Wesley Clark steps in it, Ed Morrissey writes:

After decades in the news business, Bob Schieffer may have thought he’d heard it all — until yesterday on Face the Nation, when he interviewed Wesley Clark. Clark came as a surrogate for the Barack Obama campaign and attacked John McCain’s military service, saying that he was “untested and untried”. After Schieffer pointed out that McCain commanded the largest naval air squadron, had honorably endured over five years of torture as a POW in Vietnam, and had been on the Senate Armed Services committee since Obama was in college, Schieffer asked how Clark could claim that McCain was “untested and untried”. Clark stunned him with this answer:

Jim Geraghty notes that Clark's slur is one of eight attacks on McCain's military service by surrogates of the Obama campaign:

Is anyone else sensing a sharper edge to Team McCain since Wes Clark became Democrat Number Seven and Rand Beers became Democrat Number Eight in speaking critically of John McCain's service in Vietnam?

"Mr. Beers' remarks are part of a pattern of Obama supporters attacking John McCain's military service, and a reminder of why it's what Sen. Obama, his supporters and his campaign actually do that matters most," McCain spokesman Brian Rogers tells ABC News. "Sen. Obama speaking out against these attacks isn't really relevant — either his supporters aren't hearing him or they don't believe his words."

It's really nice that Obama said today that "no one should ever devalue that service, especially for the sake of a political campaign." It's also meaningless if everyone else in the Democratic party ignores him. Barack Obama doesn't have total control of the actions and words of every surrogate, but after the eighth instance, without any major consequence beyond a spokesman saying that Obama "rejects" the surrogate's statement, it starts to look like a deliberate and cynical good cop/bad cop routine. Let's see the candidate himself calling out his supporters by name. Let's see some heads rolling — was Samantha Power's declaration that Hillary was a "monster" really that much worse? (Team McCain ditched Cunningham over using Obama's middle name.)

As Orrin Judd noted on Sunday, "The poor Democrats still think John Kerry lost because his service to his country was attacked, rather than his disservice."

We looked at a few of the previous attacks on McCain's service in a mid-May edition of Silicon Graffiti:

In a related development, John Hinderaker spots a pair of attempts to make these attacks seem bipartisan:

Politico--and still more the anonymous Yahoo News headline writer!--know that attacks on McCain's service by the Obama campaign and other Democrats are poisonous and likely to backfire. So they are trying to give the Democrats cover by creating the misleading impression that these disgusting smears are somehow bipartisan.

Read the rest, complete with a screen capture of Yahoo's headline.

There's an unintentionally hilarious juxtaposition about a minute and half into this Evening Magazine segment on hippies descending upon Vancouver in 1967, when the curator of the city's museum looks back on their arrival and says, "The late 1960s and '70s...That's when I think modern Vancouver was born."

The editor then immediately cuts to a shot of the museum's exhibition in psychedelia devoted to a movement that's the very antithesis of modernity:

It's impossible to discern for certain in these matters, but reading between the subtext and the symbolism, one comes away with the mildest of perceptions that James Lileks may have slightly enjoyed Wall-E.

As the above quoted headline of his Wall Street Journal op-ed suggests, John Bolton is none-too-pleased with President Bush's declaration that North Korea is no longer a state sponsor of terrorism:

Maskirovka – the Soviet dark art of denial, deception and disguise – is alive and well in Pyongyang, years after the Soviet Union disappeared. Unfortunately, the Bush administration appears not to have gotten the word.

With much fanfare and choreography, but little substance, the administration has accepted a North Korean "declaration" about its nuclear program that is narrowly limited, incomplete and almost certainly dishonest in material respects. In exchange, President Bush personally declared that North Korea is no longer a state sponsor of terrorism or an enemy of the United States. In a final flourish, North Korea has undertaken a reverse Potemkin Village act, destroying the antiquated cooling tower of the antiquated Yongbyon reactor. In the waning days of American presidencies, this theater is the stuff of legacy.

North Korea has consecutively broken every major agreement with the U.S. since the North's creation. The Bush administration provides no reason why this one will not be added to that long list except the audacity of hope. Where have we heard that recently? Barack Obama and John Kerry both announced support for the deal, and Mr. Obama said he intended to apply Bush's policy to other rogue states, thus confirming the early start of the Obama administration.

The Feb. 13, 2007, agreement states explicitly that North Korea was to provide "a complete declaration of all nuclear programs" within 60 days. This it manifestly did not do, either in timing or substance. The declaration, more than 14 months overdue, and which is not yet public, has long been forecast not to include information on weaponization, uranium enrichment, or proliferation activities such as cloning the Yongbyon reactor in Syria. Although the North provided less than it agreed 16 months ago, we compensated by giving up more than we agreed, which is typical of decades of U.S. negotiation with the North.

Read the whole thing.

P.J. Gladnick flashes back to 1968 and Apocalypse Then:

Today is the official publication date of The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment by Paul and Anne Ehrlich. The release of this book was timed to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the publication of Paul Ehrlich's once exceedingly popular "The Population Bomb" in 1968. If you expect to see much about either of these books in the mainstream media, you are in for a big disappointment. The MSM is avoiding the whole subject of Paul Ehrlich and his apocalyptic "The Population Bomb" like the plague nowadays. The reason is probably because it might draw embarrassing attention to the fact that apocalyptic visions, despite their popularity at one time such as the current global warming alarmism, are usually proven to be flat out wrong. Such was the case with Paul Ehrlich's "The Population Bomb" which the Intercollegiate Studies Institute ranked as one of the 50 Worst Books of the 20th century due to its many errors.

Gladnick quotes from a Brothers Judd review of Ehrlich's book that's also well worth your time.

It's yet another not-so-final countdown!

Charles Johnson has a video clip of, as he says, a typically bizarre piece of Iranian antisemitic propaganda, with the usual lunatic conspiracy theories run amok, and notes:

Good grief. The bizarre antisemitic propaganda being fed to the Iranian people would be funny in a dark way if it didn’t provoke such a sense of foreboding, of history repeating.

Capt. Jack Sparrow, Tom and Jerry, and the cast of Zionist poultry from Chicken Run could not be reached for comment.

Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters asks, "Can a publisher, editor, and owner of magazines be any more biased than proudly admitting on national television that he's contributed to Barack Obama's campaign?"

While you ponder, consider that on Sunday, the publisher and editor of Rolling Stone -- who just so happens to also own Men's Journal and Us Weekly -- told CNN's Howard Kurtz that he's given money to the presumptive Democrat presidential nominee.

In fact, Jann Wenner did so without batting an eye in an interview aired on "Reliable Sources".

Noel seems suprised, but given the far left worldview of Wenner, reflected in his flagship publication since its inception, who couldn't see that one coming? But I actually think Wenner's admission is a very positive one. As I've written before, I'd much rather journalists--and their publishers--come clean on their biases than fall back on the mid-20th century model of feigned objectivity. At least it allows consumers to make an informed decision rather than have to guess at the worldview of a media source.

The Washington Times posits that the model for Obama's hope and change is the nation right next door.

If his Trudeaupian vision for America comes to pass, can we expect a similar stifling of free speech as has inflicted Canada? Yes we can!

Ann Althouse quotes an interview with Uma Thurman's father, whom Ann notes is "a professor of Buddhist studies and is ordained as a Tibetan monk (though he is American)":

"As a Buddhist, how do you reconcile your pacifism with the roles your daughter Uma has played in films like Quentin Tarantino’s bloody 'Kill Bill'?"

A question for Robert Thurman. Answer:

Quentin is kind of obsessed, he’s a wild guy. But he is very brilliant. We trust that his motive is to show people the foolishness of violence rather than to glorify it. I hope that’s true.

Think it is?

Oh, absolutely: Tarantino’s movies illustrate their director's belief in the foolishness of violence in exactly the same way that JFK demonstrates Oliver Stone's faith in Occam's Razor to discern the truth and his hatred of the utter futility of conspiracy theories...

Spanning the globe to bring you the constant thrill of corrupt governmental grifters on multiple continents, "it's Elitist, Do-Nothing, Civic Parasite Day at Hot Air"--complete with video!

John Nolte, the artist formerly known as Dirty Harry, notes that at least one critic is taking offense at the word "homo" being used by Will Smith's eponymous character in the upcoming summer blockbuster Hancock.

Fortunately for the net worths of all concerned in the film's making, it's an American production protected by Hollywood's armies of lawyers--because that line really won't play up north!

(H/T: 5'F.)

"The obvious question: will they look at us in 70 years with the same mixture of amusement, indulgence, respect and outright hilarity? the obvious answer: that's how we regard webpages from 1997. Of course they will."

Back in December, I mentioned Alycia Lane, a Philadelphia-area TV news anchorbabe who was fired after an altercation with a Manhattan police woman:

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

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

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

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

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

While that story sounds trashy enough as it is, it only gets weirder from there:

CBS3 yesterday released anchorman Larry Mendte from his contract 31/2 weeks after FBI agents seized his home computer amid allegations that he illegally broke into former coanchor Alycia Lane's e-mail.

Sources said an internal investigation at CBS3 disclosed that software that secretly captures keystrokes - including passwords - had been installed on a station computer.

Mendte's firing came nearly six months after CBS3 fired Lane, following her arrest in New York for allegedly hitting a cop.

What began as a series of gossip-page scandals embarrassing Lane has morphed into a federal criminal investigation and a sexual-discrimination lawsuit.

The FBI is looking into whether Mendte illegally accessed Lane's e-mails and leaked information from them to the media, including an angry message from a wife upset that Lane sent bikini photos to her husband.

Six months ago, when Lane was fired, Mendte represented a strong public face for the station. But on Thursday, Lane filed a lawsuit in which she said Mendte worked to discredit her behind the scenes and that CBS3 defamed her as she was fired from her $800,000-a-year job.

Now, Mendte, who had about a year left on his contract, has been fired from his $700,000-a-year job.

Mendte's lawyer, Michael Schwartz, said Mendte was notified of the station's decision before it was made public. Schwartz declined to talk about the investigation or specifics about Mendte's career, except to say: "We continue to work with the federal authorities and expect a prompt resolution of this matter. I fully expect that Larry will resume his broadcasting career."

CBS3 said the claims in Lane's suit had no merit.

As of yesterday, Mendte, 51, had not been charged with any crime.

It is illegal under federal law to read another person's e-mails without permission. However, people charged with such a crime are rarely sentenced to prison, unless the crime includes significant economic or physical harm.

The Mendte case broke publicly late last month, when FBI agents armed with a search warrant arrived at the Chestnut Hill home he shares with his wife, Fox29 anchor Dawn Stensland. Mendte went to work the next day, but left abruptly.

Stensland is not suspected of any wrongdoing, sources said.

In a statement read during the 6 p.m. news yesterday, CBS3 anchor Susan Barnett said that Mendte was "released" effective immediately and that he was under investigation by the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Patty Hartman, spokeswoman for U.S. Attorney Patrick L. Meehan, said she could neither confirm nor deny the existence of a Mendte investigation.

Mendte's image and bio were removed yesterday from the station's Web site, which also carried a brief statement about his termination.

The station said the decision to let Mendte go was based on an independent investigation conducted by CBS.

You stay classy, big media!

(Hat tip: My mom, one of the great connoisseurs of Philadelphia television news, who told Nina and I that Mendte was fired "after he was caught going into someone else's Internet!" Hey, everyone's entitled to their own private series of tubes...)

Now that they have Jon Stewart's official permission to make sport of The Man Who Would Be King, readers of NRO's Media Blog have some fun captioning this week's messianic Obama photo on the cover of Rolling Stone.

Click here for some earlier thoughts on Obama And The Age Of Outrageous Credulity.

Ezra Levant writes, "The Canadian Human Rights Commission, like any petty tyranny, has a strong instinct for survival":

As I predicted last week on the Michael Coren Show, that instinct would cause them to drop the complaint against Mark Steyn and Maclean's. And so they did.

With an RCMP investigation, a Privacy Commission investigation and a pending Parliamentary investigation, they're already fighting a multi-front P.R. war, and losing badly. Not a day goes by when the CHRC isn't pummelled in the media. Holding a show trial of Maclean's and Steyn, like the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal did earlier this month, would be writing their own political death sentence.

So they blinked. Against everything in their DNA, they let Maclean's go. That's the first smart thing they've done; because the sooner they can get the public scrutiny to go away, the sooner they can go about prosecuting their less well-heeled targets, people who can't afford Canada's best lawyers and command the attention and affection of the country's literati.

While this is a victory of a sorts, as David Warren wrote last December, the process itself is a form of punishment:

For more than twenty years, in this column and elsewhere, I have been writing against the human rights commissions, which have quasi-legal powers that should be offensive to the citizens of any free country. They are kangaroo courts, in which the defendant's right to due process is withdrawn. They reach judgements on the basis of no fixed law. Moreover, “the process is the punishment” in these star chambers -- for simply by agreeing to hear a case, they tie up the defendant in bureaucracy and paperwork, and bleed him for the cost of lawyers, while the person who brings the complaint, however frivolous, stands to lose nothing.

And if you haven't heard it yet, click here for my recent XM interview with Jonah Goldberg and Kathy Shaidle on the topic.

Update: "Isn't it funny how we're having more fun than the asshats trying to **** with us?"

Pixar's new Wall-E certainly looked incredible in its trailer, but it left Kyle Smith with quite a sour aftertaste:

A more advanced flying probe-bot sent to Earth for reasons unknown has feminine curves and lovely blue eyes that leave WALL-E smitten, though except for her habit of laser-zapping any suspicious object she could be one of those white bullet-shaped trash canisters you’d see at a snack bar.

When she and WALL-E start to beep sweet nothings at each other, she has a higher-pitched tone than he does and says her name is Eva, so WALL-E is confirmed to be a heterobot. The two of them wind up at a space station that houses the remnants of the human race. At this point the film, previously dingy and dark, goes matte black.

The earthlings — or maybe Americans, as none of them have any other kind of accent — are brain-dead blobs perpetually stuffed to the gills with entertainment. They never leave their spotless flying barcaloungers — and never could, since their bones have shrunk to useless twigs inside their Shrek-like masses. They float through their troglodyte lives as unquestioning subjects of the master corporation (the same one that ruined the Earth) that houses them, distracts them and feeds them. All foods are made to be sucked down like milkshakes for maximum convenience.

It’s hard to see how a Disney-certified happy ending can result from this, and the answer is it really can’t. This is perhaps the most cynical and darkest big-budget Disney film ever, and an artistic gamble on the scale of Fantasia, which initially flopped despite critical acclaim. Pixar is now acting like Disney’s senior partner. Perhaps never before has any corporation spent so much money on insulting its customers — WALL-E is expected to be the year’s most heavily promoted film.

The meatball humans in WALL-E are like customers passively being served up a fake existence at the Magic Kingdom (which readily provides wheelchairs for not merely the afflicted but also the obese and the simply lazy), snorfling up the latest wows in an entirely artificial setting where every beverage and hotel room brings profits to the same corporation. And Disney paved over a few thousand acres of Florida wetlands to build Walt Disney World in the first place.

How paying customers will react to being told they’re porky slobs, or are headed in that direction (WALL-E is set 800 years in the future) will depend on how closely the people in the audience ignore the people on screen and concentrate on WALL-E and Eva.

Speaking of Disneyworld, Kyle's description of the schizophrenia of Disney's current cinematic product is of a piece their in-person entertainment. Here's James Lileks' description of his recent visit to Disney World's EPCOT Center:

Since we were here to do things we had not done before, we decided to take in “The Circle of Life,” a show about the interconnectedness of man, nature, and anthropomorphic cartoon characters. I hate to be a killjoy grump about these things, but oy, what a load of sanctimonious rubbish. The actual Circle of Life, as applied to animals, consists of birth, killing, consumption, excretion, copulation, and solitary death from small predators in the blood or nasty ones with big teeth. Sometimes there’s death by fire, for variety’s sake. It takes consciousness on the human level to extract the metaphorical weight in the whole Circle of Life thing, and while I think it’s wonderful to appreciate and marvel at the intricate ecosystems of the planet, and tread as lightly as necessary, wordless choirs voicing ecstatic vowels over footage of wildebeest herds does not really equal a High Mass for spiritual impact or depth. All of which I kept to myself, of course. But I felt like the village atheist.

The plot was hugely ironical: Timon and Roomba or whatever the warthog is named were building a resort in the jungle, and damning a stream to create a water feature. Simba showed up to demonstrate the error of their ways. The hilarity of any manifestation of the Disneyverse criticizing an artificial lake to build a resort goes without saying. And it did go without saying, of course. Simba said that Timon and Roomba or whatever were acting like another creature that did not behave in tune with nature, and that creature was . . . man.

BOO HISS, I guess. Jaysus, I tire of this. Big evil stupid man had done many stupid evil bad things, like pile abandoned cars in the river, dump chemicals into blue streams, and build factories that vomited great dark clouds into the sky. Like the People’s State Lead Paint and Licensed Mickey Merchandise Factory in Shanghai Province, perhaps? Simba gave us a lecture about materialism and how it hurt the earth – cue the shot of trees actually being chopped down, and I’m surprised the sap didn’t spurt like blood in a Peckinpah movie – and other horrors, like forests on fire because . . . well, because it was National Toss Glowing Coals Out the Car Window Month, I guess. I swear the footage all came from the mid-70s; it was grainy and cracked and the cars were all late-60s models. Because I’m pretty sure we’re not dumping cars into the rivers as a matter of course any more. You’re welcome to try to leave your car on the riverbank and see how that turns out for you.

As I mentioned to Tammy Bruce on Tuesday when discussing the envirohectoring subtext of The Happening, Hollywood likes to think of itself as a wild and crazy Sodom and Gomorrah on the Pacific--an endless orgy of hedonistic abandon. But like much of the left in general, lurking just behind its hipster artifice, modern Hollywood has a surprisingly puritanical, we know what's best for you streak. And just as last year's anti-war message was piledriven into the ground by Hollywood, there's lots more eco-lectures to come!

Nobody wanted to be lectured by their parents as a kid; so how long will grown-up audiences voluntarily shell out hard-earned money to replenish the coffers of an industry that's rapidly becoming one giant digital nag?

Back in 2003, in a post titled "Mao And The Godfather", we had some thoughts on, and a photo of, the Andy Warhol print of Mao Zedong that hung above the mantelpiece in Francis Ford Coppola's dining room at the height of his power as a film director in the mid-1970s.

A reader of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism blog quotes from an article by Jed Perl that suggests that Warhol didn't choose Mao as a subject randomly:

Mao is Marilyn, only more so. The terms "icon" and "global icon" are nowadays tossed around with slapdash glee, so it is important to make a basic distinction. It was the moviegoing public that made Marilyn Monroe an icon, because they responded to her beauty, her charm, her wit. The people who hang posters of Marilyn on their walls do so because they like her. It's that simple. But the omnipresence of Mao's image has an altogether different origin. While Leftists in the United States in the late 1960s may have gladly chosen to hang Mao's portrait on their walls, among the billion Chinese who were sure to have his portrait in their homes and in their workplaces, it was understood that they would have endangered their own safety if they did not put his portrait where Mao wanted it to be. There is a world of difference between an icon freely chosen and an icon imposed from above, and the difference has more than a little to do with the difference between a liberal society and an authoritarian society. Warhol's way of blurring this distinction leads straight to the political pornography that characterizes so much of the new Chinese art.

The distinction was not lost on Warhol. According to one of the umpteen books on him that has appeared in recent years, Warhol "often stated that his goal was to obtain the patronage of a dictator, who would then mandate that Warhol's portrait be placed in every governmental office, school, and so on, ensuring the artist unlimited financial opportunities." Was Warhol kidding when he fantasized about being a dictator's court painter? To some degree, of course, he must have been. But then again the fascination of Warhol's work was based on a confusion or conflation of a number of different kinds of power, beginning with the power of celebrity and the power of advertising and the power of art. In the early 1970s he added to that incendiary but still somewhat benign mix another element: the power of communist propaganda. That was the point at which his work turned foul. Warhol's Maos—as well as the Hammer and Sickle still lifes from later in the 1970s and the Lenin portraits of the 1980s—bring his own mercenary spin to a Western love affair with the certitudes of absolutist politics that dates back to the 1920s and 1930s. That was when some members of the European and American intelligentsia decided that the bombastic images of healthy working men and women coming first out of Russia and then out of Nazi Germany offered a relief from the intricacies of modern art. After all, there is nothing less intricate than a painting by Andy Warhol.
The impact that totalitarian imagery can have on free people is an enduring problem. Susan Sontag's essay on the subject, "Fascinating Fascism," was published two years after Warhol began to paint Mao. She could just as well have been thinking of Warhol's Maos, and more generally of the leftist infatuation with the iconography of the Cultural Revolution, when she remarked that the sophisticated public was beginning "to look at Nazi art with knowing and sniggering detachment, as a form of Pop Art." Sontag, who never liked to get too far ahead of her audience, was aware that her readership had still not quite outlived its infatuation with the Maoist look. But she made an important point when she observed that there is a difference between appreciating the peculiar power of a certain kind of totalitarian imagery and going right ahead and succumbing to that power.

As Jonah's reader suggests, expect lots more totalitarian imagery during the coming Olympics in Beijing; in the meantime, we'll always have Che.

Hi, I'm Troy McClure--you might remember me from such automated information kiosks as "Welcome to Springfield Airport!" and "Where's Nordstrom?"

Sorry for the lack of of posts this week, but it's been a bit crazy lately: on Tuesday morning, I appeared on the Tammy Bruce Show, to discuss why The Happening isn't, unless you enjoy zillion dollar enviro-snuff films, basically discussing this post from the weekend. That was tremendous fun--then it was all downhill from there. As soon as my interview concluded, I flew to New Jersey to visit relatives, one of whom is in rather ill-health. In addition to a flight that arrived into Philly two hours late at 2:30 AM, my luggage unfortunately decided not to join me on the flight; despite numerous frantic calls to American Airlines, my bags didn't show up until yesterday evening. But on the bright side--he said, in a tone laced with bitter, bitter irony--you've never met a friendlier, more cheerful staff than the baggage handlers at Philadelphia International Airport at 3:15 in the morning...

As I said recently--The Mrs. Grace L. Ferguson Airline & Storm Door Company: a user manual for cost-conscious airlines, a sneak preview of the future for the rest of us.

Watch for regular blogging to resume in a bit--and thank you for patience.

A member of the LinkedIn social networking Website spots some possible Obamabrushing going on:

"I was beginning to think LinkedIn was on to something, that is until this weekend.

The Obama ad that ran like a legitimate “Question” and members respond with “Answers”. That is the case in point. All was fine, until certain answers were removed when those answers didn’t agree with the Obama campaign positions.

I don’t care which side of the political isle one is on. Had McCain done the same thing, I would equally protest. That act proved to me that Obama is afraid of the 1st Amendment to the Constitution."

W. Strouse and I agree, K von Hopf

What are your thoughts? If you are running for the highest position in the land and representing all Americans, should you censor responses to your posted question? Or, are you just out to win the vote?

I guess they haven't gotten that memo that Obama's morphed from Mr. Hopenchange into a full-on Machiavellian electoral ninja. In any case, his campaign's Website administrator has been deleting Samizdat blogs left and right (err, actually left and more left, to be specific), so why not airbrush his LinkedIn page as well?

When I was assembling the ancillary B-Roll material for the latest Silicon Graffiti video, I wanted to do a segment that charted the growth of electronic media, from three national television networks in the 1950s, to several hundred at the turn of the century, and then compare that to exponentially more rapid growth of the Blogosphere, from a few million in 2004 to 112 million plus today, according to Technorati.

I had remembered a pretty cool Edward Tufte meets Spirograph chart of the Blogosphere from very shortly after we went online in March of 2002, and used a screen capture of it, which appears at about the 5:05 mark of the video, rotating 360 degrees via a little 3-D animation to add some kinetic energy to an otherwise still photo:

But to the best of my knowledge, the above chart hasn't been updated for several years. I wish I had known about a successor to that format a couple of weeks ago, as I would have surely incorporated it into that portion of the video. It's a somewhat similar map of the Blogosphere galaxy, though the emphasis appears to be on a few hundred of the top political sites. Which makes sense--the Blogosphere is so huge today, it must strain even Google and Technorati's capabilities to map it all.

I'm happy to say that we made the cut--here's our position in the political Blogosphere--center right, but not too far out into the whichy thickets, which makes sense:

And here's a close-up of that quadrant of the galaxy, and some of our neighbors orbiting nearby:

(Found via the expert Blogospheric navigators at Hot Air and Protein Wisdom.)

Rich Lowry writes, "I've been thinking lately that Bill Kristol should take a leave of absence for a couple of months and go help out on the McCain campaign":

McCain has been nothing if not energetic (giving a majorish speech almost every day). He has scored day-to-day tactical victories over Obama, as this Washington Post story noted. But the sum is less than the parts. Worse, McCain's political persona seems to be getting lost.

Take energy. There was another McCain conference call on it today. It was painful to listen to Sen. Lindsey Graham pound Obama for saying "no" to every energy proposal, then have to explain (kind of half-heartedly, I thought) why McCain says "no" to drilling on ANWR. If McCain was going to semi-flip on drilling, he probably should have gone all the way and done it in a big way (e.g., hold some sort of conference on energy, or spend a week touring ANWR and off-shore drilling platforms). Then, there was the matter of the contradiction between his new somewhat pro-drilling stance and his continued high-profile advocacy on global warming. I think if McCain could get his own house in order on this issue, he would really do serious damage to Obama.

But there's a sense you never know where McCain is going to be on any given day. Is he zigging toward the center, or zagging right? And on top of this, the campaign feels so defensive—all about not being Bush and not being Obama.

All of this is diminishing McCain, who is a serious, impressive guy for all his flaws. With every clever tactic and worthy small-bore proposal—whether it’s off-shore drilling or the battery prize—McCain loses a tiny bit more of his stature and his sense of who he is. He needs to be bigger than Obama to win the election, and he needs his political persona—as a patriotic fighter determined to fix Washington and win the war—to come out clearly and unmistakably.

I think some new blood—focused just on the big picture—would help the McCain team. My candidate would be Kristol. He obviously has a keen political mind; he's a McCain guy going way back (and as far as I know has a good relationship with McCain's key people); and he's a conservative who understands the need to move beyond the Bush administration without being panicked by every Bush association.

Anyway, that's my suggestion. Maybe someone else would make more sense. Or maybe this big-picture focus can be generated by folks already there. But here's hoping we see it one way or the other...

I'm not sure if Bill Kristol is the guy, but there's a lot of truth there. Obama had a mistake-filled week last week culminating most visibly with his faux-presidential seal, a huge touch of high camp, which though dropped, will be the gift that keeps on giving via Photoshop and YouTube. It's gotten to the point where even the media can't downplay all of Obama's gaffes, no matter how reverentially they treat him. And yet McCain doesn't seem at all poised to pounce his opponent's numerous unforced errors.

We've previously linked to responses from James Lileks and James Pethokoukis, but found via Tim Blair, this is the perfect rebuttal to AP's Doomsday rhetoric:

On Friday, I had some thoughts on the anti-consumerism subtext of Pixar's upcoming Wall-E movie, and wrote:

Anti-consumerism: now there's a message you'd expect from the entertainment industry. Parents--buy your kids less Star Wars toys! And stop paying $15.95 a pop to buy all those DVDs! But thanks for spending ten buckets a ticket and five dollars for a drum of popcorn to watch our movie!

I wonder if the summer popcorn crowd will get whiplash when they go from the conspicuous consumption of Sex In The City to the hectoring subtext of Wall-E?

And once you're done being lectured on the evils of consumerism by your betters in Hollywood, you can buy their merchandise!

For only $250, you can buy the remote-control Wall-E action figure – which will be available in time for Christmas. When kids aren’t busy making the world a better place, they can plop down in front of the plasma and exercise their thumbs on the Wall-E video game, available for Nintendo Wii, PlayStation 2 and 3, and Sony PSP. You can carry your Wall-E lunchbox to school and at night, sleep under a Wall-E poly-blend comforter.

And this isn’t even recounting the junk associated with the Toy Story trilogy (the third one comes out in 2010), Ratatouille, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, and so forth.

Pixar is not in the business of going green. It’s not in their interest. So why tell little children that consumerism is bad while pushing a load of useless crap down their throats?

Hey, nobody said it was easy for Hollywood to be puritanical.

Update: Related thoughts on puritanical Hollywood here.

I quoted James Lileks' take on AP's feverish doomsday piece yesterday, and James Pethokoukis describes AP's screed thusly:

"I know you're just a reporter, but you used to be a person, right?" is a quote from the film Deep Impact and immediately came to mind after I read this article from the Associated Press. (It actually took two people to write it.) The "article" made me weep for my chosen profession. The absolutely disgraceful lead:

Is everything spinning out of control? Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism. Horatio Alger, twist in your grave. The can-do, bootstrap approach embedded in the American psyche is under assault. Eroding it is a dour powerlessness that is chipping away at the country's sturdy conviction that destiny can be commanded with sheer courage and perseverance.

I dunno, maybe contributing to our low national morale are media that 1) compare a weak economy—although one that has yet to suffer even a single negative quarter—to the disastrous economies of the 1930s and 1970s; 2) forget to mention that the average person buying a home in, say, January 2000, is still sitting on a 66 percent gain; 3) ignore the economy's sky-high productivity, which helps make it the most competitive in the world; 4) ignore a global economic boom that is pushing up gas prices but also raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty; and 5) for the heck of it, perpetuate the myth that college is unaffordable. (Oh, and since the authors of the article brought it up, it sure looks to this Soviet politics major that Iraq is turning into a situation for al Qaeda that is exactly the reverse of Afghanistan in the 1980s: Militants take on superpower. Get annihilated along with their global brand.)

America's "can-do" attitude? We are coming off a record year for initial public offerings. I mean, I could go on and on here. I don't know anyone who is giving up, other than the AP.

As Andy McCarthy writes:

Rush talked about that article this afternoon and made the excellent observation that the AP could have just said "Vote Obama" — it would have saved them several hundred words and spared the rest of us a lot of wasted time!

But at least it's giving the Blogosphere a chance to expose the can't-do spirit that seems to permeate AP.

At least until the bill arrives.

Meanwhile, as the AP tells the nation as a whole, "Yes We Can't!", the media as a whole have gone equally silent reporting on another nation's progress.

As Ed Morrissey notes:

Al Sharpton may get another chance to distract everyone from the massive IRS investigation into his personal and professional finances by seizing on another Don Imus eruption.

And this time around, if Imus is ousted, no one can blame this on anti-Hillary forces engaged in battlefield prep.

Bing and Bob are nowhere to be found, but Michael Totten has an amazing assemblage of photos and stories from the road, in a locale that combines Christianity, Islam, and beautiful architecture amidst plenty of Soviet-era concrete monstrosities.

Or, maybe they just thought Faye Dunaway looked smokin' hot brandishing a .38 snubnose in her cashmere sweater and beret.

Making the rounds to promote his new book Nixonland, Rick Perlstein tells Reason:

reason: You like to mix cultural history with political history. Bonnie and Clyde is one of the central texts in the book.

Perlstein: My theory is that Bonnie and Clyde was the most important text of the New Left, much more important than anything written by Paul Goodman or C. Wright Mills or Regis Debray. It made an argument about vitality and virtue vs. staidness and morality that was completely new, that resonated with young people in a way that made no sense to old people. Just the idea that the outlaws were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys—you cannot underestimate how strange and fresh that was.

The 1967 release of the movie certainly coincides with the period where traditional liberalism and the far left began to merge; not coincidentally, this was also the period where traditional morality began to break down. The next year would be 1968, a year the left is alternately trying to recreate, or is permanently trapped in, or both. Mick Jagger's lyrics to the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" called the philosophy of the day "heads is tails", and whereas liberals once worshiped science and progress, they soon found themselves admiring the Black Panthers and William Ayers' Weatherman group, and tossing both modernism and hope for the future under the bus.

1968 was also the year that, only a few months before his death at the hands of a young radical, Bobby Kennedy told a college audience:

"I am also glad to come to the home state of another great Kansan, who wrote, 'If our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all their youthful vision and vigor then there is something wrong with our colleges. The more riots that come on college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow.'"

Orrin Judd reviews Perlstein's book here, and makes a great observation, which dovetails perfectly into Perlstein's Bonnie & Clyde reference and the breakdown of the mid-1960s in general:

I'm only in the early stages of reading Friend Perlstein's book but am struck by a potentially fatal flaw in his thesis that's implied in the review above. With his expected honesty, Mr. Perlstein initially identifies Nixonland as the sort of Red America that the Adlai Stevenson eggheads found themselves stuck in ad unable to comprehend in the 50s. That this part of the metaphor endures--is indeed a seemingly innate part of the culture--is reflected not just in his own essays about contemporary politics but in books by his friends and fellow Brights, like Thomas Frank's unintentionally hilarious, What's the Matter with Kansas.

On the other hand, the sort of violent divisiveness that he associates with Nixonland rather conspicuously developed at the exact time that Richard Nixon was not a central part of the national political scene. Inner-city riots, assassinations, student demonstrations, radical Left terrorism--all of these social plagues arose during the Johnson/Great Society years, the pinnacle of the Left's ascendancy. Even the initial violent reactions were led by Democrats--like LBJ sending federal troops into Detroit or Mayor Daley breaking up protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention. If anything, as Mr. Douthat suggests above, the return of Richard Nixon --a liberal Republican--in 1968 might be seen as an attempt by American voters to restore the social calm and consensus of earlier eras. Richard Nixon, at least in his final incarnation, should probably be considered an effect of the social breakdown of the Liberal 60s, rather than a cause of anything much.

As president, Nixon was no conservative, particularly in his domestic governance, which much more of an extension of LBJ than any sort of warm up act for the Gipper. (And Nixon's poor handling of the economy directly paved the way for the disastrous Carter years, which spawned the economic trainwreck that Reagan and Paul Volker would miraculously right.) But to the America of 1968 that didn't think that Bonnie & Clyde "were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys", no wonder both Nixon's association with the relative calm of the Eisenhower years (at least in comparison with what was to come afterwards), and his promise of law and order sounded remarkably appealing. In that sense, perhaps Nixon's entirely unplanned timeout from the national scene during the mid-1960s wound up serving him remarkably well.

(Perlstein quote found appropriately enough here.)

I had meaning to comment on that ridiculous AP doomsday story that Drudge linked to recently, but there's no way I can top the fine demolition that James Lileks performs:

EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL.

That’s the headline. First line:

Is everything spinning out of control?

No. But they go on:

Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism.

Horatio Alger, twist in your grave.

The can-do, bootstrap approach embedded in the American psyche is under assault. Eroding it is a dour powerlessness that is chipping away at the country's sturdy conviction that destiny can be commanded with sheer courage and perseverance.

Previous generations rolled up their sleeves and swam out there and saved those polar bears. As for “abysmal” home values, it depends where you are; I’ll admit that people who sank everything in Miami condo markets are finding their psyches chipped and dinged, but A) lower home prices mean people who want to buy one but couldn’t afford it now are sitting better – B) the authors can take heart in this story about San Francisco being unaffordable for the middle class. Thank God! There’s hope!

Cue the obligatory heartland can’t-do fella with busted bootstraps:

"It is pretty scary," said Charles Truxal, 64, a retired corporate manager in Rochester, Minn. "People are thinking things are going to get better, and they haven't been. And then you go hide in your basement because tornadoes are coming through. If you think about things, you have very little power to make it change.

Rochester has had zero tornados this year, if I recall correctly. Even if they do get one, it probably won't be as bad as the 1883 example, which was bad enough to have its own wikipedia page. But again: what has happened to America that your optimism is insufficient to turn away rotating clouds? In the old days, by jiminey-crackers, we’d hold up pictures of Roosevelt and the twisters would just melt away.

The guy’s 64 years old, and he hasn’t figured out that some things get better, some things get worse, some things stay the same, and some things to which no one’s paying attention will shape the news much more than the panic du jour in the news today? He’s 64, and can’t figure out that grown men don’t say “scary” unless describing how they felt about the Wolfman when they were nine?

It is amusing, really – after sticking people’s heads in the muck every day for years, promoting every faddish scare, fluffing the pillow beneath every yuppie worry, swapping the straight-forward adult approach to news with presenters who emote the copy with the sad face of a day-care worker telling the children that Barney is dead – in short, after decades of presenting the world through the peculiar prism that finds in every day more evidence of our rot and our failures, they wonder why people are depressed. Hang the banner, guys: Mission Accomplished.

Of course, not everyone feels this way; I’d guess that people who watch television news are more inclined to pessimism. But there’s another side to this: the pessimism among some may not stem from some impotent feeling that one is a cork toss’d in a sea of cruel destiny, that you can’t do anything, that nothing will get better – no, the pessimism may arise from the suspicion that there’s something abroad in the land that’s had a good hardy larf about “Horatio Alger” and all the other manifestations of individual initiative for 30 years. The cool kids and the clever set have always smirked at that sort of stuff. You can get them going if you make a speech about our ability to solve things, but you’d better phrase it in the form of a government initiative, or brows furrow: well, then, how do you propose to do it?

The bottom of the page says “Average rating: two out of five stars.” Our confidence in the media to undermine our happiness is being chipped away, too. We’re in worse shape than we thought.

Remember when AP helped its readers make sense of the news, instead of describing life as one long unfathomable horror? Of course, that was when AP was actually in business to report, instead of "changing the world", or these days, sending dunning notices to bloggers.

Of course, one reason why wire services might be shaking down the Blogosphere is that they could use the money:

For newspapers, the news has swiftly gone from bad to worse. This year is taking shape as their worst on record, with a double-digit drop in advertising revenue, raising serious questions about the survival of some papers and the solvency of their parent companies.

Ad revenue, the primary source of newspaper income, began sliding two years ago, and as hiring freezes turned to buyouts and then to layoffs, the decline has only accelerated.

Sort of like a Red Queen's Race, you might say.

But then, as Michael Crichton wrote 15 years ago, the newspapers brought a lot of this upon themselves:

"[T]he American media produce a product of very poor quality," he lectured. "Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it's sold without warranty. It's flashy but it's basically junk."

Just read the AP story at the of the post. And the media is cranking out that junk during a period when they can least afford to, as a technological sea change is devouring them:

And as I said, fortunately, their own Jurassic Park awaits:

George Carlin, dead at age of 71.

"Obama Moves to Reintroduce Himself to Voters", the Washington Post, notes, but check out the language of the opening paragraph:

In the opening weeks of the general-election campaign, Sen. Barack Obama has moved aggressively to shape his campaign and offered a clear road map for the kind of candidate he is likely to become in the months ahead: an ambitious gamer of the electoral map, a ruthless fundraiser and a scrupulous manager of his own biography in the face of persistent concerns about how he is perceived.

"Aggressive", "ambitious", "ruthless"--this sounds far more like the press at large is beginning to describe Obama using the David Brooks Machiavellian badass political samurai model, rather than the positive Hope! and Change! Yes We Can! new politics message that Obama began nationally with.

If the press continues to describe Obama in such terms, this could create a nifty opening for McCain to attack Obama on his cynicism and rote Chicago politics, much as Reagan deflated Carter in 1980 (who masked his own punitive opinions of America underneath a similar veneer of sunny optimism four years earlier) with his "Well, there you go again" line.

And on a related note, Lexington Green of the Chicago Boyz notes, "It is weird how so many who claim to like Obama hope he is lying. Three examples come to mind immediately". Read the rest.

Update: Jennifer Rubin observes Obama as he loses "His Teflon Sheen".

Warner Todd Huston has a terrific roundup of photos documenting "Obama's Propagandistic Iconography: the Making of a Messiah". Regarding the latest example, Mickey Kaus asks if Obama's mocked-up pseudo-presidential seal was his Mission Accomplished moment. Both certainly pleased the base, while alienating the more skeptical.

And speaking of trips down memory lane, "And now, Barack Delano Obama"...

Related: While we're on the subject of messianic propagandistic iconography, did Obama personally tell a campaign volunteer to shut up about her Che Guevara Flag? He must have forgotten about this one, in any case.

Update: A voice of cool, dispassionate reason emerges as a strong counterforce, finally:

I think that we can take a lesson from the Republicans in the sense that we seem to be continually looking for the next Messiah. I think that’s a bad habit.

Oh wait, nevermind--that was Obama himself two years ago. It's not easy, but I guess a man can get used to rampantly overflowing hagiography pretty quickly if he has to.

Will Kim Jong Il endorse Sen. Barack Obama? Yes he can!

Castro we knew about, and Qaddafi chimed in just the other day, but Kim Jong Il?

I wasn’t expecting that.

Take me now, Lord. My life as a blogger is complete.

The Obamessiah must ask himself once again: Why do all these anti-American tyrants keep s…um, endorsing my candidacy?

Meanwhile, See Dubya also asks, "Come on, Osama, your turn…you know you’ve got one tape left in you…"

If he does, will Uncle Walter once again blame it on Karl Rove, as he did when Punxsutawney Osama emerged and saw his shadow during the last weekend of October in 2004?

While England has many of the same problems that inflict the bluer alcoves of America, fortunately, that enlightened bastion of reason and common sense has its priorities firmly in order:

A council has banned the term "brainstorming" and replaced it with "thought showers".

Tunbridge Wells Borough Council in Kent was accused of taking political correctness to extremes after instructing staff to make the change.

The move came as council chiefs feared the word brainstorming might offend mentally ill people and those with epilepsy.

No, this story offends those of us who have a modicum of common sense remaining, which appears to be the world's scarcest resource these days. Meanwhile, as the editor of the 11th edition of the Newspeak dictionary once said, "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."

(Story via Dirty Harry's other blog; headline via Claude Rains.)

Glenn Reynolds links to San Francisco Chronicle staff writer James Temple, who describes "urban flight flipped on its head":

The number of low- and middle-income residents in San Francisco is shrinking as the wealthy population swells, a trend most experts attribute to the city's exorbitant housing costs.

Many worry it's increasingly turning San Francisco into an enclave of the rich, where nurses, firefighters, cops, teachers and other professionals aspiring toward homeownership or in need of cheaper rent can no longer afford to stay.

"A kind of derogatory term for the city would be Disneyland for yuppies," said Hans Johnson, demographer with the Public Policy Institute of California. "There is a legitimate public policy concern when a city that many people have lived in for many years and regard as their homes becomes so expensive they can't afford to live there anymore."

Last year, USA Today noted, “San Francisco Hopes To Reverse Black Flight”, but it's part of a much larger trend, as I noted earlier in 2007:

As a city, San Fran