Posted 9/19/2003 03:50:28 PM by Edward Driscoll
IS SUPERMAN PRO-SADDAM? Brent Bozell on the left's infiltration of the comic book world. (Here's a thought--somebody should update Bill Buckley's first book, and write about "God and Superman at DC". On second thought, maybe not.)

Posted 9/19/2003 03:44:52 PM by Edward Driscoll
PAUL KRUGMAN IS AN ANGRY MAN, according to Bruce Bartlett, who writes that Krugman is unhappy with supply side economics, largely because it was built on necessity, not ivory tower theories. How? Read the whole thing.

Posted 9/19/2003 03:20:28 PM by Edward Driscoll
LIFE IMITATES PETER COOK: There was a classic "Derek and Clive" sketch by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, that went something like this:

Cook: I was against it, you know. Moore: Against what? Cook: The Second World War. Moore: Well, I think everyone was against the Second World War! Cook: Yes, but I wrote a Letter!

Today, almost everyone is against Iran obtaining the technology to build nuclear weapons. But Europe wrote a letter!

Posted 9/19/2003 03:04:03 PM by Edward Driscoll
CALLING OCCUPANTS OF INTERPLANETARY CRAFT: Federation High Commissioner Gray Davis is proud of the "people from every planet" that make up the great state of California. Hey, didn't Davis make sport of someone else's verbal skills just a week or so ago...?

Posted 9/19/2003 02:47:19 PM by Edward Driscoll
THEN AND NOW: Contrary to popular opinion, I don't completely wallow in nostalgia--there's a lot about today's society that I like. But it's tough not to feel that we've lost a fair amount of civility, when comparing this essay on Manhattan in 1939 (linked to by James Lileks) with this recent article in the Wall Street Journal on today's fashions--or lack thereof. The 1980s rediscovered fashion to a certain extent. As Lileks once described it people temporarily threw off their beat 1970s Army surplus olive drab Vietnam-protesting jackets and decided to look sharp. Will it happen again? Hope springs eternal, but its arteries (at least around here) are definitely feeling sclerosed these days. Ironically, America has lost its sense of fashion, just as it's become obsessed with design aesthetic. But how do you abandon personal aesthetics, and insist on good design in inanimate objects?

Posted 9/18/2003 12:13:10 AM by Edward Driscoll
READ THE WHOLE THING: Lileks is spot-on. As usual. (Hopefully I'll have posts with more than ten words in them on Thursday. But in the meantime, do click on over and read James Lileks.)

Posted 9/17/2003 05:00:42 PM by Edward Driscoll
BACK FROM ROOT CANAL: Hopefully more posts later, as my mouth and brain become less numb.

Posted 9/17/2003 12:50:15 PM by Edward Driscoll
POLITICAL VIRILITY: Jay Nordlinger on "the Daddy Party".

Posted 9/17/2003 11:40:33 AM by Edward Driscoll
CRUISING PAST CRUZ'S RACIAL CONTROVERSIES: Tim Graham has more on MEChA, Bustamante, and the scandal that the "vast right wing" media (just ask the two Als, Gore and Franken!) refuses to investigate.

Posted 9/17/2003 03:01:49 AM by Edward Driscoll
"THE WHITE ZONE IS FOR LOADING": Man oh Manischewitz--all of a sudden, San Jose Airport looks pretty darn good!

Posted 9/17/2003 12:12:58 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE PAGE: John Hawkins asked 125 right-of-center bloggers who their favorite editorial columnists are. 37 responded. Here's the list.

Posted 9/16/2003 02:42:15 PM by Edward Driscoll
KISS OF DEATH: Retired General Wesley Clark has entered the presidential race. He's already gotten his first endorsement. He's toast. UPDATE: Here's David Frum's take on Clark.

Posted 9/16/2003 12:12:24 PM by Edward Driscoll
FREE TO CHOOSE: John Hawkins has an exclusive interview with the great Milton Friedman.

Posted 9/16/2003 11:08:52 AM by Edward Driscoll
"POLITICAL FEVERS ARE A DANGEROUS THING": Charles Krauthammer has some thoughts on what makes the Bush haters so mad.

Posted 9/16/2003 10:57:48 AM by Edward Driscoll
MEDIA ROUNDUP: Charles Johnson has another example of anti-Israeli bias at AP. And, Glenn Reynolds has a photograph which is the virtual definition of "manufacturing dissent". Meanwhile, CNN's Christiane Amanpour claims that in the run-up to the war in Iraq, "the press was muzzled, and I think the press self-muzzled," she said. "I'm sorry to say that, but certainly television and, perhaps, to a certain extent, my station, was intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News." Of course, what Amanpour doesn't say (and apparently was never asked), is that Eason Jordan, CNN's chief news executive admitted that he was willing to be literally intimated by Saddam Hussein and his foot soldiers, and presented radically slanted, pro-Baathist coverage, in order to say to put those magic words, "live from Baghdad" on the screen. A spokeswoman from Fox News puts has the last word: "It's better to be viewed as a foot soldier for Bush than spokeswoman for al-Qaeda." Or Saddam Hussein. UPDATE: To coin a phrase--heh. ANOTHER UPDATE: Upon returning from a visit to Iraq, Federal Judge Don Walter writes:

We must have the moral courage to see this through, to do whatever it takes to secure responsible government for the Iraqi people. Having decided to topple Saddam, we cannot abandon those who trust us. I fear we will quit as the horrors of war come into our living rooms. Look at the stories you are getting from the media today. The steady drip, drip, drip of bad news may destroy our will to fulfill the obligations we have assumed. WE ARE NOT GETTING THE WHOLE TRUTH FROM THE NEWS MEDIA. The news you watch, listen to and read is highly selective. Good news doesn't sell.

Exactly. ONE MORE MEDIA UPDATE: Brent Bozell wants to know why the media aren't asking Bill and Hillary about why they didn't do more to prevent 9/11. QUICK QUESTION: How does anyone with a conscious say that she's been "muzzled" by a rival TV network, when the network she works for admitted that they aided a despot who thought nothing of literally cutting the tongues off of those who opposed his regime?

Posted 9/15/2003 09:29:23 PM by Edward Driscoll
POSTREL ON TELLER: Last week we had a brief post on the death of Edward Teller. Virginia Postrel has a detailed memoriam, with several links.

Posted 9/15/2003 09:14:24 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE DOWD AWARD: Andrew Sullivan has a new award category, and a very appropriate first nominee to break it in. UPDATE (9/16/03): Sullivan writes that "The Post comes through" with a correction to his Dowd Award nominee. "Good for the Post. The New York Times is, apparently, too wedded to Maureen Dowd's ego to do the same thing".

Posted 9/15/2003 03:52:03 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE IRAQI/AL QAIDA WTC BOMBING CONNECTION: John Hawkins (and Dick Cheney) have details.

Posted 9/15/2003 03:32:28 PM by Edward Driscoll
WOODWARD & BERNSTEIN, THE NEXT GENERATION: Jacob Sullum has a brief post on Reason's "Hit & Run" Blog about "the aptly named Michael Puffer, an intrepid investigative reporter for the Danvers, Massachusetts, Herald". Puffer practices hard-hitting investigative journalism at its very, very finest. As Sullum writes, "It makes you proud to be a journalist". Indeed.

Posted 9/15/2003 11:11:01 AM by Edward Driscoll
CALIFORNIA RECALL RECALLED: InstaPundit and National Review Online's "The Corner" has links and opinion. For the Corner, start here and read up. UPDATE: Glenn predicts, "Unless there's some awfully compelling legal principle that's not making it into the press accounts, I predict a reversal on this one. It's just too explosive." If the US Supreme Court overturns the 9th Circuit, and if Arnold or McClintock wins, it's an extremely safe bet that we'll have the tinfoil hat wearing folks on the left making the same arguments they made after the US Supreme Court overturned the rogue Florida Supremes, something along the lines of, "Bush (or "The Republicans" or "the conservative Supreme Court", or whatever their epithet for the right is) rigged the recall! It's a conspiracy!" And I'll bet the judges on the 9th Circuit know full that's what will happen. For them, it's win-win: If Davis stays in power a few more months, or the election is held in October and Bustamante wins, great. Election held in October and Schwarzenegger wins? It's the eeeeeeevil Republican Supreme Court's fault! UPDATE: Here's a solution that's so obvious, and so simple, it doesn't have a prayer of being implemented.

Posted 9/15/2003 02:29:41 AM by Edward Driscoll
ANYONE...ANYWHERE: Mark Steyn has some thoughts on the death of Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh:

"It's terrible wherever it happens," said Fredrik Sanabria. "But you think you would be safe from this kind of violence in a country like Sweden." Really? Why would you think that? Sweden's violent crime and murder rates have been going up, up, up over the last quarter-century. But just about every Swede quoted in every news story seems mired in what National Review's Dave Kopel described, after September 11, 2001, as "the culture of passivity." The lone exception was Lanja Rashid, a Kurdish immigrant. "If I had been there at the stabbing, I would have ripped his face off," she said. "We Swedes have to think again. How could he have got away? How could people just stand back and watch?" You can blame it on a lack of police, as everyone's doing. But Mrs. Lindh's killer didn't get away with it because of the people who weren't there but because of the people who were: The bystanders. When I bought my home in New Hampshire, I heard a strange rustling one night and, being new to rural life, asked my police chief the following morning whether, if it had turned out to be an intruder, I should have called him at home. "Well, you could," said Al. "But it would be better if you dealt with him. You're there and I'm not." That's the best advice I've ever been given. This isn't an argument for guns, though inevitably Sweden has gun control, knife control and everything else. It's more basic than that: It's about the will to be a citizen, not just a suckling of the nanny-state narcotic.

All of which helps to explain why Sweden's economy and crime rate is worse than those progressive utopians in...Mississippi.

Posted 9/14/2003 02:41:53 PM by Edward Driscoll
EBERT ON RIEFENSTAHL: Roger Ebert has a perceptive retrospective of Leni Riefenstahl, drawing upon his 1992 review of the documentary, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl. Ebert appropriately excoriates Riefenstahl for being a Nazi sympathizer. But how many Soviet filmmakers are still praised to this day by film scholars, even though their works, while fictional, were propaganda to the Soviet Union? Is it simply because Sergei Eisenstein (to name one example) created fiction, whereas Riefenstahl was a documentarian? It's been frequently noted that a huge mistake on our part was not holding Nuremberg-like trials for the apparatchiks and party members of the Soviet Union after the Cold War ended. This is yet another example of how a lack of recorded judgment continues to create an unnecessary double standard when it comes to two equally evil empires of the 20th century.

Posted 9/14/2003 12:56:58 PM by Edward Driscoll
$430,000: That's how much George Harrison's rosewood Telecaster, custom made by Fender as a gift for using Fender equipment (and boosting Fender's sales in the process of course), fetched in auction on Saturday. This was the guitar that Harrison played in the Beatles' last concert, on the rooftop of Apple's offices on Savile Row in London, in what would be the climax of their last movie, Let It Be, so it's no surprise it fetched a considerable chunk of change. UPDATE: In other Beatles-related news, Yoko Ono has gone on record for being a fan of Rachel Corrie, the American flag burning, Palestinian sympathizer killed by an Israeli bulldozer. Charles Johnson writes:

I don't think the man who wrote "if you go carryin' pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow" would have approved of his wife slobbering over the hate-filled terrorist supporter who did this: [Johnson follows with the infamous photo of Corrie feverishly burning an American flag.]

For better or worse, obviously, we'll never know. But the sad thing is, I'll bet Lennon would have approved of just that. UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: This quote by Yoko in Johnson's post speaks volumes of her priorities:

The events that have occured since 9-11 have made me terribly vulnerable, as if the slightest breeze could make me cry. (Emphasis mine.)

Since? Since? What about 9/11 itself? How did that make you feel?

Posted 9/14/2003 12:38:50 PM by Edward Driscoll
IRONY CAN BE PRETTY IRONIC SOMETIMES DEPARTMENT: KTVU, channel 2 in the Bay Area, just advertised their California gubernatorial recall coverage during the 49ers/Rams game. They're calling it "Race to the Recall". No word yet on what Cruz Bustamante thinks of that name.