(Sorry, one of my favorite Simpsons quotes.) They're also still happily voting Democrat, of course, and contributing in large quantities to both parties.

I blame the zombies.

Austin Bay writes shares his adventures in attempting to watch the Cowboys-Packers game, which was only available on the NFL Network, a channel many cable companies have yet to include in their line-ups:

Thursday around noon: Richard proposed we meet at a sports bar — Third Base, on Sixth Street near MoPac. Sounded fine to me, I’d never been there but I told him the place’ll be packed. We need an infiltration plan with a seize and hold objective. Richard said he’d get there at 6:30 pm. I said I could get there about 7:15 because I had to meet my wife downtown at a Rice University graduate get-together in our favorite Austin, Texas coffee shop, Halcyon. Cool deal.

Except Richard called me on my cell at 6:20 and said the line at Third Base already extended into the parking lot. Nix on Third Base (…a vague suggestion of Abbott and Costello…). My wife suggested I walk around the corner from Halcyon to a bar on Lavaca Street and see if that establishment had the NFL Channel. Indeed the bar did have the channel, but it also had a not-quite elbow to elbow crowd and no open seats or tables to seize and hold.

I phoned Richard and laid out a Yeats’ allusion: “This is no place for old men…who can’t stand up for three hours.”

Richard said to come by his house and we’d watch the game on his super Mac. I trundled in about 7:45 PM and we sat down to watch the game on the computer.

Internet stutter galore, occasionally interrupted by total freeze. Richard decided that NFL.com’s server was overloaded. We followed the game for a quarter-plus via the “game tracker” screen. For those who haven’t seen one, it’s a small football field where the line of scrimmage moves across the screen as the game progresses. You also get written commentary on the plays.

Well, you get what you pay for, or in this case don’t pay for.

Hopefully things will be easier when we move into a Web 50.0 world--rapidly becoming a necessity as total time spent online ratchets up exponentially. (Thus explaining the corresponding Red Queen's Race to the bottom that’s simultaneously occurring in several competing legacy media.)

As I've said a couple of times before, Helen Thomas stays in the front row of White House press conferences for only one reason: to make it so easy for presidential press secretaries to shine as they score points off her endless screeds.

Update: Ian Schwartz has the video of Perino's TKO of Thomas.

In case you missed it, yesterday's show on XM satellite radio's POTUS '08 channel is available for downloading here. Pretty nifty line-up, too:

Join host Bill Bradley for thoughts on yesterday's GOP YouTube/CNN debate, plus:

Pajamas CEO Roger L. Simon and Bob Owens of Confederate Yankee interview Sen. Fred Thompson regarding the future of America's War On Terror.

Should Thompson not get the nomination, Ed Morrissey and Duane Patterson (producer of The Hugh Hewitt Show) discuss his chances as a GOP vice presidential nominee.

Glenn Reynolds and Dr. Helen Smith discuss the upcoming Supreme Court case involving the Second Amendment with Robert Levy of the CATO Institute.

Liz Stephans and Scott Baker of Breitbart.TV on the role of YouTube and viral online video in the 2008 presidential election.

Produced by Ed Driscoll.

For extended versions of each of today's segments, and the video of the Thompson interview don't miss this week's PJM Political "Director's Cut Interviews."

For podcasting techies wondering what I used to record the segments with Liz and Scott, and the previous segments from the last two weeks' shows all recorded earlier this month from Blog World in Las Vegas, I simply used my trusty Samson Zoom H4 Handy Recorder (which has a pair of pro-style XLR jacks, visible in the photo that accompanies the Videomaker review), a pair of Shure SM58 mics, and a pair of tabletop mic stands. The Zoom recorder uses an SD card, and an 2-gig sized card provides about two hours of audio, which can quickly be ported over to a PC's hard drive and then into your DAW program of choice for editing and mixdown.

I threw them all into a suitcase before heading to Vegas just as a lark, but I was astounded at how clean the audio was, even with the roar of Vegas Convention Center crowd all around, which is why I ended up doing so many interviews there. The trick, I think, is the Shure SM58s. There's a reason why so many rock groups use them on-stage and on live recordings--their cardioid input pattern makes them great at focusing the loudest sounds (which normally should be the person talking/singing/playing into them) and de-emphasizing the background noise.

Glenn Reynolds quotes this passage from a recent Politco article:

"Congressional Democrats are reporting a striking change in districts across the country: Voters are shifting their attention away from the Iraq war. . . . One House Democratic aide summed up the challenge for the leadership, and admitted that it may be a smart move for Democrats to focus on the economy since they haven't been able to deliver on Iraq."

Translation: it's time to really start talking the economy down even more before next November.

For years, I've been aware that I prefer more vermouth than most modern sybarites whenever I mix a Martini. Now I know why!

Cold Fury's Mike Hendrix looks at the "avant-garde" art world, which has never met an attack on Western Civilization and its philosophical underpinnings it didn't like, rendered inchoate by radical Islam's ever-present threat of death. It ends with a link to this dark fantasy post:

NEW YORK: The American photographer Andres Serrano, who gained notoriety with his photographs of corpses and a work entitled Piss Christ, was gunned down earlier today in Manhattan. New York City Police Department spokesman, Kevin McEngano said his department had received a letter from a previously unknown group called Warriors of Christ for Justice that has claimed credit.

McEngano quoted from the letter: ”Let it be known that offensives to the Christ and His Bride will no longer be met with mere words. Blasphemers like Serrano will no longer profit by mocking the Redeemer.”

The reality in the west is quite different, of course. The freedom to attack Christianity with impunity has ultimately provided "artists" such as Serrano with remarkably cushy gigs.

Related: "In this battle between chick lit and God, chick lit wins."

Back in 2003, a period when Steven Den Beste was routinely cranking out brilliant 5,000+word essays on a daily clip. (Don't try this at home, kids!), he wrote a terrific piece on the post-9/11 credibility gap that Amnesty International has been suffering--very much a self-inflicted wound.

Which has yet to heal.

Related: Tammy Bruce, in her first op-ed in nearly two years, writes, "Teddy Bear Case Exposes Failure of American Feminist Leaders".

Chalk up both Amnesty and feminism's silence to yet more crippling cases of "Hypocrophobia."

As the above headline suggests, Red State has some thoughts on what should happen next at CNN. Meanwhile, Glenn Beck compares and contrasts how CNN's management runs roughshod over his CNN show, versus what "accidentally" slipped through the cracks last night.

Then-Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos in 1993:

We have become hostage to Lexis-Nexis.

Ramesh Ponnuru, today:

Can CNN Use Google?

I doubt Bill and Hillary are complaining about the media's technological "progress" over the last 14 years.

Virginia Postrel--who owns the word Dynamism (in many, many ways) links to Daniel Weintraub's column in the Sacramento Bee:

Wow.

I tuned into the CNN/YouTube Republican presidential debate Wednesday night and was surprised to see so much fear. I thought the GOP was supposed to be the "daddy" party -- all strong and manly. But these guys were quaking in their loafers about any number of threats to our safety and livelihoods. From Islamic terrorism to Chinese manufacturers, European farmers, Mexican laborers and even Canadians (yes, Canadians!), the Republicans seem to think the world is about to take us down. Their solutions vary. Some want to curl up in a little American ball to shield ourselves from attack. Others want to "stay on the offense" with the military to keep the bad guys at bay. Nobody really conveyed a sense of confidence in the future, or in the American people's ability to prosper peacefully in a more competitive world.

Of course, the Democrats are not much better. They deny that the Islamists are a threat but see even bigger monsters in the economic closet and are even more eager than the Republicans to protect us from competition and change.

The sad thing is that these candidates must know that a lot of voters share their insecurities, or they wouldn't try so hard to feed them. But doesn't anybody on the campaign trail speak for dynamism, the creative spirit, innovation, and the potential of individuals to do great things? Doesn't anybody running for president think that Americans can compete -- even thrive -- by participating in, not fleeing, a growing global economy? This is the dawn of the Information Age. The world is changing fast. Yet these folks all sound as if they think it's 1955. The Cold War and the Red scare all over again.

I work in what's commonly thought to be the 21st Century equivalent of the buggy whip industry, yet even I have a far cheerier outlook about the future than any of these guys exhibited last night. It was almost as if they were trying to channel Lou Dobbs, or they were hypnotized by that great CNN fearmonger on their way into the studio.

PS to my Republican friends: I know CNN did a lousy job picking the questions and half of them came from people with links to Democratic candidates and causes. But they didn't pick the answers. The candidates still had their say. And in two hours of yakking, I don't think I heard a single sentence expressing confidence in the ability of individuals to pursue happiness on their own. Isn't that what the Republicans are supposed to be all about?

Paging Mr. Gipp; Mr. George Gipp to the white courtesy phone, please.

Yesterday, Dean Barnett gave his predictions regarding last night's debate:

Last night, [Hugh Hewitt] had YouTube's “director of news and politics,” Young Steve Grove, on his radio program. It's an interview that has to be heard to be believed. Young Steve showed an unusual mastery of the new left’s rhetorical tics; he mindlessly repeated his talking points, while evading such simple questions like where he went to school and how old he was.

In a way, it's sad that this most important of Republican debates will descend into demagogic idiocy. Expect the same kind of purportedly heart-tugging rubbish the left faced, e.g. hospital patients asking about health care reform and school teachers inquiring about No Child Left Behind with a brood of smiling tykes in the background. Of course, it will probably be worse than that. Let your mind run wild, picturing wounded vets and grieving widows.

The good news for the candidates is with all this stupidity running amuck and wildcards being dealt, there's a golden chance for some candidate to have a real “I paid for this microphone” moment. Tonight's format will likely reward the bold.

Today, Jim Geraghty writes:

And I would have liked to see a Republican candidate rip into CNN for using a cartoon that mocked the sitting Vice President to ask a question. I don’t care if his approval rating is at 2 percent, you don’t mock the number two man in government as a power-hungry paranoid snoop at a GOP debate. You just don’t.

Talk about a blown opportunity--this would have been an absolutely killer sound bite for any GOP candidate wishing to energize the conservative base.

On the other hand, one of Dean's predictions is very much coming true:

And hopefully tonight will serve as a teachable moment for Republicans regarding technological flash vs. political substance.

This is a huge "See, I Told You So" moment for both Hugh Hewitt and Rush Limbaugh.

Compare and contrast: NBC turns a few of their studio lights off in a useless symbolic gesture of faux energy effiency. But CNN really walks the walk--turning off their computers, their Internet connection, and planting, planting, planting!

Update: Hugh Hewitt writes, "Last night's fiasco was so thorough that it will take a while to settle in just how damaging it was to CNN's reputation as a news organization." As Glenn Reynolds notes, "If Fox hosted a Democratic debate and many of the most pointed questions turned out to come from Republican activists, but Fox didn't disclose that, do you think it would pass unremarked?"

Details here.

(Alec Baldwin could not be reached for comment.)

Well, not exactly. But scroll to about 44 minutes into the latest episode of Breitbart TV's B-Cast to hear us name-checked, in our regards to our recent PJM Political interview with Liz Stephans and Scott Baker.

Bill Bradley, the host of Pajamas' PJM Political on XM's POTUS '08 channel, has some thoughts on the GOP debate on CNN, in a podcast we recorded immediately after the debate aired on Wednesday night.

Michelle Malkin writes:

Retired Brig. Gen./gays in the military lobbyist/Hillary-Kerry supporter Keith H. Kerr wasn’t the only plant at the CNN/YouTube debate. The plant uncovering is in full-swing over at Free Republic.

Read the whole thing--Michelle and her readers are doing a pretty thorough job themselves.

More at Wizbang.

Update: Found via Gina Cobb, CNN didn't exactly distinguish themselves when the questions weren't plants, either.

Hugh Hewitt is your one-stop shop for post GOP debate who-said-what spin. We'll also be talking about the debate on tomorrow's episode of PJM Political on XM's POTUS '08 channel.

And speaking of Hugh, in light of who lost the debate--again--it's worth flashing to this.

Back in 1993, after Bill Clinton promised to be all things to all people to get elected, and then began flopping his flips once in office, then-presidential aide George Stephanopoulos (now with ABC, very much a lateral move) chastised journalists for being too literal:

He says reporters today all have computers, which means they can look up promises too easily. His bottom line: ''We have become hostage to Lexis-Nexis.'' He may have a point, at that.

But that was at the tail end of the stone knives and bearskins era of the online world. These days, "Clinton Campaign Not Compatible With YouTube Era . . . "

Update: In more ways than one, I'm not sure how compatible CNN is with the YouTube era, either.

When I was a kid, English heavy metal referred to Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple. It’s taken on an entirely new meaning these days, as Mark Steyn notes:

The other week, in Wednesbury in the English Midlands, an unusual crime occurred. A thief passed down a residential street and methodically stole every single front door handle and house number. The victims discovered the burglary when they tried to leave their homes and found the door no longer opened. An Englishman’s home may be his castle but if you can’t let down the drawbridge it’s indistinguishable from a dungeon.

Trying to get a, er, handle on property crime in the United Kingdom is a problematic business. Why would anyone steal door knockers? Well, there’s a construction boom in India and China. Demand for lead is higher than at any time since 1980 and the price of copper has quadrupled in two years. And in a globalized market place that hasn’t escaped the attention of Britain’s criminal gangs, for whom “scrap metal” has become a far more lucrative proposition than it might once have been. According to The Times of London, this summer 19 schools had their roofs stolen. What’s the point of locking your valuables when the lock itself – and the handle and the hinges – is suddenly valuable? Eighty manhole covers were recently stolen from the streets of Gloucester. And don’t bother warning the criminals that if they carry on like this they’ll wind up in court, because they’ve already been there: The magistrates’ court in West Bromwich now leaks because metal thieves stole the lead from the courthouse roof.

Or as Steyn writes, "The police have no leads, and the buildings have no lead."

To understand how a society can change radically within a generation, it's worth flashing back to this quote from Stanley Kubrick in 1972, when he was promoting his film version of A Clockwork Orange:

Mr. Kubrick now lives in a sprawling home in Borehamwood, 30 minutes out of London, with his third wife, Christiane, an artist, and their three daughters, together with seven cats and three golden retrievers. The house, enclosed by a brick wall, also contains the director's offices and editing facilities.

"It's very pleasant, very peaceful, very civilized, here," Mr. Kubrick said in an interview. "London is, in the best sense, the way New York must have been in about 1910."

These days, just as Burgess and Kubrick warned, England has come to resemble the out of control liberalism depicted in A Clockwork Orange, with a feckless police watching helplessly as crime throughout England (especially London) skyrockets. Meanwhile, thanks largely to Rudy Giuliani’s Broken Window policies,"New York's murder rate has dropped to its lowest level since police records first became available more than 40 years ago", as London's Telegraph notes.

Force Majeure Farm performs some simple arithmetic:

When I was in second grade, I played the part of one of the innkeepers in St. Catherine's School nativity play. I was a great innkeeper and delivered my line (line, not lines) so memorably, with such expressive gesture (gesture, not gestures), that my parents still like to tell the story each year over Christmas dinner. "There is NO room at the INN!"

There were at least 100 friends and relatives packed into the room to see our little production, all smiling and wishing us well. Sister Marita stood in the wings, script clutched to her chest, exuding confidence in us.

Last weekend, Brian DePalma's movie Redacted opened in 15 theaters. 3,000 people showed up. 3,000 -- I had to look at the article twice -- not 30, 000, not 300,00 -- 3,000. That works out to 200 people per theater and about $26,000 in gross profit.

This amazes me, because I would have figured the school play effect would have been much larger. By this I mean that, no matter how boring the play, no matter how bad the actors, you can always count on your mother or best friend to attend and tell you it was wonderful. By adding in a famous director, a professional cast and crew, and expensive marketing campaigns, one could reasonably expect the school play effect to be magnified -- conservatively, let's say 10 family and friends per cast/crew member who will see the movie out of die-hard loyalty.

IMDb lists approximately 85 people as the official cast and crew for Redacted, who therefore account for nearly a third of the audience according to "school play" math. Since I've never heard of any of the cast members (admittedly, I don't follow Hollywood that closely), I'll give DePalma credit for drawing in the remaining audience: 2,150.

Wow. Who told DePalma and his backers that this is a movie people want to see? Where was his big cheering section when it counted, literally counted, in ticket sales? It's enough to suspect a Hollywood fragging.

He should have hired Sister Marita.

I have no idea if insurance companies still do this, but for years, wannabe insurance men had to go through a sort of rookie hazing the agencies typically called "Project 21". Which was a fancy way of saying that they had to write down the list of 21 names of their friends and families and give them the hard sell for a life insurance or auto policy. Maybe DePalma should have had each member of his crew make a Project 21 list in return for employment.

Dean Barnett has some thoughts on tonight's GOP YouTube debate. If you haven't already heard it yet, make sure you follow the link and listen to the interview that Dean refers to:

Last night, [Hugh Hewitt] had YouTube's “director of news and politics,” Young Steve Grove, on his radio program. It's an interview that has to be heard to be believed. Young Steve showed an unusual mastery of the new left’s rhetorical tics; he mindlessly repeated his talking points, while evading such simple questions like where he went to school and how old he was.

In a way, it's sad that this most important of Republican debates will descend into demagogic idiocy. Expect the same kind of purportedly heart-tugging rubbish the left faced, e.g. hospital patients asking about health care reform and school teachers inquiring about No Child Left Behind with a brood of smiling tykes in the background. Of course, it will probably be worse than that. Let your mind run wild, picturing wounded vets and grieving widows.

The good news for the candidates is with all this stupidity running amuck and wildcards being dealt, there's a golden chance for some candidate to have a real “I paid for this microphone” moment. Tonight's format will likely reward the bold.

And hopefully tonight will serve as a teachable moment for Republicans regarding technological flash vs. political substance.

We'll be rebroadcasting the audio from Pajamas' recent video interview with Fred Thompson in tomorrow's PJM Political on XM. Near the end of the 16-minute long interview, Thompson thanks Roger Simon for giving him so much more time to discuss the issues (in this case, the GWOT) than the typical ten second soundbite on the evening news. That's the sort of way that technology can benefit the candidates, not video clips of sock puppets asking inane questions.

Besides, doesn't the MSM do that already?

Update: On the other hand, this guy's pretty good--run some of his questions, CNN!

Further proof that it's time to bring McLean Stevenson out of cryogenic storage: "Iraq = Korea".

Fed-up with Hollywood's anti-war movies? Why not another round of Catholic bashing, then!

Roger Simon makes a great point about Hollywood's current crop of anti-war/anti-American movies. Their lack of passion and paint-by-numbers formula are killing them at the domestic box office almost as much as their politics:

Now that Brian De Palma’s Redacted is such a bomb you almost feel sorry for the director (the film opened nationally to a total audience of three thousand souls – you could do better with your grandmother’s home movies… or maybe even a blank screen), I would like to go further with my analysis of why the Hollywood antiwar movies are failing.

In his interview with Pajamas Media, actor/politician Fred Thompson said they flopped because they were probably “bad movies.” Undoubtedly so, but there is a reason for why this particular “badness” occurred and it is not simply their seemingly anti-American viewpoint. The movies are essentially inauthentic. The filmmakers think they are supposed to be antiwar, but they don’t feel it in their guts.

How do I know that? Part of this is admittedly a gut feeling on my part. This feels to me like a cinema of “received wisdom,” not based on personal experience or “emotional knowledge” of any kind. No matter how you stand or stood on the Vietnam War, compare these recent ventures (Lions for Lambs, Rendition, Redacted, The Valley of Elah) with, to pick one example, Oliver Stone’s Platoon. The director’s passion is literally splattered all over the screen. Ditto for his Born on the Fourth of July. And, not surprisingly, the audience went.

No passion, no conviction of this sort, is evident in the current movies. And that is lethal. Art without genuine conviction is boring and worthless. What else does the artist (filmmaker) have to give to the audience but his or her passion? It’s no surprise the audience is disinterested without it.

And since beneficent deed goes unpunished, since American audiences have had the good taste to say, ala Sam Goldwyn, "Include me out" of the current crop of Hollywood's Ike Turner-style patriotism, expect lots more of these films:

Seven of the seven anti-war films haven’t just flopped, they’ve been humiliated. So, what does Hollywood do? They greenlight a half-dozen more of them.

Like I said, expect a glut in the guitar picks market by the end of next year.

Update: Related thoughts from Ed Morrissey and Investors' Business Daily.

You watched their show, seen their clips from the candidates--now hear how they do it, their thoughts on the YouTube phenomenon and the role DIY video will play in the 2008 presidential channel, as Scott Baker and Liz Stephans of Breitbart.TV sit down with me for a 15-minute audio interview recorded live at Blog World Expo in Las Vegas.

Michelle Malkin, and Scott Baker And Liz Stephans of Breitbart.TV weigh in on the Denver City Government's crude, racist "diversity training" video:

But hey, on the plus side, the rapidly declining cost and increasing accessibility of self-produced video means that demonizing white males isn't just for Madison Ave. and the big TV networks anymore!

Well, if you say so, Variety--you certainly can't prove it in the television ratings. Though as Iowahawk's recent parody correctly notes, it's not like Hollywood loses much sleep these days over pleasing its domestic audience, whether it's on the big screen or small.

Tim Blair writes:

It’s not often one happens upon a story combining issues of architecture, environmentalism, institutes of higher learning and accidental avian windowcide, let alone such a story written in a manner joyously suggestive of B-grade horror movie previews. For this, we thank the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and journalist Andrea Jones.

As Tim adds, in full Monster Chiller Horror Theater Mode, "Read on. If you dare!"

Someone is taking the title of Jonah Goldberg's upcoming Liberal Fascism just a mite too seriously:

The only positive thing I can think of about Hitler’s time on earth–I’m sure he would have eliminated all bloggers. In Colonial times, bloggers were called “Pamphleteers.” They hung on street corners handing them out to passersby. Now, they hang out on electronic street corners, hoping somebody mouses on to their pretentious sites. Different medium, same MO. Shakespeare accidentally summed up the genre best with these words from a MacBeth soliloquy: “. . .a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. . .”

As Ace writes, "That's a quote from a Philadelphia sportswriter responding to a baseball blogger who, fairly politely and rationally I think, wrote him an email telling him that his pick for MVP was wrong."

Shades of another former sportswriter's reductio ad Hitlerum.

"Bronco Fans: Honk If You Want To Go To Court!"

I think this would qualify as the legal equivalent of givin' 'em the business...

"The Wonderful Politics of Lawrence Of Arabia"--which like almost all classic movies, would be a disaster if made by today's filmmakers.

Richard Miniter explains "Why 9/11 Conspiracy Theories Linger."

Meanwhile, Mark Steyn, celebrating his Website's fifth anniversary, flashes back to the left's conspiracies regarding the death of Paul Wellstone, and Neo-Neocon goes back even further, to the mother of all conspiracy theories.

Theodore Dalrymple writes, "For millions of its inhabitants, Britain is a failing state. It assumes responsibility for education and health care without regard for results; and it fails in its most basic duty, to ensure that its inhabitants can go about their business with reasonable security":

A recent incident—the assault of a 96-year-old man—has brought home to the British public just how little it can rely on the state for protection. The assailant, 44, was frustrated that the elderly man was in his way as he tried to board a train. Shouting “You bastard!,” he punched the man in the face, blinding him in one eye. The attack occurred in full view of many other passengers, and a closed-circuit television camera captured it as well.

Police subsequently apprehended the man, who claimed that the 96-year-old had attacked him first. It would be difficult to imagine a more brutally unfeeling and egotistical crime or more cynical self-justification. It is extremely unlikely that the guilty man is a model of kindness in his other human relations.

The judge in the case, however, said that sending the man to jail would “do nothing to protect the public,” and therefore sentenced him to just three years’ probation. How he came to the opinion that requiring the perpetrator to have a brief chat once a week with a probation officer would achieve this objective is a complete mystery. As the judge himself conceded, “a significant prison sentence would well be justified,” and the charge was such that he had the power to sentence the guilty man to life imprisonment.

The very next day, fittingly enough, the government released figures revealing how probation endangers the public. Over the previous year, serious offenders who had been released from prison early and placed on probation committed at least 83 murders and rapes, a significant portion of the national total. Given the extremely low arrest rate for reported crimes of violence in Britain—and bearing in mind that one-half of all crimes are not even reported—the real figures for violence committed by serious offenders placed on probation after early release from prison must be significantly higher.

Much like its condition in England today, FDR-style American liberalism thoroughly exhausted itself as rational governing force by the late 1960s and (especially) the 1970s. And a big reason why, as Steven Hayward noted in example after example in the first volume of The Age of Reagan, were liberal prosecutors who were often remarkably lenient to criminals. (See also: Horton, Willie.) The vast majority of Americans eventually stopped tolerating such radical chic permissiveness in their government officials and criminal justice system. But is such a course correction still possible in England--and if so, how long will it take to occur?

Update: Needless to say, the crime prevention techniques of this nation are no great shakes, either.

With Trent Lott riding off into his hair the sunset, it's worth flashing back to Reason magazine in December of 2002, when, inspired by Lott's urge to party like it was 1948, Charles Paul Freund wrote:

It was Inauguration Day, and in the judgment of one later historian, "the atmosphere in the nation's capital bore ominous signs for Negroes." Washington rang with happy Rebel Yells, while bands all over town played 'Dixie.' Indeed, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who swore in the newly elected Southern president, was himself a former member of the Ku Klux Klan. Meanwhile, "an unidentified associate of the new Chief Executive warned that since the South ran the nation, Negroes should expect to be treated as a servile race." Somebody had even sent the new president a possum, an act supposedly "consonant with Southern tradition."

This is not an alternate world scenario imagining the results of a Strom Thurmond victory in the 1948 election; it is the real March 4, 1913, the day Woodrow Wilson of Virginia moved into the White House. The details, above and below, are drawn from the work of historian Lawrence J. Friedman, especially 1970's The White Savage: Racial Fantasies in the Postbellum South.

Wilson plays a surprisingly large role in the early chapters of Jonah Goldberg's upcoming Liberal Fascism, of which Kevin Holtsberry has some thoughts. (And having read the book's galleys myself, watch this space for lots from me on its topics in the coming months.)

Listening to his interview with Laura Ingraham and his fear of Rush Limbaugh, Tom Brokaw clearly has issues with the new media world:

This morning on Laura Ingraham's radio show, she talked to former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw. Brokaw's got a new book, and she says to him, "You mentioned Rush Limbaugh in the book, but you kind of throw away a line about Limbaugh, and it's in the drug section. And without a doubt, Rush Limbaugh's the most influential Boomer I think in the media today. There's no person who has had more of a profound impact on the way people think about politics than Limbaugh, and he gets a line, you know, the drug thing, which I just don't think that's right, Tom.

BROKAW: My problem with the whole spectrum is that there is not -- you know, you know what Rush is -- what his whole drill is, he doesn't want to hear another point of view, except his.

INGRAHAM: Oh, I disagree. He talks to all sorts of people. Well, he doesn't interview people like I do. I mean, I have guests on--

BROKAW: He doesn't -- he doesn't interview people, and he mocks people--

INGRAHAM: But he's not an objective -- he's not an objective person, he doesn't say he is, and that's the difference between him and anchors on some of our networks who have political agenda but then pretend that they're objective.

BROKAW: Well, Laura, we're never going to resolve this. You know, you have your point of view, and I have mine.

(Audio here.)

And Tom does have his point of view, as does the nightly news. Post-9/11, the more perceptive members of the legacy media have gone on the record to discuss their biases (even Tom inadvertently triangulated himself earlier this month); and numerous journalists have written articles explaining why a completely unbiased media is an impossibility, but an arguably necessary fiction to maintain in the early days of radio and TV, back when broadcast frequencies were scarce. (Humbly submitted for your approval...) Someone should alert Tom that that's no longer the case in the 21st century, as anybody who's glanced at the channel line-up of his DirecTV or XM satellite radio receiver has seen--or simply surfed a handful of the 100 million-plus blogs tracked by Technorati.

More: Tim Graham of Newsbusters adds:

This is rich talk coming from a man whose network hired Bill Moyers as his newscast’s only commentator in 1995, and a man who wrote a syrupy tribute to hot liberal mock-jock Jon Stewart for his "Athenian" ideals in Time magazine.

Not to mention someone who was upset in 2003 with Eason Jordan, then chief news executive of CNN. Brokaw had no beef with CNN broadcasting out of Iraq for years little more than propaganda approved by Saddam Hussein. No, he was angry that Jordan finally disclosed the sham after Iraq was liberated. As Brokaw said at the time:

On Tuesday's Late Show, Brokaw told David Letterman that CNN “should have worked harder at conveying” what Jordan knew, but that if you “decide to keep that as a secret for yourself to protect those people and to protect the interests of your company, then you probably ought to keep it secret for a long time because it opens them up now, wherever they go, wherever they're stationed, 'well what are they not telling us now?'”

And heaven forbid the public ask that.

Gratuitous Unrelated Ra^ther Bashing: "Dan Rather, Plus Three:"

iYule.TV puts a virtual fireplace in your pocket.

As Orrin Judd writes, "Doesn't this need to be a streaming simulcast?"

Mary Katharine Ham--"Pronounced With an 'Umpty'"

"Teen materialism linked to self-esteem".

I need a study to tell me this?

David Freddoso writes, "Hastert Resigns Today":

I am told that former Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) is faxing his resignation letter to Gov. Rod Blagojevich this afternoon.

Once the resignation is official, the governor has five days to set the special election within 120 days of the resignation. Because filing deadlines and the like prevent it from being much earlier, the primary will probably be held Feb. 5, the same date as the presidential primary.

Hastert announced Nov. 15 that he would be resigning before the end of the year.

That's the headline on Power Line's post announcing Lott's retirement from the Senate next month. As Allahpundit writes:

Bad on pork, bad on racial issues, bad on amnesty, and hostile to the one media weapon conservatives wield simply because it dared to challenge him. Like Mark Levin, I shall not miss him.

I doubt few Republicans will.

(But his hair--the Important Southern Hair!--was perfect. Maybe he'll hand it over to his successor!)

Longtime readers will know that I'm not a huge fan of Pat Buchanan for reasons that we explored in this post, amongst others, but in his new book, Buchanan really goes beyond the pale with this particular recommendation:

• A purge of neoconservative ideology and the “Cakewalk” crowd” from national power.

But they make such cool recording software!

Given the statistics (and her meltdown in November of 2004), former ABC News Anchorwoman Carole Simpson endorsing Hillary isn't at all surprising. Just add her to this list.

I'm not entirely crazy about Mike Huckabee, for some of the reasons that John Fund discussed in his recent PJM Political interview. But still, this is a terrific ad:

Mike Lief brings horrific photos back from his recent ocean cruise:

I was standing on the 10th deck, gazing down on the midships pool on the Lido Deck, when something caught my eye. What the hell? That can't be what I think it is ... can it?

Holy crap! It's a man with a tramp stamp! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you People's Exhibit 1, circumstantial evidence that the modern American male has lost his mind (not to mention his self respect). Ladies, you can't possibly think that's attractive, can you?

I'm not sure what the ladies will say, but I do know what the good Dr. Dalrymple has written on the subject in general...

Tattoos are a "refutation of the doctrine that the customer is always right. In the tattoo parlour, the customer is always wrong".

...is especially applicable in this specific case.

Clintonian bimbo erruptions come early this campaign season: Huma Abedin definitely has it going on; the Times of London wonders if she has it going on with Hillary.

The French "youth" movement returns yet again, with predictable results.

Hot on the Manolo Blahnik heels of Jodie Foster discovering her inner Charles Bronson, Naomi Wolf has a curious new-found earth-toned respect for the Second Amendment!

Rick Moran has some thoughts on a disturbing new poll regarding 9/11 conspiracy theories:

I never thought I’d witness it in my lifetime. The paranoid left, aided and abetted by universal access to the internet along with an educational system that has stopped teaching young people the mechanics of thinking rationally, has apparently broken through and gone mainstream.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the federal government had warnings about 9/11 but decided to ignore them, a national survey found.

And that’s not the only conspiracy theory with a huge number of true believers in the United States.

The poll found that more than one out of three Americans believe Washington is concealing the truth about UFOs and the Kennedy assassination – and most everyone is sure the rise in gas prices is one vast oil-industry conspiracy.

Sixty-two percent of those polled thought it was “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that federal officials turned a blind eye to specific warnings of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Only 30 percent said the 9/11 theory was “not likely,” according to the Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll.

While there is certainly enough paranoia on the right about 9/11 and “The New World Order,” black helicopter conspiracies, the driving force behind 9/11 truthers, Kennedy conspiracists, and Area 51 nutcases has been the far left of American politics.

And with the advent of the internet, where their most outrageous conspiracy theories are given the patina of respectability, they have been able to capture the dim witted, the ignorant, and especially the young who have grown up without the benefit of learning how to think critically and rationally about the world around them.

To believe that people in the United States government – specifically Bush and Cheney but anyone for that matter – had advance knowledge of 9/11 and did nothing to prevent it is to believe that there is a monstrous evil abroad in the land – that the President of the United States is as bad as Adolf Hitler, standing by while so many were killed. Variations of that theory have Bush pulling a “Roosevelt” (another, older conspiracy theory) who wanted to get into World War II so he did nothing despite prior knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack. In the expanded theory, Bush wanted to go to war in the Middle East for the oil.

For those with the critical thinking skills of a marmoset, such a formulation makes perfect sense. The only problem is that those who actually think about that idea for more than a few seconds realize the enormous problems for someone actually planning and carrying out such a conspiracy so that it has a chance of success.

You can tell much about a society by how widespread conspiracies and mysticism are at any given time. It's no coincidence that by the middle of the 1970s, vast swatches of the American public believed virtually everything Leonard Nimoy was telling them: UFOs, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, the occult, etc., were real. That we've apparently entered into a similar epoch is not a healthy sign for the nation, to say the least.

"Oh, the Humanity!" Just in time for next month's Led Zeppelin reunion: the Ron Paul Blimp!

This sounds like a worthy cause:

Join Move America Forward for the “Honoring Heroes at the Holidays Tour” this November 26th - December 16th as we cross this nation holding pro-troop events in 40 cities across America to honor and salute the men and women of the U.S. military who will be thousands of miles away from their homes and families during this holiday season. (Help us pay for the cost of this effort by making a donation - HERE).

Along the tour we will be collecting more than 100,000 Christmas, Hanukkah and holiday greeting cards for our troops that we will deliver to them in Iraq and Afghanistan. Get your kids involved, and invite local schools to participate! On the outside envelope be sure to write either: “Christmas Card for Our Troops” or “Hanukkah Card for Our Troops” or “Holiday Card for Our Troops.” Hear what legendary TV personality, Ed McMahon, has to say about the effort - CLICK HERE to LISTEN.

Visit their Website, here.

As Tom Blumer of BizzyBlog notes, "Walter Williams, a member of it, is a 'Greatest Generation' dissenter." Williams writes:

There's little question that the greatest generation provided their offspring, the baby boomer generation, with goods and services that their parents could not afford to give them. But tragically, the greatest generation did not instill in their children what their parents instilled in them, the values and customs that make for a civilized society. In previous generations, people were held responsible for their behavior. Today, society at large pays for irresponsible behavior. Years ago, there was little tolerance for the kind of crude behavior and language that's accepted today. To see men sitting while a woman was standing on a public conveyance used to be unthinkable. Children addressing adults by their first name and their use of foul language in the presence of, and often to, teachers and other adults were unacceptable.

A society's first line of defense is not the law but customs, traditions and moral values. These behavioral norms, mostly transmitted by example, word-of-mouth and religious teachings, represent a body of wisdom distilled over the ages through experience and trial and error. They include important thou-shalt-nots such as shalt not murder, shalt not steal, shalt not lie and cheat, but they also include all those courtesies one might call ladylike and gentlemanly conduct. Policemen and laws can never replace these restraints on personal conduct. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. This failure to fully transmit value norms to subsequent generations represents another failing of the greatest generation.

This failure has also helped to continue to expand government (a process that began during the Greatest Generation's heyday). As behavioral norms are abandoned because they fail to be passed down from one generation to the next, more and more laws end up being written to replace a common sense increasingly forgotten, until the result is a society sort of along the lines of A Clockwork Orange: nothing is permitted, but the most important laws are rarely enforced with any degree of seriousness. (See also: New York City, circa 1975, or San Francisco, today.)

Dr. Helen, who appeared in the first segment of this past week's PJM Political, has some thoughts on holiday drivers:

Is it my imagination or are the current crop of holiday drivers mean as snakes and nuts to boot? I have been flipped off twice this week by drivers--both who were at fault. One driver with some real Christmas spirit--with a tree in the back of his truck for goodness sakes--ran a stop sign, almost hit us and had the gall to flip us a bird. Another car was using the turn lane to drive in as if it were a regular lane and was mad that I was there--uhh, turning. Naturally, the two young guys in the car had to jump up and down flipping birds. Then to top it off, a car crossed two lanes of traffic while I was going straight and nearly plowed into me; only by quickly pulling to the other side of the road did I avoid a collision. And they looked mad at me! Anyone out there experience this level of holiday cheer while out cruising around?

I spent all of this past week in New Jersey driving between my hotel in Mt. Laurel and various relatives in nearby towns (with a detour on Wednesday to vist XM HQ in DC), and I was astounded how much tailgating was happening on New Jersey's Route #295. The traffic density wasn't all that heavy (nowhere near as bad as the Bay Area, needless to say), but the drivers on the road tended to be clustered together in tight bunches, sort of like NASCAR drivers trying to draft each other. At one point, I had a driver so close to the rear of my car that if I had had to stop suddenly, he would have joined me in the front seat of my car. And even after putting the emergency blinkers on and slowing down, he still continued to tailgate.

I blame George Bush, global warming, big oil, and Atari.

Where have you gone Winston Smith? Our nation turns its doubleplus melancholy glazzballs to you:

The San Francisco Chronicle has recently activated a devious system by which it deceives commenters on its website, SFGate.com. Here's how it works:

If you make a comment on an article posted at SFGate, and if the site moderators then subsequently delete your comment for whatever reason, it will only appear as deleted to the other readers. HOWEVER, your comment will NOT appear to be deleted if viewed from your own computer! The Chronicle's goal is to trick deleted commenters into not knowing their comments were in fact deleted. I'll give evidence below showing how they do this.

Why would SFGate do such a thing? Because ever since public input was first allowed at SFGate, many commenters who had their comments deleted would come back onto the comment thread and point out that they had been silenced for ideological reasons -- i.e. they weren't sufficiently "progressive" -- or because they had pointed out ethical lapses at SFGate and the Chronicle. Or any number of other reasons that the Chronicle did not want known. So, to pacify these problematic commenters, the SFGate moderators came up with a very clever and underhanded coding trick to prevent deleted commenters from ever finding out that they had been silenced.

Glenn Reynolds adds, "If this is real and not some kind of bizarre caching problem, I'm torn between disgust and admiration for their cleverness . . ."

To paraphrase what I've written before regarding media double-standards, imagine the howls of outrage from the Chronicle and the gallons of ink they'd spill on the topic if General Motors or Wal-Mart had installed such a system on their Website.

Update: Charles Johnson adds, "Surprise! George Soros-funded pseudo-blog Think Progress is pulling the same trick to censor critics. Konservo has screen shots to prove it."

Return with us now to the era of Woodrow Wilson, Carrie Nation and Margaret Sanger, as "Progressive" New Puritans continue their sweep through government, devouring your freedoms.

David Harsanyi of the Denver Post and the author of Nanny State writes that it's the return of the most obvious form of puritanism--prohibition:

Drinking is under attack these days in ways we haven't seen since the failed experiment with national alcohol prohibition in the 1920s. Indeed, for many neoprohibitionists, that experiment wasn't a failure at all, since it did cut alcohol consumption, which is all that matters. We can see that mentality today in policies that go beyond preventing drunk driving or punishing drunk drivers and aim to discourage drinking per se.

But food is also under attack; in San Francisco, where the progressive dream can be seen in the US in its full glory: out-of-control vagrants harrass an otherwise shrinking but ever-so-environmentally correct population, fireplaces could soon be banned. (And they may already be banished in some Bay Area suburbs.)

And then of course, there's the story making the rounds on the starboard side of the Blogosphere and cable TV this week:

At the age of 27 this young woman at the height of her reproductive years was sterilised to “protect the planet”…

“Having children is selfish. It’s all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet,” says Toni, 35.

“Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population.”

Where it all ends only knows Gaia, but here are three examples of taking environmental absurdity to its most absurd destinations.

Noah Pollak asks, who is Chris Hedges?

Writing in The Nation, Chris Hedges would like you to know that in these times, he is suffering a terrible ordeal of conscience — and that it is not just his ordeal, but indeed the entire nation's.

I will not pay my income tax if we go to war with Iran. I realize this is a desperate and perhaps futile gesture. But an attack on Iran—which appears increasingly likely before the coming presidential election—will unleash a regional conflict of catastrophic proportions. This war, and especially Iranian retaliatory strikes on American targets, will be used to silence domestic dissent and abolish what is left of our civil liberties. It will solidify the slow-motion coup d'etat that has been under way since the 9/11 attacks. It could mean the death of the Republic.
...
I will put the taxes I owe in an escrow account. I will go to court to challenge the legality of the war. Maybe a courageous judge will rule that the Constitution has been usurped and the government is guilty of what the postwar Nuremberg tribunal defined as a criminal war of aggression. Maybe not. I do not know. But I do know this: I have friends in Tehran, Gaza, Beirut, Baghdad, Jerusalem and Cairo. They will endure far greater suffering and deprivation. I want to be able, once the slaughter is over, to at least earn the right to ask for their forgiveness.

Who is Chris Hedges? Not only was he a New York Times reporter for 15 years, he was its Middle East bureau chief in the 1990's. Yikes.

As Glenn Reynolds adds, "Yeah, kind of makes you wonder what's going on with their current reporting staff that we won't find out for years."

'Tis the season when the front lines in the Cold Civil War temporarily become a bit more visible to civilian observers. Even as Rasmussen reports...

As the holiday season begins, 67% of American adults like stores to use the phrase “Merry Christmas” in their seasonal advertising rather than “Happy Holidays.” A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that just 26% prefer the Happy Holidays line.

...Thanksgiving is slowly becoming another Holiday That Dare Not Speak Its Name, as the left's efforts to further atomize traditional American culture proceed apace.

Victor Davis Hanson writes that it's "Autumn in California" in oh so many ways:

Very shortly California will be reaching the point of no return on some tough decisions: either make the necessary investments in infrastructure and a change of attitude to accommodate the enormous jumps in population, illegal immigration, and changed lifestyles, or witness a real drop in the standard and quality of life.

It’s not just that we spend rather than invest, or grow without planning, but the educational level and competence of the average California[n] is in clear decline given the status of our therapeutic school and university systems. Gov. Schwarzenegger seems to be trying, by emulating the good governor Pat Brown of the late 1950s, but it’s awfully late in the game.

And, as Mark Steyn might note, California's demographics are none too promising, particularly in its bluest alcoves.

This New York Times article has an interesting Antonioni-ish take on whether the Zapruder film represents the complete reality of JFK's assassination. But by far, the best effort to reframe JFK's death and place it into the proper context of history was performed this year and last by James Piereson.

Jonah Goldberg writes that he finds Ron Paul "less scary than Mike Huckabee":

Historically, the conservative movement benefited from the tension between libertarianism and cultural traditionalism. This tension — and the effort to reconcile it under the name “fusionism” — has been mischaracterized as a battle between right-wing factions when it’s really a conflict that runs through the heart of every conservative. We all have little Mike Huckabees and Ron Pauls sitting on our shoulders. Neither is always right, but both should be listened to.

I would not vote for Paul mostly because I think his foreign policy would be disastrous (Also, he’d lose in a rout not seen since Bambi versus Godzilla). But there’s something weird going on when Paul, the small-government constitutionalist, is considered the extremist in the Republican party, while Huckabee, the statist, is the lovable underdog. It’s even weirder because it’s probably true: Huckabee is much closer to the mainstream. And that’s what scares me about Huckabee and the mainstream alike.

Read the whole thing.

We have a special political junkie's Thanksgiving survival guide this week on PJM Political, by the way.

(I threw caution to the wind and selected yet another scene cut from the watered-down first season of Sesame Street to illustrate the post...)

Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you!

(Whoops--I think I just crossed the streams...)

If you've ever heard on me on PJM Political or a podcast, I think I have a pretty typical middle-of-the-road northeast accent, but this poll does a great job of triangulating its origins:

What American accent do you have? Your Result: Philadelphia   Your accent is as Philadelphian as a cheesesteak! If you're not from Philadelphia, then you're from someplace near there like south Jersey, Baltimore, or Wilmington. if you've ever journeyed to some far off place where people don't know that Philly has an accent, someone may have thought you talked a little weird even though they didn't have a clue what accent it was they heard.
The Midland
The South
The Inland North
The Northeast
Boston
The West
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

I'm not from Philadelphia, but I did grow up just across the Delaware in South Jersey, and I guess it's impossible to fully shake the accent.

(Via Betsy Newmark, who has some thoughts on how accents affect the messages delivered by politicans.)

Just had a terrific afternoon visit to XM satellite radio's headquarters in Washington DC, to visit the production facilities for their POTUS '08 channel. It was a pleasure to finally meet Joe Mathieu in person after exchanging weekly emails and phone calls regarding PJM Political, and to also meet his fellow on-air talent, Rebecca Roberts and Tim Farley. (Not to mention spending a few minutes on the air discussing Pajamas and its origins in between the big story of the day.) XM has quite a production facility--on the other hand, in a way, it's also a slightly more compact than you might imagine. Just as today's technology allows individual blogs to punch far above their weight, it also allows a single facility in DC to pump over a hundred channels of audio out into the hinterlands via satellite.

It seems an impossible task, but James Pethokoukis of US News & World Report does his best to explain Hillary, Huckabee, and Dobbs.

Hollywood's blue-on-blue suicide bombings continue.

In the New York Post, Glenn Reynolds looks at the upcoming Supreme Court case involving the Second Amendment.

As Pajamas asks, "If CBS Falls In a New Media Forest, Will It Make a Sound?"

(Greetings, via my Verizon wireless card, from an Acela train bound from Philly to Washington, DC.)

As Betsy Newmark writes, "Rod Dreher has a very provacative column today about people employing the 'care bear stare' when they encounter someone who doesn't believe in the rightness of their aspirations or question the efficacy of their proposed solutions":

Has this ever happened to you? You're having a conversation with people concerned about global warming and what we ought to do to combat it. You point out that, yes, climate change is a big problem, but the solutions on the table are unrealistic for various political, economic and scientific reasons. Icy stares all around.

Then someone accuses you of being down at the mouth because you don't care enough about the planet.

Or maybe you've been talking about how to fix the public schools, and you've observed that what ails public schooling is not something that can be remedied by putting more money into the system or simply rejiggering the educational formula according to new theories.

"Well," somebody sniffs, "what's your solution?" - as if the justice or accuracy of the original critique were somehow compromised by the critic's failure to posit an alternative.

Either way, you've been blasted by what journalist Julian Sanchez calls The Care Bear Stare, after the sugary 1980s cartoon characters. As Mr. Sanchez explained on his blog, "The Care Bear Stare was a sort of deus ex machina the magical furballs could employ when faced with some insuperable obstacle: They'd line up together and emit a glowing manifestation of their boundless caring, which seemed capable of solving just about any problem."

Behind The Care Bear Stare is the ideological conviction that there's no problem that can't be solved by the power of human intelligence and relentless application of good will. It's premised on the refusal to recognize limitation, as well as an inability to accept that some things simply must be lived with, at least for the time being. The Care Bear Stare is the psychological weapon of choice for people who cannot reconcile themselves to a world without guaranteed happy endings.

Alas for the Care Bears and their cute little tummies glowing with gladsome light, we live in an imperfect world. History teaches that the attempt to perfect it is not only futile but could make things worse (e.g., communism as a solution to poverty and inequality). This tragic vision does not deny the possibility of betterment but cautions that meaningful progress usually occurs incrementally, after skeptical deliberation; almost always requires compromise; and is never permanent.

It's in the nature of things.

Of course, what's really devastating is to combine the Care Bear Stare with the patented Head Tilt Of Compassion. That always wins arguments!

Matt Drudge doesn't make too many appearances in the legacy media, so don't miss this one, in which he quotes Tom Brokaw (or was it Egon Spengler?), who sees print versions of newspapers dead in ten years. Drudge sees the print editions of US newspapers burning out much sooner than their much more vibrant British counterparts.

Matt's response one of the Sky News infobabe's queries regarding the imaginary superiority of the MSM (even after RatherGate, CNN’s efforts to prop-up Saddam and Hillary, Reuters and Adnan Hajj, AP and Bilal Hussein and dozens of other credibility meltdowns) is a classic: "That's a 1990s discussion. We're now in a totally new era where information is information."

Since I linked to two successive stories from the New York Times (found via Hot Air and Instapundit, respectively), in order to be fair and balanced, I should probably direct you to Jay Nordlinger's typically great column on breaking off your affair with the Gray Lady:

It will probably not surprise his critics that Rush Limbaugh doesn’t read the Times; he hasn’t “for a couple of years.” First, “there is no longer enough difference between the editorial pages and the news pages, particularly the front page.” Second, “I found myself questioning the accuracy of the paper based on my own knowledge. I too often wondered, ‘Hmmm—is that true?’” Third, “the New York Times is just one of many nearly identical components of the mainstream media. The point is, I know what I’m going to see or hear anywhere in the mainstream media. They are all a giant cliché now. I know them like I know my whole naked body, not just the back of my hand.”

What about the fear that, if you don’t read the Times, you’ll miss out on some “national conversation”? Among the scoffers is Peter Kirsanow, a Bush-appointed member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission: “I’ve gone long, blissful stretches without reading the Times and have found that during such periods I remain as well informed as when I read it regularly — but without the residual anger, anxiety, and irritability. Since reading the Times is not mandatory where I live — in the mid-Atlantic states — even among the elites — I’m not viewed as illiterate simply because my conversation for the day hasn’t been directed by R. W. Apple or Maureen Dowd.”

Speaking of the sticks: Sometime in the mid-1990s, the Times wrote a blistering editorial about Jesse Helms. The senator’s new, eager press secretary quickly drafted a letter to the editor, and took it in to the senator. Helms, of course, had not seen the editorial. He glanced at the letter and said, “That’s nice, son. Do whatever you want with it. But understand something: I don’t care what the New York Times says about me, and no one I care about cares what the New York Times says about me.” Therein lay some of the senator’s power.

Aside from bias, partisanship, pomposity, or other defects, some just find the paper dull. The southern (and decidedly un-dull) writer Dave Shiflett says, “I still read the Times, but not like I used to. It’s simply a bore most days, despite its evangelical political mission, which should at least liven up its prose. No such luck. A dull evangelist is easy to ignore, especially when there are so many vibrant news sources available. There’s simply nothing special about the Times, or at least special enough to warrant a wade through what is, on a daily basis, the flattest selection of prose published anywhere outside the State Department.”

Hilton Kramer, editor of The New Criterion — and for 17 years a top critic at the Times — once made a quip about Max Frankel, editor of the Times from 1986 to 1994: “He gave New Yorkers their Sundays back” — so dull (in this view) had that behemoth become.

Because, as Bernard Goldberg has written in in his books on media bias, the New York Times so shapes the agenda for the rest of the legacy media, you can easily skip the paper without fearing that you'll miss its ideas. Which is why this is far less paradoxical than it may first appear.

Glenn Reynolds quotes an interesting passage in a New York Times piece on science and religion:

“Many Europeans, as well as leftists in America,” Dr. Silver says, “have rejected the traditional Christian God and replaced it with a post-Christian goddess of Mother Nature and a modified Christian eschatology. It isn’t a coherent belief system. It might or might not incorporate New Age thinking. But deep down, there’s a view that humans shouldn’t be tampering with the natural world.”

Hence the opposition to genetically modified food.

Didn't Europe go down this road with rather disastrous results once before? Related thoughts on replacing traditional religion with aesthetics and homebrewed mysticism from Tom Wolfe. Also from Jonah Goldberg (who may have some further thoughts on this topic next year), note the symbiotic relationship between postmodern Europe and the American left touched on in the above paragraph.

This New York Times article on the upcoming DVD version of the first season of Sesame Street is on the one hand a hoot, and on the other rather depressing in terms of how badly the nanny state has made inroads into American society since 1969. Back then, it merely wanted to educate your kids about reading, writing and 'rithmetic (in the form of taxpayer-funded shows like Sesame Street). These days it wants to go much, much further than that:

According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

Say what? At a recent all-ages home screening, a hush fell over the room. “What did they do to us?” asked one Gen-X mother of two, finally. The show rolled, and the sweet trauma came flooding back. What they did to us was hard-core. Man, was that scene rough. The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist.

Nothing in the children’s entertainment of today, candy-colored animation hopped up on computer tricks, can prepare young or old for this frightening glimpse of simpler times. Back then — as on the very first episode, which aired on PBS Nov. 10, 1969 — a pretty, lonely girl like Sally might find herself befriended by an older male stranger who held her hand and took her home. Granted, Gordon just wanted Sally to meet his wife and have some milk and cookies, but . . . well, he could have wanted anything. As it was, he fed her milk and cookies. The milk looks dangerously whole.

Live-action cows also charge the 1969 screen — cows eating common grass, not grain improved with hormones. Cows are milked by plain old farmers, who use their unsanitary hands and fill one bucket at a time. Elsewhere, two brothers risk concussion while whaling on each other with allergenic feather pillows. Overweight layabouts, lacking touch-screen iPods and headphones, jockey for airtime with their deafening transistor radios. And one of those radios plays a late-’60s news report — something about a “senior American official” and “two billion in credit over the next five years” — that conjures a bleak economic climate, with war debt and stagflation in the offing.

The old “Sesame Street” is not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for softies born since 1998, when the chipper “Elmo’s World” started. Anyone who considers bull markets normal, extracurricular activities sacrosanct and New York a tidy, governable place — well, the original “Sesame Street” might hurt your feelings.

I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”

Forty years from now, when the current season of Sesame Street is being assembled for release on whatever the successor format to the successor format of DVD is, how much of it will have to be reshot to comply with how much further the nanny state is sure to have expanded further?

The complete Pajamas Media video interview with Fred Thompson, which runs over 15-minutes, is now online. As the post the video is embedded into notes, we'll also be incorporating the audio of Thompson's interview into next week's segment of PJM Political on XM Satellite Radio's POTUS '08 channel.

Like a modern-day Sinclair Lewis, in his quest for tenureship, James Lileks blows the lid off the squeezably soft bonded cellulose underbelly of mid-20th century consumer culture.

As the Professor is wont to say: They told me that if George Bush was elected, there would be a new blacklist in Hollywood--and they were right!

How long can Hollywood's reactionary anti-Americanism continue? That's the topic of Mark Steyn's latest Maclean's column. We're name-checked about halfway through it in regards to this post, but don't let that stop you from reading it.

Feel the nuance: At Reuters, one man's terrorist is merely another man's freedom fighter. But Rudy Giuliani? As SCTV's Count Floyd would say, he's one scarrrrrry, scarrrrrrrry guy, boys and girls!

Spot the ringers!

Meanwhile, Mary Katharine Ham visits the planting garden itself with "A Day at The Hillquarters", and Gateway Pundit channels its inner Pete Seeger--"There Is a Time For Planting at CNN."

Mark Steyn looks at Japan's demographic woes, beginning with a quote from the BBC:

Japan has the world's highest proportion of elderly people. More than 20% of the population are now over the age of 65. By 2050, that figure is expected to rise to about 40%.

Mark writes:

I wouldn't want to be a Japanese teen circa 2020 in a Lawrence Welkified society. But maybe by then the robots will be hot enough to be pop singers and movie stars.

As I wrote a few years ago for Tech Central Station, as far as the technology to create Max Headroom-style pop stars, it really is only a matter of time.

Roger L. Simon has some thoughts on "Phony Obama" as he "Swift Boats the Swift Boaters":

Now Obama accuses the Clinton crowd of playing "Swift Boat politics."

Baloney. This has nothing to do with the Swift Boat veterans, who, agree with them or not, were completely public in their allegations. Those Vietnam vets, saying quite specifically who they were, even making a film and writing a book about it naming literally dozens of names, accused John Kerry of misrepresenting (to put it mildly) his activities during the Vietnam War. Other than issuing a denial and stamping his feet, Kerry never refuted them formally or, though he promised he would, published his official war record.

This is the opposite of what is going on here, which is a hidden war of innuendo with no specifics mentioned at all, let alone any attribution. But Obama - the supposed "new politician" - is using it to play the oldest of political games, "guilt by association," and, as is usual in these cases, basing it on a phony standard with no facts. He's just preaching to the choir and stamping his feet - like Kerry.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I increasingly find Obama to be like a late night infomercial host - slightly charming, slightly unctuous, factually meaningless. Ready for the Presidency? Don't be silly.

Much like Bill Bradley playing the role of the hapless Washington Generals in 2000 against Gore, Hillary will cruise to the nomination far less on her gubernatorial merits (which are minimal) than how ineffective her opposition has been making the case against her. All of which explains why Tim Russert was so demonized recently--he's been her toughest opponent by far.

Related: Karl Rove, now ensconced in his new Kos-vexing post at Newsweek, explains "How to Beat Hillary (Next) November".

"NY1 Anchor Quits After Calling a Show on the Station Under a False Name."

Fair enough--but if that's the precedent that's been established, shouldn't there be a mass resignation turned in on Monday morning from the CNN crew and anchors that worked (or more accurately, worked over) Thursday's Democratic debate?

Update: Steve Boriss writes, "CNN learns that news media will now pay a much higher price for their traditional attempts to pick the Democratic Presidential nominee".

It's a good post, and well worth your time, but really, what price has CNN paid? Yes, all of the efforts over the past twenty years or so of conservatives to point out the overwhelming bias inherent in CNN's "objective" coverage has resulted in Fox News typically clobbering CNN in the daily ratings. But advertising dollars continue to poor in, and CNN is still beloved by Washington elites.

Unless there's a very public investigation of CNN's efforts to influence Thursday's debate along the lines of the TV quiz show hearings of the 1950s, there's isn't an obvious downside to their shenanigans Thursday. And with Democrats currently in control of both houses of Congress, why would they bother biting the hand that strokes them?

One man is doing his part to Save Old Media--one anchorperson at a time.

With Atlas being mugged every day by barbarians at the blogs, this man has the patience of a saint, slowly introducing new technologies to liberal luddite Manhattanites. But somebody has to carefully guide them into the 1990s, knowing that taking them all the way to the 21st century maybe a bit too much Future Shock if not done gradually.

Terry Teachout looks back at Norman Mailer:

So what is it about this seventy-five-year-old has-been that continues to make aging editors weak in the knees? The answer, I think, is that he is to literature what the Kennedys are to politics, a living, breathing relic of the vanished era of high hopes. Even though he was already washed up as a novelist by 1960, Mailer had retooled himself as a middlebrow journalist just in time to bang the drum for JFK. Talk about sucker bait: Mailer had spent the Fifties bemoaning the "partially totalitarian society" that was America under Dwight Eisenhower, and along came a handsome young Democratic philosopher-king, a glamorous millionaire who wrote books (or at least signed them), flattered susceptible authors (including Mailer), and hung out with the likes of Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe. All at once the joint was jumping, and everything seemed possible, from racial equality to free love...

No doubt Mailer, like Kennedy, will never lack for bootlickers, at least while his generation is still alive. It's hard to accept that a once-promising writer has become a burnt-out case, especially when the memory of his promise is part of your own lost youth. Who would have guessed in 1960 that the first literary star of the electronic age would end his days as a nostalgia act, the Glenn Miller of Camelot? Once again, Jack Kennedy got it wrong. Life is fair--all you have to do is give it time.

While Tom Wolfe is still writing good material and the late George Plimpton is still warmly remembered, it seems safe to say that most of the rest of the cast of Wolfe's epochal New Journalism book--Mailer, Capote, Hunter Thompson, Jimmy Breslin, Joan Didion, et al--didn't exactly age well, or adapt to the times as their careers went on. Many became unknowing parodies of their former selves (see: Capote, Studio 54 era), a reminder it's only a matter of time before the avant garde become merely garde.

Which is why staying humble (or at least grounded somewhere close to planet Earth), somewhat current and avoiding bitterness when the zeitgeist doesn't break your way seem like awfully good career warnings for today's would-be authors.

On Monday, Pajamas is scheduled to run an extended interview with Fred Thompson devoted exclusively to Fred's views on the War On Terror. In the meantime, here's a teaser.

The one upside to CNN cooking the books for Hillary on Thursday? The karmic retribution that John Edwards must endure after having junked debates hosted by Fox News because of populist bias towards Republicans, only to be run over by CNN and its elitist bias towards Hillary. Or as Noel Sheppard puts it:

Add it all up, and CNN stocked the questioning members of the audience with -- at the very least, as who knows what else the blogosphere will identify?!? -- a former intern for Sen. Reid, a former head of the Arkansas Democrat Party, and a prominent Muslim leader.

Honestly, folks, the Democrats made a huge stink about not appearing in any debate sponsored by Fox News for fear of its biases. Yet, it seems a metaphysical certitude that FNC, with all the focus upon it, wouldn't have dared exhibit such obvious partiality.

In fact, just imagine the uproar that would have emanated from press members if Fox had employed such shenanigans. This likely would have been the lead story of all three broadcast network news programs Friday, as well as featured every hour on the hour at CNN and MSNBC.

Of course, maybe this explains why the Democrats refused the FNC debates in the first place, which would be an interesting story for a news magazine like "60 Minutes," "Dateline," or "20/20" if they weren't all vested in the same hypocrisy.

Liberal media bias? What liberal media bias?

As an aside, I want to congratulate and applaud the work of the bloggers mentioned in this report. As much as the legacy media disingenuously position themselves as advocates of the people and free speech, the new media continue to be the only ones demonstrating democratic principles our Founding Fathers would be in any way proud of.

And this isn't even the preseason--this is merely training camp. The fun doesn't really start until January.

Update: "I'm glad CNN randomly selected ordinary people like you and me. We wouldn't want anyone to think that Hillary was shielded from all of the tough, grueling questions that Tim Russert asked."

"Ron Paul Nuts Busted for Making Their Own Money."

The Guardian:

As Hitler shouted his way up the political ranks in Germany, the Guardian and Observer misjudged the extent of his early influence, writes Sir Ian Kershaw.

That's not entirely surprising, given the talent pool that the Guardian was presumably drawing upon in the 1930s, which is yet another reason why Winston Churchill was the proverbial lone voice in the wilderness prior to 1939.

Found via Rob Port, who notes that it's "Not very surprising, given that the same publications largely ignore the rising threat of Islamic fascism." Rob adds, "Some things never change, I guess, and some people never learn."

Just ask Columbia University.

It starts off with rather nuanced language, and by the time it's done, I'm still not entirely certain, but I get an emanation of a penumbra of a feeling that Michael Medved was slightly--just slightly--disquieted by Brian DePalma and Mark Cuban's Redacted:

Meanwhile, Libertas notes that it's not exactly filling theaters, in even in bluest of the blue states, either.

A year ago, when I wrote "The Era of Big Cinema Is Over" for Tech Central Station, I was inspired by a comment that George Lucas made to Variety that Hollywood should produce lots of low-to-medium budget movies, rather than big zillion dollar blockbusters, like Star Wars (just to pick an ultra-successful cinematic franchise entirely at random). And this is the result: Hollywood is now producing relatively inexpensive movies for itself far more than pleasing audiences and selling tickets. But how long can this game go on?

Related: Ross Douthat writes that concurrent Hollywood misfire Lions for Lambs is "like watching Sean Hannity debate Jane Fonda after they both spent the whole day together sniffing glue."

(Via Small Dead Animals, which dubs Douthat's cyanoacrylate-laced bon mot the quote of the week.)

Update: Libertas's Dirty Harry takes one for the team and watches Redacted so you don't have to:

Every performance in the film is excruciatingly bad, and all because DePalma made three decisions so stupid he should have his Directors’ Guild card revoked. First, he cast people who can’t act. Second, he put in their mouths melodramatic, overwrought dialogue straight out of an Ed Wood film. Finally, because of the single camera gimmick, he’s left with bad actors spouting lame dialogue he can’t edit around. By eliminating the option to cut into his scenes he removed the most powerful tool a director has and that’s the power to edit a good performance using the best pieces of each take. In other words, DePalma stupidly painted himself into a corner of having to choose the scene that sucked the least.

In other words, Alfred Hitchock's Rope, it ain't.

Jim Geraghty writes:

One of the odder themes of the Democratic debates has been the not-so-hidden disdain for the moderators, who I think haven't been that bad. (I don't think any of them have been as bad as Chris Matthews has been for the Republicans, with his opining/critiquing Thompson, 'You should have stuck with no.') Obama complains the questions are designed to divide us, Hillary says she won't answer hypotheticals, Kucinich gets into a snit about Blitzer using the term "illegal immigrants"... The Democratic candidates have drunk deep from the polls of the netroots and concluded that men like Wolf Blitzer and Tim Russert are part of the vast right-wing conspiracy (!) and that they can score points by treating the guy asking the questions as the villain.

I thought it was conservatives who generally attacked the media, not the left. But it is a reminder that the Blogosphere was born with bipartisan contempt for the MSM.

William Kristol reminds Tom Brokaw of the virtues of the Greatest Generation:

Q: If the World War II generation was the "greatest generation," what is the Vietnam War generation?
A: I don't think the full judgment of history is in yet. There is certainly greatness in the '60s generation. They changed our attitudes about race in America, which was long overdue.
--Tom Brokaw, interviewed in the November 19 U. S. News & World Report, on his new book, Boom! Voices of the Sixties.

Whoa! The '60s generation changed our attitudes about race in America? Rosa Parks, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King Jr.--were they from the Vietnam war generation? Earl Warren, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and Hubert Humphrey? For that matter, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, murdered on June 21, 1964, in Mississippi? None of these was a member of the " '60s generation." None was a boomer.

There really was greatness in the "greatest generation." It fought and won World War II, then came home to achieve widespread prosperity and overcome segregation while seeing the Cold War through to a successful conclusion. But the greatest generation had one flaw, its greatest flaw, you might say: It begat the baby boomers.

The most prominent of the boomers spent their youth scorning those of their compatriots who fought communism, while moralizing and posturing at no cost to themselves. They went on to enjoy the benefits of their parents' labors, sacrificed little, and produced nothing particularly notable. But the boomers were unparalleled when it came to self-glorification, a talent they began developing as teenagers and have continued to improve
up to this day. They were also good at bamboozling their parents, and members of the "silent generation" like Tom Brokaw, to be overly deferential to them--even to the point of giving them credit for things they didn't do.

Meanwhile, Daniel Henninger wonders "Can America rise above the divisions of the 1960s?" and concludes, not yet:

What fell out of 1968 was a profound division over what I would call civic vision.

One side, which took to the streets in Chicago or occupied Columbia University, concluded from Vietnam and the race riots that America, in its relations with the world and its own citizens, was flawed and required big changes. Their defining document was the March 1968 Kerner Commission report, announcing "two societies," separate and unequal. The press, incidentally, emerged from Vietnam and the riots joined to this new, permanent template. That, too, has never stopped.

The other side was, well, insulted. It thought America was fundamentally good, though always able to improve. The Voting Rights Act passed in 1964 on a bipartisan vote, opposed mainly by southern Democrats. This side's standard-bearer called the U.S. "a shining city upon a hill." But after 1968, no Democratic presidential candidate would ever speak those words. Nor will Mr. Obama ever repeat Mr. Sarkozy's explicit repudiation of that era.

If it's Hillary versus Rudy, McCain or even the placid Mitt Romney, we will be in those streets again. Besides, her candidacy comes with Jumpin' Jack Flash himself, Bill Clinton. Would it be a good thing if the country's politics said bye-bye baby to the children of 1968? Probably. But it won't happen this time.

And finally, for more debate about the decade (along with the 1970s) that never, ever, ever ends, in one of their ongoing video chats, Peter Beinart asks Jonah Goldberg, "What's Your Problem With Frank Rich's take on the Sixties?"

Your quote of the day:

"The plain truth is that if guys like DiCaprio, Clooney and Robert Redford, were women, they’d be called bimbos."

--Burt Prelutsky, "Hypocritical Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous"

Burt's article is also good place to post a link to this. First, let's set aside whatever political subtext Cruise and his writers have in mind for choosing this story when they did, and concentrate on the actor. The age is right--in fact, at 45, Tom's nearly a decade older than Claus von Stauffenberg in 1944. But will anyone buy him and his acting mannerisms, which are little changed since the days of playing callow youths in the 1980s, and his whiter-than-white perfect Hollywood dentition as an aristocratic, combat-hardened (not to mention severely wounded) WWII Prussian officer?

Allahpundit acidly sums describes Cruise's acting technique as "his smirking cocksure jackass shtick". In other words, to paraphrase the already revised lyrics from a famous Rush parody from the 2000 election, he lacks gravitas. (And how!) But then, so do virtually all American actors under 60, as Frederica Mathewes-Green pointed out in her exceptional article a few years ago.

It might save time for the person who wasn't planted in the audience by CNN for yesterday's Democratic Debate to identify himself. Hugh Hewitt (who stopped by this week's episode of PJM Political) once dubbed CNN "The most busted name in news", and it sounds like they may have been busted yet again.

Update: More at Gateway Pundit.

Tim Graham of Newsbusters writes:

Former NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw took the publicity tour on his book on the 1960's to PBS’s Tavis Smiley show, where he discussed how he was "in a rage" when a friend of his died in Vietnam, although he initially believed in it when John F. Kennedy insisted in a domino theory in southeast Asia, a premise that "quickly came apart." Brokaw agreed with Smiley that there were many parallels between Iraq and Vietnam, and also agreed that Martin Luther King is the most important figure in American history. But he also agreed when Smiley insisted no one has ever been able to detect a bias in his reporting and anchoring: "I've been comforted over the years that people on the far left and people on the far right have said to me, ‘What party are you in, anyway?’ I have never been able to figure it out."

For those who have any doubt that Brokaw fit the mold of the liberal media elite, see MRC’s Media Reality Check on twenty years of Tom Brokaw tilt. Here’s the exchange from PBS:

SMILEY: As I sit and listen to you talk, Tom, now about all of these issues that you've covered in your career and lived through in your life, I always thought that as a newsman, you, Tom Brokaw, kept your feelings, kept your politics out of what you -- I know on paper you have to do that or you don't have a job. [!]

BROKAW: Hard. It's hard.

SMILEY: How do you do that all these years?

BROKAW: It's hard. Well, I believe that fundamentally my reputation as a journalist would depend on my integrity and as a reliable place to go and get as much of the facts as you possibly can. Truth is pretty elusive, as you know. It's got a lot of dimensions to it. So over the years, I always tried to be the one person wherever I was working that would give a fair representation of what was happening, and then I hoped a reasonable and intelligent analysis or insight into why it was happening. And I've been comforted over the years that people on the far left and people on the far right have said to me, "What party are you in, anyway? I have never been able to figure it out." (Laughter) And I'd say, "That's exactly the reaction I want you to have."

That you're an establishment liberal? Because that's the position you've just triangulated yourself into, Tom.

Yet another great moment in surveys--not to mention headlines: "Bars, nightclubs linked to more drinking".

Good luck with that. If Kerry can prove that this moment never happened--which is the core of the Swift Vets' anger with Kerry--that's one helluva Jedi mind trick!

Mackubin Thomas Owens brings Kerry's Winter Soldier phase into the 21st century: "Slandering the American Soldier--An American media tradition."

Update: Related thoughts from Jonah Goldberg.

Found via Glenn Reynolds, John Redwood asks, "Why are so many people leaving the UK?"

Probably for many of the same reasons we explored here, here and here.

Paging Theodore Dalrymple: your next column--heck, maybe next book--just wrote itself.

(Via Ann Althouse. As one of her commenters writes, "Stay classy, London.")

The latest PJM Political is online--click here to listen!

Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of the Blogosphere, PJM Political, hosted by Bill Bradley, catches up with Colonel Austin Bay in Abu Dhabi, Richard Miniter and Vaclav Havel in the Czech Republic, and extensive coverage of last week’s BlogWorld & New Media Expo in Las Vegas, including interviews with:

Glenn Reynolds, from An Army of Davids to the limits of the Blogosphere.

Hugh Hewitt on changing lives, one Blog at a time, and A Mormon In The White House.

Ed Morrissey on a talk radio station that’s open to all, and interviewing Rudy Giuliani.

Stephen Green on Vodka, Vegas, Hillary, and Peggy Noonan.

Pajamas CEO Roger Simon looks ahead--next year’s BlogWorld, and to later this month, when he interviews Fred Thompson.

Rick Calvert, the CEO of BlogWorld Expo, on putting it all together.

James Lileks: Will Hillary revoke Wolf Blitzer’s license?

Bill Bradley: Has Elliot Spitzer revoked Hillary’s license?

Produced on location by moi.

Extended versions of several of this week's segments can be found here. Finally, if you missed any previous episodes of PJM Political, click here and scroll through for hours of audio archives.

The Pat Robertson/Meat Loaf connection, revealed.

From the eminently quotable Steve Green:

Just a note. When you hear "national service," remind yourself the Democrats are talking about reinstating the draft, only for welfare programs instead of the Pentagon.

Read the rest of his drunkblogging of Thursday's debate, here.

In the early 1989, CNN brought you the definitive Crossfire line-up that starred Pat Buchanan and Michael Kinsley. These days, Newsweek has a much more postmodern political cage match in mind....

In the New York Times-owned Boston Globe, Joanna Weiss writes, "On TV, men are the new weaker sex":

In one sense, this is gender-bending stuff as old as Shakespeare, imagining what things might be like if men were more like women, and vice versa. But on ABC, role-reversal is pursued with such vigor that it feels like a social mission: a feverish, wholly off-putting attempt to break free of the boy-meets-girl formula.

Nowhere is that clearer than on "Grey's Anatomy," ABC's wildly-popular lead-in to "Big Shots," where the character of Derek Shepherd - once known as "McDreamy" - has completed his transition from guy-the-heroine-pines-for-in-spite-of-herself to simpering McWeenie. When he was introduced in season one - a neurosurgeon seducing medical intern Meredith Grey at a bar - Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey) was the classic TV bad boy. He was distant and commitment-phobic. He nursed a deep dark secret. He was "McDreamy" because he was a fantasy: attractive but unattainable.

* * *

On "Grey's," in short, empowerment has become a zero-sum game. And a show that once found creative ways to ogle men has evolved into a show that wants to see them punished or demeaned. Mark Sloan (Eric Dane), the womanizing plastic surgeon dubbed "McSteamy," is now in pursuit of Erica Hahn (Brooke Smith), a hard-charging heart surgeon who calls Sloan and Shepherd "Pretty and Prettier." And of late, the male character most successful in romance is George O'Malley, the nerdy intern who is going through a remedial year. One of the other characters nicknamed him "Bambi."

This has been a topic that Glenn Reynolds has discussed at length for years at Instapundit. It is indeed a zero-sum game--just not the one Hollywood and the networks think it is.

Update: Much more on this topic in a recent post from the Anchoress: "Stupid men, Stupid Parents, Stupid Madison Avenue."

Related: "Ideology trumps the marketplace with these networks, unfortunately", Brent Bozell notes. "They've been bleeding audiences since 1994. They've lost 50% of their audiences, and yet they continue the same way they've been going."

Ideology also trumps the marketplace when it comes to big-screen Hollywood as well, of course. Arguably, even more so.

Yes, I've used that headline before, but it seems appropriate to dust it off again, since Jules Crittenden is celebrating his 366 day in the Blogosphere today.

Err, except for whoever commissioned this jingle:

(H/T: NY)

Fans of Garden & Gun magazine may want to petition the magazine to launch a sequel--Garden & Grenade Launcher:

During an afternoon tea party at the elegant governor's mansion in the capital of South Carolina, former Arkansas first lady Janet Huckabee told CNN she is pretty handy with a grenade launcher.

Huckabee, the wife of Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, said in an interview that she once shot a grenade launcher at a National Guard training camp in Arkansas.

"I have fired a grenade launcher and hit the target two out of three times, so I think that's pretty good odds for me," she said, noting that she had a special interest in military matters and has also jumped out of an airplane, flown in an F-16 and shot an MP5 submachine gun.

While readers of Reason magazine aren't fans of Huckabee's liberal political stances (and for good reason), they should have few complaints regarding his distaff half.

Stephen Frank of California Political News and Views explains all:

If you were an advertiser, would you pay for people who read newspaper stories on line, without your ad?

1. Newspapers are losing paid circulation of the hard copy paper.

2. One way to up the numbers is to make believe that someone reading a story on line has read the whole newspaper, including the ads.

3. This is transparently phony and the advertisers must believe the numbers are even lower than reported.

4. Nothing wrong with reporting the "hits" on a papers web site, but that is different from those who get ink on their hands reading the paper.

Is this another example of the mainstream media trying to fool the public? What do you think is the cause of the newspaper losing circulation?

As I've written before, just imagine the teeth-gnashing stories that newspapers would run if GM, Wal-Mart, et al were caught cooking the books like this.

Jonah Goldberg explains "Why The Hillaryites Hate Russert":

John Podhoretz (remember him?) offers an answer to my question. Basically, he says it goes back to the 2000 New York Senate race. It's a good answer, but I'm not sure I buy it. I think JPod helps clarify why Hillary hates Russert. But what I want to know is how anyone can seriously attack Russert's drivers license (and other) questions from the Philly debate. I think the answer lies far from her personal animosity. If it would help her get elected, she'd say Tim Russert is on her short list to be Vice President. I think the answer lay in a certain carefully honed sense that the Clintons should be treated like royalty combined with a strategic desire to paint her as a victim (and thus help goose the women's vote). I also think — and this will be denied up and down by liberals — that they hate Russert because they believe the press should be liberal and favorably partisan toward Democrats and they get furious when Russert — or anyone else — won't play the game the way they want.

They needn't worry much about this periodical--not that there was much cause for alarm in the past, of course.

Update: Ed Morrissey asks, "Who would make a good match for Markos at Newsweek?":

Speculation has already begun on Newsweek's choice for a Rightosphere head-popper. Tom Maguire kindly recommends me for the position, but Newsweek has not contacted me, and if they plan to announce this soon, they must already have communicated with their first choices. I'm not certain that I would be a complete analog to Markos in any case. I try to expand minds, not explode heads; a proper balance would have a conservative willing to match Kos' stridency on topics, and hopefully with better arguments.

Who would make a good match for Markos at Newsweek? Who can burst open heads with tough-minded conservative rhetoric? Or should that be what we want in the soon-to-be filled position at Newsweek?

Follow the links for a flashback to the kerfuffle involving the Washington Post (Newsweek's parent company) and the saga of Ben Domenech.

When they were promoting the original release of 2001: A Space Odyssey, I believe Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick each told interviewers variations on this joke, which probably received wide traffic in the 1960s:

The first supercomputer is built, and it's virtually omniscient. Scientists ponder what historic first question to ask it. So after extensive deliberation, they program the initial punchcard (remember, we're talking the 1960s here): IS THERE A GOD?

"THERE IS NOW", the computer immediately replies--and it was right!

(H/T: 5FF)

In principle at least, it certainly sounds like a great way to end one the long-running Civil War between North & South.

(Via a Governor LePetomaine-quoting Glenn Reynolds.)

James Lileks explores the elite aging boomer's nostalgie de la boue:

If there’s one conviction that afflicts the keenest mind as it ages, it’s the belief that Things Were Better Then, and Things Are Horrible Now, usually because no one has learned the lessons of your own generation and insisted on experiencing the world for themselves. (Frank Rich provided a neat example of this a few days ago, when he diagnosed Americans as “clinically depressed” and unable to capture the glories of his demographic, which Took It To the Streets, Man. And blew up a few buildings while they were at it, but you can’t make an omelette without breaking into a farmer’s coop, stealing his chickens, setting fire to the coop and running off with the eggs, all of which you later misplaced because you were high.)

Now that's chutzpah: the generation of liberals (or progressives, or whatever they want to be called this week) that internalized what Tom Wolfe once called "Starting From Zero" and junking the accumulated weight of mankind's experience is now shocked that modern culture has a very different sense of recent history than they do.

Roger L. Simon explains why "Hicks Nix Peacenik Pix":

Since there’s a strike on and I can’t get work anyway, I will let ‘er rip:

The truth is Hollywood people are massively uninformed. They live in a bubble and, outside what they read in the New York Times and hear on NPR, they know almost nothing about what is really going on in the Middle East. And very few of them are curious to find out, because they assume what they already know is true and they have no impetus to investigate further.

But there is deeper reason for this than mere convenience and received conventional wisdom. These are not curious people because they are highly self-protective. They live a hugely privileged lifestyle, often based to a great degree on luck (and they know it), and this existence could only be threatened by contradictory information. Who wants that – particularly when it would alienate your colleagues, hurt your reputation and cause work problems?

Better to produce movies that validate the orthodoxy, even if they are economic disasters. Your colleagues will be impressed and you might win a prize (De Palma did – at Venice). Most of them are low budget anyway – a piffle. And the distribution system is rigged anyway. The antiwar swill won’t lose that much money because, boring as the films may be, they will be force-fed into the global entertainment machine, grouped in packages with other movies and sold to foreign television distributors to re-emerge as late-night reruns in Albania or wherever on into 2027 and beyond. A minor loss, if any.

And there is another benefit. (Here is where I am really going to make enemies.) Making movies like these or making extreme liberal public pronouncements make you seem like a good guy to yourself, when in your private life you are a miserable, self-serving bastard.

Read the whole thing.

It's time to thaw McLean Stevenson out of cryogenic suspension--because Fred Silverman's back, and he's running NBC again. That's the only way to explain these two mind-numbingly stupid peacock network fumbles occurring back-to-back.

Well, it's not the only way, but it is the only explanation that makes some sense, isn't it?

Allison: No, that was wonderful. I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype.
Alvy Singer: Right, I'm a bigot, I know, but for the left.

20 years ago, Ted Danson told us that we had only ten years to save the world's oceans.

And he was right!

Update: Meanwhile, back on land, the radical cloning program on the Island of Dr. Moreau proceeds apace...

Billionaire entrepreneur and leftwing film producer Mark Cuban threatens to take on Bill O'Reilly at Blog World.

J.D. Johannes explores the "End of the War Hero", at least in nihilistic Hollywood:

In the latest round of war movies the heroes are not the Soldiers and Marines who every day fight and defeat a vicious and barbaric enemy--the heroes are reporters, lawyers and activists.

And since every story requires a villain, the real enemy--Mohammedan Jihadists--are replaced by neo-cons, politicians, Soldiers and Marines.

This substitution of the traditional mono-myth away from a hero who faces physical danger and conquers an enemy is a result of cowardice of the modern story tellers.

The human mind craves the same narrative--this was illustrated by Joseph Campbell...also, we all want to be the hero.

But when confronted with a real life situation--like the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and larger war on terror few will step up to be heroes.

The many who do not have the ability to step up fall into two categories--those who acknowledge their inability to be heroes and those who do not.

Being a hero is not a job for everyone, many accept this and give credit to those who are willing to take the challenge.

But there is another group for who the sting of their own cowardice is too much to bear. They are not willing to accept that they cannot be heroes.

They cannot accept that, even if they were younger or had the physical ability to confront a violent villain, they would shrink from the challenge.

To alleviate their guilt they invent a new villain--Halliburton, Cheney, neo-cons, politicians, military officers, Soldiers, Marines--in short, anyone who will not physically harm them.

Not the least of which is this imaginary terror.

More at Power Line, which references Richard Lester's Cuba, "one of Sean Connery's least-seen films", and one of a series of pro-Castro movies that Hollywood seems to alternate each year with an anti-McCarthy and/or anti-blacklist movie. (Sense a theme?)

To be fair though, Cuba at least had for eye-candy a gorgeous-looking young Brooke Adams, thus making it somewhat passable entertainment with the sound down and fast-forward button at the ready.

If you had any doubts regarding the difference between new and old media, merely compare and contrast: In egalitarian Las Vegas: the Blog World Expo convention, in which bloggers with traffic ranging from zero to millions of bytes served could--and did--attend, mingle, ask questions, and learn from each other. Or as Steve Green puts it, "The job here was to meet people, make connections, and make for better blogging."

Concurrently, in elitist Manhattan: "Stark, in-your-face snobbish social inegalitarianism", as Mickey Kaus puts it--which, if anything, sounds like an understatement, in which journalists and their audience maintained a forced distance from each other that was chasm-like in its symbolism.

There is no Hell, there is only the 1970s. And its clothes.

(H/T: VP)

Will 2008 be like 1988? Is it "Willie Horton Redux"?

Mr. President, we must not allow a mine shaft gap!

Found via Instapundit, the New York Times' spin-off paper, The International Herald Tribune notes that the "Hollywood strike underlines bleak outlook for movie business":

As Hollywood digs in for a second week of a strike, the screenwriters might want to send a few angry picketers over to Will Smith's place. Or Steven Spielberg's.

And maybe the studio executives should think about joining them on the line.

As it turns out, the pot of money that the producers and writers are fighting over may have already been pocketed by the entertainment industry's biggest talent.

That is the conclusion of a surprisingly bleak new assessment of financial dynamics in the movie industry titled "Do Movies Make Money?" The researchers' answer: not any more.

Why, it's like The Era of Big Cinema Is Over, or something...

Robert Redford just wants to say one word to you. Just one word: plastics:

Mr. Redford may be staying out of the presidential race, but he makes some highly provocative comments about Republican Mitt Romney, based on his many years among the Mormons of Utah.

“They are very adept at not being fazed and speaking fluently and gracefully. Why? Because every single male who’s a Mormon goes on a mission for two years when they’re 19 or 20,” he says. “They learn how to deflect blows and stay on message. No wonder Utah is the place that all these Republican senators go. It’s perfect. So when you see Mitt Romney, he’s already been practicing how to deflect blows and stay on message. But it’s plastic.”

As Professor Bainbridge notes:

If Redford had said anything remotely that bigoted about a candidate who was, say, Jewish, gay, or black, Hollywood would be screaming for his head. But when you’re a liberal icon, I guess it’s okay to be a bigot, as long as you chose the right targets.

Oh, that's a given.

Jonah Goldberg finds Frank Rich having a sad case of Nostalgia De La Radical Chic:

The Frank Rich column Jon Adler links to would be laughable if it weren't so shameful. Indeed, it's precisely the sort of paranoid nonsense Frank Rich would mock if it came from an anti-Clinton conservative in the 1990s. But it is interesting in one respect. He's angry at the American people for not replaying the 1960s. I keep seeing this weepy babyboomer nostalgia popping up. Rich writes:

In the six years of compromising our principles since 9/11, our democracy has so steadily been defined down that it now can resemble the supposedly aspiring democracies we’ve propped up in places like Islamabad. Time has taken its toll. We’ve become inured to democracy-lite. That’s why a Mukasey can be elevated to power with bipartisan support and we barely shrug.

This is a signal difference from the Vietnam era, and not necessarily for the better. During that unpopular war, disaffected Americans took to the streets and sometimes broke laws in an angry assault on American governmental institutions. The Bush years have brought an even more effective assault on those institutions from within. While the public has not erupted in riots, the executive branch has subverted the rule of law in often secretive increments. The results amount to a quiet coup, ultimately more insidious than a blatant putsch like General Musharraf’s.

Ah, yes. Things would be so much better today if we had riots and "angry assaults on American governmental institutions. Just like in the good old days.

It's an interesting duality, isn't it? As James Piereson has noted, punitive liberals such as Rich and Times publisher Pinch Sulzberger believe that America can do no good, having been born of Original Sin. And yet they long for some of the darkest days in America's recent history: Rich waxes nostalgic for the urban riots of the 1960s, just as more Bohemian New Yorkers miss Manhattan in the 1970s, when crime and urban decay ran rampant.

Update: Jules Crittenden declares "Both thumbs up for a Rich tour de force of BDS. Or maybe, just BS."

Patrick Ruffini on "The Top 10 Things to Know" about the 2008 presidential election.

Back when I was a kid, the only thing I recall being able to build out of Legos were lame-looking toy houses. But these days, their catalog is filled with surprisingly complex toys promoting very un-PC concepts, not the least of which are Gaia-defiling construction equipment, dispensaries of Big Oil, and race cars, which the left holds in utter contempt due to their goreball worming connotations, as Tim Blair would say. And Lego also produces a whole line of toys promoting the violent destructive fantasies of a raaaaacist Hollywood filmmaker. But as James S. Robbins notes, Lego as a corporation is as reactionary and politically correct as they come:

A few days ago I posted a bleg asking for ways to reach out to Lego Systems, Inc. to see if they would donate Lego sets to wounded warriors at Walter Reed who use the sets for therapy. Quick response from Lego — forget it. Now we learn that Lego has awarded $5000.00 to eight year old Kelsie Kimberlin, as part of their first annual Creativity Awards. Her entry — a 5 minute anti-Bush video set to an altered John Lennon tune ("Happy Springtime/Bush is Over").

Problem: the video was actually produced by her father, Brett, who runs Justice Through Music, a civic engagement nonprofit. Brett is also noteworthy for being a convicted bomber (aka terrorist), and for having claimed to have sold pot to Dan Quayle in 1988. Just the kind of person you want associated with your child's favorite toy. Some free advice to Lego — want to fix this PR nightmare? Do the right thing and help the wounded warriors already.

Further thoughts on postmodern corporate hypocrisy here.

One week before the Adnan Hajj clone tool scandal broke in early August of 2006, which did for Reuters' credibility as an objective non-biased new gathering organization what Dan Rather did to the Columbia Broadcasting System, Ace of Spades had a remarkably prescient blog post:

The American media is setting itself up for a massive scandal. One day, it will in fact come out that they are guilty of willful blindness and a deliberate avoidance of asking their stringers tough questions to maintain their own plausible deniability.

And they'll have to answer some hard questions, such as, "If you're so vigilant against being 'used' by the American government for its 'propaganda,' why are you so blithely nonchalant about being worse-used by America's enemies?"

Many of Steven Glass' colleagues looked back and wondered how they'd been fooled by his fabrications for so long. Apart from the outlandishness of some of his stories, he also had an uncanny knack for getting the Killer Quote that tied together a piece or summed it up in one pithy, bullet-point sentence. We should have known no one gets that lucky so consistently, they said later.

The American media seems to be an employing a possible Army of Steven Glasses [Like I said, prescient--Ed], and yet they're more than willing to pretend they don't know what's going on so long as those suspiciously-dramatic front-page pictures keep coming back from the foreign stringers.

One year later, Richard Landes writes that not much has changed, in "Al-Dura and the 'Public Secret' of Middle East Journalism."

While I was away at Blog World, books written by two of my favorite authors arrived in the mail, with topics as disparate as can possibly be imagined:

In Praise of Prejudice by Theodore Dalrymple

Gastroanomalies by James Lileks

Watch for more on these two books in the coming weeks.

You can just picture the meeting in the United Artists boardroom: "Well boys, I say we write that check for $35 million to Robert Redford to direct and star in an anti-Bush, antiwar drama alongside Meryl Streep and the almost always bankable Tom Cruise. What could go wrong?"

Update: Related thoughts from Robert Bidinotto, the editor of the New Individualist magazine, who asks, "How does Hollywood expect general American audiences to ratify, with their entertainment dollars, movies that essentially spit in their own faces, blaming them for being a malignant force in the world?"

That dovetails into a telling anecdote from Jonah Goldberg's USA Today essay:

The public doesn't get to decide what movies are made. As President Bush might say, Hollywood is the "decider." The public determines which movies are successful. Perhaps the studios of yesteryear knew something today's moguls don't. Maybe Americans don't like to see America and her troops run down, even during an unpopular war.

When Peter Berg tested The Kingdom on Americans, he was horrified when the audience cheered when the FBI killed the terrorists at the end. "Am I experiencing American bloodlust?" the director agonized. Berg's contemptuous reaction toward American audiences may point to a few of the reasons these movies are faring poorly at American box offices.

Or as George Clooney babbled last year at the Oscars:

"I would say that, you know, we are a little bit out of touch in Hollywood every once in a while. I think it's probably a good thing. We're the ones who talk about AIDS when it was just being whispered, and we talked about civil rights when it wasn't really popular. And we, you know, we bring up subjects."

What happens when you're an out of touch coastal artists' enclave, and you bring up a subject? Sometimes, like the director of The Kingdom, you get whiplash when your potential domestic audience out in the hinterlands is 180 degrees out of phase from your tunnelvision and freeze-dried 1960s mindset.

If you haven't read it yet, don't miss Roger Kimball's devastating obit for Norman Mailer, who as Woody Allen once quipped, donated his ego to science long ago. Read the whole thing, but for me, this passage really stood out:

A few years before, at a party he threw to announce his mayoral candidacy on the “Existentialist” ticket, Mailer got drunk and stabbed his wife Adele (number two), nearly killing her. (In 1969, Mailer ran for mayor again, this time on the “Secessionist” ticket, which included proposals that New York City become the fifty-first state and that disputes among young criminals be settled by jousting tournaments in Central Park.) Adele declined to press charges, and so Mailer escaped this outrage with a fortnight in Bellevue for observation.

Mailer’s obsession with violence against women seems to have had a long gestation. Carl Rollyson opens his biography of Mailer with the story of John Maloney, a drunkard and a friend of Mailer and William Styron. In 1954, Maloney stabbed his mistress and fled. He was later jailed but released when charges were dropped. Styron recalled that at the time Mailer said to him: “God, I wish I had the courage to stab a woman like that. That was a real gutsy act.” That tells one all one needs to know about Norman Mailer’s idea of “courage.”

What is perhaps most alarming about Mailer’s violence against his wife was that it seems to have titillated more than it repelled his circle of friends. In any event it brought very little condemnation. “Among ‘uptown intellectuals,’” Irving Howe wrote “there was this feeling of shock and dismay, and I don’t remember anyone judging him. The feeling was that he’d been driven to this by compulsiveness, by madness. He was seen as a victim.” Readers who wonder how stabbing his wife could make Mailer a “victim”—and who ask themselves, further, what Mailer’s being a victim would then make Adele—clearly do not have what it takes to be an “uptown intellectual.”

And then add to it the drug-fueled primitive William Burroughs, who played William Tell with his common-law wife Joan Vollmer in 1951, with disastrous results, as his Wikipedia biography notes:

In 1951, Burroughs shot and killed Vollmer in a drunken game of "William Tell" at a party above the American-owned Bounty Bar in Mexico City. He spent 13 days in jail before his brother came to Mexico City and distributed funds to Mexican lawyers and officials, which allowed Burroughs to be released on bail while he awaited trial for the killing, which was ruled culpable homicide. Vollmer’s daughter, Julie Adams, went to live with her grandmother, and William S. Burroughs, Jr. went to St. Louis to live with his grandparents. Burroughs reported every Monday morning to the jail in Mexico City while his prominent Mexican attorney worked to resolve the case. According to James Grauerholz two witnesses had agreed to testify that the gun had gone off accidentally while he was checking to see if it was loaded, and the ballistics experts were bribed to support this story. Nevertheless, the trial was continuously delayed and Burroughs began to write what would eventually become the short novel Queer while awaiting his trial. However, when his attorney fled Mexico after his own legal problems involving a car accident and altercation with the son of a government official, Burroughs decided, according to Ted Morgan, to "skip" and return to the United States. He was convicted in absentia of homicide and sentenced to two years, which was suspended.

Birth of a writer

Original Ace Double edition of Junkie (a.k.a. Junky) from 1953, credited to "William Lee". This was Burroughs's first novel publication. Burroughs later said that shooting Vollmer was a pivotal event in his life, and one which instigated his writing:

I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would have never become a writer but for Joan's death... I live with the constant threat of possession, for control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invador [sic], the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a life long struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.

O.J. Simpson is currently spending the second half of his life in a well-deserved career purgatory, his reputation presumably ruined permanently. I have no idea of how aware he is of Mailer and Burroughs, but I wonder what he would think if knew how easy it was for them to get off virtually scott free from such bloody acts in the early days of what would ultimately become long and well-rewarded careers.

Just got into San Jose airport, and back home from Vegas. While I was there, I recorded a ton of audio from Pajamas' booth at the BlogWorld convention. Watch--err, listen--for this in the coming weeks in future episodes of PJM Political.

Update: Speaking of audio, "Nothing says blogger party like subdued hip hop", as Duane Patterson writes, complete with a short video clip of such "music" at the Thursday night Pajamas Party at Blog World. It's proof that not everything was smooth sailing on Blog World's maiden voyage.

By the way, it was a pleasure to finally meet both Duane and Ed Morrissey for the first time in person, and they graciously allowed me to sit in on their regular gig at Blog Talk Radio. I appear about 20 minutes into show, after Ed's interview with Rudy Giuliani (via scrambled subspace radio from the planet Skyron), and N.Z. Bear, who was there at Blog World, but sadly I didn't get a chance to talk much.

If you missed our weekly episode of PJM Political on XM Satellite Radio's POTUS '08 Channel today, you can listen to it here.

You'll hear:

Host Bill Bradley asks: Is John Edwards going to sacrifice himself to take down Hillary Clinton?

Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post and CNN’s Reliable Sources discusses his new book, Reality Show: Inside The Last Great Television News War.

Pajamas' own Corn & Miniter Show (With Eli Lake of the New York Sun sitting in for Richard Miniter), explore the winners and losers of the Democrats’ recent debate.

Austin Bay of Pajamas' Blog Week In Review podcast interviews Heather Mac Donald and Steven Malanga, co-authors of The Immigration Solution, with an emphasis on Hillary, Russert, and last week's debate.

James Lileks, master of the Bleat and purveyor of Gastroanomalies.

Glenn Reynolds and Dr. Helen Smith ponder if Hillary Clinton is “a daring girl.”

David Paul Kuhn of Politico.com spots The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma.

Pajamas CEO Roger L. Simon and Blogosphere pioneer Mickey Kaus debate Fred Thompson’s latest campaign ad.

Produced by yours truly.

Extended versions of several of this week's segments can be found here. Finally, if you missed any previous episodes of PJM Political, click here and scroll through for hours of audio archives.

The Blog World show in Vegas is quite a hit--Hugh Hewitt is live broadcasting his show from there, including a telephone call into the show from Mark Steyn, and an in-person appearance from Glenn Reynolds.

And speaking of which, I think the electricity to power Hugh's show has caused several dangerous voltage surges throughout the exhibit space. Which is my excuse--and I'm sticking with it!--for the ultra-goofy, pardon me, I'm having 50,000 watts pumped into my fillings right now look that I'm displaying in this photo.

In the future, everyone will be Joseph McCarthy for 15 minutes.

(When they're not being Hitler, of course.)

As Pajamas HQ notes, "What Happens At Blog World Stays At Blog World."

Well, except for any audio I bring back for use on PJM Political, that is!

And you don't have to be Nostradamus (or Criswell for that matter) to know that Number 11 on this list of predictions is an absolute given.

Just click, as it starts making the rounds, as yet another meme rises to the surface from the ground up, rather than the top down. Which is one reason why it won't be incorporated into Hollywood's product anytime soon.

Update: "As Instapundit notes, it beats the hell out of comparing it to this photo."

But, by God, if this isn't outlawed by the Geneva Convention, it most certainly should be.

(In contrast, here's an infinitely more positive example of music as a weapon.)

From his recent anti-American movie to his old man stubble and overflowing facial topiary, which combines to make him look like an elderly hippie clerking for beer money at Guitar Center, Tommy Lee Jones has definitely seen better days.

I've long championed new and alternative media, but this post by Tom Gross isn't quite what I had mind:

Scarcely a day goes by without Hamas’s American and European apologists claiming that there is now no money in Hamas-controlled Gaza.

Not only are tens of millions of dollars being taken into Gaza every month, as Ha’aretz revealed yesterday, but now the Associated Press reports today that:

Hamas plans to build $200m. Hollywood-style media city (AP, Nov. 7, 2007)

And that's in addition, as Tom adds, to the existing production facilities the Palestinian authorities have long had in Gaza "for fooling gullible western journalists."

Radical chic old media pros looking for work thanks to Hollywood's ongoing strike may want to get their resumes in early. Please note though, that a strict dress code will be enforced in the new facilities.

Update: More at Ynet.

Back in February of 2004, I wrote:

After decades of trying to claim impartiality, there have been several admissions lately by the media that they are indeed, biased.

A theme I followed up shortly thereafter in a couple of interviews with Bernard Goldberg at Tech Central Station, and an article a few months ago for the New Individualist titled Atlas Mugged, which explored the push-pull interaction between old media and new. The trend away from an 80-year old definition of objectivity was also also spotted last year by James Taranto, who wrote:

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

Much like the New York Times coming clean in 2004, it has something of a "Gosh, who knew!" quality to it, but add this announcement to the list as well. And as Stephen Spruiell asks, how long before their parent network makes official what is otherwise remarkably obvious.

Ann Althouse notices a superstar architect being sued for taking his deconstructionism just a little too seriously:

The building is incredibly cool, a showpiece. Check out these pics of the Stata Center at MIT, designed by Frank Gehry. But MIT is suing, "charging that flaws in his design... one of the most celebrated works of architecture unveiled in years, caused leaks to spring, masonry to crack, mold to grow, and drainage to back up."

Corbusier would have gone from Bauhaus to the poorhouse if his clients sued him along similar lines.

Anne Applebaum explains why actors like Sean Penn and fashion models such as Naomi Campbell get the warm and fuzzies around murderous thugs such as Hugo Chavez:

In fact, for the malcontents of Hollywood, academia, and the catwalks, Chávez is an ideal ally. Just as the sympathetic foreigners whom Lenin called "useful idiots" once supported Russia abroad, their modern equivalents provide the Venezuelan president with legitimacy, attention, and good photographs. He, in turn, helps them overcome the frustration John Reed once felt—the frustration of living in an annoyingly unrevolutionary country where people have to change things by law. For all his brilliance, Reed could not bring socialism to America. For all his wealth, fame, media access, and Hollywood power, Sean Penn cannot oust George W. Bush. But by showing up in the company of Chávez, he can at least get a lot more attention for his opinions.

As she explains, it's the same radical chic urge that drove celebrities, intellectuals, and the original useful idiots of 90 years ago to flock to the then-new Soviet Union.

Austin Bay's latest Blog Week In Review podcast is now online; it features Austin's interview (which I produced) of Heather Mac Donald and Steven Malanga of the Manhattan Institute. They discuss their new book, co-authored along with PajamasXxpress blogger Victor Davis Hanson, The Immigration Solution: A Better Plan Than Today's.

Heather and Steve discuss why immigration, legal and otherwise has dominated the news, its role in the War On Terror, and the kerfuffle over Hillary's drivers license gaffe during the Democrats' debate last week in Philadelphia.

Neo-Neocon has a question:

Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that Andrew Bolt is right, and that we’ve already won in Iraq.

Or if that’s too utterly unbelievable for you, let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that the violence in Iraq continues to decline, civil order continues to improve, and it ends up being a viable and functioning country—and an ally—within the next couple of years.

In other words, what if the new counterinsurgency methods of General Petraeus really have reversed a situation that as recently as last spring looked exceedingly dire, and had many declaring it was already lost?

If so, these would be my questions:

If things turn out well in Iraq, will it finally put the ghost of Vietnam to rest?

I had thought we had put that ghost to rest after Desert Storm and then President Clinton's various foreign excursions throughout the 1990s, but since history for the left begins with the JFK's assassination, it seems like it's impossible to fully retire Vietnam as a reference point to contrast current wars against.

(By the way, check out Neo-Neocon and the rest of the Sanity Squad on Blog Talk Radio.)

That was then, this is now, I guess: I can remember a time when the left calling someone "subversive of constitutional government" was the highest compliment imaginable.

As Orrin Judd notes, Peter Viertel, who passed away this week at age 86, had a view of life from the front row seats. Married to Deborah Kerr, associate of John Houston, Viertel was the author of White Hunter, Black Heart, his 1953 best-selling novel, which in the early 1990s, Clint Eastwood made into a pretty nifty film, with Clint playing a thinly-disguised version of John Houston and Jeff Fahey playing a character based on Viertel himself.

A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, even in Hollywood:

An elegant children's book, from a more civilized era.

Four years ago, Dennis Miller told The American Enterprise magazine:

The Left is so busy saying John Ashcroft is Hitler, and President Bush is Hitler, and Rudy Giuliani is Hitler that the only guy they wouldn’t call Hitler was the foreign guy with the mustache who was throwing people who disagreed with him into the wood-chipper.

And since in the future, everyone will be Hitler for 15 minutes, this week's candidate for the business end of Reductio ad Hitlerum is NBC's Tim Russert, with Rudy Giuliani closing fast for the coveted, if readily available, slur.

Update: "What exactly have they put in the water at The New Republic?"

The Financial Times writes that the Democrats "wake up to being the party of the rich":

A legislative proposal that was once on the fast track is suddenly dead. The Senate will not consider a plan to extract billions in extra taxes from megamillionaire hedge fund managers.

The decision by Senate majority leader Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat, surprised many Washington insiders, who saw the plan as appealing to the spirit of class warfare that infuses the Democratic party. Liberal disappointment in Mr Reid was palpable at media outlets such as USA Today, where an editorial chastised: "The Democrats, who control Congress and claim to represent the middle and lower classes, ought to be embarrassed."

Far from embarrassing, this episode may reflect a dawning Democratic awareness of whom they really represent. For the demographic reality is that, in America, the Democratic party is the new "party of the rich". More and more Democrats represent areas with a high concentration of wealthy households. Using Internal Revenue Service data, the Heritage Foundation identified two categories of taxpayers - single filers with incomes of more than $100,000 and married filers with incomes of more than $200,000 - and combined them to discern where the wealthiest Americans live and who represents them.

Democrats now control the majority of the nation's wealthiest congressional jurisdictions. More than half of the wealthiest households are concentrated in the 18 states where Democrats control both Senate seats.

We wrote about this trend and some of its implications over three years ago, during the 2004 presidential election:

In many TV sit-coms and comedy movies from the 1960s through the early 1980s, you'll see the cliché of the wealthy country club Republican, ala Nelson Rockefeller. Jim Backus' blue double-breasted blazer-wearing Thurston Howell III character was an example of this; David Ogden Stiers' Major Charles Emerson Winchester on M*A*S*H (ironically, Winchester was a Boston Brahmin, like Senator Kerry) was another.

George H.W. Bush's image was very much in that mold. But he interrupted a flip-over that began with President Reagan's self-made aw-shucks folksy style and continued with George W. Bush's cowboy boots-wearing, BBQ-loving manner and the Texas twang of his voice.

It highlights an interesting trend in politics over the last 25 years:

The shift of the Republican party as now being associated with "the little guy", the average man--who might be a blue collar guy, or he might be a self-employed high tech entrepreneur. But either case, he's working hard to get by and better himself. In contrast, the Democrats are now very much the party of the elite: ambulance chasing trial lawyers (including John Edwards himself), often big business, foreign interests, the media, academia, and most dramatically, Hollywood.

Writing in the L.A. Times, Thomas Frank, himself a self-professed liberal, bemoans the Democrats' close association with Hollywood and fears (quite rightly so) that it's hurting the Democrats' image.

In a way, it's irresistible: most people wouldn't resist a chance to meet a larger-than-life celebrity, particularly when he's gushing about your political party. But the attendees at Democrats' convention last week also dropped by "lavish soirees thrown by regional telecom giants, consumed the free lunch proffered by other regional telecom giants and gotten word of '60s heroes feted by weapons manufacturers". This is an image far removed indeed from the FDR through LBJ-era Democrats, who tried to project an image of being the scrappy party of the underdog.

Of course, it also highlights the elites' love of stasis: if you're on top of the world, who wants radical change? Why bother reforming the Middle East? Why clean up Social Security or education?

As Ace writes:

It's nice to be rich enough to not care much about taxes and the economy. But it's not nice for the plutocrats to pull up the ladder of opportunity and thus protect their privileged positions.

One of many ways Blue States do just that is by city governments making it virtually impossible to build on or otherwise develop property, dramatically ratcheting up existing property values. That's a topic Virginia Postrel has been exploring in depth recently on her pioneering Dynamist blog. Start here, then just keep scrolling.

(With apologies to Allen and Gerard): I saw the self-described best minds of my generation destroyed by Bloggers, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the Internet's streets at dawn looking for a miracle fix to their industry's woes:

The NY Times will finally, but fearfully, allow readers to post comments under their articles, something the Washington Post and USA Today have been doing for quite awhile. The Times is so worried about this baby step that they have taken the unprecedented precaution of hiring four part-time staffers to screen each submission before posting it, rather than simply allowing readers to call attention to problem posts like other online newspapers. Kate Phillips, editor of the Times’ Caucus blog said that she struggles so much with the “intolerance” and “vitriol” she sees in some comments that on rare occasions “I almost wish we could go back to the days when we never heard their voices.”

Which is merely the latest of ten years' worth of old media variations harkening back to this moment:

I must confess, my first reaction to having our speaker today at the National Press Club was the same as what a lot of other members of the Club have had: Why do we want to give a forum to that guy?

Or anyone else who isn't already an insider, apparently.

You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don't, you wind up at a subsidiary of a subsidiary of General Electric.

I can't say I'm losing much sleep over the Hollywood writers' strike, but Nikke Finke has wall-to-wall coverage for those who are interested. In a recent post, she notes:

I've just confirmed that Leno and Conan will be in strike-forced repeats starting tonight. Also Jimmy Kimmel. Also Dave and that foreign dude who follows him (aka Craig Ferguson). This is going to have a devastating effect on promotion for the all-important holiday movie season starting now. And if this strike lasts awhile, Oscar campaigns as well. Meanwhile, you know that report I cited earlier that Jon Stewart is paying his writers' salaries during the first two weeks of the strike out of his own pocket, for both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, according to Portfolio.com. Well, his rep has denied it. That's right, denied it.

Beyond talk show comedians, the strike is also having an impact on activist Hollywood celebrities who pine for their brain trusts: just check out this recent Huffington Post item from Nora Ephron, clearly rendered inchoate...

Update: Gates Of Vienna has a modest proposal to end this destructive conflict and bring order to the show-business galaxy. (Sorry, just recycling lines from older Hollywood productions, much like the industry itself may be doing in the coming weeks.) I've got far too many tasks in Outlook to check off this week to volunteer myself, but I'm definitely sympathetic to the idea.

More: Inchoate but inspiring!

Yesterday, we linked to a Power Line item regarding Cuban dissident Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, who was awarded the Medal of Freedom from President Bush today, where he described Biscet as "a dangerous man" to the Cuban dictatorship--"He is dangerous in the same way that Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi were dangerous."

(And just to dovetail with Scott Johnson's post above, you just know the folks at AFP loved having to type that line.)

Biscet is also the topic of a recent video by The Wall Street Journal featuring columnist Mary Anastasia O'Grady:

In his latest "Best of the Web" post, James Taranto examines Hillary's Democrat debate kerfuffles last week (also discussed by John Fund in the video above) and concludes:

Male Democrats routinely do what Mrs. Clinton stands accused of doing now: pout and play the victim. There is no question that such behavior is unmanly. But it would be an outrageous sexist calumny to suggest that it is womanly. It is childish: Little boys and girls pout and play the victim. Grown men and women do not.

What about the politics of all this? Maybe it is true that women respond better to men to such childishness. Certainly they have tended to vote more Democratic than have men in recent presidential elections. Will a woman's playing the victim qua woman resonate even more with female voters than, say, Dukakis's or Kerry's crying over wounded patriotism? Perhaps. On the other hand, men vote too, and it also seems possible that they will find Mrs. Clinton's bellyaching especially off-putting.

There is another danger for Mrs. Clinton in all this. Her great advantage in the Democratic field is that she is the only one of the top candidates who comes across as a grown-up. Barack Obama seems like a bright young man who may do great things when he grows up. John Edwards is Peter Pan, Esq.

Being a woman sets Mrs. Clinton apart from the boys. Whining like a girl reduces her to their level.

Read the whole thing.

Back in 2003, UPI's James Bennett diagramed the latest rise of anti-Semitism on the continent of Europe, still reeling from the evils of the Holocaust. In the new issue of City Journal, Melanie Phillips diagrams "Britain’s Anti-Semitic Turn":

Anti-Semitism is rife within Britain’s Muslim community. Islamic bookshops sell copies of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the notorious czarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; as an undercover TV documentary revealed in January, imams routinely preach anti-Jewish sermons. Opinion polls show that nearly two-fifths of Britain’s Muslims believe that the Jewish community in Britain is a legitimate target “as part of the ongoing struggle for justice in the Middle East”; that more than half believe that British Jews have “too much influence over the direction of UK foreign policy”; and that no fewer than 46 percent think that the Jewish community is “in league with Freemasons to control the media and politics.”

But anti-Semitism has also become respectable in mainstream British society. “Anti-Jewish themes and remarks are gaining acceptability in some quarters in public and private discourse in Britain and there is a danger that this trend will become more and more mainstream,” reported a Parliamentary inquiry last year. “It is this phenomenon that has contributed to an atmosphere where Jews have become more anxious and more vulnerable to abuse and attack than at any other time for a generation or longer.”

At the heart of this ugly development is a new variety of anti-Semitism, aimed primarily not at the Jewish religion, and not at a purported Jewish race, but at the Jewish state. Zionism is now a dirty word in Britain, and opposition to Israel has become a fig leaf for a resurgence of the oldest hatred.

As it usually is.

Somebody's seen Waterworld and A.I. one too many times:

On Monday’s CBS "Early Show," co-host Harry Smith interviewed New York City Mayor, Michael Bloomberg. The liberal mayor has followed in the footsteps of Al Gore and implored the government to take action to address an impending environmental crisis, saying "We need to do something now." To match Bloomberg’s alarmist rhetoric, Smith added "Manhattan will be underwater by 2050." Amusingly, even Bloomberg thought that assertion went too far, "There's a -- I don't know that Manhattan will be underwater, but certainly the environment's going to be a lot worse that we leave our children."

Hey, I love Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick as much as the next guy, but I do know that A.I.'s only a movie.

Still though--for those who are true believers, it might be time to buy property in Trenton or Paramus. Could be prime beachfront real estate by 2050!

Video of a dim NBC Sunday night broadcast, here.

"Hollywood Writers Announce Strike".

Like I said before, fight it out hammer and tongs fellas; take as long as you need. You'll only be speeding up the migration to here.

Update: Much more from Roger L. Simon who's happy his day job keeps him off the picket lines.

When George Bush was elected president, I was told he would usher in the new dark ages. And they were right!

As exciting a game on the field as the first half of tonight's Cowboys at the Eagles was, the program that NBC built around it sure did have its moments of strangeness:

NBC's "Sunday Night Football" officially will become a "green" show this weekend, as it kicks off an initiative that will see the broadcaster televise 150 hours of environmentally-themed content this week across its broadcast and cable networks, online sites and mobile platforms.

Green week will start one hour into "Football Night in America," at 8:00pm ET. That's when studio host Bob Costas will explain the initiative.

About 90 seconds before the end of the pre-game show, NBC literally plans to turn the lights out, having the pregame crew finish the show in the dark. The studio lights will stay off through the halftime and post-game shows.

I had to not see it to believe it. Whenever I've done videos, I've spent hours getting the lights just so. Who knew it all you had to do was say, "Hey man, we're going dark to be green", and no lights at all are necessary.

Television: It's like radio without pictures!

Seriously though, all religions have their rituals which seem strange, old-fashioned, and just downright rococco to outsiders, and this is yet another example. (But wouldn't turning off the 90 babillion kilowatts of power that light-up a night game at the "Linc" have saved a helluva lot more energy than turning off a handful of Lowel Omnis back at the studio?)

For decades conservatives have complained endlessly about the big three TV networks' biases, only to be rebuffed by television journalists and producers who would respond with a shrug, "Biased? Us? Huh--sorry, I just can't see it, myself." (CBS's Dan Rather, not surprisingly, was a master at this technique.)

But lately, NBC has really let it all hang out, even on a show as mainstream as Sunday Night Football. Pink, the rockerette who screamed the show's theme song last year is a PETA spokeshumanoid. (Happily, this year she was replaced.) Keith Olbermann, who routinely compares conservatives to Nazis on NBC's MSNBC cable outlet appears on the pregame show and at halftime. This week show featured ads for Al Gore's upcoming appearance on 30 Rock, beyond Obama's appearance last night on Saturday Night Live. And elsewhere on NBC, their flagship Nightly News show is hosted by a man who has compared America's founding fathers to terrorists.

Earlier this year, retired Army Col. Ken Allard, then a regular contributor to NBC, had enough:

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

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

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

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

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

At the end of the 2004 presidential election, Howard Fineman of Newsweek wrote:

A political party is dying before our eyes--and I don't mean the Democrats. I'm talking about the "mainstream media," which is being destroyed by the opposition (or worse, the casual disdain) of George Bush's Republican Party; by competition from other news outlets (led by the internet and Fox's canny Roger Ailes); and by its own fraying journalistic standards.

And if anything, that trend has only accelerated.

So thank you, NBC, for letting viewers know where you stand. After after 80 long years of pretending otherwise, doesn't it feel good to finally come clean with your audience?

You can read related thoughts from Sister Toldjah--asuming the lights are still on in your den. And The Sundries Shack would like NBC to disclose each show's carbon footprint--"so I can determine whether they have any grounds on which to criticize me for my lifestyle."

Finally, "I notice they didn't turn off the bright lighted Toyota sign." Heh.^TM

"How many peaceniks who compulsively quote one sentence out of Ike's farewell address, warning about the 'military industrial complex', have read the whole speech?"

"Hezbollah did it. Iran runs Hezbollah. Er go, Iranians had a hand in the 1994 Buenos Aires Jewish center bombing that killed 85 people. 13 years later, justice may finally start catching up with the perps."

One huge problem with treating terrorism as a criminal matter, as the left would prefer: the wheels of international justice move at a pace that's makes glacial look supersonic.

"Mondale Endorses Clinton for President".

"Conservatives are down on President Bush, blaming him for everything under the sun, picking at him. Sure, he’s made mistakes. But he also has greatness in him. And this was a great act. In bestowing the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Oscar Biscet — an all-but-forgotten and all-but-helpless man in a Cuban dungeon — George Bush has done an incredibly large-hearted and important thing."

Don't miss this wonderful 2002 interview of the recently deceased Brig. Gen. Paul Tibbets by Studs Terkel:

Tibbets: I tell people I tasted it. "Well," they say, "what do you mean?" When I was a child, if you had a cavity in your tooth the dentist put some mixture of some cotton or whatever it was and lead into your teeth and pounded them in with a hammer. I learned that if I had a spoon of ice-cream and touched one of those teeth I got this electrolysis and I got the taste of lead out of it. And I knew right away what it was.

OK, we're all going. We had been briefed to stay off the radios: "Don't say a damn word, what we do is we make this turn, we're going to get out of here as fast as we can." I want to get out over the sea of Japan because I know they can't find me over there. With that done we're home free. Then Tom Ferebee has to fill out his bombardier's report and Dutch, the navigator, has to fill out a log. Tom is working on his log and says, "Dutch, what time were we over the target?" And Dutch says, "Nine-fifteen plus 15 seconds." Ferebee says: "What lousy navigating. Fifteen seconds off!"

ST: Did you hear an explosion?

PT: Oh yeah. The shockwave was coming up at us after we turned. And the tailgunner said, "Here it comes." About the time he said that, we got this kick in the ass. I had accelerometers installed in all airplanes to record the magnitude of the bomb. It hit us with two and a half G. Next day, when we got figures from the scientists on what they had learned from all the things, they said, "When that bomb exploded, your airplane was 10 and half miles away from it."

ST: Did you see that mushroom cloud?

PT: You see all kinds of mushroom clouds, but they were made with different types of bombs. The Hiroshima bomb did not make a mushroom. It was what I call a stringer. It just came up. It was black as hell, and it had light and colours and white in it and grey colour in it and the top was like a folded-up Christmas tree.

ST: Do you have any idea what happened down below?

PT: Pandemonium! I think it's best stated by one of the historians, who said: "In one micro-second, the city of Hiroshima didn't exist."

ST: You came back, and you visited President Truman.

PT: We're talking 1948 now. I'm back in the Pentagon and I get notice from the chief of staff, Carl Spaatz, the first chief of staff of the air force. When we got to General Spaatz's office, General Doolittle was there, and a colonel named Dave Shillen. Spaatz said, "Gentlemen, I just got word from the president he wants us to go over to his office immediately." On the way over, Doolittle and Spaatz were doing some talking; I wasn't saying very much. When we got out of the car we were escorted right quick to the Oval Office. There was a black man there who always took care of Truman's needs and he said, "General Spaatz, will you please be facing the desk?" And now, facing the desk, Spaatz is on the right, Doolittle and Shillen. Of course, militarily speaking, that's the correct order: because Spaatz is senior, Doolittle has to sit to his left.

Then I was taken by this man and put in the chair that was right beside the president's desk, beside his left hand. Anyway, we got a cup of coffee and we got most of it consumed when Truman walked in and everybody stood on their feet. He said, "Sit down, please," and he had a big smile on his face and he said, "General Spaatz, I want to congratulate you on being first chief of the air force," because it was no longer the air corps. Spaatz said, "Thank you, sir, it's a great honour and I appreciate it." And he said to Doolittle: "That was a magnificent thing you pulled flying off of that carrier," and Doolittle said, "All in a day's work, Mr President." And he looked at Dave Shillen and said, "Colonel Shillen, I want to congratulate you on having the foresight to recognise the potential in aerial refuelling. We're gonna need it bad some day." And he said thank you very much.

Then he looked at me for 10 seconds and he didn't say anything. And when he finally did, he said, "What do you think?" I said, "Mr President, I think I did what I was told." He slapped his hand on the table and said: "You're damn right you did, and I'm the guy who sent you. If anybody gives you a hard time about it, refer them to me."

Read the whole thing.

(Via Kate McMillan.)

Update: "Sometimes the transformative event comes in an instant, as it did out of the skies from a B-29 60 Augusts ago. Sometimes the transformation is slower and less perceptible: The United States that so confidently nuked two Japanese cities is as lost to us as the old pre-mushroom cloud Nagasaki."

A blogger linked to by Steven Den Beste explores the limits of multiculturalism:

I read a great comment by one of my favorite intellectuals, Camille Paglia in Salon last month critiquing the concept of multiculturalism. In short, the problem with multiculturalism is that it requires monocultures that have to not subscribe to the concept of multiculturalism. But you can’t really make other people subscribe to multiculturalism or else all those cultures start to bleed together and lose all of their individuality. Japan loses its “Japaneseness”, Turkey loses its “Turkishness”, Germany loses its “Germanness”, and so on unless you’re really good at making up history, like when Japan claims things from China, Korea, or the West as being Japanese. Now you’ve just got one homogenized culture left.

In his look at Alan Bloom's The Closing Of The American Mind two decades on, Mark Steyn writes that, not all that surprisingly, such a bland confection is about as filling as a can of Diet Coke:

“Popular culture” is more accurately a “present-tense culture”: You’re celebrating the millennium but you can barely conceive of anything before the mid-1960s. We’re at school longer than any society in human history, entering kindergarten at four or five and leaving college the best part of a quarter-century later—or thirty years later in Germany. Yet in all those decades we exist in the din of the present. A classical education considers society as a kind of iceberg, and teaches you the seven-eighths below the surface. Today, we live on the top eighth bobbing around in the flotsam and jetsam of the here and now. And, without the seven-eighths under the water, what’s left on the surface gets thinner and thinner.

As Steyn notes, "We are all rockers now"--and he's right. Just listen to what's playing on your local department store's muzak, which is probably indisuishingable from your local Classic Rock FM station:

Bloom is writing about rock music the way someone from the pre-rock generation experiences it. You’ve no interest in the stuff, you don’t buy the albums, you don’t tune to the radio stations, you would never knowingly seek out a rock and roll experience—and yet it’s all around you. You go to buy some socks, and it’s playing in the store. You get on the red eye to Heathrow, and they pump it into the cabin before you take off. I was filling up at a gas station the other day and I noticed that outside, at the pump, they now pipe pop music at you. This is one of the most constant forms of cultural dislocation anybody of the pre-Bloom generation faces: Most of us have prejudices: we may not like ballet or golf, but we don’t have to worry about going to the deli and ordering a ham on rye while some ninny in tights prances around us or a fellow in plus-fours tries to chip it out of the rough behind the salad bar. Yet, in the course of a day, any number of non-rock-related transactions are accompanied by rock music. I was at the airport last week, sitting at the gate, and over the transom some woman was singing about having two lovers and being very happy about it. And we all sat there as if it’s perfectly routine. To the pre-Bloom generation, it’s very weird—though, as he notes, “It may well be that a society’s greatest madness seems normal to itself.” Whether or not rock music is the soundtrack for the age that its more ambitious proponents tout it as, it’s a literal soundtrack: it’s like being in a movie with a really bad score. So Bloom’s not here to weigh the merit of the Beatles vs. Pink Floyd vs. Madonna vs. Niggaz with Attitude vs. Eminem vs. Green Day. They come and go, and there is no more dated sentence in Bloom’s book than the one where he gets specific and wonders whether Michael Jackson, Prince, or Boy George will take the place of Mick Jagger. But he’s not doing album reviews, he’s pondering the state of an entire society with a rock aesthetic.

That’s another reason I don’t like the term “popular culture”—because hardly any individual examples of popular culture are that popular. I don’t mean that whatever the current Number One single is this week will sell far fewer copies than the Number Ones of the 1940s, but in the sense that a gangsta rapper is not as popular as Puccini was ninety years ago, or Franz Lehár a century ago, or Offenbach. Popular culture has dwindled down to a bunch of mutually hostile unpopular popular cultures. The only thing about it that’s universally popular is its overall undemanding aesthetic.

So Bloom is less concerned with music criticism than with what happens when a society’s incidental music becomes its manifesto. The key to what’s happened is in the famous first sentence of the book. “There is,” writes the author, “one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.” To quote the African dictator in a Tom Stoppard play, a relatively free press is a free press run by one of my relatives. A relative culture ends up ever shorter of any relatives to relate to. In educational theory, it’s not about culture vs. “counter-culture” but rather what I once called lunch-counterculture: It’s all lined up for you and you pick what you want. It’s the display case of rotating pies at the diner: one day the student might pick Milton, the next Bob Dylan. But, if Milton and Bob Dylan are equally “valid,” equally worthy of study, then Bob Dylan will be studied and Milton will languish. And so it’s proved, most exhaustively, in music.

Which is, ironically enough, quite a contrast to the music that it replaced, the music of our parents and grandparents: In the 1950s, decades before rock and roll became The All-Pervasive Aural Wallpaper Of Our Lives, the average person had all sorts of cultures available to him, as they were absorbed into the American pop music of the time: boogie-woogie, Calypso, the Samba, the Waltz, the extended harmonies that Gil Evans was employing in the 1950s under Miles Davis' trumpet, these are all byproducts of extremely divergent cultures, as is European classical music of the prior centuries, which pop arrangers happily stole from, royalty free.

Hey, I love the late John Bonham's 16th-note kick drum patterns as much as the next guy, but it's amazing how much of the rest of pop culture got trampled underfoot along the way.

Update: On the other hand, "It's an obvious impossibility for an entire genre to not stumble into eternal truths on occasion and one place where rock consistently does so is in the bleak view of the battle of the sexes."

After Obama played himself wearing an Obama mask in an imaginary setting on Saturday Night Live, another presidential candidate dropped by the NBC studios:

Senator Thompson hit exactly the right note on Iran on this morning's Meet The Press, and Tim Russert did a great job in giving the looming confrontation with Iran the time it deserves.

Any American who doesn't understand Thompson's reference to the "12th Imam" should blame the MSM for a fundamental failure to report the crucial facts about the mullahs and their operatives, their ambitions and their ideology.

Senator Thompson joins Mayor Giuliani and Governor Romney in talking bluntly about the central issue in the world right now. Thus the top two and number three in the GOP race are all serious about the most serious issue, and not one Democratic candidate is.

Frank Rich worries that the election of 2008 will turn on Iran. He's right to worry because if it does, no Democrat will win because no Democrat is deling candidly with the prospect of this terrorist regime acquiring the nukes it is so obviously pursuing.

Like the man said, "History teaches us that underestimating the words of evil, ambitious men is a terrible mistake."

"It’s time for the press to declare themselves either free guardians of the public trust or owned members of a political movement. They can’t be both."

Interesting postmodern progression as liberal politics and show business continue their increasingly seamless blending. In 1992, it was a novelty when candidate Bill Clinton appeared on Arsenio Hall's chat show with his saxophone and Wayfairers. Then five years later, real-life footage of by-then President Clinton added verisimilitude when carefully inserted into key points of the Jodie Foster sci-fi drama, Contact. On Saturday, Barack Obama willingly appeared in in a sketch on Saturday Night Live to mock Hillary:

Can an interview with himself be far behind?

(Presumably, the current staff of SNL holds both Obama and Hillary in greater esteem than their predecessors did Gerald Ford, when he made his cameo appearance introducing the show while in office.)

Update: "Kind of funny, but not very presidential."

When Tony Said recently "the days of the old-fashioned newsroom are over", he didn't know the half of it!

RELIABLE SOURCES have informed this website that the American newspaper, The New York Times, passed away on October 20 at the age of 156. The same sources indicate that despite initial reports attributing the cause of death to chronic jaundice, the coroner’s report is expected to state the once-proud media outlet, formerly referred to as “the newspaper of record” by people who should have known better, died of self-inflicted wounds.

News of the fatality arrived at this site through a telephone call from the offices of the Saga Shimbun, a local newspaper in Japan. When asked if the reports of the Times’ demise were credible, the informant stated the Saga newspaper’s employees had spent the day in stunned disbelief and laughter after reading this article, which appeared on the 20th. “If they think this is journalism,” the informant stated, “rigor mortis set in decades ago. It’s absurd, starting with the premise, and it gets worse with each paragraph. I’m surprised this story got past an editor during the first draft.”

Via the trend-spotting, trend-setting Tim Blair.

Update: Another aging and sclerotic Manhattan dowager seems to be having a strange case of incontinence these days.

Frustrated at the thought of a Hollywood writers strike? Roger L. Simon suggests the perfect replacement for your favorite weekly show. Tune in each Thursday!

Tony Snow recently told his audience at the Media Institute that "everyone needs to realize that the days of the old-fashioned newsroom are over. It’s a different world out there – wilder, more competitive, and much less predictable than even a decade ago":

Rather than cursing innovation, journalists need to embrace it. They need to get out of their cubicles and plunge into the task that drew most of us into the business in the first place –the challenge of engaging a chaotic world filled with willful fellow human beings; a world of joy and agony; of triumph and crushing failure; a world united by love and atomized by hatreds and aggression, [sic: comma in original--Ed]

The democratic media provide new tools for examining our world, new competitors for reporting about that world, and new reminders to the press establishment that markets really do work – and people want better than they’re getting.

I come not to bury journalism, but to celebrate and challenge it. It’s a cliché that every crisis presents an opportunity, but it’s true: The democratization of the media is a good thing. We now face competition from all quarters – including from people who have specialized expertise that journalists lack. We ought to welcome the new participants in the game and learn from them. They should do the same with us.

There’s an old boast in the business – that the job of a journalist is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. The thing is, we never realized that we were becoming The Comfortable – with good pay, job security, and access to movers and shakers all around the world. We need to cast off our coziness — venture away from safe stories and presumptions and into the wilderness of new topics, new ideas and new sources of information.
In that quest lies the possibility of fulfillment and joy — and the hope of keeping alive the text and the spirit of the First Amendment.

Read the whole thing. Found, logically enough, via two sources which have done much to speed up the acceleration of the dino-media, Instapundit and Newsbusters.

"You can have my Ho Hos when you pry them from my cold, dead hands!" is the rallying cry that seems to emerge from Andy Kessler's recent Tech Central Station piece. Which isn't the first time the Cali Cupcake Cops have reared their ugly new puritan heads--recall this post by Virginia Postrel from a few years ago on a very similar theme.

Related: Gee, that only took about 15 years! NBC has only just now figured out that maybe, just maybe, there's a nanny state.

More: Meanwhile, Iowans--particularly right around this time each year--fear the dreaded Pumpkin Police!

In "Death by Political Correctness", the Weekly Standard's Charlotte Allen performs a detailed forensic reconstruction of the long strange train wreck that is Antioch College.

John Edwards takes the opera gloves off:

Greg Beato writes, "type 'best practices for newspapers' into Google, and The Onion is nowhere to be found. Maybe it should be":

Are there any other newspapers that can boast a 60 percent increase in print circulation over the past three years? Yet as traditional newspapers continue to lose readers, only industry mavericks like the New York Times’ Jayson Blair and USA Today’s Jack Kelley have looked to The Onion for inspiration.

One reason The Onion isn’t taken more seriously is that it’s actually fun to read. In 1985, cultural critic Neil Postman published the influential Amusing Ourselves to Death, which warned of the fate that would befall us if public discourse were allowed to become substantially more entertaining than, say, a Neil Postman book. Today, newspapers are eager to entertain—in their Travel, Food, and Style sections, that is. But even as scope creep has made the average big-city newspaper less portable than a 10-year-old laptop, hard news invariably comes in a single flavor: Double Objectivity Sludge.

Too many high priests of journalism still see humor as the enemy of seriousness: If the news goes down too easily, it can’t be very good for you. But do The Onion and its more fact-based acolytes, “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report,” monitor current events any less rigorously than, say, the Columbia Journalism Review?

During the past few years, multiple surveys by the Pew Research Center and the Annenberg Public Policy Center have found that viewers of “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” are among America’s most informed citizens. Now, it may be that Jon Stewart isn’t making anyone smarter; perhaps America’s most informed citizens simply prefer comedy over the stentorian drivel the network anchor-mannequins dispense. But at the very least, such surveys suggest that news sharpened with satire doesn’t cause the intellectual coronaries Postman predicted. Instead, it seems to correlate with engagement.

It’s easy to see why readers connect with The Onion, and it’s not just the jokes: Despite its “fake news” purview, it’s an extremely honest publication. Most dailies, especially those in monopoly or near-monopoly markets, operate as if they’re focused more on not offending readers (or advertisers) than on expressing a worldview of any kind.

The Onion takes the opposite approach. It delights in crapping on pieties and regularly publishes stories guaranteed to upset someone: “Millions Participate In Cuban Version Of ‘Survivor.’” “Heroic PETA Commandos Kill 49, Save Rabbit.” “Gay Pride Parade Sets Mainstream Acceptance of Gays Back 50 Years.” There’s no predictable ideology running through those headlines, just a desire to express some rude, blunt truth about the world.

Actually, there may well be an ideology hidden in those headlines, and it may not be the one you think.

(Incidentally, the Onion's online videos are also often both very funny, and have absolutely first-class production values.)

As Jonah Goldberg has written recently, the Amazon page for his upcoming book has become one of the frontlines in the cold civil war: when it's not being hacked, it's subject to the worst sort of derogatory comments and innuendo. I'm about a third of the way through the galleys of Jonah's book, which makes all of the shadowboxing of the Amazonians all the more astonishing: having not seen the actual contents of the book themselves, it's fascinating how they're driving themselves insane over merely a title, a subhead, and a book cover. It will be interesting to see how the dialogue changes once the book starts getting into the hands of readers, and its ideas start being discussed in the Blogosphere and beyond.

"My cell phone rang, and I could tell Anita Thompson was crying...'The L.A. Times just did a piece ... It's just so wrong'":

"He wrote more in the final five years of his life than he did in the previous 15 years of his life," said Mrs. Thompson, who . . . is currently working with Tulane University professor Douglas Brinkley on a collection of her husband's interviews to be published next year.

"Some of Hunter's most astute writing was in those ESPN columns," she said.

Really? This wasn't exactly one of Dr. Gonzo's more astute moments.

...Or maybe it was, which would make his latter days all the more wistful in retrospect.

In Slate, Josh Levin offers some very good suggestions to fix it. But minimizing the number of what James Taranto would call "Wannabe Pundits" (an ongoing phenomenon which hit bottom when SI's writers used Pat Tillman's death in Afghanistan to let their BDS run rampant) would help enormously to make what holds itself out as a mass-media entertainment publication readable again to those of us whose worldview wasn't formed on the Upper West Side.

Maybe if Jerry had brought a babka...

"Until recently, these types of protesters tried to sidestep the accusation that they're anti-American by saying that Bush is the world's #1 terrorist. But now that Bush is leaving office soon, they've dropped the pretense."

I've been getting numerous visitors today searching on "Deborah Santana"; they've been going to my post with a photograph of Carlos Santana and his wife Deborah at the 2006 Oscars, with Carlos in his dinner jacket and uber-reactionary Che T-shirt, and now I know why: they're declaring their marriage splitsville.

For those who are interested, here are the details from the San Jose Mercury of their divorce announcement.

Stephen Spruiell parses out yet another attack on this week's Public Enemy Number One.

Investor's Business Daily notes, "Even Harvard Finds The Media Biased":

The debate is over. A consensus has been reached. On global warming? No, on how Democrats are favored on television, radio and in the newspapers.

Via Small Dead Animals. Be sure to follow the link on her related item.

Update: Further thoughts on the IBD essay from Tom Maguire.

Leftwing opinions on the War On Terror and its component battles have been conflicted, to say the least. And then there was this recent, curious, statement:

[Justice Stevens] won a bronze star for his [World War II] service as a cryptographer, after he helped break the code that informed American officials that Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, the commander of the Japanese Navy and architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, was about to travel to the front. Based on the code-breaking of Stevens and others, U.S. pilots, on Roosevelt’s orders, shot down Yamamoto’s plane in April 1943.

Stevens told me he was troubled by the fact that Yamamoto, a highly intelligent officer who had lived in the United States and become friends with American officers, was shot down with so little apparent deliberation or humanitarian consideration. The experience, he said, raised questions in his mind about the fairness of the death penalty. “I was on the desk, on watch, when I got word that they had shot down Yamamoto in the Solomon Islands, and I remember thinking: This is a particular individual they went out to intercept,” he said. “There is a very different notion when you’re thinking about killing an individual, as opposed to killing a soldier in the line of fire.” Stevens said that, partly as a result of his World War II experience, he has tried on the court to narrow the category of offenders who are eligible for the death penalty and to ensure that it is imposed fairly and accurately. He has been the most outspoken critic of the death penalty on the current court.

But lest you think the left has gone soft, there is one man--one very, very dangerous enemy of the state--that they believe should be terminated with extreme prejudice.