Posted 3/9/2002 11:38:10 PM by Edward Driscoll
HOWARD KURTZ SAYS TROUBLED TIMES FOR NETWORK NEWS:

The audience is shrinking -- and graying -- because of changing lifestyles and more media choices. Older folks who came of age in the pre-cable era are accustomed to tuning in for news at 6:30. Most younger people never acquired that habit, are still working at that hour or are just plain less interested in news, surveys show. A growing number get their information online, essentially becoming their own editors.

You got it, Howard. We're sick of being talked down to, biased reporting, and/or simplification. In an era of a dozen different cable news, sports and financial channels, of hundreds of news and opinion Web sites, and Weblogs customized to a unlimited myriad of personal tastes, the big three networks' evening news (and PBS's as well) are done. As Ken Bode, a former NBC correspondent who teaches at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism says in Kurtz's article, "When Brokaw, Jennings and Rather retire, it is a perfect time for these corporations to decide their newscasts are no longer worth it." He adds, "Unless something dramatic happens, inevitably, the network newscasts are gone." Wonder what Bernard Goldberg and Glenn Reynolds think of Kurtz's article.

Posted 3/9/2002 10:12:36 PM by Edward Driscoll
SGT. STRYKER TAKES ON FRENCH CONSPIRACY THEORISTS:

I always get a kick out of dumbasses who make up conspiracies about stuff they know nothing about. Case in point: Someone whose only knowledge of aircraft is obviously limited to sitting in one as a passenger, displays his ignorance and complete lack of sense for all to see.

A friend of mine sent me the same link that the sarge refers to above. It's just an astonishing bit of paranoid horsesh*t. Read the comments on the sarge's site for further proof as to just how unbelievable this conspiracy stuff is.

Posted 3/9/2002 11:08:12 AM by Edward Driscoll
BRENT BOZELL ON NIGHTLINE:

But the proposition that “Nightline” is less relevant is unquestionably true. When the show began in 1979, viewers in Idaho or Louisiana or Alaska relied on the Big Three broadcast networks for their world news. But today, in virtually every remote corner of the United States, Americans can get on the Internet and read the New York Times, or newspapers from around the world. They can read entire Congressional reports, or watch Pentagon press briefings. They can find out the latest headlines at any minute of the day or night on cable news.

Here's my theory, for what it's worth. Sell the "Nightline" package, including Kopel, to CNN or Fox News. Every political and news junky gets those channels, thus keeping "Nightline" on the air, but freeing up the airtime on ABC for David Letterman. Or just cancel the show. The world will survive. Besides, who has time for "Nightline" when there are blogs to read?

Posted 3/9/2002 01:37:09 AM by Edward Driscoll
WHAT WAS NEW YORK LIKE ON SEPT 10th? READ TOM WOLFE'S ARTICLE in the (UK) Guardian, which provides the same snapshot in microcosm of Manhattan that his first chapter in Hooking Up, "What Life Was Like at the Turn of the Second Millennium", does for America as a whole.

Posted 3/9/2002 01:11:45 AM by Edward Driscoll
ON A FRIDAY WHEN BOTH RICKY WILLIAMS AND TERRY GLENN GET TRADED, PRICELINE MAY SOON JOIN THEM... Reuters says that Priceline is looking for a suitor. Prior to September 11th, Priceline was getting its act together, as I wrote in my first article for National Review Online's Financial section back in August of 2001, which is astonishingly still online:

Similarly high stock prices can’t be reported for Priceline.com (PCLN), which ended Friday at $5.79 a share, but they may be headed towards recovery. After a tumultuous year of William Shatner’s ads, and trying to use its platform to allow consumers to “name your own price” for cheap gas and cheap groceries, the company has come to its senses and focused on its core business: cheap airfares. Additionally, [Scott Kessler, Internet industry analyst with Standard & Poor’s] says, “unlike companies like eBay and Amazon, which prioritized their customers as the most important constituency, you get the impression that Priceline definitely did not do that.” Fortunately, Priceline also decided to refocus on customer service as a way to turn the company around. While this hasn’t yet made a large change in their stock price, several analysts believe that Priceline has made some very positive steps in the right direction. As corporate travel is down and airlines are relying on individuals to make up the slack, the current economic conditions may also be a benefit. Kessler has issued Priceline a “hold” recommendation.

September 11th and its obviously disastrous impact on air travel certainly helped to keep Priceline's stock in the dumper, which makes it a desirable takeover or merger target. ...But what will happen to Shatner?

Posted 3/8/2002 11:37:41 PM by Edward Driscoll
WANT TO KNOW WHICH DOT.COMS ARE ABOUT TO KICK THE BUCKET? Take a look at F*ckedCompany.com. Geez, I didn't know that Morpheus bit the dust, but the article that F-edCompany.com refers to says they have, but for very different reasons than Napster.

Posted 3/8/2002 09:08:58 PM by Edward Driscoll
I AM ROWLF, PIANO PLAYER TO THE STARS...

	You are Rowlf! You don't draw attention to yourself much, preferring to keep your cool and stay in the background.
Take the What Muppet Are You? Quiz!

Which Muppet are you? Take the quiz yourself!

Posted 3/8/2002 04:04:08 PM by Edward Driscoll
CALIF. VOTERS NIX NEW POLICE, FIRE BUILDING THAT VIOLATES TOWN'S FENG SHUI says this FoxNews.com article. I don't have anything to add to this, except it's such a hilarious (and typical) California craziness sort of story. By the way, has anyone seen my mantra?

Posted 3/8/2002 12:58:50 PM by Edward Driscoll
KMART TO CLOSE 284 STORES, AX 22,000 JOBS according to this Reuters article.

Discount chain Kmart Corp. (KM.N) said on Friday it will close 13 percent of its stores and cut nearly 9 percent of its work force as part of its reorganization under bankruptcy protection, resulting in a charge of $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion.

In late January, Instapundit.com had all sorts of good links and comments about Kmart. Check out this archive and start scrolling down to read just how groups of customers Kmart has managed to p.o. And then click over to Siloh Butcher's Web log (which Instapundit also mentions) for her brilliant rebuttle (including a great Tom Wolfe reference) to a Wal-Mart bashing San Francisco Chronical columnist. My favorite quote however, is this one, from from Eve Kayden's Blog:

"Amazon makes money as Kmart files for bankruptcy. Did I fall asleep and wake up in an alternate universe?"

Posted 3/8/2002 12:38:19 PM by Edward Driscoll
JONAH ON STIMULUS PACKAGE, on National Review Online's "The Corner"

GREAT NEWS! [Jonah Goldberg] The House just passed the stimulus package – immediately after Greenspan says the recovery is "well underway"! Maybe we can declare war on al-Quaeda the day after we execute Bin Laden?

See this article for more information about what was actually passed, including "'a "Liberty Zone' in the lower Manhattan section of New York in which $5 billion in various tax breaks would be available over 10 years to help the city recover from September's attacks."

Posted 3/7/2002 11:38:10 PM by Edward Driscoll
LARRY KUDLOW SAYS "BYE-BYE BABY RECESSION". More from NRO Financial, where Kudlow says:

Rumor has it that when the judges at the National Bureau of Economic Research decided last fall that the U.S.'s tenth recession in the past fifty years started in March 2001, they used Arthur Andersen to audit the books. Just kidding, of course, although some Bush administration officials are now questioning whether the recession happened at all.

Hope he's right. Certainly the recent upticks in the Dow point to a recovery gathering steam in the next few months.

Posted 3/7/2002 11:31:06 PM by Edward Driscoll
RUSSIA NOW HAS A FLAT TAX AND THEIR ECONOMY IS TAKING OFF. Read Deroy Murdock's take on Russia & flat tax in National Review Online's Financial section. Murdock writes:

Since January 1, 2001, Russians have enjoyed a 13 percent flat tax. That's right. The once-Communist superpower now stands to the right of publisher Steve Forbes on taxes. The former GOP presidential contender staunchly advocates a 17 percent flat tax. "Sometimes philosophical seeds fall on interesting ground," Forbes says. "After Marxism, which was the philosophical equivalent of the IRS code, something understandable has obvious appeal."

Unlike their 20th century abortion known as communism, this is a Russian economic system that makes perfect sense. If their economy continues to grow at its current five percent, and their tax revenues grow, just as the Laffer curve says they should, expect other nations to follow. Now if only the US would get the message...

Posted 3/7/2002 09:36:29 PM by Edward Driscoll
1970s SCI-FI PARANOIA MAKES A FLASHBACK ON TURNER CLASSIC MOVIES. Bob Cook of Flak Magazine has a humorous look at TCM's recent triple play of 1970s paranoia movies: Rollerball, Soylent Green, and Silent Running. Having just recently dusted off my laser disc, letterboxed copy of THX-1138, I'd say Cook's commentary is dead-on. What a gloomy period the early '70s was for Hollywood, especially its science fiction films. Cook says "These movies were made when the hippie dream was just about dead, large conglomerates like ITT were all the business rage, and the environment was a wreck," but he leaves out the real reason why these films were made: after Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey every science fiction film that Hollywood cranked out had the same tone: heavy, ponderous, lugubrious, and dull. 2001 wasn't dull, but then there was only one Stanley Kubrick. So until Star Wars came along, with its swashbuckling, Republic Serial tone, we were stuck watching films like those in the Flak article, and their equally paranoid cousins: Colossus: The Forbin Project, Logan's Run and the Planet of the Apes films. Looking back at George Lucas's THX-1138, with its impressive Kubrickian/Orwellian production design (made for about $1.98), it's amazing how differently the world turned out since then: we don't all look like, dress alike, work in the same jobs, and worship the same God. I'll take a Tofflerian world over an Orwellian one any day. Fortunately, as one of the few directors two make a second science fiction film in the 1970s, Lucas was able to make a much more enjoyable sci-fi universe. The Flak article ends on a note as scary as any of those films:

Even amid talk of remaking Westworld, The Omega Man, Logan's Run and the like, it's doubtful; as the Planet of the Apes and Rollerball remakes proved, today's pessimism doesn't come close to the misanthropy, dashed dreams and nuclear fears of the '70s. Or maybe it was the cocaine.

Posted 3/7/2002 09:18:42 PM by Edward Driscoll
JUST ADDED PAT TOOMAY'S excellent essay on Tom Landry to the links page. Toomay was drafted by the Cowboys in the early 1970s, and played with them on two Super Bowl teams. It's one of the most even-handed tributes to Landry, which respects the man, but also mentions his flaws. And Landry did have flaws, no matter how innovative a coach he was. Read Toomay's profile about what it was like to work for (as he was often called by his players), The Man.

Posted 3/7/2002 04:09:12 PM by Edward Driscoll
JOHN FUND ON CALIFORNIA'S FAILED PROP 45, THE TERM-LIMIT END-AROUND:

Knowing that term limits remain overwhelmingly popular, California's pols decided they didn't dare ask voters to repeal the state's limits of six years in the Assembly or eight years in the Senate. So they polled and focus-grouped until they came up with Proposition 45, a clever end-run around the law that they thought would trick voters. Under the guise of protecting term limits, the initiative would have allowed any incumbent to stay in office four extra years by getting the signatures of one-fifth the number of people who voted in the last election. Incumbents would still have to appear on the ballot and be re-elected to their extra terms, but in hypergerrymandered California well over 95% of incumbents routinely win re-election.

Fund ends his article with:

In the end one of the best arguments for term limits is how much effort some of those incumbents affected by them struggle to escape them. This week in California voters sent a message that state legislators should consider expending less energy cooking up career-survival schemes and more time solving the state's problems: budget shortfalls, electricity and traffic congestion. Let's hope they pay attention.

They probably won't, but perhaps stronger messages can be sent in November.

Posted 3/7/2002 03:54:44 PM by Edward Driscoll
MORE FROM ANDREWSULLIVAN.COM:

FINALLY, THE FRENCH DO SOMETHING USEFUL: “The ground war in Afghanistan hotted up yesterday when the Allies revealed plans to airdrop a platoon of crack French existentialist philosophers into the country to destroy the morale of Taleban zealots by proving the non-existence of God. Elements from the feared Jean-Paul Sartre Brigade, or 'Black Berets', will be parachuted into the combat zones to spread doubt, despondency and existential anomie among the enemy.” I don’t know who this guy is, but he sure made me laugh.

Posted 3/7/2002 03:50:19 PM by Edward Driscoll
BUSH GOES SOFT ON STEEL. Andrew Sullivan writes:

George Will rightly eviscerates Bush’s cave-in to protectionism and industrial policy. Why Karl Rove is running economic policy is beyond me. Are they that scared of the upcoming elections? This is easily the dumbest, worst, and most cynical decision yet of this administration, and I hope principled conservatives give them hell for it.

I said to a friend earlier today that Bush's steel protectionism reminds me of (yet another reason) why I wouldn't want Pat Buchanan in the White House. The whole thing sounds like a bad flashback to the Keynesian economics liberal Republican days of Richard Nixon, and tarriffs, wage and price freezes, etc. And it's strange to see somebody run on the free market policies of Reagan (which, for the most part, Clinton carried over) and then do something like this.

Posted 3/7/2002 02:20:46 PM by Edward Driscoll
ADDED A PARTIAL LIST OF "DEAD TREE" ARTICLES TO THE ARTICLES PAGE. (Which seemed to be a good place to them.) This was from a Word document I wrote around November of last year, so it needs updating for 2002 and late 2001, but it does give some idea of the stuff I've written in the last few years. Wish I could find those Atari 2600 videogame reviews I wrote for The Space Gamer around 83 or so when I was about 17, and the one or two little tidbits I wrote for Thrasher back then as well...

Posted 3/7/2002 11:05:56 AM by Edward Driscoll
ARMY CAPT. ZAPS AL QAEDA GUIDES U.S. FIREPOWER AT JEERING ENEMY says the New York Daily News. This Captain has very, very big brass balls. And his enemy is very, very stupid... (And obviously has never seen Monty Python's "how not to be seen" sketch.)

Posted 3/7/2002 11:03:22 AM by Edward Driscoll
ESCARGOT PASSION--It must be official. I've seen everything that there is to see on the Web.

Posted 3/6/2002 03:18:43 PM by Edward Driscoll
LET A HUNDRED BLOGS BLOOM ON CAMPUSES NATIONWIDE, says Stanley Kurtz on National Review's "The Corner" Blog.

Any college students out there in blogland? Here’s an idea. Two important scandals at Berkeley have just drawn national attention, at least in the conservative press--the male-sexuality course featuring live (possibly gay) sex and a party game with genital photographs, and the theft of a campus conservative paper (probably because of a story exposing reverse racism by a college Hispanic organization). I’ve written on both scandals here on The Corner, and thereby played some small roll in spreading the story, but it’s really Kevin Deenihan’s CalStuff blog that enabled the rest of us to spread the story. What if we had at least one good conservative blog at every college that now has a campus conservative newspaper? Right now, there are a tremendous number of PC outrages on campuses across the country that no one ever finds out about. It’s increasingly clear that one of the best things about the Internet is the end-run it allows us to make around the iron control of the liberal media.

Kurtz says that with conservative blogs on campuses across the country able to link to national blogs and to campus newspapers alike, "we could break through the barrier of politically correct campus censorship and rapidly expose any number of scandals. The general public would quickly start to act as a counterweight to the campus Left. Look at Berkeley. As a result of all the blogging, the campus conservative paper has collected thousands of dollars in contributions, reprinted its stolen press run, and spread knowledge of reverse racism on campus nationally." Sounds good to me--I think we'll see more and more college bloggers, even if they have to go "undercover" and use a nom de blog to run any gauntlets of interference, such as St. Stryker, who uses his psuedonym to keep his identity secret from his Air Force superiors.

Posted 3/6/2002 09:20:58 AM by Edward Driscoll
UPDATED THE LINKS PAGE TO INCLUDE "THE INTERNET'S GREATEST HITS". From time to time, certain article appear on the Web that stick with the brain. As Hunter S. Thompson might say, they have that certain extra "something"... These are a few of those articles (including Jonah Goldberg's classic "You, Me and the Sty", James Lileks at the Olive Garden, Rand Simberg on "Media Casualties", and more).

Posted 3/6/2002 06:57:22 AM by Edward Driscoll
UPDATE ON SIMON OVER RIORDAN. Arnold Steinberg, a California political consultant has his take on how Simon did it here. Patrick Ruffini's update to his Web log (previously linked below) also discusses Simon's win. Of course, it don't mean a thing until the voting booths ring in November. But if anybody's vulnerable, it's ol' Grayout.

Posted 3/6/2002 12:19:32 AM by Edward Driscoll
I JUST UPLOADED MY ARTICLE ON AMERICA'S OTHER ROCKET PROGRAM. This was written for Nuts & Volts, and there's a very thin chance that it may still run there. But it looks like the person who wrote the "how-to" piece that was to go along with it, never completed their article. So here's my take on a typical Saturday with the Reaction Research Society, who take their rocketry very seriously.

Posted 3/6/2002 12:07:54 AM by Edward Driscoll
HEADLINE ON THE DRUDGE REPORT: BYE BYE, GARY. Matt's Web page links to an AP report on Yahoo!, that says "News - Condit Loses Primary to Former Aide" Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. Seeee ya! And interestingly enough, Bill Simon beat Richard Riordan in the Republican primary to run against Grayout Davis in November. At least the voters will have some serious differences to chose from.

Posted 3/5/2002 07:53:09 PM by Edward Driscoll
GREAT RIFF BY DAVID BRENNER ON AIRPORT SECURITY posted by Jeff Jarvis on his WarLog site. Jarvis says " Comedian David Brenner just ranted on Fox News about airport security. They're just idiots, he says. The plan to pay them more will do nothing: 'Give an idiot $2 more and you have an idiot with $2.' He quoted the head of security at one airport as saying: 'All computers must be tooken out of their bags. Tooken!... Let 'em go back to asking, 'Do you want a lid on that, do you want fries?' " Jarvis saves the best for last: now when Brenner gets pulled out of line, he pulls out a picture of the Most Wanted terrorists and says, "This is what you are looking for, not a Jew comic." Not a bad idea actually. Now if only Norman Mineta would get the message. (Yet another interesting tidbit unearthed by the ubiquitous Instapundit.)

Posted 3/5/2002 05:08:55 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE DIGITAL BITS REVIEWS ALMOST FAMOUS in both its original DVD edition and in its new "Untitled: The Bootleg Cut" form. Almost Famous, while it didn't become the blockbuster it was predicted to be, was loved by just about everybody who saw it. As somebody who grew up in the seventies and followed the real versions of the fictitious bands shown in the film, I would have loved to have been that kid, writing for Rolling Stone in his early teens. What was quite amusing about Cameron Crowe's script, were the lines of dialogue aimed at 2000 audiences: "If you think that Mick Jagger will still be doing the whole rock star thing at age fifty, well, then, you are sorely, sorely mistaken.". Or, when the kid is in New York with an article due, the actor playing Ben Fong-Torres, one of the original Rolling Stone editor tells him to transmit to their San Francisco office via 'the Mo-Jo'. "It's a very high-tech machine that transmits pages over the telephone! It only takes eighteen minutes a page!" I love it. I wonder how many young reporters-in-training are reporting on groups via blogs? And are blogs the 2002 Mo-Jo?

Posted 3/5/2002 01:01:44 PM by Edward Driscoll
DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN HAS BEEN BOOTED from the PBS NewsHour and Don Imus, according to the esteemed InstaPundit.Com Reynolds said he didn't hear about Imus until he read a letter in MediaNews, which "also answers (partly) my question of why Doris Kearns Goodwin has created more outrage than Michael Bellesiles among the media crowd: "Goodwin's long chain of reputedly accidental borrowings, but they show her tendency to pickpocket her peers." Bellesiles, you see, was just pulling the wool over the eyes of Americans. He wasn't doing anything to his peers." It's been interesting to watch a number of heretofore respected folks tarnish their reputations recently--Goodwin, Stephen Ambrose, Michael Bellesiles, and perhaps most signifigantly, Jesse Jackson. Of course, some things never change. Dave Kopel on National Review's The Corner blog, says, "You might think that things are looking kind of grim for Michael Bellesiles, author of the hoax book Arming America. Even National Public Radio has caught onto him. .Despite the record of Bellesiles's mendacity--well-covered by Melissa Seckora on NRO, he has just been awarded a new $30,000 grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities, to write another book about guns. The NEH gave money to the Newberry Library in Chicago, which gave the money to Bellesiles, and which refuses to disclose how such a notable faker was awarded your money. Should the Newberry Library be renamed the Office of Strategic Deception?"

Posted 3/4/2002 07:29:56 PM by Edward Driscoll
EARTHLINK LAUNCHES CABLE HOME NETWORKING SERVICE, according to this Reuters article. It sounds a little back-to-the-future to me, since it implies that that the networking will be off the existing home cable TV lines, ala the old days of 10-base-T networking on RG-6 cables. Of course, at 10 megabits a second, that will be plenty fast for most cable modems. And infinitely faster than "sneakernet", of course. Of course, support of multiple computers on a home network makes sense for cable modem providers. I spent a hellish 48 hours or so trying to figure out how to get the multiple PCs in our home to talk to our cable modem after @Home hooked it up in early 1999. Fortunately, Sygate eventually did the trick, and still does, to this day.

Posted 3/4/2002 06:48:05 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE MARCH ISSUE OF NUTS & VOLTS HAS MY NEW COLUMN. I started an every-other-month column for Nuts & Volts magazine called "Micro Memories". The first one is on Xerox PARC, and its revolutionary Alto and Star PCs. Just about every feature in your PC, from its basic architecture, to WSYWIG word processing, came (often directly) from PARC. Sorry it's not online, but please run out and buy many copies of it today!