MSNBC asks Diana West, "Are Adults Acting More Like Teenagers?", as if there's some doubt about this trend.

Related thoughts here and here.

I’ve temporarily decamped to campy Las Vegas for a couple of days. Posting will, needless to say, be sporadic. Maintain narrow stances in the interim.

Update Means-testing!

"President Bush has shown that he is up to speed on the latest historical discoveries on Vietnam. Those who are inclined to disagree should first get up to speed themselves."

What--leave the cocoon of the 1970s and its most fervent myths?

Your quote of the day:

“If it is properly sealed, it should not pose much of a threat unless it is dropped,” said former New York City emergency services director Jerry Hauer, an ABC News consultant.

He was referring to the Phosgene "nerve agent" (apparently of Iraqi origin, to boot) found in an office at the U.N.

This time, you've really failed me, Hans Brix.

CNN, whose credibility became seriously in disrepute after finally disclosing "The News We Kept To Ourselves", is dropping Reuters, infamous for believing that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" (actually, CNN believes that as well) and even more ill-famed after "Picture Kill", involving Adnan Hajj, ace Photoshop expert.

Fortunately, CNN already has a new visual consultant all lined up to replace him!

And their producers can always call upon the crack editorial department here, if need be, to replace Reuters' text-based journalists.

And yet, despite all these incidents, Daniel Henninger actually seems to wonder why a growing number of people don't trust the legacy media.

Go figure.

Making the rounds today is a Condi Rice at Stanford story that's being reported like it's the equivalent of the sled at the end of Citizen Kane and its dollar-book Freud symbolism. But it's old news--here's a January 2005 Grauniad article with the same story.

Meanwhile, Karl of Protein Wisdom has a well researched history of the legacy media and Iraq. I'd add to it what's probably the first use of the Q-word regarding Iraq from CNN--three weeks before fighting against Saddam began in 2003, as well as my spotlight on Reuters' own particular photographic misadventures in the Middle East.

Which dovetails into Buckhorn Road's post on "The Magic Bullet Theory", as it applies to the wire services that are "reporting" out of the Middle East. While there's no mention of Arlen Specter or Oliver Stone, it's further proof that everything old is indeed new again.

My friend (and fellow Blog*Fest*West co-conspirator) Cinnamon Stillwell has some thoughts in the San Francisco Chronicle on the avenue (in front of the court house) where terrorism and censorship meet.

Mickey Kaus asks, “Who has to try to kill themselves in this town to make the front page?”

I couldn't believe--just a few days after their prospective new owner gave them a lecture on how they had to give customers the news the customers wanted--that the editors of the L.A. Times would run the Owen Wilson suicide-attempt story on page B-3. And they didn't! They ran it on page B-4. A little box on B-1 features the riveting headline, "Actor hospitalized." ... Let's see: A world-famous leading man actor, "one of Hollywood's top comedy stars," at the peak of his career, slits his wrists. ... In Los Angeles. ... Where movies are not just gossip material--they are what cars are to Detroit: the big local industry. Page B4! ... Once again, across the continent, with a three hour handicap, the New York Post had plenty of time to put a much better Owen Wilson story on its front page. ... I have run out of ways of saying that the LAT is a pathetic stuffy, faux-newspaper run by respectable liberal twits and doomed to die! Janet Clayton, the paper's well-connected, life-sapping AME, should grab an Annenberg School sinecure while she still can. ...

More: B-4 and After Emailer X notes another example from the past few days:

When director John Singleton killed a pedestrian with his SUV, the news got buried in a squib on B4 in Saturday's paper. Even though the incident happened on Thursday evening and the newsroom had a full 24 hours to work on the story. [link added]

Be merciless, Zell. It's your only hope.

As Mickey writes, for L.A., "movies are not just gossip material--they are what cars are to Detroit: the big local industry". How badly do you have to screw up the endless amount of story material dropped in your lap every day?

As badly as the L.A. Times does...every day.

Meanwhile, Kathy Shaidle has some valuable rehabilitation advice for Wilson: "Woody Harrelson helping Owen Wilson kick drugs is like hiring Albert Fish to babysit your kids."

(Yet another storyline the L.A. Times would be too clueless--not to mention too leftwing--to run with.)

Tammy Bruce notes:

Richard Jewell has been found dead in his home at the age of 44. Jewell was in fact a hero by noticing the suspicious backpack left in Olympic Park, giving people enough warning and moving them out of the way, saving countless lives. Yet, even in today's headlines, the fact that the FBI let leak that he was a (convenient) suspect forever tragically overshadowed his heroism.

Tammy writes that in her opinion:

The FBI gave the media a suspect in an attempt to quell the fears of the Olympics-attending public. Jewell was that sacrificial lamb and another travesty of the Clinton/Reno Department of Justice.

Matt Drudge dubs him "the man the media murdered"--of course, Jewell wouldn't have been the first.

Heh:

Incidentally, three squares? I'll bet Laurie gave Larry hell for that line. Which would explain the bright idea he eventually had to celebrate their breakup.

That's the headline of this essay in industry bible Editor & Publisher. And why not? The media have gotten over objectivity on every other topic ages ago. Of course, given the organizations that big media donates to (or in NBC's case, the business that's their parent company), it's a pretty safe bet that they've long gotten over what ever "objectivity" they once had on environmentalism as well.

(H/T: RC)

Veteran actor Sir Ian McKellen gives a demonstration in magical thinking:

Sir Ian McKellen is so offended by the Bible’s anti-gay stance he makes a point of ripping out the relevant page every time he stays in a hotel room. The openly homosexual actor, a longtime campaigner for gay rights, accepts he shouldn’t vandalise the Bible, but finds it difficult to contain his outrage at the contents of Leviticus 20:13 when he spots the holy book in hotels. McKellen says, “It’s the one thing I find difficult to defend but do go on doing.” The Leviticus 20:13 passage reads: “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them.”

Some random thoughts:

As the late Cathy Seipp once wrote, "Behind the New Age grin of beatific self-righteousness with which so many Hollywood celebrities greet the world often lurks a tantrum ready to erupt."

Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien was a devout Catholic. Funny how that didn't prevent McKellen from appearing in the films based on his legendary books. But a paycheck's a paycheck, right?

I thought trashing a religion's most sacred publication constituted a hate crime these days. Can hotels thow the book--so to speak--at McKellen for such vandalism?

Will Newsweek excoriate McKellen for such an act? And if not, why not?

When will the New York Times hire him as a contributor?

Chris Matthews called Sen. Larry Craig "a sexual deviant and a world-class hypocrite" simply for his wide political stance in a Minneapolis men’s room. What would Matthews say about this?

Update: Related thoughts from Daily Dollop.

(And where it all will end, only knows God.)

As a follow-up to my review for Pajamas of AMC's Mad Men (and in case you're wondering, I'm enjoying the mini-series quite a bit more these days than my original take, now that it's gotten past its overly expository folk-Marxist premiere episode), Rondi Adamson makes a great observation. If you buy into the Babbitt-like subtext of the series, "Every marriage fifty years ago, we are led to believe, was nothing but a loveless travesty, maintained for public perception only, secretly crushing the will to live of both partners." On the other hand:

Say what you will about the role of women fifty years ago, but at least they didn't go out in flippity-flops or stretch pants, flab showing, hair out of control, even the wealthiest among us looking like we're on our way to the convenience store nearest our trailer-park in order to stock up on Doritos. And say what you will about the men, but they wouldn't have dared show up at even a casual weekend barbecue in crocs and shorts, wearing an "I'd rather be sailing" t-shirt or a baseball cap adorned with some silly sports logo, fingers poised to scratch inappropriate areas publicly. They were groomed and matching, even as personal happiness eluded them.

Speaking of the aesthetics of relationships designed largely for public consumption, don't miss her photographic comparison of now and then as an example of how society has "progressed" over the past 50 years.

Rondi's post reminds me very much of something that James Lileks once wrote about the era portrayed--ocasionally with a brush so heavy-handed it must weigh a ton, in Mad Men:

I'm fascinated by the post-war era--1946 to, say, 1964--and in many ways it was an absolute Golden Age. Not perfect; no era is. It's stupid to romanticize a period, but equally stupid to dismiss it for its failure to be as Perfect and Glorious and Wise as our enlightened time. It's easy to snicker at their fear of Communism, but in context I'd be scared too--the USSR was a heavily armed, expansionist totalitarian state, and its domestic apologists were not only wrong, but defending a system that equaled and bested the Nazis for prolonged brutality.

The '50s are sniffed at, I think, because the victors write the history, and in the cultural battles fought by the boomers, the '50s were the era of Mom and Dad, the era of rules, the era of oppression. To the boomers, the '60s are the Years of Glory, because that's when they got to go to college, live in dorms, stay out late and come home blitzed on ditchweed without answering a lot of questions. Being Boomers, they elevated this period to mythic status, and hence we've had to live with this incessant '60s worship ever since. Personally, I'm sick of it; I'm sick of their music, their fashions, their politics, their interminable self-satisfaction and narcissistic desire to regard their generation as the apogee of human endeavor. Yawn. It's been such a stultifying weight on society that we can't seem to come up with anything new--hence this never-ending cycle of nostalgia we're in. We must worship the '60s, be amused by the '70s, and loathe the '80s. Why loathe? Because that's when the boomers first started to feel out of touch, i.e., old.

These are all horrible overgeneralizations. That's the problem. Each era gets boiled down to a few pat symbols. The '50s are sock hops and tail fins. The '60s are protest and Woodstock. The '70s are shag and disco balls. The '80s mean greed and Izod. The '90s--well, who knows. It's all ridiculous; every era is much more than that, and at the same time no different than our own. People eat, work, raise kids, laugh, snore, worry about whether the sofa should go in that corner or over there.

All that said, I have only two points: I love living now, and wouldn't change this time for any other. Point #2: were it a choice between driving a minivan down a vacant suburb strip mall corridor eating a franchise hamburger and listening to some "Big Pimpin'" on the CD player, OR driving a turquoise BelAir around downtown Philly listening to Joe Niagara introduce Chuck Berry tunes on the AM radio--

Not even close.

Tip of the Trilby to the always stylishly-shod Manolo, who also links to the newest blog in his burgeoning fashion empire. I think the punchline at the end of this post actually was understood reasonably well during the era of depicted in Mad Men, and then forgotten, oh, about six or seven years later. I'd like to think that hopefully as The Great Relearning slowly (all too slowly) progresses, it too will be rediscovered.

The syndrome first given name by the good Dr. Krauthammer sure works in mysterious ways--it's caused Rush Hour 3 to become a hit, even as it somehow simultaneously caused Playboy to lose circulation.

Bush Derangement Syndrome--is there nothing it can't do?

Isn't this merely an update of Diane Sawyer's earlier Dictator ‘07 Whistlestop Tour but with guaranteed lower ratings?

I'm sure Katie will pack lots of radical chic designer scarves, needless to say.

Nicole Gelinas writes "Two years after Katrina, New Orleans desperately needs law and order":

As Reverend Nguyen The Vien, pastor of one of eastern New Orleans’s churches, told me earlier this year, “We’re here and we’re rebuilding”—with or without federal assistance. Indeed, Nguyen and his parishioners seemed to treat the subject of government help almost as an afterthought: it may help pay the bills if it ever arrives, but it’s not expected. After Katrina, neighbors fixed up Nguyen’s church under his direction so that they would have a “home base” for eating, sleeping, and showering. Then they set to work rebuilding houses, one by one. Residents of many other neighborhoods—white, black, and Asian—have done the same. As New Orleanians have found out the hard way, the work is backbreaking, but not impossible.

What individual New Orleanians can’t do by themselves is fix the city’s long-broken attitude toward criminal justice. Over and over again during my February trip to New Orleans, I heard how demoralized residents feel when they buy and install new appliances, pipes, and furniture for their flooded-out houses, leave for a day or two, often to temporary homes—and return to find their hard-earned new handiwork ripped out and stolen.

For generations now—and this is the city’s deepest problem—New Orleans has hobbled along without a real law-and-order presence. Criminals graduate from petty crimes to burglary to drug-dealing to carrying illegal weapons to gang robberies to murder, and face few consequences at any stage. The police, and especially the prosecutors, are ineffectual. Since Katrina, things have gotten much worse, in part because criminals, finding life difficult in cities that enforce the law, have returned to the Big Easy in numbers disproportionate to those of law-abiding citizens. Mayor Ray Nagin doesn’t try to fix things, perhaps because, as he often says, he believes crime is a social problem, rooted in a lack of opportunity for poor youth.

The Bush administration has deployed extra federal law-enforcement agents to try to get the worst criminals off the street. The state of Louisiana, meanwhile, has sent the National Guard to patrol half-empty neighborhoods. But just as the U.S. military can only do so much in Iraq when Baghdad’s local government is ineffective, the federal government can’t do much in New Orleans until the city’s local government changes its attitude and behavior. Residents have no reason to think that criminal behavior has predictable negative consequences, because Nagin and New Orleans district attorney Eddie Jordan have failed to make clear that people who commit crimes in New Orleans will be prosecuted.

But President Bush can use federal dollars to try to convince them to do it. In his speech in New Orleans on Wednesday, Bush should announce that he’s ready to ask Congress for $500 million over two years to overhaul New Orleans’s police and prosecutorial forces. But he also should say that the money is contingent on a pledge from Nagin and Jordan that their city’s Number One priority will be law enforcement. Bush should also tie the federal money to measurable results: rational arrests (from quality-of-life crimes all the way up to homicide), effective prosecutions, and, ultimately, fewer crimes.

It’s an enduring mystery why Bush hasn’t used the Katrina disaster to show the world that America can rebuild a major city using a bedrock conservative principle: law and order first. Democrats are welcome to propose the same idea, of course. Obama, Edwards, and Clinton have all mentioned New Orleans’s crime problem in their recent speeches. But they often tie it to a lack of staff and equipment in the city after Katrina—as if it’s a question of rebuilding something that was lost, instead of building from scratch the most essential component of any city’s success. Until politicians understand that basic difference, spending more money—or bragging about past billions spent—while tolerating intolerable conditions in a first-world city is nothing short of disgraceful.

Paging Mayor Giuliani--your next stump speech awaits.

As Glenn Reynolds writes, "Black people are fleeing San Francisco".

But then, who isn't?

Update: On the other hand, San Francisco does have some surprisingly encouraging economic signs, if you just know where to look. Meanwhile, Jeff Goldstein calls on Nancy Pelosi to have a true Profiles In Courage moment.

Related: "Mom, Dad meet my boyfriend, Winkle Paw".

James Taranto wryly notes that "Life Imitates the Movies":

"You've proved to me that all this ultra-violence and killing is wrong, wrong, and terribly wrong. I've learned my lesson, sir. I see now what I've never seen before. I'm cured, praise God! . . . I see that it's wrong! It's wrong because it's like against society. It's wrong because everybody has the right to live and be happy without being tolchocked and knifed."--Alex de Large (Malcolm McDowell) in "A Clockwork Orange," 1971

"First, I want to apologize, you know, for all the things that--that I've done and that I have allowed to happen. . . . I was ashamed and totally disappointed in myself to say the least. . . . I want to apologize to all the young kids out there for my immature acts and, you know, what I did was, what I did was very immature so that means I need to grow up. . . . I feel like we all make mistakes. It's just I made a mistake in using bad judgment and making bad decisions. And you know, those things, you know, just can't happen. Dog fighting is a terrible thing, and I did reject it."--dogfighting conspirator and erstwhile NFL star Michael Vick, Aug. 27, 2007

As I've written before, it's Anthony Burgess' world, we just live in it.

(If it's Stanley Kubrick's world, I'd sooner live in this one than the one with the Korova Milk Bar.)

Update: Of course, sometimes the Ludovico Treatment fails...

Wow, I am so retroactively ahead of the curve on this one!

That's what Tim Blair is joking in response to Washington Post Radio going off the air:

Washington Post Radio, which brought the newspaper’s journalists to the local airwaves, will go off the air next month after failing to attract enough listeners and losing money during its 17-month existence.

Post Radio, which is broadcast regionwide on 107.7 FM and 1500 AM, was not able to draw even 1 percent of listeners during its first year.

What, you've never heard of it either? Exactly.

At least the Wall Street Journal is smart enough to concentrate on Internet video: Once they purchased their cameras and built their green screen set, their ongoing costs drop like a stone; it's got to be a much cheaper strategy to give voice to their pundits.

Since he lacks the dotty elder statesman clout that permits the anchors at CBS's 60 Minutes to get a pass on their ethnic slurs, isn’t it time for Matt to a pay a visit to the General Electric Corporation’s resident in-house all-purpose Torquemada for absolution?

Mickey Kaus writes, "Has Big Hollywood made a single non-anti-US post-9/11 film I missed?"

I wish I could say Bill O'Reilly was wrong about Paul Greengrass' Bourne Ultimatum being an anti-American film, but I saw it last weekend and O'Reilly's right. It's not just that the script plays on opposition to Bush anti-terror tactics--waterboarding, etc. Or that in a moment of calm hero Matt Damon utters maybe 15 of the 40 words he speaks in the film and explains that he's simply trying to apologize for ... well, the CIA's sins, or maybe America's. Just because you oppose waterboarding and believe the U.S. has a lot to apologize for doesn't make you anti-American. The problem is the film is unredeemed by any sense that America or the American government ever stands for or does anything that is right. It is a big hit overseas. ...

The film also made me feel guilty, because I watched Greengrass' United 93 and left convinced it was a searing indictment of Bush's behavior in hours after 9/11. (Air controllers spend much of the film trying to locate the AWOL President they can obtain an order to shoot down the hijacked jet.) I didn't know anything about Greengrass, and the film looked like it had been based on actual records by a meticulously dispassionate observer. But Greengrass' Bourne film undermines his credibility and retrospectively dissolves United 93's anti-Bush power. I don't trust anything the man makes. ... P.S.: Has Big Hollywood made a single non-anti-US post-9/11 film I missed? I can't remember one (aside from Team America: World Police, which was a cartoon).. ... And don't say World Trade Center. That passed up several potentially epic patriotic moments (e.g. the Dave Karnes story) in favor of a tribute to the fraternity of New York transit cops. ... Next up: In the Valley of Elah, a well-made version of the Scott Beauchamp Story. ... Is it the international market that makes our studios behave this way? I sense an underserved domestic niche.

No kidding.

Curiously, in Black Hawk Down and We Were Soldiers, war films whose principle photography was presumably completed just prior to 9/11 and released in early 2002, (after which Tinseltown would enter into a temporary holding pattern, before letting it all hang out) Hollywood seemed to have reached some sort of an accommodation with the American military. I wish I could find the quote--I think it was from James Bowman, maybe Rich Lowry, that while Hollywood's never going to be pro-military, at least they've come around to treating the American soldier as a professional warrior, not a victim of jingoistic hawks.

But don't worry, if there's a President Obama or Hillary in 2009 and he or she decides we need to remain in the Middle East, Hollywood will be more than willing to turn on a dime. Again. Historically, the left has always been able to do smoother 180s than Tony Hawk, any day.

"And, the Stalls Come a-Tumblin' Down".

ABC reports, "The Future of the Workplace: No Office, Headquarters in Cyberspace--Some Companies Don't Care Where Workers Are as Long as They Get the Job Done".

Geez, Toffler wrote about telecommuting in The Third Wave in 1980. Numerous businesses (not the least of which is Pajamas) rely heavily on it. Wall Street firms used telecommuting to stay afloat immediately after 9/11. Why such a breathless headline from ABC?

The Grauniad reports, "Two of the BBC's most senior news and current affairs executives attacked the corporation's plans yesterday for a Comic Relief-style day of programming on environmental issues, saying it was not the broadcaster's job to preach to viewers":

The event, understood to have been 18 months in development, would see stars such as Ricky Gervais and Jonathan Ross take part in a "consciousness raising" event, provisionally titled Planet Relief, early next year.

But, speaking at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival yesterday, Newsnight's editor, Peter Barron, and the BBC's head of television news, Peter Horrocks, attacked the plan, which also seems to contradict the corporation's guidelines. Asked whether the BBC should campaign on issues such as climate change, Mr Horrocks said: "I absolutely don't think we should do that because it's not impartial. It's not our job to lead people and proselytise about it."

Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite, Walter Duranty, David Halberstam, Woodward and Bernstein, Katie Couric, Arthur Schlessinger, Peter Jennings, and Pinch Sulzberger could not be reached for comment.

Some thoughts on artistic nihilism from Megan McCardle and James Lileks. McCardle writes:

Back when I wanted to be a fiction writer, I wanted to be the kind of fiction writer who has a dramatic slide into the abyss. It wasn't long after I stopped writing short stories that it occurred to me that dying old, desperate and alone probably wasn't nearly as inspiring for the people it happened to as it was for twenty-year olds looking for an excuse to smoke too much.

In my teens, I caught a similar whiff of nihilism listening to the Velvet Underground and watching Mick Jagger and--phew!--Anita Pallenberg in Performance. I'm not sure what its youthful attraction is, but if it dates back to Fitzgerald's time, it's a remarkably long-lived trend. Which dovetails nicely into this post on the proto-youth movement of the 1920s and its sadly obligatory cynicism.

Why, young whippersnappers, I'm old enough to remember when satire meant Terry Southern and Larry Gelbart. These days, "satire" is your last refuge when your leftwing hyperbole goes too far, and you'd like a get out of jail free card without the demeaning hassle of having to utter the even more shopworn "I'm sorry if you were offended" line. Or as Ace wrote a few month ago, back when an earnest Rousseauvian primitive was called on her lunacy and also played the "satire" card:

Ah, well. Let's just chalk it all up to nuance. Lefties want a free reign to speak in absurdities, but also want us to go along with their calling verbal mulligans when their absurdities become punchlines.

Which is also Andy Rooney's latest defense for an ethnic reference that, as Noel Sheppard writes, would have caused the left to reach for the smelling salts had Rush or Hannity uttered it. (And incidentally, it's not the first time that an ancient member of the 60 Minutes old guard was caught using similar opprobriums.)

Lots of details, and a running update, at Michelle Malkin's.

The Dissident Frogman explains the difference between a fired and non-fired cartridge to Agence France-Presse. His choice of costume should win him lots of fans at this "news" agency, as well.

Mark Steyn writes that "The American left completes its long strange trip of the last 40 years". If so, then this was a key signpost along the way.

Update: Related thoughts from Cassandra of Villainous Company.

This sounds absolutely horrific:

When Detroiters began to die on the first day, the list was easily contained on the front page of the paper. Dora Brady, 89, in her home on Sanford. Nathan Derby, 97, in his home on West Philadelphia. A worker at Dodge Main, collapsing on the line. A man working in a laundry, another in a restaurant downtown. A night watchman found dead when the office was opened. An elderly man found in a field at Telegraph and Ann Arbor Trail. Another beneath the street sign at Burlingame and 14th.

Edison Fountain in Grand Circus Park was a popular cooling off spot for city youngsters.

There were 10 in all on the first day. No one could have known that it was only the beginning of one of the greatest and deadliest disasters in the history of Detroit.

* * *

Healthy men and women would start off for work in the morning and never come home, falling in the streets or at work when they were overcome by the sun and heat. Weeping relatives besieged Receiving Hospital and the morgue, where the dead were lined up in corridors since no space remained on the slabs. Doctors and nurses collapsed at their stations, overcome by heat and fatigue. "It's as if Detroit has been attacked by a plague out of the Middle Ages," one observer wrote.

It happened in 1936, not this year or 1998.

(Via Small Dead Animals.)

News from the cartoon kingdom, as Berke Breathed's "Opus" cartoon gets censored for exactly the reason you'd suspect.

As does....The Dreaded Ball of Blasphemy!

In Commentary's "Contentions" blog, Michael J. Lewis has some thoughts on a recent essay by Yale's William Deresiewicz regarding America's increasing discomfort with the high priests of academia:

Deresiewicz, himself a professor at Yale, concedes that the modern professor is often a “careerist parvenu.” But if so, it is because he has no other choice; the old-boy network that once allocated teaching jobs among a small elite no longer exists. “[T]he old gentility rested on exclusion,” he explains, “and the new rat race is meritocracy in motion.” And he concedes that today’s professor is far more likely to sleep with his students than his pre-1960’s predecessors, but not with the freewheeling abandon that Hollywood imagines.

Deresiewicz is more interesting when he moves from the sociology of the professor to the sociology of the American public—and why Americans seem so hostile to academics. His proposed explanation is fascinating:

Americans’ traditional resentment of hierarchy and hostility toward intellect have intensified since World War II and particularly since the 1960s. Elites have been discredited, the notion of high culture dethroned, the means of communication decentralized. Public discourse has become more demotic; families, churches, and other institutions more democratic. The existence of academia, an institution predicated on intellectual hierarchy, irritates Americans’ insistence on equality, their feeling that intellect constitutes a contemptible kind of advantage. At the same time, as American society has become more meritocratic, its economy more technocratic, people want that advantage for themselves or their children. With the U.S. News rankings and the annual admissions frenzy, universities are playing an ever-more conspicuous role in creating the larger social hierarchy that no one acknowledges but everyone wants to climb. It’s no wonder that people resent the gatekeepers and enjoy seeing them symbolically humiliated.

Deresiewicz may well be right about this, but one element is missing from his spacious essay: the extent to which college professors have been complicit in their own loss of public prestige, particularly in the humanities, where Hollywood’s academic rogues are invariably found. Two generations ago they were respected for subordinating their lives to scholarship, and much of the prestige of their academic subjects—whether Shakespeare or Descartes or George Washington—accrued to them. Today, Shakespeare, Descartes, and Washington don’t seem to count as much as they once did. Now whose fault might that be?

(Via Pixologic.)

Back in March, I asked if a movie like 300 might have a chance to wake Hollywood from its half-decade of artistic slumber, and concluded:

Obviously, not in the short term. With the exception of Spider-Man 3, virtually all of the innumerable trailers yesterday before 300 highlighted Hollywood's current phase: dank, gross, low-budget nihilistic horror films, and, in a very similar genre, the latest effort by Quentin Tarantino, which featured the disgusting image of a buxom young woman whose leg is amputated and replaced with a machine gun, which she alternately walks on and fires at the baddies (baddies being a relative term in a Tarantino movie, of course) by crouching in some sort of kung fu-style pose spraying bullets upward. (No, really.)

Brent Bozell has some thoughts on this new genre of "torture porn":

As long as there’s been a Hollywood, there have been “horror” movies. But what qualifies as horror in the eyes of today’s horror movie manufactures is altogether different from anything Alfred Hitchcock considered as art.

Take Darren Bousman, director of the forthcoming horror flick "Saw IV." He eagerly told MTV.com that in his new movie, "There is a scene...where I physically regurgitated in my mouth...There is stuff in this movie that I’m dying to see whether it gets past the MPAA [ratings board]." Scenes that make the directors vomit make them happy? Bousman told a horror-movie website he’s looking forward to his next movie, a horror-film-meets-musical: "There’s nudity; there’s violence; there’s tons of hot girls; there’s breaking out in song while ripping spinal cords out. It’s great!"

Perhaps you’re thinking that these remarks sound like over-enthusiastic pre-release publicity, and I agree. But now take Eli Roth, the maker of the recent flop "Hostel: Part II." His delight with gory movie-making is breathtaking. He told Interview magazine that, "Everybody says that I'm different on the days we're shooting the gore – that I'm just extra happy. I try to have that same excitement and enthusiasm for every scene, but when we're doing some really disgusting scene I'll catch myself gleefully jumping up and down at the monitor. I'm so happy I could cry."

And then he said something even more remarkable: "We're in a really violent wave, and I hope it never ends. Hopefully we'll get to the point where there are absolutely no restrictions on any kind of violence in movies."

On the bright side, I think this "really violent wave" signals the end of the nation's momentary "big puritanical mode" the makers of Basic Instinct 2 used to excuse their poorly-conceived, poorly-written and poorly-acted sequel from achieving box office nirvana.

(As to why Hollywood is having to resort to tactics that would have made William Castle and Ed Wood--not to mention most carnival barkers--blush to sell tickets, click here.)

Don't worry, they'll follow-up on FoleyGate as soon as they get back to this even earlier election-eve chestnut.

The New York Times' ombudsman has some thoughts on what we once dubbed (ala the Feiler Faster Principle) the Internet Immortality Thesis.

As Michael Wade writes, Lee Harris' new book "will be gaining a lot of attention in the months ahead".

With inflation and unemployment spiraling out of control, that can only mean one thing: it's time for serious talk of a leftwing coup. Maybe even a putsch!

I'm only surprised at how long it took him to join the rest of the conspiratorial denizens in the Star Wars cantina; as Charles Johnson writes, the pomposity of his headline is a classic.

Update: Victor Davis Hanson adds:

Two observations come to mind.

First, we know why there is now a colloquial verb in English "to fisk."

Second, The "Even I" of Fisk's title should read "Especially I."

These are sad times in the West, but the inevitable wages of a quarter-century of elite postmodern thought.

Speaking of which, David Frum has an amusing look back at how one of postmodernism's founding fathers was seduced by the Iranian revolution.

If, as James Piereson suggests (and welcome to the party, pal! What took you so long?), the Cold War assasination of JFK led sixties-era Democrat elites down the rabbit hole of conspiracies, Noemie Emery brings a report on the latest comings and goings of the paranoid style:

The fascists are coming! Or rather, they're already here, installed in the White House, planning like mad to subvert the Constitution and extend their reign in perpetuity, having first suppressed and eviscerated all opposition and put all of their critics in jail. Thus goes the rant of America's increasingly unhinged left. If only, sigh many Bush partisans, wondering when this administration will get out of the fetal position and show some fighting spirit. To them, as to most reasonable observers, the White House shows the chronic fatigue of a two-term presidency reaching its final year. Nonetheless, paranoia about what Bush and Co. are up to preys on the minds of many progressives, who have progressed, in this case at least, beyond reason.

(Incidentally, just to check, is Noamie considered a member of Bill Kristol's posse of thug rappers?)

My current favorite is Andrew Sullivan's newest riff, on "The Weimar President". I can only guess that Andrew believes that President Bush is an elderly figurehead leading a weakened but relatively benign quasi-socialist administration suffering the ravages of hyper-inflation and that Hillary, Obama or whoever his successor is, is the next Hitler, about to install a terribly malevolent war machine and concurrent massive welfare state?

Further deconstruction of this lead zeppelin of an analogy, here.

To follow-up on the Katie Couric post below, as I've written before, it can't be much fun to be CBS these days. Nikke Finke writes:

I've learned that egoist Les Moonves is talking out of both sides of his mouth concerning the erupting controversy over his CBS fall reality show Kid Nation. On the one hand, I'm told his CBS board of directors has been assured that the company is conducting "an internal investigation" into Kid Nation. "Everybody is being interviewed. All the footage will be watched. We will give the board a full report on what happened. This is of great concern," I understand directors were told. But, publicly, CBS is denying all allegations it violated any laws or put any children in jeopardy during the production. So how can Moonves stand behind CBS' denials when its own internal probe has barely begun? Or is there really no internal probe going on? Meanwhile, he hopes to ride the publicity from the controversy all the way to great ratings in September. For this and so many other reasons, Moonves needs to cancel the broadcast of Kid Nation.

Finke writes, "I'm shocked by what I've just heard from CBS". Even if you'd Ra^ther set aside the obvious reason, all I can ask, at this late date is...Why?

“There is no elegant way out for Katie", writes Myrna Blyth, quoting the last line in Ed Klein’s unauthorized biography, Katie: The Real Story:

What is interesting is the analysis of the reason for Katie’s morning TV success. According to Klein:

Andrew Tyndall, whose Tyndall Reports monitors television news said, “Being a morning anchor… requires wearing a multitude of hats. One a hard-news hat…a human-interest hat, a celebrity-interview hat and a household-feature hat. Nobody has been able to do four out of four in the morning but Katie.”

But this skill set has proved of little help in doing the job that she now has and wanted so much, the job her journalist father always told her was the best one in television “sitting in Walter Cronkite’s seat.”

Since her takeover of The CBS Evening News, Couric has suffered a disastrous year—and it isn’t getting any better. Les Moonves, the CEO of CBS who lured her to the network and masterminded the massive publicity campaign that preceded her first CBS broadcast, recently told a reporter he takes no responsibility for how her show has failed. Klein writes,

Katie [is now] damaged goods…At heart, Katie was not an anchor—sober, authoritative and wise. She had reached the height of television stardom by being what she had been in her father’s house: cute, funny and girlish. There was no way to reconcile her ambition with her personality.

Kind of makes you tear up, recalling the way Katie used to do during human-interest stories on Today. But, hey, it is hard to feel sorry for someone making $15 million a year, especially if you were on the other end of one of her self-absorbed tirades.

While the money's nothing to sneeze at, Katie's timing is certainly suspect: taking over a show that was already damaged goods (arguably along with its entire news division) thanks to its previous anchor, that's broadcast on a legacy medium that, to put it mildly, has seen its better days.

"You know it's bad when your own ombudsman compares you to Richard Nixon".

As I've written before, whom gods destroy, they first make into unknowing Nixon parodies.

ESPN reports that the NFL has announced that they're suspending Michael Vick "indefinitely":

The NFL has suspended Falcons quarterback Michael Vick indefinitely without pay following his admission of guilt in a dogfighting scheme.

On Friday, Vick filed his plea agreement in federal court admitting to conspiracy in a dogfighting ring and agreeing that the enterprise included killing pit bulls and gambling. He denied making side bets on the fights, but admitted to bankrolling them.

Friday afternoon, a letter to Vick from NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said, in part:

"Your admitted conduct was not only illegal, but also cruel and reprehensible" and regardless whether he personally placed bets, "your actions in funding the betting and your association with illegal gambling both violate the terms of your NFL player contract and expose you to corrupting influences in derogation of one of the most fundamental responsibilities of an NFL player."

Goodell freed the Falcons to "assert any claims or remedies" to recover $22 million of Vick's signing bonus from the 10-year, $130 million contract he signed in 2004.

A few days ago, Yahoo Sports' Dan Wetzel described Vick's recent travails as "Unique talent, inexplicable fall":

We've grown callous to the self-destructing rich and famous of sports and entertainment, be it from drugs or drink, divorce or gambling, even murder and mayhem.

But dogfighting? Did Michael Vick really blow it all – a $130 million contract and multiple endorsement deals – to pursue this barbaric hobby in the woods of Virginia?

"People are going to start looking at me with stupidity," Vick told ESPN during the NFL draft, when he was still declaring his innocence. "That's stupid."

It's beyond stupid. The NFL employs players who have been convicted of spouse abuse, involuntary manslaughter due to drunken driving and obstruction of justice in a homicide investigation, to name a few. It's not called the National Felon League for nothing.

In Hollywood, we've come to treat troubled actors and actresses as theater. In Washington, D.C., political sex and bribe scandals are met with a yawn.

Yet this one shocked America, in part because of the viciousness of the crime and in part because of its senselessness.

Vick isn't some talentless starlet or a hack politician. He was a true star with true ability, and in his prime at 27, set up to be a top player in America's top sport.

The key phrase there is "set up"; not in the sense of being framed, but being coddled by the NFL. For several months, Debbie Schlussel has noted that the NFL protected Vick's image on numerous occasions, including banning sales of Falcons' jerseys bearing his number and his two alter-egos, "Ron Mexico" and "Ookie", both infamous among NFL fans. The league magically caused a sure drug-related arrest at Miami International Airport to vanish. This may or may not be tied in with the NFL itself, but it's also worth noting that the senior Jim Mora lost his radio show after agreeing with a guest that his son's most mercurial player was a "coach killer", an otherwise fairly common phrase amongst sports fans.

Every year, the NFL invites veteran players to address rooms full of newly drafted rookies on the exponentially increased public exposure and off-the-field hazards associated with playing America's most-watched professional sport. And every year, by protecting players such as Vick, the NFL nullifies its own message. Perhaps if they had intervened earlier with Vick, his career wouldn’t have been put on indefinite hold with such a nuclear flameout.

James Pethokoukis lists a number of reasons why President Bush bailing out homeowners would be an incredibly unfortunate idea.

(Incidentally, at least America's housing issues don't slice the nation apart anywhere near as painfully as those in Russia.)

It always saddens me when an extreme religious faith distances a young person from his much more agnostic parents.

Sometimes irony really can be ironic, as MSNBC falls for a quote on an Al Sharpton parody blog (which is only fair, as long ago, they fell for the "real" Sharpton). Tawana Brawley, not to mention Georges Sorel, could not be reached for comment. And as the Gawker blog notes, "The next time someone trots out the adage about bloggers not being reporters, we're going to note that reporters aren't exactly reporters these days either."

But hey, they do get to decide "what is news and what isn't", and much more importantly, what's haiku-worthy.

That was fast--as a follow-up to my post late last night, the Technorati "About Us" page now reads:

Currently tracking 100 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media.

Sometime in the last hour, the 100,000,000 blog arrived. Whatever its topic (and I wonder if Technorati can track which blog it is), congrats, and welcome to the Blogosphere!

Update: It's a digital quagmire, as the "grim milestone" watch begins!

The Technorati "About Us" page contains the following line:

Currently tracking 99.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media.

100 million is right around the corner. Remember three years ago (a millennia in Internet time, I know) when six or seven million blogs seemed like a lot?

(And yes, heeding Theodore Sturgeon's best-known aphorism is particularly key here.)

Daniel Henninger has some thoughts on what the deaths of two firemen in the abandoned Deutsche Bank builfing opposite Ground Zero tells us about post-9/11 America:

The details of this public-policy morass are no exception in the post-9/11 world. They are the norm. The hyper-complex requirements and mindset reflected in the public record over 130 Liberty St. mirror the endless debate and litigation we've also layered into efforts to surveil and prosecute terrorists.

Yes, partisanship plays its part, but intellectual hubris and self-regard plays a larger part. We've got a society that's smarter than ever, but maybe too smart for its own good. Whether the problem before us is national security, the environment or protecting baby, we compulsively drive the system now to develop the most exquisite, complex procedures, which allow us to think ourselves both perfectly safe and ethically perfect.

Procedural perfectionism has been raised to religious status. Normal people now think like lawyers, bureaucrats and administrators, rather than as in the techworld, where the culture values fast mid-course corrections and can-do.

One may ask: The political and commercial forces that produced stasis for 130 Liberty St. may outwardly mourn the deaths. But would any of them pull back from their obsessions now to get the building down fast? I doubt it.

We have met the enemy, and he is still us.

So Manhattan's culture has transformed dynamists into stasists? Hasn't it specialized in standing athwart history for decades?

Sitting in for Dennis Miller and interviewing Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, Andrew Breitbart notes:

In a famous interview on Fox News last September, Bill Clinton told Chris Wallace he authorized a finding for the CIA to kill Osama bin Laden. "We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since.” Today, Newsweek's Michael Isikoff told Andrew Breitbart, guest hosting on the Dennis Miller Show, that the new CIA watchdog report reveals that Clinton's claim tends to "stretch reality." The original video clip and the full Isikoff report are in the related links.

Glenn Reynolds suggests, "Someone should ask Sandy Berger about this"; further thoughts from Ed Morrissey, at the newly redesigned Captain's Quarters.

As I've written before, the past 25 years have seen a quiet revolution in home music recording, that's right in line with the growth of other "Army of Davids" technologies that dramatically empower individuals. In 1982, the breakthrough product that made home recording possible was the cassette four-track recorder. These weren't one half of the eight-track deck that you had in your '77 Chevy Vega; they used an ordinary stereo audio cassette, but played that cassette in only one direction, so that there were now four individual, synchronized tracks to record on. You could put a drum machine (another newly designed product) on one track, a bass guitar on another, an electric guitar on the third and a vocal on the fourth, and voila! Instant DIY song. (Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska album was home-brewed using a cassette four-track machine.)

But most musicians wanted to do more than that--and these days, companies such as Boston-based Cakewalk offer products that give the average home musician as many tracks as his PC's memory and hard drive will hold. Not to mention PC-based software synthesizers that are also infinitely more flexible than their 1980s counterparts. George Martin and Quincy Jones cost a lot more to hire, but the same basic technology they use in their recording studios is increasingly accessible to those recording home.

Having launched in 1987, Cakewalk are currently celebrating their 20th year of business, and my interview with Greg Hendershott, Cakewalk's CEO, is an attempt to bridge the gap between those early days and now. Ideally, it will make a good overview to those new to PC-based recording, but dying to dip their toes into the water. It's 20 minutes long, 18.7 MB in size, and can be downloaded here, or via our Apple i-Tunes page. (No iPod required; virtually any PC can download and play an MP3.)

Oh wait, that's the catch phrase from Death of a Salesman, not to mention the headline to every one of Arthur Miller's obits. But Mickey Kaus notes that People magazine (which had then only recently been spun-off from the march of Time) paid little attention in 1977 to Elvis's death--exactly two paragraphs' worth in the issue that followed his demise. (Or return to the mothership, depending upon your personal epistemological beliefs in the after-Elvis-world):

Elvis was no longer a big deal in some circles, but he was in other, well-populated sectors. This scenario--the media elites not caring about Elvis, but then why are all those people going to Memphis?--reinforces the point that the culture of celebrity is an organic, populist (and pre-Diana) phenomenon and not a recent, top-down corporate trick.

Some things never change: as I wrote back in 2004, the elite media also paid short shrift to a quite similar outpouring of grief after Dale Earnhardt's death in a Nascar accident in early 2001, from what must be something of a shared fan base, and both being considerably drawn from those living in what we now call the Red States.

But then, that will happen when you have a one-size-fits-all legacy media attempting to cover an increasingly diverse country primarily from offices in New York and L.A. (And as can be seen by the above two examples, failing pretty badly.)

Andrea Harris asks, "How can I care about people who don't care about themselves?"

Natalie Solent recounts the story of a woman left alone to give birth (when she had been told it was dangerous to do so) all by herself in a toilet in a hospital, while nurses refused to help. In Britain. She wonders: "How do we get our nerve back?"

The answer is you don't; nerves don't grow back. They're dead, Jim.

My youthful Anglophilia is just about gone and events like these are helping speed it on its way to oblivion. I'm glad I got to go to England when I was just out of high school, before the zombies took over. I will admit, I've been slogging through Mark Steyn's America Alone, and it's been a hard go not because he's a lousy writer (though the book is spready, and could really be compressed into a few of his columns) or because I disagree with him (I agree with just about everything he says), but because I simply don't care about Europe anymore. How can I care about people who don't care about themselves? The few actual live humans who still live in that hollow charnel house should leave before it collapses and takes them down with it.

It sounds like a fair number of them actually are doing just that.

British study finds: "Bar workers more likely to die of drinking".

(I need a study to tell me this?)

Update: From The Onion: "Study: Smokers Bad For Workplace", which actually dovetails remarkably nice with the above legit study!

In his screed against Victor Davis Hanson, Andew Sullivan has railed against "The vileness and chutzpah of the current neocon right". Previously, Sullivan has attacked theocons. And with his long-running "Derbyshire Award", it's pretty safe to say that Andrew's never been a big fan of paleocons.

That kind of narrows things down a bit, it seems. What's left on the right? While the legacy media will forever refer to him as "Conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan", it seems reasonable to ask, what branch of conservatism is Andew supporting?

(Via Glenn Reynolds.)

Update: Related--and NSFKS!--thoughts on "Our New Orwell" from Mickey Kaus.

"George Wallace Assailant to Leave Prison; AP Fails to Note Wallace Was Democrat".

Woodrow Wilson could not be reached for comment.

U.S. News & World Report reports, "Momentum Shifting To GOP In Iraq Debate".

Good. But somebody tell this member of the GOP.

Even as the New York Times has the gall to claim "the pullout from Vietnam had few negative repercussions for the United States and its allies", Brent Baker opens up the legacy media's memory hole to remind the rest of us of "The Unnewsworthy Holocaust: TV News and Terror in Cambodia":

In the wake of President George W. Bush's reminder Wednesday about how the “killing fields” of Cambodia followed the 1975 U.S. pullout from Vietnam and the region, a look back at a study, by William C. Adams and Michael Joblove, which documented how from 1975 to 1978 the three broadcast network evening newscasts, as well as the New York Times and Washington Post, virtually ignored the ongoing massacre of millions by the Khmer Rouge. Below is an excerpt, fairly lengthy since I can't imagine this is online anywhere else, from the MRC's 1990 book, “And That's the Way It Isn't: A Reference Guide to Media Bias.”

As Mickey Kaus recently wrote, the media is "in the business of killing stories these days, not publishing them, apparently", to which Steven Den Beste added:

That has always been the most important power of gatekeepers. Not in deciding when to open the gate, but in when to close it.

And that's the reason that the gatekeepers are so upset by the rise of blogs and other alternative media. They still have the ability to open the gate for stories they like, and to try to focus attention on those stories, but they no longer have the ability to close the gate because thousands of bloggers have dug tunnels under the fence.

At least news can escape today, unlike many of the Cambodians of the late 1970s.

Andrew Cusack of the New Criterion writes:

If our previous post on the wonders of British youth "culture" made you wonder why the natives still bother to live in Britain at all, the answer is: more and more aren't. The BBC reports that more people left the United Kingdom last year than in any year since they began taking records. But look on the bright side: the greater the number of Britons emigrating means more room for the new immigrants who'll be needed to fill London's mega-mosque.

The bluer the state, the more likely people will leave it.

Ed Morrissey's newly redesigned Captain's Quarters site is setting sail--hop onboard and take a look!

I picked up a copy of Diana West’s The Death of the Grown-up at Borders tonight; it's a topic that certainly fascinates me (see these previous posts for some related thoughts), while I'm sympathetic to John Leo's criticism in the Wall Street Journal, it certainly seems like there's still plenty of material for West to mine.

In his latest Bleat, James Lileks excerpts this passage of Leo's review:

The 1920s is a far better place to begin detecting the seeds of adolescent revolution, but Ms. West thinks not. She finds "no mention of teen-age problems" in the famous Middletown studies done in Muncie, Ind., in the '20s and '30s by Robert Lynd and Helen Merrill Lynd. But in fact the Lynds noted the rising conflict in Middletown between parents and their young. Arguments about too much drinking (this was during Prohibition) and staying out too late were common. The automobile, mass produced and available to ordinary families, offered the young the means of forming peer groups and a place to have sex.

The Roaring '20s were a shock that did much to loosen parental controls. A familiar argument holds that the rebellion of the 1960s might have occurred decades earlier if the Depression, World War II and the recovery period of the 1950s had not intervened. By not noticing the forces unleashed in the '20s, Ms. West misses a chance to analyze the 1930s youthquake that might have been.

In response, Lileks asks us to "Imagine a 60s-style youth movement in the 30s":

Can you imagine these people grooving to Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway at Woodstock? (Armstrong, after all, did enjoy the herb.) If the Depression hadn’t been as severe, and the youth of the thirties had fought the draft and argued for pacifism, could we have fought WW2?

Actually, it's one of the great what-ifs to ponder how close we came to just that last item.

From all accounts, Stalin was apparently quite shocked that Hitler decided to violate his pact with the Soviet Union, and spent a week in deep depression immediately afterwards, even as Nazi Germany was racing through the USSR. Prior to that though, as I've written before, American-based communists such as Pete Seeger, Dalton Trumbo, and Charles Chaplin, were all, in their own way, issuing material whose pacifistic sentiments would have been right at home in the anti-Vietnam war late-1960s. As would these elite British youth of the late 1930s, prompting George Orwell to write, "Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist", a truism to this day.

There's another interesting 1930s and '40s-themed review that went up yesterday, this one by David Frum, of Gotz Aly's Hitler's Beneficiaries (which I'm also working my way through, contra Pat.), a sort of Mirror Universe version of Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man:

Gotz Aly's Hitler's Beneficiaries doesn't look like an explosive book. Written in a dry, unsensational style, it studies that driest and least sensational of subjects: public finance.

Aly devotes little attention to generals and commandants. The leading figures in his pages are central bankers and revenue administrators. After the Second World War, many of these men presented themselves as apolitical technicians; many remained in government to serve the democratic Federal Republic. And yet, as Aly tells it, these public financiers in the security of their offices committed crimes as black and terrible as any committed by the black-coated murderers of the SS.

Aly's first great message is that the Nazi regime was a popular one. There was little resistance to Hitler—and comparatively little repression against non-Jewish Germans. In 1936, the Nazi concentration camps contained only 4,700 prisoners, and not all of these were political. In 1937, the Gestapo employed only 7,000 officers and men to police a population of 80 million. (By contrast, the East Germans would employ 190,000 Stasi to monitor a population of 17 million.)

The secret of Nazi popularity was not—repeat not—the allegedly fanatical anti-Semitism of the German people. Rather, Hitler and the Nazis built a welfare state that delivered real benefits to German families. This welfare state was paid for by plundering first Germany's Jews and then the conquered nations of Europe.

Hitler often gets credit for pulling Germany out of the Depression. This claim is false: Germany in 1938 remained a poorer country than the Germany of 1928. Hitler launched a military buildup and created major social programs that Germany could not afford. By 1939, the Nazis were spending 20.5-billion marks on the military and 16.3-billion marks on civilian programs—all supported by only 17-billion marks in tax revenue.

Protective of his popularity, Hitler refused to tax ordinary Germans to pay these bills. (Throughout the Second World War, democratic Britain accepted much higher taxes than Hitler dared impose on totalitarian Germany.)

None of that seems entirely surprisingly; David Ramsay Steele's 2003 essay on "The Mystery of Fascism", seems to dovetail remarkably well with the above passage.

(Incidentally, Reason also had an good review of Hitler's Beneficiaries that's also well worth your time.)

"Dirty Harry" of Libertas watches Nicole Kidman's The Invasion so you don't have to--and based on its pathetic box office on its opening weekend, you didn't. Which was wise:

The small amount of goodwill the better parts of the film create are blown apart by an absurd ending that tries to cover up the films incoherent themes and ideas in smug irony. It’s so obviously tacked on and cowardly I almost wish the filmmakers had gone for it and just told us the world would be better off without us.

That would certainly have made this niche audience happy!

Update: while I was wandering around Borders tonight ( I know, shocker), I noticed this book, also designed to appeal to that same niche market, which is also closely related to these old friends of ours. C'mon Hollywood--doesn't this gang deserve a movie whose ending they'd enjoy?!

Related: "Oh, how the mighty have fallen": When actors make all the wrong career choices after an early moment of brilliance--or at least charismatic competence.

Ed Morrissey writes:

Is it fair to paint this report as evidence that the fault for our unpreparedness belongs to the Clinton administration? I'd say that it's not healthy to think along these lines. It's better to leave the partisan sniping aside and have everyone learn the lessons than it is to turn this to partisan advantage. Tenet ran the CIA, and he's responsible for its performance. Bill Clinton appointed him, and George Bush kept him on the job.

I would say that it's fair to point out that passages such as "No comprehensive report focusing on bin Laden was written after 1993," and "no comprehensive report laying out the threats of 2001 was assembled" put lie to the assertions by Clinton-era national-security officials that they handed the Bush administration a turn-key strategy to deal with al-Qaeda. The IG's report clearly shows that no such strategy existed -- which is why Bush insisted on developing one.

Once the primaries are over and Hillary begins to shift her rhetoric closer to the center, it will be interesting to observe the tightrope she'll be forced to walk in regards to describing her husband's handling of this issue, as she pivots towards 2008.

Time to go hunting, boys:

The poor old Scandinavian moose is now being blamed for climate change, with researchers in Norway claiming that a grown moose can produce 2,100 kilos of methane a year -- equivalent to the CO2 output resulting from a 13,000 kilometer car journey.

Global warming--it's a Second Ammendment issue!

(With apologies to Groucho and Jonathan Klein for the above headline.)

Last summer, in the Christian Science Monitor, Julia Gorin wrote:

It's a peculiar thing that as the threat of global terrorism reaches a crescendo, so apparently does the threat of global warming - at least that's what some would have us believe.

Tough language is borrowed from the war on terror and applied to the war on weather. "I really consider this a national security issue," says celebrity activist and "An Inconvenient Truth" producer Laurie David. "Truth" star Al Gore calls global warming a "planetary emergency." Bill Clinton's first worry is climate change: "It's the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it."

Freud called it displacement. People fixate on the environment when they can't deal with real threats. Combating the climate gives nonhawks a chance to look tough. They can flex their muscle for Mother Nature, take a preemptive strike at an SUV. Forget the Patriot Act, it's Kyoto that'll save you.

Reuters brings it all back home, by bringing their displacement full circle: "Climate Change a Security Issue Like Cold War".

"Summer's Fall: NYC Faces Record-Breaking Cold".

Sippican Cottage says:

The New York Times et al., like to tell people that the internet is killing their business. Please. I can't be the only one that noticed that the front page is the editorial section now, and the editorial page has the quality and usefulness of unhinged rants. I'm not really in the market for either. And I'm too young to read the obituaries.

I certainly do get my information in glittering pixels every day. But as usual, they're either fooling themselves, or trying to fool you. I buried you, Mr. Newspaper, in a shallow grave, a decade before I saw that magnificent arial text on that tiny little 486 intel computer over a modem. And I'm not interested in whether they're fooling themselves, or trying to fool me, trying to blame the internet.

Meanwhile, Ace runs roughshod over the L.A. Times' latest anti-blog screed by Michael Skube. (Just add it to this pile and light the bonfire.) Ace adds that it "Seems an odd time for the MSM to lecture bloggers about the need for 'the patient fact-finding of reporters'":

No one -- no one -- ever got into the media to report on local car collisions or new and exciting federal farm subsidies.

What they got into the media to do was to tell people how and what to think, and its that prerogative of the Intellectual Aristocracy, and not the unglamorous business of information collection, collation, and dissemination, that they're crying about losing.

Note that they do not dare actually state their belief that they are specially qualified to do the thinking for the American public. They can't say such a thing. The public would laugh at their presumption -- some idiots went to a one year finishing school (and not a particularly academically demanding one besides) and now they have the special privilege of deciding what the public should think about each and every issue?

So instead they have to make the argument dishonestly -- whining about a job that isn't seriously threatened in order to preserve the job they really fret about losing, but a job which no one ever asked them -- let alone beatified them -- to do. How reporters got conflated with analysts and general-purpose experts without portfolio is anyone's guess. But that conflation having been made (at least in the minds of some, particularly their own), they'll be damned if they're going to give that gig up now.

Reporters seem to think they sell the news at 75 cents a copy -- and they tell us all how to interpret and analyze that news at no additional charge.

They think they're being generous by offering us their scary talents in this regard for free.

The above headline is a quote from Ace, but Jeff Goldstein, as usual, places it into added additional ironic context:

In his New Republic book review of Lucy Riall’s Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero, Alexander Stille writes:

Riall does not overemphasize the modernity of Garibaldi; she recognizes that he is not quite our contemporary. One of the interesting cultural differences that separates us from the culture of the Garibaldi cult is the almost willful use of wholly invented stories and details in the vast majority of Garibaldi biographies that circulated at the time. Even though there was plenty of dramatic and novelistic material from the real life of Garibaldi to draw on, writers seemed to go out of their way to fabricate stories and details. As Riall observes, conforming to the canons of contemporary romance and melodrama was much more important than any notion of journalistic accuracy and historical verisimilitude. “One of the most striking features of this script,” she writes, “was the apparently seamless blend of fact and fiction, of novelistic fantasy and political truth, and this blend…seems to have been at the heart of Garibaldi’s public success.”

[my emphasis]

Perhaps that separation of cultural conventions is no so complete as Mr Stille would pretend it to be. Or maybe it’s just that someone forgot to tell Franklin Foer.

For you lawyers out there, tell me: can one get a cease and desist order letter against a rather delightful example of situational irony…?

Speaking of which, Randall Hoven of the American Thinker (it was great to meet Thomas Lifson, his publisher, on Saturday at BFW, BTW, to discuss key TLAs) updates his list of media fabulists to include over 80 prominent members: "It's Not Just Scott Beauchamp (II)".

In US News & World Report, James Pethokoukis writes:

"More Americans making ends meet with less money," was the headline atop a Boston Globe story Tuesday morning. The newspaper went on to tell its readers that Americans in 2005 earned a smaller average income, when adjusted for inflation, than in 2000, $55,238 vs. $55, 714.

What the story notably failed to tell readers is that incomes have been on the rise since 2002, a fact I gleaned from a different version of the story on the New York Times website. (The original version of the Times story had a misleading headline "Average Incomes Fell for Most in 2000-05," but it was later changed to "2005 Incomes, on Average, Still Below 2000 Peak." The Globe story also said that Americans' total income in 2005 was $7.43 billion. I'm pretty sure it's "trillion," not "billion.")

It might have also been nice had either story mentioned the great likelihood that the Internal Revenue Service data the newspapers relied on will show further income gains for 2006 and 2007, given the state of the economy and the continuing rise in real wages. I would have also liked to have the seen the two stories give a nod to the fact that government numbers tend to overstate inflation, and thus real incomes probably did even better than the official numbers show. How about this for a fair headline: "Incomes Grow for Third Straight Year, Though Still Below 2000 Peak"?

More at Bizzyblog.

Does it get any better than this for Michael Bloomberg? He just experienced the ultimate moment of nanny state auto-erotic nirvana, as he bans himself: "Nobody's going to elect me president of the United States."

Bloomberg gave his scoop to a struggling cub reporter named D. Rather, at an little-seen TV network called HDNet. Considering where he made his fortune, I think it's great to see that Bloomberg is still supporting new and alternative media!

Update: More good news! With Bloomberg out, "Accordingly, We Expect Much Less Discussion of Trans-Fats on the Campaign Trail". But it's not exactly like the Nanny State solely resides in him, of course.

Heh.

Dean Barnett asks, "What other industry goes to such lengths to make the vast majority of its customers know they’re second class citizens?"

Meanwhile, Jules Crittenden notes that the paradoxically pacifistic Party of Rage can really get their freak on when they're treated like second class citizens:

Rep. Bob Filner is facing an assault and battery charge after an incident at Dulles Airport where he allegedly pushed an United Airlines bag claim employee as first reported by ABC7/Newschannel 8.

… Filner, a Democrat from California, allegedly attempted to enter an employees-only area on Sunday night.

Van Cleave spoke with several witnesses who said they heard Filner yell “You can’t stop me,” before pushing aside the employee and refusing to leave the office.

Filner disputed the account in a statement issued by his office.

“Congressman Bob Filner is on his way to Iraq, visiting our troops, and will have a full statement when he returns. Suffice it to say now, that the story that has appeared in the press is factually incorrect - and the charges are ridiculous,” the statement said.

Jules dubs it "pre-traumatic stress syndrome", or rage induced by encounters with someone not up speed with their DYKWIA--"Do You Know Who I Am". Or perhaps its guilt-induced paranoia caused by a fear of committing the left's newest, and yet most heretical sin.

In any case, thanks to the media, we may not know which party they are, when they emphasize their disapproval in such physical outbursts. Curiously, this rarely warrants the same response from these ordinarily ultra-sensitive souls.

Update: "It’s easy to see why he’s so anti-gun. He thinks we all have as little self-control as he does."

One of the elements of the Blogosphere that’s often a feature, not a bug--especially in retrospect--is that if you don’t write about something fast enough, somebody else will. And often he’ll come up with a better take than you would. So for a quick summary of Saturday’s event, I urge to stop on by Jeremayakovka’s blog for his thoughts on Blog*Fest*West, our gathering in San Francisco this past Saturday. And note the photo in which I appear to have Karl Rove’s mind-control rays, or maybe simply frickin’ lasers--really, is that too much for me to ask for, people?--burning through my eyeglasses. (Or maybe I’m just eyeing the Guinness.)

I will add though, that in addition to my co-conspirators, Cinnamon Stillwell and my wife Nina (who organizes parties the way that von Braun plans moon landings), the handful of major league hitters who bravely signed up for this test flight were a particularly nifty line-up.

There was Roger Simon, the co-founder of Pajamas Media, who attended along with two of his trusted lieutenants, Neil Spolin and Aaron Thies. Joanne Jacobs, who virtually invented education-themed blogging in early-2001. And Mickey Kaus, whose pioneering Kausfiles Blog/E-Zine is what inspired Glenn Reynolds to start blogging. Which in turn, chances are, inspired your blogging--or at least blog reading--addiction. Combined, you’ve got a pretty good running start towards assembling the folks who originally brought you the center-right side of the Blogosphere in the days immediately after 9/11, in one room.

Blogging, like most forms of writing, is a solitary task--which in a way, makes perfect sense. No matter how big your readership, it’s purely a one-on-one relationship with each individual reader, whether it’s via the printed page or the page click. But it’s great to get out and mingle with others in your field. I’ve been to a few previous blogger gatherings, including a Denver Blogger Bash in 2004, early conspiratorial neo-pajama-con planning in the mountains over looking Silicon Valley, the subsequent November 2005 wild & crazy pre-launch party in the bowels of the Seagram Building, and the actual launch of Pajamas the next day high atop Manhattan in the Rainbow Room.

But ever since I started blogging in early 2002, I’ve been on the lookout for something like what we eventually dubbed Blog*Fest*West out here. Fortunately, so have lots of other folks, and it’s a safe bet that Saturday is merely the first of an ongoing series of get-togethers. Needless to say, we’ll let you know when the next one is happening--and hope you can drop by for a handshake. And maybe some Guinness.

On Patterico.com: "Don’t Swallow Whole Just Yet What The Media Is Feeding You About the Vick Plea Deal".

Linking to a recent Time magazine article on the--it can't happen soon enough--death of rap, James Hudnall writes:

Now, I like some old school hip hop, back when artists actually used their own music and weren’t sampling and remixing everything. But I feel sad that the culture that gave us jazz, the blues, R&B, and soul music could provide this abortive fetus of a genre.

I concur!

By the way, Time magazine notes:

The growth spurt was fueled by sensationalism. Tupac Shakur shot at police, was convicted of sexual abuse and ultimately was murdered in Las Vegas. But Shakur both alive and dead has also sold more than 20 million records. Death Row Records, which released much of Shakur's material, was run by ex-con Suge Knight and dogged by rumors of money laundering. But between 1992 and 1998, the label churned out 11 multiplatinum albums. Gangsta rappers reveled in their outlaw mystique, crafting ultra-violent tales of drive-bys and stick-ups designed to shock and enthrall their primary audience--white suburban teenagers. "Hip-hop seemed dangerous; it seemed angry," says Richard Nickels, who manages the hip-hop band the Roots. "Kurt Cobain killed himself, and rock seemed weak. But then you had these black guys who came out and had guns. It was exciting to white kids."

Hip-hop now faces a generation that takes gangsta rap as just another mundane marker in the cultural scenery. "It's collapsing because they can no longer fool the white kids," says Nickels. "There's only so much redundancy anyone can take."

Some can take a Pinch more than others, of course.

Blonde Sagacity writes: "So it would seem that the DNC is the party of the rich and Conservatives are the hard working middle class..."

Indeed they are--that's a topic I covered in depth over three years ago. Thomas Sowell's essay on the same topic, "The Oldest Fraud", written immediately after the election of 2004 is also well worth a reread. And David Brooks also did a great job of exploring the ramifications of this trend in the seminal Bobos In Paradise from early 2001.

Maggie's Farm has a modest proposal to bring the War On Drugs to an immediate and successful conclusion:

The United States Government wastes a lot of money, time, and effort composing dreadful anti-drug messages that they broadcast on AM radio right after Art Bell goes to sleep, and on television in the wee hours just before the test pattern comes on.

Gerard should be given all the money, and we could all gather our kids around the computer, point at his pictures, and tell them:

"I don't care if you become an alcoholic, a pederast, a serial murderer, or god forbid, a State Senator; but under no circumstances will I allow you to end up like these people."

I couldn't agree more.

The greatest running back who ever played QB may be about to enter the ultimate dog-eat-dog world.

To paraphrase her admen's slogan only slightly: Say what you will, she ran a helluva hotel.

Update: Leona's death allows a thousand snarky headlines to bloom--like this one!

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of liberal journalists...? The Architect knows!

In an embarrassment to the industry, some staffers at a Seattle Times news meeting cheered when Rove's resignation was announced. To his credit, Editor David Boardman made the incident public and warned that staff meetings should not "evolve into a liberal latte klatch." Rove responded by sending a basket of cookies to the newsroom, with a note saying "my wife shares in your enthusiasm."

Rove really knows how to play on the left's worst fears. That newsroom must have felt like they had just received a basket of oranges from the Godfather.

Incidentally, I'm sure, in say, the eyes of the editors of the New York Times--or even the L.A. Times--that Seattle is considered something of an old media backwater, a legacy industry's legacy industry. But somebody should give Boardman the memo from 2004, so he won't have to keep apologizing at this late date regarding his staff's quite human emotions and prejudices.

Update: "Major League Baseball was really embarassed by steroid use, and took steps to end it. MSM prefers to cover up."

More: Michelle Malkin suggests an alternative gift...

I was surprised to see a couple of interesting responses to my Superbad post on Saturday, (thanks no doubt to Jules Crittenden's link), which I quickly knocked out as I was heading out to Blog*Fest*West (and more on that, later).

Here's an even older Hollywood formula than horny teenager movies like Superbad, as the New York Times notes:

Few narratives in American popular culture have proved as durably resonant — or as endlessly adaptable — as “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” the tale of a planetary takeover by extraterrestrial seed pods that replicate and replace sleeping humans. Originally a 1955 novel by Jack Finney, this paranoid fable has now cloned itself several times over, spawning four movies in five decades. Tapping into themes of individualism and conformity, personal freedom and social control, the idea of soulless “pod people” has become an all-encompassing metaphor that finds a sociopolitical relevance whatever the period.

The “Invasion” films add up to a veritable catalog of anxieties that have plagued the American psyche in the last half-century. Don Siegel’s 1956 B-movie, the first and still the most Rorschach-like, emerged from a national climate of Red scare hysteria and from a Hollywood traumatized by the blacklist. Philip Kaufman’s 1978 update, also called “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” relocated its ground zero from small-town California to a post-utopian San Francisco where summer-of-love idealism had curdled into a Me Decade morass of cultish psychobabble.

Abel Ferrara’s “Body Snatchers” (1993), which followed an election season thick with talk of “family values,” zeroes in on the domestic sphere. Set on a military base in the South, it also includes explicit references to the recently concluded Operation Desert Storm.

The fourth version, called “The Invasion” and opening Friday, appears to adhere to the outline while adding a few bells and whistles. (The film has not yet been screened for the press.) Starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig and directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel (best known for the 2005 Hitler biopic “Downfall”), the film would seem to have an abundance of current qualms to exploit, from new pandemics and terror threats to extreme makeovers and genetic engineering.

Still, it would be quite a feat if the new “Invasion” musters even a fraction of the original’s ambiguous power.

Indeed it would, as Fox News' Roger Friedman writes:

No matter how much money she’s being guaranteed for movies these days, Nicole Kidman had better start thinking twice about her legacy as an actress.

Her new one, "The Invasion," opened Friday and bombed quite brilliantly. It took in a little less than $2 million. The price for this disaster? Over $100 million. And even though it co-stars James Bond actor Daniel Craig, nothing can make "The Invasion" into a hit.

What’s worse is, no one wanted even to see it in theatres. At boxofficemojo.com, a poll among subscribers showed almost no interest in "The Invasion."

Of course, the marketing didn’t help. The movie looked like "The Stepford Wives II," another Kidman disaster. And in many of the ads, Craig’s name wasn’t even mentioned. It was just Nicole Kidman, looking beautiful, running among dead eyed weirdos.

The public smelled a rat, Warner Bros. punted, and the rest is history.

Time to start cutting up the prints to make guitar picks, boys. Not to mention working on story ideas that aren't remakes of decades old projects.

Update: More at Libertas.

Last month, The New Criterion's Adi Sivaraman noted that CNN's Christiane Amanpour had--to say the least--mixed emotions regarding Oriana Fallaci and her frequent and passionate critiques of Islamofascism:

Aside from a few notable exceptions, Friday’s speakers all attempted to distort Fallaci’s opposition to Islamofascism. They attempted to water it down or to distort the facts by shifting the emphasis away from an opposition to radical Islam to an opposition for human rights abuses. Christiane Amanpour, in particular, was one of the worst in this vein. She struggled desperately in front of the audience to reconcile her admiration of Fallaci as a female journalist with her personal disbelief that Fallaci could do something as un-multicultural as criticize another civilization.

For a fun exercise, try squaring the above paragraph with this:

Finishing [CNN's upcoming three-part series called God's Warriors] didn't leave [Amanpour] with a sense of fear over the implications of stronger fundamentalist movements.

"I did come away with a sense that we—or those people who don't want to see religion in politics and culture—if we don't look into it and see what is going on, we're in danger of missing it and not be able to react to it properly," she said.

Power Line's John Hinderaker writes:

Ms. Amanpour identifies herself as one of those who "don't want to see religion in politics and culture." Which is to say, they don't want to see religion at all. I think we can diagnose her perception of "fundamentalism" as follows: "fundamentalism" means religion-based beliefs that are antithetical to her own liberal views. Islamic "fundamentalism" is a serious danger in that it encourages terrorist violence that could kill her. The likelihood of that, however, is relatively remote. Christian (and Jewish) fundamentalism doesn't pose any such hazard, but the danger that it does pose is much more immediate: most such "fundamentalists" vote for and support political candidates with whom Amanpour disagrees. So, on balance, Amanpour is as concerned about opposing the immediate "threat" of Christian fundamentalism, as she is about opposing the potentially fatal threat of Islam extremism.

This is not necessarily an irrational point of view. But it is the perspective of a political partisan, not the perspective of a journalist.

And clearly, Amanpour has no problem doing something as un-multicultural as criticizing another civilization, not to mention its religions, when it suits her own worldview.

Update: Related thoughts, here.

One of the my favorite relics from the mid-1990s, back when the promise of the Internet carried with it a gleaming aura that combined Buck Rogers with Marshall McLuhan, was Wired Style, Wired magazine's attempt at creating an AP Stylebook for a brave new switched-on world. Its definition for "Web" began thusly:

Call it the Web, the World Wide Web, or W3, this is the place where your money, phone calls, and email may soon live.

Along with every aspect of your news, whether print, audio, or video, according to The Future of News.

OK, now that headline is definitely hyperbole to get your attention. But as the New York Sun notes:

Fifteen years ago, the notion that an amateur filmmaker could write, shoot, edit, and project a professional-grade film in only 48 hours would have been a near-impossible thought. But times change quickly, and for the 2007 filmmaker, in the age of Final Cut Pro and YouTube, the idea is a challenge rather than an impracticality.

For our thoughts on adding a professional sheen to your slightly smaller scale video productions, click here.

Update: In City Journal, John Robb explores the flip side of the Glenn Reynolds' "Army of Davids" meme:

Eventually, one man may even be able to wield the destructive power that only nation-states possess today. It is a perverse twist of history that this new threat arrives at the same moment that wars between states are receding into the past.

Robb's article is titled, "The Coming Urban Terror", which also dovetails into Mark Steyn's latest essay.

On the Pajamas motherblog today, Richard Miniter interviews--amongst several other people related to the story--Scott Thomas Beauchamp's German fiancée, prior to his marage to a New Republic staffer. She tells him:

“He hates the army. The only reason he joined was because he wanted to have more experience to write about.”

Needless to say, read the whole thing.

(Beauchamp and earlier examples of Winter Soldier Syndrome, explored here; the condition's origins, here.)

Judith Weiss, celebrating her fifth year in the Blogosphere, is really on a roll. First, she captures this moment, which simultaneously sums up both elements of Charles Krauthammer's best-known aphorism. Next, she notes that England as a whole is caught in the same Death Wish phase that American cities found themselves trapped in during the 1970s, liberalism's zenith:

Britain seems to be reinventing the wheel that the urban citizens in the US painfully constructed in the 1970s: the idea that being endlessly forbearing and understanding about criminals and bullies does not produce justice; rather a refusal to judge, and to judge harshly when necessary, encourages injustice toward the most vulnerable and tears asunder any fabric of communal responsibility.

Judith writes, "I am struck by how badly the UK needs a Rudy Giuliani", and I have that thought whenever I visit San Francisco, as I did yesterday. Which makes sense--given the attitudes of its elites, San Francisco is essentially an enclave of the EU in a much more conservative nation. And the regions that need someone who takes crime as seriously as Giuliani are also the least likely to vote for someone like him. (Which is also a reminder of how badly Manhattan had to fall before the blue nose proto-bobos of Manhattan in the early 1990s could hold their nose and vote for a Republican.)

Two years ago, I wrote about "Nostalgie De La Left":

Archie and Edith Bunker, Norman Lear's parody of a aging conservative couple coping with their radical chic son, started off each show by warbling, "Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again". (Now, I don't know many conservatives who want Hoover back; I know at least a couple who'd happily take Calvin Coolidge, though.)

Archie and Edith wanted to live in "the good old days" of World War II and Ike, in a TV show that aired originally in the early 1970s, an era when the left was still routinely reminding people not to trust anyone over 30 (as late as 1979, Bruce Springsteen, on his 30th birthday, quipped to his audience, "well, I guess I'm 30--I can't trust myself now!"), and long before liberals made peace with what Tom Brokaw would eventually dub "The Greatest Generation".

But since 9/11, increasingly, it's been the left who've wanted to live in the past. If every war is Vietnam, then every protest is Selma and Chicago in '68. Even down to adopting the clothes of the '60s and the peace symbol and its accompanying two-fingers hand gesture, which was for almost 30 years was seen as an ossified remnant of the late 1960s.

Want photographic proof? Compare this recent slideshow flashing back to the original hippies, and "The Summer of Love" that Slate put together, with Gerard Van Der Leun's photoblog of "Hempfest Seattle" (found via Instapundit), and note that the appearances of the people in these two events are identical; frozen in time, despite four remarkably turbulent decades having passed.

I can somewhat understand the older hippies who want to recreate--or remain permanently trapped in--their halcyon days of youth. But the younger members that Gerard photographed seem particularly sad: in a sense, they're desperately seeking the same level of costumed camaraderie as a sci-fi convention attendee costuming himself in a yellow Star Fleet jersey or a Darth Vader costume. Or more charitably, they're as nostalgic in their own way as the the nineties micro-fad of wearing zoot suits and spectator shoes and dancing to Brian Setzer's retro boogie-woogie tunes. In that same post from two years ago, I quoted Jonah Goldberg, who once wrote:

Nostalgia is common to all ideologies (even among libertarians and their unkempt cousins, the anarchists). But conservative nostalgia is almost always geared at recreating communities of the past. Therefore nostalgia is helpful for the right in that it reminds us what should be conserved. Left-nostalgia, however, is invariably aimed at recreating movements, not communities, of the past. This makes Left-nostalgia particularly pathetic, since all successful progressive movements are forward-looking. Conserving in a progressive movement is like trying to tie your shoelaces while running downhill.

(Me? I'll simply wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.)

Libertas reviews this year's remake of Fast Times At Ridgemont High:

No doubt Superbad will be a hit. But a touchstone? A classic? Another Stripes, American Pie, Napoleon Dynamite, or Caddyshack? Doubtful. More like Andrew Dice Clay: something that felt cool, edgy, totally-now, and dangerous at the time, but through more mature eyes, just feels, well… Crude, shallow, and simple-minded.

The semi-annual horny teenager movie is a Hollywood staple that dates back to at least the early 1980s, (and possibly to 1978, if count Animal House amongst its brethren) when it replaced the semi-annual Cheech & Chong stoner movie. That makes the genre about as old as the Hope & Crosby road pictures were in the mid-to-late-1960s, when Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Richard Pryor, and the other comedians who demolished the Hollywood old guard started making their first movies.

So who's going to demolish the current Hollywood formulas as they start to look increasingly gray and tired themselves, no matter how young the cast is?

If you're in San Francisco on Saturday* and can part with a couple of sawbucks or so--stop on by!

But please, take a moment to RSVP here, first:

* Or you're willing to commit a heresy so abominable, even Torquemada would blush...

Details at Pajamas HQ.

Like Ziggy Stardust, Mickey Kaus goes in search of the Spiders From Mars:

Top kausfiles executives have come up with a comprehensive, future-oriented business plan at their annual summer strategy session. Our new organization goal is simple: It is to beat "how many spiders does a person swallow in their sleep" in the News & Media rankings of search terms. ... Harder than you might think! Pinch isn't doing it either.

People don't plan to fail, they merely fail to plan for the importance of "how many spiders does a person swallow in their sleep" in their news coverage!

Just press play--the punchline is a scream:

Thoughts on the above clip, and the much more diversified--and fun--British media from Steve Boriss.

Greg Pollowitz has some thoughts on Tom Brokaw, new media, and classic cocktails:

Tom Brokaw's thoughts show that he really doesn't take the threat of "new media" to "old media" seriously:

In 1992 someone asked me how I would change the presidential debate format. I proposed handing each of the candidates a double martini in the firm belief that would get them beyond their canned answers.

I think in 2007 we can pair up the martini past and the electronic future. How long would Joe Biden talk on a cellphone after knocking back a big Gibson, straight up?

A Gibson? Kind of shows the demographic the network nightly newscasts are aiming for.

I'm sorry, but a conservatism divided against vintage, time-tested, perfectly-proportioned, classic libations cannot stand! I will defend the rise of the new media to anyone who listens, and have frequently pointed out the rapidly aging demographics of television news, but a Gibson is not Geritol.

As Jonah Goldberg once wrote:

Conservatism has always been a mix of the gut and the brain. Lincoln defined it as a preference for the old and tried against the new and untried.

And which mix would you rather have in your gut and brain? A classic cocktail with a century or so of breeding and history, or something like this?

Kathryn Jean Lopez checks her GPS and notes that "We're Not on Sesame Street Anymore":

"Puppet Up! — Uncensored," an adults-only improv show featuring puppets instead of people, comes from the Jim Henson Company — but don't expect Kermit the Frog singing "It Ain't Easy Bein' Blue."

First, these are puppets, not Muppets: In 2004, the Mouse ate the Frog — that is, the Walt Disney Co. acquired the Muppet characters, including Kermit and Miss Piggy, for $90 million. Second, "Puppet Up!" which will perform tonight at the Avalon Hollywood theater, does not include recognizable characters from other TV shows and movies that have featured Henson Company characters, including "Sesame Street," "Dinosaurs" and "Fraggle Rock."

Isn't Henson and co. merely not-so-boldly going where Avenue Q went before, several years ago?

(Very funny clip here; needless to say, plenty of R-rated language, though.)

An AP report currently linked to by Matt Drudge claims that an "Ammunition Shortage Squeezes Police":

Troops training for and fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are firing more than 1 billion bullets a year, contributing to ammunition shortages hitting police departments nationwide and preventing some officers from training with the weapons they carry on patrol.

Thankfully, one thoughtful law and order-oriented mayor has hit upon his own unique way to save ammo!

Hot Air has the details.

Like I said when Karl Rove resigned, very few White House staffers in any administration go the distance. Snow says he's resigning for financial reasons; but I can't help but think that not having to wade into ground zero of the legacy media's attack machine every day will also be good for his health. In terms of Snow's endless public good cheer and media savvy professionalism, whoever his successor is will have some big shoes to fill.

Update: "What Will Tony Snow Do Next?", Duane Patterson asks--and suggests one possible scenario--at the newly reconstituted Radioblogger.com.

"Yet Again: AFP's Photo Woes Continue", Confederate Yankee writes, catching Agence France-Presse lifting a photo taken by a US soldier serving in Afghanistan, and passing it off as their own.

Back in late 2005, I linked to essays by Brian Anderson, Edward Jay Epstein, and Mark Steyn, each describing how political correctness has limited Hollywood's ability to tell stories--which is why today's conventional live-action Hollywood movie typically only comes in one of a handful of flavors:

Cheap to produce leftwing political documentaries.

Slash and burn horror movies.

Horny teenager movies.

Remakes of proven boomer-era properties: comic books, toys, and old TV shows.

Epic, big budget quests and historical battles.

Two fairly disparate sources note that two more genres are, if not dead, then certainly in the cinematic equivalent of intensive care: Time magazine ponders, "Who Killed the Love Story" in Hollywood. And Camille Paglia declares "Art movies: R.I.P." with the concurrent deaths of Bergman and Antonioni. That's in addition to the demise of middlebrow culture in general, which Terry Teachout discussed last year.

Like I said...

Power Line reflects on the former, Mojo Nixon on the latter:

Meanwhile, England's Telegraph has a snapshot of boomer narcissism and the urge to "Start From Zero" defined:

"Before Elvis, there was nothing," said John Lennon

And Ten Years After (to coin a phrase), we could imagine there was no heaven--and back then, it was easy, if you tried.

"It is the nature of civilization to use energy and it's the nature of liberalism to feel bad about it."

--Robert Bryce of the Austin Chronicle. Read the rest, here.

Some thoughts on the Fed and the economy from U.S. News & World Report's James Pethokoukis.

In City Journal, Steven Malanga writes, "Behind Newark’s epidemic violence are its thousands of fatherless children."

I doubt Michelle Malkin would argue with that, but she posits an additional reason, which NRO's Media Blog has further thoughts on.

Somewhat related to the previous post, Brent Bozell writes that when it comes to the legacy media, "off the record" is often just the opposite:

Author Stephen Hayes has a new book out simply called "Cheney," and the veep gave him 30 hours of interviews. One theme that emerges is that Cheney's opinion of the press corps has deteriorated just as much as their opinion of him. They clearly think Cheney doesn't operate by professional norms. But as the book documents, it is the professional norms of journalism that are often tossed overboard by reporters out to get him.

In May of 2003, Cheney spoke at Southern Methodist University in Dallas as a guest of Hugh Sidey, the former Washington bureau chief of Time magazine. The session was officially off the record, not to be quoted by the press. The ruling established, Cheney could be more forthcoming, and among other things told the gathering that he thought they had killed Saddam Hussein on the first night of the war in Iraq.

You can only imagine his reaction the next day when the Dallas Morning News, which co-sponsored the SMU event, ran a story quoting Cheney, blatantly violating the journalistic rules established. The reporter even acknowledged in his piece that: "Before Mr. Cheney's remarks, university officials announced late Tuesday afternoon that the session would be considered off the record." But that sacred rule was violated – because it was Cheney.

Once you understand how the game works, isn't it obvious why an increasing number of MSM journalists don't want to talk to MSM journalists?

Update: On the flip side, Victor Davis Hanson writes, "Enough with anonymity."

Randall Hoven does yeoman work in this post, producing a laundry list of over 60 members of the MSM--many of whom are very big hitters indeed--who have been caught very publicly cooking the books:

Offenses include lying and fabricating, doctoring photos, plagiarism, conflicts of interest, falling for hoaxes, and overt bias. Some are hilarious, such as an action figure doll being mistaken for a real soldier. Some are silly, such as reporting on a baseball game watched on TV. Some are more serious.

Randall asks, "If this is the visible part of the iceberg, just how big is the iceberg?" Big, especially when you consider how much easier it was to yank the polyester over readers' glazzballs before the Blogosphere.

And check out the 1998 quote from Bernard Kalp at the top of Randall's post; it very much places a laundry list of my own from a couple of years ago into context.

Ralph Peters writes, "The media missed a big one yesterday":

They ran with the story that the Bush administration will soon designate Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps - a major troublemaker in Iraq - as a terrorist organization. But they didn't look past the public-consumption explanation that the move lets our government go after the Revolutionary Guards' finances and the international companies that cut deals with Tehran's thugs.

The real reason for the move is to set up a legal basis for airstrikes or special operations raids on the Guard's bases in Iran.

Our policy is that we reserve the right to whack terrorists anywhere in the world. Now we have newly designated terrorists. And we know exactly where they are.

This doesn't mean we won't go after their money, too. The Revolutionary Guards have built up a financial empire - they're religious fanatics, but, in their version of Islam, "greed is good." Hurting Iran's assassins in the pocketbook reduces their ability to export terror.

But watch that space: We've long delayed taking action against the Iranians who provide Iraq's Shia extremists with the sophisticated IEDs that kill and maim our troops. We fell into the Vietnam-era trap of allowing the enemy a sanctuary - this time, in Iran. The Revolutionary Guards' al-Quds subsidiary helped butcher hundreds of our troops - and got away with it virtually scot-free.

Looks like those days are nearing an end.

During the GWB's first term, it seemed somewhat of a given that he wouldn't leave office without dealing with Iran. Could it still be true?

Initial report just coming in.

Update: More details here. And on the left, "The day of Rage begins".

(I guess everyone was sleeping in late today.)

More: Ace has some thoughts--and a haunting song of reconciliation--for those who attend "the Ike Turner school of patriotism".

Daniel Henninger explores "The Death of Diversity" as an ideology:

Now comes word that diversity as an ideology may be dead, or not worth saving. Robert Putnam, the Harvard don who in the controversial bestseller "Bowling Alone" announced the decline of communal-mindedness amid the rise of home-alone couch potatoes, has completed a mammoth study of the effects of ethnic diversity on communities. His researchers did 30,000 interviews in 41 U.S. communities. Short version: People in ethnically diverse settings don't want to have much of anything to do with each other. "Social capital" erodes. Diversity has a downside.

Prof. Putnam isn't exactly hiding these volatile conclusions, though he did introduce them in a journal called Scandinavian Political Studies. A great believer in the efficacy of what social scientists call "reciprocity," he wasn't happy with what he found but didn't mince words describing the results:

"Inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television." The diversity nightmare gets worse: They have little confidence in the "local news media." This after all we've done for them.

Colleagues and diversity advocates, disturbed at what was emerging from the study, suggested alternative explanations. Prof. Putnam and his team re-ran the data every which way from Sunday and the result was always the same: Diverse communities may be yeasty and even creative, but trust, altruism and community cooperation fall. He calls it "hunkering down."

It's a safe bet that the average newspaper journalist will quickly roll his eyes at passages like those. Which is all the more ironic considering his office is among the least ideologically diverse places in the nation.

Related: Patrick Hynes suggests that "American conservatism has devolved from a movement into an identity group."

I'm not sure if duct tape is The Force that holds the entire universe together, but it appears to be holding the Space Shuttle together, at least.

(And lord knows it needs it. For our look back at NASA's better days, click here.)

Some things are universal, whether it's over tapas in Madrid, or filet mignon in Manhattan:

Related thoughts on one of the topics that Henninger discusses, here.

England's Daily Mail reports, "Unemployment rate is six times higher than official figures"; which may explain: (a) England's binge drinking epidemic; (b) high crime rate; and (c) that 4,000 people a week are reported attempting to depart the UK for elsewhere.

Because if you build it--it being the modern socialist state--they will leave.

When a video clip has a headline like "Suburban Witch Arrested For Midnight Underwear Bonfire Moon Chants", you know you're talking Must See TV!

Watching the above clip from Slate belies the content of this story from June:

From his second-floor apartment at the counterculture crossing of Haight and Ashbury streets, Arthur Evans watches a new generation of wayward youth invade his free-spirited neighborhood.

The former flower child was among the legions of idealistic wanderers who migrated here during the Vietnam War to “tune in, turn on and drop out.”

But Evans, who has lived at the same address for 34 years, says he has never seen anything like this crowd, who use his flower bed as a bathroom and sell pot outside his window.

They’re known as gutter punks, these homeless kids with dirty dreadlocks and nose rings, lime-green mohawks and orange spray-painted faces, who panhandle with cardboard signs that riff on their lifestyles. “Please Help Us Get Un-Sober,” one reads. Another: “Please Give Us Weed, Beer or Money.”

Sometimes aggressive, they block sidewalks as they strum guitars or bang on bongos. Gangs of them skateboard down the middle of Haight Street. Some throw used hypodermic needles into a nearby pond they call Hep-C Lake.

Evans, 64, says they should get help, clean up or go home.

“I used to be a hippie. I wore beads and grew my hair long,” he said. “But my generation had something these kids do not: a standard of civilized behavior.”

And then came The Great Relearning.

Mark Steyn writes:

Andrew's post on Scottish hospitals telling infidel doctors to cut out working lunches during Ramadan and Kathryn's post on Dutch bishops telling European Catholics to call God "Allah" are two small examples of the remorseless incremental concessions we make every day in the name of "cultural sensitivity".

The question is: At what point do you stop? If it's only being "sensitive" to insist that Belgian police officers not be seen eating donuts during Ramadan, when will sensitivity require that female police officers adopt Muslim-sensitive headscarves? If it's only being "sensitive" to ask Catholic worshippers in the heart of European Christendom to call God "Allah", why not rename churches "mosques" and disavow Jesus' divinity? These small groveling unreciprocated concessions that do nothing but provoke further demands communicate the same big message: We're losers, and the best we can hope for is that you'll let us lose gradually.

I think this sums it up best:

Scratch a liberal, find a dhimmi.

Clearly, the answer is An Army of Hermans.

In a move not seen since the mid-1970s when Jimmy Page and Keith Richards were flying high--in more ways than one--on their bands' private planes, "Madonna Shocks Aeroplane Passengers With Mid-Air Vitamin Jab" screams this Evening Standard headline:

Madonna is reported to have started injecting herself with vitamins to boost her energy levels.

The singer, who turns 49 on Thursday, is said to have surprised passengers on a recent flight from New York to London by injecting herself with a vitamin shot in her arm.

Nutritionists said that such a drastic practice could have potentially harmful long-term effects on her health.

The singer is said to have refused food on the seven-hour flight and only drank bottled water.

And she calls herself an environmentalist.

(Incidentally, even by Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 standards, those are some scary arms that Madonna's shooting into!)

Update: And speaking of injections...

Oregon resident Randal O'Toole debunks Portland's Public Transit Myth for TCS Daily. See also CATO's similarly-themed white paper analysis from last year.

First Newsweek tosses the American flag into a garbage can on the cover of their international edition, then they light it ablaze on the masthead of one of their blogs, which Matt Lewis dubs "A Blog for America Haters".

Perhaps this is nothing but synchronicity, and I'm sensing a pattern where none exists, but, still, I can't help but wonder how much of that hatred begins inside Newsweek's offices and then flows outward.

In any case, so much for the burnished "mass with class" tone of Newsweek's parent company in its heyday; but then, that facade was dropped there as well, long ago.

Related: Newsweek editor dubs his own magazine's recent global warming cover story "a wonderful read, marred only by its being fundamentally misleading."

More at Extreme Mortman.

Update: Scroll to the bottom of today's Best of the Web, where James Taranto riffs a bit on Newsweek's burning new blog.

Steven F. Hayward reviews James Piereson's Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism for the Weekly Standard.

Curiously, this is one fact that really does fit the narrative.

US News & World Report's James Pethokoukis: "Mortgage Meltdown May Hand 2008 to Democrats".

(Or it may not--read the whole thing.)

According to our friends at Agence France-Presse, bullets can plug the walls of an Iraqi home...and yet remain remarkably pristine!

Bob Owens (currently offline, presumbly as a result of his Instalanche) and others note that the magic bullets' photographer has gone down this rabbit hole a time or two too many, picking over territory already strip-mined by Reuters.

Meanwhile, as always, this remains this remains the sole example of can't-miss French ammunition.

As Victor Davis Hanson wrote back in June:

When I was growing in rural California in the 1950s and 1960s, my FDR parents winced at the nut right-wing fringe. This was, remember, the era of bulk mailings on pink paper, crazy “Did you know?” unsolicited newsletters detailing the names of local and national communists, usually sent from strange addresses in the Sierra Nevada foothills. At seven and eight, we used to pick them up from the garbage and ask our parents, “Hey, Mom, are Lucy and Ricky really communists?”

My cattleman uncle Tango used to stop by with John Birch literature, warning us about the impending fluoride conspiracy to make us all impotent.

Needless to say, things have come full circle since: "It's a hugely beneficial liquid in a slim cylinder of plastic, but for US environmentalists, it is the new public enemy number one: bottled water."

True, it was a short retirement, but really, who amongst us didn't see this one coming from miles away?

Campus Watch has some thoughts on Hamid Dabashi, a Columbia University professor:

Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature and Chairman of the Middle East Languages and Cultures department at Columbia University, figures prominently in the work of those of us trying to bring accountability and balance back to the field of Middle East studies. His anti-Western, pro-Islamist, and, at times, anti-Semitic commentary have been noted by Campus Watch on many occasions.

Indeed, he holds the current "Quote of the Month" spot for his review of the film "300," in which he likens the Persian Empire to modern-day America and the Spartans to the "Iraqi resistance, the Palestinians, [and] Hizbullah," while attempting to justify suicide bombings by comparing them to the Spartans' last stand at Thermopylae. This is what many have come to expect from Dabashi, whose apologetics seem to know no bounds.

Dabashi makes another appearance of sorts in an outtake from the upcoming documentary, "Indoctrinate U." The film, which will feature interviews with Middle East Forum director Daniel Pipes and Middle East scholar Martin Kramer, focuses on bias and the "institutional intolerance" that's rampant in higher education. Filmmaker Evan Coyne Maloney has been making deleted scenes available at the "Indoctrinate U" website and the first of these involves Columbia University (watch it here).

In a "Columbia Quiz" given randomly to students and other passersby on campus, Maloney uses a Dabashi quote to make a point about what passes for acceptable in academia today. Titled, "A Professor's Lesson in Tolerance and Civility," the clip features Maloney asking quiz takers to guess whether the following quote originated with "a) Adolph Hitler b) Osama bin Laden or c) a Columbia professor":

Who said of "Israeli Jews...the way they talk, walk, the way they greet each other, there is a vulgarity of character that is bone deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture"?

The results are humorous, and yet also rather frightening. None of the quiz takers know off the bat that the quote belongs to Dabashi and one even tells Maloney that she suspects "this whole thing is designed to make me say a Columbia professor." A few correctly guess that a "Columbia professor" is the answer, while others, after appearing visibly shocked by the bigotry of the quote, assume that it originated with either Hitler or bin Laden.

When Maloney informs them that the quote is, in fact, attributed to "Hamid Dabashi, the Chair of the Middle East Languages and Cultures department," the reaction is mixed. Some just shake their heads in consternation, one cheers that she got the answer right, and others simply look uncomfortable.

Like I said, Ward was merely the tip of the iceberg.

I've only seen Colbert’s show via YouTube clips, but based on this recent incident, it’s starting to sound like some kind of mock rumble with his guests is a semi-regular occurrence. But shouldn't Richard Branson have gotten explicit approval from his own Global Village Elder People before unilaterally launching a first strike?

Needless to say, Carlos Santana is far from the only dinosaur rock star who wears his love for murderous communist stooges on the sleeve of his T-shirt:

On March 26, 2005, on the Washington, DC local PBS station WETA Channel 26, while watching "Viewer Favorites," I was shocked to see singer Eric Burton - formerly of the group "The Animals" - wearing a Che Guevara shirt while performing on that show.

As a Cuban American, as a writer and a filmmaker, I am acquainted with the Che as a mass murderer who executed, without trial, many Cubans at La Cabana fortress in Havana as well as in the Sierra Maestra Mountains before 1959.

It is shocking that an educational public television station is not aware of Che's criminal record and let pass such an insensitive and offensive display of disrespect to Che's victims and the Cuban American community in the U.S. If Mr. Burton had worn a Hitler or a swastika printed shirt, he wouldn't have been presented - rightfully so - in order not to offend the Jewish victims and Holocaust survivors.

No PBS station would dare to show a performer wearing Ku-Klux-Klan apparel, a pro-David Duke or anti-Arab, anti-Islam, anti-Mexican, anti-Chinese or any other minority group in the U.S. It would have been simply edited out without any regard to what its creator intended.

Unfortunately, those considerations do not apply concerning the Cuban American community. Apparently everybody has carte blanche to offend and defame us without impunity in all print media, radio and TV as well as academia. Moreover, I believe there is even encouragement for bashing and scorning Cuban Americans.

But, stupid me, I decided to contact WETA. On March 29, I wrote an open letter complaining and requesting an apology from Sheryl Lahti, the Director of Audience Services at that PBS station with copies to Michael Pack and John Prizer of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. As of this writing I haven't received reply from Ms. Lahti or anyone else from WETA or PBS.

A Cuban American advocate for Democracy and Human Rights in Cuba from New York City who read my letter at LaurenceJarvikOnline http://laurencejarvikonline.blogspot.com, on April 4 wrote complaining about the Eric Burton blunder. The next day he got an email from Danielle Dunbar (ddunbar@weta.com), WETA's Audience Service Coordinator.

She wrote, "Thank you for watching WETA and for taking the time to write to us about one of the performers you saw in 'My Music: The 60s Generation.' While I am sorry to hear that you object to a portion of the program, I appreciate the opportunity to respond.

"While WETA airs the fundraising special, we did not produce the program. The show was produced by TJL Productions and distributed by PBS. TJL Productions is solely responsible for its content. Nonetheless, as a public broadcaster that produces, broadcasts and values a wide range of programs that cover a divergent range of topics, it would be inappropriate for WETA to engage in such censorship. While you may dislike images of a particular subject, others may respond favorably to the same image. It is not our intent or role to suppress or promote either view, but to present the program as the show's creator intended.

Really?

"When it comes to trekking up Earth's tallest peak, age matters."

(With apologies to James Taranto. Incidentally--who knew?!)

In regards to a staffer or staffers at the New York Times being caught editing multiple Wikipedia pages, allow me to recycle one of my favorite quotes from an author who writes for the Gray Lady's chief competitor in the legacy media:

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.

This is one such farcical moment. Or as Ace writes, "I see now why the NYT is so prone to comical errors. Those vaunted multiple layers of painstaking editorial oversight are apparently being employed to edit an online fake-encyclopedia", in order to attack--in an incredibly childish fashion--any and all of the paper's ideological opponents in a juvenile cyber temper-tantrum.

NRO's Phi Beta Cons blog links to Frederick Hess's article on the limits of what is commonly described in today's shorthand as "tolerance":

Writing on NRO today, Frederick Hess examines the recent flap at the University of Maryland, where a student wearing a pro-Israel shirt was indignantly told by a cashier at the Maryland Food Collective that "Your shirt offends me. I won't ring you up."

The student was able to get another cashier to complete the transaction, but the episode led to a big flap over the rights of customers and cashiers. A spokesperson for the Food Collective says, "no one should have to have contact with people whose views they find hurtful."

If history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes, here's the San Francisco counterpoint to the above east coast incident, which Cinnamon Stillwell recently linked to:

Many Jewish customers have refused to enter Rainbow Grocery — the hippie-dippy worker-owned cooperative that preaches an "inclusive environment that is welcoming to everyone" — ever since two departments de-shelved Israeli products in an apparent anti-Israel boycott in 2002. (Store employee Naomi Jelks says it was done without store authorization, and the boycott was later shot down by an employee vote.)

Now the Human Rights Commission is investigating a complaint by ex-customer David Nahmod, who says he was called a "stupid Jew" more than a year ago by a cashier who employees say identifies as Palestinian. Nahmod, a 51-year-old freelance writer and dog-sitter, says he motioned to the woman's "Free Palestine" T-shirt and asked, "Wouldn't it be nice if they could all live in peace?" He alleges that she responded with the epithet and that suicide bombers should kill as many Jews as possible.

I worked in a retail store a couple of decades ago. Back then, the typical response to "Your shirt offends me. I won't ring you up", would have come from the store's manager and had the words "you're fired, schmuck" somewhere in the sentence.

Of course, the above incidents could have easily have escalated into something even more insane: at least no latex balloons were involved in either transaction!

(H/T: GR)

Well, Rupert Murdoch's mom, I guess, as The Future of News predicts the "Wall Street Journal vs. NY Times fight will go three rounds and end in a knockout."

Obama has his Winter Soldier moment; Jim Geraghty responds "That's it. Too many foreign policy gaffes in too short a time. Goodnight, Senator Obama. Thanks for playing."

Fortunately though, the Associated Press is more than willing to help a potential Democrat candidate out of a rhetorical jam: "That’s not an article, it’s a campaign press release", Hot Air's Allahpundit quips. It won't be the last from today's postmodern, post-objective media.

"CBS 2 Exclusive: Denny Hastert Leaving Congress".

In the L.A. Times, Jonah Goldberg has some thoughts on Karl Rove's legacy, which he compares with another famous tactician of history: "Napoleon overstayed history's welcome and was treated harshly for it, first by the Russians and Mother Nature, then by his own people and, ultimately, by the historians":

Partisan victories are nice, but they aren't an end in themselves. Harry Truman, whom Rove and others see as role models for Bush, himself liked to quote Napoleon on his fateful encounter with the Russians: "I beat them in every battle, but it does not get me anywhere."

Compassionate conservatism succeeded as a political tactic by co-opting liberal assumptions in much the same way that Bill Clinton's triangulation stole conservative thunder. Rove was, famously, the architect of this strategy, and as such the left hated him not for his ideas but for his successes, which they now want to emulate at all costs. The net-root "fighting Dems" who care about partisan victory above all else are in many respects the children of Karl Rove.

"What is history," Napoleon asked, "but a fable agreed upon?" After he pens his memoirs from his Texan Elba, maybe we'll find out what fable Rove subscribes to: the one in which he was a champion for conservatism, or the one in which he liberated the GOP from conservatism.

Rove's second term fumbles are yet another reminder why so many cabinet members and White House staffers bail at the end of the first term, a mid-term election, or whenever the getting's good, rather overstaying history's welcome.

Update: Video from the Wall Street Journal's Paul Gigot added above. And click here for related thoughts from Power Line's Paul Mirengoff, who writes that "Karl Rove was neither a magician nor an evil genius. But he did help his candidates achieve most of what was possible."

The Scooter was 89; Orrin Judd has an extensive roundup.

In other baseball news, Time magazine, flailing away in the Red Queen's Race to make up for lost readers, tosses what can only be described as a foul ball.

"Have you ever noticed that the sole mission of the Space Shuttle is to do more repairs on the Space Shuttle?"

As we've all learned from a prominent former employee of the American Broadcasting Company, fire does not melt steel. But the heat from global warming just might!

Sometimes life really does imitate art. Note this detail from The Good German, a recent George Clooney box office bomb:

Post World War II Berlin was a city of ruins up for grabs. The center of a country split into quadrants run by the Russians, Americans, the French and the British, it was clearly ripe for the taking. Politicians, prostitutes and black marketeers seized whatever opportunities they could.

Amid this backdrop arrives world weary US war correspondent Jacob “Jake” Geismar (George Clooney channeling Bogart). He’s back in Berlin to cover the Potsdam conference for “The New Republic” and picked up at the airport by his assigned driver, Tully (Tobey Maguire).

Was Scott Thomas Beauchamp chaneling Clooney chaneling Bogie when he decided to become the world's best known combat zone fabulist since Peter Arnett?

Well, now we know why Time magazine is running covers with crying Reagans and devil-horned Billy Grahams; and why Newsweek is busy running--and then immediately apologizing for its own Koran in the can and global warming paranoia covers:

Time magazine remains the nation's largest newsweekly, but its lead over archrival Newsweek has narrowed considerably, according to circulation figures released Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

Time's total paid and verified weekly circulation during the six months ended June 30 stood at 3.4 million, down 17.1% from 4.1 million during the same period last year following a reduction in January in the magazine's rate base. Newsweek's circulation stood at 3.1 million, virtually unchanged from a year earlier.

Time spokeswoman Betsy Burton said the decline in circulation was in line with the magazine's expectations after it slashed its rate base--the average circulation level it guarantees advertisers--from 4 million to 3.25 million. The move was part of Time's plans to shift its ad sales efforts to audience measurements, as opposed to strict circulation measurements. The magazine has said the former will provide advertisers with more transparency and accuracy.

Also in January, Time began publishing on Fridays, rather than Mondays, and overhauled the magazine's design to place a greater emphasis on news analysis. Burton said the redesign has been well received by reader focus groups and said she didn't believe it was a factor in the magazine's circulation decline.

Other than alienating half the country on a regular basis, as the two magazines, dinosaurs in an age of instant and unceasing news and opinion, begin to circle the drain.

Update: John Leo takes a snapshot of elite postmodern journalism. And it's not a pretty picture.

Tangentially Related: No humour please, we're Canadian liberals: "That's right. She wrote two full paragraphs referencing global warming and evolution to critique a post designed to draw attention to the falling values of newspaper stocks."

While Mark Steyn's America Alone and the essay that inspired it looks at the Big, Big Picture of the future, Richard Andrews of the Extreme Mortman blog fleshes out some of the remaining details, such as the coming rapid flameout of a generation that Glenn Reynolds describes as "rapacious oldsters":

With endless whining about the fiscal calamity coming with retirement of the Boomers (US!) born 1946-64, and how short-sighted it is not to DO SOMETHING about it RIGHT NOW, I am tolerably amused that apparently NOT A SOUL has thought to consider how TEMPORARY this glut of rapacious oldsters will be. Something will be done, eventually, when there’s no choice, and the piper(s) MUST be paid.

But what of when the the succeeding “Baby Bust” reaches THEIR Golden Years? Will whatever New, Improved (more expensive, and/or less generous) Scheme has been emplaced be undone?

Ha!

The first visible fiscal impact the Boomers had was in the 1950s & ’60s, when places like Baltimore City & County (and the Archdiocese) went nuts trying to build enough schools (and libraries) for them all. Schools and libraries the gov’t. has now spent the last couple decades closing up, or trying to convert to other (mostly bureaucratic) uses. As the years rolled on, this population cohort then fed the edifice complex in Higher Ed. (THIS shows NO sign of abating, but they aren’t concerned with students anyway, really.)

There will come the other end of the string - and I do mean end. Forty years from now, the Boomer generation should begin dying off in droves; [follow the countdown here!--Ed] by 2064, virtually all of us will be gone. (Those that have not long since passed away from obesity or botched lipo, carcinogens in our toothpaste, Chinese deviltry, drive-by shootings, or bad Karma.)

Of course, some things never change; here's what the typical representative of the coming generation of rapacious oldsters will sound like:

Of course, instead of endless Bing Crosby and Count Basie references, he'll be name dropping the Grateful Dead. And speaking of which, just to ensure that this post has everything and the kitchen sink, have I got the perfect boomer retirement present for you! (With everything that's been mixed in that sink and eventually chundered into it, that's one piece of steel you know fire won't melt.)

Or with his latest Blockbuster Report (on HDNet, where Dan and his mom will likely be the only viewers), is Captain Dan channeling his inner Captain Queeg?

"Ahh, but the butterfly ballot, that's... that's where I had them. They laughed at me and made jokes but I proved beyond the shadow of a doubt and with... geometric logic... that a duplicate key to the ballot box DID exist, and I'd have produced that key if they hadn't of pulled the Evening News out of action. I, I, I know now they were only trying to protect some fellow candidates... "

(Whom Gods Destroy, they first make into unknowing Nixon parodies.)

In USA Today, Michael Medved reviews September Dawn, and writes that when it comes to terrorists, Hollywood much prefers them to be "Mormon, not Muslim":

[September Dawn's] deliberately drawn analogy between Mountain Meadows and 9/11 raises the most puzzling question about this peculiar project: Why frame an indictment of violent religiosity by focusing on long-ago Mormon leaders rather than contemporary Muslims who perpetrate unspeakable brutalities every day?

In fact, Hollywood's reluctance to portray Islamo-Nazi killers remains difficult, if not impossible, to explain. Since 2001's devastating attacks, big studios have released numerous movies with terrorists as part of the plot, including Sum of All Fears, Red Eye, Live Free or Die Hard, The Bourne Ultimatum and many more, but virtually all of them show terrorists as Europeans or Americans with no Islamic connections. Even historically based thrillers downplay Muslim terrorism: Steven Spielberg's Munich spends more than 80% of its running time showing Israelis as killers and Palestinians as victims, while Oliver Stone's World Trade Center highlights the aftermath of the attacks with no depiction of those who perpetrated them. United 93 stands out among recent releases in showing Islamic killers in acts of terror — and it would be hard to tell that story without portraying the suicidal hijackers.

Back in 2005, Mark Steyn noted that "Hollywood prefers to make 'controversial' films about controversies that are settled, rousing itself to fight battles long won", and September Dawn fits that pattern to a T. Which is why Hollywood--both creatively, and at times at the box office--has essentially written this decade off.

Betsy Newmark's prediction for Karl Rove's future seems remarkably sound. Elsewhere, Rand Simberg's look at a Wall Street Journal news article on Rove's resignation brings to mind this moment from the heat of the 2004 election.

Meanwhile, Jim Treacher asks the question of the moment...

Update: More from Jules Crittenden. And Byron York writes:

He wasn’t. Beginning in late 2003, Rove became increasingly distracted by the CIA-leak investigation that would lead to his appearing not one, not two, not three, not four, but five times before prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s grand jury. Rove was first interviewed by the FBI in October 2003, first appeared before the grand jury in February 2004, and appeared for a fifth and final time in April 2006. He would have to wait until June 2006 before Fitzgerald informed him that he would not be indicted.

“Nobody on the inside would ever admit it on the record, and Karl would never admit it,” says one well-connected observer, “but when the full force of the U.S. government is bearing down on you and trying to put you in jail, trying to ruin you, and you know in your heart that you have done nothing wrong, and it drags on and on and on, and the politicians and prosecutors are coming after you — it can’t help but drain you.”

It did. In 2005 and 2006, by several accounts, Rove spent a significant amount of time accommodating the demands of the leak investigation. And any time he spent doing that was time that he did not spend looking after the needs of the White House. “Everybody in Washington who knew Karl and knew how the White House worked knew that when he was under that cloud, things started to go a little awry,” the observer says. “He had to spend a lot of time dealing with it.”

Read the whole thing, as they say in the halls of Coruscant.

From a look at needlessly obvious studies to a great post on faulty forecasting. See also this nifty Reason article from 1998 on "Yesterday's Tomorrows: 1968-1998", a long list of books by experts that really got the future wrong--and a few, mostly by less doomsday-oriented futurists, that got it right.

(Via Gerard Van der Leun.)

Reuters: "Study finds kids justify illegal downloads".

As Jonah Goldberg wrote a few years ago, "I need a study to tell me this?"

This Salon article by Steve Paulson titled, "The Religious State Of Islamic Science" begins:

In October, Malaysia's first astronaut will join a Russian crew and blast off into space. The news of a Muslim astronaut was cause for celebration in the Islamic world, but then certain questions started popping up. How will he face Mecca during his five daily prayers while his space ship is whizzing around the Earth? How can he hold the prayer position in zero gravity? Such concerns may sound absurd to us, but the Malaysian space chief is taking them quite seriously. A team of Muslim scholars and scientists has spent more than a year drawing up an Islamic code of conduct for space travel.

Which, at least to me, strongly implies that Malaysia's first astronaut is also Islam's first astronaut. But Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, who went up on a Space Shuttle mission in 1985, and at least according to Wikipedia (I think they're actually correct on this one, for a change) was the first Muslim in space. And the Iranian-American Anousheh Ansari is also Muslim, at least according to my intensive research efforts (i.e., a few minutes of Googling).

Paulson's introductory paragraph appears tacked on, possibly at the editor's request, to make his interview (which is pretty fascinating stuff) with Taner Edis, the author of An Illusion of Harmony: Science and Religion in Islam a bit more timely. I'm not sure why it doesn't mention the previous two Islamic astronauts, though.

Update: While I mainly focused on the article's lead, Ace gives it one hit to the body:

Hey, Christian conservatives? You want to win your creationism cases? Start bringing in Muslim creationists. And watch your liberal opponents suddenly finding it much more plausible that God -- or, rather, Allah -- created the earth, the animals, and humans directly.

To paraphrase a prominent resident of Springfield, It's depressing because it's true.

Ed Morrissey writes, "Choosy News Consumers Mistrust Media"; The Future of News adds, "Pew poll shows most Americans view media as biased, inaccurate, uncaring. And that’s the good news".

Last year, I linked to Tom Wolfe's In his Wall Street Journal profile, in which he discussed how out of touch most media elites are:

And so many of them are so caught up in this kind of metropolitan intellectual atmosphere that they simply don't go across the Hudson River. They literally do not set foot in the United States. We live in New York in one of the two parenthesis states. They're usually called blue states--they're not blue states, the states on the coast. They're parenthesis states--the entire country lies in between."

As a result, they simply can't understand President Bush's appeal to the majority of voters within those states:

George Bush's appeal, for Mr. Wolfe, was owing to his "great decisiveness and willingness to fight." But as to "this business of my having done the unthinkable and voted for George Bush, I would say, now look, I voted for George Bush but so did 62,040,609 other Americans. Now what does that make them? Of course, they want to say--'Fools like you!' . . . But then they catch themselves, 'Wait a minute, I can't go around saying that the majority of the American people are fools, idiots, bumblers, hicks.' So they just kind of dodge that question.

While Wolfe's thesis was aimed primarily at the MSM, it holds true for much of academia as well. Sitting in for "conservative blogger" (as he'll forever be called in the MSM) Andrew Sullivan on a blog hosted by The Atlantic magazine, ordinarily sensible libertarian-ish law professor Stephen Bainbridge gets his snark up to write:

I live in California. Our population is over 37 million, representing 12% of the total US population. Indeed, if we were a separate country, our population would be larger than that of all but the 34 biggest countries in the world! We're responsible for 13% of US GDP. Indeed, if we were a separate country, we'd be the 7th largest economy in the world. We produce cutting edge technology, world class wine, and much of the nation's food crop. We ought to matter. And yet, we're virtually irrelevant to American politics other than as source of money that candidates then go spend in places like Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

* * *

How is it that we persist in allowing these unrepresentative, yahoo infested, pissant states decide who gets to run for President?

I live in California, too. But I also know there are 48 other states out there, in-between the parentheses.

I'd like to think Bainbridge is kidding, and this is yet another example "Blurt and Retreat". And last I checked, there was a president not all that long ago in the scope of things who was once governor of California. Any second now, his name will come to me…

(Via Glenn Reynolds, who writes that Bainbridge's post is "not very nice. But I think the answer is, to piss off Californians and New Yorkers, something that the rest of the country agrees on . . . .")

Update: On the other hand, this is a criticism of Ames Straw Poll that's much tougher to argue with.

More: Lileks weighs in.

Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters writes that "It appears hell hath frozen over":

It appears hell hath frozen over, for a Newsweek contributing editor published an article Saturday extraordinarily critical of his magazine's cover story last week about "global-warming deniers" being funded by oil companies in an organized scam to thwart science.

In fact, Robert J. Samuelson accurately noted how "self-righteous indignation can undermine good journalism," and that this disgraceful article was "an object lesson of how viewing the world as ‘good guys vs. bad guys' can lead to a vast oversimplification of a messy story."

Fortunately, Samuelson was just getting warmed up (emphasis added throughout, h/t Marc Morano):

The story was a wonderful read, marred only by its being fundamentally misleading.

[...]

NEWSWEEK's "denial machine" is a peripheral and highly contrived story. NEWSWEEK implied, for example, that ExxonMobil used a think tank to pay academics to criticize global-warming science. Actually, this accusation was long ago discredited, and NEWSWEEK shouldn't have lent it respectability. (The company says it knew nothing of the global-warming grant, which involved issues of climate modeling. And its 2006 contribution to the think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, was small: $240,000 out of a $28 million budget.)

The alleged cabal's influence does not seem impressive. The mainstream media have generally been unsympathetic; they've treated global warming ominously. The first NEWSWEEK cover story in 1988 warned the greenhouse effect. danger: more hot summers ahead. A Time cover in 2006 was more alarmist: be worried, be very worried. Nor does public opinion seem much swayed. Although polls can be found to illustrate almost anything, the longest-running survey questions show a remarkable consistency. In 1989, Gallup found 63 percent of Americans worried "a great deal" or a "fair amount" about global warming; in 2007, 65 percent did.

Shocking. But, Samuelson wasn't finished:

But the overriding reality seems almost un-American: we simply don't have a solution for this problem. As we debate it, journalists should resist the temptation to portray global warming as a morality tale--as NEWSWEEK did--in which anyone who questions its gravity or proposed solutions may be ridiculed as a fool, a crank or an industry stooge. Dissent is, or should be, the lifeblood of a free society.

Indeed, Newsweek's choice for the White House in 2004 calls it the higest form of patriotism. But the National Enquirer-like tone of Newsweek's stories over the past few years calls into mind something that Steve Hayward has written about another Democrat, one who actually was in the White House 30 years ago:

Carter has a long habit of engaging in what was once described as “blurt and retreat,” whereby he backs away from egregious statements when called on them. Yet circumstantial evidence suggests that this language was not mere verbal sloppiness, as Carter now wishes us to think. At the end of one of Carter’s freelance Middle East peace conferences a few years ago, he let slip a comment that ranks up there with many racially tinged remarks from his various Georgia political campaigns: “Had I been elected to a second term, with the prestige and authority and influence and reputation I had in the region, we could have moved to a final solution.” It is strange that an experienced politician would use that particular expression. Carter’s secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, incautiously wrote years after leaving office that Carter’s Middle East plan in a prospective second term was simple: Sell out Israel.

It's only because of the Blogosphere that the latter half of the phrase "Blurt and Retreat" comes into play, and even then, it's all too rare; but the first half of the equation seems to be happening at an exponentially accelerating rate. With Newsweek, alone, since 2005, there was the above global warming story, plus:

Evan Thomas' recent admission that "The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong", in regards to Newsweek's coverage (and that of the MSM as a whole) of the Duke non-rape case.

Their January 2007 cover story blaming "American Occupation" and not the culture of the Middle East itself for creating "The Next Jihadists".

Christopher Dickey's 2006 innuendo titled "Hanging Judgments", in which he implied that Republicans should swing along with Saddam Hussein.

Their September 19 2005 cover calling Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath "A National Shame", even as Americans nationwide poured out millions in support of New Orleans and the other areas hit by Katrina.

Their "Koran in the can" debacle in 2005.

Their international edition that same year depicting an American flag in a garbage can as a result of the 2004 election.

You can sum all this up to a raging collective case of what James Piereson has dubbed "Punitive Liberalism", but as Piereson has tracked, it's a surprisingly recent, post-JFK phenomenon. But then, a lot's changed in journalism since World War II. In Power Line, recently former New York Times magazine editor turned Hollywood talent coordinator William Katz wrote:

Consider this statement:

"It is also true that The New York Times is not a crusading newspaper. It is impressed with the responsibility of what it prints. It is conservative and independent, and so far as possible -- consistent with honest journalism -- attempts to aid and support those who are charged with the responsibility of government. There are many newspapers conducted along different lines, some of them vicious, ill-natured, and destructive of character and reputation, and for mere purposes of sensation they frequently terrorize well qualified and well meaning men to the point where they are discouraged from accepting invitations to give their ability, genius, and experience to the administration of public affairs."

Those words were in a letter written in 1931 by Adolph Ochs, the publisher of The New York Times.

Can you imagine any publisher writing that today? Can you imagine a publisher who believes it's his duty to "aid and support those who are charged with the responsibility of government"? That publisher would be labeled "unsophisticated," blind to the "adversarial relationship," indifferent to the need to "speak truth to power." And, God knows, the man certainly doesn't want to "make a difference."

I was on The Times during the Vietnam War. I recall once going down to the newsroom, on the 3rd floor, to suggest a story on some problems at a military hospital. I was properly irate, as only someone with a fresh diploma could be. But Robert Alden, a legendary Times reporter, sat me down and quickly tempered my righteousness, recounting the history of military medicine, and the lives it had saved. He asked that I consider that background when suggesting my story. Can you imagine that today?

There have been many changes in journalism since World War II, but the most striking has come in the resumé of the journalist. Of course, there have always been college graduates in journalism. Even Ernie Pyle, the everyman reporter of World War II, had studied at Indiana. But what we've had in the last 50 years is a deluge of college graduates. They have brought some improvements. But they've also brought into journalism the culture, attitudes, and arrogance of the academic world.

I don't suggest that all was sublime before the sheepskins arrived. For every great paper of the past, there were twenty we'd like to forget. For every grand statement of Adolph Ochs, there were spectacles like a news photographer, in 1928, strapping a camera to his ankle and sneaking it into Sing Sing so readers of the New York Daily News could see Ruth Snyder electrocuted on the front page.

But there have been, especially since the sixties, disturbing trends in journalism. Just as Hollywood, in its hiring practices, has replaced talent with education, journalism is in danger of replacing experience with report cards. Journalism is not a profession. There is no specific body of knowledge required, and there is no licensing. What is needed is a sharp set of skills, high powers of observation, and a humility about how much we can understand quickly, and these come only from experience. But when you've gone through Yale or Stanford, when you've been told how smart you are, when you got 700s on your SATs, you start to believe what mom has whispered in your ear. You start to think that you "know." It's a kind of self-inflicted grade inflation. I'm bright, therefore I'm right.

The impact of this attitude has been profound. As reader Sparks said, there has been a separation between journalism and its audience, and I believe it derives directly from the separation between our universities and the nation. College graduates, especially from supposedly elite schools, see themselves as a class apart. They are encouraged to do so, especially by the sixties crowd that still patrols the hallowed halls. (Well, let's not say "patrols." It's so Marine-ish, my dears. )

I recall editing a story about the Soviet Union for The New York Times Magazine. It was written by a Canadian professor. I made my notes on his first draft, then waited for his second, which came in due course. As I read it, though, I realized something odd had happened. The professor had changed all his conclusions, making them more pro-Soviet. I called him, not hiding my annoyance. How, I asked, could a scholar flip all his opinions between the first and the second draft? His reply was direct. "You don't understand," he said, "peer pressure in universities."

Clearly, there's lots of peer pressure in the offices of the MSM as well; as Roger Ailes said in March:

"The greatest danger to journalism is a newsroom or a profession where everyone thinks alike. Because then one wrong turn can cause an entire news division to implode".

All too often though, it takes someone outside the Parliament of Clocks to catch the errors after they've been published.

Hence, the Blogosphere.

Update: Steve Boriss makes a number of exceptional points on Newsweek and Robert Samuelson's rebuttal. Rather than my quoting his entire post, read the whole thing here.

We posted our thoughts on Ellen Goodman's ridiculous "the Blogosphere is sexist" article (And what's wrong with being sexy?, Nigel asks) two years ago--and last night. But Baldilocks has the best response yet: a list of prominent female bloggers.

Check it out--then follow the links. If only because you know Goodman won't.

Tomorrow's fisking today--Ellen Goodman* of the Boston Globe decries the lack of women in the Blogosphere. Everything I wrote two years ago when this same theme appeared in a Newsweek article applies today. Just click here to read it.

Found via fellow Neanderthal patriarchal oppressor Ed Morrissey, whose thoughts on Goodman's column are also well worth reading. As are those of Ann Althouse, that apparently rarest of breeds, the woman who blogs.

Read More »

In the late 1960s, before his movie career launched, Woody Allen made several television specials, including one in which he interviewed Billy Graham. Late last year, when Ann Althouse linked to the YouTube clips of this somewhat surreal moment, "Dirty Harry" of the conservative Libertas film blog wrote:

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

Such moments in which prominent members of the "Two America" publicly debate in a colligate spirit seem to occur much less often these days; Bob Tyrrell blames it all partially, and I believe somewhat tongue-in-cheek, on William F. Buckley:

What claims the attention of major media today is a phenomenon called Kultursmog. It is the popular culture of the United States, polluted utterly by a weird politics, a politics that is often called liberal but is actually simply leftish and adolescent. It has no fixed values or ideas other than to disturb the peace, which the legally attuned will recognize as a misdemeanor in most jurisdictions of the civilized world. Kultursmog is a culture that mixes rock stars in with fashion models and the ideas of Al Gore. Occasionally the smog actually includes the Hon. Gore, along with those other "rock star" personalities, the Clintons. The Kultursmog is always politically correct, ever sensitive to the whims of the Democratic National Committee, and increasingly anti-intellectual.

What makes it anti-intellectual is that the ideas behind public policy today are almost completely derived from Buckley, Milton Friedman, Irving Kristol, and other less well-known conservatives and neoconservatives. In fact I think I can argue successfully, if ironically, that Buckley is personally responsible for the anti-intellectualism that has spread throughout major media over the past 25 years. There once was a time when the late night television shows, the morning chat shows, and the personality sections of print journalism would occasionally feature the likes of Buckley and his most frequent liberal opponents, John Kenneth Galbraith and Gore Vidal. The time is long past. Buckley finished off his opponents years ago, and no young egghead was up to taking on his wit or erudition.

In any case, it's hard to argue that the gatekeepers of the overculture are infinitely more hostile to conservatives than they were a few decades ago.

Case in point: Mark Finkelstein notices that "Time Puts Horns on the Reverend Billy Graham:"

Just when you thought the MSM couldn't sink any lower . . .

Could there possibly be an American who doesn't admire the Reverend Billy Graham? Apparently, yes. Have a look at the cover of this week's 'Time.' Of all the ways the editors might have positioned the logo, they managed to do so in a manner in which the 'M' in 'TIME' is transformed into horns protruding from the good reverend's head.

Tucker Carlson and Willie Geist took up the matter on Tucker's MSNBC show this afternoon.

MSNBC'S WILLIE GEIST: A guy who has advised presidents, the Reverend Billy Graham on the cover of Time Magazine this week. I know the media is secular, but do they have to rub it in? A nice picture there of the reverend praying, but look at the horns above his head. A not-so-subtle message that maybe he's, well, Satan incarnate.

MSNBC HOST TUCKER CARLSON: That is actually . . .. Have people complained about that? Because that's unbelievable.

GEIST: Yeah, there's some chatter on the internet right now, and there's sure to be more.

Glad to oblige.

Is the juxtaposition purely a strange coincidence? Maybe, but then so was this, which received gallons of ink in 2000. And note how often these strange coincidences seem to occur in the MSM, and whom they frequently involve.

Related: If you can't use 'em, bruise 'em.

Back in February of 2005, William Voegeli wrote in Opinion Journal:

Lyndon Johnson gave one other memorable speech in 1964. At a campaign rally in Providence, R.I., he climbed onto his car, grabbed a bullhorn and summed up his political philosophy: "I just want to tell you this--we're in favor of a lot of things and we're against mighty few." The Democrats' problem is not that they, like "Seinfeld," are a show about nothing. It's that they are a show about everything, or anything. (At one point, the Kerry-for-president Web site referred to 79 separate federal programs he wanted to create or expand.)

Ruy Teixeira says that after 2004, "the bigger question is: What do the Democrats stand for?" Here's a better and bigger question still: What do the Democrats stand against?

Fred Siegal answers Voegeli's question, in a review of The Argument, a new book by New York Times liberal political correspondent Matt Bai. Siegel's review is titled "The Againstocrats" and appears in City Journal:

The liberal billionaires, such as George Soros and Peter Lewis, and the bloggers, such as “blogfather” Jerome Armstrong, are certain of what they’re against, Bai demonstrates. They are passionate in their hostility to the Republican “dictatorship,” the reviled George W. Bush, and his war in Iraq; they despise the evangelical “lizardheads” who live in “Dumbfuckistan”; they detest the Clintons as compromisers whose strategy of triangulation has turned the Democrats, as they see it, into me-too Republicans chasing after the middle-class vote; they loathe the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and, as famed Hollywood liberal Norman Lear puts it, “Joe ‘Fucking’ Lieberman”; and they are sure, insofar as they give it any thought, that the war on terror is largely a scam that has been sold to the “morons” of middle America.

Their problem is deciding what they are for, other than more power for people like themselves. The “argument” of Bai’s title refers to the long, futile search to develop a positive agenda, beyond support for abortion and gay marriage, that would articulate “some compelling case for the future of American government.” Discussing the political virtue of conveying deep convictions, one member of the Democratic Alliance—the billionaires’ organization funded by Soros and Lewis, among others—has to ask, “What are ours? . . . once we know them, we can frame them for voters.” The better informed among the billionaires and the bloggers understand that they can’t go back to New Deal liberalism. Says Andy Stern, the one major labor leader connected with the Democratic Alliance: “I like to say to people who want to return to the New Deal that we are now as far from the New Deal as the New Deal was from the Civil War.”

In more ways than one.

Related: "Abandoning the center".

I don't have much to say about Stu Bykofsky's Philadelphia Daily News column that "To Save America, We Need Another 9/11", except to say that I'm astonished that Bykofsky's still writing--he's been in Philly newspapers probably since William Penn founded the city in 1681.

But Mark Steyn writes that he gets "a ton of mail every week along Bykofsky lines: 'Oh, this country won't get serious until there's another attack.' Sorry, but don't look to a big smoking crater in Buffalo to save us":

For a start, the author overstates the immediate unity post-9/11. Even then, there was a big difference between the "righteous rage" crowd and those who wanted to wallow in bathetic weepy let's-hold-hands-and-drone-"Imagine" candlelight vigils and retreat into antiquated tropes about "root causes" like global poverty (notwithstanding the middle-class backgrounds of Mohammed Atta and co). The second time round, there won't even be a momentary veneer of unity. The angry left will be demanding by lunchtime "What did Bush know and when did he know it?" and citing eminent scientists such as Professor Rosie O'Donnell to demonstrate that it couldn't possibly have been anything but an inside job. The less angry left will demand not a punitive military response but a 12-month blue-ribbon commission co-chaired by Lee Hamilton to call witnesses and investigate where the Administration went wrong. Less motivated types will be convinced - like British public opinion after the Glasgow attack and the sailor kidnappings - that it's blowback for Iraq. And a big chunk of the rest may even plump for the Spanish option post-Madrid: Oh, dear, we seem to have caught your eye. What would it take for that not to happen again?

The split in this country is real. The so-called "singular purpose" of Fall 2001 was mostly illusory. Lightning won't strike twice, even if the Halliburton Tsunami-Hurricane Machine wants it to.

You can see much of that if you go back to the news stories and op-eds that early bloggers were Fisking. The lefty opinions and Vietnam-era clichés of the journalists of the day were very much a mirror of the left as a whole in the fall of 2001.

Michelle Malkin adds:

What the hell happened to “Let’s Roll?” It has been reduced to a gag line in the latest Tom Toles cartoon.

Curiously, Wikipedia's page on Bykofsky, updated today to include his Drudge-linked op-ed has labeled him a neoconservative. If he is, that's news to me, though I haven't read his column in well over a decade. But of course, labels in Wikipedia's entries can change by the minute.

Update: More thoughts on Bykofsky's column from "The Stump", one of AOL's election-themed blogs.

Dean Barnett writes, "As you’ve probably heard, [Bob] Owens wrote a blog post yesterday that shredded the last remnants of The New Republic’s reputation", a post in which Owens wrote:

What is most interesting about the The New Republic's statement is that while they state they spoke to "dozens of people" in fact-checking their stories, they refused to cite the names of their experts, or explain their qualifications—those qualities that make them experts.

The reasoning behind that purposeful obfuscation is becoming ever more clear with each passing day.

"Stephen Glass Goes to War", is how Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post describes the Beauchamp debacle.

Jim Geraghty, who says he'll be appearing on Howard Kurtz's show this weekend, where he'll probably be discussing TNR's meltdown, adds:

I've enjoyed The New Republic in the past, and part of me felt a bit of pity for the magazine stepping right into a perfect sequel to Stephen Glass's story (Hayden Christensen, call your agent) but this is bad. This suggests that TNR really didn't want to find evidence to contradict their man's account, and organized their "fact checking" in a way to ensure that they found the result they wanted to find: "Oh, everything's fine, it all checks out." This is as close to a smoking gun of malfeasance on the part of TNR as we've seen in this story.

This, by the way, was exactly what Dan Rather and CBS did to their "experts" in the whole memo mess back in 2004.

Courage.

Update: Great moments in headlines: "Don't Beauchamp That Joint".

More: "The whole point of 'Shock Troops' was to demonize the U.S. military, right? And now that their little story has proven to be credibility-deficient, how do the editors of TNR defend themselves? By demonizing the military!"

"Reuters Busted by a 13-Year Old", for passing off underwater shots from Titanic as pictures from the Russian North Pole expedition.

Adnan Hajj could not be reached for comment.

Actually, Etheridge is a step up for ABC. I remember when they employed an up-and-coming child actor during the 2000 election as The New Ted Koppel.

Ace writes:

Google News Search Reveals Only A Local ND TV Station And FoxNews Mention NASA's Dramatically-Revised Temperature Records

Even as the MSM scratch their heads over poll numbers such as these.

Oh well--when I suggested on Sunday that the ultimate dénouement of Newsweek's latest global warming cover story was foreshadowed by a story from a previous edition of the magazine, I had no idea how quickly it would occur.

Update: Heh: "Global Warming Is a Hoax...But Y2K turns out to have a kernel of truth."

Pinch-hitting for Hugh Hewitt on Thursday, Dean Barnett asked Mark Steyn about John Cougar Mellencamp's recent appearance on Comedy Central's Colbert Report, "where he had a particularly muscular response he had in mind to al Qaeda and 9/11, didn’t he?" Steyn replied:

[Mellencamp] got rather annoyed at the idea that being a pacifist means you’re a wimp. And he challenged Stephen Colbert to I think it was an arm wrestling match as evidence that in fact real men are pacifists. He’d argued that the proper response to 9/11 would have been to do nothing, to have said okay, look, man, you’ve blown a huge smoking hole in the center of New York. But we’re bigger than that, so we’re not going to do anything. And he argued, he was in effect attempting to argue that that was really the manly response. And a lot of these rockers get very twitchy when, as Stephen Colbert did, that you put it to them that this is a rather kind of feeble response when somebody does that to you. And his response, his rather curious attitude then was to offer to arm wrestle Stephen Colbert into the ground. I would have liked to have seen how that would have gone.

Probably about as well as this threatened pacifistic rumble from a few years ago.

Cougar has written several songs that do a reasonable job mining territory long since explored (to death) by Bruce Springsteen. But talk shows really aren't his best medium, it seems.

The New York Times reports that Frank Rosenfelt of MGM died last week at age 85. Far from a household name, but check out the movies he was associated with in just these few paragraphs of his obit:

He made it clear that a large part of his approach was to make compelling entertainment for theaters, television and video recordings. The hundreds of pictures he oversaw included masterpieces like “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) by the director Stanley Kubrick.

“I don’t own a screwdriver,” he said in an interview with The New York Times Magazine in 1982. “I don’t even know how my television set works. All I know is they need programming and I have the programming. All I care about is that it’s my product and I get paid for it.”

One of his triumphs was acquiring the movie rights to “Doctor Zhivago,” (1965) by the Russian writer Boris Pasternak, from the producer Carlo Ponti, who had owned the rights. Variety reported that Mr. Rosenfelt had investigated whether writers in the Soviet Union had the right to sell their own properties by tracking down a scholar of Russian law. He found that the authors retained property rights. He then had top Russian literary scholars help provide a translation that would satisfy the terms of the agreement.

One of his biggest disappointments was when MGM’s movie “Network” (1976) — which contained the line “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” — lost the Academy Award for best picture to “Rocky,” The Associated Press reported. It said he banned the mention of the winning movie’s name in his home.

David Lean was once quoted as saying that the problem with Hollywood is that it "forgot how to tell stories." The troika of films mentioned above is a surprisingly literate group. Sadly, it may be a long time--if ever--that writing for the big screen returns to that level of quality.

"To me, nature is... I dunno, spiders and bugs and, big fish eating little fish. And plants eating plants and animals eating...It's like an enormous restaurant."

"And so I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Actually, make that 'I run through the valley of the shadow of death'--in order to get OUT of the valley of the shadow of death more quickly, you see."

The Future Of News writes that most of the usual suspects who complain about “fewer choices for information" due to consolidations in Big Media ignore the elephant that's been in the room for over 150 years:

In fact, the mother of all media consolidations — the formation of the Associated Press — is the reason that all of our mainstream outlets run just about the same stories. It began in 1848 as a clever and benign arrangement in which NY newspapers pooled their transportation and telegraph resources to get news from across the Atlantic faster and cheaper. But, it soon degenerated into a collusive, anti-competitive scheme. The AP papers shrewdly signed an agreement giving Western Union exclusive rights to their telegraph business in exchange for higher telegraph fees for all other news providers. Then, AP bylaws were redrafted to give members veto power over admission of would-be competitors in their local circulation areas. In desperation, the fledgling Chicago Sun took the AP all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1945 found it to be in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.

But, bylaws or no bylaws, the damage was done, and we continue to suffer from the AP’s improprieties. Today’s papers are collaborators, not competitors. Through their membership in the AP, they share news with each other, and use precious column inches to reprint the same, single set of national stories — space that could be used to provide more choices of information. In fact, the reporting costs are so low when papers work through the not-for-profit AP that no one can make a profit by launching a paper with alternative information. Now you know why not a single, financially self-sustaining metropolitan daily newspaper has been founded in more than 60 years.

Hey, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps! You really wanna do something about media consolidation? Move your Board seat from the FCC to the FTC, forget about Big Oil, Big Pharmaceutical, and Big Tobacco, and break-up the corporate conspiracy that has sharply limited our choices of information and greatly harmed our democracy — “Big News.”

It'll never happen, but clearly, the Blogosphere and other market forces have at least diluted AP's influence somewhat. Meanwhile, The Future Of News believes that the future of news may be visible now amidst the fog and rain in Seattle.

(Via Galley Slaves.)

Dan Gainor writes that "The call from the Ivory Tower just wasn't strong enough to stop media mogul Rupert Murdoch from buying Dow Jones & Company. But, it came really close":

"Murdoch also said the media's harsh coverage of him during negotiations with the Bancroft family, which controls Dow Jones, almost squashed the deal," wrote New York Post reporter Peter Lauria in the August 9 New York Post.

From the time negotiations were made public in April until the time the deal was announced on August 1, Murdoch took cheap shot after cheap shot by many of the talking heads in the media.

"I spent the better part of the past three months enduring criticism normally leveled at a genocidal tyrant," Murdoch said.

Murdoch could have avoided all of this if he simply had hired Ramsey Clark as his lead attorney and spokesman.

Hint: Martin Landau and Keir Dullea won't be getting too excited by the meager designs currently on the drawing boards.

Just hours after linking to Christopher Hitchens' Slate piece on Oakland's Your Black Muslim Bakery--which responds to press criticism in much the same way that Michael Corleone would, I come across Cinnamon Stillwell's piece on "San Francisco health food store cooperative Rainbow Grocery and its troublesome history of anti-Semitism (both in the guise of 'anti-Zionism' and of the flat-out Jew-hating variety)".

As someone she quotes in her post says, "I guess that's the extra you pay for groceries that are organic, antisemitic, and tied to alleged murderers."

Update: "Black Muslim Bakery Bilked Oakland".

On the day of his birthday, James Lileks beams back a photograph from Hell: a television set above a urinal in a hotel men's room, echoing the infamous moment in Robocop with the stock ticker in the executive W.C.

I'm not sure if I've seen TV sets in any commercial men's rooms I've been in (and I’d like to think I’d remember seeing something like that), but God knows they're everywhere else. Kaiser has had them in their doctors’ waiting rooms for several years now, and more recently, during a major remodeling, my local supermarket installed small sets at every checkout station, and a large plasma model above the produce aisle, all mostly beaming out CBS programming.

The local Bank of America branch has TV sets--with the sound on, as I recall--blaring CNN while you wait for the next teller. And of course, as any one who flies has noticed, all TV sets in all American airport waiting areas must be tuned as well to CNN. It's. The. Law.

Of course, CBS and CNN are each getting killed in their own way at the moment in the ratings: Katie Couric is third amongst evening news anchors; and Fox News cleans CNN's clock nightly. I wonder how much, if any, the presence of their Ingsoc-style telescreens contributes to their ratings? And would CNN and CBS have even lower ratings without a captive audience that's forced to watch them?

One of my local gas stations (the Gulf station, I believe) has recently installed TV screens above the meters and credit card swipes in the pumps. No long form programming here, it'a all commercials, which begin once the credit card is swiped. What’s strange is that almost all of the ads actually discourage gasoline use: they seem to be an endless stream of Toyota Prius commercials, mass transit, and other environmentally-themed ads. Bu then, to me, the whole idea of having to watch commercials while pumping gas is pretty strange. Especially when half the drivers leave their 190-db chest-pounding subwoofer-equipped car stereos blasting away while filling up.

But the timing of this recent rush to bring a whole new meaning to public broadcasting is a bit bizarre itself. It comes just as television is massively losing ground to the Internet. Happily, between laptops, PDAs, iPods, iPhones, and even handheld videogames, a growing number of people have access to digital information and entertainment that they've chosen to interact with, rather than 80-year old brodcast networks.

The annoyance of a public TV set in this day of personal media seems to greatly outweigh its benefits. Beyond the added advertising revenue, is it the relative low cost of a thin LCD-style TV set makes them inviting for retail businesses to install? Is it a sense of nostalgia for a medium that's pretty much peaked? Because maybe I missed it, but I don’t recall reading about supermarkets installing radios in the checkout counters to pump out broadcasts of Benny Goodman and his orchestra live from the Fontainebleau just as television was reaching its zenith (so to speak) in the mid-1950s.

Congratulations to Glenn Reynolds, who's celebrating his sixth anniversary on Instapundit. And while he links back today to what he was writing about in August of 2001, his current site lacks one of the most important elements that made his unique prior to 9/11: the Blogger.com button. You can see it here, on this page archived by the Wayback Machine.

When my local neighborhood finally recieved broadband around 1999 or so, I began reading some of the same big boys I knew from my previous dial-up days: Drudge, National Review, Reason, and World Net Daily amongst them. There was also the Brothers Judd, in its pre-blog, book review-dominated early days, which seemed like massive self-publishing project.

Eventually I discovered e-zines, including, I believe Mickey Kaus, maybe Andrew Sullivan, and definitely Virginia Postrel, since Reason, which she was then doing a superb job of editing, frequently promoted her personal Dynamist site. But e-zines seemed like a fair amount of work to me to maintain, based on my HTML skills--or lack thereof--back then: they had to be designed, new pages had to be FTPed up at least daily, lest the site start to develop cobwebs, and the whole thing seemed like the technological equivalent of custom tailoring: a lot of hard work and individual craftsmanship.

I knew there were also blogs, but those seemed like an entirely an entirely different kind of flying altogether, as Ted Striker would say. (Who’s this Shirley he keeps referring to? What's her blog's URL?) Or as I wrote a couple of years ago:

Prior to discovering InstaPundit, rightly or wrongly, I thought of Weblogs as being online diaries for teenagers to describe their latest trip to the shopping mall. It was only because Glenn used Blogger's software at the time that it began to dawn on me that a Weblog could do much more than simply be a daily personal diary for the world to see. I think I had a reaction similar to a young Woody Allen seeing Mort Sahl for the first time, and realizing there was a different form of humor than just one-liners and shtick, or a young musician hearing Charlie Parker and thinking, "Wow--there really is more to jazz than swing...!"

And I imagine a lot of people had the same thought, as they began to discover the Blogosphere on or shortly after 9/11, and eventually realized how flexible the medium of blogging could be.

Of course, the dinosaur media had the inverse reaction, but that's not all that surprising. Despite being in the business of reporting news, they're often the last to notice any kind of technological change. Once they do notice, if its one that threatens their livelihood, and especially, if it threatens their status, they'll attack it no end.

Chauncey Bailey, the Oakland Post editor shot by a "handyman" (as the media have dubbed his accused killer) associated with the Oakland-based "Your Black Muslim Bakery" franchise, was laid to rest today.

Beginning with its loaded metatag title of "The faith-based thugs of Oakland's Your Black Muslim Bakery", the pox on all their houses tone to this Slate piece by Christopher Hitchens is unmistakable, especially since Hitchens has a new book out titled, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. But his article is still a must-read:

Now, I'm just asking, but: rape, polygamy, intimidation, torture, murder, all these actions emanating from one address and some of them performed in the name of a fanatical ideology. What does it take before the police decide to raid the premises? Should we wait until unveiled women are attacked on the street or until honor killings or female circumcision take hold? (There is no official connection between YBMB and Louis Farrakhan's racist and cultish Nation of Islam, though it seems that Yusuf Bey Sr. did convert to some form of Islam under that sinister organization's auspices.)

My question was answered last Friday, when the Oakland Police Department finally did storm the premises, along with three neighboring homes, and arrested seven people, including Yusuf Bey IV. This, however, was too late to save the life of Chauncey Bailey, the well-liked editor of the black-owned Oakland Post, who had decided to take up where the East Bay Express had left off and to investigate the finances of YBMB. He was shot dead last Thursday in broad daylight on an Oakland street. A young handyman from YBMB named Devaughndre Broussard has been charged in the Bailey case, and other members of the group are being investigated for involvement in the earlier crimes. The "bakery" itself owes more than $200,000 in back taxes and filed for bankruptcy protection last October.

Now, again, I am just asking, but what if this racket had been named the White Christian or Aryan Nations Cookie Parlor? (Motto and mission statement: "Don't F*** With Us.") I think that Oakland's mayor, Ron Dellums—who I was startled to find was still alive—would have joined a picket line around the store (as would I). The same would doubtless have been true of Rep. Barbara Lee, in whose district the YBMB was situated. But instead, in its role as a "community business," the YBMB enjoyed warm support and endorsement from both the mayor and the congresswoman. And the guns for past and future slayings were inside the store.

As Hitchens writes, "If this isn't softness on crime, then the term is meaningless."

Ann Coulter's latest op-ed is titled, "Absolutely Fabulist".

Say, now that rings a bell somewhere...

In the New York Sun, Howard Husock takes us back to 1967, "the 40th anniversary of the political campaign which transformed the Democratic party — the presidential candidacy of Eugene McCarthy", that would launch the original "new left" (who today would qualify as The Establishment, using the lingo of that time) and ultimately cost LBJ his shot at a second term:

The McCarthy campaign was not only extraordinary by historical standards — imagine a Republican opposing Lincoln during the Civil War or a Democrat opposing Roosevelt in 1944 — but marked the entrance into national politics of the new class of Democrats who would come to dominate the party; both Hillary Clinton and a member of her inner circle, Harold Ickes, cut their political teeth in the McCarthy campaign, as did John Podesta, another long-time confidante to the Clintons. They were among the Ivy League-educated liberals drawn to politics as a means to express moral sentiments — or what Mrs. Clinton, a McCarthy volunteer herself would later call a "politics of meaning."

With Mrs. Clinton now the odds-on favorite to win the Democratic presidential nomination, it's worth reflecting on that formative political experience — and the extent to which it may still influence her campaign approach.

In addition to its "bring the troops home now" message, the McCarthy campaign also introduced new tactics into campaigning, ranging from its reliance on a core group of ideologically-motivated funders — presaging George Soros — door-to-door canvassers brought in from out of town, and, perhaps most memorably, a tactic which its young volunteers adopted known as "Clean for Gene." Viewed most simply, it involved long haired New Left types getting haircuts, before hitting the streets of Concord and Manchester.

In his definitive 1970 memoir of that campaign, "Nobody Knows," McCarthy speechwriter Jeremy Larner described the tactic this way: "There was to be said here for the self-imposed discipline of the youth corps. ‘Clean for Gene' was a policy of practical political sophistication. For several years, the peace movement had been having a mixed effect on America. In New Hampshire it was possible for students to work effectively against the war and the assumptions behind the war without an exchange of hostility."

In other words, "Clean for Gene" was about much more than a haircut. It was a tactic designed to package one's beliefs behind a misleading façade — to present oneself as the kid next door, an All-American boy or girl. In other words, this was a tactic meant not so much to disarm as to deceive. Notably, it established a pattern. Time and again, left-leaning organizations have, in the years since, sought to wrap themselves in an outer mantle of traditional Americanism, despite their distaste for it. Think of " People for the American Way" and its founding president, Anthony Podesta, whose younger brother John was the founding president of Center for American Progress. Or think of the abortive left-leaning radio talk show network, Air America, or the 2004 Kerry campaign bumper sticker, "Support America, Defeat Bush." All stem from the "Clean for Gene" tactic — asserting one's tie to American traditionalism no matter one's actual politics.

One can go further and wonder, indeed, whether Mrs. Clinton's nominally difficult to understand record — voting initially for the war in Iraq, offering apparently centrist views on everything from abortion to flag-burning to statements about the importance to her of "faith" — are themselves a long-playing version of "Clean for Gene."

Indeed, this would be the central question of a Hillary Clinton presidency: have her views evolved or, is she simply saying and doing what seems necessary to enable her to bring a social democratic agenda to power?

Hot Air's Allahpundit brings the "Clean For Gene" schism full circle:

In all candor, Kos calling the DLC “a bunch of cranks” was the closest I’ve ever come to liking him and the first insight I’ve had into why someone on the left might prefer the nutroots over the centrists. Every time I see Harold Ford or Shillary on Fox taking a very meek, politic, inoffensive line about the filthy left, it makes them look that much more feeble and hesitant by comparison. It’s all carefully tactical on their part, of course: there’s no sense antagonizing the liberals lest it provoke an intraparty schism that ends up hurting Hillary’s chances in the general election, especially when they’re confident they’ll win if, as expected, she’s the nominee and tacks back towards the right for the general next year. But I wonder how young uncommitted Democrats, presented with the two options, will come down. It’s strong horse/weak horse all over again: Kos, who at least has the stones to call his opponents cranks, versus the mealy-mouthed establishment centrists who tremble at the thought of offending the far left’s angry bottom-feeders. They look, and sound, scared. The DLC thinks it’s going to have the last laugh when Hillary’s elected, but if she tries to govern from the center the nutroots is going to make more trouble for her than righty bloggers ever could. And she’ll deserve it. Which brings us to the clip — here’s Joe Klein, nutroots hate object, hinting at what a bad idea it is for the Democratic presidential field to go kissing Kos’s ass.

And just to top things off, here's another split brewing between the new, new left and a more centrist--if not necessarily more moderate--politician.

Update: It's also worth noting another, more toxic offshoot of the "Clean For Gene" movement: Winter Soldier Syndrome.

The 21st century equivalent of "Croatoan" or "NO KILL I" surfaces in Holland.

In other news from the world of plastics, Dustin Hoffman graduates to 70 years old today.

This sounds like one of those National Enquirer self-quizzes: how you react to the I-35 bridge collapse reveals your true personality!

"Chicago Tribune Puts New Spin on Bridge Collapse as Anti-immigrant, Anti-Muslim".

"Ex-Clinton Official Ties Minneapolis Bridge Collapse to Global Warming".

"Olbermann Blames Iraq War Spending for Bridge Collapse

".

"Fred Phelps and his contemptible claque believe that God made the bridge fall because Minneapolitans didn’t round up the gays and burn them a Loring Park bonfire, so they’re going to protest the funerals of the people who died in the bridge collapse."

The I-35: It's a mirror into your soul! (Or lack thereof, in Phelps' case.)

Update: Ace: "I Don't Want To Politicize The Minneapolis Bridge Collapse, But I'm Pretty Sure It Was Andrew Sullivan's Fault"...

Last night I caught the last half-hour or so of Robert Redford's 1994 film Quiz Show, that hard-hitting topical movie that blew the lid off the corrupt game show industry...of the late 1950s. Googling around afterwards led me to Ken Auletta's New Yorker article on the film, reprinted on his site, in which he asks, "Thirty-five years after the quiz-show scandal, a group of network executives consider the question: Is television still cheating?"

The whole thing is well worth reading, starting with this:

TELEVISION has always danced with the show-business devil. The need for pictures can distort judgments a