It's easy to look at the headlines and chart a trendline straight to the abyss. But here are two positive developments that could bode well for the future:

"Gen X is least prone to adultery."

And survey says..."Generation Y biggest user of libraries."

Both sound like good news to me.

In Mark Steyn's "Happy Warrior" column in the latest edition of National Review On Dead Tree (subscription required to read online, but likely soon reprinted on Mark's Website, he compares Hollywood's recent string of anti-war duds with the plot of Mel Brooks' classic romp, The Producers:

Why have these films tanked? Roger L. Simon, a screenwriter himself, made the point that these films are “essentially inauthentic.” “The filmmakers think they are supposed to be antiwar, but they don’t feel it in their guts,” he writes. “This feels to me like a cinema of ‘received wisdom,’ not based on personal experience or ‘emotional knowledge’ of any kind.”

That sounds right. One reason the Oscar shows of the early Seventies are such a hoot compared with the butt-numbing snoozeroos of today is the tension and sniping between the John Wayne/Bob Hope/Frank Sinatra set and the hipster crowd reading out telegrams from the Viet Cong. Back then, being anti-war meant taking a side. In today’s Hollywood, being anti-war is the only side. I don’t believe Brian De Palma can tell you why he opposes the Iraq War. In fact, I doubt he thinks about it all that much. And when he does, he thinks about it through the prism of Vietnam. And you can’t make that template fit.

In a way, there’s something heartening about the inability of so many Hollywood A-listers to make a decent anti-war film. For a start, they’re all about the wickedness of the troops or Dick Cheney or some shadowy agency deep inside the administration. The actual “enemy” are largely absent. They fulfill the same role the natives do in old-school British Empire yarns: an exotic distant backdrop for conflicts played out between two different groups of white man. These days, there are “bad” Americans (the Pentagon, CIA, Halliburton) and a “good” American (usually a lawyer, journalist, or stonewalled spouse) who blows the whistle. But the glamorous guerrilla of yore is hard to transplant to the new conflict: To convey one of the chaps wreaking havoc in the Sunni Triangle or the Hindu Kush with any honesty, he’d have to be shown as theocratic, misogynist, and homophobic. You might as well make him a Republican congressman.

Which sounds like a very different reason than why filmmakers of 1970s and '80s rarely showed the North Vietnamese in full action. (With one noticeable and iconoclastic exception, whose director probably isn't too surprised by Hollywood's current string of anti-war bombs.

Geoffrey Norman suggests giving the Athlete of the Year award to one of Michael Vick's dogs: "Those dogs played for truly big stakes. If Peyton Manning had blown the Super Bowl, he would have been out a few commercials. The dogs got hanged. Or worse."

As the Vick and Barry Bonds stories indicate, along with Tom Brady fathering a child out of wedlock, and all of the lesser crimes and misdemeanors of the players who make up the NFL, NBA and MLB, professional athletics in general ended 2007 looking awfully tawdry:

And that, in fact, might be the big sports story of 2007: the end, not of illusions, but of disillusionment. After all, in order to be disillusioned, you need illusions. The kid who pleaded, “Say it ain’t so, Joe,” to Shoeless Joe Jackson after the White Sox had fixed a World Series for the benefit of gamblers was honestly dismayed. He believed, quaintly, in the integrity of the game.

The games are the back-story, now. The 2007 Super Bowl? Boring, but winning it did get Peyton some more endorsements. World Series? Red Sox and ho hum. NBA finals? Can’t even remember. But the Barry Bonds story? That baby had legs. And the Mike Vick saga? Hard to think of a case, since Icarus, where the fortunes of a single star have soared so high and then crashed so spectacularly. You could have said it was “tragic,” if it hadn’t been for the dogs. Those poor beasts made it merely tawdry; like just about everything else in sports in the unlamented year of two thousand and seven.

Meanwhile, Brent Bozell has some thoughts on the year in entertainment, where no further disillusionment is necessary.

Update: While I mentioned the Patriots' Tom Brady above, I forgot to mention his coach's win-at-all-costs predilection for illicit videotaping, yet another lowpoint for the NFL this year.

The People's Cube Website "Pwns Iranian Propaganda":

Dear Iranian Mullahs! While our satirical website and your Propaganda Directorate deal in the same trade of making up facts and exaggerating reality, we are different in that we can recognize a spoof - but you apparently can't. On Dec. 27, 2007 you used our spoof image on your propaganda website to illustrate a "true" statement that Jews are welcome in Iran and that Western reports about mass emigration of Iranian Jews are "lies spread by the Zionist hegemony."

Evil Bert could not be reached for comment.

Update: Nor could Achmed the Dead Terrorist.

Related: Rollover fun!

The Website of the great City Journal magazine, published by the Manhattan Institute, has been redesigned with a slick new look. And to kick off the rapidly approaching new year, a lead essay from one of the magazine's more prominent fans--a former mayor of Manhattan who's currently running for president. (And no, it's not Nurse Bloomberg.)

Responding to Benazir Bhutto's death, Bill Richardson immediately quipped:

“President Bush should press Musharraf to step aside, and a broad-based coalition government, consisting of all the democratic parties, should be formed immediately... It is in the interests of the U.S. that there be a democratic Pakistan that relentlessly hunts down terrorists.”

Uh-huh. Not surprisingly, Mark Steyn responds, "Wow. Who knew it was that easy?":

One way to look at what’s happened over the last five years is simply that Afghanistan and Pakistan have swapped roles. In the Eighties, Washington used Pakistan to subvert Afghanistan. Since the fall of Mullah Omar, the Taliban, a monster incubated by Pakistan, has swarmed back across the border and begun subverting Pakistan. Today, it’s the tribal lands that have a 200-yard corridor through the rest of the country, exporting Islamist values through the network of madrassahs to the fierce young men in the cities. Just as the Taliban eventually seized control of Afghanistan, so they believe they’ll one day control Pakistan. Stan-wise, the principal difference is that control of the latter will bring them a big bunch of nukes. Meanwhile, life goes on. Just as the tribal lands seem to be swallowing Pakistan, so Pakistan is swallowing much of the world. It exports its manpower and its customs around the globe, and Pakistani communities in the heart of west have provided the London School of Economics student who masterminded the beheading of Daniel Pearl, the Torontonians who plotted to do the same to the Canadian Prime Minister, and the Yorkshiremen who pulled off the London Tube bombing. Saudi men pay lip service to Wahhabist ideology but it rouses very few of them from their customary torpor. In Pakistan, Islamism spurs a lot more action.

No people are immutable. It’s worth noting that Muslims next door in India are antipathetic to jihad. Yet they are ethnically and religiously indistinguishable from the fellows in Islamabad wiring up one-year old babies as unwitting suicide bombers. The only reason one’s an Indian and the other’s a Pakistani is because of where some British cartographer decided to draw the line in 1947. Since then, Indian Muslims have been functioning members of a modern pluralist democracy, while Pakistani Muslims have been mired in incompetence, backwardness and dictatorship, and embraced jihadism as the most viable escape route. Reversing that pathology would have been beyond Benazir Bhutto’s pretty face. Or even the best-laid five-minute plans of Bill Richardson.

Similarly, how bad was fellow Democrat presidential hopeful Barack Obama's response? So bad that even noted Middle Eastern policy expert John Edwards labeled them "ridiculous."

"Obama told his supporters if he doesn't win in 2008, he won't be trying again later on."

Orrin Judd quips, "God forbid he should run when he might be mildly qualified." But it's not like any journalist will question Obama about his past statements in four, eight or 12 years. Nor will any of his potential supporters hold it against him if he changes his mind.

Rhetoric versus reality: Peggy Noonan writes, "Good luck, Iowa. The eyes of the nation are upon you."

But, as Jonah Goldberg reminds us, "In Iowa, where residents are told every day for a year that the fate of the world hangs on their vote, fewer than 1% of the population attends the caucuses. And Iowans are supposed to take 'the process' extremely seriously."

P.J. O'Rourke attempts to read the late Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s Journals, and ultimately abandons ship:

I made it all the way to page 12 before I was stopped cold by this sentence about Adlai Stevenson: "He is the one man in politics today who strikes an authentically new and fresh note." And that note would be? Ah, the note that was passed to Adlai in every classroom of grade school, high school, and Princeton--the small, crumpled piece of paper upon which was written, "LOSER!!!"

Read the whole thing, it's a scream; sort of an article-length version of Groucho's old line: "From the moment I picked up your book until the moment I put it down, I couldn't stop laughing. Some day I hope to read it."

The San Francisco Comical Chronicle's network of experts, editors, and fact checkers swing into action to report on the SF Zoo's killer tiger incident as only they and their vast resources can:

"Experts say that the depth of the moat and height of the walls could have a large impact on the animal's ability to escape the enclosure."

Who knew?!

Michelle Malkin writes on the real top story of 2007, and why it's gained so little traction in the MSM:

There’s a reason the magazine and newspaper editors are naming everything but the surge as their top story of the year. (Putin? The Virginia Tech massacre? Come on.) Good news in the war on terror is bad news for those rooting for failure. Far easier to play up casualties and sectarian strife, sensationalize accusations of atrocities, and demonize the men and women in uniform to indulge Bush Derangement Syndrome, as Washington Post staffer and NBC military analyst William Arkin did on Jan. 30 when he lambasted troops for enjoying “obscene amenities” and serving as a “mercenary” force.

Read the whole thing.

Which is the more craptacular Spider-Man PSA:

Spider-Man and Planned Parenthood from the 1970s?

Or Spider-Man and the United Nations, coming next year?

You make the call! (Preferably to Stan Lee, telling him to cut this stuff out.)

John Bolton will join Tammy Bruce at 3:00 PM pacific, along with Claudia Rossett, as Tammy sits in this week for Larry Elder on L.A.'s KABC.

And if you can't tune into that, don't miss PJM Political on XM's POTUS '08 channel at 6:00 PM eastern/3:00 PM pacific. (Podcast online--so tune into Tammy, then listen here.)

You know you're in the land of plenty when...

There's a podcast titled, "Diet in Decline: Can America's Overnutrition Crisis be Reversed?"

(Overnutrition?! God, I love that.)

And as Mickey Kaus writes, "This evening NBC Nightly News billboarded a 'housing CRISIS.' I thought a 'housing crisis' was when people couldn't find housing, not when it got cheaper. (NBC's expert: 'It's very, very difficult to find any silver lining.' No it's not.) ..."

To paraphrase Orrin Judd, every people should face such crises.

Jonah Goldberg makes a great point in his Real Clear Politics essay: "There's been a lot of hand-wringing over the spectacle of presidential candidates campaigning during Christmas thanks to the front-loaded primary schedule. But I like it. It provides a nice reminder of how unimportant politics really are":

Washington pundits and politicians have a habit of equating America's collective political mood with our feelings about our own lives. When Americans say the country is "on the wrong track" -- as three-quarters of us now say -- the pundits proclaim that Americans are in a "funk" or a "sour mood." When approval ratings for Congress or the president are in the toilet, news reports call Americans "angry" and the climate "poisonous." But walk along any American Main Street during Christmas week and you'll find the atmosphere is hardly poisonous, the mood far from sour.

Obviously, dissatisfaction with the government is hugely important in political terms, and politics are significant. But Washington needs to get over itself. Very few people define their lives politically -- a fact for which we should all be eternally grateful.

Or as Lily Tomlin once said, "Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hard-working, honest Americans. It’s the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then—we elected them."

Theodore Dalrymple writes, "Researchers from Michigan found that people in divorced households spent 46 and 56 percent more on electricity and water, respectively, than did people in married households. This outcome is not all that surprising: marriage involves (among many other things, of course) economies of scale":

One of the interesting questions that this little piece of research poses is whether the environmentalist lobby will now throw itself behind the cause of family values. Will it, for example, push for the tightening of divorce laws, and for financial penalties—in the form, say, of higher taxes—to be imposed on those who insist upon divorcing, and therefore upon using 46 percent more electricity and 52 percent more water per person than married couples who stay together? Will environmentalists march down the streets with banners reading SAVE THE PLANET: STAY WITH THE HUSBAND YOU HATE?

For myself, I doubt it. Yet these figures, if true, are certainly suggestive. The fact that there will be no demonstrations against environmentally destructive divorcees, who probably emit as much extra carbon dioxide as the average SUV, suggests that the desire to save the planet is not nearly as powerful as the desire to destroy a way of life.

Well, yeah.

Glenn Reynolds and Helen Smith interview Jonah Goldberg on his new must-read book, Liberal Fascism in a wide-ranging 39 minute podcast. Watch for my review of Jonah's book in the March issue of the New Individualist.

Details as they come in at Hot Air.

Rudy Giuliani's statement on the assassination, here.

Update: Romney and McCain weigh in as well.

Mark Steyn adds, "She was everything we in the west would like a Muslim leader to be. We should be modest enough to acknowledge when reality conflicts with our illusions. Rest in peace, Benazir."

More: President Bush issue statement, vowing that the attackers must “be brought to justice.” Bryan Preston of Hot Air asks: define justice, please.

Evidently, whatever England learned from the aftermath of its first go-around with appeasement 70 years ago has long since been forgotten.

George Jonas writes "The newsweekly Maclean's and the brilliant Steyn are the best and biggest to find themselves in the jaws of [Canada's] Human Rights Dragon, not the first":

In the summer of 1977, shortly after it came into being, Manitoba's Human Rights Commission took it upon itself to caution Maclean's for Barbara Amiel having used the word "Hun" with reference to Germans in an article about the war-years. The Commission felt it had a mandate to express a government-sanctioned disapproval over a journalist's choice of words. The post-liberal state's action against Maclean's and Steyn comes on the 30th anniversary of the post-liberal state's warning against Maclean's and Amiel. This doesn't show a liberal agenda hijacked or kidnapped; it shows an illiberal agenda that was there right from the beginning.

Someone should write a book about this topic.

Rob Port writes that retail sales were up 3.6 percent, or 2.4 if you discount fuel sales:

(though it seems to me that those should be included; the economic health of our gas stations is every bit as important as the economic health of our retail stores).

* * *

The New York Times is calling these retail numbers “bleak,” but I’d be willing to wager that the folks at the Times would be dancing in the streets if their stock prices had seen 3.6% growth instead of the negative growth their stock has seen for most of the year.

Indeed.^TM And speaking of which, Glenn Reynolds notes that online sales were up over 22 percent. And don't miss this email from one of his readers:

The same schmuck, Michael Barbaro, wrote a similar story in 2005. He also wrote a story back in September of his year trying to say back to school sales only looked good, but really weren't:

Why do we care what the some schmuck at the New York Times writes anymore, anyway?

It's like reading something Andrew Sullivan writes and instead of saying, "Sullivan thinks....." we write, "The Blogosphere today announced that...."

Bologne. We need to get out of the habit of saying, "The New York Times....." and giving backing to these folks. Instead, we should say, "Michael Barbaro wrote....." and treat him just like we'd treat anyone in the blogosphere.

But the Times has layers of gatekeepers: Editors! Researchers! They wouldn't let an error or anything that smacks of an agenda creep into their paper, or its reporting on economic conditions, both here and abroad.

(And despite the best efforts of the MSM to throw cold water on it, we hope your Christmas was as enjoyable as ours. Watch for intermittent posting from us the rest of the week.)

Update: "Seven Year American Recession Watch Remains On High Alert", and it will for another 11 months--and maybe even another four years after that.

Posting will no doubt be a bit sparse on Christmas day (not that I was a posting machine yesterday, of course; I'm very happily on vacation this week). In the meantime, let me take this opportunity to wish everyone:

A Very Merry Christmas!

Related:

And via Hot Air:

Neo-Neocon: "Twas the bloggers’ night before Christmas."

Well, after aiding the North Vietnamese and then being forgainst the Iraq War, Senator Kerry has finally found a worthy advisory to fight: the NFL's cable network.

Mickey Kaus has a must-read post that dovetails remarkably well with the Don Surber article I linked to earlier today. Don wrote that the Lewinsky scandal "turned journalism inside out"--and one of the eventual results has been the birth of two very divergent voter classes:

Room Eight's Jerry Skurnick has suggested that the electoarate is splitting into two diverging parts--people who follow politics and people who don't--with the people who follow politics much better informed than the were before (thanks to cable, web, etc.) and the people who don't follow politics less well informed (they used to get at least some information from Walter Cronkite). That certainly rings true to me. And it may, as Skurnick claims, explain some of the new volatility in polling--e.g., when the uninformed majority suddenly discovers, say, that Rudy Giuliani has been married three times.

But there's a second way to divide the electorate that asks how the voters inform themselves. Do they rely on the traditional Mainstream Media (MSM), or do they get their political information from the Web, from cable news, from the tabloids, etc. This division may have once seemed unimportant, but it doesn't anymore--its seriousness is suggested by the MSM's impressive resistance to stories bubbling up from the blogs and the tabs that don't meet MSM standards (putting aside whether you regard those standards as high or merely idiosyncratic). "Rielle Hunter"--the woman whom the National Enquirer alleges was John Edwards' mistress--was the top-searched name on the MSN site at one point Thursday, I'm told. Meanwhile, in the traditional mainstream press, 'Rielle Hunter" was mentioned only ... well, zero times.

Of the two ways to divide the electorate, the second is arguably more important. After all, even those who don't follow politics, will eventually inform themselves before the election.** But if the MSM/Web barrier remains as robust as it's been, those who inform themselves from the MSM will find out something different, when they finally tune in, than those who go to the Web and learn both the news and what might be called the "undernews." *** If you're thinking of voting as a Democrat in Iowa or New Hampshire, you might watch NBC and never know about this messy Rielle Hunter business. Or you might read DailyKos know the whole allegation plus the arguments against it plus seven theories about how it came to light. That knowledge might cause voters to vote against Edwards or to vote for him--but either way first they have to find out.

Likewise, TNR's Noam Scheiber suggests that the egghead sector ( "urban, college-educated liberals") of the Democratic party--which used to be less partisan and combative than the blue-collar/labor sector--is now more partisan and combative, because its eggy heads are wrapped up in Kos and other anti-Bush sites, where they absorb the latest undernews about the machinations of Karl Rove and Tom DeLay. Scheiber argues this is a good development for Obama, who surprisingly doesn't have to become more partisan then he actually is in order to win over non-egghead (labor) Dems.

As Mickey writes (and it's well worth reading the rest of his post), "The 2008 campaign will be a test of the relative strength of these various differently-informed electorates."

Onboard the Ron Paul mothership: "it’s hard out here for a blimp."

Glenn Reynolds writes that for Mike Huckabee, it could be deja vu all over again:

Shades of Jim Wright? Well, possibly. Reader Bill Nelson sends a link to this report that Novo Nordisk -- the stem-cell company -- distributed 35,000 copies of Huckabee's book, translated into Spanish, for free. No word what Huckabee was paid; possibly nothing, possibly a lot. No doubt people will be asking the campaign about it.

Indeed^TM. Read the whole thing^TM.

Meanwhile, some very much related thoughts from Jim Geraghty.

Don Surber writes that a key milestone is fast approaching: the 10th anniversary of the Monica Lewinsky story. As Don writes, how newspaper journalists choose to describe how the Lewinsky scandal was broken will say volumes about what they think about their readers:

Now here is the test for readers as they read in the next month rehashes of the Lewinsky scandal: Does the newspaper or columnist view the emergence of Drudge and the Internet as a good thing or bad?

The whiners will complain that no one controls the Internet and that a lot of the information is inaccurate.

Yes. And people soon learn which sites to trust. As bloggers point out, Jayson Blair worked for the New York Times, not Lucianne.com.

Another complaint is there is too much celebrity news now, as if no one paid attention to the trials involving Fatty Arbuckle, Gloria Vanderbilt and Lana Turner's daughter.

The 20th century had at least a dozen trials of the century.

Then there is the complaint that Drudge is a conservative.

But he seldom writes. He links. And the things he links to appear in liberal publications as well as conservative ones as well as middle-of-the-road sites.

He did not become popular by suppressing the news. That seems to be the job of the editors at Newsweek.

Of course, how the legacy media viewed their successors is public record. In their youth, leftwing journalists might have happily sung along with John Lennon in the late 1960s and said they wanted a revolution. But thirty years later, they certainly acted like the entrenched reactionaries they had become when it dared impinge upon their own profession.

"Well, we’ve been able to accomplish quite a bit, but not very much."---Senator Harry Reid.

Blade Runner junkies may enjoy my review of the final final cut (we hope!) of the film, over at Pajamas Media.

As Mark Hemingway writes:

Let the cry be heard far and wide! I just discovered there's a blog called "Free Mark Steyn!" that is up and running with with information about his case. And the blog pointed me to the fact that there's a Facebook group called "Defend Free Speech in Canada — The Case of Mark Steyn." So far the group only has 16 members, but you now have your marching orders.

Another way to support Steyn is to shop early and often at his Website, of course.

In case you haven't seen them yet, two podcasts which I produced are online at the Pajamas motherblog:

This week's PJM Political, with Sen. John McCain, Evan Sayet, and Steve Green of VodkaPundit.

The debut of Austin Bay's new podcast, Deep Background, with Michael Knox Beran, author of Forge of Empires and "How Lincoln Saved The World."

And speaking of deep background, also at Pajamas are the "Director's Cut" editions of several of this week's PJM Political segments--Evan Sayet's terrific speech at the Heritage Foundation (in which he outs himself as a "9/13 Republican"), the full length version of The Glenn & Helen Show's interview with John McCain, and James Lileks' segment on this week's PJM Political.

"Make Global Warming A Priority": Indeed--this poor frozen soul looks like he needs all the help he can get!

Back in early 2006, Fred Siegel dubbed H.L. Mencken the seemingly contradictory descriptive of "Anarcho-Authoritarian":

Part of the reason it's so hard to make sense of Mencken is that he was, paradoxically, an anarcho-authoritarian. He agreed with the American Civil Liberties Union on the importance of free speech. But while that organization, under the influence of principled men such as Felix Frankfurter, argued for such freedoms on the grounds that "a marketplace of ideas" (to use Justice Holmes's term) was the best method of arriving at the truth, Mencken supported it in order to shield superior men like himself from being hobbled by the little people. For the same reason, Mencken was a near anarchist when it came to America, but an authoritarian when it came to the iron rule of the Kaiser and General Ludendorff. We are more familiar with anarcho-Stalinists such as William Kunstler, who had a parallel attitude toward the United States and the Soviet empire, but it was Mencken who blazed the trail down which Kunstler and his ilk would travel.

Reading Roger L. Simon's profile of Vanessa Redgrave, it seems safe to say that she'd qualify as an Anarcho-Authoritarian as well:

Vanessa has another side as a (sometimes Trotskyist) political activist. This week we learn she has been helping Guantanamo suspects, including one Jamil el-Banna accused of “producing extremist propaganda for Osama bin Laden,” putting up half of a 50,000 pound bail surety for el-Banna and a Libyan named Omar Deghayes who has links to the same al-Qaeda cell. The actress commented, “It is a profound honour and I am glad to be alive to be able to do this… Guantanamo Bay is a concentration camp. It is a disgrace that these men have been kept there all these years.”

Concentration camp? Well I imagine it’s not a very comfortable place. It’s a prison for enemy combatants. But “concentration camp” is an explosive term, evoking images of Auschwitz or the Gulag where tens of millions died, many gassed or starved to death, assuming they weren’t first lined up against the wall, shot and tossed into pits.

No one, to my knowledge, has been murdered in Guantanamo. Difficult jurisdictional questions have arisen with legitimate human rights questions asked. There have been a few reported suicides, though I am not sure how well documented. But starvation has not been a problem. According to many reports, the detainees have never eaten so well (four meals a day) and obesity might be more of an issue. Of course, there was that report in Newsweek a couple of years back that, to punish an unruly inmate, a US military guard had flushed a Koran down the toilet. Only it was then discovered that there weren’t flush toilets, only chemical toilets, at Guantanamo, so such an act was physically impossible.

Vanessa probably missed the retraction in Newsweek. It didn’t exactly appear on the front page. Nevertheless, I doubt the fine points mean that much to her. The actress is of the school that anything done by the West, particularly the capitalist West, is suspect. She is able to overlook the ideology of al-Qaeda in this regard, which is a particularly rigorous gymnastic considering the misogyny and homophobia of the al-Qaeda worldview. No doubt the Islamist group would ban many of the films in which Redgrave appeared, including Antonioni’s Blow-Up, in which she performed basically deshabille, and Wilde, in which she portrayed the homosexual playwright’s mother. In fact, it’s likely they would ban all her films, except perhaps a documentary she made with some Palestinian activists, and about that I’m not sure, given the internecine rivalries between various Fatah and Hamas factions. (It gets, excuse the phrase, Talmudic.)

But no matter. What’s important is how Vanessa appears – to herself and the public. It’s a kind of narcissism mixed with epater le bourgeoisie, masquerading as defense of the downtrodden, although these particular downtrodden are locked in an ideology that ensures their own continued misfortune. And the more the West is blamed for that misfortune, the longer it continues. Vanessa is in essence part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Yet again this does not bother her or even penetrate her radar screen. We should all be grateful, however, for her acting, just as we should all be grateful for the acting of the similarly unconscious Sean Penn (perhaps not entirely coincidentally also from an eminent theatrical family).

What intrigues me in all this is the relationship, if any, between talent and ideological blindness or rigidity. It’s not as simple as it seems. It could be the development of these false separate selves, these mini-me’s, that take the extreme positions, such as a Redgrave or Penn or Sarandon or, to a lesser extent, Streisand, have done, enhances the illusion of empathy that creates their art. It is generative artistically while being toxic politically. The Sean Penn who embraces Hugo Chavez is the same Sean Penn who gave us Jeff Spicoli. It would be great if we could have one without the other, but maybe, in some cases, we can’t.

Sadly no--but it's not all that new a development, for what it's worth.

"Chuck Norris sues, says his tears no cancer cure."

Well, it's good to see that there are limits to his otherwise omnipotent Chucktacular powers!

Yesterday, I mentioned the American Conservative magazine's trainwreck cover story/Godwin's law violating hit piece on Rudy Giuliani. As David Frum writes, the cover illustration "depicts him in fascist pose and costume: black shirt, bandolier, jutting Mussolini jaw":

In the past, garb like that shown on the mayor would have made the hearts of the editors of the American Conservative go pit-a-pit. "She is not a bad girl at all ..." co-founder Taki Thedoropoulos wrote of a society acquaintance in 2003, "but her problem is she loves publicity about as much as I love the Wehrmacht."

And yet oddly enough, this time the fascist posture is not offered by the American Conservative as an endorsement.

* * *

Have we really reached the point where a magazine that masquerades under the label of "conservative" thinks that the very worst possible allegation to throw against a president is that he has advisers who admire Israel and support democracy, that he knows his own mind, and that he is ready to defend the country against his enemies? If this is the American Conservative's idea of criticism, God save the Republican party from ever deserving its praise.

Hey, not all American Conservative-approved presidential candidates can be Ralph Nader.

(HT: LGF)

Back in October, in a post titled "Think and Grow Middle Class" (and belated apologies to Mr. N. Hill), I wrote:

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

Keep that in mind as read an article by Karen Selick in Canada's National Post, which posits that "Food banks simply conceal problems that are too taboo to discuss these days":

The illogic of food banks is so obvious that only one explanation makes sense. Charities can't simply collect cash and give grocery money to the needy because donors know it wouldn't all be spent on necessities. Some would be spent on cigarettes, booze or bingo. Years ago, when I prepared budget statements for clients on legal aid, I was astonished at how much some poor people spent on such things. [Having worked during college breaks in a liquor store as a teenager, I'm not.--Ed]

Middle-class or wealthy Canadians shouldn't accept guilt when anti-poverty activists hint that the existence of food banks proves some moral deficiency in the economic system. Far from it. Food banks simply conceal problems that are too taboo to discuss these days.

Via Kate at SDA, who boils the pertinent facts of the situation down to a pithy seven words.

Jonah Goldberg writes, "It’s a profound commentary on the state of our political culture that Huckabee’s ad is the controversial one. Huckabee promises nothing, Hillary everything":

The contrast between the Candidate of God and the Candidate of Goodies should remind everyone of P. J. O’Rourke’s timeless book Parliament of Whores.

“I have only one firm belief about the American political system, and that is this: God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat,” wrote the indispensable O’Rourke.

“God” he explained, is “a stern fellow, patriarchal rather than paternal and a great believer in rules and regulations. He holds men strictly accountable for their actions. He has little apparent concern for the material well being of the disadvantaged. ... God is unsentimental. It is very hard to get into God’s heavenly country club.”

P. J. continues: “Santa Claus is another matter. ... He’s nonthreatening. He’s always cheerful. And he loves animals. He may know who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, but he never does anything about it. He gives everyone everything they want without the thought of a quid pro quo.”

“Santa Claus is preferable to God in every way but one,” O’Rourke concluded. “There is no such thing as Santa Claus.”

P.J.’s right. But you won’t be hearing that from Hillary this holiday season.

Years ago, I remember hearing Doris Kearns Goodwin on PBS describe LBJ's Great Society as his way of giving "gifts" to the American people--and Johnson being quite surprised when the public at large (both the right and the then-burgeoning far left) turned on him. "You should like me, I'm giving you all these gifts" was (as best as I can remember) Goodwin's description of LBJ's mindset. I guess I shouldn't be surprised to see that politicians (and their hagiographic sycophants) still think of redistribution of taxpayer money as handing out gifts.

Allah suggests that this fellow move to L.A. and "get some sort of elaborate facial tattoo that integrates the blue into it...From freak to badass overnight." He's too burly to fit into their costumes, but perhaps he could become a roadie for the Blue Man Group.

Barring those suggestions, I predict nothing but blue skies ahead for him in the Libertarian Party, myself.

Michelle Malkin writes, "I believe this Rush-bashing incident may turn out to be Huckabee’s Howard Dean scream moment."

Glenn Reynolds adds, "I told you attacking him was a bad idea. That would be like Hillary going after Oprah."

Update: Audio of Rush here.

Hillary Clinton: "Bob Dole In A Pants Suit"?

Paging Mr. Godwin:

This is the cover of the new issue of Pat Buchanan’s American Conservative magazine, featuring an article by the far left’s most dishonest blogger, Glenn Greenwald. It’s a monumental convergence of idiocies.

Ahh, another election year, another Buchanan harmonic convergence with the far left. Has the magazine's big Michael Moore cover story and interview happened yet? It's only a matter of time.

Roger Kimball reprints a holiday greeting he recently received:

To My Democrat Friends:

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all. I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2008, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great. Not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country nor the only America in the Western Hemisphere. Also, this wish is made without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wish.

To My Republican Friends:

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Forgive me, then, for wishing everyone Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Video related to the former greeting, here.

Violate it while campaigning at your peril.

(Now a nice navy blue Trilby from Lock & Co.--that's a different story!)

This headline in the London Times is a scream:

Rupert Everett: acting in Hollywood is like living in Afghanistan

Uh-huh.

On the other hand, Everett claims:

“Hollywood is a place that pretends it’s very liberal but it’s not remotely,” he told The Times. “It’s like Al-Qaeda.”

Nahh. They may hate America as much, and crank-out movies that Osama bin Laden admires, but there's just a slight amount of difference between breast implants and amputation machines.

(This Hollywood procedure, on the other hand...)

At the beginning of this short clip, Bob Schieffer says to Fred Thompson that at one point, you called Mike Huckabee a "pro-life liberal"--and Thompson doesn't disagree:

I think I already know the answer to this, but I wonder if anybody has asked Thompson what would seem to me at least to be a natural follow-up question: "President Bush's free-spending big government Compassionate Conservatism is the successor to the 'Third Way' policies of President Clinton. Does that mean that President Bush qualifies as a 'pro-life liberal' in your book as well, Senator Thompson?"

Since, as a recent YouTube clip satirically exclaims,"Webster’s Dictionary defines ‘conservatism’ as ‘How closely one’s views resemble those of Fred Thompson’", such a question would certainly make for quite an interesting debate. Though it's probably one best left for an extended discussion on PJM Political, if Senator Thompson stops by again.

Is Bill Parcells going to rebuild the post-Vick, post-Petrino Falcons? Sounds very likely, according to the Dallas Morning News.

Update: The Dolphins are also fishing for Tuna.

As Roger L. Simon writes, "Huckabee is funny...He's come up with the best laughs so far of the campaign... maybe the only laughs:

Some have suggested there is an image of a cross behind Huckabee's shoulder as he talks to the camera in the ad, but Huckabee dismissed that Tuesday.

"That was a book shelf behind me, a book shelf," Huckabee told reporters while campaigning in Houston, Texas.

Huckabee was asked if his language crossed the line between faith and politics: "Absolutely not," he said.

Huckabee went on to joke, to the delight of the reporters in the room, "I will confess this; if you play the spot backwards it says 'Paul is dead, Paul is dead, Paul is dead.'"

Well, brain-dead at least, if you know just a scintilla of the history of the 1920s and '30s.

I've already linked to this post on Minding The Campus once today, but Thomas Sowell writes that it works both ways, sad to note.

Hey, maybe there's a fair amount of truth to the cartoon that Tigerhawk posted after all!

The Chris Matthews/Freddy Krueger connection revealed!

I don't think this counts, except perhaps extremely tangentially, as an example of the Adversarial Campus in action, but still, this doesn't sound like higher education's finest hour:

In 2000, when Mr. Potter was just three years old, Harold Bloom predicted that “[t]he cultural critics will, soon enough, introduce Harry Potter into their college curriculum.” And it came to pass at Stanford University just a few months ago.

Nothing like spending $33,000 or so a year to send your kid to Stanford so that he can study “present-tense culture", no matter how enjoyable the experience may be.

Megan McCardle looks back at America's wild and carefree recent history:

The wild, drunken office Christmas party used to be a staple of television, books, and movies. Now I feel as if it's dropped pretty thoroughly out of the popular imagination; the only example I can think of recently is a fleeting scene in Bridget Jones' Diary. Were office holiday parties really that much wilder in the past? Or have we just stopped noticing, literarily?

Something tells me that David Harsanyi can answer Megan McCardle's question.

(By the way, note the reference to AMC's Mad Men series in the comments.)

Rachel Lucas on the joys of Christmas shopping at the local shopping mall.

As Dan Riehl wrote in October when the story of Dallas-area TV journalist Rebecca Aguilar confronting an innocent elderly man on-camera broke, "Leave it to a real journalist to go over the top."

Here's yet another example of a professional TV journalist acting professionally in the most professional manner possible:

Alycia Lane, the evening news anchor on CBS affiliate KYW-TV in Philadelphia, was arrested on early Sunday morning in Manhattan after an altercation with a female police officer, according to the New York Times. Lane and her boyfriend Chris Booker, and another unidentified couple were reportedly traveling in a taxi through Manhattan and became upset over a slow vehicle blocking their way. Philly.com reports Lane confronted the passengers of the slow vehicle, which happened to be a group of police officers in plainclothes.

When one of the officers asked Lane, who was taking photos with her iPhone, to step back, the news anchor reportedly began verbally assaulting the officer. According to Philadelphia Weekly, Lane screamed at the officer, saying "I don't give a f*ck who you are, I am a reporter you f*cking dyke." Lane then punched the female officer in the face, according to the Associated Press, resulting in several lacerations and swelling. The officer was treated at a local hospital and released.

According to Wikipedia, KYW-TV's slogan is "We Are Moving Ahead"--by punching the daylights out of anyone that gets in our way!

Harry Reid: bringing the right and the left together!

Well, perhaps their deductive reasoning skills are inferior, as one media figure paid tens of millions to emote while reading the AP wire service copy into a Sony HDC1000LW television camera can't figure out why another is paid tens of millions to hit a small white ball with a wooden stick while similar television cameras are following him.

The National Journal's "Beltway" blog, which has a blogroll full of conservative and far left sites, believes it's spotted a new trend: "The Return Of The Partisan Press?" (As Glenn Reynolds writes, "Was it ever really gone?" My answer's here, for what it's worth.) The Beltway's Danny Glover writes:

The Washington Independent went online a week ago yesterday (the official launch is next month), but don't let the citizen journalism outfit's name fool you. Politically speaking, it is no more "independent" than sister blogs funded by the Center for Independent Media.

The Washington branch, led by high-profile journalists like former washingtonpost.com editor and writer Jefferson Morley and former New York Times editor Allison Silver, joins a rebranded Independent News Network that includes the Colorado Confidential, Iowa Independent, Michigan Messenger and Minnesota Monitor. The Washington Independent gets funding from the Better World Fund, Arca Foundation, Open Society Institute, Park Foundation, Quixote Foundation, Rockefeller Family Foundation, Sunlight Foundation and Surdna Foundation.

All five publications in the network are independent only in the sense that they involve bloggers who work independently of mainstream media outlets. According to Wikipedia, the center's mission is to fund sites "that report news from a progressive perspective." In other words, the goal is to train an army of liberal bloggers who can infuse their opinions with actual reporting.

"We agree with CIM's vision of citizen-driven journalism serving as a critical principle of our democracy," Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation wrote at SunSpots. "We have a hunch that the new enterprise might just shake up the media establishment."

It's a novel idea whose concept hearkens back to the colonial days of the American press, when journalism was a partisan pursuit. [As opposed to today?--Ed] The question now is whether the right, always behind when it comes to political and media innovation on the Internet, will try to organize a similar operation or cede this new media battlefield to the left.

I'm not sure if I'm following his point, as the Washington Times has been publishing a conservative Washington paper since 1982. Town Hall, NRO and the Weekly Standard have also been on the Web since the mid-1990s. And since the rise of the Blogosphere after 9/11, loads of journalists have gone on the record to declare their biases, as well as those of their employers.

(Not to be confused with Christmas with the Huxatables, which would probably be much more fun, come to think of it.)

Jim Geraghty looks at Mike Huckabee's new ad and writes, "no matter how the presidential campaign turns out, I'd watch a Mike Huckabee Christmas Special":

When Bill Bradley and I spoke last week for PJM Political, he mentioned that because of the front-loaded primary season, one of the challenges of all of the presidential candidates was to get through the holidays wishing Merry Christmas and Goodwill To Men, while simultaneously telling you what rotten SOBs their opponents are. This Huckamercial seems like a pretty good way for him to get through the season.

For Hillary Clinton, it's F-bombs away!

(She might want a bottle or two of this, either to celebrate surviving the primaries, or to console herself if Operation: Rescue Hillary ultimately proves unsuccessful.)

Update: "Call me cynical, but whenever I read that a candidate has vowed not to quit, they're usually only weeks away from losing."

Kathy Shaidle reminds Maureen Dowd who won the Scopes Trial, adding "You're the ones who won't leave it alone."

Maureen might also want to check out this July 2007 essay by Garin Hovannisian, who actually bothered to read the original edition of the book at the heart of the trial, before successive versions were watered down by its publisher--against the wishes of the book's author--to placate school authorities:

George William Hunter's A Civic Biology: Presented in Problems (1914) was the book that sparked the controversy. Condemned as heretical in 1925, today it would seem to be a manual for enlightenment's battle against religion's perceived mysticism. Yet if John Scopes were to teach the very same Civic Biology in a modern classroom, he would probably be put on trial again. Because buried under the dust of history is the fact that this progressive, pro-evolution text was also quite racist.

Take, for example, these lines from page 196 of Hunter's original version:

At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; the American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.

Hunter was also a proponent of eugenics. "[T]he science of being well born," his text instructed, is an imperative for sophisticated society. "When people marry there are certain things that the individual as well as the race should demand," he wrote, arguing that tuberculosis, epilepsy, and even "feeble-mindedness are handicaps which it is not only unfair but criminal to hand down to posterity."

"If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading," Hunter lamented in Civic Biology. "Humanity will not allow this but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race."

Subsequent editions of the textbook, like the ones I found at the Library of Congress, were cleansed of such views. Terms like "civilized white inhabitants" were disappeared, while references to "evolution" were replaced with "development of man." But these revisions were chiefly the design of Hunter's publishers who, in spite of the author's protests, sought to "omit statements that are likely to give offense to large numbers of people in control of the schools."

Outraged by the "emasculation" of his work and out of patience by 1926, Hunter wrote, "I have never felt so depressed and disgusted with a revision as this one. I thought I had the material for a mighty good book and it was before you people spoiled it."

As Hovannisian writes, it's a book for no seasons. Which is why the inconvenient truth regarding its original contents has been tossed down the memory hole by the left.

Mark Steyn has some thoughts on "Rude Britannia" and what the continuing recessional of that once great nation bodes for the rest of the Western world:

Once it's no longer accepted that something is wrong all the laws in the world will avail you nought. The law functions as formal expression of a moral code, not as free-standing substitute for it. Last year, on a trolley car in London, a 96-year-old man was punched in the face and blinded in one eye. His 44-year- old attacker had boarded the crowded tram, tried to push past Mr. Chaudhury in the aisle and become enraged by the nonagenarian's insufficient haste in moving out of the way. "You bastard!" he snarled, and slugged him. A month ago, Stephen Gordon was sentenced by Croydon Crown Court to three years' probation, which means he'll have to endure weekly chit-chats with a municipal functionary, assuming he bothers turning up for his appointments. Mr. Gordon was seen to smirk as he left court, notwithstanding the mental health issues entered in mitigation.

Much of the commentary concerned the leniency of the sentence. But consider George Jonas's dictum: beating up a 96-year-old isn't wrong because it's illegal; it's illegal because it's wrong. And, if a citizen of an advanced Western social democracy no longer knows it's wrong, the laws are unlikely to prove much restraint. British society has come to depend on CCTVs — closed-circuit cameras in every public building, every shopping centre, every street, even (in some remote rural locales) on the trees. According to Theodore Dalrymple, England's greatest living pessimist, the British are second only to the North Koreans as the most monitored population on the planet; Britain is said to be home to a third of all the world's CCTVs; in the course of an average day, the average Briton is estimated to be filmed approximately 300 times. Etc. So naturally the Croydon trolley had a camera, and it captured in vivid close-up the perpetrator attacking his victim. And a fat lot of good the video evidence did Mr. Chaudhury.

Look at it from the attacker's point of view: why not beat up old people? Let's face it, they're a pain in the neck, clogging up escalators, revolving doors, sidewalks. You're in a hurry, you've got places to go, people to see, and there's always some old coot or withered biddy shuffling, shuffling, shuffling in front of you at 10 paces an hour. In Britain, in Canada, in Europe, in Japan, in China, the population is aging fast. So, if you think there are too many codgers taking 20 minutes to board the bus right now, just wait a couple of decades. Suppose five per cent of young men get irked at being delayed by geezers. What restrains them from making grampa-whacking merely the latest normalized pathology? A functioning civilization is like an iceberg: the unseen seven-eighths of codes and assumptions is the accumulated inheritance, the wisdom of the ages. Once it's gone, what's left just bobs around on the surface. Take a walk round any downtown or suburban mall and see it as Mr. Chaudhury's attacker did: what's to stop you?

And as England continues to become the world that Anthony Burgess and Stanley Kubrick predicted decades ago, now you can patrol the streets looking for your next victim in complete anonymity, apparently with tacit approval from both the police and society at large.

Meanwhile closer to home (much closer to home for me), Clayton Cramer explores "What's Gone Wrong In Oakland."

And with stories such as these, is it any wonder that, as Jeffrey Bell notes, social conservatism is far from dead (at least in the States) as a counterbalancing force?

Arthur Herman has an exceptional article in Commentary that's well worth your time, as he points out the myths of the Vietnam war created by the American establishment left and its media. Here's a but a brief sample:

According to the Vietnam myth, Nixon’s “incursion” into Cambodia in 1970, followed by Operation Lam Son 719 into Laos, was not only illegal and unconstitutional but had the effect of widening the war and destabilizing the region. In fact, it was the existence of the Communist sanctuaries that had destabilized the region, and deeply worried American allies in Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore. Nixon’s incursion was also the U.S. Army’s first major joint operation with the South Vietnamese. More than 50,000 ARVN troops proved their effectiveness at waging the kind of war they would need to fight to keep their country free: flying their own helicopters, operating their own heavy artillery and tanks, even conducting their own air strikes. Cambodia was proof that Vietnamization could work.

Meanwhile, Nixon also brought the war north. He ordered the mining of Haiphong harbor, the main unloading depot for Russian and Chinese supplies, and launched a steady bombing campaign that finally wrecked the North’s capacity to wage battle. Robert Dallek’s assertion that we failed to win a war in which we “dropped more bombs than in World War II” is thus both misleading and irrelevant. In fact, the majority of tonnage of bombs dropped during the war was in the South, not the North, was in support of tactical operations, and, thanks to the ability to bomb in far tighter clusters than during the Korean war, resulted in far less collateral damage. It was Vietnam, not the Gulf war of 1991, that marked, in 1968, the first use of so-called “smart,” laser-guided weapons.

The American media completely missed these important developments, too. More than that: to quote Lewis Sorley, “in these later years the press simply missed the war.”

Funny how that seems to keep happening.

Read the whole thing.

(Via Michael Wade at Execupundit.com, who has numerous other links that are well worth your time.)

In the Rocky Mountain News, Dave Kopel echoes some of the thoughts I had immediately after NBC ran the photos of Cho Seung-Hui after his Virginia Tech massacre.

At least Kopel is writing that the media bears some responsibility to prevent copycat killers. That's more than Tom Brokaw thinks.

Fausta has the details. But somebody should write a book or two about this topic!

Update: Hoax, according to the Daily Princetonian.

"I have finally decided to take the plunge. Last night I upgraded my Vista desktop machine to Windows XP, and this afternoon I will be doing the same to my laptop:"

To be honest there is only one conclusion to be made; Microsoft has really outdone themselves in delivering a brand new operating system that really excels in all the areas where Vista was sub-optimal. From my testing, discussions with friends and colleagues, and a review of the material out there on the web there seems to be no doubt whatsoever that that upgrade to XP is well worth the money. Microsoft can really pat themselves on the back for a job well done, delivering an operating system which is much faster and far more reliable than its predecessor. Anyone who thinks there are problems in the Microsoft Windows team need only point to this fantastic release and scoff loudly.

Well done Microsoft!

Geez--so Vista is Windows ME: The Next Generation?

Chuck Norris "has called Huck a dark horse who turned into a ‘shining stallion.’ He once praised Huck for having the ‘big package.’ (The ‘whole package,’ he corrected himself.)"

Word on the street is that his carbon footprint is awfully tiny, though...

Opinion Journal has today's pop quiz: "What do Scottie Pippen, David Letterman and Ted Turner have in common?"

Answer: None of them are farmers, but all three have received thousands of dollars in federal farm subsidies this decade.

We could add to that list of non-farmer farm-aid recipients David Rockefeller, Leonard Lauder of the cosmetics firm, Edgar Bronfman Sr. of the Seagram fortune, and Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. Our point is that you don't have to drive a tractor, plant seeds, or even live anywhere near rural America to qualify for Uncle Sam's farm largess. And you sure don't have to be poor.

The Environmental Working Group has a map of New York City making the rounds on the Internet that shows 562 dots, each representing a Manhattan resident who gets a USDA farm payment. Who knew that growing cotton, corn and soybeans was such a thriving industry near Central Park? We don't know the incomes of these people, but it's a fair guess they're not homeless.

What we have here is a real-life version of the 1960s TV show "Green Acres," but in reverse. In the fictional series, Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor play a fancy couple who flee Manhattan to live down on the farm among the pigs and goats, while she pines for the glitter of Times Square. In the 2007 version, they flee the farm for Manhattan and get a subsidy check at their Park Avenue penthouse. What a deal.

Washington refers to these people as "absentee farmers." They own the land and collect the subsidy checks, but few do any actual farming. It is true that the farmers who lease the acreage in Illinois, Iowa or Kansas are usually far from rich (though the per capita income of farmers is higher than the median family income). But studies indicate that the subsidies provide little financial benefit to these tenant farmers, who grow and harvest the crops and put food on our table. Most studies agree that the subsidies are capitalized into the price and rental value of the land. So the more generous the farm payments, the higher the rents that the absentee farmers in New Yorkers can charge.

As the editorial concludes, "Where is that Democratic devotion to class warfare when we really need it?"

Kathryn Jean Lopez writes that Rudy Giuliani's new ad "exudes self-confidence; looks like a big-production convention video":

Glenn Reynolds adds, "Rudy doesn't remind me of Reagan particularly, but this new video has overtones of both 'Morning In America' and 'There's A Bear In The Woods.'" At first glance, the video's tone doesn't seem to fit Rudy's personality all that well, but it's a knockout, majestic production.

As I wrote on Thursday:

This International Herald-Tribune article titled, "In Italy, a winter of discontent" sounds very much like a micro-version of Mark Steyn's opus "It's The Demography, Stupid", which originally appeared in The New Criterion before running in Opinion Journal.

Mark expands upon the Herald-Tribune's article himself, in his latest weekly op-ed:

So in post-Catholic Italy there is no miracle of a child this Christmas – unless you count the 70 percent of Italians between the ages of 20 and 30 who still live at home, the world's oldest teenagers still trudging up the stairs to the room they slept in as a child even as they approach their fourth decade. That's worth bearing in mind if you're an American gal heading to Rome on vacation: When that cool 29-year-old with the Mediterranean charm in the singles bar asks you back to his pad for a nightcap, it'll be his mom and dad's place.

I'm often told that my demographics-is-destiny argument is anachronistic: Countries needed manpower in the Industrial Age, when we worked in mills and factories. But now advanced societies are "knowledge economies," and they require fewer working stiffs. Oddly enough, the Lisbon Council's European Human Capital Index, released in October, thinks precisely the opposite – that the calamitous decline in population will prevent Eastern and Central Europe from being able to function as "innovation economies." A "knowledge economy" will be as smart as the brains it can call on.

Meanwhile, a few Europeans are still having children: The British government just announced that Muhammad is now the most popular boy's name in the United Kingdom.

As I say, the above demographic audit has become something of an annual tradition in this space. But here's something new that took hold in the year 2007: A radical antihumanism, long present just below the surface, bobbed up and became explicit and respectable.

And that usually works out just swell for all concerned.

(For more Steyn, catch archives of him on the Laura Ingraham Show, and Pajamas' PJM Political show.)

Just click.

Dan Riehl catches Carolyn Washburn, the editor of the Des Moines Register and the moderator for both parties debates in Iowa earlier this week pulling a fast one:

Carolyn Washburn takes a shot at Republicans with an obviously false statement in her piece summarizing the recent Iowa debates which she moderated:

By and large, the Republicans say they can get us to smaller government and lower taxes with economic growth and government efficiency. They don't ask Americans to make terrible sacrifices. About half wanted to tackle global warming and about half chose not to talk about it. They want local control and choice in education.

Chose not to talk about it!?! Not only did one Republican ask to talk about it, as opposed to raising his hand, Washburn wouldn't let them talk about anything other than what she had pre-scripted in her mind. From the transcript: see rest of pertinent part below the fold. Everyone there that was permitted to, talked about it until she changed the subject.

Read the rest for a transcription of the candidates' remarks on the topic.

A recurring item in James Taranto's Best of the Web column is his "Wannabe Pundits" feature, which frequently catches sports journalists desperate to sound like the next Bob Woodward or Michael Kinsley by injecting politics into a section of the paper (or Website) where most readers normally go to escape politics and world events. Scroll to midpage for one example Taranto highlighted from a Sports Illustrated writer.

For another example, simply check out this passage from the latest column from Yahoo Sports' Mike Silver:

Yet after last season, Tom Brady actively wooed [Randy] Moss and, once the receiver arrived in New England, he began lauding him for being a "great teammate" and a "great leader." Very few people, outside of some judgmental wackos from the religious right, have anything negative to say about Brady, but it's disturbing to hear the greatest player in football praise Moss in such over-the-top fashion.

I guess if you're a conservative and religious sports fan, Mike doesn't want you reading his column. Does that hold true for Yahoo as a whole?

Of course, God forbid you actually are judgmental, causing you to have strong opinions about someone, based on your life experiences, education, philosophical beliefs and/or religious upbringing. That skill is apparently only reserved for reporters regarding their readers.

At least those readers whose politics and beliefs differ from theirs. And maybe their editors--or lack thereof.

(And in case your wondering, I think Brady's a gifted quarterback having an incredible season, but I could see where some could be concerned over his off-field activies, which involve fathering a child out of wedlock.)

That goes without saying these days. (And probably did as well when Petula Clark had her hit with the above title way back in 1967). But simply riding mass transit in this season of peace on earth and goodwill to men can be pretty brutal as well:

Click To Play

Certainly a curious statement from a man who seemed to have little problem with the cut of the Soviets' collectivist jib back when he was in office.

The Washington Post reviews Hollywood's Censor: Joseph I. Breen & the Production Code Administration by Thomas Doherty:

"JR in 3D," the ad read in its entirety. This was in 1954, when I was starting to venture beyond the comics section of my hometown paper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. That minimalist text made no sense at first, but finally I caught on: "JR" stood for the voluptuous Jane Russell, and "3D" was three-dimensional moviemaking. Hollywood had released 3-D flicks in which tomahawks flew at us and jungle cats leapt at us. Now, it seemed, Jane Russell's bust would be coming our way. Sure enough, her new movie, "The French Line," had its world premiere in St. Louis the following week. The producer, Howard Hughes, had defied orders from Hollywood's Production Code office to tone down Russell's lascivious dancing and cover up her provocative flesh. Opening the film in out-of-the-way St. Louis rather than Los Angeles or New York was Hughes's way of thumbing his nose at the establishment.

The Code flouted by Hughes dated from the Prohibition era, and the two movements shared a basic premise: A high-toned protectorate must enforce moral standards by dictating what the rest of us get to consume. But while the impetus for Prohibition had come from fundamentalist Protestants, for the Code we have Catholics to thank. True, Will Hays, who headed the Production Code Administration, was a Presbyterian. But the Code's co-authors were a Catholic layman and a Jesuit priest, and its chief enforcer was Joseph I. Breen -- not just a Catholic but, as Thomas Doherty puts it, one who "embodied the restraint, repression, and rigidity of a personality type known as the Victorian Irish." The never-in-doubt Breen stands at the center of Doherty's knowledgeable, entertaining history of the Code during its heyday from 1934 to the mid-1950s.

The Code actually dates from 1930, but the first four years of its existence were a washout -- so much so that today film buffs treasure movies from that interregnum for their grit and candor. The studios had agreed to abide by the Code so as to defang state and city censorship boards, which applied harsh and inconsistent standards. But the procedure for ensuring Code compliance was squishy -- studios could appeal adverse decisions to a board composed of movie producers, who naturally were loath to order costly re-shoots of offending scenes. Bawdy vehicles for Mae West, sexually frank films such as "Baby Face," and crime-celebrating films such as "Scarface" were slipping past the naysayers. Scandalized Catholics fought back by founding the Legion of Decency, which asked the faithful to pledge not to attend objectionable films, and Hollywood moguls took hits at the box office. The Code, they agreed, must grow stronger teeth. From now on, appeals boards would consist of hard-nosed New York studio execs, not compliant Hollywood types. Unapproved films wouldn't get a seal of approval and thus would have limited, if any, distribution. And perhaps most important, Breen and his staff would vet scripts and head off problems before they developed.

The revamped Code worked all too well: A climate of timidity descended upon Hollywood and stayed for two decades.

It's some "climate of timidity", when during it flowed such wonderful films as:

Gone With The Wind

The Maltese Falcon

Citizen Kane

Casablanca

Shadow of a Doubt

Notorious

Rope

The Third Man

The Stranger

Singing In The Rain

And all of the rest of the golden era of Hollywood. What happened when the Production Code was replaced in the mid-1960s with today's ratings system? As Michael Medved once rhetorically asked Jack Valenti upon Valenti's retirement as president of the Motion Picture Association of America, "What happened, Jack, to all those missing moviegoers?

Hollywood originally panicked that television would destroy its business by offering for free the sort of entertainment that cost money at the local Bijou, but during the fateful 10 years of the primary TV invasion (1950-60) the audience actually declined 34%, compared with a 60% decline in those nightmarish four years of the late '60s. In later decades, the arrival of the VCR, cable TV and DVD actually corresponded to modest increases in the motion-picture audience, so no theory centered on technological alternatives can solve the mystery of the missing moviegoers.

So what happened 38 years ago to drive millions of Americans away from movie theaters? In 1966, Mr. Valenti's Motion Picture Association of America quietly dropped its enforcement of the restrictive old Production Code that Hollywood studios had imposed on themselves since 1930. Then, on Nov. 1, 1968, Mr. Valenti introduced the "voluntary rating system" that continues in force to this day. As he proudly declared in his farewell address to the industry on March 23 of this year: "The rating system freed the screen, allowing movie-makers to tell their stories as they choose to tell them." That new freedom allowed the profligate use of obscene language strictly banned under the Production Code, the inclusion of graphic sex scenes along with near total nudity and, more vivid, sadistic violence than previously permitted in Hollywood movies.

The resulting changes in the industry showed up with startling clarity at the Academy Awards. In 1965, with the Production Code still in force, "The Sound of Music" won Best Picture of the Year; in 1969, under the new rating system, an X-rated offering about a homeless male hustler, " Midnight Cowboy," earned the Oscar as the year's finest film. Most critics, then as now, welcomed the aesthetic shift and hailed the fresh latitude in cinematic expression, but the audience voted with its feet.

Jack Valenti, a devoted family man and a true war hero (he flew 51 combat missions as a dashing World War II pilot), hardly qualifies as a cultural revolutionary. He played no role in producing the darker, edgier fare that alienated most of the movie audience, but he did launch the ratings system that made such alienation possible. He's also continued to defend that system and to resist important changes to make it more functional (like renaming the deceptive "PG-13" designation as "R-13" and restricting pre-teen audiences from attending such films). Mr. Valenti and other industry leaders also hide Hollywood's deepest problems with a relentless focus on "box-office gross"--the misleading numbers that always indicate record-breaking success, but reflect rising ticket prices (largely fueled by inflation) and mask decreased patronage.

It will never happen of course, but ironically, nobody could use a return to the Production Code more than modern Hollywood. Today, the annual low box office returns of the vast majority of Best Picture-nominated movies signify that Hollywood is merely one entertainment niche market competing with many others for our dollars, a trend which we noted a year and a half ago.

(Via Orrin Judd, who dubs Breen "The Alchemist.")

Err, in this case, Old PowerPoint Presentations. Found via Galley Slaves, it's Rap Music, the spreadsheets:

(And yes, there's a language alert, but that probably goes without saying.)

Just recorded a really terrific interview hosted by Austin Bay for an upcoming segment of PJM Political, in which Austin interviewed Michael Knox Beran, who wrote "How Lincoln Saved the World" for City Journal:

In the fall of 1862, when Lincoln told Congress, “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best, hope of earth,” the fate of liberty hung in the balance in three great nations: Russia, where Alexander II sought to promote liberal reform; Germany, where Otto von Bismarck applied his dark genius to the destruction of the Rechtsstaat (rule-of-law state); and America itself.

Those three powers—Russia, Germany, and the United States—would go on to dominate the twentieth century. Only one did not become a slave empire. Had Lincoln not forced his revolution in 1861, American slavery might have survived into the twentieth century, deriving fresh strength from new weapons in the coercive arsenal—“scientific” racism, social Darwinism, jingoistic imperialism, the ostensibly benevolent doctrines of paternalism. The coercive party in America, unbroken in spirit, might have realized its dream of a Caribbean slave empire. Cuba and the Philippines, after their conquest by the United States, might have become permanent slave colonies. Such a nation would have had little reason to resist Bismarck’s Second Reich, Hitler’s third one, or Russia’s Bolshevik empire.

The historical probabilities would have been no less grim had Lincoln, after initiating his revolution, failed to preserve the U.S. as a unitary free state. The Southern Republic, having gained its independence, would almost certainly have formed alliances with regimes grounded in its own coercive philosophy; the successors of Jefferson Davis would have had every incentive to link arms with the successors of Otto von Bismarck.

None of this came to pass. The virtue of Lincoln preserved the liberties of America. In the decades that followed, the nation that he saved played a decisive part in vindicating the freedom of peoples around the world.

Michael explores those thoughts further in his new book, Forge of Empires 1861–1871: Three Revolutionary Statesmen and the World They Made, which sounds equally well worth your time.

As Mark Steyn writes, "That's one task you can always entrust to the Europeans", adding that it's "Tough Time for Satirists."

But then, it's always tough to beat real life in that department.

Tough for me to argue with this gentleman's approach to Christmas catalogs--or the lack thereof.

Update: "This originated with James Dobson's Focus on the Family, and I saw it on the blog of a former Penthouse editor. The internet is a strange place." I doubt J.B.S. Haldane would argue!

This International Herald-Tribune article titled, "In Italy, a winter of discontent" sounds very much like a micro-version of Mark Steyn's opus "It's The Demography, Stupid", which originally appeared in The New Criterion before running in Opinion Journal.

And speaking of which, both Mark and Roger Kimball of the New Criterion appeared on this week's edition of PJM Political on XM's POTUS '08 channel, which can you listen to, here.

"Vuitton-clad Venezuela minister spouts socialism."

(As opposed to your average Reuters columnist, of course.)

The benefits of modern high-speed photography? It's fast enough to capture a whole herd of RINOs as they charge into the green.

"Algeria: Al-Qaeda uses elderly terrorists in change of tactics."

But is it a sign of a last gasp? Because on the surface, it sounds remarkably reminiscent of Nazi Germany's last days and their drafting of elderly men into the Volkssturm to me.

Related: "While hundreds of Taliban are believed to have been killed, two British soldiers and one American soldier lost their lives."

Update: And just like the Volksturm, al Qaeda are also recruiting lots of young volk, as well.

This Amazon.com Automotive Editors' Blog post is the equivalent of the Greenwich Village art & heroin crowd's love for Manhattan in the Death Wish/Taxi Driver era: they know the 1970s sucked like the proverbial Hoover--and yet they can't help but want to relive it:

Many 1970s American cars are empirically bad - slow, inefficient, overstyled, under-engineered - but they are still interesting. Most people read history in books or watch it on TV; 1970s cars are rolling history, imbued with the spirit of both the people who design them and the people that use them.

Take, say, the Pinto. Not a great car. In fact, many people think it was one of the worst cars of the 1970s. Somewhere, three decades ago, a designer proudly unveiled it to the bosses at Ford; workers spent their waking hours building it. Young families bought Pintos, showed Pintos off to their friends, washed Pintos in their driveways, drove their babies home from the hospital in Pintos. Some of you drove Pintos; some of your parents or grandparents drove Pintos. Pintos were on TV, in movies, in magazines and newspapers.

The Pinto is part of the fabric of our history. Drive one today, and you can share that. The sloppy suspension, the awkward styling, the tractor-like engine; these place you bodily back in the 1970s. You experience exactly what drivers experienced in the 1970s. The realities of the OPEC difficulties, the emissions crackdown, the priorities of Americans in the 1970s--these are all reflected in the Pinto, frozen in sheetmetal and glass.

There's a much cheaper way to relive the aesthetic hell of the 1970s--and it's far less flammable, too.

Update: The American cars of the "naughts" have their issues as well, needless to say.

Obama knocks one out of the park:

Couldn't have happened to a nicer candidate.

Update: Fred Thompson of course, had the only real takeaway moment yesterday--and it allowed him to instantly demonstrate to viewers everything that's pathetic about the televised presidential debate format. Even beyond Thompson not playing the hand-raising game, his request to the Des Moines Register’s Carolyn Washburn (whom Fred Barnes dubbed "Nurse Ratched") and Washburn's response was the most telling: Thompson asked for a minute to explain his position on global warming/cooling/climate change, and she replied in the negative. She--and television in general--would much rather have the photo-op or the soundbite than a candidate carefully explain his position on an issue to potential voters.

Err, actually, in a way--it is!

(Via David Frum.)

In the middle of the decade 30 years ago, when Hollywood created a production that featured a disturbed vet returning home from a war that the creative class loathed like the plague, at least he got to star in this, rather than this.

(Note the network that will be carrying the series in question, incidentally.)

In his latest Bleat, James Lileks writes:

The other night I was watching “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation,” and thought: there are three stages to a man’s life. 1. He laughs at Clark Griswold. 2. He sympathizes deeply with Clark Griswold. 3. He laughs at Clark Griswold.

Note: Mrs. Griswold, Beverly D’Angelo is slated to appear as the “Brothel Mistress” in “Harold & Kumer Escape from Guantanomo Bay,” due next year. Mark your calendars!

Naturally, I assumed that the bard of Minneapolis was having a jape. Alas, I should have known better.

Malcolm Muggeridge's thesis: it's not just a good idea--it's the law.

Personally, I think the superstar in the left photo pulls the look off far more successfully than the one on the right.

(Warning for parents: both stars have appeared in programs designated adults-only in today's increasingly puritanical society...)

The Huckaboomlet rolls on--their new campaign video is awesome!

Not to mention their new campaign slogan...

We'll be discussing the Mark Steyn/Henry Miller connection on PJM Political tomorrow with Miller Mark.

David Frum's wife takes part in a black bag operation:

Seriously. What must it be like to wear something like that day in, day out? Never being able to show your face in public — or to a man who is not your husband. I don't think Western women appreciate how oppressive that must be."

..."And yet, you never hear a peep of protest about it from the feminist groups over here. They protest the war in Iraq. But the idea that there are people right here who want to shroud women ... to make us all submissive and invisible ... where's the outrage over that?

"And we shouldn't kid ourselves. It's coming here too. It already is here."

David adds that his wife's series of posts "seems to have thrown some HuffPo readers into gasping outrage. After all, as is well known, the real oppression of women occurs in the West, source of all evil ...."

Just ask Lawrence O’Donnell.

Jonah Goldberg scans the port side of presidential campaign after the 2006 elections:

The re-emergence of traditional rifts on the left was inevitable. Years of powerlessness obscured the divides between, for example, liberal internationalists, left-leaning realists and ideological opponents of American "empire."

Still, Democrats are doubling down on their 2006 promises even after a year of coming up short. If Democrats win the White House and more congressional seats in 2008, they vow, then suddenly the world will change.

But that's a delusion, too. They may pass more legislation, but increased Democrat power will further highlight the party's fault lines. And the emotional oomph that self-described progressives draw from their rallies, protests and blogs cannot be sustained as a governing program because our government is blessedly designed to siphon off such excitement.

The lesson that Democratic victory isn't magically transformative is a grievous one for the activists who'd dreamed of a fairy-tale deliverance from Bush. And the first stage of grief is denial - that's why they're flocking to Obama.

As Washington politics grow more disappointing, Obama's appeal grows because not just any Democrat will do anymore. As Oprah put it over the weekend, "You got to step out of your box. We can step out of our box and dream America anew again by supporting Barack Obama."

Translation: Voting for Hillary will keep you in the box. The first female front-runner for president is, amazingly, the candidate of the establishment. For all except a few feminists, she's a buzz-kill. Voting for Clinton just doesn't make Democrats feel good about themselves.

They still want a victory that will magically change the world. Unfortunately for her, neither "Democrat" nor "Clinton" nor "Hillary" is an abracadabra word anymore. But "Obama" is.

We'll also be exploring the Oprah/Obama connection in this Thursday's edition of PJM Political on XM Satellite Radio.

Related: Jules Crittenden wonders if "The New Bi-Partisanship" is President Bush's ultimate legacy.

Jim Geraghty looks ahead to the GOP debate mid-day on Wednesday:

It is hard to overstate just how big tomorrow's GOP debate is; it's in Iowa, will be broadcast three times in 24 hours. (It starts at the awkward time of 2 p.m. EST and can be seen on Iowa Public Television, CNN, C-SPAN3, Fox News Channel, C-SPAN Radio and Fox News Radio.) But the strange factor is that this is the last debate until the Iowa caucuses.

Read the rest.

Nikke Finke presents The Striking Hollywood Writer's Martini:

2 oz vodka "to fortify against the cold Strike Winter"
2 oz cranberry juice "as the writers are seeing red"
1 oz sweet and sour mix "they’re grateful for solidarity in this bitter struggle"
4 drops vanilla (or use vanilla vodka) "to symbolize the 4 cent raise they asked for"
"There’s no cherry in this drink, as writers aren’t getting a piece of the pie. Garnish with a half a redvine, as they hope to be back on the set soon."

Gad--if that's an acceptable drink out there these days, no wonder their films stink. As my dad was apt to say when presented with such a noxious concoction, "That's a dose."

Since the decline--and potential fall--of Western Civilization can be traced in its Martini recipes, why not stick with the classics?

Chris Wallace in Politico.com:

So far, Wallace has interviewed Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Joe Biden and Chris Dodd and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson; both Sen. Barack Obama and former North Carolina Sen. Edwards have declined.

The Edwards campaign confirmed that the candidate declined but did not elaborate further. The Obama campaign did not respond to requests seeking comment.

Aside from his hourlong Sunday show, the Democratic candidates will not participate in any Fox News-sponsored debates, leaving Wallace to moderate three Republican contests over the course of 2007.

“Just imagine if the Republicans, under pressure from right-to-life groups, refused to appear on CNN or MSNBC,” Wallace said.

“I think there would be holy unshirted hell. I think there would be such talk about these people being captives of the extreme right wing and why are they afraid to answer questions. And I think the absence of that is very telling.

As the legacy media becomes as balkanized as new media (and which isn’t at all a bad thing, in my book), I wouldn't be at all surprised to see Republicans boycott CNN and MSNBC--especially for presidential debates--in four or eight years. Just think of it as the American TV equivalent of England's newspapers.

Roger L. Simon watches Paul Haggis' In The Valley of Elah so you don't have to:

I came to this movie – the tale of a retired military policeman (Tommy Lee Jones) in search of the murderers of his son, who had gone AWOL on return from Iraq - expecting to be put off by its antiwar message. But I was even more put off by the ineptitude of the film itself, especially the screenplay. Simply as a mystery, it’s worse than a mediocre episode of the Rockford Files. Much of the movie is taken up with a red herring about drug dealing so obvious (and so out of an old TV show) that they might as well have had flashing neon of a red fish on the screen. The rest mostly shows Jones moaning and groaning about his dead son with Susan Sarandon and a ‘de-glammed’ Charlize Theron. The acting is good enough, I suppose, but not nearly sufficient to overcome the banal plot.

The whole enterprise was soporific and my mind kept wandering, only to be pulled back intermittently by intense antiwar screeds given, completely out of context, by various characters, as if we were suddenly plunged into a clumsy agitprop flick produced by the cultural ministry of some former communist country (Albania?). The writer-director apparently did not trust his own story to make his point, although, at the end, it is no more than the old chestnut “War is Hell” with a special (and entirely predictable) anti-American military fillip. And, for those still awake… and with IQs under triple digits… who could possibly miss the import of this fillip, Haggis hammers it home with a metaphor more ham-handed than any I can remember in recent cinema. He has the formerly patriotic Jones solemnly raise the American flag upside down over his hometown – the last image of the movie.

Although this puerile melodramatic gesture has been commented on in many reviews, few have actually seen it in the theatres. Like the rest of the current crop of antiwar films, the audience stayed away in droves.

But what fascinates me in this is not the audience disinterest in these turgid antiwar flicks. That was as predictable as the message of the films themselves. What interests me is what happened to the talented Haggis. Where did his skill go? Why did he make – let’s be honest – such an atrocious film out of this material (originally a ‘true story’ article in Playboy which he, apparently loosely, adapted)?

From Riefenstahl to Chaplin to Trumbo to Haggis, it's not far left agitprop unless the viewer is bludgeoned over the head.

I hadn't realized that NBC was the fourth ranked TV network these days, behind not just the other two of the original Big Three TV nets, but Fox, as well:

Fourth-ranked broadcaster NBC has quietly begun reimbursing advertisers an average of $500,000 each for failing to reach guaranteed ratings levels, the first time a network has taken such a step in years, media buyers said.

Networks usually offer make-goods -- free advertising slots -- in the event of such shortfalls. But NBC has none to give. In fact, no broadcast network has much ad inventory left between now and year's end -- except for, perhaps, a handful of units the week between Christmas and New Year's, and that doesn't do much for advertisers chasing holiday shoppers.

CBS, ABC and Fox also are doling out make-goods, primarily for the first quarter. They have blamed softness on a new ratings formula, but media agencies disagree. None of the networks would comment.

The networks' problems emerged even before the Writers Guild of America went on strike November 5. The networks had enough first-run shows to get them through November, and repeats and replacement programming will not begin in earnest until January -- when their problems will likely start to worsen.

Among the Big Four networks, NBC has the most serious ad shortfall, as its primetime ratings are down most dramatically. Meanwhile, none of its new series this season have caught on with viewers. Compounding buyers' angst about NBC is the network's plan to schedule more reality shows, including "Celebrity Apprentice" and "American Gladiators."

"We're trying to understand NBC's recent moves," Starcom Entertainment exec vp Laura Caraccioli-Davis said.

Me too. Glad to see their news division and even sports division's move to the hard left is paying such big dividends, though.

(Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds, who dares invoke the Q-word!)

David Freddoso begs Rudy to "Shut up"!

Californians don't want San Francisco to clean up its homeless problem!

Where are all the other towns going to send their homeless people if San Franciscans actually wise up?

Are you kidding? Palo Alto will be thrilled to take them all in.

Liz Stephans of Breitbart TV emails with this link:

While in Pittsburgh on his Christmas Tour, Glenn Beck sat down with Scott Baker and Liz Stephans of Breitbart.tv to talk about having the #1 book on The New York Times Best-Sellers list, the importance of freedom of speech, and his goal of bringing a sense of humor to conservative talk radio.

Video here.

If you enjoyed Evan Sayet's breakthrough speech at the Heritage Foundation back in March, when it quickly rocketed through the starboard side of the Blogosphere, you won't want to miss the speech that Evan gave at David Horowitz's Restoration Weekend last month.

Compare and contrast: Over at Pajamas HQ, Aaron Hanscom wonders why college kids are mocking the dead:

More proof that tolerance for murder is becoming a trend comes from the story of two Penn State students who dressed as Virginia Tech shooting victims at a Halloween party. Not even a year has passed since Seung-Hui Cho murdered 32 people in the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history, yet one of the Penn State students was disgusted that a Virginia Tech student created a Facebook group called “People Against This Costume” in response to the tasteless choice of attire.

This is a group of college students who now think it’s trendy to be upset about their friends being killed…The thing is, everybody’s making a big stink about Virginia Tech. Virginia Tech was 32 deaths out of the 26 thousand that happen in America everyday. That’s the problem with college students. They all live in an ivory tower of privilege.

While it’s not politically correct to make a “big stink” about the killings of privileged college students or holiday shoppers at the mall, honoring the murderers of Israelis is PC approved. Consider last year’s big college costume controversy. When Syrian-born engineering student Saad Saadi showed up at a Halloween party dressed as a suicide bomber, University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann had no problem posing with him for a photograph. Gutmann later explained that she wasn’t aware of Saadi’s choice of costume even though he’s shown in the photograph with a kaffiyeh around his head, a toy Kalashnikov rifle in his hand and six plastic sticks of dynamite strapped to his chest. Moreover, Saadi explained that Gutman jokingly asked, “How did they let you through security?” when he asked her to take the photograph with him.

One wonders if Gutmann would have also found the humor in the Nazi costume Prince Harry wore to a party in 2005. Harry would have fit in perfectly in the class of one Harvard University professor, who has described his shock upon learning that the majority of his students didn’t believe anybody was to blame for the Holocaust. He referred to his students’ attitude about the past as “no-fault history.”

Meanwhile, James Lileks scans the boards at Fark and is disappointed--if not exactly shocked--by the nihilism he observes:

There’s a great deadness in many people, a grim harsh joy in the conviction we are just “moist robots,” to use the cynic’s phrase, living our lives in a vast factory that arose by miraculous random happenstance. Nothing amuses them more than belief, and oddly enough, nothing angers them more. It’s not even what you believe. It’s the very fact of believing in something other than Flying Spaghetti Monster photoshop contest deadlines or the enhancements on Episode IV.

Simultaneously, the Denver Post profiles Jeanne Assam:

The guard who saved untold lives at New Life Church gives credit to God for giving her cover, and boosting her firepower as she shot a heavily-armed gunman.

“I give credit to God. I say that very humbly,” said Jeanne Assam. “God was with me, the whole time I was behind cover. Based on the firepower he had, compared to mine.”

“It seemed like it was me, the gunman and God,” Assam said.

Assam spoke at a press conference in Colorado Springs this afternoon. She is one of about 12 armed security officers at New Life Church, according to Pastor Brady Boyd.

She responded when Matthew Murray, 24, began targeting church members in Colorado Springs, after a rampage hours earlier in Arvada in which two missionary training center staff members were killed and two were injured. Two teenagers at New Life were fatally shot, and three others injured before Assam could shoot Murray.

There's something that makes Assam's attitude different than those in the other two items linked above. And I just can't put my finger on it.

Don't worry; it'll come to me eventually.

Last week, Jay Nordlinger wrote:

I was once at a Hillary press conference — this was when she was preparing to run for the Senate. As far as I know, I’m the only person who has asked her, “Do you stand by your assertion that the charges against your husband stemmed from a ‘vast, right-wing conspiracy’?”

She said, “I’m not going back, I’m going forward,” as she jabbed her finger at the next questioner. No journalist ever followed up, to my knowledge. And Hillary took very, very few questions during that 2000 campaign. Nor did reporters seem all that eager to ask them.

And you recall what George Stephanopoulos did in Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign. The Clintonites would duck tough or awkward questions, and, if reporters persisted, Stephanopoulos would say, “That has been asked and asked. We have dealt with that over and over. This is old, tired material. Do you want to embarrass yourself? Do you want to be a laughingstock?”

And the reporters would generally shut up. Stephanopoulos was right on one thing: The question — whatever it was — had been asked. It had just not been dealt with. I understand that George Stephanopoulos now works in journalism.

Consider 1998, 1999, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal was in bloom. President Clinton essentially decided not to meet the press. When he did meet with them — the very few times — he would have some other head of state alongside him. This would be a joint press conference, or photo-op, or what have you. The thinking was that reporters wouldn’t dare ask about a sex-and-perjury scandal in the presence of another head of state — especially a super-dignified one, such as Nelson Mandela.

And has Clinton ever been asked about his anti-terror policies? I recall that Chris Wallace did: and Clinton merely exploded at him, and pretended to be persecuted — pretended that Wallace was acting as a Republican tool. Also said something about Rupert Murdoch and global warming.

It was the most bizarre episode — but classically Clintonian.

Today, Jim Geraghty adds:

Before the blogosphere, Bill Clinton's "I opposed the Iraq war from the start" would have gotten limited coverage from a press corps not eager to point out his... well, lies. Today, with the Clintons taking flak from both the left and the right, his statement becomes a much bigger story. It ain't 1992 anymore, or even 2000; it's not clear Team Hillary understands that.

Read the rest of Jim's post.

Near the beginning of the "Pine Barrens" of The Sopranos (and yes, I was pretty astounded that anyone in Hollywood had heard of New Jersey's pine barrens), there was this amusing exchange:

Christopher Moltisanti: Russians? They're not all bad.
Paulie 'Walnuts' Gualtieri: How 'bout the Cuban Missile Crisis? C********** flew four nuclear missiles into Cuba, pointed them right at us.
Christopher Moltisanti: That was real? I saw that movie, I thought it was bull****.

Evidently, White House press secretary Dana Perino skipped that "movie" entirely.

Update: So did Mike Huckabee, who's looking increasingly not ready for prime time, let alone HBO.

Drudge has the early line on the Led Zeppelin comeback gig:

LED ZEPPELIN FIRST REVIEW...

...can still rock the house!

Set List...

WHOLE LOTTA HERB TEA...

Some photos here. But is it a one-off night on the tiles, or the precursor to an extended tour of the houses of the holy?

Update: Video added above; elsewhere, the New York Times loves them some Zeppelin. Not sure how that will fly at the New Criterion, though.

A Weekly Standard parody of faith and the focus group.

Bill Hunt reviews the DVD version of Blade Runner: The Final Cut and likes what he sees. He also explores the extensive bonus material and earlier versions of the movie itself, available in the special five-DVD set due out next week.

The Redacted/Plan Nine From Outer Space connection revealed here.

The subhead for an article up on the Pajamas home page begins, "Why would a senior editor of Time write an article so favorable to Russia that it could have come directly from the Kremlin? Kim Zigfeld wonders about the magazine’s agenda." After a passage by Tony Karon, the senior editor in question, Kim responds:

Dick Cheney is worse than Vladimir Putin, who’s no different from Ronald Reagan. And that’s Time magazine! Do you dare to imagine what they might be saying in Mother Jones or over at the New York Times?

Maybe that explains why Reagan was weeping on the cover of Time back in March. As I wrote then, just offstage, Henry Luce is, as well.

Hollywood writer Rob Long (Cheers, NPR), who appears, not coincidentally, on the right-hand side of the screen with Mickey Kaus in the latest segment of Bloggingheads.TV, has the perfect metaphor for the striking entertainment industry.

(And Hollywood during the pre-Lucas/Spielberg seventies was just about as shaky as GM during that period as well. They just produced an occasionally better product in between lots of Chevettes and Vegas of their own.)

The Wall Street Journal explores "The Paygo Farce", not that the "Democrats admit it was all a big confidence game":

"Democrats are committed to ending years of irresponsible budget policies that have produced historic deficits. Instead of compiling trillions of dollars of debt onto our children and grandchildren, we will restore pay-as-you-go budget discipline."--Speaker Nancy Pelosi, December 12, 2006
Well, as Emily Littela, the half-witted Gilder Radner character on Saturday Night Live, would have put it: "Never mind." Last week Congressional Democrats formally renounced their ballyhooed budget pledge to offset any new tax cuts with other tax increases or spending cuts. We're delighted to see this false promise go, but there's a larger lesson in this failure for the tax and spending battles of 2008.

Senate Democrats gave up on "paygo," as it's called, when they realized they lacked the votes to offset the $50.6 billion cost of protecting more than 20 million middle-class taxpayers from getting whacked by the Alternative Minimum Tax this year. They've spent the year floating all kinds of tax increases to make up the difference. But in the end they passed an AMT relief bill without a penny to pay for it. Paygo is now pay gone.

We should stress that this is the right decision for the economy and the federal budget. The AMT was never supposed to hit the middle class, and it only does so now because the Democrats who designed it failed to index it for inflation and raised AMT rates under Bill Clinton in 1993. With the economy in a slowdown, the last thing anyone needs now is a tax hike. The budget deficit is a little above 1% of GDP, which is below the 25-year average, and should remain so as long as the economy keeps growing.

But paygo shouldn't be allowed to expire without everyone kicking sand on its grave. That's because it has been nothing but a confidence game from the very start. Paygo doesn't apply to domestic discretionary spending, and it doesn't restrain spending increases under current law in entitlements like Medicare and Medicaid. Its main goals are to make tax cutting all but impossible, while letting Democrats pretend to favor "fiscal discipline," a la Ms. Pelosi's boast above.

Need to take away much of the sting of paygo gone bye-bye? Mix yourself a nice cold Pegu!

(Did you write this post just to link to that drink?--Ed Well, it wasn't the only reason...)

Let's list some of the news stories floating around on Friday and Saturday:

There's the NIE.

NBC's refusal, for a time, to run conservative pro-troops ads.

Andrew Young's potentially explosive comments yesterday about Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

And even the controversial Golden Compass underperforming at the box office on Friday.

Plus dozens of other stories that would make for hot, newspaper-selling headlines, in an industry that needs as much help as it can get.

So what was the headline today on the front cover of the dead tree edition of the San Jose Mercury?

Read More »

Actually, this one's pretty low on the Richter scale of O'Donnell's meltdowns. No fists banging or veins popping at all.

It's too bad no one on the McLaughlin Group thought to ask O'Donnell his thoughts on Harry Reid, though.

Update: "Just imagine if this was a being said by a conservative about a Muslim candidate."

Back in October, I visited the Arlington, Texas Guitar Show. I finally had a chance to come up for air from the PJM Political audio stuff to finish the short video I shot and edited of the action in the main showroom. (And yes, that's me playing assorted electric and acoustic guitars on the backing track):

The Trotsky/Lenin split of the early 1980s explained here. Ice picks, Frida Kahlo, and logic are all optional.

Tim Blair as a humorous look at "Automotive history rewritten by British socialists"; earlier, we linked to an American socialist's attempt to further cast the Model T as Original Sin.

Kathy Shaidle explores Canada's Macleans magazine as United Flight #93.

(Related thoughts here and here.)

In addition to what Robert Bidinotto wrote the other day, here's yet another reason why the Huckabee Boomlet may very well go bust.

Does this present an opening big enough for the Straight Talk Express to drive right through? Or could the benefits of The Greatest Speech Ever In The History Of Mankind pay dividends for Mitt?

...Or the sterile lack thereof.

(Say, I wonder if American Thinker's Jack Kemp knows Pajamas' Bill Bradley, in the apparently growing ranks of eponymous new media punditry?)

Recorded last year at Duke, as the college staff and local D.A. were attempting a real life mashup of Bonfire of the Vanities and I Am Charlotte Simmons:

(Many more videos to be found at Fora.TV; hat tip: The Brothers Judd.)

"I'm very surprised that General Electric allows this to happen":

In a foregone conclusion, the coveted Sean Penn presidential endorsement goes to Dennis Kucinich.

Stu Nahan could not be reached for comment.

It doesn't have the same dulcet, retro '50s ring as Giuliani-Huckabee, but Kudlow-Huckabee was a reality today, as the Huckabee Boomlet marches on.

But will it all crash and burn with the kaboom, the ear-shattering kaboom?

It's not quite Mr. Fusion, but this sounds pretty cool:

It's a nuclear reactor that can fit in a rail car. Non-greenhouse-gas emitting, and -- according to Hyperion -- free from any danger of meltdown, or other nasty radiation incident.

Bonus:

One of the initial applications proposed for the generator is to power the recovery of oil from shale fields. So maybe we'll use an alternative energy source to acquire an alternative energy source! Sounds like a good idea.

Indeed.^TM

Coming this summer to a multiplex near you, to satisfy the inner five year old in all of us....Speed Racer: The Motion Picture!

But isn't there a disconnect in Hollywood promoting The New Holocaust yet again?

(HT: SG)

As the primaries approach and the tension in the campaign season begins to accelerate, the Associated Press does all that it can to stoke the excitement...by going through its list of the most inane questions to ask the candidates. Yesterday it was least favorite foods, today it's favorite jokes. As Greg Pollowitz writes, it's tough to argue with Fred Thompson's response.

Robert Bidinotto writes, "it appears that Huckabee is about to confront his own version of the 'Willie' Horton scandal":

Back in July 1988, my article "Getting Away With Murder" in Reader's Digest exposed the practice by former Mass. governor Michael Dukakis of commuting the sentences of convicted criminals sentenced to "life without the possibility of parole." It chronicled the subsequent crimes of commuted thugs -- most infamously, the story of murderer William R. Horton, Jr. (whom the Republicans nicknamed "Willie" during the presidential campaign). Once commuted and freed from prison [on a weekend furlough], Horton went on to savagely attack a couple in Maryland.

Pundits say that my article cost Dukakis the presidency.

Now, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee is climbing in the GOP primary polls, especially in Iowa. Huckabee's "compassionate conservatism" softly echoes the liberalism of Dukakis. It includes, apparently, compassion for convicted thugs.

More here.

"Ms Thomas, I just read your piece on President Reagan's diaries. I'm sorry to have to say this, but you had no excuse not to get to know President Reagan. I was a member of the military staff serving at the White House all during the Reagan administration. I've met you several times, during both social and business occasions. After all these years I remember well the attitude you displayed during trips to, in particular Santa Barbara and the Ranch. You showed no sense of curiosity toward the President's policies and I thought showed only the utmost disdain for the man, his Presidency, and his achievements."

Plants are everywhere these days!

(We looked at CNN's many plants yesterday.)

In television news, if it bleeds, it leads. And the reverse is true as well.

Meanwhile NBC, which began the year with one of its "military analysts" attacking the troops in his Washington Post blog, is ending it by ignoring them entirely. Which is all the more curious, considering they could probably use the ad revenue.

Update: NBC stays classy.

Kathy Shaidle writes:

Guy who used to be married to supermodel, then looked in the mirror and said to himself, "Hell, I'm Billy Joel, I can do better" releases anti-war song called "Christmas in Fallujah".

Here's what Christmas in Fallujah will actually be like, as opposed to the "Christmas in Fallujah" of Billy Joel's menopausal multi-millionaire daydreams.

Billy would have been better off if he was collecting royalties on the number of rewrites of "We Didn't Start The Fire" appearing in YouTube videos this year.

Cause and effect:

I’m going to add that very few people now actually remember what it was like during the period of the feminist movement. Everything was up for grabs. No one knew what to do or how to do it. Betty Friedan ruined a Super Bowl party in my very own home by wearing a black leather miniskirt and swinging her (not bad) legs clad in fishnet stockings back and forth in front of the TV screen so that nobody could see the plays. She radicalized a sizable bunch of neutral men into committed anti-feminists that day.

"Cowboys-Packers game was the top rated cable show in 14 years."

If you haven't stopped by yet, this week's PJM Political features:

Jonah Goldberg and Hugh Hewitt discuss CNN's Virtual Reality during last Wednesday's GOP YouTube Debate. Also on the show:

Host Bill Bradley discusses the surprising surges of Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee.

Mary Katharine Ham explains how she made the leap from the newspaper to new media.

James Lileks uncovers the Huckabee/Hanna-Barbera connection.

Joe Mathieu tells Pajamas' Austin Bay what makes the POTUS '08 Channel tick.

Produced by Ed Driscoll.

Tune in here to listen!

Reuters reports:

President George W. Bush is expected to outline on Thursday a plan to freeze mortgage rates for five years for many U.S. homeowners facing sharp increases in their monthly payments, industry sources said on Wednesday.

Steve Green opines:

What the "sources" didn't say is that loan-wary banks are going to become even warier, as their expected high-risk rewards vanish in a puff of unintended consequences. Now that's how you tank an economy, you big giant dummy head. I haven't seen a Republican pull an economic move this stupid since Nixon's wage/price freeze back in '72.

It's not the first time that President Bush has dipped into the 37th president's economic playbook, of course. Here's a flashback to a post written in the first week of this blog's existence, back in March of 2002.

And White House economic tinkering may only get worse in '09.

The Independent Women's Forum interviews Diana West about her book, The Death of the Grown-up in a 12-minute podcast.

We interviewed Diana a few weeks ago on PJM Political, which we excerpted as a separate podcast--click here to listen.

Understatement alert: "forgive and forget is precisely what a Hillary Presidency would not do."

Not surprisingly, Jurassic journalist Helen Thomas isn't too happy about new media.

But then, she's not all that crazy about old media, either: back in 2005, she famously shouted, "I'll never talk to a reporter again!"

No blogs, no reporters. That kind of limits Helen's options, doesn't it?

I guess she can always make her own videos...

In 1997, Lawrence Kudlow gave a keynote speech which began:

In terms of defending President Reagan and the economic policies he started 15 years ago, and to which I contributed, I knew I was on to something last autumn during the presidential campaign of ‘96. A lot of people in this room probably felt it was a fairly lackluster campaign and I suspect from the Republican perspective it was. For me, however, probably the most interesting aspect of it was that candidate Clinton essentially ran on a platform that emphasized smaller government, lower taxes, and traditional family values. And just like the politician who made these three issues winning issues, namely Ronald Reagan, Clinton won easily.

A lot of conservatives in Washington and other places are very resentful and angry and cranky and even pessimistic over the current state of affairs. I am not, and I am glad that Mr. Clinton continues to run and govern on what are essentially Reagan principles (admittedly Clinton's own interpretation of those principles, but imitation is the sincerest form of flattery). It shows the power and force of Reagan's ideas and vision.

Don't expect the next President Clinton, if elected, to govern in the same fashion.

Read More »

Like Spinal Tap's manager, Les Moonves wouldn't say that CBS's audience is shrinking...but it is becoming more selective:

CBS's loss might be ABC's gain, but according to the CEO of CBS Corp., those aren't viewers the Tiffany network wants. Portfolio.com's Jeff Bercovici, at the UBS media conference in New York, writes about Les Moonves' answer to a question about The CBS Evening News' ratings story:

"I am concerned that the average person who watches evening news is 61 years old," Moonves said. "We tried to get that a bit younger. People flipped over to Charlie Gibson, but those are mostly 60-plus[-year-old] men. That's not a demographic we want."

>More: With CBS Evening News down 15% among the A25-54 demo, year-year a network insider asks, "Exactly which demographic does Les Moonves want?"

Meanwhile, it sounds like NBC will be turning more lights out than just its football broadcasts.

Finally, over at ABC, with a writer's strike muzzling the big talkers, "Nightline Tops Leno & Letterman."

This past weekend, I had an interesting email exchange with "Dirty Harry" of Libertas, which amplifies my quick review post of Blade Runner: The Final Cut last weekend. You can read the details here.

Glenn Reynolds wraps up Romney reax.

Video via Hot Air.

Update: Full text at NRO.

JFK nostalgia--it's not just for Democrats any more!

Update: And for more nostalgia on the GOP stump, Rick Moran investigates "The Ghost of Reagan Past."

Iowahawk goes dumpster diving yet again, this time stumbling over the first draft of Franklin Foer's "epic blamestorm", buried within a dumpster "behind Marty Peretz's townhouse!"

By now, the identity of Scott Thomas is publicly known. He is Scott Thomas Beauchamp, age 24. He first came to our attention nearly a year ago by way of Elspeth Reeve, one of three reporter-researchers who work at TNR as essentially yearlong interns and whose responsibilities include fact-checking and making sure that the break room has plenty of Coffeemate non-dairy creamer. When she sent along a piece from her friend Scott in Iraq, we were intrigued. "Hmm," we thought, intriguigedly, "here is a young man in thick of great tragedy of our time, who will bring readers an introspective view on the day-to-day life of a typical soldier, whether it involves massacres of innocent villagers or a humdrum fragging of a psychopathic sergeant." When, before publication, Beauchamp asked for a pseudonym, we granted it. We felt that a soldier in a war zone could write most honestly about his feelings and experiences under a penumbra of anonymity. In return, we asked for a 25% share of book royalties, with a 10% option on future theatrical film and DVD gross.

His first piece, a Diarist titled "War Bonds" published in our February 5 issue, described the woes of an Iraqi boy named Ali Baba who found a magic lamp from which emerged a bikini-clad Genie, only to be killed when his magic carpet was downed by an insurgent RPG. This first piece didn't receive much attention, but the attention it did receive was positive. In any case don't remember any Hawks bitching about that one.

Several weeks passed before Beauchamp sent us another story--one recounting dialogue between French soldiers along a guard tower, taunting and catapulting cows at British SAS forces, which we rejected. During that time, he took leave in Germany with Reeve. The two had been casual friends at the University of Missouri and resumed a relationship online, which quickly turned into something serious. During Beauchamp's leave, he and Reeve left Germany...

...And the rest is Blogosphere history. Read the whole thing.

I'll second Classical Values' nomination. It's accompanied by the photo of the year from 2000.

Then: Tulip Mania.

Now: "What if everyone believes in global warmism only because everyone believes in global warmism?"

Details, as they emerge, at Hot Air.

As Glenn Reynolds writes, "Because nothing says 'journalistic detachment' like helping terrorists brush up on their fire-and-movement skills."

Nice to know that this sort of stuff isn't just Reuters' shtick these days.

Fireplaces? Well, hopefully yours will be grandfathered.

Internet servers? Hey, give 'em time.

Manned exploration of Mars? Forgetaboutit!

Hey, I thought it was the right that wanted to stand athwart history and yell stop...

While the promise of a new year brings with it mixed expectations, for decades upon decades its arrival has been soothed for millions of men with a free calendar provided by his local tradesman that's filled with color photographs of 12 months of sexy, scantily-clad women in provocative poses.

But an Italian firm that "deals with the construction of sarcophagus, cinerary urns and handycraft-items of funeral art with cooperation of experienced art masters" maybe pushing the envelope just a hair with the 2008 calendar they're offering to their customers.

Mark Steyn or Theodore Dalrymple could rip off 2000 words about the cultural significance of this, umm photographic achievement in about five minutes, I reckon.

Jim Geraghty writes:

Just got this reaction from a guy at a rival campaign, watching McCain at the MTV/MySpace presidential candidate dialogue: “Compare the professionalism of the MTV folks to what CNN has thrown together the last two debates and it’s no contest. Tonight’s production was very well done.”

Ouch.

It's amazing that CNN has now set the bar so low that mere technical competence is all that's necessary these days to clear it.

(Via The Anchoress.)

Obama is emailing his supporters:

Friend —

When I decided to run for president, I accepted that my opponents would dig through my record looking for something to attack.

I didn't realize they'd go all the way back to kindergarten.

Can't say I blame him.

Update: Of course: Yet another botched joke!

More: "Hillary's ship has begun to take on water."

At the end of 1969's Easy Rider, just before the ridiculously contrived happy ending the studio tacked onto the film to salvage its prospects at the box office, Peter Fonda tells Dennis Hopper, for no particular reason, "You know Billy, we blew it".

Dennis Prager agrees. He writes, "We live in the age of group apologies. I would like to add one. The baby boomer generation needs to apologize to America, especially its young generation, for many sins":

So we really blew it, and what's really amazing is that few of us have changed our minds. Most people get wiser as they get older. But not those of us baby boomers who still believe these things. Of course, many of us never bought into these awful ideas that have so hurt you and our country, and some of us have grown up. But many of us still talk, think, dress and curse the same as we did in the '60s and '70s. And we're still fighting what we consider the real Axis of Evil: American racism, sexism and imperialism.

But for those of us who know the damage baby boomers as a whole did to you, a heartfelt apology.

Related thoughts here.

As I'm prepping this week's segment of PJM Political on XM, here are two of the more extreme examples of new media round-ups of last week's CNN/YouTube GOP debate. First up, Breitbart TV, which has lots of clips of the more...horticultural...aspects of the debate:

It's great stuff, and Liz and Scott have done their usual thorough job, as they round-up a number of CNN's plants--they're rapidly become the Nightly TV News of the Blogosphere (which, as much as we bash the MSM 'round here, is meant as a compliment, incidentally). But for sheer alternate Virtual Reality, don't miss Frank J's take.

At least, I think it's the alternate reality version...

It may seem harsh to some, but to be fair, the nation does have a fair amount of past experience in regards to cults that merge futuristic technology, a devotion to cinema, Gnostic paganism and blind messianic devotion to its struggling artist turned leader.

For years, I thought the best moose joke was this one. But as always, there's no way for satire to best real life.

Update: Rocky couldn't be reached for comment, but Steven Den Beste certainly could!

From: Steven C. Den Beste
Sent: Monday, December 03, 2007 9:23 PM
To: ed@eddriscoll.com
Subject: Moose jokes: you lose 10 geek cred points

Woody Allen?

The best moose joke is the opening credits of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail". Any geek would know that.

Hang your head in shame, Ed!

It's a fair cop.

In Michael Gerber's perennial back catalog best seller The E-Myth, he explains the ultimate goal of a well-running business:

A World of Our Own

And that after all is the "Dream of American Business," the dream that has served as the catalyst for so many entrepreneurial (and not so entrepreneurial) efforts.

To create a world of our own.

What is this Entrepreneurial Revolution people are talking about today, where countless millions of us are going into business for ourselves?

It's nothing more than a flight from the world of chaos "out there" into a world of our own.

CNN, like CBS's Dan Rather before them, may have taken Gerber's advice just a little too literally, though.

Further confirming his point, this post by Dan Riehl makes an amusing follow-up to Roger Simon's Pajamas article from early this morning.

People magazine finds Hoovervilles ascendant in beautiful downtown Burbank:

One thing’s certain about the Writers Guild of America strike, it follows no script.

Despite assurances of job security from Jay Leno himself, on Friday the staff of the Tonight Show learned they were all out of jobs—and they were not guaranteed to be rehired once the talk show returns, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

By Saturday, sources close to Jay Leno confirmed to PEOPLE that starting Monday, when workers face their first day off the NBC payroll, the talk show host will begin paying crew and band and other employees out of his own pocket.

This comes on the heels of NBC’s announcement that the network “regretfully informed the people who work on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and Late Night with Conan O’Brien that their services are not needed at this time due to our inability to continue production of the shows.”

What can you expect from such a money-grubbing strike-busting Red State veteran of the conservative media?

As I've written a few dozen times here on this blog and in articles, the first decade of the 21st is witnessing the conclusion of the American mainstream media's 80-year obsession with providing "objective" journalism. Which is a move that's long overdue--wherever you stand on the political spectrum, simply compare the uniform bland establishment liberal institutional tone of American newspapers with the much more vibrant and diverse British model. And as Virginia Postrel recently wrote:

Reading [Objectivity by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison], I began to understand why I've never embraced my own profession's celebration of objectivity. Real objectivity would turn the journalist into a C-Span camera, simply recording data without any sort of selection or pattern-making. With all due respect to C-Span, good journalism in fact requires trained judgment: about what's important, what's interesting, what's worth telling. Good journalism includes story telling and analysis, even in straight news stories and all the more in features or analytical pieces. Mistaking fairness or accuracy for "objectivity" only confuses journalists, their audiences, and their critics.

Concurrent with the demise of the legacy media's feint towards omniscient God's eye all-knowing objective journalism is--not at all coincidentally--the American public finally understanding that, as Roger Simon notes at Pajamas HQ, the notion of an all-knowing fact checker at newspapers and television networks is very much a myth.

Related: "CNN: We Don’t Know How To Research".

Pieter Dorsman emails:

Today PoliGazette launched, a new moderate right-of-center news and blogsite developed by Michael van der Galien (Van Der Galien Gazette) Pieter Dorsman (Peaktalk) and Jason Steck (Militant Moderate).

Stop by and take a look, here.

Three updates on the ongoing War On Christmas: First up, Tom Blumer explores when the C-word is acceptable for use by leftwing journalists:

It seems beyond dispute that there is a strong bias against using the word “Christmas” to describe not only the shopping season, as noted above, but also events, parades, and festivals that happen during the Christmas season. There is, however, a bit of an exception — “Christmas” is a word that is much more acceptable to use when “Scrooge” employers are letting people go.

Meanwhile, Mark Steyn explains what two recent newsworthy incidents say about the cultures that produced them:

East is east, and west is west, and in both we take offense at anything: Santas saying "Ho ho ho," teddy bears called Mohammed. And yet the difference is very telling: The now-annual Santa lawsuits in the "war on Christmas" and the determination to abolish even such anodyne expressions of faith as the Pledge of Allegiance are assaults on the very possibility of a common culture. By contrast, the teddy bear rubbish is a crude demonstration of cultural muscle intended to cow and intimidate. When east meets west, when offended Muslims find themselves operating in Western nations, they discover that both techniques are useful: Some march in the streets, Khartoum-style, calling for the pope to be beheaded, others use the mechanisms of the West's litigious, perpetual grievance culture to harass opponents into silence.

Perhaps somewhere in Sydney there's a woman who's genuinely offended by hearing Santa say "ho ho ho" just as those New Hampshire atheists claim to be genuinely offended by the Pledge of Allegiance. But their complaints are frivolous and decadent, and more determined groups are using the patterns they've established to shut down debate on things we should be talking about. The ability to give and take offense is what separates free societies from Sudan.

Finally, Jules Crittenden writes, "Surgeon General to Santa: Lose It, Fat Boy!"

But isn't that rather culturally insensitive of the Surgeon General? Not to mention out of his jurisdiction, unless the US is claiming the North Pole as our 51st state. And even if we were, wouldn't Santa be grandfathered, due to his centuries of living up there?

(Don't miss this comment by one of Jules' readers, which puts the Cold Civil War and its northern front into sharp perspective.)

Related: Which stores dare to use the C-word? "The Attack on Christmas 2007" lists the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly on the retail front of the American overculture's War On Christmas.

Update: And speaking of taking No Offense just smidge too far, just click.

If it seems like the New York Times is the paper your grandmother reads because she doesn't get the Internet, her VCR endlessly blinks 12:00, and if she's heard of videogames at all, she equates them with Pong, there's a reason why: the writers at the Times have a surprisingly similar mindset.

Jonathan Last explores how the New York Times covers videogames--in a word, badly:

This sort of thing drives me nuts because (a) the videogame industry isn't that hard to cover and (b) it's a big enough sector that it deserves semi-serious coverage of its business aspects. But here's Joystiq on a NYT story:

First the Old Gray Lady says Gran Turismo 5 is "a hyper-realistic, high-speed journey, [and] is one of the best sellers for [the] Sony console." One little problem, the game isn't out yet. Next up they say the PlayStation 3 is $299, which would be awesome and perhaps the Times has some incredibly privileged info about Sony's holiday strategy, but we're pretty sure the system is going to be starting at $399 for a while. Oh, but they're not done yet. Did you realize the PS3 and Xbox 360 are both powered by the Cell processor? This is being reported by the venerable New York-freakin'-Times, so it must be true, right?

Goodness knows there's nothing wrong with making a mistake in writing a story. And maybe these errors were inserted by copyeditors and not the reporter. But these errors are so elementary that they suggest that the writer knows very little about the business and is just kind of parachuting in because someone assigned the story to him.

How hard would it be to have one guy on your business staff whose job was to keep half and eye on videogames while he went about his other beats?

And as Steve Boriss and Jeff Jarvis note, if you think the Times' coverage of the video game industry is off the mark, just imagine how it covers the Blogosphere.

National Review Online's in-house warblog, The Tank cooks the books, as Tom Wolfe would say, or more charitably, has a fog of war moment. Ed Morrissey compares and contrasts NRO editor Kathryn Jean Lopez's quick response versus the stonewalling of TNR's Franklin Foer:

Every publication eventually makes a big enough error to warrant a retraction and an apology. Even here at CapQ, I've had to do it a few times, and believe me, it never feels good. One has to resist the urge to rationalize mistakes and spin enough to avoid admitting error. Just as with customer service, where I often described my management position as "professional apologizer", editors have to bite the bullet and admit error to maintain organizational credibility.

Kathryn Jean Lopez did so here. Notice that she did not blame the critics for pointing out the error or assume that the criticism was motivated by some sort of conspiracy. She didn't, in essence, blame the customer for a faulty product. She took quick action to investigate, found obvious shortcomings, and issued an apology and a detailed accounting of the problem.

Had Franklin Foer done that when the story fell apart at TNR, he could have not just saved the magazine from a credibility collapse, he could have enhanced its standing. Instead of acting professionally, he assumed the Nixonian posture that anyone questioning TNR's product must automatically be an enemy against whom all defenses were necessary. Instead, even in an apology, he couldn't help blaming the customers for a shoddy product.

Much more from Michelle Malkin. As Kathy Shaidle suggests, "The Right should always be open to self-criticism"; it's certainly good for its collective mental health.

The great thing about Hollywood is that there's not much that separates this list from this one. But then, that's not an entirely new development.

Eric Scheie writes that last night's Democratic debate on Mark Cuban's HD-Net channel (which doubles as Dan Rather's elder care facility) was the political wonk's equivalent of Thursday's Cowboys-Packers game on the NFL Network.

(Minus Bret Favre, Tony Romo, and the Cowboys' cheerleaders, of course.)

Not surprisingly, I have very mixed emotions about Evel Knievel. But he was absolutely tailor-made for the craptacular pop culture of the 1970s, and it speaks volumes about television that whatever lofty goals and ideals the ABC network's sports division paid lip service to, it was Knievel's jumps--and especially his frequent spectacular crashes--that kept Wide World of Sports going during that decade. And I love Mark Danziger's description of Evel:

But there’s something in him that is a pluperfect example of what built America; that’s why seeing him in his late-Elvis stars and stripes leathers doesn’t quite bring the mocking laughter that it ought to. Because he has that glint in his eye.

It’s the one you see in the self-made rough-handed men in the corner of the hardware store that would as soon shake your hand as knock you down - and might just do both in one morning before loaning you twenty bucks and buying you a cup of coffee for 50 cents.

To put an academic point on it, it’s the Jacksonian impulse in the American spirit. Generous, vain, reckless, violent, striving and ever hopeful.

Lots of video of Knievel in action at Hot Air, if you're interested. Note that Howard Cosell, who frequently railed against television's sophomoric approach to sports, had no problem covering a Knievel jump or two.

Bob Owens--who did yeoman work getting past TNR's endless stonewalling--writes:

It took fourteen pages--13 of those geared towards Franklin' Foer's attempt to keep his job--but here's the punchline:

When I last spoke with Beauchamp in early November, he continued to stand by his stories. Unfortunately, the standards of this magazine require more than that. And, in light of the evidence available to us, after months of intensive re-reporting, we cannot be confident that the events in his pieces occurred in exactly the manner that he described them. Without that essential confidence, we cannot stand by these stories.

Bob promises much more to come.

Meanwhile, Allahpundit adds:

An interesting admission from page 3. I remember righty bloggers taking some static when the story first broke for noting that Beauchamp’s wife, Elspeth Reeve, worked for the magazine. It turns out to be relevant:

An interesting admission from page 3. I remember righty bloggers taking some static when the story first broke for noting that Beauchamp’s wife, Elspeth Reeve, worked for the magazine. It turns out to be relevant:

Michelle Malkin suggests to also be on the lookout for thoughts from Michael Goldfarb at the Weekly Standard, "who started the ball rolling and endured much abuse from the TNRites and the nutroots for calling B.S. and tapping open-source intelligence in the blogosphere–especially among milbloggers–to expose the lies, distortions, and attempted cover-up."

Update: You stay classy, TNR.

Or is it Eyes Wide Shut? It's definitely Risky Business, in any case:

I was watching tv the other day and saw a "public service announcement" that shocked me. I looked up the website at the end of the commercial at www.thewaytohappiness.org. and found the site was built around the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard in some type of pamphlet entitled, "The Way to Happiness." The commercial is entitled, "Don't be Promiscuous" but looks more like an endorsement of extreme domestic violence against men. You would never have a commercial where men were smacking women and breaking things over their head for cheating. Why is this okay? Do Scientologists believe in men being abused?

Take a look at this sick commercial and let me know what you think.

Like I said earlier this week, "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!"

In any case, I'd say the makers of the commercial could definitely use hours of psychiatry and a few gallons of antidepressant drugs.

We report, you decide:

The Brutally Honest Weblog believes that "Jason Whilock, a black columnist writing for The Kansas City Star" is being brutally honest in a way that will "piss off the modern day civil rights movement. He's provocatively telling the truth."

On the other hand, Jason Cole, who contributes to Yahoo's NFL coverage, praises Whilock's earlier efforts, but demurs at his latest column: "It's powerful, it's strong, it makes you think. But if it's wrong, it's dangerous."

Nina and I caught Blade Runner: The Final Cut in Campbell last night--it says something when a movie originally shot 25 years ago, with only a handful of new subtle, cleaned-up CGI shots, is infinitely better in scope and ambition than anything playing in theaters today. (And attracted a pretty good--if fairly middle aged--crowd as well.) You could probably say the same thing about the movies in 1982, (cue the William Goldman quote) but Hollywood at least was coming off a decade of great movies in the 1970s. I doubt that even the most hardcore of Hollywood fans would compare the quality of the films of the "naughts" with the films of the period of 1970-1983.

Bill Hunt of The Digital Bits has an extensive review of the latest--and maybe even final!--version of Blade Runner and the shots that were replaced and cleaned-up. These changes definitely help the film's continuity, which was its weakest element: I can understand why Leonard Maltin trashed the film in his popular guide; beyond the killer production design and music score, the film really does have the feel of a movie where the director was trying to clean things up at the last minute in the editing room. Check out how much expository information is dubbed in, particularly in the early scenes in the police station with Harrison Ford's Deckard and his boss, Capt. Bryant, played by veteran character actor M. Emmet Walsh. Much of it comes when Walsh's character is speaking is off the screen during a reaction shot of Ford, or a cutaway to a computer monitor. The new version smoothes a lot of this out, but it's clear that there was probably too much information flying around for early audiences to process, and the editors tried their damndest to fix this at the last minute--and didn't entirely succeed.

But so what? Like 2001: A Space Odyssey 14 years prior, Blade Runner is an awe-inspiring collection of great images and sounds, and should be viewed on the big screen--at least before watching it this way.