Posted 5/29/2004 10:49:09 AM by Edward Driscoll
HEY STEVE, YOU'RE RIGHT: You really do feel the hangover more when you're a mile above sea level! Others had different kinds of mile high adventures last night. Although to be fair, I don't recall seeing Jeff Goldstein with his pants off. Thanks to Zombyboy, Darren Copeland, and the others who organized the event. A great time was had by all--even if some of the details are still hazy and will require the same attention to forensic detail normally reserved for the Zapruder film to be recalled. Oh, and Sammy was cute when she rolled around the floor. UPDATE: Andrew Olmsted looks at what a diverse crowd attended the Press Club and yet how amicable the conservation was, and concludes, "Rodney King would have been proud".

Posted 5/28/2004 03:55:25 PM by Edward Driscoll
LOOK OUT DENVER: I'm in town and ready for tonight's shindig. (Although to be honest, I haven't been participating in the pre-bash warm-ups as much as Steve Green has been.) I'd like to especially thank the Jennifer Aniston-wannabe sitting next to me on the flight in for accidentally spilling her Sprite on the right cuff of my trousers and my black loafers. (Neither of which I'm wearing tonight.) She was very apologetic; my immediate reaction was an Yngwie-like "YOU HAVE UNLEASHED THE F***ING FURY!!", but it came out with more a Woody Allen-style "That's OK, not a problem. Can happen to anybody." That minor hiccup aside, I'll see whoever shows up in a few hours.

Posted 5/27/2004 10:57:55 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE RIGHTEST OF THE RIGHT STUFF: Meet William Foxley, hero. And be sure to read to the end.

Posted 5/27/2004 03:48:27 PM by Edward Driscoll
PERFECT TOGETHER: Pat Buchanan meets the Arab News.

Posted 5/27/2004 03:27:39 PM by Edward Driscoll
ARE UN AMBULANCES BEING USED to transport Palestinian terrorists? Charles Johnson has a damning photo from the Israel Defense Forces web site.

Posted 5/27/2004 03:17:21 PM by Edward Driscoll
TOTALITARIANS, HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS AND AMERICA'S RESPONSE: Peter Burnet looks at the similarities between the left's appeasement of the original Axis of the 1930s and today's Axis of Evil.

Posted 5/27/2004 12:46:03 PM by Edward Driscoll
DAVID LETTERMAN, HOSS: He chided CBS for running a sitcom instead of showing President Bush's speech Monday night. "The network feels that the war in Iraq is important, however not as important as the season finale of Yes, Dear. So they couldn't be bothered."

Posted 5/27/2004 12:20:21 PM by Edward Driscoll
THINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU'RE ED: As James Lileks once wrote, "parachute journalism" is the laziest sort of reporting. "Find a Symbol of America, talk to a guy eating supper, and discern the Pulse of the Culture". Which is why I'll be stopping by the Rocky Mountain Blogger Bash tomorrow. If you're attending, you can't miss me--I'll be the guy who sort of looks like this.

Posted 5/27/2004 12:14:51 PM by Edward Driscoll
AFTER WATCHING AL GORE FLIP OUT YESTERDAY, John Hawkins writes, "If only we could transfer the towering hate and rage left-wingers like Al Gore & Howard Dean feel towards Republicans to the terrorists who want to kill us all, our country would be better off." On the other hand, Byron York writes that secretly, some Republicans love it. UPDATE: Maybe Morgan Spurlock should investigate Al's choice of cereal in the morning. (Via Will Collier.) ANOTHER UPDATE: Say what you will about Al, he's a unifier, bring disparate people from all walks of life together in harmony. James Taranto writes, "give Gore credit for helping liberals and conservatives find common ground in this era of polarization":

"It is now clear that Al Gore is insane," writes the New York Post's John Podhoretz. "I don't mean that his policy ideas are insane, though many of them are. I mean that based on his behavior, conduct, mien and tone over the past two days, there is every reason to believe that Albert Gore Jr., desperately needs help. I think he needs medication, and I think that if he is already on medication, his doctors need to adjust it or change it entirely." Maureen Dowd of the New York Times agrees. When he delivered a speech to the far-left outfit MoveOn.org yesterday, she writes, "Mr. Gore hollered so much, he made Howard Dean look like George Pataki." She says the erstwhile veep represents "the wackadoo wing of the Democratic Party."

And while in the past, we've been no great fan of the former Vice President, we certainly agreed with his comments about Iraq--or at least those he made in 1998.

Posted 5/27/2004 11:58:39 AM by Edward Driscoll
DISHING IT OUT, BUT NOT TAKING IT: On Monday, Maria Bartiromo of CNBC confronted Morgan Spurlock, the director of Super Size Me. James Glassman writes that "He was reduced to a fool. It was beautiful to watch". And read. UPDATE: The Internet Movie Database reports:

Roadside Attractions and Samuel Goldwyn films have accused MTV of refusing to air commercials for Super Size Me, the award-winning documentary which landed in the top-ten box-office attractions last weekend, something rare for a documentary. The two companies said in a statement that they were told that the ads were "disparaging to fast-food restaurants," which are big advertisers on the youth-oriented cable outlet. MTV disputed the charge, saying that the distributors balked at a deal. (More here, for when the IMDB link scrolls off.)

Wait a second--Spurlock told Bartiromo, "we live in a country where people should have the right to say what they want". So why are his backers upset that MTV doesn't want to run their ads? SUPER-SIZE THIS UPDATE: Somebody could make a whole documentary about this.

Posted 5/27/2004 10:37:08 AM by Edward Driscoll
BLASTS FROM THE PAST: Stephen Hayward deconstructs Jimmy Carter's failure to prevent the Shah from falling and concludes, "In retrospect, the fall of Iran may have been the single greatest foreign policy blunder of the last 50 years, not excepting Vietnam. Had Iran not become a bastion of international terror, it is unlikely we would be where we are today." (Advantage Simpsons? Well, I wouldn't go that far--Ed) And O.J. Simpson is on a tenth anniversary tour of his most infamous moment, including a photo-op at the scene of the murder.

Posted 5/27/2004 09:44:06 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE PRE-TIMES UNIT ROLLS INTO ACTION: It's rare to Fisk an article even before it's written. But thanks to a piece I wrote in March, I'm able to do just that. The Brothers Judd link to an article in today's the New York Times that says:

The number of bloggers has grown quickly, thanks to sites like blogger.com, which makes it easy to set up a blog. Technorati, a blog-tracking service, has counted some 2.5 million blogs. Of course, most of those millions are abandoned or, at best, maintained infrequently. For many bloggers, the novelty soon wears off and their persistence fades. Sometimes, too, the realization that no one is reading sets in. A few blogs have thousands of readers, but never have so many people written so much to be read by so few. By Jupiter Research's estimate, only 4 percent of online users read blogs.

And how many people is four percent of online users? As I wrote in my March Tech Central Station article about a similar piece that appeared on CNN's Website, according to one study, there are 146 million adult Internet users in the US alone. If we assume that only four percent of online users are reading them, that's 5,840,000 readers:

Scott Ott, the humorist whose Scrappleface Website is a Blogosphere favorite (in January of 2003, Ott coined the brilliant "Axis of Weasels" meme that later graced the cover of The New York Post), puts things into sharp perspective. In one of his typically satiric news articles, he wrote that if only about two percent of Internet users actually write Weblogs, it means that there are more bloggers writing, than people reading USA Today (whose circulation is 2.6 million), The New York Times (1.6 million) or The New York Daily News (805,000). Ott doesn't mention CNN, but since the article most prominently appeared on CNN's Website, it's probably worth noting that in the US, CNN's typically daily viewership is only about 450,000 viewers. (The Fox News Channel, the cable news ratings leader, gets an average of 799,000 viewers during their broadcasting day.) Of course, if I were CNN, I'd be worried about having, in a manner of speaking, all of my viewers, and then some, owning Weblogs.

That goes double for the Times, where Bloggers had a field day with Howell Raines, Jayson Blair and Maureen Dowd. (And naturally, there's no mention of Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Reynolds or Mickey Kaus, who used their Blogs to pummel The Times last year at the height of the Blair scandal). ...and stories like this one, which find the one blogger on the planet who doesn't know what his stats package says:

Mr. Wiggins, 48, a senior information technologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing, does not know how many readers he has; he suspects it's not many. But that does not seem to bother him. "I'm just getting something off my chest," he said.

It then concludes, "Indeed, if a blog is likened to a conversation between a writer and readers, bloggers like Mr. Wiggins are having conversations largely with themselves." Oh sure, that never happens at The Times. UPDATE: What did others in the Blogosphere think of the story? Ask Memeorandum! LAST UPDATE: Instalanche! Welcome readers of The Professor.

Posted 5/27/2004 09:27:21 AM by Edward Driscoll
UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES: Daniel Grant looks at the legal obligations owners of artwork have to their artists. UPDATE: For links and info on artists' rights under the law, my wife suggests this page.

Posted 5/27/2004 09:24:55 AM by Edward Driscoll
IRAQ, THEN AND NOW: Brendan Miniter of the Wall Street Journal looks at what might have happened had President Bush #41 liberated Iraq, with Democrats controlling both the House and the Senate at the time. Of course, the elder Bush was assailed by both many on the right, and by opportunists on the left, for not finishing off Saddam. Just as Bush #43 is being assailed by both many on the right, and by opportunists on the left, for doing just that.

Posted 5/26/2004 02:26:05 PM by Edward Driscoll
MORE PRISONER ABUSE IN IRAQ: Andrew Sullivan has the details. Scroll up to here, where Sullivan also asks why gays in America have ignored the plight of their counterparts in the Middle East.

Posted 5/26/2004 02:10:50 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE END OF DAYS: How else to explain this headline:

"'Spanky' the Clown Arrested on Child Porn" Herschel Krustofsky could not be reached for comment.

Posted 5/26/2004 02:06:42 PM by Edward Driscoll
"SOMEWHERE", Richard Baehr writes, "Pat Buchanan is smiling" at the latest round of anti-Semitism.

Posted 5/26/2004 12:53:31 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE RUBBER DIPLOMA CIRCUIT: Via Betsy Newmark, Ben Shapiro has an amusing look at who's speaking at college commencements this year. (For what it's worth, my graduating class listened to Malcolm Forbes. It was a fairly pedestrian speech, as I recall. But on the other hand, that's not necessarily a bad thing.)

Posted 5/26/2004 12:15:48 PM by Edward Driscoll
LET'S NOT ASSUME THE SALE JUST YET: Kerry's plane has "John Kerry President" on its side. Despite the best efforts of the press, I don't think it's official yet. And I suppose this was inevitable:

Comparing the plane to aircraft that brought U.S. troops to and ferried them home from Vietnam, Kerry called the plane his ``freedom bird.''

But after Vietnam, Kerry said:

I did take part in free-fire zones, I did take part in harassment and interdiction fire, I did take part in search-and-destroy missions in which the houses of noncombatants were burned to the ground. And all of these acts, I find out later on, are contrary to the Hague and Geneva conventions and to the laws of warfare. So in that sense, anybody who took part in those, if you carry out the application of the Nuremberg Principles, is in fact guilty.

If that's how Kerry feels, why is he naming his plane after those that transported armies of fellow war criminals to and from their destructive tasks? You'd think somebody that ashamed of his actions in Vietnam would want to play them down. UPDATE: Rich Lowry notes that AP didn't pick up on the missing "for" in the "John Kerry President" emblazoned on Kerry's campaign aircraft.

Posted 5/26/2004 12:09:16 PM by Edward Driscoll
COMPARE AND CONTRAST: Al Gore has harsh words for anyone with an (R) to the right of his or her name, and thinks that Iraq is a "catastrophe". His running mate in the 2000 elections thinks differently. Will any reporter ask either man why he thinks his counterpart's view is so bi-polar? UPDATE: Actually, I agree with Gore on Iraq. Especially when he says things like this:

''We need national resolve and unity, not weakness and division when we are engaged in an action against someone like Saddam Hussein,'' the vice president said on CNN's Larry King Live. Wired for a round-robin of live interviews with five network TV anchors, Gore blanketed the airwaves with a prediction that critics of the president's decision to strike Iraq would change their opinion as they learned more about the situation and received more information from military leaders. ''This action is the correct action,'' he said.

Whoops--that was in 1998. Nevermind. The press certainly doesn't.

Posted 5/26/2004 10:47:52 AM by Edward Driscoll
"NO, I MEAN, WHO IS THE REAL ENEMY?": I don't know about you, but I can absolutely picture this exchange between writer/producer/director Lionel Chetwynd and a Hollywood mogul:

When he was 17, Ike's screenwriter and co-executive producer Lionel Chetwynd joined the 3rd Battalion Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment), spending two years in the Canadian peacetime military. During that time he met some veterans of Dieppe, a bloody but necessary dress rehearsal to D-Day that established the futility of invading a fortified European port. Now in his early 60s, Chetwynd is a longtime naturalized American citizen who was born in England and raised in Montreal. He'd remembered from Canadian regimental history that of the 4,400-odd Canadians sent to Dieppe, about 3,600 were killed. Although they knew it was basically a suicide mission, not one man failed to report for duty. Chetwynd asked one of the old soldiers in his regiment, Sgt. Gordon Betts, why. "My generation had to figure out what we were ready to die for," Chetwynd recalled Betts telling him. "You kids don't even know what to live for." Many years later, when Chetwynd was a successful Hollywood writer specializing in historical dramas, he told the Dieppe story during a Malibu dinner party — as a sort of tribute to the men who died there so people could sit around debating politics at Malibu dinner parties. One of the guests was a network head who asked Chetwynd to come in and pitch the story. "So I went in," Chetwynd told me, "and someone there said, 'So these bloodthirsty generals sent these men to a certain death?' "And I said, 'Well, they weren't bloodthirsty; they wept. But how else were we to know how Hitler could be toppled from Europe?' And she said, 'Well, who's the enemy?' I said, 'Hitler. The Nazis.' And she said, 'Oh, no, no, no. I mean, who's the real enemy?'" "It was the first time I realized," Chetwynd continued, "that for many people evil such as Nazism can only be understood as a cipher for evil within ourselves. They've become so persuaded of the essential ugliness of our society and its military, that to tell a war story is to tell the story of evil people."

Kind of puts it all into perspective when someone living in Hollywood is complaining about "the essential ugliness of our society" and thinks that during WWII the real enemy wasn't the Nazis, but the men who fought them, doesn't it?

Posted 5/26/2004 10:39:07 AM by Edward Driscoll
CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER: Orrin Judd praises Bill Clinton.

Posted 5/25/2004 11:12:20 PM by Edward Driscoll
QUOTE OF THE DAY: "The hottest part of hell is reserved for those who, at a time of grave moral crisis, steadfastly maintain their neutrality."--Winston Churchill (Via Tom Maguire.)

Posted 5/25/2004 07:09:44 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE PURPLE DECADES: Ilya Shapiro writes on being "Stuck in Purple America", which makes a nice trifecta alongside of Rod Dreher's "Crunchy Cons" piece and David Brooks' Bobos In Paradise.

Posted 5/25/2004 03:25:03 PM by Edward Driscoll
HOME THEATER IN A BOX: My latest Electronic House newsletter is now online.

Posted 5/25/2004 02:01:59 PM by Edward Driscoll
TESTS CONFIRM SARIN GAS in Baghdad bomb. Follow this link to read just how deadly even a single drop of sarin can be. And continue to watch the media keep moving the goalposts. UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan spots Dan Rather spinning the story as only he can. REUTERS "UPDATE": The kings of quotation marks aren't acknowledging this find, either. ONE MORE UPDATE: H.D. Miller has more, here.

Posted 5/25/2004 01:56:20 PM by Edward Driscoll
OPENING SOON: Jonathan Last looks at the art of the movie trailer. Last doesn't mention it, but my favorite trailer is the one that Welles narrated for Citizen Kane, where he uses his most ingratiating voice-over style to introduce his cast of then-unknowns. It's included on the DVD, and as RKO's advertising men said of the film, it's terrific.

Posted 5/24/2004 08:06:40 PM by Edward Driscoll
QUOTE OF THE DAY comes from Joe Lieberman, a Democrat who gets it. "If we don't lose our will, someday we'll look back on what we've done in Iraq with pride."

Posted 5/24/2004 04:49:45 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE BROKEN WINDOWS THEORY: In his commencement speech at Hillsdale College, Edwin J. Feulner, the president of The Heritage Foundation, applies it to public discourse. Too much good stuff here for me to quote an excerpt. Instead, RTWT. Too bad E.L. Doctorow didn't apply similar reasoning to his commencement speech this weekend. UPDATE: For background on the broken windows theory, read this Atlantic article from 1982 by James Q. Wilson, and this transcription of a PBS program hosted by Ben Wattenberg, who explains how Wilson's theories led to a dramatic increase in the quality of life in Manhattan, and not coincidentally, a drop in its homicide rate, when they were applied by Rudy Giuliani. As Wilson himself said, "The ability to measure the crime rate permits you to test theories, to test competing arguments, to see who is correct."

Posted 5/24/2004 04:39:40 PM by Edward Driscoll
LIFE IMITATES THE ONION: Betsy Newmark has two examples, here and here. Malcolm Muggeridge, call your office.

Posted 5/24/2004 03:55:34 PM by Edward Driscoll
GLENN REYNOLDS LOOKS AT the latest findings from the Pew Research Center on the political demographics of America's newsrooms. Be sure to read the comments from Mike Gordon, one of Glenn's readers, as well. And click here and then scroll down for James Taranto's thoughts. (Scroll down a little further to the "Red Alert" for the probably-not-all-that-astonishing source of John Kerry's campaign slogan.)

Posted 5/24/2004 03:38:52 PM by Edward Driscoll
RATINGS TRUMP WAR FOR CIVILIZATION: None of the broadcast networks are expected to carry President Bush's speech tonight. It will only be available on the cable news channels. UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds has some thoughts.

Posted 5/24/2004 02:08:50 PM by Edward Driscoll
HUNTER S. THOMPSON, HOLOCAUST DENIER: How else to explain this passage in his ESPN column:

The long-dreaded 2004 Olympics in Greece will be the ultimate crossroads for sports and politics in this new and vicious century. The recent photos of cruelty at the Abu Grahaib all-american prison in Baghdad have taken care of that. Yes, sir. We have taken the bull by the horns on this one, sports fans. These horrifying digital snapshots of the American dream in action on foreign soil are worse than anything even I could have expected. I have been in this business a long time and I have seen many staggering things, but this one is over the line. Now I am really ashamed to carry an American passport. Not even the foulest atrocities of Adolf Hitler ever shocked me so badly as these photographs did.

As I said last Sunday, Thompson and the late William S. Burroughs are the prime examples that sooner or later, decades of pharmaceutical excess catch up with a writer--and the results are not pretty. As James Lileks wrote that same day:

Thompson has less hope than the Islamists; at least they have an afterlife to look forward to. All we have is a country so rotten and exhausted it’s not worth defending. It never was, of course, but it’s even less defensible now than before. He can say what he wants. Drink what he wants. Drive where he wants. Do what he wants. He’s done okay in America. And he hates this country. Hates it. This appeals to high school kids and collegiate-aged students getting that first hot eye-crossing hit from the Screw Dad pipe, but it’s rather pathetic in aged moneyed authors. And it would be irrelevant if this same spirit didn't infect on whom Hunter S. had an immense influence. He's the guy who made nihilism hip. He's the guy who taught a generation that the only thing you should believe is this: don't trust anyone who believes anything. He's the patron saint of journalism, whether journalists know it or not.

Does anybody at ESPN proof Thompson? Is there an editor who receives his copy and says, "Abu Grahaib is worse than the Holocaust. Yeah, sports fans will love this!" Rush Limbaugh and Gregg Easterbrook were fired from ESPN last fall because of their excesses. It should be interesting to see if anything happens to Uncle Duke. UPDATE: And the Airbrush Award of the month goes to...ESPN. After the Drudge Report had a link to the article which contained the above quote, ESPN doctored it to now read:

The long-dreaded 2004 Olympics in Greece will be the ultimate crossroads for sports and politics in this new and vicious century. The recent photos of cruelty at the Abu Grahaib all-american prison in Baghdad have taken care of that. Yes, sir. We have taken the bull by the horns on this one, sports fans. These horrifying digital snapshots of the American dream in action on foreign soil are worse than anything even I could have expected. I have been in this business a long time and I have seen many staggering things, but this one is over the line. Now I am really ashamed to carry an American passport.

Gee, and I thought only the BBC airbrushed their stuff. ANOTHER UPDATE: Drudge is mentioning the airbrush, here. Drudge writes:

But after being linked to the DRUDGE REPORT, a top editor demanded the sentence be immediately edited --without Thompson's okay, according to an ESPN.com staffer. "Hunter can go too far sometimes," the Bristol-based ESPN employee told the DRUDGE REPORT.

Yes he can. So why aren't Thompson's excesses noticed before ESPN is deluged with email? Of course, as Drudge notes:

As with the original, Thompson still concludes with the thought: "Now I am really ashamed to carry an American passport."

Why not move to France?

Posted 5/24/2004 01:21:14 PM by Edward Driscoll
LIES AND THE LYING LIARS ON THE LEFT WHO TELL THEM: Fred Barnes writes that he has just the person to look into Michael Moore's lies and distortions: "Al Franken has taken special interest in public liars, writing a bestseller called Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. Al, the Moore case is now in your court". Found via "The Corner", where Tim Graham writes:

If you can't get upset with a film that crazily attacks the president and slanders the war effort, and makes wild accusations about the Bushes being tight with the bin Ladens, then you should take some outrage pills. Then there's all the liberal film critics. The same people who earlier this year sounded like a pack of anthropologists who miraculously all attended the crucifixion of Christ and became fiercely convinced that Mel Gibson is mangling history will now all treat Michael Moore like his documentaries aren't the slightest bit factually mangled.

Well, this was the year that Hollywood honored Leni Riefenstahl at the Academy Awards.

Posted 5/23/2004 07:51:11 PM by Edward Driscoll
MOVE ALONG, NOTHING TO SEE HERE: Another railroad-related article, this time about a motion detector being discovered alongside the heavily trafficked Northeast Corridor in Philadelphia, written in the same "nothing unusual here" style as the article we linked to last week about a rocket launcher(!) found near Atlanta's railroad station. Here's another article, about New Jersey railroad lines being videotaped. Here's a brief article in The Washington Times that actually tries to put a few of the pieces together. I really fear that we're going to wake up to another Madrid, only it will be in Manhattan's Penn Station, not Spain.

Posted 5/23/2004 05:35:36 PM by Edward Driscoll
DON'T EXPECT TO SEE SGT. STRYKER at either of the chief parties' conventions this year: "I've always thought political conventions were for folks who considered DragonCon way too hip", he says, among other thoughts, here.