Astonishingly, via the Huffington Post:

We may now understand why Barack does not wear a flag lapel pin. He's afraid that Bill Ayers will stomp on him.

Heh. You know, some blogger should make a video exploring all of that ancient Radical Chic rhetoric coming home to roost.

Keeping wide swatches of nearby sources of oil off-limits to drilling only ensures that Americans will be paying the Pelosi Premium for some time to come.

As Jim Geraghty writes, this would be a slam-dunk issue for John McCain to exploit--so naturally, don't hold your breath waiting for him to take it on.

Paging Theodore Dalrymple: Grist for your next essay on the decline and fall of western civilization is waiting right here.

John Brummett of the Arkansas News Bureau writes that because "Bill Clinton has behaved ineptly and inanely" on the campaign trail, "His wife has taken to sending him to small towns, like the Republicans did to conceal Dan Quayle in 1988."

But Bill may not be the only one making Quayle-esque gaffes on the campaign stump:

Victor Davis Hanson writes, "Almost imperceptibly to the McCain campaign, I think Obama has already established quite new messianic rules of engagement that will be difficult to overturn". But "the eventual downside for Obama is that the loftier the prophet, the more transparent his all-too-human transgressions."

Just to follow on from my post from this morning, here's yet another article that would easily have fit in on Newsbusters, except that its chief source of quotes is a liberal who is complaining about the partisan nature of CNN's political coverage:

When Clinton supporter Lanny Davis appeared on CNN during primary night, shortly before 10 p.m., there was a peculiar exchange with host Anderson Cooper.

Cooper: Lanny, let me start off with you. We haven't heard from you tonight. Your take on Barack Obama's speech earlier?
Davis: You haven't heard from me tonight. And I'm not sure — I’m not sure you want to hear from me tonight but —
Cooper: We heard from Paul Begala. This is your big chance.
Davis: Well, actually, I don't think we heard very much from Paul Begala. We did hear an awful —
Cooper: All part of the conspiracy against Hillary Clinton, I suppose.

During the Election Night broadcast, there was palpable tension between Davis and CNN reporters and panelists on camera — and apparently, with producers off camera.

Looking back, Davis said by phone this afternoon, he considers it “the worst experience I ever had on television.”

What bothers Davis most is that CNN is the network with which he’s had the longest relationship, where he’s maintained close friendships through the years, and that he's always considered middle-of-the-road in its coverage. But in his opinion, CNN has not treated Hillary Clinton fairly in the ’08 race.

Formerly special counsel to President Bill Clinton, Davis admits wholeheartedly to being a partisan and strongly supports Clinton against Obama.

So what happened on Tuesday night?

Davis, by his account, was invited to appear on the CNN panel in New York but declined because of a family commitment — his son’s baseball practice in Maryland. Instead, he opted to participate by remote from the network’s D.C. studio.

He was instructed to arrive around 8:30 p.m., he said, in order to take over the pro-Clinton position once Paul Begala left. So Davis left the baseball practice early in order to arrive at the studio on time, but he didn’t make it on air until almost 10 p.m.

A CNN spokesperson said that Davis was scheduled to go on-air at 9pm, but CNN didn't go to him or any commentator during Sen. Obama's speech in the 9pm hour, just as no commentators were on-air during Sen. Clinton's speech later the same night.

Davis said he told a producer several times before getting on-air that he wanted to offer a counterpoint to CNN’s panel, which he thinks is too pro-Obama.

Regarding the panel's make-up, Davis said that he believes Gloria Borger, David Gergen, Donna Brazile and Carl Bernstein are all tougher on Clinton than on her rival. And he maintains that Roland Martin is definitely a “partisan for Obama.” (Martin has not official endorsed Obama and is not labeled as such on the network,)

According to a post found via Protein Wisdom and Hot Air, Martin is apparently quite a partisan for Reverend Wright, in any case.

More from Davis:

Regarding CNN’s competitors, Davis said that MSNBC is “shameless about their bias toward Obama,” and Fox has been the fairest — which is saying a lot coming from a self-described member of the Democratic Party’s left wing.

“Fox, no matter how much you might criticize an ideological bent, in this campaign, they have been religiously middle-of-the-road, point-counterpoint,” Davis said.

And that’s what Davis said he expects from CNN, the network where he’s had “the longest history, best friends, and most respect.”

And that's the rub, isn't it? Like most in old media or who orbit closest to it, they don't object that it's partisan anymore--they're merely upset when it's stacked against their politician.

This could make for one of those cheesy guilty pleasure National Enquirer-type surveys:

Choice of Hillary Metaphor

Reveals Your Inner Personality!

Is Hillary:

• Norma Desmond?
• Your psycho ex-girlfriend?
• Richard Nixon?
• Don Corleone?
• Big Brother?
• Or is she simply everything you hate about yourself?

You make the call!

Update: This one arrived too late to make the initial cut: Is Hillary Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction?

Travis Kavulla notes that last night, "Apparently a laser light show – or, rather, a piece of 'illumination art' – was projected onto the National Cathedral" in Washington, DC:

Last night, [Gerry Hofstetter, a 45-year-old artist from Zurich] ran a series of glass plates through a 6,000-volt projector and said artisty things like "Light is hope, fire is energy. These colors mean hope and energy."

Light is hope? I only wish more in the artistic class still believed that.

James Taranto writes:

For all the hype about Barack Obama being some new kind of politician, in one respect he is very similar to recent Democratic presidential nominees: He takes criticism very badly, responding to it by getting both defensive and nasty. It is a most unattractive quality.

And remember, he's the optimistic one in the family:

Michelle Obama: …working in some of the toughest neighborhoods on the south side of Chicago, worked for years in neighborhoods where people had a reason to give up hope, because their jobs had been lost, steel mills shut down, living in brown fields left by those closed steel plants, unsafe streets, schools deteriorating, grandparents raising grandkids. Barack spent years working with churches, busing single mothers down to City Hall to help them find their voice, building the kind of operations on the ground, just like he’s doing in this race, block by block, person by person. Now you tell me whether there’s anybody in this race who can claim to have made the same choice with their lives. You tell me. But I think that Barack Obama is the only person that can claim that kind of choice…so trust me, we’ve seen it all. Barack has seen it all.

Hugh Hewitt: Mark Steyn?

Mark Steyn: (laughing) Well, you know, that’s…I don’t know…Chicago doesn’t sound like part of America. It sounds like we need to fly in some U.N. relief agency. They should all pull out of Burma and fly into these derelict parts of Chicago. The fact is, community organizer is a bogus term. She ought to knock it off. Real people…one of the most pathetic aspects of this race is that somehow, a guy like Mitt Romney, who runs successful companies, he’s regarded as Mr. Bloated Plutocrat like the guy in the top hat on the Monopoly board. A guy like that actually makes a contribution to people’s lives, to generating the great wealth in corporate America that pays for everything else. And a community organizer, which most functioning communities in the United States don’t have the need for, is an entirely bogus term. She is becoming, I miss Teresa Heinz Kerry.

HH: (laughing)

MS: God bless here. I used to love going to John Kerry events, and John Kerry would be droning I say to George Bush, bring it on, and Teresa used to stand there next to him looking board out of her skull. God bless her. She was a, you know, she’s a genuine, a very genuine woman. And Michelle Obama by contrast seems to have all the condescension of Teresa Heinz Kerry, plus this weird bitterness and anger. I think she’s a very strange woman.

Ascending towards the eschaton, one is always likely to get the vapors.

From Peggy Noonan's fingers to this terrific video on YouTube:

Operation Chaos: the gift that keeps on giving. At least until it doesn't.

Good question. Let's ask Bill Ayers next time we see him, or any of these folks.

(H/T: IP)

On Wednesday night, as I was mixing down the elements for this week's PJM Political (which you can listen to here--and yes, I did get far too silly writing the headline)--I listened to some of the audio from Rush Limbaugh, the first time I had done so in a while. As a result of Operation Chaos, he's clearly having more fun than he's had in quite some time and this essay in Slate by Jack Shafer is one of the many inadvertent byproducts of it:

My intention here is less to light a candle for the Clinton candidacy—which remains the long shot it was even after her Pennsylvania primary win in late April—than to give Russert and company the hot foot for their dramatic exuberance.

Whether covering politics, the stock market, or sports, television reporters live inside the moment, and the fundamental questions before them are always "who's winning, who's losing, and why" (which just happens to be the tag line of Slate's "Politics" department). If a TV reporter can peg a winner, he will. If no winners are in attendance, he'll identify a loser. If no winner or losers can be found, he'll drum up that somebody has "gained" momentum. The medium doesn't reward procrastinators or qualifiers.

Although TV reporters may expect thing X to happen while they're on the air, they plan for contingencies Y and Z. Before going on camera, they stuff their cheeks with a huge assortment of pithy insights so that, no matter what happens, they have something smart to mouth. The most excitable of the TV news chipmunks was usually Dan Rather, whose election night scripts—"Bush is sweeping through the South like a big wheel through a cotton field"—covered events that ultimately may have occurred only in parallel universes.

When Russert exclaimed the inevitability of Obama's nomination, it was an act of recall, not an act of cognition. At the moment he bestowed the nomination upon Obama, his network had yet to call Indiana for Clinton. Shuffling his mental notes and calculating the possibility of an Obama victory in Indiana, how could he resist speaking the words he had composed in his head two months ago?

Russert of course, a former aid to Mario Cuomo, came to NBC via the revolving door between Democrats and old media (See also: Stephanopoulos, George; and Matthews, Chris). Jeff Jarvis and James Wolcott, who have each openly declared for Hillary, have also recently clung bitterly to similar opinions. I don't know if Shafer is a Hillary or an Obama man (perhaps he's a McCain backer, but I would tend to doubt it, based on where he's writing), but when the above could have been written for National Review Online, or Brent Bozell's Media Research Center, (including its subsidiary, Newsbusters), it's been fascinating to watch the center-left turn on their own mass media, as a result of this extended primary season.

Mark Hemmingway asks, "How bad are things in the newspaper industry? See prayingforpapers.com."

I know there are no atheists in fox holes and unemployment lines, but I wonder what these people would say about that site?

They call it witchcraft...Or the reality party, depending upon who you talk to.

"The way the Japanese could tell they were losing WWII was that the great victories reported by their media were getting closer and closer to home. Our media problem is like a fun-house mirror version of this - the way we can tell we are winning is that our crushing defeats are happening less often and to different enemies."

Elsewhere, Cindy Crawford discovers her inner General Jack D. Ripper:

According to Crawford and the “Thirsty for Change” Web site, Americans use 50 billion water bottles a year.

“Fifty billion in America and only 50 percent are recycled,” Crawford said. “So that’s like 38 billion that aren’t recycled.”

The Exurban League explores the new math:

Let's see... 50 Billion x 50% = 25 Billion, subtract the loss factor, add in the safety margin, carry the missing supermodel brain cells... yep, 38 billion!

Do we know if Cindy has any thoughts on fluoridation?

(And don't even ask her about toilet paper...)

Update: Liberty Peak Lodge crosses the streams: check out the caption on the photo above this post.

With his rapidly becoming infamous quote Tuesday night on CNN that Democrats couldn't win in November with a coalition of “eggheads and African-Americans,” Paul Begala inadvertently reveals his inner-Stevenson.

But what would President Merkin Muffley Say?

Extreme Mortman has some thoughts on--to coin a phrase--democracy, whiskey, sexy:

Happy 60th birthday, Israel!

Democracy. Military might. Strong, reliable ally of America. Front-lines in the global war on terror.

But more important, as CNN put it, “Israel is hip, sexy, and fun.”

Or as P.J. O'Rourke once wrote:

"We're not being sexist here," my friend insisted. "It's not that looks matter per se. It's just that beautiful women are always on the cutting edge of social trends. Remember how many beautiful women were in the anti-war movement twenty years ago? n the yoga classes fifteen years ago? At the discos ten years ago? On Wall Street five years ago? Where the beautiful women are is where the country is headed."

All of which makes quite a contrast to the original No Fun League.

In the Atlantic, Ross Douthat writes, "the GOP is now a working-class party":

There are two important points to be made about these numbers, and the deeper reality they reflect. The first, which you hear around these parts a lot, is that the GOP is now a working-class party (with class defined by education and culture more than income, just to be clear; there are plenty of skilled craftsmen who make more money than teachers and journalists and academics), and that it needs to start acting like one if it's going to rebuild its shattered majority.

If the first half of that equation sounds familiar, it should: it's a theme that we wrote about four years ago when the GOP, and its incumbent president were riding high. After the midterms--and with more trouble potentially on the way--Douthat adds:

The second is that the GOP can't only be a working-class party; just as the famous Judis-Texeira emerging Democratic majority is built around the mass upper class and the poor but depends on winning some working-class votes to put it over the top, so any future "Party of Sam's Club" Republican majority is going to need to win back at least some of the mass-upper-class votes that the party has hemorrhaged during the Bush years.

Hopefully it won't take another Carter-esque extended economic malaise this time.

Rush Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos", which featured voters from one party crossing over--perfectly legally--to vote in the other party's primary elections. The resultant furor from Democrats has led to unintentionally hilarious comparisons to"radio broadcasts that incited violence in Rwanda and Kenya". And journalists from the original Blue State chiming in (translation here). And even former presidential candidates saying stuff like this:

David Plouffe and a series of big gun endorsers are holding a conference call to stress the scale of last night's victory.

"He clearly did more than he had to and she did not achieve what she had to," said Senator John Kerry.

Both Plouffe and Kerry stressed the importance of the Limbaugh Effect.

"Rush Limbaugh was tampering with the primary," Kerry said "If it was not for Republicans taking Democratic ballots, he would have won," he said of Obama.

So we won't be reading any articles like this in 2012, right?

Of course we will. But the spittle-flecked hypocrisy generated this year when the Florsheim is on the other foot will be fun to look back on when we do.

Tim Graham looks at Tim Russert, spin-meister:

Drudge focused the World Wide Web on Tim Russert's arrogant "Arise, Sir Loin of Beef" declaration that the Democratic race is over and "no one's gonna dispute it." The first words out of Russert's mouth this morning on NBC were "I cannot find an objective Democrat who does not think this race is over."

Tim Russert is a Democrat, but not an "objective" one. This declaration is spin, not reality, especially when we know the Clinton Chutzpah Express can avoid the "reality" obstacles that cause every other political family to call it quits. I don't recall Russert telling the country that the Clinton presidency was "over" in 1998, and that only the Clintons didn't realize it, that "no one's gonna dispute it."

Regardless of where political reality lands, what people should see in that Drudge clip and the NBC clip this morning is Tim Russert asserting himself as President of the News. People should see that this is an intensely political press that calculates every word it says and every story it covers and every poll it commissions. Russert and his colleagues don't want to just observe. They want to run the country. They want to have the power to make and break presidents. They want to tell the people to follow their robotic orders and deeply drink of the "conventional wisdom" they manufacture. "Objective" is not an adjective to them; it is a noun. Their objective today is to clear the path and get the Democrats back in the White House.

Compare Russert's firm, Kent Brockman-like The Race Is Over statement with the endless interjections and biases from a fellow MSM'er when he couldn't believe the race was over in 2000.

"It's got to hurt when George McGovern says you can't win."

Update: Jim Geraghty waxes nostalgic for "the good old days when you could buy a politician, and they would stay bought":

Why does anybody trust George McGovern?

He just turned on Hillary, rescinded his endorsement of her, endorsed Obama, and called on her to leave the race.

And he does it after the Clinton family foundation gave $25,000 to support the McGovern Library and Center for Leadership and Public Service in Mitchell, South Dakota in early 2007.

Ingrate.

Heh.^TM

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.)

One great thing about election years in the post-9/11 era: the MSM really isn't afraid to let it all hang out. As Kathryn-Jean Lopez noted last week:

CNN’s “news” coverage on Sunday night went out of its way to be as unfair and unbalanced as possible. They aired Wright live. During the fiery speech, Wright plugged CNN “anchor and special correspondent” Soledad O’Brien and “long-term friend” CNN analyst Roland Martin. Both O’Brien and Martin appeared on-air after the event, discussing how funny and effective Wright was. As they explained to viewers how to understand Wright’s infamous “God damn America” comment, evening anchor Rick Sanchez insisted viewers keep watching replay after replay and apology after apology for Wright. “I would imagine the people watching [on TV] would say, ‘Wow, I didn’t realize the guy had two masters degree and a Ph.D. I didn’t realize he spoke five languages.’ ” And that changes “God damn America” for you, doesn’t it? That appears to be CNN’s hope. O’Brien continued raving about the speech, “It was very funny. It was hilarious at times.” And in the morning, O’Brien was back, calling Sunday night a “homerun” for Wright.

Which you can watch here. As I wrote shortly afterwards, the media will have to go into backwards-reverse-somersault Olympic-level fip-flops to go from gushing over Wright to tossing him under the bus.

And here you go! The CNN anchor who interviewed O'Brien for her "home run" moment last Monday, is today telling Obama that his network is a "Wright Free Zone".

In the tank? Just a tad.

"1984 -- A user manual for lefties; a warning for the rest of us":

Just as Jack Torrance was trapped in the Overlook Hotel for all eternity, Stephen King appears to doomed to relive "Jon Carry's" gaffe from 2006.

Need to raise your blood pressure in a hurry? Just check out the photo that Marathon Pundit found of Bill Ayers--in whose home Obama launched his first political campaign in 1995--dancing on top of a crumpled American flag.

(Via Hot Air.)

From New York magazine comes a piece titled, "About That Crush on Obama: If Barack is out of touch with America, then the media must be too."

As Orrin Judd writes, "Holy Master of the Obvious, Batman!"

When Saturday Night Live is more in touch with reality than you are, it might be time to get out of midtown Manhattan a bit more often. Maybe visit an Outback Steakhouse, and have some red meat in a Red State, if only for anthropological research purposes.

Update: Dean Barnett writes--and this isn't breaking news anymore, of course--that " the old media are dying":

One of the things that is killing them is their dual pretense of objectivity and neutrality. If Dan Rather was fairer or more objective than the Huffington Post, he had me fooled.

So what will rise from the ashes of the old media castles? What we'll likely have is a Wild West of information where news consumers will have to seek out truth on their own. This isn't unprecedented. After the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Tombstone's two newspapers gave starkly different accounts of the affair, one championing the Earps and the other the Clanton/McLaury faction.

Horace Greeley ran for president at the tail end of his career and invented Andrew Jackson's most famous quote at the start of it ("John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!"). Newsmen with an agenda are nothing new under the sun. And the market will reward those with a fidelity to the truth and punish those who demonstrate the opposite. Please see the pathetic Mr. Rather currently toiling away on something called HDNet for comforting evidence of that fact.

The prospect of not having a newspaper or news source of record may frighten some people since it would be new territory for the modern era. But far more frightening is a thankfully bygone era when a media powerhouse like Walter Cronkite could call the Vietnam War lost because he didn’t understand what had happened with the Tet Offensive. Worse still, so impeccable was his credibility that the country would believe him.

Better to have a nation of citizens actively engaged in finding the truth than assuming they're getting the truth from what's in fact an unreliable source.

Exactly.

(Via Maggie's Farm.)

And then they hit the campaign trail. If somehow you've just woken up and tuned into the presidential election, here's how to get up to speed with what the lefthand side of the aisle has been up to in a brisk seven minute video from Slate:

(Via Ann Althouse.)

Dr. Helen checks out Julia Gorin's new book, Clintonisms:

I spent the morning reading a new book by conservative comedian Julie Gorin called, Clintonisms: The Amusing, Confusing, and Even Suspect Musing, of Billary. I generally don't go for these kinds of books that make fun of various presidents but this one was sort of catchy and funny--although if you like the Clintons, you may not see it that way.

In the introduction, Ms. Gorin states that we are faced with the real possibility of a second Clinton presidency and her book "attempts to preempt that reminder and at the same time examine the pressing issues and questions that may be revisited in the event of a second Clinton presidency..."

She notes that her book is not a scholarly work and is not meant to be fair or balanced. "It's a collection of anecdotes, reportage, jokes and first, second and third-party quotes from and about the Clintons." The anecdotes, jokes and quotes range from those "Defining the Clintons" to "With Peacekeepers like These..." which focuses on disturbing sayings from the Clinton's ideas of foreign policy. The hypocrisy of many of the musings is food for thought.

You can hear my interview with Julia in the latest edition of PJM Political--tune in here; she's about 15 minutes in, right after Bill Bradley's opening segment.

Last week, we mentioned the strange op-ed by Paul Auster that the New York Times published. The author of the Weekly Standard's Scrapbook column follows up with this:

Readers with long memories will recall the spectacle of Columbia undergraduates--children of privilege enrolled at a distinguished Ivy League institution founded when New York was still a British colony--invading classrooms and administrative offices, manhandling deans, professors, and fellow students, stealing and destroying books and documents, vandalizing chambers devoted to learning, roaming corridors in search of fodder to burn. The Columbia strike of 1968 made a temporary celebrity of a student named Mark Rudd, and publicized the episode's emblematic slogan: "Up against the wall, motherf--r!"

It also unleashed something instructive in Paul Auster:

Speech followed tempestuous speech, the enraged crowd roared with approval, and then someone suggested that we all go to the construction site and tear down the chain-link fence. .  .  . The crowd thought that was an excellent idea, and so off it went, a throng of crazy, shouting students charging off the Columbia campus toward Morningside Park. Much to my astonishment, I was with them. What had happened to the gentle boy who planned to spend the rest of his life sitting alone in a room writing books? He was helping to tear down the fence. He tugged and pulled and pushed along with several dozen -others and, truth be told, found much satisfaction in this crazy, destructive act.

One of the great parlor games of modern scholarship is pondering how the German people--citizens of the land of Bach, Kant, and Goethe--could find themselves marching in step behind Adolf Hitler. Well, Paul Auster and his Boomer companions at Columbia offer a clue. Here is as plain and startling a description of the mob mentality--together with the attendant hysteria and romanticized violence--as you are likely to find in the op-ed pages of the New York Times, nicely camouflaged in the language of nostalgia and social protest.

If, in this presidential election year, anyone wonders how the political left grew estranged from the American mainstream, yielding the politics of the past four decades, they need only read Paul Auster's tribute to the Columbia strike, written "alone in this room with a pen in my hand" as "I realize that I am still crazy, perhaps crazier than ever."

The writer of the Scrapbook adds that every now and then, he's "seized with the thought that the last, best hope of mankind--or at any rate, for our peace of mind--will be the death of the last surviving member of the Baby Boom generation."

Of course, he's far from alone in that department--and for those keeping score at home, just follow along with this easy-to-use toteboard!

Even as Obama attempts to covert the masses to what the Washington Post calls "his own vision of patriotism", Roger L. Simon notes that "According to Reuters, Obama is trying to wrest the 'Straight Talk' mantle from McCain."

With straight talking all-American mentors like Bill Ayers and Rev. Wright, and his own wife's punitive liberalism, all I can say is, good luck with that.

Update: Does Barack have a temper isssue as well?

Jeff Jarvis spots an interesting stat:

Pew said that in 2007, 53 million Americans “have used the Internet to publish their thoughts, respond to others, post pictures, share files and otherwise contribute to the explosion of content available online.”

Only 50 million Americans now buy daily newspapers.

The writers are starting to outnumber the readers.

And the readers are reading something else. Pew says that in 2006, 57 million Americans read blogs, more than read newspapers.

More signposts on the road to 2014.

The Washington Post notes:

Somalia is a cautionary example for those who, like Barack Obama, favor rapidly withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq and managing any threat from al-Qaeda with an "over the horizon" strike force. Such forces indeed have the ability to target and kill leaders. They do nothing, however, to change the conditions under which al-Qaeda finds refuge and recruits. As Gen. David H. Petraeus is demonstrating in Iraq, successful counterterrorism requires providing security for the civilian population, economic reconstruction and the brokering of political accords — in other words, nation-building. That's as true in Somalia as it is in Iraq.

For another cautionary tale for those who favor withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq, check out the above video. And speaking of Blair's Law, note the anchorman reporting on what his predecessor wrought in 1968, as it comes to pass seven years later.

Australia's Tim Blair has a theory that he calls, logically enough, Blair’s Law. He describes it “the ongoing process by which the world's multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force.” And in City Journal, John Murtagh writes that the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground were no exception in 1970:

During the April 16 debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, moderator George Stephanopoulos brought up “a gentleman named William Ayers,” who “was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol, and other buildings. He’s never apologized for that.” Stephanopoulos then asked Obama to explain his relationship with Ayers. Obama’s answer: “The notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn’t make much sense, George.” Obama was indeed only eight in early 1970. I was only nine then, the year Ayers’s Weathermen tried to murder me.

In February 1970, my father, a New York State Supreme Court justice, was presiding over the trial of the so-called “Panther 21,” members of the Black Panther Party indicted in a plot to bomb New York landmarks and department stores. Early on the morning of February 21, as my family slept, three gasoline-filled firebombs exploded at our home on the northern tip of Manhattan, two at the front door and the third tucked neatly under the gas tank of the family car. (Today, of course, we’d call that a car bomb.) A neighbor heard the first two blasts and, with the remains of a snowman I had built a few days earlier, managed to douse the flames beneath the car. That was an act whose courage I fully appreciated only as an adult, an act that doubtless saved multiple lives that night.

February 21st, 1970 was exactly five weeks after Leonard and Felicia Bernstein invited the Black Panthers up to his Park Avenue duplex for their fundraiser, along with some of his closest friends, including Otto Preminger, Barbara Walters, Frank Stanton, musician Peter Duchin, and the wives of Harry Belafonte, Arthur Penn, Sidney Lumet and Richard Avedon, as Tom Wolfe memorably described firsthand in Radical Chic.

(Via Hot Air, which has video of Murtaugh's appearance yesterday on Greta van Susteren's Fox News show.)

Update: And just to really bring things full circle...

Mark Steyn notes that with his speech this week on Reverend Wright, Senator Obama has revised and extended his remarks from his speech in Philadelphia. As Steyn notes, "great-speech-wise, it’s a bit like Churchill promising to fight them on the beaches and never surrender, and then surrendering a month and a half later, and on a beach he decided not to fight on":

The [Philadelphia] speech was designed to take a very specific problem — the fact that Barack Obama, the Great Uniter, had sat in the pews of a neo-segregationist huckster for 20 years — and generalize it into some grand meditation on race in America. Senator Obama looked America in the face and said: Who ya gonna believe? My “rhetorical magic” or your lyin’ eyes?

That’s an easy choice for the swooning bobbysoxers of the media. With less impressionable types, such as voters, Senator Obama is having a tougher time. The Philly speech is emblematic of his most pressing problem: the gap — indeed, full-sized canyon — that’s opening up between the rhetorical magic and the reality. That’s the difference between a simulacrum and a genuinely great speech. The gaseous platitudes of hope and change and unity no longer seem to fit the choices of Obama’s adult life. Oddly enough, the shrewdest appraisal of the Senator’s speechifying “magic” came from Jeremiah Wright himself. “He’s a politician,” said the Reverend. “He says what he has to say as a politician… He does what politicians do.”

The notion that the Amazing Obama might be just another politician doing what politicians do seems to have affronted the senator more than any of the stuff about America being no different from al-Qaeda and the government inventing AIDs to kill black people. In his belated “disowning” of Wright, Obama said, “What I think particularly angered me was his suggestion somehow that my previous denunciation of his remarks were somehow political posturing. Anybody who knows me and anybody who knows what I'm about knows that — that I am about trying to bridge gaps and that I see the — the commonality in all people.”

Funny how tinny and generic the sonorous uplift rings when it’s suddenly juxtaposed against something real and messy and human. As he chugged on, the senator couldn’t find his groove and couldn’t prevent himself from returning to pick at the same old bone: “If what somebody says contradicts what you believe so fundamentally, and then he questions whether or not you believe it in front of the National Press Club, then that’s enough. That’s — that’s a show of disrespect to me.”

And we can’t have that, can we? In a shrewd analysis of Obama’s peculiarly petty objections to Rev. Wright, Scott Johnson of the Powerline website remarked on the senator’s “adolescent grandiosity.” There’s always been a whiff of that. When he tells his doting fans, “We are the change we’ve been waiting for,” he means, of course, he is the change we’ve been waiting for.

“Do you personally feel that the Reverend betrayed your husband?” asked Meredith Vieira on The Today Show.

“You know what I think, Meredith?” replied Michelle Obama. “We’ve got to move forward. You know, this conversation doesn’t help my kids.”

Hang on. “My” kids? You’re supposed to say “It’s about the future of all our children,” not “It’s about the future of my children” — whose parents happen to have a base salary of half a million bucks a year. But even this bungled cliché nicely captures the campaign’s self-absorption: Talking about Obama’s pastor is a distraction from talking about Obama’s kids.

Which may be why Michael Barone asks, "Is the bottom falling out for Barack Obama? It’s too early to say that, but there are some disturbing signs."