Peter Wehner:

Time magazine must be enormously proud of the civil tone and the rigorous quality of arguments advanced by one of its most prominent figures.

Wehner notes one of the dangers of MSM blogging:

Wouldn't you know it? In my recent exchanges with Joe Klein, I made the point that blogging was harming Klein because it allowed his unfiltered rage to make its way into print (so to speak), thereby embarrassing him and Time magazine. Klein responded with a blog post offering... more unfiltered rage.

I sense a pattern developing.

On the other hand, at least it allows the rest of a chance to see what's behind all the increasingly sclerotic claims of "objectivity", "fairness," and other legacy media reflexive arguments left over from the mid-20th century.

Matthew Sheffield has an interesting observation at Newsbusters. He notes that "non-ideological points are pretty much the only type of criticism that you'll see the establishment liberal press allow to be made against Democratic presidential candidates. Republicans, meanwhile, can be criticized at a personal level and on a policy level":

Think back: In 2004, George W. Bush was portrayed by Big Media as an arrogant, stupid, warmonger peddling reckless tax cut. In contrast, John Kerry was portrayed as a high-falutin' rich kid who was being dogged by false charges of insufficient patriotism. (Right-leaning arguments against a Democrat are always spurious.)

In 2000, Bush was portrayed as an ignorant doofus who wouldn't have gotten anywhere without his daddy's status. On the ideological side, he was a stupid isolationist with a fetish for tax cuts and destroying Social Security. Al Gore, meanwhile was just a robotic arrogant jerk.

Go further back and the trend still holds. Bob Dole was an old desperate sell-out pandering to the far right, Bill Clinton was just a philanderer who wasn't sufficiently liberal. George H. W. Bush, meanwhile was basically the same as Dole with the added horror of being the legatee of the fiend Ronald Reagan.

You have to go back to 1988 with Michael Dukakis to find a Democrat who encountered widespread criticism in Big Media for his ideology. That is a pretty sad fact.

And even there, I'm not sure how critical the response was from Big Media. On the one hand, the exceedingly establishment liberal Saturday Night Live's "Dukakis After Dark sketch" in 1988 (now apparently embargoed on Hulu or YouTube) had a great line from Jon Lovitz, who played Dukakis:

Well, thanks for coming to the party. That just about does it for the campaign. You know, I think the one thing that really hurt us is the fact that Reaganomics works. It really does. I mean, aren't you better off than you were eight years ago? I know I am. How about the rest of you? [ looks at his guests, who shake their heads in agreement ] I wish you weren't, but you are. You are better off. And there's no denying it. Well, I'd like to thank my guests - my running-mate, Lloyd Bentsen, who'd asked me to remind you he's still on the ballot down in Texas; Jane Fonda; Daniel Ortega; an, of course, my good friend Ted Kennedy. Good night.

But the title of the equally establishment history of the campaign by Jules Witcover and Jack Germond, Whose Broad Stripes and Bright Stars? The Trivial Pursuit of the Presidency 1988, tells you exactly how the authors thought that Dukakis was beaten, through symbolism, and not ideology.

But beyond that, I'd say that Matthew is spot-on. The media's cognitive dissonance in 2004 over the response to the early-1970s reserve activities of the two major candidates--"lying" Swift Vets, versus "fake but accurate" TANG documents illustrates Sheffield's Law perfectly.

Paul Mirengoff of Power Line writes that "Obama Removes his mask": "It's not even quite August yet and he's still ahead in the polls, but Barack Obama has played the race card, claiming that he expects Republicans to inject race into the campaign.":

It seems clear, therefore, that the race card has become a permanent part of Obama's hand, a wild card to be played whenever the spirit, or the circumstances, so moves him.

What does Obama's latest play tell us about the current circumstances? I think it tells us that, despite Obama's presidential preening, he senses he may be in trouble. The "world tour" bounce appears to have been a short-hop only, and his pretentiousness is beginning to grate even on some in the MSM. The McCain campaign is ridiculing Obama as a celebrity and little more. There's enough truth in this suggestion to make the candidate uncomfortable. He doesn't feel he can ignore the attack, but he also cannot respond with "I am too a man of substance who deserves my celebrity." Hence the whining; hence the race card.

But for maximum effectiveness, you only get to play this card once--use it repeatedly, and it increasingly seems like crying wolf. And firing it in late July, when nobody but us wonks is paying much attention to the presidential race seems like a rookie error. Which plays right into the McCain camp's hands when the media takes the bait, as Ace writes:

Obama's attempts to mau-mau (am I allowed to say that?) the press may or may not be successful; but some reporters aren't buying the Obama camp's preferred practice of crying racism at the drop of a hat.

But it definitely won't work with the broader public. So Obama's game here is a dangerous one for him. White people bitterly cling to their resentment that they can't say boo without being accused of being closet, or out and proud, racists. If Obama thinks he's actually going to persuade the middle by claiming that you don't vote for him, you must be a racist, he's in a for a bad surprise.

This worked in the primary, because all liberals are required to pretend that every single cry of racism is valid. Not so among the bitter, clingy folks.

Exactly.

The dark horse third-party Burge '08 ticket focuses on two key issues of the day, both of which, I think, are succinctly summed up by the above headline.

And while he approaches the second issue only grudgingly (note the divisive "Internet hat pundit" attack aimed at us, though clearly an implied shot at the entire fourth estate--or maybe just the Stetson company--I'll get back to you), we're quite proud of our efforts in getting Mr. Burge on the record regarding the latter issue. You're welcome, gentle reader; you're welcome!

CAIR targets Abercrombie & Fitch, the onetime clothing retailer turned porn shop.

Lindsey Graham weighs in on McCain's new ad:

Well, one thing's for sure. If you embark upon a world tour, and you decide to make a campaign speech in a foreign country in front of 200,000 Germans, and you act like you're already president, people may notice.

And that's what this is about: that he chose to go to Germany and do something I've never known a candidate to do before. You know, he orchestrated the press conference with the French president. He said something, yesterday, basically, that he embodies everything good about America. Well, you know, it's good to have self-confidence. But you can, maybe, go too far.

The whole ad is about the idea of fame without portfolio. Paris Hilton is famous for being famous. She draws a crowd for no apparent reason. Well, I think he has, you know--in Senator Obama's case, is the effort to be commander in chief and the leader of the free world about portfolio?

He is a celebrity, no question about it. Somebody asked me about Germany. I said, "There goes Germany. We're going to have to get to 270 without Germany." (LAUGHTER)

But this is a hysteria around a personality that's attractive, but when you look under the hood, there's not a whole lot there. So fame without portfolio is, sort of, fashionable. But leadership without experience is dangerous.

Indeed.^TM Meanwhile, leftwing author Rick Perlstein (H/T: OJ) stumbles into another element of Obama's stagecraft that the ad highlights. He's got the title right, though he's far from the first to notice Obama's eschatology.

Update: Ross Douthat adds:

Comparing the "Celeb" ad to stills from Leni Riefenstahl's work, Perlstein writes: "I actually wonder if the Republicans had a crew on the scene to capture just the right angles; for instance, the identical camera placement shooting the speaker over the shoulder at stage right." If he actually wonders that, I fear for his sanity. Here's a tip for liberals: If your candidate is going to stage enormous rallies in front of tens of thousands of chanting Germans (with monuments to Prussian military might in the background) in the middle of his Presidential campaign, it isn't the GOP's fault if the footage comes out looking a little like Hitler at Nuremberg.

A rock concert has to resemble the poster, or it risks being false advertising.

Martin Eisenstad writes, "I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it seems that the new McCain ad criticizing Obama for being a celebrity has ruffled some unintended feathers":

I, for one, quite liked the ad, but I hear whispers from the inner campaign staff that the phone was burning off the hook today with calls from Paris Hilton's grandfather, William Barron Hilton (co-chair of the Hilton Hotel empire), furious that the McCain ad drew an unflattering comparison between Obama and his own granddaughter.

It seems that the elder Hilton has donated $18,400 to the McCain campaign, and $35,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee in the last couple of years. (Paris's father, Rick Hilton, has given an additional $6,900 to the McCain campaign. Suffice it to say, he's none too pleased either.)

Apparently, the elder Hiltons had breathed a sigh of relief that Paris was starting to get her act together since hitting rock bottom with her stay in jail last year, when all of a sudden the McCain ad compares her unfavorably to Britney Spears and Barack Obama.

Somehow, I think all of the players will survive this moment--they can meet here for cocktails afterward!

Deceiver.com has a screencap and a link to Reille Hunter's Website, which is a hoot:

Looks like there are two Americas: the America where not-John-Edwards'-babymama Rielle Hunter has erased her web site from existence, and the America where someone else has put it right back up.

Actually, it's not America--the URL is the Egyptian mirror site for the San Francisco-based Internet Archive Wayback machine, but still, click over for the graphics, stay for the sweet, new age chakra!

(Via the crystalline blogging of Australia's Tim Blair.)

Update: Welcome Deceiver readers! Take a look around; hopefully you'll like some of what you see.

Late Update (8/8/08): Edwards begins to come clean--er, so to speak--click here for details.

This is absolutely horrific--and naturally, because everyone is unarmed, nobody fights back:

Breitbart.tv video: Man Decapitates Fellow Passenger Aboard Greyhound Bus.

(I'm not embedding this, as it only seems to auto-play.)

Update: More details here.

Scott Whitlock writes, "The hosts and correspondents on Thursday's 'Good Morning America' did not hold back in expressing their displeasure over a new John McCain ad that depicts Barack Obama as a celebrity and compares him to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton":

Co-host Diane Sawyer hyperbolically derided the spot as a "political nuclear attack" and asserted that the campaign is taking "a strange new turn."

GMA news anchor Chris Cuomo seemed equally flummoxed. He opened the show by asserting, "Some odd campaign news today. There's a round of new campaign commercials that really have us scratching our heads here." A bewildered Sawyer agreed: "What sort of committee meeting do you have where you say, 'Let's use Britney!' 'Let's use Paris!' Yes, that'll be a blow!" In a second segment, former Clinton aide-turned journalist George Stephanopoulos claimed the commercial could be seen as "angry, cranky, too negative" and McCain himself might be viewed as "a bit of a whiner given the fact that most polls that he is behind."

At one point, Sawyer queried, "Will it read as sour grapes and boomerang?" The entire tone of the morning show's coverage seemed desperately out of touch. It seems obvious that McCain was attempting to, in a not-so subtle way, depict the Obama campaign as superficial and not ready for prime time. And since the Arizona senator must deal with a media who both fawns and defends Obama, how can such attack ads be surprising?

You know you're over the target when you start receiving flak. The local San Jose CBS station led with the story last night; their teaser ad also hyped it as if it was some sort of out-of-bounds attack. But the danger of a politician acting like a rock star is that he sets himself up to be treated like one by his opponent. Jann Wenner's wildest fantasies to the contrary, we don't elect rock stars, we just buy their records.

Related: Leave Barack Alone! And Robert Stacy McCain has some thoughts that are worth reading as well:

If Obama starts sliding in the polls, he's going to be like a guy at the steering wheel of a vanload of backseat drivers, with the MSM geniuses endlessly second-guessing his every move, and the likes of Keith Olbermann and David Gregory wondering aloud what the hell is wrong with his campaign. There is nothing more beautiful to behold than the sight of Conventional Wisdom crumbling at it's first collision with reality.

Robert notes that "The grumbling from the MSM's backseat drivers has already begun."

Meanwhile, Rachel Lucas blames "beer goggles", and Confederate Yankee explores the inevitable result of too much drinking: the next day's hangover.

Matthew Balan writes:

After Barack Obama's more-than-enthusiastic greeting by many attendees at the UNITY convention for minority journalists in Chicago on Sunday, some in the media have expressed outrage that some have now questioned their objectivity, despite the appalled reactions from some of their own peers to the display and the live video shown on CNN [above].

April Yee wrote on Andrew Romano's blog on Newsweek.com on Monday about the question of whether minority journalists can cover the Illinois senator objectively. She quoted Ernest Suggs of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who objected to this question even coming up in the first place: "That mindset needs to change.... It is offensive that because we have the same color or the same agenda, our journalistic ethics and responsibilities go out the window."

Indeed--I'd say you're living up to your responsibilities just fine.

So can you immanentize the eschaton through the Force?

"I am the father of our Star Wars movie world--the filmed entertainment, the features and now the animated film and television series," (George Lucas) says. "And I'm going to do a live-action television series. Those are all things I am very involved in: I set them up and I train the people and I go through them all. I'm the father; that's my work. Then we have the licensing group, which does the games, toys and books, and all that other stuff. I call that the son--and the son does pretty much what he wants." He laughs. "Once in a while, they ask a question like 'Can we kill off Yoda?', things like that, but it's very loose.

"Then we have the third group, the holy ghost, which is the bloggers and fans. They have created their own world. I worry about the father's world. The son and holy ghost can go their own way."

Pretty biblical stuff from a guy whose original idea was to portray communist North Vietnam in a favorable light...

Betsy Newmark writes, "Apparently, under Iowa law, dancing naked on a stage is legal because it can be considered an expression of art."

I realize that while all politics is local, when a man becomes a presidential nominee, he must take a national, at times global perspective; and thus has little time to study hometown issues.

But the question must be asked nonetheless: where does Iowa's most famous son, Dave Burge, aka Iowahawk, currently heading up the maverick's maverick presidential ticket, Burge-Goldstein 2008, stand on this critical issue?

Update: Steven Den Beste responds via email: "As close to the stage as possible, of course!"

Heh, indeed.^TM

Back in 2004, Mark Steyn noted that the famously hard-partying John Kerry had his sensitive troubadour side as well:

The time: last month; the place: MTV. The interviewer asks: ''Well, we know that you were into rock 'n' roll when you were in high school, and we know that you play the guitar now. Are there any trends out there in music, or even in popular culture in general, that have piqued your interest?''

''Oh sure. I follow and I'm interested,'' says John Kerry. ''I'm fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think there's a lot of poetry in it. There's a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think you'd better listen to it pretty carefully, 'cause it's important . . . I'm still listening because I know that it's a reflection of the street and it's a reflection of life.''

Steyn dubbed Kerry's "America's first flip-flopper hip-hopper"--sad to say, he's not the last.

Remember the bad old days of Kremlinology, when analysts would study who was airbrushed out of Soviet photos to see who was out of power?

Greg Pollowitz notices--for some reason known only to the L.A. Times and don't you dare read anything into it--a curious update of the photos of potential veep candidates by the Times.

Mickey Kaus's ongoing victory lap takes him to the virtual studios of PJM Political this week.

John McCain? No--Osama bin Laden!

Osama bin Laden wanted to introduce himself to America with an ABC television interview months before al Qaeda bombed two U.S. embassies in Africa, the interviewer testified on Tuesday.

Former ABC correspondent John Miller, testifying at the first Guantanamo war crimes trial, also recalled comparing bin Laden with U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt as he made small talk during filming of the May 28, 1998, interview at an Afghanistan mountain hideout.

It was a rare opportunity for an American journalist, and Miller detailed a movie-thriller route to get to bin Laden, complete with multiple plane flights in Pakistan, a nighttime border crossing into Afghanistan, and muzzle flashes from automatic weapons at an al Qaeda checkpoint.

"You are like the Middle East version of Teddy Roosevelt," Miller, who is now the chief FBI spokesman, told bin Laden in a selection of the interview tape screened for the trial of bin Laden's driver, Salim Hamdan.

Michael Moore and Brian Williams could not be reached for comment.

Nice little career you got there, Mr. Voight! Shame if something were to...happen...to it...

Update: Related thoughts from Mickey Kaus.

Currently on Drudge:

EARTHQUAKE HITS LOS ANGELES... PRELIM MAG 5.8... FELT IN DOWNTOWN, WEST L.A., SAN FERNANDO VALLEY, ORANGE COUNTY.. DEVELOPING...

Earthquake map of California here.

Very preliminary AP report notes, "The late Tuesday morning jolt was felt from Los Angeles to San Diego, and slightly in Las Vegas."

More from CNN:

A magnitude-5.8 earthquake has struck just east of Los Angeles, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The quake's epicenter was about 2 miles southwest of Chino Hills and about 5 miles southeast of Diamond Bar, the USGS said. Chino Hills is about 30 miles east of downtown Los Angeles.

The center was about 7.6 miles deep. In general, earthquakes centered closer to the Earth's surface produce stronger shaking and can cause more damage than those further underground.

A 5.8 magnitude quake is considered by the USGS to be "moderate," which can cause slight damage to buildings and others structures. About 500 can happen globally each year, the survey says.

CNN's Ed Lavandera was at Disneyland with his family and felt the temblor. He said the shaking lasted about 5 seconds.

More detailed AP report here.

Tim MacMahon of the Dallas Morning News, who's out in Southern California to follow the Cowboys' training camp loses it: "EARTHQUAKE!!!"

Update: 12:30 PM PDT: Welcome Instapundit readers.

More from AP:

In Orange County, about 2000 detectives were attending [a] gang conference at a Marriott hotel in Anaheim when a violent jolt shook the main conference room.

Mike Willever, who was at the hotel, said, "First we heard the ceiling shaking, then the chandelier started to shake, then there was a sudden movement of the floor."

Chris Watkins, from San Diego, said he previously felt several earthquakes, but "that was one of the worst ones."

Delegates and guests at a cluster of hotels near the Disneyland resort spilled into the streets immediately after the quake.

Update: 2:06 PM PDT News video at Hot Air; Ed Morissey notes that the quake has been revised slightly downward to 5.4 on the Richter Scale, adding:

I'm a native Angeleno, and I know what a 5.4 quake means... mostly nothing. If it had occurred on the Whittier-Newport fault or under LA, it might have caused some damage, but this quake's epicenter was in Chino Hills--at least 60 miles out of LA to the east. What's in Chino Hills? Mostly dairies and farms, with a smallish bedroom community. At best, we're talking about making some cows nauseous.

My Remy Martin 1738 didn't budge from the shelf during a 5.6 magnitude quake near San Jose last October, though as Duane Patterson suggests, "For those dairy farmers that inhabit much of Chino Hills, plates might make a fine Christmas gift. Yes, the cows are fine, too."

Fans of Mike Myer's Dieter character and his techno-Brechtian goof Sprockets will get a chuckle out of this, but as Allahpundit notes, I'm not sure how well it will play back in the Sudetenland Peoria:

85-year old Alaskan GOP Sen. Ted Stevens indicted by federal grand jury.

In that Orwellian L.A. Times sense of the word, of course.

Last night, when I was wading through background material about John Edwards for my interview today with Mickey Kaus for this week's PJM Political on XM Satellite Radio, I noticed something odd about Edwards' Wikipedia profile--there's no mention of a rather high-profile scandal that's orbiting directly above him, which seems pretty odd; Wikipedia pages are rather notorious for often being the first to be updated when news or a scandal breaks. And they definitely have news of Bob Novak's health scare, which broke earlier today. And today, instead of silence, there's this at the top of Edwards' profile there.

So why the Edwards embargo?

(Oh--did I mention I'm interviewing Kaus on Edwards this week? Tune in here on Wednesday; it will be more informative than this interview, I assure you.)

Victor Davis Hanson: "Why Do Europeans Love Obama? Let us count the ways"...

As a follow-up to our previous post on Orson Bean, John Gibson, in a clip posted at Johnny Dollar's Place, looks at the calm, nuanced reaction of the left to the news of Bob Novak's brain tumor. Novak was a JFK and LBJ-supporting liberal who made the journey right in the 1970s.

Andrew Breitbart's latest Washington Times column on the new Hollywood Blacklist features several quotes from his father-in-law, the great Orson Bean:

"When the blacklist hit, I saw actors walk across the street to avoid me. The doorman at 485 Madison Avenue (former CBS headquarters) turned his back as I walked by. But I never felt hated by the ring-wing blacklisters. They just felt we were terribly wrong," he said.

"These days, the left doesn't just disagree with right-wingers--they hate them."

Maybe that's why there's been historically much more of a outflow amongst intellectuals from port to starboard since the mid-1950s. As Jonah Goldberg noted in early 2001, many ex-communists followed Bean's path to the right--or at the least back to the center:

If you count normal, non-pointy headed people, millions. Generation after generation of the Left's best minds have decided they like things over here more. Many if not most of National Review's founding editors were former Communists. The very word "neoconservative" was coined as an epithet by the socialist Michael Harrington to describe all of his friends who were heading for the exits to conservatism. It's not just the older generation. Every decade we get a new wave of writers and scholars who have come in from the rain, Christina Hoff Sommers, Michael Kelly, Andrew Ferguson, Charles Murray, just to name a few. Hell, I don't even act surprised anymore when I meet conservatives who say "I used to be a Communist." It's almost a cliche.

Which might also help to explain Glenn Reynolds' quote from a year later:

As the old saying has it, the left looks for heretics and the right looks for converts, and both find what they're looking for. The effect is no doubt subliminal, but people who treat you like crap are, over time, less persuasive than people who don't. If people on the Left are so unhappy about how many former allies are changing their views, perhaps they should examine how those allies are treated.

We touched upon the original blacklist, and Hollywood's eternal Mobius Loop-style reminiscences of it in a recent edition of our Silicon Graffiti video blog:

Rich Lowry writes that "If elected, Barack Obama might make history in more ways than one. He will be the country's first black president, but also--perhaps as consequentially--could be its first transnational president":

Transnational progressivism is closely allied to multiculturalism. Both share a hostility to American exceptionalism and seek to rein it in, by imposing global rules on the U.S. and by transcending its traditional culture (as defined by history, symbols and language). Obama, who for so long painfully sought an identity and initially found it in a black-nationalist church, clearly has affinities running in this direction.

Consider his gaffes: The world won't stand for us driving and eating and air-conditioning our homes as we please. We should worry less about immigrants learning English and more about teaching our kids Spanish. Gun-owning, Bible-believing people in rural areas are bitter. The flag pin is an inadequate symbol of patriotism. When Obama briefly auditioned his own presidential seal, "e pluribus unum" got bumped.

These are all hints of Obama's instincts, but he knows he has to check them. He has restored a flag pin to his lapel, ditched the fake seal and in Berlin was careful to declare himself also "a proud citizen of the United States" and defend America's global leadership. He'd be wise to do more. In November, the world doesn't have a vote.

What--it's not a question on that global test I heard so much about four years ago?

And even beyond that, has Jon Voight just thrown his Hollywood career under the bus in one fell swoop?

Philip Terzian and Jennifer Rubin suggest that "Barack Obama bears a striking resemblance to Thomas Dewey in the 1948 presidential race", as Rubin writes:

Dewey was an accomplished prosecutor for one.) Terzian makes a strong argument, although he doesn't mention a telling incident from the 1948 campaign. Dewey was speaking from a train when it unexpectedly began to back up. Dewey cracked that the engineer "should probably be shot at sunrise, but we'll let him off this time since no one was hurt." Truman pounced and made much of Dewey's contempt for the working man.

The lesson of that: voters don't like it when you overlook or take for granted folks like them. And what's more, little incidents reveal grace and personal character, leaving a lasting impression on average voters. That is why Obama's soldier snubbing gaffe and the parade of excuses may last longer than the trip photos. It revealed a lack of good sense and an obsession with his own image and needs above those of others, in this case some of the people most deserving of our respect and affection. The reason for the cancellation--that he could not bring campaign entourage and cameras--is the nub of the matter. For Obama, it is all about the show.

And that's why McCain, whose only hope may be an appeal to ordinary voters' sense of decency and common sense, is right to make an issue of it.

Which may explain this.

This just in: he may be Dick Cheney; he may be George W. Bush. He may simply be just another billionaire masked vigilante in a full-body black PVC suit. But the new Batman movie--now with 2/3rds more Michael Mann-esque neo-noir atmosphere!--seriously rocks.

Over at Ace of Spades HQ, they're looking at a "Peaceful Bicycle Advocacy Group Attempting to Persuade a Motorist to Abandon His Gas-Guzzling Ways...By beating the s*** out of him and trashing his car."

Paging Mr. O'Rourke...Mr. P.J. O'Rourke to the white courtesy phone please.

Robert Stacy McCain writes, "Blogging sucks: Women, minorities hardest hit:"

If there's anything in the world I hate, it's women reporters writing "Oh, we're so oppressed" stories in the New York Times:

[M]any women at the conference were becoming very Katie Couric about their belief that they are not taken as seriously as their male counterparts at, say, Daily Kos, a political blog site. Nor, they said, were they making much money, even though corporations seem to be making money from them. . . .

Yet, when Techcult, a technology Web site, recently listed its top 100 Web celebrities, only 11 of them were women. Last year, Forbes.com ran a similar list, naming 3 women on its list of 25.

"It's disheartening and frustrating," said Allison Blass, a BlogHer attendee. . . .

Ladies, please: If your blog sucks, it's not because of some patriarchal conspiracy, OK? And as for making money, you could almost certainly fit into my living room every independent blogger who earns a full-time living off blogging. Generally speaking, bloggers either have some other job to support their blogging habit, or else they're "blogging for the man" (e.g., the Atlantic Monthly bloggers, the Gawker cartel, etc.).

I wrote my rebuttal to this legacy media perennial three years ago; and it's not as though the Times itself is in the black, as Thomas Lifson and I discussed this week on PJM Political.

(Via Dr. Helen.)

Mickey Kaus wonders if the Obama-worshiping media will help toss John Edwards under the bus for him:

Will the Pro-Obama Bias Turn Anti-Edwards? At this point, does Barack Obama want John Edwards to even show up in Denver, much less give a prime time speech? Even if the Love-Child saga progresses no further than it already has, an Edwards Denver appearance will inevitably be accompanied by renewed speculation about his seemingly scandalous and politically toxic behavior. Obama's in what looks like a surprisingly close race. He doesn't need to carry Edwards' baggage. He needs a positive convention. And Obama has previously shown a willingness to bury troublesome associates without much fuss (ask Jim Johnson).

If you're an Obama strategist, mightn't you conclude that the best thing for your candidate would be if the press weighs in quickly and definitively concludes that Edwards is guilty, with the result that he and his whole sordid story go away until after November?

Glenn Reynolds suggests, "If so, just pass the word and the L.A. Times will be all over the story. With memos to bloggers encouraging them to cover it!"

Heh, Indeed.^TM

Meanwhile, if Edwards is increasingly likely to be out as Obama's veep nominee, Michael Costello proposes a viable replacement. His wide stance on the issues will certainly get the media's toes-a-tappin'!

Douglas MacKinnon compares and contrasts two hypothetical candidates for the White House:

Over the last few weeks, I ran a very basic resume poll. I knew the only way this poll would work would be to talk to people outside of the egotistical, out-of-touch bubble that is our nation's capital. To get an honest reaction, I'd have to talk with average Americans who are more concerned about real life and the welfare of their families, than the names, education, wealth, or accomplishments of those who seek their support.

My premise was very simple. You have two people who are being considered to run your county, head up your local school board and manage your police force. Based on the background and experience listed below, who would you choose?

Candidate A: Middle-aged. Studied overseas. Attended two different colleges in the U.S. before getting a degree. Went on to get a law degree. Worked community affairs in his adopted home city. Was elected to local office. Served in local politics for just over six years. Got elected to a federal state-wide office. Has one real year of experience in that job.

Candidate B: Middle-aged. Went to college and got a degree. Served in the National Guard for six years. Became a sergeant. While in the National Guard, earned a law degree. Became an investigator for a consumer-protection division. Was elected to a federal office. Was re-elected to a federal office. Was elected to a federal statewide office. Was re-elected to a federal state-wide office. Served in the executive branch for four years.

Either in person or over the phone, I showed or recited exactly as written above, the background of these two candidates to voters who don't follow politics very closely. I ended up speaking with twenty different people from diverse backgrounds.

To be sure, some of those I spoke with rightfully said, "In reality, I'd need to know a lot more than you're giving me." Accepting that caveat, all 20 people picked Candidate B. Candidate B is Dan Quayle.

Candidate A is Barack Obama.

MacKinnon writes, "The final poll will be taken on Nov. 4. Most of the people won't be fooled." Maybe--but unforced errors along the way such as this aren't helping Candidate A's opponent gain traction.

Sounding a bit like the Bud Lite "Real Men of Genius" commercials, The Columbia Journalism Review salutes you--the men of...Real Journalism!

Today's front-page piece in The New York Times about Congressman Charlie Rangel's rent-control boondoggle--he has four rent-controlled apartments in Manhattan, including one that serves as a campaign office--is a clear illustration of what separates a real journalist from the thousands of pretenders who take great pleasure in denigrating the embattled MSM.

The very existence of the piece makes the case. We don't typically find such stories on blogs, in part because most "citizen journalists" don't have a professional journalist's DNA. They too often pursue personal agendas, or partisan ones. There is evidence that this is changing--the citizen journalists at places like Off the Bus and the Chi-Town Daily News strive for journalism that is intellectually honest--and that is a welcome change indeed. Journalism--however flawed--is built upon the ideas that public servants should be held to a higher standard, that the powerful must be checked when they abuse that power, that the public has a right to information that the powerful would rather keep hidden.

Except of course, when gatekeepers are perfectly happy to keep things quiet:

From: "Pierce, Tony"

Date: July 24, 2008 10:54:41 AM PDT

To: [XXX]

Subject: john Edwards [sic]

Hey bloggers,

There has been a little buzz surrounding John Edwards and his alleged affair. Because the only source has been the National Enquirer we have decided not to cover the rumors or salacious speculations. So I am asking you all not to blog about this topic until further notified.

If you have any questions or are ever in need of story ideas that would best fit your blog, please don't hesitate to ask [sic]

Keep rockin, [sic]

Tony

(Found via Steve Boriss.)

As a kid, I was never very good at building model airplanes (particularly when it came time to paint and detail them), and thus, a key career path is no longer open to me: minister of Iranian propaganda:

Here's a photo of the pilot. But really, isn't Iran's copying photos from the latest Revell catalog more or less on a par with this?

At least in this geographical context. But Scott Johnson of Power Line quotes a key passage from Obama's "Sermon to the Germans", and Rush Limbaugh's response. First, Obama:

People of Berlin, people of the world, this is our moment. This is our time. I know my country has not perfected itself. (cheers) At times we struggle to keep the promise of liberty and equality for all of our people, we've made our share of mistakes, and there are times when our actions around the world have not lived up to our best intentions.

Here's an excerpt of Rush's take:

"We haven't perfected ourselves." You know, that's a key phrase, by the way, is one of the things that drives liberalism is the fact that they think people and institutions can be perfected. They think they can be perfect.

Obama's discussing the use of government to achieve the perfection of man in Germany? Now that's audacity.

BigMouthFrog looks at the audacity of symbolism, then and now.

Update: "Because When Germans Call a Charismatic Political Leader a Messiah, Good Things Happen." Heh.^TM

England's Daily Mail reports, "Genocidal Napoleon was as barbaric as Hitler, historian claims."

Why, there's a direct line from the French Revolution to the unending bloodshed of the 20th century? Somebody should write a book about that!

AP checks in on the two-minute hate in DC:

"I am really astonished at the mood in this room," commented one witness, George Mason University School of Law professor Jeremy Rabkin.

"The tone of these deliberations is slightly demented," Rabkin said. "You should all remind yourselves that the rest of the country is not necessarily in this same bubble in which people think it is reasonable to describe the president as if he were Caligula."

Nahh, they'd be pretty cool with him.

"Hi, Nancy! Do you really want to play chicken over energy policy?"

Let me just note something here, Madam Speaker: you have twenty or so seats that were ours in 2006. Every single one of those seats is held by a freshman Representative who will have to go home in August and campaign. Do you really want to send them out there to explain to their constituents why gas prices have doubled under their watch? Because we're planning to bring up the topic, in precisely the ways that you really, really don't want us to. And there's no reason whatsoever to assume that the above 20 point deficit can't be shrunk. A lot.

So let's dance.

Moe Lane

Nancy's response--at least for the moment--is summarized by this bumper sticker.

Jason Maoz of Commentary asks, "Whatever Happened to Liberal Humor?"

Fire up the Tardis--with or without Barry behind the wheel: We answered that one two and a half years ago, three years ago--and five years ago!

(H/T: KS)

Related: "Best. Headline. Ever."

Back in 2003, we linked to a Washington Times article in which their journalist reported that the TSA's slogan was "Dominate, Intimidate, Control"; Annie Jacobsen writes that you can add "And Seek Payback" to their mission statement:

Last March, in a report ironically called "Keeping Them Honest," Drew Griffin revealed that of the 28,000 daily commercial flights, fewer than 1% are guarded by federal air marshals. Further, Griffin interviewed rank and file who revealed that morale was so low that colleagues were leaving the service in disgust. Thinner than ever on numbers, the TSA was now fast-tracking airport screeners to carry weapons on planes. Many of these screeners lacked any law enforcement experience, military training, or college degrees.

Drew Griffin's report embarrassed the TSA. So instead of merely addressing the problem on which he reported, TSA put its resources into trying to find out who spoke to Drew Griffin.

Obviously, this is a department that will go far under President Obama.

Related: "Video: Nightmare at 20,000 feet."

Mark Finkelstein of NewsBusters writes:

The screencap captures it nicely: Heather Wilson, smiling. Robert Wexler, mouth agape. On this afternoon's Hardball, the feisty, brilliant [bio: high honors Air Force Academy grad, Rhodes Scholar] GOP representative from New Mexico took on the duo of the combative congressman from Florida and host Chris Matthews, and walked away a winner. The subject was Obama's Berlin speech, and by extension his presidential qualifications.

You'll find excerpts below, but they don't do begin to do justice to Wilson's brio and the coolness under verbal fire she displayed. That's why I'd strongly encourage readers to view the video. Wilson kicked off her tour de force in commenting on a clip of Obama in his Berlin speech proclaiming that various walls, including one between American and Europe, "cannot stand" and must be torn down.

The video may take a few minutes to download, as it's Windows Media instead of Flash; but don't miss it--it's well worth your time.

Lewis Black, in the above clip, witnesses the eschaton immanentized--and now with extra decaf caramel macchiato flavoring!

But as with all of man's previous attempts to build heaven on earth, the eschaton cannot sustain itself indefinitely. Sadly, the Wall Street Journal has published a list of upcoming Starbucks closings (and none in my town. So there!), and James Lileks explores the plight of the suddenly Starbucks deprived coffee drinker:

We have been bracing for the list of closings, and it was finally revealed: 27 Starbucks outlets will be shuttered in Minnesota, leaving only 45,234. Hasta barista, baby.

The effect on the Twin Cities will be light -- the average citizen will still be within six minutes of a $4 cup of coffee at all times. Productivity will not suffer as people slump over at their desks from lack of jitter-juice. The people you have to pity -- aside from the employees, who probably can't fill a bathtub now without thinking "room for cream?" and won't soon find another job requiring that question -- are the folks in the small towns who will lose a piece of the outside world.

A Strib story last week by Emma Carew told the plight of Albert Lea teens mourning the loss of their coffee shop.

And you can understand why: Starbucks was like an embassy of a country where people sat around and read foreign newspapers, like the Wall Street Journal, and discussed things.

Geez, isn't that what they invented the Internet for?

More names thrown under the bus--or is it under the ego? Charles Johnson points out that the Gipper's name was never uttered by Obama while speaking in Berlin, and John J. Pitney Jr. notes another name not spoken:

Between 1804 (during the fight against the Barbary Pirates) and 2004 (during Iraq), the United States held nine presidential elections in wartime. Only two of these elections--1952 and 1968--produced a change in party control. Both times, the winner was a Republican who ran on national-security experience, and the loser was a Democrat who seemed more dovish.

Obama can claim no executive or military experience. The last president to have neither was Warren G. Harding. By a two-to-one margin, Americans think that McCain would do better as commander in chief.

And so Obama came to Berlin to build up his image on national security. If only appearances matter, then he did himself some good. The substance of his remarks was different. He credited the 1948 Berlin Airlift to international cooperation. "It was this spirit that led airlift planes to appear in the sky above our heads," he said, as if some global vibe called aircraft from the vasty deep. Actually, it was Harry Truman. As Elizabeth Spalding recounts in The First Cold Warrior, "At first, Truman was almost alone in thinking that an airlift would work as an effective response to the Soviets."

Truman made a tough, risky decision. That's what presidents do. Obama did not acknowledge this point. He didn't even mention Truman's name.

On the other hand, as Ann Althouse suggests, "Surely, if he'd been there in 1948, he would have said the Berlin airlift is hopeless. He thought the surge was hopeless."

As others have noted, all that Hope and Change and Audacity hides an awfully grim and pessimistic worldview.

Update: And perhaps it's being reciprocated in kind: CNN's Amanpour 'Surprised' by Lack of 'Euphoria' After Obama Speech."

It's not just a presumptive victory lap...it's the Love Parade.

Over at the The Weekly Standard's blog, John McCormack writes, "Obama Thinks It Would Be 'Inappropriate' to Meet with U.S. Troops in Germany."

Yes, best to avoid entirely the risk of repeating this moment four years ago from another tyro nominee.

Instapundit notes that GOP has--shocker!--fumbled its battlefield preparations after the 2004 election.

Were they asleep at the wheel? Did they think that John McCain would automatically be The Man, and therefore, his mutual love affair with the media would continue once a Democratic nominee was found? Did they think Rush, Fox, the Freepers, Drudge, and a few dozen blogs and Websites would be enough?

A while back, Patrick Ruffini compared lead pipes and leaky pipes in the two party world of online political media. Certainly a lot more plumbing should have been installed by the GOP immediately after 2004 (which might have prevented the 2006 debacle). Or an even better metaphor that fits into the usual battlefield preparation riffs that I can't think of right now.

Still though--forget it, he's rolling.

Dr. Melissa Clouthier makes a suggestion as to what the Obama-In-Berlin poster resembles. But after a quick survey of Germanic graphic design in the immediate post-Weimar and post-Bauhaus era, I'd say it's closer to the compositional elements and color pallet here.

But as Ross Douthat writes:

Yes, of course the Hitler comparisons are absurd, but I'd really like to know which genius on the Obama campaign thought it would be a good idea to have their candidate conduct a major campaign rally in Europe with three months to go till the election and their candidate, despite an incredibly favorable climate and a fumbling opponent, still clinging to a 2-4 point lead in the polls?

I can see though, why the poster does appear to give off, at first glance, a definite whiff of, to borrow from a line from John Glenn back in 2004, "the old Hitler business." But as Jonah Goldberg has pointed out in Liberal Fascism, these sorts of propagandistic design elements were in the air throughout the west in the 1930s. As were programs such as this.

Because everything old is new again!

Update: While the text is in Italian, most of the artwork isn't, and you can see some interesting (and mostly recent) juxtapositions and comparisons of the Obama poster here.

The Obama Berlin speech versus "We Are The World"--see if you can identify which line comes from which!

(And the latter certainly worked out well for all concerned, of course.)

Mickey Kaus explores "Edwards and the agony of the MSM", beginning with his paraphrase of a Business Week article on John Edwards by Jon Fine:

Fine notes that "Edwards isn't considered a likely vice-presidential candidate by the press." That's true. But he is a likely Obama cabinet official. Many Dems would like to see him as Attorney-General. That's what's at stake in the love-child coverage. The Enquirer has killed him as a VP candidate. But if the MSM goes into full "protect Elizabeth" mode the damage might yet not quite be enough to stop his confirmation by a Democratic Senate next year. "Protect Elizabeth" = "protect A.G. John."

After a long list of MSM outlets that fail to report the story, Mickey quotes Jim Treacher:

"Which story gets a bigger audience: A story the blogs run with but the mainstream news ignores, or a story the news runs with but the blogs ignore? I'm thinking the news comes out ahead, but just barely. And at this rate, not for much longer."

And it's not like such an MSM bottleneck on a story that everyone knows the basics of hasn't happened before. As Tony Blankley wrote in late August of 2004:

Mark the calendar. August 2004 is the first time that the major mainline media -- CBSNBCABCNEWYORKTIMESWASHINGTONPOST L.A.TIMESNEWSWEEKTIMEMAGAZINEASSOCIATED PRESSETC. -- ignored a news story that nonetheless became known by two-thirds of the country within two weeks of it being mentioned by the "marginal" press.

It was only after a CBS poll showed that Kerry had lost a net 14 percent of the veteran's vote to Bush -- without aid of major media coverage or substantial national advertising -- that the major media outlets began to lumber, resentfully, in the vague direction of the story. And even then, they hardly engaged themselves in the spirit of objective journalism.

According to Editor and Publisher, the respected voice of official big-time journalism: "Chicago Tribune managing editor James O'Shea tells Joe Strupp the Swift Boat controversy may be an instance of a growing problem for newspapers in the expanding media world -- being forced to follow a questionable story because non-print outlets have made it an issue. "There are too many places for people to get information," says O'Shea. "I don't think newspapers can be gatekeepers anymore -- to say this is wrong, and we will ignore it. Now we have to say this is wrong, and here is why."

Now, there are two revealing statements there. First, it is odd to see Mr. O'Shea, an official, credentialed seeker of truth, complaining about "too many places for people to get information." He sounds like a resentful old apparatchik glaring at a Xerox machine in the dying days of the Soviet Union.

The second noteworthy statement is the hilarious complaint that they can no longer merely think a story is wrong and ignore it: "Now we have to say this is wrong, and here is why." It apparently escaped his thought process that if he hadn't yet investigated the story, it might not be "wrong." A seeker of truth in a competitive environment might have phrased the sentence: "Now we will have to report it to determine if it is right or wrong."

As Blankley wrote, August 2004 may have been the first time the undernews bubbled straight to the surface, but obviously, it will be far from the last.

Sad, sad news out of Denver: "Sound waves, goo guns won't be used on DNC protesters."

An instructional video from an earlier Colorado riot suggests some effective crowd control methods. I can only hope the proper authorities watch and learn before it's too late.

"Blew That One."

And on a related note, here's great moments in mastheads.

Your blood-pressure raising moment of the day courtesy of Eyeblast.tv; remember when the left debated whether or not scenes such as this actually happened in the late 1960s?

Something tells me the folks at Little Green Footballs won't be too enamored with this Obama photo-op.

House Republican Leader John Boehner on Fox News: "All We're Asking is for Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barack Obama to Allow Congress to Vote."

Quote of the day, part deux:

"I've heard people talk about the 'drive-by media,' but this is ridiculous."

--Glenn Reynolds on Bob Novak's driving skills--or lack thereof.

AMC's Mad Men series is filled with poke-the-viewer-in-the-ribs moments where characters in a TV series set in 1960 are smoking and drinking like, err, mad--even with their kids around, and on the way, in the case of one pregnant character who smokes like a chimney. And yet somehow, we all managed to survive such a stone knives and bearskins culture. So I have to laugh when a celebrity gossip site, full of photos of Hollywood actresses in various stages of undress and occasionally in various stages of acts that would have caused the boys in the Hayes Office to go into complete myocardial infarction in 1960, has a puritanical headline such as this: "Britney Spears in a Bikini is Smoking... In Front of Her Kids."

Gosh--I know I'm shocked.

Something else the characters in Mad Men wouldn't be the least surprised by, because they had a millennium of history and common sense to go by: "Social stigma drives some women to remove tattoos."

And as usual, the L.A. Times, where history and culture are always in the present-tense, is surprised by (a) a topic that Theodore Dalrymple was writing about nearly a decade and a half ago and (b) your grandmother understood 50 years ago.

(Via Conservative Grapevine.)

"We don't see a need to improve upon our credibility by, say, putting the audio on the web."

--Der Spiegel, which according to Patterico, helpfully rewrote Iraqi PM Maliki's remarks for "clarity."

Related: "Photo Ops and 'Fake Interviews': Obama's Excellent Overseas Adventure."

VodkaPundit, Capt. Ed, The Anchoress, Lileks, and the American Thinker all in handy portable podcast form (as Lileks himself would say)? Why yes, the new edition of PJM Political is now online!

Jim Geraghty asks:

Obama says that even knowing what he knows now, he still would have opposed the surge.

So why does he want a surge of additional troops in Afghanistan?

Note also the "animated" discussion between Obama and Gen. Petraeus that Jim also mentions.

"Some of us have a theory that he might once have been a president of the United States, but that he did something horrendous, so that all records, everything was wiped out about him. There is nothing in history books. There are no pictures on stamps or money."

Unlike the fellow in the video archives that Woody's asked to identify in the above clip from Sleeper, it seems increasingly unlikely that John Edwards will ever be president. But Mickey Kaus wonders if the Ministry of Information will quietly toss Edwards' file down the memory hole to avoid the potential risk of doubleplus ungood malreported prolefeed:

Will this be the first presidential-contender level scandal to occur completely in the undernews, without ever being reported in the cautious, respectable MSM? That's always seemed an interesting theoretical possibility--a prominent politician just disappears from the scene, after blogs and tabloids dig up dirt on him, but nobody who relies on the Times, Post, network news or Mark Halperin has the faintest idea why.

Didn't the MSM already do that to the 1970's-era back story of Edwards' running mate in 2004?

Roger L. Simon:

John Edwards--he of constructing a 28,000 square foot home while preaching about the two Americas and remonstrating about the environment--is one of the most reprehensible schmucks to appear on the American political scene in some time. And that's saying something. That he played this game while his wife had cancer makes it contemptible beyond words. Now we know why he was always primping in the mirror. It is narcissism unbounded.

Elsewhere, Byron York notes, "Today Is Fitzmas for Mickey Kaus."

"This is my proposed Quayle Test. Ask yourself: How each time Obama says something stoopid, would the press would have crucified Dan Quayle for it?"

(Via Glenn Reynolds.)

Jeff Jarvis writes that "Actually is the new 'y'know'":

The most overused and unnecessary word on broadcast is "actually." Start counting how many times it is used by TV people and you'll hate me for driving you nuts.

While I'm kvetching, why do TV people introduce a panel of three people and then say, "Mr. Jones, let me start with you." Just start with him: ask your question. Why this need to warn Mr. Jones?

I actually find myself actually using the word far too often myself. As I'm actually doing right now...

Where's Walter Winchell when you need him? "SEN. JOHN EDWARDS CAUGHT WITH MISTRESS AND LOVE CHILD!"

That's the stuff! (The stuff that probably just cost the Silkmeister a chance at being Obama's veep.)

"Remembering Battle of the Network Stars."

"Free piece of advice to the lovelorn Maverick: Perhaps McCain should leave the media mockery to others who haven't had their lips planted on the MSM's backside for decades."

Actual Rocky Mountain News headline: "DNCC's Director of Greening experience questioned."

I hope she's up to the task:

Only three state delegations have agreed to eliminate entirely their carbon footprints by purchasing travel offsets, despite the pleas of convention organizers.

The heavily vegetarian "Lean 'N Green" menu has touched off a slew of gripes, ranging from caterers who can't find enough Colorado-grown organic vegetables to Denver City Council member Charlie Brown calling menu planners "the food police."

The biggest environmental disaster to befall the convention hit two weeks ago, when the Barack Obama campaign announced that the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee would make his acceptance speech at Invesco Field at Mile High stadium.

The decision to move to the stadium threw a Chernobyl-sized wrench into the sustainability plan. Switching the venue from the Pepsi Center, which seats fewer than 20,000, to Invesco, which holds 78,000, threatens to saddle the convention with the Shaquille O'Neal of carbon footprints.

Democratic officials have remained tight-lipped on the environmental impact of the move, saying they're still crunching the kilowatt numbers.

As Orrin Judd notes, "The telecast of his speech will be eco-porn!"

Christian Toto sounds like he'll likely be tuning out the latest incarnation of what was once the Siskel & Ebert show:

Doesn't have a great ring to it, does it?

Turns out the folks behind "At the Movies with Ebert & Roeper" already have a backup plan. They'll throw E!'s Ben Lyons and Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz into the balcony once occupied by Siskel & Ebert (hat tip Thompson on Hollywood).

I'm not a TCM watcher, alas. I've become an HD snob and that channel isn't broadcast in high-def on my system. And Lyons seemed affable the times I've caught him on E!, but I can't share any other pertinent thoughts about him.

This could be another Katie Couric moment, although on a less important scale. News hounds don't bother with the network's nightly newscasts anymore, but that didn't stop CBS from throwing tons of money Couric's way.

Do movie fans still wait for "At the Movies" before surfing over to Fandango?

Like the rest of the dino-media, the one-size-fits-all movie critic is going the way of the one-size-fits-all anchorman (sorry, Katie). Movie fans increasingly look for critics with similar worldviews, much the same way that news junkies have long sought out bloggers with compatible mindsets.

Update: Nikke Finke is not amused:

Ugh. The retooled Ebert & Roeper show premiering September 6th will be co-hosted by Ben & Ben -- a Generation Why duo who only got the gig due to nepotism. Ben Lyons is the nobody son of Jeffrey Lyons, the film critic world's biggest hack and quote whore with zero credibility, while Ben Mankiewicz is the slacker host on Turner Classic Movies, whose only claim to fame is that he's a watered-down member of the famous film family. Now, there's a working definition of the death of film criticism for you.

Heh.

Dan Quayle, eat your heart out: "Well, let me--let me be absolutely clear. Israel is a strong friend of Israel's."

Having been rejected for publication by the New York Times, copies of which are no doubt sold throughout our northernmost 51st state, John McCain clearly has a slam-dunk case for the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal.

According to this AP report from April, Katie Couric's evening news show "averaged 5.34 million viewers last week, breaking a record low for CBS News' flagship show that had been set the week before, according to Nielsen Media Research."

And the rest of you 295 million troglodytes who tuned her out? Sexist bastards, the lot of you:

"Unfortunately I have found out that many viewers are afraid of change. The glory days of TV news are over, and the media landscape has been dramatically changed. News is available now for everyone, everywhere, all the time, and everybody fights for the last pieces of the shrinking pie. The corporate pressure and the ratings terror are intensifying all the time, and the situation is not simple. I find myself in the last bastion of male dominance, and realizing what Hillary Clinton might have realized not long ago: that sexism in the American society is more common than racism, and certainly more acceptable or forgivable. In any case, I think my post and Hillary's race are important steps in the right direction."

All that pioneering bravery, and for only $15 million a year.

Warner Todd Huston asks, "So, What Should we Call The Media, Anyway?"

Roger Kimball offers some advice to John McCain:

This fact is one reason I generally try to refrain from dispensing advice to candidates. But the recent dust-up--first reported, I believe, by the Drudge Report--over The New York Times's refusal to print an op-ed by John McCain responding to an op-ed they published the week before by Barack Obama prompts me to depart, at least partially, from this tradition.

I say "at least partially" because my advice is negative: I do not have a 5-point program for ending taxes, avoiding death, or obtaining waterfront property in Maine free of charge. But I hate to see wasted energy just as much as Al Gore says he hates it, and I have a simple one-stop program for saving the McCain campaign--and the campaigns of other Republican candidates--quite a lot of energy. (By the way, you can read the McCain op-ed in The New York Post here.)

It's as simple as it is efficient: Ignore The New York Times. More and more of your constituents are doing so, why shouldn't you? Join the many happy folks who have Kicked the Times: Don't read it, don't refer to it, don't regard it as an authority on anything. You'll feel cleaner and your blood pressure will thank you. Above all, do not write, and do not allow your staff to write, op-eds for the Times. On the off chance that the paper actually publishes your piece, you will only help to bolster its sense of smug self-righteousness and perpetuate the illusion that the paper treats the candidates, or the issues, even-handedly. They don't, and you shouldn't collude in fostering the destructive myth that they do.

I agree, except that since the Times' unforced error already occurred, Sen. McCain should exploit their incredible double-standard as much as he can; it will rally his base and build sympathy amongst undecideds. Much like Ra^therGate (which this is already being compared to, rightly or wrongly) and its proprietors' meltdown ended up being a pretty healthy gift to President Bush, McCain should collect as many dividends as possible from the Times' enormous gaffe.

Update: Just fire up Premiere Pro and tack a line or two onto the end of this ad!

So badly that even Dee Dee Myers can see it.

Rick Moran writes, "The story of John McCain's discarded op-ed explains why the New York Times is dying":

Someday, when newspapers are a thing of the past and you take your grandkid to the museum where artifacts of the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune are on display in vacuum sealed cases to protect the yellowing, brittle paper from disappearing entirely, there will be a special exhibit devoted entirely to the New York Times.

Famous front pages will be featured along with pictures of the Sulzberger family who owned the paper for generations, famous reporters, and the last publisher when the paper folded in 2018--Matt Drudge.

The inscription on the shiny bronze plate below the exhibit might read:

Thought of as the "newspaper of record" for more than 100 years, the Times eventually succumbed to disappearing ad revenue, a catastrophic decline in circulation, and the consequences of a perpetual, unrelenting, obvious and sickening bias exhibited against its political enemies.

The news industry has already built the museum that Rick describes--join us on a video tour!

Roger L. Simon confesses, "When I read this morning on the Drudge Report that the New York Times had rejected John McCain's op-ed, I think I knew how he was feeling. I too have been rejected by the paper":

In my case it came after having written for them successfully several times, notably a couple of humorous essays I did for the New York Times Book Review about my travels to the Soviet Union and Spain with International Association of Crime Writers, so I was particularly hurt by their rejection of an article the magazine section had commissioned from me in early 2003.

The subject of that article? The burgeoning interest in political blogs. I took the position that such bloggers as Glenn Reynolds and Mickey Kaus were becoming more influential with readers than newspaper columnists and would soon be a serious alternative to (though not a full replacement for) mainstream media. The Times turned it down. As with McCain, they asked me to "try again" and I did--but I soon realized I had a message they didn't want to hear or promote.

So it came as no surprise to me that the paper nixed John McCain's view on Iraq, wanting him to explain what "victory" meant. (How risible is that after all this time!) Despite its pretense of even-handedness, the Times is no more "fair and balanced" than Fox News or anybody else. No media outlet is. They try to hide it by publishing select political opponents like David Brooks, but that is no more than smoke screen. Bias is as American as apple pie. (Come to think of it--bias is as human as breathing.)

As I wrote back in 2004, after the Times' then-ombudman wrote, "Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? Of course it is":

Okrent's admission has repercussions throughout virtually all of America's media. For example, the New York Times finally admits it's liberal, but still carries the motto, "All the news that's fit to print".

What does that do to the folks who claim that because Fox sometimes tilts to the right (don't tell Geraldo and Greta, though) that they shouldn't be using "fair and balanced"?

Of course, the Times doesn't know it (well, maybe they do now), but in a sense, they did McCain a huge favor by generating sympathy for McCain amongst his base, which often doesn't feel all that simpatico with their candidate. But thanks to the Times, --"You're a real conservative at last, Maverick!"

Meanwhile, Greg Pollowitz notes the op-ed that ran in place of McCain's.

The Dallas Morning News notes:

FoxSports.com is reporting that the Giants have dealt disgruntled tight end Jeremy Shockey to the Saints for a second-and fifth-round pick.

More to come ...

UPDATE: The Saints are confirming the deal, which is pending league approval and Shockey passing a physical.

Elsewhere in the NFC East, the Washington Redskins acquire Jason Taylor in a trade with the Miami Dolphins, after more than a little bad blood was shed between Taylor and Bill Parcells.

Byron York writes:

For months now, John McCain has urged Barack Obama to visit Iraq. "It has been 873 days since Sen. Obama's one and only visit to Iraq," a McCain campaign statement said on May 30. "Before [he] decides to override the recommendations of our commanders in the field and surrender the fight, he should have the judgment to see for himself first-hand the conditions on the ground."

Maybe McCain shouldn't have been so emphatic. What if Obama went to Iraq, decided his position was the correct one, and then, in a major campaign coup, received what appeared to be the endorsement of the Iraqi prime minister? And--extra points--made himself look more statesmanlike in the process?

Obama arrived in Baghdad early this morning, and all that seems to have happened.

As Allahpundit writes, "The discomfort is palpable and apt to get worse as the day wears on. "

Fun Wired article from a few years back:

They're supposed to be hellish wastelands. But some of the sinister netherworlds found in books, movies, and videogames seem pretty cool. Sex, drugs, kick-ass weapons, fly rides - where do we sign up?

Number one on the list always sounded pretty bitchin' to me, as well. I'm kind of surprised that this city isn't also on the list, though.

On the other hand, who needs fiction, when chances are, there's a real life dystopia right in your own backyard!

Betsy Newmark writes that she's "rather disgusted at Bill O'Reilly's unctuous defense of himself for not revealing that Jackson had used the n-word in his little rant":

I haven't ever thought much of Bill O'Reilly, but this story exposed him for an even bigger buffoon than I'd thought he was before. Note how he had a different reaction about people who criticized Don Imus for his riff on the Rutgers basketball team. At that time, with guest host Michelle Malkin interviewing him, he pretended that he was going to be all fearless in exposing those who criticized Imus but then used racist language themselves.

MALKIN: Well, I guess the rehabilitation of Don Imus will begin. But, I mean, how optimistic are you that the rehabilitation of all of the other hate-mongers and hate-tolerators is going to take place?

O'REILLY: Another excellent question.

I don't care whether their rehabilitation takes place at all. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to spotlight them now. And I think other people will, too, that, when they get back into this groove of hate, we're going to lay it out there, that we're going to layout there the gangster rappers, who they work for, who is paying them.

I wouldn't want to be Snoopy Dogg right now.

(LAUGHTER)

O'REILLY: And I wouldn't want to be Ludacris or 50 Cent, because every move they make is going to be on "The Factor."

I guess that that was just some self-promoting spin because Jesse Jackson was one of the biggest mouths out there protesting against Don Imus. But when Bill O'Reilly had an exclusive video shot of the sanctimonious Reverend using the n-word, he tried to bury the tape.

Maybe Bill's trying to stay on Al Sharpton's good side, lest he wind up in the same star chamber that Imus did. In any case, as Betsy writes, "O'Reilly may bluster all he wants, but he's proven that his zone has quite a good deal of spin."

Scott Whitlock writes:

On Monday's "MSNBC News Live," journalist Andrea Mitchell and Washington Post editorial writer Jonathan Capehart discussed whether Americans are not "sophisticated" enough to understand the attempted satire in the cartoon featured on the cover of the current New Yorker magazine. According to Mitchell, "...The only question there is whether [the cover] is too sophisticated to actually be perceived the way it is intended."

Congrats, Andrea! You've just personified each and every element present in the second most famous New Yorker cover.

Godzilla Versus Rodan; the Cowboys versus the Steelers; Ali versus Frazier; Coke versus Pepsi; Springfield versus Shelbyville: life in the arena is a harsh one. Fortunately Kyle Smith is there to referee the celebrity caged death match between two middle-aged angst-ridden rockers each perpetually trapped in 1975:

It does not happen often, but once in a while the urge comes upon me: I want to rock.

So I went to see Billy Joel at Shea Stadium.

Also, I went with my mom, who could not rock if you handed her a bottle of Jack, a Stratocaster and a live bat while blasting "The Immigrant Song."

You may argue that Billy's rock credentials are suspect, too. But Joel, who played the last two concerts ever at Shea, and Bruce Springsteen, who arrives at Giants Stadium next week for three shows, are two middle-aged gents who would like us to believe that they rock. Who is correct? Let's break it down.

Read the rest.

Karl of Protein Wisdom links to my interview on PJM Political this past week with James Lileks on AMC's Mad Men series; there's an interesting debate on the show's aesthetics and writing going on under the post in the comment section.

"Despite all the hype over Obama's religious outreach, a new Pew survey indicates Obama actually has slightly less support from evangelicals than John Kerry had at this point four years ago."

Audacity--how bitter is thy aftertaste!

Charles Johnson notes that "the Barack Obama campaign has been making sure Obama doesn't have to answer any real questions from the international media."

(Such as a question about his choice of venues in Germany.)

Meanwhile, here's a domestic reporter that Obama would actually be quite wise to meet with:

On Wednesday, presumptive Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama blamed his wife's high negative ratings on "the conservative press--Fox News and the National Review" as well as "rants by Sean Hannity."

He also said, "And you know, the problem is that rarely do these folks have the guts to say it to your face."

On Thursday, Hannity struck back (video embedded right):

Senator Obama, here is my invitation. Anything I've ever said about you, you can sit right here, and I will say it to your face. Do you have the guts to come on this program and take some tough questions?

In the late 1960s and 1970s, when television meant four liberal networks and the sole token conservative program was Bill Buckley's Firing Line, Ronald Reagan benefited greatly by regularly going into the network hornets' nests, debating, and regularly besting his ideological opponents in the media.

And at least until this year, John McCain counted many of his best friends in those same networks. On the opposite side of the aisle, Hillary easily survived an appearance on Bill O'Reilly's show this year; and as Roger Ailes noted last year, "The candidates that can't face Fox, can't face Al Qaeda".

In less than a year, Ezra Levant not only gets his right of free speech challenged by a Canadian Imam who thuggishly sicked the Alberta "Human Rights" Commission on him, he's now facing anonymous death threats on his blog. Having already witnessed, up close and personal, the failure of Canada's dangerous and incompetent government, as Kathy Shaidle writes, Ezra is "opening sourcing" things--and offering a $1000 reward to anyone who can identify the person who threatened him.

Even as liberal comedians continue to knock their product, if not its target, the legacy media celebrates a broad diversity of marketing slogans as it prepares for November:

CBS News creative director Bob Peterson has rolled out this new logo for CBS News coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign. CBS continues with the "Campaign '08" theme, while ABC calls theirs "Vote '08" and NBC's is "Decision '08"

Oh to have been a fly on the wall when the real Don Drapers of Madison Avenue submitted their bills for those innovative slogans!

Michael M. Bates writes that back in print regarding former Senator Max Cleland is "a liberal myth, one still being circulated by the New York Times":

"Obama's Lobbyist Policy Excludes Cleland" was posted last night on the New York Times's "The Caucus" blog. It relates that former Georgia Senator Max Cleland was disinvited from a Barack Obama fundraiser because the decorated war veteran is now a registered lobbyist.

The piece ends with:

As a surrogate for Senator John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign, Mr. Cleland often got marquee billing at campaign events, even landing a coveted speaking role at the Democratic National Convention. He lost his bid for a second term in 2002 after a Republican television advertisement depicted him as unpatriotic.

Fortunately, we have YouTube--we can fact check your Sulzberger!

Bates goes on to quote Michael Crowley in the liberal e-zine Slate:

Most famously, Chambliss ran a vicious ad on Cleland's homeland security votes featuring images of Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. In the popular liberal mythology, the ad disgustingly questioned Cleland's patriotism. "To this day I am motivated by--and I will be throughout this campaign--the most craven moment I've ever seen in politics, when the Republican Party challenged this man's patriotism in the last campaign," John Kerry has said.

But that's not what happened. The ad, though sleazy in its use of Osama and Saddam, didn't question Cleland's patriotism. It questioned his political courage and judgment. It focused narrowly on his behavior in office and his actual votes against the Homeland Security Department. With images of Bin Laden and Saddam flashing onscreen, a narrator declared that, "As America faces terrorists and extremist dictators, Max Cleland runs television ads claiming he has the courage to lead." The ad then listed Cleland's votes against the Homeland Security Department and said he was stalling "the president's vital homeland security efforts." It concluded: "Max Cleland says he has the courage to lead, but the record proves Max Cleland is just misleading."

Unfortunately, Cleland did a lousy job of responding to such attacks. As he was pummeled on national security--clearly the issue of the day as war with Iraq neared, Cleland stuck to stale Democratic themes like Social Security. Occasionally, Cleland and his supporters counterattacked, but they were ineffective.

Evidently, the Times is counting on its readers not to simply search for the video themselves--but of course, why Timesperson Michael Falcone couldn't do that himself and embed a link or the actual video is also a reasonable question.

That's Bill O'Reilly's take, in response to AP disparaging Tony Snow in their obit, after canonizing Tim Russert.

But then AP already announced that they're quite happy to ditch objectivity, as I noticed in my previous post.

Venomous Kate writes, "When we were visiting the in-laws last week, I didn't have internet access and actually found myself reading a dead-tree newspaper for the first time in several years":

It was discomfiting to settle for poorly written stories that barely skimmed the surface of an issue while realizing that immediately educating myself further on a topic or reading a dissenting opinion wasn't an option. More than once I found myself questioning statistics in a story about the election or the war but I couldn't hop online to do some fact-checking of my own.

No wonder so many technophobes can't discuss politics beyond sound bites and headlines, I found myself thinking. How can we ever consider our voting populace educated if they're limited to merely accepting biased statements as "news"?

But therein lies the biggest limitation and turn-off for many readers: you either know and accept that a newspaper or news magazine has a political prejudice and will be running slanted stories that leave you in the dark or you assume you've got the full story when, in fact, you probably don't. (And you know what they say about people who "assume" things.)

That's the real change the internet's brought to MSM: readers who are interested in the issues no longer have to depend upon a paper to decide for them "all the news that's fit to print".

Don't understand the situation in Darfur, much less know where the place is? Hop online and read Wikipedia, then explore from there. Wonder why Conservatives think Obama's secretly a Muslim when, after all, he attended a (possibly racist) church? Do some exploring and decide for yourself.

When you read the news online, additional information is just a mouse click away. When you read it in a newspaper or magazine you're not just subscribing to their publication but to their political biases as well.

Having been through the whole Dan Rather/National Guard memo debacle in the last election, I know better than to trust the accuracy what I see in print. MSM's political bias has, in my mind, become a given.

Judging by the drop in subscriptions and advertising revenue for print media, even people who don't spend their entire days at the computer are starting to realize and reject this limitation, too.

So is this the beginning of the end for newspapers and news magazines in printed form? Quite possibly. But it might also signal a new beginning, too: that of the curious, self-educated reader. News organizations desiring to stay in business might want to take note and work with that. A good start: eliminating the annoying registration requirements and paid access to archives which simply send online readers looking for a more convenient source of news. An even better approach: stop fearing the blogosphere and start linking to it, instead.

Unless, of course, newspaper and magazine editors really are afraid readers will discover just how biased their stories are.

Indeed--although as I've written several times here over the years, increasingly journalists are quite happy to either (a) tell you their biases or (b) even if they don't, let it all hang so far out that it's obvious. And in a curious development that in a way is the final triumph of the Blogosphere--AP is encouraging its journalists to inject more of their biases into a story, not less.

Just the facts? That's strictly Jack Webb and Dragnet '66, dude.

Related: As for another mass media whose freshness date has long expired? "Some People Still Watch TV And Get What They Deserve."

Well actually, of course you can--but that was before science got Title Nined, as Rod Dreher and John Tierney note. The latter writes:

Until recently, the impact of Title IX, the law forbidding sexual discrimination in education, has been limited mostly to sports. But now, under pressure from Congress, some federal agencies have quietly picked a new target: science.

The National Science Foundation, NASA and the Department of Energy have set up programs to look for sexual discrimination at universities receiving federal grants. Investigators have been taking inventories of lab space and interviewing faculty members and students in physics and engineering departments at schools like Columbia, the University of Wisconsin, M.I.T. and the University of Maryland.

So far, these Title IX compliance reviews haven't had much visible impact on campuses beyond inspiring a few complaints from faculty members. (The journal Science quoted Amber Miller, a physicist at Columbia, as calling her interview "a complete waste of time.") But some critics fear that the process could lead to a quota system that could seriously hurt scientific research and do more harm than good for women.

The members of Congress and women's groups who have pushed for science to be "Title Nined" say there is evidence that women face discrimination in certain sciences, but the quality of that evidence is disputed. Critics say there is far better research showing that on average, women's interest in some fields isn't the same as men's.

In this debate, neither side doubts that women can excel in all fields of science. In fact, their growing presence in former male bastions of science is a chief argument against the need for federal intervention.

Read the rest.

Ever since the media's infamous "DemocRATS" articles first ran in September during the 2000 campaign, usually the subliminal advertising paranoia begins to arrive late in the race, as with the Republican follow-up in October, 2004.

But as a helpful way to deflect attention from the New Yorker's cartoon, ABC has discovered that theoretically it's possible, that if you watch John McCain's new, nearly eight minute long video attacking Obama's Iraq War flipflops while you stand on your head, look cross-eyed, simultaneously chant passages from the Tibetan Book of the Dead and take hits from an Evian-cooled bong full of Acapulco Gold, it's possible to see what looks like it might be the letters Al Qaeda, in one of the video's 14,000 or so frames.

Abraham Zapruder could not be reached for comment.

And no word yet, if you play the anti-Obama ad backwards, if it spells out Paul Is Dead, Here's To My Sweet Saul Alinsky, or Hillary Is The Antichrist.

See if you can spot the disparity between the photo and its caption in this NPR story. Here's the text:

Angelica Hernandez (left) and her mother, Gloria Nunez, struggle to make ends meet on a very limited budget.

Click over for the photo.

The headline of the article is "For Some Ohioans, Even Meat Is Out Of Reach", which of course, probably makes PETA quite happy, in much the same way that rising gasoline prices give a warm fuzzy feeling to Gore and Obama.

That's the advice to comedians from leftwing journalist Joel Stein, (who knows a thing or two about recovering from the proverbial botched joke himself), as he explains, "How To Make Fun Of Obama" in the L.A. Times. As Stein tells comics, you "have an arsenal of jokes to use against a 71-year-old ex-POW cancer survivor and Obama is too touchy a subject?

Maybe this is why American talk show hosts are loathe to mock the eminently mockable Obama--they fear if elected, he'll throw a Canadian-style snit and create an American equivalent to Canada's "Human Rights" Commissions. Over at Pajamas HQ, Kathy Shaidle writes that after watching Canada's HRC unleashed on stand-up Guy Earle after a bout with a pair of lesbian hecklers went awry, Mark Steyn told Hugh Hewitt:

You know, if you're Don Rickles, you don't want to be booking any stand-up appearances in the Dominion of Canada anytime soon, because the joke police are in full flight up there.

Read the whole thing.

The Obama/John Belushi connection, as discovered by Orrin Judd.

Bonus question: Was Hawaii already one of our 57 states when the bomb was dropped on it?

Ronald Reagan's famous quip to Jimmy Carter during the presidential debates in 1980 was designed to puncture Carter's ever-growing hectoring punitive liberal tone. Carter's natural elitism was masked by his initial sunny campaign persona and omnipresent smile during his 1976 campaign, but worn down by four years in which Carter's fecklessness was no match for rising inflation, unemployment and interest rates, a flat-lined stock market, a newly radicalized and reprimitivized Middle East, and a Soviet Union which had reacquired its taste for land acquisition, all a direct result, as the Gipper would go on to prove once in office, of Carter's outdated playback coupled with Carter's own built-in sense of malaise.

Fortunately for the American public, Barack Obama has arrived at the same dissipated and humorless state merely from being out on the campaign trail, instead of after four painful bumbling years actually in the Oval Office!

Of course, those could well be on the way no matter what happens, but Obama's current malaise may be why, as James Bowman posits, the New Yorker tried to do Obama a favor this week, by giving him something to punch against, to restore the populist charm of his campaign back in the earlier, carefree days of the primaries:

The most disturbing thing about this media storm is the utter humorlessness not only of the hard left and the media, which we already pretty much knew about, but of the Obama campaign itself, which professed to be mightily offended by the cartoon. And suddenly I am struck by another possibility: that the posture of taking offense was the Obama campaign's repudiation of the support of the eggheaded, Kerry-loving, cheese-eating faction that so many Americans look on as elitist. At the risk of being seen to have jumped on the paranoiac band-wagon myself, I wonder if giving the offense in the first place was The New Yorker's way of offering him that opportunity to disclaim the elitist tendency he was so damaged by when Hillary Clinton successfully identified him with it during the primary campaign.

But of course, Obama is no mood to look at gift cover in the mouth, as Kathleen Parker writes:

Oh, for a good riposte.

Barack Obama's levity-free reaction to the now-famous New Yorker cartoon leaves one reluctantly wondering: Is he humor-challenged? Perchance, does he take himself too seriously for a nation of wits and wags?

So soaring has been Obama's rhetoric and so dazzling his smile that we've missed the possibility that the Illinois senator is less the lanky rock star and more the purse-lipped church lady, clucking his tongue in disapproval of the chuckling masses.

His campaign's angry reaction to the magazine cover shows a stunning lack of political dexterity. It wasn't always so.

In earlier days, Obama was self-deprecating and light of touch. But something happens as people get closer to Washington, as Obama himself has pointed out in other contexts. A popular story that Obama tells concerns a Las Vegas debate during which he was asked about his weaknesses.

Obama answered that he has trouble keeping up with paper, that his desk is a mess. O.K., it wasn't knee-slapping hilarious, but it was honest and, therefore, endearing. A real answer from a real person.

In contrast, two of Obama's contenders, both Washington veterans, responded to the same question with the kind of painful earnestness that makes dogs cynical. As Obama recounts it, one of them said his biggest weakness was that "I'm just so passionate about helping poor people." The other said, "I'm just so impatient to help the American people solve their problems."

Oof.

Obama continues the story: "So then I realize, well, I wish I'd gone last and then I would have known." (Laughter, applause.) "I'm stupid that way, I thought that when they asked what your biggest weakness was, they asked what your biggest weakness was. And now I know that my biggest weakness is I like to help old ladies across the street."

Now, that's funny. And there's a reason the other two candidates — John "passionate" Edwards and Hillary "impatient" Clinton — aren't leading the Democratic ticket.

But that was before the Cult Of Obama was cemented into place as the official narrative, right around the time of this messianic MTV moment. As a result, Charles Krauthammer writes, "Americans are beginning to notice Obama's elevated opinion of himself":

There's nothing new about narcissism in politics. Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president. Nonetheless, has there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?

Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted "present" nearly 130 times. As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, has he ever produced a single notable piece of scholarship? Written a single memorable article? His most memorable work is a biography of his favorite subject: himself.

It is a subject upon which he can dilate effortlessly. In his victory speech upon winning the nomination, Obama declared it a great turning point in history -- "generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment" -- when, among other wonders, "the rise of the oceans began to slow." As Hudson Institute economist Irwin Stelzer noted in his London Daily Telegraph column, "Moses made the waters recede, but he had help." Obama apparently works alone.

Obama may think he's King Canute, but the good king ordered the tides to halt precisely to refute sycophantic aides who suggested that he had such power. Obama has no such modesty.

After all, in the words of his own slogan, "we are the ones we've been waiting for," which, translating the royal "we," means: " I am the one we've been waiting for." Amazingly, he had a quasi-presidential seal with its own Latin inscription affixed to his lectern, until general ridicule -- it was pointed out that he was not yet president -- induced him to take it down.

Much like Senator Kerry before him, Obama's newly discovered humorlessness is a gift to John McCain and his advisors if they're savvy enough to use it to their advantage, and in a sane world, it would be a gift to late night TV as well, if they only they were smart enough to get their own sympathies out of the way and have some fun for a change:

"Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough slammed the "hacks" at "The Daily Show" on Wednesday for only making fun of Republicans and giving a free pass to Democrats. Discussing a July 15 New York Times piece that described how TV comics and talk show hosts are hesitant to make fun of Barack Obama, Scarborough mocked, "I never want to hear anybody from 'The Daily Show' or any of these other shows ever saying again, 'We speak truth to power.' 'Cause you know what they do? They speak truth to Republicans."

After admitting that Republicans have made many mistakes over the last seven years, the MSNBC host continued to eviscerate the crew at the "The Daily Show" and others: " But, please, don't be subversive, because you're not. Because you're a hack. You're a hack for the Democratic Party and you only tell jokes about one side."

Because Obama is rife for satire, as Kyle Smith notes:

Jimmy Kimmel says comedy writers refuse to make fun of Obama because he's black: "There's a weird reverse racism going on." Others vow that, gee, they'd be wiling to make fun of Obama but, damn, he just hasn't done anything worthy of making jokes about yet.

Naw, nothing funny about being the first admitted coke user to be nominated by a major party. Nothing funny about palling around with a member of the Weather Underground. Nothing funny about spending 20 years going to the church of a psychotic rage-a-holic preacher who makes Jimmy Falwell look like St. Augustine. Nothing funny about having a wife who said she had never felt proud of her country before. Nothing funny about flippity-flopping on your no. 1 issue–campaign finance–or voting for a surveillance bill you vowed to fillibuster. His problems with quitting smoking alone would be the subject of a million late-night riffs if he were a Republican.

Comics insist they're equal-opportunity offenders but they're really not. When they talk about making jokes about Obama, they shy away from anything whose punchline implies some failing and go off-roading into neutral comedy territory like his father's goat-herding or his habit of tying everything into his talking points. Kimmel suggests going for laughs by making fun of Obama's ears. Hard-hitting stuff, James. A writer for Letterman suggests that the audience won't go for any racist stuff. True, but so what? There's nothing racist about mocking cokeheads or wobbly principles.

As Kyle wrote, it's "Day Five since Barack Obama's camp revealed he has suffered an acute humorectomy"; if, as Joe Scarborough wrote above, a similarly humor-challenged conservative were discovered (cough--Quayle--cough), they'd circle around him like sharks getting their first taste of chum.

Well, have it fellas--the water's fine, if you're willing to dip a fin toe in. Even Jon Stewart says so.

Christian Toto, who appeared yesterday on PJM Political, reviews Trumbo for Pajamas Media, "the new crockumentary", as the Drunkablog accurately dubs it, on blacklisted "Hollywood Ten" writer Dalton Trumbo, while quoting from Ronald Radosh:

There is a lengthy sequence in which Donald Sutherland reads from Trumbo's 1939 antiwar novel, Johnny Got His Gun. Nowhere do we learn that Johnny, touted by the Communists during the years of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and serialized in their newspaper, was withdrawn from circulation by Trumbo when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. Literally overnight, the Communist party's peace campaign ended and was replaced by calls for intervention against Hitler.

Accordingly, Trumbo censored his own book, took the plates from the publisher, and let it go out of print. But the novel, which had gotten good reviews, was still popular, and readers wrote to Trumbo to find out where it could be found. Not satisfied that his book was no longer available, Trumbo--fearing, undoubtedly correctly, that many of those letter-writers were isolationists, and some even pro-fascist--invited the FBI to visit him at home in 1944, and turned the letters over to the agents. He informed on Americans who only wanted to read his own novel! . . .

That's a topic I also mention in my recent Silicon Graffiti video:






Meanwhile, on his blog, Christian writes that Glenn Beck has come up with a rather novel way to begin to break the new Hollywood blacklist.

Your must see eco-hypocrisy video of the day, via Americans for Prosperity:

Al was recently quoted in the New York Times (sure, but for the sake of argument, assume they got it right) as saying that:

"The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk," Mr. Gore said in a speech to an energy conference here. "The future of human civilization is at stake."

As Glenn Reynolds likes to say, I'll believe there's a crisis when the people who tell me there's a crisis start acting like there's one themselves.

I've pointed out a few times that Pat Buchanan has become increasingly cozy with the far left...but who could have seen this one coming?!

(With apologies to Paul Simon.)

Related: No word yet if Chutch is intending to get in on the action.

Eric Idle's proto-Spinal Tap Beatles parody TV movie in 1978:

In the midst of all this public bickering, "Let it Rot" was released as a film, an album, and a lawsuit. In 1970, Dirk sued Stig, Nasty, and Barry; Barry sued Dirk, Nasty, and Stig; Nasty sued Barry, Dirk, and Stig; and Stig sued himself accidentally.

Newsmax, today: "Rangel to File Ethics Complaint--Against Himself."

Leftwing historian Rick Perlstein recently told Reason that "Bonnie and Clyde was the most important text of the New Left." It certainly foreshadowed the radical chic that runs through the liberalism of the late 1960s, from the Black Panthers sipping Martinis in Leonard Bernstein's salon to recurring parodies such Michelle Obama in camo and combat boots clutching an AK-47 on the cover of this week's New Yorker.

Speaking of the New Yorker, how much did Pauline Kael's championing of the movie impact the rest of culture? In my interview with James Lileks on AMC's Mad Men for PJM Political, we discussed the middlebrow culture of the 1950s and early 1960s. That culture was eventually eviscerated, as anyone who turns on a TV or goes to the movies knows all too well. But how much is Pauline Kael to blame?

Her part in the process began four decades ago when she wrote an article for The New Yorker defending Bonnie and Clyde, the 1967 Warren Beatty film that treated two 1930s bank robbers with sympathy and raucous humour.

Most critics found Bonnie and Clyde empty and trashy. The crusty old New York Times guy, Bosley Crowther, then one of the most influential American critics, decided that Bonnie and Clyde failed to meet his narrow, simple-minded, painfully respectable standards. It was too violent, and he thought the love story of its doomed, hare-brained title characters was "sentimental claptrap."

Kael, whose critical reputation was in its early stages, used Bonnie and Clyde as the opening shot in what turned out to be a war against middlebrow, middle-class, middle-of-the-road taste. Her New Yorker piece began: "How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on? Bonnie and Clyde is the most excitingly American American movie since The Manchurian Candidate. The audience is alive to it."

She announced no less than a revolution in taste that she sensed in the air. Movie audiences, she said, were going beyond "good taste," moving into a period of greater freedom and openness. Was it a violent film?

Well, Bonnie and Clyde needed violence. "Violence is its meaning."

She hated earnest liberalism and critical snobbery. She liked the raw energy in the work of adventurous directors such as Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Martin Scorsese. She trusted her visceral reactions to movies.

When hired as a regular New Yorker movie critic, she took that doctrine to an audience that proved enthusiastic and loyal. She became the great star among New Yorker critics, then the most influential figure among critics in any field. Books of her reviews, bearing titles such as I Lost it at the Movies, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and When the Lights Go Down, sold in impressive numbers. Critics across the continent became her followers. Through the 1970s and '80s, no one in films, except the actual moviemakers, was more often discussed.

It was only in the late stages of her New Yorker career (from which she retired in 1991) that some of her admirers began saying she had sold her point of view too effectively. A year after her death (in 2001) one formerly enthusiastic reader, Paul Schrader, a screenwriter of films such as Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, wrote: "Cultural history has not been kind to Pauline."

Kael assumed she was safe to defend the choices of mass audiences because the old standards of taste would always be there. They were, after all, built into the culture. But those standards were swiftly eroding. Schrader argued that she and her admirers won the battle but lost the war. Acceptable taste became mass-audience taste, box-office receipts the ultimate measure of a film's worth, sometimes the only measure. Traditional, well-written movies without violence or special effects were pushed to the margins. "It was fun watching the applecart being upset," Schrader said, "but now where do we go for apples?"

As the above article concludes, "Not long before she died, Pauline Kael remarked to a friend, 'When we championed trash culture we had no idea it would become the only culture.' Who did?"

(Via Jonathan Last.)

Kyle Smith writes:

Though my brilliant colleague Billy Heller writes most of the headlines in the Post's Pulse section, including yesterday's "Grinner Takes All," I'm slightly embarrassed to admit I wrote the hed for tomorrow's review of the supergay new musical "Mamma Mia": ABBA-DABBA-DOO!

Seriously, this movie is a quantum leap forward in gay technology. It is to previous incarnations of gay what the Apollo space program was to the bicycle. Lou Lumenick predicts it will do $30 million this weekend, though there is a slightly more interesting movie opening against it. Is this a much gayer country than I previously suspected? Is "Mamma Mia" the gay Batman? The Flighty Knight?

Wouldn't that be a violation of the Wertham Act of 1954?

Back in 2006, I wrote, "Baby We Were Born To Run--From The Wall"--but Reuters has put an entirely new spin on that headline! Betsy Newmark spots everybody's favorite wire service praising Bruce Springsteen's efforts in the twilight of the Cold War, with the headline, "Did the Boss help bring down the Berlin Wall?"

Frankly, this revisionism of the Cold War by the MSM cannot stand. We were told by no less an authoritative source as the BBC that a former actor who envisioned himself going on to bigger and greater things ended the Cold War, without firing a shot in the process. As he once wistfully told a German reporter, "I find it a bit sad that there is no photo of me hanging on the walls in the Berlin Museum at Checkpoint Charlie."

And so do we.

Allah notes a familiar phrase has returned to Obama's lexicon: "essentially, spouses are civilians."

Much like Reverend Wright was, back in April. But as I noted back then:

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?

And as Allah notes, Michelle's "not a 'civilian' if she's out on the trail promising that you're going to immanentize the eschaton, champ."

By the way, Obama's use of the word "civilian" always strikes me as an odd Godfather homage, where the gangsters were careful not to take out anyone not actually in the mob. I.E., "Sollozzo knows he's a civilian." Ironically, and safe to say entirely unintentionally on Obama's part, it becomes an even more interesting word choice considering the rapidly escalating level of real violence back in his hometown.

To Nanny, or not to Nanny, that is the question.

(And sad to say, I think I know the answer, as does Hubert Humphrey.)

It's victim politics a-go-go! First up in an interview in GQ, Mark Penn (whom the magazine describes as "her beleaguered chief strategist") shares some thoughts on why Hillary lost:

...Look, there’s no question that the Obama campaign took comments that could not in any way, shape, or form in an objective reality be seen as racist, and they told surrogates to characterize them that way. And I think that was the… And not only that, but when you look at who was making the comments, people who devoted their lives, you know—President Clinton was there in Little Rock—who devoted their lives to kind of repairing the breach racially in this country, it was doubly, it was really doubly unfair and troubling.

All of which is awfully rich coming from someone associated so closely with the couple that brought you the politics of personal destruction. But Rich does have a point, and Obama's surrogates have found a new target--those white racist reactionaries...at the limousine liberal Manhattan magazine that dubbed Bill Clinton the first black president a decade ago:

Myrlie Evers-Williams, 75, the widow of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, told an NAACP luncheon group Tuesday that political spin masters and the news media are painting the Obamas as unpatriotic and dangerous radicals. She said the attacks are serious enough to use the term lynching, even though that usually refers to racially-motivated killings.

Evers-Williams, a chairwoman emeritus of the civil rights organization, said New Yorker magazine’s recent cover is an example. The magazine’s cartoon cover shows a turban-clad Barack Obama bumping knuckles with a gun-toting Michele Obama as an American flag burns in a fireplace…

“As I watch the political scene unfold, I realize there is more than one way to lynch someone,� said Evers-Williams. “I look at the picture of the New Yorker and to me that was subtle, political lynching. You can call it satire if you want.�

While his surrogates and supporters patrol the old media, Obama himself takes on those upstarts on the right:

GLAMOUR: An AP poll shows that while the positive ratings on Michelle are higher than those of Cindy McCain, her negative ratings are higher as well. I’m curious about how as a husband that makes you feel. Does it mystify you? And what do you want to say to those Americans who don’t know the woman that you know?

SENATOR OBAMA: It’s infuriating, but it’s not surprising, because let’s face it: What happened was that the conservative press—Fox News and the National Review and columnists of every ilk—went fairly deliberately at her in a pretty systematic way…and treated her as the candidate in a way that you just rarely see the Democrats try to do against Republicans. And I’ve said this before: I would never have my campaign engage in a concerted effort to make Cindy McCain an issue, and I would not expect the Democratic National Committee or people who were allied with me to do it. Because essentially, spouses are civilians. They didn’t sign up for this. They’re supporting their spouse. So it took a toll.

Which is of course, yet another page from the Clinton playbook: it's hard to think of any potential first ladies prior to Hillary in 1992 being used as campaign surrogates; as late as 2003, Howard Dean's wife basically stayed home while he campaigned.

No wonder television's comics are afraid to make sport of Obama, despite his myriad flaws, not the least of which is buying into his own messianic press clippings. Fortunately, there is one iconoclast willing to say that the emperor-to-be is bereft of his Burberry suit.

Though sometimes it's tough to tell which is which. First up, Andrew Ferguson gets "Lost in the Personasphere":

My first glimpse of the personasphere came several years ago at a county fair. It was like all county fairs, an all-American overload of colored lights and hurdy-gurdy noise and questionable smells. I'd always thought it was an experience that nobody could be bored by. Then I saw a gaggle of four teenage girls walking together along the midway. They were yacking away, as teenage girls, you might have noticed, sometimes do-but they were yacking into their cell phones. Walking four abreast, they were huddled in their personaspheres, each in her customized bubble, talking to someone who was far away instead of the friends that plan or chance had placed beside her. They were lost not only to one another but to the noise and color around them.

Since then, the appliances that furnish a personasphere have grown in number and complication. Walk down any city street and you'll see people deploying one gadget or another to construct their bubble, ignoring the nearby in favor of the faraway. Here comes a kid talking excitedly into a cell phone, followed by a businessman calling up a webpage from his iPhone, followed by an office hack scrolling through the messages on his Treo. Meanwhile, life erupts all over the place, unnoticed. If this were a just world, I'd get to see at least one of these busy people walk into a lamppost or fall through an open manhole, the way people used to do in silent movies. They never do, though, at least not while I'm around. This must not be a just world.

But it is a very distracted one-though maybe distraction isn't the fitting word. A distraction is supposed to be something that draws you away from immediate experience, pulls your attention from the matter at hand. The personasphere involves experience once removed, pressed through a piece of hardware; in the personasphere, immediate experience is the distraction, an annoyance that takes you from the now-primary business of texting, phoning, websurfing-being elsewhere. Faced with the real world, we draw our personaspheres over us like a cloak against the cold.

I'm a silver-lining guy, as my friends will tell you, always searching for the upside in any given situation, so I'll mention one nice thing about this cocooning, this withdrawal of everyone into his own personasphere: It has served to prove the techno-utopians wrong once again. From the dawn of the Internet through the coming of the Wi-Fi era, the utopians told us that technology would pull us together and restore a common life to a fragmented culture.

We can see how mistaken they were. Consider the man lost in his personasphere, at dinner, on a bus, in an elevator, scheming into a cellphone or tapping a message on his BlackBerry. If technology has brought him closer to distant friends it has also made it easier to detach himself from those near at hand. As his world expands, it shrinks-roughly to the size of his busy, excitable, unutterably lonely self.

And the flipside? Kyle Smith of the New York Post is about to receive comment number #300 on his review of Wall-E:

As always, I am humbled by the number of people who, upon reading a lukewarm reaction to a cartoon about cute robots, managed to reach down deep and bring up some deeply crazed fury.

To be fair, some futurists, such as Alvin and Heidi Toffler in 1980's The Third Wave, didn't predict, as Ferguson wrote, "that technology would pull us together and restore a common life to a fragmented culture." Just the opposite--it's the technology itself that's atomizing a once mass culture, as we've gone from three national TV networks in 1968 to 112,000,000 blogs in 2008. But within that atomization, there is room for shared bonds to be forged--even if it occasionally involves fending off a crazed Wall-E storm.

The International Herald Tribune (aka, the road show edition of the New York Times reports, "Media stars will accompany Obama overseas":

Senator John McCain's trip to Iraq last spring was a low-key affair: With his ordinary retinue of reporters following him abroad, the NBC News anchor Brian Williams reported on his arrival in Baghdad from New York, with just two sentences tacked onto the "in other political news" portion of his newscast.

But when Obama heads for Iraq and other locations overseas this summer, Williams is planning to catch up with him in person, as are the other two evening news anchors, Charles Gibson of ABC and Katie Couric of CBS, who, like Williams, are far along in discussions to interview Obama on successive nights.

And while the anchors are jockeying for interviews with Obama at stops along his route, the regulars on the Obama campaign plane will have new seat mates: star political reporters from the major newspapers and magazines who are flocking to catch Obama's first overseas trip since becoming the presumptive nominee of his party.

The extraordinary coverage of Obama's trip reflects how the candidate remains an object of fascination in the news media, a built-in feature of being the first African-American presidential nominee for a major political party and a relative newcomer to the national stage.

But the coverage also feeds into concerns in McCain's campaign, and among Republicans in general, that the media is imbalanced in their coverage of the candidates, just as aides to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton felt during the primary season.

Media bias in the presidential race? Say it ain't so, Katie! Say it ain't so!

Update: Roger L. Simon has a schadenfreudinistic angle on the trip: "Poor Dan, deprived of a junket like this by a bunch of bloggers." You can hear my interview this week with one of the key bloggers who helped to retire Dan Rather's flak jacket, here.

Tim Blair looks at the Midas Muffler school of economics:

2001:

Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., dramatized his objections [to the Bush tax cut] ...he held up a spare part and said, "If you're a typical working person, you get $227, and that's enough to buy this muffler."

2008:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's wife, Michelle, complained the government's $600 economic stimulus check was only enough to buy "a pair of earrings" ...

Or nearly three mufflers. Which, for the sake of her husband's campaign, Ms Tiffany Cartier Michelle DeBeers Obama might consider using.

No word yet on President Merkin Muffley's tax-cutting proposals, though.

That's the question that David Frum asks:

During the Enron collapse of 2002, the public and the media were persuaded that Enron was somehow a Republican scandal, based on little more than senior management's history of contributions to the Republican party.

The ties between the Fannie Mae debacle and the Democratic party are much more intimate than that. Senior Democrats chosen for their political connections - James Johnson, Franklin Raines, Jamie Gorelick - took tens of millions of dollars in compensation out of the company. The ties between the Obama campaign and Fannie Mae are especially intimate: not only did Johnson head Obama's veep-vetting operation, but we learn in this Washington Post article that the campaign that Raines is advising Obama on the mortgage crisis! Well, he should know. Let's just hope the Obama operation is able to keep Raines away from the accounting side of things. Even the amazing Obama fundraising operation could not afford that!

More seriously: Here is potentially the largest financial disaster in American history. The American taxpayer stands to lose billions; Democratic insiders have extracted tens of millions. If Enron was a party scandal ... what is this?

The offramp to Schumerville?

Remember the carefree 1980s, when a team like the New York Jets could call themselves "Gang Green" and you knew it was only metaphorical? Welcome to the brave new NFL:

Hand signals captured on videotape are once again being scrutinized around the NFL. Only this time, it's not the New England Patriots studying them for a competitive advantage, but league officials in search of a more sinister message.

The NFL, concerned that some players might celebrate by flashing the hand signals of street gangs, has hired experts to examine game tapes and identify the gestures.

"There have been some suspected things we've seen," said Milt Ahlerich, the league's vice president of security. "When we see it, we quietly jump on it immediately, directly with the team and the player or employee involved to cease and desist. Period."

As I've written before on an unrelated NFL topic, the see-no-evil attitude of college athletics should share some of the blame as well.

Good question.

From my point of view, I'd say that these days, it's primarily a gossip and style rag that gets in waaaay over its head whenever its Bush-obsessed journalists let their hatred drive its political coverage despite the inevitably diminishing returns.

Oh wait, that's why people hate Vanity Fair.

Seriously though, while I haven't blogged much about Jesse Helm's death, due to my discomfort with much of his career baggage, I can't help but think he got this moment right:

Sometime in the mid-1990s, the Times wrote a blistering editorial about Jesse Helms. The senator's new, eager press secretary quickly drafted a letter to the editor, and took it in to the senator. Helms, of course, had not seen the editorial. He glanced at the letter and said, "That's nice, son. Do whatever you want with it. But understand something: I don't care what the New York Times says about me, and no one I care about cares what the New York Times says about me." Therein lay some of the senator's power.

An interesting development, as the Vanity Fair article notes, is that Times hatred became bipartisan this decade, which I'm sure the Times loves, though (and especially after this essay) it provides less ideological cover than they think.

The Dow Jones? Of course not. But the Blogosphere's going great guns in this election year. Simon Owens writes that political blog traffic is up an average of 48 percent for first of half of 2008. Owens breaks this aggregate number down for 17 of the biggest blogs.

This sort of thing can sure ruin an otherwise casual trip to the drive-thru.

"At rare intervals, there appears among us a person whose virtues are so manifest to all, who has such a capacity for relating to every sort of human being, who so subordinates his own ego drive to the concerns of others, who lives his whole life in such harmony with the surrounding community that he is revered and loved by everyone with whom he comes in contact. Such a man Dalton Trumbo was not."

--Ring Lardner Jr., at Trumbo's memorial service in 1976.

Back in 2006, Mark Steyn noted that "Hollywood prefers to make 'controversial' films about controversies that are settled, rousing itself to fight battles long won."

You can see that dynamic--or lack thereof--at work in the new documentary Trumbo that's hitting the art house circuit this summer on screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. It's a look at the Blacklist and McCarthyism of the 1950s that's brave and daring--a cutting edge triumph of dissent and free speech! ...As long as you're willing to discount the dozen-plus movies on the topic that Hollywood has made since the mid-1960s.

In contrast, did Hollywood produce or distribute any anti-Soviet Union films during that same time period? Not too many, needless to say; but we'll also look at the few that qualify--if only tangentially. Along the way, we also look at the convoluted real-life history of Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun novel, which as Orrin Judd described in his review, is as byzantine a story as anything Trumbo wrote for the silver screen.

Those are the topics we explore in the latest edition of our Silicon Graffiti video blog. It takes its title from an earlier article by Steyn, back when he reviewed the play that toured a few years ago starring Nathan Lane as Trumbo for the New Criterion. For our previous forays in videoblogging, tune in here.

Update: Andrew Breitbart looks at the new Hollywood blacklist: "Mr. Spielberg, tear down this wall!" And Glenn Reynolds links to Total Eclipse, the greatest film you've never seen.

Gary Condit, conservative? Mark Hemmingway catches the Washington Post in yet another round of Name That Party:

The Washington Post has a been putting out lengthy special report out on the Chandra Levy case. Here's how they describe Gary Conditin in today's installment:

They met at hotels and inside his fourth-floor, turn-of-the-century condo at the top of Adams Morgan, an eclectic neighborhood of ethnic restaurants, offbeat shops and jam-packed nightclubs near the National Zoo and Rock Creek Park. It was not a typical neighborhood for a conservative congressman from a right-leaning agricultural district. [Emphasis added]

Now reading that, would you get the impression Condit was a Democrat?

Only if you're a New Yorker subscriber.

(Or, Complexity And Contradictions in Postmodern Democratic Architecture, to borrow from Robert Venturi.)

Betsy Newmark notes that in his recent Time column on rich liberals voting against their class interests, Michael Kinsley "contradicts the whole Thomas Frank thesis from What's the Matter with Kansas?"

Fortunately, he doesn't sound too bitter about it in the process.

Isn't the fascist epistemology of bicycling obvious? I mean, think about it: Freddie Mercury and Queen were dubbed "may be the first truly fascist rock band" by Rolling Stone at precisely the time they were singing...this.

Coincidence?

Of course.

But Sonny Bunch has a great observation here:

The hypocrisy of the biking community is kind of breathtaking. On the one hand, they demand equal access to the roads and get incredibly angry when car drivers suggest that the dangerously slow speeds at which bikers travel might hinder the flow of traffic. On the other, they proclaim that the laws of the road do not apply to them, and car drivers are just jealous. You can’t have it both ways, dears. Make up your minds.

Howard Dean could not be reached for comment. Nor could P.J. O'Rourke, but his earlier views on the topic can be found here.

"Rep. and House Energy Chairman Ed Markey: Somalia, Black Hawk Down Incident Caused by Global Warming."

Time to update this ever-growing list; as Ace writes, "Remember those superstitious, irrational, anti-scientific yahoos during the Middle Ages who blamed every phenomenon on the Devil?"

Chris Matthews has an exceptional idea, as Newsbusters notes: Matthews Worries 'Right' Will Turn New Yorker Cover into T-Shirt."

Capital idea, Chris! In an age where brand synergy is all, I'm sure the fellas at Those Shirts and the legal bean counters inside the New Yorker's offices could work out a licensing agreement that would be mutually beneficial. Considering how much the Manhattan-based print media have been suffering financially, I'm glad to see that Matthews is always on the lookout for ways to increase their revenues through carefully selected cross-promotional opportunities.

Seriously though, it's amazing, isn't it? A decade spent comparing President Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Rush Limbaugh, and more recently wishing that fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton would snuff it is all perfectly fine, but the left is positively apoplectic when their own firing squad turns circular.

(Which actually happens with surprising regularity.)

(Although, to be fair, it's tough to picture the Shawn-era New Yorker that Tom Wolfe satirized in his classic "Tiny Mummies" article doing anything that would actually get them this much negative press, particularly amongst the left.)

Michelle Malkin writes welcome to the big leagues, rook, where the establishment left routinely satirizes politicians of all stripes. What, you thought you'd get a pass?

On the Minneapolis Star-Tribune's home page, James Lileks has been doing a routine where he plays Jimmy Lileks, Ace Reporter, a sort of postmodern parody of '50s-style investigative reporter beamed into the 21st century. In the latest edition, he discovers that Apple has a new product that all the kids seem to rave over called the iPhone! It allows you to make calls without having a phone plugged into the wall and everything!

But Lileks is doing a parody, and one that's aimed squarely at online readers who are technologically savvy and know the news before the paper does. The only excuse the yutz in the clip below has for his shtick is that he's playing to his TV station's base: 80-something year old shut-ins who don't know what an iPhone is either. Watch how huffy he gets when someone in line calls his bluff and correctly asks him, is this really journalism you're doing, buddy? And the ultimate irony? With 158,295 views and counting on YouTube, he's probably gotten more viewers than his station's TV news show gets.

Charles Johnson makes a great observation about the L.A. Times: unlike many blogs which allow for instant publication of their readers' comments, the L.A. Times requires editor approval before comments appear under their articles. Which means that an editor had to sign off on each of the vicious attacks on Tony Snow that are appearing under his obit.

Which is why Patterico asks: Given how quickly Howard Kurtz has been known to slam the starboard half of the Blogosphere when its commenters lose it, will he respond in-kind to the leftwing editors of the L.A. Times allowing readers with a similar slant to run amok there?

Maybe I wasn't that far off the mark with the Obama as Don Draper analogy this past week. Eric Scheie looks back at the past few decades of liberal Madison Avenue-style presidential sloganeering and quips:

Anyone remember "Keep Hope Alive"? (I guess audacity has cut the nuts off that slogan.)

Heh, indeed.^TM Sonny Bunch looks at some additional nutcutting by the South Park boys, here.

Ezra Levant to America's Congress: put Canada on the watch list of human rights abusers.

But even if such an action occurred, it may be a case of too little too late. Stories such as this one indicate that America may be rapidly headed in the same direction as Canada, where any hurt feeling is grounds to claim victimization and/or call the lawyers.

In his latest op-ed, Hugh Hewitt writes:

The environmental lobby owns Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, and Barack Obama –the brave new leader—doesn’t dare take it or them on. That lobby is applauding the deindustrialization underway, and their attitude is that a depression wouldn’t be such a bad thing as a lesson in learning how to live within our environmental means. Their jobs aren’t on the line, after all, and their disdain for the impacted industries is complete.

What they and the Triple D Democrats hasn’t counted on, though, was America making the connection between the deteriorating economy and their anti-energy agenda.

Energy is freedom. Energy is prosperity. Every Democrat on the fall ballot is part of the anti-energy party which is wrecking havoc on the economy and every family’s budget. A vote for any Democrat is a vote for shortages, rising gas prices, rising unemployment, and falling production. A vote for any democrat is a vote for failing airlines and collapsing financial institutions and for the shuttering of car plants and large manufacturing.

A growing, vibrant economy needs energy. The Democrats are anti-energy.

It is that simple.

Read the whole thing, then sign the petition.

Update: Found via Instapundit, Jack Kelly writes, "it takes mighty, repeated blows" to knock through the general public's inattention and apathy towards politics. Kelly adds, "As Ronald Reagan put it, a successful candidate must paint 'with bold colors, not pale pastels'":

But Mr. McCain has been Hamlet when he needs to be Henry V. He is discarding a strong hand through mixed messages and equivocation. He supports drilling on the outer continental shelf, but opposes it in ANWR. He backs a "cap and trade" program to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that would devastate our economy. Nuance is important in policy-making, but can be disastrous in political campaigning. If the trumpet be uncertain …

Mr. McCain needs to decide, pronto, which is more important to him: Winning the election or receiving an occasional kind word from liberal pundits who will vote against him.

If he wants to win, Mr. McCain needs to demonstrate in a dramatic way he'll take every reasonable step to increase energy supplies - including drilling in ANWR.

And he needs to do it soon. The No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, Dick Durbin, who is from Barack Obama's home state of Illinois, said Wednesday: "I'm open to drilling and responsible production." Mr. Obama has altered his position on virtually every issue he campaigned on during the primaries. Could another flip-flop be in the offing?

"Durbin's comment may be a signal that Obama will pivot soon," said the Wall Street Journal's Jim Taranto.

As I wrote last month, the first man who stands up on a podium in the middle of America's Vast Pestilential Wasteland and says the equivalent of this post's headline wins the election.

I can't say for certain, but I'd wager a bet that Jonathan Last is mildly pumped about the upcoming new Batman movie. I'll keep hacking the Internet until I know for certain.

Another post at Galley Slaves begs the obvious question: has Starbucks announced any store closings in Gotham City yet?

While Charles Johnson has spotted a serious example of fauxtography, and is thus only receiving belated, grudging acknowledgment from the Jurassic media, Ann Althouse looks at fauxtography's lighter side, and asks, "Why is it so hard for a magazine to shoot a decent celebrity cover?":

Some shocking examples of uglification here. My theory is that magazine editors want professional models and are annoyed to by the fact that celebrity faces on the cover help circulation so much that they can no longer do what their aesthetic sensibilities tell them is right. Thwarted, the wreak their revenge. It's passive aggression.

And speaking of fauxtography's lighter side, one of the house bloggers at Yahoo's music blog spots "Jennifer Hudson's Slim Chance" and asks, "Is it just me, or does Jennifer Hudson look, um, DIFFERENT on her debut album's cover?"

This one is based on a story that's four years old, though its source material dates back to at least the late 1960s. Back in 2004, Mark Steyn watched that year's Democratic presidential candidate forced to backpedal because of comments made by celebrities and one of his fundraisers and quipped:

John Kerry's raised nearly 50 million bucks from Hollywood, and, short of divorcing Teresa and the pre-nup kicking in, he's not going to find that kind of money anywhere else. So he's obliged to go along with, for example, Whoopi Goldberg comparing President Bush with her own, ah, intimate areas, as she did at a recent all-star Kerry gala. Or with Meryl Streep musing, ''I wonder which of the megaton bombs Jesus, our president's personal savior, would have personally dropped on the sleeping families in Baghdad.'' The financial benefits of the celebrification of the Democratic Party are unquestionable. But the surest sign of its limited appeal in the broader sense was the Kerry campaign's refusal to release the video of the Goldberg-Streep gala. Having the most popular figures in popular culture on your side can seriously damage your popularity.

And here we go again! Same basic plot, different actors:

Barack Obama today has distanced himself from comedian Bernie Mac after an appearance at an Obama fundraiser last night. The comic performed a profanity-laced set at the function which ended with hecklers telling him to get off the stage after a joke that some deemed particularly offensive to women. Obama joked about the fundraiser being a "family affair" when he followed Mac on stage, but the campaign got more serious about criticizing the comedian afterwards:

Toward the end of a 10-minute standup routine at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Chicago, the 50-year-old star of "The Bernie Mac Show" joked about menopause, sexual infidelity and promiscuity, and used occasional crude language.

"My little nephew came to me and he said, 'Uncle, what's the difference between a hypothetical question and a realistic question?'" Mac said. "I said, I don't know, but I said, 'Go upstairs and ask your mother if she'd make love to the mailman for $50,000.'"

As the joke continued, the punchline evoked an angry response from at least one person in the audience, who said it was offensive to women.

How did it get more offensive? The Chicago Tribune gives a little more detail:

He promised to help Obama and ended his irreverent riff with a joke involving the women in the families and living with two "hoes."

"Hoes", eh? That Bernie Mac--he's such a rake!

Particularly, as Ed Morrissey notes, in an environment where the women who are ex-Hillary voters that Obama is trying to woo are still teed-off over establishment liberal news coverage of her that they see as "sexist", here's some real sexism shoved into their faces by a comedian in his role as an Obama surrogate.

But then, as Mark Steyn wrote four years ago, "Having the most popular figures in popular culture on your side can seriously damage your popularity."

Tony Snow, Fox News anchor, frequent Rush Limbaugh guest host, and of course, White House Press Secretary, has passed away at age 53.

By all accounts a remarkably fair and optimistic man; a sunny conservative in the mold of--well, isn't it obvious?--he was much beloved by fellow conservatives and many--but not all--on the opposite of the aisle in the legacy media.

Ed Morrissey has some thoughts here. And the Corner has loads of posts on Snow--just keep scrolling.

Snow's death, comes so quickly after the death of Tim Russert; both men passed at away at compartively young ages, in their mid-50s. News reports and op-eds in the coming days will allow for very interesting comparisons of how the legacy media treats one of their own, versus someone who questioned the conventional wisdom of an industry which pays lip service to multiculturalism and diversity, and yet reflexively leans, and hires, almost exclusively to the left. AP has already gotten their digs in; others are sure to follow.

I've seen this movie before: a summer of tabloid news stories and killer sharks. Hopefully the ending won't be as terrifying as the first go around.

Amy Ridenour asks, "Jackson's Obama Comments: Should Fox Have Broadcast Them?"

Let's ask Roger Ailes!

In between setting up CNBC and then Fox News, Roger Ailes wrote a superb book on public speaking called You Are The Message, which, not surprisingly, given his career as a TV producer, had numerous tips on working with the media--and avoiding getting worked over by them. At one point, Ailes wrote:

Recognize that any time you are in the presence of a newsperson, the conversation is fair game for the record. Jimmy Carter's famous confession that he sometimes had lust in his heart for women other than his wife was uttered to a Playboy magazine journalist as he was leaving Carter's home at the conclusion of the formal interview.

Even Mike Wallace, big-game hunter of the unguarded moment, got caught in this snare. As recounted on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal by TV critic Daniel Henninger in March of 1981, Wallace:

was interviewing a banker in San Diego about an alleged home improvement fraud involving mainly black and Hispanics, who supposedly had signed contract they couldn't understand, which led to foreclosures on their home mortgages.

The bank hired a film crew of its own to record the interview with Mr. Wallace. The bank apparently left its recorder running during a break in the CBS interview, and the tape has Mr. Wallace saying, in reply to a question about why the black and Hispanic customers would have signed their contracts, "They're probably too busy eating their watermelon and tacos."

When the Los Angeles Times got wind of this indiscretion and reported it, there was at least a minor uproar from reporters and others about Wallace's "racially disparaging joke". Wallace ultimately pleaded "no bias", admitting that over time he'd privately told jokes about many ethnic groups but that his record "speaks for itself".

Henninger added, "Needless to say, this has to be the most deliciously lip-smacking bit of irony to pop out of the oven in a long time. Here we have the dogcatcher cornered. The lepidopterist pinned. The preacher in flagrante delicto. This is the fellow who has imputed all manner of crimes against social goodness to a long lineup of businessmen and bureaucrats. From here on out, all future victims of Mr. Wallace can take some small comfort in knowing that although they may stand exposed as goof-offs, thieves and polluters, he's the guy who made the crack about the watermelons and tacos."

As Ailes wrote, "Recognize that any time you are in the presence of a newsperson, the conversation is fair game for the record." Jesse Jackson may thought he had the legacy media so in the tank that they'd never turn on him. Of course, he wouldn't be the first former Democratic presidential candidate to believe that.

Michael Kinsley has some advice for the diehard supporters of Hillary Clinton who remain remarkably disgruntled--and may never be re-gruntled--after her defeat in the primaries:

But true, professional unscrupulousness--the kind of do-anything-to-win pragmatism that Democrats envy in Republicans--requires more than just working yourself up into a lather of dislike. Sometimes, in fact, it requires the opposite: putting aside your dislike, your disappointments, your anger, your feelings of betrayal. In the case of Hillary Clinton's erstwhile supporters, all of these feelings seem overwrought to me. But there is no point in arguing about this, or at least not now. Now is the time to just get over it.

You don't have to fall in love, you just have to fall in line.

Update: Oh, Now She Sees Bias!

Greg Pollowitz writes that Obama's gaffes, flip-flops, and triangulations have convinced the all-knowing final arbiter of all-things conservative that "Santa Claus does not exist."

Of course, Sullivan concluded his brief but very public fling with conservatism back in 2004, when he endorsed a senator who, by the way, served in the Navy during Vietnam as "the right man - and the conservative choice - for a difficult and perilous time."

Hmmm: Senator, Navy man, Vietnam vet. If only Sullivan could find such a candidate running for the White House in 2008!

Update: Related thoughts from Ann Althouse.

In an era where media ranging from blogs to magazines come and go with alarming haste, eight years on the radio is a statement in and of itself. We had Hugh Hewitt on Pajamas' XM show yesterday to discuss his new pamphlet, A Letter to a Young Obama Supporter, but he never mentioned that the eighth anniversary of his radio show was occurring today. Many happy returns to the microphone!

Denver: coming to the convention? Meet Our Monsters!

But pay no attention to our homeless, please.

It's safe to say that Jesse Jackson isn't Senator Barack Obama's biggest fan right at the moment. And I think it's equally safe to assume that Tom Blumer isn't enjoying Obama's preemptive strike on the economy:

Remember the grief Dick Cheney received in late 2000, and then President Bush in early 2001, when they were accused of “talking down the economy”?

In summer of 2008, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, presidential candidate Barack Obama, and Senate majority leader Harry Reid aren’t merely talking the economy down; they’re taking it down.

They have created what I am calling the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) economy. Businesses and investors are responding to their total lack of seriousness by battening down the hatches and preparing for the worst.

Meanwhile, the more rarefied quadrants of the leftwing also seem to lack a universal appreciation for Obama's triangulation efforts, as he seeks to move from the far left to somewhere closer to nearby to within shouting distance of the center left:

Hope.

Change.

It was all you talked about.

Then the FISA bill you gave the telecom companies retroactive immunity - something you said you were against - and voted FOR it on the senate floor.

Third party candidates, here I come. You’re no different than McCain.

Man, can Obama's inclusiveness bring everyone together, or what?

Last year, Mark Steyn noted that "Celebrity behavior has been pretty consistent for the last century:"

In the Twenties, Hollywood stars shagged anything that moved, did drugs, divorced routinely - but they (or, at any rate, the studios) understood that it would not be good for this stuff to get out, and on the rare occasions it did get out it was a career ender. The gulf between the celeb life and the lives of the masses was a very well-kept secret.

Obviously, that's not the case these days, illustrating huge changes in cultural mores. I'm not sure whatever happened to The Summer of George, but Michele Catalano writes that this year is "the Summer of Tabloid Divorce":

Let’s face it. We are a culture obsessed with our stars. Somewhere around the time of OJ Simpson’s fall from grace, the gossip rags went from generally fawning over lifestyles of the rich and famous to excitedly pointing out their flaws. We have made a culture of watching the unraveling of our pop culture idols. From the Star to TMZ, it’s all about pointing out the inadequacies of the elite, be it mental or physical. If it not Britney Spears’s mental breakdown, it’s Kirstie Alley’s ballooning weight. Behind every story about Angelina Jolie’s expanding brood of children, there’s a story about Brad Pitt’s supposed infidelity. We’ve created an industry devoted to gloating over the downfall of the rich and famous.

It’s not hard to see why we do it. Here’s someone with more money than we could ever imagine. While we’re struggling to make this month’s mortgage, they are spending $7,000 on a handbag. While we contemplate a vacation in our own backyard, they are jetting off to France for a weekend wine tasting.

For some people, there’s a certain satisfaction in seeing their idols brought down to a more human level. Look, they cry just like us! They have feelings! Their lives can fall apart, too! It’s vindication for us that money can’t buy happiness. For others, there’s a smugness that goes with the stories. You may have millions, but at least my marriage is better than yours. At least my kids aren’t in jail.

I think there's an enormous amount of truth in that last paragraph. In the first half of the century, when society didn't know anything about Hollywood's stars, it looked up to them; these days it laughs at their ridiculous foibles. I'm not sure if Hollywood considers that a fair trade, but its not like the worst tabloid offenders do all that much to eschew such publicity in the first place.

Extreme Mortman explains that the media is "Making A Mountain Out Of A Mohel."

Elsewhere, Mark Hemmingway suggests that the Jackson Grab will become the new fist bump.

Me? I think Jesse's been watching too much Stephen Colbert:

Just arrived from Amazon is the DVD collection of the first season of AMC's Mad Men, a show about which I've written several times previously. But the package is fascinating: its four DVDs are encased in a nifty giant tin mock cigarette lighter, and inside is an ad for a pair of actual working Zippo lighters embossed with the Mad Men logo. The inserted ad recalls an earlier sponsorship of the show. They're reminders that the producers of Mad Men want to have it both ways--they want to look down upon their characters for smoking and excessive drinking (pretty rich coming from hedonistic Hollywood), but simultaneously, they're happy to use their series on the excesses of advertising to advertise the exact vices the show condemns. Now that's postmodern entertainment!

Does the hectoring subtext of the writing matter all that much? Maybe not, as I wrote last week:

While the show's first season had some good episodes as it gained its stride and got past the hectoring tone of its debut (which I discussed at length over at Pajamas HQ last year), it's the extremely well crafted look of the show that serves as the real time machine. It's a reminder that, while Mad Men's establishment liberal Bobos In Paradise writers believe that the past is a strange, alien world, the series' production and costume designers certainly makes that world look remarkably inviting, especially when compared with today.

On the Museum of the Moving Image's Website (found via the IMDB) is a nicely written, if slightly hyperbolic article on the strength of Mad Men's production design, though--Warning!--it does contain a pretty big spoiler for anyone coming into the show cold via the DVD package. And come to think of it, the scene in question creates a modern connection to the show that I'm absolutely sure its writers didn't intend at all:

The climax of the first season of Mad Men, set at the dawn of the 1960s at a Madison Avenue advertising agency, is actually a brilliant anticlimax—a revelation swiftly followed by a re-veiling. Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), a clumsy striver at Sterling Cooper, attempts to topple the resident alpha dog, Don Draper (Jon Hamm), with what looks to be a career-ending disclosure: Draper, the firm's dazzling creative director, is living under an assumed name; he's a fraud, likely a Korean War deserter, and possibly worse. Campbell blurts it all out to the avuncular overlord, Bertram Cooper [Wonderfully played by Robert Morse, who's perhaps the show's most inspired casting choice--Ed], while Draper stands by silently, poker-faced, hands steady enough to light yet another cigarette. The elder statesman Cooper considers, waits an agonizing long beat, and makes a purely utilitarian reply.

"Mr. Campbell, who cares?" Cooper asks calmly, his voice burring with pity and disdain for the youngster's naive theatrics. "This country was built and run by men with worse stories than whatever you've imagined here."

"The Japanese have a saying," Cooper continues. "‘A man is whatever room he is in'—and right now, Donald Draper is in this room."

This marvelously tense scene—from the season's penultimate episode, titled "Nixon vs. Kennedy"—is Mad Men in a nutshell. (The AMC series has its second-season premiere on July 27; the complete first cycle of 13 episodes is now out on DVD and Blu-ray disc from Lionsgate.) The televised Nixon-Kennedy debates are generally acknowledged as the moment when image overtook content and began supplanting it; for the hard-drinking, impeccably tailored men and women who populate the randy, smoke-filled offices of Sterling Cooper, the self is a performance, adjusted according to the demands of The Room. Context is everything. Everyone leads at least a double life. (For the men, juggling a wife and mistress is practically a job requirement.) Denial is enormously useful. (One character was pregnant all season and didn't know it.) But it's the dashing über-WASP Don Draper—né Dick Whitman, son of a prostitute, orphan of the Depression—who most fully embodies the idea of the self as a brand that can be revamped on the whims of the market, without remorse or apology. He is what he does. (And why is Donald Draper in this room? Because he generates revenue.)

"A man is whatever room he is in"--that's a remarkably timely phrase right about now, isn't it?

Related: The characters in Mad Men would be horrified by this lack of consumer choice in Obama's hometown; something tells me the producers wouldn't, though.

"Just cut to the chase and name the kid Rehab."

"Memoir says Madonna's true love is herself."

Steve Green, the great VodkaPundit, is taking over as host of PJM Political. If you missed this week's show on XM Satellite Radio's POTUS '08 channel, tune-in here for all of the 100-proof fun, including guests Hugh Hewitt, Evan Sayet, Roger Kimball, along with James Lileks' weekly segment.

Orrin Judd sums up exactly what I was thinking about the outcome of Jesse Jackson's Kinsleyesque gaffe in the perfect headline: "If Barry Won't Come To Sista Souljah..."

Incidentally--Jesse Jackson making a crude disparaging remark when he didn't think the mics were on? Whodathunkit?!

Update: "Shakedown's Meltdown"!

More: "It’s a win-win for both of them in the long term."

"WHAT'S WORSE THAN MAUREEN DOWD? Fake Maureen Dowd!"

But what happens if you cross the streams and Dowdify fake Maureen Dowd? Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light...

Around 1969 and '70, when The Who's Tommy was a pop culture phenomenon, Pete Townshend and his manager, Kit Lambert were culturally aware enough to know that when they booked their self-described rock "opera" into real opera houses, they were veering dangerously close to camp. It was only The Who's sledgehammer live stage show (and Townshend's often great songwriting) that saved them--at least until Ken Russell arrived on the scene to direct the movie version a few years later.

Flash-forward to nearly 40 years on, and we find two prominent cinematic auteurs also seeking to enter the rarefied world of opera. But are they self-aware enough to know that the joke will be on them if their choice of venues actually comes to pass?

Back in 2004, we quoted Radley Balko's take on today's left becoming just a might...conservative in their thinking:

You know, you sometimes get the feeling the day after the polio vaccine was invented, today's left would have run editorials lamenting the good ol' days, when we were a little more cautious about what swimming pools we jumped into, and expressing sadness that we'd now have no new stories about the afflicted overcoming their disability to inspire the rest of us.

I'm not kidding. They're that resistant to change. Every mill that shuts down is a "sign of our sad times." No matter that the new mill will do things better, faster and cheaper than the old one. New farming techniques grow more food on less land. But dammit, if there wasn't something romantic about the old-stye "family farm" that's deserving of government protection. Innovation isn't celebrated, it's excoriated for displacing some idealized vision of the way things once were. In matters of progress and dyanmism, the left is far more conservative than the conservatives are.

In his latest op-ed, "The Politics of Can't-Possibly-Do", Daniel Henninger writes that you can see the left's love of stasis most dramatically in the giant hole in the ground that remains at the corner of Church and Liberty Street:

This week the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey issued a stunning document to explain why Ground Zero has remained nothing but a hole for some seven years.

It is arguably the greatest political and bureaucratic fiasco in the history of the world. Remember the line about how if we don't rebuild the towers "the terrorists will win"? The terrorists will be dead of old age before this project is finished.

Port Authority Executive Director Chris Ward, who did the remarkably frank report at the request of a frustrated Gov. David Paterson of New York, wrote that original estimates of time and cost (now at $15 billion) "did not reflect the unprecedented challenges associated with a project . . . involving so many different public and private stakeholders." (Arguably the system began its decline when the vocabulary changed deadly "factions" into benevolent "stakeholders.")

Ground Zero is a perfect storm of contemporary American politics. The report cites "19 different governmental entities from every level of government each laying claim to some component of the overall project." And, "Each entity makes daily decisions about their individual projects, but no streamlined process or authority is in place to . . . ensure that each decision is in the best interest of the overall project." This sounds eerily like the 9/11 Commission's assessment of our dis-coordinated national security agencies.

Besides the public players, the report notes "dozens" of family groups representing the victims, plus various community groups. Bowing to another toxic value, the agency promises to still be "inclusive," then complains no one has the authority to decide anything.

That is because productive decision making has fallen as a public value below "being heard." Even being heard is no longer enough. The "stakeholders" have to prevail, somehow assuming that the process – or a complex project like this – will endure endless blows. Meanwhile, construction of the wholly private, 52-story 7 World Trade Center building was done in 2006.

New York City, a chipping temple to the public sector (the roadbeds would embarrass a third-world country), will sink or swim beneath this dead weight. But as a case study of system malfunction, the Port Authority report on unbuilt Ground Zero is a warning shot to our acrimonious national politics. A can-do tradition is losing ground to can't-possibly-do. Barack Obama's appeal rests heavily on the belief that he'll bring back can-do. He's one man. The answer lies deeper, with a people who have to choose between politics that moves its system forward or a politics that just wants to have fun.

And not even that: given their rampant puritanism, do the left's true believers really have all that much fun?

“‘The same old Washington textbook campaigns just won’t do.’ Deploring ‘triangulating and poll-driven positions,’ he said that ‘telling the American people what we think they want to hear instead of telling the American people what they need to hear just won’t do.’ The Democratic party had been at its best, he told the crowd, when ‘we led, not by polls, but by principles; not by calculation, but by conviction.’”

--Barack Obama, Democratic Senator from Illinois, November 10th, 2007.

What is it about octogenarian presidents of CBS that seem to assume that the power to run a television network confers immortality? In 1990, Christopher Buckley reviewed Sally Bedell Smith's biography of William S. Paley, and wrote:

"WHY do I have to die?" the aging William S. Paley repeatedly asks of a somewhat helpless friend toward the end of Sally Bedell Smith's fascinating and exhaustive biography of the man who built the Columbia Broadcasting System. At this point, having kept company with Mr. Paley's ego for more than 600 pages, no reader is likely to be surprised at the old solipsist for having posed such a bizarre question, and so unphilosophically at that. If CBS's corporate logo was its famous "eye," Mr. Paley's innermost being ("soul" seems not quite the right word) bore the indelible stamp of an "I." The friend "could give no answer except to reassure him that his mother had lived into her nineties." The reply was possibly ironic, as it was Mr. Paley's cold and unloving mother, Goldie, who by shunning her young son had forced him to turn to the larger world for constant, indeed unremitting, affirmation.

* * *

TO the end of his career, Mr. Paley remained a desperately insecure man: jealous of his wife's affection for her son from her first marriage; jealous of Frank Stanton, whom he disastrously hounded from CBS, thereby insuring the ensuing succession of catastrophes that have made the network now, as Mr. Stanton put it perfectly, "just another company with dirty carpets." Lear-like, Mr. Paley ultimately subverted and ruined CBS, the thing he loved above all else -- besides himself -- driving out Mr. Stanton's successors, undermining the company by leaking unfavorable reports about them to the press, meddling in programming even though his quondam powers had by now left him, fretting obsessively about his perks, his private jet, his helicopter, his office, unable to let go; gobbling down experimental, supposedly life-prolonging protein pills every half-hour, gorging on supposedly restorative cucumbers, unable to let go, even of life. For Bill Paley, "Why do I have to die?" was the perfectly logical question.

But as it must to all men, death came to William Samuel Paley on October 26, 1990, at age 89. But note the echos of Paley's famous existential question in this quote uttered by his latest successor, age 85:

"I DON'T want to die. I love what I'm doing. I love Viacom. I love CBS. And so I don't want to die. I have a will to live. The same will to win that I've always had. And, I'm gonna fight death as long as I can. I like it here. I don't want to go anywhere else" - Sumner Redstone on CNBC's "Business Nation."

Ask not for whom the station identification tolls for...

I can't be entirely certain, but I'd say there's a reasonable chance of a penumbra of an emanation of a rumor that these people simply are not here to make friends:

(From the friendly neighborhood Manolo himself at his terrific gossip blog, Ayyyy!)

Kathryn Jean Lopez chuckles, "Someone Typed This with a Straight Face?"

From Media Matters, attacking The New York Times Magazine reporter for not doing a hit piece on Rush Limbaugh:

The mighty, and allegedly liberal, New York Times

Emphasis, of course, mine.

I'd say the Times itself cleared up the alleged part pretty clearly four years ago.

Roger Simon has a fascinating audio interview with "Reza Khalili", the nom de cloak of a man who sounds like quite an interesting fellow:

Going public for the first time in an article and podcast on Pajamas Media, an Iranian who infiltrated Iran's Revolutionary Guard for the CIA accuses the mullahs of orchestrating — among other things — the 1988 explosion of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

It's followed by an article from Khalili as well.

Update (10:21 AM): Never link to something without listening to it! Apparently technical difficulties have prevented the audio from being used, but the article by "Khalili" is still online.

I'd chalk this one up to "illustrating absurdity by being absurd", but in the crazy bizarro world of Washington with Harry "Oil Makes Us Sick" Reid and Nancy of the Pelosi Premium, who knows? Stranger things have happened:

Donald Sutherland is yet another superstar actor to whom Bill Whittle's Lou Grant Effect remains inviolable. As an actor, Sutherland nearly always invests his characters with charisma and charm; from the original Hawkeye Pierce in Robert Altman's M*A*S*H to the small town cop investigating crimes in the big bad city in Klute, to his wealthy proto-bobo Manhattan art collector in Six Degrees of Separation. But without a script and a director, this is the result:

As far as conspiracy theories go, the one actor Donald Sutherland posited at the Huffington Post Monday certainly doesn't rank very high.

After all, there's a long line of political pundits predicting the Clintons are conspiring to steal the Democrat presidential nomination from Barack Obama.

But, coming from Kiefer's dad, and the original "Hawkeye" Pierce from "M*A*S*H," the entertainment value is, well, delicious.

Get out the popcorn, folks...you won't be disappointed (emphasis added, h/t NBer Gary Hall):

The DNC's 'Terry McAuliffe mind-set' ruined the campaigns of Gore, Kerry and Senator Clinton and now the legions of McAuliffites who have surrounded Barack Obama are doing their damndest to undermine the possibility of his Presidency...There's a well sourced rumor of Machiavellian proportions running around that what's going to happen is that his base support will be so demoralized they won't have the vital conviction they'll need this August to withstand a McAuliffite push to persuade disenchanted delegates on the floor of the convention to make a resurgent Hillary Clinton the Party's nominee!...His heart and soul is being gutted and ours with it... This morning's news in the Washington Post is that he's revised his positions on abortion and troop withdrawal! His supporters are being sent to hell in a handbasket and it has to be stopped!

Suddenly, Sutherland sounds more like Frank Burns than Hawkeye!

Meanwhile, the otherwise regal Lauren Bacall also has a painful case of Hollywood, Interrupted:

Q: You told Larry King, “I’m a total, total, total liberal and proud of it.” Are you excited about the election?

A: I am. I’m a big Barack person. What I find really hard to take is the way the media behave. … They seem to pick on Barack much more readily than they do on McCain. They suddenly say he’s this kind of politician, he’s not what we thought, dah-dah-dah-dah. … I don’t understand why these anchors say, “We’re not supposed to take a side, we’re supposed to just give the news,” but they don’t just give the news, and they don’t tell the truth, excuse me. I only listen to Keith Olbermann. To hell with the rest of them. I’m an MSNBC type now.

Yes, if there's one thing about the legacy media, it's that they really, really despise Obama. Particularly at CNN. And the Washington Post. And The New York Times. And...

"Around the world, demand for bourbon is booming."

But does your choice of liquor make you...racist?

James Webb: "Under no circumstances will I be a candidate for Vice President."

Tough to argue with that. And in any case, it seems kind of imprudent for someone to seek executive office after less than one full term in the Senate...

"California is making it mandatory for cars to be labeled with global warming scores, figures that take into account emissions from vehicle use and fuel production."

"I remember watching the Nixon-Humphrey presidential race on TV. A friend of mine who spoke German and English translated for me. I heard Humphrey saying things that sounded like socialism, which I had just left."

England's Telegraph: "Toddlers who dislike spicy food 'racist'".

And don't even mention those ne'er do well urchins--and bourgeois parents in the proletariat sector--who commit the doubleplus ungood crimethink of food waste!

(Can't the kids just claim that bland food and garbage are covered under their own personal interpretation of sharia law and be issued a hall pass?)

Ed Morrissey writes:

The Weather Channel has been a major advocate for global-warming policies. Combining it with the Keith Olbermann/Chris Matthews network will probably result in a major release of greenhouse gases on its own. Given NBC’s inability to impose even a modicum of balance and objectivity at MS-NBC, we can expect Jeff Zucker to use this new outfit as a platform on which to push even harder for statist policies on energy production and use.

But will the lights stay on in the studio?

The most busted name in news has a remarkably appropriate redesign of their logo this year!

As Ann Althouse notes, judging by the tone of his voice, and the laughter that follows, I'm pretty sure McCain is kidding in the above clip, especially when bloggers and new media outlets such as Ed Morrissey and Pajamas were part of McCain's key media outreach strategy when he (a) needed to woo the base during the primaries and (b) was relatively cash starved. And note that McCain's camp has even attempted to reach out--in that patented it won't work but it looks good to squishy undecided voters Maverick style--across the Blogospheric aisle to prominent leftwing bloggers as well.

In 2004, John McCain defended fellow Senator John Kerry against the exceedingly well-deserved attacks by the Swift Boat Vets and related groups. But in the world of Washington, no good deed goes unpunished; and even the Associated Press has to laugh (check out the second paragraph quoted below) at the turn of events involving their candidate's latest surrogate to take a shot at McCain's military service:

John Kerry says Republican John McCain doesn't have the judgment to be president.

If that's the case, then it's probably a good thing McCain rejected overtures from Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004, to form a bipartisan ticket and run with Kerry as his candidate for vice president.

Kerry had no kind words his Senate colleague Sunday, accusing McCain of poor decision-making on everything from backing tax cuts for the wealthy to making support for continuing the U.S. military presence in Iraq the centerpiece of his presidential campaign.

"John McCain ... has proven that he has been wrong about every judgment he's made about the war. Wrong about the Iraqis paying for the reconstruction, wrong about whether or not the oil would pay for it, wrong about Sunni and Shia violence through the years, wrong about the willingness of the Iraqis to stand up for themselves," Kerry, who supports Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, said on CBS' "Face the Nation."

"If you like the Bush tax cut and what it's done to our economy, making wealthier people wealthier and the average middle class struggle harder, then John McCain is going to give you a third term of George Bush and Karl Rove," the Massachusetts senator added, echoing an Obama campaign talking point.

Kerry later said the McCain of 2008 isn't the McCain he courted in 2004.

"John McCain has changed in profound and fundamental ways that I find personally really surprising, and frankly upsetting.

And Kerry is expert in changing in profound and fundamental ways, that millions of Americans found surprising and frankly upsetting.

McCain has built his famous "Maverick" reputation by building bridges across the aisle, to the point where numerous conservatives wonder which party McCain owes his allegiance to. How does he view these blue falcon attacks, now numbering at least a dozen if not more, on his military record? Did he expect them as part of business as usual in Washington?

Kerry was apparently surprised when his post-war anti-American actions from the early 1970s were questioned in 2004. (Scroll down to the bottom of the page of this Newsweek postmortem from immediately after the 2004 election to Kerry's apoplexy when Charlie Gibson questioned him about his infamous early-1970s ribbon toss.) I'd be curious if McCain, who was a POW in Hanoi during Kerry's Winter Soldier days, is equally surprised.

On Thursday, I wrote about the ongoing efforts--from a variety of sources--to reframe World War II, in an effort to cast the Allies' efforts in a much more cynical light than history currently remembers them.

But Matthew Yglesias sets the Wayback Machine way, way back, in an effort to reframe not 1945, but 1776.

Well, lots and lots and lots of butter on her popcorn when at the movies: Robert Reich, offshore drilling (and the sad lack thereof), Antonioni's Blowup and a young Hillary Clinton's deep abiding love of hot buttered popcorn--all this--and more!--coalesces, thanks to Ann Althouse, in the Rosetta Stone of blog posts.

(H/T: IP)

We already had an Admiral Akbar reference just a few short hours ago; might as well go the whole bantha today: "This is What Happens When You Combine Boba Fett, Flashdance and Fireworks":

Mandalorian Dance
by PatrickBoivin

Pull quote from Jules Crittenden's post on the demise of Larry Harmon, the man who gave the world Bozo the Clown? “Larry’s aim in life was to Bozo-ize the world.”

A man's got to have a goal in life; I think we can safely say that Harmon has accomplished his.

Chevy Chase began his career 30-odd (very odd) years ago savaging a former GOP vice president; back then, part of the joke was that Chase looked nothing like the then-60-something Ford. But as always, God has the last laugh. It's further proof that Botox, plastic surgery and better medical technology merely cause Orwell's maxim to be pushed back a decade or two: At age 64, Chase has the face he deserves.

As Mary Katharine Ham asks, "How ticked off do you think Chevy Chase is these days when he wakes up, looks in the mirror...And sees a slightly less-handsome version of Dick Cheney before his eyes?"

I'd say very.

Maggie's Farm links to "a righteous attack on Le Corbusier" by Roger Scruton in City Journal.

I took my own shots at Monsieur Jeanneret a few years back, in a long, long post with heavy assists from Tom Wolfe and City Journal's own Theodore Dalrymple.

Bill Clinton is now Democrat number #10 or #11 who has fun storming the castle, attacking John McCain's military service and POW experience. Though as always with Bill's hamhanded attacks, and yes, I use this word rather advisedly, there's a remarkable amount of blowback to his candidate involved.

Stop Global Warming...before it turns you into Admiral Akbar!

(Who looks a lot like Mary Steenburgen these days! It's certainly only one step removed from being turned into a zombie, which is enough to make one want to mix one of these in response.)

Related, If Exceedingly Tangentially: "Arugula causes global warming"!

In early May, about a week after their anchors and reporters gushed that Rev. Wright had hit--in Soledad O'Brien's words, "