Posted 3/24/2004 01:14:22 PM by Edward Driscoll
OFF TO THE BIG EASY: I'm in the American Airlines Admirals' Club in Dallas right now, in between flights from San Jose to New Orleans, where I'll be until Monday. Blogging will be sporadic, but I will be checking email. So help yourself to the free beer and pretzels, but try to keep the place tidy, OK?

Posted 3/23/2004 02:16:50 PM by Edward Driscoll
COMING ATTRACTION: There's a jazz museum coming to Harlem; an idea that's long, long overdue. The man who's bringing it there? Perhaps surprising to some (for instance, me!), it's Leonard Garment, former advisor to President Nixon. On the other hand, as Net Hentoff wrote, "Mr. Garment was the only presidential counsel to have, in his youth, been in Woody Herman's reed section".

Posted 3/23/2004 12:50:59 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE DEFINING MOMENT: Brendan Miniter explains why Republicans are running negative ads against Kerry now, rather than waiting 'til the summer.

Posted 3/23/2004 12:40:41 PM by Edward Driscoll
DID RICHARD CLARKE block efforts to apprehend Osama bin Laden?

Posted 3/23/2004 12:38:20 PM by Edward Driscoll
JOANNE JACOBS FISKS A TIME MAGAZINE article on home schooling.

Posted 3/22/2004 10:46:39 PM by Edward Driscoll
SENTENCES THAT WOULD HAVE MADE NO SENSE before the Blogosphere came into existence: Hugh Hewitt writes, "Powerline's Hindrocket fisks Clarke".

Posted 3/22/2004 10:41:28 PM by Edward Driscoll
DAVID ADESNIK OF OXBLOG, linking to my post from the weekend on the subject, has some thoughts on the Jack Kelly/Jayson Blair kerfuffle.

Posted 3/22/2004 05:27:29 PM by Edward Driscoll
IDIOT CULTURE: Carl Bernstein quips that President Bush is "the most radical president of my lifetime and perhaps in the century." Err, which century? Since the 21st century actually began on January 1st, 2001, that means that Bill Clinton served 20 days (and about six hours) as president this century (and spent his last night pardoning everybody short of Osama bin Laden), before George W. Bush was inaugurated on January 21st, 2001. So there aren't a whole lot other presidents "in the century" for Berstein to compare Bush to. Unless Bernstein means the 20th century. He does know it's over, right?

Posted 3/22/2004 03:56:37 PM by Edward Driscoll
HUGH HEWITT: "The perception that the Democrats are weak on defense and hesitant to engage the terrorists is out there because the Democrats are weak on defense and hesitant to engage the terrorists".

Posted 3/22/2004 03:31:13 PM by Edward Driscoll
DOING THE JOB THE MEDIA USED TO DO: Indepundit interviews Rebecca, a representative of the University of California, San Diego chapter of the International Socialist Organization. Rebecca spoke this Saturday--"a white, apparently middle class American girl, standing in the middle of San Diego, advocating support for thugs and terrorists who murder Americans and Iraqis alike".

Posted 3/22/2004 11:52:49 AM by Edward Driscoll
DID HILLARY CLINTON REALLY SAY that with Saddam Hussein gone, there have been "pullbacks" in the rights Iraqi women enjoyed under his rule? Nat Hentoff has some thoughts. (Via Betsy Newmark.)

Posted 3/22/2004 11:40:30 AM by Edward Driscoll
A BIG DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE RIGHT AND LEFT COASTS? Earthquakes registering 2.0 on the Richter scale get news articles in Philadelphia. A quake that small is usually the butt of jokes by Californians, who know that the Richter scale moves upward exponentially, and know what a serious earthquake is.

Posted 3/22/2004 11:16:45 AM by Edward Driscoll
MEN ARE FROM MARS, WOMEN ARE FROM VENUS, and its author is apparently threatening bloggers with lawsuits. Instapundit has the details.

Posted 3/22/2004 01:09:06 AM by Edward Driscoll
"A HOUSE OF HORRORS" is how John Facenda, the late "Voice of God" narrator of NFL Films once described Philadelphia's Veterans Stadium, and in many respects, the epithet certainly fit. But the stadium is no more: it was imploded on Sunday.

Posted 3/21/2004 09:48:50 PM by Edward Driscoll
SIGN OF THE TIMES, MESS WITH YOUR MIND: John Hawkins writes, "I'd like to see some of these placards that are being carried around by some of these "brave dissenters" show up in the mainstream media sometime. Normally, if there's any hint of controversy, the media just CAN'T wait to slap it on the front page. But when it comes to these anti-war rallies, for the most part it's see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil". Hawkins has four photos of some of the signs that were carried this weekend. The last shot is just staggering: as the Professor would say, the person carrying it isn't anti-war, just on the other side. UPDATE: And he's the subject of today's "Bleat" by James Lileks. Read the whole thing.

Posted 3/21/2004 08:58:12 PM by Edward Driscoll
HAMAS FOUNDER KILLED in an Israeli missile strike.

Posted 3/21/2004 01:31:57 PM by Edward Driscoll
DECISION MADE: If you try really, really, really hard, I'll bet you can guess which of the men running for the presidency just received Noam Chomsky's endorsement. I'll give you a hint: surprisingly, it wasn't Ralph Nader. If you give up, Tim Blair has all the details.

Posted 3/21/2004 12:16:06 PM by Edward Driscoll
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS--NOW IT'S TRULY TONE DEAF: Joanne Jacobs writes that in England, the PC clean-up crew is trying to get sign language changed because they feel it relies on outdated social stereotypes. But deaf Britons are resisting. In some respects, written English has already been split into two languages--one that's traditional and one that's PC (for very simple examples, changing Christmas to holidays, mankind to humankind, etc.). It looks like sign language could be headed in the same Babel-like direction.

Posted 3/21/2004 11:42:53 AM by Edward Driscoll
IN THE BEGINNING: I like Chris Muir. I think he's a helluva cartoonist. I even interviewed him last year for Tech Central Station. But he's just made me feel like I should I apply for Social Security:

I cut my teeth on my school's Altair back in '76. It was hooked up to a Western Union teletypewriter, which was being used as its keyboard and printout device. The monitor, a converted television set, would come a little later. Programs were entered in and saved to paper tape, which the machine punched, a bit like a player piano, to save programs. I was about ten at the time. I'll never forget walking into the classroom where it was kept: seeing that machine in its blue and gray box for the first time, was a bit like all of my dreams from watching Star Trek and Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey had come true. And now it's the equivalent of a Model T from 1908. Incidentally, Muir is trying to get Day by Day into newspapers. Please call, write, or email the syndicates he has listed on his site if you'd like to see it there as well.

Posted 3/21/2004 11:35:19 AM by Edward Driscoll
COMING NEXT YEAR: THE ANTI-PASSION: Jack Matthews of the New York Daily News writes that Ron Howard's film of The Da Vinci Code is scheduled to be released next year. Matthews' description of the film (and the book it was based on) makes it sound like there could very well be the same sorts of protests against The Da Vinci Code that accompanied The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988. And in other Passion news, it was finally knocked off the top of the box office charts--by, ironically enough, The Dawn of the Dead.