From the home office In Little Rock, Arkansas...

By the way, the rather expansive new American flag which appears in the video is for sale here. Here's where you can find the Hillary as Indiana Jones video, and the Hillary as Norma Desmond clip. And the 3:00 AM mash-up in the video is here.

Previous Silicon Graffiti episodes can be found here.

The Black Panthers and Weathermen (aka Weather Underground) were anarchistic paramilitary far left groups from the late 1960s, whose ties crossed at least once in 1970. They're resurfacing again though in a surprising place: each has been referenced via Barack Obama's presidential campaign, particlarly the latter group. Back in February, the Politico's Ben Smith noted:

In 1995, State Senator Alice Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district’s influential liberals at the home of two well known figures on the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

While Ayers and Dohrn may be thought of in Hyde Park as local activists, they’re better known nationally as two of the most notorious — and unrepentant — figures from the violent fringe of the 1960s anti-war movement.

Now, as Obama runs for president, what two guests recall as an unremarkable gathering on the road to a minor elected office stands as a symbol of how swiftly he has risen from a man in the Hyde Park left to one closing in fast on the Democratic nomination for president.

“I can remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill Ayers’ house to learn that Alice Palmer was stepping down from the senate and running for Congress,” said Dr. Quentin Young, a prominent Chicago physician and advocate for single-payer health care, of the informal gathering at the home of Ayers and his wife, Dohrn. “[Palmer] identified [Obama] as her successor.”

Obama and Palmer “were both there,” he said.

Obama’s connections to Ayers and Dorhn have been noted in some fleeting news coverage in the past. But the visit by Obama to their home — part of a campaign courtship — reflects more extensive interaction than has been previously reported.

And Tom Maguire also uncovered another connection:

The Obama/Ayers soundbite is this: Obama and Ayers (a professor of education) worked together on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge for several years in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to reform Chicago's public schools. The extent of their relationship is not clear, since Obama has been opaque on this topic both in a televised debate and at his website. However, Ayers was instrumental in founding the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and Obama was the group's first chairman, so there is something being concealed there.

And it's not like Hillary Clinton is without sin in this department, herself.

(Earlier Silicon Graffiti videos can be found here.)

Just in time for the results from the Pennsylvania Democratic primary, here's the latest Silicon Graffiti. It's a reminder that sometimes, in the never-ending search for the next JFK, you have to toss the old one--and his wife--overboard.

(Previous editions of Silicon Graffiti can be found here.)

Rock & Roll has a museum in Cleveland; and Jazz has a de facto museum in Manhattan’s Lincoln Center. What does the traditional news industry opening a museum of its own in Washington DC say about its viability in the age of Blogs and the Web?

Complete with cameo appearances by Mick Jagger and Orson Welles, my latest Silicon Graffiti video is online, using old media's recently completed museum honoring--who else?--themselves as a launching point:

The video references the nifty EPIC 2014 multimedia presentation from 2004, which you can view in its entirety on its homepage, and more of my own videos can be found here.

(Bumped to top.)

About a week ago, I spotted an interesting contrast in the widely disparate tone of how two similar news stories were covered by their local TV stations:

Note the extremely positive style in which the local TV news station in Blue State generally "anti-War" Bobos In Paradise Santa Rosa, California reported the story of an elderly Army vet who defended himself against a robbery attempt. Then compare it how one now infamous ex-reporter in the generally more conservative area of Dallas reported the story of another elderly Army vet who defended himself against multiple robbery attempts.

The contrasting styles indicate, among other things, the folly of the remaining pockets of the media who claim to be "objective", unbiased, and generally above the fray. The above videos also illustrate that tone, language and context are all key parts of crafting the news, whether it's for print, TV or radio, as well consideration of how the news will be received by the local audience. (Hence the additional outrage over former Dallas-area journalist Rebecca Aguilar's badgering tone.) And all of those elements are based on the skill and life experiences of the producer, editor and/or reporter, who brings together the writing, interviewing, and soundbites, whether they're printed quotes or A/V clips.

That's the subject of our latest Silicon Graffiti video podcast, complete with a quote from Glenn Reynolds, and a cameo appearance by Liz Stephans and Scott Baker of Breitbart.TV, via an excerpt from this clip.

(More video blogging found here, incidentally.)

Mark Steyn writes:

Jeepers, will all business during the Clinton Administration be transacted at 3 AM? Is it some union-negotiated flex-time deal? “Home foreclosures mounting”? We’d better wake the President.

As Jim Geraghty, or possibly someone else at NRO recently noted, the ideal response from a prospective President McCain would be to seriously ream anyone on his staff who wakes him at 3:00 AM over a domestic financial "crisis"--there's a reason why they call the time when the sun is visible "bankers' hours". (The acceptable alternative response would be, "Call Kudlow, dammit!", but that's a whole 'nother story.)

But hey, like I said, it's always 3:00 AM somewhere...

By the time of his death in 2005 at the venerable age of 98, Philip Johnson was arguably America's best known architect, having designed his famed "Glass House" in 1949, and worked with Mies van der Rohe on Mies's Seagram Building a few years later. The former was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1997; the latter dubbed "Building of the Millennium" by the New York Times.

But Johnson's puckish demeanor in his later years, which earned him decades of good cheer from fellow Manhattan elites, hid a dark journey through the liberal fascist politics of the 1930s, which culminated in his cheering on the Nazis as they marched through Poland in 1939. “We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed. It was a stirring spectacle”, he would write to a friend at the time.

At the start of the 1930s, Johnson was an admirer of the socialist-leaning architects of Germany's Bauhaus, as he founded the newly born Museum of Modern Art's architectural department, and helped put modern architecture on the map in the US. Apparently after witnessing a Hitler rally in Potsdam in 1933, Johnson was immediately attracted to the Nazis. That moment sent Johnson on a seemingly strange journey: shortly thereafter, he would leave MoMA to seek employment with first Huey Long and then Father Coughlin, before ultimately winding up cheering the Nazis on at the start of WWII.

During that same period though, while Johnson openly admired the Nazis, he befriended the last director of the Bauhaus, Mies van der Rohe, even as the Nazis were shuttering the design school's doors. Returning to MoMA in the 1950s and establishing himself, via his famed Glass House, as a known architect in his own right, as Hilton Kramer noted in the mid-1990s, and Anne Applebaum shortly after Johnson's death, Johnson did a near-thorough job of tossing his radical past down the memory hole. At the least, most of his fellow Manhattan elites didn't lose too much sleep over it.

And yet, comparing Johnson's past with the lost history of the 1930s described in Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, in retrospect Johnson comes across as a sort of dark version of Woody Allen's Zelig character, appearing alongside several of the fascist left's most important figures in both the US and Europe during the Depression.

(More video blogging found here, incidentally.)

While it lacks the staggering production values and stentorian dialogue readings of the finest Fred Spencer Productions, the latest edition of Silicon Graffiti, our in-house video blog, is online. It analyzes and breaks down the creepy 9/11-ish vibe of a couple of advertisements, the first a Starbucks ad that actually ran in Manhattan less than a year after September 11th (here's our concurrent blog post from our first year). And the second, a much more recent viral video for a (possibly fictitious?) Dutch travel agency with close to a million and half views on YouTube and at least one appearance on the cable news channels, which is where I first saw it at the start of this month.

(Past episodes of Silicon Graffiti can be found here.)

That's how Foreign Policy's Mike Boyer reports the conversation went at a recent Council on Foreign Relations event in DC involving representatives of both the Hillary and McCain camps:

After Mara Rudman, who is advising Hillary Clinton, very briefly addressed the issue of Clinton's foreign policy experience, [Randy Scheunemann, who is overseeing foreign policy issues for John McCain's campaign], chimed in with:

"Please keep running those 3:00 A.M. ads about who you want to answer the phone, because we like those."

Happy to oblige:

Because it's always 3:00 AM, somewhere!

Update: The Gipper certainly understood inter-party campaign jujitsu.

Several pundits have noted that Hillary's new "3:00 a.m." ad could be the perfect ad for John McCain. So for the latest edition of our Silicon Graffiti video blog, we mashed it into just that:

And for those who want to link to the mash-up itself, here it is:

Update: Welcome Power Line readers! Elsewhere in the Blogosphere, Jammie Wearing Fool notes, "Girl in Hillary's 3 a.m. Ad Actually an Obama Supporter".

More: Ann Althouse and Michelle Malkin dissect SNL's parody of the "3:00 a.m." video.

(Bumped to top.)

(Bumped to top--Ed)

In between the audio work for the weekly XM show, here's a short video I shot on the joys of green screen and DIY video, and the groundwork that's being laid for the eventual successors to the stodgy old network news:

For some background, tips on getting started, and links to the individual clips embedded in the video, there's an accompanying Blogcritics article as well.

And if you missed our previous Silicon Graffiti video (focusing on Ezra Levant and the now infamous Alberta Human Rights Commission), just click here.

At Pajamas, we believe in covering all of the election returns, no matter how obscure the precinct:

(Hey no worse than Florida voters, who can't figure out that they've already had their primary, last week...)

Update: Real results here.

Well, that's what my fellow Blogway Boy says, at least:

In-between recording some--hopefully!--serious Super Tuesday material for this Thursday's Pajamas Media's PJM Political show on XM Satellite Radio, I also sat in, along with Roger Simon, on a shoot by Pajamas' video maestro Mark Anderson. I'm not sure which of us is Mort and which of us is Fred, but here you go:

Since I'll be busy much of the day assembling the next edition of PJM Political, hopefully this will hold you over in-between posts:

Here's a link to the Pajamas article the video references.

The following video is a Rashomon-like experience: poignant look at Red State elites on the eve of a tumultuous election year? Hagiographic inadvertent infomercial? Self-indulgent holiday video? All of the above?

You make the call!

Secrets of XM revealed!

(A big thanks to Joe Mathieu of XM's POTUS '08 Channel, for giving me a tour of the facilities on the day before Thanksgiving.)

Back in October, I visited the Arlington, Texas Guitar Show. I finally had a chance to come up for air from the PJM Political audio stuff to finish the short video I shot and edited of the action in the main showroom. (And yes, that's me playing assorted electric and acoustic guitars on the backing track):

With apologies to Lorne Michaels...

Tune in weekly to #130 on your XM dial, and anytime, here.

With the return of Dan Rather, an article I wrote for the September issue of the New Individualist magazine seems especially timely. It's titled "Atlas Mugged: How a Gang of Scrappy, Individual Bloggers Broke the Stranglehold of the Mainstream Media" , and I certainly hope you'll stop by and give it a read. It features quotes from interviews conducted especially for the piece with Glenn Reynolds, James Lileks, and also Shannon Love of the Chicago Boyz Website, who provided loads of great material on the birth of mass media.

For better or worse, it was also a chance to shoot some video, obviously inspired by the look and feel of Hot Air's "Vent" series: