Please note that as of February 9th 2009, this blog has been incorporated into the main Pajamas Media site and new posts can be found here. While the main Ed Driscoll.com URL will automatically redirect there, the old RSS feed won't; but its successor can be found here, as well as the new URL. Please adjust your bookmarks and aggregation pages accordingly.

Thank you for your continued readership,

Ed

FuturePundit explores "Mate Preference Trends" in the era of, as Tom Wolfe one called it, "Starting from Zero":

Strip away tradition. Strip away religious beliefs. What happens? Men and women are looking at each other in ways that seem even more influenced by their evolutionary heritage. The mating market looks like it is becoming more competitive.

Or as Kay Hymowitz described it last year in City Journal, "Love in the Time of Darwinism."

(HT: I/P)

Yawn--another day, another Alec Baldwin meltdown--although give him credit; at least this time it's merely in print, and he's not doing his Christian Bale impersonation (or is it the other way around?) while screaming at his daughter:

To John McCain. You need to keep quiet, John McCain. You lost and more importantly you are to blame for your loss. You ran a lousy campaign. In terms of message, logistics, ideas. Now you can't seem to shut up about the stimulus package. Another rich Republican market shill who can only deal with spending bills that stimulate the Dow. You gotta shut up, John McCain. We can never go back to the Stone Age ideas that the likes of you and Paulson and Cheney (re: fighting terrorism) have tried to force down our throats.

Of course, Alec has a few Stone Age ideas of his own that he'd be happy to force down the throat of anyone who he disagrees with.

Update: Welcome Big Hollywood readers! Please look around the whole blog, or at least scroll through the archive category named after an earlier Breitbartian Tinseltown expose: Hollywood, Interrupted.

Despite self-serving doomsday prognostications by President Obama, and a skewed unemployment chart produced by Nancy Pelosi and promoted by Andrew Sullivan, Alan Reynolds, a senior fellow with the Cato Institute, reminds us that "It's A Recession Not A 'Catastrophe'".

In the interim however, Brett Joshpe has a modest proposal for Big Hollywood:

Unlike the greedy Wall Street executives though, who have torpedoed our economy by allowing federal bureaucrats to bludgeon them into making bad loans, Hollywood would surely understand the merit of pay caps. After all, it would enable the entertainment world to fulfill its pledge "to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves but each other." (Cut for laughter and gagging and take two!)

But seriously, for the people who are leading the environmental movement and spearheading efforts to turn the Academy Awards green, cut back on the number of SUV's in their entourage, and demonstrate frugality to Al Gore, this is such a great opportunity to demonstrate restraint and help out the new President. What better way to show solidarity with Democrats who want to impose a command and control economy and to confiscate wealth from the rich. Especially since everyone needs to make sacrifices right now. Not to worry though, Steven Spielberg and crew, it will feel patriotic.

As such, we should cap the compensation that movie studios and Silver Screen stars make, particularly given the wealth disparities between the actors and actresses and the grips, stagehands, and extras. While there will be times for profits, this is not that time, especially when people are losing jobs and the Golden State's $40 billion budget deficit is bigger than most countries' total economic GDP.

It so refreshing to see Hollywood stars embracing this new America. They are just in time to put their dollars where their mouths are and to start fulfilling their pledge.

What say you, Ashton and Demi?

What caused the meltdown of the banking system? Was it Texas-Hold'em Poker? According to those new puritans at New York magazine it was--gasp!--television! Worse, horror-of-horrors, it was cable television, and they want this sort of smut and financial pornography banished from the airways:

The real villains here, the truly bad seeds at the heart of this crisis, have gone unpunished thus far and are still in operation. They are Jeff Lewis and Ryan Brown of Bravo's Flipping Out, Armando and Veronica Montelongo of TLC's Flip This House, Kristen Kemp of TLC's The Property Ladder, Kendra Todd of HGTV's My House Is Worth WHAT?, and the TLC, Bravo, HGTV, and Fine Living networks in general. All of them encouraged people to take out massive loans in order to buy and renovate homes and sell them at a profit when, really, most people have terrible taste, and furthermore, are bad at laying tile. These shows are still on! WHY?

But then, there are all sorts of reasons for those on the left to avoid examining some of these root causes:



Back in late December, we noted that the Connecticut Post refused to print emails from readers if they delved too heavily into a particular hometown topic:

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

All of which points to a word that the New York Times simply can't bring itself to speak, Ed Morrissey writes:

The Times wants to sell Dodd as a victim of the "moneyed Washington subculture where powerful incumbents are invited to get something wholesale," but that's poppycock. The man who accepts a bribe is no more of a victim than the man who offers it. It takes both to create corruption, and it's hard to find a more bald example of it than this. Dodd oversaw Countrywide as part of his committee chairmanship and understood that when he accepted the two loans for below-market rates and no-points acceptance. Countrywide later went belly-up, costing the nation billions of dollars for its easy-terms lending practices, and Dodd has been among the voices blaming the collapse of the lending markets on poor oversight. Well, he ought to know that firsthand, oughtn't he?

There's more at stake in this refusal to acknowledge corruption, and we have seen it in Barack Obama's Cabinet appointments. He and Congress have excused wrongdoing for Tim Geithner that would likely have resulted in criminal prosecution for others because Geithner supposedly belongs to a rarified elite group of technocrats that the nation can't do without. That stands the rule of law on its head, and put Geithner, Dodd, and others like them beyond the same responsibilities as the rest of us plebes. Dodd, Geithner, and other DC insiders now get a pass from responsibility for their actions simply because of who they know.

Taking sweetheart deals from the industry Dodd oversaw is corruption, regardless of the circumstances. Refusing to pay taxes even after getting reimbursements from one's employer is tax evasion. When we start making up new names for old crimes based on the relative power of the person who committed them, we have ended the rule of law and created an aristocracy.

Exactly. As G.K. Chesterton noted a century ago, "It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem"--or where it began.

Candidate Jimmy Carter said yes on the campaign trail, but history remembers his actual presidential administration with much more of a gimlet eye. And President Obama is having more than a few Carteresque moments of his own.

Found via Steve Green's weekly roundup of Blogs at PJTV.com, Barbara Curtis writes:

On Tuesday, as press secretary Gibbs fielded questions from the press regarding Daschle's dropping out as HHS secretary, Obama and Michelle "escaped" to read a book to second graders at a DC public school:

[Click for video]

There's certainly the irony that his own girls are going to the most elite school in DC while the Obamas grandstand among the common kids in a public school.

But ponder the significance of a man who spent only several months in the Senate and then campaigned for almost two years to get to the White House, who now spends two weeks flubbing administratively while entertaining lavishly, then together with his wife acts like it's such a terrible burden they have to "cut loose" and "break out."

And just imagine if Bush had done something similarly shallow in the midst of constantly crying "Crisis!" to the citizens of this country.

"Who is this guy? Where is the Barack Obama who charmed the country and challenged it to greatness?" is New York Daily News columnist Michael Goodwin's cri de coeur.

Over at his American Spectator blog, Robert Stacy McCain responds:

Campaigning is tough, but governing is infinitely harder. Remember when first Hillary Clinton, and then Republicans, tried to point out that Obama had no executive experience, had never really shown leadership in his legislative jobs, et cetera? Now his deficiencies are hurting him every day. The White House has many advantages, but it's not a very good place to hide.

Orrin Judd looks into distance and observes: "Somewhere, a killer rabbit licks its chops."

As South Carolina's Governor Mark Sanford noted on CNN today, "A lot of people who've made some very stupid decisions are being bailed out by the population at large":

"A problem that was created by building up of too much debt will not be solved with yet more debt," Gov. Mark Sanford said Sunday, making a reference to the federal deficit spending that will likely finance the federal stimulus package.

"We're moving precipitously close to what I would call a savior-based economy," Sanford also said Sunday on CNN's State of the Union.

The South Carolina Republican said such an economy is "what you see in Russia or Venezuela or Zimbabwe or places like that where it matters not how good your product is to the consumer but what your political connection is to those in power."

The "savior-based economy"? What could go wrong?

Update: Welcome Insta-readers. Feel free to look around the site, and if you like what see...Read The Whole Thing™, to coin a phrase.

As an adjunct to Kathy Shaidle's recent Examiner piece titled, "The Vietnam War: everything you know is wrong", Indy Jane and The People's Cube graphically illustrate what the New York Times would have looked liked in 1943 if it was Pinch Sulzberger running the show in 1943, and not his grandfather.

(And for some thoughts on how legacy mass journalism's collective tone changed dramatically during the course of Vietnam, ultimately becoming bifurcated from a wide swatch of its readers and country, follow the links here.)

Mary Katharine Ham checks in on the Winter Soldier In Winter, and writes, "John Kerry: You Know What's the Problem With Stimulus Tax Cuts? All That Freedom."

(Andrew Sullivan could not be reached for comment.)

Robert Stacy McCain and Donald Douglas weigh in on Judith Warner's New York Times-approved Freudian fantasies of a shack-up with Barack, or as Douglas calls it, the "Sexual Subtext in Obamessianism."

Update: The Skepticrats are appropriately skeptical about those seeking a Last Tango In Washington, and note that "It's worth checking out Gawker's post about this just for the illustration they use", which brings new meaning to the phrase "Unicorn Rider."

We'd get at least another four years of Clint Eastwood-inspired tough guy comparisons--and they were right!

If you enjoyed the recent "Picture Kill" edition of our Silicon Graffiti videoblog, which looked at a series of deliberately botched or manipulated stories by the MSM designed to drive a particular agenda or worldview, don't miss Kathy Shaidle's latest piece in the Examiner. Kathy sets the Wayback Machine and the B.S. detector (also known as the A.P. detector) to 1968 for part one of her series debunking the MSM myths of the Only War In History for the boomer era and their journalists.

Submitted for your approval--two opening paragraphs. First up, this is Iowahawk:

WASHINGTON - U.S. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu announced his resignation this morning amid new reports that Alameda County workers had unearthed more than a dozen additional dead hobo bodies at his former home in Berkeley, California. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist had been the subject of a week-long controversy after he amended his White House application form to declare "3 or 4" hobo corpses in his crawl space, but after this morning's discovery, Chu said he felt he could no longer serve as an effective spokesman for Administration energy policy.

Next, this is Agence France Presse:

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's office moved on Friday to quash claims he attended a mystery concert featuring ABBA lookalikes singing to him from behind a veil at a military-style compound.

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

(HT: SG)

"Did Saddam Hussein Bug Dan Rather Before the Iraq War?"

Join host Steve Green of VodkaPundit.com and myself for a troika of interviews with best-selling authors:

• Roger L. Simon, the CEO of Pajamas Media.com and PJTV.com, on his new book, which looks at forty years inside Hollywood, Blacklisting Myself.


• Bernard Goldberg, formerly of CBS, now with HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, and a frequent commentator on Fox News, for his look at A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media.


• And veteran talk radio host Hugh Hewitt provides a sneak preview of GOP 5.0.

Tune in here to listen! Incidentally, the interview with Roger L. Simon is available online separately, here.

Glenn Reynolds links to a post on the Flying Debris blog on the apparently systematic harassment of a group of anonymous Chicago-based blogs:

The bloggers at the fantastic Chicago blog Uptown Update and the now defunct blog What the Helen have been subpoenaed by a developer of the notorious Wilson Yard project in the Uptown neighborhood. Additionally two Uptown community groups have recently been subpoenaed, the Uptown Neighborhood Council and the Buena Park Neighbors.

Glenn adds, "Expose Chicago politicians and their cronies, and they'll try to expose you, I guess."

See also: Plumber, Joe The.

Sister Toldjah has some thoughts on Peter Robinson's Forbes piece on President Obama's remarkably rocky start, along with a link to my own post on Robinson's article from late last night.

And as Mark Steyn concludes, "Some of us never expected [President Obama] to walk on water. But we didn't think he'd be all at sea taking on quite so much of it after a mere two weeks."

Judith Warner, the author of a book titled Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety begins her op-ed in the New York Times, still, despite its anemic stock price, one of the most influential spokes in the legacy media, thusly:

The other night I dreamt of Barack Obama. He was taking a shower right when I needed to get into the bathroom to shave my legs, and then he was being yelled at by my husband, Max, for smoking in the house. It was not clear whether Max was feeling protective of the president's health or jealous because of the cigarette.

Who dreams of having the President of the United States in their shower while their spouse is yelling at him for smoking? Worse, who admits to this in public? Warner herself provides a clue, here:

"This is the first president I've known who looks, talks and acts like a peer," is how one Washington man explained it to me. "Notwithstanding his somewhat exotic life story, I feel like I understand what he's like and where he's coming from. And despite his incredible achievements, he still seems like a lot of people I know. If you stopped the clock in 2004, in fact, or maybe a couple of years earlier, he'd feel roughly like a peer in terms of accomplishments, too.

Which means that if he had an (R) after his name instead of a (D) that Washington man would be calling him grossly unqualified for the White House, instead of admiring his rapid rise to power and vapid, chameleonic style.

More from the "Washington man" Warner quotes:

"Of course I know nobody with his political gifts, speaking skills and confidence, and he's also a gifted writer and thinker. But I feel like one or two different turns for Obama or me and he could have been someone my friends and I wouldn't think it extraordinary to have in our circle."

Sometimes this sense of close identification turns a bit dark. There's a subcategory of people who feel that they really should have true intimacy with the Obamas.

Included in that category are people whose shame is so diminished, they begin op-eds in a newspaper read by millions with embarrassingly mawkish dreams of showering with the President of the United States while simultaneously reaming him out for having a Marlboro 100 in the house.

Update: "Mind-sexing Obama??? File under Things I Could Happily Lived The Rest of My Life Without Thinking About."

That reporters would be threatened, and even physically roughed up on occasion--if not by the president himself, then by members of his cabinet--and they were right!

Amy Ridenour provides a case study of how the legacy media covers global warming:

When University of Washington Professor Eric Steig announced in a news conference and paper published in the January 22 edition of the journal Nature that he and several colleagues had removed one of many thorns in the sides of climate alarmists -- in this case, evidence that Antarctica is cooling -- he received extensive worldwide attention in the mainstream press.

But when a noteworthy error was found in Stieg's research less than two weeks after it's publication, of the mainstream press, only an opinion column in the London Telegraph and a blog associated with the Australian Herald Sun carried the news.

The Stieg paper's release was covered by 27 newspapers, including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times, by CNN, by the Associated Press, by NPR and quite a few others (see reviews of the coverage at the end of this post).

After independent analyst Steve McIntyre discovered a noteworthy error in the data, and released his results on his influential blog Climate Audit beginning on February 1, based on a Nexis search I conducted February 6, none of these outlets chose to inform their readers.

Of course, such biased "reporting" followed by much less visible retractions isn't just limited to global warming, but many other pet causes of the left--such as this media meme, to reference but one.

Hey, somebody should do a video about this topic!

Peter Robinson writes, "Every so often a president finds himself standing completely exposed--naked, so to speak--before the political class." Reasonable people (if such a group can be found to debate President Bush's record) can disagree, but Robinson believes that President Bush was first caught with brass exposed in October 2005, when he nominated Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court:

As she began making courtesy calls on members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, word began leaking from the offices of astonished senators that her purchase on even the most basic constitutional case law proved tenuous.

In contrast, Robinson believes that President Obama's fallibility is being exposed much sooner in his administration's tenure:

Permit House Democrats to draft his stimulus legislation? What could Obama have been thinking? Only one answer fits: Obama wasn't thinking.

After the Harriet Miers debacle, Bush quickly recovered the support of Washington Republicans. He nominated Samuel Alito in Miers' place and then returned to his other duties as chief executive. That was that. Nobody ever had Bush figured for a brilliant mind anyway.

In recovering from the stimulus debacle, Obama is unlikely to prove quite so lucky. A brilliant mind is exactly what Obama's supporters in Washington thought he had. Brilliance defined Obama. Brilliance is what Obama was all about. Now we know that he has already made some dumb mistakes.

The glee among Republicans right now is only to be expected. The long faces among Obama's startled supporters in Washington are a lot more telling.

In 2007 and 2008, Obama was given virtually no vetting by a media deep in the midst of a "slobbering love affair," to borrow from the title of Bernard Goldberg's latest book. (Incidentally, Bernie will be a guest on this week's PJM Political show tomorrow on Sirius-XM satellite radio.) He (Obama, not Goldberg) encouraged voters to view him a cipher that they could project onto any and all hopes they wanted. He frequently engaged in messianic rhetoric while campaigning, and seemed to encourage similar responses from his more rabid fans--certainly, he did nothing to tamp down such responses.

Even when he won the election, and the media's comparisons to Lincoln, FDR, JFK, and other presidents venerated over decades or more of history continued, Obama consciously played into them, jetting back to Chicago and taking the train, a la Lincoln, to his inauguration.

What could go wrong once it became time for the least experienced executive in the nation's history to actually govern?

"When The Economy's Worse, Dressing Better"

But what would Machiavelli say?

David Harsanyi notes--shocker!--a remarkable dichotomy between Pelosi's comments pre- and post election.

Samizdata.net notes:

In a recent New York Times column, Paul Krugman wrote about what he called the bad faith of the opponents of President Obama's economic stimulus plan. Krugman is apparently labouring under the view that his side has a monopoly of virtue in the current debate and that the Obama plan can not possibly be attacked on the merits.

Apparently?

(HT: I/P)

The Cincinnatus Bengalsaurus was the rarest of dinosaurs, roaming the earth 1,000,000 years Ocho Cinco.

A decade's worth of obsession over "global warming" by Sacramento can't prevent a headline such as this--filled with not just eco-doomsday fear mongering, but alliteration you can believe in! "Energy Chief Chu predicts California climate catastrophe."

Gee, now there's a headline that will stop the ongoing outward migration.

"How do you turn a hearwarming tale into just another excuse to call conservatives heartless, mean ol' hatemongers? Just ask Jessica Heslam from the Boston Herald who, right in the first sentence of her story, decided it would be fun to take a slap shot at a conservative that helped save a woman's life, this week."

Jonah Goldberg's latest essay begins, "The stimulus bill has failed:"

Barack Obama has failed. The Trojan Horse of Hope and Change crashed into the guardrail of reality, revealing an army of ideologues and activists inside.

Now, before I continue, let me say that Barack Obama will still be popular, he will still get things done, and he will declare victory after signing a stimulus bill.

But Obama's moment is gone, and politics is about nothing if not moments.

Read the whole thing; follow the links here.

Found via Orrin Judd, a Red Sox baseball blog describes this key holiday for Bostonians:

A Red Sox season used to be something that you ran away from. With the final heart-breaking out, fans would turn to the Patriots - and, before them, the Celtics - as antidote for the pain of another Fenway collapse. Now, in the wake of back-to-back gut-wrenching Patriots finishes, the baseball season has become Boston's salvation.

That was no more evident than on Yawkey Way Saturday morning. It was Truck Day, cause for several television crews, Dirt Dogs staff, and a hundred fans to celebrate this distinctly Boston tradition so unique in all of professional sports. For all, it was the precursor to spring and hope. And for many, it was also an occasion for healing after Sunday's Super Bowl. I know. I was one.

My son and I started last week bent on attending a parade.

Of course, I would imagine Truck Day conjures up rather opposite emotions if you're a sports fan living in Baltimore.

The etymology of an all-too popular and surprisingly insidious pop-culture phrase, explored by the new blog (and like ours, a Sekimori design), Gotham Resistance.

Jennifer Rubin writes that when Tom Daschle backed out, "the conventional wisdom was that Geithner had gotten 'lucky' since he slipped through before the firestorm":

But that might not be right and, in fact, he may now be a never-ending source of angst for the Obama team. When we get to the inevitable Obama tax hike on the "rich" will Geithner be the one trying to sell the proposition to the voters and Congress? You can hear the Republican retort already. ("Yeah, not a problem since you don't pay all your taxes!") Even now, is he capable of performing PR for the administration on the news show circuit while the first question would be whether he too should step down?

Plus some thoughts on who in Obama's cabinet benefits from a hobbled Geithner.

"How To Deal When You Want To Have Sex With A Client."

Something must have been in the air last night--I stepped onto the balcony of my hotel room in Texas and saw a moonlit landscape that glowed as if illuminated by black light--and that was before the cigar and Remy. But I've got nothing on James Lileks, who saw his SHADO.

No sex, no drugs, no wine, no women--but ladles of endless pork. Something to be avoided like a cyclone ranger, lest it cause The Vapors: "Lessons From A Stimulus That Failed."

That's the headline from the Financial Times, which notes:

The US economy is suffering its steepest downturn since at least the 1970s and could descend into a depression, Jeff Immelt, General Electric's chief executive, warned on Thursday.

Far from warning about a devastating economic slowdown, most of GE's other spokesmen are surprisingly copacetic with the idea.

"At least Henry Ford knew how to make a car."

"Bill Gates just released mosquitos into the audience at TED and said, 'Not only poor people should experience this.'"

As Orrin Judd notes:

Two thoughts occur: (1) hasn't he been responsible for releasing enough bugs already; and, (2) if malaria actually was a disease of wealthy whites DDT wouldn't be banned.

Long before there Al Gore flunked out of Divinity School, this is yet another reminder of the horrors caused by the original junk science poseur, Rachel Carson.

On the other hand, Gates could easily make amends for this asinine stunt by becoming the next spokesman for Raid or Orkin.

"Have we had a more incompetent vetting process in the White House over such a short period of time? When we criticized Barack Obama's lack of executive experience, even we didn't think it was going to be this bad."

Update: "It's easier to list the Obama-nees who aren't tax cheats than those who are."

More: "Two thoughts: (1) Don't any of these people pay their taxes? And (2) Is this, like, some kind of karmic payback for all the Joe-the-plumber tax business?"

Sorry to recycle one of our more popular recent headlines so quickly, but it certainly seemed to fit Mary Katharine Ham's latest video:

Manolo for the Men sadly reports, "the economic downturn has led to a true casual-ty: 21, the famed Manhattan restaurant, is no longer requiring that male diners wear ties, as it had for the prior 79 years."

"It is the final victory of Los Angeles," Tim Zagat of the popular eponymously named restaurant wry noted.

There really are two Americas, Glenn Reynolds writes:

So in a way we have found a new kind of politics. We've gone from a "culture of corruption" in which people who figured in scandals (can you say "Duke Cunningham"?) faced actual consequences, to a culture of impunity, in which it's taken for granted that the rules for big shots are different.

Don't pay your taxes? If you run a dry cleaning shop in Cincinnati, the IRS will come down on you like a ton of bricks. But if you're a congressman or a former senator or a Treasury nominee, you can just sheepishly pay up, perhaps even , as in Daschle's case, without being assessed any penalties.

For that matter, an IRS field agent with these tax problems would have been cashiered, but Geithner, who will have the IRS under his supervision, gets the job anyway.

Ordinary Americans can be excused for thinking that there are two sets of rules: One for the bigshots, the connected, the Made Men of Washington D.C., and another for everyone else.

The Obama Administration may well ride out these particular scandals, and get its chosen nominees into office. Republicans may even let them, on the theory that an admitted tax-evader will probably find it harder to back tax increases on the rest of us.

And, besides, the Republicans in Congress who would be asking the questions are Made Men themselves. But the damage to the polity will remain.

Indeed. Read the whole thing^TM.

Burning Man Festival gets sued--after man attending festival gets burned.

No, really!

(And at the other extreme of Mother Nature's thermostat, "Buffalo State College hosts the national teach-in on Global Warming Situations today -- a day the local temperature bottomed out at minus 6 degrees.")

"NBC's Ann Curry Gushes: 'Who Are We Going to Be' Because of Obamas?"

CBS's Katie Couric scolds the New York Post for running, as she sees it and decrees it, "an unfair picture" on their cover of President Obama.

"If [ABC thinks] they are bleeding audience numbers now, what do they suppose will be their audience's reaction when it is established that their chief Washington correspondent continues to be a key strategist for the Democratic Party?"

"Reporter Escorted From White House After Seeking Obama Autograph."

President Obama: "I think it's fair to say that I don't always get my most favorable coverage on Fox, but I think that's part of how democracy is supposed to work. You know, we're not supposed to all be in lock step here..."

I was on the Breitbart.tv B-Cast earlier today discussing the future of online video, as well as the current difficulty in making Internet advertising revenues work. Tune in here to watch.

The lead item has nothing to do with the future of multimedia, but it's quite a moo-ving story in its own right...

At least once a season on TV's WKRP In Cincinnati, semi-competent news journalist Les Nessman would win Ohio's Silver Sow Award for his morning farm reports. Robert Kennedy Jr. sounds like he's definitely in the running for the fictitious award's next presentation ceremony, with this quote:

Today during a House Judiciary Committee hearing, Congressman Steve King asked Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to confirm a quote he made to the Des Moines Register in 2002: "Large-scale hog producers are a greater threat to the United States and U.S. democracy than Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, says Robert F. Kennedy Jr., president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, a New York environmental group."

Kennedy responded: "I don't know if that's accurate, but I believe it, and I support it."

He'd face stiff competition from fellow Democrat Joe Biden, who has his own equally unique priorities for what's more important than the War On Terror:



(Oh to be a fly on the wall, if those two ever decided to compare notes on the topic.)

In his best-selling Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg wrote:

Like the editors of the old Soviet encyclopedias who would send out updates to instruct which pages should be torn out, American liberalism has repeatedly censored and rewritten its own history so that the "bad guys" were always conservatives and the good guys always liberals.

In The American Spectator W. James Antle III writes that you can see this phenomenon at work in Sam Tanenhaus' latest article:

I've been prodded to read and comment on this Sam Tanenhaus essay pronouncing conservatism dead. Tanenhaus is a smart guy who knows quite a bit about the conservative movement, much more than most liberal writers. But I'm not terribly impressed by his eulogy for the right. Uncharacteristically, Tanenhaus makes little effort to understand conservatives on their own terms. Instead we get embarrassingly tendentious liberal cliches like this:

Today, the situation is much bleaker. After George W. Bush's two terms, conservatives must reckon with the consequences of a presidency that failed, in large part, because of its fervent commitment to movement ideology: the aggressively unilateralist foreign policy; the blind faith in a deregulated, Wall Street-centric market; the harshly punitive "culture war" waged against liberal "elites."

This completely airbrushes out the "responsible" center-left's initial support for the Iraq war, the fact that the biggest "deregulation" relevant to banking was signed into law by Bill Clinton, the left's own role in the "harshly punitive 'culture war'" (which side imposed their will on the electorate via the courts?), and of course any distinctions between Bush's crony capitalism meets Sarbanes-Oxley meets bailouts and the laisezz faire wild west of Tanenhaus' fevered imagination.

Read the rest here; related thoughts from Orrin Judd.

What is it with the New York Times' ads lately? Last month, Galley Slaves linked to their incredibly lame Bobos In Paradise On Park Ave. themed Web video ads, noted (accurately, I think) "Whatever was spent on this 'Conversations' project might as well have been flushed down a drain. Just ridiculous", and asked, "Do Newspapers Deserve to Die?"

Today, Steve Green looks at the Times' latest online ad featuring a glowing photo of The One Who Pinch Has Been Waiting For and asks:

Is it just me, or has the NYT ad department just given the President a ringing endorsement? It's one thing when the editorial page makes an endorsement, but a banner ad? Really?

My favorite is the recent theme featuring the headline, "Subscribe To History," which has a remarkably ironic unintended subtext.

Liberal blogger describe liberal legacy media as racist--for asking the president a question when he visited the White House press room. ("You can't ask questions in here! This is the press room!" Ann Althouse quipped with Strangelovian satire immediately after the incident.)

Such blue-on-blue reactionary thinking was merely a matter of when, as it's far from the first time that left has formed its own circular firing squad on the issue of race.

Brent Bozell files the latest dispatch from the defensive side of the Culture War:

McKay Hatch is a 15-year-old boy from South Pasadena, California who people clearly hate. He's received over 60,000 negative E-mails, most of them vicious, some including death threats that have spawned police and FBI investigations. What has this boy done that's caused such anger? Was he caught dealing drugs? Did he rage? Did he kill? No. He started a No Cussing Club.

And for that he is vilified. Hatch says some people are going out of their way to curse him at school, on the Internet and on the phone. They send him pornographic magazine subscriptions. Not long ago, someone ordered $2,000 worth of pizza delivered to Hatch's house. Then came the death threats.

Brent Hatch, the teenager's father, told reporters one death threat in particular crossed the line. "I was at the hospital with my wife, we were visiting family, and some guy had called on my cell phone said, 'I know you you're gone, you're not there, and I'm in front of your house and I'm going to kill your family.'"

If the purveyors of profanity think that cussing is so harmless, why are some of them so unbelievably hostile to anyone suggesting a voluntary ban on the bleeps?

Theodore Dalrymple has written tens of thousands of words attempting to answer variations on that last question. Here are but a few of them:

A problem arises, however, when all such rules, arbitrary as some of them might be, are eroded to the point of total informality. The culture of any society becomes graceless in the absence of all formality, a development that is peculiarly evident in my own country, Great Britain. Here, gracelessness has become, by a peculiar ideological inversion that has occurred in my lifetime, a manifestation of political virtue. My father's view of the whole matter of manners has triumphed all but completely.

The argument goes something like this: formality is etiquette, and etiquette is a manifestation of an unjust, class-ridden, patriarchal society. The rejection of etiquette and the formality it entails is therefore a sign that one is on the side of the angels, that is to say, of the egalitarians. Modern egalitarians, at least in Britain, do not content themselves with the kind of abstract or formal equality before the law that allows any amount of difference in wealth, status, taste, and sensibility; they demand some progress towards equalization of everything, including manners.

Of course, egalitarians are just as attached as everyone else to their own material possessions and wealth and have no real intention of forgoing them by radical redistribution, at any rate, of their own money and possessions. The struggle for equality--of the actual rather than the formal kind--has therefore to be transferred to fields in which it will cost the egalitarian nothing, or nothing material and financial.

What better way to prove your egalitarian credentials than by adopting the supposedly free and easy, utterly informal manners of those at the bottom of the social scale? The freer and easier the better, for such informality demonstrates another quality beloved of, and praised by, intellectuals: a superiority to the dictates of convention. Thus you can never be quite informal or unconventional enough.

But why the anger? Reminding the New Puritans of their flaws is guaranteed to make them quite cross--especially when anger is their primary emotion to begin with.

Speaking of boomer-era flashbacks, Glenn Reynolds dubs this "Chris Dodd's Modified Limited Hangout"; Mark Tapscott writes that "There are two kinds of journalists in the world":

those who have been been given the idiot's treatment by public officials on a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for public documents, and those who will be.

Believe me, I know because I didn't get inducted into the Freedom of Information Act Hall of Fame for nothing (no, really, I am not making that up. Go here if you think only liberals get such honors.).

Now Senate Banking Committee Chairman Sen, Chris Dodd, D-CN, has pulled what has to be an all-time classic evasion stunt against journalists covering Congress and the economic crisis concerning his promise six months ago to make public all of the documents about his sweetheart loan deal with Countrywide Mortgage.

Dodd invited a select few Connecticut reporters to his office in Hartford Monday and gave them a few minutes to view - but not copy - a small selection of documents that he claims proves he did nothing wrong in accepting special treatment from Countrywide that saved him a reported $75,000 in refinancing a couple of loans worth a total of $800,000. The Wall Street Journal called it Dodd's "Peek-A-Boo Disclosure."

How will Beltway journalists respond? Tapscott predicts that they'll happily play along:

My guess is that they will do nothing because Dodd is a Democrat and he will be protected just as they have protected House Financial Services Committee Chairman Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), Clinton administration officials like former OMB Director Franklin Raines, and the many Democrat donors and operators like Mozilo who made millions through their associations with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They forced lenders to lend billions to unqualified buyers, shielded the process from public exposure and accountability and then cried "Wall Street greed" when their Ponzi scheme exploded and the economy tanked.

In other words...

"Vietnam analogies can be tiresome", Evan Thomas writes, before attempting to yoke Newsweek's Man In The White House with the hoariest of all Vietnam cliches (hint, the first letter begins with "Q") that the New York Times is simultaneously attempting to apply as well.

And additionally, as Orrin Judd writes, if you're a liberal Beltway journalist, you don't let the fact that it's a rather sloppy history of the endgame in Vietnam in the first place stop you from using it in the first place.

Besides, Vietnam and Watergate are the two ends of the boomer axis upon which the legacy media rotates, as James Taranto wrote in 2005, in the midst of Newsweek's Koran-in-the-can debacle:

The obsession with Vietnam and Watergate is central to the alienation between the press and the people. After all, these were triumphs for the crusading press but tragedies for America. And the press's quest for more such triumphs--futile, so far, after more than 30 years--is what is behind the scandals at both Newsweek and CBS.

It's also behind the Valerie Plame kerfuffle, which hasn't been properly recognized as a journalistic scandal. The mainstream media accepted uncritically a Democratic partisan's unfounded allegations of criminal conduct within the Bush administration, suddenly discovering that there was no crime only when the ensuing special prosecutor investigation threatened to put two reporters behind bars. (See our February account of the New York Times' evolution on the subject.)

In response to the Koran-flushing debacle, Newsweek has acknowledged only technical problems with its reporting. This follows the pattern of CBS, which commissioned an "independent" report that allowed the network to claim it was free of political bias. In the Plame case, we don't know of any journalistic outfit that's admitted an error; the Times, for instance, still insists baselessly that Plame's "outing" was "an abuse of power."

The problem in all three cases is that news organizations were so zealous in their pursuit of the next quagmire or scandal that they forgot their first obligation, which is to tell the truth. Until those in the mainstream media are willing to acknowledge that it is this crusading impulse that has led them astray, we are unlikely to see the end of such journalistic scandals.

Curious though, that such high boomer-era cliches linger on nearly 40 years after their initial debut, even when there's a president that the legacy media doesn't immediately wish to destroy.

And who better to tell than Allahpundit (trackbacks be upon him) himself, linking to an NPR(!) Webpage: "Shhh: Al Qaeda leadership decimated, complete defeat foreseeable."

Matthew J. Darnell, who edits the "Shutdown Corner" football on Yahoo.com notes that "Matt Millen's NBC commentary comes with a warning label." He links to a Detroit Free-Press article that explains how local TV provided a little extra expository information about the former Detroit Lion during the Super Bowl pregame show:

Every time a certain familiar face showed up on camera Sunday during NBC's Super Bowl pregame show, Channel 4 ran a scroll at the bottom of the screen:

"Matt Millen was president of the Lions for the worst eight-year run in the history of the NFL. Knowing his history with the team, is there a credibility issue as he now serves as an analyst for NBC Sports?..."

Hilarious. But good for Channel 4, not toeing the company line as it sought online comments from viewers on Millen's gig. Or maybe it was just trying to distance itself from NBC's brilliant move.

You can see video of the label in the YouTube clip above. Of course, it's too bad the networks don't inform their viewers with similar warning labels applied to those working outside their sports divisions...

Back in 2005, I linked to a typically great article titled "California Screaming" by the now sadly deceased Cathy Seipp:

Behind the New Age grin of beatific self-righteousness with which so many Hollywood celebrities greet the world often lurks a tantrum ready to erupt. When the full, roiling boil is over, the slow simmer can last for weeks, if not months. By comparison, old-style screamers can seem quaint, almost benign. The storm may have been intense, but it passed quickly. A classic of the type -- the agent Norman Brokaw, for instance -- could suggest lunch within minutes of a blowup. And the scream usually took the form of a statement: "Get outta here!"

But new-style screamers eschew declarative sentences for rhetorical, F. Lee Bailey-esque questions: "What were you thinking? Why did you even pick up the phone? Do you even have a brain?" This can be harder to bear. As an observer told me once, "If it's 'You're fired,' then at least you're out. If it's someone trying to teach you a lesson, you're there, and you're stuck."

Some screamers can hardly utter a sentence that doesn't contain the f-word. The syllable almost seems to function as their sound, signifying only that they are in the room. Others are more careful with their language, because being sworn at is the point where many screamees stop listening and may even quit. So bland, schoolmarmish words of displeasure are amplified to ear-splitting volume. A vein-popping "Un-ACC-EPT-able!" is a great favorite. Also, a drawn out "DIS...A...PPOINTED!!!"

When in full throttle, the classic Hollywood screamer cannot be neither stopped nor shamed. I once heard a story about a studio executive who screamed at someone's assistant for a good five minutes before realizing he was in the wrong office -- possibly even on the wrong floor. "Well, if you see her," he yelled before stomping out, "tell her what I said!"

Screaming actors, it seems, can be easier to deal with, perhaps because they are not always famous for their brains. Many years ago, I read a story about how Roger Moore (a nonscreamer) took a younger actor aside and suggested he stop attacking everyone on the set. "I'm not in this business to win a popularity contest," the screamer fumed. "I just want to be a good actor."

"Well, you've failed at being a good actor," Moore replied reasonably. "Why not try for the popularity contest?"

Christian Bale is certainly a good actor, but he makes Paul Anka's infamous meltdown sound positively genteel with this must-hear rant.

Mime was money for Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma at the presidential inauguration, and similarly, lip-syncing is good enough for Jennifer Hudson to get the job done singing the national anthem at the Super Bowl.

Charles Johnson writes:

In an interview with the Washington Post, the leader of the UN's blind, toothless International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei (on whose watch Iran's nuclear weapons program has been able to advance almost unhindered), compares Iran to Japan and asks, "Why isn't the world worried about Japan?"

Gosh, I missed all the Nightline segments on Japan seizing the American Embassy in Tokyo. I'll see if they're up on YouTube or Hulu and get back to you when I find them. This could take a while...

Charles Platt was a senior writer for Wired, whom much like Michael Lewis, George Plimpton, George Orwell, and other journalists, decides to go to work in an industry reviled by, or otherwise unknown to elites--in Platt's case, Wal-Mart:

The picture above is of me, finishing my shift at the world's largest retailer. How did I move from being a senior writer at Wired magazine to an entry-level position in a company that is reviled by almost all living journalists?

It started when I read Nickel and Dimed, in which Atlantic contributor Barbara Ehrenreich denounces the exploitation of minimum-wage workers in America. Somehow her book didn't ring true to me, and I wondered to what extent a preconceived agenda might have biased her reporting. Hence my application for a job at the nearest Wal-Mart.

Getting in was not easy, as more than 100 applicants were competing for fewer than 10 job openings. Still, I made it through a very clever screening quiz, then through a series of three interviews, followed by two days of training. I felt ambivalent about taking advantage of the company's resources in this way, but I was certainly willing to do my part by working hard at the store, at least for a limited period.

The job was as dull as I expected, but I was stunned to discover how benign the workplace turned out to be.

Platt writes, "As for all those Wal-Mart horror stories--when I went home and checked the web sites that attack the company, I found that many of them are subsidized with union money." Of course, anti-capitalist forces demonizing department stores is hardly a new trend, and certainly not limited to America.

Read the whole thing, which concludes with a reference to Adam Shepard, the author of Scratch Beginnings, whom Glenn Reynolds and Dr. Helen Smith interviewed for one of their podcasts last year.

(Via Walter Olsen and John Hawkins.)

During the Super Bowl, when Cardinals wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald made a key play, NBC's cameras caught his father in the press booth, working the game for the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder. Papa Fitzgerald acted remarkably stoically to his son's on-the-field wizardry and Al Michaels quipped, (and I'm paraphrasing), "No cheering from the pressbox--that's the sign of a true journalist."

I don't know if anybody else interpreted it the same way, but to me, that was was a short sharp rebuke to just about everybody in NBC's news department in 2008.

But when old media wasn't overtly cheering, they kept rockin' in 2008, as one of Glenn Reynolds' readers notes:

What Katrina taught the media was that they could hurt Bush by lying. What 2008 taught them was that they could help Obama by not reporting at all. What will 2009 teach them? I shudder to think.

Me too.

John Hinderaker adds:

A basic reality of our time is that our mass media are monolithic, and what they choose to report (or not report) depends on what fits the narrative they are pushing on the public. If our reporters and editors wanted to portray Obama as clueless and out of touch with ordinary Americans, he has given them ample opportunity to do so. But because they are Democrats and he is a Democrat, they have no desire to tell that story. So "let them eat steak" is not a theme you'll be seeing on the evening news.

Lovers rarely kiss (up) and tell.

Update: "Sometimes the mask slips." And, as happens very occasionally, more than one mask slips.

As I wrote in November about Bruce Springsteen:

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?

Over at Andrew Breitbart's "Big Hollywood" salon, Nick Gillespie of Reason magazine (who, like myself, grew up in New Jersey in the middle of Springsteen mania) makes it official--and asks, "did Janet Jackson's nipple really condemn us to a lifetime of Super Sunday misery?"

To be fair it's the Super Bowl halftime show--whether it's Up With People or a corporate dinosaur rock star, it's supposed to be miserable. But at least Up With People was honest in its own relentless polyester cheer. Springsteen will be singing to 66,000 people who have paid thousands of dollars to be in attendance, and tens of millions watching the game in their warm suburban homes in Dolby Digital Surround Sound on 52-inch rear projection HDTVs about how Dickensian the nihilistic purgatorial Hell the American existence is. Gillespie adds:

I will say this much in anticipation of the composer of "Mary, Queen of Arkansas" performing this weekend: I grew up in Monmouth County, New Jersey, which contains both Springsteen's hometown (Freehold) and his early haunt (Asbury Park), so I can't stand him in the same way that only a New Yorker can really, really hate the Yankees. I think that even his biggest fans will admit that his output over the past 25 years or so would make even Beethoven nostalgic for the first few albums. Springsteen is in that elite group of rock stars who have objectively sucked two, three, or even four times longer than they were ever any good (are you listening Sting, David Bowie, R.E.M., Patti Smith?). That, and in the video for "Glory Days," he had the worst fake baseball throwing arm since Gary Cooper in Pride of the Yankees. Which is saying something.

Watching Springsteen perform at the Super Bowl--and before him, rock mummies like Tom Petty and Rolling Stones--let's just say I'd rather go straight to the Bodies exhibition, where at least no one is pretending that the corpses on display aren't actually dead.

But then, as Mark Steyn notes, (quoting from another "Big Hollywood" essay), "for half-a-century now rock has very successfully been 'both establishment and anti-establishment'":

In fact, "a rebellious underdog distributed by the status quo" is the very definition of rock: All those fellows calling for revolution while contracted to Capitol, Columbia, EMI., Warner Bros - the exact same companies running the music biz back in the days when Glenn Miller and Bing Crosby were where the big bucks were. A few years ago the Warner Megabehemoth Globocorp launched a rap label called "Maverick", and nobody laughed.

Rockers attending the Obama inauguration are like visiting royalty at a Bourbon or Habsburg wedding. By the way, over the years I've met kings, princesses, dukes and all the rest, and none of 'em were as hung up on precedence as the aristorockracy. A decade or so back, Sting had to issue a formal apology because at one of his big save-the-rainforest banquets at his country pile he committed the ghastly social faux pas of seating Jools Holland (of the band Squeeze) next to some no-name session musician. In Britain, these guys all live in stately homes, and any of their number who makes it to 50 without choking on his own vomit or being found face down in the swimming pool gets knighted - Sir Elton John, Sir Mick Jagger, Sir Paul McCartney, etc. Obama's pal Bono has a knighthood. You say you want a revolution? Sorry I'm having tea with the Prince of Wales that day.

Or apologizing to your fan base on the left for--gasp!--selling records in Wal-Mart.

Not that there's anything wrong with that--though of course, as Billy Joel said to John Cougar Mellancamp when the latter man was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, "You're right, John, this is still our country and we'll always be victims of powerful people."

No matter how many tens of millions they stuff into your bank account.

Glenn Reynolds notes:

SO, MICHAEL STEELE DOES OUR INTERVIEW in December, and in January he's RNC Chair. Bill Haslam does our interview on Wednesday, and on Thursday he raises $1.4 million. Coincidence? . . . I think so.

Of course! The real reason is that both segments were featured on Pajamas' weekly show on Sirius-XM radio! You can hear the segment featuring Steele's interview here, and our newest show featured the interview with Haslam.

Coincidence? Uh yeah--I think so, too. But still!