Posted
1/3/2004 08:09:00 PM
by Edward Driscoll
REFLEXIVE DENIAL: An Egyptian charter jet crashed, killing everyone on board. Naturally, French and Egyptian officials simultaneously announced that the crash was't the result of any terrorist act.
Steven Den Beste writes, "We've seen this kind of reflexive denial before, and it's based more on trying to keep people calm than on any actual knowledge".
Posted
1/3/2004 05:55:49 PM
by Edward Driscoll
IED--Intrauterine Explosive Device: If this is for real (and if it isn't this time around, it probably will be eventually), Norman Mineta's worst nightmare has just arrived.
Posted
1/3/2004 05:25:16 PM
by Edward Driscoll
OOPS, NEVER MIND: "Why don't we move that 9-11 preparedness issue to the backburner, eh, Governor?" asks Orrin Judd after Dean was warned repeatedly about the lax security at his state's nuclear power plant.
Posted
1/3/2004 05:07:00 PM
by Edward Driscoll
FOOTBALL, GUITARS AND PANCAKE MAKEUP--they finally got it right!
Not. Geez, ABC dusts off hoary old Kiss to duet with Hank Williams Jr. on the Monday Night Football opening of today's second wildcard game.
Motley Crue and Twisted Sister--stay close to the phone and keep that Cover Girl foundation handy. You could get the call next!
Posted
1/3/2004 03:16:08 PM
by Edward Driscoll
HISTORY AIN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE: Virginia Postrel looks at history's myths versus reality. Postrel punctures all sorts of conventional wisdom here.
Posted
1/3/2004 02:33:29 PM
by Edward Driscoll
STEVEN DEN BESTE IS HAVING FUN at the expense of ABC News, where "Fawaz A. Gerges analyzes the consequences of Saddam's capture, and concludes that we're doomed".
Needless to say, Den Beste disagrees.
Just a little...
Posted
1/3/2004 01:43:30 PM
by Edward Driscoll
WELCOME TO THE XFL: My wife watched Ray Lewis' fowl-mouthed intro and weird posing during the opening of ABC's wildcard playoff coverage and remarked--quite accurately--"they're making it just like the XFL". Yup--Lewis (the NFL's defensive MVP this year) does seem like he's ready for a career in pro wrestling, doesn't he?
And I feel all warm and fuzzy that you can now apparently say "p***ed off" on national TV and not have it beeped. Because it's important to teach good sportsmanship and advanced vocabularies to impressionable kids. Of course, be thankful for small favors: at least ABC beeped Baltimore Ravens head coach Brian Billick when he told his team, "F*** the [Tennessee] Titans".
THE NFL spent decades refining its image, and eventually replaced the pastoral sport of baseball as America's number one sport in the process. Why are they tarnishing it now?
UPDATE (4:37 PM PST): All that hype, and the Ravens lose 20 to 17.
Posted
1/3/2004 12:50:12 PM
by Edward Driscoll
THE POMO ENGLISH PAPER TITLE GENERATOR: Works with album and TV show titles, too!
Just plug in an author and title and get such academia-friendly report titles as:
Posted
1/3/2004 12:32:45 PM
by Edward Driscoll
THE ON-SCREEN "CRAWL": Are TV news networks using it as a subtle form of bias?
Posted
1/3/2004 12:29:33 PM
by Edward Driscoll
REP. RALPH HALL (D-TX R-TX) SWITCHES PARTIES: "In other words, the Dean surge has already given George W. Bush coattails, nearly a year before the election".
Posted
12/31/2003 05:02:25 PM
by Edward Driscoll
Posted
12/31/2003 04:25:51 PM
by Edward Driscoll
LIFE IMITATES THE FIRST VELVET UNDERGROUND ALBUM COVER: Roger Kimball looks at Europe's fruit police.
Posted
12/31/2003 03:52:33 PM
by Edward Driscoll
2003 WAS AN ASTONISHING YEAR FOR FREEDOM: Saddam Hussein was toppled, Khaddafi is allowing nuclear inspections, and Al-Qaida is on the run. The stock market, a forward-looking economic indicator, and a pretty reasonable benchmark for the privately owned wealth of the nation's citizens, had its first positive year since 1999. And most Americans have had their eyes opened to the dangers of terrorism and its appeasement. So what does AP have to say about all this?
Posted
12/31/2003 03:18:50 PM
by Edward Driscoll
THOMAS SOWELL LOOKS AT TWO RECENT EARTHQUAKES and their results under two different social systems.
Posted
12/31/2003 03:09:37 PM
by Edward Driscoll
MORE BUSH BENEFITING STAGECRAFT by the evil Karl Rove.
Posted
12/31/2003 03:05:24 PM
by Edward Driscoll
WHAT HE SAID! Glenn Reynolds doesn't mince words when it comes to the Palestinians' war against Israel.
Or as Charles Johnson frequently quips, "Lovely people. Let’s give them a state, right away!"
Why do I get the feeling that a big chunk of the Blogosphere won't be attending Peter Jennings' new year's eve party--or Willie Nelson's?
Posted
12/31/2003 02:39:44 PM
by Edward Driscoll
JOHN GREGORY DUNNE, novelist, screenwriter and husband of fellow author Joan Didion, died Tuesday of a heart attack at age 71. Newsday reports:
The grandson of an Irish immigrant, he often focused on the Irish-American experience--particularly in his million-selling novel "True Confessions." The 1977 breakthrough book involved a Los Angeles murder and its effect on two Irish-Catholic brothers, one a police detective and the other a priest. Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall starred in the movie, which Dunne adapted with Didion. "'True Confessions' was a major novel, one of the best books ever written about politics," said Pulitzer Prize winner David Halberstam, a friend and fellow writer. "He was a very important writer, and a wonderful friend--talented, edgy, combative." Dunne's book "The Studio" provided an unflinching look behind the machinations at Twentieth Century Fox, a major motion picture studio. It was hailed for its insider's take on Hollywood. Dunne eventually became part of the movie industry, working with Didion on several screenplays. Their first, "Panic in Needle Park," starred Al Pacino and captured an award at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival.Dunne and Didion were also championed by Tom Wolfe in his classic New Journalism anthology of the mid-1970s.
Posted
12/31/2003 01:35:52 AM
by Edward Driscoll
BRASS COJONES: FrontPage magazine.com names Col. Allen B. West their Man of the Year.
Posted
12/31/2003 12:19:00 AM
by Edward Driscoll
KENNETH SILBER of Tech Central Station has seven "Things to Look For in 2004".
Posted
12/30/2003 10:45:18 PM
by Edward Driscoll
MORNING IN AMERICA UPDATE: AP reports that "Late sales give retailers best holiday in four years".
UPDATE: Larry Kudlow has some thoughts on the coming election year's economy.
Posted
12/30/2003 10:40:23 PM
by Edward Driscoll
DID THE AIR FORCE INTERCEPT an Air France flight headed towards LAX earlier tonight?
Posted
12/30/2003 10:36:43 PM
by Edward Driscoll
SE7EN: Bill Callahan's been fired as head coach of the Oakland Raiders.
Posted
12/30/2003 03:51:29 PM
by Edward Driscoll
SO THIS IS WHERE CRUZ BUSTAMANTE sends his kids to high school.
Hey, whatever happened to "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"?
(Link via InstaPundit.Com.)
UPDATE: Kimberly Swygert has some thoughts.
Posted
12/30/2003 03:31:11 PM
by Edward Driscoll
SARAH SMILE: "Every day I wake up and find more things about America that I love," says a woman rescued from Saudi kidnappers.
Posted
12/30/2003 03:19:43 PM
by Edward Driscoll
ANOTHER PERNOD, SMEDLEY: "Armavirumque", the weblog of The New Criterion looks at the year in blog.
Meanwhile, John Hawkins has the top ten list (actually 12!) of top ten lists.
And National Review has fired up its crystal ball, to look at what's to come in 2004.
Posted
12/30/2003 01:02:56 PM
by Edward Driscoll
FROM THE HOME OFFICE IN MORDOR: "50 Reasons Lord of the Rings Sucks".
I think #35 is spot-on. Just ask the people of Springfield.
Posted
12/30/2003 12:51:30 PM
by Edward Driscoll
THE REASON FOR THE SEASON: James Taranto writes that a few of his readers disputed his questioning the sincerity of Howard Dean's assertion that he is a "committed believer in Jesus Christ."
In response, Taranto simply runs Dean's December 25 message to his supporters, and notes, "Dean manages to mention Thomas Jefferson and FDR--admirable men, to be sure--but he says not a word about the man whose birth we celebrated last Thursday. He can't even bring himself to use the word Christmas".
Yeah, that's the spirit that'll woo the red states.
UPDATE: Chris Muir seems to agree.
Posted
12/30/2003 11:43:49 AM
by Edward Driscoll
HOPLOPHOBIA? "Gun-rights group touts new 'word'". Of course, this would require, under the ADA, that the Times hire a certain amount of hoplophobes for their paper.
Oh wait, they already do!
Posted
12/30/2003 11:21:08 AM
by Edward Driscoll
NUMBER SIX: Steve Spurrier, the ol' ball coach, is now the ol' unemployed coach.
UPDATE: Or is he?
ANOTHER UPDATE: He gone.
Posted
12/29/2003 10:46:12 PM
by Edward Driscoll
SKIP BAYLESS writes that Bill Callahan, head coach (for the moment) of the Oakland Raiders, sealed his fate months ago.
Posted
12/29/2003 10:29:14 PM
by Edward Driscoll
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS KILLS: "Sky marshals could be placed on British flights to and from the United States this week, but the U.K. pilots' union says its objections to guns on planes could lead its members to refuse to fly".
Meanwhile, perhaps the New York Times is having second thoughts when it comes its hatred of the Second Amendment.
Posted
12/29/2003 09:54:48 PM
by Edward Driscoll
ALMOST FREE: Glenn Reynolds writes:
Already, ownership of fancy goods is less a mark of social status than it used to be. Huge wide-screen TVs are, in my part of the world at least, associated as much with trailer parks as with wealth. ("You never see a double-wide without at least a 50-inch TV," a salesman told me. A bit of an exaggeration, perhaps, but a common view). Fancy watches, now no more accurate than the cheap ones, are a mark of pretension, not status. And services -- scorned as unproductive in the day of Adam Smith -- are now moving up the ladder. Massage therapy and restaurant meals are comparatively high-margin growth businesses, while television sellers are fighting things out in a market where prices are plummeting. Plumbers and cleaning services, meanwhile, are doing well. A glimpse of the future? I suspect so.Me too. As Tom Wolfe wrote a few years ago, we are "fulfilling Saint-Simon's and the other nineteenth-century utopian socialists' dreams of a day when the ordinary workingman would have the political and personal freedom, the free time and the wherewithal to express himself in any way he saw fit and to unleash his full potential".
Posted
12/29/2003 09:16:29 PM
by Edward Driscoll
MY GOD, this could singlehandedly destroy the World Wide Web!
UPDATE: And now..the rest of the story! (Via Stephen Green.)
Posted
12/29/2003 04:22:09 PM
by Edward Driscoll
REDNECK PLANET: In Redneck Nation, Michael Graham wrote that during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the left castigated the South for its obsession with race, and then, rather than moving towards a color-blind society as Martin Luther King had rightly demanded, became race-obsessed itself.
Glenn Reynolds links to merely the latest in a long line of exhibits that prove Graham's thesis.
Doesn't it strike any of the conspiracy mongers that looking endlessly for racism in PC-obsessed Hollywood is more than a little silly?
UPDATE: Speaking of the South...
Posted
12/29/2003 04:15:17 PM
by Edward Driscoll
JEFF JACOBY looks frighteningly like Michael Moore in the photo that accompanies his articles. Fortunately, he doesn't sound like him, as he writes about hate speech from the left.
Posted
12/29/2003 04:03:11 PM
by Edward Driscoll
SADDAM SQUEALS: Reuters reports that Hussein "has given his U.S. captors information on hidden weapons and as much as $40 billion he may have seized while he was Iraq’s president".
As Mona Charen recently wrote...
Posted
12/29/2003 03:52:51 PM
by Edward Driscoll
THE OTHER VAST CONSPIRACY: Byron York, in a rare Wall Street Journal article, looks at George Soros and declares, "At any given time, there is some small sliver of the American population that believes the president--any president--is a Nazi. Those people are usually thought of as nut cases. Now they can count among their number one of the world's richest and most influential men."
Posted
12/29/2003 03:32:06 PM
by Edward Driscoll
SAY WHAT? "FBI urges police to watch for people carrying almanacs".
UPDATE: Nick Gillespie has more.
Posted
12/29/2003 03:02:16 PM
by Edward Driscoll
CLIFF HARRIS AND CHARLIE WATERS were the Batman and Robin of the NFL during their playing days with the Dallas Cowboys in the 1970s, and I have a review of their new book on Blogcritics.
Posted
12/29/2003 01:31:40 PM
by Edward Driscoll
THE CONTRARIAN: Howard Dean has a lock on being the Democrats' nominee, right? Not so fast, writes Stephen Green, who looks at the Democratic front runners' poll numbers and says, "Not only is this primary race not over, it's hardly even begun".
Posted
12/29/2003 01:18:11 PM
by Edward Driscoll
MORNING IN AMERICA UPDATE: The Nasdaq cracks 2000, for the first time since January of 2002.
And the Dow gained 125 to stand at 10450.
Posted
12/29/2003 01:13:11 PM
by Edward Driscoll
WHO'S GOTTEN THE AXE IN THE NFL? ESPN.com has a running list of NFL coaching changes.
There's four five currently on there. Watch for more, shortly.
(Incidentally, what's with ESPN's new page design that puts all sorts of ads and links above the main story, making it not even be visible on most monitors without scrolling down?)
Posted
12/29/2003 01:15:56 AM
by Edward Driscoll
AS JIM MORA WOULD SAY...PLAYOFFS!! PLAYOFFS!? The playoff picture in the NFL is all firmed up, as Green Bay, Seattle and Baltimore are the last teams to straggle into the postseason.
Posted
12/29/2003 01:11:36 AM
by Edward Driscoll
THE FUN 'N' GUN GETS STUNNED AND DONE: Jim Litke of AP sticks a fork in Steve Spurrier.
Posted
12/29/2003 01:02:06 AM
by Edward Driscoll
ABBEY ROAD IN A BOX, VERSION 3: My review of Cakewalk's Sonar 3.0 Windows-based recording program is online at Blogcritics. My review comes complete with a tune I recorded with the program, playing all the instruments...and singing as well!
UPDATE: Instalanche!
Posted
12/29/2003 12:01:38 AM
by Edward Driscoll
MEET LUCKY THE DINOSAUR: He's the newest creation of Walt Disney's Animatronics department, and the subject of my cover story in Servo magazine. And for a 20 foot high green fellow covered in scales, he's cute as a button, to boot!
Look for Servo on your newsstand today! (Or, wait until a nice civilized hour on Monday. Or subscribe via Amazon.)
Posted
12/28/2003 11:58:26 PM
by Edward Driscoll
QUESTION: Who was the first black American to spend a night as a guest of the White House, and which president made it happen?
Answer: Neither are who you think.
Posted
12/28/2003 10:00:33 PM
by Edward Driscoll
LILEKS ON THE IRANIAN EARTHQUAKE:
I wonder if this disaster might be the Iranian Chernobyl. (Or the 21st century equivalent of the Lisbon earthquake, if you remember your Voltaire.) Just as that catastrophe laid bare the lies and the failures of the Soviet system, so might a horrible earthquake call into question the Mullahs’ claim to rule at the behest of the Almighty. It’s hard to insist that Allah wants Israel destroyed but never gets around to leveling Tel Aviv with natural disasters. Do I think that all Iranians believes the Mullah’s claims? No. Neither do I think that the contributions of America will change public attitudes - because I don’t think they’ll come as a surprise to most, and certainly not to the classes who can change the nature of the government. But the adminstration's aid effort is a surprise to certain domestic elements. I heard a network news feed on the radio say that the US was sending aid despite having branded Iran as a member of the Axis of Evil. Oy. Did the author of that dispatch believe that the administration regarded the Iranian people as a seething mass indistinguishable from the calculated madness of the ruling clerics? If US aid to Iran comes as a surprise to anyone, then they don’t understand the US.Read the rest.
Posted
12/28/2003 09:47:16 PM
by Edward Driscoll
AN IMPROVED CLIMATE: Ian Murray writes that statist environmentalists will remember 2003 as a very bad year for their credibility.
They're not the only left-leaning group who will have bad memories about this year.
Posted
12/28/2003 06:12:52 PM
by Edward Driscoll
MISSING SURVEY BODES ILL for 2004 Democrats: The missing exit polls for the 2002 mid-term elections have finally been released--and there's some interesting data there.
Posted
12/28/2003 01:47:38 PM
by Edward Driscoll
TIME MAGAZINE'S "PERSON" OF THE YEAR: Mona Charen has some end of year reflections on Time's decision to name the American solider as the man person of the year:
Meaning no disrespect at all to the world's finest fighting force, I have a feeling that the excellence of our men at arms had little to do with this decision. No, it seems pretty evident that the editors of Time were desperate to find someone, anyone, to name instead of George W. Bush. The person of the year is supposedly selected for having had the most influence on events of the past year, for good or ill. But this standard is not always strictly applied. Think back to 2001, for example. It is blindingly obvious that the one person who shaped the world the most that year, very much for ill, was Osama bin Laden. But Time's editors could not bring themselves to name him -- not when they were receiving daily warnings from readers threatening to cancel their subscriptions; not when so many continue to see the person of the year as some sort of honor. So they punted and chose Rudolph Giuliani. But (again let me stress that I bow to no one in my admiration for the U.S. military), the persons of the year Time chose would be sitting in Fort Benning and Camp Pendleton, not in Saddam's palaces today had it not been for George Bush. Not only has Bush shown the courage to take the fight to the terrorists and made this a victory year for American forces and American values, he has begun the process of remaking the Middle East in a more democratic mold, a challenge he created and embraced, and on which he will be judged by history. You may consider it too ambitious, or you may think him a visionary, but either way, it seems to me, George Bush must be acknowledged as a huge actor on the world stage. Time magazine needs to work on its news judgment.Time needs to work on its judgement, period.
Posted
12/28/2003 01:44:44 AM
by Edward Driscoll
THE VEGGIE VIGILANTE: NewYorkish.com checks in with Bernard Goetz and finds him "Still Crazy After All These Years".
Indeed.
(Found via H.D. Miller.)
Posted
12/28/2003 01:37:21 AM
by Edward Driscoll
A THOUSAND POINTS OF LIGHT: Virginia Postrel, in an all-too-rare these days Reason article, describes how Christmas displays illuminate a strong economy.
Posted
12/28/2003 01:31:23 AM
by Edward Driscoll
"XMAS PRESENT FROM PROGRESSIVES: STARVATION": David Horowitz wants to know "how many poor people have progressives starved since 1917"?
The number is easily in the eight digits. Easily.
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