Variety explores the prospect of "A dark latenight ahead" as "Writers strike reality sets in":

While the networks have been repeating the mantra that "screens will not go black," it won't take long for TV viewers to see the impact of a Writers Guild of America strike.

The canaries in TV's creative coal mine are latenight hosts such as David Letterman and Jay Leno, whose monologues and sketches are dependent on union writers. If history is any guide, both shows will almost instantly go dark, as would "Saturday Night Live." Comedy Central's latenight stalwarts "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report" would also likely switch to repeats in the immediate aftermath of a strike.

"Boom -- our show just shuts down," said "SNL" vet Amy Poehler. "It's just done. There is no backlog of scripts." (For more on latenight and the strike, log on to Variety.com)

Primetime comedy and drama series will feel the pinch immediately, though the on-air effect will be delayed at least a few weeks for most shows as they air completed segs. Cruelest blows will hit the frosh crop of shows that are just starting to get a toehold with viewers, including ABC's "Private Practice," "Pushing Daisies" and "Samantha Who" and CBS' "The Big Bang Theory."

The repercussions of scribes going out will surely be felt at Hollywood's major talent agencies. It's widely expected that a prolonged strike would result in serious layoffs; some agencies have already sketched out strike contingency plans involving salary deferments and other cost-cutting moves.

Fight it out hammer and tongs fellas; take as long as you need. You'll only be speeding up the migration to here.

So I'm sitting with my wife, having dinner in our favorite local Italian restaurant, minding our own business, when at about 8:05 Pacific time, this interrupts and really harshes our collective mellow:

The U.S. Geological Survey reports that a 5.6 earthquake based in the Alum Rock area of San Jose hit at approximately 8:04 p.m.

Bay residents as far away as Sacramento and Sonoma reported feeling the tremor.

There were no immediate reports of major damage or injury.

The USGS reported at least seven aftershocks, all measuring less than magnitude 2.0.

USGS seismologist Steve Walter said the quake hit the Calaveras fault.

Drudge had the police gumball on for a time, and the local television stations will spend the rest of the evening making a huge deal about it, but in Milpitas, a suburb of San Jose, and seven miles from the quake's epicenter, things seem to be in pretty darn good condition: the electricity's on in the house. The cable modem is (needless to say) working. The books are all on the shelves, and none of the Remy Martin 1738 hit the floor.

No nuke, no foul, right?

Update: Earlier today, I had interviewed Virginia Postrel for this week's PJM Political on XM. And apropos of tonight's shakin' all over, here's one of my favorite columns from her, on "Resilience vs. Anticipation".

Ron Rosenbaum:

So I was down in DC this past weekend and happened to run into a well-connected media person, who told me flatly, unequivocally that “everyone knows” The LA Times was sitting on a story, all wrapped up and ready to go about what is a potentially devastating sexual scandal involving a leading Presidential candidate. “Everyone knows” meaning everyone in the DC mainstream media political reporting world. “Sitting on it” because the paper couldn’t decide the complex ethics of whether and when to run it. The way I heard it they’d had it for a while but don’t know what to do. The person who told me )not an LAT person) knows I write and didn’t say “don’t write about this”.

If it’s true, I don’t envy the LAT. I respect their hesitation, their dilemma, deciding to run or not to run it raises a lot of difficult journalism ethics questions and they’re likely to be attacked, when it comes out—the story or their suppression of the story—whatever they do.

Mickey Kaus adds:

My vestigial Limbaugh gland tells me it must involve a Democrat, or else the Times would have found a reason to print it. ... P.S.: If it's just Richardson, that will be very disappointing.

(Via Glenn Reynolds, who adds, "If it's there, it'll leak.")

Don't try connecting these dots, you'll only give yourself a headache:

Justice Stevens: U.S. shootdown of Admiral Yamamoto helped turn me against the death penalty

Ace puts it into rather salty terms, but it's hard to argue with his take.

Update: Somewhat related thoughts from Jules Crittenden.

Columbia Journalism Review:

Just after the invasion in 2003, reporters could go almost anywhere and talk to almost anyone. Then, slowly, everything changed.."

Michael Totten:

I can go almost anywhere and talk to almost anyone in Iraq right now.

William Langeweische (Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair) rented a house in the Red Zone and reported from there on and off, unembedded, for four years.

Read the whole thing.

"Consumer advocate and 2004 independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader sued the Democratic Party on Tuesday, contending officials conspired to keep him from taking votes away from nominee John Kerry."

But will Ralph fire up the Corvair for a run in '08?

Last week, Jonah Goldberg and Peter Beinart had quite an interesting video debate on whether or not the US should have entered WWI. The joys of hyperinflation was one of its byproducts, and a Bauhaus-designed 1,000,000 Reichmark note from the Weimar Republic in 1923 is currently up for sale on eBay.

An exasperated Betsy Newmark declares, "It's enough...almost...to make one a libertarian":

Thomas Sowell puts his finger on a central cause of so many of the problems we face today.

It is remarkable how many political “solutions” today are dealing with problems created by previous political “solutions.” Three examples that come to mind immediately are the housing -market crisis, the wildfires in southern California, and the water shortages in the west.

Add in our problems with people not being able to afford health insurance, the quality of our schools, AMT bracket creep, and fears for Social Security. And, I'm sure, a whole host of other issues that I don't have the time to think of. When you trace back to the origins of the problem, there is some well-meant government decision there in the beginning that started the whole mess.

And rather than reversing that original decision, the choice always seems to be to pile on more government solutions to fix the problem that some choice decades ago created.

The history of politics post New Deal and Great Society is pretty much an endless laundry list of trying to fix, tinker with, or add onto the programs of the New Deal and Great Society, isn't it?

As Warner Todd Huston notes, despite AP's best efforts at spinning the numbers, at 25,000 visitors in its first year, the George McGovern Legacy Museum (!) had 5,000 less visitors than the annual traffic of the Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin Mustard Museum. But that's boffo business compared with the number of ticket purchasers on the opening weekend of another attempt to glorify the toothless legacy politicians of the 1970s, Jonathan Demme's blockbuster Jimmy Carter biopic.

"[The Edwards campaign] didn't want us to put it out there. Now, because of you and other broadcast and print reporters, it's everywhere."

Funny how that's often the case...

Rob Port writes:

Fantastic news for North Dakota which to this point has only had a visit from one other Presidential Candidate, and that was just Dennis Kucinich who doesn’t even really count.

Now I’m not a Rudy Giuliani supporter myself, but this is a great opportunity for North Dakota. We need to show the nation that it’s worth the time of the candidates to stop in here and visit us.

That was a topic that James Lileks explored with characteristic tongue-in-cheek in his segment of PJM Political a couple of weeks ago. Tune in here to listen--Lileks appears about 25 minutes into the show.

Err, "except those plastic discs", writes Chris Anderson of Wired and The Long Tail in a good follow-up to our earlier post here.

Dean Barnett is The Plucky Smart Kid With the Fatal Disease--and he has quite a story to tell, in the latest volume from the New Pamphleteer.

Nikke Finke explores the ultimate form of celebrity image control, which is actually smart self-promotion to end-run the drive-by legacy media:

In a savvy bit of News Corp synergy, The Darjeeling Limited's star Owen Wilson tonight at midnight airs his first interview since his September suicide attempt on MySpace.com. This was the result of a marketing brainstorm by Darjeeling's studio Fox Searchlight, which approached fellow News Corp.-owned MySpace.com with the idea for the interview by Owen's friend and Darjeeling director Wes Anderson. It's a 5- to 10-minute pre-taped piece: Anderson and Wilson set the agenda themselves, and Anderson directed, edited and produced the whole thing. Hilariously, there's a really angry article about this on ABC News, which just happens to employ both Barbara and Diane. Headlined, "Tell All Or PR Ploy?", ABC News complains how fallen stars now have a far more appealing option than the ABC interview divas: "Cut the pesky journalist out of the mix and tell all, on their own terms, on the Internet. It's the ultimate form of image control." But ABC News defends the use of journalists for celebrity interviews, claiming the TV newsosaurs have integrity. What b.s.

I doubt Nicolas Sarkozy would argue with that.

The Times writes that "Memories of Obama in New York Differ":

Mr. Obama has, of course, done plenty of remembering. His 1995 memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” weighs in at more than 450 pages. But he also exercised his writer’s prerogative to decide what to include or leave out. Now, as he presents himself to voters, a look at his years in New York — other people’s accounts and his own — suggests not only what he was like back then but how he chooses to be seen now.

Some say he has taken some literary license in the telling of his story. Dan Armstrong, who worked with Mr. Obama at Business International Corporation in New York in 1984 and has deconstructed Mr. Obama’s account of the job on his blog, analyzethis.net, wrote: “All of Barack’s embellishment serves a larger narrative purpose: to retell the story of the Christ’s temptation. The young, idealistic, would-be community organizer gets a nice suit, joins a consulting house, starts hanging out with investment bankers, and barely escapes moving into the big mansion with the white folks.”

In an interview, Mr. Armstrong added: “There may be some truth to that. But in order to make it a good story, it required a bit of exaggeration.”

A Democratic presidential hopeful exaggerating his past? Huh--perish the thought...

Libertas's "Dirty Harry" writes that the format war between competing high definition DVD formats has slowed the acceptance of the successor to the DVD, which is now in its tenth year of existence. And the film studios are shooting themselves in the foot, since the money isn't in the player, but the back catalog.

A format war merely slows--or stops--Hollywood's efforts to resell its back catalog yet again, which is where the real long term money is, anway. When I go high-def DVD, I'll be on my fourth or fith copies of some movies, having gone from VHS to 12-inch laser disc (remember those?!), to DVD. And along the way, having bought pan & scan and letterboxed LDs, and original issue and remastered DVDs of some of the titles I was more obsessive about.

Meanwhile, I just downloaded my first MP3-only only album off Amazon.com. It's a complete win-win for both consumer and Amazon: there's no physical product to be inventoried, packaged and shipped, and it downloads so quickly over broadband that it's near-instantaneous consumer gratification. The individual tunes are MP3s so there's complete portability amongst the PC and iPod-style player. It's been licensed by the record company, so there are no Napster legal issues. And the MP3s are rendered in 256 kbps format, which is, I believe the second highest quality format available via MP3. (Per XM's request, we do PJM Political as a 320 kbps MP3, which is the highest quality MP3 format.)

There's little doubt that as broadband speeds increase--and they will--video will be soon be added to the download mix, and not just teeny YouTube clips. Eventually DVD collections such as these will be a download away. I don't think bricks and morter stores will fade away anytime soon, but the Long Tail is becoming increasingly easier for savvy online retailers to implement.

Oh, what album did I buy? This.

No, really! Fooling around with Roland's new VG-99 guitar modeling system and its built-in recreation of their classic original GR-300 guitar synthesizer got me in the mood to hear 1984's version of "The Future of Guitar." (Would that that future came true, as compared to what passes for pop music on the radio today.) And speaking of the VG-99, if you're a guitar aficionado, you may enjoy my review of Roland's latest guitar modeling system, which I knocked out for Blogcritics over the weekend.

Found via Maggie's Farm: When Reason (complete with a John & Yoko-inspired headline whose freshness date expired in 1969) has good news from Iraq, you know there's good news from Iraq.

On the other hand, Michael Yon writes that Afghanistan's definitely looking shakier at the moment.

"Giuliani is Mideast's worst nightmare".

I certainly hope so.

Fred Barnes writes, "Only Rudy and Mitt have credible scenarios". If that's true, items such as this will increase Fred's chances to be nominated as either man's veep.

Lisa, if you don't watch the violence, you'll never get desensitized to it!

Chief Illiniwek rides again!

First the University of Illinois bowed to the forces of political correctness and booted out Chief Illiniwek as the campus’s mascot – after the Chief had served in this role for 81 years. The university’s student government association had declared the use of this symbol of honor and loyalty to be discriminatory and a racial stereotype.

Now, in the name of free speech, UI has lifted the prohibition, allowing the Chief’s logo on homecoming parade floats.

Hail to the Chief (and good sense at UI)!

Photos of the good chief's return, here.

Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Washington Post:

Memo to everyone everywhere: Al Sharpton isn't a black leader, he just plays one on TV.

But only because television, in contrast to the Internet, is the biggest Memory Hole ever invented by man.

David Kahane is the nom de word processor of a conservative screenwriter hiding out at one of the most dangerous places in the world for anyone from Hollywood who wants to keep his job--National Review Online:

I sure hope you like C-SPAN, reruns, and reality shows, because if we the Hollywood proletariat have our way, every writer in town is going on strike, perhaps as soon as this Thursday. If you ask me, it’s not a moment too soon.

Technically, we’re striking against the producers, the studios, and the networks — the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers — who have been trying to screw us out of our fair share of VHS and DVD residuals for years, and whose initial offer was to screw us even harder. With a brave new world of iPhone technology on its way, we want to make sure we don’t get fooled again.

But everyone knows we’re really striking against you, the ungrateful, reactionary, and probably crypto-fascist audience. You’ve let us all down by not going to see our movies.

The Kingdom? A disappointment at $46 million. Rendition? A huge antiwar belly flop for Reese Witherspoon, Meryl Streep, and the guy from Brokeback Mountain playing in 2,250 theaters that hasn’t yet managed $8 million. Elizabeth: The Golden Age? The Catholic-bashing costume party with Cate Blanchett in high dudgeon and higher drag is a flopola at $14 million. In the Valley of Elah, from scribe du jour Paul Haggis? It’ll be lucky to make $7 million. At this rate, you probably won’t even go to see Brian De Palma’s Redacted.

Frankly, we’re tired of throwing our pearls before you swine. So we’re firing you.

A couple of years ago, Mark Steyn wrote:

That’s why Hollywood prefers to make “controversial” films about controversies that are settled, rousing itself to fight battles long won. Go back to USA Today’s approving list of Hollywood’s willingness to “broach the tough issues”: “Brokeback and Capote for their portrayal of gay characters; Crash for its examination of racial tension . . .” That might have been “bold” “courageous” movie-making half-a-century ago. Ever seen the Dirk Bogarde film Victim? He plays a respectable married barrister whose latest case threatens to expose his homosexuality. That was 1961, when homosexuality was illegal in the United Kingdom and Bogarde was the British movie industry’s matinee idol and every schoolgirl’s pinup: That’s brave. Doing it at a time when your typical conservative politician gets denounced as “homophobic” because he’s only in favor of civil unions is just an exercise in moral self-congratulation. And, unlike the media, most of the American people are savvy enough to conclude that by definition that doesn’t require their participation.

More from "Kahane":

It’s so sad: Here we were, on a roll, with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in command of Congress, the Clinton Restoration practically a fait accompli, and Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize to use as a doorstop alongside his Oscar — and this is the thanks we get.

Well, I just don’t get it. It’s not like our patriotism is questionable or anything. Like Bonosera the undertaker in The Godfather, we love U.S.-America, we believe in U.S.-America, just not U.S.-America the way she is now: a racist, sexist, homophobic bastion of white male privilege, built on the backs of Africans and Native Americans and exploited immigrants, seeking to export its murderous rage to the Middle East and beyond. And all right-thinking people — by which I mean “left-thinking” people, of course — agree with us. You certainly won’t get any argument on the west side of Los Angeles, and wherever I travel in this great land of ours — to places as diverse as San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, and the Upper West Side — it’s unanimous. America stinks!

Or as Ace wrote a few months ago, "Call it the Ike Turner school of patriotism."

Like Tina, the audience seems a bit tired of being battered every night by this stuff.

Update: More from the Ike Turner school of patriotism in the lead item found by James Taranto today.

Compare and contrast: The average Republican presidential candidate's attitude towards the media? Probably summed by this moment in the 2000 election.

The average Democrat's attitude towards the media? Probably summed up by this:

A spokeswoman for the Edwards campaign said it had no problem with student reporters.

“This is silly,” campaign spokeswoman Colleen Murray said in a statement. “We love all reporters, the problem is the feeling isn’t always mutual.”

And when it isn't, you'll do everything you can to deny them access, whether it's mighty Fox News, or a tyro student journalist.

While the idea of balkanized culture is routinely decried (often simultaneously by those complain about "Two Americas..."), we sometimes forget that, particularly in a time of a cold civil war, most people like the idea of heading towards the bunker and tuning out the parts of the media world they don't like just fine.

The egos of John Kerry and Larry "Tippytoes" Craig got some major competition this past week from two legacy media titans: Bobby Caina Calvan (and to be fair, we now all know who he is), and John Beaudoin of the Woodbine Twiner, (no, really!) the one man who could completely and utterly lock-up Iowa for Hillary, if she would just grant him a 15-minute telephone interview.

Dean Barnett has an exceptional suggestion for Beaudoin to get past Hillary's gatekeepers, and I urge him to follow Dean's advice...

Frank Martin explains why Harry Reid's poll numbers in Nevada are so low, even the crack forensic scientists of CSI: Las Vegas couldn't find them.

Truth be told, I don't think that Reid actually believes any of this stuff, but when you're a spokesman for an ideology that's headed far, far to the left in recent years, you've got to toe the party line.

John Podhoretz reviews Lars and the Real Girl, "An uncharming tale of a troubled young man and his inflatable doll":

In the comic classic Harvey (1950), James Stewart played a drunken fellow who claims his best friend is a six-foot-tall invisible rabbit, and is indulged in his fantasy by his frustrated sister. In 1986's terrifying River's Edge, Dennis Hopper played a psychotic drug dealer living in a trailer with a blow-up sex doll who helps a group of teenage kids cover up the drug-related death of a friend. In 2007, Ryan Gosling chose to follow up his Best Actor Oscar nomination last year--he was the youngest nominee in the category in the award's 80-year history--with the lead role in a movie that combines all the hilarity of River's Edge and all the horror of Harvey.

The movie is called Lars and the Real Girl. It's about a sweet, vacant, and withdrawn 27-year-old who begins squiring a very expensive and realistic-looking sex doll around the small town where he's lived all his life. He says the doll is his girlfriend, that her name is Bianca, that she is the very religious Brazilian daughter of missionary parents, and that, because of her religious convictions, he and his new girlfriend cannot share quarters. Lars asks his brother Gus and sister-in-law Karin to put Bianca up. If anyone tells Lars that Bianca is made of plastic, he simply doesn't hear the remark.

Gus and Karin, who is pregnant, take Lars to the local doctor, who also has a degree in psychology. The doctor talks to Lars and then informs his family that Lars is suffering from a "delusion"--a diagnosis that evidently required an advanced degree. And said doctor, displaying what screenwriter Nancy Oliver and director Craig Gillespie clearly believe is great wisdom, tells Lars's family to go along with it until there's a way of determining the cause of Lars's delusion. Eventually, everybody in town--an uncommonly glum and grim sort of place that could use a dash of fantasy--goes along with it, too.

Someone wrote Lars and the Real Girl. Someone directed it. Someone named Sidney Kimmel--a clothing manufacturer who has decided to become a motion-picture producer--put up the money to make it. Some firm has chosen to distribute it. And it has Ryan Gosling, who showed in The Notebook that he has the chops to be an old-fashioned romantic leading man of the sort Hollywood hasn't seen since the 1970s.

What were they thinking? What were they drinking/smoking? It would be a relief to know that Lars and the Real Girl was actually made because someone was using the production to run a drug-smuggling operation. At least that would offer a rational explanation for the existence of this positively gobstopping piece of work.

Gee, I skipped this movie once already 20 years ago. Time to miss it again.

Matthew Sheffield of Newsbusters writes:

Most everyone on the center-right knows the media are biased in a leftward direction, much fewer on the left are able to see this phenomenon--they are just saying the truth. Because of this, it's always refreshing to see a liberal news organization sit down and notice something that's left-biased such as the Boston Globe did recently when it correctly observed that ABC's "View" is skewed against conservatives and religious people.

Not to mention being skewed pretty far afield from the shared consensual hunch the rest of us call reality, of course.

Eric Scheie spots the Columbine killers in the process of becoming cult heroes:

Considering Che a hero while blaming the NRA for kids who go bad?

In a twisted way, there's a certain logic to it.

Sadly, yes (see also Oswald, Lee Harvey and his benighted status in Oliver Stone's JFK.) And if Cho Seung-Hui joins the list, we can trace a key moment in his ascension to this decision by NBC to create his Che/Oswald/Travis Bickle-style anti-hero pose.

Speaking of conspiracy theories, Jules Crittenden writes, "Truman Lied, Aliens Died", and Bill Richardson, if elected president, volunteers to blow the lid off the ultimate intergalactic cover-up.

As usual, Mark Steyn makes several prescient observations in his latest syndicated column:

Take the Scott Thomas Beauchamp debacle at the New Republic, in which the magazine ran an atrocity-a-go-go Baghdad diary piece by a serving soldier about dehumanized troops desecrating graves, abusing disfigured women, etc. It smelled phony from the get-go – except to the professional media class from whose ranks the New Republic's editors are drawn: To them, it smelled great, because it aligned reality with the movie looping endlessly through the windmills of their mind, a nonstop Coppola-Stone retrospective in which ill-educated conscripts are the dupes of a nutso officer class.

It's the same with all those guys driving around with "9/11 Was An Inside Job" bumper stickers. That aligns reality with every conspiracy movie from the past three decades: It's always the government who did it – sometimes it's some supersecret agency working deep within the bureaucracy from behind an unassuming nameplate on a Washington street; and sometimes it's the president himself – but when poor Joe Schmoe on the lam from the Feds eventually unravels it, the cunning conspiracy is always the work of a ruthlessly efficient all-powerful state. So Iraq is Vietnam. And 9/11 is the Kennedy assassination, with ever higher percentages of the American people gathering on the melted steely knoll.

There's a kind of decadence about all this: If 9/11 was really an inside job, you wouldn't be driving around with a bumper sticker bragging that you were on to it. Fantasy is a by-product of security: it's the difference between hanging upside down in your dominatrix's bondage parlor after work on Friday and enduring the real thing for years on end in Saddam's prisons.

That's the real flaw in Christopher Dickey's "Deliverance" metaphor: If Cheney is Burt Reynolds, and the rest of America is Jon Voight, and the river is Iraq, who are the hillbillies? Well, presumably (for he doesn't spell it out) they're the dark forces you make yourself vulnerable to when you blunder into somewhere you shouldn't be. When the quartet returns to Atlanta a man short, they may understand how thin the veneer of civilization is, but they don't have to worry that their suburban cul-de-sacs will be overrun and reduced to the same state of nature as the backwoods.

James Piereson, as I've written before, believes the start of this sort of fantasy/security thinking amongst the left began with their inability to process that a communist assassinated JFK. If Oliver Stone, Jim Garrison, and their fellow conspiracy nuts really did believe that LBJ and/or the Pentagon conspired to whack Kennedy, and now believe that an even larger conspiracy toppled the Twin Towers, crashed a plane into the Pentagon, and another into a field in Pennsylvania (just for the heck of it, I guess) then why on earth do they continue to live in this country?

Why yes, this is a textbook case of "Not loving thy neighbor."

Pajamas: Catherine McMillan of Small Dead Animals "reports on the election campaign in one of Canada’s most politically-charged provinces."

The Oscar Igloo blog comes in from the cold to look at the top 10 Oscar flops:

Early hype can do wonders for small films with big aspirations like Little Miss Sunshine or Half Nelson but it can also be deadly for those big-budgeted, studio products made for awards attention in mind if they fail to live up to their massive buzz. The story of the Academy Awards is full of Oscar flops; films that generally sacrificed substance for (over-the-top) style and here's our overview of the ten most shameful attempts at awards attention in recent memory:

It's not mentioned by the above blog, but special consideration should be given to the "class" of 2005, which as John Scalzi wrote at the time:

Consider this: a nominee for Best Documentary -- March of the Penguins -- has made more money than any of the Best Picture nominees. I guarantee you that has never happened before, ever. When Hollywood's best films can't compete with chilled, aquatic birds, there's something going on.

A trend which shows little sign of abating.

"If you're going to make a heartfelt tribute, you've got to get the basic facts right."

The Daily Mail reports:

The BBC has frequently been accused of having a liberal bias.

But now the corporation's own staff appear to have confirmed this by revealing their political views on the networking website Facebook.

A survey of BBC employees with profiles on the site showed that 11 times more of them class themselves as "liberal" than "conservative".

Critics seized on the figures as evidence that the supposedly impartial corporation, paid for by the licence fee, is dominated by liberals.

I know--what a shocker! But as with the legacy media on this side of the Atlantic, the idea that it could hide its biases was pretty foolhardy once the Web made all information instantaneous and retrievable. Besides, it's not like most journalists these days still try to hide their biases.

AP reports:

Two Senators on Friday called for a congressional hearing to investigate reports that phone and cable companies are unfairly stifling communications over the Internet and on cell phones.

Sens. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, said the incidents involving several companies, including Comcast Corp., Verizon Wireless and AT&T Inc., have raised serious concerns over the companies' "power to discriminate against content."

Because, really, isn't that the Senate's job?

"It's time for a TGIF edition of one of our favorite games: WIARHSI. For you beginners, that's 'What If A Republican Had Said It?'"

And of course, those who bore of WIARHSI can always play a few rounds of "Name That Party". Funny how the two contests often go hand-in-hand.

In my "Hollywood Nihilism" post from earlier this week, I quoted a story told by writer/director Lionel Chetwynd when he pitched a WWII movie to Hollywood execs:

When Chetwynd was a successful Hollywood writer specializing in historical dramas, he told the Dieppe story during a Malibu dinner party — as a sort of tribute to the men who died there so people could sit around debating politics at Malibu dinner parties. One of the guests was a network head who asked Chetwynd to come in and pitch the story.

"So I went in," Chetwynd told me, "and someone there said, 'So these bloodthirsty generals sent these men to a certain death?'

"And I said, 'Well, they weren't bloodthirsty; they wept. But how else were we to know how Hitler could be toppled from Europe?' And she said, 'Well, who's the enemy?' I said, 'Hitler. The Nazis.' And she said, 'Oh, no, no, no. I mean, who's the real enemy?'"

Horrified onlookers of the daily television entertrainwreck The View saw that mindset played out this morning by Whoopi Goldberg.

Not since the early days of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and New Shimmer have two-two!-great tastes come together in a full metal redorkulation overload.

FEMA fakes a press conference--but why?

Exurban League heads for the magma:

While Pvt. Scott Beauchamp moves on with his life, Franklin Foer continued digging the hole deeper. To help readers better understand The New Republic editorial position, we offer an infographic showing Editor-in-Chief Foer's current status:

Just click.

Jonah Goldberg writes, "If you think American politics have gotten nastier, crueler, and more symbolic over the last 20 years, blame Ted Kennedy":

By today’s standards, the slimy insinuations that Bork was a racist seem almost quaint. The investigations of his private life — Senate staffers pored over his video rental records in hope of finding something prurient — pale to the deepwater dredging of private lives today.

But that’s how precedents work. Small violations of principle tear the social fabric and the breach is pulled ever wider as more people march through the opening.

Read the whole thing.

Keef has nothing on the British Navy:

In 1805, British Admiral Horatio Nelson was killed during the Battle of Trafalgar off the coast of Spain. Most sailors were simply put to rest at sea, but as an admiral, Nelson had to be brought back to England for an official burial.

To preserve his body during the voyage home, the second-in-command stored Nelson's body in the ship's vat of rum and halted all liquor rations to the crew. Not a bad idea, but when the ship reached port, officials went to retrieve Nelson's body and found the vat dry.

Disregarding good taste (in every sense), the crew had been secretly drinking from it the entire way home. After that, naval rum was referred to as Nelson's Blood.

Pschew! I think I'll stick with my Remy Martin 1738, sans royal navy zombie brains.

Ed Morrissey writes:

Eventually, even Hollywood has to acknowledge the market forces that drive ticket sales. If moviegoers refuse to watch ham-handed political screeds, investors won't put any more money into them. They will have to either start providing more balance to their offerings or go back to ignoring present-day reality again.

Wanna bet? A handful of blockbuster non-political summer hits and an endless stream of DVD and cable/DBS royalties buys a lot of low/mid-budget leftwing agitprop. (Not to mention also keeping Altman and Woody Allen behind the camera long after their freshness date had expired.)

Update: One byproduct of Hollywood's endless anti-war cycle? Peggy Noonan writes, "The New Republic's editors seem to have mistaken Vietnam movies for real life."

Don Surber (by way of Forbes) is speculating the New York Times, much like the Wall Street Journal only a short time ago this year, might be on the market--and if it isn't, it's merely a matter of time:

I was told a long time ago what the purpose of a newspaper is by Adam Kelly, who once was the only conservative columnist in West Virginia.

The purpose of a newspaper is to make money for its publisher.

For a while their, Pinch Sulzberger understood this. He was nicknamed Pinch because that’s what he did with pennies. Then I guess he attended too many cocktail parties or whatever they have in Upper Manhattan — gallery openings? — and decided to use his newspaper to educated us dummies in America.

NYT had to sell off its TV stations to keep the newspaper going. I used this analogy before, but it is like tossing the life jackets overboard to keep the Titanic afloat.

Reported Elizabeth Corcoran of Forbes: “Beverly Hills, CA -
Dow Jones changed hands faster than anyone might have imagined. Could The New York Times be next on the takeover list?

“Forbes editor Matt Miller asked the four investors on the private equity panel at Forbes 2nd annual MEET conference whether they felt that The New York Times Co. was ripe for a takeover. Three out of four said yes.”

Knight-Ridder wasted the 1980s and 1990s chasing Pulitzers. It is now out of the newspaper business.

Someone will buy the NYT and preach local, local, local, which is the mantra of the newspaper consultants in this decade. It may work.

I doubt it.

"The purpose of a newspaper is to make money for its publisher"--I know someone who seems to understand that.

Oh--and note whom Forbes is suggesting as a possible buyer. Name ring a bell?

(For much more on the Times' woes, tune in here.)

You certainly didn't--I liked this video much better in its first iteration:

(Via Jonathan Garthwaite.)

The latest essay by Michael Fumento dovetails remarkably well with my post on "Hollywood Nihilism" from last night:

You can’t argue that Hollywood’s only motivation in bashing anti-terrorist efforts is money. "Babel" lost money and it's clear "The Kingdom" will as well, while "Rendition" came out of the starting gate a full-fledged flop.

Moreover, it’s hardly the case that Islamists don’t make believable villains, much less more believable and captivating than evil cyber-geniuses and neo-Nazis. Islamists have killed about three thousand American civilians on 9/11, killed almost 200 people in the Madrid Train Bombings, and 52 more in the London subway bombings.

Islamic terrorists routinely explode bombs in markets and launch chlorine gas attacks. They build torture chambers and make and display videos of beheadings in which the victim screams in agony as his head is sawed off with a dull knife.

Even their foiled plots are often bizarre, such as Richard Reid’s “shoe bomber” attempt. These guys are a scriptwriter's dream. Quentin Tarantino couldn't think this stuff up.

As to not wanting to stereotype either Arabs or Muslims, the vast majority of whom want nothing to do with violence done in Mohammed’s name, has it occurred to the Tinseltown terror apologists that nobody suffers more from Islamic terror than Muslims themselves?

Islamist terrorists everyday kill and maim Iraqis and Afghans. Afghans were forced to suffer for years under the Taliban terror regime. Now the terrorists have blown up at least 136 Pakistanis and injured 400 more for the “sin” of greeting former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Was there what the Islamists call an “infidel,” such as a Christian or Jew, among them?

Whether CAIR cares about them, we should. So should the moguls in La La Land. Instead, they’re giving us the equivalent of 1943 movies equating FDR with Hitler.

Hollywood truly has declared war on the global war on terror.

(Via Charles Johnson.)

Jeff Jarvis:

Roy Greenslade, a fixture of British journalism — former newspaper editor, now journalism professor and newspaper columnist and blogger — writes a powerful post today submitting his resignation to the National Union of Journalists there.

Read the whole thing--it's the 21st century equivalent of the head of United Buggywhip Workers telling his comrades that this newfangled horseless carriage device just might possibly pose a moderate threat to how their industry does business.

Update: So what's the future of news (besides the name of a terrific blog on that very topic)? That's a topic that Michael Malone, ABC's "Silicon Insider" discusses at length with me here.

To boldly go where no 30-something Brylcreemed JFK-substitute has gone before!

Update: This intergalactic leader, who needs even bigger lifts in his shoes than Shatner, probably won't be releasing a similar volume anytime soon.

No, that's a new law firm, it's the guests on this week's PJM Political show. The MP3 version of this week's PJM Political on XM Satellite Radio's POTUS '08 channel is now online--tune in here to listen!

What does GOP presidential hopeful Gov. Mitt Romney say about HillaryCare and other issues? Glenn Reynolds and Dr. Helen Smith interview the former Massachusetts governor. ( Full-length interview here.)

Other topics discussed in this week's show, hosted by Bill Bradley, include:

Diana West of the Washington Times on her new book, The Death of the Grown-Up, and the dearth of grown-ups on the 2008 campaign trail. (Full-length interview here.)

Gray Lady Down! Michael Malone, ABC News' "Silicon Insider" on "How The New York Times Fell Apart." Will the Blogosphere pick up the pieces in '08? (Full-length interview here.)

James Lileks on Ron Paul and his....dedicated...fans.

US News & World Report's James Pethokoukis: Will subprime mortgage woes equal a subprime economy in '08?

Corn & Miniter on the first GOP candidate to leave the race.

Bill Bradley compares and contrasts the response to the Southern California fires with Katrina in '05.

Roger Simon on the campaign trail.

Produced by yours truly.

Finally, if you missed any previous episodes of PJM Political, click here and scroll through for hours of audio archives.

Jim Geraghty asks McCain "if he was familiar with the circumstances of Scott Beauchamp and the allegations of false reports in The New Republic":

McCain had some idea, it seemed, asking, “He is saying that he did some things that he didn’t actually do, is that correct?” I said that was part of it, but the greater controversy was that he had tales of bad behavior on the part of U.S. soldiers, and now there’s some indication those stories don’t check out, and that documents that came out yesterday suggested the magazine had suspicions about his stories for a while, but had not commented publicly.

McCain: I would just be shocked that something like that would occur at The New Republic, that the stories wouldn’t check out.

Me: Senator, you sound like you’re smirking as you say that.

McCain: (laughing) I’m shocked that gambling would be taking place in that establishment.

Heh. This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Or not--but it's still quite a witty response from Sen. McCain.

Remember the crash of 1987? Apparently, it was all Donald Luskin's fault:

Now it can be told! Twenty years after the great stock market crash of October 19, 1987, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by more than 22% in a single day, the truth about why it happened can now be revealed.

And believe me, I know what really happened. Because I caused the crash myself. Yep, it was me. With a little help from some market manipulation, a lot of bad judgment and some colossal mistakes.

Back then I ran portfolio management and trading for Wells Fargo Investment Advisors. With $69 billion under management, we were then the world's largest institutional investment manager. The company is now called Barclays Global Investors, and with almost $2 trillion under management, it's still the world's largest.

In 1987 Wells Fargo was by far the largest player in the two strategies that caused the crash. One was "program trading," the simultaneous execution of hundreds of stock trades with a single electronic order. The other was "portfolio insurance," a hedging strategy that used program trading and stock index futures to hedge the downside risk in institutional stock portfolios.

According to official government reports issued in the aftermath of the crash, program trading and portfolio insurance combined to cause the crash. The portfolio insurance strategy required that Wells Fargo execute program trades, selling all 500 stocks in the S&P 500, over and over as the market declined. With every execution, the market declined even more. And that triggered the next execution.

Wells managed portfolio insurance strategies for America's largest pension plans. But other giant pension plans just used us to manage their S&P 500 index funds, managing the portfolio insurance part themselves. On the day of the crash, we were executing plenty of sell programs for our own portfolio insurance strategies all day. At the same time, clients called to say, "Sell a billion S&P, right now" -- and we did. Then they called again. And we sold again. And again.

That's why I say I caused the crash. It was my team's finger that was on the sell button. It was our job to push it, and we pushed it.

Read the whole thing.

The subhead on this Sunday Times of London article asks, "Leaderless, underfunded and short on compelling subjects, British film-makers are up against it, thinks Stephen Frears. So, will he do anything about it?"

Umm, if your idea of a "Big British Film" is this rather than this, isn't the case lost already? Besides, why should England, whose left has infinitely less civilizational confidence than your average Hollywood denizen--and that's saying something--buck the trend towards the New Smallness that Tinseltown began?

I was about to add this as an update to the post below on Hollywood's attitude towards America and war, but it's worth branching off on its own. Allahpundit writes, "Wildfire victims getting what’s coming to them, says [George] Carlin":

No need for grandiose outrage here. He’s been saying stuff like this for decades. In fact it’s a core part of his act, which is why he’s allowed to skate. I offer the clip not as fodder for indignation but because it’s a nice little window into Carlin’s persona: the bitter hippie, broken-hearted by the failure of the 60s, whose idealism has since decayed into a cynicism so black and weary that revanchist, schadenfreudean sentiments like this now escape his lips without the slightest stutter. And of course it’s all paired with the most touchy feely, cringemaking New Age back-to-the-land nonsense about being “in balance with nature” the way the Indians are. Thus the paradox of the malignant self-styled humanist: We need to join hands and tap into the spiritual creatures within — and if we don’t, then he hopes your house burns down.

In his look at Rupert Murdoch's ever-growing media empire, Steve Boriss writes:

Businessman Murdoch knows that success is about keeping customers happy — an obvious idea that is thoroughly rejected by the journalism dogma that pervades his competitors. This dogma insists that audiences are not customers at all, but “citizens” who must be provided with a pure stream of objective truths that only journalists know how to create. Moreover, this truth-flow is thought to be so precious and necessary to this country’s survival that journalists must be independent of pressures from anyone or anything — no pressures allowed from government, employers, business competition, corporate takeovers, advertisers, even the demands of their own readers with their questionable judgment and taste for sensationalism.

Unlike today’s journalists, Murdoch will respect his audiences’ tastes and seek to fulfill their needs. If he sees an opportunity, he will not hesitate to offer news that is sensational, titillating, or compatible with viewers’ worldviews. He will provide them with handsome men and strikingly beautiful women to look at. He will draw them in and make them feel good about being a part of a community, delivering news that makes them proud to be an American, a stockholder, or a conservative. He will not run news that is negative, cynical, and despairing, or that runs-down cherished institutions to which his audiences identify.

The attitudes displayed by "Bobos In Paradise" such as Carlin, and journalists such as Bobby Caina Calvan and Rebecca Aguilar all stem from the same mid-sixties wellspring of nihilism-cum-narcissism--which means such a worldview is now well over forty years old. In contrast, what Boriss describes as Murdoch's attitude towards his customers, while not always clearly reflected in his product, is a surprisingly refreshing change of pace. Naturally though, it's those who would benefit the most from adopting it who are, by their very nature, far too cynical to notice.

Or not--as Ed Morrissey writes:

Matt Drudge has announced his acquisition of documents from the Army investigation into allegations of misconduct made by Private Scott Beauchamp, and they make The New Republic look like the Nixon administration for stonewalling. He provides PDFs of the documents as support as well. Beauchamp admitted to investigators that he made up most of the stories, including the most disturbing tale of troops harassing a disfigured woman, as well as running over dogs in armored personnel carriers. Why did Beauchamp tell these lies? He had literary aspirations and didn't mind libeling his comrades to achieve them.

Much more at Hot Air and Pajamas. And while Drudge has removed the PDF files that Ed mentions above, note that Charles Johnson has them available for downloading.

As I noted at the start of the month, Hollywood has, over the last decade or so (in other words, prior to 9/11, or even George W. Bush taking office) adopted a remarkably nihilistic view of America's involvement in war--any war, whether it's Iraq, the War On Terror, or even World War II. The latter is all the more remarkable, considering WWII was long thought to be "the Good War" by virtually all concerned--partially because it had the blessings of the left, happy that we stopped the Soviet Union's former ally, Nazi Germany. Nearly a decade ago, Mark Steyn documented the first signs of the change in Hollywood's souring on WWII in Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan:

Purporting to be a recreation of the US landings on Omaha Beach, Private Ryan is actually an elite commando raid by Hollywood and the Hamptons to seize the past. After the spectacular D-Day prologue, the film settles down, Tom Hanks and his men are dispatched to rescue Matt Damon (the elusive Private Ryan) and Spielberg finds himself in need of the odd line of dialogue. Endeavouring to justify their mission to his unit, Hanks's sergeant muses that, in years to come when they look back on the war, they'll figure that `maybe saving Private Ryan was the one decent thing we managed to pull out of this whole godawful mess'. Once upon a time, defeating Hitler and his Axis hordes bent on world domination would have been considered `one decent thing'. Even soppy liberals figured that keeping a few million more Jews from going to the gas chambers was `one decent thing'. When fashions in victim groups changed, ending the Nazi persecution of pink-triangled gays was still `one decent thing'. But, for Spielberg, the one decent thing is getting one GI joe back to his picturesque farmhouse in Iowa.

And as I added in my post from earlier this month:

You could see that same worldview hidden beneath an otherwise much more comic book version of war in Paul Verhoeven's 1997 film of Starship Troopers. Writer-director Lionel Chetwynd (who wrote the made-for-TV movie starring Tom Selleck as Ike) described to Cathy Seipp his encounter with that same attitude when he pitched a story about the allies' attack on the French town of Dieppe in 1942:

When Chetwynd was a successful Hollywood writer specializing in historical dramas, he told the Dieppe story during a Malibu dinner party — as a sort of tribute to the men who died there so people could sit around debating politics at Malibu dinner parties. One of the guests was a network head who asked Chetwynd to come in and pitch the story.

"So I went in," Chetwynd told me, "and someone there said, 'So these bloodthirsty generals sent these men to a certain death?'

"And I said, 'Well, they weren't bloodthirsty; they wept. But how else were we to know how Hitler could be toppled from Europe?' And she said, 'Well, who's the enemy?' I said, 'Hitler. The Nazis.' And she said, 'Oh, no, no, no. I mean, who's the real enemy?'"

"It was the first time I realized," Chetwynd continued, "that for many people evil such as Nazism can only be understood as a cipher for evil within ourselves. They've become so persuaded of the essential ugliness of our society and its military, that to tell a war story is to tell the story of evil people."

And this sort of show biz punitive nihilism shows no sign of abating, as evidenced by this post by Glenn Reynolds:

"THE PROBLEM IS NOT WITH THE PEOPLE THAT STARTED THIS. THE PROBLEM'S WITH US." That's a Robert Redford breakout line from the trailer to his new war-on-terror movie that just appeared on my TV. It certainly sums up a certain worldview.

Indeed it does--and considering it's well into its second decade of Tinseltown existence, it's hardly a "progressive" one at that.

Update: Related thoughts from Roger L. Simon.

As Hugh Hewitt writes, the legacy media would love turn the southern California fires into Katrina Mark II, but "they don't have that chance given the accessibility of thousands of observers and lots of local media to the actual facts on the ground."

"Trust but verify" may have worked fine for the Gipper and the Soviet Union, but when it comes to the MSM, verify, and even then don't trust 100 percent.

Update: "Harry Reid Blames California Wildfires On Global Warming...Before He Denies He Said It", which sounds very much like the Democrat Senate majority leader is inadvertently attempting to transfer Iowahawk's "Top Scientists Warn: Sea Gods Angry" routine onto dry land.

In Opinion Journal, Gary L. McDowell writes that the 20th anniversary "of Robert Bork's failed nomination reminds us what's at stake in the coming election":

Recalling Mr. Bork's experience serves to remind us of how precarious the judiciary's balance is at any given time, and how today's highly politicized process prevents even the most gifted and prominent jurists from expecting to be confirmed (or perhaps even desiring the chance to undergo the ordeal).

But more important, it is a reminder that presidents must be willing to undertake what they know will be a horrific fight in order to see the bench filled not with liberals or conservatives or partisans, but with constitutionalists.
In this sense, the Bork vote is not just a matter of quaint historical interest, but the first great battle in the contemporary war for the Constitution--a continuing war that must be won if true self-government is to prevail.

Time has shown that Mr. Bork's theory of constitutional interpretation remains very much alive; he was defeated but his central idea was never discredited. That theory of interpretation and its implicit belief in restrained judging should continue to guide anyone who believes that the inherent arbitrariness of government by judiciary is not the same thing as the rule of law.

Read the whole thing.

Michael Barone offers Democrats some advice: "We're Not in 2006 Anymore":

Things are not working out as Democratic congressional leaders expected. For the first eight months of this year, they struggled to find some way to shut down the American military effort in Iraq.

They took it for granted that we were stuck in a quagmire in Iraq, with continuous high casualties and very little to show for them. They pressed hard to get the Republican votes they needed to block a filibuster in the Senate and were cheered when some Republicans, like John Warner, seemed to lean their way. They worked hard over the August recess to pressure Republican House members to break ranks and vote with them.

But the Republicans mostly held fast. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell skillfully parried their thrusts in the Senate. House Minority Leader John Boehner persuaded most House Republicans to hang on. Then, over the summer, the news out of Iraq started to get better.

The Democrats took back control of both houses last November by running some remarkably centrist--and even hawkish--sounding candidates in the south and midwest, Red States where the Democrats' normal far left views constantly get trounced. And in remarkably blue Connecticut, after a hiccup in the primaries, Joe Lieberman won re-election by also remaining strong on Iraq.

The problem is that the Democrats' nascent Congressional leadership then resumed their usual course tacking left, and the predictably disastrous results occurred right on cue when they completely ignored their party's rhetoric last November.

Bryan Preston compares and contrasts; Glenn Beck loses it.

Reuters looks at Tim Robbins' new film:

Have you ever dreamt of smashing up that car in your neighborhood whose burglar alarm has the bad habit of going off in the middle of the night?

U.S. director Henry Bean used to do that just that, breaking into other people's cars to disable their alarms, so he could get a good night's sleep. He ended up in court and in jail, until he decided to stop and make a film about it.

"Noise", Bean's provocative second film, casts Tim Robbins as David, an upper-class family man driven insane by New York's loud sounds -- grinding garbage trucks, horns honking, back-up beepers and worst of all, car alarms squealing at all hours.

Robbins has a fair amount of real-life experience acting insane, but the film's family man driven round the bend theme sounds like a remake of Michael Douglas' Falling Down. And ironically, with its Dolby Digital six-channel soundtrack, it will probably be one of the loudest movies in the multiplex.

Can't blame the movie makers for this, but note the article's headline: "Tim Robbins wages crusade against noise in new film". I thought the PC police (Reuters chief amongst them) banned the C-word, post-9/11.

Or to paraphrase Eason Jordan only slightly, the smells we kept to ourselves. Having watched umpteen hours of his channel in D-FW airport yesterday, I'd say the network name on his microphone is appropriate as well.

Alan Dershowitz writes that "Oxford Union is dead":

This is an obituary for the Oxford Union, which claims to be one of the most famous and distinguished debating societies in the world. The reality is that it is no longer a debating society at all; it has become a propaganda platform for extremist views, primarily of the hard-left. It has now stopped even pretending to present both sides of controversial issues. To be sure, it puts forward a façade of balance, by presenting speakers who purport to represent both sides of an issue. But the Oxford Union has become a Potemkin village where a façade of fairness serves as a cover for the reality of bias.

But it's not the first time that sort of primitive mindset has flourished there.

Kathy Shaidle:

When I was growing up, the people most likely to say "if you look at history" were cranky old men who'd phone the cranky old host of the local radio talk show, warning that metric or mandatory seat belts or women in the workplace was this week's sign of the apocalypse.

Beautiful, youthful Naomi Wolf has become that cranky old man.

That's what being a Leftist does to you.

Read the whole thing.

CBS’s Bob Simon, March 16, 1990 Evening News:

“Few tears will be shed over the demise of the East German army, but what about East Germany’s eighty symphony orchestras, bound to lose some subsidies? Or the whole East German system, which covered everyone in a security blanket from day care to health care, from housing to education? Some people are beginning to express, if ever so slightly, nostalgia for that Berlin Wall.”

Jay Price and Qasim Zein of McClatchy Newspapers, October 16, 2007:

As violence falls in Iraq, cemetery workers feel the pinch

Then and now, no matter how good the news, the legacy media is always there to see the dark side.

As Scott Johnson writes, it's the cover-up that kills you:

It’s been another week without word from the New Republic on the status of its "investigation" into the columns of TNR Baghdad Diarist Scott Thomas Beauchamp. "The editors" have not spoken on the matter since their August 10 update. At that time "the editors" spoke grandly of their "commitment to the truth" and their efforts to resolve the "legitimate concerns about journalistic accuracy" that had been raised by the critics of Beauchamp's TNR Baghdad Diarist columns. They also said they took those concerns "extremely seriously."

Ten weeks later, however, their promises have proved empty. "The editors" think they can stonewall their way through the scandal. They should know better. Indeed, as we will see below, once upon a time TNR editor Franiklin Foer instructed readers in the wisdom of the proposition that "stonewalling never works."

Which involved a rarely witnessed paean to the wisdom of David Gergen. Whose advice to liberals seems to go as unheeded just about as often as it's proffered.

When I reviewed Chris Anderson's The Long Tail for Tech Central Station in 2005, I picked a musical genre with an enormous catalog but less than blockbuster front-end sales as an example to demonstrate how the Internet is changing retailing:

Back in October of last year, Chris Anderson of Wired magazine created a powerful meme -- the concept of "The long tail". His article discussed how e-tailers such as Amazon and Netflix are changing how we think about inventories of books, DVDs and CDs; and how pop culture is transformed by making available not only obscure titles that would otherwise consume valuable space in a physical store, but also all of an artist's back catalog.

For example, your local Borders is likely to have, say, Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, Porgy and Bess, and a few of his other titles available on CD. Amazon has virtually every CD that he's played on that's currently in print (or available used) as well as almost every disc released by his myriad sidemen. (And if some of their albums aren't available on CD, they're likely to pop up in LP form on eBay from time to time.)

La Shawn Barber writes that even more than jazz, classical music is benefitting from this development:

You may not find a wide selection of classical music at the local Tower Records (do they still operate brick-and-mortar stores?), but in the digital world, the pickings are plentiful, as are online discussions about classical music. The Internet fuels the long tail of retail, which in turn favors niche industries and products, independent artists (filmmakers, musicians), classical music labels, etc...And anyone using a computer has immediate access to at least 30-second samples of music in that thousand-year back catalogue.

The forces driving the long tail are the “democratization” of the tools of production and distribution, and better filters (search engines, recommendations, rating systems, etc.). The long tail itself has “democratized” classical music, making it more accessible and less intimidating for us regular folks.

Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds examines another online trend: "There are now more World of Warcraft players in America than farmers."

Leroy Jenkins could not be reached for comment.

Just heading back from Dallas, where I spent the past weekend conducting research into antique electrically-powered sound-pattern creation devices such as this:

Back in a bit with more.

"Election Depression Hurts"--but Mary Katharine Ham finds a way to beat the election blues...

Stephen Spruiell interviews Neil Cavuto on the launch of the new Fox Business Channel:

Cavuto adds, however, that sometimes the controversy works in his favor. “I’ve heard it said that, particularly at Fox News Channel, a lot of people watch simply because they hate us. My response to that is, ‘Do they have a Nielson Box?’”

“So I don’t really care,” Cavuto says, “but I do think that any impartial observer would look at how we’re presenting business information on Fox Business Network and come away with [the impression that] this isn’t about elephants or donkeys. This isn’t about red or blue. This is about green, and helping people make more of it.”

Cavuto says that one reason that Fox News and now Fox Business have drawn so much scrutiny is that both networks are often willing to break from the media consensus. Of the biggest story in the business world right now, the trouble in the subprime mortgage market, he says most of the media’s hysterical coverage isn’t justified by the facts.

“I do think the media have way, way, way overstated the severity of this situation,” he says. “To hear most of the media tell it, you’d think that every mortgage was melting down. In fact, that’s a popular term, to call it ‘the mortgage meltdown.’ It’s an expression I’ve forbidden to use here at FBN, because if you’re going to say ‘meltdown,’ you’d better damn well tell me that every house in America is under lava.

In-farging-deed. More from Cavuto:

“The statistics are quite the opposite,” he says. “Ninety-six percent of all mortgages are still being paid on time. Now, I’m not saying there isn’t a great deal of pain out there. There are a lot of folks in trouble, but not all folks. The same thing applies to the subprime mortgage situation. You’d think that everyone who has a subprime mortgage is a delinquent, yet close to 9 out of 10 of them are paying their mortgages back on time. And subprime mortgages, which is a bad name for them, gave young people opportunities to buy homes that, when I was a young guy, would never have been afforded to me in my life.

“So it’s not all bad,” he says, “but the media leave that little part out, because that little inconvenient truth doesn’t fit in with the one that they want to push, which is that we’re going to hell in a handbasket… but that’s the kind of stuff I want to elicit out of my guests. I want to get a timetable of where they see things going, how big a problem this is. I let it be known that I think this issue has been overstated, but guests can come on and argue it with me. Many have. But that’s how the network serves viewers. We want to debate these issues, to get beyond the consensus views and be a little contrarian.”

And as we've seen from the overwrought reaction to its predecessor news channel, even a little contrarianism is too much for many free thinkers to stomach.

"I’m sorry you took my story the wrong way."

The very worst non-apology apology possible. But why should she stop being completely tone deaf now?

"Suddenly Dodd mania begins."

Update: On the other hand, suddenly, Brownback mania concludes.

This could be fun:

Well, I certainly had a good laugh today at Universal's expense. How in the world can the studio expect truthfulness from a just greenlighted Kurt Cobain biopic when Courtney Love will exec produce with attorney Howard Weitzman? You know, and I know, but they don't seem to care, that this movie is gonna get crucified by critics, audiences and Nirvana fans just by involving Courtney, who owns her dead hubbie's life rights.

On the other hand, how could it be any worse than this recent cinematic musical abortion?

Jonah Goldberg's latest op-ed dovetails rather nicely into Kurt & Courtney's entertrainwreck life story:

For years, conservatives criticized the likes of Madonna for proselytizing commercialized decadence, and conservatives routinely came out the losers. The press, generally being liberal, disliked the perceived censorial uptightness of conservative “culture warriors.” The press, also being professionally and personally infatuated with celebrity, instinctively defended stars over the meanies, because stars boost ratings and get you into glamorous parties. The meanies stay home with their kids.

But here’s the thing: Conservatives were right about Madonna, and even Madonna has partially admitted as much. The problem is that Madonna — like Hilton and Anderson — is irrelevant. These celebrities can afford their sins or, if you prefer, their mistakes because they’re rich and famous. Madonna told one interviewer that she’s never changed a diaper. How many “working moms” can say that?

What matters is the signal such people send.

Forget the question of “bad” versus “good” for a second. These people got rich by glamorizing behaviors and values normal people simply cannot afford. The working-class teenage girl who tries to follow in Madonna’s or Paris’s or Pam’s footsteps isn’t going to follow them into the pages of People magazine. She’s going to follow those footsteps straight off a cliff. And yet, the bad guy in our culture is the person who says so.

I don’t want to restore Puritanism. But would it really be so terrible if more people pointed out that prostituting yourself over a poker debt and then marrying the John isn’t merely unromantic, it’s not even something to brag about?

Read the whole thing.

Hugh Hewitt looks at "Katie Couric And The California Adventure That Isn't", two very high-priced Blue experiments that have failed to win much Red State support. You can scroll through this blog for endless suggestions to improve the former's efforts; this post from 2003 offered much more specific advice designed to tweak the former.

Update: "CBS Is Reaching for a New Hit, but the Early Numbers Fall Short":

Despite the weak start and the company’s struggles on Wall Street — some analysts have downgraded CBS’s stock, which has fallen 5.6 percent this year — Mr. Moonves himself remains sanguine.

“I would say that a few analysts are missing an important part of our story,” Mr. Moonves said. “I’m not concerned about the state of CBS. I’m a bit concerned about the state of network television generally. But I think it’s idiotic to draw conclusions too early. I’ve been in television for 27 years. I know you can’t read the tea leaves in a couple of weeks.”

CBS’s chairman, Sumner M. Redstone, apparently feels the same way. Last week, Mr. Moonves signed a rich deal to head CBS through 2011. The new contract lowers his salary to $3.5 million, from $5.9 million, and ties a greater percentage of his compensation to the performance of the network’s stock. That performance does not depend exclusively on network ratings.

Still, a ratings slide at the network could have more of an effect on CBS than it might at some of its media rivals, like the News Corporation, Time Warner or Walt Disney. Since CBS and Viacom split in December 2005, CBS no longer has the same portfolio of other highly valued assets, like cable channels, which can offset stumbles at flagship networks.

In contrast, Steve Boriss posits that "The future of news is Time Warner’s to lose. Which they probably will."

Nice to click on the stats counter and see a number of visitors from Breibart.tv: underneath their video of definitive San Francisco Democrat Congressman Pete Stark's latest mental adventure down the Rabbit Hole is a link back to our May 2004 post quoting an earlier moment of Fortney's verbal extemporization.

Stark is sort of the Spock's Beard version of a fellow Democrat Joe Biden, a Senator of whom Jonah Goldberg has noted, is "famous for his brain’s chronic inability to hold brake fluid":

Once he revs his engines, the motormouth can’t be stopped, and he just keeps talking and talking and talking. My theory is that those constant smiles where he displays his shiny fake teeth are the facial equivalent of flashing your brights while driving, signaling to those in Biden’s path, “I can’t stop this thing!”

But both are a reminder of something that P.J. O'Rourke once wrote about one house of Congress:

"The founding fathers, in their wisdom, devised a method by which our republic can take 100 of its most prominent numskulls and keep them out of the private sector where they might do actual harm".

Needless to say, that description is equally appropriate for wide swatches of the other house as well.

At the moment, despite the thuggish efforts of KDFW's management, disgraced MSM journalist Rebecca Aguilar's driveby hit on an innocent elderly business owner is still online here.

And that footage is incorporated into this segment of Breitbart.TV, featuring hosts (and TV vets themselves), Scott Baker and Liz Stephans analysing Aguilar's odious performance and obvious agenda-based attack journalism.

Newsbusters: "AP Ignores Farrakhan's Threats, Merely Refers to Him as 'Fiery Orator'":

Furthermore, it surely is not very arduous for a reporter to discover the racist and anti-Semitic vitriol that Farrakhan has spewed over the years.

I've long known the media have rather short memories when it comes to their favored sons, but this is ridiculous:

Tuesday night's address was the keynote speech for Farrakhan's Holy Day of Atonement, which also commemorated the 12th anniversary of the Million Man March, held Oct. 16, 1995 in Washington.

Farrakhan cut a healthy-looking figure Tuesday in a gray and gold pinstriped suit, a wide smile flashing often under the trademark side-part in his wavy, black hair and thin-rimmed glasses.

Geez--I haven't seen a hate-filled man praised in such fulsome language since...well, since last month.

Your headline of the day:

"it's all fun and games until a guy is hanging at the end of a Speedo drawstring."

(Via 5'F, who notes, "And frankly even then it sounds funny.")

Don Surber notes that "NYT won’t talk to its own reporters".

But hey, would you?

Update: The layers and layers of editors and fact-checkers at the Times produce their own very special remake of Three Kings.

Just in time to sway the 2008 election, Steve Green looks at a case of "Wrong Facts, Right Narrative":

It only took six years of constant, strong growth, record-low unemployment, low interest rates, several years of a housing boom, and new stock market records... for the MSM to finally convince almost half the population that we're in a recession.

Well done, guys.

To be fair though, if I worked in the MSM, I'd be pretty depressed right now, too.

In related posts, Rick Moran notes that "It’s 1980 all over again, at least if the malaise felt by Americans today is any indication". And Orrin Judd looks at the lessons from the 1987 stock market correction, a historical blip in the Dow that the MSM presented at the time as the Next Great Depression. Until the remarkably mild 1990-'91 recession, that is.

The MP3 version of this week's PJM Political on XM Satellite Radio's POTUS '08 channel is now online--tune in here to listen!

PJM Political spends a fair amount of time in the Minnesotan corner of the Blogosphere this week, as Captain Ed Morrissey interviews GOP presidential hopeful, Senator John McCain. Also joining host Bill Bradley are:

John Hinderaker and Paul Mirengoff of Power Line, Time magazine's "2004 Blog of the Year" on the state of the 2008 election.

James Lileks, the Bard of Minneapolis.

And from beyond the Twin Cities:

The Glenn & Helen Show, featuring energy efficiency guru Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute with his advice to the 2008 candidates.

Govindini Murty and "Dirty Harry" of the Pajamas-affiliated conservative film blog, Libertas on Hollywood's role in the 2008 presidential election.

The Corn & Miniter Show, featuring David Corn, Richard Miniter, and dozens of oysters on the half-shell.

Steve Green of VodkaPundit and Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom, with their unique take on the candidates and their foibles.

And host Bill Bradley on the state--precarious and otherwise--of the candidates' finances.

Produced by yours truly. And yes, my voice was shot this week.

And for extended "Director's Cut" podcast versions of several of this week's segments, click here.

Finally, if you missed our previous episodes of PJM Political, listen here.

Michael Malone has a great piece on how the New York Times went off the rails in the age of the Web and the Blogosphere, culminating in Morgan Stanley metaphorically telling the Times to "DROP DEAD". (Gerald Ford could not be reached for comment.)

Michael concludes:

If you surfed the Web yesterday you couldn't miss the fact that millions of folks out there were cheering the impending End of Times. I didn't. I want the Gray Lady to straighten out, clean herself up, and regain her old dignity. America needs an honest woman as its newspaper of record.

That's a nice sentiment, but frankly, I can't ever see that happening. Her old dignity was clouded by a lot of original sin.

Fortunately though, the Times' last, best hope has emerged, as it sees the light, and enters the 21st century. About 2001, or 2002, to be exact, as they've finally discovered the blog.

Update: Across the pond, an even grayer lady, Auntie Beeb, isn't in the best of health, either.

Dan Riehl notes, "Leave it to a real journalist to go over the top":

So much for bloggers stalking people in the news. Leave it to a real journalist to go over the top. Police say there was no crime comitted by him. He's a senior citizen, a veteran, and ultimately he's reduced to tears by a reporter following up on a story after his business was broken into twice in three weeks.

Make sure you've taken your high blood pressure medication before clicking on the above YouTube clip. One upside though: I'd like to think that the Dallas-area TV station is about get lots of angry email in response to Rebecca Aguilar, their icy interrogator. As Glenn Reynolds writes:

I was struck by reporter Rebecca Aguilar's body-language, literally standing over him in judgment. The way she looked down, literally and figuratively, on an old man who had defended his life, entirely legally, and reduced him to tears seems to me to be representative of the worst stereotypes of Old Media. Then, when she belatedly realizes that she's coming across like a bully -- because, you know, she is -- she retreats into faux-sympathy and the laughable claim that she's just helping him get his side of the story out. It's like something out of a local-tv parody on The Simpsons.

Aguilar's bio ends with this passage:

I've been a television reporter for more than two decades. And even though I have won several awards (including several Emmys and 2005 Texas A.P. Reporter of the year), nothing is more rewarding than someone who says I made their lives a little better cause I listened and told "their story".

And if I get them to cry on camera, so much the better, as far as the boys at AP are concerned.

Update: One of Dan's commenter points to this item, which notes that "KDFW Suspends Rebecca Aguilar After Controversial 'Ambush'". I'm glad to see the station acted, and quickly.

Related: "Who says journalists must be jerks?", Steve Boriss asks; he posits that such boorish behavior is not part of The Future of News:

The silly idea that reporters must be rude and curmudgeonly is a recent development, and one that could only survive in a non-competitive news environment. One non-believer is Fox News guru Roger Ailes, who recommends a book by James Fallows that gets to the root of this �attitude journalism.� Fallows says that �real investigative zeal has been replaced by a kind of lazy attitudinizing� � for example, asking high-ranking officials questions �in a snarling and hostile sounding and suspicious sounding way, that makes you seem tough.� Is this really the best way to get revelations from uncomfortable interviewees? Is this really the best way to draw adoring audiences? To believe that, you�d almost need to have attended journalism school.

Exit question: Isn't this yet another textbook demonstration of America's ongoing "Cold Civil War?"

Update (5/17/08): Video of Rebecca Aguilar's now infamous segment seems to come and go on YouTube, but it's the centerpiece of a recent edition of our Silicon Graffiti video podcast, and you can watch it in its entirety, about two minutes and 40 seconds in:

Update (12/31/08): We recently had our own experience with the above video coming and going--and coming back again--on YouTube, which you can read about here.

The horror...the horror...

(Via Andrea Harris who had an appropriately similar, horrified reaction.)

In the 1970s, Hollywood didn't seem to know where its audience went, as ticket-sales increasingly flat-lined until two young tyro directors named Spielberg and Lucas had a blinding flash of the obvious: American moviegoers want to be entertained, not beaten over the head with obviously political agitprop.

In the 1990s, Hollywood longed for a strong 50-something president who would kick terrorist butt and could even fly a plane when needed. Having witnessed such a man actually get elected, they very quickly went insane and in their seven year temper tantrum, slowly forgot the key to success given to them by the two young directors in the late 1970s.

Since Hollwyood's lacks the collective humility to look within themselves when the bucks don't gush as fast as they'd like Hollywood's film makers actually lapsed into quite a novel series of excuses in the post 9/11-"naughts":

In 2003 it was cell phones.

In 2005 it was the Red States.

In 2006, the Hindenburg-like crash of Basic Instinct 2 on its opening weekend was blamed by Hollywood insiders on the nation being "in a big puritanical mode"--which would be news to the millions who subscribe to Playboy, Penthouse, Maxim, et al.

Near the start of this year, the movie industry was floundering due to supermarket tabloids.

And the newest excuse? Halo 3.

No, really!

Many film executives are convinced audiences stayed home to play Microsoft’s carpal-tunnel classic, “Halo 3,” which went on sale on Sept. 26. The game sold an astonishing $170 million worth of copies on its first day, before going on to sell well over $300 million…

For Microsoft, it’s no wonder video games, and in particular “Halo 3,” are competing with blockbusters for opening weekends. “We marketed it like a film,” said Josh Goldberg, a “Halo 3″ product manager at Microsoft, adding, “and now, we’re just as big or bigger than film.” He said “Halo 3″ was marketed as an event film in terms of its partnerships, with beverage, automotive, fast feeders and mobile-phone companies all joining up.

“The audience on this game is the 18-to-34 demographic, similar to what you’d see in cinemas,” said Mike Hickey, an analyst at Janco Partners, a Denver research firm, adding that “this could last for several weeks.”

In contrast, Hollywood's memory lapse is eternal.

While people who live in stucco houses shouldn’t throw quiche, I've posted some rather unkind words about Philip Johnson after his death. But his Glass House, though clearly (heh!) inspired by Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House (but really, what was Johnson doing in the 1940s and '50s that wasn't inspired by Mies?) was such an iconic piece of Mid-Century Modern.

Meanwhile, James Lileks has some architecturally-related video that's also well worth your time.

Sorry for the lack of posts today--the idea of blogging anything today was absolutely antithetical to what little was left of my well-being, as I had a mammoth case of stomach flu last night. At least I think that's what it was.

But could it have been a deliberate attempt, via poison, to silence a quasi-prominent-ish member of the Blogosphere...?

Just remember: Maalox cannot melt pyrosis!

Naturally, with CNN this weekend having reanimated half of the fossilized "No Nukes" brigade from their cryogenic suspension since 1980, Chris Matthews on MSNBC tracks down the rest of the team.

Further proof of the trend that Blair's Law documents: "The ongoing process by which the world's multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force."

Coming up next after this brief commercial timeout: Strawberry Alarm Clock's take on drilling In ANWR.

Two quick technology updates:

Found via Steve Green, I hadn't planned to buy an Apple iPhone, but I'm starting to change my mind...

And while I often have sushi while sitting in front of my PC's twin LCD monitors, apparently the in-thing amongst the really hip members of the digerati is preparing the sushi right on them. That sounds good to me, but aren't they worried that the wasabi will melt the plastic?

Fausta Wertz, Pajamas' New York area editor notes that there's good news and bad news in the Global War On Terror.

The good news: "Al-Qaeda In Iraq Reported Crippled".

The bad news? They've decided to take up former governor Tom Kean on his long-running tourism efforts: New Jersey And A.Q.--Perfect Together.

Can the Mob That Whacked Jersey be bothered to take on the new dead-end kids on the block?

To follow-up on my post yesterday about the divergent paths of old and new media, Reason magazine is producing their own videos, which feature high quality production values, and a pretty good anchorman to boot:

The appropriately named RightyBlogs is your one-stop shopping source for hot conservative bloggedy goodness. Stop by today!

Can't argue with this quote from Tom Blumer of BizzyBlog:

It’s a tradition that goes back at least as far as the Vietnam War, when CBS edited and reshuffled the content of a TV interview with a US general to make it appear as if he believed that having wars from time to time was a necessary and good thing. CBS, operating in the days of Old Media’s de facto monopoly, paid little if any price for its transgression. Someone on the order of a Bill Buckley or Cal Thomas objected, and that was about it.

That creative editing was occurring and considered a hallowed right of Old Media during its “good old days” is almost indisputable. As I recall it, several Nixon Administration advisers in the early 1970s whom the networks wished to interview agreed to do so, with but one proviso: The interviews would either be live, or air unedited. My recall is that CBS never followed through on any of these interviews. Readers are welcome to fill in any gaps in yours truly’s memory.

The practice of “creative interviewing” continues. The latest to get caught doing it is New York Times “Questions For” writer Deborah Solomon.

Note the examples that Donald Luskin mentions, which strongly implies that the Times' ozone layer of ombudsmen and editors didn't intercede until a few of Solomon's fellow Manhattan/Beltway journalists loudly complained. Which leads one to believe that for everyone else, altering quotes or video interviews beyond recognition will still be considered fair game in the legacy media.

As I mentioned a while back, by the late 1990s, when savvy interviewees finally caught onto the fact that their quotes could be twisted against them, CBS attempted to counter, at least for a time, by having interviewees sign a release form that they wouldn't tape their own interviews, according to Bernard Goldberg. Now that's chutzpah.

if, as James Taranto has written, Helen Thomas is American journalism's crazy old aunt in the attic, then Ted Turner is its nutty uncle. In 2005, we noted his Strangelovian comments regarding North Korea; today, Newsbusters catches this exchange between Turner and GQ magazine:

QUESTION: You're also opposed to the Iraq war.

TURNER: I've become very antiwar. I don't think the way to accomplish things is to bomb people. [Good thing Ted wasn't around to offer advice on how to deal with the Confederacy, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan--Ed] All that does is make them angry. That causes insurgent movements and so forth. It's easy to start wars, hard to stop them.

QUESTION: I know that you think Fox News helped fan the flames of this war.

TURNER: Well, they did. This is Rupert's war.

Gee, I thought news organizations were neutral utopian transnational organizations surveying the world's events from on high--or as Charleton Heston once yelled to a CNN anchor, "Who do you think you are? Switzerland?"

But if we go by Ted's logic (such as it is), then isn't it far better for a news organization to have removed a dangerous tyrant than to have propped him up for over a decade?

Why yes, that is a Blog World Expo button on our sidebar, and thank you for noticing! See you in Vegas in less than a month!

Fellow Silicon Valley resident Alan D. Mutter writes, "As if the mainstream media didn’t have enough trouble navigating the uncharted realm of digital innovation, they are losing many of the young, technologically astute employees who could be their guides":

“What am I doing here?” a talented young designer and programmer working at a publishing company asked me recently. “These guys don’t get it. I’ve got to get out. I’m just wasting my time.”

Like the others quoted in this article, the young journalist is not being named, so as to protect his livelihood until he bails out of his MSM job.

He summed up the frustration of the twenty- and thirty-something professionals who grew up with a keyboard at their fingertips and an iPod, or at least a Walkman, plugged in their ears. They use modern media the way their generation does, not the way their fifty-something bosses wish they would.

But the young net natives, for the most part, rank too low in the organizations that employ them to be invited to the pivotal discussions determining the strategic initiatives that could help their employers sustain their franchises.

“In most organizations, the people with the most online experience have the least political capital,” said one mid-level online editor at a newspaper. “It seems like the pace of change inside media is slowing, tied up in politics and lack of expertise in managing technical projects – while the pace of change is continuing apace outside our windows.”

I don't have too much else to add to Glenn Reynolds' comments on the Washington Post's Marc Fisher's drive-by shot at XM satellite radio's new POTUS '08 channel, or Pajamas' weekly contribution to the 24-hour channel, PJM Political. Except to note that, just as former CBS (and later CNN) executive Jonathan Klein was unnerved that "a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing" could expose Dan Rather promulgating forged documents (to borrow from Pajamas CEO Roger L. Simon's weekly introduction to the PJM Political), it might surprise the WaPo's Fisher that the elements that go into the PJM Political show are assembled almost entirely in a series of home studios. Including the Glenn & Helen Show, Austin Bay's Blog Week In Review, James Lileks' segment, and my own interviews linking them together. Not to mention all of the editing, mixing and mastering, which I do on an a high-end PC designed primarily for music production, and armed with some pretty nifty audio software.

And while I'm proud of what we've been able to do on PJM Political, I still think the ultimate example of DIY production is England's 18 Doughty Street. Every day, they self-produce hours of high-definition live television for the Internet out of a London townhouse. I'm not sure if I'd want to do that! (At least not on a daily basis.)

As Mutter writes in the above link, the 20 and 30-somethings working in the nation's newsrooms know that this sort of programming really is the future of news--even if their bosses would rather stick with a model that's been outdated since Tim Berners-Lee found a way in 1989 to run a user-friendly graphical Web on top of an Internet that was already two decades old.

(And just wait 'til the 64-bit revolution in computing really starts to power the Army of Davids and their multimedia efforts.

(Via Small Dead Animals, whose graphic of a large and equally dead flyblown reptile couldn't be more appropriate for their post.)

I couldn't find a video clip of Rick Moranis as Cavett interviewing himself, but this is a pretty good runner-up:

SCTV - Best of the Early Years - SCTV - Taxi Driver with Dick Cavett

Posted Sep 19, 2006

Dick Cavett stars in Taxi Driver.

27 years ago, the Canadian television parody series featured featuring Rick Moranis' dead-on impersonation of deadpan Dick Cavett interviewing...Dick Cavett.

Today, in a rather belated effort to catch up, the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz interviews himself.

As another Washington Post media critic wrote today:

Be careful what you wish for. In this era of media superficiality, newsroom budget cuts and celebrity worship, there's also a growing call for depth and tough reporting on the crucial issues of our time, such as the election of a president.

But as we've seen more than a few times recently, the Washington Post and its subsidiaries may not be the best place for that depth and tough reporting. Which may be why the legacy media is on Forbes' endangered species list this week, several months after first appearing on ours.

Update: Video here. A hint before watching it: Courage--as another legacy media figure is wont to say.

Steve Green writes that he's "Just Trying to be Helpful":

Say it to yourself over and over again...

WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 — Israel’s air attack on Syria last month was directed against a site that Israeli and American intelligence analysts judged was a partly constructed nuclear reactor, apparently modeled on one North Korea has used to create its stockpile of nuclear weapons fuel, according to American and foreign officials with access to the intelligence reports.

..."There is no Axis of Evil, there is no Axis of Evil." That Syria was building a North Korean-designed nuclear reactor, not long after taking delivery of "cement" from a North Korean ship, while at the same time North Korea has been promising to dismantle its nuclear program -- why, that's all just coincidence. That Syria is nuke-pursuing Iran's Mediterranean proxy is also mere coincidence.

And there will be lots of people who have already buried their heads in the sand and returned to wall-to-wall trashing of the US and Israel immediately upon reading this news.

And some of them are in awfully powerful or influential positions, which is why Mark Steyn is wondering why no Cold War-style "Long Telegram" outlining official American policy has come out of the War On Terror.

Nikke Finke writes:

It's now abundantly clear that Clooney's domestic popularity as an actor isn't what the media or Hollywood thinks it is. After all, his Warner movie is one of the best reviewed this early fall (90% on Rotten Tomatoes). But except for his ensemble movies -- the franchise Ocean's 11, 12 & 13 or A Perfect Storm or Batman & Robin-- not one George Clooney-starring movie has ever opened big at the domestic box office despite plenty of hype. But he keeps getting hired as the top salaried star of pics especially at Warner because he's considered a big name internationally. Such is the decision making of Hollywood.

Didn't Libertas point this out a couple of weeks ago?

In any case, as I've written before, Orson Welles, who, post-Citizen Kane, had enormous difficulty obtaining funding for his movies because of their inevitably low domestic box office returns, would plotz if he saw today's environment in Hollywood. It's the norm for Tinseltown to build movie after movie around directors and/or actors who routinely bomb at the US box office. in addition to Clooney, Woody Allen, Rob Reiner, Spike Lee, Sean Penn, Sharon Stone and Nicole Kidman all come immediately to mind as directors and actors who've had box office bomb after bomb, yet still are considered "bankable" by studio executives. (See also: the late Robert Altman.)

Pajamas Media asks, "Is it something in the water cooler at City Hall?":

Five of the last seven mayors of Atlantic City have pleaded guilty or have been convicted of some crime — and now Robert W. Levy has resigned under a cloud of deceit, depression, and substance abuse. Fausta Wertz reports that none of his replacements looks very promising, either.

I guess The Mob That Whacked Jersey is finding it tough to recruit new capos.

Rob Port makes a great observation: America's high standard of living changes the definition of "poverty"; he links to a post by Philip Brewer, who writes:

In the 1950s and 1960s, a working man could support a family at a middle-class standard of living with just one income. It might surprise you to learn that one person working full-time, even at minimum wage, can still support a family of four at that standard of living. Nowadays we call that “living in poverty.”

Rob adds:

I’m sure that will surprise a lot of people, but it’s all a trick that has been played upon us by the politicians. After all, it’s sort of hard for them to levy more taxes and expand the size and power of government unless they convince a significant chunk of us that we’re victims and cannot possibly get by without government assistance.

In the 1930s, as Amity Shlaes discusses in The Forgotten Man, it was logical to assume that poverty was partially a result of geography. But these days, as Orrin Judd and Kathy Shaidle each note (and from across the pond, so does Theodore Dalrymple in vast tracts of his back catalog), it's very often much more a function of mindset than anything else.

The New York Post:

Every major daily paper in New York took note of President Bush’s decision to bestow the first Medal of Honor of Operation Enduring Freedom on Navy SEAL Lt. Michael Murphy - a Long Islander who gave his life for his country and his fellow SEALs.

Every paper but one, that is.

And it shouldn’t be particularly hard to guess which one.

Of course--and note that it's the same paper which a few years ago wondered why there is a dearth of nationally-known heroes from the war in Iraq.

To paraphrase Captain Ed on a related topic, I guess he missed the cut.

Will history look back on the first term of what may very well be the first Clinton administration as the high-water mark of using children as political pawns? Because it seems like it's a tactic made infinitely more difficult in the age of the Internet, where we can fact check your urchins. Weighing in on the Democrats' Graeme Frost debacle, Mark Hemingway notes how a similar attempt by Republicans to use a nine-year-old as the poster child for Social Security reform was treated by the left, the same people who are now referring to "The Swift-Boating of Graeme Frost". Gee, that's awfully harsh on the kid--last time I checked he didn't sell out his country to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in a time of war.

How did political discourse fall to such a low ebb? That's a topic that James W. Ceaser explores in the Weekly Standard.

Power Line:

If the Bush administration gets attacked, the press will report it. But what if someone attacks the press? If the attack goes unreported, did it ever really happen?

As Mickey Kaus wrote in August, the legacy 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.

Fortunately, reporters aren't the only people reporting the news these days.

I've read a lot--and posted my fair share--of material on the graying of television's audience. But I had no idea how bad the problem had truly become. In the late 1980s, television tried to keep my parents' generation glued to the tube by recycling oldsters such as Raymond Burr, Andy Griffith, Telly Savalas, and the blue-haired cast of The Golden Girls.

But as Katherine Mangu-Ward of Reason notes, times change, and new eras call for new nostalgia:

Writing for CNN today, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, and Harvey Wasserman share some thoughts about nuclear power (Note: Don't think about that last sentence too hard. You'll hurt your head or bring on the apocalypse or something). They're worried that the siren song of cheap, clean energy will seduce us once again, when we should be rightfully seduced only by Bonnie's dulcet tones.

This line in the CNN piece is a remarkably dual-edged sword:

These "new" reactors are the same as the old ones, with a few bells and whistles, and a proven 50-year track record of catastrophic failure.

Indeed, and it's brave of the "Troubadour-American Community", as James Lileks dubbed them on Thursday's Hugh Hewitt show, to admit their own shortcomings. (Audio here, which foreshadows the geriatric rockers' CNN piece rather well.)

Fortunately, nuclear engineers are a bit more introspective.

James Lileks has some advice for Home Depot, and their ad agency:

Let us repeat the idea, in case any marketers are tuning in: it is not necessary to denigrate one sex in order to appeal to the other.

Your cooperation is appreciated.

But, really, not expected.

Jesse Walker of Reason has a list of helpful hints for those hoping to win their own Nobel Peace Prize--"Al Gore did it--you can too!"

Update: Kathy Shaidle brings it all back home:

Another Alfred -- Nobel -- endowed his famous prize as a "Winchester House" style conscience sop. He'd invented dynamite, to blast away rock during mining. Naturally, dynamite's until-then-unmatched ability to blast away human beings was discovered shortly thereafter, to Nobel's eternal shame.

Luckily, he didn't live to see the prize handed out to Arafat...

If Al Gore is a decent man, thirty years from now, having finally admitted he was wrong about global warming, he will endow a new prize, to be presented annually to a man or woman who tried to undo the incalculable damage done by An Inconvenient Truth.

I hereby nominate Bjorn Lomborg as its first recipient...

Meanwhile, I can think of no better way to commemorate this special occasion than by directing you to two other sites:

* re-read Hugh Hewitt's classic litany of Gore's lies, "Gorelero", which only goes up to the year 2000.

To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, read the whole thing, follow the links, repeat the dosage.

John Edwards (and/or the layers and layers of fact and typo-checking editors at the New York Times): "I've been in love with the same women for 30-plus years..."

(Much more at Kausfiles.)

To understand how organizations like the Nobel Prize began to slowly go off the rails, it's worth flashing back to the tremendous opening shot of Paul Johnson's opus Modern Times:

At the beginning of the 1920s the belief began to circulate, for the first time at a popular level, that there were no longer any absolutes: of time and space, of good and evil, of knowledge, above all of value. Mistakenly but perhaps inevitably, relativity became confused with relativism.

No one was more distressed than Einstein by this public misapprehension. He was bewildered by the relentless publicity and error which his work seemed to promote. He wrote to his colleague Max Born on 9 September 1920: 'Like the man in the fairy-tale who turned everything he touched into gold, so with me everything turns into a fuss in the newspapers.' Einstein was not a practicing Jew, but he acknowledged a God. He believed passionately in absolute standards of right and wrong.

He lived to see moral relativism, to him a disease, become a social pandemic, just as he lived to see his fatal equation bring into existence nuclear warfare. There were times, he said at the end of his life, when he wished he had been a simple watchmaker.

The public response to relativity was one of the principal formative influences on the course of twentieth-century history. It formed a knife, inadvertently wielded by its author, to help cut society adrift from its traditional moorings in the faith and morals of Judeo-Christian culture.

On the other hand, we certainly can't fault the Nobel Committee's clear American bias, though...

In case you haven't seen the links from the Insta- and VodkaPundits, as well as the one-man global pundit (thank you gentlemen!), this week's PJM Political is online now, and will be on XM in about an hour and a half.

I think we assembled a pretty good show, if I do say so myself:

You'll hear Mark Steyn, the one-man global content provider, discussing his best-selling America Alone in the context of the 2008 election. Also joining host Bill Bradley are:

Laura Ingraham on an excerpt of the Glenn & Helen Show discussing her new book, Power to the People.

Amity Shlaes, on her best-selling look at the Depression, The Forgotten Man, (about which Rudy Giuliani recently told talker Glenn Beck that "it would be great for everybody to read it").

James Lileks, the Bard of Minnesota.

University professor/blogger Steve Boriss on the Future Of News, and its immediate future: the upcoming election year.

Jules Crittenden of the Boston Herald and his own Pajamas-affiliated blog on the transnational synchronicity of Katie Couric and Barack Obama's near-simultaneous flag pin kerfuffles.

Steve Green of Pajamas-affiliated VodkaPundit and Bill Bradley on Tuesday's GOP debate.

Roger Simon and Bruce Carroll of Pajamas-affiliated Gay Patriot on the first Democratic debate aimed towards the GLBT community.

Err, and me!

Finally, if you missed our first two episodes of PJM Political, listen here.

At the beginning of the Steven Hayward article we linked to a couple of posts back, he wrote:

It used to be that the [Nobel] award went to people of genuine humanitarian or diplomatic accomplishment, like Mother Teresa, Albert Schweitzer or Doctors Without Borders.

As further proof of the immutability of Conquest's Second Law, Scott Johnson of Power Line explores some of the more dubious milestones along the Nobel Prize's paths of glory.

Scott asks, "How about some recognition for the scientists of Laputa discovered by Gulliver in the course of his travels?" Laputa's good deeds were significantly punished in 1963, as fans of Dr. Strangelove will recall.

The modern CEO covers all the bases, knows all the angles. He's got one eye on the bottom-line, and another looking towards the expansive globe--or globes--yet to be surveyed and conquered.

As Allah writes, "Look on the bright side: after Arafat, Carter, and Iranian marionette Mohammed ElBaradei, the award couldn’t possibly be more degraded."

Steve Hayward has some additional thoughts on Al Gore's Nobel prize, and a bold prediction: "In 20 years Gore or his climate alarmist successors will be lucky to appear on cable access TV, and Gore’s Peace Prize will take its place alongside Le Duc Tho’s 1973 award as a Nobel embarrassment". If that sounds harsh, simply compare Gore with Paul Ehrlich, the most prominent Malthusian of the 1970s, when modern eco-hysteria began:

It’s never a good sign when politicians declare a scientific matter settled; we all remember how well that worked out for the Vatican when they told Galileo 400 years ago that astronomy was settled. It is even more problematic to suggest that climate change is not a political issue, but a moral issue, but then to demand massive political interventions in the economy to fix the problem.

The adrenaline rush of the Nobel is likely to prove evanescent, however, and will probably turn out to be the high water mark of climate hysteria. Increasingly, climate catastrophe is coming more and more to resemble the hysteria over the “population bomb” of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In those days, Paul Ehrlich was a frequent guest on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, and there were government commissions launched here and abroad to ponder whether we needed an aggressive anti-natalist policy. The effort to develop a population policy in the U.S. collapsed quickly and quietly when someone pointed out that any anti-natalist policy would disproportionately affect racial and ethnic minorities. Oops.

Population pressures were and remain a genuine environmental concern, but it gradually became clear that Ehrlich and other alarmists had way overestimated the problem, and it looks very different today. (Indeed, the great social problem of the end of this century may be population that is falling too rapidly.) And while Ehrlich is still peddling the same Malthusian gloom, he never turns up on the Tonight Show any more; in fact, he doesn’t even make it on Hardball or Countdown with Krazy Keith.

Likewise, climate change is a real phenomenon, but the catastrophic scenario of Gore and his fellow climate campaigners is steadily fraying around the edges if you follow the scientific literature closely. Has anyone noticed, for example, that global temperature has been flat for the last decade, after two decades of slow and steady increase from 1980 to 1998?

Read the whole thing.

Today is the seventh anniversary of the attack on the USS Cole. Though you wouldn't know it from most legacy media sources:

On this day in the year 2000, the guided missile destroyer USS Cole was attacked by Islamic terrorists associated with Osama bin Laden's al-Quaeda group. Today is the seventh anniversary of that attack. Seventeen American sailors were killed and thirty-eight injured in the attack which severely damaged the ship. Yet not a single major media organ has reported this so far.

Attacking a warship has been long viewed as an act of war. The most recent example occured in 1968 when North Korea attacked the USS Pueblo. To our national shame, the Pueblo is still in the hands of that country. A rather more forceful response occurred in 1941, when Japan attacked the US Pacific Fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor.

However, then-President Bill Clinton did not respond to the attack on the Cole, emboldening the Islamists who viewed the United States as a paper tiger. The attack on the Cole was one of a series of attacks on Americans throughout the decade of the 1990s to which the United States failed to respond. This eventually led to al-Quaeda and its allies decided to attack the Twin Towers in 2001. Unfortunately for them, President George W. Bush took a different view, correctly deciding to respond with military force. Since 2001, there have been no further successful atttacks on American soil, though we remain engaged in a military offensive against the Islamic terrorists.

However, despite the significance of today's date, not a single major media organ has chosen to cover it. Why? CNN felt that news about Britney Spears' thoughts on her choldren were important enough to put on their front page, but there is no mention of the attack on the Cole. MSNBC has former Vice-President Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize plastered all over the front page, but there is no mention of the anniversary of the attack on the Cole. The New York Times similarly has no mention of this attack anywhere on their front page.

The post-Cold War 1990s was a vacation from history in more ways than one, it seems.

Update: Much more at the Jawa Report, and QT Monster has a moving video tribute to the American sailors killed in the terrorists' attack.

"If there weren't an Ann Coulter, the Democrats would have to invent her. I can't imagine a greater walking advertisement for the supposed bigotry of the extreme right."

It's also hard to find a better walking definition of Conquest's Third Law.

Incidentally, they're going at it hammer and tongs in the comments at Hot Air, if you'd like to wade in on Ann's latest self-promotional kerfuffle.

Fashion, thy name is Lyndon Baines Johnson.

I've been swamped recently (for reasons which will hopefully be obvious later today or early tomorrow), but Ace has a great link and write-up to a post from Newbusters catching Good Morning America's Chris Cuomo and media critic Howard Kurtz talking rather openly about bias and the role of a media that once claimed to be objective in shaping recent events. Ace writes:

From context I'm not sure if Kurtz is saying this is a good thing or merely noting an inescapable fact, but we now have two of the MSM admitting it was news coverage, and specifically how it was "shaped," that turned the public against the war.

On Tuesday's "Good Morning America,"co-host Chris Cuomo and media critic Howard Kurtz ignored the role that liberal bias has played in the decline of ratings for the network evening newscasts. At the same time, Cuomo and the "Washington Post" reporter seemed to be proud of the media's ability to turn Americans against the war in Iraq. Kurtz, who has written a book on the subject, asserted, "I believe that these newscasts in 2005 and 2006 played the biggest single role in helping to turn public opinion against the war."

Cuomo agreed and complimented the journalist's analysis. He enthused, "It's easy to say, 'Oh, well. The war was unpopular. People were looking for the unpopularity of it. At some point, the networks gave that to them.' But you have a more penetrating look at it. You take a look at it in terms of the role of the nightly newscasts in shaping the ideas about the news..."According to Kurtz, the top three network anchors kept "framing the story in such a way" that the bad news finally had an impact. And while the two reporters wondered about the effect the iPod and internet are having on network low ratings, at no time did they discuss liberal bias or salient facts such as that journalists backed John Kerry over George Bush by a two-to-one margin.

Meanwhile, as Maria Bartiromo reminded us last night, two thirds of Americans think the country is either about to enter a recession or is already in a recession, despite 22 quarters of consecutive growth, low unemployment, surging tax receipts, and record stock prices.

I wonder if Howie and Chris have any idea how the public got this very counter-factual idea stuck in their heads.

And don't forget this moment as well; as Amity Shlaes reminded me recently in an interview regarding her exceptional book on the Depression, The Forgotten Man, floods can dramatically change political histories.

15 years ago, the battlefield in the cold civil war was prepped by the media's turning a mild recession into The Worst Economy In 50 Years. So it certainly makes sense for them to prepare for next year by talking down the current economy as much as possible. Legacy media advertising revenues have cratered in certain quarters; I'm sure they think the rest of us should suffer as well. And if enough Americans believe and delay big purchases, sell stock, et al, and we actually do go into recession, so much the better. As we saw in 1992, the economy doesn't need much of a dip before television in particular launches into dire warnings of impending Hoovervilles.

Prominent Libertas film provocateur "Dirty Harry" is now also blogging at his own site. Go ahead, make his day!

Variety: "Peter Greenaway says cinema is dead":

Famously uncompromising British helmer Peter Greenaway declared cinema officially dead but said interactive forms of filmmaking offered exciting new possibilities.

Far be it from your humble narrator to argue with him.

Back in 2000, Orrin Judd wrote:

Is it possible that the History of the 20th Century can be explained by simple reference to a change in prepositions? That is the gist of the epiphany that struck me while watching David M. Kennedy on Booknotes (C-SPAN). He and Brian Lamb were discussing the fact that this book is part of the Oxford History of the United States joining James McPherson's excellent one-volume history of the Civil War, Battle Cry of Freedom : The Civil War Era (1988). Suddenly, the switch from "of Freedom" to "Freedom from", in the respective titles, struck me as emblematic of the pivotal change of emphases in the Modern world. The history of America from Plymouth Rock until the Crash was essentially the story of Man's struggle for Freedom, but Freedom in a positive sense, Freedom to do things--to worship, to speak, to gather, etc. Thus, McPherson's book details the great convulsion of the 19th Century, the Civil War and the struggle to free the slaves--a struggle to expand freedom. But Kennedy, charting the great 20th Century convulsion, has it exactly right, the importance of the responses to the Depression by both Hoover and Roosevelt lay in their decision to elevate a negative idea of Freedom, freedom from want, from hunger, from "the vicissitudes of life" above, and against, the traditional American ideal of republican Liberty. This shift from a government aimed at protecting Freedom to one designed to provide Security is the single most important thing that happened in 20th Century America.

Mark Steyn concurs:

The story of the western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government ‘security,' large numbers of people vote to dump freedom — the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, seat belts and a ton of other stuff.

As Erich Fromm wrote in 1941, "Why is it that freedom is for many a cherished goal and for others a threat?"

It's dumpster pizzas for Ron Paul!

(Though I still think Mike Gravel still gets the nod for best use of surrealism in a campaign ad.)

Gee, this progress only took self-identified "Progressives" about twenty years:

It’s progressives vs. libs in Babylon by the Bay, where they’ve finally figured out that encouraging aggressive panhandlers, squatters and junkies to come to your city is a “quality of life” problem. Warning: Graphic references to drug use, “human poop,” “throwing up,” “George Bush,” ”the Iraq war” and “law enforcement.” SF Chron:

San Francisco - the liberal, left-coast city conservatives love to mock - could be undergoing a transformation when it comes to homeless people. Although the city would still be a poor choice for a pep rally for the war in Iraq, indications are that residents have had it with aggressive panhandlers, street squatters and drug users.

“Maybe there has been an epiphany,” says David Latterman, president of Fall Line Analytics, a local market research firm. “People have realized they can hate George Bush but still not want people crapping in their doorway.”

That’s deep. But maybe people crapping in your doorway is Gaia’s way of telling you George Bush is right.

Heh. Someone alert Maria Bartiromo:

Forgive my grumpiness and general depression this morning. I still haven’t recovered from yesterday’s Republican debate. That is, I haven’t recovered from the questions CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo asked during the debate.

A sample of the sadness that’s sweeping America, as indicated by her questions:

“Two-thirds of the American people said that we are either in a recession or headed toward one. Do you agree with that?”

“Senator, you painted a very nice picture. The Dow and the S&P 500 today at new highs — tonight — record numbers. And, yet, two-thirds of the people surveyed said we are either in a recession or headed for one. Why the angst?”

“Here in Detroit, Michigan, alone, one in every 29 homes went into foreclosure in the first six months of the year. Whose job is it to fix this problem? The government or private enterprise?”

“Is London going to replace New York as the financial capital of the world?”

“What is the greatest, long-term threat to the U.S. economy?”

“Wall Street executives are making millions of dollars every year, paying tax rates of 15 percent, while the average guy out there is paying 30 percent in taxes. Is this system fair?”

After hearing all that, I need something to make me feel better about what’s happening in America. Maybe I’ll watch a film by Michael Moore.

Best avoid a film produced Warner Brothers. That's twice now that they can't even say America.

Jonah Goldberg writes that "Belgium is coming apart at the seams":

You probably don’t realize it, but we are living in an unprecedented historical moment. For the first time, Belgium has managed to be interesting without getting invaded by Germany or abusing an African colony.

What’s so interesting? In short: Belgium is coming apart at the seams. For four months, its 11 political parties have been unable to form a national government because the Dutch-speaking regions want greater autonomy, or even outright independence.

Primarily split between Dutch-speaking Flemings and French-speaking Walloons, Belgium was formed as a constitutional monarchy where the non-French speakers were mostly treated as second-class citizens. Even today, 177 years later, there are no national figures or national political parties. Each party represents its own ethnic, linguistic or regional enclave. But, although the Flemish majority is somewhat more prosperous, the Walloons have a perceived stranglehold on Belgian politics. One is tempted to joke that it’s an Iraq with better weather and waffles.

But it isn’t a mini-Iraq, and not just because they’re not killing one another. It’s more like a mini-European Union. In fact, that’s the one thing everyone can agree on.

No country is more invested in the EU experiment than Belgium, whose capital, Brussels, is also the capital of the EU. If Belgium falls to sectarianism, what does that say about prospects for making Europe into a super-Belgium?

Meanwhile, Pieter Dorsman notes that Holland isn't doing so great either these days. Not the least of its problems is an institutional cowardice resulting in "the first refugee from Western Europe since the Holocaust."

Finally, trouble appears to be brewing in Switzerland.

(Maybe somebody should alert the Washington Post about Europe's woes.)

A video on Breitbart.TV is headlined, "Southwest Airlines Sorry for Making Man Remove Vulgar T-Shirt". I don't know why, when the man in question wore a T-shirt with the words "MASTER BAITER" printed in large type on the back and front of the shirt. With a huge "Ain't I a stinker?" grin on his face, he told a television reporter, "To undress in front of 132 people, to put a new shirt on, I was unbelievably embarrassed."

In a sane world, he would have been too unbelievably embarrassed to wear such a shirt in public in the first place. Kudos to Southwest for sparing the passengers around him two hours or more of having to stare at a vulgarity.

Kevin McCullough:

Columbia University--you know--the same school that only days ago was welcoming Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with open arms despite thousands of New Yorker's objections, is now feigning indignation at a hangman's noose found on the door of one of it's African American professors in its Teacher's College.

But here's the million dollar dilema, how can a school pretend to be so offend by outright racism and ethnic prejudice, when they invite perhaps the most racist, anti-semitic person alive [and Ahmadinejad, too--Ed] to their campus and given him an uninterrupted microphone for more than 30 minutes?

Sure the noose carries with it a frightening symbol of ignorance that still occurs today, but how does inviting one of the world's biggest terrorists to take the coveted stage send the message that you're an instution that takes a stand against such ignorance?

Inquiring minds you know...

The danger of a multi-culti value system in which, as definitive 20th century primitive William Burroughs liked to say, "Nothing is true, everything is permitted", is that somebody is very likely to take you up on the idea.

Mark Steyn has a warm remembrance of Lois Maxwell, who for 25 years played James Bond's Girl Friday, Miss Moneypenny:

Almost everyone connected with Bond turns out to have feet of clay: Sean Connery is a dreary Scottish nationalist off-screen; Roger Moore says he doesn't like guns; and, when Daniel Craig leapt into his Aston Martin in Casino Royale, it emerged he could only drive automatics. They had to get a stuntman in for the stick shift. But in over a decade of her column in the Toronto Sun, Lois Maxwell revealed a Moneypenny of magnificently robust views. She'd have made a better "Canada's Thatcher" than Kim Campbell ever could.

She wanted the role Judi Dench got -- the first female head of MI6. True, the CIA seems to have dwindled down into the world's biggest typing pool, sitting around in Virginia monitoring email all day. But even there the stenographer does not get to be boss. And so Lois Maxwell bumped up against the glass ceiling, and never got to be M -- the one letter the secretary couldn't take.

Read the whole thing; for a three-minute look back at the franchise's peak, click here.

Found via Dr. Helen, Steven K. Erickson of Crime And Consequences recounts the awful history of repressed memories:

The recent issue of Scientific American Mind has an article by prominent psychologists Scott O. Lilienfeld and Kelly Lambert on the history of recovered memories used in psychotherapy. As Lillenfeld and Lambert allude to, the recovered memories movement was largely responsible for the genesis and explosive growth of the controversial diagnosis of multiple personality disorder during the 1980s. It is no coincidence that the specious multiple personality disorder and recovered memory movement both occurred during the daycare sexual abuse scandals of the 1980s which led to numerous people being falsely accused of worst possible crimes. Most reasonable people look back at these times and wonder how could such junk science so perniciously influence our legal system. Yet recovered memories and multiple personality disorder was heralded at the time by the various professional associations and academics as "science" and those who argued otherwise were labeled "deniers." Professors readily embraced media appearances suggesting that this new science was uncovering an ugly empirical truth about our society. Hindsight gives us the ability to laugh (and perhaps shed some tears) at this psuedoscience.

Yet our hindsight is often narrow. These days many folks are sounding the clarion call that addictions -- ranging from the hardcore ones to the newly discovered video game addiction -- are, in fact, diseases. The science is irrefutable they say. But just as with multiple personality disorder and recovered memories, the devil is in the details. Few of these supporters of the disease model of addictions openly admit that by transforming addictions from a moral failing or mental disorder into a disease means opening the funnel of federal and precious healthcare dollars into the addiction behemoth. Instead, fancy brain images of addicted brains are eagerly shown as proof that addicted brains are diseased brains. But, as history shows, money and politics often drives science more than anything else.

You don't say.

The word of the day: can you say "entertrainwreck" boys and girls? I knew that you could!

It’s refreshing to know that even during troubled times, prison-tat enthusiast and consummate entertrainwreck Amy Winehouse still takes time to coordinate her ill-chosen foundation garments with her cherry flavored phallic symbols.

Click over for shudder-inducing photograph.

Exit Question: is Amy in the midst of "The Odyssey Years" that David Brooks writes about today?

In his essay today, Roger L. Simon mentions listening to Miles Davis' Birth of the Cool in the late 1950s. One of the ironies of someone like Winehouse, who no doubt believes she's absolutely on the cutting edge (probably in more ways than one) of pop culture is that she's affecting a style that was done 50 years ago by artists like Miles and on the distaff side of '50s jazz, Billie Holiday. And even while attempting self-immolation via various and sundry white powders, they made infinitely better music, to boot.

Jeff Jarvis explores "The real media consolidation: Google":

Bottom line: Google controls nearly 40 percent of online advertising.

Now pair that news with the folding of TimesSelect. Consumers, as we used to be called, won’t support media and journalism with their money. Advertising will. We will become entirely dependent on advertising. And what happens when Google controls the majority of online ad revenue in this country? They’re headed there, for as a TechCrunch commenter points out, Google’s online ad revenue and share of revenue are growing faster than online advertising as a whole.

On the one hand, we should be grateful to Google for enabling the support of much new media. On the other hand, we should fear teh vice in which Google holds our privates. That’s where media power is consolidating — not in old conglomerates (some of which now depend for a good bit of revenue on who? — on Google.)

And yet, for a company involved in as many diverse projects as Google, Zombie notes that it's definition of "diversity" is awfully skewed in one direction:

Google is completely infected by the multicultural bug, and that means they’ll honor anything that isn’t part of the “traditional” culture or power structure: American, Christian, conservative, and so on. I’m neither Christian nor do I consider myself a conservative, but even I bristle at Google’s hubris.

Read the whole thing.

Roger L. Simon writes "have some sympathy for the neocons"--and appropriately enough for such an allusion, Mick and Keith do indeed make a brief appearance in his latest essay, though they come across as far more out of touch and aloof in their modern day personae than their zeitgeist-defining Beggars Banquet days.

As Roger notes, neoconservatives "may be under attack currently, but if we do actually win in Iraq, as now seems a possibility, for them there will be Hell to pay."

Read the whole thing.

Randall Hoven has assembled a tremendous list (in alphabetical order) of the top 101 lies and misinformation from the elite media and related figures. He calls it "Media Dishonesty Matters", and I recommend reading it to everyone, since we're all consumers of news and opinion in one form or another. Upon first glance, I just have one minor quibble. Included in Hoven's list is this incident from the 2004 presidential election:

92. Evan Thomas, Newsweek (2004). Admitted bias. Thomas said, "Let's talk a little media bias here. The media, I think, wants Kerry to win. ... They're going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic and there's going to be this glow about them ... that's going to be worth maybe 15 points."

Unless you actually do believe the legacy media is unbiased (an impossibility in my book, for reasons I go into here), then I'm don't believe that Thomas should be faulted for admitting the truth about his profession, which jibes perfectly with all of the studies that have been taken regarding their voting habits.

In a related post, TigerHawk explores "Partisan differences in trusting, and not trusting, the media", which is also well worth your time.

Jules Crittenden writes, "Columbus Day may be the most unPC holiday of the year. That’s why I intend to celebrate it doing the most unPC thing I can think of. Working for a living."

As I've written before, I belonged briefly to an organization called "the National Writers' Union" in the late 1990s; I got a couple of fun freelance assignments from their online tip sheet. But when one of their newsletters referred to Columbus Day by the angry left PC-euphemism du jour (see: Civil War, Cold), it was time for me to bail. Cult religions are far too exclusive for my tastes.

Update: Related thoughts here.

"Manolo says, at this point, you should perhaps consider changing your barber."

(I know Billy said “The Republicans, I can’t even say their name--I gag" last year, but perhaps he's carrying party loyality just a tad too far...)

Well, metaphorically at least; but this incident at a New Hampton, Iowa town hall meeting sounds remarkably similar to an incident involving another leftwing frontrunner for the presidential election four years ago. In both cases, neither of the candidates were prepared that the person asking them questions might have a viewpoint that differs from theirs.

Painfully overt condescension was an Achilles heel of the effete "Progressive" Senator from the northeast four years ago; will it also serve to alienate this year's effete "Progressive" Senator from the northeast, despite the best efforts of her battlefield preparations and media supporters?

Radical chic--it's not just for Park Avenue orchestra conductors anymore!

(Someone should send a case of these T-shirts to BBC HQ.)

Michael Barone visits the typical American college campus, and does not like what he sees:

Racial quotas and preferences continue to be employed, as a recent article on UCLA makes clear, in spite of state laws forbidding them, and university administrators seem to derive much of their psychic income from their supposed generosity in employing them. This, even though evidence compiled by UCLA Professor Richard Sander suggests they produce worse educational outcomes for their intended beneficiaries and even though Justice Clarence Thomas makes a persuasive case in his book My Grandfather’s Son that they cast a stigma of inferiority on them.

Of course, college and university administrators insist they aren’t actually using quotas when in fact they are, as O’Connor’s decisive opinion in 2003 invited them to do. The result is that one indispensable requirement for being a college or university administrator is intellectual dishonesty. You have to be willing to lie about what you consider one of your most important duties. So much for open inquiry and intellectual rigor.

This is not the only way the colleges and universities fall far short of what were once their standards. Sometime in the 1960s, they abandoned their role as advocates of American values — critical advocates who tried to advance freedom and equality further than Americans had yet succeeded in doing — and took on the role of adversaries of society.

The students who were exempted from serving their country during the Vietnam War condemned not themselves but their country, and many sought tenured positions in academe to undermine what they considered a militaristic, imperialist, racist, exploitative, sexist, homophobic — the list of complaints grew as the years went on — country.

English departments have been packed by deconstructionists who insist that Shakespeare is no better than rap music, and history departments with multiculturalists who insist that all societies are morally equal except our own, which is morally inferior.

Economics departments and the hard sciences have mostly resisted such deterioration. But when Lawrence Summers, first-class economist and president of Harvard, suggested that more men than women may have the capacity to be first-rate scientists — which is what the hard data showed — then, off with his head.

This regnant campus culture helps to explain why Columbia University, which bars ROTC from campus on the ground that the military bars open homosexuals from service, welcomed Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose government publicly executes homosexuals. It explains why Hofstra’s law school invites to speak on legal ethics Lynn Stewart, a lawyer convicted of aiding and abetting a terrorist client and sentenced to 28 months in jail.

What it doesn’t explain is why the rest of society is willing to support such institutions by paying huge tuitions, providing tax exemptions and making generous gifts. Suppression of campus speech has been admirably documented by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. The promotion of bogus scholarship and idea-free propagandizing has been admirably documented by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. It’s too bad the rest of America is not paying more attention.

They're asleep in New York. I bet they're asleep all over America...

Found via Mark Steyn, here's an interesting turn of phrase by William Gibson, expanded upon by The Hyacinth Girl:

At some point last month, I put down William Gibson's newest tome and picked up something written by Victor Davis Hanson. I am only now getting back to Spook Country, and though I'm afraid that I know exactly where Gibson is going with this, I found his idea of this country being in a "cold civil war" to be fascinating. What would that entail, exactly? A cold war is a war without conflict, defined in one of several online dictionaries as "[a] state of rivalry and tension between two factions, groups, or individuals that stops short of open, violent confrontation." In that respect, is the current political climate one of "cold civil war"? I think arguments could be made to that effect. My mother, not much of a political enthusiast, has made similar assessments since the 2000 election, concerned that the political climate (which has become increasingly acrimonious in the last 7 years) would indeed lead to some sort of lukewarm civil war--not hot, not cold, just divisive and destructive. Seven years ago, I laughed off her fears, secure in my naivete.

Now, I'm not so sure.

There are certain elements within this country that would rather see our country fail and possibly fall than to see their political rivals succeed. It's this sort of petty, short-sighted partisan bickering that will metastasize and bring down empires--or benevolent democratic hyperpowers.

Tread carefully, folks.

In his Bleat tonight, James Lileks wrote:

This is what annoys me to no end about the 60s, to cram it all into a tidy convenient decade; the overculture and the underculture ganged up
on the great Middle, for different reasons but with equal gusto. The Middle was Crass, in the eyes of the overculture; Phony, in the eyes of the underculture.

And of course, as David Frum has written, the sixties were really the vanguard, the early warning detector of the looming culture war, which rages--if a "cold civil war" can be said to rage--to this day.

Update: I'd say this example of toxic disinhibition qualifies as one front in the Cold Civil War. At least it's a battle that's still cold in the US, because it's just the opposite elsewhere.

Combustable redorkulation:

“We’re going to keep on praising together. I am confident that we can create a Kingdom right here on Earth.”

NRO's having a fundraiser right now. They could probably make a few extra bucks by printing up a fresh run of one of their bumperstickers from the 1960s.

James Lileks channels his inner Hunsecker:

It’s a blogger’s life. You spend the night on the town in your accustomed style, beginning at the club where the maitre d’ waves you to the table from which you can behold the gaudy parade of humanity – and there you sit, entertaining well-wishers, tipsters, publicity agents, starlets, producers, guys on the make with two-buck gossip dressed up as a sawbuck expose. When one o’clock rolls around you collect your hat and walking stick and head over to the after-hours blogger’s club: brandy and Cubans until three. Your chauffeur motors you home as the city sleeps; you draw a bath, put a board over the edge of the tub for your laptop, and type your next post. It has that brisk insouciant patter that makes Winchell look like Henry James with a mouthful of syrup, but really, don’t they all. This is why they read you. This is why they fear you.

Wow, and I thought I was the only one leading precisely this lifestyle!

(And as James adds, "Alas, you wake..." For an actual look at a modern-day equivalent to Winchell and the nowhere near as Runyonesque life he leads, click here.)

The BBC's graphic design department has proposed a new logo. Anybody who's read this will not be entirely surprised by the change in slogan illustrated here...

What an astonishing series of media moments have occurred just within the last couple of weeks. The New York Times are profoundly disappointed that they have no "defining atrocity" to pin on Americans in Iraq. Both Robin Wright of the Washington Post and Barbara Starr of CNN told Howard Kurtz today that decreasing US casualties in Iraq aren't newsworthy as far as they're concerned. And Katie Couric says that she is "uncomfortable" with "the whole culture of wearing flags on our lapel and saying ‘we’ when referring to the United States".

Wow, if this keeps up, people might actually question which side the American media are rooting for. And they might even wonder how recent a development this is, when compared with media coverage of World War II.

Nahhh. Never happen. You stay classy, old media!

Update: To build on a topic we discussed here this past week, Jules Crittenden further explores ongoing efforts by today's punitive media to reshape the narrative concerning World War II: "The Good War, World War II, doesn’t bear up well under scrutiny with head tilted left".

We're going to party like it's 1999, or at least 1997 and '98. First up, Mark Steyn demolishes the conspiracy theory du jour that the queen had Princess Di whacked because she was sleeping with Dodi Al-Fayed, the Mohammedan Candidate:

National Review's David Pryce-Jones made the point that, in persisting with his lurid accusations, Mohammed Fayed revealed how little he understands Britain: He's lived there for years, it's been good to him, he owns Harrod's and the Paris Ritz and various other baubles. No big deal. He's one of many, many beneficiaries of Western openness to "the other." And yet he's convinced himself that Buckingham Palace is so consumed by "Islamophobia" that the queen's husband dialed M, and M called in Moneypenny, and Moneypenny faxed 007, and a week later the princess and her Islamostud are dead.

Reality is more humdrum: In multiculti Britain, everyone was indifferent to Di's Muslim lover. Could have been a Hindu, could have been a Buddhist. Who cares? But, instead, Fayed has retreated into the paranoia and victim mentality that stunts so much of the Muslim world. A while back, I was in Jordan, and a wealthy Saudi told me that the Iraq war was part of a continuous Western assault on Islam that includes the British Royal Family's assassination of Dodi Fayed. And so, in a London courtroom, a freak one-off celebrity death becomes just another snapshot of the big geopolitical picture.

More flashbacks from the late 1990s: As Ann Coulter notes in her radio interview with Kevin McCullough, next year will be the tenth anniversary of Bill Clinton's impeachment hearings. So Hillary will have that in the background--and quite possibly the foreground--as she campaigns next year.

Nina Totenberg of NPR, and the editorial writers at the New York Times are both feigning surprise that Clarence Thomas still harbors some anger at their efforts to destroy his reputation, and his chance to sit on the highest court of the land. The Times' editorialist wrote:

"The rage he harbors raises questions about whether he can sit as an impartial judge in many of the cases the Supreme Court hears."

That quote is the headline of a recent post by Ann Althouse, who responds:

The NYT would like to say that Clarence Thomas's anger disqualifies from hearing some cases. Isn't it insanely obvious that if a liberal black judge harbored anger for the way he was treated over the years, the NYT would admire him for his passion and for the crucial perspective he brings to judging — perspective that white judges can never hope to reach through mere knowledge and empathy?

But somehow NYT editorial writers can understand that a conservative black judge's emotions are distorted, overblown, and disqualifying.

A recent Brent Bozell op-ed quotes Congressman Bobby Rush (D-Illinois), as he holds what Bozell dubs "a very unique hearing, focusing on the way the culture is being soured by the makers of sexist and racially charged rap music":

The congressman could have knuckled under from pressure by the anything-goes Old Guard of gangsta rap, but instead boldly put his prestige where his heart is. He said this music of violence and degradation has ''reduced too many of our youngsters to automatons, those who don't recognize life, those who don't value life.'' He was unequivocal. “There is a problem -- a deep-seated, deeply rooted problem in our country," he said. "The paycheck is not an excuse for being part of the problem.”

Loser: Michael Eric Dyson. The professor and Bill Cosby-hating author has become America’s leading excuse-maker for irresponsible thug music. He blamed America, that never-draining cesspool of racism, for whatever problem exists. “America is built upon degrading images of black men and women, so any discussion of misogyny or homophobia or sexism has got to dig deep into America, including Congress and corporate and religious institutions.”

Congressman Rush was not accepting that ridiculous excuse. He understands black rage against injustice in America, but in no way does it justify thuggery. He said, “I still have rage, but how do I channel it? Am I going to spew out counterproductively? Or do I accept a higher responsibility to take my rage and do something to improve the community?"

Why is it perfect acceptably for a liberal black congressman to declare that “I still have rage, but how do I channel it?", but not a conservative black Supreme Court justice?

Back to Ann:

Imagine that a liberal black judge had written a passionate, personal story of his life. Make that judge a man who grew up in poverty in the south in the era of segregation. Imagine a conservative newspaper editorial criticizing him for failing to write something more dignified, something more like like a history book written a white judge who was raised in middle-class, midwestern suburbia or a theoretical book written by a white man who spent his childhood in middle-class San Francisco. Don't you think the New York Times would sneer at that editorial and call it racist?

Via blogger "Eclecticity" who adds, "the New York Times is almost brazen in it's elitism and leftism, but since they breath the air in Manhattan, they can't even see it."

Which is an awfully parochial attitude for a newspaper whose publisher was once quoted as saying that "Diversity not only makes good moral sense, it makes good business sense too."

We've all seen people who look exactly like this, but why on earth do they actually believe they're epatering les bourgeois when they've adopted a look that's straight out of a 25-year-old copy of Thrasher magazine?

Related thoughts here.

(H/T: 5'F)

The New York Times, defining atrocity down:

Last year, when accounts of the killing of 24 Iraqis in Haditha by a group of marines came to light, it seemed that the Iraq war had produced its defining atrocity, just as the conflict in Vietnam had spawned the My Lai massacre a generation ago.

But on Thursday, a senior military investigator recommended dropping murder charges against the ranking enlisted marine accused in the 2005 killings, just as he had done earlier in the cases of two other marines charged in the case. The recommendation may well have ended prosecutors’ chances of winning any murder convictions in the killings of the apparently unarmed men, women and children.

Funny, I would consider the defining atrocity of the Vietnam War to be something like this; the mass graves still being uncovered in Iraq filled with Saddam's victims are their Iraqi equivalent. But evidently, these incidents have gone down the Times' collective memory hole.

Besides, it's the other guy's country, as Pinch would say.

Just to follow up on the addendum to our post earlier today, John Stephenson has the perfect headline for our times:

ACLU Files Suit for Teacher Fired for Painting With His Butt

Andres Serrano could not be reached for comment.

Warner Todd Huston:

Imagine this scenario: A Republican Mayor of a famous city lies about his service in Vietnam and is caught at it but before that revelation comes to light he was already in trouble as he was about to be recalled by the citizenry for commonly being absent at city council meetings. What's more he also presides over a city council that has several members under investigation for sexual misconduct, drunk driving and at least one recent council member who is in jail serving a conviction for bribery. Imagine how the MSM would howl over the Republican "culture of corruption?" And yet, this scenario that I describe actually exists with but one small alteration in the particulars. The mayor in question actually exists. His city council is as corrupt as I describe. Only the mayor is a Democrat instead of a Republican... not that the MSM seems to have noticed.

Yes, it's time for another edition of "Name That Party!"

(Though to be fair, when you're dealing with The Mob That Whacked Jersey, their party affiliation is a given.)

Well, five actually. As the Drapers' distaff neighbor on AMC's Mad Men frequently illustrates, number six on Cracked's list certainly wasn't a trend exclusive to the 1970s, but fortunately, it did become increasingly socially unacceptable in the years that followed.

I'd add this to the list as well, though there's no end to the horrid trends that ran concurrently through the Decade That Taste Forgot.

(Via Kathy Shaidle.)

Related: "Our Child-Based Decadence", which, as David Frum has written, is much more a byproduct of the 1970s than the 1960s.

Glenn Reynolds writes that "in some quarters, patriotism is the highest form of dissent. Er, or it would be..."

(Somebody should put that on a bumper sticker!)

Back in 2004, Jonah Goldberg looked at the post-Michael Kelly Atlantic and wrote, "The Atlantic is still a great magazine, but it seems to be inching urther and further into official Liberal Magazine Land."

That destination is concluded, with an article that begins:

If the American idea was to subdue Native Americans and place them at the disposal of European settlers, to import several million Africans to the New World and subject them to a lifetime of slavery, to impose on Asian immigrants a lifetime of discrimination, then perhaps the American idea was not so admirable.

And thus, the post-JFK strain of punitive liberalism rears its ugly head again. Or as Ace of Spades quipped a while back, "Call it the Ike Turner school of patriotism."

Tim Blair has "Possibly the ultimate leftist slogan of 2007"; no that's not it in Tim's headline above, click on over to see it for yourself printed on--where else?--a t-shirt.

Charlie Rangel would no doubt approve, as would the authors of this book.

Or as Hot Air dubs it, "World Trade Center attacked; women, minorities hardest hit"; in the L.A. Times, Meghan Daum writes:

Because I seem to be one of an ever-dwindling handful of women under 50 who still call themselves feminists (and, therefore, am allowed to make fun of feminists with impunity), let me say this: Anyone who blames the weird, conflicted state of contemporary womanhood on the cultural fallout of 9/11 isn't just burning her bras but smoking them.

Not that Susan Faludi, the prize-winning journalist and author of the just-published book, "The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America," hasn't shoe-horned plenty of compelling evidence around this slightly whacked-out notion.

In a succinct 354 pages (shockingly brief for the normally prolix Faludi), she argues that in the months and years following the 9/11 attacks, the rhetoric surrounding various notions of national security (some of it appropriate, much of it overly simplistic and reactive) enabled the media to more or less announce that the whole nation was returning to traditional values and gender roles.

I guess the Air Force Academy didn't get the message in time.

Related: "The Real Gender Gap".

Via Greg Pollowitz:

SECRET Service agents guarding Jenna Bush were red-faced yesterday when they got locked out of their car. "They had escorted Jenna into the CBS studios on 59th and Fifth for an interview on 'The Early Show' and returned to find they'd left the keys inside," a source told us. Then, after Jenna left in another vehicle, CBS cameramen began shooting the agents as they waited for a spare key. "They weren't very happy about it, it was embarrassing. They wanted them to stop shooting and asked for the tape, but didn't get it," the spy said.

Exclusive footage from inside Jenna's car, here.

"Are you better off now than you were four years ago?"

"Last year, two [computer] programs were endorsed by Britain’s health officials for people with panic attacks, mild depression, or phobias."

Hopefully one of them was Eliza...

"Those eight months in Paris, back in 1919, that's when our world began to go off the rails."--about 25 minutes into Thursday's edition of Ed Morrissey's Heading Right show on Blog Talk Radio, David Andelman of Forbes makes the same point regarding World War I that I discussed a couple of weeks ago.

Of course, my post from mid-September is only about 175 words long; Andelman has a whole book on the topic titled A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today, which sounds like a must-read.

As I wrote in 2005, and (unbeknownst to me at the time) Jonah Goldberg wrote in 2001, from time to time, the left deploys the circular firing squad, and surprisingly often, it's Hollywood that winds up caught in the crossfire.

When the bullets start to fly and the f-bombs begin dropping, the best thing for the rest of us to do is to sit back, watch the explosions (provided by Gloria Allred, rather than ILM) thunder and crash, and pass the popcorn.

This doesn't surprise me in the least: "Clerics Who Started Cartoon Jihad Never Saw The Drawings".

Father Andrea Santoro could not be reached for comment.

Found via Kathy Shaidle, New York magazine does a drive-by profile of Matt Drudge, without the cooperation of Drudge himself:

Phillips and Drudge’s greatest collaboration was the speech he gave at the National Press Club in June of 1998. Doug Harbrecht, then–press-club president, invited Drudge over the objections of many members who wondered how he could invite Drudge “into the sanctum sanctorum of American journalism.”

It was a staggering speech. Drudge was both revolutionary Tom Paine and dreamy populist. “I used to walk these streets as an aimless teen, young adult. Walk by ABC News over on DeSales. Daydream. Stare up at the Washington Post newsroom over on 15th Street, look up longingly, knowing I’d never get in. Didn’t go to the right schools. Never enjoyed any school, as a matter of fact. Didn’t come from a well-known family—nor was I even remotely connected to a powerful publishing dynasty … I would never be granted any access, obtain any credentials … There wasn’t a likelihood for upward mobility in my swing-shift position at 7-11.”

The best line in that speech was Drudge’s statement that “It’s more fun to talk about Godzilla than watch it.” He was introducing the reporters to the new hierarchies of the information age, when events, from Putin to Godzilla, would collapse into so much spectacle for a surfer on the Net. Seriousness doesn’t interest Drudge; phenomena do. As he wrote in his book, “Politics is as Important as Hollywood. Is as Important as Science.” Drudge flattens all hard news into collage, and it is this, more than anything, that angers the old guard.

Indeed it does. Not the least of which is New York magazine itself.

Since Drudge doesn't need publicity from New York magazine, why would he bother being subjected to their snark? In a way, it's sort of reminiscent of the reluctance displayed by William Shawn of the staid New Yorker to be profiled by New York back in the mid-1960s, when the magazine was an insert in the scrappy New York Herald Tribune employing writers such as Tom Wolfe and the young Jimmy Breslin. Nowadays, New York is as much a Tiny Mummy as the New Yorker itself. Both are fighting a rear-guard battle attempting to keep pace in the rapidly changing world of Internet journalism that Drudge helped to usher in.

(Incidentally, tune into this week's edition of PJM Political, either on XM #130 when it's rebroadcast tonight at 11:00 EDT, or tomorrow, when the podcast version will be online, for a few minutes with Andrew Breitbart, Drudge's Sancho Panza.)

Recently Glenn Reynolds noted that the launch of Sputnik 50 years ago this week was more a surprisingly improvised case of the Right Stuff, Soviet style, then a carefully planned first step by the Russians to sieze the ultimate high ground in the Cold War. But it had huge--if surprisingly temporary ramifications, as Rand Simberg notes:

In the mid-1950s, many science fiction writers, such as Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein, were predicting that men would walk on the moon. But none of them were so bold in their predictions as to claim that it would happen in the coming decade. It made no sense--there was a logical progression to such things. In 1958, we could barely toss a few pounds into orbit, and in the first year of launch attempts, three out of four had failed. The notion that we would be sending people into space, in a couple years, let alone all the way to the moon within a few more, seemed like too far out a prediction even for a visionary writer of fiction.

But what would have seemed even more fantastic was the notion that, having landed men on the moon in the late sixties, the last one would trod on the regolith a few years later, and there would be no return for half a century. That was beyond science fiction, into the realm of dystopian fantasy.

As Rand notes, "Yet, in part because of the Sputnik panic, that's exactly what happened." Read the whole thing.

And for own look at NASA's all-too-brief golden days, click here.

Click here for further details, or tune into #130 on your XM dial, the POTUS channel.

And if George, Bill, George and Jimmy are tuning in, remember, this offer still stands....

"Oh sure, they're environmentally conscious and cost-efficient, but there's a dark side to those zippy Toyota Priuses: They can be lethal to the blind."

Emergency medical technicians aren't that crazy about them either, considering their electrical cables can generate quite a shock when cut into.

Thus winning the eternal support of Katie Couric, her fellow newscasters, Hollywood, and other compassionate head-tilters, "Obama Stops Wearing Flag Pin", AP and Drudge breathlessly report.

In contrast though, John Stephenson isn't losing much sleep over this transnational tempest in a press release.

Update: More from Pajamas HQ, Hot Air, and Michelle Malkin.

Roger L. Simon:

I believe in my heart that had Al Gore been elected president in 2000 (and as we all know he almost was – he won the popular vote), he would be just as knee deep in the War on Terror as George Bush is right now and fighting it in more or less the same manner. He would be in Iraq.

It would certainly be consistent with everything he, and the administration he was second in command of, said in the 1990s.

(Obligatory YouTube clips below fold.)

Update: Al's got the Anchoress's vote! Of course, it all depends on which Al we're talking about--he morphs decade by decade.

Read More »

It's not just Rush, Imus, O'Reilly, and Savage: "Anti-Talk Radio Campaigns Emerge Across America".

New York Post readers instinctively know to hit Page Six first if they want all the juicy gossip. But where should L.A. Times readers go if they want even a taste of the same hot stuff? Mickey Kaus advises remaining L.A. Times readers (or is just reader? Not sure if plural tense is appropriate here...) to first hit page B-3 when opening up the papers--"It's Where The News Is":

On page B-3 of today's Los Angeles Times: 1) Britney Spears loses custody of her children. 2) Wife-leaving L.A. Mayor Villaraigosa's super-hot girlfriend quits her TV job when Telemundo assigns her to Riverside to avoid a conflict of interest. ... Too interesting! The Times highminded editors thought Angelenos should instead read "Bill seeks faster reports on nursing home allegations," which ran under huge picture on B-1. ... P.S.: Here's an excellent idea from blogger Steve Smith: "Maybe the local paper should just make the third page of its B Section a super-hyped, 'go-to' section for people interested in ... dirt, and gossip." Better yet, make it a pullout section. Then they could, you know, kind of wrap it around the more important sections with the riveting nursing home complaint procedure pieces that win Pulitzers....

Talk about burying the leads--as Mark Steyn once quipped, in 1978, you could afford to have a boring daily. Not today, as the L.A. Times discovers each time it checks its ever-shrinking circulation figures.

Dr. Helen cuts directly to the chase, as the 2008 presidential race enters the realm of the Mondo Bizarro:

If Mr. Giuliani wants to be the next leader of the free world, he would do well to heed this advice, for while voters can overlook a man who has had three wives and family problems, they can’t overlook is a man who looks like he’s pussy-whipped.

Heh. Indeed. Read the whole thing.^TM

James Lileks:

I am watching “Flags Of Our Fathers,” which I believed was a gritty, realistic, reverent account of the battle of Iwo Jima. It may yet become that. So far, aside from some horrifying battle sequences, it is movie about the cynical, callous exploitation of the famous flag-raising picture. Apparently every state-side government employee was a brittle, shallow, two-faced, glad-handing PR-minded ass who regarded soldiers as ignorant cattle. I also have the Japanese version of the movie, Letters from Iwo Jima. I have this odd feeling it will concern itself very little with the issues raised in this movie. I have the feeling I’ll be hearing a lot about honor.

I’m well acquainted with the story behind the photo. What’s odd is how the movie seems to suggest it all happened in some peculiar incomprehensible manufactured Eurasia-Eastasia struggle. I’m sure there was a certain amount of calculation that went into the photo’s eventual fame, but the level of bitter, angry, barking empty cynicism is rather remarkable. It’s amusing to be lecture by Hollywood on the devious use of imagery, of course, but apparently it’s okay if the imagery is being used to disassemble the devious use. But might that be devious itself, depending on the intention?

Later, having watched it all: A formless, repetitive mess. I get the idea: there are no heroes. Men fight for the men next to them, not abstract ideals. I get that last part. No one goes over the hill for the 7th Amendment. But a nation, a culture, fights for abstract ideals. You can make the case that the abstractions are lies or misguided artifacts of the time or the product or whatever you choose, but it’s still true. There’s no sense in this movie that World War Two was fought for any particular reason. It just was a thing that happened and some guys paid the price and the survivors were dragged out for an ad campaign.

Tempting though it might be, this is one Hollywood trend you can't blame on President Bush or the War On Terror; as Mark Steyn wrote nearly a decade ago:

Purporting to be a recreation of the US landings on Omaha Beach, Private Ryan is actually an elite commando raid by Hollywood and the Hamptons to seize the past. After the spectacular D-Day prologue, the film settles down, Tom Hanks and his men are dispatched to rescue Matt Damon (the elusive Private Ryan) and Spielberg finds himself in need of the odd line of dialogue. Endeavouring to justify their mission to his unit, Hanks's sergeant muses that, in years to come when they look back on the war, they'll figure that `maybe saving Private Ryan was the one decent thing we managed to pull out of this whole godawful mess'. Once upon a time, defeating Hitler and his Axis hordes bent on world domination would have been considered `one decent thing'. Even soppy liberals figured that keeping a few million more Jews from going to the gas chambers was `one decent thing'. When fashions in victim groups changed, ending the Nazi persecution of pink-triangled gays was still `one decent thing'. But, for Spielberg, the one decent thing is getting one GI joe back to his picturesque farmhouse in Iowa.

You could see that same worldview hidden beneath an otherwise much more comic book version of war in Paul Verhoeven's 1997 film of Starship Troopers. Writer-director Lionel Chetwynd (who wrote the made-for-TV movie starring Tom Selleck as Ike) described to Cathy Seipp his encounter with that same attitude when he pitched a story about the allies' attack on the French town of Dieppe in 1942:

When Chetwynd was a successful Hollywood writer specializing in historical dramas, he told the Dieppe story during a Malibu dinner party — as a sort of tribute to the men who died there so people could sit around debating politics at Malibu dinner parties. One of the guests was a network head who asked Chetwynd to come in and pitch the story.

"So I went in," Chetwynd told me, "and someone there said, 'So these bloodthirsty generals sent these men to a certain death?'

"And I said, 'Well, they weren't bloodthirsty; they wept. But how else were we to know how Hitler could be toppled from Europe?' And she said, 'Well, who's the enemy?' I said, 'Hitler. The Nazis.' And she said, 'Oh, no, no, no. I mean, who's the real enemy?'"

"It was the first time I realized," Chetwynd continued, "that for many people evil such as Nazism can only be understood as a cipher for evil within ourselves. They've become so persuaded of the essential ugliness of our society and its military, that to tell a war story is to tell the story of evil people."

I'm not sure when such a worldview developed; though James Piereson would argue this was the flashpoint. But in any case, the mindset that fuels Hollywood's dangerously self-destructive cocktail of nihilism and a punitive blind spot regarding America and its role in the world is surprisingly similiar to the elite news media's long-running sense of aloofness and cosmopolitanism.

Update: I haven't been watching Ken Burns' recent series on WWII, but reading posts such as this, it sounds like much of the above is driving its subtext--or lack thereof--as well.

In The L.A. Times, Jonah Goldberg writes, "I have no interest in 'questioning' Couric's patriotism. Rather, I'm interested in questioning her definition of it":

I've come around to the view that the culture war can best be understood as a conflict between two different kinds of patriotism. On the one hand, there are people who believe being an American is all about dissent and change, that the American idea is inseparable from "progress." America is certainly an idea, but it is not merely an idea. It is also a nation with a culture as real as France's or Mexico's. That's where the other patriots come in; they think patriotism is about preserving Americanness.

Yet the strangest and most ironic aspect of our national culture is that we have an aversion to talking about a national culture. Samuel Huntington, one of the country's premier social scientists, has become something of a pariah for constantly reminding people (in books such as "The Clash of Civilizations" and "Who Are We?") that the United States is a nation, not just a government and a bunch of interest groups.

Many liberals hear talk of national culture and shout, "Nativist!" first and ask questions later, if at all. They believe it is a sign of their patriotism that they hold fast to the idea that we are a "nation of immigrants" -- forgetting that we are also a nation of immigrants who became Americans.

Read the whole thing.

Kathy Shaidle has an urgent plea: "Dear Men Across The English Speaking World -- Please. Stop. Looking. Like. This":

I'm not sure what you were thinking ten years ago when you started with the mouth mullets, knock-off hipster glasses, bald head "frat-jock-semi-pro-goalie" look, but Clinton's not the President anymore, the X-Files is over and we all have to, as they say, move on.

This look was ugly back then but now it is both ugly and old. It's also nakedly, desperately aspirational: "I'm really a working class bloke but I'm trying to look like a middle class, 24/7-table-reading-of-Glenngary-Glen-Ross, commission-only-Toyota-salesman for some reason."

Kaithy adds, "We'll talk about tattoos another day."

By all means, please do.

Loch Ness monster sightings are down, according to AP:

There have been more than 4,000 purported sightings of a creature — affectionately dubbed "Nessie" — since a surgeon vacationing at the lake in the 1930s released a photo allegedly capturing the legendary monster on film. [Since recanted--Ed]

Since then, Nessie has been a key tourism draw, bringing an estimated 6 million pounds ($3 million) a year into the Scottish Highlands, according to The Times.

The faithful have speculated whether Nessie is a completely unknown species; a sturgeon, even though they have not been native to Scotland's waters for many years; or even a last surviving dinosaur.

In the age of digital cameras, webcams and video recorders, it is surprising that the number of reported sightings is falling.

No it isn't.

Back in August, Myrna Blyth dismissed a hatchet job by Vanity Fair on Rudy Giuliani's wife and wrote:

At one recent gathering of concerned Republicans, someone joked that the former mayor’s campaign staffers only wished they had a Teresa Heinz Kerry problem.

Be careful what you wish for--Betsy Newmark explores the problems the Rudy's wife is indeed causing his campaign: "It all comes back to that phone call during the NRA speech. It turns out that this wasn't something that had happened a few times, but dozens of times."

Tech Central Station's Andrew Och discusses America's tech and real estate bubbles of the last decade with Daniel Gross, the author of Pop: Why Bubbles Are Great for the Economy, and asks what next bubble is likely to burst:

GROSS: When you look back at history, you can see these early stages to a bubble. People say there's a new technology and a new set of economic assumptions behind it. You tend to get government subsidies behind a new sector. You tend to get investor enthusiasm.

TCS: And where do you see those things happening now?

GROSS: We are seeing all those elements right now in alternative energy. People are saying that there are a new set of economic assumptions surrounding energy use. Oil prices are very high. There's all the concern about global warming. Therefore, they say, we need to invest more in this area.

There's been fantastic growth in wind, solar, ethanol. We have government subsidies for all of these things, which encourages people to invest in them even at high levels. And you can see it crossing over into the popular culture. It's not just business publications. It's everywhere you look - TV, radio, newspapers, company's websites. Everybody is talking about producing alternative energy, using alternative energy.

So, I think the stars are aligning for a bubble in alternative energy.

It will be fun to watch the media report--or not--on that when and if it happens.

Colleen Raezler writes:

When’s the last time your local Christian youth group stoned somebody to death?

Hollywood likes to claim their programming simply reflects reality, but the latest episode of Cold Case was an exercise in bigoted, Christophobic fantasy.

Why should NBC's Law & Order franchise have the exclusive on this sort of stuff?

Incidentally, stoning might be considered by some to be a viable option if this story involving a CBS employee is true.

Annie Jacobsen has some thoughts on the death of Carol Ann Gotbaum, the 45-year old woman found dead in an airport holding cell at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport an hour after being arrested on a disorderly conduct charge:

Let’s be clear about who the boogeyman is at airports. It’s not the beefy security guards, nor is it the airport police. The bad guy is the Islamic terrorist who has his or her heart set on taking out another group of planes. It’s the Islamic terrorist who, according to National Counterterrorism Director John Scott Redd, is plotting something, “not unlike the U.K. aviation threat last year.” Passengers know this—it’s not “lack of information” that makes the heart go thump in the chest. And none of this means any of us should refuse to fly. What it means is that it’s time for anyone who wants to, to admit their fear of dying while flying without being called a racist, a coward or a xenophobe.

Three years ago, I unwittingly made a public name for myself expressing my fear and outrage over the behavior of 13 mala fide Syrians—posing as musicians and acting like terrorists—who were traveling alongside me and my family on a Northwest Airlines cross-country flight. The White House Homeland Security Council ordered a federal investigation of what happened on the flight; the results verified my account. That took three years. But in the meantime, I hardly felt it necessary to pretend I wasn’t afraid. On that flight, my heart rate mimicked that of a Formula One driver, a mugging victim, and a parachutist in a free-fall. And sometimes, when I’m in airports today, my heart rate rises again. This has nothing to do with long lines, unfriendly staff, burly security or men in blue. It’s the sometime-experience of fear of dying while flying. I have it, others have—you might have it too.

Don’t blame the police. Face the facts about the terrorists.

Read the whole thing.

Related: "Air travel may be the first industry based on a business model of kidnapping and imprisonment."

Allahpundit writes that with Hillary's $27 million in the bank in the third quarter alone, "It’s game over, man."

Meanwhile, noting that--understatement alert!--"The GOP Has Some Re-Branding to Do", Larry Kudlow writes, "A couple of significant stories in today’s Wall Street Journal point to a very pessimistic outlook for Republicans in 2008."

Besides Hillary's war chest, of course.

Update: Wow, perfect timing, GOP! Slubog has "a growing sense that the tension between social conservatives and moderates in the Republican party is about to blossom into full-blown hostility."

Found via Tim Blair, Malcolm Farr writes that far too many rock musicians became "bogged down with superficial heroin chic", including "God" himself:

Eric Clapton might have contributed more to the world than wonderful music had he been candid earlier about the stupidity and indignity of heroin use.

Instead of seeing old "Slow Hand" looking cool on stage or imagining him that way while listening to records, youngsters might have learned the reality.

And that was that Clapton, during his heroin addiction, was massively constipated.

Clapton was chokkers, as he reveals in his just-released autobiography.

Writing of his heroin daze with the overdose-doomed beauty Alice Ormsby-Gore, he says: "We lived on chocolate and junk food. Heroin completely took away my libido and I became chronically constipated."

Eric wasn't God, as the graffiti painted on the London Underground insisted. He was clogged.

Bluesman Robert Johnson went down to the crossroads to make a deal with the Devil for superhuman guitar powers. Clapton would have sold his soul for a decent bowel movement.

There is nothing glamorous in any addiction, as the current crop of idiots using ice demonstrates daily. But many Australians still haven't got the message on heroin. Otherwise Afghanistan's poppies would be used in vases instead of drug factories.

Reading biographies of the great jazz artists of the 1950s, it's astonishing how many of them were addicted to smack, back when Clapton, Jimmy Page, Lou Reed, and the Beatles were still in grade school. But then, to Start From Zero is to believe that there's no history in the world to learn from.

Glenn Reynolds: "Fake war hero complains about ‘fake soldiers’ remark", in an effort to affect battlefield preparations. And it's not the first of such efforts, in the biggest story the legacy media isn't covering.

Wonder why?

"Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt"--Reason's David Boaz reviews Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933–1939, by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, and explores, "What FDR had in common with the other charismatic collectivists of the 30s".

Related thoughts here, here, and here.