more, if this report of a suddenly wobbly Tony Blair is true.

In one of their patented all-caps screaming headlines, the New York Post exclaims: "LET ALIENS VOTE: ACTIVISTS".

Have they cleared this suggestion with fellow Manhattanites Agents K and J, and Chief Zed?

Dean Barnett notes that saying Massachusetts' Deval Patrick "has stumbled out of the gate as governor would be an understatement":

First, Patrick decided that the modest Ford Crown Victoria that Mitt Romney tooled around in for four years was beneath him. Rather than lease another Crown Vic or remain in the one that Romney used right up until his last day in office, Patrick opted to lease a $46,000 Cadillac. Actually, it would be more accurate to say he opted to have the state lease a $46,000 Cadillac. None of the funds for the gaudy new ride came out of Patrick’s pocket, even though the new governor doesn’t lack for means.

Then Patrick compounded the tin-eared politicking. When the local media challenged him for this excess in a time of fiscal austerity, Patrick defended it as a necessity because Ford had discontinued the Crown Victoria. There was only one problem with this story – Ford hasn’t discontinued the Crown Vic. Patrick later ascribed his mistaken assertion to a misunderstanding with the State Police. Since the Staties lease only about 80,000 Crown Vics a year, it’s understandable how they could make such an error.

Heh.

Meanwhile, in a City Journal essay titled "Steamrolled", Steven Malanga writes that unlike his eventually much-maligned predecessor, "Governor Spitzer loses his first Albany battle".

Glenn Reynolds flashes back to 1998, "when it was okay for Democrats to sound tough"; Robert Bidinotto goes back 30 years further to reference one of the few remaining who still do:

Where have you gone, Joseph Lieberman? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you...

Joltin' Joe hasn't gone away, and seems to understand the mentality of much of the left is stuck in 1968:

“A lot of Democrats are essentially pacifists and somewhat isolationist,” [Lieberman told the New Yorker]. He had particular problems with Senator Edward Kennedy’s proposal to deny the President funding for a troop surge, and with an idea recently raised by the senior senator from Connecticut, Christopher Dodd, to cap the number of American soldiers in Iraq. Lieberman was not willing to say whether he would remain a Democrat if the Party cut off funding for the war. “That would be stunning to me,” he said. “And very hurtful. And I’d be deeply affected by it. Let’s put it that way.”

Lieberman’s Democratic colleagues know that if he switched parties they would lose their majority, and so they tend to indulge him, unless they are speaking to reporters off the record.

This year promises to be a crucible for both camps.

Update: Ed Morrissey reminds us that Hillary's recent "bug out in 90-days ultimatum" could be a decisive moment for Lieberman:

The worst part about it is its nakedly political purposes. Hillary has come to regret her run to the center during her Senatorial career, and now wants to suck up to the International ANSWER set that runs the Left of the Democrats. In order to establish her bona fides and compete with Barack Obama's demand for a phased withdrawal by March 2008, she just bumped the timetable up by nine months.

It's not even clear that such a demand would be Constitutional. Congress can suspend the funding for the troops, but Congress has never actually revoked an AUMF before while hostilities continued. An attempt to do so would probably meet a Presidential veto, which Congress would be unable to override. Even if it did, the White House would sue the Congress and demand a Supreme Court decision on the legality of such a move -- which would take weeks, at the least, during which our troops would find themselves in limbo. At that time, our enemies would pounce, and create a huge political firestorm over whether we should retreat under fire.

And she wants to run to fill the role of Commander-in-Chief?

Again, watch for Joe Lieberman on this issue. He has made it clear that his loyalty to the Democrats ends at a bug-out. Hillary's demand, if pushed, may change the entire calculation in the Senate and leave Harry Reid with the title of Minority Leader. The line Lieberman drew in the sand now approaches, and Hillary apparently wants to push the Democrats far past that and over a political cliff -- and take our entire efforts against terrorism with them.

Somewhat related thoughts from Jonah Goldberg.

President Reagan knew of whence he spoke, when he said, in 1986, "Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it".

As his industry continues to cease motion, veteran newspaperman Steven Rattner has a list of solutions to that go from practical to increasingly off-the-wall when he reaches this conclusion:

Purchasing major newspapers would be costly and perhaps impractical, so a hybrid model may make more sense. We could create a pool of money (possibly from a license fee similar to how the BBC is funded). News organizations with an expensive but important project in mind could apply for funding, much the way producers in the public television world have for the last 40 years.

If it stops moving, subsidize it.

A government funded newspaper? I guess that's one answer to my own question of where the media's post-9/11 woes are taking them. And, as Rattner notes, we already have partially taxpayer-funded television and radio, (and a taxpayer-funded passenger railroad, space program, increasingly taxpayer-funded healthcare, etc.).

By calling The Washington Times "a kind of house organ for conservatives", the obvious tacet implication of ABC's Terry Moran is that its DC-based competitor is the competing house organ for liberals.

At least until Rattner's National Public Newspaper ever gets off the ground.

Speaking of fur children, I had forgotten about this site, which I first linked to back in 2004.

Forget the lack of small-fry that AP reported in 2005; San Francisco's got even bigger woes: it needs golfers to start teeing off, stat!

Thomas Sowell writes:

San Francisco has six municipal golf courses — and they are losing money. Now there is all sorts of hand-wringing over what to do about it.

Sowell explains why the simplest solution to this problem--sell the incredibly valuable and currently under-utilized land and rake in millions and millions--is the least likely solution to be deployed by the city.

"DemocracyRules" is mad as Hell, and he's not going to take it anymore!

I certainly hope he let out a good loud Beatle-esque White Album shout of "I GOT BLISTERS ON MY FINGERS!!!!" when he was done typing all that.

(Via Tim Blair, who writes, "There’s ranting, and then there’s RANTING". Indeed.^TM)

Richard B. Mckenzie writes on the law of unforseen consequences:

In 2006, the California legislature authorized the state Department of Motor Vehicles to distribute 85,000 stickers to the owners of gasoline-electric hybrid cars. The stickers allow drivers to travel without passengers in all of the state's high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes, which were formerly restricted to cars with two or more passengers. A report determined that California's HOV lanes were operating only at two-thirds of their capacity and not easing congestion as much as they could; the idea was to stimulate demand for hybrids and thus reduce the emissions of greenhouse pollutants.

The sticker distribution did exactly what it was supposed to do. People wanted to shave time off their commute, and the stickers drove up demand for hybrids for the Toyota Prius and Honda Civic hybrid (the only cars that qualified for stickers), so much so that the small Prius has been selling for over $30,000, and until recently had waiting lists. The Civic hybrid has carried a dealer "added premium" to the manufacturer's suggested list price of as much as $4,000 (with the hybrid Civic total price nearly $7,500 higher than the quoted price of a non-hybrid Civic).

But it seems that the hybrid HOV program, rather than suppressing automobile use, did the exact opposite: The program was wildly popular, and the HOV lanes became clogged. Californians began talking about "Prius backlash."

Then at the end of January, the DMV ran out of stickers, leaving more than 800 new Prius and Civic hybrid owners, who may have been enticed to buy their hybrids at premium prices inflated by sticker advantage and who applied for the stickers, without the right to drive alone in the state's HOV lanes.

Way back in the summer of 2001, I made a modest proposal that's still worth looking into, as a way of solving the problem.

Libertas's "Dirty Harry" writes that the L.A. Times has only just now realized the implications of the overt politicization of this year's Grammy awards:

After the liberals and their allies in the media spent days crowing and celebrating the Dixie Chicks’ big win and how it was a free speech victory, and political vindication, and blah blah blah — they’re now starting to wake up and realize they did the Chicks and themselves more damage than good. Because in their drunken hubris they’ve all but admitted the Grammy awards had nothing to do with the merits of the music and everything to do with politics. And that’s not only a black mark on the music industry, it also diminishes the Chicks’ victory, giving their critics even more fodder. Well, too little and too late, here comes the L.A. Times eager to undo some of it’s own damage.

The recent overt politicization of the Oscar awards (foreshadowed by this moment in the mid-1970s) was a significant milestone in the movie industry's quest towards irrelevancy as a mass medium that serves a wide swatch of the public on both sides of the political aisle. The recording industry seems awfully eager to follow in their footsteps.

The New York Times praises Forest Whitaker for his portrayal of Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland for revealing "some of Amin’s positive qualities".

Has Idi taken his first step on the inevitable path towards icongraphic T-shirt superstardom?

And it wouldn't be the first time that the Times itself has met a bloodthirsty dictator and/or third world revolutionary and presented his positive, nuanced qualities as well.

Glenn Reynolds and Dr. Helen are both riffing on the phrase "fur children" to describe what you and I normally refer to as pets. Glenn writes:

I ran across this term -- meaning pets you have instead of, you know, real children - a while back and was bothered. I mentioned it to a friend from DC, who remarked that it wasn't uncommon to see women, and even men, on the street with a cat or small dog in a baby carrier.

Great science fiction plot: Hostile aliens infect humanity with a virus that causes us to lavish parental attention on animals instead of human offspring, as a means of extinguishing the human race without a messy invasion. But it's just a science fiction plot. Isn't it?

UPDATE: Stephen Carter emails:

I spotted your item today about "fur children". In P. D. James's novel The Children of Men, set in a world in which no children can be born, there are two scenes involving women caring for pets as if they were babies -- not only walking them in strollers, but actually having them baptized -- and the narrator tells us that this is common behavior. I suppose the symbolism (to say nothing of the psychology) was too complex to risk trying to put this in the film.

What's funny is that behavior intended to symbolize an apocalyptic state has now become semi-normal.

In the Bay Area, I remember hearing the phrase "fur children" to describe pets as far back as 2000--or maybe even the late 1990s. And it's not at all a coincidence that while the number of "fur children" in the area may be rising, in 2005, AP wrote that "San Francisco has the smallest share of [human] small-fry of any major U.S. city", adding, "Just 14.5 percent of the city's population is 18 and under." In linking to this column, James Taranto wrote:

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.

Or as Mark Steyn put it back then in regards the bluest state of them all--the EU:

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?

To coin a phrase, it's the demography, stupid.

Update: Insta-Steyn-lanche! Welcome Glenn Reynolds and Mark Steyn readers.

In his latest patented FAQ list, this time on where things stand in Iraq and the US, Dean Barnett writes:

8) Isn’t it also part of the “warrior chic” that has become such a fixture of liberal politics the last few years? If you served in the military, you can say the craziest things and still have absolute moral authority.

Yes, the left has become very much enamored with its chicken-hawk trope. In a way, I feel bad for them. They love it now, but what they’re effectively doing is delegitimizing the opinion of anyone who disagrees with someone who wore the uniform.

If they think the chickenhawk argument is strong, wait until they see its converse – the just plain chicken argument. Imagine a veteran who supports a war running against a war opponent who has never served. Oh the humanity!

McCain versus Hillary?

A month ago, I linked to the Newark Star Ledger's nascent video blog site devoted to all things New Jersey (designed by Sekimori, who previously overhauled this site's graphics), and wrote:

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.

David Corrigan wrote me yesterday about his own video blog, a well-produced site whose name says it all: South Jersey Video Magazine.

Here's a recent sample, with footage of an impressive snowbound tiger and other critters "enjoying" a typically harsh New Jersey winter. Sadly, no sloths involved, but I can't tell you how representative the interviewed veterinarian’s accent is of the region I grew up in.

Brit Hume delivers a richly deserved smackdown to John "Okinawa" Murtha.

How bad a job is Murtha doing? How obviously defeatist is he? Even the Democrats’ house organ has slammed him. As Glenn Reynolds writes, “Murtha is the face of today's Democratic Party on the war. This is bad for the country, and likely to prove unwise politically”.

Meanwhile, Dean Barnett reminds us that sadly, Murtha's symptoms are spreading beyond his own party. Fortunately, an excellent tonic has arrived, and just in time.

Sorry to step on Paul Harvey's territory, but scroll down to the subhead titled, "The most underplayed story in France so far this year" in this post by Nidra Poller for further details on the motives of the tharted Air Mauritania hijacking we briefly mentioned yesterday.

As to why it's "The most underplayed story in France so far this year", this essay by David Thompson might shed some light, as might this post from Tammy Bruce.

As of the time of this post--and it could change at any moment--here's what's currently at the top of Wikipedia's profile of Beach Boys' lead singer Mike Love:

Michael Edward Love (born March 15, 1941 in Los Angeles, California) is an American singer and songwriter who was one of the lead singers and lyric writers of The Beach Boys. He formed the band along with Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson, and a school friend Al Jardine. He is an asshole.

He may or may not be, but it is amazing what slips through the cracks at "the open-sourced encyclopedia"; John Seigenthaler Sr. could not be reached for comment.

Update: Blink and you miss it! It appears to be gone now, but I did manage a screen capture before it vanished down the Memory Wikihole.

Glenn Reynolds recently wrote:

I find [Wikipedia] a decent place for casual reference when the subjects aren't politically charged, but much less useful when they are.

But even with something as innocuous and non-political a topic as this, it's a reminder that the Wiki page you're reading--and citing--on a particular topic can change literally from minute to minute.

Unlike say, President Reagan with "Win one for the Gipper", or her own husband's "I feel your pain", Hillary Clinton does not yet have a universally-known catch phrase associated with her, yet. But one of Hillary Clinton's better-known lines was this:

We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.

That seems to be how the media is operating this decade. In the early days of the Blogosphere, the mantra was that while Big Media would do the reporting, you'd go the Blogosphere for opinion. But increasingly, it's been the Blogosphere that's been doing the heavy lifting:

The pro-regime change views on Iraq of the media and their party in the 1990s before flip-flopping in 2003 and 2004. (And more recently, their flip-flopping on a troop build-up).

John Kerry's Winter Soldier past, and the Swift Vet's ads and story.

Dan Rather and Mary Mapes' adventures in typography and falsification.

Cindy Sheehan's original meeting with the president.

The truth behind the media's original lurid Katrina stories, and "Mayor Nagin's Motorpool".

The actual Mohammed cartoons.

The details of the Duke non-rape case.

All of these were given wide dissemination into the public consciousness by the Blogosphere first, since they didn't fit into the media's style guide. And no doubt, there are numerous additional examples that could be plugged in here.

This week, there were two stories whose background the media seemed to work furiously to airbrush: the anti-religious bigotry and colorful language of John Edwards' would be professional bloggers, and the background of the Salt Lake City Sniper.

Of the former, Newsbusters writes, "Print Editions of Time, Newsweek Covered Edwards Without Vulgar Anti-Christian Specifics". Because running them would violate the media's delicate Victorian sensibilities and/or anger the magazine's subscriber base.

Regarding the latter, Charles Johnson writes:

As Los Angeles correspondent for British leftist/Islamist newspaper The Guardian, Dan Glaister specializes in condescending “look at the stupid Americans” pieces. Yesterday he launched a sneering attack against LGF and Jihad Watch, for having the unbridled temerity to ask whether Sulejman Talovic could possibly have had Islamic motivations for his murder spree in Salt Lake City: Playing with fire.

His position seems to be that hot-tempered cowboy Americans simply can’t be trusted with information like this. And if you raise the question (even if you do it carefully, with disclaimers and question marks), you’re a hate-spewing bigot trying to stir up the idiot masses to do violence against peaceful, innocent Muslims. And sure enough, look what happened: the masses actually wrote angry emails! To a newspaper! The horror!

This is where the media are heading, and the British are getting there first. If you suspect Islamic terrorism when a Muslim commits mass murder, and say so publicly, you’re going to be attacked and derided as a bigot. The fact that Islamists launch mass murder attacks around the world nearly every single day is immaterial; the vital job of journalists is to make sure there is no “backlash,” and they’ll withhold information to prevent it.

Of course, the media seem to withholding all sorts of things these days--and frequently distorting or inventing the news that they disseminate. As I've written before, this seems to be a curiously acclerating trend.

Mel Brooks' salad days:

As Charles Johnson writes, "In the post-9/11 world, this is how you deal with airplane hijackers": Air Mauritania passengers beat up hijacker.

Update (2/17/07): More details here.

It's a quagmire! John Podhoretz spots one congressman sounding the alarm:

"It is time to pull our troops out . . . . The longer we stay in . . . the more chance we have of being sucked into another Vietnam in that region. ...Our troops must come home now. Therefore, if given the opportunity I intend to offer an amendment to the fiscal year . . . Defense appropriations bill that would require that our troops be pulled out . . . 15 days after the President signs the appropriations bill. That is more than enough time for an orderly withdrawal....We have run out of excuses for remaining . . . . It is time to come home."

— Rep. Ed Markey speaking on the floor of the House...

about the invasion of Grenada...

in 1983.

Podhoretz also makes this sad but true observation:

Nobody who actually supports the troops says "I support the troops" any longer. The words "I support the troops" are now solely for those who oppose what the troops are doing.

As I wrote earlier this month, while there's much to be faulted in the anti-military writing of Joel Stein and William Arkin, at least they're upfront with their readers on where they stand.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, a statement by early blogger Ken Layne became a rallying cry to the nascent Blogosphere, much like "Go West Young Man" was to an early generation of Americans (or "Food Fight!" to a newer one, to borrow Roger Ebert's riff). Layne's original quote went like this:

It's 2001, and we can Fact Check your ass. And you, like many in the Hate America movement, are no longer able to dress your wretched "reporting" in fiction. We have computers. It is not difficult to Find You Out, dig?

In the course of massive repetition, Layne's statement was boiled down to its essentials:

We have computers. We can fact-check your ass!

But 2001 and the spirit of the early days of blogging is increasingly receeding further into the distance, as this passage near the end of Howard Kurtz's new profile of Michelle Malkin illustrates:

Sometimes, though, Malkin seems to use the same howitzer against every provocation. After she started crusading against the "Girls Gone Wild" culture as a "liberal assault on decency," the satirical site Wonkette received -- and posted -- a picture of Malkin's head on the scantily-clad body of a college student, whose image had been plucked from the Web. Malkin denounced what she called the "hate-filled cowards" at Wonkette's parent company for "repeatedly smearing and attempting to humiliate me."

After being contacted by Malkin's lawyer, Wonkette ran a snarkily worded semi-retraction. The site's West Coast bureau chief, Ken Layne, says he doesn't know or care whether the picture is real and calls Malkin "incapable of getting a joke."

"People send us dumb stuff all the time, and if it makes us laugh, we post it," he adds.

As Ann Althouse wrote last year:

People blog for lots of different reasons, and blogging is still burgeoning and developing. Don't cave into nostalgia for a Golden Age, especially one that got its golden glow from the horror that was 9/11. Things were bound to change and shake around, and some bloggers that you liked then may put you off now. But there are always a million new bloggers, and blogging is a beautifully fruitful format.

If not always a beautifully truthful format, of course. But these days, what media is?

Judith Weiss writes, "The Orwellian erasing of Jewish history continues".

Update: Welcome readers of Sigmund, Carl and Alfred, who have some thoughts on Judith's post.

What's going on with NBC?

At the start of the month, I wrote:

So far the Blogosphere has spotted Chernobyl-style meltdowns in credibility by CBS, the Washington Post, Newsweek, AP, and on numerous occasions, the New York Times and Reuters.

When I interviewed Glenn Reynolds last year for my TCS Daily article on An Army Of Davids, he quoted a passage from Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End that "utopia was a Red Queen’s Race with extinction". Glenn added, "Even if things are going terribly, it will seem like it’s going well, right up until the end".

Have the mainstream media quietly begun some sort of Red Queen's Race of their own? Or is the Blogosphere merely getting increasingly better at catching the media's worst moments and publicizing them?

Here's another example of that apparent trend in action: Bill O'Reilly has been swinging at NBC repeatedly for heading further to the left in recent months. NBC's news president Steve Capus counterpunches that "I think it's really kind of sad and pathetic, some of the things that he's been lobbing at us these days", even as he hires ultra-leftwing BDS-obsessed Keith Olbermann to provide commentary for NBC's flagship Nightly News, in addition to his regular low-rated gig at MSNBC.

In response to this move, and the now infamous recent post by William Arkin, who's employed by both NBC and the Washington Post, retired Army Col. Ken Allard, a regular contributor to NBC, has had enough:

It is, therefore, possible to argue that NBC is merely undergoing a delicate arabesque in anticipation of changing audience preferences and the long- hoped-for Democratic restoration (although journalists generally seem reluctant to raise the tough questions that should punctuate the 2008 campaign).

But has anyone else noticed the network's precipitous retreat from journalistic and ethical standards? Not only were no apologies given and no pink slips issued for Arkin's outburst, but on his MSNBC show last week, Keith Olberman went out of his way to defend this "valid criticism" of our military.

In January, Conan O'Brien was allowed to escape without apology after airing a particularly tasteless gay skit deriding Christianity: "Oh, Jesus, I love you, but only as a friend." (Just try doing that sometime using Mohammad's name!)

And only this week, questions have been raised about the cozy relationships between CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo and the companies she covers as a supposedly objective journalist. The response by Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE and godfather of the NBC family: "Substantially, I don't think she did anything wrong."

Fine: Let's hope he's right. But sometimes the only way to show where you really stand is to vote with your feet. And so with great reluctance and best wishes to my former colleagues, with this column I am severing my 10-year relationship with NBC News.

As I wrote in my original post:

The media as a whole aren't going away any time soon, of course (although Hugh Hewitt might argue with that). They're too well funded via advertising, subscriptions, stocks, bonds, and other revenue. But it seems like something has to change--the accumulated weight of all of the errors, gaffes, and uses of wildly slanted tone in otherwise "objective" reporting has to begin to register at some point.

Where will NBC's direction further to the left lead them?

Update: Related thoughts from Sigmund, Carl and Alfred, found via The Anchoress, who has thoughts on both new media and old, and their evolution.

Update 2/16/07: Welcome Hot Air readers; and allow NRO's Stephen Spruiell to place NBC's current positioning into sharp perspective:

Ken Allard quits, William Arkin stays, and Keith Olbermann just got promoted. That should give you a pretty clear idea of where things stand right now at NBC News.

Indeed it does.

Or, Miami Vice meets YouTube: "Mexican drug cartels taunt each other with YouTube videos".

Just to complete the already strained analogies, would the Corleone family have taunted Moe Green and Sollozzo with this in the 1940s if the technology existed back then...er, and if they weren't all fictitious characters, of course?

Or maybe anti-diversity. In any case, As Pennsylvania's Jack Murtha (D-PA) describes his strategy "for not only limiting the deployment of troops to Iraq but undermining other aspects of the president’s foreign and national security policy", and several Republicans are eager to go along, on the other side of Lake Erie, Jonah Goldberg writes that the words of its Democrat governor are "An Omen, to Be Sure":

COLUMBUS - Gov. Ted Strickland on Wednesday had a message for President Bush: any plan to relocate thousands of refugees uprooted by the Iraq war to the United States shouldn't include Ohio.

The Bush administration plans to allow about 7,000 Iraqi refugees to settle in the United States over the next year.

There is mounting international pressure to help millions who have fled their homes in the nearly 4-year-old war.

The United States has allowed only 463 Iraq refugees into the country since the war began in 2003, even though some 3.8 million have been uprooted.

Strickland, a Democrat who opposed the war as a U.S. House member, said Ohioans cannot be expected to have open arms for Iraqis displaced by the war.

Once again, punitive liberalism trumps all.

It's not just a lazy media cliche to describe Vietnam vets who "razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan" these days. Bookworm Room writes that the current meme amongst journalists is to use the riff to make a victim out of Sulejman Talovic, the Bosnian Muslim who killed four and wounded five others in Salt Lake City:

This “scarred by war” meme certainly wouldn’t be the first time the media has ascribed killing tendencies to a specific group. You may recall that, for decades, we heard that Vietnam Vets were loaded guns, just waiting to go off. Since my Dad was a WWII vet who’d seen the worst kind of fighting, as had all his peers, I found this peculiar vulnerability in the Vietnam Vets hard to understand. Over and over I’d asking anyone who cared (and many who didn’t), why this group of soldiers, unlike any other group, was unable to return to normal civilian life after the war. Most guessed that it was because of drug use in Vietnam, with some adding that it was because of American hostility when the Vets returned home.

Of course, none guessed that it was because the mythology about the Vets’ violent, anti-social, self-destructive habits was untrue. Most people (myself excluded) were surprised by a significant recent study showing that the “crazy vet” myth was a vastly overblown construct, rather than a reality.

In this case, therefore, I’m taking with a large grain of salt this early attempt to portray Talovic as a kid who was a bomb waiting to go off because of what happened in Bosnia, as opposed to either a crazy psychopathy, or another drive-by jihadist.

Bookworm Room links to a Robert Spencer article that explores the "circumstantial evidence that supports Islamism as an explanation for Talovic’s acts".

Update: "Allahpundit" writes:

The Freepers have been sniffing around for signs of jihad ever since it was revealed that the killer was Muslim. A few of them think they’ve found it here. Skip ahead to 1:25; you’ll hear two gunshots at 1:28, followed by a few seconds of cops shouting and then, at 1:39, what some claim sounds like “Allahu Akbar” three times. For all I know it’s Bosnian profanity, but judge for yourself.

Another Update: Charles Johnson doesn't believe there's a cry of “Allahu Akbar” on the recording.

John Cougar Mellencamp tells Charlie Rose that the U.S. should not have responded to 9/11 or Pearl Harbor--before launching into Oliver Stone-style conspiracy theories regarding JFK.

For Chevrolet, which currently employs Mellencamp as their representative spokesrocker, this yet again "News Of Fresh Disaster".

Update: Little Pink White Houses? John Hawkins writes that the sky's the limit for Mellencamp's political future after his appearance on Rose's show...

In Mark Steyn's remembrance of Pope John Paul II, republished in his recent anthology of obits, he notes that when John Paul passed away in early April of 2005, the New York Times accidentally uploaded the first draft of its own obituary to its Website, which began like this:

Even as his own voice faded away, his views on the sanctity of all human life echoed unambiguously among Catholics and Christian evangelicals in the United States on issues from abortion to the end of life.

need some quote from supporter

John Paul II's admirers were as passionate as his detractors, for whom his long illness served as a symbol for what they said was a decrepit, tradition-bound papacy in need of rejuvenation and a bolder connection with modern life.

Fortunately, the guys at Power Line captured a screen grab before the Times updated their article. Steyn would later dub the Times' flub a "hilarious self-parody of the progressivist cocoon", adding:

The pontiff's many "detractors" were all lined up and ready to go, but despite over a billion Catholics in the world and millions of evangelical Protestants throughout America who also admire him, the paper somehow failed to notice until the last minute that they'd overlooked something--"NEED SOME QUOTE FROM SUPPORTER".

PBS, another representative of the progressivist cocoon, also "Need Some Quote From Supporter", but somehow, couldn't seem to find one this week, Tim Graham of Newsbusters writes:

Several national newspapers praised the four-hour PBS Frontline series beginning Tuesday night titled "News War," on how Team Bush (and Team Nixon before that) undemocratically waged war on the press. There's not much on whether the press was undemocratically waging war on the elected president in those cases. (Who, pray tell, voted for the New York Times to run the country?) The man setting the table for the first two hours is Arun Rath, who the South Asian Journalists Association website jokingly notes "acquired a semi-classical education at Reed College in Oregon ('Atheism, Communism and Free Love')." What a surprise for an NPR/PBS producer.

In a new interview on the SAJA website, Rath explained how he was somehow completely incapable of tracking down conservatives to comment on the show's arrogant liberal thesis, namely that the press is crucial to save democracy from freedom-crushing Republicans:

We tried without success for nearly a year to get someone from the administration to talk to us, but at the last minute we scored an interview with Dan Bartlett. That, and a number of other key interviews came about from simple persistence and effort over a long time by a number of producers.

We were originally going to feature a lot more about the rise of conservative media in this series, but it just wouldn’t fit in the end; plus we’d tried without success to get interviews with the big names at Fox News, and to talk about conservative media without such key players (Rush Limbaugh et al also turned us down) felt a little weak.

Suffice it to say PBS has not contacted the news watchers at the MRC. It's probably also easily guessed they didn't call the many conservative talk show hosts and members of Congress who could build up a decent head of steam about the arrogance of Obama-worshipping newspapers who wage war on the war on terror.

Amongst the "et al" that Rath tosses aside after El Rushbo's name, Hugh Hewitt writes that he was contacted for an interview request:

Producer Raney Anderson journeyed to California to make the case for why I ought to participate, and I declined. I spent a decade inside the PBS system, and while I think Ms. Anderson is a talented and sincere documentarian, the form is inherently biased as the moment a cut gets made, an editorial choice has been rendered, and I didn't trust a PBS team, however talented, to make those choices about what I have to say about media, new and old.

I was open to being persuaded, though, and made a sincere offer to Ms. Anderson: She could come on my radio show, discuss the series with me, her objectives and her methods, and then I would run a web-based poll asking my listeners if I should participate. I would agree to abide by their vote.

This bit of applied transparency intrigued Ms. Anderson, but was ultimately declined. The negotiations were interesting and good humored. I did provide many other suggestions. We parted on good terms. A few months later, Ms. Anderson --a very persistent producer-- tried again, and even dangled the prospect of having the series' host, Lowell Bergman, appear on my program. I declined. With most docs, it is the producer and director who matter most, and I had offered to allow the team to film the entire radio show on which they appeared.

Hugh adds:

I have to say that old media's insistence that new media play by its rules is outdated. It is too bad that PBS is still mired in the old ways, producing all the usual shows from all the usual suspects.

And still spinning every step of the way.

Given the long history of PBS (and commercial networks such as CBS where Bergman cut his teeth; Al Pacino portrayed him during his 60 Minutes days in the 1999 movie, The Insider) of pulling the football away at the last second, have conservatives finally figured out that it's not worth their time appearing on shows such as this? But couldn't PBS have found someone from National Review, the Weekly Standard, the Power Line guys, or someone else from the Blogosphere to appear? Or is the balkanization of the media finally complete?

And by not finding anyone on the right to appear, as producer Arun Rath notes above, aren't they making the point that President Bush made during his first term regarding how unrepresentative of a diverse national audience the legacy media has become?

The PBS show and its fallout with Hugh illustrate the difference in how the right and left define "the press". In these days of Weblogs, cheap digital audio recorders and minicams, conservatives believe that "the press" refers to mediums now open to anyone (witness how many one-man bloggers such as Michael Yon are, or recently have been in Iraq). PBS, despite, or perhaps because of their government funding, seems to be mired in the 1972-era definition that "the press" equals journalists cocooned in large New York and DC office buildings--old institutions turned sclerotic and moving increasingly further leftward--the Times, the Washington Post--and PBS itself. As James Q. Wilson wrote late last year:

Focusing ever more sharply on the mostly bicoastal, mostly liberal elites, and with their more conservative audience lost to Fox News or Rush Limbaugh, mainstream outlets like the New York Times have become more nakedly partisan.

So why should the Bush administration play ball with them, any more than a Hillary Clinton or Obama administration be expected to give much time to Fox News or National Review?

Jonah Goldberg writes that 9/11 has caused a remarkable shift in concerns amongst the Republicans' conservative base, which will be played out in the race for the nomination between former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani:

Romney was a dedicated pro-choice politician for most of his career. When he ran against Ted Kennedy for the Senate, he was as pro-choice as you can get.

Now, at least partly to win over social conservatives, Romney is unapologetically pro-life, saying that he realized the folly of his ways when dealing with embryonic stem cell controversies as governor. I have some quibbles with his conversion story, but that's a subject for another column.

Then there's Rudy. He's going a different way. While tacking and trimming somewhat, he's basically staying pro-choice. Whatever his true convictions, the simple fact is that he has little choice. Unlike Romney, who had the stem cell controversy as an impetus for his conversion, Giuliani - who once almost went into the priesthood - now has no plausible excuse to switch positions even if he wanted one. You need some story, some event, to believably pull off a switcheroo of that proportion, and running for president isn't one of them. So, while he's saying the right - and Right - things about judges and judicial restraint, he's not backing off.

It seems indisputable that prior to 9/11, Romney's strategy would win and Giuliani might not even bother trying.

Of course, Giuliani's national profile expanded enormously because of 9/11. And while the press harps on that point, the more interesting part of the story lies elsewhere. The war on terror hasn't just changed Giuliani's profile as a crisis-leader, it's changed the attitudes of many Americans, particularly conservatives, about the central crisis facing the country. It's not that pro-lifers are less pro-life or that social conservatives are suddenly OK with homosexuality, gun control and other issues where Giuliani's dissent from mainstream conservative opinion would normally disqualify him. It's that they really, really believe the war on terror is for real. At conservative conferences, on blogs and on talk radio, pro-life issues have faded in their passion and intensity compared with the war on terror. Taken together, terrorism, Iraq and Islam have become the No. 1 social issue for conservative base of the party.

Note: I didn't say it's become the No. 1 foreign-policy or national-security issue for social conservatives. It's become the No. 1 social issue, at least for many of them.

Unambiguous polling data is hard to come by on this point, but the anecdotal data is enormous.

Jonah concludes:

That's not to say either Romney or Giuliani will win, but they're the ones to watch because they get to design their first impressions in a way other top-tier candidates like John McCain and Newt Gingrich can't. Romney and Giuliani, both immensely attractive, savvy and well-funded politicians, are in effect the canaries in the coal mine of conservative politics. If either emerges from the dark tunnels of primary season alive, it will tell us a great deal about the future of the GOP and American politics.

As for the aftermath of 9/11 on the left? "We'll call it 'surrender without responsibility'", Glenn Reynolds writes.

Steve Frank writes, "I would not be surprised if the stores had a special surcharge for having real people check you out for your bread and milk":

A few years ago the grocery industry [in California] went on a 20 week strike. It was a lose for everybody, most especially for the strikers, some of whom went into bankruptcy and many others who still work in the industry, but get fewer hours and less pay and benefits.

It was inevitable, before reality set in.

Since then Albertsons have been installing self check out stands, with one employee helping 4-8 counters at the same time—fewer workers. There was no way Von’s, Ralph’s and Albertson’s could pay the high wages and benefits, without raising prices. Even today, there is resentment by customers for the slashed tires, the yelling and name calling by the union strikers.

Last November, the people of California voted $10 billion for schools. LAUSD just gave a 6% raise to the teachers—so most of the money for new facilities is actually going to go in wages, in the end, The grocers don’t have the luxury of raising taxes or bonding to pay for increased pay or benefits.

Should there be another grocery strike, they will lose even more customers, workers will have even fewer hours to work, and those self check out stands will be in the majority. I would not be surprised if the stores had a special surcharge for having real people check you out for your bread and milk. The day of the grocery clerk is over, the union murdered them.

My local Albertson's supermarket has an aisle consisting of four self-serve machines, which each combine a barcode scanner, credit/debit card processing machine, and bagging dispenser. It seems to work reasonably well, despite the inevitable 20-point IQ drop that each customer faces when confronted by the self-serve's GUI (even here in bleeding-edge high tech Silicon Valley). As the programming of these relatively new machines improves over time and they become increasingly user-friendly, I think Frank is right: more and more, clerks will become the province of both higher-end boutique stores, and smaller, non-union businesses.

Stephen Spruiell asks, "Remind me: Why is Libby the only one on trial for perjury?"

Glenn Reynolds writes, "a waste is a terrible thing to mind":

Or, in other words: "Nowadays, every politician will be defeated by exactly one word. Kerry got 'stuck.' Biden had 'clean.' Obama gets 'wasted.'"

And John Edwards had "Godbags", though it was spoken by his would-be Blogitrix, not himself. To understand how so many on the right view the Democrats and religion, check out Rod Dreher's "The Godless Party" (with a title that says it all), and this 2004 essay by Peggy Noonan. As numerous bloggers on the right and the left have written, to hire someone whose writing embodies the very worst of those clichés was a horrible decision that reflects squarely on either Edwards' own anti-religious views, or at the most generous, his lack of attention to detail. And given the uphill campaign that Edwards finds himself in to merely earn the nomination, he's severely shot himself in the foot so early in the presidential race.

Update: "100 wpm typing speed. 500 wpm deleting speed."

More: Bryan Preston adds:

There may be one silver lining in all of this. If being a potty mouthed bigot limits one’s blogging career opportunities, maybe there will be fewer potty mouthed bigots among the blogs. That, I would consider a substantial win.

Indeed it would.

"GMA's Diane Sawyer Allows Iranian President’s Wild Statements to Go Unchallenged".

For yesterday's post regarding the previous stop of Diane's tour, click here.

Update: Mark Steyn and Hugh Hewitt discussed an earlier stop on Diane's tour last week:

HH: Now that brings me around to Bashar Assad’s iPod. Now Diane Sawyer went to interview Bashar Assad, and ended up talking to him about his iPod, and not raising the Hama massacre, or the assassination of Gemayel. And I like Diane Sawyer. She was, I actually took her office over. She was a ghost writer for Nixon, and I followed in her place. She’s always been a very serious journalist. What happens, Mark Steyn, to American journalists, even good ones, in the presence of killers?

MS: Well you know, this is why I loved Oriana Fallaci, because whatever people…a lot of people have different view of her, but she was the one celebrity interviewer who used to just go to these big shots, these dictators, she interviewed Castro, she interviewed Arafat, she interviewed the Ayatollah Khomenei, and she was the one who never fell for them. And this thing where they somehow think you’re getting to the real guy when you ask him about his iPod, this isn’t a new thing. When Yuri Andropov became the leader of the Soviet Union after Brezhnev died, the Soviets tried to promote him as a new face of Soviet communism, and went on about how much he liked Glenn Miller. And this idea…I mean, this was a guy who was the KGB hard man.

HH: Right.

MS: That is not changed by the fact that he likes to go home, put his feet up, and listen to Chattanooga Choo Choo. I mean, it’s an absurd, and it’s actually quite disgusting the way these people think, these interviewers think that somehow it’s getting us a clue to the real man. I’ve mentioned before that Saddam Hussein liked Sinatra. He liked to play Sinatra CD’s. He liked Quality Street Toffees from England, which happen to be my favorite kind of toffees, too. So if I was dating Saddam Hussein, we’d sit there listening to Songs for Swinging Lovers, and eating our Quality Street Toffees, and we’d have a grand old date. But it doesn’t change the fact that he’s a mass murderer.

James Lileks once wrote, "Maybe [film] directors like dictators because they understand the desire to have final cut". I'm not at all sure why those who fancy themselves as cynical world-weary journalists melt in their presence, however.

Update: "Compare Diane Sawyer, subservient in her headdress, with Oriana Fallaci interviewing the Ayatollah Khomeini".

More: Lawhawk adds, "And as I expected, not a single mention of Iran's relationship to Hizbullah. Curious how that happens".

Between the politically-fueled Grammys, the death of Prozac-fueled Anna Nicole Smith, and the hydrogen and liquid oxygen-fueled past of Lisa Marie Nowak, the timing couldn't be better for the debut of GlossLip, the gossip-fueled blog of Dawn Olsen, wife of Blogcritics founder Eric Olsen. "Celebrity Gossip From Our Lips To Yours", is their slogan.

It's all off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush, to borrow from Sid Hudgens' old slogan.

(And if you simply can't get enough of Anna Nicole Smith's trainwreck life and death, don't miss this recent post by Cathy Seipp on "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Bimbo".)

Marty Schottenheimer took his team to a 14-2 record in 2006. His reward? The unemployment line.

“‘Collective Nervous Breakdown’ on Meet the Press”.

It really does seem like it's accelerating, doesn't it?

We rarely check in with the animal kingdom on this blog, but this student video from Staten Island Technical High School is certainly well worth your time...

(Via fellow dedicated animal enthusiast Ace of Spades, who was kind enough to link to us earlier today.)

Related: John Podhoretz has his own report from the wild kingdom today--"Fa Love Pa!"

Newsbusters writes that ABC's Diane Sawyer "Portrays Dictatorial Syria as a Pro-Family Welfare Paradise":

Would it be too much for Sawyer, in the midst of all the America bashing, to point out that while Syria may have a fine kindergarten system, women of that country, according to Human Rights Watch, "have little means for redress against sexual abuse or domestic violence"?

Yes, of course it would.

Ezra Klein writes:

We spend a fair amount of time talking about detainee treatment and Guantanamo. But there is no greater, or more common, human rights abuses in America than those occurring in our overcrowded, constantly expanding, jails.

It never seemed to bother California's former attorney general of course. But then, he had issues of his own to work out. Maybe his successor will do better on this issue, but while it may increase my CO2 emissions, I'm not holding my breath.

The fact that this man didn't cop a Grammy last night says something very deep about the American psyche...

(Via The Anchoress. And yes, my riff above is a staggeringly obscure Miami Vice reference.)

Regarding the Dixie Chicks' Grammy wins last night, Lorie Byrd highlights this unintentionally hilarious quote by former Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart:

I think people are paranoid," former Grateful Dead member Mickey Hart told Reuters. "I think that if they speak out, they think they're gonna get whacked by the government. It's pretty oppressive now. Look at the Dixie Chicks. They got whacked."

They did? Let's see: magazine covers, Grammy Awards, a documentary movie. As Mary Katharine Ham wrote about the Dixie Chicks last fall, "Man, it's rough being silenced".

They did lose a wide swatch of their fanbase of course; I'm certainly no expert on country music, but I'd say that Lorie's thoughts echo millions of her fellow country fans:

The Dixie Chicks did not get "whacked" by the government. If anyone "whacked" them it was their fans who like their music without political sermonizing, thank you very much. It was the country fans who chose in droves to stop buying their CDs and told DJ's they didn't want to hear them on the radio. Sorry, but George Bush can 't be blamed for this one.

As for being whacked, if five Grammy wins is being whacked, then I'll bet there will be some other singers hoping someone decides to whack on them a bit. I didn't watch the Grammy awards tonight, but was switching channels around 11 and kept the dial on CBS long enough to see the Dixie Chicks win for song of the year and for album of the year. I was a huge fan of their music back when they were a country act, before they became professional victims. When they said they didn't want those fans that are also fans of people like Reba McIntyre, they lost their country base, and me, for good.

What seems new though is the trend of celebrities attacking their own audiences--I thought that was strictly reserved for punk rockers, circa 1975. Or as I wrote last fall:

When entertainers were attacking President Reagan back in the 1980s, I don't remember them slagging their audiences as well. Maybe because it's not exactly the best way to build sympathy for your cause. And maybe because audiences didn't have the tools to fight back then.

Libertas adds:

They went from selling tens of million of records to less than 2 million. They went from #1 hits to not being able to crack the Top 20. They went from filling arenas to cancelling tour dates and having to play in Canada. They went from winning awards for their work to winning consolation prizes prizes for their politics.

And that is the consolation prize: the current career path of the Dixie Chicks equals that of anti-American and/or anti-Bush actors such as Sean Penn, Danny Glover, Danny DeVito, Alec Baldwin, et al. Those actors have given up the brass ring of superstardom on the level of Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger during his pre-governator days, and Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise prior to their recent meltdowns. But they'll never be without work. In a town as reactionary as Hollywood, it literally pays to toe the company line.

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

Update: "Jonah, remember the words of ‘Thomas Jefferson’: Dissent is the highest form of patriotism, except when you dissent from the Dixie Chicks."

Star Trek's classic "Doomsday Machine" episode got the deluxe CGI treatment this week. I thought the results were remarkable (and I remember being pretty disappointed last fall by Paramount's initial efforts), but will the Lord Of Jasperwood rejoice when he sees the transformation of his favorite episode?

"Armed Liberal" writes:

Deborah Howell, the Post ombudswoman, has a piece up on l'affaire Arkin.

It's a reasoned, establishment take on blogging, is appropriately critical of Arkin - even though she understates the loathsomeness of what he said - and includes one gem that needs to be held up and examined.

Arkin is unrepentant about two things: He works for The Post. Period. And he said he is "probably one of the best-known and respected anti-military military bloggers."

I hadn't seen that before, but it pretty accurately sums him up, doesn't it?

Indeed it does. And it's right in line with a trend I've been casually tracking since the early days of this blog, which James Taranto summed up thusly last year:

Something odd is afoot in America's elite media--increasingly, journalists are unabashed about admitting their liberal bias.

Back in November, James Q. Wilson wrote:

But in the Vietnam era, an important restraint on sectarian partisanship still operated: the mass media catered to a mass audience and hence had an economic interest in appealing to as broad a public as possible. Today, however, we are in the midst of a fierce competition among media outlets, with newspapers trying, not very successfully, to survive against 24/7 TV and radio news coverage and the Internet. As a consequence of this struggle, radio, magazines, and newspapers are engaged in niche marketing, seeking to mobilize not a broad market but a specialized one, either liberal or conservative.

Economics reinforces this partisan orientation. Prof. James Hamilton has shown that television networks take older viewers for granted but struggle hard to attract high-spending younger ones. Regular viewers tend to be older, male, and conservative, while marginal ones are likely to be younger, female, and liberal. Thus the financial interest that radio and television stations have in attracting these marginal younger listeners and viewers reinforces their ideological interest in catering to a more liberal audience.

Focusing ever more sharply on the mostly bicoastal, mostly liberal elites, and with their more conservative audience lost to Fox News or Rush Limbaugh, mainstream outlets like the New York Times have become more nakedly partisan. And in the Iraq War, they have kept up a drumbeat of negativity that has had a big effect on elite and public opinion alike.

As Howell implies in her support of Arkin, clearly, the Post's readers on the left have their ideal journalist; but what does this trend forecast for the future of Big Media?

Update: "So the Washington Post and NBC News has William Arkin but the New York Times unbelievably has John Burns".

Burns is even more impressive when you consider the environment he functions in.

Ed Morrissey writes:

Imagine my surprise when the New York Times ran an op-ed yesterday on the evils of an overly large federal government and the wisdom of following the Constitutional framework for sovereign states united in common defense.

Given the trends amongst the left over the last decade, I'm not as surprised as Ed seems to be. Of course, the federalism of early America was also combined with a remarkably laissez faire approach to the markets and capitalism, which began to ebb with the development of the first truly big businesses, the railroads. That half of the equation will of course be completely ignored by a left that wants to strangle business growth--and if the snail darter (remember him?) couldn't do it, they can only pray--seemingly almost literally--that "another 30 Kyotos" will.

Sigmund, Carl and Alfred write:

Daniel Pearl, murdered and beheaded- Among his last words, was an ‘admission‘ to being the ’son of a Jew.’

The administrator of a London Islamic school admits to using textbooks that refers to Jews and Christians as ‘monkeys and apes. She defiantly claims the references to Jews and Christians as ‘monkeys and apes’ are taken ‘out of context.’ The administrator does not indicate the proper context for describing Jews and Christians as ‘monkeys and apes.’

At a recent Democrat Party meeting, the opening prayer was delivered by a man with clear and direct ties to terror and bigotry. He counts among his friends Holocaust deniers and makes less than veiled threats against Jews and others.

So far, there have been no editorials taking note of these events.

As Fox's Roger Ailes said last year, "Bias is not what you say; it’s what you eliminate".

The Associated Press quietly airbrushes a quote by CAIR's Ibrahim Hooper regarding Ayaan Hirsi Ali. As Allahpundit notes, its meaning remains largely the same, but Hooper's tone is made considerably less harsh:

What we’re looking at here, I suspect (but obviously can’t prove), is Hooper having made the first comment during their interview, then gotten buyer’s remorse when he saw how shrill it looked in print. So he called up the AP hours after the fact and asked them to replace it with a more “nuanced” version — and the AP agreed to do so.

Which brings us to our exit questions. First, am I missing some other obvious explanation? And second, if not, is giving sources a do-over on quotes after a story’s been published standard practice in the industry? I’m asking in earnest. I honestly don’t know the answer.

In the online world, it probably happens more often these days than most are aware, much like wide swatches of Wikipedia change daily. Winston Smith (and his superiors) would have had a field day in an all-digital media world.

John Hinderaker of Power Line writes:

The current flap over the Pentagon Inspector General's report on Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans has embarrassed the Associated Press, the Washington Post and, if he has any shame, the Inspector General. The controversy does have the merit, though, of raising once again the issue of the relationship between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda and other terrorists.

The Inspector General said it was "inappropriate" for Feith's group to question the wisdom of the CIA's dogma that Saddam Hussein, a "secularist," would never cooperate with bin Laden or other Islamic terrorists. There was a time, though, when the likelihood of such collaboration was widely reported and understood. Thus, courtesy of Power Line Video, we are rescuing from the memory hole this ABC News report from 2000.

As I wrote in June of 2004:

The more I think about it, the more this quote by Dennis Prager hits home:

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

In the 1990s, President Clinton and his administration released numerous bits of intel and information on Bin Ladin and Saddam Hussein to the press. As a result, The New York Times, as well as Newsweek, and NPR each ran stories documenting his ties to Bin Ladin. Yesterday, the 9/11 commission confirmed those ties, and admonished the press for ignoring them. Was Saddam directly tied to 9/11? President Bush never said he was. But clearly, Iraq and Al Qaeda were quite cozy with each other. Something the press spent the past decade documenting when it benefited one administration, and the past three years chucking down the memory hole when it hindered another.

I'm very happy to see Power Line rescue ABC's video from the archives.

Update: Don Surber spots more war amnesia.

In the latest edition of Blog Week In Review, Michael Ledeen proposes that President Bush employ many of the same techniques against Iran that President Reagan successfully used to encourage dissent in the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Don't miss it.

And for lots of other thoughts on the topic, stop by the great Regime Change Iran blog.

As Tom Wolfe likes to say, "An intellectual is a person knowledgeable in one field who speaks out only in others". That definition applies in spades to Professor Philip Bohlman of the University of Chicago, who is the president of the now legendary Society of Ethnomusicologists.

For sheer non-humor that becomes unintentionally hilarious in its stuffed shirt starched-into-concrete rigidity, don't miss the audio recording of his interview with Hugh Hewitt. How this professor must shriek in horror every time he sees a production of Guys & Dolls...

As a follow-up to our post yesterday titled "Bostonians Forgainst Dissent", we should mention that Tim Blair's latest post, in which he posits that for the junior senator from Massachusetts, "dissent is the lowest form of environmentalism":

There was a time when Kerry supported dissent, even to the extent that he dissented with historical records on who said what about dissent.

One of the Senator's more humous gaffes near the tail end of his 2004 run for the White House was this:

Kerry told reporters on the plane that any shlub would pay the $250 air fare to travel from one state to another to windsurf.

Presumably now understanding the ecological holocaust such wanton use of eeeevil aviation is causing, Kerry regrets those remarks even more today than he did back then.

Be forewarned, those of the fairer sex and those with weaker constitutions--there is much foul language awaiting you; but much mirth to be had in the end. Onward, to the show!

(Background here and here if you're coming in cold to this story.)

Boston's Senator John Kerry: "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism".

Ellen Goodman of The Boston Globe: "Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future".

Jonah Goldberg replies, "Disgusting, Illogical, Stupid--Those are just some of the words that come to mind":

No, Ellen. Let's not just say that. Denying that the industrialized mass-murder of millions actually happened isn't really quite the same thing as refusing to believe global warming is real. I believe global warming is real, by the way. But people who "deny" — a bad word to begin with — that global warming is real are unpersuaded by media hype and the constantly moving goal posts of a funding-hungry scientific community. People who deny the Holocaust happened tend to be the kinds of people who are actually sympathetic with the perpetrators of the Holocaust. They tend to enjoy poking Jews in the eye with taunts and smirks.

Or attempting to kidnap them.

Update: "Above all, we can't stand to be bullied", James Taranto writes. "And what is it but an act of bullying to deny that there is any room for honest disagreement, to insist that those of us who are unpersuaded are the equivalent of Holocaust deniers, that we are not merely mistaken but evil?"

Much more from Taranto on Goodman's odious moral equivalency at the top of his latest "Best of the Web" column; don't miss it.

Betsy Newmark describes how the media could make this week's STORY OF THE CENTURY even better:

Gosh, if I thought of myself as a serious journalist and then got a job working for a 24-hour news channel, I don't know if I could respect myself in the morning.

The death of Anna Nicole Smith, a woman famous for no particular reason except for her physical attributes, has given them an excuse to show endless loops of her at various weights and states of undress.

The only thing that would be better for cable news producers is if there could be some way to connect her death to the astronaut story. And maybe if Paris Hilton could make a guest appearance.

Despite all of the vaunted talk of the superiority of the legacy media to the Blogosphere, they live for train wreck stories such as Anna Nicole Smith and NASA's Lisa Nowack. And, sadly, so do their audiences.

Update: John Podhoretz, whose New York Post certainly knows a thing or two about tabloid scandals, has found the perfect angle to up the ante--and it might even be true, to boot.

"As another famous pilot once said, 'a trench coat and wig and, a knife, BB pistol, rubber tubing and plastic bags....Gosh, a feller could have a pretty good time in Vegas with all that stuff.'"

Infoworld reports:

Yahoo Inc. has launched a service called Pipes designed to let regular users mix different RSS and Atom feeds and create data "mashups," a process that so far has required programming knowledge.

Pipes features a drag-and-drop interface that the company hopes non-technical users will find simple and intuitive as they manipulate content syndication feeds to combine data in new and useful ways.

An example of a Pipe is this one , which meshes listings from Craigslist with data from Yahoo's local search engine to display apartments for rent near any business, Yahoo said.

Another one collates news about topics chosen by the user from a variety of sources.

"Pipes' initial set of modules lets you assemble personalized information sources out of existing Web services and data feeds. Pipes outputs standard RSS 2.0, so you can subscribe to and read your pipes in your favorite aggregator. You can also create pipes that accept user input and run them on our servers as a kind of miniature Web application," reads Yahoo's description of the service , posted Wednesday night.

While Pipes today lets users mix data from RSS and Atom feeds, Yahoo hopes to extend the service to support other data formats, Web services, processing modules and output renderings, Yahoo said. For example, Yahoo will open up access to the Pipes engine to programmers and add support for the KML data source, which is used to display geographic data in Google Inc.'s popular Google Earth mapping application and Google Maps Web site.

As if they didn't need it, this is yet another reason for Pinch & crew to be scared: it's now a breeze to build your own newspaper out of the best bits of information sources from around the world.

The Anchoress has an exceptional take on why Katie Couric is third in the ratings:

Katie may have had high Q ratings, but she is always-and-forever the Thanksgiving Parade Girl. She’s the Olympics and Royal Weddings Girl. She is not the goto voice for information, reassurance, explanation, or gravitas.

Dan Rather, for all his faults, wrote his own copy if he needed to. He had his own voice and it was - until the last few years - a commendable, professional and credible voice. When the Challenger blew up he was appropriately solemn but still curious, informative, able to take a model of the vessel and talk intelligently with a scientist about what exactly had happened in those moments. He was intellectually spry enough to move from one element of that tragedy to another with seamlessness, gravity and maturity. He was, frankly, Rudy Giuliani on 9/11. It might have been Rather’s finest hour.

Katie could never do that. She has no “voice” of her own on the CBS Evening News because her voice - as evidenced by various ill-advised magazine articles I’ve read over the past few weeks and those blog pieces she has written which were not well vetted - is the voice of the cheerleader married and gone suburban. She cannot write her own copy, and I think that makes a world of difference to a broadcaster, because when someone is accustomed to fleshing out a story in one’s own words, one can think on one’s feet, so to speak. If the teleprompter goes awry or the story shifts quickly, one’s synapses are well-stretched and able to fire on demand, so that the whole tone of the broadcast never really dips much.

Right now, if a story shifts, Katie has a teleprompter, a voice in her ear and no freaking clue what she’s supposed to say next: enter the cheerleader. The tone becomes inconsistant, Katie looks trapped and it all starts to remind one uncomfortably of amateur night. No, I’ll go even further, it’ looks like “bloggers doing news!” And that’s pretty bad. One remembers the Challenger disaster and thinks Katie would refer to the falling rocket boosters as “Gi-normous!”

On the other hand, if there's breaking news involving sports bras, then Katie's your goto girl.

Forty years ago, Arthur C. Clarke, with a film he co-wrote called 2001: A Space Odyssey about to be released the following year, was asked to speak at the annual meeting in Manhattan of the American Institute of Architects. Among the many futuristic predictions he offered were these glimpses that sound astonishingly prescient in retrospect:

Newspapers will, I think, receive their final body blow from these new communications techniques. I take a dim view of staggering home every Sunday with five pounds of wood pulp on my arm, when what I really want is information, not wastepaper. How I look forward to the day when I can press a button and get any type of news, editorials, book and theater reviews, etc., merely by dialing the right channel.

Electronic “mail” delivery is another exciting prospect of the very near future. Letters, typed or written on special forms like wartime V—mail, will be automatically read and flashed from continent to continent and reproduced at receiving stations within a few minutes of transmission.

That was in May of 1967. This week, Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger of the New York Times finally got the message, according to Hugh Hewitt:

"I really don't know whether we'll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don't care, either," said New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. to Haaretz Tuesday.

We don’t care either. The “we” are the one time loyal readers of newspapers. “We” are the “market.” And the market doesn’t “care” about carriages driven by horses, ships with sails, or the Pony Express. The market cares about demand, and demand for newspapers is drying up.

In his latest op-ed, Hugh wonders if the efforts to complete the newspapers' move to the online world will also involve a strategic re-think of what information is delivered. Or will the newspapers will continue to try to pretend that it's still 1967, delivering the same sclerotic content on a CRT instead of pulpwood? As one of Hugh's readers emails in:

Enjoyed this column. You touch on an important, underdiscussed part of daily papers' problem: They assume they are their readers' primary source of news. Hence the insipid game summaries in the Sports section (when, as you said, everybody who cares about the game grabbed all the info they need from ESPN and the Internet 8-12 hours before the paper hits their driveway). The same goes for Yesterday's Big Vote in Washington - it's ancient, but every paper feels compelled to cover it.

This is an important flaw because its root is - ta da! - hubris. Arrogance. An unwillingness to live in today's world, where by the time a newspaper is delivered, I've read thousands of words of analysis at the Corner, Powerline, Michael Barone's blog, HughHewitt.com, etc.

As Hugh responds, it's a matter of steam versus sail.

The New York Sun writes that its scrappy local competitor is determined to keep "the American people from knowing the nature of the enemy in Iraq because identifying this enemy as Al Qaeda casts the debate about the war in a whole different light".

Add it to the Strategy Page list of Top Ten Myths of the Iraq War, the bulk of which of course, are media creations, both by commission and omission.

Meanwhile, Austin Bay explores what's happening in Afghanistan.

Austin's lead quote? "As I've said in the past, it will be a bloody spring".

Jim Lindgren writes:

Hundreds of Vietnam-era veterans have publicly claimed in recent decades that they were spat on by citizens or anti-war protesters because of their military status, either before they went to Vietnam, when they were on leave, or after their returned from overseas. Yet several journalists and at least one scholar, sociologist Jerry Lembcke of Holy Cross, think that such things like this never happened, that they are an “urban legend.” Lembcke claims: “Stories of spat-upon Vietnam veterans are bogus.”

Lindgren responds, "Contrary to Lembcke’s claims, I quite easily found many accounts published in the 1967-1972 period claiming spitting on servicemen". Read the whole thing.

Is Wade Phillips about to become the Dallas Cowboys' next head coach? That's what a source is telling the Dallas Morning News. Sure hope he brings his dad's ostrich-skin cowboy boots and ten-gallon hats to the games.

Jokes aside, Phillips does bring a sound record as a defensive coordinator, is a proponent of the 3-4 defense that Bill Parcells installed during his tenure as Cowboys head coach, and a 48-39 regular season record as a head coach. Apparently, if the Dallas Morning News' report is true, all of this helped him win the job over his closest rival, Norv Turner, a great offensive coordinator with poor-to-middling results as a head coach.

"Message to Nancy Pelosi: when NBC's Matt Lauer and David Gregory agree that your quest for a big plane is turning into a PR mess, and ABC's Chris Cuomo calls it a case of 'jet envy,' it's time to fold your wings."

And when your constituency is obsessed with global warming/cooling/climate change, take a smaller car, too.

Update: "Murtha Threatens to Cut Pentagon Funds Over Pelosi's Jet".

The One Free Korea blog links to a news report that states that "On December 20th, a mass group of 120 prisoners from the camp in Hwasung escaped"; the camp is "half the size of the state of Rhode Island", and holds 10,000 prisoners. One Free Korea adds:

In the history of North Korea, there has only been one known incident like this one — the mass uprising at Onsong, Camp Number 12, in 1987, when 5,000 people were killed. The punishment for escape is death, and former guards claim that they were offered generous bounties for killing escaping prisoners.

Apparently 21 have been recaptured and face near-certain death sentences; others have made it to China:

The significance of this, if true, is proof of the existence of an organized underground inside North Korea. As you will see below, Hwasong is a very long walk from China. Without help from an underground, these people would have had nowhere to go; they would all have been recaptured or killed almost immediately. If around 100 prisoners were still at large weeks after the fact, or made it at least as far as China, someone must have helped, hidden, and fed them.

I certainly hope they make it to ultimate safety.

Despite Ted Turner's fantasies to the contrary, North Korea is a nightmarish hellhole of a nation. As Christopher Hitchens wrote last year, "George Orwell's 1984 was published at about the time that Kim Il Sung set up his system, and it really is as if he got hold of an early copy of the novel and used it as a blueprint".

"And an electable one, at that", writes Steven Malanga, whom we interviewed in an early podcast last year.

A memorable Weekly Standard article a couple of years ago spoke of the environment of "punitive liberalism" that the Gipper took on when he was president. By the early nineties, nowhere was that attitude more entrenched than the Big Apple, and no better fighter of it was Giuliani.

Update: Or not: "Social cons agree — he’s the best Democrat in the field!" Just don't say it with Krylon.

Another Update: James Lileks writes, "Rudy Giuliani is in. Suggested campaign slogan: 'He dealt with Brooklyn. He can handle Baghdad'":

He's not a sure thing; he has enough baggage to fill the cargo hold of a cruise ship. His sundry personal-life issues bother social conservatives; the gun control stance dismays the Second Amendment wing of the party; the pro-choice opinions alarm the evangelicals. That leaves about 47 Republicans, right? After all, it's just a party of cousin-marrying yahoos who'd sooner shoot up Planned Parenthood than vote for one of those fish-on-Friday types. Right?

No. Voters are more flexible and forgiving than you might expect. And none of the objections obscure the central appeal of the Rudy candidacy: He'll nuke 'em if he has to. That won't be the central theme of his campaign, of course, but it's the unstated strength of his candidacy. He's not a wuss.

Read the rest, in which Lileks investigates the rest of both teams' starting line-ups for the '08 race.

"Arab TV: Operations in Baghdad have begun".

Iraq The Model writes:

We're now only a few kilometers far from Azamiyah, so if there's going to be some action, we'll certainly hear-or see-it, and we'll keep you updated.

Click early and often there, and at Pajamas HQ for updates.

In 2003, William Arkin, then writing for the L.A. Times, accused then-Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin of being a man "who believes in Christian 'jihad'"; today in his Washington Post blog, Arkin writes that he's being "demonized":

In that process, I have ceased being a person, an individual, or a human being, all essential to justify the campaign to annihilate me. I'm not trying to offer myself up as victim here, nor do I expect the critics to change their view. I'm merely pointing out the process and the implications of the dehumanization.

Dehumanization? That's rather rich from a man who accuses American soldiers of being mercenaries to which America ships "obscene amenities into the war zone", and whose post last week which kicked off all of the controversy began as a rebuttal to a 21 year old soldier.

But it's an amazing role reversal when a journalist employed by the Washington Post plays the victim card (despite his best protestations to the contrary) and brays against an angry mob furiously engaged in a "campaign to annihilate me".

Somewhere, Richard Nixon is chuckling at the new media world.

Further proof that the era of journalistic objectivity is long dead and gone--even if it ever truly existed in the first place: Newsweek's Evan Thomas: "Our Job Is To Bash the President".

Fair enough. Don't act entirely surprised when he bashes back, though.

Ed Morrissey writes:

Harry Reid has a dilemma on his hands. His control over the Senate rests on a single vote; even if Senator Tim Johnson of South Dakota recovers enough to return to the Senate, the loss of one member of Reid's caucus will allow Dick Cheney to cast the deciding vote on control of the upper chamber. While this isn't news, an article posted yesterday by the New Yorker reveals that the debate on Iraq may push the Senate's only independent to rethink his loyalty.

Read the whole thing; there's too much in the New Yorker excerpt and Ed's trenchant analysis to quote here.

Meanwhile, The QandO Blog notes how the media mischaracterizes the Senate Resolution vote; further thoughts and links on the topic at Instapundit.

Here's a story that sounds like a subplot that was left on the cutting room floor of Moonraker, or maybe the old UFO TV series:

Lisa Marie Nowak, 43, is (or perhaps was) an active Space Shuttle astronaut, who was a mission specialist on a Discovery launch last summer. She was arrested at Orlando International Airport today on attempted kidnapping and battery charges, "after police say she attacked her rival for another astronaut's attention", according to the Orlando Sentinel.

Ooooooohkaaay. Here's a plot that Law & Order or CSI: Miami certainly wouldn't have dreamed up on their own:

Nowak drove more than 12 hours from Texas to meet the 1 a.m. flight of a younger woman who had also been seeing the astronaut Nowak pined for, according to Orlando police.

Nowak -- who was a mission specialist on a Discovery launch last summer -- was wearing a trench coat and wig and had a knife, BB pistol, and latex gloves in her car, reports show. They also found diapers, which Nowak said she used so she wouldn't have to stop on the 1,000-mile drive. Reports show that after U.S. Air Force Capt. Colleen Shipman's flight arrived, Nowak followed her to the airport's Blue Lot for long-term parking, tried to get into Shipman's car and then doused her with pepper spray.

Nowak, 43, is charged with attempted kidnapping, battery, attempted vehicle burglary with battery and destruction of evidence. Police considered her such a danger that they requested she be held without bail in the Orange County Jail, reports show.

A married mother of three, Nowak told police that she was "involved in a relationship with," Bill Oefelein, another NASA astronaut, which she categorized as "more than a working relationship but less than a romantic relationship," according to the charging affidavit.

Oefelein, who piloted the most recent shuttle Discovery flight in December, could not be reached Monday night at home in Houston.

Given all of the recent attention that the first efforts towards privatizing manned spaceflight had been getting, this sounds like just what the doctor (McCoy, or Crusher, I guess) ordered to get NASA's PR machine back on track!

Or not.

Update: I guess there's a bright side to this story, in a way. We're one step closer to living in Star Trek, in that, when everyone's an astronaut, or at least space travel is commonplace, such stories are bound to start proliferating.

We've come a long way though, from the early days of NASA, when Henry Luce of Time and Life went to such enormous lengths to make the original Mercury 7 astronauts appear as clean cut and wholesome as boy scouts to preserve their mythic, heroic status. This story is an effective bookend to that innocence of NASA's heady early days.

Another Update: Ed Morrissey adds:

NASA will have some work to do to deconstruct all of the ways in which this trio managed to embarrass the program in such a tawdry way. They'd better be quick about it, though, because this is the most eligible story for TV moviedom since a cheerleader's mom tried to find a hitman for the mother of a rival.

But only if they get the special effects right. Industrial Light & Magic--time to fire up that blue screen again!

One More: More here.

The New Yorker profiles Joe Lieberman:

Lieberman says that he does, at times, feel isolated. He is a liberal on social policy and a conservative on defense, in the bygone style of the late Senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson. “I’m the Lorax,” he said. “I’m saving that one tree.”

In another conversation, he told me that he was reading “America Alone,” a book by the conservative commentator Mark Steyn, which argues that Europe is succumbing, demographically and culturally, to an onslaught by Islam, leaving America friendless in its confrontation with Islamic extremism.

“The thing I quote most from it is the power of demographics, in Europe particularly,” Lieberman said. “That’s what struck me the most. But the other part is a kind of confirmation of what I know and what I’ve read elsewhere, which is that Islamist extremism has an ideology, and it’s expansionist, it’s an aggressive ideology. And the title I took to mean that we Americans will have ultimate responsibility for stopping this expansionism.”

Lieberman likes expressions of American power.

Unlike the New Yorker, of course.

Update: Stefan Beck of "Armavirumque", The New Criterion's Weblog, makes a great observation:

The New Criterion noted in November 2006: “As we go to press, The New York Times Book Review hasn’t yet deigned to notice [Mark Steyn’s America Alone]. Will they?” Months later, they still haven’t. This is peculiar enough given that the book made in onto the Times’s own nonfiction bestseller list, and that it has been reviewed in dozens of other publications.

As Beck writes, that's "downright embarrassing when you consider some of the influential people who have given it their attention", not the least of which is nearby Connecticut's junior senator.

"NY Times Iraq Reporter Corrects Russert: 'American Troops Were Greeted as Liberators'"

The Timesman in question is John Burns, one of the paper's best journalists; Christopher Hitchens performed his own debunking of Chris Matthews' similar assertions last year:

No, no, I was there. I saw it myself, many many times. American soldiers and British soldiers were greeted by hundreds of thousands of people with real joy. I saw it myself. I can't believe people say it didn't happen."

After the media began airbrushing their coverage of the war prior to 2003, I can.

As a follow-up to our post on February 1st, Greg Gutfeld, simultaneously Arianna Huffington's main man and bete noir, has a late night show debuting tonight on Fox News at 2:00 AM EST.

Giuliani's in. "If Petraeus can’t turn it around, then he, St. John, and My Man Mitt are competing to see who gets to lose to Hillary in the general election", Allah writes.

Tim Graham writes that network sports producers will have to make liberal use of sophisticated audio editing software to clean up Tony Dungy's shocking remarks on live TV immediately after the Super Bowl:

Victorious Colts coach Tony Dungy said to CBS sports anchor Jim Nantz on the post-game show last night that he and Bears coach Lovie Smith were proud to be successful black coaches, but more proud of being Christian coaches. How many media outlets will use the first half, and snip away the second?

I tell you what. I'm proud to be representing African-American coaches, to be the first African-American to win this. It means an awful lot to our country. [SNIP!] But again, more than anything, I've said it before, Lovie Smith and I, not only the first two African-Americans, but Christian coaches, showing that you can win doing it the Lord's way. We're more proud of that.

The interview aired right around 10:13 Sunday night. Nantz's "social significance" question was fine, but he might not have liked the whole answer. Colts owner Jim Irsay also explicitly praised God for the victory, so the ACLU's teeth must have really been on edge at this lack of separation of church and sport.

Every year my wife and I put on a Super Bowl party in our home just outside San Jose; about 25 people attended last night. So I got to observe this brief battle in the Culture War first hand; it was a true Bobos In Paradise moment.

Sitting in front of me in the den were two couples, both in their early 50s; clean cut, casually well dressed, and outwardly extremely conservative looking. But in the surprisingly conformist culture of the Bobo Bay Area, appearances aren't always what they seem. One couple, and the wife of the other, sneered in remarkable condescension at Dungy's remarks. "So he's thanking God for winning. I guess God doesn't like the losing team, huh?!"

Gee I dunno; if a man can keep his faith in something greater than himself through an incident such as this--and clearly Dungy has--then I think he, not to mention God Himself, can put the NFL's weekly rumbles into perspective.

"Why do they say stuff like that?" was the remark I heard immediately afterwards. Well, perhaps one subliminal reason is to generate responses such as yours. (I've heard sports anchor Gary Radnich of the local KNBR 680AM sports radio and former local NBC television affiliate KRON make virtually identical remarks whenever an NFL athlete has thanked God.)

Unlike Janet Jackson's shopworn halftime routine a few years ago, think of this as the most radical example of Epater Les Bourgeois at the Super Bowl.

Update: Give CBS credit--they left Dungy's remarks (which occur at about 2:40) in the clip they uploaded to YouTube of the Lombardi Trophy presentation, now at the top of this post.

Another Update: "Tony Dungy just committed a cardinal sin in the Church of the Left: putting religious identity over racial identity. Blasphemy!"

More Mary Katharine Ham adds:

Despite the fact that Dungy and Lovie Smith both emphasized their faith over their race, all you will hear about from sportswriters is Dungy's race. Sportswriters. Achingly predictable sometimes. Most of the time, in fact.

Indeed.^TM

"Yes, we'll have to raise taxes," John Edwards said on Meet The Press yesterday.

Meanwhile, Dean Barnett (in print) and Michelle Malkin (in a fun video, sort of Masterpiece Theater meets George Carlin's "Seven Words You Can't Say On TV" routine), introduce the world to the Edwards campaign's new Blogstress.

Ed Morrissey writes:

Super Bowl commercials generate a lot of foolish analysis, perhaps as much foolishness as contained in the advertisements. This year provided plenty of that in several varieties, reflecting the efforts of ad agencies to make the biggest impression in their greatest competitive event. However, none of it comes close to matching the idiocy of the analysis provided by the New York Times, whose ad analyst blamed the war in Iraq for making commercials more violent.

One of my favorite lines by the Washington Post's Anne Applebaum from a different front in the culture war seems apropos here:

"Sometimes in the course of a great American debate there comes a moment when the big battle guns fall silent, the pundits run out of breath, and -- unexpectedly -- the long, bitter argument suddenly turns into farce".

Update: "I guess that for New York Times writers, everything, even ads for beer or a Snickers bar have the war as a subtext. I think the guy just took too many deconstruction lit classes in college".

Well, yeah.

Earlier this week, Variety reported:

Less than a week before the Super Bowl, only two movie ads are confirmed for the game -- a steep decline from last year, when eight pricey plugs yielded decidedly mixed results.

Do tell.

And speaking of the Super Bowl and its commercials, Allah has an open thread at Hot Air to discuss those very subjects.

On Friday, we linked to an article describing the new 75 million dollar advertising campaign that newspapers are launching to remind readers that they're still relevant in the online era. In fact, one of the campaign's slogans is -- drum roll, please! -- "The Internet is the best thing to happen to newspapers since the paper boy."

And it certainly would be...if they could just figure out how it works and what to do with it: "Internet 101 at the Los Angeles Times".

No word yet on how many credits Remedial Internet Sock Puppetry counts for, though.

Izzy Video is a Weblog and accompany video podcast series created by Arizona-based videographer Israel Hyman. If you're interested in improving your video podcasting efforts, or any facet of video production, tuning into a few of Izzy's how-to video podcasts certainly wouldn't hurt.

(Hat tip: Pajamas' Andrew Marcus.)

Hillary fires up the Tardis:

Hillary has gone John Kerry one better. The junior senator from Massachusetts of baleful Gallic mien merely voted for the $87 billion . . . before he voted against it.

That's nothing. Hillary Clinton fired up the Time Machine, travelled back to 2002, and assured her fellow Dems that had she been president, the war in Iraq would never have happened.

On this afternoon's Hardball, Chris Matthews played the clip of an angry Hillary saying this today to the winter meeting of the DNC:

"If I had been president in October of 2002, I would not have started this war. I would not!"

View video here.

Good to know! Most excellent adventure, Hillary Dude! And the fact that you voted to authorize President Bush to start the war? No problem! You can fix that during your next travel back in time.

Expect lots more spot-airbrushing (and certainly not just from Hillary) over the next two years.

Brent Bozell writes about the repercussions of Hollywood's Isaiah Washington kerfuffle:

Last October, gossips chattered about a scrap between two male stars on the set of the hip ABC medical show "Grey's Anatomy." Actor Isaiah Washington reportedly called a fellow cast-member a "faggot." The rumors spurred cast-member T.R. Knight to openly declare he is gay.

The irony was rich and inescapable for Robert Peters, the president of Morality in Media. While insisting he had no intention to defend Washington's babbling, he nonetheless asked, "How do we explain the phenomena of TV executives and their high-priced actors being so deeply concerned about the sensibilities of adults in the workplace but so totally unconcerned about the well-being of children in their audiences?"

The networks fill the public airwaves with cursing and sexually charged conversation and simulated sex while countless children are watching, he said, and there are no apologies. (One need go no further than watching "Grey's Anatomy.")

In fact, the networks are in federal court at this very moment, suing for the "right" to drop F-bombs on children whenever they'd like. That F-bomb is OK for national television, but it's not OK for the new F-bomb to be uttered anywhere, even on the privacy of the set, even when it's between adults.

Once again, Hollywood looks hypocritical, so high and mighty about their vaunted right to shock and offend, to push every envelope and melt every taboo, and it doesn't matter how many they offend. But in their neighborhood there are rules, they have their own list of Seven Dirty Words you can't say, their own system of censorship and their own secular sacraments of penance. [Read the rest of Bozell's article's for Washington's terms of penance, which are Byzantine--Ed]

We saw this in November, when comedian Michael Richards screamed the N-word at a comedy club, recorded on a cell phone. No one would rebroadcast the offending word, even as Richards was denounced in every venue. We can applaud that and ask: So why not the same standard for the other obscenities?

The double standard at the Internet Movie Database has been particularly amusing. Their breathless daily reports on the latest twists and turns of Washington's story have featured nothing but references to "f****t". This despite the fact that a search of their database turns up loads of quotes from movies throughout the years that feature the word spelled out in its entirety. Will the IMDB go back and asterisk out that word's use in the rest of the quote database? And then what about the use of the original F-word? Or to pick but one example of another word that modern Hollywood has run into the ground onscreen, the endless use of the N-word in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, not the least of which was by Tarantino himself during his memorable on-screen appearance during "The Bonnie Incident".

But then, foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of political correctness.

(And it goes without saying that Hollywood has largely ignored the story of the "naughts", despite its being spearheaded on 9/11 by homophobes astronomically more intolerant than anything a single actor could ever hope to muster up.)

Don Surber illustrates just how petty a man William Arkin is:

I don’t want to write about this again, but here is where military/homeland security blogger Bill Arkin of the Washington Post went wrong: He picked on a kid.

Ernie Pyle never did. The American reporter takes on the brass, never the troops.

Arkin’s woes began when Spec. Tyler Johnson, 21, was asked by NBC News what he thought of the war protesters.

Now it all makes sense: the one thing the elite media hates is when anyone poaches on their territory. Opining is our job. Leave it to the pros--we'll determine what you should think!

To slightly paraphrase something I wrote in 2005, newspapers hold themselves out as representing "the little guy"--until the little guy decides to go into the same business of offering news and/or opinion to the public. (And here's a boatload of examples therein.)

This paragraph by Arkin in his pseudo-apology today stuck out to Don much as it did to myself when I first read it:

After writing off all his critics as “arrogant and intolerant” on Thursday, Arkin still didn’t get it today:

In the 30 years that we’ve had an all-volunteer force, this is the first war we’ve had where the justness of the cause is questionable and where we are losing and still could “lose.”

Really? Grenada was not questioned? Panama was not questioned? The Gulf War wasn’t questioned even though the vote in the Senate was 52-47?

Not to mention President Clinton's numerous military excursions in the 1990s, which Rush Limbaugh would routinely dismiss as mere "Meals On Wheels" missions.

Regarding the latter half of Arkin's sentence (nice use of postmodernist quotes around the word "lose", by the way), as Libertas asks on their blog of anyone in Hollywood using similar defeatist rhetoric:

1. What will happen in Iraq if we lose?

2. Are you okay with that?

Finally, Don writes that if Arkin "wanted to call someone a mercenary, he should take it up with Gen. Pace or CSM Mellinger, guys who could fight back: Men who are in charge of the operation".

Well, back in 2003, Arkin did smear Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin as a man "who believes in Christian 'jihad'".

So to be fair, Arkin is willing to fire at will, regardless of rank.

Even as he risks absorbing amounts of rhetorical flak and blowback sufficient to destroy the credibility of lesser journalists in the process!

AP reports that "Newspapers start $75 million campaign to fight image of decline". Gee, whatever led to that impression?

The newspaper industry this week announced a $75 million marketing campaign to declare its relevance in the Internet age as advertising revenues were flat, buffeted by major mergers and a wounded domestic auto industry.

It's the second year in a row that the Newspaper Association of America has advertised directly to its advertisers, trying to change the perception that the industry is on the decline, executives said.

"I am sick and tired of all the doom and gloom reports out there about the death of this industry," said Earl Cox, chief strategic officer of The Martin Agency, the marketing group in charge of the campaign. The perception is "inaccurate and it's unfair and it's unacceptable." [If you say so--Ed]

Ad revenue at its member papers in the third quarter of last year declined 1.5 percent from a year earlier to $11.79 billion, according to the NAA. Traditional print ads fell 2.6 percent to about $11.2 billion while online ads rose 23 percent to $638 million. Total ad revenues were slightly up for the first two quarters of the year.

The campaign attempts to attack the notion that newspapers are being left behind in the battle to attract consumer "eyeballs."

One campaign slogan reads: "The Internet is the best thing to happen to newspapers since the paper boy."

As James Lileks told Hugh Hewitt yesterday:

That's great--you want to reduce the greatest technological achievement of our age down to some seven year old urchin from the orphanage shouting "Wuxtry! Wuxtry!" on the corner. You know, there aren't any paper boys anymore, and the things are being delivered by 45-year old guys who are now delivering the newspaper because they've lost their jobs at the newspaper!

Personally, I think Lileks contributed a far better--or at least far hipper--slogan in 2005:

The Newspaper. A Viable Alternative to Staring Into Space.

When jet aviation took off (so to speak) in the mid-1950s, railroads began numerous ad campaigns to remind all those former rail passengers that train travel was still around, and still equally viable, until Congress created Amtrak in 1972 to stop the hemorrhaging--or at least pass it off from the shareholder to the taxpayer. Perhaps a half century prior, advertising extolled the leisurely pace of horse and buggies over that new-fangled horseless carriage. Of course, like the railroads themselves, that doesn't mean that any of the legacy information sources are going away anytime soon.

In theory though, they could be morphing into something new. As I wrote about another media once declared past its prime last fall in a profile of David Sarnoff:

After a century that has seen the rise of motion pictures, radio, television, the Internet, and other media, we now know that no media fully destroys another. While most believed that the one-two punch of first television and then FM radio would bulldoze AM into obsolescence, it didn’t quite happen, did it? Just ask Rush Limbaugh, Al Franken and the other talkers making their own fortunes from a technology that David Sarnoff popularized nearly a century ago, and still going strong.

But something tells me that this massive newspaper ad campaign, coupled with the equally massive meltdowns in journalistic credibility that accompany it, portends an increasing amount of turbulence in the newspaper world.

Here's one possible way it might shake out. Something tells me that the real future of the news industry will less dramatic, if even stranger.

In the early 1990s, Hillarycare attempted to give America all of the benefits of England's socialized medicine--and cripple the healthcare industry in the process. Now she's proposing to confiscate oil industry profits and put them in “strategic energy fund”, ala Hugo Chavez.

Or as she said in 2004, “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.”

One possible reason that Hillary's presidential efforts might be doomed? Dick Morris says it's in the bag.

James Lileks typically has lots of fun by tweaking the nostalgia of the past with joyful irony. (As opposed to joyless irony, which has been an infinitely more common currency for the last 30 years or so.) But to celebrate ten years of The Bleat--if not the earliest online diary, then certainly one of the earliest that's still going strong and read by a huge audience--Lileks applies the irony beam on himself, and reminds us what the first Bleat looked like in those Jurassic Internet days of 1997.

So what came before the Jurassic period? This.

Charles Johnson wrotes that William Arkin was read the riot act by the Post:

Washington Post “national security” blogger William Arkin (a hard left anti-military writer who has inexplicably been employed as a “military analyst” by NBC and the LA Times) must have been read the riot act by his superiors at the Post, because there’s no other way he would have issued even this much of a weak non-apology: A Note to My Readers on Supporting the Troops.

Last year at this time we had Joel Stein at the L.A. Times; now Arkin. Who's the next mainstream journalist who declares he Supports The Troops by trashing them in print?

I know I've trotted out this 2005 quote by Umberto Eco a few times before, but it dovetails perfectly into Don Surber's Instalanched post today:

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.

Keep that quote in mind, as Don Surber writes:

We have reached a creepy time in our civilization. Socialism has led to secularism and the absence of a religion is driving people nuts. The dark secret is that God does not need religion, Man does. Without God, there is no controlling moral authority. Atheism’s pretensions toward logic overlook the disturbing conclusion that if we are just clumps of chemicals haphazardly assembled through trial and error over time through evolution, then we are not our brother’s keeper. Kill. Rape. Steal. Lie. Cheat. For there is no God under that system, and no reason not to.

Societies need religion. But because all the past religions, like every other endeavor of mankind, were imperfect, the pseudo-intellectuals reject them all. They see salvation only through a new religion. Jane Fonda once embraced Jonestown. Oops.

Call it Gaia, but it is the same caveman reading the entrails of some animal to predict tomorrow. There is the same loony sacrifice to try to sway the gods to spare us. Offered up are SUVs (never pickups) and incadescent lamps and turning off the Eiffel Tower for a few moments. Divinity School dropout Gore makes a perfect leader.

Robert Giegengack, 67, seemed to tell the Philadelphia magazine what his younger colleagues are afraid to say: The science ain’t there.

“I always get sidetracked because, first of all, the science isn’t good. Second, there are all these other interpretations for what we see. Third, it doesn’t make any difference, and fourth, it’s distracting us from environmental problems that really matter.”

He said, “it doesn’t make any difference” because China and India with 2.4 billion people are going to build and drive 10 times as many SUVs as we are willing to give up.

(Why do enviros not go after pickup trucks? It is the Easy Rider rifle racks, isn’t it? Charlie Daniels’ admonition to leave the long-haired, redneck country boys alone is taken serious in Marin County and 90210.)

Glenn Reynolds has frequently written about the lack of seriousness on the part of the global warming obsessives who won't ban their own use of private planes and stretch limos, but I think the third rail of global warming is NASCAR. If Al calls for a ban on that, I'd love to see how his home state of Tennessee reacts if he decides to run for the presidency again.

More Surber:

I mock global warming because it is dangerous. Big business is slowly falling into line. There is your fascism. There is your oppression of scientists. A guy like Giegengack may be the last in a position to speak the truth to all this power:

“There’s all this stuff about saving the planet. The Earth is fine. The Earth was fine before we got here, and it’ll be fine long after we’re gone.”

Delaware’s state climatologist is in trouble for saying the science isn’t there. Blasphemists will be punished.

I don’t know much about science. But I do know coercion when I see it.

I saw Barbara Boxer on the “Larry King Show.” She said the debate is over. That statement of finality is more harmful than all the emissions from all the SUVs ever built. The politicians are using this to expand their power. This is the Patriot Act on steroids.

Unlike the Patriot Act, environmentalism has been affecting millions since the early 1970s. It's the reason gas costs as much as it does (can't build new refineries in the continental US; and especially can't drill in the Vast Pestilential Wasteland of ANWR, ever ever!), and the reason why California had its rolling blackouts in the Gray Davis era, due to a lack of modern power infrastructure. As the global warming crowd gathers steam, watch for many more shortages and price gouges--and many more blights on personal freedom and comfort than anything in the Patriot Act.

Update: Gaia--and NBC--are feeling awfully schizophrenic these days: "NBC: Beware of 'Global Warming'; No Wait, Fear the Cattle-Killing 'Deep Freeze'".

Another Update: "YEEEEE-HAAAAA!"

Scott Ott satirically writes, "A day after a Turner Broadcasting guerrilla marketing campaign for an adult cartoon put Boston on full terror alert, the company said it would reconsider other 'edgy' marketing plans it was about to launch":

Turner had placed dozens of battery-operated light boards displaying an obscene gesture throughout each of the 10 major U.S. cities. A series of Boston bomb scares sparked by the devices forced authorities to shut down roads, bridges and a section of the Charles River yesterday.

An unnamed spokesman for Turner said the company would now review plans for the following guerrilla marketing campaigns designed to “generate buzz” about the cartoon.

– Renting a 747 painted with the show’s name and flying it past skyscrapers in major cities
– Hiring young men to show up in malls, on buses and other heavily-trafficked areas who would suddenly whip open their coats to reveal a special vest with blinking lights, and begin shouting the theme song of the show.
– “Abducting” strangers, blindfolding them, forcing them to their knees and then broadcasting their videotaped “confessions” that they love the cartoon.
– Hiring young men to suddenly stand up on buses and airliners and loudly declare that the new cartoon is “da bomb.”
– Planting hundreds of improvised advertising devices (IAD) that would suddenly flash, make a loud noise and scatter thousands of promotional fliers all over the road or sidewalk.
– Mounting a “viral” marketing campaign in which dozens of journalists would each receive an envelope containing a white powder along with a note daring the recipient to hold his breath until the debut of the new cartoon.
–Calling the White House, Pentagon, Supreme Court and other famous places and claiming to have planted a “dirty bomb” on the front steps, which turns out to be a paper bag full of dog droppings with the show’s logo stamped on the bag.

“These promotional gimmicks are designed to appeal to the kind of adult who would stay up late to watch cartoon characters who use foul language and obscene gestures,” the Turner source said.

In related news, Turner reported that overnight ratings from Boston showed TV viewership got a big boost thanks to the panic that forced citizens to remain in their homes. The company’s CNN division also saw a large increase in viewers eager to follow news of the bomb scares.

And then their ratings hit bottom the second the two dufuses who spearheaded their marketing opened their mouths.

Update: The Boston Herald writes that two fake pipe bombs turned up while the police were tracking down Turner's Lite-Brite-style marketing props. They were "unrelated to the advertising scheme for Cartoon Network’s Aqua Teen Hunger Force, police officials said", according to the Herald.

Greg Gutfeld maybe getting his own late night talk show on the Fox News Channel.

The sounds of HuffPost readers' heads exploding will be audible nationwide if this happens.

Mary Katharine Ham writes that unlike most politicians, President Bush certainly knows his away around heavy machinery, whether it's jet aircraft or Caterpillar D10-model bulldozers:

Bush seems like the kinda guy who can keep a tractor under control, and we all know how he likes to mess with the press kids. (Via IMAO)

North Carolina Governor Mike Easley, on the other hand? Total threat behind the wheel. An N.C. governor that can't handle a stock car? A state disgrace, I tell you.

Didn't Easley get the memo from fellow Democrat Al Gore that Global Warming is the New Holocaust? Why on earth would he be tooling around in a race car messing with Gaia, the ultimate MILF?

What's gotten into the water supply in America's two biggest newspapers? Stephen Spruiell writes, "I think we're witnessing a very public meltdown over on WashingtonPost.com":

Earlier today William Arkin published a new post responding to those who took issue with his characterization of U.S. troops as bloodthirsty and ignorant mercenaries. But while the post can still be found by following the direct link, it has vanished from Arkin's home page. Did someone at the Post direct him to take it down? Or did he himself have second thoughts about certain passages, like this one:

These men and women [in the military] are not fighting for money with little regard for the nation. The situation might be much worse than that: Evidently, far too many in uniform believe that they are the one true nation. They hide behind the constitution and the flag and then spew an anti-Democrat, anti-liberal, anti-journalism, anti-dissent, and anti-citizen message that reflects a certain contempt for the American people.

The best reaction so far is John's from OpFor: "If there is a war that's unwinnable, it's the war on this type of horrid ignorance."

Ace has a good question too: "Since Arkin asserts that the troops should not be allowed to influence the public's opinion on the war, and since the entire left demands that anyone supporting the war become a troop himself — has the left pretty much created a Catch-22 by which any and all support for the war is illegitimate?"

Allah has some related audio that you've got to hear to believe. Arkin's piece represents a turning point — "baby killer" coming back into vogue. How tragic.

Ace asks another good question:

I’m especially taken by [Arkin’s] central complaint about the connn-unnn-drumm that the US military no longer (as if it ever did) perfectly represents the broader beliefs and traits of American society.

Question: What about the connn-unnn-drummm that the US media represents the broader American society even less?

That's a topic we've explored extensively on this site from time to time; here are a couple of representative samples.

Meanwhile, regarding an even larger--if much more fiscally shaky--paper up the Northest Corrider, Charles Johnson adds that the "New York Times Hits Bottom, Digs":

On the heels of Washington Post writer William Arkin’s anti-military piece, now we have the New York Times publishing a picture and video of a US soldier dying in Iraq—before his family was notified. And even though the Times says they’re going to apologize, the video is still there.

This is a new low. The media are in full-tilt failure-promotion mode, and they don’t care who they have to hurt to do it.

Michelle Malkin has more: The NYTimes’ unspeakable violation.

So far the Blogosphere has spotted Chernobyl-style meltdowns in credibility by CBS, the Washington Post, Newsweek, AP, and on numerous occasions, the New York Times and Reuters.

When I interviewed Glenn Reynolds last year for my TCS Daily article on An Army Of Davids, he quoted a passage from Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End that "utopia was a Red Queen’s Race with extinction". Glenn added, "Even if things are going terribly, it will seem like it’s going well, right up until the end".

Have the mainstream media quietly begun some sort of Red Queen's Race of their own? Or is the Blogosphere merely getting increasingly better at catching the media's worst moments and publicizing them? By and large, I believe the general public has come to believe that the vast majority of old media outlets lean to the left, despite the exponentially diminishing claims of objectivity. And since half the country does as well, newspapers and television have a wide audience to aim their content. So does that mean that Blogosphere complaints about the MSM are being read as mere partisan sniping?

The media as a whole aren't going away any time soon, of course (although Hugh Hewitt might argue with that). They're too well funded via advertising, subscriptions, stocks, bonds, and other revenue. But it seems like something has to change--the accumulated weight of all of the errors, gaffes, and uses of wildly slanted tone in otherwise "objective" reporting has to begin to register at some point.

Let's assume there won't be another household name figure like Dan Rather taking a second very public, very spectacular fall from grace anytime soon. How much longer can the media keep all of these gaffes that don't involve a household name media figure under the mat? Sooner or later, the broader public that wouldn't know a Weblog from an iPod will become aware of just how badly a once Elite Media has performed this decade.

Related: Here's a possible Red State Red Queen's Race brewing.

Betsy Newmark writes that "Joe Biden had the most disastrous opening day ever of a presidential candidate in history"--and if anything, that's understating Joe's gaffe.

How bad was it? So bad that even the New York Times ran a surprisingly harsh article on Biden today.

Betsy adds:

Remember how the media tried to figure out if George Allen's mother was a racist and if he'd learned the expression macaca from her because she was from North Africa? Well, are they going to ask Joe Biden if his mother commonly described blacks as "clean as a whistle, sharp as a tack"? Are they going to try to psychoanalyze why these words came out of his mouth in reference to Obama? Or is it just a laugh at Joe Biden. You know, we all expect him to allow his mouth to get ahead of his brain sorta like we all knew that Sandy Berger had a messy desk and so we shouldn't question why he was stealing and destroying classified documents from the National Archives.

And in all the laughter at Biden, people aren't paying attention to what I think was more interesting in his interview - his attacks on Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. After all, he called Edwards' plan for pulling out of Iraq "Fluffernutter." I love that. Can we now quote Biden on all these pullout plans out there? After all, Obama has basically the same idea that Edwards has. And if Joe Biden, so respected by Democrats for his foreign policy expertise, calls such plans "Fluffernutter" who are we to disagree?

Maybe Hugh Hewitt should pose Biden's Fluffernutter line to the spineless House and Senate GOP members he's been having on his show this week.