Andrea Billups of the Washington Times writes about advertising and father figures:

Todd Wasserman knew he had touched a nerve when he saw the enormous number of responses from readers.

As editor of Brandweek, a New York-based magazine that covers the nation's marketing industry, Mr. Wasserman penned a column in November bemoaning the treatment of fathers in advertising.

The dad-as-buffoon and the anti-father imagery seemingly permeated advertising and marketing campaigns, which continually use stereotypes about men to get cheap laughs, he observed. And they are increasingly the norm.

The letters poured in.

"I don't think we ever got so much reaction," said Mr. Wasserman, the father of a 5-month-old. "That fathers are often the butt of ads and accepted as idiots, that was just commonly accepted. But for me, it just seems like a stale target, a safe target for someone trying to get an easy laugh in an ad. The more people I talked to, the more it seemed a lot of people felt that way."

He is not alone in his assessment.

No, far from it.

In City Journal, Andrew Klavan, whose novel True Crime was adapted for the big screen by Clint Eastwood, writes:

During World War II, Hollywood stars like James Stewart and directors like Frank Capra enlisted in the military to combat dictators as willingly as Sean Penn and Michael Moore now tootle down to Venezuela and Cuba to embrace them. More to the point, yesteryear’s studio heads—many of them conservative Republicans—worked in cooperation with a Democratic administration to produce top-notch entertainment supporting the war effort. The result was not only rousing combat tales like 1943’s Sahara, Bataan, and Action in the North Atlantic—all still watchable today—but also some of the finest motion pictures ever made: 1942’s Casablanca and Mrs. Miniver, for instance, and the terrific yet all-but-forgotten They Were Expendable (1945). It was one of the film industry’s finest hours.

Much has changed in Hollywood since then. The fall of the business-driven studio system has freed creative types to make more personal films, just as the internationalization of markets and multiple methods of distribution protect them from the financial consequences of alienating the nation’s mainstream. If their anti-American labor of love bombs in Peoria, their investors will probably still make their money back in Europe and on the DVDs.

Beyond that, however, the movie business merely provides the most glamorous example of a greater change throughout our creative and intellectual communities: a decades-long drift toward an idiot radicalism. Movie artists—like all artists except the most original—are the products of the atmosphere of fashionable opinion that surrounds and sustains them. They may play at being heroes who speak truth to power, but the real powers in their lives are the elites who feed them praise, awards, and jobs. To them, the filmmakers speak nothing but slavish agreement.

Because of this, Hollywood war films past and present reflect the political philosophy not just of a small lotusland enclave, but of a large segment of our culture-making classes. The changing ways that these films portray the internal experience of the warrior, along with the change in their overall depiction of the nation and its guardians, are signs of deeper developments with unnerving ramifications.

Indeed they are; read the whole thing.

"McCain wouldn't be my first pick. Then again, none of the candidates were really my first pick. But I think the notion that, variously, conservatism, the country or the party are doomed if he's the nominee or the president is pretty absurd."

If you missed Pajamas' weekly show on XM's POTUS '08 presidential election channel, tune in here:

Rudy Giuliani and John Edwards head for the sidelines, and Bill Clinton dusts off the memories of Jesse Jackson in South Carolina, plus:

Host Bill Bradley on John McCain's comeback, the Kennedys' endorsement of Obama, and a preview of Super Tuesday.

Jonathan Last of the Weekly Standard on the campaign trail with Bill Clinton.

Bridget Johnson on "California's New Starring Role in the Presidential Primaries."

Mary Katharine Ham on being dubbed "The Worst Person In The World" by a little known talk show on public access cable TV.

Produced by Ed Driscoll.

For extended versions of the interviews featured on the show, don’t miss this week’s PJM Political “Director’s Cut Interviews.”

Here are two more tracks to add to the CD edition of SCTV's classic Stairways To Heaven album:

Update: Here's an even cooler DIY mash-up.

Linking to a recent AP article, James Joyner ponders why bloggers are being considered a national security threat:

Let me get this straight:

The AP is publishing cyber-security planning scenarios, thus making it easy for the enemy to know what’s not being planned for.

The major papers are routinely publishing reports on highly classified documents.

Bureaucrats and Congressmen who are losing turf battles leak state secrets all the time.

And it’s bloggers that they’re worried about?

Well, I'd be worried about these tyros joining the Blogosphere, myself.

Michael Moore, four years ago:

“There’s a reason that they’re saying Kerry is the No. 1 liberal in the Senate. It’s because he is the No. 1 liberal in the Senate.”

But hey, that was then, this is now.

"With apologies to Dr. Kubler-Ross."

CBS' Harry Smith:

In the civic religion that is Democratic politics, the most treasured covenant was passed to the young Senator from Illinois.

Well, it's tough to argue with the former half of that equation.

As to "the most treasured covenant", and the reality that it was built upon, James Piereson has some thoughts.

Since I'll be busy much of the day assembling the next edition of PJM Political, hopefully this will hold you over in-between posts:

Here's a link to the Pajamas article the video references.

Noemie Emery writes that the world is changing too quickly for the dead tree publishing world to keep pace: "things change so fast nowadays that by the time a book about current affairs hits the market, the reality it is describing may well have ceased to exist."

That's always the danger of projecting current trends too far out into the future. It's not at all a new phenomenon, but clearly it is an accelerating one.

Bruce Bawer writes:

It’s very clear what’s going on here – and where it’s all headed. Europe is on its way down the road of Islamization, and it’s reached a point along that road at which gay people’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is being directly challenged, both by knife-wielding bullies on the street and by taxpayer-funded thugs whose organizations already enjoy quasi-governmental authority. Sharia law may still be an alien concept to some Westerners, but it’s staring gay Europeans right in the face – and pointing toward a chilling future for all free people. Pim Fortuyn saw all this coming years ago; most of today’s European leaders still refuse to see it even though it’s right before their eyes.

Read the whole thing.

Fox has wisely ruled that the Super Bowl will be a politics-free zone.

Unfortunately, someone didn't get the message, it seems.

Anne Applebaum asks, "Where Did All Those Gorgeous Russian Women Come From?":

There was a particular historical moment, round about 1995 or so, when anyone entering a well-appointed drawing room, dining room, or restaurant in London was sure to encounter a beautiful Russian woman. Though the word beautiful doesn't really capture the phenomenon. The women I'm remembering were extraordinarily, unbelievably, stunningly gorgeous.

These women were half-Kazakh or half-Tartar with Mongolian ancestors and perfect skin; dressed in the most tasteful, most expensive clothes; shod in soft leather boots; and perfectly coiffed. They were usually accompanied by an older man, sometimes much older, to whom they were perhaps married, or more likely not. They spoke in low, alluringly accented voices and towered over the lesser mortals in the room. I distinctly remember gazing upon one such creature while in the company of a friend, an old Russia hand who'd spent much of the previous decade in the Soviet Union. He stared, shook his head, and whispered, "But where were they all before?"

In the aftermath of the Australian Open, a tennis tournament whose final rounds featured a parade of notably stunning ex-Soviet-bloc players, it is perhaps time to make a stab at answering my friend's question. Whatever you may say about the Soviet Union in the 1970s and '80s, it was not widely known for feminine pulchritude. Whatever you may say about women's professional tennis in the 1970s or '80s, it did not feature many players who looked like Maria Sharapova, the latest Australian Open victor.

Where were they all before?

Though this is a fairly frivolous question (OK, extremely frivolous), I am convinced it has an interesting answer. To put it bluntly, in the Soviet Union there was no market for female beauty. No fashion magazines featured beautiful women, since there weren't any fashion magazines. No TV series depended upon beautiful women for high ratings, since there weren't any ratings. There weren't many men rich enough to seek out beautiful women and marry them, and foreign men couldn't get the right sort of visa. There were a few film stars, of course, but some of the most famous—I'm thinking of Lyubov Orlova, alleged to be Stalin's favorite actress—were wholesome and cheerful rather than sultry and stunning. Unusual beauty, like unusual genius, was considered highly suspicious in the Soviet Union and its satellite people's republics.

This doesn't mean there weren't any beautiful women, of course, just that they didn't have the clothes or cosmetics to enhance their looks, and, far more important, they couldn't use their faces to launch international careers. Instead of gracing London drawing rooms, they stayed in Minsk, Omsk, or Alma Ata. Instead of couture, they wore cheap polyester. They could become assembly-line forewomen, Communist Party bosses, even local femmes fatales, but not Vogue cover girls. They didn't even dream of becoming Vogue cover girls, since very few had ever seen an edition of Vogue.

As Applebaum concludes, "Beauty is a matter of luck, but the same could be said of many other talents. And what open markets do for beautiful women they also do for other sorts of genius."

I first met Mary Katharine Ham when I covered a special Senate briefing for bloggers for the second day of Pajamas Media's existence, back in November of 2005. She seemed so fresh-faced and innocent back then. Who knew that just a couple of years later, she would be destined to become.... The Worst Person In The World.

Personally, I blame this tragic denouement on the all-corrosive effects of Las Vegas.

Kay Hymowitz charts the current status of the Decline of Western Civilization with the SYMs--Single Young Males:

Maxim asked the SYM what he wanted and learned that he didn’t want to grow up. Whatever else you might say about Playboy or Esquire, they tried to project the image of a cultured and au courant fellow; as Hefner famously—and from today’s cultural vantage point, risibly—wrote in an early Playboy, his ideal reader enjoyed “inviting a female acquaintance in for a quiet discussion of Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.” Hearing this, the Maxim dude would want to hurl. He’d like to forget that he ever went to school.

Maxim happily obliges. The editors try to keep readers’ minds from wandering with articles like “Confessions of a Strip Club Bouncer.” But they rely heavily on picture-laden features promoting the latest skateboards, video games, camcorders, and other tech products, along with an occasional Q-and-A with, say, Kid Rock—all with the bare minimum of print required to distinguish a magazine from a shopping catalog or pinup calendar. Playboy’s philosophy may not have been Aristotle, but it was an attempt, of sorts, to define the good life. The Maxim reader prefers lists, which make up in brevity what they lose in thought: “Ten Greatest Video Game Heroes of All Time,” “The Five Unsexiest Women Alive,” “Sixteen People Who Look Like They Absolutely Reek,” and so on.

Obligatory Allahpundit-inspired Exit Questions: Do the trends that Hymowitz describes above dovetail into this--and if so, how are they intertwined?

Update: Reader Stephen Shields squares the circle, with a link to this.

Teddy Kennedy was quoted today as saying:

"Through Barack, I believe we will move beyond the politics of fear and personal destruction and unite our country with the politics of common purpose."

Pretty ironic, considering it's coming from the man who did the most to bring the politics of fear and personal destruction to modern Washington.

Update: The New York State chapter of NOW decides to raise the stakes on Ted, to see who can peg the irony meter higher.

Karl of Protein Wisdom writes:

The Clinton strategy of marginalizing Obama as “the black candidate” and claiming that Obama was a Reagan supporter strikes at the very heart of the mulicultural vision, at the very heart of the Left-liberal identity. It cannot be compartmentalized as a defense of progressive ideals or the progressive movement because there is no significant ideological difference between Sens. Clinton and Obama. Moreover, the Democrats’ success in 2006, combined with their belief that this will be a “change” election cycle, makes the environment much different from the 1990s, when the Clintons were seen as first arresting the advance of the Right, later as the only bulwark against a GOP-led Congress. Thus, the relentless, overweening ambition and narcissism of the Clintons and their resort to racial politics is so nakedly exposed that Left-liberals are unable to avert their eyes from it.

Of course, it remains possible — perhaps even probable — that Left-liberals would rally to the Clintons again, should she win the nomination and even the general election. But I would still suggest that at the margins, this campaign, in this political environment, has forced Left-liberals to see the Clintons in a way that erodes the intensity of support they enjoyed in the 1990s. The scales have fallen.

Read the whole thing.

In September, I wrote:

As detailed in Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover's Mad As Hell: Revolt at the Ballot Box, 1992, what some may not recall these days about Bill Clinton's "Sister Souljah Moment", was that it had little to do with insulting a two-bit virtually unknown rapper, and everything to do with distancing himself from the failed radic chic 1970-era politics of her backer, Jesse Jackson. It was one of many gestures that allowed Clinton to position himself as much more moderate than the average Democrat presidential candidate, and went far towards cementing his candidacy.

For a moment of course, Clinton thought he needed Jackson's imprimatur during the impeachment hearings, but ten years on, Jesse's back to being merely a name to be demagogued by Bill.

Will it work? Michael Graham posits that it already has:

How to Defeat Obama?

Fight him. That's what the Clintons have shown. When he is forced to fight, Sen. Obama's inexperience shows. His record, slight as it is, is tough to defend.

He's got a glass jaw, and he will fall into the trap of identity politics.

In fact, he already has. The "could we beat Obama?" conversation is purely academic. It's over. The Clintons have defeated him already, because he is leaving South Carolina as "the black candidate."

He won't win another state. Even worse, in November Hillary will carry 90 percent of the black vote, despite their cynical, race-based campaign against the first viable black presidential candidate.

But it sounds like the scope of Obama's victory last night may make the Clintons look increasingly small. Still, don't count out what 17 years of battlefield prep can do for you.

Found via Fausta's Blog, Front Page magazine notes that "The David Horowitz Freedom Center has succeeded in putting the feminists and Islamists on the defensive":

As David Horowitz and Robert Spencer note in the article below, the DHFC's exposure of the feminist movement's lack of attention to women's rights in the Muslim world has caused many of the movement's most prominent activists to sign a letter protesting that they originated concern for Muslim women. The letter, drafted by feminist writer Katha Pollitt, has been signed by such notables as:

Susan Faludi, the author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women, which argues conservatives are trying to suppress American womyn, and The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, which claims terrorism provided a handy excuse for the American Right to begin binding women's feet again;

Julianne Malveaux, who expressed her feelings about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on PBS' To the Contrary, "I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early like many black men do, of heart disease"

Jennifer Baumgardner, a Nation writer whose idea of fighting female oppression is staging productions of The Vagina Monologues;

Dana Goldstein, an employee of the Soros-funded Center for American Progress and a writing fellow at the Soros-funded The American Prospect; and

More than 700 more leftists.

The letter spread quickly, beginning on the website of the far-Left's flagship publication, The Nation. (The Nation's piece was also picked up by Yahoo News). Soon, it had been posted on Mother Jones, the Islamic Forum, the University of Maine, and many other sites -- including that of a woman named Heart who is running for president. Not all are pleased; at least one insists U.S. immigration laws and Israeli treatment of Palestinians are a more direct affront to women's rights than clitorectomies. (She asks, "Does Ms. Pollitt think that 'Muslim countries' are particularly hostile to women’s rights for some reason?") Nonetheless, the very fact that the Left, so long silent about the crimes countenanced by its Islamic partners in the antiwar movement, now feels that it must mount a rousing defense is a vindication of our efforts. -- The Editors.

Hey, everyone's entitled to an off-decade.

Noel Sheppard of NewsBusters writes:

NewsBusters reported in December that Internet behemoth Google had a disclaimer cautioning readers that the website of conservative magazine the American Spectator "may harm your computer."

For some reason, this warning no longer exists.

This raises a couple of important questions:

Did the American Spectator do anything to its website that made it "safer?"

If not, did Google change its "harmful site" parameters, and, if so, why?

It raises another question--which Websites get stuck with this tag?

I noticed the same warning on the libertarian Tech Central Station Website (where I've been an off and on contributer since 2002), when I did a Google search to find Arnold Kling's "Folk Marxism" meme last May. Here's a screen capture from back then displaying that same "This site my harm your computer" warning above two separate TCS links.

After seeing that warning pop-up, I immediately sent the above screen capture to Nick Schulz, TCS's editor and publisher to let him know. The warning that Google slapped on TCS quickly went away, presumably after Nick or one of his associates got in touch with Google. And as Noel writes above, Google removed their warning on the American Spectator's site, again, presumably after a friendly email or twenty from the folks at AmSpec.

This could be something that one or two mischievous coders in the bowels of the Google cubicles are doing to goof off in-between World of Warcraft sessions. Or it could be some sort of virus or malware installed by someone not associated at all with Google, but designed to trigger Google's warning mechanisms, and thus steer traffic away from non-PC sites that might engender thoughtcrime. But the fact that it's hit at least two prominent libertarian, conservative, free-market, non-leftwing, whatever you want to call them sites is quite a remarkable coincidence, it seems.

Fresh on top of Hamas' noontime candlelit noontime siesta yesterday, Small Dead Animals spots another case of Middle Eastern fauxtography: the giant killing machines oppressing the "Occupied Territories Of The Little People."

"Killer dolphins baffle marine experts."

Found via Ace of Spades, National Review's Andrew McCarthy writes:

The readers’ representative recounted discussing the matter with Times editor Bill Keller. Tellingly, Keller said he “does not want to single out Greenhouse … because it would appear to be a tacit rebuke in the face of a partisan assault.” And so, at last, we stumble into the truth. The Times is not a newspaper. It is a partisan, self-consciously engaged in partisan battle.

This was news when their previous ombudsman at least had the cojones to cop to it in more straightforward language four years ago. No one should be all that surprised, these days.

"A U.S. study suggests marketing plays a role in how often parents buy fast food for their children."

I need a study to tell me this?

If someone in Hollywood has been itching to do a distaff postmodern remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Rope, your perfect source material has just presented itself.

(Via Hot Air, which wryly dubs the story "Tabloid nirvana attained.")

One of the readers of NRO's Corner has an excellent suggestion:

One way our people ought to start standing up to the various debate moderators is to start simply answering their rather biased questions with a repeated stock phrase which clearly identifies who they are.

So, for example, when a wacky Tim Russert question pops up, the answer should always start: “Well, Tim, I understand why you phrased your question that way, as a former top aide to Mario Cuomo, but let me tell you…” Same trope with Brian Williams: “Brian, I understand why you’d put it that way, given your previous speechwriting work for Jimmy Carter, but here’s the way to look at it…” Stephanopolous: “George, we all know your work for Bill Clinton, so you may look at it that way, but let me tell you…”

No need to be heated or confrontational in laying their backgrounds on the table, just gently and firmly remind viewers and colleagues of who these people really are. Might get the New York Times and the liberals in a twitter, but would force the media ethicists and howard kurtzes to cover the controversy and maybe introduce just a little shame into the systems of these jokers…

Of course, if you're on the opposite side of the aisle, you can simply ask for the deck chairs to be rearranged at your leisure.

Ezra Levant writes:

I was interviewed on the XM satellite radio channel "POTUS '08". Click here to hear it. I'm not sure how a radio channel dedicated to the 2008 U.S. presidential election found a way to dedicate 15 minutes to a case of Canadian censorship, where the CBC's several radio channels have been silent on the subject.

That's an easy one--Ezra's story went from Little Green Footballs to Hot Air to Instapundit to the Pajamas motherblog, stopping by for a cup of coffee on my blog as well. Since it seemed to resonate so much with Pajamas' bloggers--not to mention readers--it seemed to me that it was a topic we should explore on Pajamas' radio show, even if it's a story only tangentially related to the 2008 election. (Presumably, we'll be back to wall-to-wall election horse race coverage next week.)

Even more fauxtography from AP and Reuters?

On at least two occasions this week, Hamas staged scenes of darkness as part of its campaign to end the political and economic sanctions against the Gaza Strip, Palestinian journalists said Wednesday.

In the first case, journalists who were invited to cover the Hamas government meeting were surprised to see Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and his ministers sitting around a table with burning candles.

In the second case on Tuesday, journalists noticed that Hamas legislators who were meeting in Gaza City also sat in front of burning candles.

But some of the journalists noticed that there was actually no need for the candles because both meetings were being held in daylight.

"They had closed the curtains in the rooms to create the impression that Hamas leaders were also suffering as a result of the power stoppage," one journalist told The Jerusalem Post. "It was obvious that the whole thing was staged."

Note the sunlight streaming into the room, from behind the curtains.

Of course, this is far from the first time Reuters has been caught cooking the books in the Middle East. But hey, maybe Hamas are just big Sunday Night Football fans...

Update (1/26/08): Pajamas HQ notes:

Since this post went up, TIME has altered the caption on the photograph. Now it strikes a much more “symbolic” note: “Blackout: The Israeli embargo has left the Gaza Strip without electricity. To emphasize its plight the Palestinian Parliament met by candlelight on Tuesday.”

James Lileks sails into the annual Minneapolis Boat Show, camcorder in hand:

(Larger version viewable here.)

We had Ezra Levant on PJM Political today, and even played excerpts from a couple of his YouTube clips. But Iowahawk, somehow, has found the original complaint against Levant.

Or a reasonably satirical facsimile thereof.

He hasn't even gotten the gig with the Redskins yet, but there's already a "Fire Jim Fassel" Weblog.

Their motto? "Why waste time"!

Roger L. Simon: the John Wayne of the Blogosphere?

As Glenn Reynolds notes:

THE NEW YORK TIMES ENDORSES HILLARY CLINTON -- and, because they must want to do him harm, John McCain. (No, really -- Rudy's people are even pointing out the endorsement.)

Thus offering the perfect softball for Brian Williams to unwittingly pitch to Rudy during tonight's GOP debate:

Back in 2004, Jeff Zucker, the president of NBC told USA Today, "No one understands this NASCAR nation more than Brian." Curious, isn't it, how such a man of Middle America can pay such deference to the Gray Lady?

Update: Related thoughts from Duke Wayne Roger L. Simon.

Back in early 2006, Australia's John Birmingham profiled Tim Blair, amongst others, in his look at conservative comedy:

Blair, the closest antipodean analogue of O'Rourke, is a declared political warrior, with no interest in fairness, unlike traditional satirists such as Patrick Cook or Mike Carlton who are even-handed in their choice of targets. A Blair column is predictable insofar as you know who is going to get whacked - exactly the same people who took a beating in that morning's Miranda Devine op-ed piece. But unlike Devine, Blair consistently rewards attention with little hash cookies of humour such as his obsession with AC/DC's bagpipe player. Does he tour? Does he have groupies? Are they called bag ladies?

He does indeed tour--and gets down with his bad, Utilikilted self!

(Get well soon, Tim!)

It's to a far, far better gig that Kucinich goes--because let's face it, Ed Straker can't run SHADO forever.

Ezra Levant was our special guest this week on PJM Political, in which he discussed his infamous videotaped kerfuffle with the Alberta Human Rights Commission.

Also on the show were David Frum on his new book, Comeback:Conservatism That Can Win Again, Patrick Cox, who was Fred Thompson's first campaign hire, and James Lileks.

Tune in here to listen to the whole show, or here to go straight to my interview with Ezra.

As David Frum, our guest this week on PJM Political wrote in How We Got Here, the 1970s was an era loaded with bad ideas (not to mention even worse aesthetics). One of the few bad ideas that America dodged was converting to the metric system--but that's not the case in EU-ifed England. Debbie Schlussel warns, "Beware the metric jihadis. Consider me a fellow member of Al Anti-Metricaeda."

Robert Bidinotto writes, "So much for the canard that the Bush administration manufactured lies to justify the Iraq invasion":

The Bush people didn't lie. They were taken in by Saddam Hussein's lies.

And ultimately, Saddam was taken in by his own lies.

Misled by Saddam, the Bush administration (and most of the world) honestly believed that he had WMD, and the invasion therefore made sense. So, don't blame Bush for an "unnecessary war."

Blame the lying thug who provoked it.

Like most fascists, Saddam simply wasn't prepared to have his bluff called, despite the astronomic stakes involved.

In 1960, Mort Sahl summed up the race--fought alongside virtually identical political positions--between Richard Nixon, the 47-year old vice president of President and former General Dwight D. Eisenhower, then 70, and 43-year old John F. Kennedy, the son of the 72-year old one-man political machine Joseph P. Kennedy as "Oh yeah? So's your old man!"

Tom Maguire writes that the fiercely fought battles between Hillary and Obama boil down to "'You're Black' Versus 'You're The Boss's Wife'".

As Orrin Judd writes, "In the absence of ideas, they're stuck fighting over minutiae."

Update: The American Thinker looks at a much more bitter and modern version of "So's Your Old Man."

Titled, "Obama: I'm Not a Muslim! Forward This to Everyone You Know", this Wired article contains this unintentionally ironic passage:

The Obama campaign announced the debunking effort with an e-mail barrage from John Kerry of Massachusetts, in which the former presidential candidate urges supporters to "e-mail the truth" to everyone on their address books, to print out the facts about Obama's background and post them at work, and to call local radio stations and talk to neighbors.

"If lies can be spread virally, let's prove to the cynics that the truth can be every bit as persuasive as it is powerful," Kerry wrote in the note.

Kerry's note was titled "Swiftboating" -- a reference to Kerry's own presidential campaign in 2004, which was famously sunk by falsities spread by the lobbying group Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth.

Yes, how did the Swift Vets, on their budget, talk Industrial Light & Magic into digitally inserting Kerry into footage of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations back in 1971, and pay Rich Little for doing an outrageously over-the-top Boston Brahmin accent? (But c'mon Rich--JJJJJennnghis Kahn? isn't that a bit too much? Nobody will believe it!) To complete the ultimate scam, ILM then digitally inserted Kerry, much like Hollywood's Forrest Gump a decade ago, onto the set of the Dick Cavett Show from that same year. And they talked C-Span into running that footage in 2004. Amazing!

Update: Related thoughts from Mike Hendrix and Power Line.

Playing the role of attack dog on the campaign trail, Bill Clinton snarls at CNN:

"Once you accuse somebody of racism or bigotry or something, the facts become irrelevant."

as Ace writes, "Irony much? Oh yes, very much."

(Sorry for the lack of posts yesterday; I was putting this week's PJM Political to bed.)

Michael Ledeen writes that the Washington Post may finally be getting it:

Monday the WaPo had a front-page story about the "foreign fighters" in Iraq. It was based on the so-called Sinjar documents, captured in Iraq, and detailing the lives and activities of would-be martyrs. It increases the percentage of foreign suicide bombers in Iraq to something like ninety percent.

Maybe it's time to rethink the "civil war" theme?

There's a thought.

On his Pajamas blog, Michael's thoughts on "The Post, Newsweek, and the Jews" (specifically their commissioning--and subsequent apologizing for--Arun Gandhi and his anti-Semitic rant) are also well worth your time.

James Taranto links to an astonishing passage in a CNN article that certainly puts the emphasis on the second word of the phrase presidential race:

Recent polls show black women are expected to make up more than a third of all Democratic voters in South Carolina's primary in five days.

For these women, a unique, and most unexpected dilemma, presents itself: Should they vote their race, or should they vote their gender?

No other voting bloc in the country faces this choice.

Steve Green responds that identity politics-themed articles such as this are "Why Politics Make Me Drink Reason #478". adding:

I dunno. White Republican males had like seven or eights guys to choose from (plus Ron Paul), and they seem to be handling it just fine.

Heh^TM.

More on media-induced identity politics from Steve Boriss, who writes, "Media Blinders Impede a Colorblind Society."

While this is a perfectly acceptable Tom Cruise parody video, I'd say that Mickey Kaus has Tom's shtick down.

KSW, all you spectators, KSW!

A public service message campaign whose time (and Newsweek!) has come.

Breaking, as Matt Drudge would say:

NEW YORK -- Oscar-nominated actor Heath Ledger has been found dead at a downtown Manhattan residence, police said Tuesday, in what might be a drug-related death.

NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said Ledger had an appointment for a massage at the SoHo apartment that is believed to be his home. A housekeeper went to let Ledger know the masseuse was there, and found him dead at 3:26 p.m, Browne said.

Ledger was found with a bottle of pills next to him, according to an NYPD spokesman.

The Brokeback Mountain star was 28; his next role was scheduled to be as the Joker in the next Batman movie, where presumably (and somewhat reminiscent of Brandon Lee in The Crow), principle photography had already concluded before his death.

Andrea Harris writes:

A tale of two photos. Even now, with the truth about the Vietnam War trickling ever so slowly out into the world, I’ll bet most people still accept the “received wisdom” about these famous photographs. I know I had no idea.

One of the photos that Neo revisits was previously dissected in an early Jonah Goldberg G-File, back in 1999. But the second, and equally iconic photo I didn't know the real history of either.

Meanwhile, over at Opinion Journal video, Bret Stephens suggests that the resurgence of John McCain is due in large part to the desire of a wide swatch of the American public to avoid a repeat of the defunding of the South Vietnamese by the American left and its horrific aftermath:

The claim that there was no “bloodbath” in South Vietnam is true only by comparison with what happened to its neighbor Cambodia. On top of the more than 275,000 South Vietnamese who died fighting in the country’s armed forces, at least 65,000 were murdered or shot after “liberation”—the equivalent of three-quarters of a million people in today’s United States. According to the scholar D.R. Sar Desai, the Communist regime forcibly relocated or sent to “reeducation camps” somewhere between one-third to one-half of South Vietnam’s population; perhaps as many as 250,000 died of disease, starvation, or overwork, and the last inmates were not released until 1986. Ironically, the victims included many former members of the National Liberation Front and Vietcong, who realized too late that they had been puppets of the North all along. Another million or so Vietnamese, most of them ethnic Chinese, fled by sea from the new regime; an unknown number died or were lost at sea.

Amy Winehouse, this year's answer to the self-destructiveness of Billie Holiday and Janis Joplin, merged with the frightening visage of Patti Smith at her most emaciated, is "headed for rehab the same day The Sun newspaper ran on its Web site a video of her allegedly smoking a crack pipe."

Speaking of the Atlantic, Marc Ambinder writes:

Ex-Sen. Fred Thompson has told several Republicans that he has decided to drop out of the presidential race and will make public his intentions by close of business.

Thompson does not plan to endorse any rivals for now, even though one of his best friends is Sen. John McCain.

He's been visiting his mother, who is ill, in Tennessee.

(Via Hot Air.)

Update: It's official--Jon Henke, Thompson's Internet consultant, emailed this campaign statement:

McLean, VA - Senator Fred Thompson today issued the following statement about his campaign for President:

"Today I have withdrawn my candidacy for President of the United States. I hope that my country and my party have benefited from our having made this effort. Jeri and I will always be grateful for the encouragement and friendship of so many wonderful people."

It's a safe bet that we'll be discussing this further on this week's PJM Political on XM.

This sounds like good news:

Beginning today, TheAtlantic.com is dropping its subscriber registration requirement and making the site free to all visitors.

Now, in addition to such offerings as blogs, author dispatches, slideshows, interviews, and videos, readers can also browse issues going back to 1995, along with hundreds of articles dating as far back as 1857, the year The Atlantic was founded.

We're pleased to bring The Atlantic before a broader online audience. We hope that the quality of its writing, the trenchancy of its insights, and the depth and thoughtfulness of its reporting will inspire many of our online readers to join the Atlantic family by becoming print subscribers.

Surf away, starting here.

The following video is a Rashomon-like experience: poignant look at Red State elites on the eve of a tumultuous election year? Hagiographic inadvertent infomercial? Self-indulgent holiday video? All of the above?

You make the call!

They played it left hand, but made it waaaay too far:

Speaking of MSM classiness, James Taranto outlines the New York Times' latest self-inflicted wound:

As Mark Steyn writes:

Have you been in an airport recently, and maybe seen a gaggle of America’s heroes returning from Iraq? And you’ve probably thought, “Ah, what a marvelous sight. Remind me to straighten up the old ‘Support Our Troops’ fridge magnet, which seems to have slipped down below the reminder to reschedule my acupuncturist. Maybe I should go over and thank them for their service.”

No, no, no, under no account approach them. Instead, try to avoid making eye contact and back away slowly toward the sign for the parking garage. You’re in the presence of mentally damaged violent killers who could snap at any moment.

You hadn’t heard that? Well, it’s in the New York Times: “a series of articles” — that’s right, a whole series — “about veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who have committed killings, or been charged with them, after coming home.” It’s an epidemic, folks. As the Times put it: “Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories. Lakewood, Wash.: ‘Family Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife.’ Pierre, S.D.: ‘Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress.’ Colorado Springs: ‘Iraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring.’”

Obviously, as America’s “newspaper of record,” the Times would resent any suggestion that it’s anti-military. I’m sure if you were one of these crazed military stalker whackjobs following the reporters home you’d find their cars sporting the patriotic bumper sticker “We Support Our Troops, Even After They’ve Been Convicted.” As usual, the Times stories are written in the fey more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone that’s a shoo-in come Pulitzer time: “Individually, these are stories of local crimes, gut-wrenching postscripts to the war for the military men, their victims and their communities. Taken together, they paint the patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.”

“Patchwork picture,” “quiet phenomenon”… Yes, yes, but exactly how quiet is the phenomenon? How patchy is the picture?” The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan either “committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one.” The “committed a killing” formulation includes car accidents.

Thus, with declining deaths in theater, the media narrative evolves. Old story: “America’s soldiers are being cut down by violent irrational insurgents we can never hope to understand.” New story: “Americans are being cut down by violent irrational soldiers we can never hope to understand.” In the quagmire of these veterans’ minds, every leafy Connecticut subdivision is Fallujah and every Dunkin’ Donuts clerk an Abu Musab al-Zarqawi with an annoyingly perky manner.

It was the work of minutes for the Powerline website’s John Hinderaker to discover that the “quiet phenomenon” is entirely unphenomenal: It didn’t seem to occur to the Times to check whether the murder rate among recent veterans is higher than that of the general population of young men. It’s not. Au contraire, the columnist Ralph Peters calculated that Iraq and Afghanistan vets are about a fifth as likely to murder you as the average 18-34 year-old American male. Better yet, the blogger Iowahawk meticulously drew his own “patchwork picture” of another “quiet phenomenon”: the Denver newspaper columnist arrested for stalking, the Cincinnati TV reporter facing child-molestation charges, the Philadelphia anchorwoman who went on a violent drunken rampage.

Vietnam War veteran turned Dallas businessman B.G. Burkett made a second career of rehabilitating the reputation of slandered veterans as a result of a deep institutional bias against the former soldiers of that war in the 1970s that ran from John Kerry to newspaper editors to Hollywood. (See: Driver, Taxi amongst numerous other similarly themed films from the 1970s.) The New York Times, amongst others, have learned nothing from that period, and in the coming years, we may very well need men like Burkett again.

As part of his series with Reason's TV division, Drew Carey notes that the Nanny State has no rhythm:

Chris Matthews has a bad case of Joe Biden motor-mouth disease, as highlighted in a conversation this past week between Hugh Hewitt and Mark Steyn:

HH: Mark Steyn, speaking of Sunnis and Shias, I want to play for you Chris Matthews last night on Jay Leno’s show. Here is Mr. MSNBC:

Chris Matthews: Republicans are like the Iraqis. Have you noticed? They’ve got their Shia wing, the fanatics. They’ve got Huckabee…and this is where I get into trouble. This is just where I get into trouble. Huckabee and Thompson are the Shiites, and the Sunni, the more moderate guys are McCain and who else have they got over there? And Rudy Giuliani. And then they’ve got Romney the Kurd.

Jay Leno: Right, right.

CM: I mean, they’re all over the place. Who’s going to unite them?

JL: And Senator Larry Craig is the guy with the sheep.

Hugh Hewitt: What do you think, Mark Steyn?

Mark Steyn: Oh, you need a better writer if you’re going to do Islamic analogies, I think.

HH: (laughing)

MS: The fact is, I mean, I don’t understand how you could have been Chris Matthews, sitting there night after night, and not picked up on the fact that in his thing, what is it, the Shia are Mike Huckabee, they’re the extremists, and the Sunni are the moderates. Now you see, that’s the exact opposite of what it’s been in Iraq.

HH: In Iraq, you’re right.

MS: Yeah, yeah.

HH: You’re right.

MS: And you know, and Mitt Romney being…I don’t even understand. It doesn’t work as an analogy. You can apply those kind of analogies. I used to do that up in Canada for a while, where I said that for the last forty years, Canada had been like Iraq, where you know, the unrepresentative minority had been running the country, and holding all the levers of power. I meant the French Canadians. But you know, you can make those analogies work. But he managed to get it all completely wrong. Astonishing.

But Matthews was a model of civility when compared to Arun Gandhi, grandson of India’s legendary leader “Mahatma” Gandhi:

Following recent criticism by myself and others about a piece prominently highlighted on The Washington Post’s home page on January 7, which suggested Israel was somehow following in the footsteps of Nazi Germany, the newspaper has issued a rare apology.

The piece, part of the Post’s religion column, was penned by Arun Gandhi, grandson of India’s legendary leader “Mahatma” Gandhi, and was titled “Jewish Identity Can't Depend on Violence.”

The Washington Post has often been criticized by Jewish groups for running pieces highly slanted against Israel, but it is extremely unusual for the paper to acknowledge bias.

In a statement on Friday The Washington Post wrote that readers “found Gandhi’s initial remarks anti-Semitic and his subsequent apology insufficient. When we undertook this project over a year ago, we wrote that our goal was to shed light on a subject – religion – – that too often generates heat. The Gandhi post failed to comply with that mission, and we can only ask our readers to extend ‘On Faith’ a measure of forbearance and tolerance as the site endeavors to conduct a civil and illuminating conversation. We regret the initial posting, and we apologize for the episode.”

Arun Gandhi’s original piece also appeared on the Newsweek website.

You stay classy, MSM.

Update: Related thoughts from Jewish Journal.com.

Wow, Robert Redford just can't catch a break these days. First his movie tanks ($35 mil budget, $14 mil domestic gross), and now this:

PARK CITY, Utah – The Sundance Film Festival has plenty of star power, but Friday night it ran out of the electric kind.

Park City’s Main St. went dark about 10:30 p.m. because of what officials said was an overuse of electricity. They blamed the blackout on the clubs and lounges that pop up during the movie festival and host parties for the flicks.

Chaos ensued when the lights went out at Harry-O's nightclub, where more than 1,000 guests were hearing Maroon Five play. People ran for the doors.

Main St. became packed with confused festival goers.

But at the Sky 360 Delta Lounge down the street, party planners lit candles and kept the bar open despite the blackout.

Authorities worked feverishly to restore power, and 40 minutes later the lights were back on Main St.

Why didn't Sundance simply follow the lead of their fellow leftwingers at NBC, and claim they were intentionally making an important enviro-political statement?

Update: Tim Blair spots a belated Gore Effect at Sundance.

Jules Crittenden writes that the more things change in Germany, the more they remain the same.

Can we dispatch this young fellow to the Great White East for a few months for a minor attitude adjustment?

Ed Morrissey's been on quite a roll lately. In a post today, he explores the most recent example of the left's circular firing squad:

There are a few moments where pure schadenfreude can honestly be enjoyed without guilt. Besides Geraldo getting assaulted by neo-Nazis he wanted to exploit for ratings, the second-best example is watching Democrats beat each other up by accusing each other of the voter fraud they insist doesn't exist in general elections. This time, Bill Clinton provides the blue-on-blue action in Nevada:

Today when my daughter and I were wandering through the hotel, and all these culinary workers were mobbing us telling us they didn’t care what the union told them to do, they were gonna caucus for Hillary.

There was a representative of the organization following along behind us going up to everybody who said that, saying 'if you’re not gonna vote for our guy were gonna give you a schedule tomorrow so you can’t be there.' So, is this the new politics? I haven’t seen anything like that in America in 35 years. So I will say it again – they think they're better than you.

Wow -- who would have thought that unions try to organize voters? Isn't that why people like Bill Clinton have sucked up to them for decades? Having a leading Democrat complain about union pressure on members for political action has to be one of the most clarifying and completely hilarious moments in politics since .... well, since Howard Dean flamed out in Iowa and the Democrats picked John Kerry as the nominee.

And yesterday, linking to Christopher Hitchens' latest essay, Ed writes, "Identity Politics Is Chauvinism Under Another Name":

At the heart of Hitchen's argument is this fact: it is just as chauvinistic to vote for someone on the basis of their gender or ethnicity as it is to vote against them for the same reason. It's reflexively a form of bigotry, the notion that a candidate is superior for these superficial reasons, or that different groups should get "turns" at holding power. The latter especially represents the antithesis of individual liberty and equality and instead vaults identity politics into a system in which elites make determinations of power distribution.

In that system, the real power remains with the elites, not with the symbolic representation of the groups -- and the elites know it.

This post by Glenn Reynolds seems to the above two posts from the good Captain together.

Update: Meanwhile, Victor Davis Hanson explores the flipside to Ed's thoughts on the left: Republican Fratricide.

Tremendous passage from the late Michael Kelly, found via Cold Fury:

Sinatra, as every obit observed, was the first true modern pop idol, inspiring in the 1940s the sort of mass adulation that was to become a familiar phenomenon in the '50s and '60s. One man, strolling onto the set at precisely the right moment in the youth of the Entertainment Age, made himself the prototype of the age's essential figure: the iconic celebrity. The iconic celebrity is the result of the central confusion of the age, which is that people possessed of creative or artistic gifts are somehow teachers-role models-in matters of personal conduct. The iconic celebrity is idolized-and obsessively studied and massively imitated-not merely for the creation of art but for the creation of public self, for the confection of affect and biography that the artist projects onto the national screen.

And what Frank Sinatra projected was: cool. And here is where the damage was done. Frank invented cool, and everyone followed Frank, and everything has been going to hell ever since.

In America, B.F., there was no cool. There was smart (as in the smart set), and urbane, and sophisticated, and fast and hip; but these things were not the same as cool. The pre-Frank hip guy, the model of aesthetic and moral superiority to which men aspired, is the American male of the 1930s and 1940s. He is Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep or Casablanca or Archie Goodwin in Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe novels. He possesses an outward cynicism, but this is understood to be merely clothing; at his core, he is a square. He fights a lot, generally on the side of the underdog. He is willing to die for his beliefs, and his beliefs are, although he takes pains to hide it, old-fashioned. He believes in truth, justice, the American way, and love. He is on the side of the law, except when the law is crooked. He is not taken in by jingoism but he is himself a patriot; when there is a war, he goes to it. He is, after his fashion, a gentleman and, in a quite modern manner, a sexual egalitarian. He is forthright, contemptuous of dishonesty in all its forms, from posing to lying. He confronts his enemies openly and fairly, even if he might lose. He is honorable and virtuous, although he is properly suspicious of men who talk about honor and virtue. He may be world-weary, but he is not ironic.

The new cool man that Sinatra defined was a very different creature. Cool said the old values were for suckers. Cool was looking out for number one always. Cool didn't get mad; it got even. Cool didn't go to war: Saps went to war, and anyway, cool had no beliefs it was willing to die for. Cool never, ever, got in a fight it might lose; cool had friends who could take care of that sort of thing. Cool was a cad and boastful about it; in cool's philosophy, the lady was always a tramp, and to be treated accordingly. Cool was not on the side of the law; cool made its own laws. Cool was not knowing but still essentially idealistic; cool was nihilistic. Cool was not virtuous; it reveled in vice. Before cool, being good was still hip; after cool, only being bad was.

Quite a legacy. On the other hand, he sure could sing.

One of the observations that Diana West made in The Death of the Grown-Up is how much of the heavy lifting in the birth of modern culture--with all its pluses and minuses--occurred in the 1950s, though the 1960s gets all the credit.

But while Sinatra was indeed a harbinger of things to come, he was also very much a man of his times. In Gay Talese's epochal 1966 "Frank Sinatra Has A Cold" article for Esquire, you can actually see the cool style of Sinatra’s highpoint ebb into the sunset, and the aesthetic of the late sixties being born, when Sinatra encounters legendarily cranky sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison.

And as Mark Steyn wrote recently, by the following decade dispatches between the two cultures--the post-war showbiz culture and the anti-war culture of mud--were even chillier:

One reason why the Oscar shows of the early Seventies are such a hoot compared to 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.

Which means, through the paradigm of The Manchurian Candidate and even programmers like Von Ryan's Express, plus his support of JFK and RWR, we can look back at Sinatra as a remarkably patriotic, all-American guy, in spite of himself, his myriad excesses, and nihilistic cool.

Maybe it was simply that while Sinatra was indeed cool, he never succumbed to its successor pose: irony. Which, in retrospect, may have saved him from himself, unlike those who followed in his wake.

Update: Welcome Libertas and Jules Crittenden readers!

Since the early days of this site, a recurring theme has been that no satirist is able to improve upon real life for its pure absurd absurdist absurdity. Which is what makes this Iowahawk parody, titled "As Casualties Mount, Some Question The Emotional Stability of Media Vets" so delicious:

Accounts of media psychopathy, while widespread, have until now been largely anecdotal. In order to provide a more focused and systematic study of the crisis, Iowahawk researchers set out to identify and tabulate criminal arrests and convictions of current and former journalists. While by no means comprehensive, this 10-minute project yielded a grim picture of a once-proud profession now in the grips of tragic, drunk, violent, child-raping rage.

The stories cited in the opening paragraph, while instructive, are by no means isolated. Google searches return hundreds of crimes attributable to workers in America's media industry, and millions of pages containing the terms "journalist" and "murder." They are as shocking in their detail as they are in their number.

What's astounding--and deeply troubling--is that while Iowahawk's tone is satiric, the myriad of links embedded in his post go to story after story of actual troubled journalists melting down, one after the other.

With so many examples of veterans of this profession leading troubled lives, one wonders if recruiters should be barred from college campuses to prevent their trolling for new enlistees into such a dangerous, personality destroying field.

Regarding the distaff side of "progressivism", Amy Alkon writes, "For people who are supposedly about seeing women 'as people first,' these feminists sure are all about pussy!"

Kaithy Shaidle sizes up the other half of the equation:

Funny too how, for men who envision themselves as all enlightened and cerebral and highly evolved, male progressives so often reveal their main concern to be the satisfaction of transitory base appetites, which they view to be the cure-all for every societal ailment.

James Taranto explores the moment when both worldviews collided ten years ago, with disastrous results for all concerned.

According to Hot Air, Jon Stewart's Daily Show is getting calls to release the full, unedited 18 minutes of their interview with Jonah Goldberg yesterday. This was boiled down to six minutes to air on TV. In and of itself isn't that isn’t that remarkable, except for the frustrated pseudo-apology that Stewart offers at the start of the clip, and the choppy footage that follows. ("At least Michael Moore is subtle when he does that", one of Jonah's readers quips.) It does seem remarkably dishonest rather curious that the Daily Show couldn't simply upload the raw camera footage from the VTR and the camera switcher to the 'Net. It's not like the bandwidth is costing them much money. (Or use YouTube or Brightcove or any one of a dozen different video aggregation sites if it is.)

For Pajamas' weekly PJM Political show on XM, I've had to edit numerous interviews for space requirements (particularly in the early days of the show, when I still learning the proportions and ingredients, and overbooked guests in fear that XM wouldn't appreciate gaps in the show--or worse, 55 continuous minutes of Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66 tunes on their presidential election channel.) But I also created the "Director's Cut" posts to upload the full length versions of those interviews if they aired in a truncated format. And if we can do it at Pajamas, there's simply no reason that Comedy Central, with a lot more manpower at their disposal, can't as well.

Well, there is a reason, and it's not one that's very flattering to the Daily Show and its host.

On the other hand, all of the controversy isn't hurting Jonah's book sales of course--it's currently #2 on Amazon.

Update (1/18/08 11:42 AM): Leftwingers explode as Jonah's book is number one on Amazon.

Well that's not exactly what I'd call what's happening to Ezra Levant, but if the lawsuit fits...

Five years ago over at Tech Central Station, I described, using the terms that Virginia Postrel created in The Future and its Enemies the ongoing civil war in California, between the dynamists of Silicon Valley up north, and the stasists in Hollywood down south. The computer industry creates software that empowers individuals to blog and produce their own music, video, and other multimedia applications. Hollywood, in the form of both the movie and music industry, wants to keep content in their control as much as possible.

Roger L. Simon writes that just as with the original Civil War, the south isn't likely to win this one, either.

Your medium is dying, Charles Johnson informs the legacy media:

Sacred Heart University in Connecticut has conducted a poll on Americans’ opinions about the news media—and the amount of distrust is surprising even to me: Americans Slam News Media on Believability.

The era of the media mandarins, handing down unquestioned wisdom from their high-tech towers, is most definitely over.

Steve Boriss explores the moment ten years ago when it became increasingly obvious to the American public that much was wrong with those mandarins.

With a tip of the fedora to the denizens of Fark, it's pretty obvious that's the inevitable outcome to this perennial story of the naughts.

Fast breaking news from UPI: "Rove belittles Democratic candidates."

Update: More from the Architect, at The Hill.

National Journal's Hotline is releasing a series of well-produced vlogs to their own page on YouTube. Here's their wrap-up of the GOP frontrunners yesterday in Michigan:

(Their preview of yesterday, with hosts Amy Walter and John Mercurio recreating the cold of Motown and the sunny cocktail spirit of Las Vegas via green screen and props is also a fun video.)

Roger L. Simon writes that the presidential election all comes down to one simple question:

While watching the endless pundit blather on TV tonight after the Republican Michigan Primary and Democratic Nevada Debate and reading the various opinion meisters commentaries online, I had one of those rare zen moments of simplicity. It all comes down to a simple question:

Who would you like to be in the White House if Pakistan fell to al Qaeda and the Islamists gained control of its nuclear arsenal?

Answer that question and you will know your candidate. All the rest, as they say, is commentary.

Indeed^TM.

This just in--the anchorwoman's an airhead!

Back in late 2001, just as the Blogosphere was getting started, Glenn Reynolds proffered some advice for those who wanted to dip their toes into the pool:

Any time you start to doubt yourself, and wonder if you're fit for the big leagues of American thought and opinion, you can just read The Times and be thankful that the standards of the big leagues aren't so high.

As video blogging becomes increasingly accessible, if anything, the Professor's advice is even more useful to those who want to opine in front of a camera, rather than a keyboard.

As Charles Johnson writes, Robert Bidinotto, the editor of the New Individualist magazine to which I've written for from time to time (including the "Atlas Mugged" Blogosphere piece), "has been one of the few libertarian bloggers who tried to sound a warning about The Only Man Who Can Save America, and today he’s feeling vindicated: The Ron Paul controversy — a postmortem."

In his recent videotaped interview with Pajamas' Richard Miniter, Tom DeLay quipped that he heard John McCain "was running as a Republican this year."

Guess again, Tom...

England's First Post e-zine writes that "Veteran directors are showing their younger peers how to tell stories." But it unintentionally illustrates why movies have increasingly lost the ability to do just that--tell stories. Or as I wrote in January of 2006:

Over four years ago, on the weekend before 9/11, John Podhoretz explained a big reason why modern movies by and large stank: it's the writing, stupid, to paraphrase James Carville. During Hollywood's golden era, moviemakers knew that while they could craft iconic images, they weren't the best source of original narratives:

Since the movies are a visual medium, most of the energy and enthusiasm of moviemakers derives from a command of the camera and an ability to manipulate images. What they don't know very well - what they've never known very well — is why one given story is better than another given story.

So they tend to steal their stories from elsewhere. And in the first half-century or more of the movies, that meant they turned to other media for material — to books and theater, primarily, and to the kind of stories they told. Novels and plays derive their power entirely from character and plot. Add a strong visual storytelling sense to a strong narrative line, and you have something wonderful and new.

But something happened around 1950. Movies increasingly began to draw their inspiration from other movies. The young French directors of the famous late '50s "new wave" were inspired by hack Hollywood filmmakers, not by Shakespeare or Balzac or Dickens. In the 1960s, their American stepchildren burst forth: Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Brian De Palma, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorcese, Steven Spielberg, and others.

These men could do things with a camera nobody had ever been able to do. They had seen every movie ever made and had broken those movies down frame by frame, turning themselves into the Noam Chomskys of film — the world's foremost experts on the grammar of visual storytelling.

They brought a new snap and dazzle to film. When that was combined with both a new freedom in subject matter and new technological developments, the medium became exciting again, in the late '60s and early '70s — in a way it hadn't since the advent of television. And the movies they turned out earned more money than anyone had ever dreamt possible.

The problem was that all these brilliant moviemakers knew was the movies. They weren't well-read — most of them didn't attend college, or if they did, they studied only film — and they didn't seem to feel at all humbled by their own ignorance. As a result, they understood classical storytelling only through the bastardized versions offered by Hollywood. It was like fourth-generation xeroxing. Stories and characters grew weaker as their original sources grew increasingly distant and hazy.

And as that First Post article highlights, those original sources are still diminishing in the rear view mirror.

Orrin Judd compares and contrasts 2000 and 2008:

There's a very simple question you can ask to gauge the racial character of the race: what are three policy changes Senator Obama has said he will pursue if elected?

Recall that eight years ago, if you'd asked the same question about W (the eventual winner), it would have been easy for people to answer: cut taxes, test kids in school, privatize Social Security, and give government money to religious charitable organizations, just to name a few of the big ones.

But ask yourself--and most readers here follow politics to some considerable degree--what are Obama's issues? What does he want to change? What would be the point of his presidency?

Isn't the sole purpose of his candidacy to afford America an opportunity to vote for a black guy for no other reason than that he's black?

How is Hillary Clinton supposed to run against that without race entering the discussion?

She can't, and as Matt Bai recently noted, "The most dangerous place to be in the rest of the country is between the Clintons and an elected office." The result, which has caused the Clinton attack machine to aim left instead of right for once, hasn't been pretty, as we've all seen. David Brooks writes:

All the habits of verbal thuggery that have long been used against critics of affirmative action, like Ward Churchill [Err, that should be Ward Connerly, as Betsy Newmark, and not the Times' layers and layers of fact checkers noted--Ed] and Thomas Sowell, and critics of the radical feminism, like Christina Hoff Summers, are now being turned inward by the Democratic front-runners.

Clinton is suffering most. She is now accused, absurdly, of being insensitive to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Bill Clinton’s talk of a “fairy tale,” which was used in the context of the Iraq debate, is now being distorted into a condemnation of the civil rights movement. Hillary Clinton finds that in attacking Obama, she is accused of being hostile to the entire African-American experience.

Clinton’s fallback position is that neither she nor Obama should be judged as representatives of their out-groups. They should be judged as individuals.

But the entire theory of identity politics was that we are not mere individuals. We carry the perspectives of our group consciousness. Our social roles and loyalties are defined by race and gender. It’s a black or female thing. You wouldn’t understand.

Even in this moment of stress, Clinton wants to have it both ways. She wants to be emblematic of her gender and liberated from race and gender politics. As she told Tim Russert on Sunday: “You have a woman running to break the highest and hardest glass ceiling. I don’t think either of us wants to inject race or gender in this campaign. We’re running as individuals.”

Huh?

What we have here is worthy of a Tom Wolfe novel: the bonfire of the multicultural vanities. The Clintons are hitting Obama with everything they’ve got. The Obama subordinates are twisting every critique into a racial outrage in an effort to make all criticism morally off-limits. Obama’s campaign drew up a memo delineating all of the Clintons’ supposed racial outrages. Bill Clinton is frantically touring black radio stations to repair any wounds.

Meanwhile, Clinton friend Robert Johnson, a one-man gaffe machine, reminds us of Obama’s drug use and accuses him of being like Sidney Poitier in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” Another Clinton supporter, Gloria Steinem, notes that black men were given the vote a half-century before women.

As Brooks writes, "This is the logical extreme of the identity politics that as been floating around this country for decades. Every revolution devours its offspring, and it seems the multicultural one does, too."

Douglas MacKinnon ponders what David Letterman will do in January of 2009, when he doesn't have fellow boomer George Bush to attack nightly:

In now a famous “You Tube” moment, Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel, went on Letterman to be the recipient of the host’s rude and sophomoric antics. As the segment shifted into high gear, O’Reilly asked Letterman a pointed and direct question: “Do you want the United States to win in Iraq?”

To the surprise of no one but his sycophants, Letterman could not or would not answer the question. When pressed by O’Reilly to answer, the best he could do was to play to his mostly left-leaning audience for cheap debating points and say, “It’s not easy for me because I’m thoughtful.”

How thoughtful do you need to be? it's an A or B question: do you want the US to win, or Al Qaeda, the Baathists, and Iran? Letterman, who, 20 years ago, was once the master of postmodern irony, became its unintentional victim as he unwittingly echoed Jack Benny's classic gag when he retorted to a fictional mugger shouting “Your money or life, pal!” on his old radio show: "I'm thinking it over!"

But then, as Bill Kristol writes in today's New York Times, much to its ombudsman's chagrin, "It’s apparently impermissible for leading Democrats to acknowledge — let alone celebrate — progress in Iraq."

Update: Related thoughts from James Bowman:

Just look at the campaign on behalf of Darfur. "It’s not a political issue," says superstar heart-throb George Clooney. "There is only right and wrong."

Following the Letterman thesis, that's not very thoughtful at all, George.

Orrin Judd has some thoughts on Joan Didion's career arc:

Actually, what's most striking about Ms Didion's work is how good the early stuff was--Slouching and the White Album--and how bad the later, as she became just the sort of trend-sucker she'd previously warned against. Thus, where you'd think someone so smart might have learned something from opposing Ronald Reagan's war on Marxism in Latin America in the '80s, she instead opposes liberalizing the Middle East too. It's a rare enough life arc, but she went from an interesting young conservative to a depressingly orthodox liberal as she aged.

She's not alone, though in one sense: with the exception of Tom Wolfe himself, few of the New Journalists he touted in the mid-1970s aged very well.

Err, don't bet on it--at least in its current form:

IN 2006 EMI, the world's fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,” says a person who was there.

Meanwhile, over at Blogingheads.tv, Michael Hirschorn of VH-1 and Jon Fine of Business Week bemoan what they call "The last days of the rock star".

A fascinating subtext of their conversation is that both are unhappy over the media's continuing fragmentation, as the Long Tail grows longer. In Hirschorn's case, it's awfully ironic: In the decade before the World Wide Web began riding on top of the Internet in the early 1990s, cable television was the Long Tail of the 1980s, as narrowly-themed channels such as his own VH-1 began to demassify the Big Three television networks, ending their 35 year uncontested run.

The anti-smoking brigade's work is now complete.

(Forewarned is forewaxed: Accompanying photo not for the faint of heart.)

Flashing back to the mid-century when Alfred Hitchcock helped to make Hollywood great, William Katz explains what the Master of Suspense could teach us about the 2008 election.

Tatiana Siegel of Variety writes:

Longtime Hollywood publicist Julian Myers will turn 90 soon. And he worries the end may be near ... for Hollywood.

Myers frets that the WGA stalemate -- with all of its acrimony, vitriol and job losses -- is a harbinger of ill things for the industry.

"The strike impasse is speeding the end of Hollywood filmmaking and television production," says Myers, who has been working in the biz since 1939 and is still an IATSE member. "There are more union contracts coming up for renewal, and already unionists are crossing union lines. IATSE is urging its members to go right on through. Insults are being exchanged, faces will be bashed and fatalities are a possibility."

Myers, of course, remembers when such confrontations were more common. He recalls participating in a 1946 strike in which 900 unionists were arrested in front of Warner Bros. Studios and bussed off to a Burbank jail.

Now, with tensions again running high, Myers worries that the town might be consumed.

"Does a dying Hollywood need a civil war today to hasten its erosion?" he asks.

If the strike doesn't kill it, its current product is certainly hastening its demise.

Update: "Hollywood doing without the Golden Globes? Why, it’s just like the Fall of Saigon!"

Tim Blair, the man who put Australia on the Blogosphere's map, and whom I met at the infamous Pajamas pre-launch party back in November of 2005 writes:

Feeling poorly for some time. Saw a doctor a few weeks ago, who sent me to a specialist, who booked me into hospital for tests.

It’s cancer.

Major abdominal surgery next week. If all goes well, the remaining non-cancerous section of me will be home by early-mid February. No idea yet how long a full recovery might take beyond then. Medical advice is very positive, but that wouldn’t count for much in the absence of care and love from family and friends. I’ve been overwhelmed. I’m lucky.

Luckier than I ever knew.

Usual posting to continue shortly.

It better--Tim's gynormous carbon footprint is all that stands between us and the next Ice Age.

(And needless to say, our thoughts and prayers go out to Tim for a full a speedy recovery.)

Robert Novak looks at "Women Versus Oprah":

The absence of Oprah Winfrey from the frantic four last days of the New Hampshire primary campaign after her heavy schedule in Iowa backing Sen. Barack Obama may be traced to heavy, unaccustomed post-Iowa abuse of the popular entertainment superstar by women.

Winfrey did not publicize it, but her Website was swamped with complaints after she went to Iowa. The principal complaint was that she betrayed women by not supporting Sen. Hillary Clinton. The criticism was described as personal.

Several of these critics identified themselves as African-Americans, indicating that gender is more important than race for many people.

Not surprising, given their employer, the hosts of NBC's Tonight Show have had political views that have uniformly fallen somewhere on the left, from Steve Allen to Jack Paar to Johnny Carson to Jay Leno. But as I mentioned to Tammy Bruce when she appeared on PJM Political last month to discuss Oprah's endorsement of Obama, I don't recall reading that any of them deigned to officially endorse a presidential candidate. By injecting herself into the presidential race, Oprah knew she'd alienate at least half her audience--and doesn't seem to mind.

Warner Todd Huston writes:

Lifestyle magazine, a publication that serves Pennsylvania's Delaware Valley area, published a nice story this week reporting how a long awaited veteran's cemetery is finally underway in Buck's County, Penn. Oh, the story seems nice enough, but there is one problem. The photo accompanying the story shows a soldier, circa WWII, in near silhouette trotting across a wintry field, rifle in hand. That there is a photo of a soldier from WWII tacked onto a story about a new veteran's cemetery isn't the problem. The problem is that the photo is of a Nazi German soldier from WWII and NOT an American soldier! This is a shocking mistake that reveals many things about the folks at Lifestyle Magazine.

As Huston notes, even beyond the botched photo, "the first paragraphs of the story are a bit odd. A story about the final resting place of our honored veterans is begun with two paragraphs about a Kris Kristofferson song!"

As Mark Steyn writes, "in Canada today you're only entitled to your opinions if [Alberta 'human rights agent Shirlene McGovern] says you are".

Update: At the Belmont Club, Richard Fernandez writes:

Whether or not Ezra Levant is declared "innocent" or "guilty" by the Canadian Human Rights Commission of publishing the "Mohammed Cartoons" is beside the point. What is at issue is whether or not a Canadian government agency has the competence to punish someone for what in saner times would be considered a routine exercise in free speech. It is the legitimacy of the Canadian Human Rights Commission that is on trial here. They themselves are in the dock and they have put themselves there.

Note the accompanying video that Richard most appropriately links to.

Found at Theo Spark's:

In a news conference Deanna Favre announced she will be the starting QB for the Packers this coming Sunday. Deanna asserts that she is qualified to be starting QB because she has spent the past 16 years married to Brett while he played QB for the Packers. During this period of time she became familiar with the definition of a corner blitz, and is now completely comfortable with other terminology of the Packers offense. A survey of Packers fans shows that 50% of those polled supported the move.

Does this sounds idiotic and unbelievable to you? Well, Hillary Clinton makes the same claims as to why she is qualified to be President and 50% of democrats polled agreed. She has never run a City, County, or State.

When told Hillary Clinton has experience because she has 8 years in the white house, Dick Morris stated "so has the pastry chef".

Actually, I'd take Deanna and Brett in the White House over the return of Hillary and Bill, any day.

"Obesity now a 'lifestyle' choice for Americans, expert says":

"Obesity is a natural extension of an advancing economy. As you become a First World economy and you get all these labor-saving devices and low-cost, easily accessible foods, people are going to eat more and exercise less," health economist Eric Finkelstein told AFP.

I need a "health economist" to tell me this? Fifty years ago, in those less enlightened times, less obssessed with counterknowledge, this was called "common sense."

Is David Duke trolling the Blogosphere these days?

Mark Steyn and Timothy Noah concur: "change" is an utterly meaningless word in presidential politics.

Meanwhile, via Kathy Shaidle comes your quote of the day:

"Barack Obama is a powerful speaker. So is my Bose Bass Amp."

As Kathy writes, "Yeah, it's only January, but seriously: do you think this can be topped"?

As I've written before, there was a time when Woody Allen's self-deprecating shtick was endearing. These days, one's infinitely more likely to agree with his low assessment of himself:

New York filmmaker Woody Allen has confessed he does not understand why so many of his films are revered and he has been labeled an influential director.

The "Manhattan" director said he rarely understands why one of his films is met with great success and industry kudos, while another appears to fall on deaf ears, the New York Daily News reported Sunday.

"It's hard for me to know. I'll think, 'I really brought off my ideas, it's great,' and no one sparks to it," Allen told the newspaper. "And then other times I'll finish a film and think, 'I really screwed this one up,' and for some reason, the public and the press embrace it."

Which movie would that be? Manhattan in 1979?

In a post that dovetails remarkably well with the material mined by Jonah Goldberg, Neo-Neocon writes, "there’s a long history of literary 'useful idiots,' people whose critical faculties seem to stop where their art ends. For every Emile Zola, there’s a Harold Pinter":

I was reminded of all of this recently when reading the book Partisans by David Laskin. It’s mostly a glorified gossip sheet about the group of writers who were connected to the influential journal Partisan Review during its formative decades, the 30s and 40s. Partisans follows their closely intertwined lives from then through the 60s and beyond; they were an especially active group, however, in their earlier years (and yes, that activity included playing an almost endless game of musical beds).

Included were such luminaries as Mary McCarthy, Philip Rahv, Edmund Wilson, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Dwight Macdonald, writers who were exceptionally well-known in their day but who are far less famous now. The following describes their initial reaction to World War II, according to Laskin:

They didn’t, at least at first, consider it their war at all, but rather a hopeless conflict between two systems they despised: capitalism and fascism. OF course, they conceded that facism was worse than capitalism, but they believed that if American joined the war against fascism, it was doomed to become fascist itself. As a number of prominent PR writers declared in an open letter published in the magazine, “Our entry into the war, under the slogan of ‘Stop Hitler’, would actually result in the immediate introduction of totalitarianism over here.”

Plus ca change, plus c’est la même chose, non?

Some of these writers changed their minds about World War II after Pearl Harbor and the all-important entry of the Soviet Union to the Allied side, making it all right for good Leftists to advocate fighting Hitler.

Yes, it's remarkable what an order from Stalin could do to focus the mind.

Back in September, I wrote:

As detailed in Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover's Mad As Hell: Revolt at the Ballot Box, 1992, what some may not recall these days about Bill Clinton's "Sister Souljah Moment", was that it had little to do with insulting a two-bit virtually unknown rapper, and everything to do with distancing himself from the failed radic chic 1970-era politics of her backer, Jesse Jackson. It was one of many gestures that allowed Clinton to position himself as much more moderate than the average Democrat presidential candidate, and went far towards cementing his candidacy.

Amazing how the Democrats' PC Identity Politics Playdough Fun Factory this campaign finally caused Bill to come full circle.

Mark Steyn weighs in on Ezra Levant's interrogation.

Update: As does Glenn Reynolds, with an assortment of links that, as usual, are well worth your time.

War takes many forms--in some case, no immediate physical violence is necessary, merely a government seeking appeasement with its enemies via the courts. As Charles Johnson writes, this is must-see video of a "Canadian Publisher Persecuted for Mindcrime."

It's also an excellent sneak preview of an even more famous show trial yet to come.

Update: Much more at Hot Air. Be sure to follow the links to Ezra Levant's site itself.

More: As with Steyn's upcoming trial, "the punishment is not the verdict but the process."

By the way, for those who have the software to download YouTube clips and want to archive Levant's videos of his show hearing, I'd save them sooner rather than later. Hopefully I'll be proven wrong, but I wouldn't be surprised to see them quietly disappear from YouTube some time in the not too distant future.

If you're going to steal a car, don't take photos of yourself with the camera in the glovebox:

"Why is it", Burt Pretlutsky wonders, "that nobody is asking Barack Obama about his religious convictions? From what I’ve gathered, they’re far more fascinating than Mitt Romney’s."

The answer of course, is for the same reason that virtually no one in the legacy media uttered the words "Winter Soldier" on camera to Senator Kerry in 2004. But don't let that stop you from reading Burt's column.

Daily Dollup blows the lid off Diebold rigging New Hampshire for Hillary.

(Don't let Kucinich see this--he might think it's real.)

Update: Don't tell Bill Maher this is a joke--it would be like putting a stake in his heart.

Back in the mid-1970s, Jimmy Page told an interviewer that "I always thought the good thing about guitar was that they didn't teach it in school." In other words, for Page, and his fellow British guitarists growing up in the late 1950s, rock and roll and the blues were genres you had to be dedicated enough to learn on your own.

Found via Bloggingheads, David Brooks writes that "Miami" Steve Van Zandt, Bruce Springsteen's longtime rhythm guitarist (and eventually, owner of the Bada Bing Club) would like to see that changed:

It seems that whatever story I cover, people are anxious about fragmentation and longing for cohesion. This is the driving fear behind the inequality and immigration debates, behind worries of polarization and behind the entire Obama candidacy.

If you go to marketing conferences, you realize we really are in the era of the long tail. In any given industry, companies are dividing the marketplace into narrower and more segmented lifestyle niches.

Van Zandt has a way to counter all this, at least where music is concerned. He’s drawn up a high school music curriculum that tells American history through music. It would introduce students to Muddy Waters, the Mississippi Sheiks, Bob Dylan and the Allman Brothers. [Gee, not Springsteen, as well?--Ed] He’s trying to use music to motivate and engage students, but most of all, he is trying to establish a canon, a common tradition that reminds students that they are inheritors of a long conversation.

And Van Zandt is doing something that is going to be increasingly necessary for foundations and civic groups. We live in an age in which the technological and commercial momentum drives fragmentation. It’s going to be necessary to set up countervailing forces — institutions that span social, class and ethnic lines.

Music used to do this. Not so much anymore.

Education used to do this as well. Not so much, anymore.

But back to the main point of Brooks and Miami Steve. Jazz was essentially frozen in amber as a creative force once Lincoln Center hired Wynton Marsalis to be its "Musical Director of Jazz." Miami Steve wants to do the same thing to rock. And it's not like education isn't already dominated by Present Tense Culture.

(Or, for another way to look at Brooks' column: this just into the New York Times: Pop culture is fractured and demassified, something that Alvin Toffler predicted 28 years ago.)

Could nanny statist Mike Bloomberg still enter the race? John Fund says...maybe:

Maybe it's the Cheez-Its talking.

In the latest issue of National Review "On Dead Tree" (online, but subscription required), the cover has a now familiar smiley face with a tiny little moustache on it. Inside, Jonah Goldberg writes:

During the fight over the Contract with America, Rep. Charlie Rangel complained that “Hitler wasn’t even talking about doing these things.” (This is technically accurate in that Hitler wasn’t pushing term limits for committee chairmen and “zero based” budgeting.) When Newt Gingrich invited black congressmen to Capitol Hill social events, Rep. Major Owens responded by declaring, “These are people who are practicing genocide with a smile. They’re worse than Hitler. . . . We’re going to have cocktail-party genocide.”

Ronald Reagan was of course called a fascist by Communists from his earliest days fighting Reds in Hollywood. Before that, “everyone knew” that Barry Goldwater was a Nazi or Nazi sympathizer.

Two generations of Hollywood scriptwriters, actors, and producers have been warning that the fascist peril lurks beneath the surface of the Right. Pleasantville, Falling Down, Fight Club, American Beauty, American History X, and countless other films advanced this idea. In the film adaptation of Tom Clancy’s novel The Sum of All Fears, the all-too-real threat of Islamist terror is switched to a cabal of rich, white, conservative businessmen who just happen to be — you guessed it — Nazis. Even after 9/11, it seems liberals think the fascist Right is America’s real, and only, existential threat.

* * *

This received wisdom is understandably vexing for conservatives, who have never had a kind word for fascists or Nazis. I’ve gotten used to it. When speaking on college campuses, I’ve been called a Nazi many times. The kids, accustomed to bullying their opponents with charges of intolerance that would be better aimed at themselves, rarely expect a response.

“So, tell me,” I usually ask my accuser, “except for the bigotry, murder, and genocide, what exactly is it about Nazism you don’t like?”

Taking advantage of the ensuing pierced-tongue-tied silence, I explain: The Nazis were socialists. The Nazi ideologist Gregor Strasser put it succinctly: “We are enemies, deadly enemies, of today’s capitalist economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, its unfair wage system, its immoral way of judging the worth of human beings in terms of their wealth and their money.” The speech that first attracted a young Adolf Hitler to fascism was titled “How and by What Means Is Capitalism to Be Eliminated?” The Nazi-party platform demanded guaranteed jobs, the “abolition of incomes unearned by work,” the nationalization of all large corporations and trusts, profit-sharing in all major industries, expanded old-age insurance, a government takeover of big department stores (think Wal-Mart), the prohibition of child labor, and countless other “progressive” reforms.

In February of 1945, in the midst of the death rattles of the Nazi's collective existence, after the allies bombed Dresden, Robert Ley, the head of the Nazis' Labor Front, wrote:

"After the destruction of beautiful Dresden, we almost breathe a sigh of relief. It is over now. In focusing on our struggle and victory we are no longer distracted by concerns for the monuments of German culture. Onward!...Now we march toward the German victory without any superfluous ballast and without the heavy spiritual and material bourgeois baggage".

And as Jonah notes in his book, when Mussolini, his mistress and Nicola Bombacci, Mussolini's longtime confidant (and previously, a friend of Lenin's) were executed after being captured in April of 1945, Bombacci shouted, "Long live Mussolini! Long live Socialism!"

Despite, an intense (dare I say fascistic?) effort by the left to attack it unread, Jonah's book is currently number #6 on Amazon. (I wonder what Patrick McGoohan thinks of that?! If you haven't read it yet, you owe it to yourself to do so.

For a positive snapshot of race in America, compare and contrast: Barack Obama is currently leading Hillary Clinton in the total number of delagates he needs to win the Democrats' presidential nomination. In contrast, Al Sharpton is reduced to shaking down a TV channel that's located at number #605 in the ozone layer of your DirecTV dial, and watched by about 150,000 viewers. (That's less than Breitbart.TV):

Broadcaster Kelly Tilghman has apologized. Tiger Woods has accepted it. But the Rev. Al Sharpton says it isn't good enough.

In events resembling the prelude to the fall of radio host Don Imus, Sharpton appears to be marshaling his forces for a fight with the Golf Channel, which suspended Tilghman on Wednesday for a racially insensitive statement made last week.

Tilghman uttered the remark during coverage of Hawaii's Mercedes-Benz Championship on Friday, while she and and co-host Nick Faldo were bantering about how young golfers might challenge ever-dominant Woods.

Faldo said, "To take Tiger on, well yeah, they should just gang up for a while until ..."

"Lynch him in a back alley," Tilghman interrupted with a chuckle.

Tilghman is a far cry from Imus, the morning show host who was canned after calling the Rutgers University women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos." Unlike the disc jockey, who is known for his off color humor and outspoken remarks, she has no history of stoking racial tensions.

But Sharpton says it is the word -- not the person or their history -- that matters. In a Wednesday interview, he compared Tilghman's statement to calling for a woman to be raped or for a Jewish-American to be sent to a gas chamber.

Or faking a hate crime. Or one of your followers burning down a business after you demonized it.

To bring things full circle, here's another questionable statement. As Dan Riehl writes, "Thank God he's a Democrat, or this might actually be racist."

Scott Hinderaker of Power Line writes:

The American Jewish Congress submitted this understated advertisement about the status of women in Israel to Ms. Magazine. Underneath the attractive photographs of Israel's foreign minister (Tzipi Livni), Supreme Court president (Dorit Beinish), and speaker of the Knesset (Dalia Itzik), the ad reads: "This is Israel." I think it is fair to say that in most parts of the United States it would be deemed an utterly innocuous ad.

Ms. rejected the ad. Yesterday the AJC issued this press release with the following comments:

"What other conclusion can we reach," asked Richard Gordon, President of AJCongress, "except that the publishers -- and if the publishers are right, a significant number of Ms. Magazine readers -- are so hostile to Israel that they do not even want to see an ad that says something positive about Israel?"

When Director of AJCongress' Commission for Women's Empowerment Harriet Kurlander tried to place the ad, she was told that publishing the ad "will set off a firestorm" and that "there are very strong opinions" on the subject -- the subject presumably being whether or not one can say anything positive about Israel. Ms. Magazine publisher Eleanor Smeal failed to respond to a signed-for certified letter with a copy of the ad as well as numerous calls by Mr. Gordon over a period of weeks.

According to the press release, the powers-that-be at Ms. provided advice on the kind of ad that might pass muster with them:

A Ms. Magazine representative, Susie Gilligan, whom the Ms. Magazine masthead lists under the publisher's office, told Ms. Kurlander that the magazine "would love to have an ad from you on women's empowerment, or reproductive freedom, but not on this." Ms. Gilligan failed to elaborate what "this" is.

Yes, that's certainly a tough one to figure out.

Update: Meryl Yourish writes:

What time is it, folks? That’s right. It’s Israeli Double Standard Time. It occurs every day of the week that ends with a y.

Read the whole thing.

About a minute into the latest B-Cast by Liz Stephans and Scott Baker of Breitbart.TV (whom we interviewed a few weeks ago on PJM Political), they casually mention that their previous show attracted about 400,000 views.

In and of itself, that's an impressive number for a newscast. (Any show on MSNBC would be considered a hit if it pulled those numbers.) But consider the extreme economy of scale going on here:

As of 2005, CNN in primetime attracted less than 700,000 daily viewers, but with a budget of zillions of dollars and a ton of real estate, technicians and on-air talent. In contrast, the B-Cast is, I believe, run out of an office in Pittsburgh by two people with one set, a couple of cameras, laptops for the on-air talent (in other words, Liz and Scott) to cue those cameras and YouTube clips, and I guess another computer or two to record the sum of all those parts and upload the show to Andrew Breitbart’s news aggregation site. The hosting of the video itself is supplied by any one of numerous online video hosting sites, which helps to reduce what was once a significant expense: the high-bandwidth, and associated costs, of online video.

As I've written before, watch for more and more micro-TV stations to pop-up on the 'Net, using a variety of formats, from green screen and virtual sets to the Breitbart.TV model, to England's 18 Doughty Street Website, which is Internet TV on a fairly large scale. But still far more streamlined than traditional over-the-air and cable networks.

I wonder if the executives at CNN and other networks are aware of the growth of Internet TV, and if it bothers them? Blogs are much easier to start of course, which is why newspapers are acutely aware of the Blogosphere, and their fear is palpable in their their often hysterical reactions to the Internet over the last decade. But as traditional television ratings hit new lows, and more and online video content goes live on the Web, could we see a similar reaction from the TV networks?

We will when advertisers latch onto online video programming in big numbers. When something like the daily Breitbart.TV show opens and closes with ads from Toyota and Proctor & Gamble, we’ll know once and for all that after sixty years, traditional TV really is just another legacy medium.

Update (1/12/08): Liz Stephans of Breitbart.tv emails, "Scott was referencing the traffic to the site -- Breitbart.tv as a whole", not the individual B-Cast show itself. While we regret the error made above, the basic points remains valid, I think: all those video clips viewed by those clicking into Breitbart.tv means time spent away from CNN, FNC, and traditional television. And a show like the B-Cast is proof that a quality long-form news show can be made, with smart use of the right technology, at a cost infinitely lower than the traditional networks spend.

While Bill Bradley has a cogent and reasoned post-mortem of New Hampshire in this week's edition of PJM Political on XM Satellite Radio's POTUS '08 channel, others aren't as reserved.

Some on the left blame Diebold for Obama's loss--which would implicate Hillary's campaign in a pretty giant conspiracy, if true. Others? Well, as Michelle Malkin bluntly puts it, "Chris Matthews: New Englanders are lying bigots."

But both examples are predicated on ideas hatched in fever swamps. What is it with the left's ability to divide and conquer their own constituents?

Update: And speaking of New Hampshire and fever swamps...

More: Related thoughts and links via Glenn Reynolds.

Sure John McCain may have picked up this key Hollywood celebrity endorsement, but how can he top the sheer animal power of this?

Cinnamon Stillwell encounters "Apocalyptic Environmentalism on the Streets of San Francisco":

Weather used to be the only safe subject for those trying artfully to avoid the twin topics of discord: religion and politics. But, these days, merely remarking that "it's a nice day" or "stormy weather we've been having lately, eh?" is enough to elicit a tidal wave of doom and gloom. And it matters not whether it's hot or cold outside. All variations in temperature, I'm told by these self-described experts, stem from "global warming."

Where once it was the crazy homeless guys standing on Market Street (or whatever main drag is at hand in one's respective urban environment) with signs reading, "The End is Near," now it's your average, everyday citizen who, upon the slightest provocation, launches into a diatribe about how the end of the world is imminent.

Such a creature wanders my neighborhood looking for potential converts and a friend and I once had the unfortunate experience of running into her. It was Christmas Day and in the spirit of the season we wished her a "Merry Christmas" (not a "Happy Holidays," mind you) in passing. She took this as an opening to start rambling, in a glassy-eyed manner, about how strange the weather had been lately, which soon morphed into dead polar bears, melting ice caps and, you guessed it, the end of the world.

Having lived in the Bay Area all my life and grown accustomed to the ever-changing weather ("Always wear layers," I tell visitors), I took issue with her contention that "We haven't had normal weather in the Bay Area in twenty years!" "What's normal weather?" I asked her, and then proceeded to note that local weather has always varied and that certainly hadn't changed over the past twenty years.

My companion chimed in with a few facts to contradict the global warming alarmism on display and concluded with the statement, "I'm not buying it." Ms. Prophet of Doom looked confused and, glazed expression intact, soon wandered off in search of a more gullible audience. Undoubtedly, she'd never encountered anyone who didn't agree with her apocalyptic scenario and cognitive dissonance set in.

The Care Bear Stare strikes again!

City Journal's André Glucksmann writes:

Time knows that many will find its choice of Vladimir Putin for Man of the Year shocking—but any publicity is good publicity! The magazine presents a peremptory defense: the Man of the Year “is not a boy scout,” he is not a democrat, but he numbers among the very powerful, those who shape the world’s destiny “for better or for worse.”

Maybe they've confused him with FDR.

Jonah Goldberg notes how much the 2008 presidential race is driven by identity politics and populism over ideas and substance:

The winners of the Iowa Democratic caucuses stacked up in reverse order of experience, with the seasoned Christopher Dodd and Joe Biden scraping the bottom and the relatively inexperienced John Edwards and Barack Obama rising to the top. So much for “the issues” and “competence” driving voters’ decisions.

What Americans really want when they look into a politician’s eyes is to see their own images reflected back, like in Narcissus’ pool. The presidency in particular has become the highest ground in the culture war. Americans want a candidate who validates them personally. “I’m voting for him because he’s a hunter like me.” “I’m backing her because she’s a woman too.” “I’m for that guy because he’s angry like me.” Such sentiments have colored the presidential contest for so long, they’ve saturated it like stain into wood.

And for more on history’s ultimate examples of identity politics and populism, be sure to check out Jonah's new blog to promote Liberal Fascism.

"Study: Obesity linked to less productivity."

Really? That would be news to Alfred Hitchcock, who directed 66 movies, and Orson Welles, who directed 40 films. Or Rush Limbaugh, who has generated bazillions hours of radio.

Over at Hot Air, "NBC reporter admits it’s 'hard to stay objective' when covering Obama."

Not that NBC was cooly detached in their coverage of Hillary, as well.

You don't think that the fourth-ranked network has a bias towards the...Nahhh.

It's official: Barack Obama is the Rashomon candidate:

He's Princess Di!

He's the next JFK!

He's Tom Hagen!

He's God!

He's a Vegas Stripper!

In short, he's everything and anything you want him to be. Like the undefined Senator Kerry at the start of 2004, project away, voters!

Update: Barack to the 1960s: Hillary says Obama's no MLK (though claims she's LBJ), but the NYT says he could be RFK!

The Most Busted Name In News--yet again.

For a look at whom the viewing public actually considers the most trusted name in news, click here.

If you can get past the presenter, who with his sandals, T-shirt, stubble and unctuous gestures looks and sounds like he's 30 going on 12, ("Right--back to being a grown-up!" Paging Ms. West; paging Dr. Dalrymple) there's some tremendous video of Mies van der Rohe's seminal all-glass house, completed in 1951, here:

Mies designed this house before Philip Johnson's Glass House, but Johnson's house--built at the height of his "Mies van der Johnson" period--was completed first. But Mies's plan, with its floating appearance and the patio built ajog from the house proper has much more tension and dynamism than Johnson's square glass box.

(Incidentally, I needed to scale the video down to fit the blog. For a larger version of the clip, click here.)

How Jeri Ryan of Star Trek: Voyager fame inadvertently changed history.

(Worth clicking for the photo alone...)

Update: High traffic to the above link has temporarily blown out the WPRI.org server. The post (and photo) is also available here.

Heck, if President Reagan, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and 9/11 couldn't finish off the sixties, why should this election?

Vox Day (he of the bitchin' tonsure; his hairstyle looks a bit like the design on the Washington Redskins' helmets of the early 1960s) interviews Jonah Goldberg on Liberal Fascism, which debuts tomorrow:

What did you mean when you said that it's not an Ann Coulter book in your interview on the Glenn & Helen Show?

It's a response to this jabbering fraction of a man named Tim Noah at Slate who has been insisting for about four years, sight unseen, that I have written what he calls an Ann Coulter book. And by that I mean a bomb-throwing book that sheds heat, not light. Now, I think there's a place for them and I think there's more serious argumentation in Ann Coulter's books than a lot of people on the Left are willing to concede because they don't want to give her arguments any credence. But at the same time, it is indisputable that Ann is something of a performance artist. She is most useful for entertaining people who already agree with her and for providing ammunition and morale to her side. She does not go into a college lecture hall and persuade very many people who are sitting on the fence on an issue.

I didn't want to write that kind of book. Ramesh Ponnuru has been a great influence on me and one of the things he often says is that he is much more interested in dealing with liberalism's best arguments rather than its worst ones. I think a lot of people on the Right, a lot of people in punditry generally, have gotten very comfortable playing these games of simply looking for the weakest link in the other side's chain and entirely ignoring the stronger ones. This book is aimed at the strongest links, or at least that's what my intent was. I'll leave it to other people to decide how successful I was.

My take (which I'll discuss in depth in an upcoming issue of the New Individualist is that Jonah was extremely successful, find out for yourself here.

"Gay Patriot West" makes an interesting observation about both Bill Clinton and the left in general:

Had he lost the 1992 election, would Democrats have treated him like they treated previous losers such as Michael Dukakis? I once saw the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee at the Getty here in LA. Alone and all but unnoticed, he rode the tram from the parking structure to the museum itself, just like any other passenger. A man who once attracted the attention of the free world as he ran for the White House, could not even attract the attention of his fellow passengers.

This idea — about Democrats’ love for Clinton — comes to mind again as his wife’s political fortunes seem to be fading. He can’t seem to translate the adulation he once enjoyed into sustained success for her at the ballot box.

Contrast Clinton’s appeal with that of Ronald Reagan. The Gipper retained his base of support even after he failed to secure the GOP nomination in 1976. I think it’s because his appeal was based only his part on his charisma and political skills. It was also based on his ideas, notions which resonated with many Republicans — as well as with a vast swath of the American electorate.

I think GPW's right that that's the expected outcome when putting personalities above ideas and issues in an election. It's also why John Kerry could so quickly be discarded after 2004; and why Democrats invariably seem to prefer fresh faces that voters can project anything upon over seasoned vets as their presidential nominees.

"Day By Day's" Chris Muir is holding a fundraiser to offset his bandwidth costs. To keep his cartoon going, and its women in various stages of undress, contribute here.

The Official Beverage Of Hell--soon in liquor stores everywhere!

Hillary lets a glycerin tear flow--since it's on the eve of New Hampshire, does this count as her Edward Muskie moment? If so, Power Line's Paul Mirengoff writes that it could work to her benefit, unlike Muskie's waterworks:

They say that, as in baseball, there's no crying in politics, and Ed Muskie came to a bad end in New Hampshire in 1972 after he appeared to cry in public. But the video of Clinton doesn't necessarily cast her in a bad light, and could even help her with female voters, upon whose support she's more dependent than ever.

And for more news from 1972, George McGovern, who back then was comparing Ho Chi Minh to George Washington, reminds us that in contrast, he just doesn't like the cut of Dubya's jib.

Update: The Anchoress predicted Hillary's Iron Eye Cody impersonation last week; Tammy Bruce has video of the Other Clinton Crying Moment.

Reviewing For Love of Politics Bill and Hillary Clinton: The White House Years by Sally Bedell Smith in the Weekly Standard (edited, needless to say, by the eeeeeeevil Bill Kristol), Noemie Emery has a lengthy, detailed and exceptional look at the three-headed hydra of the 1990s: Bill, Hill, and Al.

Everybody else has already linked to Ezra Klein's description of Obama as savior, but just in case you missed it, it's a classic:

Obama's finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don't even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I've heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.

Naturally, a potential leader so radiant and beatific needs his sinister opposite, enthroned in a sulphuric abyss:

That's odd...I heard [the New York Times' corporate jet] was already booked this Friday picking up Bill Kristol from hell.

Wow--I am getting old--I remember when it was the right that embraced evangelicalism and a fire-and-brimstone worldview.

Related: "It's the secular Left vs. the Christian Left."

Light rail: no matter how useless it is, it's no joking matter, dammit.

Update: David Freddoso explores L.A.'s disastrous desire named streetcar.

As Michelle Malkin writes:

The deterioration of journalism–from Janet Cooke to Stephen Glass to Scott Thomas Beauchamp to Staged News Galore to Rathergate to Reuters-gate to More Fake News Galore–isn’t the fault of individual MSM reporters, editors, or shoddy journalism schools.

Whose fault is it? The “dean of journalism” Helen Thomas blames bloggers. Damned bloggers!

Business and Media Institute quotes Thomas as saying:

“What I really worry about is that I think the bloggers and everyone, everyone with a laptop thinks they’re journalists,” Thomas said. “And, they certainly don’t have our standards. They don’t have our ethics, and so forth. There’s a deterioration,” she continued. “Reporters laid down on the job in the run up to this [the Iraq] war.”

* * *

“I think they did a lousy job and we’re making for it now because the questions that should have been asked were not asked and because of 9/11 and the fear of being called unpatriotic, un-American and so forth. We let the country down,” Thomas added.

So if it's all those darn bloggers that caused, as Helen put it, big journalism's "deterioration" back in 2002 and 2003, let's run the numbers and see how are bloggers are impacting its downhill slide today.

Back in early 2004, I estimated the number of bloggers in the US at around 7,300,000 for a Tech Central Station article. That's an impressive number, but less than four years later, my, how quickly the neighborhood has grown! These days, Technorati tracks--say it with me now in your best Dr. Evil voice--over one hundred million blogs. And with Blogospheric growth that exponentially powerful, just imagine how much more intense the suckage of old media is today, as opposed to just five years ago.

Actually, no need to imagine it. Just read their product.

The truly sad thing is that Huckabee can probably outplay both of these guys on bass guitar.

Hillary gets booed. And this is one time she can't overdub them out, as she--or her admirers at Viacom--did immediately after 9/11.

(H/T: IP)

Flip Pidot notes a huge milestone in the automotive industry:

For the first time since the Great Depression, Ford Motor Company (F) is not the second-largest automaker in the country.

* * *

In 2007, Toyota (TM) sold roughly 2.62 million cars in the U.S., compared to Ford's 2.54 million. The company is also poised to snatch the dominant global share from long-time global share dominator General Motors (GM).

Coincidentally, Toyota is unburdened by the crippling legacy costs wrought by decades of powerful union influence on America's shrinking, unprofitable auto industry. You'd be losing share to Toyota too if you were saddled with a $1,500 per car union handicap (slightly less than Toyota's profit per car).

The good news is that as the domestic auto industry bleeds out and is forced (despite threats of massive strikes) to trim its bloated health care and pension payouts, Congress will likely step in and force the Big 3 into keeping the veins open. As additional losses force additional layoffs and the ratio of employees to pensioners continues to decline, the industry's ensuing death spiral should be mercifully swift.

In Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg writes, "There's a reason liberal economists joke that General Motors is a health care provider that makes cars as an industrial byproduct."

Evidently, Toyota hasn't forgotten what business it's in.

Did Obama just win one for the Gipper? Just in time for New Hampshire, Bill O'Reilly provides Obama his equivalent of the "I'm paying for this microphone"/Adam Clymer is an ***hole moment. Not to mention hours of material for Keith Olbermann.

Roger Simon writes that "You don't have to be Sigmund Freud to see" that Bill doesn't want Hillary to win:

Last night in NH, he grinned into a TV camera and introduced Hillary and his daughter as "My girls..."

Wow. The feminist movement has now been turned on its head.

Why would he stop now? Bill's been causing the feminist movement's internal logic to be remolded into new Playdough Funhouse Factory shapes since about 1998. Or maybe 1992. Or maybe 1980. Or maybe...

WCBSTV in Manhattan reports:

Amtrak workers are threatening to strike. The railroad and its unions are struggling to reach new labor agreements. Workers could walk off the job at the end of January.

If that happens, rail lines across the country could be crippled, and Penn Station in Manhattan would be forced to close.

Don't toy with my emotions like that.

It's Hammertime at Pajamas HQ:

Former House majority leader Tom DeLay sizes up the Republican presidential hopefuls and tells PJM’s Richard Miniter that none of them measure up to his ideal leader of the free world.

Fun interview--and Delay is far from the only conservative underwhelmed by the lack of conservative street cred contained within the GOP's 2008 candidates.

Libertas reviews The Bucket List, starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, and directed by (uh-oh) Rob Reiner:

Edward Cole (Nicholson) is a multi-millionaire who specilaizes in the hostile takeovers of public hospitals in financial trouble which he in turn privatizes. He’s a bit of a shark whose mantra is two to a room, a mantra that comes back to haunt him after he falls ill. To avoid a public outcry of hypocrisy Edward is wheeled in next to auto mechanic Carter Chambers (Freeman), a man just diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.

Over the course of the first act the two men bond through their mutual misery brought on by chemotherapy which in the end does both little good. Handed a death sentence, Edward offers to fund all of Carter’s dreams if in exchange Carter will share his, and off they go to leap from airplanes, race cars, ride motorcyles over the Great Wall of China, and enjoy anyplace else the all-too obvious inserted CGI backgrounds will take them.

There’s just one problem. Carter’s a married man with three grown children and yet with less than a year to live he bids his loving and faithful wife goodbye to fulfill all the dreams his familial responsibilities kept him from realizing. The script works hard to rationalize this but in the end it was impossible for me to accept Carter’s choice as anything other than a terribly selfish one, making The Bucket List another piece of damning evidence that those who make the movies today are so hopelessly out of touch with the rest of us it’s no longer funny. The trial to prove this correct would be a short one: “Your Honor, I found a dying Morgan Freeman unsympathetic.” Case closed.

Back at the start of the often appropriately named “naughts”, Thomas Hibbs explored in his book Shows About Nothing that Hollywood's love of nihilism can appear in the strangest places--not just the expected (exploitive horror films such as Martin Scorsese's remake of Cape Fear) but in product such as the long-running and much beloved TV sitcom from whence Hibbs' title derives, war movies, and films such as this one, and seems so ingrained into the L.A. culture, no one even notices it anymore:

The desks a script must pass over before receiving a greenlight are numerous and that not one rational mind saw this as the outrageous wish fulfillment fantasy for narcissists it is, is beyond comprehension. Not only was it impossible for me to sympathize with Carter, I was disgusted with every smile on his face because it was at the expense of a woman forced to deal with the death of her husband of forty-five years alone, and worse, rejected.

And, no, this isn’t a movie where Carter comes to realize his priorities. This is a movie about living life to the fullest … at the expense of whomever. It’s a reverse character arc where the good and dutiful family man looks into the abyss and learns his priorities have been out of order. Work? Family? Kids? Grandkids? Screw that, I’m going to Hong Kong with my new millionaire buddy!

As Libertas's "Dirty Harry" writes:

With this his fifth dud in a row, maybe Hollywood will finally figure out what to do with director Meathead, and that’s to put him in a room with Barry Levinson and Lawrence Kasdan, two other directors way past their prime, and use them as script readers: anything they choose to direct goes in the trash thus saving the studios hundreds of millions.

Don't bet on it.

Michelle Malkin asks, "Will the MSM quit fear-mongering now?"

Ok. Now that Barack Obama has won a resounding victory in 94.9 percent white Iowa, will the MSM and the Dems stop yammering about racist, un-diverse voters already? The bigotry concern troll act is getting old and tired. Not as old and tired as Hillary Clinton’s campaign. But close.

Later in her post, Michelle answers her own question--of course the MSM won't quit their fear-mongering of this issue, and given the ideological makeup of both the MSM and Obama's supporters, it's fascinating to watch punitive liberalism devour its own. But even that isn't all that new a development.

Just had a great interview with Steve Forbes, which, barring any huge breaking developments, should air as a segment of next weeks' PJM Political.

And this week's show? It airs tonight at 7:00 PM eastern/4:00 PM pacific, but you--yes you!--can hear it now. Need need to thank us--just consider it part of the rich assortment of swanky free virtual swag that provide our readers here at Ed Driscoll.com on a regular basis...

Steve Green goes Full Metal Stolichnaya on Iowa Republicans.

In the New York Sun, Ronald Radosh pens an extremely positive review of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism:

Not only is it a slander to yell fascist at the right; Mr. Goldberg presents a strong and compelling case that the very idea of fascism emanated from the ranks of liberalism. As he argues, contemporary liberalism descended from the ranks of 20th-century progressivism, and "shares intellectual roots with European fascism."

When Mr. Goldberg uses the term "liberal fascism," he is not offering a right-wing version of the left's smears. He knows it is a loaded term. What he is talking about is the historical idea of fascism: a corporatist and statist social structure that creates a deep reliance of its subjects on the government and engenders a sense of community and purpose. In American politics, this tendency toward statism has always been much more at home on the left than on the right.

It is impossible in a short review to do justice to the rich intellectual history of American liberalism that Mr. Goldberg offers to his readers. He has read widely and thoroughly, not only in the primary sources of fascism, but in the political and intellectual history written by the major historians of the subject.

Readers will learn that the very term "liberal fascism" came from the pen of H.G. Wells, the famed socialist author who delivered a speech at Oxford University in 1932 that included hosannas to both Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany. "I am asking," Wells told the students, "for a Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis." Democracy, he argued, had to be replaced with new forms of government that would save mankind, producing a "'Phoenix Rebirth' of liberalism" that would be called "Liberal Fascism." Like the activism, experimentation, and discipline that made the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany new dynamic societies, the West too could reach such a plateau by adopting the new soft fascism that suited it best.

Wells was not unique in offering this call to liberals. In giving us a true alternative history of modern liberalism, Mr. Goldberg shows how the ideological roots of fascism were liberal and left-wing, as were some of fascism's early proponents, especially in the Italy of Benito Mussolini. Most of us today forget that Mussolini, to his dying day, considered himself a man of the left and a socialist, who through nationalism and the corporatist reorganization of the polity sought to modernize a dying, 19th-century liberalism. Many will nevertheless be surprised to find that Mussolini's large band of admirers included the journalist Herbert Matthews, the comic Will Rogers, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, the historian Charles Beard, and the muckraker Lincoln Steffens. It only strengthens his case to find that one person Mr. Goldberg leaves out, the founding father of American trade unionism, Samuel Gompers, praised Mussolini's creation of a new corporate state as a guide for American labor, and as a model for American society as a whole.

Read the whole thing--and barring more excitement from Iowa or some similar breaking news, Glenn Reynolds and Helen Smith's recent interview with Jonah should air tonight at 7:00 PM eastern on XM's POTUS '08 channel in the last segment of PJM Political.

This could be interesting:

It’s been speculated that a big reason so much of the black vote stayed with Hillary thus far is because they didn’t think Obama could win. That fear is dead now, with South Carolina shaping up to be a proving ground.

And as the Moderate Voice notes, "Obama 1, Black Democratic Establishment 0". Glenn Reynolds adds, "Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson can't be liking this too much."

Meanwhile, Betsy Newmark writes, "This has got to be the death knell for the John Edwards campaign":

He just doesn't have the money to compete at the level that will be necessary from here on out. He's going to fade away as the rest of the primaries progress. And where will his supporters go? I would bet that most of them are not going to go to Hillary.

While Hillary's campaign is far from DOA, Betsy suggests, probably quite accurately, that "The Clinton campaign has got to be sweating bullets now."

Related: Another reason why Hillary's campaign advisors might be sweating bullets? The liberal media's love of declaring the primaries a fait accompli, even as they're just getting started.

Brent Bozell writes, "the media’s jackrabbit speed in declaring the race over helps accelerate the whole process and take the old-fashioned patriotic appeal out of primary elections where voters matter."

Huckabee and Obama win big--if possibly pyrrhic--victories in Iowa. Of the former, and his victory over Mitt Romney, Matt Lewis writes:

FOX is speculating there was a 46 percent Evangelical turnout in Iowa, which obviously benefited Huckabee. There didn't seem to be a whispering campaign, or any sort of anti-Mormon attacks, but there is no doubt that Christian-conservatives got behind Mike Huckabee in Iowa tonight.

Is there some deep-seated concerns about Romney's faith, or was this just a result of Mike Huckabee -- a former Baptist Pastor -- having better credentials?

Regardless, Romney’s path is now very difficult. He will have to contend with McCain in New Hampshire and Michigan, and Huckabee and Thompson in South Carolina ...

Speaking of Huckabee, Ed Rollins gives a remarkably pugilistic victory speech to Chris Wallace; Michelle Malkin writes, "When a campaign guru is garnering more attention for himself than his candidate, it spells trouble."

Oh I don't know--that nice Mr. Carville certainly captured a fair amount of media attention for himself, and look how well his candidate turned out...

Update: With his huge shinola-eating grin, John McCain looks like he's about to make a tasty snack out of Huckabee in New Hampshire.

More: Politico agrees, writing that in Iowa, Romney "played hard here and appears to have lost by a significant margin." And "with John McCain surging in New Hampshire and only four days to recover, the pressure is on."

The Glenn Beck/Hillary Clinton connection...Revealed!

(Hillary photo via Ed Morrissey. Obligatory Airplane! reference in title via Lloyd Bridges.)

Update: Hillary's concession speech--"As thrilling as watching Michael Dukakis play computer chess."

Black Five on "Operation Puppy Love":

Do not taunt happy fun trial lawyers; heed the important safety warnings that Laurie Kendrick has assembled.

Obviously, Mike Huckabee is not the reincarnation of Ronald Reagan. But Ed Rollins, his campaign chief, is doing a pretty spot-on impersonation of Hunter S. Thompson, as he stars in "Fear and Loathing In Des Moines."

"Please do not bring any alcoholic beverages into the newsroom. Let’s go out like the professionals we have been these last, difficult weeks."

Ben Hecht, Lou Grant and Ben Bradlee would simultaneously weep upon reading that, except they were real men (Well, OK, Grant was fictional, but you can't have everything, as they say in Cairo) who didn't do that kind of stuff.

Who better than Iowahawk himself to educate voters on the important role our nation's 29th state plays in presidential politics:

Iowa is a Microcosm of America. A one-day national presidential primary (as some analysts have recommended) would be prohibitively expensive for all but the most well-funded candidates, and make 'dark horse' campaigns virtually impossible. Democracy is better served by a small scale contest that allows for grassroots candidates to build momentum, while representing the country as a whole. Luckily, Iowa is an almost perfect miniaturized 1/100th scale model of the United States. For example, Northeastern iowa is filled with gritty and glitzy urban financial centers like Dubuque, "Iowa's New York." Iowa's Missouri River West Coast teems with hi-tech Gay entertainment centers like Sioux City ("The San Francisco of Iowa") and Council Bluffs ("The Malibu of Iowa"). With its fashionable supermodel nightclubs and machine gun-wielding drug lords, far southeastern Keokuk is our Miami Beach. And, in the center of it all, there is Des Moines, which is famous as "the Des Moines of Iowa."

Iowa is also widely known as "The Diversity State," with its vibrant Norwegian-American community and its equally vibrant German-American community, not to mention a growing population of German-Norwegian-American halfbreed mestizos. And, according to the most recent U.S. Census, Iowa has twice as many African-Americans as New Hampshire, and both of them are keenly involved in the political process.

Read the whole thing, then drop by this week's edition of PJM Political for more Iowa-tastic politics!

Update: As if Iowahawk's introduction isn't enough, he's also live blogging the rich futuristic psychosexual fission that is the Iowa Caucus.

The New York Times' hiring of Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard for their op-ed page happened while I was on vacation, so I didn't get a chance to blog about it. But Fred Seigel has a thorough article on the topic, including, of course, the left's 19th nervous breakdown upon hearing the news:

For conservatives, long accustomed to self-serving liberal pieties about tolerance, the orgy of outrage at having to face an alien point of view was wonderful to behold, and no one enjoyed it more than the man at the storm’s center. As Kristol put it to Politico.com, with the obvious relish of the skinny guy on the beach who gets the girl in the fourth panel, “I was flattered watching blogosphere heads explode.” (This provoked a new round of outrage: “Lawd, this is one son of a bitch I detest,” a typical posting hissed. “Smarmy prick. I’m sure that amuses him even more.”)

In fact, about the only one seemingly surprised that Times readers would respond with such vehemence was the man most responsible for the appointment: editorial page editor Andy Rosenthal. Noting that he had trouble understanding “this weird fear of opposing views,” Rosenthal observed in an interview that Kristol “is a serious, respected conservative intellectual—and somehow that’s a bad thing. How intolerant is that?” There’s something almost touching in the naivety behind those words. Can Rosenthal truly be so unaware of the character of his own core readership? Does he actually believe that they’re open to challenge, or even reasonable back-and-forth? Doesn’t he read his own paper’s letters page? “David Brooks can write the mildest column in the world,” Bernard Goldberg observes, “and the letters to the editor act like he’s Hitler.” Now, to their horror, letter-writers face the prospect of regularly waking up to a leading exemplar of a far more aggressive conservatism—a muscular supporter of the war who has characterized the Times itself as “irredeemable.”

Outside of the Timesmen, is there anybody--on the right or the left--who was surprised by the left's temper tantrum? Rosenthal's naiveté helps to illustrate an astonishingly parochial mindset inside the Grey Lady.

Kudos to Bill Kristol for getting the gig though--especially since the MSM in general far prefers fake Republicans over real ones.

The Bard of Minneapolis travels west to Sin City for his Christmas vacation and dispatches a hilarious and well-illustrated Bleat. I wonder if he'll make it back out this September for the second Blog World Convention?

This Houston Chronicle article really takes Alvin Turing's test to new heights:

If you're younger than 35, you'll probably live long enough to put David Levy's prediction to the test. Levy says that by 2050 we'll be creating robots so lifelike, so imbued with human-seeming intelligence and emotions, as to be nearly indistinguishable from real people. And we'll have sex with these robots. Some of us will even marry them. And it will all be good.

Hey, somebody should make a movie about that!

Simon Owens notices an interesting traffic pattern:

It has long been understood that the largest liberal blogs have generally produced more web traffic than the largest conservative blogs. But I have noticed a general trend over the past few months that I didn’t want to write about until the end of the year. After surveying the traffic stats of many major political blogs, I found that web traffic for several major liberal blogs either declined sharply or stayed the same while major conservative blogs saw a sharp increase in traffic.

Tim Blair suggests it may due to the presidential race: "the Republican nomination contest is relatively open, while at this stage the Democrat contest is a two-horse race. More viable candidates = more debate = more posts = more traffic."

Even as the Blogosphere counts its numbers, Canada's CTV, on the cutting edge of societal evolution, notices that there is indeed this hot new trend called blogging that's just poised to take off!

For a generation that has traded in pens and paper for wireless laptops and PDAs, blogging has become the new journaling, with millions spilling their guts in online forums that are available for anyone and everyone to read.

Geez, talk about news from 2002.

Howard Kurtz is an excellent writer and a great source of inside baseball info regarding the media, but he has the same blindside that numerous other journalists have when it comes to his profession, where they simply can't see the forest for the trees, no matter how many times it's pointed out to them. Dana Milbank of all people (he of the Cheney Derangement Syndrome, which caused him to go on TV dressed like Johnny Carson's old Floyd R. Turbo character in the wake of Cheney's hunting accident) tried to point out to Kurtz yes indeed, there's no such thing as an objective, unbiased media, and that the media is becoming increasingly balkanized. (And as anyone who's read this blog for any length of times knows, to me, that's not a bad thing.) But in response, Kurtz lowered the blinkers over his eyes. Or as Tim Graham puts it:

Out of kindness to his Washington Post colleague, Howard Kurtz dedicated a second segment of CNN's Reliable Sources on Sunday to the Post's Dana Milbank to plug his new book, Homo Politicus. While Milbank wrote that the media's split into liberal media and conservative media, Kurtz objected that CBS or the New York Times would be considered liberal or favorable to Democrats, that it's unfair to compare conservative editorial pages or opinion journals with "mainstream" media like CBS.

This despite Ra^therGate, and all the evidence from previous elections, but particularly 2004. This despite the New York Times' ombudsman's mea culpa that year that "Of course" the Times is a liberal paper. This despite Mary Mapes' admission that she didn't know any of the Internet players on the right. Or the many journalists, usually at the tail-end of their careers, who come clean about their profession.

I tried to bring up a couple of these issues when Howard appeared on PJM Political this fall to discuss his book Reality Show and you could just hear the hackles going up in response. On the other hand, if I had to work every day at the Washington Post and CNN, (the latter born of original sin thanks to Eason Jordan's multiple low points as a journalist) I'd probably take a see-no-evil approach to my colleagues as well.

Via Copious Dissent, Milton Friedman debates far left Canadian author and econocrank Naomi Klein:

More here.

Something tells me that this could double as B-Roll footage for the politicians stumping in the Iowa cold this week:

(Via Blue Crab Boulevard.)

Check out the photo of Huckabee currently on Drudge--when did Matt hire Luis Bunuel to be his photographer?

Update: His close shave complete, Huck heads for Hollywood--and an appearance with Jay Leno.

Secrets of XM revealed!

(A big thanks to Joe Mathieu of XM's POTUS '08 Channel, for giving me a tour of the facilities on the day before Thanksgiving.)

The New York Times runs a correction; clearly the answer to their woes is even more leftwing groupthink.

Kathy Shaidle of Relapsed Catholic, and more recently, her Five Feet of Fury blog, has an e-book out:

The year was 1987. My then-housemate, the vegan lesbian stripper/art student, was off to protest the new Witches of Eastwick film as defamatory.

Now, I marched against cruise missiles and CIA mischief every other weekend, but drew the line at picketing Cher.

More details here.

(Richard Miniter's recent post at his Pajamas Express blog dovetails nicely with the theme of the excerpt that Kathy has posted.)