Posted 7/3/2004 04:04:19 PM by Edward Driscoll
APPLAUSE FOR COSBY: Joanne Jacobs writes that "Bill Cosby is continuing his campaign to get blacks to take responsibility for their own problems. And he's speaking to receptive audiences". With the exception of the press, of course.

Posted 7/3/2004 03:41:31 PM by Edward Driscoll
WIN ONE FOR THE GIPPER: GOP chairman Ed Gillespie is comparing this election year with Reagan's campain in 1984 against Walter Mondale.

Posted 7/3/2004 01:28:15 PM by Edward Driscoll
DUELING BRANDOS: Power Line links to two takes on Marlon Brando, one by John Podhoretz, the other by Terry Teachout.

Posted 7/3/2004 11:19:36 AM by Edward Driscoll
CAN'T MAKE IT TO THE BIG APPLE THIS FOURTH? Want to see fireworks above the Statue of Liberty? Click here. (Via "The Corner". And speaking of fireworks, be sure to read Glenn's post on the subject.)

Posted 7/2/2004 02:37:08 PM by Edward Driscoll
JOHN KERRY'S SISTER SOULJAH MOMENT? Interesting post by Michelle Malkin.

Posted 7/2/2004 01:11:21 PM by Edward Driscoll
SAY IT ISN'T SO! AP reports that "Nader Accuses Democrats of 'Dirty Tricks'". UPDATE: In a related story, Charles Johnson writes that "nine members of the House of Representatives have written to Kofi Annan to request UN observers to monitor the US Presidential election". Excuse me while I stop giggling--this is the funniest story I've heard in ages. As Johnson writes, "The left has left the planet".

Posted 7/2/2004 01:04:54 PM by Edward Driscoll
TRANSLATORS WANTED: Virginia Postrel--knowledge arbitrageur. Wow, I like that--I should have that title printed on my business cards! (Is it trademarked? Where do I send the royalties, Virginia?)

Posted 7/2/2004 12:47:35 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE MOTHER OF ALL CAPTION CONTESTS is going on over at Captain Ed's (no relation).

Posted 7/2/2004 11:47:27 AM by Edward Driscoll
HEAR IT FROM THE MARINES, who aren't happy with The Washington Post's coverage of the events in Iraq. And then add to the list:

CNN's admission that they were in bed with Saddam.

Time's duplicitous coverage.

Dr. Bob Arnot leaving NBC because he was unhappy with how they slanted stories coming out of Iraq.

Reuters' refusal to call terrorists what they are.

AP being in bed with terrorists.

The New York Times' tactics when the 9/11 Commission verified Saddam's connection with al-Qaida.

Not pretty, is it? UPDATE: Steve Den Beste analyzes bias, Saddam's trial and Bush Derangement Syndrome. Needless to say, RTWT. ONE MORE UPDATE: Oh and add to the list Tom Brokaw "correcting" then-incoming Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi when Allawi suggested Saddam was connected to al-Qaeda.

Posted 7/2/2004 11:30:42 AM by Edward Driscoll
MARLON BRANDO DEAD AT 80, according to this TV news site. Via Betsy Newmark. As of 4:00 am last night (don't ask), nobody else had any details on the Web, or on Fox, MSNBC, CNN or CNN's Headline News. Terry Teachout has interesting piece on Brando, placing his career into perspective without gushing over it, or the very strange life that went along with it. UPDATE: Editor & Publisher writes:

What newspaper was first to report the unexpected death of actor Marlon Brando? The winner, by a wide margin, appears to be the New York Post, if only in an unconfirmed manner. In its Friday morning edition, on page 11, the Post printed a small story, with a picture of Brando from "The Godfather," under the headline: "Brando is dead: TV report." It cited a bulletin on the Web site of Phoenix-based KPHO-TV, of all places. The paper said police had not confirmed the death but claimed that relatives were gathering at the actor's Los Angeles home.

Given the Internet, the blogosphere and wall-to-wall cable TV, why the condescending tone that it wasn't AP/Reuters/UPI/NYT but a Phoenix-based TV station "of all places" that broke the story?

Posted 7/1/2004 07:37:21 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE ORWELLIAN BBC: Charles Johnson writes that they've found a new nadir.

Posted 7/1/2004 07:21:05 PM by Edward Driscoll
SCRATCH ANOTHER ONE OFF THE LIST: Richardson withdraws from Kerry VP search. National Review Online's Jim Geraghty writes that Kerry's choice is down to three men, "or this is one of the great disciplined fake-outs of all time". Meanwhile, Dick Morris says "I would not sell life insurance to anyone who has Hillary Clinton as his running mate." Especially after her staggering gaffe this week.

Posted 7/1/2004 06:58:30 PM by Edward Driscoll
FOR THE LEFT, IT'S SEPTEMBER 10th AGAIN: Mark Steyn diagrams the difference between the period between 9/11 and Fahrenheit 9/11:

One day a pair of security guards from the Iranian mission will be heading for the Lincoln Tunnel, and they won’t be carrying just their Kodak Instamatics. The war on terror’s a bit of a joke on the Left these days. In Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore says Bush is deliberately keeping the population in a state of fear, and he gets some of his biggest laughs with clips of solemn announcers announcing upgraded terrorism alerts. I suppose it is pretty funny. Until it happens. And then Moore and the Democrats will switch to arguing that Bush knew it was going to happen all along and didn’t do anything about it. In the autumn of 2001, Jacob Weisberg, now editor of Slate, wrote a column bemoaning what he regarded as a silly post-9/11 trend. The Weekly Standard, the New Republic and other publications had begun giving ‘Susan Sontag Awards’ and similarly facetious honours for notably stupid anti-war commentary. Early winners included Oliver Stone, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Michael Moore, etc. Weisberg thought this unworthy of serious news magazines: ‘Stone and Moore are well-known cranks, regarded with considerable distaste even on the Left,’ he wrote. The idea that ‘these comments represent a significant body of anti-war opinion’ was preposterous.... Put bluntly, there is no anti-war movement, intellectual or popular, in the United States. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying no one opposes the war. According to polls, 5 per cent of the country is against it. There are pacifists and Buddhists ...Those policing the debate are dropping the rhetorical equivalent of daisy cutters on a few malnourished left-wing stragglers.’ Well, something’s changed in the last couple of years, and those left-wing stragglers are a lot less malnourished. Last weekend Michael Moore, the ‘well-known crank’ regarded with ‘considerable distaste’, had the Number One movie in North America. Okay, its weekend gross was $21 million, which sounds big, until you realise that the week before a dumb comedy called Dodgeball took $30 million without anybody even noticing. On the other hand, the business of Congress wasn’t put on hold because so many Democratic bigshots were attending the premiere of Dodgeball. That did happen with the premiere of Fahrenheit 9/11, and when the movie was over it was all five-star raves. Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa urged all Americans to see the film. Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, praised the film for raising ‘a lot of issues that Americans are talking about’ - i.e., is Bush in league with the bin Laden family? As those Iranian photographers remind us, this war can only be won abroad. And, as the rise of Michael Moore emphasises, it can only be lost at home.

Brent Bozell writes:

For the Left, this film is a test to separate the wheat from the chaff, the honorable from the dishonorable, the serious from the unserious. In the Clinton years, conservatives needed to step away from the unsubstantiated videos that talked in conspiratorial tones about all of Clinton’s heinous secret crimes. To be taken seriously, every liberal today should criticize “Fahrenheit 9-11" as an affront to journalism and civil discourse.

Bozell adds that "To their credit, a number of liberal pundits and journalists have been passing this test", but sadly, few critics on the left and even fewer leftwing politicians have been. And the film places John Kerry in a vice grip: he risks alienating his base if he condemns it. And he risks alienating moderates if he doesn't. Not surprisingly in this type of situation, he's said (to the best of my knowledge) nothing about the film. And as a result, he's allowed it to define him. UPDATE: John Hawkins also has some thoughts.

Posted 7/1/2004 03:51:25 PM by Edward Driscoll
HUSSEIN'S THE THIN MAN: James Taranto notes it can be awfully difficult to tell Michael Moore and Saddam Hussein apart these days.

Posted 7/1/2004 03:42:40 PM by Edward Driscoll
HOLLYWOOD: NOT ANTI-WAR, merely on the other side, as Glenn would say.

Posted 7/1/2004 02:43:56 PM by Edward Driscoll
WHAT THE INTERNET WAS INVENTED FOR: "ImplosionWorld.com is pleased to bring you the finest in explosive cinematic adventures"!

Posted 7/1/2004 01:36:49 PM by Edward Driscoll
REMEMBER THE SCANDAL AN ATLANTA NEWSPAPER CAUSED IN 1946 when during the Nuremberg Trials, it ran a headline that said, "GOERING: 'THE REAL CRIMINAL IS TRUMAN!'"? Of course not--it never happened. But Will Collier (who's on a roll today!) notes:

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution leads its homepage today with: "Saddam: The Real Criminal Is Bush." Yeah. That's the most important thing that happened in the courtroom. Mmm hmm.

Nope, no media bias there. Nothing to see, move along! SILLY UPDATE: I'm confused: when did Saddam start looking like Victor French? SERIOUS UPDATE: James Lileks writes that "What matters most now is adopting the correct cynical pose" about Saddam's trial. Because clearly, the fact that Saddam Hussein is being tried by the very people he mercilessly ruled over for a generation can't be a clear and obvious positive event. If it were, George W. Bush would get the credit for it, and we can't have that, of course. Based on the Lileks Template, it appears that the Journal-Constitution is using the Template Code labeled D-with a little of Template Code F thrown in as well. FLASHBACK: To see how blase the world viewed the capture of Saddam (alive, needless to say, unlike the vast majority of previous despots when their regimes came to an end) click here, keep scrolling down. ANOTHER UPDATE: Via Instapundit, Arthur Chrenkoff looks at the media's pro-Saddam spin machine.

Posted 7/1/2004 11:17:24 AM by Edward Driscoll
COMPARE AND CONTRAST: Will Collier of VodkaPundit links to both yesterday's interview by Tom Brokaw of Iraq's current prime minister and last year's Dan Rather interview with the fellow who routinely threw men into shredding machines, amputated their limbs, and ripped babies from their wives' wombs, and who kept a "violator of women's honor" on his payroll. Collier asks "which of the two Iraqis received the more respectful treatment" by the media? "Which one was softballed, and which one was challenged?"

Posted 7/1/2004 01:50:44 AM by Edward Driscoll
QUOTE OF THE DAY: "The Clinton Administration: Just another set of marionettes for the Evil Neocon Puppetmasters!"--Glenn Reynolds, tongue firmly in cheek.

Posted 7/1/2004 01:40:18 AM by Edward Driscoll
"DAVID BROOKS, SWAMP THING": I've written at least a couple of times here that I think it's a good thing that David Brooks is writing for The New York Times and he continues to do a good job there. But Michelle Malkin notes that Brooks may have gone native since joining the Grey Lady. And as Malkin notes from past personal experience as the former token conservative at the Seattle Times, "no matter what their lips say, 'your people' inside the newsroom will never admire you as much as you proclaim to admire them."

Posted 7/1/2004 01:10:03 AM by Edward Driscoll
"THE ISRAELI PUPPETEER": Charles Johnson looks at Ralph Nader, anti-Semite.

Posted 6/30/2004 11:36:59 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE DESIRE NAMED STREETCAR: When I visited my parents in South Jersey this weekend, I noticed that NJ Transit's light rail system is finally operating in their area. ...and surprise, surprise, the cars and local station appeared virtually empty. Texas Public Policy Foundation looks at the impact of light rail on America's cities and does not like what it sees:

Out of the nation’s 50 largest urban areas, 23 had rail transit in 2000. This study reviews those 23 regions and finds: • Half of all rail regions lost transit commuters during the 1990s; • Taken together, rail regions lost 14,000 transit commuters in the 1990s; • Meanwhile, bus-only regions gained nearly 53,000 transit commuters in the 1990s; • Transit lost market share of commuters in two-thirds of all rail regions in the 1990s; • Per capita transit rides declined in half the rail regions; • Transit’s share of total travel declined in a majority of rail regions; • Sixteen of the 20 urban areas with the fastest growing congestion are rail regions – and one of the other four is building rail transit; and • By comparison, only three of the 20 urban areas with the slowest growing congestion are rail regions – and only because all three have nearly zero population growth. Based on these and other criteria, including cost effectiveness, safety, energy, and land use, this paper constructs a Rail Livability Index that assesses the effects of rail transit on urban areas. Every rail region earned a negative score, suggesting rail reduces urban livability. Rail transit is not only expensive, it usually costs more to build and often costs more to operate than originally projected. To pay for cost overruns, transit agencies often must boost transit fares or cut transit service outside of rail corridors. Thus, rail transit tends to harm most transit users. Rail transit also harms most auto drivers. Most regions building rail transit expect to spend half to four-fifths of their transportation capital budgets on transit systems that carry 0.5 to 4 percent of passenger travel. This imbalanced funding makes it impossible to remove highway bottlenecks and leads to growing congestion. Rail’s high cost makes it ineffective at reducing congestion. On average, $13 spent on rail transit is less effective at reducing congestion than $1 spent on freeway improvements. Investments in rail transit are only about half as effective as investments in bus transit. Rail transit also tends to be more dangerous than other forms of travel. Interstate freeways cause 3.9 deaths per billion passenger miles. Accidents on urban roads and streets in general lead to about 6.8 deaths per billion passenger miles. Among the various forms of urban transit, buses, at 4.3 deaths per billion passenger miles, are the safest; heavy rail averages 5.0, commuter rail 11.3, and light rail 14.8.

I understand that cities need public transportation to function, but why not purchase additional buses and build additional roads or widen existing ones, which would benefit not only the buses but also individual motorists. Unlike fixed rail lines, if a route doesn't provide enough passengers for a bus to make sense, it's easy to reassign them elsewhere. The Texas Policy report is an 84 page Adobe Acrobat file, so I'm not going to say "read the whole thing". But just skimming it is pretty frightening in and of itself.

Posted 6/30/2004 09:51:21 PM by Edward Driscoll
A TALE OF TWO MOVIES--AND 22 CRITICS: You can learn a lot about a movie critic by comparing how he reviewed Mel Gibson's The Passion Of The Christ with what he wrote about Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. UPDATE: Make that 23: James Panero of The New Criterion looks at how Andrew Sullivan views the two films.

Posted 6/30/2004 09:41:33 PM by Edward Driscoll
BEST OF THE ED TODAY: James Taranto's "Best of the Web Today" column echoes something we wrote last week. Here's Taranto:

From where we sit, it appears that Democrats in 2004 are repeating the mistake Republicans made in 1996: assuming that the intensity of their own loathing for the incumbent means that loathing is widespread beyond the partisan base. We could be wrong, of course--our own political preferences no doubt color our views--but a party that consorts with the likes of anti-American filmmaker Michael Moore strikes us as more desperate than confident.

I guess we view things through a similar shade of Wayfarers. As I wrote last week:

They're overplaying their hand, just like the over the top Wellstone funeral-cum-political orgy of 2002. They've hitched themselves to something which is likely to rebound very badly in their faces; but in the meantime, I hope a rope-a-dope strategy is in place by the White House, because without signs of the president fighting back, all of this can be brutal to watch. On the other hand, the staggering amount of overheated rhetoric doesn't sound at all like the FDR-style jaunty "happy days are here again" feeling of a party confident of victory in the fall.

Incidentally, the rope-a-dope began the next day.

Posted 6/30/2004 09:25:32 PM by Edward Driscoll
IF A TREE FALLS BUT THE WASHINGTON POST DOESN'T REPORT IT, does it make a sound? Paul Bremer gave a stirring speech before leaving Iraq on Monday--but you wouldn't know it if you read the Post, which reported, "There was no farewell address to the Iraqi people, no celebratory airport sendoff". Meanwhile, Tom Brokaw is helpfully schooling Iraq's new Prime Minister on the Saddam-al Qaida connection. As the Professor writes, "Why, oh, why, can't we have decent news media?"

Posted 6/30/2004 08:47:50 PM by Edward Driscoll
POWER LINE LOOKS AT Orwellian Maryland, where food stamp recipients don't actually get "stamps" anymore. Instead, they get a plastic card modeled on bank debit cards. Its name? The "Independence Card."

Posted 6/30/2004 05:43:54 PM by Edward Driscoll
BEATS DRAMAMINE ANY DAY: Set sail with Steve Green's Navy!

Posted 6/30/2004 05:33:19 PM by Edward Driscoll
M-AUDIO'S OMNI-STUDIO: Another review on Blogcritics, this time on a nifty soundcard for home musicians, complete with an audio file of a song I recorded using it.

Posted 6/30/2004 11:37:54 AM by Edward Driscoll
THE NEW MUSIC BUSINESS: I have a review of Robert Wolff's How To Make In the New Music Business on Blogcritics.

Posted 6/30/2004 12:52:49 AM by Edward Driscoll
IF IT'S TUESDAY, I MUST BE THE FORMER SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES: I just downloaded the 57 bazillion emails I received while I was away from a broadband connection for a couple of days. 56.5 bazillion of them were spam, but this one is a classic:

From your latest column: "One needs to point out that the pan-Arab media said nothing when the Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad destroyed Hama and killed more than 10,000 of his own innocent people, or when Saddam Hussein used poison gas on Iraqis and created 300,000 anonymous graves." Guess which liberal ****sucker gave Saddam the gas along with anthrax, smallpox, and other bacterial cultures in '83-'84? (I can talk like this 'cause Cheney proved it in the Senate last week.) Donald Rumsfeld gave him the gas and germ cultures for the Reagan administration and admitted it before Congress in testimony last March. Look it up. The whole country is getting hip to neocon ***holes like you, Rummy, and Bush. Crowds are flocking to Fahrenheit 9/11 and recognizing the truth when visual evidence is shown to them. AND YOU CAN'T DO A THING ABOUT IT. The days of hysterical demagogue liars like you, Coulter, "Savage", the Limbaughs, Hannity, and the rest are coming to an end. These little piggies are going home. Bye-bye.

I'm not printing the name of the person who sent this to me (or the foul language, which I replaced with asterisks) because deep down inside, I'm a nice guy. And I don't want to embarrass somebody who has confused me with Newt Gingrich. (Does Newt receive nastygrams about his latest posts in Blogcritics?)

Posted 6/29/2004 11:59:47 PM by Edward Driscoll
BACK IN CALIFORNIA: Expect regular blogging to resume tomorrow (Wednesday).