As Tom Blumer writes in Newsbusters, put down all beverages before reading this quote from Al Neuharth, extracted from his column in today's edition of USA Today:

In the olden days, some newspapers actually were backed or funded by political parties. Not only did most endorse candidates, but news coverage often was slanted or opinionated.

Now most newspapers try to be fair and objective in news columns.

OK, to be fair, if you define "the olden days" to mean the era before the national radio networks, that's reasonable--and the era that followed, which was centered around a unified mass media, served the American public reasonably well until about 1968. But Victor Davis Hanson writes today, as I noted in an earlier post today, that era was shattered by the rise of the World Wide Web and replaced with a hyperpartisan advocacy media--which isn't necessarily a bad thing, as long consumers know that that's what their getting, and not a continued feint towards objectivity.

An increasing number of journalists understand that. But to borrow from an earlier post, there are those stragglers, such as Neuharth, whom every year sound more and more like the mythological Japanese soldier discovered on a desert island years after World War II ended, who doesn't realize the war's over, and how it concluded.

In repairing our nation's rapidly aging infrastructure, count me as very much one of the "Pro-Pavement People" that Matthew Continetti mentions here, as opposed to "The desire named streetcar."

Reader Patrick Cox sent me a link to this Reuters piece, titled, "WITNESS: Berliners' love affair with America grows cold". Here's a sample:

During the 1990s pro-American sentiment was still high.

They appreciated George Bush's support for reunification in 1990 that overcame British and French reticence. And Bill Clinton got rock star treatment every time he came here.

Even in the wake of September 11 attacks, Berlin's support for the United States was special. More than 200,000 attended a pro-America rally in Berlin on September 14, 2001 to hear German President Johannes Rau say:

"No one knows better than the people here in Berlin what America has done for freedom and democracy in Germany. So, we say to all Americans from Berlin: America does not stand alone."

Germans even dropped their taboo on taking part in foreign military operations and sent forces to help the U.S.-led mission in Afghanistan.

So what went wrong?

It was, of course, the dispute over the invasion of Iraq.

Before that, U.S. presidents had always been welcomed in Berlin. However, in May 2002 George W. Bush needed 10,000 German police to shield him from 10,000 anti-war protesters.

In June, Bush spent only a few minutes at Berlin airport on his way in and out of Germany for meetings with Chancellor Angela Merkel in an isolated village 100 km to the north.

It was difficult to believe that a U.S. president seemed to be avoiding the city that owed its very survival to America. There was a brief ray of hope a month later when Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama gave a speech in Berlin -- and 200,000 people showed up.

In case things don't change after November 4, perhaps it's time to try finally to get rid of the American accent.

Which brings Germany full circle: having been liberated by the US after their feverish support of a genocidal mustachioed tyrant, Germany is apparently peeved at the US because we defeated another nation's genocidal mustachioed tyrant. Yet curiously, that nation seems pretty happy not to be under Saddam's yoke.

(Triangulation spotted here; potential for deja vu all over again, here.)

Update: The proprietor of the Bitter Sanity blog spots a little time traveling going on, and emails:

From the article you just commented on:

It was, of course, the dispute over the invasion of Iraq.

Before that, U.S. presidents had always been welcomed in Berlin.
However, in May 2002 George W. Bush needed 10,000 German police to shield him from 10,000 anti-war protesters.

Um... people protesting an invasion that didn't start until ten months later? Prescient, those Germans.

Iraq didn't become an area of major controversy in Europe until winter 2002/2003, if I'm remembering correctly. These people wouldn't have been protesting Iraq - they would have been protesting either the dethroning of the Taliban, or America in general. Probably America in general.

I'm surprised that made it through Reuters' layers and layers of fact checkers.

James Pethokoukis explains "Why Democrats Will Target the Investor Class in 2009":

If Barack Obama is elected president next week, 2009 may well bring a concerted and all-out effort by the Obama administration and a Democratically dominated Congress to turn the generally pro-Republican Investor Class into an endangered class by, among other tactics, raising investment taxes and ending the tax preferences for 401(k)'s, IRAs, and other retirement accounts.

Via Betsy Newmark, who writes, "watch for it. Don't say you weren't warned."

Update: More via the Professor.

Heh, indeed.^TM

Back in June, the liberal New Republic noted that Joe Klein took Time magazine's "Swampland" blog into the fever swamp, when he wrote:

The fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives--people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary--plumped for this war, and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel. And then there is the question--made manifest by the no-bid contracts offered U.S. oil companies by the Iraqis--of two oil executives, Bush and Cheney, securing a new source of business for their Texas buddies.

James Kirchick of TNR replied:

"Raised the question of divided loyalties?" Why doesn't Klein just come out and answer the "question," instead of cowardly using a vague, past tense construction, and say that a cabal of Jews agitated a War for Israel? His suggestion that they advocated "using U.S. lives and money to make the world safe for Israel" is the exact same sort of thing Pat Buchanan said about the First Gulf War (remarks that led his former mentor William F. Buckley Jr. to label him an anti-Semite).

More questions for Joe Klein. If the Jews with dual loyalties really ran our foreign policy, wouldn't they have pressed first for war with Iran, which presents a far graver threat to Israel than Saddam ever did? And how come so many non-Jews like Don Rumsfeld, former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey, the Kurds, just to name a few, all "plumped for war?"

With Klient's latest writing...

I've never met Rashid Khalidi, but he is (a) Palestinian and therefore (b) a semite, so the charge of anti-semitism is fatuous.

...He's still in the fever swamp, as Jeffery Goldberg of The Atlantic writes:

I want to be absolutely clear that I'm not about to accuse Joe of being an anti-Semite, but I will note that this the first time I've ever heard a Jewish person, or a non-anti-Semite, make this sort of malicious statement, one that perverts the universal meaning of a term in order to mock the phenomenon of Jew-hatred. "Jew-hatred" is actually my preferred term, because, as I'm sure Joe knows, "anti-Semitism" was a term invented by the avant-garde Jew-hater Wilhelm Marr, who was the founder, in 1879, of the League of Anti-Semites, which argued that Germans and Jews were locked in a death struggle for racial superiority. And we know where that ended.

Since Marr's time, of course, the term has evolved from a compliment to an insult, but its meaning has held steady all these years. As I said, the only people who insult Jews by denying the meaning of the term are, in my experience, anti-Semitic. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas, told me in an interview once that his organization could not be anti-Semitic, because Arabs were the true Semites, while Jews were simply European impostors. This interview occurred at a time when Yassin's suicide bombers were systematically seeking out large groups of Jews in order to murder them for the crime of being Jewish. By Joe's dangerous new standard, the World War II-era Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Husseini, who was a Nazi fellow traveler and a frank advocate of total Jewish extermination, could not be called an anti-Semite because he was Arab. So, really, who's being fatuous?

I know that Joe derives great pleasure from criticizing Jewish supporters of the Iraq War -- the Wolfowitzes, Perles and Feiths --in specifically Jewish terms, while never seeming to use the Christianity of other supporters of the war, including Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, and other such marginal figures, against them. I don't like the double-standard, but it's part of the rough and tumble. However, emptying the term "anti-Semitism" of its accepted meaning in order to score points against John McCain? That's simply too much.

You stay classy, Time magazine.

"Disgruntled Congressman Hastings Threatens Life of Opponent Marion Thorpe"--everything old is new again!

Hey, Thomas Jefferson said so and everything--but just in time for the final descent of his campaign, "Obama kicks dissenting reporters off plane."

But then, as Victor Davis Hanson writes, "Sometime in 2008, journalism as we knew it died, and advocacy media took its place"--a trend I've been tracking since early 2004.

(And these guys since the mid-1980s.)

Marvel Comics and Mark Steyn's America Alone thesis on demographic decline team up for all of the two-fisted, one-handed imaginary action you can handle!

A Japanese man has enlisted hundreds of people in a campaign to allow marriages between humans and cartoon characters, saying he feels more at ease in the "two-dimensional world".

Comic books are immensely popular in Japan, with some fictional characters becoming celebrities or even sex symbols.

Marriage is meanwhile on the decline as many young Japanese find it difficult to find life partners.

Taichi Takashita launched an online petition aiming for one million signatures to present to the government to establish a law on marriages with cartoon characters.

Within a week he has gathered more than 1000 signatures through.

"I am no longer interested in three dimensions. I would even like to become a resident of the two-dimensional world," he wrote.

"However, that seems impossible with present-day technology. Therefore, at the very least, would it be possible to legally authorise marriage with a two-dimensional character?"

Sounds like somebody's due for a nice long rest in Arkham Asylum.

Besides--there's a larger marital issue which clearly Mr. Takashita hasn't considered. Since it's reasonable to assume that the most popular female cartoon characters would have thousands--nay, millions of male suitors, why, that's bigamy!

If you want to get up to speed quickly on the background behind the Khalidi-Obama tape that the L.A. Times is sitting on, then I strongly recommend the 10-minute or so interview on PJTV between Roger L. Simon and Ben Shapiro. Click through Roger's post, here.

The L.A. Times is infamous for its 3,500-word hit piece which ran in 2003 on then California gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger. It hit the streets in--when else?--October of that year.

Gosh, wonder why the Times is treading so lightly this time around?

(Gateway Pundit suggests the paper maybe interested in safety and protection over and over both mere politics.)

Related: "This Is the Khalidi Obama Embraced".

Amity Shlaes reminds us that yes indeed, FDR's policies prolonged the Depression--or as Mark Steyn wrote at the start of the month:

"Lots of other places -- from Britain to Australia -- took a hit in 1929 but, alas, they lacked an FDR to keep it going till the end of the Thirties. That's why in other countries they refer to it as "the Depression," but only in the U.S. is it 'Great.'"

For most of the 1970s, Archie and Edith sang, "Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again." It took a few decades, but at long last, their wish finally comes true.

Meanwhile, Charles Johnson spots one huge budget-busting proposal from Obama, which is troubling not just for its fiscal excess.

As a connoisseur of fine conservative satire, I must say, I do rather like the cut of this "Iowahawk" fellow's jib:

When my late father T. Coddington Van Voorhees VI founded the iconoclastic conservative journal National Topsider in 1948, he famously declared that "Now is the time for all good conservative helmsmen to hoist the mizzen, pour the cocktails, and steer this damned schooner hard starboard." In the 60 years since he first uttered it after one-too-many Cosmopolitans at one of Pamela Harriman's notorious foreign policy black tie balls, father's pithy bon mot has served as a rallying cry for conservatives from Greenwich to Chevy Chase. Today, I say it's time for we conservatives to once again grab the rigging and set sail with the flotilla of the true conservative in this race: Barack Obama.

Trust me, I haven't taken this tack lightly. No Van Voorhees has supported an avowed socialist since great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandpapa Cragmont Van Voorhees lent Peter Minuet $24 and a sack of wampum to swing a subprime mortgage on Manhattan Island. Old dad himself often recounted how, as a lad, he would command the family chauffeur Carleton to drive the Duesenberg down to the Times Square Trans-Lux so he could hiss Roosevelt. But I've taken a good measure of this Obama fellow, and I must say I like the cut of the man's jib.

How can I say this, you ask? One look at this Obama chap is all the answer you need. Suave, tanned, unflappable, Harvard connections; it's obvious that here is a man to the conservative manor born. One imagines him at the helm of the Ship of State, basked in the sunlight diffusing through the seaspray over the bow, like some beautiful rugged Othello from a rapturous Ralph Lauren catalog, calmly issuing instructions to the deck crew in that magnificent mellifluous baritone of his. It's that easy-going, almost effortless grace that has all the A-list conservatives like David Frum and Kathleen Parker whispering Reaganesque in hushed tones. Even Peggy Noonan -- the Grand Dame of Gipperism -- has succumbed to Obama's undeniable conservative charms. Just last month I listened to her wax poetic about the Adonis of Chicago between chukkers at the Newport Club polo tournament final. "Why Peggy, you old dowager," I quipped, "I believe you just had an orgasm."

Do I even need to add the "read the whole thing" encomium here?

Babalu Blog notes, accurately, I think, that "It's a lose-lose proposition for Obama's supporters":

On November 4th, Barack Obama just might win the presidential election. But regardless of whether he wins or loses, the vast majority of his supporters will lose. If McCain wins the election, they will feel the sting of watching the candidate they placed all their hopes in be defeated. But it stands to be much worse for them if their candidate wins.

By placing their hopes and aspirations in the hands of Obama, they have in effect transferred the individual faith they have in themselves to another person. A person who has promised to make their dreams come true for them. No longer will they have to fight, or struggle, or even work to achieve their dreams; Obama promises to do it all for them. But sooner, rather than later, they will realize that Obama can never deliver on this impossible promise. It is then when they will experience a pain much greater than they can imagine; the pain of realizing that you gave up not only your most sacred dreams and hopes to someone else, but that you gave up hope on yourself so that someone else can do it for you.

Which is why, "If I were John McCain's campaign, I would have just bought enough time to run this video after Obama's infomercial..."

Related: "America the Miserable." (Speaking of mirrors and reflections.)

The candidate as Rorschach test: Jennifer Rubin writes that Sarah Palin is every candidate you want her to be--and more.

Meanwhile, Roger L. Simon analyzes Obama's inkblot results.

(Just don't cross the streams.)

A year ago, Editor & Publisher ran a story with the above headline, in reference to climate change. (Article text available here)

Sufficed to say, the industry has taken their house organ's advice deeply to heart on a variety of other topics as well--with less than satisfactory results to their collective net worth.

That's a youthful, if momentarily glazed-looking Bill O'Reilly in the above YouTube clip from a news update twenty years ago (and about five years before this now-viral moment referenced in the above headline). Note the position of the Dow at the end of the segment, which provides some surprisingly reassuring contrast for where it stands today.

Something for the optimists and pessimists at Pajamas Media HQ--and if the latter group are proven correct, some thoughts on who will blamed the most and why, and yet may very well be the party's best hope in the near term future--although the latter conventional wisdom doesn't always survive the campaign trail.

As Michael Wade notes, "On this day in 1938, Martians landed in New Jersey", courtesy of Orson Welles' radio program and H.G. Wells' novel. Sadly, I suspect the latter would probably be pretty cool with what the writer of the latest movie version of his book used them to metaphorically stand-in for.

Meanwhile, James Lileks squares the circle, and John Nolte has additional Halloween movie selections. Though for us veteran connoisseurs of Philadelphia TV of our boomer youth, it's just not the same without Dr. Shock or Stella, "that Maneater from Manayunk" introducing them.

Update: And speaking of Philadelphia, congrats to the Phillies!

Amanda Carpenter catches a sly moment of numerical slight-of-hand as well in the Obamamercial, for those thinking of going John Galt next year.

Biggest celebrity in the world already known for his faux-presidential seal and other self-reverential campaign graphics produces infomercial on mock-White House set. Chris Matthews' take? "It was romance. It was realism."

More human than human is our motto. But like another product of the Tyrell Corporation, does Obama see unicorns when he dreams?

The Weekly Standard's blog looks at "what might have been."

Larry Kudlow talks presidential economics on this week's edition of PJM Political, also featuring James Lileks' warm remembrance of Dean Barnett, and a round-table pre-postmortem of next week's election featuring Steve Green, Lileks, Ed Morrissey of Hot Air and myself.

And you'll never look at Five Easy Pieces the same way again!

The Politico, then and now.

"Shining a light on the Obama fundraising machine"--and its curious list of donors.

Check out this howler in a piece in CQ Politics titled, "What McCain Defectors See in Obama":

The defectors are a mixed lot, but all represent some brand of recognizably conservative thought. Some like Doug Kmiec, Andrew Sullivan, and Ken Adelman are probably conservatives by anyone's definition, while others are cut partly from an older mold. They bear some resemblance to the moderate Republicanism of the Rockefeller era, but the issues of their time are not the same.

Sullivan is as conservative these days as much as John Kerry was "the right man -- and the conservative choice -- for a difficult and perilous time."

(H/T: Orrin Judd, whose link to Powers' essay is titled, "Inherit The Windbags.")

"There's a wealth of information that would help define Obama just waiting -- and waiting -- for the press to discover", Abraham H. Miller writes, in a piece titled Obama's Chicago Secrets":

But maybe CNN and the rest of the electronic media won't send anyone to Chicago because it is blowing its investigative budget flying reporters to Alaska to explore why anyone would fire a public safety director who refused to dismiss a state trooper who tasered a twelve year old boy -- a trooper who was reported to be drunk while on duty, and who allegedly threatened someone's life. Now, there is a story we all can believe in -- "Troopergate."

Obama gets a pass because nothing is more important to the electronic media than getting Obama elected. Obama gets a pass on Bill Ayers because, at some level, most of the people in the media business can identify with what Ayers did. That's why they won't even mention the Weather Underground's planned bombing of the Fort Dix dance. That's why the name "Diana Oughton," the naïve girl who became Ayers' revolutionary partner and lover and who blew herself up in the Manhattan townhouse bomb factory, is never mentioned in any report on Ayers. This despite Diana's story being well known, as a result of award-winning journalist Thomas Power's book, Diana: The Making of a Terrorist.

Let's face reality: If Bill Ayers had been blowing up black churches and belonged to some neo-Nazi organization, do you think his long-time association with someone who might be the next president would be so cavalierly dismissed? Do you think that Dean Stanley Fish of the University of Illinois would consider penning a letter on behalf of some non-repentant neo-Nazi? Imagine if that neo-Nazi had said: "I did not do enough bombings. I did not kill enough blacks."

The left is so wrapped up in its own high-minded sophistry that it is incapable of distinguishing between being self-righteous and being politically obscene. There is no difference between fascism and communism. They are two sides of the same totalitarian currency. They lead to the same excesses. Yet, communism is palatable to the point of being chic, while fascism is appropriately despised.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was as natural an alliance as one between Britain and the United States. The media's failure to see Ayers as indistinguishable from the terrorists who bombed the Birmingham Church is a poignant and terrible commentary on where journalism -- especially electronic journalism - is today.

Bias exists not only in the obvious such as what we are told and how it is told to us, but also in what we are not told.

As the electronic media plows its resources into examining Sarah Palin's wardrobe and repeats Democratic talking points as news, more important subjects for real investigative reporters are ignored. What was Obama's role in Rezko's pay-for-play scheme? What did Rezko expect in return for the $300,000 subsidy for Obama's Hyde Park mansion? What is Rezko now telling the federal prosecutor?

Also, is it merely coincidental that Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn (Mrs. William Ayers) worked at the same law firm as Michelle Obama? How far back does the relationship with William Ayers go and how close is it? And does the relationship stem from both seeing America through similar ideological prisms, one based on hate, and the other -- as Michelle Obama so clearly articulated -- based on shame?

Don't hold your breath for answers.

Don't worry, the media will apologize for not doing what was once thought of as its job.

After their man crosses the finish line next week.

Back in 2005, Howard Dean told the late Tim Russert that "I will use whatever position I have in order to root out hypocrisy."

This seems like an exceptional place to start.

While my Ministry of Truth video on Monday dealt primarily with the ability to pivot history on a 180-degree fulcrum, as an additional feature, it's worth noting that the modern news media's primary role is not to disseminate information, but to withhold it. Sometimes permanently, or simply holding it back until it won't do much damage to a favored patron, at which point it can be released on page D-17 of the late Friday edition of the paper, in a two or three paragraph article in nine-point type next to the local plumber's advertisement and supermarket coupons.

The drawback to this approach of course, is that if there's a hint that the paper is sitting on a story, it can lead to wild--or who knows?--overly mild speculation about its contents.

All of which is why "2008 is not a year on which honest journalists shall look back with undiluted pleasure."

In the latest edition of Silicon Graffiti videoblog, we visit industrious Outer Party Member Winston Smith hard at work in the Ministry of Truth, and look at how history can be turned on a dime, including:

• The Pivot on the Iraq War.
• Hollywood and the Iraq War.
• All media, all malleable.
• Pivots by Dalton Trumbo and Pete Seeger during World War II.
• World War II revisionism today.
• One man's new found respect for private property and the Chicago P.D.!
• And a homage to the most Kafkaesque secret agent of 'em all. Be seeing you!

This is the 19th edition of our ongoing Silicon Graffiti videoblog series, which began in January of this year; click here for all of the previous editions.

Jules Crittenden wonders if insane neo-Nazis have mutated into an even weirder hybrid of "AndrogeNazis":

Hey, is it just me or does that neo-Nazi assassination plotter look like maybe he goosesteps with the left jackboot as well as the right? You know, siegheils from both sides of the Nuremberg rally. Like maybe his death train rattles in both directions.

Maybe he's an Ernest Rohm fan.

I let out an audible gasp when I read the news a few minutes ago, even though I knew he had been ailing: Dean Barnett dead at the far-too-young age of 41.

You can hear my interview with Dean from last November, here.

Update: The Weekly Standard has a round-up of blogger and pundit memorials to Dean, here.

As Power Line notes, over at the once-respect publication The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan has posted (under the same headline) a YouTube video trashing Sarah Palin titled, "Red, White and MILF." John Hinderaker responds:

I don't think there is any precedent in our history for the shameful manner in which the Left has treated Sarah Palin. Left-winger Andrew Sullivan gleefully posted a particularly disgusting example of the phenomenon today; it's a YouTube video titled "Red, White and MILF." Watch it only if you have a strong stomach. If you don't know what "MILF" means--I'm sure most of our readers don't--Google it.

I can remember when Sullivan was a respected journalist, not a gutter smear merchant and borderline pornographer. His descent exemplifies the Left's decline in recent years to a baboon-like level of discourse. The vileness of much of what passes for political "argument" on the Left has to be seen to be believed. The worst impulses of human nature have been not just unleashed, but rewarded. If you haven't looked at web sites like Democratic Underground, Daily Kos, the Huffington Post and Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, you have no idea what the phrase "gutter politics" really means.

Nowhere has the vileness of the Left been more sickening than in its treatment of Governor Palin. It is interesting to contemplate what a semi-pornographic video about Barack Obama, playing on the same sort of prejudices and stereotypes that are so disgustingly on display in Sullivan's video, would look like. Frankly, I can't imagine such a video being made, let alone featured on the web site of the once-proud Atlantic magazine. But on the Left, anything goes--the more slimy and disgusting, the better.

Sadly, that's been true for a number of years now. But from time to time, some have called the left on their actions. Here's a pioneering member of the Blogosphere in 2002 on the dangers of racism, invective and ad hominem attacks emanating from the left:

When a black public person like Harry Belafonte calls another African-American a slave to white masters, you see what I mean. When defenders of feminism call someone who files a sexual harassment lawsuit "trailer-trash," you get the picture. When a gay man can write a column asserting that another man is a "nasty faggot," it's hard to think of how much lower the discourse can get. When liberals denigrate the president as a "boy" or as a "sissy," to quote Maureen Dowd, homophobia doesn't lurk far behind.

I remember a brief interaction I had with one Barbra Streisand long, long ago when the Paula Jones suit had just been filed. I asked Ms. Streisand what she thought of the suit. "Oh, she's just a little kurva," she replied, referring to Jones. That's a yiddish expression for "whore." Charming.

That blogger's name? Andrew Sullivan, oddly enough.

Sarbanes-Oxley? That's strictly for those Joe the Plumber-type suckers in the private sector, writes TigerHawk:

Mark Steyn has more on the hilarious and probably intentional failure of internal controls at the Obama campaign. If it were a public company it would have to disclose a material weakness, and its auditors would wonder whether its "tone from the top" had actually encouraged the practices in question. Fortunately for politicians of all parties, we do not hold government to anything like the same standard of accountability that applies to private businesses with public stockholders.

Reviewing the last weeks of a campaign that seems like it commenced "sometime during your first child's initial year in primary school", Tim Blairadds, "this is just a guess, but it could be that the rules are different for Democrats."

(Video found via Little Green Footballs.)

As Nick Schulz of Tech Central Station spotted in late August of 2004, Harper's magazine editor Lewis Lapham "wrote about the GOP convention speeches before anyone even stepped to the podium":

But the only "mistake" Lapham made is in revealing for all to see what has long been known by anyone who pays attention to the news: the major media routinely bring to their coverage of significant political events a predetermined storyline -- you might want to call it a "Lapham". Facts that undermine the storyline are ignored or explained away as aberrations to The Truth. For the editor of Harper's and other establishment press figures, it really makes no difference to them what will be said at Madison Square Garden because the Laphams are already set, loaded in the scribblers' word processors and television anchor tele-prompters and ready to go.

Or maybe these days it's best known as Ifillization, but New York magazine also jumps the gun a bit on the results of the election, just as multiple members of Lapham's Blue Media did in 2004.

Scott Johnson of Power Line --part of the "monster" that Mary Mapes, inadvertently helped to create when deliberately cooked the books at CBS in 2004 (back when viewers were still surprised that such things occurred), has some thoughts on her post this week at the Puffington Host. He reaches a conclusion similar to my take from Friday.

As to Big Media in 2008, the Professor and his readers have some thoughts on the state of "Blue Journalism."

"Joe Biden's RAVE Act of 2002 was a terrible blow against dance-generated alternative energy."

A half century ago, Marshall McLuhan noted:

The bias of each medium of communication is far more distorting than the deliberate lie. The form and tone of some press styles may make the very concept of truth irrelevant. The most urgent and reliable facts presented in this way are a travesty of any reality.

And that was during the (surprisingly brief) era in which a mass media feigned objectivity--and might have even believed it themselves. McLuhan's observation is even more true these days, as Roger L. Simon writes.

Update: Rick Moran may have caught CNN in yet another fabrication.

Steve Green writes:

Sixty-five million years ago, dinosaurs ruled the earth -- with the same unthinking ruthlessness which Rep John Murtha (D, PA-12) rules the House Defense Subcommittee. His own website brags that "[o]f the nearly 10,000 men and women who have served in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1789, only 90 have served longer than he has." But maybe, just maybe, like the dinosaurs, Murtha's time is up.

He's long overdue for a nice long vacation on the beach at Okinawa.

A reporter for Newsweek has no problem admitting to the world that he'd like to take out Rudy Giuliani--in a nonlethal way of course; "just something that put him out of commission for a year or so." But if a journalist asks tough questions of The One's veep nominee, she's immediately put on the defensive for doing her job and not merely being a cheerleader.

Certainly in terms of their collective mental health, we know that to be true from the yin and yang of the Michael Malone and Mary Mapes posts we linked to yesterday, but the Professor also spots, as he calls it, more media retrenchment:

"The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., will reduce its newsroom staff by nearly half through voluntary buyouts as New Jersey's largest newspaper seeks to return to profitability." Whatever happens to the rest of the world, the news business is already in a depression.

And just as it did with the economic slowdowns in the early 1990s and the period surrounding 9/11, there's little doubt the media's own woes are coloring how they report the business news outside of their industry.

It's been a while since I've posted at Blogcritics, but I have some initial impressions over there of the beta version of Adobe CS4, focusing on Photoshop, Premiere Pro and After Effects, all of which have some spiffy new features. I hope to follow-up with the final release version in the not too distant future.

Mary Mapes, the woman who brought you RatherGate, wrote yesterday at the Huffington Post:

Americans aren't responding to the old plays -- the fake fears, the faux outrage, the conservatives who yell "Communist" at the news cameras, the pompous right-wing bloggers who once held such sway. I know all too well how scary and effective these old tactics were in 2004. Today, they are toothless. Ha, ha. Nothing makes me happier than seeing once swaggering players like Powerline, Free Republic and Little Green Footballs forced onto the sidelines, left to limply watch this campaign pass by like a parade in which they play no meaningful part. They just don't matter anymore.

Mapes' post is titled, "The Monster is Dying"--so "conservatives who yell 'Communist' at the news cameras" are declasse, but attacking conservatives as a monolithic "monster" on a Weblog is reasoned nuance journalism. Charles Krauthammer, call your office!

But behind each of those "monsters" was at least one person who in one form another said, "I don't know how many people will actually listen, but why shouldn't my voice be heard as well?" (Just as the founder of the Huffington Post presumably said as well at some point.) Much like a certain Ohio tradesman with entrepreneurial dreams who is now called "the now infamous Joe the plumber," on over 500 Webpages. Or as another journalist with the same initials as Mary Mapes wrote today:

So much for the Standing Up for the Little Man, so much for Speaking Truth to Power, so much for Comforting the Afflicting and Afflicting the Comfortable, and all of those other catchphrases we journalists used to believe we lived by.

And calling one half of the Blogosphere "toothless" because their presidential candidate isn't an effective purveyor of the same message as they are seems awfully disingenuous to the other side--I don't think the bloggers at, say, the Daily Kos would take kindly at being called, by extension, toothless in 2004 because John Kerry was such a feckless candidate. It also fails to take into consideration that pundits supporting the out-of-party are able to go on the rhetorical offense, something that the right-hand of the Blogosphere will likely have ample opportunity to do so over the next four years.

But if indeed "The Monster is Dying", what a run! In September of 2005, a year after RatherGate broke, Mapes admitted that she had never heard of any of the blogs that she quotes above, even as she was a working TV producer at a corporation which billed itself at the time as "America's Most Watched Network", and hence, presumably, had her pulse on the nation's political scene:

Within a few minutes, I was online visiting Web sites I had never heard of before: Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, Power Line. They were hard-core, politically angry, hyperconservative sites loaded with vitriol about Dan Rather and CBS. Our work was being compared to that of Jayson Blair, the discredited New York Times reporter who had fabricated and plagiarized stories.

And accurately so, of course.

But hey, from cat food eating pajama-wearing navel gazers to a journalistic "monster" in the space of seven years after 9/11 is a pretty amazing growth cycle--and something tells me that the starboard side of the Blogosphere isn't going away anytime soon, no matter how much Mary wishes it were so, and no matter what the outcome on November 4th.

Kevin D. Williamson asks readers to "Explain this reasoning to me":

According to the geniuses at the Times, the governor of Alaska is self-evidently and grossly unqualified to be vice president of the United States, but a pop singer is obviously qualified to be lecturing the world about African civil wars and developmental economics.

Here's a little insight into the world of the Times op-ed page from editor Andrew Rosenthal:

Though rockers and pop stars are welcome, another group faces an uphill battle on to the New York Times' editorial page - conservatives. "[US Secretary of State] Condoleezza Rice is a particularly bad op-ed writer," Rosenthal said. However, the problem doesn't end there. "The problem with conservative columnists," Rosenthal said, "is that many of them lie in print." And they can't sing.

Liars? That's a bit cheeky from the newspaper that brought us Walter Duranty and Jayson Blair.

Condoleezza Rice got her PhD when she was 26 and speaks fluent Russian. Bono wears snazzy glasses and can see Ireland from his house.

It's more than reasonable to extend Rosenthal's attack on conservative columnists to potential conservative readers of the Times, and to reasonably assume that the Timespeople would prefer those readers avoid their product, just as many of those in Bono's industry would prefer they stay home. Which is one of the reasons why Steve Green projects out the Times' finances and writes, "The NYT in default? It couldn't happen to a nicer paper."

And even as his profession rushes headlong towards a financial cliff, veteran journalist Michael Malone writes that its moral bankruptcy has never been more evident:

Read More »

Forget the Black Panthers, hobnobbing with High Society on Park Avenue, happily dining on "asparagus tips in mayonnaise dabs, and meatballs petites au Coq Hardi". Bill Ayers is the workingman's unrepentant former domestic terrorist, and as such has earned longest of long shot third party presidential candidate Dave Burge's coveted support.

(Sirhan Sirhan could not be reached for comment.)

Fred Siegel looks at Mike Bloomberg, now approved by his obsequious city council to run for a third term as New York's mayor-as-nanny:

For the past year, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has been on a perpetual campaign for higher office. He's toured the country and run an ad campaign touting his educational "achievements," as a stepping stone to national office.

His lavishly funded and enormously effective p.r. operation has garnered adoring articles in Esquire, Vanity Fair and GQ on how this post-partisan philosopher-king of sorts has had supposedly extraordinary fiscal and educational accomplishments. But as Bloomberg, whose billions make it possible to insert himself into any campaign at almost any time, lost out on his presidential and vice-presidential hopes, he was reduced to buying a third term as mayor of Gotham. And that's where his problems began.

Read the rest--and then check out William Warren, who adds, "According to the City Council, sometimes the people need a king."

For an update on the McCain campaign worker who claimed she was attacked at a Pittsburgh ATM, Hot Air has the details--or the lack thereof in this case. As one Pittsburgh TV station notes:

Police sources tell KDKA that a campaign worker has now confessed to making up a story that a mugger attacked her and cut the letter "B" in her face after seeing her McCain bumper sticker.

Like I said yesterday, who Twitters about going to the bank? And as a reader emailed this morning, "Looking at the photo that has to be the most conscientious knife attack ever made. Uniform cut depths, nothing that needs stitching. Put some antibiotic ointment on it and forget about it"--adding, "It's a hoax. And I surely wish she hadn't done it."

Indeed.^TM

Jonah Goldberg updates a Boomer/Gen-X Saturday morning video chestnut: "The new Schoolhouse Rock cartoon: 'Conjunction: a word that connects a racist attack and Barack Obama'":

This week, an editorial writer for the Kansas City Star denounced John McCain and Sarah Palin for suggesting that Obama is a socialist because he wants to "spread the wealth around." Don't they understand that "socialist" has always been a racist codeword used by bigots like J. Edgar Hoover to demonize black activists like W.E.B. Du Bois?

A couple problems: First, as best I can remember, Marx, Engels, Lenin, George Bernard Shaw, Eugene V. Debs, Norman Thomas, and Michael Harrington do not usually get a lot of attention during Black History Month. Second, as writer Michael Moynihan recently noted, Du Bois wasn't merely a socialist, he was a Stalinist! (Du Bois was not entirely unsympathetic to the Nazis, either.) [Paul Robeson was also pretty keen on Uncle Joe--Ed] Besides, when did "socialist" stop being an anti-Semitic codeword for Jew? Maybe when the left started going batty over "neocons."

I'm pretty sure I received the memo replacing the outdated terminology a while back from the liberal Bletchley Park.

Echoing the slogan of the 1930s National Recovery Administration, Mickey Kaus writes that even "Baskin-Robbins is doing its part" to get their man elected.

The NRA (no relation to this NRA) gave corporations that "did their part" a blue eagle logo to display--and woe betide those who didn't cooperate. Presumably, Baskin-Robbins is hoping to be rewarded with the official "Patriot Employer" symbol for their more recent efforts.

From the department of "Be Careful What You Wish For", in my recent "Bonnie & Nixon" video, I incorporated a little of the audio from Bobby Kennedy's March 1968 speech at the University of Kansas, in which he quoted early 20th century progressive William Allen White's call for violence and upheaval by way of higher education:

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

As to bring things full circle (and then some), note who's namechecked on the dedication page of a book authored by a noted '60s rioter and rebel turned academician much in the news recently.

In a surprise bombshell study that absolutely no one could foresee, the Politico recently announced--brace yourself!--"Study: McCain coverage mostly negative".

Which is why Boston-based talk radio host Michael Graham writes, "I have a dream for Sen. Barack Obama":

I have a dream that one day, for just 24 hours, he could be Sarah Palin.

OK, maybe that's less of a dream and more a plot point from a bad Lindsay Lohan movie (redundancy alert!).

But imagine the Democratic nominee's day as Barack Palin Obama:

He wake up and reaches for a secret cigarette and a copy of The New York Times [NYT]. Instead of the usual partisan puff pieces ("Obama Health Care Plan Pledges Miraculous Healings For All"), the Times is running exposes about his family.

Does his spouse have extremist political views? Who pays when his kids travel to Washington? And how do we know one of them isn't really his grandkid?

Opening the editorial page Palin-Obama finds column after column filled with personal attacks and insults. Comments about his looks, how much his clothes cost, his speaking style - even suggestions that the radical teachings of his church might be a legitimate topic for discussion.

He clicks on MSNBC and sees the spittle-flecked face of Chris Matthews.

"Obama says he's cutting taxes for 95 percent of taxpayers, but he's not. He's just sending them checks! No cut in their tax rate AT ALL! IT'S A LIE, A LIE! AAARRGGHHHH!

As the MSNBC medical staff fires yet another tranquilizer dart into Matthews' thrashing body, Palin-Obama gets ready to face the day.

At the airport, Palin-Obama is under siege from the traveling press. "Why are you hiding, Sen. Obama? You haven't taken questions from us since last month. Joe Biden hasn't held a press avail since Sept. 7! Afraid he'll make another 'guaranteed crisis' comment? How many more screw-ups before you dump the guy?"

A crowd of thousands gathers to hear him speak. When Palin-Obama mentions the "destructive foreign policy of George W. Bush," someone shouts "murderer!" Another cries, "off with this head!"

By lunchtime, the cable news headline is: "Obama Whips Up Angry Mob, Some Fear Campaign May Inspire Violence."

That afternoon, Palin-Obama sits down with a CNN reporter who spends the first half of the interview asking variations of the question, "How can a half-term senator with zero executive experience and no record of achievement be president? Shouldn't you be ashamed of yourself for even running?"

"Let's talk energy independence," Palin-Obama asks hopefully. The reporter instead demands to know why Obama won't release his medical records, his original birth certificate or the names of about half his contributors.

"You're the most secretive candidate since Nixon," the reporter insists. "And besides, the guy who plays you on 'Saturday Night Live' is way hotter."

The day grinds on. False stories repeatedly corrected by the campaign continue to air. One Palin-Obama supporter - a plumber who asked John McCain a tough question at a campaign stop - had his private medical files hacked into, and found Candy Crowley hiding in his dumpster.

One more campaign stop, more questions about his wife's politics, his children's travel schedule and his clothing budget - and Palin-Obama finally reaches his hotel for a night's rest.

His nightmare of misreporting, mean-spirited negative attacks and blatant media bias is over. For Gov. Sarah Palin, it's going to last at least 12 more days.

You can see ABC's attempt at flooding the zone with negative headlines on display, here. And Tunku Varadarajan of Forbes gives you the A to Z of all the negative coverage here.

Remarkably timely video from the Onion:

On the other hand, the fighting amidst the cold civil war in Australia is also escalating to a new intensity as well.

Update: 10/24/08: It's a hoax; Hot Air has the details--or the lack thereof in this case. As one Pittsburgh TV station notes:

Police sources tell KDKA that a campaign worker has now confessed to making up a story that a mugger attacked her and cut the letter "B" in her face after seeing her McCain bumper sticker.

Like I said below, who Twitters about going to the bank? And as a reader emailed this morning, "Looking at the photo that has to be the most conscientious knife attack ever made. Uniform cut depths, nothing that needs stitching. Put some antibiotic ointment on it and forget about it"--adding, "It's a hoax. And I surely wish she hadn't done it."

Indeed.^TM Story from yesterday follows:

Found via Matt Drudge, WTAE-TV in Pittsburgh reports:

A 20-year-old woman who was robbed at an ATM in Bloomfield was also maimed by her attacker, police said.

Pittsburgh police spokeswoman Diane Richard tells Channel 4 Action News that the victim was robbed at knifepoint on Wednesday night outside of a Citizens Bank near Liberty Avenue and Pearl Street just before 9 p.m.

Richard said the robber took $60 from the woman, then became angry when he saw a McCain bumper sticker on the victim's car. The attacker then punched and kicked the victim, before using the knife to scratch the letter "B" into her face, Richard said.

Richard said the woman refused medical treatment after the assault, which happened outside the view of the bank's surveillance cameras.

The robber is described as a dark-skinned black man, 6 feet 4 inches tall, 200 pounds with a medium build, short black hair and brown eyes. The man was wearing dark colored jeans, a black undershirt and black shoes.

In a horribly macabre bit of irony, I read about this story immediately after concluding an interview for next week's PJM Political with Peter Wood, the author of A Bee In The Mouth, a 2007 book focusing on anger in American life, and particularly politics.

(Add this story to the Police Blotter Politics post from yesterday morning, a topic which I discussed a bit further on yesterday's afternoon's edition of PJTV, which subscribers can watch, here.)

Update: Ace cautions that "This could be a hoax. It's has a too-perfectly-awful-to-be-true feel, a Tawana Brawley feel." On the other hand, Ed Morrissey has a photo of the victim--in addition to the letter B scratched into her face, she has a very real looking black eye, to boot.

More: Glenn Reynolds adds, "This is so serious that I predict it will get almost one-tenth as much national coverage as something some guy yelled at a Palin rally once."

Update: Michelle Malkin expresses doubts; explaining why "that McCain volunteer's 'mutilation' story smells awfully weird."'

One item that does seem odd to me is this post on the victim's Twitter page:

atodd: Stubbornly searching for a bank of america to avoid ATM fees.
Thu, 23 Oct 2008 00:23:21 +0000

Of course, I could be reading my own concerns into this; my parents were always very discreet when leaving their small business to go to the bank, for fear of getting mugged, so I had that ethos drummed into me through osmosis. On the other hand, just because I wouldn't want the world to know when I was going to the bank, doesn't mean that others aren't blogging up a storm about that aspect of their lives.

Update: This Pittsburgh Tribune Review article mentions in the second paragraph that "Police planned to administer a polygraph test to Ashley Todd, 20, because her statements about the attack conflict with evidence from the Citizens Bank ATM where she claims the incident occurred, police said."

The article concludes by quoting local police Chief Nate Harper, who says. "We are treating this as a credible report", but adds, "The ATM has a security camera, and investigators were trying to watch the video."

Whether or not Todd's story is conclusively proven to be a hoax, note the smug headline on this Smoking Gun report.

Related: Tough to argue with this assessment: "election season is crazy season."

Kathy Shaidle connects the dots and illustrates why the Gray Lady is in more than a Pinch of trouble.

Having been dubbed racists and rednecks by Rep. Jack Murtha (D-PA), (after previously being dubbed bitter and clinging by Barack Obama) at least one poll illustrates that his constituents are especially eager to prove the punitive liberal wrong.

As Nicole Gelinas noted back in April, when New York's Governor David Paterson was inaugurated, he heard from a number of his old friends, now living out of state:

Paterson cited a number of personal friends, all former New Yorkers, who have contacted him from out of state since his ascent to the governorship. "A friend from primary school, Randy San Antonio, told me he moved to Dallas 20 years ago," Paterson began. "Another friend, Randy Watts, had moved to Reno. A friend from Syracuse, Marvin Lee Simons, said he's working in Lower Manhattan. I said we should get together . . . and he said, 'Well, I don't live in New York. I live in western Pennsylvania.' Jeff and Stacey Stackhouse wanted to start a business on Long Island. They moved two years ago--they're trying to start their business in Charlotte, North Carolina. They couldn't pay the taxes here."

Gov. Paterson's chief of staff has his own idiosyncratic, remarkably psychosomatic solution to the issue--a severe case of "non-filer syndrome."

(John Derbyshire writes about it here, just before being overcome with a terrible case of "non-blogger syndrome.")

Roger L. Simon looks at two very different, but sadly both fairly mediocre political movies: Oliver Stone's W and David Zucker's An American Carol and describes want sunk both movies: "It's the Quality, Stupid"--or the lack thereof:

I feel badly writing that about An American Carol because its director David Zucker and co-screenwriter Myrna Sokoloff are terrific people and I very much wanted for their movie to work for admittedly political reasons. Almost no "conservative" films are made by the movie industry and when one slips through you root for it fiercely, so I waited until the film mercifully disappeared from the marketplace before making this opinion known. But I think it is important that negative "inside" opinions be known; because if there is one thing that is bad for conservative filmmaking in general, it is to make bad films. Because of the bias, they have to be better than the liberal ones.

Want really sinks both movies is the desire to produce agitprop, to tell an overtly political story. I hope that there are many more conservative movies--both to compete in the marketplace of ideas, and to reduce the near-monopoly that the left currently has on moviemaking. But I'd like to see them evolve to the point where their politics are subordinate to a good story, instead of vice-versa, as An American Carol seemed to me when I watched it in rough cut form at the Republican National Convention in late August. I had hoped that some of the flaws that were evident in this pre-release version would have been reduced in the final tweaking before the film hit the theaters, but it appears that that didn't occur. (You can hear the segment featuring Roger, Glenn Reynolds and myself interviewing those associated with the movie from an early September edition of PJM Political.)

Budding filmmakers on the right could learn much from the lefties of the 1950s, who were forced, because of the Hays office, to bury the more subversive elements of their films. Which worked in their favor--it produced infinitely more enjoyable movies than say, the World War II-era Mission To Moscow, arguably the most extreme example of leftwing agitprop to emerge from the Golden Era of Hollywood. As I wrote last year:

In the 1950s and up until the mid-1960s, it was possible to sneak all sorts of leftwing ideas into films by burying them deep into the subtext of the shooting script. Did you think that The Hustler was merely a film about a down-on-his-luck pool bum brilliantly played by Paul Newman? So did I--until I listened to the audio commentary on the DVD, and discovered that it was a film about the Blacklist. (Hey, if you say so, guys.) Similarly, on one level, it's possible to argue that The Manchurian Candidate is a leftwing fantasy concerning the assassination of Joseph McCarthy, but the film's incredible pacing, plot twists, and eye-popping cinematography help to soft-sell that it's yet another anti-McCarthy movie. And from the same era, while Dr. Strangelove is obviously an anti-military/anti-Cold War film, its Swiftian absurdity and brilliant screenwriting, and pox-on-both-sides message makes it all go down remarkably smooth.

There was less need for this once the G/PG/R/X rating system replaced the Hays Office. (Which had a variety of unforeseen consequences.) But the craftsmanship built up over several decades of moviemaking still showed through in numerous films in the post-Hays, post-Bonnie & Clyde, pre-Star Wars late 1960s and 1970s.

And speaking of the latter, it's a textbook example of a filmmaker employing exactly the methods I describe above to produce what turned out to be a staggeringly commercially successful movie.

As I said, budding conservative filmmakers could learn much from this period.

No--it's worse: Rick Moran explores "The GOP and the 'Dead Parrot' Scenario."

One explanation as to its cause can be found here.

How will the Dead Parrot Scenario translate in 2009? That's the subject of this week's PJM Political, featuring Michael Barone, John Fund, Brian Anderson and James Lileks, and hosted by the VodkaPundit himself, Steve Green.

I've always thought socialism was an oft-used legitimate phrase to describe a wealth-distribution scheme involving high taxes and a command and control economy that placed onerous burdens on entrepreneurs and businesses, but was considered, particularly in the first half of the 20th century, much less bloody than the alternatives further towards the left. But lately, it's apparently become a codeword--but is socialism code for being black or being Muslim?

Let me know the definitive answer and get back to me, fellas.

Update: "Biden advises GOP to focus on economy, not attacks"--and yet when they do, they're smeared by Obama's surrogates, which makes for quite a Mobius loop.

As it did in 2004, the last month of the presidential election increasingly resembles dispatches from the police blotter, rather than a nation of adults carefully weighing whom their commander in chief should be. Here's but a sample of what's going on out there:

• "Overnight, the Republican Party's office on the courthouse square in downtown Murfreesboro was attacked. A large brick with a symbol for anarchy written on it was thrown through a window, taking out the entire glass front."

• "Owner Believes Lexus Vandalized Due To McCain Sticker." (Time to update these T-shirts and bumper stickers.)

• "Video: Code Pink tries to arrest Rove."

• "Angry graffiti messages were spray-painted on the garage of Norm Coleman's St. Paul home overnight and discovered this morning.

  "'u r a criminal resign or else,' was scrawled in black on the side of the yellow garage in the Summit Hill neighborhood."

• Restaurant Offers Free Pizza for [Stolen] McCain Signs.

• "Does Reebok Condone Violence Against Women?"

• "Anti-McCain vandalism hits Maryland: Democrat Displaying GOP Candidate Sign Wakes Up To Find Home, RV, Truck Covered With 'Vote Obama' Graffiti."

• "NEW: Dashcam Video of Palin Protestors: 'With the opportunity of having a national figure in town, civil disobedience is one of the best ways you can get your message across,' she told 11 News." (More video here.)

• "The Hill notes that police departments across the country are preparing for post-election violence."
  

As Peter Wood, the author of last year's A Bee In The Mouth, on anger in America told an interviewer:

For example: "[New Anger involves] deriding an opponent for the sheer pleasure of expressing contempt for other people....New Anger is a spectacle to be witnessed by an appreciative audience, not an attempt to win over the uncommitted....If in your anger you reduce your opponent to the status of someone unworthy or unable to engage in legitimate exchange, real politics come to an end....Whoever embraces [New Anger] is bound to find that, at least in the political realm, he has traded the possibility of real influence for the momentary satisfactions of self-expression."

And clearly we're seeing a lot of those momentary satisfactions of "self-expression", even if the Victorian Gentleman would prefer not to discuss their origins and root causes.

Betsy Newmark stumbles onto Robert Conquest's Third Law of Politics.

(Not to be confused with Malcolm Muggeridge's Law, which is always in operation where Joe is concerned.)

Update: Welcome readers of Charlie Martin's Explorations blog.

But quote swapping to help your guys and hurt their opponents? Hey, that's all in a day's work for the Obamedia.

As Orson Scott Card writes,"Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper. But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie."

Only one?

Update: Related thoughts from John Hinderaker of Power Line.

It will be curious to see how this stunt goes over with, as Ed Morrissey has dubbed them, the Tanning Bed Media:

The best-funded political campaign in American history says news organizations will have to pay--in some cases almost $2,000 each--if they want to cover Barack Obama's election-night celebration in Chicago.

As Ed writes, "Don't expect too much sympathy from us for the Tanning Bed Media. The only reason why Obama's in a position to demand tithes from the worshiping media is because journalists and editors didn't do their jobs in the first place."

Somebody has been watching too much NBC.

Your bumper sticker of the day: "She is not a woman--She is a Republican."

Well, hopefully not this Joe.

As Jennifer Rubin writes, "On the very same day he told us that Colin Powell should have ended all questions about Barack Obama's national security bona fides, Joe Biden comes along to tell us precisely why we should be scared of Obama as commander-in-chief:"

"Mark my words," the Democratic vice presidential nominee warned at the second of his two Seattle fundraisers Sunday. "It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."

"I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate," Biden said to Emerald City supporters, mentioning the Middle East and Russia as possibilities. "And he's gonna need help. And the kind of help he's gonna need is, he's gonna need you - not financially to help him - we're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right."

Jennifer adds:

Well, golly, if Obama is so untested that we will have a series of international crises -- at the very time we are in a financial meltdown -- which will make the Cuban Missille Crisis look like a walk in the park, shouldn't we vote for the other guy who will keep all the miscreants in their place?

Hey, it's 3:00 am...

Update: I'm not this Ed, either. Although I didn't think he did too bad a job when he was a mayor of a surprisingly bitter and clinging small town in Pennsylvania.

As Mary Katharine Ham writes:

Palin addressed a North Carolina fund-raiser Thursday night saying, "We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington, D.C. We believe...that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation."

The comment was quickly picked up by media outlets and the Obama campaign, whose spokesman Bill Burton asked in an e-mail to reporters, "What part of the country isn't pro-America?"

Well, there is a small company town in southern California whose chief industry routinely compares one American political party with an ideology that that ended 60 years ago, but not before killing tens of millions of people, while annually explaining away its own deeply entrenched support for an ideology that concurrently also killed tens of millions of people, and is still trudging along in one form or another.

Further answers here.

Kevin D. Williamson spots "An Unbelievable Headline from Slate":

"Believing in vote fraud may be dangerous to a democracy's health."

Still though, I'm glad to see Winston Smith is finally off IngSoc's vast government payroll and happily writing in the private sector.

Incidentally, back in 2002, Glenn Reynolds suggested one simple method of reducing voter fraud:

The fact is, if you could come up with a new technology as simple and resistant to fraud as the paper ballot, people would be pretty impressed. So why do we use machines?

Perhaps in part for the same reason that some people used to prefer canned vegetables to fresh ones: "it's more modern!"

But since then, as any trip to the supermarket will demonstrate, the left have moved headlong into organic vegetables and away from the more modern canned variety.

Couldn't paper ballots be sold to the left along similar lines? Vote the organic way--vote paper!

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And no doubt, was trashed (likely for good reason) by Mr. Blackwell, who died today at age 86.

This just in to the Tinseltown trade paper: "Republicans in biz feel stifled, bullied."

Who knew?

Young'ins today (or younglings, for you Revenge of the Sith geeks) just don't know what it was like back in the old days, when we had to walk five miles in the snow just to snail-mail out our query letters hoping to impress an editor high atop a far off office tower to maybe--just maybe--publish our wares. Of course, "the old days" means as late as about 2002, so I can absolutely vouch for what Robert Stacy McCain writes here:

Politically, Andrew Sullivan is erratic, and his attacks on Sarah Palin have been wildly irresponsible, but in two sentences of his latest article for The Atlantic Monthly, Sullivan makes a huge point:

If you added up the time a writer once had to spend finding an outlet, impressing editors, sucking up to proprietors, and proofreading edits, you'd find another lifetime buried in the interstices. But with one click of the Publish Now button, all these troubles evaporated.

Younger people -- i.e., those under 35, who have started their careers since the online explosion of the mid-1990s -- have no appreciation for how instantaneous Internet communication has transformed the world of the professional writer, of which blogging is the ultimate example.

I'm 49 and Sullivan's 44, so we both began our careers when there were no Web sites, when the Internet was something known only to academics and technogeeks, when editorial "gatekeepers" stood squarely between the writer and the reader, and when the only way to gain access to mass readership was to present yourself and your work to these gatekeepers, in person or via mail (I would say "snail mail," but that term did not exist).

Of course, Sullivan started his career at a much higher level -- I used to read his articles in the New Republic when I was a staffer at the Rome (Ga.) News-Tribune -- but in recalling the limitations of journalism in the pre-Internet age, he echoes my own memory.

Applying for a staff position, you would "send clips and resume" or, if you were a freelancer, mail out manuscripts in hope of finding a publisher. It required the commitment of an enormous amount of time and energy, with a lot of time spent waiting for replies, if any. Mail out a clips-and-resume package on Monday, which might be delivered to the editor on Thursday or Friday, and if you were lucky you might get a phone call the next week.

On my desk is a book, The Proud Highway, a collection of Hunter S. Thompson's letters from 1955-67. Reading it, you get some sense of the difficulties a writer faced seeking assignments in the Bad Old Days. The young Thompson was a genius (and arrogantly aware of it), but had to spend an enormous amount of time pitching articles to editors, at a time when that meant typing letters on a manual typewriter, and most of the time getting rejected.

All this tended to limit a writer's career mobility. If you got a staff position, you tended to stay wherever you were and work your way up (rather than hop from job to job, as many young journalists do now) since the process of applying for jobs was so laborious. And once a freelancer found an editor who'd publish one of his articles, he would keep pitching that editor, trying to establish a regular outlet for his work. For example, Thompson regularly freelanced for the National Observer, and when he sold a feature to the national men's magazine Rogue in 1961, he kept pitching them for future assignments (without luck).

Though I'm not sure, as Robert writes above, that "blogging is the ultimate example"--or at least text blogging. Because the Internet has also opened up podcasting and video blogging, allowing anyone to do his own one-man radio or TV show, in addition to traditional text-based journalism. It goes without saying that not everyone will alchemically fill those vessels with brilliantly transcendent content (just poke around YouTube for 30 seconds or so)--but the platforms are readily available to virtually anyone. Which is why those with aspirations of becoming the next fill in the name of your favorite superstar pundit here are well advised to read the whole thing.

"Terry Tate, Office Linebacker" made his debut in a Super Bowl ad that aired in late January of 2003, pitching Reebok sneakers. And considering the average career length of a real NFL linebacker, I guess Terry should be glad he still has a job. He's a free agent these days, no longer, to the best of my knowledge, associated with Reebok, but considering his national launch, it seems safe to say that Terry and Reeboks will forever be intertwined.

So I wonder what the sneaker manufacturer thinks of their former pitchman's latest video. Here's Terry, with a little digital editing help, brutally shoving a woman onto an unforgiving concrete floor and yelling oddly Freudian epithets at her, while tacitly endorsing high gasoline prices and the liberal media:

Is this funny? As they say in the NFL--you make the call! On the plus side, at least Terry's shown only trying to permanently injure Palin, not kill her, as The Economist and Keith Olbermann metaphorically called for, when Hillary was running.

So in that sense, it's a definite step forward in an election year in which the surprisingly well entrenched sexism of the liberal overculture was none too thrilled at the idea of female politicians from either party running for national office.

Noel Sheppard writes:

Whether it's an example of the host's bias or incompetence, potentially one of the most amazing aspects of Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama on Sunday's "Meet the Press" was that Tom Brokaw didn't ask the former Secretary of State about the success of the surge in Iraq or the Democrat presidential candidate's opposition to this winning military strategy.

Given Powell's critical position in garnering support for the Iraq War, as well as his involvement in Desert Storm many years ago, it should have been essential to any interview dealing with his endorsement of either candidate how he feels the 2007 increase in troops has worked, and what the Senatorial vote on this strategy by his candidate of choice says about that person's foreign policy acumen.

Despite this logic, a full examination of the transcript and video of this almost 30-minute interview identified absolutely no reference to the surge whatsoever, and no questions posed to the former Secretary of State concerning the wisdom of Sen. Obama's position on it.

There's hope and change and audacity in the air! Why would a unbiased objective hard-hitting journalist spoil the good feelings?

(No? Well, we can always blame it on a lack of research due to NBC's budget cuts.)

Shortly before the election of 2004, Tim Cavanaugh of Reason looked at what he called, "Twilight Of The Liberal Hawks":

What unified the liberal hawks was that their support for the war was based unreservedly on what is popularly understood as the "neocon" vision, the prospect of exporting democracy to the Middle East through force of arms. According to the "forward strategy of freedom," a democratic Iraq with an emancipated citizenry would serve as an example and beacon to the Arab autocracies, empowering liberals in the region while undermining dictatorships; opening up avenues of freedom and self-expression for ordinary citizens in the Muslim world would in turn remove the impetus for terrorism. For liberals whose taste for progressive-minded interventionism had been whetted by the Clinton administration's operations in the Balkans and Haiti (and probably even more so by the counterexample of Clinton's failure to stop the massacre in Rwanda), the invasion of Iraq looked like a natural fit, even if it was advanced through a Defense Department with whom they had little stylistic or political affinity.

Thus, in late 2002 and early 2003, we found such luminaries as Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Fred Kaplan, Kenneth Pollack, Fareed Zakaria, Jeff Jarvis, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Ignatieff, and many others arguing for the expenditure of American lives and treasure in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

These days, none of those luminaries can summon a kind word for the president who acted in accord with their own arguments.

And with these two endorsements, his successor.

"George this is of what I'm talking about. This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood who's a professor of English in Chicago who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from..."

Over at the newly spiffed-up Power Line site, John Hinderaker writes that Sarah Palin apearing on Saturday Night is "a mistake, I'm afraid":

It's not that I lack confidence in Governor Palin; I don't. But I think it's almost always a mistake to visit an enemy's home turf without a clear understanding that you are among enemies.

The Saturday Night Live people are Democrats. That's all there is to it, and they will never give Sarah Palin, or any other Republican, a fair shake. Palin is, of course, more than a match for them in a fair fight. But for a fight to be fair, it must first be acknowledged that it's a fight. That won't happen tonight, and it will be almost a miracle if Palin gains from the exposure.

I'm old enough to remember when President Gerald Ford appeared on Saturday Night Live. That night, he was ridiculed as a klutz, in keeping with the image he had among liberals. It was grotesquely unfair: Ford, an all-America football player at Michigan, was undoubtedly the most athletic President of modern times. But reality won't intrude when your enemy is the editor.

News accounts indicated that the next morning, a shell-shocked Ford summoned his aides and asked who it was who thought it would be a good idea for him to appear on the television show that had been ridiculing him non-stop since he became President. I'm afraid a similar fate awaits Governor Palin.

It wasn't Ford appearing on Saturday Night Live that was the real problem--it was Ron Nessen, Ford's press secretary, who hosted the show. And as I noted shortly after President Ford passed away in 2006, in a very long post quoting from a history of SNL, as one of the writers said out of Nessen's earshot when he agreed to the gig, "The President's watching. Let's make him cringe and squirm."

As John notes, it's guaranteed that similar thoughts were expressed this week as well.

Back in April, Obama discussed Reverend Wright with Chris Wallace:

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

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

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

Obama talking about his wife, back in July:

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.

I guess once you move beyond the inner circle, the definition of "civilian" becomes slightly hazier.

Clark Hoyt, the New York Times' ombudsman, writes:

Throughout this election season, most of the thousands of messages I have received about Times news coverage have alleged bias -- bias in headlines, photo selections, word choices, what the newspaper chooses to write about and what it ignores, what it puts on Page 1 and what it puts inside. Most of the complaints, but by no means all of them, have come from the right. Nobody acknowledges the possibility that, because of their own biases, they could be reading more, or less, than was intended into an article, a headline or a picture. Many go a step beyond alleging mere bias to accuse The Times of operating from a conscious agenda to help one candidate and destroy the other.

"It's so obvious who the NYT is supporting for the presidency," said Cheryl Page of Jackson, Miss. "How sad that our media can't just report the news, rather than print their opinions in biased ways." There is a proper place for opinion in The Times -- the editorial and Op-Ed pages -- and there is no doubt that most of the newspaper's regular columnists and its editorial policy favor Obama. It would be a shock if The Times did not endorse him.

But the paper's news coverage is another matter. It is supposed to be evenhanded. I think I've seen bias from time to time, and I think The Times made a serious mistake early this year that gave its critics on the right a lot of ammunition: an article that suggested, but failed to prove, a romantic relationship between John McCain and a female lobbyist. (The Op-Ed page, though independent from the newsroom, added to the problem when it ran an article by Obama without first securing a companion piece from McCain. McCain then offered a rebuttal, but when the paper asked for major revisions, he refused and his supporters cried foul.) But I think the news coverage over a long campaign has been better and fairer than critics would admit.

At least the Times' previous ombudsman was willing to come clean four years ago.

(Hoyt's article is titled, "Keeping Their Opinions to Themselves"--not to be confused of course, with "The News We Kept To Ourselves"--different news agency; different messianic figure being propped up.)

Related: And speaking of what a difference four years makes....

Peter Wood's 2007 book, A Bee In The Mouth, explored the growing anger in American politics.

It's on full display, here, and here. Though of course, don't expect the Victorian Gentleman to investigate.

So is this what 'Til Tuesday were singing about back in the halcyon days of MTV?

Til Tuesday - Love In A Vacuum
by jpdc11

(Via Allah, who gives the news its appropriate sobriquet.)

In an earlier post, I linked to Ed Morrissey's discussion of the New York Times' Jodi Kantor attempting to troll Facebook for any muck she can rake on Cindy McCain.

Here's the letter from Kantor, which Ed quotes:

I saw on facebook that you went to Xavier, and if you don't mind, I'd love to ask you some advice about a story. I'm a reporter at the New York Times, writing a profile of Cindy McCain, and we are trying to get a sense of what she is like as a mother. So I'm reaching out to fellow parents at her kids' schools. My understanding is that some of her older kids went to Brophy/Xavier, but I'm trying to figure out what school her 16 year old daughter Bridget attends- and a few people said it was PCDS. Do you know if that's right? Again, we're not really reporting on the kids, just seeking some fellow parents who can talk about what Mrs. McCain is like.

Also, if you know anyone else who I should talk to- basically anyone who has encountered Mrs. McCain and might be able to share impressions- that would be great.

Thanks so much for any help you can give me.

Jodi Kantor
Political correspondent
New York Times

If the following letter is real, an attorney for Cindy McCain is attempting a little pushback:

These allegations and efforts to hurt Cindy have been a matter of public record for sixteen years. Cindy has been quite open and frank about her issues for all these years. Any further attempts to harass and injure her based on the information from Gosinski and Clark will be met with an appropriate response. While she may be in the public eye, she is not public property nor the property of the press to abuse and defame.

It is worth noting that you have not employed your investigative assets looking into Michelle Obama. You have not tried to find Barack Obama's drug dealer that he wrote about in his book, Dreams of My Father. Nor have you interviewed his poor relatives in Kenya and determined why Barack Obama has not rescued them. Thus, there is a terrific lack of balance here.

I suggest to you that none of these subjects on either side are worthy of the energy and resources of The New York Times. They are cruel hit pieces designed to injure people that only the worst rag would investigate and publish. I know you and your colleagues are always preaching about raising the level of civil discourse in our political campaigns. I think taking some your own medicine is in order here.

It's signed, "John M. Dowd [of] Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP". While the letter states that "none of these subjects on either side are worthy of the energy and resources of The New York Times", the mere fact that "Barack Obama's drug dealer" is being introduced into the public discourse by a campaign surrogate itself is pretty remarkable. (But hey, all's fair in a presidential race, right?)

But then, given that the Tanning Bed media have made the business license of someone who merely asks a question of a candidate fair game, and now, the parenting skills of a potential first lady, they shouldn't be surprised if the other side decides to push back.

In the Weekly Standard, Sam Schulman asks, "Why is Bill Ayers a respectable member of the upper middle class and Sarah Palin contemptible?"

Pour yourself a Johnnie Walker Black and remember. The presidential campaign was going to be about sex--the sex of the inevitable winning candidate. Then it was going to be about race. We dreamed we would atone for slavery and the Berlin Airlift, impress Europe and charm the Arab world. But the undecided voters who will determine the winner are no longer interested in race or sex. They are looking at social class. Which ticket best expresses the values and tastes of the upper-middle-class--and captivates the rest of us who follow the lead of the upper-middles?

The class argument is why the Bill Ayers strategy won't do. In the sex and race eras, it would have worked nicely. Obama's longtime working collaboration with the radical educational theorist and retired terrorist would dramatize his carefully but hastily discarded political radicalism. But no longer. The anti-Ayers publicists are quite right about Ayers's malignity and Obama's connivance. But when they try to explain what Ayers has done in the past and still wants to do--turn schools into nurseries of revolution, make leftist views a condition for becoming a teacher, promote dictatorship, and glorify violence--they injure not help their cause. Class will always trump politics. Being the first in one's family to adopt liberal political sentiments or move to New York City means a step into the middle class, for most Americans, and an increase in social status. More extreme political radicalism lifts one a step or two higher.

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn became Sixties royalty not because of the status of the Ayers family in Chicago, but because of their relish for violence. They attempted to kill, and celebrated the killings of others (like Charles Manson's victims and the murder of any number of cops), to set an example for the less privileged. "We've known that our job is to lead white kids to armed revolution. . . . Tens of thousands have learned that protest and marches don't do it. Revolutionary violence is the only way," said the future Mrs. Ayers in 1970. On the other hand, there were the masses of students who merely marched and flashed the peace sign. Socially, they were nowhere. That was the shock of the Kent State massacre--the veteran martyrs of Harvard's University Hall and Columbia's Low Library wondered that such a terrible and authentic event could have taken place at a far-away state school to people of whom we knew nothing.

Now mainstream Chicago regards Ayers as rehabilitated--but why?

Schulman's piece appears to have written before a certain Ohio tradesman became a household name. But the blowback caused by Joe's walk-on part in the cold civil war reminds us that it is very much a class war--and specifically, the left's attempts to eviscerate the middle and working classes.

Related: Jennifer Rubin writes, "Suddenly, the race card doesn't look as important as the class warfare card."

Dave Burge of Iowahawk has a rare non-satiric post in which he writes:

We've all witnessed a lot of insanity in American politics over the last few years. Up until the last few days, none of it has seriously bothered me; hey, just more grist for the satire mill. But after witnessing the media's blitzkreig on Joe 'the Plumber' Wurzelbacher, I can only muster anger, and no small amount of fear.

Politicians -- Sarah Palin, Bill Clinton, et al. -- obviously have to put up with some rude, nasty shit, but it's right there in the jobs description. Joe the Plumber is different. He was a guy tossing a football with his kid in the front yard of his $125,000 house when a politician picked him out as a prop for a 30 second newsbite for the cable news cameras. Joe simply had the temerity to speak truth (or, if you prefer, an uninformed opinion) to power, for which the politico-media axis apparently determined that he must be humiliated, harassed, smashed, destroyed. The viciousness and glee with which they set about the task ought to concern anyone who still cares about citizen participation, and freedom of speech, and all that old crap they taught in Civics class before politics turned into Narrative Deathrace 3000, and Web 2.0 turned into Berlin 1932.0.

Godwin's Law! you say? if the jackboot fits, wear it.

Or as Jim Treacher notes:

The whole "He's not a licensed plumber!" non sequitur is really fantastic. So, if you happen to be standing in front of Obama when he publicly reveals his socialism, what does the media do? Demands to see your papers. That's just delicious, is what that is.

Of course, at Matt Drudge once said:

"Roger Ailes told me early on, you don't need a license to report. You need a license to do hair".

Or be a plumber. But which job gets your hands dirtier?

(Meanwhile, Jim Lindgren spots a tax issue that doesn't involve Joe the Plumber, but an actual presidential candidate. Which is why the issue will never be raised by the media.)

Linking to my April 2005 review of Frederick Taylor's Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945, which discussed what a geopolitical football the city of Dresden has been ever since the end of World War II, Canada's Damon Penny notes that a panel of German historians has revised the death toll of the allies' bombing of the city near the end of WWII sharply downward:

For more than 60 years Britain's Bomber Command led by Arthur 'Bomber' Harris has been vilified for causing up to 500,000 deaths in the carpet bombing of Dresden during World War II.

But now, after a four-year investigation, a panel of German historians has said that the true number of dead from the Allied air raids in January 1945 was between 18,000 and 25,000.

They reached the figure after combing through death certificates, hitherto sealed eyewitness reports, registration cards for people made homeless and hospital records.

It now emerges that the high number of deaths from 'Operation Thunderclap' was a myth invented by the Nazis, perpetuated by Communists and re-born in the past decade to serve the aims of ultra-nationalists.

[...]

It suited the Nazi propaganda machine to claim that half-a-million women and children had been incinerated in the firestorm. It helped persuade a struggling population that this was awaited them all unless they fought for Nazism with their last breath.

Then the Communist East Germans perpetuated the myth, mindful that it served their purposes by showing the destructiveness of capitalism and fascism combined.

In the last decade neo-Nazis have sought to keep the lie alive as they praise many of the policies of the Third Reich.

Incidentally, Dresden also makes an appearance near the end of this post on modern architecture and the near universal need amongst the left to start from zero.

They told me that if George W. Bush were elected president, I'd be spending time in Hooverville! And they were right!

On Thursday and Friday, I videoed Roger L. Simon at the Hoover Institute at Stanford. As Roger writes:

I am back from five days as a Hoover Media Fellow where - among many interesting and valuable encounters with other fellows - I got to meet one of my personal heroes, Robert Conquest, age 91.

I am pleased to report the author of that seminal work on Stalinism The Great Terror has, as the cliche goes, all his marbles at his advanced age. Ed Driscoll and I visited him and his third wife Liddy at their home in Stanford faculty housing on Friday to make a short video. Sharp as he may be mentally, the historian/poet is quite feeble, his voice weak, but we still found his stories of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, etc., riveting. This is a man who has been at the very center of the intellectual conflicts of the Twentieth Century. After reading Conquest, you can never look at GB Shaw, JP Sartre and numerous other Stalin apologists with the same unbridled admiration.

Conquest answered a few questions for us and even read some of his poetry, including a translation he did from a long battlefield poem by Solzhenitsyn (Prussian Nights). The Russian author asked Conquest to translate it when they met in Zurich in 1975 after Solzhenitsyn had been finally expelled from the Soviet Union. The raw footage of our video has been uploaded to our servers and will appear in edited form on Pajamas TV next week.

Roger asked Conquest about his Three Laws of Politics--and much like Arthur C. Clarke's Three Laws, these are holding up extremely well.

CNN's Kyra Philips had quite an interesting slip-up today; managing to mangle the c-word into her introduction of Republican strategist Leslie Sanchez. Total accident? Freudian slip? Deliberate slur? Subliminal reference to this infamous T-shirt? You make the call!

Over the weekend, Glenn Reynolds wrote:

NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE? So we've had nearly 8 years of lefty assassination fantasies about George W. Bush, and Bill Ayers' bombing campaign is explained away as a consequence of him having just felt so strongly about social justice, but a few people yell things at McCain rallies and suddenly it's a sign that anger is out of control in American politics? It's nice of McCain to try to tamp that down, and James Taranto sounds a proper cautionary note -- but, please, can we also note the staggering level of hypocrisy here? (And that's before we get to the Obama campaign's thuggish tactics aimed at silencing critics.)

As always, it gets worse: as Gateway Pundit notes, now the left is re-editing YouTube clips to create snuff porn about plumbers. (Gateway's post is well worth your time, but caution strongly urged before clicking play on the ghastly YouTube clip he's embeded.)

I was a little worried about being hyperbolic in discussing the concept of "a cold civil war" on this week's PJM Political, recorded on Tuesday. Who knew how prescient the show would quickly seem?

That's Betsy Newmark's take on Joe Wurzelbacher, though it's happening in a slightly reverse fashion from George Allen's seminal gaffe in 2006. The establishment liberal media magnified Allen's own mistake a thousandfold. In this case, Obama's Kinsley-esque gaffe that demonstrates his soft socialism is undergoing a far more intense scrutiny than it otherwise would have as a byproduct of the media's declaring war on somebody who was approached by Obama to ask the candidate a question. In any case, it's a reminder that once the Two-Minute Warning sounds, strange things begin to happen:

Meanwhile, in his own video series with fellow-NRO-er Mark Hemingway, Jim Geraghty posits:

I contend we've passed a threshold in the way the media perceives their jobs; they'll never go back to paying any attention to news that is bad for their preferred candidates, and they'll never again worry about accuracy in stories that are critical of the candidates they hate.

Fortunately though, even when the media wiffs a story, the truth occasionally still wins out.

"Let's get just a little smart folks."

While the media are off rummaging through Joe Wurzelbacher's garbage cans to investigate which brand of plumber's tape he uses, and if he has the sales receipt for it, Stephen Green explores "The Hottest Sex Scandal You Never Heard of":

In one of his recent Davenport Mystery novels, author John Sandford claimed -- satirically, it is hoped -- that Democrat scandals are "always about money," and Republican scandals are "always about sex." Except, you know, for Bill Clinton and his dress-soiling ways. John Edwards and his love child. And Mel Reynolds, convicted of having sex with teens. Or Barney Frank and his male prostitute. Or, right now down in Florida, Democratic Congressman Tim Mahoney and...

"Uh... Tim who?" you might fairly ask.

If you haven't heard of Mahoney, it's because our Mainstream Media is in Full Bore Yawn Until It Goes Away Mode. After all, there's an election going on, and what could be less important in a Congressional race than a Congressman who paid off his mistress to the tune of a hundred and twenty thousand smackeroos, and I don't mean on the lips.

"Uh... there's money involved, too?"

But wait, there's more, involving the man who replaced Mark Foley. (Oh, him you remember? Wonder why?) Read the whole thing.

While he maybe the 21st century's answer to Amity Shlaes' Forgotten Man of the 1930s, as Robert Stacy McCain writes, "Frankly, I'm not worried about Joe, who can obviously take care of himself. I'll be surprised if he doesn't have a book deal and his own talk radio show by Election Day."

Say, I hear there's going to be an opening over at CNN pretty soon...

Ramesh Ponnuru looks at "The Curse of the Senate:"

One of the reasons sitting senators don't become president is that they get used to talking in an insider shorthand that is incomprehensible to most people. McCain exhibited that trait a few times last night. Obama doesn't seem to have contracted Senate-itis, perhaps because he has hardly been there.

I agree--and that was a question I brought up during yesterday's post-debate podcast over at PJM Political, which if you haven't heard it

Chris Muir reminds us that plumbers often perform a pretty healthy reality check:

Orrin Judd asks, "Why Isn't This John McCain On The Campaign Trail?" Good question. He's infinitely more relaxed and confident than the flinty, tentative John McCain who showed up last night:

I've already linked to Glenn Reynolds' post on Joe Wurzelbacher, but this quote from one his readers is worth highlighting:

The harassment of Joe the plumber is the singular biggest mistake of the Obama campaign. The MSM is making Joe a martyr. Heck, DKos just published Joe's home address. Obama is now not only a Marxist but a Marxist bully - just another Chicago thug. America roots for the underdog and they will not take this action kindly. If Joe were a hero yesterday, wait a few days.

Obi Wan's line in Star Wars when fighting Darth Vader comes to mind - "Strike me down and I will return more powerful than you can possibly imagine." Americans will realize what happened to Joe could easily happen to them. And they will remember this come November.

Well, some will, but whether or not the politics of plumber destruction will be a game changer remains to be seen, of course. But the dynamics of the story do seem vaguely similar to the memorial for Paul Wellstone in late October of 2002. It was initially planned as a bipartisan memorial to an earnest Minnesota politician tragically killed when his private campaign plane crashed. The "memorial" became in the end, a hugely partisan pep rally, demonstrating for millions the most rapacious aspects of the far left in an election year. The back-to-back attacks by the establishment liberal press and their candidates on two conservative-appearing middle Americans, first Sarah Palin, and now Joe Wurzelbacher similarly demonstrate how craven the left can act when they smell blood in the water.

At least American blood. Terrorist blood should never be shed, of course.

Noel Sheppard writes:

Somehow I get the feeling we're going to be hearing much more from Joe...how 'bout you?

Post facto exit question: is Joe the Plumber this election's October surprise? Could he single-handedly change this entire campaign?

Think about it: regular guy wanting to advance himself without the shackles of a socialist tax plan.

Could this be a game-changer?

Not in the slightest.

As Glenn Reynolds writes, the legacy media have done "more investigations into Joe the Plumber in 24 hours than they've done on Barack Obama in two years." The media have internalized Joseph Conrad's famous aphorism from The Heart of Darkness and they're in the process of completely destroying Joe the Plumber, as an object lesson for anyone else who dares Think Different, just as they've already successfully done with Sarah Palin, just as they did 20 years ago with Dan Quayle. Occasionally, an apostate such as Ronald Reagan, Clarance Thomas, Rush Limbaugh or George W. Bush is able to survive such exposure and go on to powerful accomplishments, which is all the more reason why the media must destroy the Other, the Alien, before his message becomes too powerful.

Update: And just like that, a meme is born! Ed Morrissey (with a memetic assist from Jim Treacher) goes inside "The Tanning Bed Media."

You know that proverbial tank that the media are supposed to be in? Snapped Shot has your snapshot of exactly what it looks like.

Steve Green was under the weather Wednesday (hence no drunkblogging). And while I could never replace Steve's sybaritic savoir-faire, I guest-hosted (in addition to the usual production efforts) tonight's PJM Political podcast postmortem of the final 2008 presidential debate. My guests include James Lileks, Glenn Reynolds, and Jennifer Rubin.

I spoke with Mark Steyn yesterday for PJM Political on XM Satellite Radio's POTUS '08 channel regarding his Canadian show trials. Ten minutes of the interview is at the top of this week's show; the unedited version (which runs about twice as long) is here.

Power Line has a spiffy new look, and even more power under the hood. Stop by and take a look!

Our dedicated team of fact checkers is hard at work verifying the accuracy of the following statement from one of the two major candidates running for the White House this year:

"I am convinced that if there were no Fox News, I might be two or three points higher in the polls," Obama told me. "If I were watching Fox News, I wouldn't vote for me, right? Because the way I'm portrayed 24/7 is as a freak! I am the latte-sipping, New York Times-reading, Volvo-driving, no-gun-owning, effete, politically correct, arrogant liberal. Who wants somebody like that?

Fact check: Lie. Obama does not own a Volvo.

Read More »

So is John McCain a Nazi or a Confederate slave owner? I wish the Obama campaign would make up its mind, and simplify its talking points for the media down to one useful all-purpose epithet, rather than the scattershot nailbomb approach of their advisors.

Shooting in Paris, John Travolta's latest movie has a pyrotechnic run-in with the Angry Paris Street:

Local officials said, however, that they believed that four days of filming with the Hollywood actor, due to start yesterday, had been "abandoned" for good.

The movie's producer, Luc Besson, had chosen to shoot a few sequences of a spy movie, "From Paris with Love" in Les Bosquets as a gesture of solidarity with local people. Nearly 100 people had been given jobs as extras and security guards.

Ten specially equipped cars, assembled for stunt sequences in the movie, were burned by persons unknown late on Sunday night. Local people insisted yesterday that the attack must be the work of "jealous" members of youth gangs from another district. Police said that they were investigating reports of an attempt to demand "protection money" from the production company.

Most people in the Les Bosquets estate at Montfermeil, 10 miles north east of Paris, had welcomed the filming. Moussba Harb, 43, hired as an extra, said that a "childhood dream, a gift from the heavens, has gone up in smoke."

However, tempers have been running high in recent days. M. Besson's production company, Europacorps, had promised to pay 95 local people Euros 100 a day to work as extras, cooks or security guards.

Some local youths complained that, given the Euros 38m budget for the film, this was a paltry amount. The payments were increased to €200 a day.

As Orrin Judd writes, "Maclean's better not run this one", but Tim Blair has some advice for the harried (hey, what did they expect?) filmmakers:

Says a singed production spokesman:

"There's no now possibility of Mr Travolta or any of the other stars of the film operating in such a dangerous area.

"The scenes we were meant to do here will now be shot elsewhere."

Try Baghdad. It's safer.

Heh, indeed.^TM

"It's noteworthy that Jackson does not consider himself a Zionist, and believes that Obama is not a Zionist, either. I don't often agree with Jackson, but this time I think he's right."

PUMA power!

That's the headline of the latest piece in the Wall Street Journal by
Gerald Seib. (Whom I shared a panel with for PJTV at the GOP convention.)

Though I would argue that any hopes for "a post-partisan era" were illusory at best--especially considering what an illusion, and a brief one at that, the previous version was.

Jim Geraghty points to a remarkably simple--and proven--way to cut down on voter fraud.

From Shelby Steele:

To be born into a minority group is, among other things, to be born into a collective experience of insecurity. Put differently, it is to be born into a group of nervous people. If you are born black in America, as has been my own fate, then you are born into a particularly intense insecurity. Your people have known almost nothing but insecurity and impotence for centuries -- this as opposed to the majority culture's experience of itself as heroic and world-beating; ingenious in peace, dominant in war.

One thing this means for minorities is that their group identity will often be the enemy of their individuality. In its insecurity, the group is naturally threatened by the impulse in some of its members to think for themselves. Individuals like this seem to put the group at risk. What will we do if the majority culture thinks you speak for us? Your indulgence in individuality jeopardizes the carefully constructed mask we present to the powerful majority. Your individuality collaborates with them. So knock it off. Get in line, or we will shun you to the point of extinction.

Placed into dramatic context, here.

"Almost a year after two teenage girls were found dead -- allegedly executed by their father -- in the back seat of a taxicab in Texas, the FBI is saying for the first time that the case may have been
an 'honor killing.'"

As we've discussed numerous times around here, when states go from red, or even purple, to hard core blue--residents and businesses vote with their feet. (Even in the big blue states overseas.)

Ed Morrissey's latest post explores similar ground--and it focuses on a state (New Jersey) whose fiscal and gubernatorial woes were the subject of one of our very first podcasts.

Update: This comment underneath Ed's post crystallizes the opinions I've heard from several of my friends and family still in New Jersey.

Over the weekend, Michelle Malkin pasted up quite a rogue's gallery of the violent left. John Hawkins provides an equal number of quotes to go along with them.

Just don't expect the Victorian Gentleman to pay much attention.

Yesterday, Glenn Reynolds featured an intriguing quote from James Bennett of UPI:

Now, of course, Columbus Day is under attack as a holiday in the United States by the forces of political correctness. This is primarily an effect of the Calvinist Puritan roots of American progressivism. Just as Calvinists believed in the centrality of the depravity of man, with the exception of a miniscule contingent of the Elect of God, their secularized descendants believe in the depravity and cursedness of Western civilization, with their own enlightened selves in the role of the Elect.

Sorry to be a day late and a (almost) URL short on this, but I found the full essay was surprisingly challenging to track down. Happily though, the Freepers have a reprint, and it's well worth your time. Though I disagree with Bennett's conclusion that we're celebrating the wrong Italian, as Columbus Day is--sadly and idiotically--yet another traditional holiday under enough attack already.

But then, they all laughed at Christopher Columbus...

Update: Wretchard's Warning is well worth heeding.

Everything old is new again! When I was poking through the Truveo video search engine to find B-Roll material for my "Two-Minute Warning" October Surprise edition of Silicon Graffiti a couple of weeks ago, I came across Mary Katharine Ham's first HamNation video from the fall of 2006, in which she outlines the Mark Foley scandal:

Just overdub Mahoney for Foley, change the R to a D, and presto, brand-new video--or same old scandal. In any case, recycling is always a good thing, right?

Update: Shocker! "TV Newsers Who Fawned Over Foley Sex Scandal Ignore Mahoney."

Gay Patriot has a state by state list of electoral fraud reports, something that will no doubt expand quite a bit between now and November:

You'll note that most sources are local papers and news stations or blogs, few are national media or the leading dailies. That is, while local media and blogs are covering this, the national media is downplaying it or downright ignoring it.

Gee, wonder why?

2008 won't be like 1984--but 2009? Hey, that's a different story:

For my hipster Libertarian friends out there, you need to get this through your thick skulls. Republicans, given the kind of power the Democrats are about to accrue, would maybe take away your right to get a completely totally naked chick to grind on your lap in a publicly licensed bar. The Democrats will do their damnedest to take away your right to speak. There's the First Amendment, and then there's the First Amendment. Be careful what you wish for.

--Steve Green, "Fighting Words."

We haven't heard much about the left's 180 degree pivot on the Iraq War in recent months, as the Surge has allowed the situation in Iraq to stabilize to one degree or another, which helps John McCain. But quietly, in the background, old man pivot keeps on rolling along.

"Many in the West will demonstrate their fierce originality and intellectual independence today by condemning Christopher Columbus using the same shopworn cliches they used last year."

So from that perspective, we should give Google bonus points today for the creative--and, gosh darn it, down right adorable--way they stuck the shiv into yet another traditional holiday.

Update: Steve Green adds:

Cursing the history that brought you here is like wishing you, yourself never existed.

But he's probably not alone in that sentiment.

Indeed. Friends don't let friends mix cocktails that blend equal portions of post-modernism and anti-modernism.

Jules Crittenden studies photos to determine if Kim Jong Il is an ex-despot, or merely pining for the fjords.

(In any case, we probably should put the four million volts through the clapped-out tyrant just to see if he goes "voom.")

Tim Blair looks on the bright side of the financial crisis: "Considering that greenish economic policies would have delivered similar financial setbacks, but over a much longer period, we're ahead here. Just."

Update: If the Green Bubble has burst, the pork bubble is, as always, indestructible. But here's some good news here, more or less.

A few years ago, when Jonah Goldberg pointed out "the generalized ignorance or silence of mainstream liberals about their own intellectual history", he wasn't kidding!

Breaking financial news just in from The New York Daily News: "Prostitution has not suffered drop-off despite economic meltdown."

But is the world's oldest profession considered a leading or lagging economic indicator?

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

(From Galley Slaves. Well, it's not actually from Galley Slaves. It's actually from a smaller blog that was purchased in a leveraged buyout...)

Oliver Stone, borrowing a few tabs of Jim Morrison's acid:

"I think in this present political state, the real George W. Bush might not approve of this movie," says Stone with a wry grin. "But this movie tries to understand George W. Bush -- the good, the bad and the ugly.

"I tried to be fair and balanced and compassionate," Stone adds. "I don't take sides. I don't take political sides. I'm a dramatist, and this is the movie I've made."

Yes--imagine the movies that Oliver Stone might have produced had he truly been a polemicist!

(As this email to Glenn Reynolds highlights, Hollywood rounding out the Bush years with yet another in an eight year series of attacks on the man--a few of which actively called for his, or a convenient surrogate's assassination--guarantees no honeymoon for Obama if he is elected in November.)

Related: "Democrats and Republicans have become two solitudes, and so, the result of the election will be ugly, no matter which side wins."

The tagline for George Clooney's 2005 movie, Good Night, And Good Luck is "We will not walk in fear of one another." Judging by the above video (originally found here), that's not a message that many from its core audience deep within the Zabar's Zeitgeist of Manhattan seem to have internalized.

Which is more than a little depressing--if not at all surprising--considering the outpouring of support that Red States demonstrated in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, as "a lot of you remember"--to borrow Sen. Obama's remarkably nonchalant phrasing.

"It seems odd that the people of Minnesota would infer from an economic crisis that they should send a baggy pants comedian to the Senate, but I suppose a panic consists, in part, of irrational behavior on a large scale."

Didn't they learn their lesson from the 1980s? Is it a coincidence that the economy took off the moment that Al Franken was off network TV?

(Of course. But why take chances?)

NewsBusters notes that the "NYT Pulls Misleading Account of Palin Puck Dropping Ceremony" at the Philadelphia Flyers' home game yesterday.

As with these prior fabrications, having a video of the event to cross-check with the reported coverage makes all the difference.

Glenn Reynolds (and no, he's not the subject of the above headline, which I'll get to in just a moment) writes:

NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE? So we've had nearly 8 years of lefty assassination fantasies about George W. Bush, and Bill Ayers' bombing campaign is explained away as a consequence of him having just felt so strongly about social justice, but a few people yell things at McCain rallies and suddenly it's a sign that anger is out of control in American politics? It's nice of McCain to try to tamp that down, and James Taranto sounds a proper cautionary note -- but, please, can we also note the staggering level of hypocrisy here? (And that's before we get to the Obama campaign's thuggish tactics aimed at silencing critics.)

The Angry Left has gotten away with all sorts of beyond-the-pale behavior throughout the Bush Administration. The double standards involved -- particularly on the part of the press -- are what are feeding this anger. (Indeed, as Ann Althouse and John Leo have noted, the reporting on this very issue is dubious). So while asking for McCain supporters to chill a bit, can we also ask the press to start doing its job rather than openly shilling for a Democratic victory? Self-control is for everybody, if it's for anybody. . . .

As I've noted before, in The Right Stuff and in subsequent promotional interviews, Tom Wolfe described the press as "the proper Victorian Gentleman":

I'll never forget working on the [New York] Herald Tribune the afternoon of John Kennedy's death. I was sent out along with a lot of other people to do man-on-the-street reactions. I started talking to some men who were just hanging out, who turned out to be Italian, and they already had it figured out that Kennedy had been killed by the Tongs, and then I realized that they were feeling hostile to the Chinese because the Chinese had begun to bust out of Chinatown and move into Little Italy. And the Chinese thought the mafia had done it, and the Ukrainians thought the Puerto Ricans had done it. And the Puerto Ricans thought the Jews had done it. Everybody had picked out a scapegoat. I came back to the Herald Tribune and I typed up my stuff and turned it in to the rewrite desk. Late in the day they assigned me to do the rewrite of the man-on-the-street story. So I looked through this pile of material, and mine was missing. I figured there was some kind of mistake. I had my notes, so I typed it back into the story. The next day I picked up the Herald Tribune and it was gone, all my material was gone. In fact there's nothing in there except little old ladies collapsing in front of St. Patrick's. Then I realized that, without anybody establishing a policy, one and all had decided that this was the proper moral tone for the president's assassination. It was to be grief, horror, confusion, shock and sadness, but it was not supposed to be the occasion for any petty bickering. The press assumed the moral tone of a Victorian gentleman.

And a huge part of that Victorian Gent's daily job is take a rogue's gallery such as this, and make you believe that they're nothing but polite, Ralph Lauren-clad kids just back from playing touch football on the lawn at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port.

Just as it was in 1963, the legacy media's primary role in its twilight years as gatekeeper is to keep news out. Unlike back then, it's not because there isn't enough time or space to report it (bandwidth on the Internet being infinite), but to protect their friends, colleagues, political constituency and their ideology as a whole. And to make their opponents, which prior to the Blogosphere constituted a big chunk of their readership--back when the emphasis was on silent majority--look as badly as possible.

(Jim Treacher boils the schism down to just two words.)

Update: More from Treacher: "I'm going to start calling them the Deathbed Media."

As Andrew Malcom writes, John Lewis (D-GA) predictably demagogues John McCain on race:

Lewis took the occasion of McCain himself admonishing his supporters Friday night to cool it in their shouted distaste for the Democratic ticket.

Lewis said: "George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who only desired to exercise their constitutional right."

He said McCain and Palin are "playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all."

McCain's side fired back (note the military term) that Lewis' assault (again) was a character attack "shocking and beyond the pale."

Malcolm adds that "McCain called on Obama to repudiate the attack, which the Democratic presidential nominee's campaign didn't really do later in the day", instead releasing their now standard-issue "Yes, but..." statement:

Later Saturday, Obama's camp shot up a flare to disassociate itself from the worst of Lewis' statement, while not really rebuking the political ally who had turned his back on the Clintons so helpfully at just the right time during the primary season. But it added a qualifier to allow the odor of Lewis' remarks to linger.

"Sen. Obama does not believe that John McCain or his policy criticism is in any way comparable to George Wallace or his segregationist policies," said the campaign statement. But wait! There's more:

"John Lewis was right to condemn some of the hateful rhetoric that John McCain himself personally rebuked just last night."

Bottom line: Just like World War I, artillery back and forth. The trenches didn't move any. But unlike that military stalemate, this election race has a predetermined end. Both sides fed their troops some angry propaganda Saturday to keep them outraged and fired up out there on the front lines.

Most of us watched from the sidelines, shaking our heads and wondering over the persistent absence of serious discussion beyond bumper-sticker sound bites.

And McCain has one less day to change the game's momentum.

The overt cries of racism from the left should have been anticipated by the McCain campaign, as they were a staple of how the Obama campaign also ran out the clock in the primaries against Hillary, Victor Davis Hanson writes:

The common denominator in all this? Ask Bill Clinton who saw all this earlier in the primaries. Team Obama has so prepped the battlefield that it is nearly impossible to raise legitimate questions about Sen. Obama's mysterious past without incurring charges of racism and / or character assassination. The modus operandi is to have Obama high in the clouds talking about hope and change and brotherhood, descending on occasion to lament those who cruelly lie about him, and then ascend again as he unleashes a variety of surrogates who preemptively create a climate in which McCain can say very little without being condemned s illibera [sic] and worse.

Many of us warned about all this in March and April as we saw the Obama Rules box in Hillary. Time is running out for McCain and Palin, and they must act preemptively themselves, honestly warning that they expect to be demonized and have the race card played against them, but that such threats and invective will hardly stop them from asking even more legitimate questions.

Exactly--except that this should have been a preemptive strike from McCain, not a Hail Mary play deep in the fourth quarter. Since hindsight is 20/20, here's a little bit of Monday morning (okay, Sunday afternoon) quarterbacking:

At some point over the summer, ideally during his acceptance speech in Minneapolis, the moment of 100 percent media coverage, which would have allowed him to use the spotlight to bypass the spin of the MSM, McCain should have said something along these lines:

I respect Senator Obama as an opponent, and I also respect the process of democracy in America. The Senator and I have serious disagreements on the most troubling issues of our day. And the American people need to know as much as they can about both of the men running for the most important job in the world. While I have many friends in the media, something tells me that they won't do the most thorough job of explaining Senator Obama's history and the background of his longtime acquaintances. So it's going to be up to us--myself and my supporters, to help make that case.

As I said, I have many friends in the press, and you and I will know if they're covering the election fairly if they report the facts on my esteemed opponent and his history--which, while it isn't as lengthy as mine, contains some rather curious moments--in as much detail as they discuss my history, and the background of Gov. Palin, soon to be the next vice president of the United States.

We'll know very quickly, my friends, about how both the media and my friends across the aisle intend to play this election. If they crudely describe my campaign or myself, or even subtly impugn in some way that it's racist, as happened to my friend on the other side of aisle, the great senator from New York, Hillary Clinton when she ran her gallant fight against Senator Obama, then we'll know what we're in for.

And my friends, if and when such an unfortunate moment happens, I will call out Senator Obama, his fellow Democrats on the other side of aisle, and the media for their role in abetting this.

It's time America move beyond the crude racial demagoguery and bitter divisiveness of the past, and the McCain campaign is committed to seeing that happen. Help me make it a reality, my friends!

And have that clip, and plenty of "see, I told you so" speeches ready for when the inevitable attacks from the media and the left started to occur this fall.

At the start of the month, Robert Stacy McCain (John's more ebullient very distant cousin) rightly called out the campaign for its late September attacks on the media:

I didn't comment on it at the time, but I was shocked when Steve Schmidt lashed out at the New York Times on Sept. 22. Every word Schmidt said about the NYT being in the tank for Obama was true. But you don't do that. Ever. Not in a campaign you have any hope of winning. It is one thing to criticize specific errors by specific reporters, but for a presidential campaign manager to call into question the fundamental integrity of a newspaper that more or less dictates news coverage at the three major broadcast networks? Uh uh. No way. Leave that work to surrogates. Then Wednesday, in an interview with the Associated Press, McCain himself got all hostile with the reporter. That is tantamount to an admission of defeat.

Exactly.

Over the summer, both on my blog and via PJTV at the convention in Minneapolis, I praised the McCain campaign's effective use of YouTube and their outreach to bloggers as examples of a campaign that seems to get the importance of new media. But so far, I've seen very little that leads me to believe that the campaign knows how to handle old media, and the prevent defense they're committed to helping Sen. Obama play.

Again.

Mike Huckabee and blogger Frank Martin each question the timing of the markets' current meltdown.

Oracle's Larry Ellison has the right business mindset for a time like this, and as far as conspiracy theories, for the moment, I agree with one of Frank's commenters, who quotes one of Charles Krauthammer's aphorisms:

Krauthammer's razor (with apologies to Occam): In explaining any puzzling Washington phenomenon, always choose stupidity over conspiracy, incompetence over cunning. Anything else gives them too much credit.

I agree--but I also reserve the right to revise and extend my remarks at a later date, once everything shakes out, as it inevitably will.

Guest blogging for Hugh Hewitt, Bill Dyer notes the passing of Betsy Newmark's father at age 93:

I extend my condolences to Betsy Newmark, the fine blogger who's long been on both Hugh's and my blogrolls as the writer of Betsy's Page, on the loss of her father, George Washington Bamberger, last night at age 93. Like my own, Betsy's dad was a veteran, a volunteer who'd served in the Pacific theater in WWII. And as also was true in my family, she only heard some of her father's war stories when he told them to his grandchildren. But he no doubt reveled quietly and long in the calmer life of a husband, father and grandfather, and businessman. We all mourn with her the passage of yet another unpretentious American hero of our Greatest Generation, and we commend her father and his entire family for his life lived well.

Indeed.

LilacRose links to a post of mine, amongst others writing on the same topic, and wonders if the Cold Civil War that we discussed last year at this time might get a tad warmer come November:

As far as I'm concerned, the differences are irreconcilable. One part of the country wants a socialist, European-style country. The other part wants a country based on free-enterprise and the Constitution. One side has disdain for orthodox Judeo-Christian faiths, whereas the other side embraces or at least tolerates those beliefs. One part believes that if we just let down our defenses, everything would be peace and lovebeads. The other part knows we live in a dangerous world and that defense is essential.

However this election turns out, there will be turmoil. If Obama wins, a large part of the country will feel angry and powerless against the will of the left leaning blue states, the news media, Hollywood and academia. (In fact, they already feel that way, I assure you.) They will believe that ACORN created enough false voter registrations to put Obama over the top. If McCain wins, the left will riot and claim, "The Diebold machines were hacked!" The blue states, the news media, Hollywood and academia will resent that the will of the "dumb hicks" in flyover country overruled that of their "betters". And we will hear the cries of, "Racism! Racism!" ad nauseam.

I hate to sound all doom-and-gloom, but I see absolutely no solution to this. Or at least no solution in which America stays in the same form it is now. I hope I'm wrong about that. I guess we'll see.

As James Lileks wrote a year ago:

This is what annoys me to no end about the 60s, to cram it all into a tidy convenient decade; the overculture and the underculture ganged up on the great Middle, for different reasons but with equal gusto. The Middle was Crass, in the eyes of the overculture; Phony, in the eyes of the underculture.

Meanwhile, some thoughts on the state of the Cold Civil War near the 49th Parallel, here.

Update: Much more on this topic from Mark Steyn, and from April Gavaza, the "Hyacinth Girl", who, in a newly written post, revisits the topic she originally kicked off a year ago.

Or is it the other way around? In any case, Maggie's Farm has a terrific video piped in via Outer Party member 6079 Smith W. from the Ministry of Truth.

As I've written before here, the past two presidential elections have brought out numerous painful flashbacks from the dreadful late 1960s and early 1970s leftwing culture of radical chic anti-Americanism. But this post at The New Criterion by Michael Weiss is truly Six Degrees of Separation moment:

William Ibershof, the lead prosecutor of the Weathermen in 1972 (and so the Marcia Clark to Bill Ayers' O.J.), has written a letter to the editor of the New York Times in response to its article on Obama's association with the domestic terrorist. Ibershof does little beyond add another layer of sediment on top of a story that partisans of the Illinois senator, and evidently two-thirds of voters polled by Fox News, wish to see dead and buried. However, one point he makes merits attention for its historical irony:

I do take issue with the statement in your news article that the Weathermen indictment was dismissed because of "prosecutorial misconduct." It was dismissed because of illegal activities, including wiretaps, break-ins and mail interceptions, initiated by John N. Mitchell, attorney general at that time, and W. Mark Felt, an F.B.I. assistant director.

So Deep Throat's incompetence enabled Ayers escape jail, become a fixture in the radical groves of academia, and then head up an education program endowed by Richard Nixon's former ambassador to Great Britain.

As Yogi Berra said upon learning of the Jewish mayor of Dublin: Only in America.

Heh, indeed.^TM Weiss's post is titled "Nixonland", a topic we explored a bit in video form a couple of weeks ago.

Despite the progress the nation has made, portions of America still remain remarkably xenophobic and puritanical. When The Other appears, challenging an insular culture's accepted notions and long-held reactionary superstitions, the result is cognitive dissonance in the extreme, bringing out the very worst in our citizens, as this unfortunate sound bite demonstrates all-too-well.

Update: Charles Johnson spots yet another example of puritanical naivete.

Since the role of the MSM is now largely to withhold information damaging to itself and the left (but I repeat myself), occasionally news seeps out from some strange sources--such as Bill Maher's late night HBO show:

As odd as it might seem, for the second week in a row, a panelist on "Real Time" actually divulged information about Democrat involvement in the current financial crisis that most mainstream media outlets continue to hide from the public. With stocks cratering, and a serious economic contraction looming, one has to wonder when America's "serious" media will follow suit and expose the truth behind the current crisis.

After all, in 2006, the word "macaca" and solicitous e-mail messages from a little-known congressman were headline news for weeks, and were largely responsible for the Democrats taking back the Senate and the House. Of course, all this attention came despite the misstatement by then Sen. George Allen (R-Virg.) and the behavior of Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fl.) no way threatening the finances of Americans or our very economy.

There is absolutely no question that if Maxine Waters was a Republican that had blocked GSE reform this decade, and was caught lying on national television about campaign contributions from Fannie and Freddie, this would be headline and front-page news for days with full-scale coverage of how she and others in her Party were responsible for the current calamity.

Yet, it seems almost a metaphysical certitude that with about three weeks to go before Election Day, the Obama-loving media are going to keep this matter buried long enough to get their candidate in the White House.

Like I said in my recent video, the Two-Minute Warning has sounded, and the legacy media only need about three more weeks to drag their candidate into the end zone.

From the liberal New Republic magazine:

His use of the phrase is resonant. It comes from a scene in Malcolm X, where Denzel Washington warns black people about the hidden evils of "the White Man" masquerading as a smiling politician: "Every election year, these politicians are sent up here to pacify us," he says. "You've been hoodwinked. Bamboozled."

By uttering this famous phrase, Obama told his black audience everything it needed to know. He was helping to convince blacks that the first two-term Democratic president in 50 years, a man referred to as the first black president, is in fact a secret racist.

Rev. Wright could not be reached for comment.

Update: Leonard Bernstein continues to rebuff our interview requests as well.

Jonah Goldberg once described feckless Europe as the world's biggest college campus. Michael Barone and Mark Steyn wonder if that dubious distinction will quickly be supplanted by America under an Obama administration.

I'll never look at Annette Bening's nude scenes in The Grifters the same way again...

Update: Rand Simberg posits:

"On the other hand, it's probably a lot easier to make Annette Bening look like Helen Thomas than vicey versy.

I'd say that's an staggeringly safe assumption.

As Allahpundit is wont to say...Duuuuude!

(Jerry Carroll could not be reached for comment.)

Every election we're told that "this is the most important election ever"--or alternatively, "this is the most important election of our lifetimes." (Which for many Gen-X'ers/Gen-Y'ers is the equivalent, since their sense of history essentially begins there.)

Betsy Newmark believes that the first time the "most important election ever" phrase was first used during the 1864 election, though she argues that it was the previous election which actually qualifies, and it's tough to disagree.

(Though both election years featured particularly pitiful efforts by MTV to "Rock The Vote", since MTV nor rocking existed back then, according to current anthropological research. Kinescopes of Dick Clark's American Bandstand only go back as far as the Reconstruction era.)

In The Denver Post, David Harsanyi writes:

Those Republicans anticipating a fourth-quarter comeback during the debate were instead hit with a wet fish. Did the putative Republican candidate just propose that the U.S. Treasury renegotiate millions of mortgages at a better price?

Was McCain simply unable to articulate a more complex position? It sounded a lot like a comprehensive nationalization of the mortgage industry. It sounded a lot like hundreds of billions of additional tax dollars.

Yep, he meant it. It's called the American Homeownership Resurgence. It will stabilize the economy. And Obama will stop global warming. And McCain will find bin Laden, even if he has to do it with his bare hands. And . . . well, at this pace, we're about two debates away from being promised free lemonade and snicker doodles.

None of these promises have worked. So now the McCain campaign will set its sights on Bill Ayers, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rezko and other members of the Legion of Doom. All of them are legitimate topics for conversation, but with less than a month to go, the conversation reeks of desperation.

In fact, the entire campaign has been one big act of publicity stunts. McCain's shining moment this campaign, as far as I can tell, was a funny ad comparing Obama to Paris Hilton.

What McCain's candidacy does tell us is that the Republican Party -- even if it somehow miraculously pulls this one out -- is in need of some creative destruction. Not ideological purity but ideological renewal.

Because being a "maverick" is a political slogan, not a political philosophy.

It's not even a political slogan--merely a bumper sticker.

On his homepage, Mark Steyn writes:

Their Marsupial Majesties at the British Columbia "Human Rights" Tribunal have dismissed El-Mo's complaint against Maclean's and voted unanimously to acquit the hatemongers:

The panel has concluded that the complaints are not justified because the complainants have not established that the Article is likely to expose them to hatred or contempt on the basis of their religion. Therefore, pursuant to s. 37(1) the complaints are dismissed.

For the full monster PDF ruling, click here. I'll be discussing the verdict later today after 6.30pm Mountain Time with Rob Breakenridge on 770 CHQR Calgary. Further comment from Kathy Shaidle & Pete Vere - and there's never been a better day to pick up a copy of The Tyranny Of Nice.

You can hear my extensive interview with Pete and Kathy from earlier this week, at Pajamas HQ.

Update: Mark Hemingway adds:

The bottom line is that while it's great Steyn is off the hook, free speech in Canada still does not exist in any meaningful way. It would be fair to say that Steyn and Maclean's magazine were spared by the bureaucratic star chamber because they were well-known enough to fight back and attract considerable publicity. The next person in Canada who dares to excercise his freedom of speech in a way that attracts the government censors probably won't be so lucky. And unfortunately, Canada is still rank with Human Rights tribunals actively looking for those that express politically incorrect opinions, reprint objectionable Bible verses etc. so they can go about their business of denying free expression.

Christopher Buckley (yes, Bill's son) breathes deep the cult of Obama, endorsing him, and adding:

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren't going to get us out of this pit we've dug for ourselves.

Jennifer Rubin asks, "Oh, my--where to begin?"

A first-class temperament does not consort with terrorists or lie about his affiliation with the same. A first-class temperament does not invoke the race card when presented with legitimate criticism. A first-class temperament does not seek to shed his Leftist skin for political expediency. To conclude otherwise is confuse calm with deceit.

And as for the hope that his first-class intellect will lead him away from more extreme ideas, I am not sure what biography Mr. Buckley has been reading. But Obama's is replete with identification with Left-wing causes and their practitioners. What would possibly lead him now to rethink a lifetime of political thought and action? Certainly a smashing political victory and a compliant Democratic Congress will be confirmation, if any was needed, that he has been on the correct ideological track.

On the other hand, considering how closely McCain's fortunes have tracked the S&P 500, it may all be academic, sort of like a course taught by Bill Ayers.

In Forbes, Peter Robinson writes:

This is a story about using American politics to promote the highest of ideals and to realize the worthiest of accomplishments. You may be forgiven your skepticism. But keep reading.

Indeed--it's a terrific profile of War Connerly, who notes:

Politicians have seldom supported him. "When it comes to race," Connerly says, "political correctness is profound. Even conservative Republicans are afraid to take a stand." Organizations from chambers of commerce to unions to the League of Women Voters have fought him, instigating legal challenges that have so far thwarted his efforts to put initiatives on the ballot in Florida and Oklahoma. "In issues involving race," Connerly explains, "the establishment is always at odds with the people." But Connerly has succeeded in putting bans on racial preferences on the ballot in Washington, Michigan, Colorado and Nebraska. The people of Washington enacted a constitutional amendment banning racial preferences in 1997. The people of Michigan did so in 2006. The people of Colorado and Nebraska will make their decision on Nov. 4.

Will the measures in Colorado and Nebraska win? Comfortably, Connerly insists. Whenever bans on racial preferences are permitted to go before the voters, they win.

In a related item, Roger L. Simon explores "Dangerous times ahead: racism in the Blogosphere."

Videomaker has a sneak preview of CS4, the latest version of Adobe's flagship product line. Watch this space for more on this powerful addition to the Army of Davids' multimedia toolkit.

Jonah Goldberg writes, "The simple, relevant fact is that the more detailed and extensive a plan a president proposes, the less likely it is that it will be enacted":

One basic reason for this -- often overlooked by politicians and the journalists who cover them -- is that presidents don't make laws in our system. Congress does. And Congress usually has plans of its own. Bill Clinton promised health-care reform, and his wife had a plan thicker than the New York City Yellow Pages. Congress never even voted on it.

Much like Obama, Bill Clinton barnstormed the country promising a middle-class tax cut. Once he got into the White House, that got filed under "never gonna happen." George H.W. Bush said "read my lips" about his plan to never, ever, ever raise taxes. It turned out that "never" is a term open to many interpretations.

As Jonah concludes:

I'm not saying that candidates shouldn't have platforms. But voters -- and journalists -- should look at them as mission statements, not the political equivalent of instructions that come with a disassembled bicycle.

The real hints for how to choose a candidate, at least in a general election (as opposed to a primary), reside in the realm of judgment, philosophy, track record and temperament. And, using those criteria, the choice shouldn't be hard at all.

It's also worth revisting Jesse Walker's article from this past April in Reason, which listed FDR's campaign promises as a candidate in 1932. As Jesse notes, what FDR proposed is a far cry from the monstrosities of the New Deal which wound up prolonging the Depression for seven agonizing years. (And would ultimately require something even more torturous--World War II--to jump start the American economy.)

Related: "Who Killed 'Reality'? Who But The Media?"

When did the Manolo become the photo editor at the Associated Press?

Annie Jacobsen writes that if the Muslim world's vice squads consider Barbie to be "Jewish", wait 'til they find out the origins of their favorite cartoon and movie superheros:

When Iranian toy seller Masoumeh Rahimi thinks of Barbie and Ken dolls, she thinks of heavy artillery -- only worse. "I think every Barbie doll is more harmful than an American missile," Ms. Rahmi told the BBC back in 2002. In April 2008, Iran's top prosecutor and religious cleric, Ghorban Ali Dori Najafabadi, upped the anti-Barbie campaign by calling for a ban on the sale of all Barbie dolls from the country. "Barbie is an emissary of nudity and promotes moral corruption," wrote the hardliner newspaper Kahyan.

* * *

The anti-Semitic tirade came after the Mutaween learned that Barbie's creator, Ruth Handler, was Jewish -- and that the American businesswoman, entrepreneur, and U.S. Business Hall of Famer had named the dolls after her two Jewish children, Barbie and Ken Handler.

But it appears not all religious clerics are doing their homework about which Jew created what incredibly popular icon. Last summer, Hassan Nasrallah -- the leader of the terrorist organization Hezbollah -- appeared proudly depicted as Superman in the Palestinian daily newspaper Al Ayyam. In the cartoon, Nasrallah was pictured pulling back his religious robes, a la Clark Kent, to reveal a Superman suit underneath. Superman is Lebanon's most popular superhero. Many teenagers believe him to be Lebanese because of his dark, swarthy looks. But if Barbie is "Jewish," so is Superman; he was created by two Jews named Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, in 1932.

The same goes for just about every other "Jewish" superhero, many of whom are growing increasingly popular throughout the same countries in the Middle East. This summer, audiences from Egypt to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) flocked to see movies about Batman, Iron Man, the Hulk, and the X-Men -- all as "Jewish" as Barbie and Superman are. Each of these superheroes was created by a Jewish-American comic book writer.

All I can add (at least while still in my secret identity as a mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan new media firm) is, "Up, Up, And Oy Vey!"

Or, with a title like "From the Horse's Mouth", speciest at least: John Hawkins presents the quotable Barack Obama.

Rachel Lucas writes that "1984 finally arrived 24 years later."

On the doubleplus side, at least they're not feeling too comfortable in the Ministry of Truth right now.

In a fair world, Harry Reid would be the Piranha Party's first snack (bring plenty of Maalox); but if Dingy Harry does indeed believe that linking Obama to Franklin Raines is racist, then he might want to start by cleaning up the real racists that exist within his party's half of the Senate.

Back in 2005, Howard Dean, another Democratic Senator, told the late Tim Russert that "I will use whatever position I have in order to root out hypocrisy." Dean and Reid certainly have their work cut out for them, eh?

Incidentally, could someone alert CNN that Robert Byrd is a Democrat? One of their Obama cheerleaders journalists seems to have forgotten that recently.

Ed Morrissey writes that the great Soxblogger "is currently in the ICU with a terrible attack of his cystic fibrosis"--and could really use your prayers and good wishes:

So often in this business, we become friends with people whom we've never met face to face. That's certainly true of Dean Barnett of the Weekly Standard. I've long admired his writing, and Dean has always been kind enough to request me as a guest whenever he guest hosts for Hugh Hewitt. He calls me his "crazy uncle", a humorous reference to Jeremiah Wright.

My friend Duane "Generalissimo" Patterson tells me that Dean has had to be admitted to the hospital and is currently in the ICU with a terrible attack of his cystic fibrosis. I'd like to ask Hot Air readers for their prayers for my friend and his family. I know they will appreciate the support.

After exchanging numerous emails and a phone call or two, I finally met Dean at the first Blog World in November of 2007, and interviewed him there for last year's Thanksgiving edition of PJM Political. The interview appears about 23 minutes into the show; we discussed his then-new pamphlet, whose gritty title is The Plucky Young Kid With The Fatal Disease: A Life With Cystic Fibrosis. Dean's whole life has involved four decades worth of beating the odds; here's hoping that this current episode is no exception.

"Since I had the misfortune to become ensnared in the Canadian 'human rights' racket, I've come to appreciate more and more the comment one fellow left on an Internet post somewhere or other, remarking that he was in favour of free speech, because the alternatives 'were just too weird.'"

That's a brief excerpt from Mark Steyn's article-length introduction to Pete Vere and Kathy Shaidle's new book, The Tyranny of Nice, on Canada's "Human Rights Commissions", and their patented show trials to purge all doubleplusungood thoughtcrime from Airstrip Canada.

How weird do those trials get? And could similar such weirdness be coming to the US? Tune in to my 40-minute long interview with Kathy and Pete over at Pajamas Media.

As Jonah Goldberg writes, "The specter of Herbert Hoover is conjured every time there's an economic calamity, large or small":

But you know what? Specters are ghosts. And ghosts aren't real.

The Herbert Hoover of popular imagination was a laissez-faire lickspittle of Adam Smith. But this idea began as Rooseveltian propaganda and endures as the creation myth of modern liberalism.

William Leuchtenburg, possibly the greatest authority on the FDR era, wrote some time ago, "Almost every historian now recognizes that the image of Hoover as a 'do-nothing' president is inaccurate."

After the stock market crash of 1929, Hoover browbeat business leaders to keep wages and prices high. He invested heavily in public works projects. He pushed for an international moratorium on debts. He created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which later became a home for many of FDR's Brain Trusters. Hoover increased farm subsidies enormously.

Some of Hoover's interventions were good but ineffectual. A few were very, very bad and very effective.

In 1932, Hoover in effect repealed Calvin Coolidge's tax cuts, increasing the rates for the poorest taxpayers by more than 100 percent and hiking the top rate from 25 percent to 63 percent. Worse, contrary to his own better instincts, Hoover signed the disastrous Smoot-Hawley trade bill that raised protectionist walls at precisely the moment the world needed trade the most.

Then there's this idea that FDR rode to the rescue, saving the day by untying the American people from the railroad tracks of runaway capitalism. Former Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, now a surrogate for Barack Obama, recently said on NPR: "It's very tempting to always think that the government should just stand back and let the private sector sort these problems out. That's the kind of thinking that made the Depression 'Great.'"

Summers should know better (in fact, I'm sure he does). The Great Depression was not made "Great" by government inaction. Indeed, FDR's New Deal may have been wonderful in some mytho-poetic sense, and maybe some of its reforms can be defended in some broader context, but as an effort to end the Great Depression, the New Deal was a failure. As my colleague Mark Steyn writes, "Lots of other places -- from Britain to Australia -- took a hit in 1929 but, alas, they lacked an FDR to keep it going till the end of the Thirties. That's why in other countries they refer to it as "the Depression," but only in the U.S. is it 'Great.'"

Which is why the great Amity Shlaes reminds us in her recent column that "The stock market crash of October 1929 and the Great Depression were not the same thing". The late Robert Bartley of the Wall Street Journal titled a nifty economic history of the 1980s The Seven Fat Years. FDR turned the Depression into seven very, very lean years:

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

After scrutinizing Roosevelt's record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

Read the rest, here.

Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt brings it all up to date with the omnious-sounding, "President Barack Hoover."

Mark Sheldon of IlliniPundit writes, "I got a call yesterday from Steven Gray, a reporter for Time magazine who was in town today doing an article on student voter registration":

He left a message on my voice mail asking for ten minutes of my time. I didn't get back to him so he showed up in my office today. He asked for five minutes, no doubt noticing how busy I was and I politely said no. He comes back with..."come on, just five minutes?"

I told him no, because first, I was busy, and two, I really had no idea what he would do with the video he was planning to shoot of me. He gave a little roll of the eyes and so I asked if I could have an unedited copy of the entirety of what he taped of me. He said "No one does that!" That was the end of the conversation.

He seemed like a nice guy and I have no particular reason to doubt his integrity as a reporter. Except for his instant negative reaction to my request.

Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit, has suggested that everyone bring their own cameras to interviews. I was a little busy to try that stunt, so I went with the next best thing. I wasn't surprised that the reaction was negative, if for no other reason than I expect my response was pretty much out of the blue.

Not doing the interview is probably a good career move. After all, if Time does you right, you get 15 minutes of fame. If they do you wrong, you get a lifetime of infamy on their website.

No hard feelings Mr. Gray. Next time I won't ask for the tape, I'll take Reynolds' advice and bring my own camera.

I guess it's a form of progress that Gray's reply was simply a startled, "No one does that!", because a decade ago, our sensitive legacy media considered taping your own interview "intimidation", as former CBS journalist Bernard Goldberg wrote in Arrogance, his sequel to his first inside the trenches book on media bias:

You know the old saying "They can dish it out but they can't take it"?

In October 1999 the ABC newsmagazine 20/20 was about to air a story on a man named Michael Ellis, the founder and CEO of a company that markets a controversial weight-loss pill. It was the kind of investigation that doesn't always end well for the person on the other end of the camera, the one being interviewed. So, fearing his comments might be taken out of context and that the interview might be edited to make him look bad, before the 20/20 piece aired Ellis took the unedited transcript and video of the entire interview-which he'd recorded on his own-and put it out on the World Wide Web.

This made people at ABC News very angry. In fact, one vice-president told the New York Times, without a hit of irony, that "We don't want other people attempting to get into and shift the journalism process." [Things were much more fun for the legacy media when they had a monopoly--Ed]

Next to be heard was former ABC News Vice President Richard Wald, now teaching young journalists at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Wald called the CEO's strategy, "a not-so-subtle form of intimidation".

Got that? When the media disseminates information about "other people", it's news. When "other people" disseminate information about themselves, it's intimidation.

It didn't take long for the tsunami to reach CBS News, where its president, Andrew Heyward, put out the following in-house memo. I share it with you now, in its entirety.

You can read Heyward's memo at my original blog post on the topic from 2005. Bernie doesn't mention if CBS typed it up on the 1973 edition of Microsoft Word or not, though.

(H/T: IP)

For a sneak preview of today's PJM Political on XM Satellite Radio, check out the podcast of the blogger round-table recorded immediately after Tuesday night's debate, featuring:

• PJM Political host Steve Green--fresh off his usual soiree into debate drunkblogging, plus:

• James Lileks.

• Glenn Reynolds.

• Jennifer Rubin.

• Produced by your humble narrator and multimedia maven.
  

So far today, we've seen Bill Ayers, former Weatherman, Barbara Walters, former attendee at Leonard Bernstein's 1970 "Black Panther Fondue & Twister Party" (to borrow a pithy Iowa-riff) refusing to talk about Ayers, and bloggers making lame Marvin Gaye references--and that's just on this blog alone. And now George Farging McGovern will apparently be appearing, via video, in tonight's debate.

(And that's in addition to the 2004 election's brush with the 1970s, in the form of flashbacks to John Kerry's Winter Soldier days.)

Enough with the 1970s! When does the decade that never ends...end?

Since I spent a semester learning at NYU, it's only fair that I return the favor. Their Department of Psychology is hosting an online academic research study "to learn more about the psychological bases of political attitudes and voting behavior", as their Website puts it.

They've emailed me, along with other bloggers, to ask that their readers take part in their survey, which takes about 15 minutes to complete, once you start here.

At Pajamas HQ, Dr. Helen debunks a lame reply from Salon's advice columnist to someone with a raging case of PDS and mentions University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt, whose studies found:

While conservatives could put themselves in the mindset of liberals, liberals did not return the favor. [Yet more proof of the accuracy of Krauthammer's Law--Ed] In other words, like Hater, some scream, rant, and rave when someone does not agree with them, with no understanding of why people are different. Perhaps a little empathy is in order here for Hater's friends and family.

It would certainly help to reduce the "Attack of the Hatemail", which San Francisco-based columnist Cinnamon Stillwell found herself in the midst of when she publicly praised Palin in print, alliteratively speaking.

That's the headline from Newsbusters, hence the quotation marks above. And it's not all that surprising from a six degrees of separation point of view. Walters was was in attendance at Leonard Bernstein's Park Avenue duplex for his infamous 1970 fundraiser for the Black Panthers--and the Panthers and Weathermen were this close.

(And still are!)

As John Dickerson writes in Slate, "The 41st president's run-in with Ponytail Guy left such a mark that it haunted his son throughout his campaigns":

I remember watching a town hall during the 2000 campaign in which George W. Bush consistently refused to call on a man waving from the middle of the crowd like he was trying to flag a rescue plane. Bush pretended not to see him but let on afterwards that he'd seen him and avoided calling on him for fear of creating a moment. In 1996, when Bob Dole was given the chance to attack Clinton's character in a town-hall debate, he demurred, saying the debate should be about the issues.

This year's campaign shows how partisans on both sides go after the journalists who ask questions they don't like. During the Democratic primaries, Chris Matthews, Tim Russert, and George Stephanopoulos were all savaged for the questions they asked and how they asked them. Last week, Gwen Ifill was attacked for a book she hasn't written about a subject she isn't addressing. [Say what?--Ed]

"Real" people (by which I mean people who don't do this for a living) who are asking the questions may be harder to rough up. Or maybe not. On Tuesday night, if Son of Ponytail Guy asks a question, he can rest assured that he will receive a thorough going-over in the blogosphere. So I suggest all prospective questioners Google themselves, make sure they're on good terms with their co-workers, and wipe clean their Facebook page. If they don't--or even if they do--they could become the story very quickly.

Indeed--Michelle Malkin suggests that bloggers carefully check the flora and fauna in the bleachers of tonight's town hall debate. Specifically, the wide array of plant life that's likely to be sprouting up amidst the whichy thickets of the audience.

Update: I was just talking about this post at the top of today's edition of PJTV--subscribers can tune in here to watch. (And if you're not a subscriber--what are you waiting for? Click here!)

In a brief slide show, the BBC explains which fonts are chosen for which movie posters and why.

Many fonts are chosen to perform workaday service on movie posters. But only one has gotten the offer to star in a movie of its own:

(Found via a Google search on "Helvetica Postrel", which, speaking of movies, has quite a Damon Runyon-esque ring of its own.)

The question this presidential election year isn't whether or not there will be an October surprise--but how many of them we should expect:

(Previous editions of our Silicon Graffiti video blog, going back to the start of the year, can be found here.)

Michelle Malkin posits why NBC has yanked one of the few Saturday Night Live sketches that's both funny (at times) and actually pokes fun at the left. (Given the overt biases of both SNL and NBC as a whole, that's no doubt a big part of the reason in and of itself that the clip was pulled from NBC's video site.) And Pat Dollard has uploaded his own copy of the video, here.

Somebody doesn't want you to watch it--isn't that reason enough to click over?

It's compare and contrast time! First up, this passage from academia's Ayers apologia:

All citizens, but particularly teachers and scholars, are called upon to challenge orthodoxy, dogma, and mindless complacency, to be skeptical of authoritative claims, to interrogate and trouble the given and the taken-for-granted. Without critical dialogue and dissent we would likely be burning witches and enslaving our fellow human beings to this day. The growth of knowledge, insight, and understanding--- the possibility of change--- depends on that kind of effort, and the inevitable clash of ideas that follows should be celebrated and nourished rather than crushed. Teachers have a heavy responsibility, a moral obligation, to organize classrooms as sites of open discussion, free of coercion or intimidation.

As witnessed by this moment at Brandeis:

Professor Donald Hindley, on the faculty for 48 years, teaches a course on Latin American politics. Last fall, he described how Mexican migrants to the United States used to be discriminatorily called "wetbacks." An anonymous student complained to the administration accusing Mr. Hindley of using prejudicial language. It was the first complaint against him in 48 years.

After an investigation, during which Mr. Hindley was not told the nature of the complaint, Brandeis Provost Marty Krauss informed Mr. Hindley that "The University will not tolerate inappropriate, racial and discriminatory conduct by members of its faculty." A corollary accusation was that students suffered "significant emotional trauma" when exposed to such a term. An administration monitor was assigned to his class. Threatened with "termination," Mr. Hindley was ordered to take a sensitivity-training class.

Call it "The Tyranny of Nice", to coin a phrase.

Or call it Anarcho-Authoritarianism, to borrow from an Fred Siegel's look at H.L. Mencken from a few years ago in the Weekly Standard, which I flashed back to earlier today, mainly because I was looking for a euphemism for "radical chic" in my post linking to Roger L. Simon's "Running On Empty" reminiscences on Bernadine Dohrn and her apologists in Hollywood:

The Sage of Baltimore needs to be placed in a broader intellectual context. The man who is still selectively celebrated by people like Rodgers, as if he were nothing more or less than an American iconoclast, was one of a number of anti democratic thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic. Some of them, like D.H. Lawrence, were proto-fascists; others, like H.G. Wells, were apologists for Stalin [Wells was no slouch as a proto-fascist himself, either--Ed]. But they all denounced democracy in the name of vitalism, eugenics, and a caste system run by an elite of superior men.

Part of the reason it's so hard to make sense of Mencken is that he was, paradoxically, an anarcho-authoritarian. He agreed with the American Civil Liberties Union on the importance of free speech. But while that organization, under the influence of principled men such as Felix Frankfurter, argued for such freedoms on the grounds that "a marketplace of ideas" (to use Justice Holmes's term) was the best method of arriving at the truth, Mencken supported it in order to shield superior men like himself from being hobbled by the little people. For the same reason, Mencken was a near anarchist when it came to America, but an authoritarian when it came to the iron rule of the Kaiser and General Ludendorff. We are more familiar with anarcho-Stalinists such as William Kunstler, who had a parallel attitude toward the United States and the Soviet empire, but it was Mencken who blazed the trail down which Kunstler and his ilk would travel.

That Ayers and Dohrn were consciously or not exploring concepts that were well over 60 years old at the height of their terrorist activities actually isn't all that surprising. When you're starting from zero, to borrow Tom Wolfe's line, it's easy to forget that you're also running in place--or at least in circles.

Faster than time itself--as Robert Stacy McCain pipes in news from November 5th on how his distant cousin lost.

The theme is very reminiscent of Glenn Reynolds' October 2006 pre-postmortem of the GOP in the midterms. And given the tenor of the month (and yes, admittedly, it's still very early) odds are that it's as prescient as well.

Mickey Kaus spots an example of McCain "losing" the support of journalists whose support he never had in the first place. Mickey adds:

It might seem as if the MSM reaction against McCain's shift to negativism has "driven the final nail into his coffin," as Heilemann suggests. The Feiler Faster Thesis says no--given the speed with which the country now processes information, there's plenty of time for several dramatic twists and turns, including lead changes. Obamaphiles (in the press and elsewhere) are deluding themselves, I think, if they think they can ride the economic crisis and the reaction against negativity to victory in a month. Plus Obama's not that far ahead.

Which isn't to say I disagree with Ace's current grim tone, though.

Victor Davis Hanson writes, "On the Ayers matter, there is only one question that matters":

After Ayers wrote his Fugitive Days (2001), and after he told the NY Times (on 9/11 of all dates!) that "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough," and adding when asked if he would do it all again, "I don't want to discount the possibility,'' did or did not Barack Obama continue to communicate at all with him in person and via email?

If so, that belies all his protestations that he was young when Ayers was bombing, or a mere casual acquaintance on boards and community projects. In other words, when the world knew via the New York Times, and a much publicized book tour in 2001, that Ayers felt no remorse about his bombing spree and terrorism, did Obama continue with his association? If so, ipso facto that is proof both of Obama's poor judgement and his later lack of candor in recalling his association with his terrorist-associate.

Jim Geraghty asks a related question: "Could you shake hands with William Ayers?"