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