Cam Edwards writes, "Well, if it makes you feel any better Senator… this whole episode has been tough for me too":

You see, two of my five kids are actually my stepkids. We don’t make a big deal out of it. In fact, they’ve always called me “Dad”. Just like your father, who wasn’t around when you were growing up, my two oldest kids haven’t seen their biological father in years. And like you, they’re the offspring of a white mother and a black father. Our other three kids are as pale as milk, so we’ve gotten our share of odd comments over the years. I’m sure you remember similar comments when you were a kid and were out with your grandparents.

But as a parent, you try to deal with it the best you can. You tell your kids that most people are just ignorant, and that skin color doesn’t make you any different. You thank God that the civil rights movement has been as successful as it has, and that the comments you do get are few and far between. You teach your children that people should be judged on the contents of their character, not the color of their skin.

Then Jeremiah Wright becomes the story of the day and now you’re trying to figure out what to tell your 7-year old when he asks if it’s true that he’s different than his older brother and sister, and if we love him more or less than we love them. You wonder if your 17-year old son and your 21-year old daughter have bought into what Rev. Wright is peddling, and if the bond of family is stronger than race-based rhetoric. And yes, you wonder why it took Senator Barack Obama twenty years to figure out Jeremiah Wright when most of the rest of us figured it out in about five minutes.

Sorry Senator, but I’m starting to wonder if your comments distancing yourself from Reverend Wright are really sincere. I’m also wondering if you were really that close with him to begin with. I’m wondering a lot of things about you, but it boils down to one concern: are you lying to us now, or were you lying to us all along about Reverend Wright? Either way, it would make you the worst kind of politician. You know the stereotype: slimy, oozing with contempt for the voters, willing to say anything to get elected. The exact opposite of how you present yourself, basically.

In other words, a typical Cook County hack, as Orrin Judd has noted.

Jim Geraghty quotes from "A Story About McCain That Makes You Say, 'Wow!'":

[Ret. Col. Bud] Day relayed to me one of the stories Americans should hear. It involves what happened to him after escaping from a North Vietnamese prison during the war. When he was recaptured, a Vietnamese captor broke his arm and said, "I told you I would make you a cripple."

The break was designed to shatter Mr. Day's will. He had survived in prison on the hope that one day he would return to the United States and be able to fly again. To kill that hope, the Vietnamese left part of a bone sticking out of his arm, and put him in a misshapen cast. This was done so that the arm would heal at "a goofy angle," as Mr. Day explained. Had it done so, he never would have flown again.

But it didn't heal that way because of John McCain. Risking severe punishment, Messrs. McCain and Day collected pieces of bamboo in the prison courtyard to use as a splint. Mr. McCain put Mr. Day on the floor of their cell and, using his foot, jerked the broken bone into place. Then, using strips from the bandage on his own wounded leg and the bamboo, he put Mr. Day's splint in place.

Years later, Air Force surgeons examined Mr. Day and complemented the treatment he'd gotten from his captors. Mr. Day corrected them. It was Dr. McCain who deserved the credit. Mr. Day went on to fly again.

That's just jaw-dropping.

Read the rest, over at Libertas.

Jonathan Pierce of England's Samizdata reads Andrew Sullivan, so you don't have to, spotting this classic Sullivan moment:

It's extremely depressing that the first major national black politician who takes on the victimology of Sharpton and Jackson is greeted by the right with the kind of cynicism you see at Malkin or the Corner or Reynolds. It reveals, I think, the deeper truth: the Republican right only wants a black Republican to do this.

As Jonathan writes, "Republicans want to vote for Republicans: who knew?"

Go figure!

I guess their chief concern is finding "the right man — and the conservative choice — for a difficult and perilous time."

James Pethokoukis notes that the economy grew 0.6 percent in the first quarter of 2008, even with the drag of the Pelosi Premium around its neck:

Now that's not a robust number by any means, but it's not so bad given all the worry out there that the economy is headed off a cliff. Before you declare a recession, as many economic pundits have, shouldn't the economy, well, actually recess a bit—if only for a quarter?

But what about those rice shortages, eh?

With the reemergence of Rev Wright back into the limelight he so dearly craves, the name Bill Ayers has been pushed back into the underground a bit. But this story is a reminder of why his relationship to Obama matters as well:

During the April 16 debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, moderator George Stephanopoulos brought up "a gentleman named William Ayers," who "was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol and other buildings. He's never apologized for that." Stephanopoulos then asked Obama to explain his relationship with Ayers. Obama's answer: "The notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn't make much sense, George." Obama was indeed only 8 in early 1970. I was only 9 then, the year Ayers' Weathermen tried to murder me.

Much more here, from Ed Morrissey.

I'm not at all sure which Chicago paper carries his column, but Iowahawk has excerpts from "Dear Barry: Relationship Advice From Illinois Senator Barack Obama". A sample:

Dear Barry:

I've been married to the same wonderful man -- Let's call him "Jeremiah" -- for 20 years. He's a great provider and we live in a beautiful home. He dotes on me and treats me like a queen; even after twenty years he still brings me little gifts and opens doors for me. Best yet, our sex life is fantastic! Jeremiah enjoys spicing things up with role-play, such as "Adolf and Eva," and we host weekly swinger get-togethers for like-minded couples. I know it probably must sound kind of kinky, but trust me - it keeps things interesting in "the boudoir."

That's where the trouble comes in. Lately it's been hard for Jeremiah to step out of his bedroom character, even when we have company over. For example, the other night I was hosting bunco night for the neighborhood girls and Jeremiah came goose-stepping into the rec room in his black leather swastika thong and riding crop, screaming "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer!!"

Frankly, it was somewhat embarrassing. I've asked Jeremiah to "tone it down" and save the Nurenberg speeches for the privacy of swinger's night, but he refuses. Also, I think he may be clinically insane. I'm worried that if word gets out it may hurt our chances of getting membership in the country club. What should I do?

Confused in Hyde Park

RTWT, as Dear Abby would say if she used four-letter acronyms.

Standard & Poor's cuts the bond ratings of the New York Times:

Credit-ratings agency Standard & Poor's Ratings Services on Tuesday cut its long-term rating on newspaper publisher The New York Times Co., as its advertising revenue continues to fall.

S&P cut its corporate credit rating and senior unsecured debt rating to "BBB-" from "BBB."

"BBB-" is one notch above "junk bond" status. The ratings were removed from CreditWatch, but the outlook is negative, meaning another downgrade could occur.

"The rating downgrade reflects a worsening pace of decline in advertising revenue at the company's newspaper publications," said S&P credit analyst Emile Courtney in a statement.

Despite weakening ad revenue, The New York Times has a diversified and quickly growing online revenue base. S&P expects online revenue will begin to offset print revenue declines over the next few years.

Shares fell 35 cents to $19.96 during midday trading.

In 2002, NYT stock was worth over $50 a share.

And I as mentioned in a recent video, just wait until 2014...

Ann Althouse parses Obama's press conference today, and notes that while he denounced Wright's speeches, he backs off on actually denouncing Wright himself. And indeed, Obama seems more perturbed by their timing than anything else.

Which dovetails into this curious exchange between Obama and Chris Wallace, which Paul Mirengoff highlights:

WALLACE: Did you talk to reverend Wright recently about his decision to make a series of public appearances at this particular point?

OBAMA: You know, I didn't talk to him about that. I had talked to him after all this had happened, partly because I regretted — I always regret people who are civilians, essentially, being dragged into these political fights.

And I expressed to him — I said, "Look, we have very strong differences. I do not agree with the comments that you made. On the other hand, I regret that you have drawn so much attention."

How is Wright a civilian? When your ideology makes "the personal the political", and in an effort to create a holistic worldview, has politicized everything from religion to light bulbs to national defense, how can there be any "civilians" in politics?

You could make a good case that the Swift Vets or those victims of Bill Clinton who spoke out against him were "civilians" in politics--they knew that they would no longer be private citizens, and that by pointing out inconvenient truths about media favorites, they would be publicly trashed, and that their lives could potentially never be the same.

In contrast, Wright, gave politicized sermon after politicized sermon to his large clergy, and saw one of his sermons become the title of Obama's book, and others were quoted by Obama in his autobiographies. Over the last week, beginning with his appearance on Bill Moyer's show, Wright seems clearly intent in making the most of his 15 minutes. That doesn't sound like a political "civilian" to me.

Related: Heather Mac Donald explores "Poisonous 'Authenticity'".

Ezra Levant explores the strange case of Montreal's "Bar Le Stud":

Pete Vere sends me this interesting case study of the wild animal biting madly. A Montreal gay bar, Bar Le Stud, told a woman named Audrey Vachon that she wasn't allowed in -- it was a men-only establishment, and had been happily operating that way for eleven years. Then the human rights commissions got involved, and Bar Le Stud has copped a plea bargain. We don't know the details of how much money Vachon got paid or -- and you know this was part of the deal, it usually is -- the kind of "sensitivity training" that Bar Le Stud's staff have to undergo.

A gay bar -- like a straight bar, like a Christian church -- has age-old rights that long pre-date our fads of "human rights". Bar Le Stud has property rights, which include the right to exclude people. They have freedom of association. They have contractual rights. Strangers have no "right not to be offended" by them. They have no "right" to come onto their property, to change the purpose of Bar Le Stud, and to interfere with its peaceful practices. But now they do.

Misguided gay rights activists -- like Darren Lund, and even Richard Warman -- have used the bludgeon of human rights commissions to batter down the real rights of others. But they have laid down precedents that, in this case at least, are being used against gays.

It doesn't happen often, because conservatives, and straights, and Christians, aren't as active as their opponents in the grievance culture that Canada's HRCs foment. And, of course, even if they were, the grievance-activist bias of HRC staff would probably dismiss those complaints.

But that can only last so long. As Mark Steyn pointed out in his last Maclean's column, Adolf Hitler didn't invent Germany's censorship laws, nor did he write the emergency powers provisions that the Nazis abused. They were all written by the liberal Weimar Republic.

Leftist and ethnic-identity activists have loved the HRCs because they have usually picked on those groups' enemies. But the dangerous precedents have been set, and everyone's rights are at risk, as Bar Le Stud has found out.

What we accept as the current definition of the culture war may look like a blissfully calm warm-up phase a decade or so from now. Consider the implications of a news story such as this, particularly if, as seems likely, such stories become more and more commonplace.

Update: Ezra concurs with my take, and notes: "Even if they don't believe in free speech or property rights for their opponents, liberals should protect the concepts for themselves." Read the whole thing, as they say.

Mark Steyn:

Jonah, mortarboarding at Gitmo is when detainees are made to put on a cap and gown and listen to back-to-back commencement addresses by alternating Clinton cabinet secretaries and PBS hosts. Most of them crack during Janet Reno.

I'd say that by far, this is the definitive example of mortarboarding--with this a close second. But the competition is fierce, with numerous new potential contestants participating each spring.

In his latest presser, as Allahpundit notes, Obama is shocked--shocked!--that there's racism being uttered by Rev. Wright, the pastor whose sermons he attended for 20 years, except for the really bad ones, which he never heard, except for those he quoted in his book.

Congratulations, senator--you've just entered the same maze of pretzel logic your colleague explored in 2004.

See-Dubya writes:

Who to root against? One is an anti-semitic, state-subsidized, bloated, corrupt friend of despots and thugs and enemy of the West, and the other…

Is exactly the same; both float prominently through the poisoned alphabet soup division of Blair's Law, as the UN is P.O.ed at the BBC.

The Bard of Jasperwood looks back on the events of the past few days with Lileksian understatement:

Interesting how we thought that Romney’s candidacy would lead to a discussion of religion and politics, eh? Turns out that was just the warm-up act.

The performance of the main attraction this weekend also places an interesting perspective on this recent quote regarding the citizens of the more remote exurbs of the Keystone State, eh?

"And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Nora Ephron could not be reached for comment.

Update: "What The Clintons Did For Feminism, Could Obama do for race relations?"

I'm not sure how much I buy Jim Geraghty's theory that Rev. Wright's antics are setting the stage "For the All-Time Sister Souljah Moment", but the timing is interesting, of course:

And now, for a really far-out theory... Wright goes out, makes even more outrageous remarks, and it gives Obama the opportunity to finally sever the ties. A statement like, "I loved this man, but I cannot abide what he is saying now... I am leaving that church and must disavow Jeremiah Wright."

Issue resolved. Obama is given credit for being a healer, for a courageous move, for standing up against divisiveness at great personal emotional expense, etc. ...

Wouldn't it be seen as remarkably transparent? After all, Jesse Jackson's baggage wasn't as obvious a hold on Bill Clinton when he invented the Sister Souljah moment. And Obama already has quite a collection of connect the dot moments, between Wright, Rezko, the New Black Panthers, Ayers, etc. Is it too many to overcome in the general, even with the media's transparently obvious support?

And speaking of the media, considering that Bill Moyers and CNN recently gushed over Wright, by throwing the good reverend under the bus (where Obama's grandmother was also last seen) won't he calling into question their judgment too? Of course, given how much they've been played, would they even notice?

As Libertas notes, "Yeah, this will make money":

[Filmmaker] NICK Broomfield … is under fire for his latest, “Battle for Haditha,” a probe into the 2005 Marine massacre of 24 men, women and kids in Haditha, Iraq, allegedly in retaliation for the bombing death of one jarhead. The flick, opening May 7 at Film Forum, features former enlisted Marines portraying the killers in explicit reenactments of what some call “Bush’s My Lai ,” and is being slammed as a smear job. One group, Defend Our Marines, states … Broomfield claimed he’d show the world the “unflinching truth” about Haditha, but instead had actors improvise phony, obscenity-filled dialogue as they shot innocent civilians. One scene in which an Iraqi is gunned down as he flees through a field is said to be completely fictional. Charges against five of eight Marines involved have been dropped so far.

Cue the refrains of "fake but accurate", and "emotional truth" that are sure to come.

Most of Broomfield's previous documentaries were feminist-themed movies. As an interviewer asked him, "You seem to focus a lot on strange women in your films":

PM: You know, Courtney, Aileen Wuornos, Heidi Fleiss and, uh, Margaret Thatcher. Is that more than coincidence?

NB: I think I am more interested in women than in men. But I have made twenty three films, and under slightly half of those have to do with men. For example, I did a movie about the head of the neo-nazi party in South Africa. But the more high profile films that have been shown in this country have to do with women.

However, I do find women more interesting. You know, women have been through a lot more interesting changes than men over the last twenty years. They went through the whole feminist movement, and I think the position of women has really changed in society in terms of what's expected of them and from them. And the women I choose are all moderately powerful.

Hmmm--I guess there was a dearth of "moderately powerful" women in the Middle East for Broomfield to film. Can't imagine why that is, (though maybe Ms. magazine knows) but I suppose covering that story would be a documentary too far, lest he join Theo van Gogh in the great editing bay in the sky. Best make nice, safe, perfectly reactionary boilerplate about the big bad U.S. instead.

Colby Cosh writes that Bill Clinton is suffering from an enormous case of what Alvin Toffler once dubbed Future Shock:

Readers will recall that Clinton's presidential campaigns took place in 1993 and 1997--the age of steam-engines and chaste courtship, when the public obtained the news of the realm by means of telegraph, tintype, and whispered rumours passed along by drunken stagecoach drivers. In that vanished time, no one ever dreamed that a candidate would have to account for fleeting images and haunting "sound bites" blown up beyond all reasonable significance by as-yet-unimagined mediums like "tele-vision". Indeed, little is known about the electoral methods of the period, but it is thought that chief magistrates were chosen by assemblies of eminent citizens who scrawled names on pieces of broken pottery that were then cast into giant ceremonial urns.

At the preternaturally advanced age of 61, Mr. Clinton is clearly no longer capable of participating in the new, unrecognizable democratic cyberprocess. He is obviously better suited to be exhibited publicly, in humane fashion, as a geriatric wonder who, by God's grace, is still capable of gumming soft foods and forming the occasional coherent sentence.

Fortunately, there's a new museum that's perfect for both Bill, and the sclerotic medium of his all-too-fleeting glory days.

(Via 5'F)

You gotta start someplace, and here's how Americans in the 1930s were instructed to use a then cutting-edge piece of technology....their new rotary phones:

(Via Execupundit; phone-blogging from a more recent past here.)

Related: Check out the moderne table and chair that Ann Althouse photographed in the Brooklyn Museum of Art--that's one of the swankier tables those 1930s phones would have rested on.

Along with Michelle Malkin's "Vents", Bob Parks' "Outside The Wire" videos were a definite inspiration last year as I began assembling the elements that would go into my "Silicon Graffiti" video series. And his latest video is a doozy--two guesses as to the subject of Bob's lead story:

(Via Eyeblast.TV)

Found via Mark Steyn, Ezra Levant writes:

Nelly Hechme is the innocent bystander whose Internet connection was hacked by the Canadian Human Rights Commission, so their investigators could cover their tracks when they went online under their secret codenames to surf white supremacist websites.

(I know. That entire sentence is insane. But it's true.)

Read the whole thing; more here.

For our video look at Ezra's run-in with Alberta's local "Human Rights Commission" from back in January, click here.

Ann Althouse has a great take on the New York Times' recent attempts to run interference for Barack Obama:

Come on. There is a serious question here about whether Obama is too left wing. We damned well get to talk about it. If you're going to push us back and call us racists for trying to address an overwhelmingly important political problem with a black candidate for President, then what you are essentially saying is that America is not ready for a black President. And that would be racist. Either we can talk about him vigorously or we can't. And if we can't, he shouldn't be President.

Fortunately, Obama himself says that the criticism of Wright is fair game, particularly if longer than 30-second snippets of his fire-and-brimstone sermons are used to place his overtly political remarks into context. So I'd say Obama's approval outweighs the Times' tut-tutting, particularly given the previous established moralistic food chain created by the deciders at the Gray Lady regarding "absolute moral authority".

(Of course, 2004's Democratic candidate was even more hand-picked and coddled by the Times. Which may have accounted for, say, just to pick a number at random, 15 percent of his popularity back then.)

Update: More from Jim Geraghty, who reminds us that Rev. Wright will be playing extremely slow pitch softball at the National Press Club tomorrow.

Given how easy it now is to find previous Final Countdowns, just once, I'd love to see the next Final Countdown met with some skepticism from the press: Mr. Gore/Erlich/Danson/DiCaprio, etc., why should we believe you, when there have been so many earlier doomsday predictions that have never come to pass?

(H/T: TB)

Related: Via Small Dead Animals, Canada's Lorrie Goldstein opens up an even more recent memory hole:

Dear Globe and Mail and Toronto Star:

For 15 months, I've been saving your respective front pages from the glorious weekend of January 27-28, 2007, when you simultaneously declared your mutual jihads against man-made global warming.

I knew they'd come in handy some day and now, they have.

Indeed, it seems like only yesterday I awoke to my Saturday, January 27, 2007 Globe to be greeted by the hysterical, front-page headline "Welcome to the new climate," under a politically correct green masthead, declaring at the bottom: "We want action. We're ready for sacrifices."

Not to be outdone, the Star a day later had its own World War III, front-page headline, "State of denial: Do the skeptics of global warming have a hidden agenda?" -- in the finest traditions of "do you deny beating your wife?" journalism.

And now, here we are, just 15 months later and isn't it great you both have exactly what you wanted -- skyrocketing gasoline prices and about-to-skyrocket food prices -- since as we both know, hitting energy-hogging Canadians in their pocketbooks is the only way to make them reduce their evil greenhouse gas emissions hard and fast.

Or as it's been dubbed in States, the Pelosi Premium.

Howard Kurtz interviews military analyst and retired Army colonel, Ken Allard:

HOWARD KURTZ, HOST: Last year, you quit NBC and MSNBC...

COL. KEN ALLARD: That's correct.

KURTZ: ...after a ten-year relationship. You indicated you thought they were moving to the left.

ALLARD: I thought they really had moved very slowly to the left, and I also thought that when they had the chance to clarify to the fact that they were not moving to the left, they didn't do so.

Allard left the networks in early 2007. Particularly in the case of MSNBC (and tacitly, with stunts such as this at NBC), the two affiliates of GE aren't exactly hiding their position on the ideological spectrum these days.

Curiously though, as I've written previously, for such a savvy media critic, Howard never seems to notice these things.

Charles Johnson spots "Lefties Seething Over Obama on Fox":

The irony here is completely off the scale. These are people who advocate speaking with our real mortal enemies, enemies who chant “Death to America” and kill American soldiers and civilians, but they’re unyielding when it comes to ... Fox News?

Freud called it displacement.

With Al Sharpton threatening to "close this city down", Michelle Malkin asks, why is Al "still welcome in polite society?"

As I wrote just this past week, linking to my article on the topic from a few years ago in The New Partisan:

From politicians such as Al Sharpton, Robert Byrd and John Kerry to artists such as Michael Moore and Philip Johnson, it's amazing what you can get away with in your salad days as long as you emerge with the right politics afterwards.

Michelle writes, "Some readers wonder why I continue to write about the Sharpton-MSM lovefest. Why? Because the enablers deserve to be held responsible and shamed publicly until they stop."

Since the modern MSM has not a molecule of shame in their collective nervous system, I'm not sure if that's possible. Besides, as Mark Steyn notes, it suffers from an enormous moral inversion:

In a scrupulously politically correct age, it's not offensive to organize a "Kill the police!" demo or to preach that the government invented Aids in order to perpetrate an African-American genocide. You can pull that stuff and still be part of respectable society, hanging out with presidential candidates and whatnot. What's grotesquely offensive is the chap who's insensitive enough to point out such statements and associations.

Which is never more obvious in an election year, just as we saw in 2004, when it was the Swift Vets who were demonized by the media for pointing out John Kerry's 1970s-era anti-American demagoguery, not the man actually made those remarks.

The MSM once had a monopoly on the past. Today, with that control broken, they get quite cross with whomever points out a leftist's otherwise grandfathered radical chic past.

Update: Which may be why, as people abandon the MSM's top down control of information, we've entered "The 'Golden Age' of Web news".

Burt Prelutsky explores the political correctness which has so alienated newspapers (particularly Burt's local paper, the L.A. Times) from their readers, and notes:

In the old days, Hollywood was run by a bunch of tough cookies who kept one eye on the starlets and one eye on the bottom line. These days, it appears as if the movies are in the hands of bozos who think there’s something tacky about making movies that actually turn a profit.

Still, there’s another group that makes these guys look like hard-headed businessmen. I refer to those people who own newspapers. The way they carry on, you’d think their names were Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Gummo.

Does that make Rupert Murdoch Irving Thalberg?

More from the Time Warp files, as NRO's Greg Pollowitz links to a Huffington Post blogger none-too-keen on Keith Olbermann's typically hyperbolic language (and gee, welcome to the club!):

Olbermann was discussing the election with Newsweek's Howard Fineman, a frequent guest. They topic was, how can a winner finally be determined in this never-ending Democratic race for the nomination? Of course, the assumption was that it was Clinton that should be shown the door (despite clearly still earning her spot in the race thanks to, um, voters). Fineman said that, all the delegate math aside, ultimately it was going to take "some adults somewhere in the Democratic party to step in and stop this thing, like a referee in a fight that could go on for thirty rounds. Those are the super, super, super delegates who are going to have to decide this."

Said Olbermann: "Right. Somebody who can take her into a room and only he comes out."

Which sounds sort of like a rewrite of the Economist's infamous line earlier this month, which I quoted in my recent video:

The Democrats are all too aware that their civil war could spell disaster. A cavalcade of senior Democrats, including senators Patrick Leahy and Chris Dodd, have advised Mrs Clinton to retire to her room with a glass of whisky and a loaded revolver.

Are these the examples of the nuance that the left is so known for?

The wheels of progress grind exceedingly slowly at Newsweek, but eventually, the magazine grudgingly catches up with conservative thought: First this week, Eleanor Clift nods in tacit agreement with everything Republicans said about the Clintons in the 1990s.

Shortly thereafter, Michael Hirsh runs an article there titled, "How the South Won (This) Civil War". That was a theme that Michael Graham, a southerner currently transplanted to New England, described six(!) years ago, in a book with much less bitter tone (actually, it's quite a funny read) called Redneck Nation. Its subhead also notes..."How the South Really Won the War".

Let's do the time warp again!

Update: Speaking of time warps, Glenn Reynolds flashes back to November of 2004 and notes, "Jeez, they used to at least wait until after they lost the election to start this talk."

Reuters reports that "A Saudi blogger detained without charge for more than four months after expressing pro-reform opinions has been released, a colleague said on Saturday":

Fouad Farhan was detained in early December after running an online campaign over 10 men arrested since February 2007 on suspicion of financing militant groups, but whose supporters say they are being punished for pro-democracy activity.

"I spoke to him and he's in good spirits. He said he was treated really well," said Ahmed al-Omran, who published the news on his website (https://www.saudijeans.org).

"It was surprising. After blocking his website, I thought his detention would go on longer. It's good news."

Saudi authorities blocked Farhan's website (https://www.alfarhan.org) earlier this month.

Of course, for Reuters, one man's extended jail sentence is merely another man's visit to the Breakfast Club.

During the 1990s, conservatives believed that the Clintons were something out of The Godfather, with endless dark deals and bodies buried (Vince Foster, and even Ron Brown, depending upon how deep down the conspiratorial rabbit hole of the VRWC one went) to stay in power.

That was all tut-tutted by the left during the 1990s, but as I recently said, that was then and this is now. In the very liberal Newsweek, the even more liberal Eleanor Clift essentially says that they were right:

I'm beginning to think Hillary Clinton might pull this off and wrestle the nomination away from Barack Obama. If she does, a lot of folks—including a huge chunk of the media—will join Bill Richardson (a.k.a. Judas) in the Deep Freeze. If the Clintons get back into the White House, it will be retribution time, like the Corleone family consolidating power in "The Godfather," where the watchword is, "It's business, not personal."

Not that anyone will be sleeping with the fishes with Hillary in the White House, but with the Clintons it's business and it's personal. Just think of all the scores to settle, the grievances to indulge.

So if Obama runs, he'll be the second coming of Leonard Bernstein's salon, with radical chic terrorists and racist thugs such as William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, and Reverend Wright. If Hillary wins, it will be the second coming of Don Corleone, according to Eleanor.

Sounds like an exceptional reason to ride the Straight Talk Express, to me.

As I noted as soon as I saw it, that recent Time magazine global-warming as Iwo Jima cover is straight out of the "moral equivalent of war" playbook that as been a staple of the left since World War I that Jonah Goldberg described in Liberal Fascism. So it's not surprising that Jonah writes about that cover in his latest syndicated column:

Even if Walsh and his bosses at Time were merely trying to be descriptive of American attitudes, they’d still be flat-out wrong. If Americans saw environmentalism as the purest expression of patriotic sentiment — like, say, buying Liberty Bonds during WWI — Time’s declaration might be defensible. But Americans don’t think any such thing.

The latest Gallup environmental survey shows that only 37 percent of Americans worry about global warming “a great deal,” a drop from 41 percent last year. Indeed, the share of Americans greatly concerned with climate change is about the same as it was a decade ago, which still sounds a bit high since the globe pretty much stopped getting warmer in 1998. Even among environmental concerns, climate change isn’t priority No. 1 for most Americans.

The editors of Time surely know this, which explains their real motive: They want to persuade Americans otherwise. And they are honest about it. Richard Stengel, Time’s managing editor, who recently admitted that he doesn’t much care about “objective” journalism, insists that “there needs to be an effort along the lines of preparing for World War II to combat global warming and climate change.”

Just as "the moral equivalent of war" traces its roots to WWI, so too does the desire for an "objective" media, as Steve Boriss recently noted.

As I've written before, journalism, but big and small, has definitely entered into its post-objective phase. Which is both long overdue and much more akin to a return to its pre-20th century roots than some sort of breakthrough development.

David Freddoso writes, "Republicans are jumping on Nancy Pelosi for getting the price of gasoline wrong by nearly a dollar in an interview":

I argue today that this is less significant than the fact that her promise to bring down gas prices was already a lie the moment she first uttered it. Pelosi isn't failing to do something about gasoline for lack of leadership or a plan, but because lower gas prices undercut a hugely important plank in the Democratic platform.

Higher gas prices are an essential part of creating economic disincentives against carbon pollution — that's the entire point of cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, and other proposed Global Warming fixes. In fact, today's high prices are already leading to greater conservation. Democratic complaints about gas prices are for election years — that's all they ever were.

Unlike Mrs. Pelosi, the more honest San Francisco Democrats will actually admit to that.

"Strap in. You’re in for a predictable 90-minutes."

And that's the problem with virtually every Hollywood film these days, isn't it? (Except that most films are nearly twice as long. At least, to paraphrase Alvy Singer, with H&K's new flick the food here is terrible, and mercifully, such small portions, too.)

Update: Writing for Pajamas Media, Kyle Smith of the New York Post notes that "there's only one decent political joke in the entire movie"--the direction of which, unintended or not, won't surprise many on the starboard side of the Blogosphere.

Couldn't he have have simply let it keep growing naturally to demonstrate the importance of sustained old growth forestry?

I once dubbed Pink Floyd's Roger Waters the Pat Buchanan of British rock: both, in retrospect, would have been quite OK with appeasing Nazi Germany; both are anti-Israel. But Julia Gorin has an excellent suggestion (and yes I'm very late to this) for Waters' next destination on his bringing "The Wall To The Wall" tours.

Of course, I could see why Rogers wouldn't want to Meddle there, not when his prospective audience would likely shout "One Of These Days, I'm Going To Cut You Into Little Pieces!" The Final Cut would then be followed by the Great Gig In The Sky, unless Waters plans to Run Like Hell after the gig.

OK, I'll stop now, before Brain Damage occurs...

With conservatives grudgingly in his camp (barring Bob Barr parachuting in at the last minute) and the far left having decided that, unlike 2004, a Vietnam vet as president just isn't their cup of chai, Jim Geraghty believes that John McCain is triangulating towards the great undecided middle, even as the Democratic primaries (onward to Guam!) continue.

On the surface, it may appear that Maverick is once again throwing conservatives under the bus, but as Geraghty writes asks in an earlier post, "Does no one else see what's going on here?"

How many other North Carolina Republican Party ads have you heard about this year? Last year? The year before that?

By criticizing the ad, McCain turned it into a national story, which means the ad is likely to be replayed on the cable networks and linked on YouTube and discussed on the talk shows and talk radio and written about in newspapers and magazines. This ad has 76,000 views on YouTube already, and it was posted online Tuesday.

And McCain gets to take the high road, saying he doesn't want to see negative campaigning done on his behalf.

Meanwhile, Hillary is doing some triangulating of her own.

"After 30 years of railing for separation of church and state, Bill Moyers comes to the aid of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright."

Glad to see that there's one man of the cloth that Moyers is willing to support! Meanwhile, several names and Webpages mysteriously have begun to go missing on Obama's Website.

Perhaps the rapture has arrived there.

Related: "In adversity, bitter pundits cling to their Obamessiah."

Jim Geraghty explores Barack Obama's radical ties with former Weatherman (and I don't mean in the Willard Scott sense) Bill Ayers who, like the fellow that Wretchard linked to on Wednesday, hasn't changed his worldview a jot since 1968, other than no longer literally putting his Semtex where his mouth is.

Geraghty writes:

The problem for Obama isn't that his ties to Ayers are so close (that we know of so far). Ayers hosted a party that was, effectively, the first fundraiser for Obama. They served on the Woods Foundation board together, and he spoke on some panels. That's not as close a relationship as with, say, his mentor Jeremiah Wright, but it's a lot closer than most Americans will ever come to a person who set bombs in public buildings.

But what is really revealing about this mess for Obama is that when asked about it, the candidate reacted with a mix of surprise and indignation that we haven't quite seen since, "I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again: I did not.. have... sexual... relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." Recall, Clinton's finger-wagging tone wasn't striking just for the audacity of the lie, but for the barely-suppressed outrage; Bill seemed genuinely offended that anyone could accuse him of such a thing.

In the case of Obama, he clearly felt that George Stephanolopous asking about this was completely out of bounds. That no one in their right mind could possibly be concerned, disgruntled, or disapproving of associating with someone like William Ayers. As Obama insisted, this is just a professor who lives in his neighborhood.

But the average professor who lives in the neighborhood didn't set bombs, even a long time ago.

Obama could have easily said, "I met Ayers and worked with him briefly, but I don't like him. I don't have any use for those who set bombs, or those who enthusiastically praise the acts of Charles Manson" (as Bernadine Dohrn did). But he didn't. In this whole set of circumstances, Obama felt that Stephanopolous was the one out of line.

Meanwhile, Tom Hayden, last seen bemoaning the growth of capitalism in Vietnam, notes that Hillary has plenty of radical chic baggage of her own.

Newsday's "TV Zone" believes that Katie Couric may land on her feet after bailing from CBS, and replace Larry King when King finally goes off into the sunset after hosting his talk show since about 30 seconds after Philo T. Farnsworth invented the medium in 1927. Replacing King would actually be a good move for Katie, I think, since cheerfully chatting it up with guests suits her talents and perky demeanor much more than hosting the evening news and the institutional gravitas that the latter gig (and its ever-shrinking elderly audience) demands.

And speaking of which, Troy Patterson, Slate's in-house TV critic, suggests that euthanasia is the Ra^ther logical conclusion to the CBS news division, post-Katie:

I propose that it is time for CBS News to be put down, in the Old Yeller sense of the phrase. It's time to turn out the lights and just start airing Hollywood gossip at 6:30 p.m. The network could follow Schieffer's lead and simply dissolve the thing after the inauguration, maybe keeping 60 Minutes around, either as a commercial-free public service program (because what exec doesn't love a prestige-hogging loss leader?) or under the auspices of CBS' entertainment division (because why keep pretending?). The farewell would be handled with dignified pomp—tributes to Murrow and Severeid and so forth. And if Walter Cronkite is in good health, he could do the honors with a final sign off. I'm serious. That's how bad things are, and that's the way it is.

And like Lenin's tomb, the mausoleum has already been built for the curious to view the remains.

"Wretchard" of the Bellmont Club looks at Paul Auster, whom the New York Times notes, presumably without the intended irony, "is the author of the forthcoming 'Man in the Dark'":

Paul Auster's "Vietnam me act crazy" article in the New York Times is that worst of confessions: that kind that is accidentally funny. Explaining his strange behavior on a certain day in the 1960s, Auster says,

Being crazy struck me as a perfectly sane response to the hand I had been dealt — the hand that all young men had been dealt in 1968. The instant I graduated from college, I would be drafted to fight in a war I despised to the depths of my being, and because I had already made up my mind to refuse to fight in that war, I knew that my future held only two options: prison or exile.

Maddened by these alternatives, Auster went off and raised comparative hell.

After the outburst in the park, campus buildings were stormed, occupied and held for a week. ... Along with more than 700 other people, I was arrested — pulled by my hair to the police van by one officer as another officer stomped on my hand with his boot. But no regrets. I was proud to have done my bit for the cause. Both crazy and proud.

I hesitate to draw any comparisons with the present — and therefore will not end this memory-piece with the word “Iraq.” I am 61 now, but my thinking has not changed much since that year of fire and blood, and as I sit alone in this room with a pen in my hand, I realize that I am still crazy, perhaps crazier than ever.

"I am 61 now, but my thinking has not changed much" since 1968--which is as good a definition of hardened-in-concrete modern "progressivism" as you'll find.

John Hawkins writes:

Isn't it funny how the whole "chickenhawk argument" was such a oft-discussed, "crucial" point back in 2004, but today, now that the shoe's on the other foot, not a liberal soul who was making that argument seems to think it has the least bit of validity any more?

That's a topic we've also explored here a few times recently.

Just off the NFL wire, Todd Archer of the Dallas Morning News writes, "Pacman Jones is a Dallas Cowboy":

More than a month after the teams first discussed a trade, the Cowboys and Tennessee have reached an agreement, according to a source, on a deal that will send the suspended cornerback to the Cowboys.

Terms of the agreement are not yet known.

Jones fills an immediate need, but the Cowboys will still consider drafting a cornerback with one of their two first-round picks in the upcoming draft, but there is a question of when he will actually be on the field.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell suspended Jones for the 2007 season for violating the league’s personal conduct policy and has said he will review a possible reinstatement before training camp opens in July. Agent Manny Arora is hoping Jones can be reinstated sooner, which would allow his client to take part in mini-camps, organized team activities and the conditioning program.

He'll have to be a model citizen with Dallas, or the Cowboys might want to consider reopening their infamous mid-1990s-era "White House".

If you enjoyed my "Atlas Mugged" article last year on the rise of both mass media in the 1920s, and its successor, new media in the late 1990s, and you enjoyed my recent video on the recently-opened "Newseum" in Washington DC, then don't miss John Podhoretz's exceptional article on "The News Mausoleum", which documents the rise and fall of 20th century mass media, and the opening of the granite tomb they've built for themselves in the first decade of the new millennium.

Soon to be ex-GOP Congressional candidate Tony Zirkle from Indiana speaks with neo-Nazis in Chicago:

U.S. Congressional candidate Tony Zirkle is facing criticism from one of his primary opponents, and a host of people on the Internet, for speaking at an event over the weekend that celebrated Adolf Hitler’s birthday.

Zirkle confirmed to The News-Dispatch on Monday he spoke Sunday in Chicago at a meeting of the Nationalist Socialist Workers Party, whose symbol is a swastika.

When asked if he was a Nazi or sympathized with Nazis or white supremacists, Zirkle replied he didn’t know enough about the group to either favor it or oppose it. “This is just a great opportunity for me to witness,” he said, referring to his message and his Christian belief.

He also told WIMS radio in Michigan City that he didn’t believe the event he attended included people necessarily of the Nazi mindset, pointing out the name isn’t Nazi, but Nationalist Socialist Workers Party.

As the director of the play within the movie The Producers said after reading its script, "Did you know, I never knew that the Third Reich meant Germany. I mean it's just drenched with historical goodies like that!"

Just in time for the results from the Pennsylvania Democratic primary, here's the latest Silicon Graffiti. It's a reminder that sometimes, in the never-ending search for the next JFK, you have to toss the old one--and his wife--overboard.

(Previous editions of Silicon Graffiti can be found here.)

Back in the April of 2004, Steve Green of VodkaPundit dubbed The Day After Tomorrow, "The Passion of the Christ for the anti-globalization crowd."

We had no idea at the time how right he was, since at least one of its special effects shots has gone full circle, finding its way into a modern-day messiah's cinematic production.

Glad to see the fraternity of American wartime pilots is so tightly bonded:

Let me tell you what I would say to John McCain: neither of us is an expert on national defense. It's true that you went to one of the service academies but you were in the bottom of the class. It's true that you were a pilot in Vietnam, that you were shot down and spent most of the war in prison and we all sympathize with that and honor you for your courage. But you and I both had these battle experiences, you as a Navy fighter plane, I as an army bomber. I am not going to criticize your war record and your knowledge of national security but I don't want you criticizing mine either.

If I'd be allowed just one little dig at Senator McCain, since he gave me. I would say, 'John, you were shot down early in the war and spent most of the time in prison. I flew 35 combat missions with a 10-man crew and brought them home safely every time.'

With the latter paragraph, McGovern enters--not all that surprisingly--John Kerry Vietnam Mobius loop territory, as McGovern is implying that McCain could have done more to win a war that McGovern explicitly ran against, comparing, at one point in his '72 campaign, North Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh to George Washington.

History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men.

If Iran nukes Israel, it's clobberin' time under a prospective Hillary presidency:

Clinton further displayed tough talk in an interview airing on “Good Morning America” Tuesday. ABC News’ Chris Cuomo asked Clinton what she would do if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons.

“I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president, we will attack Iran,” Clinton said. “In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.”

Not that Democrat policies regarding the Middle East are ever written in stone, but for multiple reasons, let's hope we never have to test the validity of this campaign promise. But John Stephenson and Allahpundit wonder who it's aimed it.

Victor Davis Hanson writes that you go into these small artisan garrets in California like Hollywood, and, like a lot of small towns on the West Coast, it's not surprising that when people get bitter, they cling to identity politics and religions such as Scientology:

It is more interested in political correctness than profits, as the Iraq War movie bombs attest. Talent is no longer gravitating to Hollywood, but staying put in Europe and Asia. Alternate media, from the Internet to video games to cable television, mean that fewer go to the movies anymore (I went once in the last 12 months). The old bread-and-butter genres—like the Western or the war movie—are either moribund or merely landscapes for political revisionism.

One difference is the steady decline in the quality of male actors. We simply do not have a James Stewart, Burt Lancaster, Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, Bill Holden, or John Wayne any more, much less brilliant against-the grain actors like a Robert Duvall, Lee Marvin, Jack Palance, or a Yul Brenner, nor character actors like a Slim Pickens or a Ben Johnson.

Today’s he-man actors don’t even sound the same as the old breed. Compare the speech patterns and intonation of Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Spencer Tracey, Henry Fonda or Bill Holden to those of a Sean Penn, Tom Cruise, or Tom Hanks—and there seems to be a new, but separate species of male. The appeal of a Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, or Daniel Day-Lewis is that they sound like, well, the old breed rather than sensitive metrosexuals.

Some of you will sigh: Victor, Victor, actors only reflect the society that produces them. We don’t have a Henry Fonda or Jimmy Stewart because we aren’t Fondas and Stewarts any more.

Perhaps, but what I also don’t understand is that we know that excellent war films—Breaker Morant, Saving Private Ryan, and Das Boot—win over critics and audiences. Why then do we keep seeing snoozers like Redacted, Lions for Lambs, or Stop Loss? Is there that little talent left?

A few years ago, Frederica Mathewes-Green wrote a superb essay on the transformation of Hollywood actors from men to perpetual adolescents. And if you work in an industry when one of your leading screenwriters can draft an essay for general consumption that includes the phrase...

This is an election about whether the people of Pennsylvania hate blacks more than they hate women. And when I say people, I don't mean people, I mean white men.

...your product is likely to reflect those values. Even if, as VDH notes, it costs that industry literally hundreds of millions at the domestic box office.

Speaking of movies, Glenn Reynolds links to a Popular Mechanics article that wonders when will Hollywood make another intelligent sci-fi movie. That's a topic we also discussed in this post from late 2006. In an industry that adopts to change as slowly as Hollywood (that's not really a knock--it's a titanic enterprise creating multi-million dollar budgeted movies involving armies of craftsmen and actors), most of the reasons haven't changed in the interim.

Ace explains "Why Bill Ayers Matters":

As Allah snarked earlier, How come Bush's TANG records weren't similarly "tangential' as the left now claims of every character issue involving Barack Obama?

This may be obvious but it has to be said, and perhaps said repeatedly, until the left acknowledges it.

Either terrorism is a grave moral sin and unforgivable legal crime or it is not, guys. You cannot continue differentiating between "good terrorism" and "bad terrorism."

As I touched on a few years ago in The New Partisan, from politicians such as Al Sharpton, Robert Byrd and John Kerry to artists such as Michael Moore and Philip Johnson, it's amazing what you can get away with in your salad days as long as you emerge with the right politics afterwards.

Related: Dick Morris explores "Hillary's Terrorist Ties".

This bad.

Rich Lowry writes, "Just Imagine":

Regarding that Time global warming cover, just imagine if the mainstream media were as exercised about the war on terror and as devoted to crusading to win it. How different would the political environment look?

Freud called it displacement...

Jennifer Rubin reminds us not to taunt happy fun Democrats such as Nora Ephron:

The Left is losing it. Not the election. Just any semblance of sanity. From one Barack Obama fan we learn, “This is an election about whether the people of Pennsylvania hate blacks more than they hate women.” And these are Democrats, mind you.

This is the religion they cling to--and it does seem to exacerbate their bitterness, eh?

No wonder their media keeps this stuff away from the general public.

Update: "Nora Ephron's Rage and Hatred".

Cuffy Meigs does the job that old media used to claim to do.

Update: More here (and note the accompanying photo) on what is likely to be a bottomless well. But Glenn Reynolds' readers note that John McCain hides a radical affiliation of his own:

"Hasn't McCain had a long association with former Klansman and fellow Senator Robert Byrd?"

As Glenn writes, Heh.^TM

From Whoopi Goldberg, toiling away in the department of stopped clocks: "Well, what’s the matter is the Democrats are an elitist group. That’s the truth."

Whoopi's last foray into politics was so elitist, it lost her a lucrative advertising gig.

Update: Tim Blair uncovers more elitism involving the Keystone State, as "Chelsea Clinton hits the gay bars in Philadelphia":

"I think Chelsea looks better in person and she's got the body and ass of life," said Christoper Murray after wrapping his arms around her and giving her a big hug.

No word yet on what "the ass of life" means. Maybe CNN can help.

Jim Geraghty writes the next MasterCard ad:

Planned campaign expenditures for television ads with message, "McCain is as bad as George W. Bush": $100 million.

Planned campaign expenditures for radio ads with message, "McCain is as bad as George W. Bush": $20 million.

Planned expenditures for independent 527 groups reinforcing "McCain is as bad as George W. Bush" message: $200 million.

Wrecking that entire message effort with one offhand comment:

"All three of us would be better than George Bush," Obama said.

Priceless.

Heh.

Robert Novak describes Obama losing his cool last week during his debate with Hillary:

Obama is trying to change the subject, but he lost his cool demeanor when ABC News questioners Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos returned to his San Francisco statement (among other difficult issues) in Wednesday's debate. In watching campaign debates dating back to Kennedy-Nixon in 1960, I never before had seen a candidate criticize the moderator or challenge his premises so often (on at least eight occasions). "Look, let me finish my point here, Charlie," said Obama, after Gibson had interrupted him following a 126-word answer.

The other unprecedented element was the deluge of abuse heaped on the two ABC moderators by reporters on the media, television critics and political writers. They object to prolonging what amounts to a debate on "What's wrong with Obama?" Exploring whether Barack Obama is a modified Thomas Frank does not depend on television talking heads or Hillary Clinton. Supporters of John McCain, seeking to reel back the Obama Republicans, will press the issue from now to November.

By and large, politicians already have enormous egos, but few have been deified by their supporters as a sort post-Christian Saint Walking The Earth the way Obama has, coupled with a rapture from the press so obvious even Saturday Night Live could spot it. Given such beatification, I'm surprised that Obama isn't even testier with those who fail to grasp his vision.

Related: "Where's Gloria Steinem?"

More: Waffles! They're not just for John Kerry anymore.

Back in 1992, the late Pat Moynihan wrote "Defining Deviancy Down":

Moynihan argued that deviancy - crime, mental illness, out-of-wedlock births, etc. -- had become so rampant, had so thoroughly soaked into the culture, that we simply had to redefine the abnormal as normal to cope. By setting the bar lower, we comforted ourselves with the notion that the percentage of abnormal behavior was still manageable.

Moynihan's most famous example was the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. That event was a major turning point in American history, credited with helping to convince Americans to abandon prohibition. It warranted two entries in the World Book Encyclopedia. The actual details? Four gangsters murdered seven gangsters.

The CBS affiliate in Chicago notes that this weekend saw 32 shot, two stabbed, and six dead.

Related: "If I want a job cleaning your company’s toilets, I’ll have to present proof of citizenship and swear under penalty of perjury I’m legal, but if I mug you, beat you, and leave you for dead, it’s no questions asked?"

This just in: John McCain has a temper! Insert obvious inference here:

Update: McCain staffer rebuts: "As it happens, the piece is 99% fiction."

In his look at Old Media, far left scribe Eric Alterman goes from asking "What Liberal Media" (you know that one) to...What Media?

Philip Meyer, in his book “The Vanishing Newspaper” (2004), predicts that the final copy of the final newspaper will appear on somebody’s doorstep one day in 2043. [Not 2014?--Ed] It may be unkind to point out that all these parlous trends coincide with the opening, this spring, of the $450-million Newseum, in Washington, D.C., but, more and more, what Bill Keller calls “that lovable old-fashioned bundle of ink and cellulose” is starting to feel like an artifact ready for display under glass.

Hey, first you shock them...

(H/T: Alan D. Mutter, via Mark Steyn.)

Stefan Beck quotes a terrific Theodore Dalrymple anecdote in the middle of his post on the “abortion as art” scandal involving Yale senior Aliza Shvarts:

Anyone seeking a little comic relief in the wake of Yale University’s alternately sickening and embarrassing “abortion as art” scandal need look no further than Terry Zwigoff’s 2006 comedy Art School Confidential. It’s very loosely based on a comic by Daniel Clowes, which appears in this anthology and is in many ways superior to the film as a satire of the mind-bending pretentiousness and inanity one finds in even the finest fine arts academies.

As I recall, one panel in Clowes’s original depicts the “old tampon-in-a-teacup trick”: Pressed for time? Cobble together some loaded imagery and insist with a straight face that it “raises questions” about something or other. “Raising questions” has enjoyed a lucrative career as the art world’s biggest con. When the shock-schlock “Sensation” exhibition appeared at the British Royal Academy of Art, Theodore Dalrymple asked its chief of exhibitions, Norman Rosenthal, what value he saw in a giant portrait, made up entirely of tiny handprints, of the child-murderess Myra Hindley. Right on cue, Rosenthal said that “the picture raises interesting questions.”

Dalrymple asked what those might be, politely reminding Mr. Rosenthal that “it must be possible to formulate them in words.” A picture is worth a thousand of them, after all—but in this case the ratio turned out to be more like 1:1, if a sharp intake of breath may count for a word.

Of course, most great works of art do raise questions, but they do so in addition to (for instance) being beautiful, or telling a story, or demonstrating proficiency of some kind. Bad art can rarely claim to do anything but raise questions. Yale senior Aliza Shvarts’s menstruation videos supposedly address “the ambiguity surrounding form and function [sic] of a woman’s body.” If, God forbid, that sounds to you like it might mean something, take a moment to pick it apart. What ambiguity? Is there some fundamental disagreement about whether the female form should function as a tube of red paint?

The fact that ridiculing the project and its unintelligible justification seems redundant is entirely the point. At any point in this project—which at best is a black eye for Yale and a waste of our time and at worst may lead to some lunatic assaulting Ms. Shvarts—an adult could have and should have stepped in and said, “This proposal is nonsense. There is nothing artistic about it and the questions it ‘raises’ are a figment of your imagination. You’re embarrassing yourself and your school.” None did.

Probably for about the same reason that Roger Kimball describes here:

A juror in the obscenity trial over Robert Mapplethorpe’s notorious photographs the S&M homosexual underworld memorably summed up the paralyzed attitude Orwell described. Acknowledging that he did not like Mapplethorpe’s rebarbative photographs, he nonetheless concluded that “if people say it’s art, then I have to go along with it.”

“If people say it’s art, then I have to go along with it.” It is worth pausing to digest that terrifying comment. It is also worth confronting it with a question: Why do so many people feel that if something is regarded as art, they “have to go along with it,” no matter how offensive it might be? Perhaps—just possibly—Aliza Shvarts has reminded us how untrue that statement is. If so, we are in her debt.

Of course, for those who think that a genre of "art" on the cusp of its second century is still "modern", you too can apply to the Yale Art School!

Update: Related thoughts from Maggie's Farm; be sure to follow the links.

Mark Steyn notes that, pace Obama, guns and God, and proper respect for both, are what make Red State America a much healthier--and sustainable--place than the Biggest Blue State of 'em all: Europe. Steyn writes, "In the other G7 developed nations, nobody clings to God’n’guns. The guns got taken away, and the Europeans gave up on churchgoing once they embraced Big Government as the new religion":

I think a healthy society needs both God and guns: it benefits from a belief in some kind of higher purpose to life on earth, and it requires a self-reliant citizenry. If you lack either of those twin props, you wind up with today’s Europe — a present-tense Eutopia mired in fatalism. A while back, I was struck by the words of Oscar van den Boogaard, a Dutch gay humanist (which is pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool). Reflecting on the Continent’s accelerating Islamification, he concluded that the jig was up for the Europe he loved, but what could he do? “I am not a warrior, but who is?” he shrugged. “I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.”

Sorry, it doesn’t work like that. If you don’t understand that there are times when you’ll have to fight for it, you won’t enjoy it for long. That’s what a lot of Keith Reade’s laundry list — “gun-totin’,” “military-lovin’” — boils down to. As for “gay-loathin,’” it’s Oscar van den Boogaard’s famously tolerant Amsterdam where gay-bashing is resurgent: the editor of the American gay paper the Washington Blade got beaten up in the streets on his last visit to the Netherlands.

God and guns. Maybe one day a viable society will find a magic cure-all that can do without both, but Big Government isn’t it. And even complacent liberal Democrats ought to be able to cast an eye across the ocean and see that. But then he did give the speech in San Francisco, a city demographically declining at a rate that qualifies it for EU membership. When it comes to parochial simpletons, you don’t need to go to Kansas.

Will the last person out of San Francisco please turn off the compact fluorescent light bulbs?

So many on the left seemed perpetually trapped in the past, usually in the 1930s, '60s, or the 1970s, but recently, Jonah Goldberg spotted the slightly more recent epoch that has made Barack Obama so bitter:

There’s always been a certain cultural lag time to Barack and Michelle Obama, a kitschiness that’s hard to pinpoint. But I think I’ve got it: They’re self-hating yuppies straight out of the 1980s, which were to the Obamas what the 1960s were to the Clintons.

For those too young to remember, “yuppie” was shorthand for young urban professionals — think Michael J. Fox as Alex P. Keaton in the TV series “Family Ties” — who allegedly represented the collapse of ’60s values and the triumph of ’80s greed. Yuppies sold their souls for a BMW and a condo.

Ironically, the biggest complaints about yuppie materialism came from self-loathing liberal yuppies — like the Obamas.

The Obamas still seem stuck in that time warp, clinging to ’80s-style resentments and political assumptions. Michelle Obama is never so eloquent as when she’s complaining about the burden of student loans for her two Ivy League degrees and covering the high cost of summer camp and piano lessons for her kids on her family’s half-million-dollars-a-year income.

“Don’t go into corporate America,” she exhorted low-income working mothers in Ohio in February, even though she is a highly compensated hospital executive. She admits to being consumed with “a constant sense of guilt” over having to balance work, politics, and family. “It’s guilt, feeling guilty all the time.”

It’s telling that for the Clintons, JFK defined politics, but for Obama, Ronald Reagan is the role model. Last year, Obama admitted to admiring the Gipper’s “transformative” leadership (though not his policies). Indeed, not only did Reagan restore confidence in the nation while reducing confidence in government, he put a stake in the heart of the “Vietnam syndrome” and the blame-America-first ethos of the Democratic Party. The Reagan Revolution moved the country durably to the right — so much so that even Democrats saw the writing on the wall. Obama wants to erase that writing.

And as Abe Greenwald of Commentary writes, so does someone else with a Brilliant Disguise, whose artistic career peaked just before the decade the Gipper made:

It’s true that Obama speaks to the America Springsteen usually writes about. But I’m not sure what he’s referring to in this description. Springsteen’s America is a soot-covered wasteland of junked cars, violent townies, shotgun weddings, racist cops, closed factories, and endless unemployment lines. If you think Obama was tough on small town mentalities, consider the lyrics of Springsteen’s “Born to Run”:

Baby this town rips the bones from your back
It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap
We gotta get out while we’re young
‘Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run

* * *

When, in 1980, Springsteen wrote...

I got a job working construction for the Johnstown company
But lately there ain’t been much work on account of the economy
Now all them things that seemed so important
Well mister they vanished right into the air
Now I just act like I don’t remember, Mary acts like she don’t care

...who could blame him? It was less than a year after Jimmy Carter had gone on television and made a speech diagnosing the country as clinically depressed and spiritually bankrupt:

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us.

Springsteen took the nation’s pulse and wrote about it. The problem is that his sense of America–forged during the Carter years–has not changed since. Sure, he came out with an inspirational post-9/11 album. But that came and went as fast as Yasir Arafat’s blood donation to the victims.

Springsteen said in his Obama letter: “After the terrible damage done over the past eight years, a great American reclamation project needs to be undertaken.” But it’s hard to imagine what exactly he wants to reclaim. The last time Springsteen’s lyrics reflected any consistent sense of romance and adventure in connection with America was during the Nixon years. Personally, I’d love to see him make music like that again. But somehow I don’t think that’s what he’s getting at.

Sadly, as Slate of all publications once noted, Bruce's second manager, Jon Landau, who went from Rolling Stone critic to rock Svengali, took that Springsteen away from us, transforming Bruce in his formative years from an exciting quirky apolitical musician to just another leftwing product on the showbiz assembly line.

(And speaking of Slate, nice of them to create a fun anti-Obama ad, which will have a little traction even after this week's PA primary has passed.)

HuffPo: "Gingrich: Left Wing Of The Democratic Party 'Admires' American Terrorists".

Leonard Bernstein, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama could not be reached for comment. If we want to expand the list to Democrats who admire foreign terrorists, we can add Ramsey Clark, Jimmy Carter, Patty Murray, Ward Churchill, Michael Moore, "Pinch" Sulzberger, Chrissie Hynde, Oliver Stone, Margaret Cho and John Kerry to the list as well.

John Stephenson has more.

Related: "What Will Karl Do?"

More: "A Timeline Of Crime For Obama’s Buddy William Ayers".

Eric Trager writes, "The spectacle of a former U.S. president denouncing his fellow countrymen abroad was a Dixie Chicks moment for the ages"

Yesterday, following meetings with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and another Hamas delegation, Jimmy Carter blasted American attitudes regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “My country, the political arena of my country, is almost 100 percent supportive of the Israeli position,” Carter said. “You never hear any debates on both sides much, and most of the information is predicated on that sort of original premise.”

The spectacle of a former U.S. president denouncing his fellow countrymen abroad was a Dixie Chicks moment for the ages. But his choice of venue for decrying the lack of debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was no less ironic: the American University in Cairo–where students are so unwilling to consider the “other side” that they threatened strikes and sit-ins when rumors surfaced that Israeli professors had been invited to campus. Most recently at AUC, a play that featured an Israeli character was protested by its own student-actors, who walked on the stage draped in kaffiyehs and donned “Palestine will remain Arab” t-shirts following the performance. (The actors objected to Israelis being portrayed “as humans only,” one cast member said.)

Jimmy could relate to that.

If there was an Internet sixty years ago, typing the words "media", "rope", "gay" and "New York" into Google would have sent you here, reading about one of Alfred Hitchcock's most underrated movies. Typing those same words into Google these days brings you to this story:

CNN personality Richard Quest was busted in Central Park early yesterday with some drugs in his pocket, a rope around his neck that was tied to his genitals, and a sex toy in his boot, law-enforcement sources said.

His boot? Well that's one word to use, though I thought he was arrested in New York, not London...

Much more seriously, CNN has never met a repressive dictator that it hasn't admired, from Fidel Castro to Saddam Hussein, to Kim Jong-il to this latest incident involving communist China. And yet in America, Quest's Central Park quest ends with laughter all around. In most of the nations that CNN admires, it would lead to brutal prison sentences, death--or both.

Usually in the NFL, when a floundering head coach gets a late season vote of confidence from the team's owner, it means his demise hasn't been preempted, but merely delayed. The axe then almost invariably falls after the season ends, so that the transition to his successor will be less disruptive to the team, rather than, say, with three or four games in the season to go. Katie Couric just got her vote of confidence from above, which means that that clock may very well be ticking:

CBS Corp. Chairman Leslie Moonves paid a surprise visit to the CBS newsroom Friday to support embattled anchor Katie Couric.

Moonves told CBS News employees that "there are no plans for a change—today, tomorrow and into the future," according to a network executive who was there. The executive spoke on condition of anonymity because the comments were not made public.

That doesn't mean Couric's status won't be reviewed if ratings continue to lag—but that won't happen until after the election, the executive said.

Moonves and CBS News President Sean McManus both appeared at a meeting held at noon each Friday between Couric and "CBS Evening News" executive producer Rick Kaplan. The meeting is televised internally to network news bureaus worldwide.

Several recent news articles have suggested that CBS has decided to replace Couric—who is running a distant third behind NBC and ABC in the evening news ratings—sometime after the election or inauguration of a new president.

Moonves and McManus wanted to rebut these articles to news employees, said a CBS News staffer who watched the meeting.

"They decided it was time that everybody was very clear where they stood and that they were not going to let news articles set anybody's agenda," Kaplan said. "They made it clear in everybody's mind that they were totally supportive of Katie and of CBS News."

McManus' pep talk was more pointed, as he expressed anger at news articles that talked about weakness at the news division, the CBS staffer said.

Kaplan said Couric should be given more time, noting that it took years for former anchors like Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings to top the ratings. He predicted Couric—whose broadcast narrowly missed a record low rating last week—will be No. 1 someday.

Of course, as Thomas Sowell noted in 2004 when Brokaw retired (and re-quoted in video form here):

During his long tenure as NBC News anchorman, Tom Brokaw took that program from last place among the big three broadcast networks to first place. But he had more viewers when he was in last place, more than 20 years ago, than he had in first place this year. That is because fewer people now watch NBC, ABC, or CBS News. Good!

And CBS isn't doing much these days to restore credibility to their already badly damaged rep, it seems.

Power flows from the barrel of a lawsuit:

This is rich:

It might seem a bit self-flagellating for the editorial board of the New York Times to bemoan the collapse of Americans’ trust in the press over the last 30 years. But it seems that the media’s fall from grace is undermining democracy.

Because undermining democracy is a job best left to the professionals at the Times:

In his wonderful book, How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (and Found Inner Peace), Harry Stein lays out the disturbing facts about "Pinch" Sulzberger. (Sulzberger's father was nicknamed "Punch," and the none too flattering nickname for Junior is "Pinch.")

Pinch was a political activist in the Sixties, and was twice arrested in anti-Vietnam protests. One day, the elder Sulzberger asked his son what Pinch calls, "the dumbest question I've ever heard in my life." If an American soldier runs into a North Vietnamese soldier, which would you like to see get shot? Young Arthur answered, "I would want to see the American get shot. It's the other guy's country." Some Sixties activists have since thought better of their early enthusiasms. Pinch hasn't.

And he really hasn't.

But hey, first you shock them, then they put you in a museum. And a new one awaits a very Gray Lady to retire to in her dotage.

(H/T: JWF)

Related: Can't argue with this:

"The workings of American newsrooms are some of the least transparent enterprises in the country, and it is easy to believe that the press has one set of standards for government, business, and other institutions, and entirely another for themselves," the Arizona senator said.

"If you don't mind a little constructive criticism from someone who respects you, I think that is an impression the press should work on correcting," he said.

Indeed.

Amity Shlaes, the author of The Forgotten Man, a terrific history of the Depression, brings a reminder of forgotten recent history as well, as she deflates so much recent economic doomsaying:

The gloom is so thick that it feels positively German. And that’s just our domestic press. The Brits have long since decided that doom is around the American corner. Covering Bear Stearns Cos., a reporter from the Independent wrote, “Wall Street traders said they had never experienced such fear.”

The suggestion behind such talk is that the current situation isn’t merely depressing. It is that the slowdown is like the Great Depression of the 1930s. You almost expect Senators Obama and Clinton to repeat the lines from President Roosevelt’s inaugural address of 75 years ago: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

The analogy is absurd. This economy is to the Great Depression what an April drizzle is to Hurricane Katrina. So far, the Dow has declined about 12% from its record high of last fall. In the Depression, it dropped more than 80%. Unemployment is about 5%. In the Depression it was 25%.

Maybe 2% of mortgages are in trouble, and abandoned homes line some parts of Cleveland Heights. During the Depression, more than half of Cleveland was underwater. Today, one big bank has collapsed. In 1931, 1,400 banks collapsed.

Even a comparison with more recent periods is a stretch.

Today, everyone is concerned about the consequences of the Bear Stearns rescue. On the right, critics argue that the Federal Reserve’s decision to make funds available to Bear created moral hazard on a scale that can bring down our markets. These critics forget that in 1984 Washington actually nationalized a big bank. That bank was the nation’s seventh largest, Continental Illinois. Yet the Reagan Revolution didn’t stall.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Dow languished in the 800s for a period longer than it takes to collect a college degree. Unemployment in 1982 was close to 10%. Yet you didn’t hear too much talk about the New Deal or FDR’s speeches.

No--and FDR was smart enough not to suggest that a malaise had come over the nation, but you did hear his 1970s' would-be equivalent use very New Dealer-ish language when he equated reduction of foreign energy reliance with "the moral equivalent of war". And Business Week's infamous "Death Of Equities" cover in 1979 certainly had a Depression-era ring to it--only a year or two before the Dow began its rise to its current high of near 13,000.

More Shlaes:

So why so dark this time?

One reason is that last year and the year before felt so bubbly. As John Lipsky, then of JPMorgan Chase & Co., said, the market was so confident that “the only thing we have to fear is the lack of fear itself.”

Another reason for the current gloom is U.S. susceptibility to foreign wisdom. Americans tend to believe that if the Brits say something and it’s reported on Drudgereport.com, it must be so. But the Great Britain press derives some pleasure in seeing misfortune in America, and often hypes that misfortune.

Yet another problem is our addiction to Markets TV, which bears more similarity than any of us like to acknowledge to the Weather Channel. Lacking a truly dramatic winter to report, the anchors will yap about wind chill. Hear enough about wind chill, and eventually you begin to believe in it.

The most important reason for the current mood is demography. Our trouble isn’t that we have it so bad. It is that we have had it so good. Anyone who graduated college after that early 1980s’ snap hasn’t seen the Dow do much but go up.

That last point is debatable--16 years ago, another Democratic presidential nominee was also able to make great strides by transforming a temporary pause in the Dow's ascension into The Worst Economy Of 50 Years--which miraculously righted its course the very minute in November of 1992 he won the election.

The decline and fall of Western Civilization, high and low edition: First, found via the Corner, here's a slice of life amongst the down and out of Commerce City, Colorado, as "Parents Fight Over Which Gang Toddler Should Join":

A couple fighting about which gang their 4-year-old toddler should join caused a public disturbance that resulted in the father's arrest, Commerce City police said Thursday.

On Saturday, Joseph Manzanares stormed into the Hollywood Video store where his girlfriend worked, threatened to kill her and knocked over several video displays and even a computer, Commerce City police Sgt. Joe Sandoval said.

After he ran out of the store, police were called and the 19-year-old was arrested at his home.

His girlfriend told police that they had been arguing about the upbringing of their son and which gang he should belong to. The teen mother, who is black, is a member of the Crips. Manzanares is Hispanic and belongs to the Westside Ballers gang, the woman said.

"They have different ideas on how the baby should be raised. Basically, she said they cannot agree on which gang the baby would 'claim,'" Sandoval said.

Funny, when I was kid, my parents argued over whether I would join Kiwanis or the Rotary Club.

In the past, it was theorized that advanced education was a way out of the lower classes. But the Ivy League is rushing headlong to level the playing field, as this satiric IowaHawk post highlights: Learn art the Yale way, through their exclusive DYNAMIC TRANSGRESSION™ method! Got a body fluid? Then life's your canvas!

Which is certainly a reminder of one of James Lileks' key tenets: "If art contains s***, we should take it at its word."

IowaHawk's post is titled "Close Cover Before Striking", and it's based on the ads one used to find on packs of matches. I wonder what ad was on the pack Virginia Woolf used to fight the heteronormative patriarchy back in 1938?

(70 years ago--which is a reminder at how ancient and clapped out so many "modern" and "transgressive" poses truly are.)

This is fabulous:

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

From a story invented by a Mr. G. Orwell for his first generation analog blog about 60 years ago:

You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words -- scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won't contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.'

Over at VodkaPundit, a more high-tech Blog (though a fair amount of Victory Gin is available upon request, I hear), Will Collier notes that last Monday, "Thesaurus.com went down for a long stretch, and after it came back up, a remarkable number of words were gutted of synonym entries, and some were missing entries altogether."

Update: And speaking of Orwellian, though on the other side of the aisle*, Allahpundit looks at Ron Paul's fans to stop the world and get off: "How curious that their plan for the libertarian paradise calls for a quasi-communal organization via co-ops."

Read More »

David Brooks writes:

Back in Iowa, Barack Obama promised to be something new — an unconventional leader who would confront unpleasant truths, embrace novel policies and unify the country. If he had knocked Hillary Clinton out in New Hampshire and entered general-election mode early, this enormously thoughtful man would have become that.

But he did not knock her out, and the aura around Obama has changed. Furiously courting Democratic primary voters and apparently exhausted, Obama has emerged as a more conventional politician and a more orthodox liberal.

With the inevitable leftwing radical chic baggage, to boot.

The Exurban League explains why attacking John McCain because of his age, only about 11 years older than Hillary this year and John Kerry in 2004, isn't the greatest strategy. In an era where Philip Johnson (whatever his myriad flaws) was designing skyscrapers until his death a couple of years ago at age 98 and Les Paul is playing every Monday night off Broadway at age 92, and the Rolling Stones still tour, despite Keith Richards' lungs and liver being the equivalent of a 246-year old man, 71 isn't exactly the equivalent of Methuselah. And besides, "American voters love snarky college students insulting their war-hero elders", as the Exurban League's Jon writes.

On the flip-side though, it's safe to assume that McCain will exploit his expected opponent's youth and inexperience, just as Hillary already has. Maybe even using the same video:

Heh:

Click here for our recent interview with "Day By Day" artist Chris Muir on PJM Political. Incidentally, if Robert Plant is coming back and can't bring Jimmy Page, could he bring Robbie Blunt with him? Those first few post-Zeppelin solo albums before the "Tall Cool One" and Unledded eras were pretty darn nifty.

...And the left has to be the aggressors in the culture war. Which is why I disagree with the take that Daniel Henninger makes in the above video, and here:

Remember the culture wars? This week the Democrats sued for peace.

On Friday evening, email queues lit up everywhere with people reacting to Barack Obama's thoughts on life being nasty, bitter and short in small-town America. Time was not long ago that a Democratic candidate could have said such folk cling to guns and religion and are hostile to "diversity" with nary a peep from his party. Not now. Obama was repudiated. Crushed. Media analysis suggested the damage could last til November.

Before midnight, Hillary was paddling down Whiskey River with the boys at Bronko's. Then on Sunday evening, the white flag really went up over the culture war's battlefield.

Hillary and Obama were both at an event in Grantham, Pa., in Cumberland County. That's south of Mechanicsburg and east of Boiling Springs. John Kerry took Pennsylvania by 2.5% in 2004, but Cumberland gave George Bush 64% of its vote. Hillary and Obama were appearing on a CNN event called the "Compassion Forum." They were at a place called Messiah College. Connect the dots.

Campbell Brown to Sen. Clinton: "And you have actually felt the presence of the Holy Spirit on many occasions. Share some of those occasions."

Hillary Clinton: "I have had the experiences on many, many occasions where I felt like the Holy Spirit was there with me as I made a journey . . . You know, it could be walking in the woods. It could be watching a sunset."

Hit rewind on the tape of history. It is 1992, the Republican Convention in Houston, at the Astrodome. This was the moment of arrival for the "Christian right." Dan Quayle, George H.W. Bush's VP nominee, spoke to a huge throng of evangelicals about "family values." Pat Buchanan delivered his "culture wars" speech. The press corps, for whom all this was alien ground, was openly hostile to the GOP.

Shelves bend beneath the weight of books analyzing the "war" between religiously oriented cultural conservatives and secular libs. "Piss Christ" and all that. Abortion. Robert Mapplethorpe's erotic photographs banned in Cincinnati. Abortion. Gun control. Michael Moore mocking Charlton Heston. Hollywood's endless Babylon. Home schoolers. Abortion.

Though vilified, these people wouldn't go away. The exit polls for George W. Bush's victory in 2004 revealed that the No. 1 issue for most voters was "moral values." Liberal analysts furiously attacked Karl Rove for "exploiting" these sentiments.

But even Karl Rove couldn't invent God, and God and faith were everywhere in Grantham Sunday evening.

I think it was Ann Coulter who said that during a presidential election, both parties campaign as Republicans, but only one side actually is the Republicans. Whoever said it, it's certainly accurate--the culture war may temporarily go to ground during an election year (although not even then: which side released Fahrenheit 9/11, the (grossly inferior) remake of The Manchurian Candidate and the enviro-apocalyptic The Day After Tomorrow in 2004?) but that doesn't mean that it ends, as Obama's "What's The Matter With Altoona" speech in San Francisco last week so aptly demonstrates.

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, it's not surprising that people get bitter, they cling to guns or religion, and they tune into the latest edition of PJM Political, featuring Mark Steyn, Michael Yon, James Lileks—and more!

(You have no idea how close I came to using the above uber-pretentious late-1980s high-MTV era-inspired title on the actual PJM post.)

Proof that your 1970s-era leather jacketed populist hero to the working man persona may be looking a bit threadbare these days--when you actually say with a straight face, “I’ve found enormous sustenance from Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd”.

Update: Bruuuuuuce! is Reason #4 of the 20 Reasons Why Frank Martin Is Bitter. And I'm even more bitter than he is over Reason #17:

17. I now own 'Blade Runner' in 5 different DVD formats.

Heck, in addition to owning multiple DVD copies, and writing about the movie for Pajamas, I've owned it on VHS, and two different laser disc versions. And reading in Billboard around 1987 that there was this new company called Voyager with something called a "Criterion Collection" that had released Blade Runner as a letterboxed laser disc (back when letterboxing was new and controversial!) and was planning to release a letterboxed 2001: A Space Odyssey later that year is why I bought my first laser disc player.

I mean, you go into these small colonies near Clavius and the Tycho Magnetic Anomaly and, like a lot of small earth colonies in the Sol Sector, it's not surprising that when people get bitter, they cling to laser discs, DVDs, or (via Lileks) space age prunes...

Immediately after the election in 2004, Rush Limbaugh was fond of quoting this exchange between David Westin, the president of ABC News, and Tina Brown, from her now long-since-canceled CNBC show (subscription required, but this gives you the gist of things):

RUSH: So, anyway, she's got David Westin on the program, and she says, "David, would you have a reporter/producer live in any of these communities?" She's talking about the red states of America here, folks. "Would you have a reporter/producer live in any of these communities and saturate themselves in these cultures so that they get more stories from those communities?"

WESTIN: I think we don't do that enough, and I'm not just talking religious communities. I'm talking all sorts of communities across the country. I think that... You understand this, Tina, living in New York or in Los Angeles, we have busy jobs. We go into the office every day. We tend to socialize with the same people, or the same types of people, and I think it's terribly important for journalists to get out whether it's overseas or domestically and try to understand.

RUSH: We need more foreign correspondents in Alabama! We need more foreign correspondents north of Palm Beach County in Florida! We need embeds to go to church, find out what's going on with these holy rollers! Ah, folks, you can't know how much I love this.

While we're waiting for those foreign correspondents to don their Willis & Geiger safari jackets and grab their Shure SM-58s and minicams, Robert Ferrigno, found via Mark Steyn, has an excellent suggestion for an ambassador to lead them into the vast unknown that is the American Heartland.

As Allahpundit notes, one hilarious result of last night's debate, is that the left has suddenly decided that George Stephanopoulos "is unacceptably partisan":

If nothing else good comes from all this, at least it’ll have opened a few eyes to left-wing media bias by putting Hillary’s supporters temporarily, and bizarrely, in the position of Republicans. Why yes, Jeralyn, Keith Olbermann is “the most shameless ridiculous hack on TV.” If Hillary wins the nomination and he jumps back face-first into the tank for her, will that still be true?

The all-is-forgiven tone that's inevitably coming between now and late August will be as amusing to watch as these examples of blatant hypocrisy have been.

Related: "Little Tyrants Upset Over Debate", but then all of these cries of "pull the bastards' license!" is leftover rhetoric from the 1920s and '30s, when terrestrial broadcast frequencies were thought to be scarce, and the government stepped in, creating the FCC to allocate them. Today, with 500 DirecTV channels, a couple of hundred satellite radio channels, 100 million blogs, and a babillion videos on YouTube and the like, we know that bandwidth is certainly not in short supply.

More: Here's an excerpt from Tim Robbins' beclowning speech at the NAB convention a couple of days ago:

"Just when we were close to a national news media providing a general consensus on what the truth is,” he added, “along comes the Internets [sic] that allows its users a choice on the kind of news it [sic] watches and the YouTube [sic]. My God, we’ve got to stop them.”

Close? Dude, in the early 1970s, your side controlled four television networks (the big three and PBS) and most big city newspapers, which by then were virtual information monopolies in their respective regions.

As I wrote earlier this week when Politico referred to the 2004 election being hijacked by "the right-wing freak show"--i.e. bloggers and the Swift Vets:

To be fair, there was certainly a neatness to the liberal conformity of the 1960s and 1970s, when three television networks and a handful of newspapers controlled the news. Breaking up those information monopolies would seam like a freak show to a particularly nostalgic mind, just as many senior citizens pine for the simplicity of an era built around Bell Telephone, three TV networks and three primary car manufacturers.

Why does it seem like all self-styled progressives want to turn back the clock on progress?

Besides, at least they can relive those monolithic mass media glory days in their own museum!

NSFW Update: If you enjoy your schadenfreude with enormous slabs of cheesecake on the side, Doc Weasel's post on this topic may be worth it for the--thoroughly NSFW--photos alone.

As Jonah Goldberg has noted in several places in Liberal Fascism, and reiterated to Salon magazine:

What appealed to the Progressives about militarism was what William James calls this moral equivalent of war. It was that war brought out the best in society, as James put it, that it was the best tool then known for mobilization ... That is what is fascistic about militarism, its utility as a mechanism for galvanizing society to join together, to drop their partisan differences, to move beyond ideology and get with the program. And liberalism today is, strictly speaking, pretty pacifistic. They're not the ones who want to go to war all that much. But they're still deeply enamored with this concept of the moral equivalent of war, that we should unite around common purposes. Listen to the rhetoric of Barack Obama, it's all about unity, unity, unity, that we have to move beyond our particular differences and unite around common things, all of that kind of stuff. That remains at the heart of American liberalism, and that's what I'm getting at.

See also, the cover of the latest edition of Time magazine, which takes Jimmy Carter's 1977 speech that explicitly equaled the reduction of foreign energy reliance with, as Carter said in his speech, "the moral equivalent of war", and puts the now-expected green spin on it. Sadly, it's probably not a belated April Fools' Edition.

(Note that Time probably doesn't call for this particular scheme, which would no doubt save quite a bit of power and resources.)

Update: "Imagine the designs that were rejected"!

Rock & Roll has a museum in Cleveland; and Jazz has a de facto museum in Manhattan's Lincoln Center. What does the traditional news industry opening a museum of its own in Washington DC say about its viability in the age of Blogs and the Web?

Complete with cameo appearances by Mick Jagger and Orson Welles, my latest Silicon Graffiti video is online, using old media's recently completed museum honoring--who else?--themselves as a launching point:

The video references the nifty EPIC 2014 multimedia presentation from 2004, which you can view in its entirety on its homepage, and more of my own videos can be found here.

(Bumped to top.)

"Halle-frickin'-lujah", writes Mark Hemingway, "Someone in the mainstream media finally mentions the William Ayers connection" during the Democrat debate Wednesday night:

Obama knows the unrepentant domestic terrorist much better than he's letting on, and Hillary calls him on it. Obama worked with him for years and was even serving on the board of directors of the Woods Fund with him at the time he made his infamous remark in the New York Times about not regretting setting the bombs.

Mr. Cool actually looks angry and flustered. How flustered? At one point, he refers to Ayers' actions "four years ago" when he meant to say forty. Then Obama points out that (Bill) Clinton pardoned two members of the Weather Underground. That little bit of info doesn't help either of them. It is a good night to be Republican.

Speaking of Radical Chic: The Next Generation, as Tom Wolfe has noted in innumerable interviews, when he showed up at Leonard and Felicia Bernstein's infamous 1970 Park Avenue fund raising cocktail party for the Black Panthers, he had his reporter's notebook out and was openly taking notes and jotting down the conversation in plain view for all to see. (Wolfe wrote for New York magazine back then, in that publication's long-bygone era.)

It was only when his article hit the streets that the Bernsteins hit the fan, as they apparently never realized the backlash that would result from their fund raiser amongst people who didn't share their punitive far left politics--which would soon have a name, thanks to Wolfe's article and subsequent book.

Which is very reminiscent to the way that a Huffington Post blogger observed firsthand and recorded the audio that would become known as Barack Obama's Bittergate, as Betsy Newmark writes--and rather than pasting in virtually her entire post, go over and read the whole thing.

In all genres of show business, there's an enormous amount of snobbery. For example, the theater world often looks down on movie performers, and the movie industry is awfully snobbish towards those who work in TV. So it's always nice to see one group of professional actors honoring a fellow actor who happens to work in a different medium.

Update: More from Scott Baker and Liz Stephans on Breitbart.tv's B-Cast Internet news show, including audio and video segments of the speech that Tim Robbins asked not to be published. Proving that once again that legacy journalists and the phrase "off the record" are almost always unrelated concepts.

"The Democrat Math On Republican Filibusters: February 29, 2008= 72 Vs April 15, 2008= 65."

Is the the proverbial New Math in action? Incidentally, I thought it was typically the minority party did these sort of photo-op stunts, not the party in power.

Austin Bay goes video, with an extremely slickly produced multimedia piece on the consequences of withdrawing from Iraq.

Jonah Goldberg parses the difference between "elite", "snob", "arrogant", and other nouns and adjectives that are fun to put Dr. Evil’s patented air quotations around:

In his telling Pennsylvania was once Belgium on the Susquehanna — cheese parties, Sam Harris book clubs etc — and it can be again if only these people get good enough jobs to lay down their guns and bibles. As just about everyone has observed by now, this is a fundamentally Marxist way of looking at the world and Obama deserves to be called on it.

But it's not elitist, not really. It clearly snobbish. It's certainly myopic and arrogant. And it's absolutely wrong. But I don't think it's elitist. Maybe I'm biased because I don't have any pressing problem with elitism, rightly understood. Elite derives from the Latin for elect and in our elections we decide who will be our (political) elite. Jefferson believed in a democratic elite which rose up on merit. I do too. We're all elitists in one way or another (Show of hands: Who wants an elite surgeon to perform their heart-lung transplant and who wants a really average surgeon to do it? If you answer that you want the surgeon from the really meaty part of the bell curve, I will concede you are no elitist).

What's offensive about Obama's comment isn't its elitism per se, but the arrogance of assuming that those who see the world through a different prism or who are relatively immune to his charms are somehow embittered and confused and therefore less equipped to decide who should be our elected elite.

And yes, I understand that elitism has come to mean snobbish arrogance and all that, which is what most people mean when they say elitist. But I'm going to cling to my view of elitism regardless of which way the tide pulls me.

Or as Mickey Kaus writes:

I'm convinced that the great achievement of Republicanism over the past decades was getting average Americans to think that it was the Democrats who were the snobs. The person who convinced me of this (in a highly persuasive lecture) was Thomas Frank.

Kaus notes, that Frank's theories "are on the verge of convincing millions of average Americans that the Republicans were right, at least about the likely Dem nominee."

Dean Barnett writes, "Several commentators have suggested that Obama's moment of sloppy candor repeats the thesis of What's the Matter With Kansas, and thus the book has a new lease on relevance":

In truth, as execrable as it was, Frank's book offered a much more tightly argued position than the one offered by the supposedly brilliant senator who has deigned to lead the American people.

Frank, a native Kansan, insisted that many poor Kansans vote against their economic interests because they're unreasonably preoccupied with social issues. The key additional ingredient to his argument was that conservative
politicians only use social issues to cynically manipulate churchgoing rubes, and really have no interest in achieving any results on matters like abortion. Frank particularly stretched to make the latter point, at one point even stating (without any evidence of course) that Sam Brownback was once pro-choice.

Although hardly identical, Obama's and Frank's sentiments do share critical commonalities. Both evidence an unbecoming condescension to the American people. And both share modern liberalism's assumption that Americans are a bunch of dullards. Perhaps no other trait has so thoroughly harmed the left at theballot box.

Anyone who has ever walked by Harvard Yard has heard the kind of condescending comments that Obama offered in San Francisco. Heck, anyone who has listened to a Michelle Obama speech has heard the same kind of contempt for the American people expressed in unequivocal terms.

If you want to find this kind of smug superiority on the left, you don't have to look very hard. If you're of a mind to do some field research, I recommend you tune into Bill Maher's show on HBO next Friday night. I predict you won't have to wait more than ten minutes before Maher and his panel of Hollywood philosophes agree on what a stupid and ignorant place America is.

Read the whole thing; elsewhere, Bill Bradley explores "The secret story of how Obama's gaffe made its way to the Huffington Post, of all places, and how it might affect campaign coverage from now on."

Update: Mickey Kaus makes a great point, via a comment submitted by one of his readers:

Alert emailer M wonders why Obama is applying a Tom Frank analysis--of working class voters who vote Republican--to Pennsylvania, since unlike Kansas, Pennsylvania is a blue state that "hasn't voted for a Republican presidential nominee since 1988." And the most economically distressed parts of the state are the most Democratic, despite all the clinging to guns and God that's going on. In short, Obama's explaining something that doesn't happen. ... I suppose one answer is that Obama wasn't explaining why Pennsylvanians wouldn't vote for a Democrat but why they might not vote for him--a black, liberal Democrat. But Obama says he's explaining why small-town Rustbelt voters don't buy the idea that government can help them, which sounds an awful lot like not buying Democratic ideology generally.

It's a false consciousness!

Found via Liberty Peak Lodge, Thomas Sowell writes, "Like so many others on the left, Obama rejects ‘stereotypes’ when they are stereotypes he doesn't like but blithely throws around his own stereotypes about ‘a typical white person’ or ‘bitter’ gun-toting, religious and racist working class people":

However inconsistent Obama's words, his behavior has been remarkably consistent over the years. He has sought out and joined with the radical, anti-Western left, whether Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers of the terrorist Weatherman underground or pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli Rashid Khalidi.

Obama is also part of a long tradition on the left of being for the working class in the abstract, or as people potentially useful for the purposes of the left, but having disdain or contempt for them as human beings.

Karl Marx said, "The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing." In other words, they mattered only in so far as they were willing to carry out the Marxist agenda.

Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw included the working class among the "detestable" people who "have no right to live." He added: "I should despair if I did not know that they will all die presently, and that there is no need on earth why they should be replaced by people like themselves."

Similar statements on the left go back as far as Rousseau in the 18th century and come forward into our own times.

It is understandable that young people are so strongly attracted to Obama. Youth is another name for inexperience -- and experience is what is most needed when dealing with skillful and charismatic demagogues.

Those of us old enough to have seen the type again and again over the years can no longer find them exciting. Instead, they are as tedious as they are dangerous.

George Will adds:

Obama does fulfill liberalism's transformation since Franklin Roosevelt. What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its working people has become a doctrine of condescension toward those people and the supposedly coarse and vulgar country that pleases them.

And Noemie Emery traces leftwing elitism back to the days of Adlai Stevenson--brought up to date via Thomas Frank's What's The Matter With Kansas:

In Our Country, Michael Barone traces this strain back to 1956 and the second campaign of Adlai E. Stevenson, who, when told "thinking people" were for him, said, "Yes, but I need to win a majority," and when praised for having educated the voters, said that too many had not passed the course. "Stevenson," Barone says, "was the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle-class American culture--the prototype of the liberal Democrat who would judge ordinary Americans by an abstract standard and find them wanting," and since Stevenson, there have been many such. Hart and Michael Dukakis were brought down by this failing, as was John Kerry, whose 2006 swipe at George W. Bush and those forced into the armed forces brought this response from some servicemen: "Halp us, Jon Carry--We R Stuck HEAR N Irak."

After their unexpected loss in 2004, Democrats were much too impressed by Thomas Frank's treatise What's the Matter With Kansas? which complained that they lost because middle-class voters were too stupid to vote their 'real' interests (which were presumably served by the Democrats), because conservatives wickedly played on their fears. ('Fear' is the Democrats' answer for every vote they don't get.) Whether middle-class interests are better served by liberalism is an open question--they did so much better, after all, under Carter than Reagan, and the Clintons did so much to help them get health care--but condescension remains an unpromising strategy. There is, it appears, not muchthe matter with Kansas. Obama's mother, he says, did come from Kansas. But the matter with Democrats, and with Obama, seems to be Thomas Frank.

Heh, Indeed.^TM

As P.J. O'Rourke once wrote, "The founding fathers, in their wisdom, devised a method by which our republic can take 100 of its most prominent numskulls and keep them out of the private sector where they might do actual harm".

And kudos to John Kerry for really living up to that premise!

Michael Goldfarb writes:

Last night's episode of Bill Maher's Real Time featured evangelical atheist Richard Dawkins (the very poor man's version of Christopher Hitchens), explaining why scientists can't be certain of much of anything:

I think any scientist would be unwise to commit himself to saying there definitely is not anything. I mean, I can’t definitely commit myself to saying there are no fairies. I’m pretty sure there are no fairies. [laughter] But, I think it would be unscientific to do what the extreme religious people do and say, “I know there is a god.”

It's an interesting contrast to comments by NASA scientist James Hansen earlier this week complaining about a high school textbook that didn't portray global warming as a fact rather than a theory:

Hansen has sent Houghton Mifflin a letter stating that the book's discussion on global warming contained "a large number of clearly erroneous statements" that give students "the mistaken impression that the scientific evidence of global warming is doubtful and uncertain."

So Hansen is certain that global warming is real and the greenhouse gases are the cause. As are Bill Maher, Barack Obama, Al Gore, and every other luminary of the left. Immediately following his interview with Dawkins last night, Maher proceeded to mock Christians for their skepticism of global warming (or indifference, as he would have it), explaining it as a result of their belief in the Rapture. But hasn't the left embraced global warming as their own version of the Rapture? They do not harbor any doubt, but believe with the fervor of religious conviction that the end of civilization will come as a result of consumerism. And they seem completely unaware that in believing this, they have shed the very skepticism that is supposed to define the secular left.

I don't think you can really dub them secular these days, now that they've found an alternative religion to embrace wholeheartedly.

Ann Althouse looks back to Time magazine's January 5th, 1970 issue, which declared "The Middle Americans" as Time's Men and Women of the Year:

Their car windows were plastered with American-flag decals, their ideological totems. In the bumper-sticker dialogue of the freeways, they answered Make Love Not War with Honor America or Spiro is My Hero. They sent Richard Nixon to the White House and two teams of astronauts to the moon. They were both exalted and afraid. The mysteries of space were nothing, after all, compared with the menacing confusions of their own society.

The American dream that they were living was no longer the dream as advertised. They feared that they were beginning to lose their grip on the country. Others seemed to be taking over — the liberals, the radicals, the defiant young, a communications industry that they often believed was lying to them. The Saturday Evening Post folded, but the older world of Norman Rockwell icons was long gone anyway. No one celebrated them: intellectuals dismissed their lore as banality. Pornography, dissent and drugs seemed to wash over them in waves, bearing some of their children away.

But in 1969 they began to assert themselves. They were 'discovered' first by politicians and the press, and then they started to discover themselves. In the Administration's voices — especially in the Vice President's and the Attorney General's — in the achievements and the character of the astronauts, in a murmurous and pervasive discontent, they sought to reclaim their culture. It was their interpretation of patriotism that brought Richard Nixon the time to pursue a gradual withdrawal from the war. By their silent but newly felt presence, they influenced the mood of government and the course of legislation, and this began to shape the course of the nation and the nation's course in the world. The Men and Women of the Year were the Middle Americans.

Ann writes, "Read the whole, awesome essay — and marvel that we've been talking about these things for the last 40 years":

Barack Obama's recent comment about the bitterness of left-behind small-towners may seem like the latest line of dialogue in a long, long conversation.

I'm not sure what's to marvel about--Obama's rhetoric in his less guarded moments is merely another byproduct of one of the more curious aspects of what Time, almost four decades ago, called "the liberals, the radicals, the defiant young" (who are not so defiant now, merely trapped in a leftover haze of conformity): their absolute inability to advance their mindset beyond the first days of Starting From Zero.

Burt Prelutsky looks back to the period of his youth with a gimlet eye, which is much more than Dick Cavett could ever do:

I can’t look at Petraeus — his uniform ornamented like a Christmas tree with honors, medals and ribbons — without thinking of the great Mort Sahl at the peak of his brilliance. He talked about meeting General Westmoreland in the Vietnam days. Mort, in a virtuoso display of his uncanny detailed knowledge — and memory — of such things, recited the lengthy list (”Distinguished Service Medal, Croix de Guerre with Chevron, Bronze Star, Pacific Campaign” and on and on), naming each of the half-acre of decorations, medals, ornaments, campaign ribbons and other fripperies festooning the general’s sternum in gaudy display. Finishing the detailed list, Mort observed, “Very impressive!” Adding, “If you’re twelve.”

Cavett utters bromides from 40 years ago, from another war that the left abandoned midway through in an effort to score partisan points and gather insider power while genocide occurred thousands of miles away--and massively escalated, once the American left had their way and we abandoned our allies--and thinks it's witty?

Well, I guess it is--if you're twelve.

Update: The 1960s never end at Politico either, where two former Washington Post journalists declare the Swift Vets, who accurately reminded voters of John Kerry's 1970s radical chic past (part of which occurred very publicly on the Cavett show back then) as part of "the right-wing freak show". As John Hinderaker writes:

If there is a "freak show" on the fringes of American politics, it can be found on the Left, at fever swamps like the Daily Kos and Democratic Underground that specialize in conspiracy theories and hate. It's interesting, though, to find out how former mainstream reporters--Harris and VandeHei formerly wrote for the Washington Post--feel about those who have broken the liberal monopoly on the news.

To be fair, there was certainly a neatness to the liberal conformity of the 1960s and 1970s, when three television networks and a handful of newspapers controlled the news. Breaking up those information monopolies would seam like a freak show to a particularly nostalgic mind, just as many senior citizens pine for the simplicity of an era built around Bell Telephone, three TV networks and three primary car manufacturers.

Matthew Sheffield writes, "If you've always thought her music was hackneyed and dull now you may have another reason to dislike Alicia Keys: she's apparently a racist conspiracymonger", as this AP report highlights (ellipses in Matthew's post):

There's another side to Alicia Keys: conspiracy theorist. The Grammy-winning singer-songwriter tells Blender magazine: "'Gangsta rap' was a ploy to convince black people to kill each other."[...]

Keys, 27, said she's read several Black Panther autobiographies and wears a gold AK-47 pendant around her neck "to symbolize strength, power and killing 'em dead," according to an interview in the magazine's May issue, on newsstands Tuesday.

Another of her theories: That the bicoastal feud between slain rappers Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. was fueled "by the government and the media, to stop another great black leader from existing." [...]

Though she's known for her romantic tunes, she told Blender that she wants to write more political songs. If black leaders such as the late Black Panther Huey Newton "had the outlets our musicians have today, it'd be global. I have to figure out a way to do it myself," she said.

Matthew adds, "All this nonsense really should come as a surprise to Keys's mother, Teresa Augello, who is white. Is this just a phase? In any case, it's hard to see how a white entertainer or a religious-oriented entertainer making statements like this and it not doing significant harm to their career."

She's not alone of course; Keys' remarks regarding her profession sound much like those expressed by Rev. Eric Lee of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who featured prominently in several recent articles over on the main Pajamas site this past week, including this one:

“In a very small part of my presentation, I referenced a meeting I had with Rabbi’s and other community leaders. A Rabbi stated in that meeting that the close relationship between the African American and Jewish communities had been disconnected after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. I further referenced in my speech that my response to the Rabbi was that the Black Power Movement emerged after the assassination of Dr. King and it was a direct response to the negative characterizations of African Americans through the silver screen, TV and the music industry, industries that are influenced by many in the Jewish community. I then stated to the Rabbis that the Black Power Movement was our effort to define for ourselves our own identity rather than be defined by anyone else. I then indicated in my presentation that I told the Rabbis’ that before a genuine coalition could be rebuilt between our communities, there would have to be dialogue and efforts made to deal with the negative characterizations of African Americans.”

But Keys' and Lee's conspiratorial ravings ignore a crucial element of the success of "Gangsta" rap: nobody twisted the arms of performers to record those records, or to strike thugish poses in videos and magazine covers to promote them, or consumers to purchase them. As Mark Steyn wrote last month regarding another prominent conspiracy theorist:

The Reverend Wright believes that AIDs was created by the government of the United States — and not as a cure for the common cold that went tragically awry and had to be covered up by Karl Rove, but for the explicit purpose of killing millions of its own citizens. The government has never come clean about this, but the Reverend Wright knows the truth. “The government lied,” he told his flock, “about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. The government lied.”

Does he really believe this? If so, he’s crazy, and no sane person would sit through his gibberish, certainly not for 20 years [as Obama had].

Or is he just saying it? In which case, he’s profoundly wicked. If you understand that AIDs is spread by sexual promiscuity and drug use, you’ll know that it’s within your power to protect yourself from the disease. If you’re told that it’s just whitey’s latest cunning plot to stick it to you, well, hey, it’s out of your hands, nothing to do with you or your behavior.

Rather than conspiracy theories about "the government and the media" as Keys believes, the latter "influenced by many in the Jewish community" as Lee believes, and the former fermenting "genocide against people of color" as Wright believes, where are the calls for personal responsibility, by three people who are all voices of influence in their respective circles?

(Onion video originally found here.)

From its headline on, this entire post by Ace on the Obamavania train wreck is well worth your time, but here's an excerpt to whet your appetite:

Video of Hillary playing the elitist card against Obama -- and successfully.

Is there another person on the face of the earth Hillary could call an elitist without exploding in a fiery ball of spontaneous irony?

Incidentally, the press is focusing on "bitterness" because that's mostly what Hillary is focusing on.

They're ignoring the critique made by conservatives, Newt Gingrich, and John McCain.

So you tell me: Are they ignoring the real issue here because they simply are unwilling to credit a non-liberal as offering a legitimate take?

Or are they so isolated in the liberal cocoon they're not even aware that a critique exists apart from Hillary's?

What's more likely? And which is worse?

As Betsy Newmark notes, Kirsten Powers hit the nail on the head: In a liberal world (including most big city newspapers, the big three TV networks and CNN), Obama's folk Marxism sounds "totally normal, and outside of that world I don’t know that he appreciates how it sounds."

AFP reports 11 people killed and at least 191 wounded in the aftermath of an explosion that "ripped through a mosque in Iran's southern city of Shiraz during evening prayers by a prominent cleric, officials said on Sunday."

Mystery surrounded the cause of Saturday's blast, which some officials insisted had been triggered by an accident but others said could have been caused by a bomb.

The massive explosion in the men's section of the mosque took place at around 9:00 pm (1630 GMT) during an evening prayer sermon by prominent local cleric Mohammad Anjavinejad, Iranian media reported.

Eleven people were killed and 191 wounded, local emergency services official Mohammad Javad Mouradian told the official IRNA news agency.

"The incident could have happened as a result of negligence. A while ago at this site there was an exhibition commemorating the (1980-1988) Iran-Iraq war," Fars province police chief Commander Ali Moayeri told the Fars news agency.

"The munitions left at the site could have caused this explosion," he added. The agency said he ruled out an act of sabotage.

Who puts on a war "exhibition" with live munitions--and apparently in considerable amounts?

Charles Johnson adds, "Very few details yet, but one suspect would be the MEK: Mujahadeen-e-Khalq (Iranian rebels)."

Back in the fall of 2005, when the media were inventing all sorts of lurid stories in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, I wrote:

In 1981, Janet Cooke was a Washington Post reporter who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning story of an eight year old heroin addict. She was eventually forced to return the prize, when when it was discovered that Cooke cooked the books and invented Jimmy out of whole cloth. (Walter Duranty's Pulitzer is still on the books, incidentally.)

Asked about Cooke in an interview, new journalism pioneer Tom Wolfe replied:

It reminded me of when I first went to work on the New York Herald Tribune and they were still laughing over the ship-of-sin scandal from prohibition days. An informant had told the Herald Tribune that there was a ship of sin operating outside of a three-mile limit off of eastern Long Island. On board you could get liquor and dope and sex. So the Tribune sent a reporter out. He didn't find the ship, but he did find a saloon in Montauk, and he phoned in about five days' worth of the most lurid stories in the history of drunk newspapermen. Half of New York City gasped and the other half rushed out to eastern Long Island to rent motor launches, until it was discovered he had made up the whole thing. These things happen about every three or four years; some reporter gets caught piping a story out of his skull...Phony stories are going to be written every once in a while, so long as you give reporters the trust that you have to give them.

And travel writers, apparently:

The Lonely Planet guidebook empire is reeling from claims by one of its authors that he plagiarised and made up large sections of his books and dealt drugs to make up for poor pay.

Thomas Kohnstamm also claims in a new book that he accepted free travel, in contravention of the company's policy.

His revelations have rocked the travel publisher, which sells more than six million guides a year.

Mr Kohnstamm, whose book is titled Do Travel Writers Go To Hell?, said yesterday that he had worked on more than a dozen books for Lonely Planet, including its titles on Brazil, Colombia, the Caribbean, Venezuela, Chile and South America.

In one case, he said he had not even visited the country he wrote about.

"They didn't pay me enough to go Colombia,'' he said.

"I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a chick I was dating - an intern in the Colombian Consulate.

"They don't pay enough for what they expect the authors to do.''

Incidentally, no word yet on the completion date of this very different travelogue.

From The Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff (though also quoted here, not surprisingly):

The only person who is still a private individual in Germany," boasted Robert Ley, a member of the Nazi hierarchy, after several years of Nazi rule, "is somebody who is asleep."

Ghost of a Flea's take on academia up in the 49th parallel (to namecheck a superb movie about a much more humanitarian Canada long since gone), sounds remarkably ominous itself:

People wonder why I quit university teaching. Imagine an office - all your colleagues and all your supervisors and anyone with a say in your tenure prospects, your research funding and your publications - where everyone organizes their careers in such a way that a "human rights" commission would have no reason to object. Their teaching practices, their research, their political views; everything they think and do including and especially their "private" lives from the television they (do not) watch to the fast food they (do not) eat to the sex lives they (do not) allow themselves to have. Even the concept of a "private" life dismissed as reactionary and/or illusory and in any event subject to the scrutiny of any undergraduate with internet access and a grudge. That is the life I escaped.

Can't say I blame him--though I imagine life in America's elite universities probably isn't much different. Like the man said: "1984 -- A user manual for lefties; a warning for the rest of us."

(H/T: SDA)

The collateral damage from Jay Rockefeller's botched attempt at carpet bombing John McCain continues to escalate.

This is interesting: The "Katie's leaving CBS" story's exit date seems to have moved up a notch, from early next year, to possibly within "the next few weeks", according to this New York Times article. (Gee, the paper of Jayson and Duranty covering the home of Cronkite and Ra^ther--there's a trust-inspiring combination, if there ever was one):

Though some people close to Ms. Couric, as well as some professional associates, said Thursday they believed that it was now likely she would not remain as anchor through the election, and might even leave in the next few weeks, that point was adamantly denied by the senior executives closest to the decision.

“Katie is absolutely going to continue as anchor until the inauguration and very possibly beyond that,” one said.

The executives involved in the situation said that no discussions of Ms. Couric’s future had taken place since the February meeting. Yet the news that she and CBS were even considering an end to the first effort to have a woman as the primary anchor of a network news division surfaced in press reports in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere on Thursday, creating a situation that appeared to leave Ms. Couric vulnerable.

“She’s not a definite lame duck,” a senior executive who has been close to the situation said. “Nothing is decided.”

But after the great fanfare that accompanied her arrival at CBS (with a five-year contract at a salary of $15 million a year) and then a year and a half of disappointing ratings, even the hint that Ms. Couric might depart was hardly a development that CBS News needs.

The news division has been buffeted by a string of bad decisions and strange turns over the last several years, beginning with the firestorm over a report in 2004 on the weeknight edition of “60 Minutes” about President Bush’s National Guard service, and most recently including a near-revolt by staff members over the hiring of an executive producer on the “Early Show” — which resulted in her firing and yet another reassessment for that program.

Lawrence K. Grossman, former president of NBC News and of PBS, said CBS’s confirmation that it was discussing the possibility of replacing Ms. Couric was disconcerting and disruptive, and needed to be viewed in a broader context.

"It suggests the decline and fall of network news, which should come as no surprise,” Mr. Grossman said.

Err, no. Or as Mark Steyn recently told Hugh Hewitt:

MS: Well, I think the news division, they’re talking exactly the wrong thing. They want to outsource the news gathering to CNN so they can spend all their money on the next big glamorous front man who sucks up all the budget, and has fantastic hair, and a fantastic wardrobe. And the reality is that that’s an antiquated, outmoded version of news. It was outmoded when Dan Rather did it, and nobody, that is never coming back. You can’t find a new Walter Cronkite. Those days are over. And I think this…so I think until you’ve got content driving that news bulletin, until there’s a reason to switch it on…because right now, if you’re interested in news, the last place you’d go to it is the CBS Evening News.

HH: That’s exactly right. If you want serious news or analysis, you don’t go to the nightly newscasts, ever.

MS: No, no, that’s actually the place for people who aren’t interested in news. And it’s pathetic in a time of war, and a time of great turbulence and great change, to switch on, and there’ll be the light item about the new fat pill, or whatever. I mean, it’s formulaic, it’s tired, it’s shallow, and it’s unwatchable.

Newspapers already have their museum. And with Medium Cool having long since become Medium Sclerotic, it's high-time tubercular blue television news was entombed there as well.

...Put his left Salvatore Ferragamo in his mouth and twist:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them…And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Four years ago, when another Democratic Senator running for the White House demonstrated that he was, in his own way, equally far out of touch with middle class voters, he at least did so by not knowing what to order on a cheesesteak (also involving Pennsylvania, in a nice example of retroactive synchronicity), or in a Wendy's, which Mark Steyn so memorably described. Or by not understanding that the average guy doesn't fly off to another state for a weekend of windsurfing whenever the mood strikes.

Talk about a rookie mistake: Leave it to Obama to make John Kerry's Brahmin hauteur seem earnestly goofy in retrospect.

Update: The timing of Obama's latest gaffe, immediately on top of this YouTube collection of audio clips from Obama's own readings of his books, which has been making the rounds through the Blogosphere this week, doesn't help matters.

David Bowie's mid-1970s song "Heroes" was about two people personally fighting back against a monumental communist evil. The Berlin wall namechecked in the song is happily gone now (I have a tiny piece of it on a shelf in my study), but the freedom-crushing spirit behind it lives on, in smaller but still sadly pervasive forms, from people who should know better. And so does the spirit of rebellion, because, after all, dissent is the highest form of patriotism.

As Tim Blair writes, "Remember these examples when next confronted by epic stupidity in your own world. We can be heroes, too."

This is a riot:

"Three guys in a garage create YouTube, and we've got 800 people in Chicago who don't know their ass from a hole in the ground!"

Sam Zell, owner of the Tribune Company, which publishes the Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, Newsday, The Baltimore Sun, and other Jurassic-era publications your grandmother still reads because the thought of turning on a computer makes her knees shake.

The NPR article on Zell also includes a subhead titled, "Journalists as 'Overhead'". Which illustrates that the author can't comprehend that unlike a government-subsidized operation, the owner can't force taxpayers to bail him out if readers aren't footing the bill:

"This is the first unit of Tribune that I've talked to that doesn't generate any revenue. So all of you are overhead," Zell said during the late February meeting with editors and reporters for the company's Washington bureau.

Most reporters and editors who cover the government don't consider themselves overhead — they describe themselves as fulfilling a key role newspapers play in a democratic society.

No, reporting the news is a key function in a democratic society. But the medium in which consumers receive that news is subject to change, as other dinosaur media conglomerates are discovering the hard way.

And as that YouTube allusion from Zell highlights, news isn't exclusively a top-down business anymore.

Related: "Will there always be print newspapers? The editor of The Washington Post said he thought so, though others might think he's in denial:

In November 2007, former “NBC Nightly News” anchor Tom Brokaw predicted the print edition of The Washington Post would “probably” be dead in 10 years. But Downie disagreed.

“I can’t see that,” Downie said. “Obviously I’m of an age where I can’t see so far out into the future, but I can’t see that.

Arthur C. Clarke could...41 years ago:

Newspapers will, I think, receive their final body blow from these new communications techniques. I take a dim view of staggering home every Sunday with five pounds of wood pulp on my arm, when what I really want is information, not wastepaper. How I look forward to the day when I can press a button and get any type of news, editorials, book and theater reviews, etc., merely by dialing the right channel.

Electronic “mail” delivery is another exciting prospect of the very near future. Letters, typed or written on special forms like wartime V—mail, will be automatically read and flashed from continent to continent and reproduced at receiving stations within a few minutes of transmission.

Meanwhile, this rather less exploratory prediction from Downie is definitely a two-edged sword:

Mid-size market newspapers may be in trouble, according to Downie. The small community newspapers and the newspaper titans – like the Post and The New York Times – will in some part be immune to the evolution of media, as it makes it way in a digital age.

Yes, it seems quite reasonable to assume that the Times will be immune to the evolution of news--that was one of the predictions made in this classic multimedia presentation beamed back from 2014.

The Internet Movie Database reports:

The current economic downturn is drying up traditional financing for many film producers -- from those turning out low-budget indies to those making big-star vehicles, the Hollywood Reporter reported today (Thursday). "Projects that would have sailed through easily a year ago are stalled in development. Movies that are practically in preproduction are falling apart at the eleventh hour," the trade publication observed. It cited a number of projects that had been in development by established producers that have fallen apart for lack of financing, including an Oliver Stone-Antoine Fuqua biopic about Colombian drugs overlord Pablo Éscobar and a Tim Robbins-directed feature called The Heretic. William Morris agent Cassian Elwes, one of the top agents among independent filmmakers, told the Reporter: "I think as we go into a tougher economy some films won't get made." He added: "And probably shouldn't get made."

Gee, you don't think Hollywood brought any of its current bad times on itself, huh? Naaaahh.

Kate of Small Dead Animals compares the glories of the economy under Bill Clinton with the dank Hoovervilles of Dubya.

I've been a bit surprised to see ascots appearing in my latest Brooks Brothers catalogs; I think it's still a look that's far too affected, even for me, but Betsy Newmark wonders if we aren't seeing the aura of a penumbra of its comeback:

According to USA Today, we are seeing glimmerings of a comeback of the ascot. A handful of guys in the public eye are wearing them. The most public practitioner is American Idol contestant, Michael Johns. While I really like Johns and he's my favorite on Idol, I hope he starts to resist such advice from the Idol stylist as this:

And yet: American Idol contender Michael Johns sang a bluesy number last week while wearing a pink-and-purple Alexander McQueen ascot, chosen by Idol stylist Miles Siggins. The contestants need "a recognizable brand, and I was thinking dandy rocker," says Siggins, who has picked out a vintage ascot for Johns to wear this week.

"Dandy rocker?" You gotta be kidding.

Please, please, stop that. America does not need a dandy rocker.

With the unfortunate death of Robert Palmer in 2003, doesn't Bryan Ferry currently have the absolute lock on that job description? (At least as frontman--Charlie Watts is often the best dressed drummer since Tony Williams.)

Jesse Walker lists FDR's 1932 campaign promises, which makes the father of centralized government sound remarkably laissez faire (sorry to use a possibly NSFW word if you're working for Starbucks):

In 1932, a classical liberal could easily conclude that Roosevelt was closer to his views than Hoover, an old progressive who had displayed a lifelong love of central planning and government-enforced cartels, a man who bragged during the campaign that he had responded to the Depression with "the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic." Among other things, President Hoover had jacked up spending, installed agricultural price-support programs, pressured businesses to follow Washington's wage dictates, and created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. But by the time a cerebral hemorrhage cut short FDR's fourth term, the federal bureaucracy's power had grown so enormously that Hoover was widely remembered as the last apostle of laissez faire.

As Jesse writes, "A candidate's campaign persona: There's the true Forgotten Man.", a reference to Amity Shlaes' seminal book on the period. And as Shlaes recently wrote, with an eye towards November of 2008, "the 1930s have plenty to tell us, yes. But the real challenge isn't deciding who resembles Hoover. The challenge is for both parties to figure out how to avoid a whole era of mistakes."

Saturday night is Yuri's night, as Glenn Reynolds notes.

Hopefully someone will drink a toast for these fellows, who may have actually preceded Yuri Gagarin into space--if not safely back onto terra firma.

Mike S. Adams:

"There’s really nothing like a dose of condemnation from a moral relativist."

But are you sure she really fits the bill?

Yesterday I interviewed Jim Geraghty for this week's PJM Political show on XM Satellite Radio on the topic of the dramatically coarsening leftwing rhetoric. In the space of two months, we've gone from MSNBC's David Shuster referring to Chelsea's parents "pimping her out", to Randi Rhodes calling Hillary a F***ing Whore, to the Economist's modest proposal:

The Democrats are all too aware that their civil war could spell disaster. A cavalcade of senior Democrats, including senators Patrick Leahy and Chris Dodd, have advised Mrs Clinton to retire to her room with a glass of whisky and a loaded revolver.

And now this combustible moment happens (which fortunately, for once this year, isn't aimed at Hillary) but too late to ask Geraghty about it.

And this is still the preseason, when typically only us wonks care about politics. Like the NFL, the general public won't really be focused on the presidential election until September--but unlike the NFL, fans in the bleachers won't be exempt from taking hits, which look to be bruising.

Earlier this week, we saw the reports in the New York Times that CBS was going to outsource their news to CNN. CBS denied the report, but hot on its heels is an article in the Wall Street Journal that they may outsource their anchorwoman. (Subscription may be required, though the full article seems to be readable, at least for now, if you go in via the Google News portal.)

In any case, it can't be much fun inside the halls of Black Rock, particularly when a certain pair of clickety stiletto heels is heard approaching, as the Journal notes:

After two years of record-low ratings, both CBS News executives and people close to Katie Couric say that the "CBS Evening News" anchor is likely to leave the network well before her contract expires in 2011 -- possibly soon after the presidential inauguration early next year.

Ms. Couric isn't even halfway through her five-year contract with CBS, which began in June 2006 and pays an annual salary of around $15 million. But CBS executives are under pressure to cut costs and improve ratings for the broadcast, which trails rival newscasts on ABC and NBC by wide margins.

Her departure would cap a difficult episode for CBS, which brought Ms. Couric to the network with considerable fanfare in a bid to catapult "Evening News" back into first place. Excluding several weeks of her tenure, Ms. Couric never bested the ratings of interim anchor Bob Schieffer, who was named to host the broadcast temporarily after "Evening News" anchor Dan Rather left the newscast in the wake of a discredited report on George W. Bush's National Guard service.

And speaking of Dan, his little-watched cable network has scored an audacious interview for an upcoming show. Courage. (Or Hope. Or Audacity. Or whatever the sign-off du jour from Ra^therLand is these days.)

Silencing Canadian bloggers into submission, one lawsuit at a time.

Much more from Kathy Shaidle, who's one of the bloggers being sued:

Richard "The Boy Named Sue" Warman has finally filed his statement of claim.

Canada's busiest litigant, serial "human rights" complainant and -- the guy Mark Steyn has called "Canada’s most sensitive man" -- Richard Warman is now suing his most vocal critics -- including me.

The suit names:

• Ezra Levant (famous for his stirring YouTube video of his confrontation with the Canadian Human Rights tribunal after he published the “Mohammed Cartoons”)
• FreeDominion.ca (Canada’s answer to FreeRepublic.com)
• Kate McMillan of SmallDeadAnimals.com
• Jonathan Kay of the National Post daily newspaper and its in-house blog
• and me, Kathy Shaidle of FiveFeetOfFury.com

Richard Warman used to work for the notorious Human Rights Commission, which runs the "kangaroo courts" who’ve charged Mark Steyn with "flagrant Islamophobia."

Richard Warman has brought almost half these cases single-handledly, getting websites he doesn’t like shut down, and making tens of thousands of tax free dollars in "compensation" out of web site owners who can’t afford to fight back or don’t even realize they can.

The province of British Columbia had to pass a special law to stop Richard Warman from suing libraries because they carried books he didn't approve of.

Richard Warman also wants to ban international websites he doesn’t like from being seen by Canadians.

The folks named in his new law suit are the very bloggers who have been most outspoken in their criticism of Warman’s methods.

Read the whole thing--including ways to help.

Brent Bozell writes that PBS is a bit like Criswell--it wants to forecast the future (and making things up just as wildly), but with no accountability when reality fails to materialize as forecast:

Ted Turner was not only interviewed, but celebrated on PBS – on April Fool’s Day. The prank was apparently on PBS. It was as if Turner had a subversive mission, to prove that PBS isn’t just for smart people. True to form, Turner walked off a cliff of rhetorical excess on the “Charlie Rose” show, charging that global warming was going to grow so severe, that in a few decades, most of humanity would be extinct. “We'll be eight degrees hotter in ten -- not ten, but 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals.”

Charlie Rose should have been embarrassed, but wasn’t. When Turner said during the show “It’s been a long time since anybody caught me saying something stupid,” he should have administered a Breathalyzer test. Instead, at show’s end, he delivered an hommage to Turner’s humanitarianism. Rose was still seated, but the tone sounded like he was bowing deeply to his guest’s expansive intellect. “You’re a remarkable man,” he declared.

The global warming disaster-movie pushers always try to intimidate their opponents by insisting the finest scientific minds are all on their side. But Ted Turner is not one of the finest scientific minds in America. All you have to do is express the politically correct opinion, and PBS will treat you as one of the world’s great sages.

PBS is a natural habitat for this kind of wild-eyed lunacy. The taxpayer-funded network has a well-worn reputation for providing gloomy – and wholly inaccurate – predictions from environmental extremists. In 1990, the PBS documentary series “Race to Save the Planet” featured another one of those lesser scientific minds, actress Meryl Streep: “By the year 2000 -- that's less than 10 years away -- the earth's climate will be warmer than it's been in over 100,000 years. If we don't do something, there'll be enormous calamities in a very short time.”

Doesn’t everyone remember the massive human die-off of 2000? [Sure--it happened concurrently with the great leftwing migration to Canada and Europe that December...--Ed]

Al Gore went to Harvard with Erich Segal, the author of “Love Story,” so he knows that being in love with the planet Earth means never having to say you’re sorry when your doomsday pitches are massively, dreadfully wrong. But shouldn’t PBS and other media outlets be held accountable when doomsday predictions they’ve facilitated from 15 or 20 years ago fail to materialize?

Why should old media, which never met a far left hustler it didn't like, be expected to start policing itself now?

Update: The BBC holds itself accountable on its global warming stories, in its own, sadly not-so-unique fashion.

Jonah Goldberg goes F-Spotting:

I don't know why I didn't think of this before. Behold a new sport for readers. Send me your examples of people just using "fascist" to describe things they don't like. For example, Kevin Costner in Bull Durham: “Quit trying to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring and besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls. They’re more democratic.”

Here's an oldie-but-a-goodie from 1979 by music critic and veteran Bruce Springsteen hagiographer Dave Marsh in Rolling Stone magazine:

Whatever its claims, Queen isn't here just to entertain. This group has come to make it clear exactly who is superior and who is inferior. Its anthem, "We Will Rock You," is a marching order: you will not rock us, we will rock you. Indeed, Queen may be the first truly fascist rock band.

As an audience member (and Queen was my first rock concert, as I recall, with Billy Squier opening), I would not have presumed to have rocked Queen. It seems reasonable to assume that when one plunked down money to see Queen, one presumed that they would be the core element of the experience which would be doing the rocking during the concert. How that made Freddie Mercury and company fascist, I cannot fathom, but like the man said...

Incidentally, in 1992, Rolling Stone magazine celebrated its 25th anniversary with a lavish party at the Four Seasons in Manhattan, a restaurant whose interior was designed by Philip Johnson.

As uttered by CNBC's David Faber, unknowingly echoing a point that Tom Wolfe made almost thirty years ago. Who says that the dinosaurs couldn't have spotted their own demise?

You can come back baby, because rock & roll YouTube never forgets:

Well except when the powers that be at YouTube pull the video of course; related thoughts here.

Following up on our recent posts on Howard Dean and Gloria Steinem in 2004 and today, in 2004, leftwing Democratic Senator Tom Harkin attacked Dick Cheney for not serving in Vietnam by inventing an aerial service in Vietnam that never happened. Today, leftwing Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller attacks John McCain...for his aerial service in Vietnam--and in the consequence insults every soldier flying a bomber or fighter-bomber today.

Like I said, morphing attacks from the left are just business, nothing personal.

(Incidentally, I'll bet Maverick just loves being Blue Falconed by a fellow member of the Senate...)

Last year, Ryan Lizza, the senior editor at The New Republic wrote:

After many lectures like this, Obama decided to take a second look at Wright’s church. Older pastors warned him that Trinity was for “Buppies”–black urban professionals–and didn’t have enough street cred. But Wright was a former Muslim and black nationalist who had studied at Howard and Chicago, and Trinity’s guiding principles–what the church calls the “Black Value System”–included a “Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness.’”

Which means, if TNR (cough...Beauchamp ...cough) is correct, then, as Charles Johnson notes, "the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, is an ex-Muslim, Nation of Islam style." Which may also explain another radical chic connection: in 2000, Obama said that "I don't think there are a lot of ideological differences," between himself and former Black Panther Bobby Rush.

And watch for anyone who comments on these stories to be demonized, despite the fact the passage quoted above came from TNR, the house organ of ancien régime liberals. But as Jim Geraghty noted last week, when the far left can call one of their own--and a former first lady and sitting US senator to boot--"a whore", it's all just business, nothing personal.

Infidels Are Cool believes that "This is just another blow to the Obama campaign. The American people are not ready to hand the reigns to someone who’s associations are beyond sketchy." I'm not at all sure about that myself, but as Charles Krauthammer recently noted, the only reason these details are so sketchy is that "Saint Obama awaits his Michael Kelly".

Jonathan C. Movroydis at The New Nixon Blog makes a great observation about the state of the legacy media:

Consistently, The Ancien Régime of news media has been a target of the blogosphere for journalistic faux pas, to which the archetypal MSMer retorts: “you guys comment on the news we report on.”

As a student blogger who reports on the problem of radical jihad on my college campus, I am constantly amused on how behind the curve the main stream media really is. Rare are the Upton Sinclairs, the Edward Murrows, and even the Bob Woodwards who are able to discern from the competing narratives of their sources and excite their readers with real nitty gritty investigative journalism.

But perhaps more amusing was reading that CBS is considering using CNN for its clandestine reporting. John Hinderaker of Powerline points out the startling fact that CBS will fire its own reporters to keep the likes of erratic commentator Katie Couric despite increased demands for raw stories and hard news by the viewing public.

Unless Katie is writing her own in the field news segments, the idea that she's a "journalist" is of course silly--she's a newsreader, as the British correctly use the term, who is paid to add her inflections to copy written by a large staff of writers and producers (hey, somebody should make a video that references this sort of thing!), just as an actor is hired by a film company to put his or her inflections on dialogue written by others. And there's nothing wrong with that--except that in the past, America got a little crazy in how it lionized its more stentorian newsreaders of the past.

CBS questions the accuracy of the recent Times article--and who doesn't these days at Walter Duranty and Jayson Blair's favorite newspaper of "record"?. But if CBS actually did go ahead and outsource its actual reporting and news gathering operations to CNN, will this make Katie America's highest paid video blogger--albeit using a much more sclerotic legacy medium, rather than YouTube or Brightcove?

Or is she that already?

(Via Uncorrelated.)

About a week ago, I spotted an interesting contrast in the widely disparate tone of how two similar news stories were covered by their local TV stations:

Note the extremely positive style in which the local TV news station in Blue State generally "anti-War" Bobos In Paradise Santa Rosa, California reported the story of an elderly Army vet who defended himself against a robbery attempt. Then compare it how one now infamous ex-reporter in the generally more conservative area of Dallas reported the story of another elderly Army vet who defended himself against multiple robbery attempts.

The contrasting styles indicate, among other things, the folly of the remaining pockets of the media who claim to be "objective", unbiased, and generally above the fray. The above videos also illustrate that tone, language and context are all key parts of crafting the news, whether it's for print, TV or radio, as well consideration of how the news will be received by the local audience. (Hence the additional outrage over former Dallas-area journalist Rebecca Aguilar's badgering tone.) And all of those elements are based on the skill and life experiences of the producer, editor and/or reporter, who brings together the writing, interviewing, and soundbites, whether they're printed quotes or A/V clips.

That's the subject of our latest Silicon Graffiti video podcast, complete with a quote from Glenn Reynolds, and a cameo appearance by Liz Stephans and Scott Baker of Breitbart.TV, via an excerpt from this clip.

(More video blogging found here, incidentally.)

Late Update 1/15/09: After a large initial flurry of traffic and then months of quiet but study activity, this video had quite a checkered history in the waning months of 2008. You can read about the efforts to banish it from YouTube, here.

Tim Blair's aphorism defines "the ongoing process by which the world's multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force."

In the Jurassic world of the dinosaur media, that definition exquisitely summarizes the proposal by CBS to outsource its news gathering operation to CNN, thus bringing together the news division which brought you the biggest trainwreck moment of 2004 (not to mention 1968!) with the news division that, prior to 2003, brought you long-running coverage of Iraq personally approved by Saddam Hussein and his apparatchiks.

(And note the story was broken by the New York Times, which isn't in the best of health in its dotage, either.)

Jacob Sullum writes that "There are two kinds of people in the world":

The kind who think it's perfectly reasonable to strip-search a 13-year-old girl suspected of bringing ibuprofen to school, and the kind who think those people should be kept as far away from children as possible. The first group includes officials at Safford Middle School in Safford, Arizona, who in 2003 forced eighth-grader Savana Redding to prove she was not concealing Advil in her crotch or cleavage.

Add the zero-intelligence tolerance insanity of the crotch inspector to school junk food patrols and the asthma Nazi, which the late Cathy Seipp reported on back in 2002.

Jonathan Leake, the science editor of the Times of London writes that the Internet "could soon be made obsolete":

The internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.

At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.

The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.

David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.

I'd be happy--well, temporarily at least--with this speed Internet, which I wrote extensively about in 2000 through 2002 for various publications, let alone what the Times is describing.

But they can't fool me. When Glasgow University's Prof. Britton says, "future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine", it's all just hegemonic code for digital-era sweatshops without end, as the other Times across the pond notes.

(Geez, hyperbole much, boys? Incidentally, the superfast Internet article was found via the pieceworkers slaving away inside the digital-era sweatshop housed on Maggie's Farm.)

Update: Ed Morrissey shouts from the hilltops, "Finally — I belong to a victim class!"

Preach it, Brother Ed, preach it! Bloggers of the world unite--you have nothing to lose but your Sitemeter stats!

Jim Geraghty wonders how the far left reached the point where Air America hostess Randi Rhodes could call a former first lady, sitting US senator and first viable female presidential candidate "a f***ing whore" (train wreck video here, for the curious):

In and of itself, it’s shocking, but it’s otherworldly when we think about what Hillary Clinton has meant to liberals for most of the past sixteen years.

Maybe Bill Richardson owes James Carville money, because that would help explain the bitter jihad the former Clinton strategist seems to be on, so relentlessly decrying the New Mexico Governor as “Judas” that Richardson stopped doing media appearances. It didn’t take much for Obama-backing General McPeak to declare Bill Clinton the equivalent of Joe McCarthy. And if you’ve read any Hillary vs. Obama thread on a liberal blog lately, you know that there have been friendlier back-and-forth exchanges in snakepits.

There’s something vaguely reassuring about all this, from the view of sitting on the right. It reveals to conservatives that the nastiness exhibited in our earlier disagreements with these folks was never personal; these people are clearly nasty to anyone who disagrees with them. Geraldine Ferraro’s long service to the Democratic party means nothing to many Obama backers; she’s a racist, “David Duke in drag,” as Rhodes put it. I’m sure Senator Patrick Leahy thought his decades of work on the left side of the aisle had bought him some street cred from feminists, but no, he was called sexist when he called on Hillary to leave the race.

Hillary gets called a "monster" by Obama's surrogates; Hillary's surrogates wonder out loud if Obama ever sold drugs. Today Clinton surrogate Ed Rendell speculates that Americans know only half the story of Barack Obama. Day in, day out, in this race it continues.

Is there nastiness on the right? Sure. But it’s hard to imagine somebody being the equivalent hero to the right the way Hillary was a hero to the left, so suddenly and severely pitched overboard – no, that’s not it, denounced and demonized — when somebody else came along.

Last night I said to Cam, "I like our base." The right had a vocal, mostly policy-oriented fight earlier this year, and tempers did flare. But bit by bit, week by week, those on the right are either making their peace with McCain. And in some cases, some righties aren't; but you rarely if ever hear them calling McCain a "[badword]ing whore" on the airwaves. By and large, a sense of decency and respect permeates conversations on this side of the aisle. There are exceptions, obviously, but the GOP race (thankfully) never turned into this bile-strewn mess.

As Jim writes, the GOP "may be the stupid party, but they're also the decent party." His comments remind me of the contrast in tone that Steven Den Beste highlighted immediately after the 2006 midterms:

2000, Democrats: "We wuz robbed!"
2002, Democrats: "We wuz robbed again!"
2004, Democrats: "We wuz robbed yet again!"
2006, Republicans: "Bummer. Oh, well, we'll do better next time."

Mark Steyn writes:

Jeepers, will all business during the Clinton Administration be transacted at 3 AM? Is it some union-negotiated flex-time deal? “Home foreclosures mounting”? We’d better wake the President.

As Jim Geraghty, or possibly someone else at NRO recently noted, the ideal response from a prospective President McCain would be to seriously ream anyone on his staff who wakes him at 3:00 AM over a domestic financial "crisis"--there's a reason why they call the time when the sun is visible "bankers' hours". (The acceptable alternative response would be, "Call Kudlow, dammit!", but that's a whole 'nother story.)

But hey, like I said, it's always 3:00 AM somewhere...

Btsigblog has a "Credit for the Army chopper pilots":

Outstanding job by a great young pilot from Pennsylvania! Can't add anything else to this... the picture is worth 10,000 words! If you don't think our military pilots earn their pay, you need to take a look at this picture. This photo was taken by a soldier in Afghanistan of a helo rescue mission. The pilot is a PA National Guard guy who flies EMS choppers in civilian life. Now how many people on the planet you reckon could set the ass end of a chopper down on the roof top of a shack, on a steep mountain cliff, and hold it there while soldiers load wounded men in the rear. If this does not impress you... nothing ever will.

God Bless our military.

Indeed. But don't miss the accompanying photo.

Charleton Heston has passed away at age 84; Matt Drudge links to a statement issued by his family:

To his loving friends, colleagues and fans, we appreciate your heartfelt prayers and support. Charlton Heston was seen by the world as larger than life. He was known for his chiseled jaw, broad shoulders and resonating voice, and, of course, for the roles he played. Indeed, he committed himself to every role with passion, and pursued every cause with unmatched enthusiasm and integrity.

We knew him as an adoring husband, a kind and devoted father, and a gentle grandfather, with an infectious sense of humor. He served these far greater roles with tremendous faith, courage and dignity. He loved deeply, and he was deeply loved.

No one could ask for a fuller life than his. No man could have given more to his family, to his profession, and to his country. In his own words, "I have lived such a wonderful life! I've lived enough for two people."

Far more than that.

More at Libertas.

In another chapter from the lost history of the 1930s, the American Spectator's Daniel J. Flynn looks at the strange legacy of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade:

Who says San Francisco doesn't honor veterans?

Last weekend, the city, which voted in 2005 to ban military recruiters from public high schools and colleges, unveiled a memorial to fighting men and women in uniform. The uniforms they donned, however, were not those familiar to American soldiers, sailors, airmen, or Marines.

The city honored American Communists and their fellow travelers who fought in the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s. The $400,000 monument, donated from private funds but hosted on public land, extends 40-feet long and eight feet high.

Media accounts of the tribute uniformly noted that members of what has become known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade fought against Francisco Franco. But those reports were conspicuously silent about the man they fought for: Joseph Stalin. Similarly absent was the word "Communist," a party with which roughly eighty percent of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade were officially affiliated.

The few surviving veterans are quick to point out that they fought fascists, but "fascist" in the Communist lexicon of the 1930s was applied to everyone from Franklin Roosevelt to Leon Trotsky to Francisco Franco. Stalin saw enemies everywhere, so many American members of the International Brigades in Spain partook in, and others fell victim to, purges of suspected deviationists among the "republican" armies.

It's also worth looking back and asking, what if they had won?

(Via Eyeblast.tv)

In the Weekly Standard, Sonny Bunch writes that Martin Scorsese's Shine A Light, his Rolling Stones concert movie, is no Last Waltz. Cold comfort for those of us who also thought the latter was more than a little overrated--or to be more charitable, hasn't been well served by the passage of time.

(Speaking of which, don't miss Bunch calling the modern sixty-something Stones "leather Muppets"! And for a great Rolling Stones concert movie, you can't go wrong with the classics.)

Charles Krauthammer writes that the battle on the left to be presidential nominee boils down to "The Fabulist Vs. the Saint":

As National Review's Byron York has pointed out, when Clinton supporter Lanny Davis said on CNN that it is "legitimate" for her to have remarked "that she personally would not put up with somebody who says that 9/11 are chickens who come home to roost" or the kind of "generic comments (Wright) made about white America," Anderson Cooper, the show's host and alleged moderator, interjected that since "we all know what the (Wright) comments were," he found it "amazing" and "funny" that Davis should "feel the need to repeat them over and over again."

Davis protested, "It's appropriate." Time magazine's Joe Klein promptly smacked Davis down with "Lanny, Lanny, you're spreading the -- you're spreading the poison right now," and then suggested that an "honorable person" would "stay away from this stuff."

Amazing. We've gone beyond moral equivalence to moral inversion. It is now dishonorable to even make note of Wright's bigotry and ask how any man -- let alone a man on the threshold of the presidency -- could associate himself for 20 years with the purveyor of such hate.

Watching such a display, you get a full appreciation of Hillary's challenge. The mainstream media are back in the tank. The "Saturday Night Live" skits parodying media obsequiousness toward Obama, followed closely by the revelation of the Wright tapes, temporarily forced the media to subject Obama to normal scrutiny. But after the "speech" and Tuzla, they have reverted to form as protectors of the myth of Obama.

The hagiographic treatment of a newly emerged Democratic leader is a recurring theme in American journalism. At the dawning of the age of Clinton 15 years ago, the cover of The New York Times Magazine featured a woman dressed entirely in white. The heading read: "Hillary Rodham Clinton and the Politics of Virtue."

Inside, under the title "Saint Hillary," the late Michael Kelly wrote a brilliantly detached, coolly ironic deconstruction of his celestial subject. Saint Obama awaits his Michael Kelly.

Krauthammer writes that the media are "back in the tank." But when are they not? The MSM is the same MSM it's been for at least the last 50 years, if not even longer. It's just a matter of which Democrat they've put their money on.

Tim Graham writes, "the folks at Barack Obama's church are telling the supposedly anti-Obama, anti-Jeremiah Wright news media to back off", attempting to connect Wright with Martin Luther King:

AP reporter Christopher Wills added that Otis Moss, Wright's replacement at Trinity, is still treating Wright as a prophet straight out of the Old Testament, even if the words he used sounded more like annoying 20th century socialist boilerplate:

The Rev. Otis Moss III, who is replacing Wright when he retires June 1, defended Wright's comments.

"One of the roles of the prophets: Sometimes you offend. You afflict the comfortable but comfort the afflicted," Moss said.

Is Wright a fiery, Marxist, racist preacher, or merely a fiery, Marxist, racist journalist?

And as far as attempting to tie Wright to MLK, Juan Williams is having none of it: "What would Jesus do? There is no question he would have left that church."

It’s been said before that we live in an age of irony, and irreverence is king", Brent Bozell writes, adding that Washington Post writer Linton Weeks recently coined "the irresistible term 'Snark Ages' to characterize it":

Even today, the counter-culturalists, now aging academics holed up in university English departments, see sentiment as an enemy. Weeks cited Temple’s Joan Mellen, who demeaned sentiment as “friend to the status quo, and to passivity. A formidable enemy, of moral no less than of artistic integrity, in art as in life, in these beleaguered times it is best quickly identified, and then scrupulously avoided.”

Hollywood’s most influential cultural commissars also live by this code. They would claim to be the champions of authenticity, but in their endless attempts to persuade us through their “art,” they often suggest that nothing is authentic on its face, that no one can be trusted and everyone deep down is a phony, living a lie. I’m not talking merely about the manufacturers of movies and television shows and music, but about the critics who constantly proclaim for the whole country what is the best in art, and the award-show managers that now slavishly follow what the critics pronounce.

Insincerity is also rampant in Manhattan, in national magazine publishing. There is no greater irony than Kurt Andersen, one of the founders of a Snark Ages trendsetter, Spy magazine, to proclaim to Weeks that “If someone were to look at 2008 culture from 1963, I suppose it would look strangely unsentimental.” How priceless. Watch as the polluter looks out on his black oil spill of mockery and decides it isn’t all good.

Weeks turned to experts who suggested that sentiment is strangled in our private lives as well. Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at the University of California, theorized that the culture "has lost the capacity to be nice, to appreciate, to be modest, and even to be reverential -- all relatives of the appreciation family of emotions." Keltner added the theory that we spend more and more time with strangers than family and old friends, people who spur us to occasions he called “deep niceness.”

But Weeks protested that people are still sentimental in their private lives, that they still say “I love you” to each other, they still send flowers and greeting cards, they still cry at funerals and at tear-jerker movies. Of course they do. We have not lost the ability to love and revere and be sincere. There are still songs and shows that reflect that feeling. They’re just dismissed as hopelessly cheesy and square.

Throughout our lives, we privately resist the Snark Ages peer pressure of popular culture. Even today’s young people can learn to reject it. Call it rebelling against the rebellion. Who’s the counter-culture now?

Or as Mona Charen wrote a few years ago:

But we can't change the channel, because this isn't just a television invention. This is our culture. This free-for-all, libertine, conscienceless Maypole dance is what we've created from once-strong roots of Puritan rectitude. A nation once lampooned for its innocence now wallows in smut of every kind.

Were it not for the new counterculture — the millions of families attempting to raise moral and idealistic kids despite the deluge of decadence — I would be in doubt about our future.

Exactly.

Writing at Pajamas HQ, Kathy Shaidle directs her Five Feet Of Fury towards the Canadian Human Rights Commission:

Next time someone threatens to “move to Canada” over real or imagined Patriot Act overreach, present him with this scenario:

Having settled into his new Ottawa digs, your expatriate pal is reading his morning paper when a familiar name leaps off the newsprint: his own.

Turns out Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) investigators were trolling your friend’s neighborhood for unprotected wireless internet connections, and leeched onto his.

Why? So they could post racist comments under assumed names on “neo-Nazi hate sites,” then charge the site’s owners with … publishing hate speech.

That’s how your innocent friend’s name and address got read aloud — then hastily broadcast by Blackberrying bloggers and journalists — in open court, as evidence in one of the CHRC’s most widely publicized cases.

So now your left-wing expatriate friend is widely suspected of being either a neo-Nazi racist or part of a secret government entrapment scheme.

His phone starts ringing. It won’t stop for quite some time.

Kind of a buzzkill after all those (highly exaggerated) reports about “gay marriage” and “legalized pot” up here in the Great White North, eh?

Kathy adds, "Pat Buchanan’s comical nickname for my country, 'Soviet Canuckistan,' is proving more accurate than he ever imagined."

Like I said in my first Silicon Graffiti video this year, think of it as totalitarianism with a smiley face.

In the Grauniad, Oliver Stone asks, "How did Bush go from being an alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the world?"

I don't know--how does anyone recover from a substance abuse problem and successfully rebuild his career in a brutally competitive industry?

STONE: I think drugs are very much a part of my generation's experience. We were not only the Cold War generation, we were the drug generation, And marijuana, with its origins in the Sixties, was good. It was a force for good. As was acid. It transformed consciousness. And in Vietnam, it certainly kept us sane.

PLAYBOY: What was your drug use like?

STONE: After the war, I took it to excess. I was using as much LSD as anybody. Even slipped it into my dad's drink once. What I did turned bad in the sense that it got heavier. My usage became heavier, but not for a purpose. It became an indulgence.

PLAYBOY: How much and what were you using?

STONE: Well, I started more acid, and grass, I suppose, in the beginning. And then I touched on some other things here and there.

PLAYBOY: Heroin? Cocaine?

STONE: Cocaine, certainly. But that was in the late Seventies. Cocaine is what took me to the edge. I finally realized that coke had beaten me and I hadn't beaten it. So in 1981, 1 went cold turkey on everything. Except an occasional drink here or there, or an occasional, you know, thing, but basically cold turkey. I moved to Paris that year and wrote Scarface, which was a farewell to cocaine.

PLAYBOY: Scarface became a cult hit. Had you quit using cocaine before or after you wrote it? .

STONE: I wrote it totally straight. But I researched it stoned, because I had to research it in South America, in various spots where I had to do it in order to talk with these people.

PLAYBOY: Before you quit, how deeply were you into it?

STONE: I would say it was an everyday thing. Hollywood in the late Seventies was-there was a kind of cocaine craze. And it lasted until later in the Eighties.

But assuming that Stone's movie hits theaters before November, it might serve as a key teachable moment for the left. It could reinforce the lesson they've been so gently trying to teach voters these past eight years, so that they won't elect another president this fall who both didn't serve in Vietnam, and who has admitted a youthful dalliance with not just alcohol, but other controlled substances as well, as ABC's Jake Tapper wrote last year:

In his 1996 memoir, "Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance," Obama wrote candidly about his high school-era drug use: "Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though."

And note that Obama may still continue to ingest what most on the left consider the most dangerous, evil, vile drug on the planet, as Tapper noted yesterday.

(HT: LGF)

Update: Related thoughts from BeldarBlog:

Recklessness is a quality that Americans voters should and do try to weed out of their presidential candidates, if you'll excuse that pun.

Even in the nanny-state America that your party is trying to move us toward, Senator, in which cigarette smoking will eventually become a criminal offense — anywhere and everywhere, even by consenting and well-informed adults who are heavily taxed for the privilege — the Nixon Rule will still prevail: It's not the crime, it's the cover-up that brings down most politicians.

Found via Glenn Reynolds, who quips, "Call it coffin-nailgate."

Heh, indeed.^TM

Last week, when I began assembling the B-roll footage and still photos for Wednesday's Philip Johnson video, I had a pretty good handle on what was readily available on the 'Net (and had ready access to any still photos I'd need from my own collection of books on modern architecture, if they weren't already online). Last July, I linked to a video containing shots of the Glass House, and I knew that clips of Charlie Rose interviewing Johnson were online. But stumbling across this YouTube clip was quite a moment of serendipity:

Sontag's arch Beat Poet-style patter, overdubbed as she's filmed driving through Manhattan, is a scream. But what a fox she was in the early 1960s, in her New Frontier Jackie Kennedy togs and hairstyle. She was right around 30 at the time; her much harsher looking appearance a decade or so later is a reminder of this John Derbyshire truism regarding how women of the far left often age.

Sontag's 1975 essay, "Fascinating Fascism", was a necessary attack on Leni Riefenstahl's attempt to rehabilitate her image 30 years after the defeat of Nazi Germany. But did Sontag know, when she was standing next to Johnson on top of the world in his Seagram Building offices, that she was standing next to someone who would have been thrilled to be another Albert Speer?

Charles Crawford comes to the Blogosphere with a pretty amazing C.V.; his bio notes that he recently retired from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office "after nearly three decades in the UK's Diplomatic Service, most of it spent serving in or dealing with communist and post-communist Europe." And in a recent post, he spots the BBC putting all of the pieces together in its "coverage" of Zimbabwe:

According to the BBC it has been 'plagued' (origin of said plagues not described) by the world's highest inflation, as well as acute food and fuel shortages.

Newsflash: These phenomena are not caused by 'plagues'.

They are caused both in general and in Zimbabwe's case in particular by truly stunning and sustained Bad Government.

The BBC's use of the plague metaphor in this context somehow craftily shifts the responsibility for Zimbabwe's calamitous plight on to ... no-one?

Sounds like the Beeb's "Powerfully Corrosive Internal Culture" hard at obfuscatory work, yet again.

Ace spots this amusing Reuters item:

If you are male and a Led Zeppelin fan, chances are you may be leaning toward voting Republican in the U.S. presidential election, according to a survey of rock radio fans released on Wednesday.

Gosh, never saw that one coming!

Midway through a routine 1942 programmer shot on the backlot of Warner Brothers and certain to be immeasurably improved forthwith with that certain Touch Of Esther, Humphrey Bogart bitterly sighs, "I bet they're asleep in New York. I'd bet they're asleep all over America." Well, they've certainly been asleep in Hollywood since 9/11/01. As I wrote a while back, Hollywood essentially wrote this decade off, creatively. And the repercussions for such narcolepsy are mounting.

First up, Ryan Vlastelica of Market Hubs asks, "Are curtains coming down on movie theaters?"

Hollywood is able, at the end of most Decembers, to proclaim the previous year its most successful ever. While true, at least on the surface, it masks a long-term problem: People just aren’t going to movies much anymore.

Movie attendance levels occasionally rise from the previous year, but the general trend has been downward. The biggest movie-going year was way back in 1946, when enough tickets were sold for an astonishing 90 million people to go every week. Then television came in and stole the theater’s audience, followed by competition in the form of video games, computers and a general lessening of audience amazement. Total 2007 attendance was down 8% from the year earlier, and the current year’s box office looks unlikely to top last year.

Which is why Shawn Levy's "Film Criticism Death Watch" post on the Oregonian's blog shouldn't be at all surprising. Of course, when Levy writes, "the idea of fewer platforms for varied voices depresses me", he's discounting the notion that, thanks to the Blogosphere, film criticism is actually infinitely more democratic than ever, even as he's typing his thoughts into his newspaper's blog.

He's right that there probably won't be many more Pauline Kaels, individual critics whom Hollywood actually loses sleep over (or buy off with a meaningless back-office studio gig as Warren Beatty actually did to quiet Kael), but for those who want to get some outside assistance into the decision as to whether or not to plunk down $30 to $40 for tickets and concessions for a night at the movies, there are plenty of opinions available.

Some of which actually vary from the Official, Accepted Hollywood Party Line, as hard as that is to imagine.

Geez, haven't any of these people ever been in a Hooters before?

(Via Breitbart.com)

But what's a dazzling urbanite like you doing in a rustic setting like this?

The latest podcast edition of PJM Political on XM Satellite Radio is now online:

As host Bill Bradley notes, John McCain+David Letterman=Comedy Gold! Plus:

• David Harsanyi on The McCain/Lieberman connection: As Harsanyi writes in his Denver Post column: Is McCain now a Lieberman Democrat? Or is Lieberman a McCain Republican? Or, is there any difference? And how do the two men fit into Harsanyi's Nanny State book?
• Begun the Wiki Wars Have! Matthew Sheffield of Newsbusters notes that the entries for the three remaining presidential candidates inside the online anarchopedia are ground Zero in hardscrabble text warfare.

• Roger Kimball of Pajamas and the New Criterion on Tariq Ali's silly nostalgie de la sixties.
• Produced by Ed Driscoll.

Only a true satiric master can beat the nigh-impossible odds that Muggeridge's Law imposes, especially when one of the participants is the nutty grandparent in cable television's attic. (Alongside Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite, Helen Thomas, Phil Donahue, and...hmmm: Whom The Gods Destroy, they first build lionizing PBS specials around.)

Add nutty Ted's latest mutterings to this one from a quarter of century ago, and it's yet another example of the Not So Final Countdown.

(Which is still probably better than this Final Countdown!)

Arlen Specter talks tough to Senate Democrats.

One of these two people is 96 years old. Or maybe both...

Further proof of Pajamas' global influence: Madonna wants to remake Casablanca, but set in Iraq. I told Roger no good could come of this, but would he listen? Nooooooo.....

Besides, another trashy wanna-be femme fatale (who's about as fatale as an after-dinner mint, as Michael York said in Cabaret) already beat her to the punch, though sadly not in the literal caged Celebrity Deathmatch sense that the phrase conjures up.

But of course, the definitive modern remake of Casablanca has already been done--and done right. How can Esther improve upon David Soul as Rick and Scatman Crothers as Sam?

By the time of his death in 2005 at the venerable age of 98, Philip Johnson was arguably America's best known architect, having designed his famed "Glass House" in 1949, and worked with Mies van der Rohe on Mies's Seagram Building a few years later. The former was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1997; the latter dubbed "Building of the Millennium" by the New York Times.

But Johnson's puckish demeanor in his later years, which earned him decades of good cheer from fellow Manhattan elites, hid a dark journey through the liberal fascist politics of the 1930s, which culminated in his cheering on the Nazis as they marched through Poland in 1939. "We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed. It was a stirring spectacle", he would write to a friend at the time.

At the start of the 1930s, Johnson was an admirer of the socialist-leaning architects of Germany's Bauhaus, as he founded the newly born Museum of Modern Art's architectural department, and helped put modern architecture on the map in the US. Apparently after witnessing a Hitler rally in Potsdam in 1933, Johnson was immediately attracted to the Nazis. That moment sent Johnson on a seemingly strange journey: shortly thereafter, he would leave MoMA to seek employment with first Huey Long and then Father Coughlin, before ultimately winding up cheering the Nazis on at the start of WWII.

During that same period though, while Johnson openly admired the Nazis, he befriended the last director of the Bauhaus, Mies van der Rohe, even as the Nazis were shuttering the design school's doors. Returning to MoMA in the 1950s and establishing himself, via his famed Glass House, as a known architect in his own right, as Hilton Kramer noted in the mid-1990s, and Anne Applebaum shortly after Johnson's death, Johnson did a near-thorough job of tossing his radical past down the memory hole. At the least, most of his fellow Manhattan elites didn't lose too much sleep over it.

And yet, comparing Johnson's past with the lost history of the 1930s described in Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, in retrospect Johnson comes across as a sort of dark version of Woody Allen's Zelig character, appearing alongside several of the fascist left's most important figures in both the US and Europe during the Depression.

(More video blogging found here, incidentally.)

Is David Mamet a canary in the coal mine for the 2008 election? That's what Daniel Henninger posits. As the above title implies, Henninger also notes that while Mamet's coming out party in the Village Voice has been widely noted in Europe, America's old media have been maintaining radio silence--at least as of when Henninger shot this segment.

(Incidentally, welcome to our 13,000th blog post as we enter into our sixth year in the land of pixels and snark, according to my blog software.)

For innumerable reasons, be glad you're not Jim McDermott (D-Baghdad) these days.

Or at least I don't think it is, given Muggeridge's Law and everything, and the fact that Time did a similar story almost concurrently: "Anti-Emo Riots Break Out Across Mexico."

I bet this news makes Emo Girl even extra super sad. But then, what doesn't?

More seriously, there's an interesting Death of the Grown-Ups slant on this story: compare how soberly Time magazine covers a story like this with how its fellow newsweekly kept a safe healthy distance when reporting on another youth phenomenon over 40 years ago. That's something I touched upon regarding their coverage of another faddish story, here.

Let's see: original Depression: Dow Jones Industrial Average bottoms out at 40 as huge unemployed swatches of the country live in Dickensian hardship. Men in breadlines wear suits and ties, largely because they have no other clothes.

The 21st century New American Depression that England's Independent has stumbled across? The Dow closed today at 12,654.36, unemployment is at 4.8 percent, and Nike's stock is doing quite nicely as the firm makes a comfortable profit selling $150 basketball shoes to parents and their kids across the country who have the disposable income to afford them.

But why is a British newspaper trying to muscle in on territory that's traditionally exclusive terrain for American journalists during an election year? Shouldn't they be investigating a protracted economic malaise that's far closer to home?

Andy Bowers of Slate believes he has found "America's Stupidest Bike Lane"; my much more curmudgeonly immediate impression is that it's a multiple-choice question with thousand upon thousands of correct answers.

Speaking of only human, Charlton Heston larger than life on the big screen, is apparently in bad shape these days back in the real world.

Demonized by the left since the early-to-mid 1980s, it will be interesting to see if there's a career reappraisal when he sadly passes away.

OK, so President Bush is an evil genius who deliberately plunged three planes into giant office buildings (oh wait, the Pentagon crash never actually happened, right?), but he brilliantly covers his tracks by appearing to be stupid enough to get conned into photo ops that wouldn't pass muster in a Poli-Sci 101 class?

Just checking.

(So what are you saying?--Ed That he's human, neither a blithering moron, nor an Ian Fleming-ish super-genius. All national politicians are photographed so much during their careers that occasional bad photos are simply part of the gig.)

UPI reports, "More die because helmet laws repealed":

U.S. motorcyclist fatality rates have increased in states that repealed their universal helmet laws in the past decade, researchers said.

The nanny state doesn't understand that freedom is also the freedom to potentially stupid things. Or as P.J. O'Rourke once said, "There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences."

I have no idea what the calendrical significance of the current date is, but wow, even Michelle Malkin's Website is going dark today...