Ed Morrissey has a lengthy post on Rod Blagojevich's appointment of Roland Burris to fill Barack Obama's open Senate seat. As Ed writes, "Rod Blagojevich has apparently decided to take the Illinois Democratic Party down in flames along with himself", concluding:

If Democrats thought they had a big enough political problem two weeks ago to put that seat at risk, they face an absolute catastrophe now. Blagojevich has exposed their petty political machinations, catching them caring more about party and power than about their constituents and clean government. Burris won't stand a chance in re-election, and Illinois voters disgusted with Blagojevich will now become equally disgusted with the fools in Springfield who allowed Blagojevich to fill Obama's remaining two years with a party insider. The Democrats may lose more than just the Senate seat in 2010.

That's essentially up to new media--you can bet that its Old Media predecessors won't remind voters of corruption on the left come election time.

More: Mark Finkelstein asks, "Ain't this post-racial period great?"

Here we have one of the more famous members of the Black Congressional Caucus accusing Senate Democrats of threatening to act like Orville Faubus, George Wallace and perhaps the most iconic of segregationists, Bull Connor.

Bobby Rush, the former Black Panther who is now a congressman from Chicago, levelled his accusation on the CBS Early Show this morning in reaction to the letter signed by all 50 Senate Democrats declaring that they would not seat Roland Burris, the African-American that Gov. Rod Blagojevich yesterday named to take Barack Obama's Senate seat.

Maybe Rush is simply paraphrasing Nora Ephron.

That's the headline of this new post by Allison Kaplan Sommer; think of it as more news that CNN keeps to itself...

(H/T: IP)

Danny Glover rounds up his choices; here's an excerpt:

3) Burning Down The House: When conservatives create videos that strike a chord with the public, they often become the target for copyright-infringement "takedown notices" at YouTube.

I can certainly relate to that; you can watch the rest of our videos here, including the Hillary 3:00 AM mash-up from March that the McCain Campaign eventually copied.

Danny also links to an interview with the anonymous maker of this awesome video, which was referenced in our recent "In Dodd We Trust?" video.

Found via Maggie's Farm, more on New Jersey's woes, from long-time resident TigerHawk.

"Congrats. The New Republic finally smoked out a hoax! Too bad they can't apply the same standards of veracity and accountability to their own writers when the fit hits the shan."

Is it better to give or to receive? Tim Blair spots Bank of America investing tens of billions of dollars in the summer "to make their operation sustainable [and] reduce greenhouse gas emissions"--before receiving $115 billion only a few months later from the ultimate source of gaseous emissions--Congress.

Related: Definition of insanity defined, here.

"If you thought the Jets firing Eric Mangini was a surprise, then you better be sitting for this one: The Denver Broncos fired two-time Super Bowl winner Mike Shanahan this afternoon"--it certainly surprised me, when I turned on the TV in the hotel a few minutes ago.

Had dinner at the Four Seasons tonight, on the drive down from New York State to visit my mom in NJ before heading back to California. Three observations:

1. If the New York economy is hurting, you couldn't tell it tonight, as the Pool Room was nearly packed.

2. The filet of bison with foie gras and Perigord truffle sauce main course was pretty amazing.

3. The older, salt and pepper-haired gentleman and his wife sitting opposite us were a seriously class act, picking up the tab for a young Marine in his dress blues having dinner with a young woman in a strapless dress that I can only assume was his girlfriend, fiancee or wife at the other end of our row of tables. When the Marine walked over to thank him, the older gentleman and his wife both replied, "No, thank you for everything you're doing to keep us safe."

Which is an awesome note to end the year on, all around.

Mickey Kaus writes, "Enjoy your daily print newspaper. It's later than you think", as the "Web Blows By Papers as News Source."

So with the Red Queen's Race marching on, will the New York Times have the money to pay off--or at least settle--on this lawsuit?

Update: Roger L. Simon: "Vicki Iseman vs. the NYT could spell Big Trouble for the Grey Lady."

"When Barack Obama makes his New Year's resolutions, at the top of his list ought to be the following: 'I will not allow America to become New Jersey.'"

Maybe this spelling-challenged gentleman really, really hates roast beef...

Last year, when New York's incoming governor David Paterson replaced disgraced fellow Democrat Elliot Spitzer, I quoted this passage from Nicole Gelinas of City Journal:

To lay out his goals, Paterson gave a speech last week similar to the one that Codey delivered nearly three years ago. "We need to take a realistic view of New York State's budget," he said, which is "too big and too bloated." He gently warned the legislature against its usual budget-balancing tricks: overestimating revenues, issuing long-term debt or hiking taxes to cover one-year shortfalls, and trying to use "gimmicks to solve real problems." He added that the legislature's modest cuts to Spitzer's budget proposal would be eaten up by April as tax revenues continue to fall. "We have got to address these issues," he said, "and not by taxing anybody."

Paterson could have recited facts and figures from census reports on how New York ranked dead last, in both raw numbers and percentages, in net domestic population losses between 2000 and 2004, with nearly 183,000 residents leaving the state annually. While immigration from other countries more than made up for these losses, New York still lost some ground in its percentage of the nation's population. And immigration could slow precipitously with the economy's woes, as a protracted credit slowdown will lessen the state's need for Parisian investment bankers as well as Salvadoran construction workers. The governor could also have cited numbers from the Tax Foundation showing that New York's state and local tax burden is a full one-fourth higher than the national average, and significantly higher than the burden in some of the states competing most fiercely with it for jobs and residents: Pennsylvania, Florida, Texas, and most of the states in the new South.

Instead, 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."

Which helps to explain one particularly bloated and malicious area of the state's government:

Without question, the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance has the most advanced residency audit program in the nation. We would hazard to guess that the department, whether out of necessity -- because so many taxpayers in the New York region have, at least allegedly, questionable residency issues -- or sheer force of will, does more auditing of taxpayers on residency issues than does any other state, and perhaps more than all states combined.

I would hazard a guess that California, the other big blue parenthesis state, is pretty effective in this department as well.

(H/T: IP, who notes sadly, "Adrienne Barbeau not included" from this particular Escape.)

...That David Bernstein of the Volokh Conspiracy wore his baseball cap with the brim facing backwards:

Who would have thought that twenty years after I, as a teenager, thought it looked cool to put my baseball cap on backwards (was it a Beastie Boys thing? Who remembers...), that youths, and even some adults (saw a guy in his 30s yesterday), would still be doing it (though there seemed to be a break for a time in the late '80s and mid '90s). Folks, the bill is on the front for reason, to shade your face from the sun. And it's soooo unclassy. Can you imagine Cary Grant wearing a backwards baseball cap? Please ladies, boycott the gents who wear the cap backwards, or at least tell them how silly it looks, and end this travesty for good. Perhaps a simple, "you know, David Bernstein had that look twenty years ago," will do.

Too bad this unwitting celebrity fashion victim and his army of media handlers such as this Reuters journalist never got the memo:

The president-elect, looking uber-cool with his White Sox baseball cap on backwards, flipped the shaka to a crowd of about 30 people as he left a gym on a Marine Corps base on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, where he is vacationing.

As Jonah Goldberg noted last week, American society--let alone the rest of the world--is far too balkanized for such a blanket statement. And in such a diverse environment, news agencies such as Reuters need to mindful of such a wide range of readers. In other words, we all know that one man's uber-cool fashion plate is another man's uber-dork. To be frank, it adds little to the national dialogue to call the attack on the basketball courts by the president elect an uber-cool aesthetic experience.

I'm no O.J. fan myself, but this guy must be really disappointed by the terms of his recent prison sentence....

Old media leaves Iraq as they found it--happily ignoring the big stories that don't fit their template. Until 2003, this meant spinning cheerfully for Saddam Hussein--and in at least one network's case complicit in covering up his crimes. Today, this means ignoring the progress occurring as Iraq makes continued strides towards becoming, as Mark Steyn recently put it, "the least-worst state in that part of the world."

That's going to increasingly leave the coverage of that fragile young democracy to new media professionals such as J.D. Johannes, whose name and coverage of Iraq was last seen being tossed into the memory hole by old media journalist Paul Mulshine in the Wall Street Journal.

Update: Related thoughts from Andrew Breitbart and John Nolte, here.

A.K.A., The Great Planet-Smashing Gig In The Sky. In any case, it's your must-see video of the day--assuming you haven't seen it already. As Allahpundit writes, "Further proof that there's nothing 'Dark Side of the Moon' can't be synced to."

Martin Kramer:

Twice, presidents named Bush have done Hamas big favors. These favors were inadvertent, but they were game-changers. It's time for a President Bush to do Israel a favor, and let it shove Hamas up against the wall, or right through the wall, depending on what's still feasible. No doubt President Bush would have preferred to leave office with a tidy "peace process," good to go. But who couldn't hear the Hamas bomb ticking in the corner? Better Israel defuse it now, than have it go off under Barack Obama just when he's trying to defuse an even bigger bomb-making operation--in Iran.

Read the whole thing.

John Hinderaker of Power Line asks:

If you seriously believe that the Earth is threatened with destruction by global warming, then the current global economic slowdown is providential. Reduced economic activity equals less energy consumption equals less carbon emitted into the atmosphere. Environmentalists have been telling us we need to reduce our energy consumption, and live more modestly, for years. Now we're doing it. So where's the celebration of the world's sharp turn Greenward?

For that, we turn to the renowned economist, Jamie Lee Curtis...

Michelle Malkin has a "Tale of two presidential workout fanatics"; meanwhile, Ed Morrissey has a tale of two politically-connected religious leaders. In both cases, one story has been met by praise (home run!) the other with derision. What ties these pairs of stories together? "Liberal double standards: It's just how they roll", Michelle writes.

Several of the recent posts here have focused on the surprisingly brief life and quiet death of objectivity in the legacy mass media. Or as Victor Davis Hanson wrote in the last days of the 2008 presidential election, "Sometime in 2008, journalism as we knew it died, and advocacy media took its place."

The replacement is a curiously schizophrenic beast; blending punditry and journalism; turning every newspaper into the Washington Times without the conservative op-eds, every network news department into Fox News without the pro-American populism. Regarding the latter trend, last month Robert Stacy McCain wrote:

The rise of Fox News as the No. 1 cable news outlet has resulted in ideological counterprograming. [emphasis in original--Ed] The success of a conservative news network has had an effect that might be best understood by reference to Newton's third law of motion. At first, there was the "equal effect" -- chastened by Fox's success, most networks sought to rein in their traditional liberal bias. But then, after the 2004 election, the "opposite effect" kicked in. Network executives figured, "Hey, Fox already has a monopoly on conservative viewers. Let's let our freak flags fly and give liberals what they really want." I really noticed this phenomenon during the 2006 campaign, when the media (a) pretended that the contributions Jack Abramoff's clients made to Democrats were meaningless, and (b) presented Mark Foley as the GOP poster boy. The existence of Fox News provides a ready-made excuse for liberals in the media to think of their bias as "balancing" Fox.

But half of the time those on the inside either don't know what's changed, or if they do, won't admit it publicly. (Occasionally a voice in these institutions will come clean and then a successor will forget the earlier admission--or more painfully, his own.)

All of which helps to set the stage for this post by Glenn Reynolds: "Paul Mulshine Blows It."

Update: Don't miss the extended comment by Jay Rosen regarding Mulshine's column, on Fausta Wertz's blog. Jay writes (amongst other things):

We are quite well informed about why the newspaper business is collapsing. The immediate cause: readers are moving to the Net but for various reasons the advertising isn't. Newspapers are stuck with huge capital structures they cannot easily jettison and revenues are falling. No one who writes seriously about new media and citizen journalism is unaware of this. No one in new media, citizen journalism or regular journalism knows what to do about it.

That's not the only reason, though it's a big one; it's an extremely safe assumption that revenues bottoming out are what's driving some of the other reasons old media's hit an iceberg (see above, and Michael Malone's great election-end column at Pajamas HQ), and is a subject we explored in video form earlier this month.

Meanwhile, Jules Crittenden also spots the extreme blurring of the lines between punditry and reporting in old media.

If you missed it today on Sirius-XM's POTUS channel, the year-end wrap edition of PJM Political is now online in handy portable podcast form (as frequent contributor James Lileks is wont to say).

Join host Steve Green of VodkaPundit.com and myself for the year-end edition of PJM Political as he recaps the key moments of the 2008 presidential election. Plus a look back at the decisive elections of the past with:

• Michael Knox Beran, the author of Forge of Empires: Three Revolutionary Statesmen and the World They Made, 1861-1871 describes "How Lincoln Saved The World."


• Amity Shlaes, the author of the New York Times best-seller The Forgotten Man on the 1932 and 1936 presidential elections.


• James Piereson, the author of Camelot and the Cultural Revolution on JFK and the election of 1960.


• Craig Shirley, the author of the Reagan's Revolution and the forthcoming Rendezvous With Destiny on the 1976 and 1980 elections and the fall and rise of Ronald Reagan.

Tune in here to listen!

The Telegraph of England has an article titled, "2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved." (Hey does that mean that the earlier 1970s-version of eco-paranoia, man-made global cooling is now back in style?) If so, one reason why is that the Internet makes it possible to go back in time and compare the predictions of the past with the current reality.

It also allows us to find earlier stories where scientists and journalists suggested that their peers in each profession ditch objectivity and play on the understandable fears of laymen. Flopping Aces has a long blog post written by Dr. Tim Ball, former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg highlighting one example of the latter technique from 1989. This is merely an excerpt:

E. R. Beadle said, "Half the work done in the world is to make things appear what they are not." The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) does this with purpose and great effect. They built the difference between appearance and reality into their process. Unlike procedure used elsewhere, they produce and release a summary report independently and before the actual technical report is completed. This way the summary gets maximum media attention and becomes the public understanding of what the scientists said. Climate science is made to appear what it is not. Indeed, it is not even what is in their Scientific Report.

The pattern of falsifying appearances began early. Although he works at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Stephen Schneider was heavily employed in the work of the IPCC as this biography notes.

Much of Schneider's time is taken up by what he calls his "pro bono day job" for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He was a Coordinating Lead Author in Working Group II of the IPCC from 1997 to 2001 and a lead author in Working Group I from 1994 to 1996. Currently, he is a Coordinating Lead Author for the controversial chapter on "Assessing Key Vulnerabilities and the Risks from Climate Change," in short, defining "dangerous" climate change." - Pubmedcentral.nih.gov

He continued this work by helping prepare the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) of the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) released in April 2007.

Schneider, among others, created the appearance that the Summary was representative of the Science Report. However, he provides an early insight into the thinking when speaking about global warming to Discovery magazine (October 1989) he said scientists need, "to get some broader based support, to capture the public's imagination...that, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts we may have...each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective, and being honest." The last sentence is deeply disturbing-there is no decision required.

And that trend very much continues nearly twenty years later--legacy media trade publication Editor & Publisher actually ran an article last year titled, "Climate Change: Get Over Objectivity, Newspapers." My post about it from August of 2007 is found here; for non-subscribers of E&P, the text of the actual article can be read here.

But then, newspapers have gotten over objectivity on virtually all stories, not just climate change--with disastrous consequences.

(Via Maggie's Farm.)

Israel pounds Gaza; Noah Pollak and Allison Kaplan Sommer have details; the latter writing:

The mission, in which 60 planes hit at least 100 carefully selected targets in Gaza, didn't come as a surprise. It has appeared inevitable over the past week, following the end of the Egyptian-brokered ceasefire.

The initial targets of the attack were Hamas police compounds. A Reuters report said that the casualties included "40 at a police headquarters where Hamas was hosting a graduation ceremony for new recruits. Among those killed was police chief Tawfiq Jabber."

Israeli television said that other targets included other Hamas targets and locations where ammunition and other weaponry are stored. In addition, Reuters reported that the attacks took place on the Gaza-Egypt border, clearly aimed at the tunnels used to smuggle weapons into the Strip.

Saturday was the appropriate day to do it from the Israeli perspective -- a day when stores would be closed, schools wouldn't be in session, and residents of Sderot, Ashkelon and other parts of southern Israel would be in their homes with their families, where they were ordered to stay, close to their shelters.

More at Gateway Pundit and Little Green Footballs.

(H/T: IP)

When I created my recent Silicon Graffiti video on the various and sundry financial meltdowns of the past few months, I titled it "In Dodd We Trust?" It was too good a pun not to use, even though it really wasn't about the Democratic senator from Connecticut per se, but Congressional meddling in economic matters in general.

But get a load of this recent story from Dodd's hometown house organ: as one of Ace of Spades' guest bloggers writes, "Connecticut Post: we're not interested in readers bitching about Chris Dodd or Barney Frank." The paper, evidently being buried with letters from readers regarding their hometown Friend of Angelo and his race-baiting friend from Boston, actually wrote:

...All letters are welcome. But there are code words hidden in some that are signals to stop paying close attention -- "Chris Dodd" and "Barney Frank." ...

On the other hand, it's nice of the paper to let us know who they're running interference for, and dropping the increasingly outdated 20th century perception of "objectivity."

(Via Gateway Pundit.)

As a candidate, Barack Obama was but one of many of the left in recent years who scolded Americans on their economic largesse--until they seemingly took his advice and drastically curtailed their spending, Mark Steyn writes in his newest column:

"Retail Sales Plummet," read the Christmas headline in The Wall Street Journal. "Sales plunged across most categories on shrinking consumer spending."

Hey, that's great news, isn't it? After all, everyone knows Americans consume too much. What was it that then Sen. Obama said on the subject? "We can't just keep driving our SUVs, eating whatever we want, keeping our homes at 72 degrees at all times regardless of whether we live in the tundra or the desert and keep consuming 25 percent of the world's resources with just 4 percent of the world's population, and expect the rest of the world to say, 'You just go ahead, we'll be fine.'"

And boy, we took the great man's words to heart. SUV sales have nose-dived, and 72 is no longer your home's thermostat setting but its current value expressed as a percentage of what you paid for it. If I understand then Sen. Obama's logic, in a just world Americans would be 4 percent of the population and consume 4 percent of the world's resources. And in these past few months we've made an excellent start toward that blessed utopia: Americans are driving smaller cars, buying smaller homes, giving smaller Christmas presents.

And yet, strangely, President-elect Barack Obama doesn't seem terribly happy about the Obamafication of the U.S. economy. He's proposing some 5.7 bazillion dollar "stimulus" package or whatever it is now to "stimulate" it back into its bad old ways.

On the other hand, as Tom Blumer writes, "If a recovery begins too soon, a massive 'stimulus' package might not be needed. Democrats consider that a bad thing."--hence even more negative jawboning from the incoming administration.

Jonah Goldberg writes:

Steve Clemons' proposed solution to the Caroline problem is to have Obama send her to London as the Ambassador to the Court of St. James. That'd be fine with me, I guess. Though I don't think it's as exciting an idea as he does. I do think it's odd though that Clemons spends so much of his post rehearsing the usual anti-Bush throat clearing while completely ignoring a point that's actually relevant: The media would be obliged to revisit her grandfather's stint in the same job. And that might be embarrassing to the Kennedy clan.

Nonsense--all things embarrassing to clan Kennedy are conveniently airbrushed from history.

Joel Stein in the L.A. Times, January 24th, 2006:

I don't support our troops. This is a particularly difficult opinion to have, especially if you are the kind of person who likes to put bumper stickers on his car.

Joel Stein in the L.A. Times, December 26, 2008:

I don't love America. That's what conservatives are always telling liberals like me. Their love, they insist, is truer, deeper and more complete. Then liberals, like all people who are accused of not loving something, stammer, get defensive and try to have sex with America even though America will then accuse us of wanting it for its body and not its soul. When America gets like that, there's no winning.

But I've come to believe conservatives are right. They do love America more. Sure, we liberals claim that our love is deeper because we seek to improve the United States by pointing out its flaws. But calling your wife fat isn't love. True love is the blind belief that your child is the smartest, cutest, most charming person in the world, one you would gladly die for. I'm more in "like" with my country.

Back in July, when he proffered advice to fellow liberals afraid to satirize then-candidate Obama (as his deifying leftwing adulation was at its zenith), Stein wrote, "We are the immature jerks we have been waiting for."

Who am I to argue?

(Via Cassy Fiano.)

No Runny Eggs is your one-stop landing page to see who's blogging on Christmas day.

One reader emailed that he wasn't able to view my "In Dodd We Trust?" video earlier in the week apparently because of bandwidth issues. If you've had similar problems, that video is now up on my YouTube page. (The higher res, higher bandwidth version is still available here.)

And if you received a DV camera in your stocking today and want to put it to work, I have an article that recently went live on Videomaker magazine's Website on the rudiments of videoblogging titled "Medium Cool: Launching Your Own Video Blog."

This just in: "Americans prefer news from Web to newspapers: survey."

The enormous readership of Matt Drudge (where I found the link) proved that to be the case a decade ago, which is why he was so initially despised by those he made obsolete.

Posting will no doubt be sparse on Christmas day (not that I was a posting machine yesterday, of course; though welcome and a happy holiday to Instapundit readers). In the meantime, let me take this opportunity to wish everyone:

A Very Merry Christmas!

Related:

And via Hot Air:

Neo-Neocon: "Twas the bloggers' night before Christmas."

And Orrin Judd has lots of Christmas-related posts. Just keep scrolling.

(With apologies to Kentucky Fried Movie for the above headline.)

Matt Labash has an exceptional piece on Detroit's myriad of woes--"The City Where the Sirens Never Sleep"--in the Weekly Standard. Read it all; it's brilliant writing that speaks volumes about why the city is such a basket case.

(As does this, incidentally.)

CNN's John Roberts can be witnessed between 6:50 and 7:30 point in this edition of Silicon Graffiti doing an amazing aerial 180 worthy of both Tony Hawk and Joseph Stalin--and here with the very definition of a Freudian slip. And yet, he seems surprisingly incredulous when one of October's chief hit and run victims of the drive-by media mocks his objectivity.

Update: Kathy Shaidle observes a revolving door revolving at the White House, as the upcoming Obama administration continues to take shape.

More: "That's a great thing about E. J. -- you don't have to read his columns anymore. You just know he's supporting Obama."

Michael C. Moynihan charts the strange birth and quiet passing of the P.C. "holiday."

Update: Ann Coulter claims vindication.

More: So does Kathy Shaidle.

If you're looking to give Plaxico Burress a Christmas gift tomorrow, a pair of trousers wouldn't be amiss: "Weapons, ammo, pants seized at Burress' NJ home."

Fair is fair: Thanks to this "alternative Christmas message" and Channel's Four's choice of host to deliver it*, England, the birthplace of Muggeridge's Law, has now run smack dab into it like an out-of-control Prius on an unsalted Seattle street.

Read More »

I'm very happy to see that the Salt Nazis ("No salt for you--ever!") haven't banned sodium chloride from South Jersey's roads yet, unlike Seattle.

Hey, glad to see that I wasn't the only one releasing previously unseen and all-too-brief material involving senatorial financial relations two days before Christmas...

Allahpundit has a holiday epiphany: "Christmas miracle: Traffic soars on 'shirtless Obama' Internet searches":

Got an e-mail from Ed 20 minutes ago telling me to check SiteMeter. On one of the most gruesomely awful traffic days of the year, with blog readers tuning out in droves to prepare for the holiday, we're ... way above our daily average. Have a look at the referrals to see why. It's not just us, either. It's Internet-wide, per the AP and The One's current standing at Google Trends.

Hours of searching to find interesting Headlines, hours of toil to compose thoughtful posts -- and all America wants is a Barack Obama beefcake pec-tacular. All right then, I won't stand in the way of love. Drink it in. A man-boobs alert has been issued by the boss and Althouse, but I say let he who is without love handles cast the first stone. And don't underestimate his strength: If German media reports are accurate, he's capable of curling 70 lbs. Judging by that photo, I'd have guessed that was half his body weight.

Clearly, our incoming president is the leader of "the American League of Justice Dispensed Shirtlessly", to borrow a Lileksian riff.

In an update to Allah's post, Ed Morrissey adds:

I'm glad AP decided to post this instead of me. I'm above posting phrases like Obama six-pack, Obama shirtless, and especially Obama topless in a vain effort to get Google traffic. You'll never see that from me. No sir-ee.

Seriously, though ... wouldn't you think that people have better things to do two days before Christmas? Thankfully, no.

Ed was kind enough to link to us on Tuesday morning, shortly before I hopped on a cross-country flight from the relatively mild climate of San Jose into bitter wintry, hail-strewn Philadelphia, the latter city yet another victim of global warming at its worst.

Glenn Reynolds links to James Surowiecki in the New Yorker, who asks, "Are Newspapers Doomed?"

"There's no mystery as to the source of all the trouble: advertising revenue has dried up. In the third quarter alone, it dropped eighteen per cent, or almost two billion dollars, from last year."

He also suggests something that I've noted in the past -- we may have been getting more news than we (that is, the market) actually wanted (that is, was willing to pay for) due to cross-subsidies from things like classified advertising. With those gone, we may wind up with less news. I hope not, but it's a plausible scenario.

Another reason why is that errors such as this are becoming increasingly easier for readers to spot.

To invert The Who, the Gray Lady will get fooled again, as Roger L. Simon writes:

No doubt most of you remember the Jayson Blair affair at the New York Times, when the paper jettisoned the reporter for publishing several plagiarized and, at least partially, fabricated stories on its front page. The ensuing brouhaha caused an editorial shake-up at the onetime "newspaper of record."

Well, what's the old saying about the "second time as farce"? [I think it's from Marx.-ed. So it is.] This time the paper has outdone itself by publishing a putative letter from the mayor of Paris, attacking the potential elevation of Caroline Kennedy to the US Senate:

The tipoff that it's a phony should be obvious, Allahpundit adds:

In the Times's defense, the letter does have a decidedly Frenchy tone ("Can we speak of American decline?"), but I ask you: Would the mayor of Paris, of all people, be likely to object to a big break for Jackie Kennedy's daughter?

Heh, indeed.™

Couldn't the Times have run the email past the ghost of Walter Duranty? That man knows a thing or two about phonying up foreign stories--and he's even got a blog, to boot. (Although, to be fair, it's about as quiet at the moment as the real Duranty is.)

Finally, Dan Riehl spots a giant iceberg looming off the port bow of the S.S. Sulzberger:

From 24/7 Wall St - based upon background and financials, ten major companies predicted to go away in 2009. Number 6 on the list? The New York Times. h/t An email from Pundita.

24/7 Wall St. looked at some of the largest and most well-known companies, reviewed their SEC filings if they are public, analyst reports, and media observations about their businesses and picked ten that probably won't be around at the end of next year.

6) The New York Times (NYT) has to repay $400 million in debt in the first half of 2009. It does not have the money. It plans to mortgage its headquarters, but it is uncertain what that will bring in an uncertain real estate market. The firm's Boston Globe and regional newspaper operations lose money, so they will be hard to sell. NYT is controlled by the Sulzberger family which has super-majority voting shares. That won't matter much when the company runs out of money. Another big media operation, perhaps News Corp (NWS) which owns The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post, will come in and auction off what it can and keep the flagship New York Times newspaper and NYTimes.com website.

If so, that will be one helluva an exit lap for this ever-accelerating race to the bottom:

I interviewed Blade Runner production designer Syd Mead back in April of 2001 for Nuts & Volts Magazine (amazingly, the article is still online, here), and happily, I'm still on his email list. When Detroit gets its act together, this is what I want to pull up to a Christmas party in:

In the meantime, Boing Boing has a pretty cool interview with Mead online at YouTube.

In his 2001 book, The CEO of the Sofa, P.J. O'Rourke wrote:

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

But of course, with every new bailout, the Senate is becoming further and further intertwined with the public sector, and doing increasing harm. As Frank Martin noted in a recent post on his Varifrank blog, "This is how it ends. As of right now, the Senate IS the banking system":

You just try prying the banking system from the hands of the Senate now. You want a loan? Sure, lets just check your voting record, lets see what kind of car you want to buy, oh darn its not a certified government "greenmobile", well sorry Mr. Consumer, we can't give you a loan for that new Toyota Dual Axle truck for your ranch, but how about a new Chevy Cobalt Hybrid? Sure thing. Sign right here Mr. Consumer.

SNAP! That's just how easy it is for you to find that you no longer have any economic choices. No banks - then no bank loans. No bank loans - then no economy. In point of fact, your entire economy is now run by just 100 people. 100 people that if most of us were in an elevator and any one of them got on, we would then get off and walk up the rest of the building rather than risk our well being by exposed to their close proximity.

Hence the subject of my newest Silicon Graffiti, which begins with a parody of Charles Schwab's 2007 ad campaign (with a little help from the cartoon plug-in from After Effects CS4) before exploring the auto bailout, and the banking bailout. And the good old days (by comparison), when Congress would look at a giant corporation and decide the best way to break it up, not prop it up. When it was wasn't defaulting on its own debts, of course.

And along the way, a look back at some early warnings from the 1990s, and going even further back, a flashback from Vice President Elect Joe Biden to President Abraham Roosevelt Franklin Washington's early televised fireside chats from the 1860s. And a timely paraphrase of the Bard of Springfield.

This is our 23rd edition of Silicon Graffiti ,which began in January of this year--you can explore the back catalog by starting here and scrolling through. It's a mixed lot, but on the average, we hope our approval rating is on the north side of these numbers.

(Also posted at Right Wing News, where I'm one of several guest bloggers this week.)

This is fiendishly brilliant:

As a prank, students from local high schools have been taking advantage of the county's Speed Camera Program in order to exact revenge on people who they believe have wronged them in the past, including other students and even teachers.

Students from Richard Montgomery High School dubbed the prank the Speed Camera "Pimping" game, according to a parent of a student enrolled at one of the high schools.

Originating from Wootton High School, the parent said, students duplicate the license plates by printing plate numbers on glossy photo paper, using fonts from certain websites that "mimic" those on Maryland license plates. They tape the duplicate plate over the existing plate on the back of their car and purposefully speed through a speed camera, the parent said. The victim then receives a citation in the mail days later.

Students are even obtaining vehicles from their friends that are similar or identical to the make and model of the car owned by the targeted victim, according to the parent.

"This game is very disturbing," the parent said. "Especially since unsuspecting parents will also be victimized through receipt of unwarranted photo speed tickets.

The parent said that "our civil rights are exploited," and the entire premise behind the Speed Camera Program is called into question as a result of the growing this fad among students.

As Mark Hemingway writes, "Yes, it would be just awful if the speed camera program was called into question as a result of this."

Ezra Levant has been named "Person of the Year" by the Canadian Christian magazine The Interim; the PDFs of his profile, where the above headline derives (it was written by fellow Canadian Blogosphere favorite Kathy Shaidle) can be found at Ezra's Website, along with a quote from Mark Steyn:

Ezra has been the indisputable man in the battle against the "human rights" racket. I've been happy to coast along, but he's doing the heavy lifting. I'm Dean Martin to his Jerry Lewis: he's doing all the work and I feed him the occasional line.

Shortly after this thing started, I had lunch with a journalistic bigshot in Montreal who advised me to play it cool - don't respond to interview requests, don't take a stand, let these suits work their way through as if it's some legalistic technicality in which you have no particular investment. And at a fancy Quebecois restaurant, that seemed like good advice. Then Ezra posted his interrogation video and I understood that my friend's advice was all wrong and that Ezra's strategy was right. Go nuclear. "Denormalize" them. Expose them for what they are - hacks at best and, at worst, deeply corrupt thugs. Ezra is like one of those shower settings where the merest nudge of the dial whacks it straight from nothing to a scalding torrent - which in a moribund public discourse such as Canada's is what it takes.

One thing that was confirmed to me this last year is that the incessant media self-congratulation about journalistic "courage" is in inverse proportion to any mustering of the real thing. It took Ezra going nuclear, going bananas, going medieval on Jennifer Lynch's totalitarian ass to rouse the great dopey herd of conventional wisdom even to take notice of this issue sufficiently to move the debate one smidgeonette in the direction of sanity. I forget who it was who said that Canadians weren't going to put up with some blowhard going crazy over "their" beloved "human rights" commissions, but they got it exactly wrong. Let's take it as read that Ezra is everything his detractors say he is - a blowhard, loudmouth, self-promoter, a "controversy entrepreneur," etc. If he weren't a blowhard, loudmouth, whatever, he wouldn't have been so spectacularly successful in his "denormalization" of Canada's "human rights" commissions.

Read the whole thing--and congrats to Ezra for surviving the machinations of the Great White Nihilistic North.

I was astonished at the YouTube clips of Canada's Star Chamber system that he uploaded in early January, and made a couple of excepts of them the subject of the first segment of my Silicon Graffiti video blog, which seems quaint--I hope--compared with some of my recent video efforts, but you've got to start somewhere:

In his profile of Paul Weyrich for the DC Examiner, Lee Edwards writes:

He was born on October 7, 1942, in Racine, Wisconsin, the son of working-class German Catholics. His father tended the boilers of St. Mary's Catholic Hospital for 50 years. He was politically active from an early age: at 19, he and his friends took over the Racine Republican party.

He worked for a local daily newspaper and then as a radio-television journalist before coming to Washington in 1967 as press secretary to Senator Gordon Allott (R-CO).

He learned how to organize from the liberal opposition. During President Nixon's first term, he attended a meeting of key liberals planning the enactment of an open housing bill. Present were a White House official, a Washington newspaper columnist, an analyst from the Brookings Institution, representatives from several black lobbying groups, and aides to a dozen senators.

Weyrich noted that everyone took an assignment. The Senate aides promised that their bosses would make supporting statements and contact other senators. The White House official said he would keep everyone informed of the administration's strategy.

The newspaper columnist promised to write a favorable article about the legislation. The Brookings analyst promised to publish a timely study that would impact the debate. The black lobbyists agreed to produce public demonstrations at the right time.

"I saw how easily it could be done with planning and determination," Weyrich later recalled, "and decided to try it myself." With funding from conservative businessmen like Joseph Coors and direct mail assistance from fundraiser Richard Viguerie, he helped start major conservative institutions such as Heritage, the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress (later the Free Congress Foundation), the Senate Steering Committee, the Republican Study Committee, and the American Legislative Exchange Council.

Liberals as well as conservatives acknowledged his essential role. In January 1981, the AFL-CIO described the New Right and specifically the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress as smart, effective and responsible for "a whole passel of persons sitting in the U.S. House and Senate."

The manufactured dissent that Weyrich describes witnessing in the early '70s and emulating during its second half reminds of something Tom Wolfe told an interviewer about his New York Herald-Tribune salad days:

Well, one of the things is what I would call "media ricochet", which is the way real life and life as portrayed by television, by journalists like myself and others, begin ricocheting off of one another. That's why to me, in Bonfire of the Vanities, it was so important to show exactly how this occurs when television and newspaper coverage become a factor in something like racial politics. And a good bit of the book has to do with this curious phenomenon of how demonstrations, which are a great part of racial and ethnic politics, exist only for the media. In the last days when I was working on The New York Herald-Tribune, I'll never forget the number of demonstrations I went to and announced that to all the people with the placards, "I'm from The New York Herald-Tribune," and the attitude was really a yawn, and then, "Get lost". They were waiting for Channel 2 and Channel 4 and Channel 5, and suddenly the truck would appear and these people would become galvanized. On one occasion I even saw a group of demonstrators down in Union Square, marching across the Square, and Channel 2 arrived, a couple of vans, and the head of the demonstration walked up to what looked like the head man of the TV crew and said, "What do you want us to do?" He says, "Golly, I don't know. What were you going to do?" He says, "It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. You tell us."

As Edwards wrote, Weyrich simply took the methods of the left and moved them starboard. Something that Mary Katharine Ham notes that Rick Warren is doing in his recent interviews with the legacy media.

Betsy Newmark reminds readers of the other side of Che Guevara:

Like the useful idiots who used to proudly wear their Mao jackets, now we have uncounted millions buying the Che T Shirts, putting up the poster, getting a Che tattoo, and buying tickets to see movies that portray Guevara as simply an idealistic revolutionary out to help the underclass. Actor Benicio del Toro who portrays him in the current film compares Che to Jesus except without that whole turn-the-other-cheek nonsense. It's a depressing commentary on the delusions of idealism that have led so many to idolize this guy and turn their own cheek to the reality of history.

Of course, as Mark Gladdblatt reminds us with a round-up of some of Che's more infamous quotes, the real Che was just a tad less sentimental than his modern disciples:

"In fact, if Christ himself stood in my way, I, like Nietzsche, would not hesitate to squish him like a worm."

Which of course sounds like something your average university Decon 101 professor would say to his freshman class. No wonder radical college professors like Bill Ayers (who emulated Che's actions) and Ward Churchill (who nostalgically emulates Che's poses) think he's Che chic.

If you missed it yesterday on Sirius-XM's POTUS channel, Saturday's PJM Political is now online; tune in here to listen.

Join host Steve Green of VodkaPundit.com for his take on President-Elect Obama's cabinet choices, and the Pythonic implications of the "shoe toss" incident that bedeviled President Bush in Iraq.

Plus, from PJTV:

• Pajamas Media CEO Roger L. Simon debates Frost/Nixon with fellow Oscar-nominated screenwriter/producer Lionel Chetwynd.
  
• Glenn Reynolds and Michelle Malkin talk with Former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, now looking to helm the Republican National Committee, followed by their conversation with the surprise celebrity from the last month of the presidential election, Joe Wurzelbacher, aka...Joe The Plumber.
  

If you missed any previous episodes of PJM Political, click here and scroll through for hours of audio archives. And tune in to Pajamas Media's PJTV channel for video coverage throughout the week.

Heh.™

Congress has less than a week to act on the latest economic crisis impacting the manufacturing sector...

(Though check the photo--is that any way for a man to dress when appearing before the Senate?)

James Taranto corrects a moment in the election timeline:

Remember Barack Obama's big race speech back in March, the one that invited comparisons to Lincoln? Neither does anyone else, but it seemed like a big deal at the time. On March 18 The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder did a short item called "Speechwriter of One" (quoting verbatim):

This wasn't a speech by committee... Obama wrote the speech himself, working on it for two days and nights.... and showed it to only a few of his top advisers.

This now appears to have been puffery, at least if the Washington Post has the story right:

One Saturday night in March, Obama called [Jon] Favreau and said he wanted to immediately deliver a speech about race. He dictated his unscripted thoughts to Favreau over the phone for 30 minutes--"It would have been a great speech right then," Favreau said--and then asked him to clean it up and write a draft. Favreau put it together, and Obama spent two nights retooling before delivering the address in Philadelphia the following Tuesday.

"So," Obama told Favreau afterward. "I think that worked."

Favreau is the 27-year-old Obama speechwriter best known for a party photo in which he pretends to grope the right breast of a life-size cardboard cutout depicting New York's junior senator. Harmless frat-boy antics, to be sure, but it does make all the solemn praise Obama got for that race speech all the more hilarious.

(H/T: FTPS)

Plenty of economic gloom in this forecast from Wall Street Journal senior economics writer Steve Moore:

Time magazine's "Person of the Year 2008" cover story, dated December 17th: President Elect Obama's "arrival on the scene feels like a step into the next century -- his genome is global, his mind is innovative, his world is networked, and his spirit is democratic."

Time magazine, December 18th: "Obama has proven himself repeatedly to be a very tolerant, very rational-sounding sort of bigot."

"For people who think there's no cultural divide in this country, consider the treatment of two women much in the news in 2008."

Found via Mark Hemingway, the New York Times notes that W. Mark Felt, the FBI agent who was revealed in 2005 to be Woodward and Bernstein's "Deep Throat" and played by Hal Holbrook in the film version of All The President's Men is dead at age 95.

Back in 2005 with a movie then in theaters about a powerful Machiavellian ruler corrupted by power that featured performances even more wooden than Robert Redford in mind, Mark Steyn wrote "Revenge of the Felt":

''Revenge of the Sith'' is a marvel of motivational integrity compared to ''Revenge of the Felt,'' the concluding chapter in that other '70s saga, Watergate. Before the final denouement last week, there were a gazillion guesses at the identity of ''Deep Throat,'' but all subscribed to the basic contours of the Woodward and Bernstein myth: that he was someone deep in the bowels of the administration who could no longer in good conscience stand by as a corrupt president did deep damage to the nation. So Darth Throat, a fully paid-up Dark Lord of the Milhous, saved the Republic from the imperial paranoia of Chancellor Nixotine by transforming himself into Anakin Slytalker and telling what he knew to the Bradli knights of the Washington Post.

Now we learn that Deep Throat was not, in fact, Alexander Haig, David Gergen, Pat Buchanan or Len Garment, but a disaffected sidekick of J. Edgar Hoover, an old-school G-man embittered at being passed over for the director's job when the big guy keeled over after half-a-century in harness.

Hmm. Like the ''Star Wars'' wrap-up, ''How Mark Felt Became Deep Throat'' feels small and mean after three decades of the awesome dramatic burden placed upon it. The nobility of the Watergate myth -- in which media boomers and generations of journalism school ethics bores have sunk so much -- seems cheapened and tarnished by this last plot twist.

The best thing I read on the subject in the last few days was a 1992 piece by James Mann from the Atlantic Monthly. He doesn't identify Deep Throat, though he mentions Mark Felt in an important context. But get a load of this remarkably shrewd paragraph from 13 years ago:

''By coincidence, the Watergate break-in occurred on June 17, less than seven weeks after Hoover's death and [FBI outsider] Gray's appointment [as acting director]. The FBI took charge of the federal investigation at the same time that the administration was trying to limit its scope.

''Therein lies the origin of Deep Throat.''

Bingo! Mann also adds: ''Rarely is it asked whether White House aides like Haig, Ziegler, and Garment were the sort of people willing to hold 2 a.m. meetings in a parking garage, or whether they were able to arrange the circling of the page number 20 of Bob Woodward's copy of the New York Times, which was delivered to his apartment by 7 a.m. -- the signal that Deep Throat wanted a meeting.''

With the benefit of hindsight, Mann's observation seems obvious. That's what the spy novelists call ''tradecraft.'' It's the sort of thing spooks and feds do, not White House aides. Why then was it not so obvious for the last three decades?

The answer is that, thanks to All The President's Men, the media took it for granted they were America's plucky heroic crusaders, and there's no point being plucky heroic crusaders unless you've got the dark sinister forces of an all-powerful government to pluckily crusade against. Think how many conspiracy movies there've been where White House aides are the sort of chaps who think nothing of meeting you at 2 a.m. in parking garages, usually as a prelude to having you whacked. In films like Clint Eastwood's ''Absolute Power'' or Kevin Costner's ''No Way Out,'' political appointees carry on like that routinely. That image of government derives principally from the Nixon era.

During that same period, Jay Rosen wrote of "Deep Throat, J-School and Newsroom Religion":

Watergate is the great redemptive story believers learn to tell about the press and what it can do for the American people. Whether the story can continue to claim enough believers--and connect the humble to the heroic in journalism--is a big question. Whether it should is another question.

Felt and many of the other supporting players of Watergate are slowly heading towards the exits. And with the lights about to go out on the legacy media, journalists finally have found a new religion to rally around--but will it be powerful enough to save the old order?

Update: Welcome readers of The Hill's Blog Briefing Room.

Elsewhere on the Web, Ed Morrissey's thoughts on Mark Felt are also worth reading.

Welcome viewers and listeners of Cam Edwards of NRA News--you can watch the video comparing and contrasting two very different television news reports of elderly vets attacked that we were discussing right here.

Really, "what can one man do to save the world?" (Click over if only for the terrific Photoshop.)

(Via the Binkmeister.)

As you've undoubtedly read by now, Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich has passed away at age 66. At Pajamas HQ, Jennifer Rubin asks, "Who Will Be the Next Paul Weyrich?"

Meanwhile, Robert Stacy McCain has some thoughts on Weyrich and the state of American culture as a whole. Be sure to follow his links as well.

Michael Graham has "The Shoe 'Nuff Truth":

Now that you've heard the Partisan Press cackle and misreport the Shoe-Flingin' Iraqi "Journalist" story for 48 hours (did the press tell you, for example, he worked at a Pro-SADDAM newspaper in Egypt?), get the Natural Truth from military analyst and historian Ralph Peters:

If an Arab journalist had thrown his shoes at Saddam Hussein or one of his guests, the tosser would've been beaten, then tortured, then killed. Today's Iraqi government is considering whether the man should be charged under the state's democratically validated Constitution.

Bush won. Even if shoe-thrower Muntadar al-Zaidi (who works for an Egypt-based media outfit) walks out in his stocking feet and becomes a hero to dead-enders, he unwittingly showed what a great thing has been accomplished in Iraq.

Charles Krauthammer made a similar point on Fox News yesterday, noting that while the Arab and American media are gleefully reporting this one man's actions as reflective of Iraq, the elected Iraqi parliament--which has to go home and answer to citizens--overwhelmingly passed the Bush-backed security plan that the president went to Iraq to sign.

Let the bad guys throw shoes, and let the US military win wars and help create democracies. I'll take that deal any day.

Glenn Reynolds places the attack into context with another event that occurred near the start of President Bush's administration.

(Via Kathy Shaidle, exploring the Zapruder film and going back and to the left wingtip.)

Times Watch has the Gray Lady's worst quotes of note for 2008--but there's still time for more!

As global warming pummels Las Vegas this week, Andrew Bolt lists the "Top 10 dud predictions" from global warming alarmists.

There's only one way to follow all that epic fail--with the ultimate butchered version of "The Final Countdown":

At Commentary, Peter Wehner writes:

As the Rod Blagojevich scandal continues to unfold, it's worth recalling that Democrats in 2006 -led by Representative Rahm Emanuel- ran on the theme that they would end "the culture of corruption." Indeed, Emanuel, in dismissing wrongdoings by Democrats at the time, explained them away as simply the actions of a few individuals. About Republicans, Emanuel said, "They have institutional corruption." The argument put forth was that Democrats would bring ethics and high standards to public office and that the Democratic Party would embody integrity and police its ranks.

It hasn't quite worked out that way.

"As the sportscaster Warner Wolf used to say, let's go to the videotape..."

Meanwhile, while the Ohio Democrat who rummaged through "Joe the Plumber's" records has resigned, Rod Blagojevish isn't going quietly.

Update: Related thoughts from Brent Bozell.

Just found in my stats counter was this Google search (the abrupt cutoff is also in the original):

hitler and national socialism are really nothing more than contemporary shibboleths in america. whether invoked by thoughtless neocons i.e. goldberg's obnoxious screed titled ''liberal fascism'' or

Lionel Chetwynd, call your office!

We mentioned AP's "Byline Strike" on Tuesday, but Dan Riehl does a great job of reading between the bylines:

The real kicker is that while the journalists are busy writing about the collapse of the Global economy, or the newspaper industry looking like it's going away, all in times so bad we need a new, New Deal - they went to the table asking for a 10% raise.

As Dan writes, it's obvious that even AP doesn't believe the endlessly catastrophic news they've been reading via AP.

Well, can't fault them there.

"They're setting me up. The bastards are setting me up!"

(H/T: AP)

A rather discordant tone struck by the "relatively young and inexperienced" CEO of the Office of President Elect:

Meanwhile, in other dispatches from the Chicago Way, the 24Ahead.com blog spots a little ongoing Stalinizing of Illinois' archives.

Even as newspapers are shedding staff and hemorrhaging money, Roger L. Simon spots "The Great Byline Strike Of '08" amongst journalists at the Associated Press:

I read with amusement that reporters and photographers for the Associated Press are staging (via the Newspaper Guild) a 'byline strike.' Say what? To stage a such a strike people have to have heard of you, but practically no one is more anonymous than a writer for a news service. It almost comes with the job description. You are the "Associated Press," not yourself. The AP is not exactly where you find the next Norman Mailer. News service reporters are not even as well known as bloggers. I mean whose names are more famous to the general public at his point -- Glenn Reynolds, Michelle Malkin and (yikes) Markos Moulitsas or [insert any Associated Press writer here]?

Not that I don't have some sympathy for my AP colleagues. These are trying times for all in the media. But they made a choice by joining a news service and that choice was for a form of literary facelessness. Also, they opted for a form of homogenization, since the AP and other news services are by mission supposed to be uniform in style and content.

And therein lies the rub. Of recent years the uniformity of the Associated Press in publishing a kind of bland, accepted liberalism of the most uninspired (and sometimes distorted) sort may be the root of their business woes - not the presence (or not) of bylines or even the current economic situation, although the latter certainly plays a part. I would suggest to the writers and owners of the AP that they consider opening up their company to people of different biases and opinions. They are supposed to be a news service, after all, not a ideological distribution center. People on the more extreme right love to compare them to Tass. That's not fair. The AP is nowhere near as bad as that. But they are pretty bad. And they are failing economically. And when you're failing economically, you're supposed to do something. [Maybe they're waiting for a TARP bailout.--ed. I'd rather drive a Buick.]

As that sage philosopher of Springfield, H. J. Simpson once told his daughter, "Lisa, if you don't like your job you don't strike. You just go in every day, and do it really half-assed. That's the American way."

And from that perspective, the staff at AP have been doing an exceptional job of alerting readers of poor working conditions there for years.

James Pethokoukis rounds up "The 10 Dopiest Business and Economy Leaders of 2008."

It makes a nice double-feature with this recent economic-themed top ten list.

Found via Newsbusters, this Chicago Sun-Times article begins thusly:

Bye bye, black Senate seat! The political blackbirds are singing a swan song for the hopes of keeping a U.S. Senate seat in African-American hands. The Rod Blagojevich implosion may have dealt that cause a fatal blow.

Last week's stunning pay-to-play charges led to calls around the nation for a special election to choose President-elect Barack Obama's successor.

That possibility has provoked outrage among black community leaders and politicians. Not so fast, they are saying.

So much for post-racial America.

Ed Morrissey posts an amusing clip of Joe Scarborough riffing on the instinctive legacy media.

As Jonah Goldberg once quipped, "those who cannot learn from history are condemned to hear George Santayana quoted to them for the rest of their lives"--or this time around, Robert Tracinski from Real Clear Politics:

It looks as if we are going to have to relive all of the mistakes of the 20th century one more time--let's hope it is one last time--before we relearn the big lesson of that century: the moral and material superiority of capitalism and the disastrous consequences of socialism in all its forms.

I thought we had learned that lesson well enough already, but it turns out I was wrong. Given a few decades to recover from the collapse of the Soviet Union--and given an opportunity to take advantage of the ideological confusion and muddled pragmatism of the pro-free-market right--the left is making a serious attempt to reconstitute itself.

And it is not just any variant of the left. It is the Old Left, the mid-20th-century left of public-works giantism, ham-fisted labor union protests, and command-and-control central planning.

By the end of the 20th century, the failure of all of these policies had caused the Old Left to splinter into two groups. The New Left hippies rejected industrial socialism in favor of anti-industrial socialism, adopting environmentalism and holding up a neo-primitive lifestyle as the ideal, while the New Democrat centrists sought a "Third Way" compromise between capitalism and socialism.

But now the discredited Old Left seems to be making a roaring comeback. We can see the signs all around us.

Consider Barack Obama's plan for up to $700 billion in New-Deal-style "public works" boondoggles. It is a good old-fashioned Keynesian "stimulus" based on the premise that you can revive the economy by spreading paper money around at random.

Yet it is now widely acknowledged that the original New Deal did not actually revive the Depression-era economy. Even under Keynes's failed theory, the amount of FDR's spending was not enough to stimulate the economy--and neither is the amount proposed by Obama. But that hasn't fazed the revived Old Left.

Which is why, as early as May, long before the September financial meltdown that paved the way for Obama's victory in November, leftwing politicians were calling for a "New, New Deal": But, as Tracinski notes above, what if the conventional wisdom is wrong about the Old New Deal, and that Risky Tax Scheme, to borrow one of Algore's catch phrases, prolonged the Depression?

FrontPage Magazine quotes the speech that Bernard Goldberg (the author of the groundbreaking books on media bias, the first titled, logically enough, Bias and its sequel, Arrogance, gave during David Horowitz's latest Restoration Weekend on November 14th. It was followed by a Q&A, where this excerpt was taken:

Bernie Goldberg: I have long argued, and I continue to argue, despite what some of my conservative friends think, there is no conspiracy. Katie Couric, Brian Williams, Charlie Gibson, and in my day, Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and Tom Brokaw never came in the morning, went into a room, summoned their top lieutenants, pulled the shades, dimmed the lights, gave the secret handshake and the secret salute, and said, "How are we going to screw those conservatives today?" It never, ever happened that way. And you know what? I wish it did because that is so outrageous. That is so unacceptable that nobody would tolerate it for two seconds.

What happens in reality is worse. What happens is there are so many likeminded people in the newsroom, they not only think alike; it becomes a group-think kind of thing so that they see conservative views as being to the right of center, which they are, and they see liberal views as middle of the road. They don't even know what liberal views are because of this bubble that they live in.

What made it different this time - despite the fact that they wanted Michael Dukakis or Walter Mondale to win, it wasn't the same thing as this year because Walter Mondale was just another white guy and so was Michael Dukakis. This was different. They were on a mission. This was very important. Their cause, as I say, was noble, and they were going to do whatever they had to do to make this happen. And unlike in past years where they all denied their bias, you're right. The questioner was right. They acknowledge it. And you know why they acknowledge it in the end? Because they don't give a damn what any of you think. That's why.

Unidentified Audience Participant: What I would like to know is there's such a contradiction here in the fact that the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times are almost spinning out of existence. Why is it that they had such a powerful effect on the election?

Bernie Goldberg: I don't know that they do have a powerful effect on - I don't think the media defeated John McCain. I think the media was as corrupt as the day is long, but I don't think they defeated John McCain.

One of my friends in the room suggested maybe two or three points, but it wasn't enough to throw the election. I think people listen to this stuff.

A poll came out. It was a reputable poll. I think it was by Pew, the Pew Research Center, that said 90 percent of Republicans - the question was simply this - "Who do you think most reporters want to win the election?" and 90 percent of Republicans said they want Obama to win. But this is a statistic that should send chills running up the spine of any journalist with half a brain; 62 percent of Democrats and independents said the same thing. Now, if they don't have Republicans - we've already decided we don't trust them, but if 62 percent of Democrats don't trust them, that's a real problem because all they have, at least in theory, is their credibility. So I think they didn't put a thumb on the scale, but they put their big fat asses on the scale this time, and they wanted him to win, and they made no bones about it. But they didn't beat John McCain.

He's right--McCain did much damage to his own campaign through its infighting and lacking of planning and coordination, and his ham-handed "suspending his campaign" stunt in late September without really knowing what he'd do once he got to Washington to deal with that month's bailout sealed his fate.

And McCain seems thrilled to be able to hang out with David Letterman and count the media as his friends again. The pressure of actually having to lead is off.

Now go over and read Goldberg's actual speech.

And for my two-part interview with Goldberg in 2004 in Tech Central Station, click here and here.)

(H/T: CG)

I originally produced the above clip, "Mugging For The Camera," back in early April as part of my Silicon Graffiti series of videoblogs, and uploaded it first to my primary video server, where I posted it here and it got a fair chunk of traffic in the Blogosphere. I then uploaded it to YouTube for hosting on my page there.

Last year, one of the subjects of the video, television reporter Rebecca Aguilar, then with Dallas-based KDFW, received a firestorm of attention (here's our post, which links to others) for her badgering tone when attempting to interview an elderly Army vet whose business was robbed on multiple occasions, and fought back. (She was eventually let go by the station.)

In late March, when a TV station in northern California reported in a rather upbeat manner about the bravery of another elderly vet who fought back rather than be mugged, it seemed to be quite a contrast to the report that aired in Dallas.

As part of my Silicon Graffiti video series, I wanted to place those two video clips side by side, as well as include comments made by other journalists and bloggers, such as the proprietors of Breitbart.TV (who are local television vets themselves), and Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com, all of which was clearly within the context of fair use.

On November 18, the page containing the above video was the subject of a DMCA take-down notice sent to YouTube by KDFW. YouTube, quite appropriately, took down the video and sent me a copy of the notice. My wife and attorney sent a counter notice, and after waiting the appropriate time, YouTube restored the content earlier this evening with a note that my account would not be penalized, which means that this won't count against me on YouTube's "repeat offender" list.

As others have noted, YouTube is quick to pull videos whenever there's a whiff of controversy or a dispute regarding them. But I'm glad to see this video back up--to the best of my knowledge, it's the only record available on YouTube at the moment of newscaster Rebecca Aguilar's original report, the others having been removed due to KDFW's objections. (See here, here and here.) But it's also a reminder not to rely on the site as your primary or, especially, your only video host.

Comedian, writer and cultural commentator Evan Sayet emails in:

My Friends (I borrowed that from John McCain since he's not using it anymore.)

Tomorrow night (Tuesday) is the last Right to Laugh event of the George Bush era. Please try to join me and a great group of political (Republican) comedians as we skewer the media, the Demorats and, of course, the man who holds the "office of the President-Elect").

This is one of the best line-ups yet, featuring the great Al Sonja Schmidt, with guest sets from Monty Hoffman and Eric Porvaznik (Mr. E. Pluribus), John Ziegler (KFI radio, "How Obama Won") taking time out from answering his hatemail to emcee. I'll be your host and headlienr.

As those of you who have attended before know, the night usually includes famous radio talk show hosts, best selling conservative authors, a few movie and TV stars -- and that's just the folks on the stage! We typically have even more in the crowd!

So...see you all tomorrow and, if you would, please pass on word to others.

Merry Christmas!

Evan

The event is at the Laugh Factory in West Hollywood and begins tomorrow at 8:00 PM--if you're in the area call 323-656-1336 for reservations.

Evan's email is also a great excuse to repost this, which is a terrific summing up of How We Got Here, to borrow David Frum's book title:

At NewsBusters Kyle Drennen spots CBS with their shoe in their mouth:

According to CBS correspondent Richard Roth, in a report on Monday's CBS Early about an Iraqi journalist throwing a shoe at President Bush during a Baghdad press conference, the incident was reminiscent of the toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein five years earlier: "Mr. Bush's message of progress was eclipsed in Baghdad by a sign of his unpopularity...The symbolism wouldn't have been lost on Iraqis, for whom shoes can be used to show extreme contempt, as with the footwear beaten against the statue of Saddam Hussein toppled by Marines five years ago."

Of course, in 2002, when Saddam held his last "election", CBS hilariously reported:

(CBS) Iraq declared Saddam Hussein the winner Wednesday - by an 11 million-to-0 margin - in a war-shadowed referendum on his two-decade military rule, sending celebratory gunfire crackling from the streets and rooftops of Baghdad.

The 100 percent turnout, 100 percent 'yes' vote shows all Iraqis are poised to defend Saddam against American forces, the country's No. 2 man said.

"If they come, we will fight them in every village, and every house," said Izzat Ibrahim, vice chairman of Iraq's Revolutionary Command Council, announcing results on what Iraq billed as a people's referendum on keeping Saddam in power another seven years.

"Every home will be a front, and every farmer, every shepherd, every Iraqi, will play his role," Ibrahim said. "All Iraqis are armed now, and by God's will we will triumph."

* * *

CBS News Correspondent Tom Fenton, reports voters going to the polls in Baghdad faced a simple choice - to vote "yes" or "no" - and everyone seemed to be voting "yes."

Whether that's because they love their leader - as many people said they did - or for other reasons, was hard to tell.

A United Nations human rights report says 500 people were jailed in the last referendum after they voted "no."

Some voters went to extremes to make it clear where they stood.

"I love Saddam more than myself," one man told CBS News, as he wrote "yes" on his ballot in blood - his own blood.

Ibrahim, announcing the vote, said all 11,445,638 eligible voters had cast ballots, and all for Saddam.

"Someone who does not know the Iraqi people will not believe this percentage, but it is real," Ibrahim said. "Whether it looks that way to someone or not. We don't have opposition in Iraq."

Iraqi officials said popular outrage at the U.S. threats to Saddam's regime made the turnout and percentage even higher than in 1995, when Saddam received a 99.96 percent 'yes' vote.

Iraqi media compared it to Bush's 2000 election victory, eked out in the Electoral College despite losing to Al Gore in the popular vote.

"The truth of the matter is that he (Bush) won by a fraction of the votes, and this fraction was engineered by sly lawyers' games," said the state-run Iraqi Daily. "Maybe this is one of the main reasons for his hysterical threats on the Iraqi choice!"

Of course. More explorations of the Memory Hole, here.

Meanwhile, Power Line reviews HBO's whitewashed miniseries about Saddam and finds more than a little equivocation:

There is much more that could be said. But let us sum up: HBO and the BBC want us to see Saddam as a family man, a tyrant at home, a dictator at work, who became this way because his stepfather beat him. He was, in this version, an ordinary kind of dictator and this was an ordinary kind of Middle Eastern authoritarian regime run as a family business. The trouble is it was not. Saddam was uniquely brutal in his rise through the Ba'athist Party. His regime sought to eliminate entire groups from the nation. He launched two aggressive wars against neighbouring states. This was not a normal authoritarian regime, nor even a bad one. Saddam was a genocidal dictator who terrorized his own people. This attempt to normalize him is a disgrace.

Saddam became a dictator "because his stepfather beat him"? Moviemakers seem remarkably generous when it comes to forgiving a tyrant's excesses when they can blame them all on a dysfunctional childhood.

More Hollywood forgiveness offered here.

The Business & Media Institute rounds them up; a Tech Central Station column by Arnold Kling from 2006 explains their origins.

In a related vein, Ronnie Schreiber explores "Myths of Organized Labor", memes which also derive from a similar ancestry.

Shocking foot-age (their pun, not mine--sorry, though) of who is behind the Iraq shoe attack. And on a more serious footnote (OK, I'll cop to that one), Roger L. Simon spots what this tells us about how far the nation has come--the idiot who perpetuated it isn't going to end up feet-first in the woodchipper, unlike if he had tried something similar to the man who was captured by the US five years ago this weekend.

The accelerating pace of change is impacting television as well. As Jonathan Last notes, NBC's plugging Jay Leno into their primetime lineup keeps their talk star happy (and things were looking shaky in that department this past summer), and keeps costs down, by reducing the amount of scripted programs the network airs:

I wonder if this is a recessionary move:

Though Mr. Leno will command an enormous salary, probably more than $30 million a year, the cost of his show will be a fraction of what a network pays for dramas at 10 p.m. Those average about $3 million an episode. That adds up to $15 million a week to fill the 10 p.m. hour. Mr. Leno's show is expected to cost less than $2 million a week.

In addition, NBC will get more weeks of original programming. Network dramas typically make 22 to 24 episodes a year. Under this deal, the executives involved in the discussions said, Mr. Leno will perform 46 weeks a year.

So Leno will give them so much bang for their buck that NBC should be able to accept pretty meager ratings with his show and still be able to justify it on a cost-per-viewer basis.

But the biggest impact of putting Leno in prime-time is that it drastically reduces the available space for scripted prime-time shows. A network only has 15 hours of prime-time a week; this move devotes 33 percent of that space to one show leaving only 10 hours to run existing programs and try out new pick-ups. I don't know how much time reality programming takes up on NBC each week--I think it's four hours--and suddenly you have very little space to work in scripted programming.

If you look at the NBC program list, I can't see how you fit those shows (minus the coming cancellations, even) into the remaining six hours. I suspect that this may mean that NBC will look to run new programming year-round, instead of just during sweeps. It's the only way I can see them getting it all out with the addition of Leno's show.

In other television news, I can't see this move booting the anemically-rated Academy Awards broadcast.

If you enjoyed my Red Queen's Race video last week, Jon Stewart (found via Jeff Jarvis and Glenn Reynolds) has a fun clip summing up the newspapers' endgame in about two minutes:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Clusterf#@k to the Poor House - Final Edition Edition

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Meanwhile, Investor's Business Daily notes that "Some journalists out there seem to be actually rooting for a new economic depression--the very thing that will hurt them more than it will hurt many others":

The blogosphere has a name for this syndrome: "depression lust." Virginia Postrel, an Atlantic Monthly columnist who invented the phrase, contributed to a Boston Globe story published in November that collected ideas from various people to (allegedly) give readers some insight into what a 2009 depression would look like.

The conditions "sounded pretty damned good to some people," Postrel writes on her Dynamist blog, "a sure sign of an affluent society, or at least affluent commentators," who, we should add, appear to be operating under the illusion that things would still be rosy for them in a depression because they always have been.

Journalists "seem positively giddy with anticipation at the prospect of a return to '30s-style hardship -- without, of course, the real hardship of the 1930s," Postrel blogs.

Jim Miller, who writes a political blog, has made a similar observation. "I can't count the number of times I read hopeful pieces in the New York Times saying that a recession might be coming soon, so now that one is actually here those people have to be pleased."

Did any of those New York Times stories come from David Carr, whose "Stoking Fear Everywhere You Look" appeared Monday?

"Every modern recession includes a media seance about how horrible things are and how much worse they will be," noted Carr, who did a bit of his own communicating with the dead spirits of the Great Depression.

As Postrel notes, journalists, whose industry is teetering and "who are already the equivalent of 1980s steelworkers," should be among the most fearful of a depression.

But they can't help themselves. Their contempt for the capitalism and free markets that have made so many of them comfortable is strong enough to make them wish for economic conditions not in their best interests -- and it comes through loud and clear almost every time they report.

And of course, with the economy slowing, the AP feverishly wishes that Obama will bring it to a stop with tons of business-choking global warming regulations.

As one of Tim Blair's readers quipped on Friday:

Obama has besmirched the "Office of the President Elect" more than anyone in American history.

In mid-November, When Obama's transition team fired up Photoshop, printed out their mock "Office of the President-Elect" signs and pasted them to Obama's lectern, the media, weary of covering the real president during the final two months of his administration (except when the Florsheims fly, of course) ate it up. Itchy with anticipation over the transition and already used to giving their candidate maximum media exposure (and plenty of cover), they were thrilled to report on his press conferences as if he already was the president--why bother with the stuffy formality of transferring power in January?

And then we all learned how to pronounce the word "Blagojevich."

With a little bit of political jujitsu in mind, this weekend, the RNC responded with this ad:

Hot Air's Allahpundit asks, "Should the RNC have waited on this? No benefit of the doubt during the interregnum, at least?"

In 2000, there was plenty of doubt, and very little of it beneficial, thrown by the out party at their successors during the transition period.

Having established the precedent, why would they think the urge to attack during what was once a calm and orderly transition would cease?

Richard Fernandez compares and contrasts conversations with nature, then and now.

(Has anyone talked with the wind lately? It could be jealous for the attention.)

"The single best thing about the election of Obama, may be that we now have a chance to view the terror threat without the distorting lens of Bush hatred."

Hey, let's give the left some credit for this--they finally found something in government worth cutting.

Jennifer Rubin adds:

How magnanimous of Biden to recommend his own irrelevancy. The funniest part of this article is the willingness of the reporter, with a straight face, to convey the Biden spin that this was "all his idea." Yeah. I'm sure President-elect Obama pleaded with him, "Joe, I need to to coordinate national security. I need you to oversee economic recovery. I need you to be charged with Congressional relations." But, of course, Biden declined. Oh, please.

The good news is that the one Biden's specialty will be labor issues. So, if the least significant person in the administration gets this in his portfolio, maybe "card check" isn't so high on the agenda after all.

If the office of the veep really is shrinking as much as the Politico states, there's a suggestion proffered by NBC as to where those funds could be used...

Or, Day By The Day The Earth Stood Still: Cartoonist Chris Muir has some fun with the latest pointless Hollywood remake.

Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt has some surprisingly kind words about a new film based on one of his early employers.

Finally, a lesson in tolerance and acceptance of diversity from actress Kate Beckinsale. Wonder if she's a Linda Ronstadt fan?

Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed toupee.

(Via VodkaPundit.)

The latest edition of PJM Political on Sirius XM's POTUS channel is now online, with host Steve Green of VodkaPundit, James Lileks, Rick Moran, Glenn Reynolds and Michelle Malkin and myself all discussing the Blagojevich blowup, plus Roger Simon and Charles Johnson on the state of Dan Rather's lawsuit against CBS.

Tune in here to listen.

John Nolte and Christian Toto watch Keanu Reeves's pointless remake of the classic 1951 sci-fi gem, The Day The Earth Stood Still so you don't have to. (Incidentally, when Hollywood makes yet another global warming movie and even the leftwing critics don't like it, you know the celluloid deserves to be cut up into guitar picks.)

Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds notes that the producers chose to digitally beam the film into space. If there's life on other planets, how will they respond?

Probably with two messages:

1. Make better movies. Which is what aliens told Woody Allen in his self-indulgent, surrealistic Stardust Memories from 1980.

2. Send more Chuck Berry! To borrow the punchline of an early Saturday Night Live sketch when a Voyager probe from 1977 sent an LP into space that included the classic "Johnny Be Goode" amongst its recordings.

Update: Get a load of the screenshot that accompanies "Klaatu barada crappo" at Protein Wisdom.

The inadvertent Desperate Housewives edition of a German scientific publication.

(Via Maggie's Farm.)

Jennifer Rubin writes that the Cook County tactics that put Illinois' Gov. Blagojevich on the national radar in the first place may well be remedied by...more Cook County tactics:

You can't beat those pols from Illinois. Faced with the most vivid display of lawlessness and base corruption in recent memory, they seek a solution that shows no regard for legality. The state's Attorney General (who may or may not have been one of the enumerated Senate Candidates in the criminal complaint) is heading to court to declare Blago "unfit" and get him removed immediately, without impeachment proceedings. Because impeachment takes so long - and will, by the way, increase calls in the interim for a special election (rather than appointment by Blago's eventual Democratic successor) to fill the empty Senate seat. So an end-around to get rid of the lawbreaker -- the "perfect" Illinois solution.

Read the whole thing.

Update: Via Instapundit, related thoughts from Ann Althouse.

As Christian Toto writes, while Roger Ebert has always been a man of the left, his BDS seems to be getting the better of him these days. In his otherwise appropriately middling review of the Keanu Reeves remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still, Ebert opines:

The message of the 2008 version is that we should have voted for Al Gore. This didn't require Klaatu and Gort. That's what I'm here for.

To which Christian replies:

Really? I thought you were here to help the public decide the best way to spend their hard-earned money at their local theater. Maybe that whole "thumb" thing was just a distraction.

Exactly. But Ebert really lets his 1960s-minted BDS flag fly in his review of Frost/Nixon:

Strange, how a man once so reviled has gained stature in the memory. How we cheered when Richard M. Nixon resigned the presidency! How dramatic it was when David Frost cornered him on TV and presided over the humiliating confession that he had stonewalled for three years. And yet how much more intelligent, thoughtful and, well, presidential, he now seems, compared to the occupant of the office from 2001 to 2009.

That's not strange, that's what the media does to every Republican president when he leaves office when comparing him to a successor from his same party. Why should Nixon be the exception?

More Ebert:

Nixon was thought to have been destroyed by Watergate and interred by the Frost interviews. But wouldn't you trade him in a second for Bush?

Nahh, I'm not a wage and price controls kind of guy. But that's the great irony of Nixon's presidency, as Tom Wicker of the New York Times wrote in his 1991 biography of Nixon. If the left could have gotten past their hatred of the man, they would found, particularly in his statist warmed over Great Society domestic policies, he really was one of them, to paraphrase Wicker's title--or at least he certainly governed like it.

While Ebert naturally gives the movie four stars, John Nolte provides a bit of much-needed perspective:

Frost/Nixon is a full on respectable, accomplished and intelligent retelling of the now famous series of interviews English television personality David Frost conducted with disgraced former President Nixon in 1977, just a few years after Nixon's resignation. No one can argue a successful stageplay hasn't been transformed into a beautifully shot narrative with two memorable performances by Frank Langella as Nixon and Michael Sheen as Frost. The film holds your attention and reeks of competence from beginning to end.

All that's missing is a point.

* * *

Frost/Nixon rates as an impressive television movie, but as a feature it lacks a point, any kind of real intellectual curiosity, and, most of all, an ambition to do more than win awards. There's a great Nixon film to be made about this corrupt but fascinating man, but a couple of terrific lead performances won't help anyone remember this one for very long.

Even Ebert circuitously admits that the film is a show about a show about nothing:

[Nixon] admitted what everyone already knew, and that freed him to get on with things, to end his limbo in San Clemente, Calif., to give other interviews, to write books, to be consulted as an elder statesman. Indeed, to show his face in public.

Wait--didn't you start your article by saying that Nixon was "interred by the Frost interviews"? So the interview that interred Nixon freed him to get on with things?

In actuality, the interview was hardly the heavyweight slugfest the movie and its hagiographic critics make it out to be. At National Review, Fred Schwarz goes back to the newspaper reviews of Frosts' interviews with Nixon to see how they played at the time with a media still giddy over their recent victory:

To someone who was around back then, the idea of making a major motion picture about such a notorious fizzle seems bizarre; you might as well write an opera about "The Mystery of Al Capone's Vault." Is this just a case of memory being deceptive? Were the interviews really a landmark of a milestone of a watershed, as the publicists assert? To test this, I looked back at the reception they got in the media of the time.

The show's producers secured lavish advance coverage by giving virtually everyone with a press card some sort of "leak": transcripts, unedited video, production notes, briefing materials, correspondence. The week of the broadcast, Nixon was on the cover of both Time and Newsweek, in that long-vanished era when those publications were considered influential. In the days leading up to the broadcast, the Washington Post ran several solid pages of Watergate transcripts and analysis, flashing back to the glory days of 1973.

After the airing of the first interview -- the only one anybody cared about, since it contained all the Watergate material -- there was far less hoopla. The Post's Bob Woodward, Nixon's erstwhile tormentor, called it "a much-touted television interview which shed little new light on the scandal."

Elsewhere in the Post, Haynes Johnson's analysis dripped with disappointment: "[The former president] proceeded, for the next 90 minutes, to give us all the familiar Nixon responses we have all seen for more than a generation. Those advance reports about Nixon being broken -- or shattered -- or even shaken by the withering interrogation of David Frost are in error. Nixon is in control throughout. He offers little that is new, and less that is of substance." Johnson continued: "Last night's program was billed as a dramatic and historic encounter between Nixon and his opponent, the relentless David Frost. It was nothing of the sort. . . . By the very end of the program, Frost looks as though he's swept up by the Nixon responses. . . . The tables have been turned. Frost had met his match."

The New York Times, in a brief, unsigned "Week in Review" item a few days later, echoed the been-there, done-that theme: "The spectacle was a familiar one . . . he portrayed himself, in typically Nixonian terms and gestures, as a victim of circumstance whose errors sprang from good intentions. . . . No important factual information about Watergate emerged from the interview."

* * *

How did this one-day story suddenly become the most important event since the Civil War? Well, if there's anything the media loves more than overhyping an anti-Republican story, it's overhyping its own importance, so when they have a chance to do both at once, it's no surprise that they get a little too excited.

As I wrote here last year, Frost/Nixon is an attempt to use history, assisted by plenty of dramatic license, to retrospectively turn a loss into a win. By all accounts, Frost/Nixon does a fine job of dramatizing the negotiations and preparation that led up to the interviews. And it's hard to imagine Frank Langella, who plays a Brezhnev-looking Nixon, giving a bad performance. Still, the movie's fundamental premise is just plain wrong.

The trailer says: "In 1974 President Nixon resigned to hide the truth. But one man had a few questions." In fact, Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment; "the truth" was contained in congressional transcripts, court papers, and Oval Office tapes, and the great bulk of it came out before Frost and Nixon sat down for their "historic" clash. Some questions did remain unanswered: Why would anyone bug the DNC? Why didn't Nixon burn the tapes? Where did the 18-1/2 minute gap come from? But Frost never brought these up.

All that his much-vaunted interviews "revealed" was the unsurprising truth that, even in retirement, Richard Nixon was the same Tricky Dick he had always been.

As Orrin Judd concludes in his review of Wicker's biography:

It is perhaps the perfect punishment that Nixon has no one left to defend him now except for the same liberals who were his lifelong enemies. One imagines Richard Nixon spinning in his grave at the very thought of a NY Times columnist penning a 700 page apologia for his life and works, and one smiles.

And as John Nolte writes:

Since 1976's All The President's Men Nixon's become a genre all his own. Take a look.

My personal favorite is Robert Altman's Secret Honor, starring Philip Baker Hall and a half gallon bottle of Chivas Regal, and its Blagojevichian conclusion. (Language warning, but the video clip's here.)

Nixon was still very much alive when the 1984 film was made; while I don't know his response, I'd like think that deep down inside, he very much enjoyed, even a decade after he left office, still being able to cause that embittered a reaction amongst the left.

(And as for Nixon's interviewer? Much like Dan Rather's banishment to the cable purgatory of HD-Net, Frost has also been exiled to his own video Siberia.)

Great moments in awareness raising through pneumonia inducement:

About 60 people took a frigid dip into Walden Pond on Dec. 6, 2008 as part of the Polar Bear Plunge. The event was planned to raise awareness on global warming.

As Tim Blair writes, "Let's hope someone pays attention. The handful of previous awareness-raising efforts have barely been noticed."

If you gnashed your teeth at Nick Gillespie's video look at Hollywood's obsession with terrorist chic, you're really going to hate "'Che' It Ain't So", Kyle Smith's review of Steven Soderbergh's endless encomium to everyone's favorite murderous thug and T-shirt icon. For the rest of us, here's a sample:

Meet Che Guevara. Just think of him as Jesus plus Abraham Lincoln with a touch of Moses and Dr. Doug Ross. After 4 1/2 hours of watching Dr. Ernesto "Che" Guevara heal the sick, teach the illiterate, daze the women, execute the lawless, defeat the corrupt, uplift the peasantry and spew the sound bite, I was convinced there would be a scene in which he turned water to Bacardi.

You can't spell cliche without "Che." And as I endured this mad dream directed - or perhaps committed - by Steven Soderbergh, I wondered where I'd seen it all before. The booted stomping through the greensward, the jungly target shooting? It's a remake of Woody Allen's "Bananas," right? Minus punch lines - or perhaps with them. "We are in a difficult situation," Che observes, at a point when his army is surrounded and forced to eat its horses.

The story of the Argentine doctor Ernesto "Che" Guevara is played with much broody self-importance by Benicio Del Toro. It will be shown in two parts after its one-week opening run. That way, on consecutive evenings, it can bore everyone but activist grad students.

Read the whole thing.

"Italian guitarist stabbed, allegedly for 'sounding evil'."

The traditional conventional wisdom (and by "traditional conventional wisdom", I mean about as far back as 2002), Bloggers are one-man bands, guys in their pajamas (to coin a phrase) producing material without the traditional infrastructure and interpersonal cooperation found in mass media.

The new conventional wisdom from mass media? Where do we sign up:

Under a new agreement reached this week with its labor unions, WUSA, Channel 9, will become the first station in Washington to replace its crews with one-person "multimedia journalists" who will shoot and edit news stories single-handedly.

The change will blur the distinctions between the station's reporters and its camera and production people. Reporters will soon be shooting and editing their own stories, and camera people will be doing the work of reporters, occasionally appearing on the air or on in video clips on Channel 9's Web site.

For decades, TV journalists have worked in teams, with the lines of responsibility regulated by union rules or simple tradition. Stories were covered by a crew consisting of a camera operator and a correspondent (and further back, by a sound or lighting technician); their work was overseen by a producer and their footage assembled into a finished story by an editor.

But technology -- handheld or tripod-mounted cameras, laptop editing programs and the Internet -- have made it possible for one person to handle all those assignments, station managers say.

Gosh--there's a shocking new development.

Welcome to the 21st century, guys--we'll be glad to show you around.

An editor at the The Hill claims that "death threats" are keeping Rahm Emanuel from attending press conferences to discuss the Blagojevich meltdown. As Mark Finkelstein writes:

Which would be the safer place to be for a political figure who's received death threats?:

a. A school concert in a public venue.
b. A press conference in the company of the President-elect of the United States of America.

If you answered 'b,' you're thinking like me and presumably most people. If you answered 'a,' you're A.B. Stoddard. The associate editor of "The Hill" offered up the strange excuse that death threats are preventing Rahm Emanuel from attending press conferences in the course of an MSNBC appearance this afternoon during which she also claimed that "President-elect Obama is taking steps to be as forthcoming and as open and as transparent as he promised he would be."

Presumably "The Office of the President Elect" has amongst it perks a phalanx of Secret Service agents at every press conference, in addition to dozens of journalists eager to take a bullet for either man.

Meanwhile, a possible reason (or maybe not) why Rahm's been remiss.

As Jim Geraghty notes, President Elect Obama is currently floating a "Nuclear Umbrella for Israel" proposal.

As Jim writes, the left will have kittens when they find out who first proposed it.

(H/T: FM)

Having aided in his defeat for the White House, the media are now allowing John McCain to safely inherit the role of inoffensive elder GOP statesman-as-lovable-loser role last worn comfortably in the late 1990s by Bob Dole.

Meanwhile even with McCain's campaign concluded, the incompetence wears on.

In contrast, "The Other McCain" offers a roadmap for GOP recovery, here.

Dissent: It's the highest form of patriotism. But patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

As others have pointed out, two of the most popular cliches among the left form quite a paradox. The Hill reports that Jennifer Granholm, Michigan's Democratic governor called the Senate "un-American" for voting against the auto bailout. (AKA further socialization of the automobile industry.)

Back in late September, during that week's Federal bailout, Rich Lowry wrote:

Pelosi unloads on House Republicans. Why is it always OK for Democrats to call Republicans "unpatriotic"?

Ramesh Ponnuru had the perfect reply: "Because it has no sting."

Or, "Journalism--The Unknown Ideal", to paraphrase a lesser known, but equally appropriate title.

The media are fixating on Rod Blagojevich's helmet hair as a sign that he's "nuts", as Vanity Fair dubbed the Illinois Democrat. It allows for plenty of cheap jokes--and we're as guilty of that as anybody. But as P.J. Gladnick writes, it also allows journalists to ignore the bigger question they'd much rather avoid:

Will other media outlets also promote the idea of Blagovich as insane due to perfectly groomed hair? Hmm... John Edwards also had an obsession over his hair so there just might be something to it. Of course, insanity as evidenced by great hair is a much more palatable excuse for Democrats and their media allies than the fact that Blagojevich was a typical member of the corrupt Chicago political machine.

And for background on that machine, Reason.TV looks at "Crook County":

...At least until next year, according to John Hawkins.

From Wired magazine, "Rare Sci-Fi Movie Props Hit Auction Block."

Over at Commentary's Contentions blog, J.G. Thayer spots "The Death Of An Axiom":

One of the most lasting legacies of Watergate were these words of wisdom: "it's not the crime, it's the cover-up." At the time of Watergate, it quickly became apparent that Richard Nixon was not directly involved in the most egregious offenses committed by his underlings, but when he learned what happened he helped orchestrate attempts to cover up and conceal it. It was for those actions, not some "second-rate burglary," that Nixon was bound for impeachment before he resigned.

But it appears that Barack Obama is well on his way to erasing that decades-old rule.

He also links to this timeline at The Volokh Conspiracy, which notes, "Everything Fits Easily Except Obama's Monday Denial."

Nick Gillespie debunks Che chic in awesome new video from Reason.TV:

I was glad to see this moment from 2005 mentioned--and described as "Wearing a swastika in a synagogue."

Update: If you gnashed your teeth at Nick Gillespie's video look at Hollywood's obsession with terrorist chic, you're really going to hate "'Che' It Ain't So", Kyle Smith's review of Steven Soderbergh's endless encomium to everyone's favorite murderous thug and T-shirt icon. For the rest of us, don't miss it.

Leggo my Bla-lego-vich!

BREAKING!--and entirely Photoshopped!--"news" at Iowhawk.com: Feds Seize Blagojevich eBay Account.

Now available at Ace, TrueValue, Home Depot and Edwards Air Force Base, the Sikorsky Weedwacker:

The Wall Street Journal notes, "In Chicago, Political Celebration Gives Way to Political Shame:"

The pride that's been surging through this city since Barack Obama's presidential victory last month is showing signs of deflating now that political corruption has returned to center stage in Illinois.

To many residents, the arrest of Gov. Rod Blagojevich for, among other things, allegedly trying to sell the president-elect's vacated senate seat marked an end to the political glow the city has been basking in.

"It was as if Chicago politics had turned a corner and this was a new day," said Sean Kennedy, former president of a student Democrat organization at Loyola University here. "All of a sudden, we get pulled back into reality, and realize nothing in Chicago has changed that much."

Gosh, there's a shocker. Meanwhile, despite being a target-rich environment there's "Not Much Humor in the Blagosphere", according to Yeah Right:

I haven't done an exhaustive search, but I'm pretty disappointed in the lack of funny material online on the Rod Blagojevich scandal. I mean, brazen corruption + lotsa obscenity + awesome name. In my book, that ought to = comedy gold. Perhaps its just that the reality is funny enough that it is stunting the creativity of our nation's funnymen who seem to be struggling IMHO.

One of their links goes to Blagojevich's Gary Hart moment from earlier this week:




Finally, though reasonable people may disagree, looking at Blagojevich's freeze-dried hair, I'd say now we know who Christopher Reeve donated his toupees to.

Just to follow up on our link earlier today to Virginia Postrel's post on "Depression Porn", Culture11 explores "Recession Chic" in the fashion magazine industry--"Who knew an economic collapse could be so fabulous?"

Meanwhile over at Ace of Spades, "U.S. Economy In Recession; Women, Minorities, and [B.S.] Artists Hardest Hit."

Back in early 2005, Howard Fineman of Newsweek wrote:

A political party is dying before our eyes -- and I don't mean the Democrats. I'm talking about the "mainstream media," which is being destroyed by the opposition (or worse, the casual disdain) of George Bush's Republican Party; by competition from other news outlets (led by the internet and Fox's canny Roger Ailes); and by its own fraying journalistic standards.

Looks like Howard's employer didn't take his advice:

Facing increased costs of postage and maintaining its circulation, Newsweek has been quietly considering a drop its circulation guarantee by a million copies or more, FOLIO: has learned.

Executives at Newsweek began discussing a rate base rollback as early as this summer, according to a pair of sources familiar with these discussions.

Both sources say that the magazine is considering slashing up to 1.6 million copies from Newsweek's current rate base of 2.6 million, which would put the magazine's rate base at 1 million.

Newsweek declined to comment.

"A million [rate base] was the extreme," said the source. But, as the year wore on, and the economic crisis worsened, "[they] didn't see a recovery."

'Thought Leader'

Aside from the cost of maintaining such a high circulation, Newsweek would like to transition from newsmagazine to "thought leader," something more akin to the Economist. "[Editor Jon] Meacham and [Time editorial director Richard] Stengel are both infatuated with the Economist," the source said. "To get that 'thought leader' position, a million is the sweet spot." The Economist's rate base in North America is 714,000.

In addition to Fineman's warning from 2005, these recent moments will stand as key mile markers on Newsweek's decent into Thought Leaderdom.

Update: More news of fresh disaster: "Hit by Recession, NPR to Lay Off Seven Percent of Staff."

Jonathan Last notes that the Gray Lady isn't exactly helping herself win converts with its latest ad campaign. And in news regarding another medium, AP spots "broadcasters having bad year":

Broadcast TV's fall season is going so poorly that four out of five returning programs have a smaller audience than they had in 2007.

Say, this trend deserves a name, don't you think?

Related: I can certainly sympathize with the image Photoshopped by Doug Ross that accompanies this post: "Newspaper CEOs rearrange deck chairs in closed-door 'Crisis Summit." This chart helps to explain that image.

(Found via Free Canuckistan.)

How much are the media in the tank for Obama? Enough so that they'll happily toss inconvenient articles down the memory hole for him.

This morning, Ann Althouse wrote:

Why am I getting the feeling that the mainstream media will do what it can to obliterate the connection between Rod Blagojevich and Barack Obama?

It's more than a feeling, to quote those sage philosophers from Boston.

Meanwhile, Ed Morrissey spots plenty of airbrushing at Obama's Change.gov site.

"Engraved in beautiful Helvetica!" Really, doesn't everyone on your list deserve one of these?





(H/T: John McCormack)

Found on Terry Teachout's About Last Night blog:

"I have never thought about what I was doing in terms of art, or 'this is great,' or 'world-shaking,' or anything like that. To me, it was always a job of work--which I enjoyed immensely--and that's it."

--John Ford, 1966

Over at Commentary's Contentions blog, Jennifer Rubin asks if Gov. Blagojevich is "Crazy or Corrupt?"

Like others, I wondered after reading the criminal complaint whether Gov. Blagojevich isn't just plain crazy. He thinks he's going to spruce up his image and run for President in 2016. He thinks he's going to get the Chicago Tribune to fire a columnist who suggested he deserved impeachment. He thinks he's going to get the President-elect to give him a huge job "in exchange" for a Senate seat. This is wacky stuff -- as if he was caught in a 1950's time warp, or a bad "B" movie. No one, even in Chicago, goes quite this far.

And were the people around him -- his chief of staff and Advisors A and B, not to mention Andy Stern -- similarly addled or were they playing along and humoring a lunatic? It seems peculiar that no one apparently said, "Oh, c'mon Governor. Barack Obama isn't giving you anything." Perhaps there was such a voice of sanity, and we'll hear it at trial.

Although I'm appalled, I'm more intrigued by the mendacity, bordering on insanity. How does some one function in a high office with such a loose grip on reality? And yes, Barack Obama did have some relationship with him, so it would be interesting to know if he ever perceived the governor of his state as a bit delusional. He did support him for governor twice, but perhaps he was duped too and didn't pick up on Blago's personal and mental failings.

The story will come out soon enough. But the most fascinating part is yet to be told -- how someone this unhinged gets to be governor and gets re-elected without anyone blowing the whistle.

Meanwhile, even though I'm pretty sure he'd wouldn't disagree with the second half of Jennifer's equation, Scott Johnson focuses on the first part, here: "Is Blago Nuts?"

With Hollywood beginning to sweat the economy, The Onion suggests a remake they just can't refuse.

(Via Yeah Right, a blog "for those of us who love pop culture but loathe the Left.")

Warner Todd Huston compares and contrasts 2008 and 2001:

Jonathan Alter was an early accuser of new President George W. Bush when he and VP Cheney began to try to warn the country that an economic downturn was well underway as he was taking office. As Bush tried to warn the nation, the media jumped all over him for "talking down the economy." Yet, as we watch the reporting of Obama's current down talking of the economy, the media has said nothing similar to the condemnation reigned upon Bush.

The myth that people like Alter was pushing in 2001 was that Clinton bequeathed a good economy to Bush, but the reality was that the spiral had already begun to fall into negative territory months before Bush took office. Despite that obvious downturn, the media formed a chorus of attacking Bush for being too negative in the face of the American people. On March 26, Alter unleashed his Newsweek piece headlined "Thanks Ever So Much, President Poor-Mouth." Alter called Bush's warnings "risky and unusual," and made the pronouncement that Bush was wrong to do so. "Even if Bush turns out to be right in his predictions of gloom," Alter wrote, "that doesn't mean he was right to make them."

On CNN, Lou Waters needled Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer on January 12, 2001 about the "politicalization " of the economy. "President Clinton, sort of, answered that as well today. He's talking up the economy. There are economists who say you guys are talking down the economy. What's happening here in this transition period, the whole, sort of, politicalization [of the economy]...," Waters said.

On March 19, The New York Times scolded Bush that presidents were supposed to be "cheerleaders for the nation's economy."

Yet, has anyone seen any similar scolding of the new "cheerleader" in chief, Obama? Has anyone seen an Alter sternly scolding Obama for "poor-mouthing" the economy? Has there been any hectoring from CNN over Obama's grave warnings? Where is The New York Times beating up that downcast Obama?

Why would the media complain about Obama, when they're doing a remarkable job of talking down the economy themselves, as Virginia Postrel notes:

If anyone should fear a Depression, it should be journalists, who are already the equivalent of 1980s steelworkers. But instead, they seem positively giddy with anticipation at the prospect of a return to '30s-style hardship--without, of course, the real hardship of the 1930s. (We're all yuppies now.)

Read the whole thing.

John Hawkins makes his list here.

There are lots of great blogs on John's list who are well worth your time. Personally though, I'd like to find a blog that cranked out a weekly show on Sirius XM radio that also featured others in the Blogosphere, and regularly uploaded new videos on topics of interest to conservatives, in addition to blogging every day.

I know it's out there somewhere.

Silicon Graffiti means great video...in any language!

Tom Blumer believes he's spotted Obama's equivalent to his Democratic predecessor's Lewinsky statement, here.

Read More »

PBS's Sesame Street music used to break terrorist wills in Gitmo!

Isn't interdepartmental cooperation nice to see? Sure, government is ever-expanding, but it's great when two very different, and often highly competitive agencies are working together to keep us safe.

And tunes from other PBS shows are being used as well:

Bob Singleton, whose song "I Love You" is beloved by legions of preschool Barney fans, wrote in a newspaper opinion column that any music can become unbearable if played loudly for long stretches.

"It's absolutely ludicrous," he wrote in the Los Angeles Times. "A song that was designed to make little children feel safe and loved was somehow going to threaten the mental state of adults and drive them to the emotional breaking point?"

He said with a deep and abiding understanding of the irony of the situation, knowing full well that he's driven millions of parents to the emotional breaking point having to listen to his music over and over and over and over again.

(H/T: CG)

Reuters: "Obama Seen Untouched by Illinois Governor Charges."

Meanwhile, as Mary Katharine Ham notes, "No need to wait for Obama to frame the issue when the Associated Press knows his favorite words already. They are great students of his oratory, after all." AP rather subjectively reports (emphasis MKH):

Though Barack Obama isn't accused of anything, the charges against his home-state governor - concerning Obama's own Senate seat no less--are an unwelcome distraction. And the ultimate fallout is unclear.

As Obama works to set up his new administration and deal with a national economic crisis, suddenly he also is spending time and attention trying to distance himself from Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and charges that the governor was trying to sell the now-vacant Senate post.

Ham writes that there's another "distraction" added by AP "just a few paragraphs later, after a vigorous defense of Obama and a rigorous downplaying of his connections to Blago":

Still, at the very least, the episode amounts to a distraction for Obama at an inopportune time just six weeks before he's sworn into office. It also raises the specter of notorious Chicago politics, an image Obama has tried to distance himself from during his career.

As MKH adds, "The story goes on to castigate mean Republicans who just won't let the issue drop, already. Again, the AP should just drop the grown-up words and write with emoticons. The picture associated with the story even features Obama wearing a frowny face. The pathos!"

We should be sympathetic though. After all, it's not easy for a legacy media at the tail end of the Red Queen's Race, when their favorite hologram needs a little help.

Bernard Chapin interviews the great Theodore Dalrymple on "The Decay and Fall of the West."

Related: And here's quite a mile marker on the road to perdition.

Back at the Republican Convention in Minneapolis, Steve Green handed me one of these bumper stickers, which Joe the Plumber sounds like he's in full agreement with:

I'm not going to speak for the Democrats but I mean, the Republicans didn't put out a candidate for us to really vote for. It's the lesser of two evils.

As Ace's co-blogger Drew M. writes, "Ah poor Maverick, no one really liked him. Alas, I'm sure he'll spend the next 4 years getting even with those of us who voted for him."

(H/T: TV)

"A new bull market? By one yardstick, it's here."

With a little help from his friendly local Pepsi-Cola bottler ad men, James Lileks charts the decline and fall of western civilization, from Don Draper grown-up swankiness in 1958 to earnest granola-munching, acoustic guitar-strumming pseudo-hippies in 1970.

Sure, blaming the fall of postwar American culture on one soft drink's ad campaign is asking a lot--but we are talking about a company that named an entire generation after its products, after all.

Before concluding with the perfect epitaph for the 42nd president, Don Surber writes that for Dee Dee Myers, Bill Clinton's first press secretary, "Groping a cardboard cutout is worse than cheating on your wife for 30+ years."

While Rod Blagojevich's pay to play scandal involving Obama's soon-to-be-vacant Senate seat in Illinois has just broken, Ross Douthat does a nifty demolition job on the Washington Post's Ruth Marcus' case for Caroline Kennedy to replace Hillary's New York Senate Seat:

I don't know about Jesse Ventura, but I find Schwarzenegger and Sonny Bono's pre-political careers as self-made showbiz entrepreneurs - to say nothing of Jon Corzine's career in finance - much more impressive than anything Caroline Kennedy has ever done. Her life has been dedicated to worthy pursuits, by and large, but most of her accomplishments (fundraising for New York public schools, editing essay collections in honor of her father, etc.) are classic "born on third base" endeavors - laudable enough without being terribly impressive. And all of the names on Marcus's list actually submitted themselves to the democratic process on their way to the Senate, the House, and the California's Governor's Mansion; for an appointment to fill a vacant seat (especially a safe vacant seat), the bar ought to be set a bit higher than "she's more qualified than Sonny Bono."

But Caroline's case is easily made with the just four simple words: She's not Fran Dresher.

What he said! A collection of soundbites from Daniel J. Ikenson of the CATO Institute on the poor financial health of the domestic auto industry, and why bailing 37 years of bad decisions (by both the automakers and Federal regulators) is a terrible idea:

Meanwhile, the 2012 Pelosi GTxi SS/Rt Sport Edition is looking more and more like it will be a reality--thus guaranteeing even lower domestic auto sales post-bailout.

Update: The Brutal Truth.

As that hoary old newspaper cliche goes, the goal of journalism is "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable", a statement that makes a hash of any mid-20th century claims to "objectivity." But in the past, most journalists, print or video, paid lip service to the idea of being a champion of the little guy, the working man, Joe Six Pack, or whatever that particular week's fabulously outdated and only mildly paternalistic reference to Middle America was.

But that was a long time ago. On Sunday, Tom Brokaw suggested that President Elect Obama tank the economy even more, by sticking it to commuters' wallets:

Let's talk for a moment about consumer responsibility when it comes to the auto industries. As soon as gas prices dropped, consumers moved back to the larger cars once again. The SUVs are the big gas consumers. Why not take this opportunity to put a tax on gasoline, bump it back up to $4 a gallon where people were prepared to pay for that, and use that revenue for alternative energy and as a signal to the consumers: "Those days are gone. We're not going to have gasoline that you could just fill up your tank for 20 bucks anymore."

And of course, the Washington Post is also pretty cool with that idea.

Meanwhile, rather than letting the marketplace decide who sells books and who doesn't, New York Times columnist Timothy Egan doesn't want anyone infringing on his turf:

The unlicensed pipe fitter known as Joe the Plumber is out with a book this month, just as the last seconds on his 15 minutes are slipping away. I have a question for Joe: Do you want me to fix your leaky toilet?

I didn't think so. And I don't want you writing books.

Gosh, there's a shocker; Tim Blair makes quick work of Egan's arrogance--but it's merely the latest reminder that newspapers in general really don't want any competition for their territory.

Of course, they're not alone in that department.

Update: Not surprisingly, Iowahawk has a few japes at Egan's expense: "Silly Plumber, Lit Is For Crits!"

Tom McMahon diagrams Illinois governors then and now.

Wow, I really wish I had seen this 2007 clip from McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt, before I shot my "Red Queen's Race" video over the weekend.

As P.J. Gladnick of Newsbusters notes, Pruitt does a terrific Baghdad Bob impersonation--but only before invoking his heartfelt commitment to "philosophers and rock 'n' roll songs. Sometimes it's one and the same as with Lenny Kravitz's song from a few years ago, 'Dig In.'"

Just in time for Christmas, giant stuffed microbes--it's fun, educational, contagious and plush!

(Besides, any wet smack from Miskatonic University can give a Cthulu plush for Christmas--why not be original this year, huh?)

With the arrest today of Illinois' Gov. Rod "Name That Party" Blagojevich for trying to sell Obama's vacant Senate seat (corruption? In Chicago? I'm shocked!), Exurban League has a photo taken at Obama's upcoming press conference.

Update: While the obvious references are to the Untouchables, Blagojevich sounds far more like Joe Pesci in Scorsese's Casino, with his Tourette's-like four, eight and 12-letter verbal explosions. They've caused quite a run at the asterisk factory at ABC News.

Hugh Hewitt notes that President Elect Obama's desire to emulate enormous 1930s-style FDR public works projects may be thwarted by very 1970s-style environmental regulations designed to ensure that nothing gets built anywhere--even if it's by the state.

And it looks like the perfect go-between who spans both worlds may not be joining Team Barack.

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

Update: More from Roger Kimball.

"Hasselbeck said dryly, 'I'm not a natural blond.'"

Back in the earlier, funnier days of the show, a recurring sketch was "What If"--one of the more memorable occurred when Kirk Douglas hosted the show, and the writers asked, "What if Spartacus Had a Piper Cub."

This may be taking the concept to extremes, though.

Partying with Obama's 27-year-old speech writer.

December 7th? Hiroshima? Forget it, he's rolling.

I hadn't planned it this way when I started working on the new video late last week, but the timing of Monday's news of fresh disaster from old media makes the latest Silicon Graffiti remarkably timely.

But first, let's define the title.

From Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass:

"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else -- if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

Back in early 2007, I started wondering if the accelerating decline of print newspaper readership, media advertising revenues, and the upcoming election year were creating a strange new tone in the media. And near the tail-end of an election year in which the media weren't afraid to let you know who to vote for--and who they were voting for--Michael Malone of ABC and Pajamas Media wrote:

Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you've spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power . . . only to discover that you're presiding over a dying industry. The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent. Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared. Your job doesn't have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb. The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you'll lose your job before you cross that finish line, ten years hence, of retirement and a pension.

In other words, you are facing career catastrophe -and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway - all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.

And then the opportunity presents itself: an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career. With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived Fairness Doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe, be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.

And besides, you tell yourself, it's all for the good of the country . . .

So here's a look at how the media got there, beginning in sepia toned 1926 when mass media was born with the first radio networks, all the way to the days of the Web, the Blogosphere, and the surprising impact Craigslist has had on classified advertising revenue--and a look at declining newspaper advertising in general.

This accelerating downward spiral has completed unnerved much of old media--to the point where a newspaper in a city once known 160 years ago for its residents' spectacular success at mining for gold completely overlooked the solid gold story dropped into their laps, helping to create a remarkably holographic presidential candidate.

(For 21 or so older Silicon Graffiti videos, click here and keep scrolling. And a special thanks to my friend Jenifer Toksvig for doing such a terrific job of recording the opening narration.)

The Gray Lady sadly notes:

Representative William J. Jefferson was defeated by a little-known Republican lawyer here Saturday in a late-running Congressional election, underscoring the sharp demographic shifts in this city since Hurricane Katrina and handing Republicans an unexpected victory in a district that had been solidly Democratic.

The upset victory by the lawyer, Anh Cao, was thought by analysts to be the result of a strong turnout by white voters angered over federal corruption charges against Mr. Jefferson, a black Democrat who was counting on a loyal base to return him to Congress for a 10th term.

A majority of the district's voters are African-American, and analysts said lower turnout in the majority black precincts on Saturday meant victory for the Republican.

With all precincts reporting, Mr. Cao, who was born in Vietnam, had 49 percent of the vote to 46 percent for Mr. Jefferson, who had not conceded as of late Saturday night.

To paraphrase The Sweet Smell of Success, the cat's in the bag, and the bag's in the freezer.

Taken back-to-back, the last two paragraphs of the Times article are a hoot:

Mr. Cao, 41 and known as Joseph, fled Vietnam at age 8 after the fall of Saigon. His father was a army officer who was later imprisoned for seven years by the Communist government. Mr. Cao, who has never held elective office, has been an advocate for the small but prominent Vietnamese community here and has a master's degree in philosophy from Fordham University.

"Knocking Jefferson off is something you don't want to bet on," Elliott Stonecipher, a Louisiana political analyst, said Saturday night. "These elections continue to show us that there is a smaller, different and more progressive New Orleans that is emerging."

So electing a Republican who mercifully escaped Vietnam after American liberals of the 1970s left the nation to be slaughtered by the Vietcong and who ousted one of the most infamously corrupt Democrats of recent years counts as a "more progressive New Orleans"?

Hey, fine with me! It's rare that the Times sees a move to the right as progress, but I'll take it.

Update: Over at The "Moderate" Voice, Jazz Shaw makes a cheap shot that moves by so quickly, it's worthy of the drive-by legacy media:

Ed Driscoll doesn't seem terribly interested in a post-racial society, but will take a win in the GOP column any day of the week.

Hmmm--how does Jazz know I'm not "interested in a post-racial society"? Isn't a Vietnamese immigrant becoming a congressman in a district in which, as the Times article I quoted above notes, "a majority of the district's voters are African-American" actually a perfect example of a post-racial society?

"New York Times Baffled How a Conservative, Oil-Drilling State Isn't in Recession."

(H/T: RSM)

"Frontrunner for best star memoir cover art EVER."

(Via Terry Teachout, who notes--and he's right--"the title's not too shabby either.")

The Rosetta Stone of humor is here--and the punchlines are endless.

Update: Found via STACLU, here's a bottomless well of bad (and needless to say reverential) Obama art. What would the response be if the ideologies were reversed, and it was a Website full of worshipful Reagan or Dubya art?

And you thought Olbermann and Matthews bit people's heads off at MSNBC:

Earlier today, we covered the character decline in American public discourse. The great Theodore Dalrymple has a look at British character, "from self-restraint to self-indulgence" in his latest City Journal essay, now online.

(Via the fine wholesale blogmerchants at Paco Enterprises.)

2009: A Smoot-Hawley Odyssey: As we've noted before, two of the four horsemen of the apocalypse could gearing up for quite a ride.

Related: I'm pretty sure this is a sign of the apocalypse as well.

Also Related: " Obama as Lincoln? Obama as FDR? How about Obama as Hoover? Now there's a real story."

Exploring the horrific death of Long Island Wal-Mart employee Jdimytai Damour, Kirsten Powers writes, "Incivility isn't just accepted these days--from celebrity news to TV shows--it's glorified:"

Last week, the Oxygen Network debuted the third season of "The Bad Girls Club" - like seemingly all reality shows, a toxic celebration of rude, mentally unbalanced people shrieking at each other.

Oxygen's Web site features a section hailing these "Destructive Divas": "From home break-ins to club toss-outs, these girls are bad. The girls get kicked out of three clubs - all in the premier episode!"

The show is the most-watched Oxygen original series ever.

One "bad girl" brags on the premiere: "I like to push people's buttons. I have jealousy issues, I'm very rude, conniving, and opinionated . . . I'm just a bad person to know. If someone was picking on me because I was, like, a cute blonde girl, my first instinct would be to tell them they are ugly."

I would plow over someone at a Wal-Mart to get my hands on discounted lip gloss.

P.M. Forni co-founded the Johns Hopkins Civility Project in 1997, and has rung the alarm bells on the collapse of civility. While Americans still have manners, he says, we've lost "the manners of past generations."

Big deal, some will say - those "manners" are just outdated customs. No, Forni argues in his book "Choosing Civility": They're the glue that holds society together.

Compare Long Island 2008 with Manhattan in 1939.

(Found via Kathy Shaidle, who has some thoughts on both Powers' essay and the misremembered legend of Kitty Genovese. For my own recent video look at anger in America, click here.)

"How Can We Make The Iraq War More Handicap Accessible?"

"Berkeley Grandma Sues Over Canceled Iraq Embed"

Which headline is real and which is satire? You make the call!

(H/T: NB)

Jennifer Rubin compares Al Franken to Humphrey Bogart---um, sort of.

Reuters reports that Iran is cracking down on "satanic" clothing--Satanic in this meaning, "tight trousers and high boots."

I guess from the Imams' point of view, Nancy Sinatra is the Anti-Christ. Or maybe Suzi Quatro.

More Reuters:

Some analysts say the authorities fear such open acts of defiance against the Islamic Republic's values could escalate if they go unchecked. This worries them when Iran is under pressure from the West over its disputed nuclear work, they say.

"Some individuals, not knowing what culture they are imitating, put on clothing that was designed by the enemies of this country," Rahmani said.

"The enemies of this country are trying to divert our youth and breed them the way they want and deprive them of a healthy life," he added.

Rahmani did not say how the offenders would be punished. Usual penalties are a warning or a fine.

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has in the past suggested Iran's enemies may try to stage a "soft" or "velvet" revolution by infiltrating corrupt culture or ideas.

I'd love to see Iran have its own Velvet Revolution--it certainly worked well in another corrupt culture well that was well worth infiltrating.

"Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says the Democrats' plan to tap the Wall Street rescue fund to save U.S. automakers doesn't have the votes to pass."

As Steve Green adds, "Keep your fingers crossed. Chapter 11 is the only way to save GM, and probably Ford. Chrysler (except for Jeep and maybe Dodge Trucks) is a goner."

Victor Davis Hanson notes that the lights are going out in the state of California--and he paints a remarkably grim forecast going forward.

But how did the Golden State lose its luster? That's the subject of this recent article in The American.

Update: At the Corner, Victor dubs the state "the left-wing version of Lehman Brothers"--even though Lehman had far more effective salesmen than some of California's leading industries.

As John Stossel writes, "Government Sets Us Up for the Next Bust":

We are in the mess we're in precisely because of earlier government interference. Easy mortgage terms and guarantees contrived a housing boom and irresponsible lending that could not be sustained. The consequences have shaken the foundation of the financial industry. But instead of freeing the market and allowing the errors to be corrected, the government is seducing the economy into a whole new set of errors. That will lead to the next bust.

"But doesn't the government have to act?" people ask. "We can't just let financial companies fail!"

I say, Why not?

Jim Rogers, the successful investor and author, puts it well: "Why are we bailing out Citibank? Why are 300 million Americans having to pay for Citibank's mistakes? The way the system is supposed to work [is this]: People fail. And then the competent people take over the assets from the failed people, and then you start again with a new stronger base. What we're doing this time is ... taking the assets from the competent people, giving them to the incompetent people, and saying, "OK, now you can compete with the competent people." So everybody's weakened: The whole nation is weakened, the whole economy is weakened. That's not the way it's supposed to work."

Bill Gates must have whiplash after what he went through in the late 1990s. Government and big business have devolved into quite a dysfunctional relationship--when government isn't seeking to punish businesses (marketing consultant Dan Kennedy believes he's spotted the next soft target for the same sort of raping the tobacco industry received in the mid-1990s), its representatives are literally telling another that bankruptcy is "not an option."

As Stossel writes, why the heck not?

(H/T: CG)

Related: "Poll: 61% oppose auto bailout."

Last year, Bill Kristol described one of the knocks against what Tom Brokaw dubbed "The Greatest Generation"--they begat the morally soft Baby Boomer generation, who took for granted the comforts their parents fought so hard for:

There really was greatness in the "greatest generation." It fought and won World War II, then came home to achieve widespread prosperity and overcome segregation while seeing the Cold War through to a successful conclusion. But the greatest generation had one flaw, its greatest flaw, you might say: It begat the baby boomers.

The most prominent of the boomers spent their youth scorning those of their compatriots who fought communism, while moralizing and posturing at no cost to themselves. They went on to enjoy the benefits of their parents' labors, sacrificed little, and produced nothing particularly notable. But the boomers were unparalleled when it came to self-glorification, a talent they began developing as teenagers and have continued to improve up to this day.

But to be fair, the vast majority of the men who came back from WWII were (like my father) decent, morally upright guys who returned from their service with the love of their country strengthened. And it's tough to truly fault them for wanting to give their kids a softer life than they had witnessed in the 1930s and '40s.

On the hand, when your dad says something like this...

In a future war involving U.S. soldiers what would a TV reporter do if he learned the enemy troops with which he was traveling were about to launch a surprise attack on an American unit? That's just the question Harvard University professor Charles Ogletree Jr, as moderator of PBS' Ethics in America series, posed to ABC anchor Peter Jennings and 60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace. Both agreed getting ambush footage for the evening news would come before warning the U.S. troops.

For the March 7 installment on battlefield ethics Ogletree set up a theoretical war between the North Kosanese and the U.S.-supported South Kosanese. At first Jennings responded: "If I was with a North Kosanese unit that came upon Americans, I think I personally would do what I could to warn the Americans."

Wallace countered that other reporters, including himself, "would regard it simply as another story that they are there to cover." Jennings' position bewildered Wallace: "I'm a little bit of a loss to understand why, because you are an American, you would not have covered that story."

"Don't you have a higher duty as an American citizen to do all you can to save the lives of soldiers rather than this journalistic ethic of reporting fact?" Ogletree asked. Without hesitating Wallace responded: "No, you don't have higher duty... you're a reporter." This convinces Jennings, who concedes, "I think he's right too, I chickened out."

Ogletree turns to Brent Scrowcroft, now the National Security Adviser, who argues "you're Americans first, and you're journalists second." Wallace is mystified by the concept, wondering "what in the world is wrong with photographing this attack by North Kosanese on American soldiers?" Retired General William Westmoreland then points out that "it would be repugnant to the American listening public to see on film an ambush of an American platoon by our national enemy."

A few minutes later Ogletree notes the "venomous reaction" from George Connell, a Marine Corps Colonel. "I feel utter contempt. Two days later they're both walking off my hilltop, they're two hundred yards away and they get ambushed. And they're lying there wounded. And they're going to expect I'm going to send Marines up there to get them. They're just journalists, they're not Americans."

Wallace and Jennings agree, "it's a fair reaction."

...Perhaps it explains why Mike Wallace's son has a far more reasoned sense of ethics than his dad.

(More here.)

Update: I've mentioned the Wallace/Jennings moment from 1989 a few times here, simply because (a) I remember watching it when it first aired and (b) it encapsulates perfectly the mindset of Old Media, who see themselves as transnationalists very much aloof from their own country--or any country. I'm glad to see that someone has uploaded the exchange to YouTube, which you can watch, here.

Dan Rather on the dangers of Big Media:

Investigative reporting, finding out what people in power don't want the public at large to know and disseminating it, is one of the most important roles of journalism in its role as the so-called Fourth Estate. And investigative reporting has gone badly out of fashion. The trend line is against it.

There are reasons. The reasons: It takes longer, it's more expensive than other kinds of coverage, and it causes trouble because the big, huge international conglomerate that now owns so many of the news outlets, they have special needs in Washington. They are asking for favors, these people, needing favors -- regulatory, legislative needs -- of the very people that good investigative reporters would be digging into and exposing, if you will. And this comes in conflict.

But when an army of independent journalists investigated one of Dan's stories, Rather accused them of being on Karl Rove's payroll. (Dan doesn't know the half of it!) And his producer questioned their authenticity, merely because she had never heard of them as late of September of 2004, near the end of the election year.

But all of a sudden, Dan's not a fan of corporate journalism--wonder why?

One of Ace's co-bloggers writes that "The NHL Is No Longer Ace of Spades Lifestyle Compliant", because Dallas Stars player Sean Avery was suspended for--gasp!--using the phrase "sloppy seconds" to describe his former girlfriends?

(And you thought that the NFL was the No Fun League!)

But given that the NHL is the national sport of Canada, and that Canada is a nation where the "Human Rights" Commission will take up the case of an aging stripper suing her boss for being fired, is it all that surprising that the NHL would want to stick the boot that's on the cover of The Tyranny of Nice deeply into Avery's backside?

He's two cult Web memes in one--but is Domo an XP or Vista kind of guy?

The self-lobotomizing effects of political correctness on the media continues, as Patterico explores "An Ongoing Mystery to Our Journalistic Betters:"

Over at The Jury Talks Back, aunursa says that CNN can't figure out why the terrorists attacked a Jewish center.

It's not terribly surprising that they're surprised. I'll never forget how, after a Muslim terrorist shot up a Jewish Center in Seattle, the L.A. Times ran a box on the front page saying that the gunman's motive was a "mystery":

[Click over for page scan--Ed]

The story contained clues, such as the fact that the gunman targeted the Jewish Center after conducting a "cursory Internet search for Jewish organizations." Or the witness who said the man had screamed "I am a Muslim American, angry at Israel!" before opening fire.

I swear I am not making up those facts, or the fact that the L.A. Times declared the gunman's motives a "mystery" in the face of that evidence.

I guess these media types just keep getting mystified.

Of course, it's not just the media who are slow on the uptake these days--with dark satire to spare, Iowahawk writes that Bombay is all just a case of Too Late The Terrorist: "Apologetic Mumbai Killers: 'We Didn't Get the Memo About Obama.'"

With a vocal assist from Vera Lynn, Obama and Hillary Meet Again:

The Onion: "NASA Simulator Preps Astronauts For Larry King Interview":

NASA Simulator Prepares Astronauts For Rigors Of An Interview With Larry King

With Jude Wanniski and Bob Bartley having gone off to the great accounting school in the sky, it's left to Fred Thompson to sardonically explain why the bailout, or bailouts, or whatever is the catchall name for the overall enormous reaming being applied to those same taxpayers that so offend Harry Reid won't work:

Jennifer Rubin adds:

Republicans have been struggling to find their political bearings. The Democrats are about to embark on a Keynesian spending spree the likes of which we have never seen. How to respond? How can Republicans possibly oppose the political juggernaut coming their way? They could do much worse than to send this short film by Fred Thompson to every voter in America. As political theater, it is brilliant. As economic education, it is indispensable.

The film demonstrates that Thompson is head and shoulders above the current crop of party functionaries in the essential task of communicating and educating voters about our current predicament and the course which the Democrats are pursuing. As they contemplate their political predicament, the Republicans might think about finding Thompson some permanent role as Party Explainer.

Fred may not be the Gipper, but compared to most in the GOP, he's a great communicator.

In Mel Brook's History of the World Part I, there's a scene in which Mel, playing the King of France, has this memorable exchange:

Count de Monet: It is said that the people are revolting.
King Louis XVI: You said it! They stink on ice!

France lost its Ancien Regime in 1789, but Harry Reid (D-NV) sounds like he's been drinking in a little too much from the House of Bourbon for his own good:

Reid
by burghnews

As AllahPundit writes, "Comedy gold from the unerring political instinct that brought us a Congressional approval rating lower than Bush's. Behold, the ultimate Kinsleyan gaffe:"

"My staff tells me not to say this, but I'm going to say it anyway," said Reid in his remarks. "In the summer because of the heat and high humidity, you could literally smell the tourists coming into the Capitol. It may be descriptive but it's true."

But it's no longer going to be true, noted Reid, thanks to the air conditioned, indoor space.

Allah asks, "What did the Senate chamber smell like before A/C?" I have no idea, but it is a reminder that Big Government needs Big Air Conditioning to prosper, as Jonah Goldberg wrote a few years ago:

In the 18th and 19th centuries a congressman wouldn't be caught dead in Washington during July. Well, actually, they might be caught dead, because they wore all those clothes and were so fat that they might have died while trying to get out. The British Embassy, for example, moved the entire kit and caboodle to Maine every summer.

The idea is: Ban air conditioning in Washington and you would cut the "productivity" of the government by more than a third (say from late May to late September) and return the United States to the limited government the Founders intended. D.C. is still full of members of this school of thought.

For such a powerful guy, Harry's an awfully delicate soul. Before he was getting the vapors from having to smell the peasants, he was having other health issues:



Come 2010 when he's up for reelection, the voters of Nevada might want to consider replacing Reid with another senator--if only to give Harry's delicate sinuses a chance to heal up.

Update: Welcome Corner readers!

Robert Stacy McCain responds to my post on frontloading the next GOP presidential candidate's complaints about media bias and writes, "What bothers me is how Ed -- and I think most Republicans -- take hostile media as a given":

This is defeatism, and I don't like it. Go back to Rep. Smith's math: If media bias influenced 4% of voters, that made all the difference.

To my mind, what this says is that if Republicans could get slightly more favorable press coverage -- say, reducing the media's pro-Democrat bias from 70/30 to 60/40 -- this improvement could make the difference between defeat and victory. Ergo, an effective public-relations program doesn't have to be 100% successful in order to make a decisive difference.

Read the whole thing.

Building on Christopher Hitchens' new essay on the fate of Bombay, John Hinderaker asks what's in a name--in this case, a lot:

Hitchens clarifies something that I missed, for some reason: the origin of "Mumbai." I first realized that Bombay had been renamed within the last year or two when, on an airplane, I read an airline magazine article about "Mumbai," evidently one of the great cities of the world, but of which I was entirely ignorant. I figured it could only be Bombay. Hitchens writes:

When Salman Rushdie wrote, in The Moor's Last Sigh in 1995, that "those who hated India, those who sought to ruin it, would need to ruin Bombay," he was alluding to the Hindu chauvinists who had tried to exert their own monopoly in the city and who had forcibly renamed it--after a Hindu goddess--Mumbai. We all now collude with this, in the same way that most newspapers and TV stations do the Burmese junta's work for it by using the fake name Myanmar. (Bombay's hospital and stock exchange, both targets of terrorists, are still called by their right name by most people, just as Bollywood retains its "B.")

This may seem like a detail, but it isn't, because what's at stake is the whole concept of a cosmopolitan city open to its own citizens and to the world--a city on the model of Sarajevo or London or Beirut or Manhattan.

The topic of establishing new names (in some ways, a variation on the left's eternal need to "Start From Zero") for settled places was explored in depth an essay by Jay Nordlinger back in 2002. As Nordlinger wrote, "If you start to go native on the pronunciation of foreign capitals and other places, there's no end to it. None"--and judging by the numerous examples he's spotted in his column, there really isn't--and substituting Mumbai for Bombay is merely the most recent and at the moment, most visible example.

(For my interview with Jay from this weekend's edition of PJM Political on Sirius XM, click here.)

One of the better articles that Slate has run was Stephen Metcalf's 2005 profile of Bruce Springsteen, which (I think quite accurately) named manager Jon Landis as Bruce's downfall, transforming him from a funky regional act to a commercial superstar--and punitive establishment bore:

For all the po-faced mythic resonance that now accompanies Bruce's every move, we can thank Jon Landau, the ex-Rolling Stone critic who, after catching a typically seismic Springsteen set in 1974, famously wrote, "I saw rock and roll future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen."

Well, Bruce Springsteen was Jon Landau's future. Over the next couple of years, Landau insinuated himself into Bruce's artistic life and consciousness (while remaining on the Rolling Stone masthead) until he became Springsteen's producer, manager, and full-service Svengali. Unlike the down-on-their-luck Springsteens of Freehold, N.J., Landau hailed from the well-appointed suburbs of Boston and had earned an honors degree in history from Brandeis. He filled his new protege's head with an American Studies syllabus heavy on John Ford, Steinbeck, and Flannery O'Connor. At the same time that he intellectualized Bruce, he anti-intellectualized him. Rock music was transcendent, Landau believed, because it was primitive, not because it could be avant-garde. The White Album and Hendrix and the Velvet Underground had robbed rock of its power, which lay buried in the pre-Beatles era with Del Shannon and the Ronettes. Bruce's musical vocabulary accordingly shrank. By Darkness on the Edge of Town, gone were the West Side Story-esque jazz suites of The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. In their place were tight, guitar-driven intro-verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus songs. Springsteen's image similarly transformed. On the cover of Darkness, he looks strangely like the sallower cousin of Pacino's Sonny Wortzik, the already quite sallow anti-hero of Dog Day Afternoon. The message was clear: Springsteen himself was one of the unbeautiful losers, flitting along the ghostly fringes of suburban respectability.

Thirty years later, and largely thanks to Landau, Springsteen is no longer a musician. He's a belief system. And, like any belief system worth its salt, he brooks no in-between. You're either in or you're out. This has solidified Bruce's standing with his base, for whom he remains a god of total rock authenticity. But it's killed him with everyone else. To a legion of devout nonbelievers--they're not saying Bruuuce, they're booing--Bruce is more a phenomenon akin to Dianetics or Tinkerbell than "the new Dylan," as the Columbia Records promotions machine once hyped him. And so we've reached a strange juncture. About America's last rock star, it's either Pentecostal enthusiasm or total disdain.

Springsteen used his power with his base to become something safe and respectable, the left's answer to Pat Boone. He's the definitive establishment rock star--it's no coincidence that Springsteen's most visible when it's an election year and there's a Democratic president to elect.

Bruce's fame, as Metcalf noted above, derives from repetition and predictability. Because, as Kyle Smith notes, no matter who's in office, when Bruce is at the local football stadium or hockey arena, it's always Darkness On The Edge Of Town:

There is a bracing consistency in Springsteenian gloom, from the Ford years ("The street's on fire, a real death waltz") to Carter's ("Lately there ain't been much work on account of the economy") to Reagan's ("This old world is rough, it's just getting rougher") to the first Bush's ("Ain't no mercy on the streets of this town, ain't no bread from heavenly skies") to Clinton's ("Oh brother are you gonna leave me wastin' away on the streets of Philadelphia?") to the second Bush's ("Woke up Election Day, skies gunpowder and shades of gray"). If the Boss has a motto, it has always been this: No hope, no change, no way.

But as Kyle asks, what happens when one of show business's most famously punitive liberals can't blame America first for a change?

(Incidentally, after a surprisingly long absence, note that the text of Kyle's blog is back online.)

Found via Conservative Grapevine, Ericka Anderson goes "inside the strange culture of America's wannabe hobos":

A class system exists among America's homeless, where hobos are considered royalty. While few people would want to live like street people, there many who emulate the life of the "hobo." These home-owning hobo-aficionados, known as "hobos at heart," are looking for more simplicity and sustainability in their lives -- something actual hobos take to the extreme.

And you thought riding NJ Transit was frightening...

In other looks at America's reprimitivization, Steven Malanga reports on "The Professional Panhandling Plague", and Matt Sanchez spots "Squeegee Guys Returning to New York Streets", as the Giuliani era further recedes into the sunset.

Ace posits that the potential of being cut by the New York Giants and suspended by Roger Goodell, the no-nonsense NFL commissioner (well, a bit less nonsense than his immediate predecessor) is the least of Burress' worries, given Manhattan's famed hatred of the Second Amendment.

Don Surber has some thoughts on the Palinophobic Liz Smith:

Liz Smith shows her ignorance.

In her column today, Smith of The New York Post shows her ignorance as well as her envy for the $7 million advance that Republican Gov. Sarah Palin can expect if she writes a book.

Wrote Smith: "What could Sarah Palin, age 44, write of a life still so young? Anything she damn well wants to write. The public, it seems, is just waiting to lap it all up like that finger-lickin' moose stew."

Barrack Obama was 34 when he finished, "Dreams from My Father."

By the way, Palin has been a beauty queen (OK, runner-up), a sportscaster, a business partner with her husband, the mother of 5, a reform mayor, a reform governor and a candidate for the vice presidency.

She's no community organizer though--and let's face it, age 44 is "a life still so young" as Smith writes; it's not until you hit the wizened age of 47 when the Lincoln, FDR, JFK, RFK, RWR comparisons start to flow in.

Elsewhere, the Moonbattery blog collects more examples of the Palinphobic left--and even, as astonishing as this will be to many, that always cool, unflappable, conservative's conservative himself, Andrew Sullivan.

(Don't miss Bill Maher's reaction to one of Andrew's rare moments of excitability.)

Related: The Winner of the Sullivan Award goes to...

Back in December of 1979, 11 people died when attempting to rush into Cincinnati's Riverfront Stadium to see the rock group The Who. The following week, Time magazine surprised many by running a cover story that absolved the group of virtually all blame in the incident. The cover dubbed the band "Rock's Outer Limits", and the accompanying story focused on their success as musical artists, rather than the tragedy in Ohio. (And I'd be the last person to argue that in 1979, near the height of their power as musicians, they weren't an awesome group, especially live.)

But unlike a rock group beloved in the eyes of most boomers, the discount chain Wal-Mart doesn't garner the same sort of good will amongst journalists. Responding to the incident on Black Friday when one of their employees died when the doors were opened to allow the first mob of shoppers into the Long Island store at 5:00 AM, a New York Times went out with the following absurd headline: "A Shopping Guernica Captures the Moment."

Evidently, New York Times economics reporter Peter Goodman (or perhaps his editor, depending upon who wrote the headline) fancies himself as the next Picasso. So who are the Nazis in his mind? The management at Wal-Mart who, somewhat like Cincinnati's Riverfront Stadium 30 years ago failed to have adequate security and preparations for the onslaught of a crowd, or the shoppers who crushed the unfortunate sales clerk? The article, found via Newsbusters doesn't say.

I'd excuse a high school or sophomoric college newspaper journalist making such an overwrought analogy. But if the New York Times and its writers and editors can't see the difference between an unfortunate shopping incident and the Spanish Civil War, one wonders what what value the newspaper has as an information source to be trusted by their readers.

Update 12/2/08: Wow--who knew this little post would receive so much traffic? Welcome Instapundit and Five Feet Of Fury readers, and even those die-hard defenders of the establishment at Sadly No.

One Cincinnati-based reader emailed in:

The New York Times has become the WKRP of journalism. The hyperbole you noted in your blog is symmetrical to Les Nessman's comparison of the eternally hilarious turkey drop to the Hindenburg disaster. Except WKRP was supposed to be funny.

Eric McErlain of the Off Wing Opinion sports blog noted that I may have mixed my Queen City stadium names:

Just a short note -- the Who concert was held at Riverfront Coliseum, not Riverfront Stadium. It's a big difference, as the former is an indoor arena with a much smaller capacity, while the latter was an open air baseball stadium.

Fair enough.

More: Another reader emails in:

The article's author does not use the word Guernica in the article. It was apparently the brainchild of one of their brilliant editors who does not know the difference between Guernica and Pamplona, which is what he was obviously trying to refer to.

So perhaps the Gray Lady was trying to run with the bulls, rather than attempting a Homage To Catalonia.

I don't know about you, but can't everyone relate to this headline? "A Giant Rubber Space Pillow Is Eating My French Villa."

Count de Monet could not be reached for comment.

CNN's Jonathan Mann runs through the usual litany of acceptable progressive predecessors (but no President RFK, alas) and asks, "Which hero do we want Obama to be?"

The Americans who are comparing him to those remarkable predecessors are putting a lot of faith in a man they barely know.

Which is a remarkably tacit way for Mann to damn his fellow media men--after all, if Americans truly are "putting a lot of faith in a man they barely know" that constitutes one epic failure amongst those whose job it is to inform them. But then, the modern function of the news media is to withhold information, not disseminate it. Something CNN has been quite good at in some areas--less so in others.

(Via Newsbusters.)

Related: Magical thinking at MSNBC: "Anchor Frets: Why Hasn't Obama's Election Ended Terrorism?"