"Once in a while there is a short piece spewed forth by some Old Media outlet or another that is so perfect as a primer of left-wing bias 101 that I just have to share it."

It seems like the last inauguration was just a week ago, but already, change has apparently arrived to change the change that just arrived:

"People Are Talking About 'President Pelosi' Now."

Because people who need Pelosi are the luckiest people in the world!

The L.A. Times is shedding jobs; it will soon have 300 fewer people employed not to publish the news.

Meanwhile, CNN isn't afraid to wear its heart on its sleeve, and its biases on its chest, though sadly, it doesn't appear that a "Wright-Free Zone" T-shirt is yet for sale.

If you missed it today on Sirius-XM satellite radio's POTUS channel, the latest podcast edition of Pajamas Media's weekly show is now online:

Join host Steve Green of VodkaPundit.com for his take on Illinois' Gov. Blagojevich's removal from office and Nancy Pelosi's proposed economic prophylaxis! Plus:

• PJTV co-host Allen Barton interviews Gordon Cucullu, the author of Inside Gitmo, published this week by Harper Collins.
  
• James Lileks on the Stimulus Bill.
  
• Col. Austin Bay, the co-author of A Quick And Dirty Guide To War, on President Obama's planned 16 month withdrawal timetable from Iraq.
  
• Glenn Reynolds and Dr. Helen Smith interview Knoxville Mayor Bill Haslam, as he prepares for the TN gubernatorial race.
  
• Produced by Ed Driscoll.

Tune in here to listen!

The sadly deceased former Dallas Cowboys wide receiver is finally in the NFL Hall of Fame, making him, as the Dallas Morning News notes, "the only man to win a gold medal, a Super Bowl ring and selection to the Hall of Fame":

Hayes was selected for induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame on Saturday in Tampa, less than 200 miles from his boyhood Jacksonville home. He will join Tom Landry, Tex Schramm as well as former Dallas Cowboys teammates Roger Staubach, Bob Lilly, Mel Renfro and Rayfield Wright in Canton, Ohio, as well as fellow Ring of Honor members Troy Aikman, Michael Irvin, Tony Dorsett and Randy White.

The wait was long - Hayes' career ended in 1975 - and painful - he reached the finalists stage in 2004 only to be rejected on the final ballot two years after his death - but historic - he is now the only man to win a gold medal, a Super Bowl ring and selection to the Hall of Fame.

Others named were: defense lineman Randle McDaniel, Bruce Smith, Derrick Thomas, Buffalo owner Ralph Wilson, defense back Rod Woodson.

Had Hayes not been selected this time, it would have been highly unlikely for him to come through the Senior Committee a third time.

After winning the 100-meter gold in the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo to earn the "World's Fastest Man" nickname, Hayes revolutionized the NFL with his speed. From 1965 to '74 with the Cowboys, he caught 365 passes for 7,295 yards and his 71 career touchdown receptions remain a team record.

In an era in which teams did not throw as much as they do now, Hayes changed the way the game was played. Defenses could not cover him man-to-man and developed zone coverages to keep him from beating them deep.

More on the rest of the class of 2009 here.

Headline via the The Sundries Shack, which asks, "Has anyone seen FEMA lately?"

It seems we have people dying by the dozens in the midwest, where they've been freezing to death for a few days. Local officials are calling out the Federal government for its notable lack of response.

But Bill Quick (found via Instapundit) believes that "'Where's FEMA?' is not the appropriate question":

The appropriate question is, "Where is the mainstream media, screaming in one united voice, that the absence of FEMA demonstrates the utter fecklessness and failure of the current President and all his policies?"

Plus his barely concealed racism, of course.

This might be a good time for those who have pledged "to be a servant to my president" to head out there, rather than bitching about the contractors working next door. On the plus side though, to the best of my knowledge, no one on the left has actually been rooting for the snow and ice, unlike previous meteorological disasters:

Jesse Newhart writes that for a few hours today, apparently all Google search results displayed the dreaded "This site may harm your computer" message:

As I reported earlier while the news was breaking, at 9:27am eastern, all Google search results appended This site may harm your computer to the top of the listing. The topic was wildly speculated on Twitter as everyone tried to decipher the problem.

At first it was reported that perhaps outsourced malware partner, the non-profit www.stopbadware.org was responsible. Stopbadware.org quickly rectified the confusion with a blog post declaring that it was in fact Google that caused their site to crash as millions of people followed the "This site may harm your computer" links back to their site.

It turns out it was human error at Google, when a likely now fired technitian, entered the '/' character into the database as a component of all URLs that contain malware. Of course there is a '/' in EVERY URL ON THE WEB!!! Matt Cutts describes the problem thusly on The Official Google Blog:

Unfortunately (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file.

By quickly they meant the problem only lasted one hour. For one hour EVERY PAGE ON THE INTERNET was reported as Malware.

The '/' is truly mightier than the sword.

What does this mean for Google search? I don't know, but for me it brings Google's search dominance and lack of any real competition into acute focus.

Indeed--for a time it seemed that Google only added the "This site may harm your computer" tag to conservative Websites. Newhart notes how easy it is for a Google tech to add it to every site's listing.

Well that's one way to stimulate the economy: sell lots and lots of Israeli and U.S. flags to the Middle East, where they'll have a remarkably short operational lifespan before replacements are needed.

Congrats to former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, the new head of the Republican National Committee; you can watch Glenn Reynolds and Michelle Malkin interview Steele here.

And sadly, as Allahpundit quips, "Let the racist 'progressive' photoshops begin!"

In his review of Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man for the Claremont Institute, Jonah Goldberg summarized the New Dealers' attempt to deploy military methods and central planning to nationalize America's economy thusly:

When liberals speak of unity and hope, what they really mean is success. The 1930s and 1960s, unlike the '20s and '50s, were decades when liberals, broadly speaking, were "winning." When you hear liberals bemoaning divisiveness and insisting that we must "get beyond" "labels" and "ideological" differences, what they are really saying is that their opponents should shut up and get with the program. The New Deal's appeal lies in the fact that it was the first time when progressive social engineers had real power without the galvanizing dynamic of a war. The Brains Trusters had spent much of the 1920s complaining "we planned in war," i.e., during World War I; they insisted that they should be allowed to plan in peace as well. The Depression gave them their shot. And that in a nutshell is why supposedly empirically minded and "reality-based" liberals still genuflect to the myth of the New Deal. It is the ne plus ultra of liberal power. Defending the New Deal is the first requirement of liberal power-worship.

Rusty Weiss spots a newspaper cartoonist so close and yet so far from this point, as he equates the passing of the so-called stimulus bill with the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima:

In one of the more insulting comparisons seen in recent memory, Albany Times Union editorial cartoonist John de Rosier does a major disservice to the honorable men who served during the Battle of Iwo Jima, by depicting recent efforts of Democrats to pass a non-stimulating 'economic stimulus plan' as equally heroic.

The cartoon shows Democrats in the role of the Marines featured in the Iwo Jima Memorial, a sculpture based on the famous photo by Joe Rosenthal entitled Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima. The exception to this replication lies in the flag being raised - the Dem's are trying to hoist a 'bailout flag' as opposed to a flag of the United States.

If that weren't insulting enough, the cartoon also shows the Republican Party mascot, the elephant, trying desperately to pull the flag down.

In short, the Democrats are trying to save our nation by heroically raising up the Obama bailout flag, while the villainous Republicans are trying to destroy our nation by stopping their efforts.

Meanwhile, in a brief item on Jonah's own Liberal Fascism book, Frank Wilson, the book editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer writes:

I downloaded Goldberg's book on my Kindle because I was curious about a book that had made it on to the NYT best-seller list without ever being reviewing in the Times or most other papers and because I didn't want to pay the full price for what I suspected might be a screed. I was pleasantly surprised to find it was a well-written historical survey of a set of ideas and how they grew. I was also surprised by what I learned about Mussolini.

As I wrote in my own review of Jonah's book:

Mussolini similarly invented the word "totalitarianism" as a way to describe a cradle-to-grave socialism that would bind all aspects of his nation together. "Mussolini meant it to be appealing to people," Goldberg said. "It was a sales pitch for his kind of government. He meant it as we would use words like 'holistic' today, as sort of covering every aspect of life; everyone's going to be included, everyone's going to be part of the community. No child is going to be left behind. That was the meaning of totalitarianism in its original conception."

Concurrently, the Philadelphia Inquirer seeks to get itself even deeper into bed with government, requesting a bailout from the state's Democratic governor. Needless to say, Il Duce would approve.

Related: The Illustrated Stimulus.

Mmmmm....steak.

(Meanwhile, Greg Pollowitz explains how PETA played NBC.)

The key word is definitely "mini!"

With Kodak and RCA putting out so-called HD versions of their YouTube-friendly mini camcorders, we knew it was only a matter of time before Pure Digital Technologies, the maker of Flip Video mini camcorders, put out an HD model of its own.

Calling it the "world's smallest HD camcorder," the $229 Flip Mino HD looks identical to the standard-definition Flip Mino. It weighs just over 3 ounces, boasts 720p resolution, and has 4GB of memory that allows for 60 minutes of recording time. The release also says that the Flip Mino HD features "all-new built-in FlipShare software for easy saving, organizing and sharing of video from your computer." We're not sure how it's different from the software on the existing Mino, but when we get more details, we'll let you know.

Like the standard Mino, you'll be able to customize the look of the Mino HD at theflip.com/store. I did an earlier post on the whole customization thing, and the one drawback is that while the service is free, you do pay the full $229 list price for the product. Most likely, the Mino HD will retail for less on Amazon and other online stores--I'd guess $199.

Via Skye of Midnight Blue on Twitter; for my recent Videomaker buyers' guide to camcorders in general, click here.

Last week, Andrea Harris wrote:

For those who were born too late and therefore are under the impression that the Seventies was a gloriously innocent time of day-glo colored discoball party fun fun fun, that decade was actually when the American character was sunk in neurotic depression. We ran from Vietnam like a bunch of scared big girls. The economy sucked. Cynicism and selfish, destructive behavior was rampant. Cars were hideous junk painted ugly "earth tones" like crap brown, condensed-milk yellow, ketchup-stain red, and garbage can green. (My father's giant boat of a '73 Ford LTD was that color. Driving it was like trying to pilot the Hindenburg on the ground.) Fashions made men and women look like clowns. (Two words: plaid pantsuits.) The divorce rate, the drug-crime rate, the venereal disease rate -- everything bad went up.

And plenty of it landed in your living room along the way--James Lileks reposts the entire original "Interior Desecrations" site from the late 1990s, the inspiration for his best selling book a few years later. For the full visual horror of the 1970s at its plastic craptastic worst, click here and keep scrolling until your eyes bleed. For my Electronic House magazine review of his 2004 book, click here.

In one of the Associated Press's reports on Blagojevich's impeachment--which astonishingly enough actually names his party--there's this choice tidbit:

After a four-day trial, the Illinois Senate voted 59-0 to convict him of abuse of power, automatically ousting the second-term Democrat. In a second, identical vote, lawmakers further barred Blagojevich from ever holding public office in the state again.

"He failed the test of character. He is beneath the dignity of the state of Illinois. He is no longer worthy to be our governor," said Sen. Matt Murphy, a Republican from suburban Chicago.

And everyone knows that character is such an important component of politicians from Illinois.

From the Land of Lincoln to the Trough for Blago in 150 years--now that's progressive politics in action.

The score of that Super Bowl when Mike Ditka's Chicago Bears pounded the New England Patriots? No--the impeachment vote against Gov. Blagojevich.

Jesus, Kipling, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper, Frank Capra, Richard Nixon and Oprah Winfrey could not be reached for comment.

To put it mildly, this doesn't sound good:

North Korea said it is scrapping all military and political agreements with South Korea, accusing the government in Seoul of pushing inter-Korean relations to "the brink of war."

"All the agreed points concerning the issue of putting an end to the political and military confrontation between the north and south will be nullified," the reunification committee in Pyongyang said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency today.

The announcement comes less than two weeks after Kim Jong Il's regime threatened "strong military steps" in response to South Korea's confrontational policies and about two months after North Korea imposed border restrictions with South Korea.

The regime has repeatedly called South Korean President Lee Myung Bak a "traitor" and a "sycophant to the U.S." It has demanded South Korea stop civic groups from launching balloons loaded with so-called propaganda leaflets criticizing Kim.

North Korea also announced today it is canceling an Agreement on Reconciliation, Non-Aggression, Cooperation and Exchange with South Korea and nullified the military boundary in the West Sea, according to KCNA's statement.

North Korea and South Korea are still technically at war as their 1950-1953 conflict ended in a truce and not a peace treaty. The two nations are separated by one of the world's most heavily fortified borders, with 1.7 million soldiers facing off each day.

Sabre rattling, or something far worse? Gird your loins--we'll likely soon see.

Steve Green writes, "They Don't Like Profits Anyway":

Via Melissa Clouthier comes this tasty little item from Gawker:

...today the NYT runs an op-ed from Yale's hallowed money manager David Swensen, in which he recommends that newspapers turn themselves into non-profits with endowments (we agree, philosophically at least). "As long as newspapers remain for-profit enterprises, they will find no refuge from their financial problems." He's talking to you, NYT!

The NYT is already headed towards zero profits for as far as the eye can see -- so why not make it official?

Even as yet another east coast paper begs for a federal bailout, there's hope yet for another legacy media: "Snuggie Sales Prove TV isn't Dead"!

Well, that's a relief.

As we noted in February of 2003, during the Pleistocene era of our humble corner of cyberspace, CNN dusted off the Q-word three weeks before the liberation of Iraq began. This week, the New York Times similarly is "Fearing Another Quagmire in Afghanistan" a week after President Obama is in office.

As Jules Crittenden notes:

The real question raised by this article is why a major American newspaper ... currently bogged down in a considerable quagmire of its own ... would want to jump into the quagmire of quagmirism again. But it looks like we may be witnessing a fascinating evolution in which Obama, having adopted a number of key Bush war policies and practices, will be subjected to the same shoddy reporting practices.

Fortunately, the Times has a legendary Pulitzer-winning journalist to airdrop into that far-off land.

(Incidentally, I wonder if the Age of Obama has caused the Times' publisher to revise this sage moment of '60s-minted Radical Chic philosophizing?)

That was then...

"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK," Obama said.

"That's not leadership. That's not going to happen," he added.

This is now:

The capital flew into a bit of a tizzy when, on his first full day in the White House, President Obama was photographed in the Oval Office without his suit jacket. There was, however, a logical explanation: Mr. Obama, who hates the cold, had cranked up the thermostat.

"He's from Hawaii, O.K.?" said Mr. Obama's senior adviser, David Axelrod, who occupies the small but strategically located office next door to his boss. "He likes it warm. You could grow orchids in there."

Huh. You know, when it comes to the weather, folks in Washington don't seem to be able to handle things.

Infidels Are Cool has the video of CNBC calling Rush to harangue him over his Wall Street Journal op-ed. It's been a while since I've watched the ostensibly business-oriented CNBC; when did their hosts start sounding like they're auditioning for the even further leftwing MSNBC?

Related: Roger Kimball suggests that maybe President Smoot "should listen to Rush Limbaugh after all."

Set the Wayback Machine for 1981, fire up your TRS-80 and experience the magical new world of...online news!

Much more retro-futurism here.

Forget the Great Man Theory of History--Blago is every great man in history; he's the Peter Lemon Moodring of politics:

(Via Unterekless Thoughts.)

Do you believe this?

Berkeley's public library will face a showdown with the city's Peace and Justice Commission tonight over whether a service contract for the book check-out system violates the city's nuclear-free ordinance.

It's Berkeley--of course you do!

Everyone knows what email is--but what is this..."Post Office" you speak of?

(H/T: Matthew Sheffield)

He's not bad; his thetans are merely drawn that way.

The New York Times: for show trials before they were for them. Maureen Dowd writes:

It's psychopathic to spend a million redoing your office when the folks outside it are losing jobs, homes, pensions and savings.

Thain should never rise above the level of stocking the money in A.T.M.'s again. Just think: This guy could well have been Treasury secretary if John McCain had won.

Bartiromo pressed: What was wrong with the office of his predecessor, Stanley O'Neal?

"Well -- his office was very different -- than -- the -- the general decor of -- Merrill's offices," Thain replied. "It really would have been -- very difficult -- for -- me to use it in the form that it was in."

Did it have a desk and a phone?

How are these ruthless, careless ghouls who murdered the economy still walking around (not to mention that sociopathic sadist Bernie Madoff?) -- and not as perps?

Bring on the shackles. Let the show trials begin.

Just as long as we start with the management who plowed this firm's stock price into the ground over the last five years.

There's a marvelous scene in Lawrence of Arabia in which Col. Brighton (played by Anthony Quayle) says to his superior officer, "Look, sir, we can't just do nothing", who replies, "Why not? It's usually best."

The Politico explains the economic "Case For Doing Nothing." It's the best way to prevent "totally impractical" stimulus plans from causing the fat lady to sing...

Recently, Charles Johnson and his readers debated if CNN ran faked footage of an attempted resuscitation of a wounded young boy in a Gaza hospital, in a video supplied by a Palestinian stringer. CNN initially pulled their video, and a day later reinserted it into their lineup, claiming:

Responding to accusations that the resuscitation efforts of Mashharawi's brother appeared inauthentic, Martin said that, based on his years of reporting from Gaza, doctors often go through such efforts even with little hope that a patient can be saved.

Charles Johnson responded:

If they really had "little hope" the patient could be saved, they'd be going all out with CPR, which means very vigorous chest compression (it's not unusual to break ribs if it's done right), and ventilation to oxygenate the blood--not delicately touching the boy's abdomen with the tips of their fingers as we see in the video clips.

But if the jury is still out on that clip, let's take a video look at news from this decade that we know conclusively was botched, including:

• The New Republic's Danger Man, Scott Thomas Beauchamp.
• Reuters' Picture Kill fiasco.
• Former CNN chief Eason Jordan claimed US (and Israeli) troops targeted journalists For assassination--but was surprisingly cool about working with Saddam Hussein.
• Hurricane Katrina and the "Echo Chamber in the Superdome."
• Document Dan Rather.
• Jayson Blair.
• And the grandfather of 'em all: Walter "Boom Boom" Duranty.

Keep rockin'--and watch for cameos by Larry Kudlow, Hugh Hewitt, and John Hinderaker!

(If you missed any of the previous editions of Silicon Graffiti, click here and just keep scrolling.)

Update: Welcome readers (viewers?) from Little Green Footballs, VodkaPundit, the Brothers Judd and Danny Glover!

More: Welcome also readers from Pundits Insta and Gateway--and from Dr. Melissa Clouthier.

Reuters reports that "New York City fears return to 1970s."

With a few notable exceptions, needless to say.

Sure, it's a large egg. But does it vibrate?

Gay Patriot writes, "Joy Behar Says Obama Too Perfect for Mockery":

On Sunday night, while doing my cardio, I caught what appeared to be rebroadcast of an episode of Larry King LIve. King asked The View's Joy Behar why comedians didn't make fun of the new president. The comedienne replied that this prez was just too perfect.*

Can you imagine how the media would react if a conservative had chastised a comedian for making fun of former President George W. Bush because he was "too perfect"? A few google searches yielded no mainstream criticism of Miss Behar's panegyric to the president (not even on the right-maybe that's because no one else was watching?)

It is truly frightening that a comedian in a free society would think her president too perfect for mockery.

As a former employee of ABC said in 2007 on Joy's show:

I'm saying that in America we are fed propaganda and if you want to know what's happening in the world go outside of the U.S. media because it's owned by four corporations one of them is this one. And you know what, go outside of the country to find out what's going on in our country because it's frightening. It's frightening.

Come back Rosie--all is forgiven!

(H/T: IP)

Victor Davis Hanson writes, "If anyone wished to know what the baby-boomer generation would do when, in its full maturity, it hit its first self-created, big-time recession, I think we are seeing the hysterical results":

After two decades of unprecedented economic growth, rampant consumer spending, and unimaginable borrowing to satisfy our insatiable appetites, we are suddenly going into even larger debt and printing trillions of dollars in paper money to ensure that someone else after we are gone pays the debt. As if the permanent solution to a financial panic and years of spending wealth we didn't create were a government take-over of the economy in the manner we currently witness in Spain, Italy, and Greece--or the high-tax, high-spend ethos of a bankrupt California.

The reaction to the economic panic was sort of analogous to the call to 'charge it!' after 9/11 (cf. Ike's fights about the surtax to pay for Korea), or to the Iraq 2006 upsurge in violence, when suddenly our leaders declared the war lost, blamed the nebulous "they" for tricking them into voting for the war, and calling for immediate withdrawals and retreats. Ditto the Stalag-Gulag Guantanamo that, by January 19, had ruined the Constitution, shredded the Bill of Rights, and forever tarnished our reputation. Yet, on the 20th, it was suddenly complex and problematic, and required a "task force" to do a year-long inquiry into the bad and worse choices confronting us. At some point in all this serial hysteria, we are beginning to see the problem is not in the stars of the economy or of the war, but in ourselves--a weird generation that, when it finally came of age, proved to be just about what we could expect of it from what we saw in its youth.

California's already reached the tipping point, and the rest of the nation isn't that far behind it--which is why James Pethokoukis proffers "10 Reasons to Whack Obama's Stimulus Plan."

James Taranto writes that already, the Obama administration has brought hope!--and change!--to one American institution: the press:

More than 144 hours into Barack Obama's presidency, the economy is still in recession, the country is still at war, and in many parts of the country it's still cold outside. Citizens are growing impatient: Wasn't President Obama supposed to bring change?

Yet one institution has changed dramatically, and in a very short time: the press. After spending the Bush years as a voice of opposition, American journalists have by and large turned on a dime and become cheerleaders for the man in power.

A case in point is the Associated Press, perhaps the nation's premier "straight news" outfit. During the Bush years, the AP introduced a new reportorial idiom called "accountability journalism," whose goal is "to report whether government officials are doing the job for which they were elected and keeping the promises they make." Turns out they weren't.

But the AP's new idiom, which we hereby name "pliability journalism," aims to show that everything is completely different from the bad old days of a week ago and before. A Saturday dispatch by Liz Sidoti, titled "Obama Breaks From Bush, Avoids Divisive Stands," shows how it works:

Barack Obama opened his presidency by breaking sharply from George W. Bush's unpopular administration, but he mostly avoided divisive partisan and ideological stands. He focused instead on fixing the economy, repairing a battered world image and cleaning up government.

A central feature of pliability journalism is the bending of contrary facts to fit the narrative of change, hope and unity. Here's how Sidoti reshapes one such fact:

So far, Obama's only real brush with issues that stoke partisan passions came when he revoked a ban on federal funding for international groups that provide or promote abortions. He did that quietly by issuing a memorandum late Friday afternoon. The move was expected; the issue has vacillated between Republican and Democratic presidents.

So three days after taking office, Obama executed a 180-degree policy turn on the nation's most emotionally charged subject. That would seem to be the epitome of divisiveness. But no. It (1) has been "Obama's only real brush with issues that stoke partisan passions," (2) was "expected" and (3) was done "quietly."

Of course it was done quietly--the new White House can't figure out how to send email. (And while I'm enormously sympathetic to technology snafus, imagine how that story would be reported in the world of objective pliable journalism if this was an incoming GOP administration.)

Update: From the visual arts department of the pliability media, political cartoonists suddenly get cold feet at the prospect of satirizing the man who promised to raise the ocean levels and heal the entire planet.

Just over the wire from AP:

John Updike, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, prolific man of letters and erudite chronicler of sex, divorce and other adventures in the postwar prime of the American empire, died Tuesday at age 76.

Updike, a resident of Beverly Farms, Mass., died of lung cancer, according to a statement from his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf.

A literary writer who frequently appeared on best seller lists, the tall, hawk-nosed Updike wrote novels, short stories, poems, criticism, the memoir "Self-Consciousness" and even a famous essay about baseball great Ted Williams.

An old-fashioned believer in hard work, he published more than 50 books in a career that started in the 1950s. Updike won virtually every literary prize, including two Pulitzers, for "Rabbit Is Rich" and "Rabbit at Rest," and two National Book Awards.

(H/T: Jose Guardia.)

A few years ago, John Derbyshire reminisced about a vignette involving Arthur Koestler:

When Arthur Koestler was a Communist in Weimar Germany, he used to have secret meetings with comrades in open public places where a police "tail" would be easy to spot. Once he met with a female comrade in a Berlin park. While discussing necessary business, the woman lost her attention and began staring at the surrounding trees. "Why is it," she suddenly blurted out, "that the leaves die wherever we go?"

I wonder if Al asks why it is that a permanent frost seems to follow wherever he goes?

Al Gore is scheduled before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday morning to once again testify on the 'urgent need' to combat global warming.

But Mother Nature seems ready to freeze the proceedings.

A 'Winter Storm Watch' has been posted for the nation's capitol and there is a potential for significant snow... sleet... or ice accumulations.

"I can't imagine the Democrats would want to showcase Mr. Gore and his new findings on global warming as a winter storm rages outside," a Republican lawmaker emailed the DRUDGE REPORT. "And if the ice really piles up, it will not be safe to travel."

A spokesman for Sen. John Kerry, who chairs the committee, was not immediately available to comment on contingency plans.

Global warming advocates have suggested this year's wild winter spells are proof of climate change.

But then, what isn't?

PBS's John Ridley:

"Quite simply, quite plainly, just by virtue his being, Obama is America. The first true American to lead our nation."

I thought questioning someone's patriotism and loyalties was bad. Ridley has manged to simultaneously trash the values of 43 earlier presidents in one shot.

Update: Like so many of us are tempted to do at moments such at this, Steven Den Beste shouts, "Hazukashii serifu kinshi tteba!!" Really, what else need be said?

Allahpundit:

When I was young and naive, I'd have guessed that the media didn't yet have the particulars of this story but were working hard to bring them out. Now I just assume that they know everything already but that the bombshell won't burst until the day after the midterms.

And even then, it will time to play "Name That Party" if the politician in question has a D between his name and his home state's initials.

Keep rockin', MSM!

Presidential enemies lists then and now--continuity you can believe in!

Noel Sheppard writes:

The Obama economic adviser who doesn't want infrastructure "stimulus" spending to only benefit "white male construction workers" is angry at Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Michelle Malkin for having the nerve to report his racist remarks the mainstream media compliantly boycotted for several weeks.

In an open letter posted at his blog Saturday, former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich accused the trio of "manifestly distorting [his] words and pulling them out of context."

The best response to that would be to say, "I claim no higher truth than my own perceptions. This is how I lived it."

"Company who sold 'Retarded Babies for Palin' t-shirts goes out of business--The owner claims he can't take the hate mail anymore."

Andrew Breitbart spots a "sexist, misogynist, homophobic, racist, speciesist and self-hating host" who must be "maimed, lynched and/or killed"--or at least "boycotted or taken off the air."

"If not, someone might be offended..."

(Well, you can't be too careful when it comes to customers at Borders these days.)

An ABC morning show host in 2007: American morale is at an all time low because 9/11 couldn't have happened without massive government help.

An ABC morning show host in 2009: "Consumer confidence has to rebound, which won't happen without massive government help."

Then: "Dissent is Patriotic."

Now: "Arguably treasonous."

Or as James Lileks wrote on election night:

I'm off to the Mall to sell razor blades so people can scrape off their "Question Authority" bumper stickers. Just remember: Dissent is still the highest form of patriotism. Except now it will be practiced by the lowest form of people.

Including those who buy airtime by the gallon.

When we last saw Chris Matthews, he was busy explaining to Al Roker which direction the Oba-tingle flowed:

Are you sure Chris? Because the direction of Obaworshiping is beginning to follow a distinct southern migration pattern. The One has gone from being on your shoulder, to in your breast pocket. So is a race to the bottom next?

Yes they can!

(H/T for the Barack-pocket sized chrestobamathy: Charlie Martin.)

As Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters writes, Howard Kurtz, the legacy media's legacy media critic has a blinding flash of the obvious and renames MSNBC "The Obama Network":

In the '90s, many conservatives referred to CNN as "The Clinton News Network" due to its obvious biases towards the 42nd president.

Years later, just days after the inauguration of the 44th president, one of that network's on-air hosts officially labeled MSNBC "The Obama Network."

You gotta love it.

At one point on his Reliable Sources segment on CNN, Kurtz said, "Okay, well then I just want to be clear about it, because MSNBC denies that it has moved to the left, and I think the evidence is pretty strong."

They don't always deny it--it just depends on who's doing the asking.

(And it goes without saying that Kurtz's employers are both in the tank themselves.)

Sherman Frederick, the publisher of the Las Vegas Review Journal writes, "As our president said, it is time to grow up":

There is a growing faction of the American left that seeks revenge more than righteousness.

Intolerant of dissenting views, this faction thinks as comedian Janeane Garofalo does that some members of the opposing political party should be "jailed." Terrorist acts (such as mailing envelopes of white power to Mormon temples because the gay marriage vote in California went the church's way) are seen by this faction as understandable and acts of legitimate political expression.

There is also an ugly racial component to it. We first saw it with Obama's pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who said, among other things, that white America had deliberately inflicted black Africa with AIDS.

When the Rev. Wright first hit the national stage, we hardly knew what to make of his irrational and separatist statements. Consequently, we pretty much ignored the substance of Wright's racially divisive rhetoric and focused on it as a day-to-day political story. It made us more comfortable, I think.

But in light of the things we saw at the inauguration, it may be time to revisit the dangers of intolerance and hate -- no matter the color of the person who makes them -- and nip this ugly mean streak in the bud.

He's absolutely right, but he lost me with that last sentence. Nip it in the bud? This isn't exactly a new development: Garofalo's shtick dates back to 2003. The origins of the black liberation theology that fuels Obama's former spiritual advisor date back to the 1960s, not coincidentally, the terrorist heyday of Bill Ayers and other paramilitary Obama supporters. Radical payback for opposing views isn't exactly new, either.

Back in mid-2004 with an election year in full swing, Charles Krauthammer coined "the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release":

The loathing goes far beyond the politicians. Liberals as a body have gone quite around the twist. I count one all-star rock tour, three movies, four current theatrical productions and five best sellers (a full one-third of the New York Times list) variously devoted to ridiculing, denigrating, attacking and devaluing this president, this presidency and all who might, God knows why, support it.

How to explain? With apologies to Dr. Freud, I propose the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release.

The hostility, resentment, envy and disdain, all superheated in Florida, were not permitted their natural discharge. Came 9/11 and a lid was forced down. How can you seek revenge for a stolen election by a nitwit usurper when all of a sudden we are at war and the people, bless them, are rallying around the flag and hailing the commander in chief? With Bush riding high in the polls, with flags flying from pickup trucks (many of the flags, according to Howard Dean, Confederate), the president was untouchable.

The Democrats fell unnaturally silent. For two long, agonizing years, they had to stifle and suppress. It was the most serious case of repression since Freud's Anna O. went limp. The forced deference nearly killed them. And then, providentially, they were saved. The clouds parted and bad news rained down like manna: WMDs, Abu Ghraib, Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, Joe Wilson and, most important, continued fighting in Iraq.

Stripped of his halo, the president's ratings went down. The spell was broken. He was finally once again human and vulnerable. With immense relief, the critics let loose.

The result has been volcanic. The subject of one prominent new novel is whether George W. Bush should be assassinated. This is all quite unhinged. Good God. What if Bush is re-elected? If they lose to him again, Democrats will need more than just consolation. They'll need therapy.

The media's pressure cooker would pop yet again the following year: as Mickey Kaus wrote at the time, Katrina allowed them to go nuclear on Bush without sounding unpatriotic, unlike their GWOT and Iraq-bashing coverage.

So this isn't exactly a new development in politics--this is merely SOP for the American left.

Perfect inner zen perfected across pond:

Theologists and Buddhist gurus have today begun a complete re-think of the path to enlightenment after a thirty-six year old man from Bristol achieved perfect inner Zen after buying a middle of the range Toshiba television from the Dixons electrical store at a retail park on Saturday.

Or heck, you could just eat a nectarine...

In anticipation of Monday's fireworks, Kathy Shaidle has a little Fun With Photoshop...

Update: Robert Stacy McCain adds:

In other words, by picking this fight, Obama is getting himself into a quagmire, giving publicity to the one person who knows best how to turn that publicity into an issue-focused argument highlighting the flaws of Obama's economic plan which, as Rush says, "anyone with a brain knows" won't work.

Just another day at the brand new White House of the Gifted.

As President Obama and his fellow Democrats in Congress attempt to ladle copious amount of pork to their cronies disguised as a "stimulus package", it's worth reading Bruce Bartlett's thorough exploration in Forbes of "the role of government in economic recovery", beginning with a short, sharp primer on the makings of the Depression, and then a look at today's economy. Here's a sample:

No one today believes that the Great Depression just happened or dragged on as long as it did because the private sector kept making mistake after mistake after mistake. It only made them and continued to do so because government interfered with the normal operations of the market and prevented readjustment from taking place.

The Great Depression resulted from a confluence of governmental errors--the Fed was too easy for too long in the 1920s, tightened too much in 1928-29 and then failed to fix its mistake, thus bringing on a general deflation that was very difficult to arrest once downward momentum had set in. Herbert Hoover compounded the problem by signing into law the Smoot-Hawley Tariff and sharply raising taxes in 1932.

Unfortunately, Franklin D. Roosevelt misunderstood the nature of the economy's problem and tried to fix prices to keep them from falling--thus preventing the very readjustment that would have brought about recovery. (See this paper by UCLA economists Harold Cole and Lee Ohanian.) He doesn't seem to have ever understood the critical role of Fed policy and mistakenly thought that arbitrarily raising the price of gold would make money easier.

Then, in 1937, just as the economy was starting to build some upward momentum, Roosevelt decided to raise taxes and cut spending, and the Fed suddenly concluded that inflation, rather than deflation, was the main problem and tightened monetary policy. (Note: According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Great Depression was basically two severe recessions--one from August 1929 to March 1933, and another from May 1937 to June 1938--not a continuous downturn.)

The result was an economic setback that didn't really end until both monetary and fiscal policy became expansive with the onset of World War II. At that point, no one worried any more about budget deficits, and the Fed pegged interest rates to ensure that they stayed low, increasing the money supply as necessary to achieve this goal.

It was then and only then that the Great Depression truly ended. As a consequence, economists concluded that an expansive monetary and fiscal policy, which had been advocated by economist John Maynard Keynes throughout the 1930s, was the key to getting out of a depression.

Keynes was right, but many of his followers weren't. They thought that budget deficits would stimulate growth under all circumstances, not just those of a deflationary depression. When this medicine was applied inappropriately, as it was in the 1960s and 1970s, the result was inflation.

Read the rest.

(Via Jonah Goldberg.)

If you missed it today on the Sirius-XM's POTUS channel, the latest edition of PJM Political is online at Pajamas HQ. Join host Steve Green of VodkaPundit.com, an all-star cast from Pajamas Media, PJTV.com, and the Blogosphere, for their thoughts on the inauguration of President Obama and the early days of his administration:

• Pajamas Media CEO Roger L. Simon.


• Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com.


• John Hinderaker of the Power Line blog.


• Hugh Hewitt of Hugh Hewitt.com.


• James Lileks of Lileks.com.


• PJTV.com co-hosts Alan Barton and Bill Whittle.


• PJTV co-host Joe Hicks interviews Reason magazine editors Matt Welch and Katherine Mangu-Ward on the future of libertarianism in the age of Obama, and the growing split between free-market libertarians and social conservatives.


• Produced by your humble narrator and boulevardier of the Blogosphere.

Tune in here to listen!

As Mark Steyn quips, "How dazzling is President Obama?"

So dazzling that he didn't merely give a dazzling inaugural speech. Any old timeserving hack could do that. Instead, he had the sheer genius to give a flat dull speech full of the usual shopworn boilerplate. Brilliant! At a stroke, he not only gently lowered the expectations of those millions of Americans and billions around the world for whom his triumphant ascendancy is the only thing that gives their drab little lives any meaning, but he also emphasized continuity by placing his own unprecedented incandescent megastar cool squarely within the tradition of squaresville yawneroo white middle-aged plonking mediocrities who came before him.

There's more than one? I think for most of the Obaboosters, the "President 2.0" phrase du jour is surprisingly close to the mark. There's Bush, there's Obama. History began on 9/11--which itself is rapidly plunging down the Memory Hole.

But then, Mark is among the few of us contrarians who haven't drunk the Obakool-Aid. Another is Abe Greenwald of Commentary's "Contentions" blog. He mines the fawning legacy media coverage of those who have imbibed deeply for hidden gems, finds them, and then jokes, "Funny, I don't remember Obama running on a platform of refreshing ignorance, but I guess I'm just disoriented from being stuck in the age of Old Politics."

Old Politics? That's so 2008.

"Now that the Obama Administration has taken power, it is critical for us to pay attention for how our language is being transformed before our eyes", The Gadfly Blog urges.

For some related thoughts, check out the conclusion of Byron York's recent interview with the man that Obama has apparently chosen to play Emmanuel Goldstein.

Fred Barnes suggests that "The Republicans' Best Weapon" is Obama himself:

In 1994, congressional Republicans carried laminated copies of their Contract With America (tax cuts, term limits, etc.) in their pockets. They may now want to laminate President Obama's inaugural address and carry it around.

This is not as silly as it sounds. Republican leaders believe the speech pleased them more than it did House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate majority leader Harry Reid. Obama's "new era of responsibility" echoed the "Personal Responsibility Act," the third of the ten planks in the Contract With America. Obama also said that it's not the size of government which matters but whether it works. Newt Gingrich coined that thought years ago. Obama lauded "risk-takers." Democrats want to tax them to death.

For the foreseeable future, attacking Obama will be counterproductive for Republicans. He's both enormously popular and the bearer of moral authority as the first African-American president.

Barnes notes that "Obama's words may be bromides or boilerplate that bear little relationship to his true sentiments or real plans." Well, as Jim Geraghty likes to note, those words (just words) all come with expiration dates.

"But so what?", Barnes adds. "Republicans in the House and Senate are a badly outnumbered minority. They have few political weapons at their disposal. Citing Obama's words makes political sense. It's at least worth a try. Republicans have nothing to lose."

And as Andrea Harris writes, welcome back my friend, to the decade that never, ever, ever ends:

For those who were born too late and therefore are under the impression that the Seventies was a gloriously innocent time of day-glo colored discoball party fun fun fun, that decade was actually when the American character was sunk in neurotic depression. We ran from Vietnam like a bunch of scared big girls. The economy sucked. Cynicism and selfish, destructive behavior was rampant. Cars were hideous junk painted ugly "earth tones" like crap brown, condensed-milk yellow, ketchup-stain red, and garbage can green. (My father's giant boat of a '73 Ford LTD was that color. Driving it was like trying to pilot the Hindenburg on the ground.) Fashions made men and women look like clowns. (Two words: plaid pantsuits.) The divorce rate, the drug-crime rate, the venereal disease rate -- everything bad went up. The idea of the psycho vet helped trash the military in the eyes of the civilian public. And when Carter became president the fan that the shit had been hitting got turned up to high. We became known as a nation of weak, effeminate suck-ups. That's why the Iranians were able to take our embassy hostage for a year.

That's what Obama and his supporters want to bring us back to.

Let me ask anyone reading this: did you know anyone in your school who was known for trying to get everyone to like them? Did you think they were great people or did you laugh when you heard they were stuffed in their locker by one of the jocks? Get ready for America to be stuffed in a locker.

Any editors reading this passage, please provide the answer to Kathy Shaidle's question, here.

In the Chicago Tribune, Mary Schmich writes, "A few months ago, before Barack Obama became the linguist-in-chief, I made a note to myself to write a column about the need to exterminate a pest."

And that pest's name? Enormity:

The problem wasn't new, but it seemed to be multiplying like mice. Suddenly, all sorts of people, pundits especially, were tossing "enormity" around with abandon. The enormity of the economic crisis. The enormity of the housing crisis, the layoff crisis, the banking crisis, various foreign relations imbroglios and Donald Trump's ego.

Every time another pundit said the word, I winced, not out of fear for my 401(k) but because I saw a battalion of newspaper editors and college professors, led by my 6th-grade teacher, Miss Birch, rapping on the pundits' enormous brains and shouting, "Enormity does not mean it's big!"

Because I was browbeaten in my formative years by such language warriors, I felt called to crusade to restore "enormity" to its proper meaning: "monstrous wickedness."

But I didn't get around to the crusade before Obama was elected, and now the truth is too huge to avoid: The battle is lost.

"I do not underestimate the enormity of the task that lies ahead," Obama told the Grant Park crowd at his November acceptance speech.

Last Sunday, he violated Miss Birch's rule again, in a speech at the Lincoln Memorial. "Despite the enormity of the task that lies ahead," he said, "I stand here today as hopeful as ever that the United States of America will endure."

When the president of the United States--Harvard lawyer, deft writer, one of the most powerful people in the world--tells Miss Birch it's time to change, well, she might.

"But not without grumbling", Schmich writes. Read the rest--her concluding sentence encapsulates postmodern feelgood hopeychangeyness and the Bobos In Paradise market segment it directly appeals to perfectly.

Back in July you'll recall that John McCain's campaign ran a YouTube video that dubbed Barack Obama "the biggest celebrity in the world" and compared the candidate (still in the middle of his first term in the Senate) to Paris Hilton.

You know you're over the target when you start receiving Good Morning America, and they and the rest of the enraptured legacy media were collectively infuriated by this ad:

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

GMA news anchor Chris Cuomo seemed equally flummoxed. He opened the show by asserting, "Some odd campaign news today. There's a round of new campaign commercials that really have us scratching our heads here." A bewildered Sawyer agreed: "What sort of committee meeting do you have where you say, 'Let's use Britney!' 'Let's use Paris!' Yes, that'll be a blow!"

And for a time it was. In mid-September, when McCain was still leading in some polls, Rich Lowry wrote:

The enduring scandal of the McCain campaign is that it wants to win. The press had hoped for a harmless, nostalgic loser like Bob Dole in 1996. In a column excoriating Republicans for historically launching successful attacks against Democratic presidential candidates in August, Time columnist Joe Klein excepted Bob Dole -- not mentioning that Dole had been eviscerated by Clinton negative ads before August ever arrived.

The press turned on McCain with a vengeance as soon as he mocked Barack Obama as a celebrity. Its mood grew still more foul when the McCain campaign took offense at Obama's "lipstick on a pig" jab. "The media are getting mad," according to Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz. "Stop the madness," urged Time's Mark Halperin, exhorting his fellow journalists to fight back against the McCain campaign's manufactured outrage.

One of the reasons why the "Celebrity" ad so angered the MSM was that it spoke to the heart of Obama's appeal--it's not ideas and policy oriented, it's "largely aesthetic and personality-based", as Peter Wehner writes in an excellent article at Commentary. Read the whole thing, but the main thesis is here:

Obama's appeal, while widespread, is largely aesthetic and personality-based. This explains why a somewhat unsettling cult of personality has arisen around Obama. His appeal is not rooted in ideas or political philosophy or governing achievements; indeed, it is not grounded in any acts of governance. Yet some people already speak of him as a Lincolnian and Messiah-like figure.

But precisely because this appeal is largely aesthetic rather than substantive, because it is not grounded in things deep or permanent, its durability is limited. Reality will intrude. A million watt smile, fashionable sunglasses, and a nice jump shot are fine - I wish I possessed each of them - but one can confidently assume that Kim Jong Il, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Hassan Nasrallah, and Hugo Chavez are immune to their charms. Inflation, deflation, and unemployment will not be determined by the eloquence of Obama's rhetoric, the dinners he attends, or the columnists and reporters he seduces.

My point is really a rather simple one: Obama will be judged by the outcome of events. The other things are fine -- but in the end, they are far less important, and in some cases they are evanescent. People magazine and the Style section of the Washington Post are fun, but they are not serious.

Right now Barack Obama, having been President for all of three days, appears to be sitting on top of the world. He is a bright, talented, and able man. But the world is an untidy and unpredictable place. Pakistan may convulse. Iran may well go nuclear on Obama's watch; if so, Saudi Arabia and Egypt might soon follow, and the most unstable region in the world would be home to several nuclear powers.

Hard decisions need to be made, often based on incomplete information and rapidly changing events. Inter-agency clashes will occur. People and agencies thought to be competent will prove to be unreliable. Intelligence agencies will not be able to tell the President all that he wishes. A massive federal bureaucracy, an emboldened Congress, and other nations will begin to assert themselves. The law of economics will not be suspended. Entitlement programs remain unreformed and therefore unsustainable. Wasteful programs will refuse to die. The deficit is exploding. People's expectations are soaring, and soon enough they will insist on results.

Barack Obama may or may not succeed as president; but whether he does or not, the things people are taken up with now will not be determinative. And if things get worse rather than better, if Obama appears overmatched by events, then what are viewed as strengths now will be seen as weaknesses later. The day's vanity will become the night's remorse.

Barack Obama is President of the United States, not a crown prince on a white horse. Fairy tales are fine; but fairy tales are childish things.

Which is my Michael Novak is speculating on "The Coming Fall"--when it will occur, and what might cause it.

Forget Timothy Geithner--check out Philip J. Heinker. He's taken the Hip Accountants' Oath!

Or, great moments in live TV!

Scroll to about 1:55 into this clip (at least while it's still online) to hear a local television sex doctor completely stick her fist in her mouth, as Gawker.com writes:

Dr. Terri Orbuch, the "Love Doctor" on a Detroit news station was talking about how lovey-dovey they are and then completely stuck her fist in her mouth. She was trying to reference last June's infamous terrorist fist jab moment, shared between the then-candidate and his wife when he won the Democratic nomination.

Unfortunately, thanks to the potent mixture of live TV and flop sweat, Orbuch blurted out this:

We also need to be affectionate, and you can see that with Barack and Michelle as well. They do a lot of a lot of touching, kissing, even fisting with one and other.

As Gawker concludes:

See, if we weren't talking quite so much about how awesome it is that they like to touch and kiss each other, we would never have had the Presidential Fisting image seared into our brains. Thanks, Detroit!

Heh.

As Glenn Reynolds wrote last week, "Remember, it's only McCarthyism if you disagree with the politics."

As Amy Alkon notes, when Robert Reich writes, titles such as this emerge from his blog:

How to Create Jobs Without Them All Going to Skilled Professionals and White Male Construction Workers

But then, Reich has always had a way with words, as Jonathan Rauch spotted in a 1997 Slate article when he compared what Reich wrote in Locked In the Cabinet, Reich's memoirs of his days as Bill Clinton's labor secretary, with videotapes and transcripts of the actual events. Reich describes himself, as Jonah Goldberg wrote in Liberal Fascism (where I first discovered Rauch's Slate article), as trapped in a Thomas Nast cartoon, "in constant battle with greedy fat cats, Social Darwinists, and Mr. Monopoly." The actual transcripts and tapes describe a reality that's far more pedestrian.

But then such fantasies of the Reich Stuff make him right at home with Bill Clinton's "meaning of is" postmodernism, Hillary Clinton's fantasy snipers in Tuzla, and also President Obama, who as a candidate similarly misremembered at least one meeting with big business.

"What if the National Portrait Gallery had the graffiti it showcases in the exhibit vandalized on the side of their building? It would be helpful to have even a small amount of education."

The Top 10 11 political t-shirts they should've sold at the inauguration.

Victor Davis Hanson notes the dichotomy that is the newly crowned President Obama:

For nearly three months since the election, we have been warned by President Obama, his staff, and the media not to burden him with unreal expectations that no mere mortal could meet.

But why then consciously borrow from Abraham Lincoln's speeches? And why re-create Lincoln's historic train ride to his inauguration--especially by flying back from Washington to Illinois to then return to D.C. by slow-moving railcar? Lincoln took the train because it was the only feasible way to get to Washington in 1861, not to copy the grand arrival of some earlier American savior.

Candidate Obama once adopted a presidential-like seal. He held a mass rally at Berlin's Victory Column (after his request for the more dramatic Brandenburg Gate was refused).

He adopted Greek temple sets at the Democratic convention. And like Zeus on Mt. Olympus, he talked about making the planet cool and the oceans recede.

And now he's capped all that by warning us to lower our expectations!

But if Obama deliberately takes on the trappings of a messiah, why shouldn't we expect messianic solutions?

Would you settle for tales of brave Obamacles?

Update: On the other hand, "Could President Obama really be Bill McKay?"

AP reports:

In a discouraging report for the American economy, General Electric Co. posted a 46 percent drop in fourth-quarter earnings on Friday and warned of a "tough environment" this year as it struggles with its ailing finance business.

To quote Mark Steyn's brilliant essay on previous reports of fresh disaster, "Hey, that's great news, isn't it?"

It is according to what GE's more public representatives have told us.

In November of 2007, one of the conglomerate's television networks urged us to turn off our lights (manufactured by GE) for the environment. Six months later, Barack Obama surely gave a tingle up the collective leg of one of their other television networks when he told told voters:

"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 at the start of 2008, the spouse of his leading opponent in the Democratic primaries was quoted as saying:

We just have to slow down our economy and cut back our greenhouse gas emissions 'cause we have to save the planet for our grandchildren.

Mission accomplished!

Kerry Picket writes:

While the media talking heads are still gabbing about the greatness of President Obama's inauguration, few, if any, are mentioning the purple inauguration ticket holders, who were stuffed thru Washington D.C.'s 3rd street tunnel hoping to see the Obama inauguration.

A Facebook group titled "Survivors of the Purple Tunnel of Doom" is for individuals who attempted to attend the inauguration with purple tickets and their January 20th horror stories (h/t American Thinker Larrey Anderson).

Click over for assorted horror stories.

Every time I see that headline though, I can't help but think of this purple tunnel--it looks like Levitra may have missed a sure-fire sponsorship opportunity.

"In an interview Thursday with The Associated Press, Gov. Rod Blagojevich compared his early morning December arrest by FBI agents to Japan's 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor."

I get these two incidents confused all the time myself.

By getting Jim Geraghty to post "The right man won in 2008:"

Mac is back--back to his moral preening about how bipartisan he is, back to his reflexive demonization of his own party, back to his refusal to recognize any legitimate concerns raised by those who disagree with him. If we're going to have Democratic agenda enacted, better it be by a Democrat than a Republican obsessed with avoiding the "partisan" label in the White House.

Read the whole thing.

Wow, talk about phoning it in: the music by Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma for President Obama's inauguration was prerecorded, apparently because of the weather conditions:

The players and the inauguration organizing committee said the arrangement was necessary because of the extreme cold and wind during Tuesday's ceremony. The conditions raised the possibility of broken piano strings, cracked instruments and wacky intonation minutes before the president's swearing in (which had problems of its own).

"Truly, weather just made it impossible," Carole Florman, a spokeswoman for the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, said on Thursday. "No one's trying to fool anybody. This isn't a matter of Milli Vanilli," Ms. Florman added, referring to the pop band that was stripped of a 1989 Grammy because the duo did not sing on their album and lip-synched in concerts.

Ms. Florman said that the use of a recording was not disclosed beforehand but that the NBC producers handling the television pool were told of its likelihood the day before.

The network said it sent a note to pool members saying that the use of recordings in the musical numbers was possible. Inaugural musical performances are routinely recorded ahead of time for just such an eventuality, Ms. Florman said. The Marine Band and choruses, which performed throughout the ceremony, did not use a recording, she said.

"It's not something we would announce, but it's not something we would try to hide," Ms. Florman said. "Frankly, it would never have occurred to me to announce it."

No, of course not. Tom Blumer dubs it "Faked But Accurate"; Ann Althouse capsulizes the postmodern surrealism of the day:

So we were listening to recorded music when the clock hit noon, the constitutional moment for the President to be sworn in! Then, he was sworn in and that might have been fake and there was a second of that too.

Glenn Reynolds asks, "A Milli Vanilli Start To The Obama Presidency?" But Bob Owens notes that the Milli-ing--and even the Vanilli-ing--started quite some time ago.

David M of The Thunder Run asks, "Are You Ready to Get Angry?" If so, this story will do the trick:

Since 9/11/01 it has become quite the event to have military color guards present the colors and be present during the singing of the National Anthem at sporting events of all kinds, and at Super Bowl XLIII this will also take place. So to say I was surprised when I received this email from a distraught Marine Mom would be an understatement:

My youngest Marine called me this morning. In the course of the conversation he made mention of being part of the Color Guard for the ceremonies at the Super Bowl. He has been part of other Color Guards at other games and has been able to enjoy the entire game after presenting the Colors. HOWEVER, this will not be the case this time. The 12 man/women color guard will be presenting the Colors and then will be escorted out of the stadium and therefore not allowed to see the game. Steven and the 11 others are quite upset about this and have asked that I see if I could contact someone and have that changed.

What? The Super Bowl won't let the military color guard stay and watch the big game? Yes you read that right. Was I skeptical? At first, but after I contacted the Tampa Bay host Committee through their official website and spoke to Katie Wagner, I was assured that yes in fact her email inbox is full of emails from upset Marine Mom's all asking for an explanation. To Ms. Wagner's credit, who by the way was extremely gracious during my questions the Host Committee has no control over game day decisions; that authority rests solely with the NFL.

What has become a common yet gracious act of allowing a military color guard to stay and watch the game from the side lines, in honor of their service to our country, this time has them being treated as if they are the unwelcome guests, common servants to be whisked away as soon as their task is completed.

David writes that up next, "We'll see if I receive a reply to my inquiries for more information from the NFL."

We'll know one way or another by the end of the day on February 1st.

Wendy Sullivan on the power of blogging:

I started blogging five years ago. It was news and political stuff, which I still do today. I had no educational background for it - just passion. I love it - it's my writing fetish. I do it for pleasure more than profit.

At the time I began, my dearest friend in the world was an unemployed journalist. She had done the "necessary" years of university to give her some kind of paper that said she had the "right" to report the news. Yet, she remained unemployed.

Out of my exuberance, I suggested she start a blog to help get her name known in the right circles. Her reply? "I'm a journalist. I don't write about the news for free!"

Fast forward five years. Today I will be lunching with the editor of the National Post, one of Canada's two national newspapers. Next week I will be a pundit once more on the Michael Coren Show.

And my friend? She gave up and now works in a bookstore, stocking shelves.

Exactly. Not that Wendy's friend needed to do blogging, but those who don't know how to proactively market themselves and who expect offers to magically arrive at their doorstep are largely doomed to fail.

"Which is worse: Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, and Nancy Pelosi controlling your doctor--or controlling your bank?"

A little Oogedy-Boogedy from the left: "Ceremony purges White House of evil spirits."

Someone on Fleet Street is a lad insane, as "Agent Bedhead" writes, if they think David Bowie(!) set in motion our current financial maelstrom.

Personally, I blame these cracked actors.

(Via Colorado's thin white vodka-swilling duke.)

Update: Problem solved--evidently, "Kate Moss Will Fix That Dreadful 'David Bowie Recession'". Let's dance!

Mrs. George Stephanopoulos on the reaction of herself and her husband to Obama's inauguration.

As its former Ombudsman Daniel Okrent wrote in 2004, "Is the New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?"

"Of course it is."

Related: Has Caroline Kennedy gotten Pinch-ed? Don Surber thinks so!

(H/T: Radio Pundit.)

Victor Davis Hanson has "An Uneasy Feeling"--and who can blame him?

I distilled from the press coverage and the crowds and the punditry yesterday that for all too many suddenly a vote for Obama redeems America. Now, to paraphrase Michelle Obama, for the first time in their lives they are apparently proud of the United States. (Had we not had the financial meltdown in mid-September, and had Obama stayed three points back in the polls, would millions have stayed soured on America and now in sullen silence licked their wounds?).

So I am surprised that suddenly the election of a single individual means that we are united, patriotic, proud of America? Suddenly Okinawa or Antietam, or all those who died at the Argonne, are ours to claim again? (This reminds of elementary school, when our third-grade split up into two sides, as the teacher quizzed us on geography-and the losers of the contest cried and said unfair and how they didn't like school or Mrs. Wilson, and then when they won the next day, how suddenly third grade became glorious, and Mrs. Wilson and her games were once again wonderful).

But America was always ours, the public, and the nation transcends the proposition of whether Obama gets elected or not--given that the United States, in its worst hour, was better than the alternatives at their best. So I think it would be wise to cool it on the "I am now proud of America" rhetoric. If getting your way means suddenly the dead at Iwo or those who were blown up in B-17s over Germany are at last your own and matter, then we are in deep trouble.

Don't miss VDH's "More Modest Proposals in the Age of Obama" aimed at The One's more beatific supporters. Such as Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, whom you can hear at 3:54 in the latest Hollywood Obaworshiping video stating, "I pledge to be a servant to our president and all mankind."

All of which is summed by this observation by Dan Blatt of Gay Patriot (via one of his commenters) on the yin and yang of the last eight years:

Obama worship is the flip side of Bush hatred. They love the one without knowing what he stands for and loath the other while mispresenting his record.

Exactly.

(H/T: IP)

Same as the old Anti-Semitism, Claudia Rosett writes.

Ed Morrissey asks, "Wasn't this supposed the era of post-racialism?":

Robert Reich apparently didn't get that message. In his appearance before Congress on structuring the stimulus plan on January 7th, Reich suggested that the package discriminate against white male workers:

I am concerned, as I'm sure many of you are, that these jobs not simply go to high-skilled people who are already professionals or to white male construction workers. ... I have nothing against white male construction workers. I'm just saying that there are a lot of other people who have needs as well. ... Criteria can be set so that the money does go to others, the long term unemployed minorities, women, people who are not necessarily construction workers or high-skilled professionals.

Meanwhile, Ed notes that if nothing else, Caroline Kennedy at least fulfilled the most important aspect of being a senator from New York, quoting this passage in the New York Times:

Ms. Kennedy's departure would reset the political calculus among the remaining contenders, about half a dozen of whom were likely to be serious prospects if Ms. Kennedy were out of the picture. Publicly and privately, Mr. Paterson has talked about the importance of selecting a woman to replace Mrs. Clinton, which could boost such candidates as Ms. Gillibrand, Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, and Randi Weingarten, the president of the United Federation of Teachers.

Ed responds:

I get it. It's sort of the Robert Reich approach; we can't allow a man (of any color, this time) to replace Hillary. Instead of looking for intellectual or experiential qualifications as a primary concern, Paterson wants simply to bar another Y-chromosomed Senator. Call it the New York Gender Stimulus plan.

Funny, I don't recall Pat Moynihan making any waves about gender when his successor announced her candidacy.

Meanwhile, the Huffington Post didn't get the post-racial memo either, as they do a spot-on impersonation of Kanye West.

It's only Barack-Age Wasteland. As the Ace of Spades blog notes, "Let's not forget - this was touted as the "greenest inauguration in history"--of course, that's not exactly how things worked out:

In the UK Mail--and I'll bet the editor had lots of fun writing it: "Former French President Chirac hospitalised after mauling by his clinically depressed poodle."

(Via Lileks on Twitter, who adds, "Now go away you silly person, or I shall maul you some more!" But just what are the commercial possibilities of canine aviation?)

It'll be a sad atmosphere in the Pool Room of the Four Seasons tonight, you know, as Caroline Kennedy ends her quixotic Senate seat bid.

Ed Morrissey bets New York State's obsession with dynastic politics won't end though: "I'd bet that Cuomo gets the call by tomorrow."

Update: Keep hope alive!

Update: Or not: "Spokesman confirms Caroline has withdrawn." And I'm sure we're feeling as withdrawn ourselves--if not much, much more so--at this news.

Not quite the same as the Chewbacca Defense, but worth reading nonetheless, as Robert Stacy McCain lists the sordid details of, as he calls him, "Mayor NAMBLA"--whose party affiliation dare not speak its name in the MSM.

I'm sure somebody on Fark has already said it about this Japanese device which PC World notes, "Aims to Translate Cat Talk ."

Via the Professor, more pet gadgetry here.

As Greg Pollowitz writes, you won't be seeing these in the MSM--they've got more important issues to discuss.

The Obama administration time machine continues to explore recent history--as we (and CNN) noted in the previous post, yesterday was a revisit to Woodstock; will their economic policy send them--and the rest of us--Back to the Thirties?

in his last week in power, in order to ensure that the nation's capital actually survive the transition process, President Bush had declared DC a disaster area. Between the inclement weather, the lack of indoor plumbing, the minimum of functional outdoor plumbing, and hundreds of thousands of pop music-loving anti-war protesters, last Thursday, I wrote that the inauguration sounded like "a repeat of Woodstock, except with Geritol the drug of choice instead of LSD, and many fewer cool bands."

CNN's John Roberts, the architect of CNN's infamous "Wright-Free Zone" last year, agrees. As Newsbusters puts it, "CNN's John Roberts Dubs Inaugural Crowds 'Barack-stock'":

CNN's CAROL COSTELLO: You know, usually, you have a little bit of a problem getting people to agree to be on television, but not yesterday. People were begging to be on TV. They wanted their thoughts recorded. They were very much aware that history was being made, and they wanted to be a part of it in whatever way they could.

JOHN ROBERTS: It really was 'Barack-stock' -- peace, love, and history.

COSTELLO: It really was.

Well far out, man! The lead act was pretty amazing, but did you catch Country Joe Biden And The Sea Kittens? Crosby, Stills And Rahm? Clinton Clearwater Revival? And how 'bout that oldies act, Thomas Jefferson Airplane!

Seriously though, it did seem like there was plenty of featherweight pop culture and more than a few bad trips yesterday as well. Hopefully the administration will recover from their dalliance with nostalgie de la boue and actually govern like grownups. The legacy media's long strange acid trip of the last election cycle may have been too much for them to overcome, though.

Update: While CNN's Roberts declared yesterday to be "peace, love, and history", Michael Medved notes that "President Obama explicitly and forcefully distanced himself from the far-left 'peace activists' who provided his drive for the presidency with much of its initial energy and urgency."

As Jim Geraghty writes, "Surprising very few of us, we see that once in office, Obama is more open about his gun control efforts at WhiteHouse.gov."

Jonah Goldberg posts his initial thoughts on President Obama's speech and notes, "I agree with most of the folks here that it wasn't as well-written as I expected. There were some awfully clunky cliches in there", after listing a few, he hits upon a great observation regarding freedom versus collectivism:

One last point, for now. There was also a great deal of nonsense in there. Ramesh already mentioned the bit about harnessing the sun and whatnot to power our factories (why not distill energy from our strategic unicorn manure stockpile). But the line that grated on me most came from the bit about service and sacrifice. He said:

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.

For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.

No, "they" didn't. Slaves certainly didn't endure the lash of the whip out of a sense of service and sacrifice for us. That is one of the reasons slavery is so evil; it isn't voluntary. Suffice it to say that if that line had come out of a different man's mouth it would not be nearly so well-received. Nor did those immigrants make their sacrifices for "us." They made them for themselves, for their own pursuit of happiness, for their families.

This is not to say we do not benefit from the sweat of their brows and the shedding of their blood, but Obama's rhetorical ambition seems broader than that insight. He wants to forge a new sense of collective identity. There are aspects of that effort that are admirable or defensible, to be sure. Don't we conservatives lament a lost sense of citizenship and the erosion of a common culture? But too often he comes across as wanting to take that collective vision and drape it over individualism and enterprise like a wet blanket. The pursuit of individual prosperity is not selfish and the effort to defend it is neither a tired dogma nor a childish thing. I often get the sense that President Obama doesn't see it that way, never more so than today.

Which may be one of the reasons why one of the most visible scorecards for that prosperity was so off today.

The newly airbrushed White House Website trashes President Bush over Katrina--and Drew M. at Ace of Spades HQ is not a happy man. Can't say I blame him.

Yes, Americans just love their presidents and immediate staff to be partisan and petty. Bad first step, fellas.

Tony Woodlief:

It was revealing that one of the speeches most worthy of note, from the incomparable Forest Whitaker, was essentially a selection from William Faulkner's Nobel acceptance speech, an uplifting affirmation of art and truth that is at the same time a denunciation of the worst of post-modernism and relativism. What we have forgotten, as unwittingly attested by the voices at this concert (excepting Mr. Obama, of course, who is a first-rate speaker), is that actors are not, in a classical Aristotelian sense, artists. They are skilled, to be sure, but they are empty vessels, to be fitted to parts as suits the real artists, the writers and photographers, the costumers and make-up specialists. This is not to deny the accidental beauty of Marisa Tomei or Jamie Foxx, or the emotive skill of Denzel Washington. But something is strangely out of whack when speeches are to be delivered at the foot of Lincoln, on ground hallowed by King, and the deliverers we choose are none of them thinkers or writers.

It was a concert, to be sure, and one can hardly expect, in today's entertainment-focused America, a crowd of onlookers to prefer Dana Goia to Jack Black's goofball-turned-briefly-serious speechifying. Who needs some stuffy poet, after all, when you have available the artistic genius behind Shallow Hal? Sure, John Irving wrote a couple of books good enough to become movies, but we've got the star of Snakes on a Plane, for crying out loud! Besides, reading is for elitists.

The reality, of course, is that most actors today are nothing without smoldering looks and other people's words, and so each in turn took the stage to read the words of their intellectual betters. Perhaps this is the way of art in a highly specialized economy--if even Christian rock stars these days have to be sexually appealing, then surely we can't cast stones at average Americans who prefer their speeches to be given by beautiful people.

As Woodlief writes, "It's a gentler kind of reflection we seek these days, not an inward look at what is good and evil within this country, within each of us, but instead a reflection that is all glitter and shine, delivered by beautiful people who have distinguished themselves by an ability to show us what we want to see."

David Horowitz has an exceptional piece on today's transition of power, placing it into both America's long-term history, and the last forty years of the left's culture war upon that tradition. As an up and coming player in Chicago politics, Barack Obama fell in with those who sought the latter; as the nation's 44th president, Horowitz lists numerous helpful signs of him embracing the former, richer tradition.

Which isn't all that dissimilar from the career path of Horowitz himself, come to think of it. As Paul Mirengoff writes, "David Horowitz may not have seen it all, but he has seen more than just about all of us, and from both sides of the political divide."

Paul quotes just about all of it, but I'll merely direct you to either link and strongly suggest reading the whole essay.

Jay Nordlinger:

When I read that the crowd today booed President Bush -- and then saw a video of it -- I thought of a quip my friend Eddie made, not long ago: "When the Left asks for a classless society, now I know what they mean."

Meanwhile, Tom Brokaw has a classless moral inversion of his own, looking at the president who liberated Iraq from a would-be Stalin and quipping that his successor's inauguration "reminds me of the Velvet Revolution," which toppled the communist regime in Czechoslovakia.

Heh: "Obama Inaugurated, Ex-Klansman Collapses."

One leading economic indicator wasn't impressed by today's festivities, as Reuters notes:

U.S. stock indexes extended losses and hit session lows on Tuesday after President Barack Obama's inauguration speech provided few new details about measures to tackle the growing economic crisis.

"I think people were looking for something, new plans, new hopes," said Joe Saluzzi, co-manager of trading at Themis Trading in Chatam, New Jersey.

"They didn't hear something new."

To be fair, an inauguration speech isn't exactly the place to lay out a new administration's fiscal agenda, but still, between this, Ted Kennedy passing out, the racially charged benediction from Rev. Joseph Lowery, whatever caused Rahm to flip the Emanuel, and the jeering of the incoming president's supporters at the outgoing commander-in-chief, there were lots of fumbles during the ecstasy.

Update: Perhaps this (via the Professor) helps to explain today's market swoon: "In the mind of the anti-free-marketeer, the government occupies the same kind of intellectual territory as the divine designer in the mind of an anti-Darwinian."

More" The temperature wasn't the only thing icy in DC today. Witness: "The awesomely awesome Carter/Clinton snub"--complete with video!

Feel the narcissism as "Generation We" makes their stand--then after a hard day's work of shooting a YouTube clip says screw it, and heads back to Starbucks for another decaf vente soy latte. As Melissa Clouthier writes, "Just in case you think the world will finally be saved once all the Boomers are pushing up daisies, I have bad news for you: they spawned."

Obviously, we need the next generation of this counter.

Rush transcription of same video featuring B-list celebs, here.

Related: Headline of the day award goes to The Gormogons: "Paging Vernon Reid".

Whoever's ghostwriting Wonkette this week ponders, "Did John Roberts Screw Up The Oath On Purpose?"

(Via Justin Hart on Twitter, who sagely advises, "Reminder to conservatives. Don't fall into this trap. It's too easy.")

Update: "ABC's Gibson on Al Gore: 'Had He Gotten a Second Term...'"

At "Big Hollywood", James Hudnall has "10 Cinematic Cliches That Must Die!"

Bill McGurn, President Bush's former chief speechwriter, whom I interviewed in November while we were both on the National Review cruise, is spot-on when writes that as the president leaves Washington DC, "he carries with him the near-universal opprobrium of the permanent class that inhabits our nation's capital. Yet perhaps the most important reason for this unpopularity is the one least commented on":

Here's a hint: It's not because of his failures. To the contrary, Mr. Bush's disfavor in Washington owes more to his greatest success. Simply put, there are those who will never forgive Mr. Bush for not losing a war they had all declared unwinnable.

Read the whole thing, and also note this hopeful sign:

Mr. Bush's success in Iraq is equally infuriating, because it showed he was right and they wrong. Many in Washington have not yet admitted that, even to themselves. Mr. Obama has. We know he has because he has elected to keep Mr. Bush's secretary of defense -- not something you do with a failure.

Mr. Obama seems aware that, at the end of the day, he will not be judged by his predecessor's approval ratings. Instead, he will soon find himself under pressure to measure up to two Bush achievements: a strategic victory in Iraq, and the prevention of another attack on America's home soil. As he rises to this challenge, our new president will learn that when you make a mistake, the keepers of the Beltway's received orthodoxies will make you pay dearly.

But it will not even be close to the price you pay for ignoring their advice and succeeding.

(H/T: Jennifer Rubin, who rounds up plenty of other inauguration morning links worth checking out, at Commentary.)

Just when you thought that media out of Gaza wasn't surreal enough, comes this moment, courtesy of Charles Johnson, who writes:

Al Arabiya reporter Hannan al-Masri is live on the air in Gaza when she is told that Hamas has just fired rockets from inside the Al Arabiya studio building, news which apparently strikes her as quite humorous.

(Turn on closed captions for English subtitles.)

This clip casts a whole new light on the numerous American media scandals of the past decade. For example, give CBS credit--as bad as RatherGate was, they've never launched missiles off the roof of Black Rock at their competitors!

Selwyn Duke has a lengthy post on the man who attempted to assassinate Hitler in 1944, in a lengthy post at The New American.

As for the recent movie version of those events starring Tom Cruise, I posted my initial thoughts on the surprisingly watchable film here.

John Hinderaker has a lengthy and sober assessment of President Bush's tenure in office. Definitely read the whole thing, but here's the linchpin of the post:

In assessing the pluses and minuses of the Bush administration, one always returns to Iraq. Many think that Bush was too slow to change strategies after sectarian violence erupted in 2006; others think that he deserves great credit for backing the surge and ultimately winning the war. The second proposition, I think, is indisputable, while the first is questionable. I'm inclined to agree with Dick Cheney that it's wrong to suggest that nothing good happened in Iraq until 2007.

With the benefit of a bit of hindsight, it seems to me that Bush's failings on Iraq were mostly political. It was always obvious that the biggest challenge in Iraq would not be felling Saddam, but rather what would come afterward. The ethnic and sectarian divisions in that country were well understood, and many (like me) wondered whether Iraq was really a country that could stay together once its tyrant was deposed. But Bush failed to adequately prepare the public for the tough, ambiguous conflict that was sure to ensue once Saddam was gone.

This failure was especially regrettable since the war, when launched, was not Bush's war but America's. Large majorities in the House and Senate voted to authorize the war, including most leading Democrats. But because Bush failed to prepare the public for the post-major combat stage, the Democrats could plausibly take the view that they had signed on only for the easy overthrow of a dictator. When the inevitable messiness ensued, they double-crossed the President. That was shameful, but it was also foreseeable, and it was enabled by Bush's failure to do the political work necessary to educate the American public.

In the end, the greatest failures of the Bush administration were political. Bush was the first MBA President, and he always seemed to think that results would carry the day. He followed Lincoln, who wrote that if events bore him out, no one would remember his critics, while if events did not bear him out, a thousand angels swearing he was right wouldn't make any difference.

That's fine as far as it goes, but Lincoln went to considerable lengths, sometimes to the derogation of the war effort, to make sure that public opinion in the North stayed with him. And he was, in the event, saved by the victories won by Grant and Sherman.

As John writes, "Bush's great failing was that his focus was almost exclusively on policy, and he was unwilling to pay adequate attention to politics." And its too bad--because had he reminded voters of the continuity on regime change of his administration and the prior one, the bipartisan support this effort had from 1998 until 2002, and the rank hypocrisy of the left's pivot on the issue, he could have done much to prop up the GOP in 2006 and 2008. Not to mention his own poll numbers.









Update: "Good luck to you on your travels, Sir. Be well."

More: "Closed Press."

This headline sounds like it could have been written in 1993:

Music industry urged to embrace the Internet

Not that they took that advice in 1993, of course.

Backwards ran the logic until reeled the mind--where it all ends knows Weimar.

(HT: I/P)

The Media Research Center is your one stop shop for Obama worshiping media clips. Savor the bias!

(No really--I'm just thrilled that even more legacy journalists are on the record regarding where they stand.)

Update: "Are They Writing for Tiger Beat or the New York Times?" Who can tell the two apart these days?

Kathy Shaidle writes that Ayn Rand is slowly being embraced in one of the nations that needs her the most: France.

Meanwhile, England, on permanent recessional since about the 30 seconds after Kiplings' poem/warning in 1897 (save for a timeout in WWII) is taking grudging steps to re-enter the late 19th century as well: "In Britain, the slowly dawning realization that burglary is a serious crime." The Great Relearning continues apace.

Ann Althouse writes, "Here's the post where you can say good-bye to George Bush":

The sun has set on the last night of the Bush presidency. Now, tired old George can retreat to Texas and not be kicked around anymore. He can wait for that history he's always talking about to do its curative work. Someday, they'll say he wasn't so bad, but, my, how he was hated. Not by everyone, though. Many of us stood by him, beginning on September 11th, when he found out that he would not be permitted to spend his time in the White House trying to distinguish himself as a purveyor of compassionate conservative. Many of us would not abandon the man who needed our support, who was, perhaps, overwhelmed by the task that was thrust upon him. And now, the work is over, so I think it would be appropriate to say thank you to George Bush, who is -- to say what Barack Obama said of him -- a good man.

All-in-all, indeed.^TM Click over to Ann's blog if you'd like to post some thoughts about the outgoing president.

This doesn't happen often, so it's worth highlighting: Howard Kurtz, a good media critic except for his frequent see-no-liberals style, actually uses the L-word; this time in reference to weeklies such as Time and Newsweek, whose publication rate is rendered glacial by the speed of the Web.

(Incidentally, Kurtz has ties to both magazines' owners: Newsweek is owned by the Washington Post Company, which also publishes Kurtz) and Time is published by Time Warner Inc., which owns CNN, the network which airs Kurtz's weekly Reliable Sources segment.)

As Kurtz notes, in order to survive, the rival editors at both of these once prominent weeklies have been forced to turn out magazines "that are smaller, more serious, more opinionated and, though they are loath to admit it, more liberal":

When Rick Stengel joined Time in 1981, every story in progress filled a thick binder -- the reporter's version, the editor's rewritten version, the top editors' version, the fact-checked version -- that would be unimaginable in today's cut-to-the-bone corporate culture.

Many of the recently laid-off staffers, Stengel says, "were people whose jobs really didn't exist any more."

When Jon Meacham joined Newsweek in 1995, "there was a phrase in the culture -- 'We need to get something in on X' -- that we never use anymore," he says. The days of a "newsmagazine of record," Meacham says, are long gone.

The rival editors are turning out weeklies that are smaller, more serious, more opinionated and, though they are loath to admit it, more liberal. They are pursuing a more elite audience, in print and on the Web, abandoning the old Henry Luce notion of catering to the masses. It is nothing less than a survival strategy.

And Kurtz lays out the survival plan later in the piece:

One answer is to jettison the old straddle-the-center formula in which the newsweeklies spoke with an institutional voice rather than publish bylines. Each magazine's lead columnist -- Time's Joe Klein, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter -- is liberal. Newsweek has been running columns by Jacob Weisberg, the liberal editor of Slate, another Post Co. property. Newsweek also ran a controversial cover last month headlined "The Religious Case for Gay Marriage" -- "one of the last great civil rights issues," Meacham says. And its top writers appear regularly on liberal talk shows on MSNBC, with which it has a news partnership.

"I'm not going to be silly about it," Meacham says. "A lot of people think we're left of center. I think it depends on the week and the issue. . . . I'm not ideologically driven by any means." He notes that Barack Obama's campaign limited cooperation with the magazine when Newsweek ran a cover photo of arugula last spring to symbolize his elitist image. Meacham himself wrote a post-election cover piece on why America is still a center-right nation.

Time ran a column last week by liberal academic Jeffrey Sachs titled "The Case for Bigger Government." This week's issue features Obama, Time's Person of the Year, yet again, and the cover headline "Great Expectations," plus a piece on his wife as "America's Next Top Model."

Stengel, who worked for Bill Bradley's Democratic presidential campaign, says he has tried conservative columnists -- including Bill Kristol, who left -- but has not come up with a star. "I get as many complaints from readers that we're too left as complaints that we're too right," he says. "I'm really conscious of trying to be fair and balanced."

Too bad you're not conscious that you've just triangulated your publication as establishment liberal.

Since the early days of this blog, I've been writing about an increasing number of legacy journalists willing to go on their record about their own, and their employers' biases. The sheer number who came out for Obama this year renders the idea of an "objective" media DOA, as many, such as Michael Malone and Victor Davis Hanson noted at the conclusion of the 2008 election. As does advertising such as this. (I can't wait to hear the response when the next GOP president asks CBS to reciprocate with his slogan on inauguration day.)

Allahpundit links to the video below, featuring, as he puts it, "Celebrities moved by new spiritual leader to become better people":

Via the Standard. If ever you doubted that Obamamania is fundamentally a religious movement, at least among nitwits like this, watch and note how few of their pledges are tied to Obama's policy agenda. It's mostly personal pap about smiling more and being a better parent, forms of self-improvement which, it seems, simply couldn't be undertaken until the GOP was out of the White House.

MySpace Celebrity and Katalyst present The Presidential Pledge


Andrew Breitbart asks, "Where Were You Celebrities After 9/11?":

God bless, President Obama. You have my best wishes and all of my best efforts. Even though I didn't vote for you, and disagree with much of your agenda.

But that doesn't mean I will forgive and forget an era of narcissism and petty complaining from the majority celebrity class that began well before Iraq. See "Hollywood, Interrupted" -- my book co-written with Mark Ebner -- which was written before and during the build-up to the Iraq war and before the WMDs weren't found. The public behavior from Hollywood was uniformly deplorable. It's a convenient lie they peddle that they were with us during Afghanistan. They weren't.

The decadence during this period was world class. The clubs raged. The boutique hotels flourished. The parties never stopped. And a precious few stepped up to support the American troops who have been valiantly fighting for your right to do lines off of each other's buttocks at your Hollywood Hills $10 million mansions.

This video is not a sign of desire to serve the country under Obama -- you will not honor this pledge like the rest of us will forget about our New Year's resolutions. This video is a relic of the era of celebrity decadence and boutique anti-Republican activism under President Bush.

It is a sickening sign that you want fast and easy absolution for having comported yourself like ill behaved children for the last eight years. Good luck, President Obama. The rest of you can go to hell.

OK, that's not entirely fair--I know of at least one celebrity who pledged her loyalty to President Bush in the immediate aftermath of 9/11--and her calm demeanor in the years since was an inspiration to us all.

Steve Green, my partner in crime on Pajamas Media's weekly show on Sirius-XM has taken the Boeing, and moved his blog into the Pajamas portal--complete with a swanky new logo designed by Blogress Stacy Tabb (who also styled this blog a few years ago) that would make Ian Fleming--not to mention Maurice Binder--proud.

AP's ubiquitous Nedra Pickler writes, "Biden shushes wife after secretary of state slip":

The wife of Vice President-elect Joe Biden let it slip to Oprah Winfrey Monday that her husband had a pick of two jobs in the Obama administration.

Jill Biden said President-elect Barack Obama gave Biden the choice of being secretary of state or vice president. The vice president-elect tried to hush his wife as soon as the words came out of her mouth, with a loud "shhh!" that sent the audience into laughter.

The Bidens made a surprise appearance on Winfrey's show, recorded at the Kennedy Center for broadcast later Monday on the eve of the inauguration.

The vice president-elect said he only accepted Obama's offer to be his running mate after talking it over with "Jilly," his pet name for his wife. Mrs. Biden said she told him vice president would be better for the family.

Fortunately for the sake of the entire planet's survival, Mrs. Biden wisely chose the job where her husband could the least amount of international harm:

In early November, I wrote:

To borrow from the vernacular of The Boss's early '70s glory days (to coin a phrase), has any musician become more Establishment than Springsteen?

Allahpundit notes the ranks of the Establishment have suddenly swelled:

One of the amusements of the Obama years will be watching the counterculture transition from inveighing against The Man to trying to get The Man reelected.

Too bad though that there doesn't appear to be an opposition party whose leaders have enough brains to capitalize on this.

In 2006, Time magazine couldn't pick a Man of the Year, so they gave to me...and you...and everyone!

This year, virtually the entire legacy media was in the tank for President Elect Obama. And for the most part, they weren't afraid to let you know it, either explicitly as in the examples in the video and text in the second half of this post, or implicitly, by executing acrobatic stunts such as this.

Which is why the many readers of Charles Johnson's Little Green Footballs blog gave the negative equivalent of Time magazine's Man of the Year Award--the Fiskie Award, named after the Walter Duranty of the 21st century--to the entire Mainstream Media.

Say, I wonder whom they'll nominate to collect their award?

Update: Gateway Pundit notes, "CNN Wants Obama's Inaugural Speech Carved in Marble... Even Before It's Delivered."

Andrew Breitbart writes, "it's understandable that Republicans are green with envy and scratching their heads wondering why the Internet works for Democrats but doesn't work for them. The simple answer:"

There is no technology that can help overcome the left's current online dominance.

There is no wizard in Silicon Valley who can make things better.

There is no Joe Trippi who can take an obscure Republican and push him to victory using online tools past, present and future.

Facebook won't do it. Twitter won't do it. Countering Soros and MoveOn .org won't do it. And mimicking Kos and Arianna won't do it.

Sorry, Republicans, there is no magic Internet button.

The Democratic Party resonates on the Internet because it resonates in pop culture. The Democratic Party resonates in pop culture because it has been committed to dominating it for over a generation.

Read the whole thing--and for my interview with Andrew discussing the left and pop culture, and "Big Hollywood", his new online salon, click here.

Ed Morrissey writes:

Note to Hamas: When the enemy has its army encamped in your territory and you have to make demands for them to leave when the fighting stops, you didn't win. They had a cease-fire in place in December, without Israeli soldiers all over Gaza, and Hamas ended it in a hail of missile and rocket fire. A month later, several of their top people are dead, Gaza has been heavily damaged, and they're isolated politically among other Arab nations, plus the IDF is now holding Gaza in a vise grip, and all Hamas has is another cease-fire. Yeah ... some victory.

All right...we'll call it a draw.

Tremendous passage from Paul Greenberg:

History is up to its old tricks again. The radical agitator of one generation becomes the conservative icon of another. Martin Luther King Jr. meets the very definition of an American conservative, that is, someone dedicated to preserving the gains of a liberal revolution.

Even when he was leading the civil rights movement, what appeal could have been more conservative or more American than his now classic speech before the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963?

"I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Is any passage more frequently cited against the quota system called Affirmative Action? Is any passage so clear a call for what conservative candidates for president always seem to be calling for -- character?

King's rhetorical might belied his relative youth; Orrin Judd adds, "the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. wouldn't even have been 80 until next year. All this change has occurred within his natural life span. Pretty remarkable."

Update: Don't miss Virginia Postrel's post on the generation of culture warriors immediately before King:

With the Tuskegee Airmen headed to the inauguration, let's take a moment to remember what they looked like when they were young and glamorous--and, of course, just how subversive that glamour was.

Be sure to scroll through the accompanying sideshow.

James Lileks proffers key advice for navigating the final new media frontier:

Dull tweet: The plane just landed

Good tweet: The plane just landed in the hudson

Found, appropriately enough, here.

As Ian Fleming once wrote, "You only live twice: Once when you're born, and once when you look death in the face."

Mark Steyn writes, "The world is flattened":

After Thomas Friedman correlates (on the back of a napkin) freedom and the price of oil, Mr Taibbi correlates, rather more plausibly, happiness and the size of Valerie Bertinelli's ass (with accompanying graph).

Valerie used to take life "One Day At A Time"; based on this headline at Power Line, I'd say Talibbi may have taken one life at the Times!

I've met Neo-Neocon in person a few times. Everyone knows she blogs anonymously (and man, is it hard talking to someone at a cocktail party when she holds an apple in front of her face the whole time), but who knew just how secret the life she was leading really was?

For you see, Neo-Neocon is also, simultaneously, Meryl Yourish at the same time. With the Bush administration concluding this week, this could be the final closely held American secret blown wide-open for the next four to eight years by the intrepid New York Times--not to mention its layers and layers of ace fact checkers and editors.

(H/T: Glenn Reynolds, who is also both Glenn Greenwald and Glenn Corbett. And maybe John Glenn, too. Who can say?)

Some thoughts on "the primal tribal imperative that underlies the relentless scapegoating of our 43rd president by his political adversaries" from Sisu Willis.

Related: On the other hand, "Welcome back from the Wilderness of Despair and Oppression, kids."

A fine selection of "Words To Rest In 2009."

For Hell has officially frozen over, as I type eight words I never, ever thought I would:

The Arizona Cardinals are in the Super Bowl.

For the late Pete Rozelle's vision of parity in the NFL, I'd say it's very much Mission Accomplished.

As Jonah Goldberg writes in the L.A. Times, on the campaign trail, Barack Obama was every candidate you wanted him to be. But that's about to change once he actually takes office and begins to govern:

Presidential inaugurations are in many ways the high-water marks of any presidency because they're so full of hope. All things seem possible. The rivalries and backbiting haven't set in yet, at least not publicly. Even the inevitable disappointments over Cabinet picks and White House staffing are tempered by the wide-eyed dreams of an ambitious agenda. Everyone -- or at least everyone who backed the guy -- has that "we can make this the best yearbook ever!" feeling.

Then comes the letdown. No, I don't mean Barack Obama will be a failed president. But even the most successful presidents bitterly disappoint some people, usually some of their biggest supporters. Indeed, they can only disappoint supporters because disappointment first requires confidence and hope. Those who voted against Obama can either have their low expectations fulfilled or be pleasantly surprised.

Many conservatives, for example, had hoped that George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" was simply a marketing slogan. They were dismayed to discover he really meant it. In the 1980s, Republican factions were deeply divided in the "let Reagan be Reagan" debates. Everyone heard what they wanted to hear during the campaign and expected the man's presidency to jibe perfectly with their expectations.

Obama's ideological compass is far more difficult to discern than Reagan's or Bush's were. This is why his conservative detractors often called him a cipher. Obama's supporters rolled their eyes despite producing often-contradictory evidence to rebut the charge.

This raises perhaps the most interesting question of the Obama presidency: "What wasn't Barack Obama lying about?"

I don't mean this to be as harsh as it sounds. I'm not talking about what his conservative critics said he was lying about -- say, the true nature of his relationship with William Ayers. I'm talking about issues where his own supporters seem to have just assumed he had his fingers crossed.

Not the least of which is Obama's infamous statement on bankrupting the coal industry, uttered a year ago in the midst of an hour long conversation the editors of the San Francisco Chronicle and then unnearthed by a blogger in the last weekend of the election; the closest anyone remotely associated with the feckless McCain campaign came to delivering an October surprise. After The One's latest flip-flop on this issue, Ed Morrissey wonders if the freshness dating has expired on that statement--but concludes, don't be too sure.

In "A Manual for Left-Wing Living", his new article in the Wall Street Journal, Kyle Smith reads Nation magazine's Guide To The Nation so you don't have to. Here's a sample:

In Monty Python's "Life of Brian," the People's Front of Judea was always prepared to respond to any crisis with an immediate burst of discussion. In "The Nation Guide to the Nation," praise is showered on the Brecht Forum cultural center in New York, which the editors note was recommended in 2000 by the Village Voice as the "Best place to start thinking about the revolution." Keep cogitating, revolutionistas. Someday your putsch will come.

Read the rest--then stop by Kyle's fine blog. (Berets, turtlenecks, sunglasses and bongos optional, of course.)

Orrin Judd looks at a bitter clinging (but certainly not a sweetie) Nancy Pelosi at odds with the incoming president and quips, "At some point over the next two years, he's gonna find that labradoodle boiling away in a pot on the White House stove...."

Selwyn Duke looks at the state of manufactured consent at the dawn of the Obama administration:

A common defense of error today is to say, with due indignation, "I have a right to my opinion!" Legally this is true, given that our First Amendment is extant. But as G.K. Chesterton once said, "Having the right to do something is not at all the same as being right in doing it." There is no moral right to an immoral opinion -- nor to one bred of emotionalism unconstrained by reason -- nor to a deceitful one.

More than ever, Americans are realizing that this isn't a sentiment to which the mainstream media subscribes. In fact, with how it shamelessly carried water for Barack Obama during the election, 2008 has been dubbed "the year journalism died" (Sean Hannity is fond of this label). Yet, while such pronouncements make for compelling commentary, nothing could be further from the truth.

The reality is that journalism is alive and well -- outside the mainstream media. As for the latter's journalism, by the third millennium it was not only dead, not only laid to rest, but fossilized and buried under the stratum containing the hula hoop and pet rock. And it would take a Jurassic Park-like effort to reconstitute its DNA and resurrect the ancient beast. Thus, a more accurate statement about 2008 is: It was the year that many more illusions about the validity of mainstream journalism died. Let us now take a look at a media that has made malpractice an art.

Read the whole thing.

Newsbusters spots "Celebs Giddy for Obama's 'Magic Moment' After 'Hell' of Bush Years". Here's but one of them:

Actress Gloria Reuben (IMDb page), now in TNT's Raising the Bar and formerly on NBC's ER, will be on hand Tuesday "to watch the magic moment happen" since she yearns for an end to the "hell" of the Bush years. (Screen capture is from Reuben on ABC's This Week in 2006 when she was promoting a play in which she played Condoleezza Rice):

It's a once-in-a-lifetime situation. The last eight years have been such hell. We're all so excited about the hope of things to come. I really think that's part of it. People are so ready to rejoice and celebrate what is hopefully the return of the foundation of the United States.

She looks fantastic. She's spent 13 years on a top-rated TV series making a high six figure if not seven figure annual salary. And "The last eight years have been such hell"? Why, lights on the set too bright? Wolfgang Puck didn't give you the first table at Spago? No, evidently, it's because the man in Washington who in the scope of things will be seen as governing in much the same fashion as his predecessor had an R after his name and not a D.

And yet, somehow, in the photo of Reuben from 2006, she's smiling--good stiff upper lip and all that whilst trapped in Bushitler Hell. That's more than other celebrities can say about their decade in purgatory--Maura Tierney, another traumatized victim of ER is quoted as saying, "I'm calm for the first time in eight years."

On the other hand, Tierney's IMDB profile notes this:

Wrote an article in the spring 2001 issue of Flaunt titled, "'Rudy Giuliani': A Fascist? You Be The Judge."

Ahh--now it all makes sense. Obviously a Buchananite crushed by his third party defeat in 2000 who's never recovered...

Related: Hollywood East.

"Leading climate expert Jim Hansen" (no relation, as far as we can tell, to a deceased but global warmingly remembered Muppet expert) believes "Barack Obama has only four years to save the world."

Of course he does. But we give Mr. Hanson bonus points for eschewing the leisurely and far overdone bourgeois pace of the ten year countdown--four isn't a number that's picked all that often from the proverbial hat for a doomsday countdown. But in any case, file this one way for election time in 2012 if--and we think the odds are somewhat reasonable here--Mr. Hanson is wrong.

In any case, no final countdown is complete without...

As Bloomberg.com notes, "Obama Inaugural Strains Lincoln Comparisons While Inviting Them":

Barack Obama's inauguration is dedicated to the proposition that all presidencies are not created equal.

In ways big and small, Obama is trying to summon Abraham Lincoln's spirit to the proceedings.

Obama will roll into Washington's Union Station today by train, duplicating part of Lincoln's railroad journey from Illinois for his swearing in. The president-elect is to appear at a concert tomorrow at the Lincoln Memorial, and will take the oath of office Tuesday with one hand on the Bible that Lincoln used in 1861. Inaugural planners drew so many ties between the Illinois legislators-turned-presidents that Obama may risk straining the comparison.

"Everyone wants to be Lincoln," says Harold Holzer, who has written or edited more than 20 books on Lincoln and the Civil War. "Is Obama overdoing it? Maybe."

For most of the 144 years since Lincoln's death, presidents of all political persuasions have tried to enlist Lincoln's reputation for honesty and courage in support of their own ambitions. Leaders "see in Lincoln's suffering validation of the criticism they have to endure," Holzer says.

In the early, pre-9/11 days of the Bush Administration, the left threw a snit about President Bush invoking JFK and his call for tax cuts to bolster a similar 21st century plan, as Jeff Jacoby wrote in March of 2001:

JFK's words are as persuasive today as they were four decades ago -- so much so that a group of Republicans has resurrected them for use in radio ads promoting Bush's tax-cut proposal. Narrated by Steve Forbes, the conservative publisher who has long championed lower taxes, the ads are designed to put pressure on Democratic senators in states Bush carried last year. "If Jack Kennedy can support tax cuts," Forbes says in the version of the ad airing in Louisiana (for example), "so can Mary Landrieu."

But not everybody welcomes President Kennedy's contribution to the tax-cut debate. Ted Kennedy, for one, is in a snit.

"It is intellectually dishonest and politically irresponsible," he fumes in a letter to the team that created the ads, "to suggest that President Kennedy would have supported such a tax cut.... If President Kennedy were here today he ... would be outraged by comparisons between his 1963 tax cut and the current proposal."

He wouldn't of course, and there's likely much in Barack Obama that Lincoln would have admired as well. But has any journalist asked someone in that slain leader's party if they're OK with one of their chief icons being co-opted for partisan purposes, as they did in 2001?

Update: Related thoughts from Sister Toldjah.

Washington DC: The home of the Parliament of Whores is surprisingly "Prostitution Free" during the inauguration.

Surprisingly harsh words from Obama's friends at AP to The One:

Unemployment is up. The stock market is down. Let's party.

The price tag for President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration gala is expected to break records, with some estimates reaching as high as $150 million. Despite the bleak economy, however, Democrats who called on President George W. Bush to be frugal four years ago are issuing no such demands now that an inaugural weekend of rock concerts and star-studded parties has begun.

Obama's inaugural committee has raised more than $41 million to cover events ranging from a Philadelphia-to-Washington train ride to a megastar concert with Beyonce, U2 and Bruce Springsteen to 10 official inaugural balls. Add to that the massive costs of security and transportation - costs absorbed by U.S. taxpayers - and the historic inauguration will produce an equally historic bill.

In 2005, Reps. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., and Jim McDermott, D-Wash., asked Bush to show a little less pomp and be a little more circumspect at his party.

"President Roosevelt held his 1945 inaugural at the White House, making a short speech and serving guests cold chicken salad and plain pound cake," the two lawmakers wrote in a letter. "During World War I, President Wilson did not have any parties at his 1917 inaugural, saying that such festivities would be undignified."

The thinking was that, with the nation at war, excessive celebration was inappropriate. Four years later, the nation is still at war. Unemployment has risen sharply. And Obama pressed Congress to release the second half of a $700 billion bailout package in hopes of rescuing a faltering banking industry.

Obama's inauguration committee says it is mindful of the times and is not worried people will see the four days of festivities as excessive.

Merely a disaster area, as Mark Steyn notes.

If you missed this week's edition of PJM Political on Sirius-XM's POTUS channel, tune in here.

Join host Steve Green of VodkaPundit.com and myself for our take on US Airways Flight 1549's miraculous landing, and next week's transition of power in DC. Plus:

* Pajamas Media CEO Roger L. Simon and Caroline Glick, managing editor of the Jerusalem Post interview Joe Wurzelbacher (the man, the myth, the plumber) from Israel, via PJTV.
* Old media throws a hissyfit; Joe The Plumber responds. (Video here.)
* James Lileks on incoming President Obama's inauguration day.
* Robert D. Kaplan of the Atlantic magazine on Iran's sphere of influence in the Middle East.
* James Pethokoukis of US News & World Report on the highs and lows of outgoing President Bush's handling of the economy.

Produced by friendly neighborhood multimedia maven.

Via the Liberal Fascism blog, some thoughts from Byron York and Jay Nordlinger on all-enveloping corporate Obama worship. And much more from Debbie Schlussel, who calls into yesterday's B-Cast on Breitbart.tv to discuss Obama taking central command of the internecine battles in the cola wars--and getting his own trading cards as a result:

Related thoughts from Hot Air's Allahpundit.

Update: "Everybody remembers those pro-Bush celebrity videos sponsored by major corporations, right? Right?"

"Prepare now for the coming post-stimulus hyperinflation with these million-dollar bills featuring Barack Obama's picture! Why wait until the government gets around to issuing them in 2011, when they'll buy a single measly gallon of gas?"

I must say, hopefully our real million dollar notes will look as sharp as these Weimar Republic bills--which, with their Bauhaus designed at least looked cool, even if they were essentially worthless due to hyper-inflation.

Some thoughts from, and about, Camile Paglia at Five Feet of Fury.

Jonah Goldberg spots Bill Moyers channeling Jimmy the Greek.

Jonah writes, "It's long past time they put Moyers out to pasture." Of course, if his statement goes down the memory hole, it wouldn't be the first time an unsavory element of Moyers is excused by the liberal establishment.

Earlier this week, we mentioned:

In the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Schwammenthal writes, "Europe Reimports Jew Hatred: The mythical Arab Street now reaches deep into Paris, London, Berlin and Madrid."

As the Professor adds, "Well, it's not as if that represents a big break with the past or anything..."

Today, Infidels Are Cool notes, "Man wearing Jewish symbol stabbed near Paris."

Maureen Dowd visits a Florida spa; unintentional hilarity ensues.

ABC entertainment president Steve McPherson is not happy that his audience, like Spinal Tap's, is becoming more selective:

ABC entertainment president Steve McPherson says his network needs to continue taking programming risks despite the economic downturn and plans a robust development slate for the fall.

McPherson told critics at the winter press tour that he plans to shoot 10 comedy and drama pilots for next season.

"We have to take swings at the plate, and we still have to be bold," he says, noting the shows that have worked best for the network such as "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives" creatively broke new ground. "We want to grow our brand and built off the success we have. ... I don't want to do a total departure and do CBS-like shows."

The entertainment president also criticized Nielsen, saying the ratings measurement company contracted by networks doesn't take into account enough forms of audience viewing.

"We're talking about a different world now," says McPherson, whose network, like most broadcasters this season, has lost viewers.

The article is titled, "McPherson Plans Robust Fall, Criticizes Nielsen." I swear at first glance, I read it as "McPherson Plans Robust Fail."

Elsewhere in old media, "Scribes Guild Mourns Death of Elegant Calligraphy."

Update: Epic fail, new media style: "Hulu CEO: 'We screwed up royally.'"

Just up on Yahoo's NFL page:

Tampa Bay has dismissed head coach Jon Gruden and GM Bruce Allen after a late-season collapse.

Details here.

Behold the delicately filigreed philosophical wisdom of "Courtney Love, Anti-Semitic Trainwreck."

(Via a mellow enharshened Kathy Shaidle: "I finally have to start hating Courtney Love.")

The Blogfather writes:

Remember, it's only McCarthyism if you disagree with the politics.

Just ask Tom Hanks.

Media Bistro's "AgencySpy" blog explains "why it's vitally important to watch what you say on Twitter":

A representative from Ketchum New York (a PR and Marketing firm) heads to Memphis to give a big presentation to their big client, FedEx, and totally offends everyone who works there before even stepping foot in the building.

Upon landing in Memphis and getting a lay of the land he tweets:

"True confession but I'm in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say, 'I would die if I had to live here.'"

Someone from inside FedEx was following Capt. Footinmouth, whose Twitter name is 'keyinfluencer' -- quite possibly the douchiest nickname of all history -- and that person sent the letter we posted below. You'll want to read it, because not only is it amazingly poignant, but because it was copied to "the FedEx Coporate Vice President, Vice President, Directors and all management of FedEx's communication department AND the chain of command at Ketchum." Thank you Peter Shankman for sharing this story.

"Mr. Andrews,

If I interpret your post correctly, these are your comments about Memphis a few hours after arriving in the global headquarters city of one of your key and lucrative clients, and the home of arguably one of the most important entrepreneurs in the history of business, FedEx founder Fred Smith.

Many of my peers and I feel this is inappropriate. We do not know the total millions of dollars FedEx Corporation pays Ketchum annually for the valuable and important work your company does for us around the globe. We are confident however, it is enough to expect a greater level of respect and awareness from someone in your position as a vice president at a major global player in your industry. A hazard of social networking is people will read what you write."

Now that you know what not to do, John Hawkins has assembled "The Super Awesome Right Wing News Twitter Guide For Newbies."

(Main story originally found, naturally enough, here.)

Related: Via Melissa Clouthier, helpful new media definitions--like, um "Twitter!"--are defined definitively, here.

Currently up on the Drudge Report is the headline, "BANK OWNED BY AMERICA; FEDS BECOME LARGEST SHAREHOLDER."

Talk about burying the lede--Drudge's headline is real story of this article from the New York Times' spinoff the International Herald Tribune. Which is why, naturally, it's buried five paragraphs in.

But as Frank Martin wrote last month:

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 cant 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.

Or as I asked last month:


And for some other video looks on how we got here, click here and here.

Update: Am I blue? You'll be, too:

Wall Street Journal's Environmental Capital Blog mentions a new buzz word in energy policy discussions--blue jobs--jobs associated with oil and natural gas industries. The industry is pushing to keep the oil and natural gas energy relevant in America's discussion of energy policy to force policy makers to keep them in mind in the formulating of new policies and programs. The gas lobby wants to keep "blue jobs" in demand, jobs that total 5.8 million nationwide--in both direct and (sometimes very) indirect jobs that the gas lobby says are dependent on natural-gas related activities.

In today's "POR economy" (centrally planned to perfection and/or perdition by the bluest of the Blue Staters, Pelosi, Obama, and Reid) aren't all jobs blue jobs?

"'Sometimes, Brian, I think we live in a parallel universe, where the media see the world one way when it's a Democrat in power and another way when a Republican is in power,' NewsBusters Publisher Brent Bozell told Fox News Channel's Brian Kilmeade."

Much more here.

In the Philadelphia Inquirer (which somehow spontaneously failed to combust when his manuscript arrived at their doorstep), Rick Santorum posits that John McCain "may be Obama's secret weapon."

Hey, his lame campaign in the last six weeks of the election helped his competitor to win--why stop now?

Dr. Melissa Clouthier takes the pulse of the MSM, with some assistance from Charlie Martin of Pajamas Media's "Edgelings" tech blog, and a little video help from your humble narrator himself.

And speaking of a troubled MSM, Newsbusters reports that the Minneapolis Star-Tribune has declared Chapter 11. Its best-known journalist in the new world of the Blogosphere and Satellite Radio directs us to this piece in the Minnesota Post for some additional details of the Strib's bankruptcy and what may be to come. (But not before including a sublime screen capture from A Night To Remember, taken at the apex between iceberg and eternity.)

Related: "Your MSM Moment of Zen."

Warner Todd Huston writes, "Biden Leaves The Senate With A WHOPPER On His Lips"--but then, Joe really is the Master of Disaster, of course:

More thoughts on Joe The Veep from...Joe The Veep.

Via Jonah Goldberg, this is a well produced look at the political spectrum and its history. Jonah writes, "I have my quibbles, but overall I think this pretty useful." I'm very much in sync with the graph that outline the poltical spectrum, which appears at 30 seconds into the video:

This lucky.

A snippet of MSNBC's coverage of US Airways Flight 1549, which downed in the Hudson earlier today, via Breitbart.tv:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Update: "U.S. Airways Crash Rescue Picture: Citizen Journalism, Twitter At Work"--amazing photos; don't miss it.

Michael Calderone writes that there was cheering in Washington Post building at the president elect's arrival today--but heaven forfend, there's no reason to believe that any reporters cheered:

Obama arrived at the Washington Post headquarters today, as covered in priceless pool report by the New York Times Helene Cooper.

After three and a half hours at his transition office, PEOTUS obama took another 6 minute ride through washington, arriving at 157 pm at the nondescript soviet-style building at 15th and L street that houses the washington post.

Around 100 people--Post reporters perhaps?--awaited PEOTUS's arrival, cheering and bobbing their coffee cups.

Pool is holding in a van outside, while Mr obama does his washington post interview, and will exercise enormous restraint by ending report before saying what really thinks about this turn of events.

Is Cooper bitter about the Times still not getting an interview?

UPDATE: "There's no reason to think there were any reporters cheering," said a Washington Post spokesperson, adding that there are "a lot of people who work in the Post building who don't work in the Post newsroom."

Excuse me, there's no reason to think there were any reporters cheering? No, of course, not. None at all.

Update: More from Allahpundit, who unearths a remarkably prescient quote from 2005:

"Too often, we wear liberalism on our sleeve and are intolerant of other lifestyles and opinions," an editor working for the Washington Post's Sunday "Book World" section charged in a contribution to a daily internal critique of the newspaper quoted by Howard Kurtz on Monday. Marie Arana disclosed that "if you work here, you must be one of us. You must be liberal, progressive, a Democrat. I've been in communal gatherings in The Post, watching election returns, and have been flabbergasted to see my colleagues cheer unabashedly for the Democrats."

I doubt anybody's very flabbergasted these days. The one benefit of the media wearing their hearts on their sleeves for Obama is that readers now know where their journalists stand, and can choose their publications accordingly.

Update: Mission Accomplished! "Exurban League has obtained an exclusive photo of the Washington Post preparing for Obama's arrival..."

More: "I hear Barack is a good name."

Details at WCBS:

A U.S. Airways airplane has crashed into the Hudson River, CBS 2 has learned. The plane appears to be in one piece and passengers are being evaucated by rescue teams.

Officials tell CBS 2 the airplane is Flight 1549, an Airbus 380 that took off from La Guardia Aiport and headed to Charlotte, N.C. There are reports that there were about 60 people on board.

Passengers could be seen standing on the wing of the plane and entering a rescue boat.

"It was just going down further and further and further and then all of a sudden it was gone," a witness named Peter told CBS 2. "I'm shaking, it was crazy. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. There was nothing wrong with the plane, it wasn't wobbling, there was no smoke coming out of it!"

There are reports that a bird strike may have caused the plane to go down, meaning a bird may have entered the engine, causing a malfunction. The bird strike apparently disabled both engines.

City officials have called a massive casualty emergency, though it's not yet known if there are any deaths.

There is no word on injuries to passengers.

The plane is floating upright in the water near the USS Intrepid. Temperatures at the time of the crash in the city were just about 20 degrees, with the water temperature likely much colder.

According to Dr. Max Gomez, a person in 40 degree water will likely lose consciousness after 30 minutes.

Found via Drudge, which has regular updates. Breitbart.tv has a live MSNBC video stream of the rescue efforts.

Update: More video here.

Headline on Contact Music.com: "Benicio Del Toro--'Che Guevara Was A Warrior, Like Batman.'"

Which fits nicely alongside the riff Oliver Stone went off on immediately after 9/11 that terrorists are like Einstein. Both quotes speak volumes of the moral inversion that is modern (and by modern, I mean insanely regressive) Hollywood.

(Found via "Big Hollywood", appropriately enough.)

Jules Crittenden writes, "Anxious not to be stuck with the blame for another Katrina, Bush puts the federal disaster response into motion ahead of time, mobilizing FEMA bucks."

Jules has photographic evidence of the multiple survival mechanisms being put into place for those enduring the disaster region. He also links to an article which states that incoming volunteers are well aware of the grim conditions they'll be facing:

Beginning this weekend, millions of people are expected to swarm into the Nation's Capital - many with the highest expectations of seeing history unfold around them.Most seem aware of the challenges they face, transportation difficulties at best, millions of charged up people in the same place, enduring the elements for long hours, and all with no access to indoor plumbing.

Not to mention all of the anti-war protesters. In other words, a repeat of Woodstock, except with Geritol the drug of choice instead of LSD, and many fewer cool bands.

Related: Not that the Washington establishment isn't itself quite a hallucinatory experience.

The mere existence of this headline--"CBS says ratings success proves network TV viable"--is proof that the clock is ticking on the model, at least in its current form. Imagine such a headline running 10, 20, 40 or 50 years ago.

Meanwhile, Galley Slaves notes that the clock may be ticking slightly faster for one of CBS' competitors.

Of course, the viable lifespan of the original big three is likely to exceed a far older component of the legacy media.

The New Jersey Star-Ledger asks, "Are we done with green?"

Now that money is tight, will environmentalism turn out to have been just a passing trend -- the political equivalent of the pet rock?

Probably not, say the experts. While some consumers may have to put their concern for the planet on the back burner for now, they will likely resume their new-found green habits once the economy improves.

"It was all about the environment last year. But it's all about the economy this year. It's like we can't think about more than one thing at a time. It's either one or the other -- almost as if we can't do both," said Ann Mack, who forecasts trends for the advertising firm JWT, formerly J. Walter Thompson.

Actually, the two are remarkably intertwined, as Mark Steyn noted at the end of last year, and Bill Clinton at its start. And presumably these fellows are getting quite a chuckle out the current economy.

Blogospheric train wreck finally, properly labeled by his employer.

Gee, that only took four years.

The Cordobakhan!

In the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Ralph R. Reiland has this classic quote from a representative of the union that made General Motors the automaker it is today--the one we're all paying to keep in business:

"No one wants to see GM go down the tubes," said picketing Jim Brown. "But we have to keep our standard of living, and GM is going to have to cooperate."

Reiland concludes:

And so, at last count, GM has lost $70 billion since 2004, the number of UAW members has been cut in half since 2004 at GM, Chrysler and Ford, from 300,000 to 150,000, and the rest of us are now stuck with the tab for the rescue.

Meanwhile, the city of Detroit finally has a bond rating to match its sterling quality of life.

The great Walter Williams writes:

Congress and the White House aren't finished with the taxpayers yet. Once a bailout parade gets started, it has a momentum of its own. President Bush, citing danger to the economy, signed a $17 billion bailout for the auto industry. According to the Wall Street Journal article "Shovel-Ready on Campus" (December 17, 2008), presidents of 36 state government universities have called for bailouts; they call it a "federal infusion of capital." Soon, if not already, state governors and city mayors will descend on Washington seeking bailouts. California is $15 billion in the hole, Florida $5 billion and things are so bad in Michigan that the governor has shut down one prison to save money.

What kind of assumptions do politicians and news media make about the intelligence of Americans to expect us to buy the idea that our current mess results from deregulation and free markets? I do not find that assumption flattering.

As P.J. O'Rourke surveys the leftwing lethargy and concludes, "we may speak without compunction of the failed Obama presidency:

What a blessing that it's a failure. Things are bad enough the way they are. There's already a huge ongoing government intervention in
the economy. Bringing the government in to run Wall Street is like saying, "Dad burned dinner, let's get the dog to cook." Now the government's going to take over the auto industry. I can predict the result--a light-weight, compact, sustainable vehicle using alternative energy. When I was a kid we called it a Schwinn.

These days, we call it this.

(HT: CG)

Two words--two simple, but powerful words that flow like the soft Corinthian leather on the bucket seats of a '75 Cordoba:

Ricardo Montalban.

If you've named your kid Hitler (and one of his siblings "JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell"), you've already come out in favor of a leviathan all-encompassing state. So why act surprised when it works against you?

And it looks like his unicorn is ready to do the full Roman Polanski switchblade maneuver on the bear market's right nostril.

If this makes no sense to you, you're not on the same wavelength--and/or medication--as this artist.

Scrappleface Network News is on the air!

Bill Whittle writes:

[Joe Wurzelbacher, better known as Joe the Plumber] stated that he did not think reporters should be allowed on the front lines to cover conflicts. This generated a lot of heat: some from the left, whose elitist disdain for Joe was best captured by John Stewart, sneering at him for his lapses in professionalism as he reminded all of us that a career being the primary news source for an entire generation of voters cannot be entrusted to a rank amateur like some common plumber, but must instead be vouchsafed to a person with a far nobler and serious and weighty background ... a career in stand-up comedy, say.

Meanwhile, Camille Paglia unloads on an infinitely bigger media figure.

Update: Related thoughts from Outside The Wire's J.D. Johannes.

Will Jerry Jones use the $3.1 roster bonus that Terrell Owens is owed in March as an excuse to sever ties with the perennial head case?

Orrin Judd spots one pundit making essentially the same "American power is on the wane" argument today that he made twenty years ago.

As Mark Steyn wrote in 2005, "It's the Demography, Stupid"--or the lack thereof: "Shaky economy means 'bye-bye baby' for some."

The star of Fantasy Island and Star Trek II ("Khaaaan!") was 88.

Patrick McGhoohan, the star of the awesome (at least at its best) 1960s cult TV series The Prisoner died at age 80. Maureen Ryan of the Chicago Tribune notes:

I thought I'd also mention that all 17 episodes of "The Prisoner" are now available for free at the AMC Web site. That cable network is remaking the series with Jim Cavaziel and Ian McKellan for a 2009 release. More information about that version of "The Prisoner" is here.

If you've never seen the series, picture a 1960s TV spy as conceived by a collaboration of Ian Fleming, George Orwell and Franz Kafka. Here are the opening titles, which feature (I believe) Vick Flick on electric 12-string guitar, the same man who played the machine gun bass guitar riff on Monty Norman and John Barry's 007 theme.




As for the show itself, James Lileks once wrote:

I'd stayed up late watching, of all things, the last episode of the Prisoner. VH-1 ran it as part of an Austin Powers 60s spy marathon. In my second year of college I was devoted to the Prisoner, and watched it with religious rapture on Sunday nights, convinced that McGoohan had crafted a perfect show - a paranoid spy drama with Large Looming Themes about the individual and society. But even then in my hemp-addled state I saw the last episode for what it was: an inedible stew of sophmoric allegory that ruined everything that had gone before. So last night I watched it again to see if it was truly as bad as I remembered, and yes, it was. Interesting concepts, but tritely executed. Even so, I'll give him credit for one thing: having spent 13 episodes defending the rights of the individual to be an individual, he turned the idea on its head at the end, and suggested that absolute individuality corrupts absolutely, that it corrupts society. I didn't understand that in 1977; I didn't see that point.

Interesting point, but when it's being made by 30 robed guys in black-and-white masks pounding a table, you have to roll your eyes and say wow, man, heavy.

That said, the Prisoner was still a good show. What was American TV doing at the time? I Dream of Jeanie.

And The Jackie Gleason Show, in whose timeslot The Prisoner ran on American TV as a 1968 summer replacement.

Update: Frank Martin quotes a remarkably prescient moment from the show.

Well, that's what's on the video. We'll get back to you on the accuracy of the interpreters after further research:

(Via Tim Blair.)

Reason.tv catalogs "Obama and the Winds of Change"--or the lack thereof:

James Pethokoukis notes that "Big Media Distorts Bush Economic Record."

It's a mixed-bag of course--just not the one being peddled on the 6:30 Evening News.

Pethokoukis writes:

The past four months have been terrible. You had the money-sucking leviathan that is the poorly implemented Paulson Plan -- and Bush's failure to push better alternatives. You had the Detroit bailout. You had a failure to vigorously defend the free-market approach that, when implemented 25 year ago, saved the imploding economies of the West and helped win the Cold War. We really needed the Explainer-in-Chief to bring his A-game. Didn't happen.

He had an A-game as a speaker? Of President Bush's attributes as a leader (the best of which I'll cheerfully acknowledge), explaining anything was not his strong suit.

Meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg writes that his successor "is interested in any idea, as long as its peddler starts from the same 'non-ideological' assumption that government experts know best":

The current climate reminds former Freddie Mac economist Arnold Kling of the battle of the Somme in World War I (a war everyone knew would be over in six months). "Having experienced nothing but failure using offensive tactics up to that point, the Allies decided that what they needed to try was ... a really big offensive," Kling writes. "My guess is that in 1916, anyone who doubted his own ability to direct an enormous offensive involving hundreds of thousands of soldiers would never have made it to general. Similarly, today, anyone who doubts the ability of a handful of technocrats to sensibly allocate $800 billion would never make it into government or the mainstream media."

Read the rest.

Joe The Veep discovers Ed the videomaker. May Barack help us all.

"A source of mine called to say that Obama's reached out to some newspaper publishers about giving papers a tax break in the stimulus package."

Man, from P.J. O'Rourke's fingers to the Connecticut papers' mouths, to Obama's ears. If this story actually is true, it's yet another example of reality invariably trumping fiction.

(Or at least me--it was guaranteed to happen like clockwork, particularly before Christmas break.)

"Study: Lack of Sleep Increases Risk Of Obtaining Cold"

OK, everybody say it with me: I need a study to tell me this?

Let he who is without sin cast the first anti-aircraft cannon.

"This is a federal building and he doesn't pay federal taxes so he can't come in."

If only that worked for prospective treasury secretaries being vetted, in addition to cats.

Tabitha Hale writes that "2008 was the year of identity politics"--on both sides of the aisle--along with some thoughts on how to get past them.

Back in 2003, James Bennett of UPI wrote a superb essay on the state of Europe in the immediate post-9/11 years that in some ways foreshadowed Mark Steyn's epic "It's The Demography, Stupid" article in early 2006 and subsequent best-selling America Alone. (For my audio interview with Mark on the book, click here.)

Key passage from Bennett:

Continental Europeans, helped by the Marshall Plan and American investment, rebuilt their countries with vigor after 1945. Led by the last generations to mature in the environment of the hybrid Jewish-European civilization, Europe seemed to pick up where it left off in 1933.

Gradually, however, Europe seemed to run out of creativity, in everything from arts, to academia, to demographic vigor, to the will to political reform. Endless rehashing of elsewhere-discredited Marxism replaced creative political thought. Overt fascism and national chauvinism were banned, but a new Euro-chauvinism took its place, loudly proclaiming the superiority of European ways over crude American ones -- a new chauvinism on a wider scale, based like the old national chauvinism primarily on resentment.

It may be coincidence, but these new generations are the ones who grew up without the experience of studying, working and socializing with substantial numbers of Jews. Can this have no effect on politics?

Well now we know--in the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Schwammenthal writes, "Europe Reimports Jew Hatred: The mythical Arab Street now reaches deep into Paris, London, Berlin and Madrid."

As the Professor adds, "Well, it's not as if that represents a big break with the past or anything..."

Update: The Freepers appear to have the full text of Bennett's essay, which may no longer available on the original UPI site.

More: Heh, indeed.™

"Like Uncle, Like Niece--Caroline Kennedy's candidacy mirrors Ted's 47 years ago."

Just click for, as Hot Air calls it, your Freudian slip of the day:

A time capsule from an era when Hollywood fought the man with the mustache, rather than backing him.

Ten years ago, the late Paul Weyrich wrote:

I believe that we probably have lost the culture war. That doesn't mean the war is not going to continue, and that it isn't going to be fought on other fronts. But in terms of society in general, we have lost. This is why, even when we win in politics, our victories fail to translate into the kind of policies we believe are important.

In his latest column, Jay Nordlinger looks at the state of the overculture and similarly concludes, "It seems to me that the Left has won: utterly and decisively":

What I mean is, the Saturday Night Live, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher mentality has prevailed. They decide what a person's image is, and those images stick. They are the ones who say that Cheney's a monster, W.'s stupid, and Palin's a bimbo. And the country, apparently, follows.

I have a friend who teaches at a prominent university, and she says that, when Palin's name is mentioned, the people laugh. In the course of the 2008 presidential campaign, an extraordinarily accomplished woman -- more accomplished than most of the rest of us will ever be -- was turned into a laughingstock.

What are the shaping institutions of American life? The news media. Entertainment television. The movies. Popular music. The schools, K through grad school. In whose hands are those institutions? In what areas do conservatives predominate? Country music, NASCAR, some churches? (Talk radio too, I suppose -- no wonder so many on the left want to shut it down.)

I will be talking more about this in the coming weeks, months, and possibly years. Sidney Blumenthal once wrote a book called "The Rise of the Counter-Establishment" (meaning conservative associations and institutions). The counter-establishment needs to be tended, and beefed up.

A country that believes that Cheney's a monster, W.'s stupid, and Palin's a bimbo is a country with its head up its . . .

Donkey?

For a longform video look at the above topic, tune into John Ziegler (he of the upcoming How Obama Got Elected documentary) talking with the hosts of Breitbart.TV's B-Cast program yesterday. (Which concluded with my recent look at our incoming gaffe-o-matic president and vice president, after a brief mime-is-money silent interlude from the hosts and their failed soundboard.)

Jennifer Rubin posits that "the president-elect may end up pleasing conservatives more than McCain would have". I think the jury's still very much out on that, but Obama's already starting to alienate the nuttier fringes of the far left--scroll down to the bottom of Zombietime's coverage of the recent Gaza War Protest in San Francisco for plenty of anti-Obama vitriol.

Last year, most PUMAs angry at Obama for derailing Hillary Clinton's election bid eventually got back in line, if not in love with The One, the bloom has come off of at least one media romance rather quickly.

"In the course of cheerleading anchoring the MSNBC coverage of Hillary Clinton's confirmation hearing today, Matthews suggested that the media shouldn't cover the Republican National Committee's criticism of Clinton."

Of course--because the role of the postmodern news media is to keep things out of the news, not let them in. I wonder if the Matthews of the 1990s would recognize his 2009 counterpart.