Two guesses as to where I've been this week:

I'm stuck in the American Airlines Admiral's Club feeling a bit like Alex undergoing the Ludovico treatment in A Clockwork Orange, as the two TV sets non-consensually blare out the Academy Awards. I can't help but agree with the New York Post's Kyle Smith when he declares Hollywood part of the "Axis of Chutzpah" for having American troops present the best documentary award:

Given that the most recent statistics show that approximately 97.4 percent of all documentaries present America as a scary place and of those 97.4, most are meant to present the troops in Iraq as overmatched at best and as abusive, sadistic criminals at worst, it’s pretty cheeky of the Oscars to have troops serving overseas present the Oscar for best documentary short subject.

“Move away from the dark side and back to the light,” the director of “Taxi to the Dark Side” says. I doubt our troops agree that we are stuck in the dark side. I think they would argue that the vast majority of them abide by the law, by the rules of engagement and by their own moral compasses, yet they get little feeling of support from their country because those who work in the media are bent on presenting sordid, depraved and illegal acts committed by members of the military and intelligence services (which are of course elements in this war, as they are in every war) as the norm in order to undercut the war and defund the troops.

Believe it or not, it could be worse: Oscar's nadir is reflected here.

Libertas's Dirty Harry is also live blogging the awards--don't miss his commentary here.

James Lileks links to one of the saddest videos you'll watch.

Elsewhere in the global snack food war, are Doritos next in the crosshairs?

(Or is Roger Kimball's quiet crusade being implemented incrementally?)

Roger L. Simon writes that "The New York Times' free fall is a good thing no matter what side you're on":

I cannot believe that an intelligent man like Bill Keller was entirely unaware that most people would be repelled by the thin gruel his paper published - even though he evinced astonishment at the huge number of negative comments, including many from Obama supporters, that appeared on their website. Others may say he and his fellow editors were just unconscious of the way people think, but I am not convinced. As evidence I offer the simple fact that they were for months reluctant to publish. Was the imminence of The New Republic story on the inside deliberations at The Times the trigger? Maybe partly. But again I suspect there was more to it. The New York Times is run by human beings, like everything else, who are subject to the same conflicting cocktail of motivations we all are.

The Jayson Blair affair, of course, was damaging to the paper, but I suspect the fallout here will be worse, since we are in the midst of a presidential campaign to determine the leader of the Western World. I don't think this necessarily means any kind of shakeup in editorial staff. It means something more serious - the continued degradation of the newspaper's already weakening reputation.

And this is a very good thing. No matter what your politics, for too many years The New York Times has had far too much power over our national discourse for one outlet. No media source should have that much authority in a democracy. We need, pardon the expression, a thousand flowers to bloom. I know Bil Keller agrees with that, because I have heard him acknowledge it. He was clearly under considerable pressure from his reporters and editors to publish this unprofessional nonsense. Why did he finally pull the trigger? I submit that he may have done so, at least in part, to shoot himself and his own institution in the foot.

Kate of Small Dead Animals spots another kind of newspaper free fall.

I've had the riffs from this moody Eric Clapton/Michael Kamen soundtrack piece rumbling through my head all weekend. Now it's your turn:

If, as the New York Times and PBS keep hectoring us, global warming requires everyone to make sacrifices, think of the greenhouse emissions and biased omissions that would be saved by the voluntary retirement of these two wasteful corporations.

Wow--to follow-up on Patterico's thoughts last night, how bad does AP want to throw the Democratic presidential race to Obama?

Bad enough that they're dredging up old Whitewater stories for those who've forgotten the scandal-ridden tobaggon ride of the mid-1990s.

(And this is as good a place as any to link to the unfortunate MSM metaphor of the day.)

Update: "All those military stalwartness analogies are a little odd, given how she threw Iraq under the bus."

To be fair though, the left treats politics like it's warfare, and warfare like it's politics.

Ralph Nader: tanned, rested and ready!

A few times on this blog, I've pondered if Michelle Obama is this year's Teresa Heinz Kerry. But the Anchoress thinks she's this year's version of Hillary, circa 1992.

Update: Meanwhile, in "What Brought Us Here?", Victor Davis Hanson has some thoughts on her husband:

One wonders how the United States has come to the brink of nominating and probably electing someone with almost no experience as either an executive or national legislator, replete with ratings and rankings that suggest he will be about the most liberal Presidential candidate since George McGovern.

Definitely worth reading the whole thing.

Compare and contrast screen grabs of two headlines at Time.

Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters catches USA Today's claim that global warming will cause giant snakes to start roaming the fruited plains.

Curiously, only a couple of weeks ago, we were told that global warming killed oversized reptiles.

"Castro Rejects Idea of Political Change."

I guess Fidel's the ultimate example of a one-time youthful leftwing revolutionary who's now standing athwart history yelling "stop."

Patterico writes that "Hillary is now being portrayed the same way as Republicans are portrayed when they defend themselves . . . she is being called an attacker by the L.A. Times (and pretty much the rest of the media as well)":

The Deciders have decided who the winner should be, Hillary. And it ain’t you. They’re already writing your obituary.

Sucks, don’t it?

Welcome to our world. This is how Republicans get treated by Big Media every day.

I don’t feel sorry for you, Hillary. Not one bit.

The Wall Street Journal has this choice soundbite from Hillary:

Sen. Hillary Clinton ratcheted up her attacks on Sen. Barack Obama today, comparing his campaign tactics to those of George W. Bush and urging Ohioans to see past his momentum.

"Enough with the speeches and the big rallies and then using tactics that are right out of Karl Rove's playbook," Mrs. Clinton told reporters at a press conference today.

Sorry, there's not enough chutzpah in the world for someone to complain about another presidential candidate's campaign tactics when her husband reformulated the presidency into an endless political campaign and whose lead strategist infamously said, "If you drag a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you'll find" regarding Paula Jones.

Mark Hemingway's article, "Swiftboating the Swiftboaters" begins:

Barack Obama’s campaign is “not sufficiently aware of the danger that exists from the conservative Freak Show,” the Politico’s Jonathan Martin wrote this week.

And ends:

When demanding more honesty and accountability in politics gets you accused of creating a Freak Show, you know who the real clowns are in the political circus.

Read what comes in-between.

Neo-Neocon writes, "You know the Times has egg on its face, when the San Francisco Chronicle gives it a tongue-lashing for publishing gossip. Ouch." She quotes this passage from the Chronicle:

Regrettably, the Times left itself and our profession open to such allegations of bias by publishing soft-focus evidence of what would be an outrageous breach of public trust.

Allegations? The Times cleared that up for us four years ago.

People magazine headline: "George Clooney: I'm the Hillary Clinton of the Oscars".

I can see that. Neither seems to play all that well in Peoria. And both were for liberating Iraq before they were against it.

Related: A few years ago, a certain Maverick presidential candidate quipped that "Washington is a Hollywood for ugly people. Hollywood is a Washington for the simpleminded". And Mark Steyn notes that the couple who did the most to equate politics and stardom 16 years ago are watching the tables turning on them yesterday via the same method.

Roger L. Simon has seen the frenzied reaction to Barack Obama's speeches before. But then, there's an increasing sense of déjà vu about the man.

(Title via Michael Totten.)

Related: With "The cautionary tale of Pierre Elliott Trudeau", Lionel Chetwynd writes of an earlier version of Obamamania as well--and its aftermath.

And the maker of "male enhancement" tablets joins Miss Cleo in the tacky cable TV commercial Hall of Infamy.

It's not quite an airbrush alert, as the word still appears in the Times' original attack on McCain, but Ed Morrissey and Tom Maguire are noting that in follow-up articles, Timespersons are no longer using the R-word. Ed writes:

A day after insinuating that John McCain had an affair with lobbyist Vicki Iseman, all of the romance appears to have disappeared from the New York Times. Faster than one can say Roberta Flack, the flak taken by the Gray Lady has apparently resulted in a Soviet-style purge of the sexual allegations from their story. Recall this in paragraph 2 of the original article:

A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.

Tom Maguire notes that now, Eastasia has never been at war with Oceania -- er, the story was never about sex. In her Friday follow-up, Elisabeth Bumiller cast the story in this manner:

Senator John McCain on Thursday disputed an account in The New York Times that top advisers confronted him during his first presidential run with concerns about his ties to a female lobbyist

After leading with the allegations of sexual misconduct on Thursday, the Times waters it down within 24 hours to "concerns" about "ties" to a female lobbyist. A day after spreading unsubstantiated gossip, they've backpedaled to the "wink-wink, nudge-nudge" method of journalism. Readers could fill in the blanks after two paragraphs, though, when Bumiller could report that McCain denied ever having an affair with Iseman.

Rush Limbaugh noted that McCain said he was "disappointed" by the New York Times' hit piece, and wonders, if he truly is disappointed and surprised, he must have been the only man on the planet not to know that however cozy he relationship with the press was in the past, they'd start to turn on him the moment he locked up the GOP nomination.

As Denny Green would say, "They are who we thought they were."

Update: The people have spoken, the bastards.

Fidel Castro's friends at AP write, “‘The night before, I slept better than ever,’ Castro reportedly wrote in a newspaper column. ‘My conscience was clear and I promised myself a vacation.’”

John McCain has an excellent tropical suggestion for Castro's travel itinerary.

Update: Related thoughts from Mark Steyn, who writes, "there beats in the liberal breast a strange passion for normalizing dictatorships."

Nikke Finke writes:

So, all in all, I think everyone should expect the Worst Oscars Ever In The History Of Hollywood. Really, Sunday can't come fast enough to put this beleaguered 80th Academy Awards which almost was picketed into oblivion out of its misery.

Or as Jonathan Last wrote three years ago:

A survey of the muck soon to be celebrated at the Academy Awards confirms William Goldman's sad truism: Every Oscar night you look back and realize that last year was the worst year in the history of Hollywood.

Dirty Harry of Libertas is once again taking one for the team, watching the Oscars (and blogging about it) so you don't have to.

If you missed Hugh Hewitt's show yesterday because you were listening to Pajamas' PJM Political on XM satellite radio, you can tune-in here and catch two hours of Jonah Goldberg discussing Liberal Fascism.

If you missed PJM Political yesterday because you were listening to Hugh Hewitt, you can catch it here.

And for a sneak preview of next week's PJM Political, take a listen to Austin Bay's interview with Tom Bevan of Real Clear Politics.

Ed Morrissey writes that Barack Obama had a Leonard Bernstein moment in the mid-1990s.

(And watch for this story to quickly go back down the memory hole.)

Update: And thus, this story isn't very surprising:

Barack Obama will have a big problem attracting the blue-collar white voters he needs to win the presidency, writes Bob Owens: they like guns and he wants to take their guns away.

Steve Green predicts, "Obama probably will be the Democratic nominee. He might even be the next President. But he’ll have no coattails at all. In fact, right now I’d bet there are a bunch of very nervous freshmen Blue Dog Democrats in Congress."

At Newsbusters, Clay Waters writes:

The fallout continues from yesterday's New York Times hit piece on John McCain. The paper itself doesn't seem eager to put up a fight as network news broadcasts, liberal bloggers, journalism professors, and the general public are questioning the Times's journalistic standards.

Roger Simon questions the timing--of the Times endorsing McCain, knowing that this story was slowly simmering on their back burner. But Orrin Judd half-jokingly writes, "Were one conspiracy minded, it would be easy to imagine that Maverick planted the story himself knowing that the Beltway Right would side with him against the Times."

Product placements in novels? It could be a coming thing, writes Stefan Beck in the New Criterion's Armavirumque blog.

Brent Bozell writes, "For decades, this has been an easy display of the media’s foreign affections. Every right-wing dictator, like Chile’s Pinochet, is a ‘dictator,’ while every left-wing dictator is merely a ‘leader,’ or in Castro’s case, a ‘dashing revolutionary’ and a ‘rock star.’ That was ABC’s Diane Sawyer on the morning of Castro’s abdication announcement":

Throughout Castro’s long history of dominating Cuba, he has also dominated the American media, who have covered him with a sickening parade of ardor and accolades, even after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Consider these morally bankrupt valentines:

1. Barbara Walters on ABC, in 2002: "For Castro, freedom starts with education. And if literacy alone were the yardstick, Cuba would rank as one of the freest nations on Earth. “

2. Dan Rather on CBS feeling all warm after Elian Gonzalez was ripped away from those “so-called Cuban exiles” in 2000: “There is no question that Castro feels a very deep and abiding connection to those Cubans who are still in Cuba.”

3. Katie Couric applauding communist achievements on NBC in 1992: "Considered one of the most charismatic leaders of the 20th century....Castro traveled the country cultivating his image, and his revolution delivered. Campaigns stamped out illiteracy and even today, Cuba has one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world."

4. Peter Jennings on ABC, in 1989: "Castro has delivered the most to those who had the least, and for much of the Third World, Cuba is actually a model of development."

5. Even sportscasters darkened their reputations. In a 1991 special covering the Pan Am Games, ABC’s Jim McKay could have been speaking for the media in 2008: "You have brought a new system of government, obviously, to Cuba but the Cuban people do think of you, I think, as their father. One day you’re going to retire. Or one day, all of us die. Won’t there be a great vacuum there? Won’t there be something that will be difficult to fill? Can they do it on their own?"

They always do back the mustache on the left--the MSM's coverage of Castro dovetailed remarkably well with their equally obsequious coverage of fellow despot-in-fatigues Saddam Hussein.

UPI breathlessly reports that "Hearing rap music can spontaneously activate pre-existing awareness of sexist beliefs, North Carolina State University researchers determined."

All together now: I need a study to tell me this?

Yet another interesting quote from Michelle Obama:

Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones.

Can we start with Keith Olbermann, first?

In "What's Ailing Oscar?", Michael Medved just buries this year's Academy Awards show, but the conclusion to this passage couldn't help but stand out a bit to me:

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences produced its first award ceremony on May 16, 1929, none of the movie moguls behind the celebration planned to use such occasions to call attention to under-appreciated art films that had escaped public attention. Instead, the whole purpose of the Academy was to add prestige and a patina of “class” to big studio productions that already appealed to a mass audience. Classic Best Picture winners managed to combine lavish budgets, epic ambition, and crowd-pleasing spectacle, like “Gone With the Wind” (1939), “Ben-Hur” (1959), “The Sound of Music” (1965), or “The Godfather” (1972) . Only recently did the Academy begin making a habit of selecting Best Picture winners that clearly aimed at more limited, selective, sophisticated audiences, as did “The English Patient” (1996), “Shakespeare in Love” (1998), “A Beautiful Mind” (2000), “Million Dollar Baby” (2004) and “Crash” (2005).

Medved adds, "In a sense, this alteration in emphasis reflected the changed status of movie-going from a wildly popular form of entertainment with universal appeal to a specialized interest appealing primarily to niche audiences (particularly young singles)."

Niche audiences? Now there's a phrase I've heard before!

"As of tonight, the market has officially pulled the plug, terminating her campaign. The only thing left for her is to muster some grace, humility and character to begin the process of pulling out."

Update: With that in mind, Jim Geraghty adds, "So, Democrats…are you sure you want to place that bet?"

Carter, Reagan, Bush #41, Baker, Clinton, Albright, Bush #43, Rumsfeld and Condi couldn't get the job done, but finally, Sharon Stone is now on the case.

Take that, Babs!

Falling behind in the delegate count? Let Steve Green and Politico highlight your path to glory!

"Would Chris Matthews have asked a Russian during the 1930s why people continue to support Stalin? Does Chris Matthews really need to have the facts of life in a brutal Communist dictatorship explained to him? Apparently yes."

A youthful case of Radical Chic is always tough to dispel.

Update: Richard Miniter adds that on NPR today, "in the morning, came the mourning":

Mostly it was from NPR’s “Morning Edition,” where the host twice referred to Cuban dictator Fidel Castro as a “hero.” And the funny thing is, Castro isn’t even dead yet.

This story is overblown by both sides: the aging hippies who somehow still admire the monster and impatient exiles waiting for reform and democracy. Suddenly everyone is breathlessly talking about Castro relinquishing power.

But it isn’t true. He will remain head of the Cuban Communist Party, which is where the real power lies. This obvious point has been missed in all of the commentary, offline and online, that I have seen.

All the autocrat has done is decline to accept another term as president of the council of state. He had already provisionally turned over those responsibilities to his brother Raul in July 2006. He is too old and sick to manage petty internal debates about which young comrade should address the provincial deputy assistant commissars planning commission. So Fidel keeps his hand on the big issues and leaves the micromanagement of his gulag island to someone else.

And who is that someone else? Why didn’t any one point out that turning over power to a member of your family, without even a pretense of an election, is what monarchs do, not Marxists? Talk about internal contradictions…

What if that someone else turns out to be Hugo Chavez?

There's a frightening thought.

Called an alarmist for his book America Alone and its accompanying magazine and newspaper articles, Mark Steyn asks a simple question: "The question then arises: fair enough, guys, what would it take to alarm you?"

Sharia in Britain? Taxpayer-subsidized polygamy in Toronto? Yawn. Nothing to see here. True, if you'd suggested such things on Sept. 10, 2001, most Britons and Canadians would have said you were nuts. But a few years on and it doesn't seem such a big deal, and nor will the next concession, and the one after that. It's hard to deliver a wake-up call for a civilization so determined to smother the alarm clock in the soft fluffy pillow of multiculturalism and sleep in for another 10 years. The folks who call my book "alarmist" accept that the Western world is growing more Muslim (Canada's Muslim population has doubled in the last 10 years), but they deny that this population trend has any significant societal consequences. Sharia mortgages? Sure. Polygamy? Whatever. Honour killings? Well, okay, but only a few. The assumption that you can hop on the Sharia Express and just ride a couple of stops is one almighty leap of faith. More to the point, who are you relying on to "hold the line"? Influential figures like the Archbishop of Canterbury? The bureaucrats at Ontario Social Services? The Western world is not run by fellows noted for their line-holding: look at what they're conceding now and then try to figure out what they'll be conceding in five years' time.

The other night at dinner, I found myself sitting next to a Middle Eastern Muslim lady of a certain age. And the conversation went as it often does when you're with Muslim women who were at college in the sixties, seventies or eighties. In this case, my dining companion had just been at a conference on "women's issues," of which there are many in the Muslim world, and she was struck by the phrase used by the "moderate Muslim" chair of the meeting: "authentic women" — by which she meant women wearing hijabs. And my friend pointed out that when she and her unveiled pals had been in their 20s they were the "authentic women": the covering routine was for old village biddies, the Islamic equivalent of gnarled Russian babushkas. It would never have occurred to her that the assumptions of her generation would prove to be off by 180 degrees — that in middle age she would see young Muslim women wearing a garb largely alien to their tradition not just in the Middle East but in Brussels and London and Montreal. If you had said to her in 1968 that Westernized Muslim women working in British hospitals in the early 21st century would reject modern hygiene because it required them to bare their arms, she would have scoffed with the certainty of one who assumes that history moves in only one direction.

Read the whole thing.

Chaz Pazienza, the former CNN producer whom we briefly mentioned here last week after he was fired from CNN for his blog, has a post today on the HuffPo:

When I asked, just out of curiosity, who came across my blog and/or the columns in the Huffington Post, the woman from HR answered, "We have people within the company whose job is specifically to research this kind of thing in regard to employees."

Jesus, we have a Gestapo?

Since you're still able to type, the answer to that would "No." On the other hand, Chez's former employer has rarely met a government with a similar agency it didn't want to prop up.

(Via Greg Pollowitz.)

Update: Speaking of propping up...

"This is not Norway here, and it is not Denmark."

Over at Pajamas HQ, there's an article by Roger L. Simon, followed by a podcast interview which I produced, and transcript, of Roger's interview with Chris Peden, the councilman in Ron Paul's district who would very much like to replace him as congressman.

Highlighted on Drudge is what is currently a brief Reuters note:

HAVANA (Reuters) - Ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro said on Tuesday that he will not return to lead the country, retiring as head of state 49 years after he seized power in an armed revolution.

"Developing", needless to say.

Update: UPI adds:

HAVANA, Feb. 19 (UPI) -- Fidel Castro, the ailing strongman who led Cuba for 47 years, is stepping down as president and commander in chief, it was reported Tuesday.

Castro, 81, who has been suffering from an undisclosed intestinal ailment, disclosed his resignation in a letter published in the state-run newspaper Granma, CNN reported. In that letter, he said he would not accept being elected to another term as president of the state council or commander in chief when the Parliament meets Sunday.

Since mid-2006, Castro's younger brother, Raul, has been Cuba's acting president, running the government's day-to-day operations.

Fidel Castro ruled the communist island since leading a revolution that toppled Gen. Fulgencio Batista in 1959.

Michelle Malkin has more.

At the BBC, Bush=Hitler, and "I think al-Qaeda would back McCain."

Why, it's like they're biased, or something!

I do not think it means what you think it means....

"I'm enjoying this Democratic primary, as it seems to be causing our friends to the left to notice phenomena that they had previously pooh-poohed."

"You want to save the earth? Here’s a little hint. Don’t. Buy. S***."

That's pretty much Bill's plan.

Scroll to about 13 minutes into this podcast on Shire Network News, where Ezra Levant tells his interviewer that Shirlene McGovern, the "human rights officer" who interrogated Levant in the YouTube clips that rocketed through the Blogosphere in early January has resigned from his case, claiming, she has "never been subjected to such public odium in my life."

Here are our small contributions to that odium.

(Via Hot Air.)

Update: Steven Den Beste emails:

Regarding the discomfort of the Canadian Inquisitor assigned to the Ezra Levant case, my reaction: "Aaah! Poor baby!"

It's like the reaction of the press to the rise of the blogosphere. "Wait a minute! We're supposed to be the ones who scrutinize others and make them uncomfortable. Why are we suddenly the ones being scrutinized? That's no fair!"

Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

“For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country."

Like I said back in September...

Update: The answer to this headline is, "Yes, it's certainly looking that way at the moment."

More: The answer to this headline? It sounds very likely, but past performance is no guarantee of future results.

"LBJ Did What Now?"

(H/T: IP)

It was only a matter of time before one of America's most influential former presidents finally joined the Blogosphere.

(H/T: HH and 5'F)

Power Line and Jules Crittenden do a thorough job of demolishing an article by Susan Jacoby of the Washington Post titled, "The Dumbing of America: Call Me a Snob, But Really, We’re a Nation of Dunces." As Jules notes:

Like most nostalgia fests, this one envisions a past more intellectual than I suspect it actually was, tosses out all kinds figures about how dumb we are … most of them without any prior reference to indicate whether it’s an improvement or not … and while decrying the dropoff in reading of paper products in the computer age, neglects to note that reading of material from around the world, previously unseen except in the immediate vicinity of distant publishing plants, has skyrocketed.

In his book of the same name, Alvin Toffler posits that the beginning of the Third Wave of history occurred in the late 1950s, when white collar jobs in the US first began to outnumber their blue collar equivalents. Given the slow by inexorable shift that transistion marked towards an information-based economy, coupled with the mania of American parents to send children to college since at least the 1970s, it seems reasonable to assume that Americans as a whole are actually better educated today than they were at any time in the past.

But look at what's also changed during that period: first, the fracturing of a shared monoculture, some of which occurred deliberately, and some the accidental byproduct of technology, such as the hundreds of channels of cable and satellite TV, and more significantly, the launch of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s.

The fracturing of mass culture also has its benefits, of course. But it's been coupled with the death of middlebrow culture and the corresponding coarsening of the media in general, along with the rise of political correctness and the corresponding dumbing down of the educational system. (Not to mention journalism!) As one of Jules' commenters notes, "Isn’t it ironic that the same intellectuals that denigrated Western intellectual history as the product of Dead White European Males now complain that Americans have become anti-intellectual?"

I've written about Reuters' corporate ills on numerous occasions (including a lengthy round-up of Reuters's most infamous moments written during the heat of their most visible recent scandal), but never as eloquently as Roger Kimball does, here.

Jeff Jacoby has some thoughts on one of history's stranger rhymes.

Nikke Finke writes, "I'm hearing that the Los Angeles Times' managing editor for features, culture and entertainment John Montorio could be headed for the chopping block":

Montorio spent 15 years at The New York Times and helped launch many of the NYT signature features sections, including The City and Sunday Styles, before joining the LAT in 2001 at the behest of Dean Baquet. Montorio tried to make several clones of those NYT feature sections at the LAT but wasn't anywhere as successful: those that died demonstrated that the LAT can't draw the necessary advertising. He oversaw an overhaul of the LAT magazine that also flopped. Most recently, Montorio launched Image, a fashion and style section. But it's generally considered that the LAT movie and TV news coverage has suffered greatly over Montorio's oversight, and the paper was consistently beat on nearly every development in the recent writers strike. Worse, his departments' articles are just bland and dull.

How hard do you have to work to make coverage of your town's biggest and craziest industry dull as dishwater?

This hard!

Update: To be fair, give the L.A. Times credit for running this.

That's the topic of this new Politico article. But Ed Morrissey, Duane Patterson and I discussed the idea on Ed's Blog Talk Radio show and Pajamas' PJM Political XM show two and a half months ago!

Building on the previous post regarding the eschaton immanentizing Obama, this CNN item from Monday January 7th, before the New Hampshire primary is a hoot:

I am going to try to be so persuasive in the 20 minutes or so that I speak that by the time this is over, a light will shine down from somewhere.

It will light upon you. You will experience an epiphany. And you will say to yourself, I have to vote for Barack. I have to do it.

Phew! Imagine any Republican running president using language like that.