POLITICAL CORRECTNESS--it's not just for leftwing atheists anymore! The state school superintendent for Georgia has proposed striking the word evolution from Georgia's science curriculum and replacing it with the phrase "biological changes over time":

Superintendent Kathy Cox said the concept of evolution would still be taught under the proposal, but the word would not be used. The proposal would not require schools to buy new textbooks omitting the word evolution and would not prevent teachers from using it.

Cox repeatedly referred to evolution as a "buzzword" Thursday and said the ban was proposed, in part, to alleviate pressure on teachers in socially conservative areas where parents object to its teaching.

"If teachers across this state, parents across this state say, 'This is not what we want,' then we'll change it," said Cox, a Republican elected in 2002.

There's no doubt that much of the bloom has come off of Darwin in the past few years, but pandering is pandering. If you're going to continue teaching evolution (and frankly, I'm not losing any sleep over its being taught in school), might as well call it what it is.

CNS News reports, "New York Times Tells Its Reporters Not to Carry Guns".

I love this line:

"The carrying of a weapon, for whatever reason, jeopardizes a journalist's status as neutral," Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis told CNSNews.com.

Why is a reporter for an American newspaper neutral? As someone once asked of CNN, "Who do you think you are? Switzerland?"

THE NAKED TRUTH: Mix magazine looks at the making--and mixing--of the Beatles' "new" Let It Be...Naked album.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

"In a real sense, the high-water mark for the Palestinian cause was September 10, 2001."--Steven Den Beste

Read the whole thing.

HEAVENLY DRECK: Slate asks, "Why is airplane music so universally bad"?

"I AM YOUR PUBLIC SCHOOL": Chris O'Donnell Fisks a horribly written, uber-politically correct, self-serving Webpage by the unfortunately named Frosty Troy (!) of the Oklahoma Education Association.

Here's Frosty's original essay. As O'Donnell writes, "Barf bags are highly recommended".

And here's Frosty's bio, which says he's not just popular--but hugely popular!

(Via Joanne Jacobs.)

MORE ON BETTY ONG: Bryan S. has some thoughts, and a link to a tape of her phone call.

For our original post, click here, or just scroll down to Wednesday's posts.

KERRY SAYS TERRORISM THREAT IS EXAGGERATED: John, you big lug you--three simple words: Little. Green. Footballs. Read it, learn it, love it.

And then let's talk.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan adds, "Back to the 1990s or post-9/11 Bush. Law enforcement versus war. It's a clear and important distinction. Let's put it at the center of this debate, where it belongs."

ANOTHER UPDATE: Speaking of Little Green Footballs, Charles Johnson posts:

According to the New York Daily News, Democratic candidate Wesley Clark sought the political support of the Muslim American Society and the Islamic Circle of North America—two Muslim groups that have been linked to terrorism by numerous sources, and are currently under investigation by the FBI.

Clark campaign spokesman Matt Bennett told the Daily News that they were unaware of the allegations or the FBI probe.

But as Johnson writes, "If that last statement is true, what does it say about how seriously Clark is taking the war on terrorism?"

About as seriously as the rest of the candidates (save Lieberman). Because as Sullivan previously wrote, for much of the left, "9/11 didn't really happen".

VOIP--LET IT FLY: I've written several articles over the past couple of years on voice over IP. James Glassman says it could be the killer app for broadband, which has had impressive growth over the past few years:

Experts see VoIP as the "killer app," the powerful application that will inspire Americans to subscribe to broadband. Today, 20 percent of U.S. homes have broadband -- up from 5 percent when President Bush took office. That's a start, but with VoIP, the figure should grow to 50 percent in a few years.

Meanwhile, VoIP is already igniting an explosion in investment that will eventually employ hundreds of thousands of new workers at companies like Lucent, Net2Phone, Intel, Dell, Comcast, Vonage, Qwest, Cisco, SBC, AT&T, Oracle and start-ups we can only guess about. It's a timely cure for a recovering economy.

What can stop VoIP dead in its tracks? The same thing that could have stopped the Wright Brothers -- rules and taxes created for another era and a different paradigm.

Said a recent news story in the Wall Street Journal, "Because of the Internet's regulation-free status, phone calls sent as tiny electronic packets over the global computer network avoid all of the regulations, taxes and fees of the traditional public phone system."

So far, anyway. But companies with an interest in maintaining that traditional system are complaining that VoIP is not really an Internet application. It's more like a long-distance phone call. So it's subject to rules and expensive access fees that will jack up costs to consumers and kill VoIP in the cradle.

The FCC's Powell can cut through this nonsense and make a historic decision to keep the Internet free. Last week, he said, "If you're going to say that Voice over IP is something that needs regulation, then you're going to have to explain to me why e-mail isn't also, or streaming video or instant messaging is not also."

Glassman says that "Such free-market rhetoric is encouraging, but with Powell, you never know." But at least he's saying it. Imagine a quote like that from anyone if there had been a Gore administration.

SUPERFLY, RIP: Orrin Judd reports that Ron O'Neal, the actor who played--and created--the iconic Superfly during the early 1970s "blaxploitation" craze passed away. O'Neal was quoted in a recent LA Weekly piece as saying:

the press thought I was some n****r off the street who made a movie about his own dissolute life. I never used drugs in those days. And my film was about a dealer who quit selling drugs and got out of that system. Still, the negative press soured my career and, eventually, it soured me.

That quote speaks volumes of the stupidity of either Hollywood, the press that covers it, or both. I don't know about you, but I never for a second thought that O'Neal was a former dealer himself, any more than I thought Marlon Brando was actually once the head of an organized crime family.

Ironically, O'Neal passed away, at age 66, of pancreatic cancer, the day before Superfly was released on DVD. Along with Shaft, Superfly represents the zenith of the blaxploitation period, and has an absolute knockout of a score from Curtis Mayfield.

NAT HENTOFF--HOSS: Hentoff writes about the American Library Association, and their pro-Castro agenda.

Hentoff's response? In June of '83, he received the prized ALA Immroth Award for Intellectual Freedom:

The citation reads: "For courageous and articulate advocacy of the First Amendment as an author, speaker, and activist for human rights" (June 1983).

I now publicly renounce the Immroth Award and demand that the American Library Association remove me from the list of recipients of that honor. To me, it is no longer an honor. Someone I know in the ALA, who was at the San Diego meeting, explained to me that some members of the council whispered privately that they agreed with the amendment calling for freeing the librarians but had to vote it down because they didn't want to be vilified as being "on the wrong team." They have put themselves in their own prison.

For more, see this World Net Daily article on Hentoff, the ALA, and Castro.

THE TERMINATOR MEETS THE GIPPER: On Thursday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a proclamation declaring February 6th--the Gipper's 93rd birthday--as 'Ronald Reagan Day' in California.

It would have been a cold day in Sacramento before Gray Davis would have made such a proclamation, and it's further proof that California is in play for President Bush.

FROM THE FROZEN TUNDRA OF MOUNT LAUREL, NJ: I have a profile of NFL Films, (which I had the pleasure of visiting this past summer, after interviewing several of their executives by phone) in Tech Central Station.

Think of it as a great way to kick off this Super Bowl weekend.

And click on the Amazon link on the right, if you want to pre-order NFL Films' documentary of Sunday's game. You'll have it in your hands, and in your DVD player, on February 24th, less then a month from now.

SWEDEN--IT'S AS EASY AS ABC: Well, at least if ABC stands for Abba, bestiality and crime. Not only does Sweden have more crime and more poverty than Mississippi, it's got more people--a lot more people--who want to get frisky with Fido as well.

I'm sure Peter Singer will be retiring there as soon as his stint at Princeton is up.

THE DOMINO EFFECT: Andrew Sullivan writes, "Raines. Boyd. Davies. Dyke. Does it get any better for fair journalism?"

Well, yeah. There's a lot more distance to go to get anywhere near a fair and balanced (to coin a phrase) mass media. But 2003 and early 2004 has seen some very positive--and welcome--steps.

IS POSTMODERNISM PASSE? Pejman Yousefzadeh, linking to a Christian Science Monitor article, says "Behold another sign that postmodern literary theory is on its way out".

I hope they're right. But I fear the damage that a generation of this stuff has caused college kids.

BIG, BIG TROUBLE FOR DISNEY: Pixar ends Disney distribution deal.

Pixar, who has produced digitally animated films beginning with Toy Story in 1995, has helped kept Disney afloat, by making fun, non-PC-obsessed (no pun intended, given that Steve Jobs is Pixar's CEO) animated films. Beginning in the 1990s, Disney's animated films always seemed to want to teach politically correct shibboleths; but Pixar just seemed to want to have fun.

Combine this with Michael Eisner's recent headaches with his board, and the result is not a pretty picture for Uncle Walt's successors.

UPDATE: The New York Times agrees:

The timing of Pixar's announcement creates a public relations nightmare for Mr. Eisner, who has been under pressure to turn around Disney's fortunes. This week, two former directors — Stanley Gold and Roy Disney, the nephew of the company's co-founder — called on shareholders to oust Mr. Eisner at Disney's annual meeting in March. Mr. Gold and Mr. Disney have complained that Disney's formerly renowned animation division has faltered under Mr. Eisner. They released a statement on Thursday saying that Mr. Eisner had mismanaged the relationship with Pixar.

Already the news of the failed talks created a flurry of interest from competitors including Warner Brothers Studios, which said it would be interested in distributing Pixar films.

The Times adds, "One film executive suggested that Mr. Jobs could now be considered a candidate to run Disney if indeed Mr. Eisner ever left."

The Disney empire under Steve Jobs--now that would be interesting to watch.

THE BIG PICTURE: The folks posting in National Review's Corner Weblog are grousing about Bush's proposed increases in the NEA's spending, and quite right so, but there are some interesting angles going on here. First, it's an election year, and this sort of stuff sounds appealing to undecided moderates. Second, it blows out much of the Democrats' demagoguery about the man. As David Bernstein of The Volokh Conspiracy notes:

Remind me again of why liberals are so hostile to George Bush? Give him a phony Haavaad accent instead of phony Texas twang, a wonky college life, a less religious persona, and an attorney general other than John Ashcroft, and George Bush, in theory, would be a dream president for many liberals, judging by their ex ante policy preferences. But the dirty little secret of American politics, as explained so well by Michael Barone, is that cultural cues are more important than policy and ideology. W just represents lots of things that coastal liberals dislike, and they will continue to dislike him regardless of how he governs policy-wise. But I find it amusing when they dress up their cultural prejudices in rhetoric along the lines of claiming that Bush is running a "right-wing" or "ultraconservative" administration that wants to roll back not just the Great Society, but also the New Deal.

Back in July of 2003, Jonathan Rauch wrote on Bush's efforts to transform the Federal Government:

The plan, therefore, has both tactical and strategic elements. In the short run, give people things they want; in the longer run, weaken the Democrats' base while creating, program by program, a new constituency of Republican loyalists who want the government to help them without bossing them around. Most important of all, however, is what might be thought of as the meta-strategy.

Essential to FDR's success in capturing the loyalty of two generations -- first the New Deal generation, then the Great Society one -- was his success in capturing the mantle of progressive reform for the Democrats. Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, had been a reformer, but so was Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican. FDR's hyperactive reformism decisively resolved the ambiguity. Regardless of what one thought of particular New Deal programs, as a group they established the Democrats as the party of progress. From that day to this, Republicans have been stereotyped as backward-looking and nay-saying -- the stick-in-the mud party, the perennial advocate of "turning back the clock."

The identification of liberals and Democrats with progressivism is essential to the Democrats' political appeal and, especially, their self-confidence. When all else fails, they remain the party of enlightenment, not least in their own minds. Thus, in his new book, The Clinton Wars, Sidney Blumenthal, a former Clinton aide, characterizes Bush as attempting "to repeal the progressive policies of the 20th century." Progressive presidents (meaning Clinton) "are elected because they stand for the idea that the old ways will not work -- and should not work," he writes, whereas conservative presidents (meaning Bush) "preserve their power through inertia... The allies of conservative presidents are indifference, passivity, and complacency. Nostalgia is the emotion that underlies many conservative sentiments -- a magical belief that if little is done, a simpler, happier time can be restored and a world of change kept at bay."

Conservatives, for their part, believe that today they are the ones who stand for progressive change, in the face of "reactionary liberalism," but they have never been able to convince the public. That is what Bush seeks to do, both by rejecting the mantra of minimal government and by passing reform after reform. Never mind how you feel about any one of his initiatives; as a group, they seek to establish that it is Republicans who now "stand for the idea that the old ways will not work." If the Democrats dig in their heels and fall back on stale rants against greed, inequality, and privatization, so much the better. The voters will know whom to thank for the empowering choices that Republicans intend to give them. As for which is the "party of nostalgia," the voters will also remember who defended, until the last dog died, single-payer Medicare, one-size-fits-all Social Security, schools without accountability, bureaucratic government monopolies, static economics, and Mutually Assured Destruction.

Reagan, the other conservative reformer among recent presidents, made important changes, but his agenda was more about undoing (Big Government, inflation, detente) than doing. He also had to deal with a Democratic Congress and a predominantly Democratic country. Bush, by contrast, can reasonably expect to enjoy eight years in office with Republican majorities in Congress and, effectively, on the Supreme Court. Republican and Democratic voter-registration numbers are now about even.

While Bush is enlarging government programs, he's frequently staffing them with conservative minds. Writing about the NEA, Roger Kimball says:

Under normal circumstances, the White House announcement that the president was seeking a big budget increase for the National Endowment for the Arts might have been grounds for dismay. Pronounce the acronym "NEA," and most people think Robert Mapplethorpe, photographs of crucifixes floating in urine, and performance artists prancing about naked, smeared with chocolate, and skirling about the evils of patriarchy.

Thanks, but no thanks.

But things have changed, and changed for the better at the NEA. The reason can be summed up in two trochees: Dana Gioia, the distinguished poet and critic who is the Endowment's new chairman.

Within a matter of months, Mr. Gioia has transformed that moribund institution into a vibrant force for the preservation and transmission of artistic culture. He has cut out the cutting edge and put back the art. Instead of supporting repellent "transgressive" freaks, he has instituted an important new program to bring Shakespeare to communities across America. And by Shakespeare I mean Shakespeare, not some PoMo rendition that portrays Hamlet in drag or sets A Midsummer Night's Dream in a concentration camp. (Check the website www.shakespeareinamericancommunities.org for more information.)

And Orrin Judd wrote in December:

The New Deal stood for the proposition that the government will take on the responsibility of providing for your every need. President Bush--though the process actually began with the Republican Congresses paradigm-shifting Welfare reform--is moving the country in a radically different direction, towards a system where the individual will resume the responsible, to the maximum degree feasible, of providing for his own social services--health care, unemployment insurance, education, mortgage, retirement, etc. (The operating title for this new system is apparently the "Ownership Society", ownership evoking yesterday's bit of de Tocqueville.) Now, conservatives, not known for their intellects, are terribly confused about all this, because the Welfare State which took 70 years to build wasn't reconstructed yesterday, which is apparently their test of someone's bona fides.

However, the Ted Kennedy's and Hillary Clinton's, far smarter and more sensitive to even tiny shifts in the zeitgeist than we Neanderthals, are well aware of what's going on. Mr. Kennedy actually figured it out after helping pass the wolf in sheep's clothing that is the No Child Left Behind Act. Nothing better illustrates the lag in Conservatives' comprehension than their continued belief that the NCLBA represented a Republican defeat. More recently, the Medicare reform--which included means-testing, MSA's and a series of other measures that Republicans have been pushing futiley for a quarter century--has been greeted as some kind of secret socialist coup by the Right, but Democrats fought it because they recognize that little reforms and the executive rule-making powers have a tendency to lead to sweeping change over time. And, at this point, time is on the GOP's side--whether they recognize it or not.

This isn't my vision of government--but then, I don't have to get elected, either. And as Rauch wrote:

"The Republican Party in 1994 tested a proposition," says a White House aide: "that people wanted government to be radically reduced. And they found out that people didn't want government to be radically reduced." Bush saw this, and he saw that the anti-government conservatism of Goldwater and Reagan had reached a dead end; and if there is a single characteristic that distinguishes Bush, it is his willingness to meet a dead end with a bulldozer. In 2002, "he really did set out to have the Republican Party stand for something different," says Michael Gerson, who signed on with Bush in 1999 and is now his chief speechwriter.

Bush's view, expressed in his book and in the 2000 campaign, is that government curtails freedom not by being large or active but by making choices that should be left to the people. Without freedom of choice, people feel no responsibility, and Bush insists again and again, as he put it in the book: "I want to usher in a responsibility era."

Big government without statism? With a minimum of top-down controls? Doesn't seem possible to me, and it's not the government model I personally want, but then I don't have to get elected, either.

UPDATE: Scott Ott "looks" at the first play those new bucks will be funding at the NEA.

NOT LIBERAL, NOT LEFTIST, merely "burgeoning": Judy Muller of ABC News takes a biased look at Moveon.org, the folks who brought you the Bush=Hitler commercials.

SURE, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL has always been a great read when it comes to improving your bottomline. In the past, it was all about stocks, bonds and mutual funds.

Today, it's illustrating a different kind of way of making money: in the betting pool for Super Bowl XXXVIII.

ON THE BOTOX BEAT: Lloyd Grove is smoothly at the forehead of politics.

ROGER L. SIMON connects the dots.

The Heaven's Gate/Wes Clark connection, as discovered by John Cole.

WHAT WOULD HARRY LIME THINK? James D. Zirin of The Washington Times writes that "Switzerland, the landlocked country that invented the cuckoo clock and the secret numbered bank account, has overcome its strong commitment to neutrality to get into the same sandbox with the other international players on counterterrorism". Zirin adds:

The Swiss were not always so quick to crack down on international terror. A U.N. report issued last month criticized Switzerland for failing to interdict support for Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network and the Afghan Taliban. The report alleged Switzerland was a pipeline for terrorist arms and money. Evidence had linked bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to Swiss bank accounts in the 1990s. Mohamed Atta and another of the September 11, 2001, terrorists briefly passed through Switzerland. It is no secret al Qaeda operatives have used Swiss cell phone numbers to communicate.

The news is that the Swiss, who were ever so neutral about Adolf Hitler, whom they eagerly provided with a depository for Nazi plunder, are not neutral about the terrorist threat. They appear now to recognize their obligation to the world community to take strong counterterrorist action.

On the other hand, Zirin says--and this is no surprise--don't hold your breath when it comes to Saudi Arabia doing anything about terrorists.

A FRIENDLY DRINK in a time of war: Why yes, I have experienced variations of this conversation a few times myself.

The online version of it, which sadly does not involve cocktails--at least not face to face--goes something like the "debate" posted on Roger Simon's site by Daniel, the third commenter from the top.

IF YOU'VE SENT ME AN EMAIL and I haven't responded, because of all of the viruses "in the air", I've been fairly agressively deleting stuff with attachments from people I don't know via my Web host, before it hits Outlook. So there's a chance one or two replies that were legit emails got nuked as well.

UPDATE: Joanne Jacobs is having a similar experience.

SHARPTON FINED BY FEC: Al Sharpton's campaign is being fined $5,500 for violating federal election laws by the Federal Election Commission. I wonder if anyone will interview Steve Pagones for his thoughts on this.

I haven't seen Cold Mountain, a revisionist (to say the least) Civil War film, but Blixa's detailed review of the film (scroll down to bottom of the page), and its themes, speaks volumes about how out of touch Hollywood is with big chunks of its audience:

There is some lip service paid, in some of the dialogue, to some bizarre notion that Inman, seemingly for the sole reason that because he has fought in a (gasp) war, is now "not good enough" for Nicole Kidman's angelically beautiful and newly-independent Ada, apparently unlike before, when he mostly "worked wood". (A preacher's daughter, she now co-runs the farm, having been quickly taught farming by Bridget Jones - or something.) He's gone off and killed people and fired guns doin' it. He's tainted, you see. Why, the things he has done! It's almost like he's a man or something.

This should be a tipoff. It jarred me out of the film entirely. Because in context that makes no sense whatsoever. This is a thought which, historically, would not have even come to the mind of an Ada, let alone an Inman. If anything, a real historical Ada may have rejected an Inman - or, rather, an Inman would have been ashamed to call upon her in the first place - because he was a deserter - but not "because he killed". Please! He was a soldier, and in joining the war, he did no more and no less what any other able-bodied man of his time and station would have felt honor-bound to do.

I think lots of modern writers simply don't know how to construct a story in which the female hero ends up with a man who has done some, shall we say, historically-"manly" things. Such as killing in a war, for example. We can't quite wrap our minds around the idea that anything so base as fighting in a war could once have been considered honorable. What is "honor" anyway?

And it's true, the prospect of a movie ending with Nicole Kidman settling down and nesting with a man who has (gasp) killed other men - a man with blood on his hands, on the wrong side of the Civil War to boot - might well be too confusing to modern audiences. Shocking, even. Jude Law was "tainted" - not necessarily by historical standards, but in the eyes of the likely audience for both the book and the film. Better to just get rid of him. His continued presence in the story would be inconvenient, out of place, causing us discomfort.

What's curious is that Hollywood films that don't completely PC-ify war and honor often do extremely well at the box office, such as Mel Gibson's The Patriot, and We Were Soldiers, Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down, and recent hits The Two Towers and Master and Commander.

Cold Mountain was directed by Anthony Minghella, whose biography page on the Internet Movie Database quotes as saying, "The only lesson to extract from any civil war is that it's pointless and futile and ugly, and that there is nothing glamorous or heroic about it. There are heroes, but the causes are never heroic."

Gee, I guess freeing the slaves doesn't count as heroic in Mr. Minghella's eyes.

(Via Stephen Green.)

UPDATE: For a more favorable review of Cold Mountain, check out Mackubin Thomas Owens in National Review Online.

I ran out to pick up the mail at my office a little while ago, and one the way back, while flipping stations on the car radio, came across the Sean Hannity Show. Hannity played the audio tape of Betty Ann Ong, the stewardess on American Airlines Flight #11, who called in to request help--any help--after terrorists maced the passengers in first class, stabbed the crew in the galley, and barricaded themselves in the cockpit of the plane, which they eventually crashed into the World Trade Center.

According to this Fox News article:

The Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States heard portions of her 23-minute conversation with the American Airlines operations center on the second of its two-day hearing Tuesday.

Nydia Gonzalez, who was on duty at the operations center that morning, told the panel how she received Ong's call at about 8:20 a.m.

"Several media accounts of what occurred on Flight 11 claimed that Betty was 'hysterical with fear,' 'shrieking' and 'gasping for air,' she said. "Those accounts were wrong."

"In a very calm, professional and poised demeanor, Betty Ong relayed to us detailed information of the events unfolding on Flight 11," Gonzalez added. "I honestly believe after my conversation with Betty that the 81 passengers and new crew members on Flight 11 had no idea of the fate they were to encounter that day."

In the tape played before the commission, Ong tells the operations center her flight and seat number and describes the scene on board.

"We can't even get into the cockpit. We don't know who's there," Ong says, before the call ends in a dial tone.

If I find, or someone emails me a link to a Real Audio or Windows Media file of Ong's conversation, I'd very much like to link to it. Ong really had ice water in her veins to be that cool under enormous--and ultimately fatal--pressure. While history may record that she was unable to get help in time, she created a vital document of the last seconds of Flight #11.

Listening to that tape left me feeling like I punched in the gut. But Jonah's right: This stuff needs to be played over and over again. We shouldn't forget the horror--and the evil men that caused it.

UPDATE: Orrin Judd writes:

It's the damndest thing, we're far enough removed from the events of that day that we can refer to 9-11 without tapping every time into the memories that are stored away somewhere in our viscera. But then you hear something or see something or read something--as happened to Brother Driscoll--and it does indeed hit you like a physical assault. What may be most interesting about the whole phenomena is that it seems to demonstrate that we may be almost too decent a people. Rare, maybe even unique, is the culture that would consciously choose to put away the most inflammatory images, sounds, and stories of that day, even as it pursues the perpetrators and wars with their comrades in terror.

Imagine the effect, even the cheap effect, to which such remembrance could be put. Recent criticism of the President--particularly in the wake of the Paul O'Neill book--has dwelt on the notion that 9-11 merely provided a convenient excuse for him to act out some kind of psychodrama whereby he got to settle his father's score with Saddam and introduce fascist rule under cover of the Patriot Act. How about an address to the nation where he just plays the tape of the two planes crashing into the WTC and then says: "History may one day show that Saddam Hussein was less of a threat than we thought he was, but what we did we did because this must never happen again." Whether something like that would work or might instead backfire doesn't even matter, because the fact is it is somehow not in the American grain to use the tragedy in that way. It's almost as if we share some kind of collective intuition about just how terrible--though not necessarily unjustified--are the things we might do if we were to exploit the darker demons of our nature.

But does that make sense? Can an entire people know (and fear) themselves at such a level? Or is there some other explanation for the way in which the central event in our recent history has been carefully stored away, only to be encountered in almost accidental fashion?

Given that the Republican National Convention will be in New York in late August, I'd like to think this is one central event that will be relived. But who knows?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Kevin Hisel sent me a link to audio of Betty Ong's conversation.

ONE MORE UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan looks at a recent article by Joshua Micah Marshall in The New Yorker and writes:

For the Clintonites, 9/11 didn't really happen. Everything the Bush administration has tried to do in foreign policy is perverse, neocon imperialism - despite the fact that Bush ran as less interventionist than Al Gore in 2000. It doesn't seem to have occurred to them that this administration's hard line against terror-sponsoring regimes and those developing WMDs was not some ideological plot - but a reaction to events.

And it's probably easier to move images of an event that cause so much cognitive dissonance in your worldview that it "didn't really happen" (to use Sullivan phrase) to the videotape archive, rather than beaming out to an audience who care about them far more than you do.

QUICK UPDATE (1/30/04): Bryan S. has some thoughts, and a link to a tape of her phone call.

BBC CHAIRMAN RESIGNS: Andrew Sullivan's response? "Yay!"

Tough to argue with him.

FOOTBALL GREAT Elroy "Crazy Legs'' Hirsch, an NFL Hall of Famer and later the athletic director at the University of Wisconsin, died today, at age 80.

CHUTZPAH: Did John Kerry, husband of Teresa Heinz, widowed heir to the Heinz Ketchup fortune, really say he was going to take a stand against "the economy of special privilege"?

Really?! Seriously? Get out of here!

PAGING MR. ROVE...PAGING MR. KARL ROVE: John Hawkins has some advice on how Bush can shore up support among conservatives.

ROE VERSUS WADE VERSUS DEAN, crackpot Clark quotes, and John Kerry on global warming/cooling/warming. All over at James Taranto's Best of the Web Today...today.

SWAN SONG: This coming season will be Jerry Rice's last.

CAN YOU SAY "BAKED"? I knew that you could.

THERE'S NO MEDIA BIAS WHATSOEVER. And like Monty Python, when I say there is none, I do mean that there is a certain amount:

ABC News correspondent John Stossel, the co-anchor of 20/20, said most mainstream journalists, including those at his network, are leftists who view conservatives as "selfish and cruel" for embracing capitalism.

Stossel was in the nation's capital Tuesday to promote his new book, "Give Me a Break," at the libertarian Cato Institute. Although he praised ABC News for letting him present free-market viewpoints on 20/20, he criticized his peers for their hostility toward those ideas.

"Where I live in Manhattan and where I work at ABC, people say conservative the way people say child molester," he said. "[Conservative] is the worst thing for a reporter to be called. And I'm a little puzzled why they call me a conservative."

Stossel said, for instance, that he has libertarian views when it comes to drug use, prostitution, homosexuality and flag burning. Regardless, liberal media watchdogs like Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting have attacked him for aligning with conservatives.

Before adopting a skeptical view of the government and public-interest groups, Stossel was an enterprising consumer reporter. He won 18 Emmys while exposing shady business practices. But since realizing that more regulation might not be the answer to the world's problems, Stossel said he has observed changes, and he has only won one Emmy in that time.

Meanwhile, John Podheretz looks at how that sort of groupthink has affected the coverage of the Democratic primary:

The results last night in New Hampshire represent a humiliating disaster for the mainstream media. The political reporters and editors who have been judging this race for a year have made utter fools of themselves.

Nobody foresaw John Kerry's huge victory in Iowa. It was suggested that Kerry was doing better in the weeks before the caucuses, but no reporter even imagined Kerry might pull 38 percent of the caucus-goers there. The press failed just as miserably in New Hampshire - but this time by overestimating and overrating John Edwards.

And Colby Cosh finds an interesting contrast between Dennis Miller and Robert Redford.

ONCE A WONDER, The Houston Astrodome seems smaller now.

HE HATE ME: Remember the XFL? The renegade pro-football league who hired Jesse Ventura to broadcast their games? The XFL gave their players the option of a slogan or nickname on the backs of their jerseys, rather than their last name.

"He Hate Me" was on the jersey of Rod Smart who played for the Las Vegas Outlaws. His unusual nom de gridiron gave him his 15 minutes of fame.

Today, Smart is a kick returner and backup running back for the Carolina Panthers. He Hate Me (minus the silly name on his jersey) is in the Super Bowl.

THE RAIDERS' NEW COACH: Skip Bayless writes that for a head coach, Norv Turner is a great offensive coordinator:

Norv Turner is not made of the right stuff to be a successful head coach -- especially not one required to regain control of this Raiders locker room. I wince at the thought of the Turner I knew in Dallas thrown into this players-rule war zone. It would be like casting Henry Gibson instead of Mel Gibson in ``Road Warrior.''

* * * Yet I stress that Turner is a rock-solid coordinator capable of calling killer games. As Washington's head coach/coordinator, Turner had no one to blame but himself for betting his future on two high draft picks who failed spectacularly -- quarterback Heath Shuler and receiver Michael Westbrook. But now Turner will have absolutely no input into personnel decisions.

So if he can buffer himself with some ``bad cop'' assistants -- a tough-guy defensive coordinator and an enforcer on the offensive staff -- he has a chance.

Turner inherits a mess in Oakland. It will be interesting--and probably painful at times--to see if he can clean it up.

LEE ATWATER ONCE SAID, "This isn't complicated. When you got 'em by the throat, you take out a damn howitzer and blow their brains out." John Ellis writes that Kerry has 'em by throat. But will he pull the trigger in South Carolina?

DUDE, WHERE'S MY CANDIDATE? I really hope National Review paid Andrew Cline combat rates for spending time with the psychedelic--and odiferous--folks who make up Dennis Kucinich's supporters in New Hampshire.

JACK PARR DIED, at age 85. Parr took over The Tonight Show from Steve Allen in 1957, turned it into a late night talk show, and then handed the ball over to Johnny Carson in 1962. Parr retired completely from TV in 1965 to concentrate on his business ventures.

LIFE IMITATES WOODY ALLEN DEPARTMENT: In 1971's Bananas, Allen, playing a nebbishy New Yorker named Fielding Mellish, joins the Che-like rebels of the fictional Latin American country of San Marcos. To feed the troops, Allen and the rebels stop by a roadside dinner and order 1,000 grilled cheese, 300 tuna and BLT sandwiches, 700 coffees, 500 Cokes, 1,000 7ups, and mayonnaise on the side. After being given the food, Woody's character assumes the role of rebel leader and yells, "Get your money from Vargas, we're the rebels!!!!"

According to Scott Hoffman, the owner of the Brown Bag Deli in West Des Moines, on the 16th of January, Howard Dean's campaign ordered 200 brown bag specials, with turkey, roast beef, ham and veggie sandwiches for a total cost of $963.01:

As he headed out that day, Scott remembered this customer has paid its bills late a couple times before. So he promised delivery this time with one condition, "c.o.d."

He showed up at the customer's downtown office just in time for lunch. The Dean headquarters was utter chaos. But he couldn't find anyone who'd pay him. They said try the other building next door. Same answer next door, try the other building. Scott went back and forth for 20 minutes. Nobody would pay.

He just assumed they would pay in good faith. After all, Dick Gephardt's campaign paid its lunch bills on time. And Howard Dean has thousands of followers in Iowa. Can't one of them give Scott his money?

We tried all day to reach Howard Dean's people-- no comment from them yet. By the way, Scott Hoffman says he considered himself a possible Dean supporter before the incident. He's since changed his mind.

To me, the answer is simple: Hoffman should hire Al Franken to collect his debts.

HEY ANDY, DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THIS ONE? According to John McCaslin, Al Franken would do better as a pro wrestler, rather than as a comedian and peace-loving pacifist:

Former comedian and soon-to-be-launched liberal talk show host Al Franken, author of 'Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right,' reportedly threw a Howard Dean heckler to the ground at a political event in Manchester, N.H., yesterday, breaking the man's eyeglasses in the process.

A witness tells Inside the Beltway that the heckler, a supporter of Lyndon LaRouche, 'would neither shut up or leave' the Palace Theater.

So Mr. Franken, who admits in his book that he needs to lose '40 pounds' from his buttocks, morphed into a bouncer and 'knocked the guy to the ground, breaking his glasses.' "

The ghost of Andy Kaufman appears to be alive and well--and mad as hell.

UPDATE: The New York Post has more details, including the fact Franken grabbed the guy from behind. Jonah Goldberg has some thoughts on how the media would treat this story if it were Rush Limbaugh employing a similar move.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Almost a year ago, another Hollywood peace activist, Tim Robbins, threatened to "hurt" a Washington Post reporter when he published a story that Susan Sarandon's Republican mother didn't condone some of her wackier activities. Aren't there more nuanced ways to deal with threats than violence? Shouldn't we try to get to the root causes of why people disagree with us?

GATEWAY GETS GOOGLED: Next time you search on Gateway, there's a very good chance that Stephen Green's angry letter will be showing up, simply because somebody there didn't realize that a CD that costs forty nine cents to burn and about a buck to ship is a helluva lot cheaper than thousands of people reading very public--and very bad--PR about your company.

PEGGY NOONAN ASKS "Democrats, for the good of the country: Stop Wesley Clark!"

Gen. Clark gives off the vibrations of a man who has no real beliefs save one: Wes Clark should be president. The rest--the actual meaning of his candidacy--he seems to be making up as he goes along. It seems a candidacy void of purpose beyond meeting the candidate's hunger. He is passionately for the war until he announces for the Democratic nomination facing an antiwar base, at which point he becomes passionately antiwar. He thanks God that George Bush and his aides are in the White House, then he says they're the worst leaders ever. Anyone can change his mind; but this is not a change, it's a swerve, and without a convincing rationale. Last week, Brit Hume asked Gen. Clark when it was that he'd "first noticed" that he--Gen. Clark--was a Democrat. There was laughter, but that was a nice big juicy softball. Gen. Clark flailed and fumbled. Later he blamed Mr. Hume for being a Republican agent.

When you are making it up along the way you make mistakes that might, politely, be called tonal. It is not terrible that he was introduced the other day in New Hampshire by a bilious activist, Michael Moore, who called the president a "deserter." Gen. Clark didn't address the charge when he took the stage. He could have been distracted, and it certainly would have been ungracious to say, "Thanks for that introduction, which I must disavow because it suggests a grassy knoll extremism with which I cannot associate myself." But in the days afterward Gen. Clark was repeatedly questioned about Mr. Moore's charge. He dug the hole deeper by leaving open the possibility that it was true.

Maybe the Democrats are listening to Noonan. Monday's USA Today reported, "Clark's Democratic presidential bid could be in serious trouble."

"I'LL BET THEY'RE ASLEEP IN NEW YORK", Bogie said to Dooley Wilson in Casablanca. It's certainly true on Broadway, where, like Hollywood, it's September 10th again, and they apparently don't want your money if you're a conservative, according to James Panero.

IF YOUR NORTON A/V PROGRAM HAS BEEN GOING CRAZY, you probably already know about the latest e-mail worm, called "Mydoom" or "Novarg" by antivirus companies.

Because of Outlook's previous vulnerability to the program, if you can access your email online, rather than pulling it down with Outlook, I'd try to pre-screen as much of it as possible and delete anything with an attachment from someone you don't recognize--maybe even from people you do recognize.

And obviously, running updates from your antivirus program's provider and from Microsoft is probably a wise move as well.

DENNIS MILLER'S NEW CNBC SHOW: Nina and I tuned in for Dennis Miller's debut tonight. Miller got off some great lines, but the show's format seemed to work against him. The monkey at the beginning--what was that all about? Unlike Saturday Night Live or his HBO show, Miller only had the crew on the set to laugh at his riffs, which seemed to make many of those lines fall flat. In a sense, no laughter is far better than a handful of nervous chuckles from a crew who's probably preoccupied with moving cameras, mics and keeping an eye on the Teleprompter. Miller mentioned something about going for a Tom Snyder Tomorrow show atmosphere, but Snyder's show was a much more intimate affair, designed to allow the post-Tonight Show audience to wind down in the wee hours. Miller's rants and cornucopia of pop culture references need more ummph behind him to nudge the guy in his living room in the ribs and tell him when to laugh.

On the plus side, Gov. Schwarzenegger was a can't-miss choice to launch the show. Miller's argument with an offscreen Roger Ailes was amusing (You owe me $12,000, Roger. Let's split the difference each send $6,000 to charity, OK?), and a nice way to tweak Fox News, where Miller stopped by for a cup of coffee before landing the CNBC gig.

And it's more than a little surprising to see Miller interviewing David Horowitz and David Frum. None of these guys (well, maybe, possibly Frum) are your father's conservative. Sandwiched between the two was Naomi Wolfe, Ms. Earthtones herself, who seemed to offer little more than Copperhead Conjunctions: "Sure Saddam's bad. But..." "I'm happy to see him gone. But..." Frum and Horowitz seemed to pull their counterpunches, but such is the nature of television. Either people throw chairs (ala Morton Downey or Joe Pine, who was name dropped by Miller early in the broadcast), or they throw softballs. Par for the course.

Like most new TV shows, I'm sure Miller's gig is a work in progress, and the rough edges will get smoothed out--or it won't stick around all that long. And it will be interesting to see if he becomes a hip alternative to Bill O'Reilly. Their politics are probably fairly similar, so it's more a matter of tone. There's obviously a marketplace of hardcore news junkies who are conservative to some degree. Who will they choose--happy-go-lucky hipster Miller, or tough-as-nails O'Reilly?

BRASS IN POCKET: Orrin Judd writes, "One further reason to use nuclear weapons on North Korea is that we could trigger just enough of a nuclear winter to counteract global warming".

Heh. Of course, they might also counteract the coming global cooling, as well.

NORV GETS THE NOD: Norv Turner, the former head coach of the Washington Redskins, and offensive coordinator of the Dallas Cowboys for their first two Super Bowls under Jerry Jones' ownership, is apparently the next head coach of the Oakland Raiders.

For the moment.

Sean Payton, the Cowboys' current offensive coordinator, had the gig last week, but turned the Raiders down. Skip Bayless writes that Payton may have hurt his long term career by doing so. "If you've just turned 40 and have the opportunity to coach the Raiders, you do it for room, board and tuition", Bayless opines, "You do, that is, if you're tough and smart. Your dream job will probably be your next one. You'll make your big money later".

Turner, fired by Dan Snyder during Snyder's first (incredibly rocky) year of ownership, is a decent head coach but a very good offensive strategist. Let's see if he can bring some discipline to the Raiders, after the mess that cost Bill Callahan his job.

PAGING MARSHALL McCLUHAN: Channeling the author of the '60s sociological classic, The Medium Is The Message, Suzanne Fields notes that:

Television is a "cool" medium, and politicians sometimes learn the hard way that it's unkind to overwrought emotions. The small screen distorts big passions, whether in a narrative drama or a stump speech. Great playwrights long ago learned that pity and fear are best evoked on a stage with an audience. Exuberant stump speeches can galvanize the troops with passionate persuasion, but such rhetoric "resonates" through a glass (screen) darkly.

Those who watched Howard Dean's "concession" speech on caucus night in Iowa nearly all agreed with Jay Leno's verdict that the governor looked like "Mr. Rogers with Rabies." Mara Liasson, the Fox News commentator who was in the room in Des Moines, was one observer who disagreed. She thought he was acting like a man refusing to accept defeat, rallying his disappointed troops, urging them on to New Hampshire.

Interpretations of candidate television performances have been grist for morning-after conversations in the five decades since the video camera became the dominating factor in presidential campaigns. This was first and famously discovered after the first Nixon-Kennedy debate in 1960, when nearly everyone who listened to the radio broadcast thought Richard Nixon had won: He had mastered the material and presented his views firmly, concisely, authoritatively. But John F. Kennedy, with big hair and no five-o'-clock shadow, had movie-star looks. The eye of the beholder trumped the ear of the listener.

Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first candidate, in 1952, to recognize the importance of the remorseless eye of the camera. He hired Robert Montgomery, the movie and television star, to help cast a television personality for him. Ike was ridiculed for it at the time, but he was prescient before he was president. He served two popular terms.

The dictates of television also helps to explain Charles Paul Fruend's theory (see below) about the increasing importance of candidates to tell a good story.

Incidentally, even though he died in 1980, back in early 2002, shortly before this blog went live, we interviewed Dr. McLuhan ourselves, and came away fascinated by his thoughts on not just television--but Weblogs as well.

TEMPORARILY TRADING IN HIS ABSOLUT FOR ROBITUSSIN, Stephen Green writes that for John Edwards, "My gut tells me the nomination is his, if he doesn't screw it up...Edwards is Clinton without the bimbo eruptions."

UPDATE: Maybe Robert Novak has taken a few nips from Steve's Robitussin bottle. Novak ponders "whether the magic found by Sen. John Edwards in Midwestern prairies could be transported across the country. The process has been slow and uncertain, but the answer still could be 'yes'.

IS THE PERSONAL POLITICAL when it comes to presidential campaigns? Charles Paul Freund of Reason argues that increasingly, having a good back story works better for presidential candidates than an issue-driven campaign:

In Iowa, candidates with a good story to tell did much better than candidates without one. In the case of Sen. John Edwards, who came in second in Iowa, an effective personal story turned out to be more valuable than the vaunted "organization" that the mainstream press kept citing as a determining ingredient for Iowa success. Edwards didn't have much organization at all. What he had was a winning and empathetic presence and a brilliant stump speech, one that combined his populist politics with his own life narrative of (according to him) struggle against wealth and privilege. It worked; Edwards is a contender for a top-spot in New Hampshire, too.

Conversely, candidates who sought to limit their personal exposure paid for it. That would be Vermont's former Gov. Howard Dean, who came in third in Iowa despite the fact that the gatekeeper press covered him as though he had already won the state. Dean based his early campaign heavily (if not exclusively) on issues, especially his opposition to the Iraq war, and protected—to a remarkable degree—his and his family's privacy from media inquiry. There was very little in the way of character construction and less in the way of storytelling in his campaign, and the "backstage" story was off limits entirely. In their place, he offered high-profile endorsements, though in an age of political intimacy, endorsements don't mean very much. Dean's is a campaign that understood one technological revolution—the Internet, and its organizational opportunities—extremely well, while it ignored the demands of the remainder of the technological environment.

In the end, Freund adds:

Dean could not insulate himself from coverage that has become nearly ubiquitous, and the character that emerged from footage of his campaign behavior apparently struck people as intemperate, thin-skinned, arrogant, and abrasive. Before it was over, one could add "crazy" to that list as well.

A random thought: did the ponytail guy at one of the debates in '92, and Bill Clinton's squishy reaction to him foreshadow this trend in presidential campaigns?

ROCKIN' RODNEY HARRISON: Don Banks of Sports Illustrated writes that "It wasn't exactly the shot heard 'round the world, but the New England Patriots' second Super Bowl run in three years started with a nasty little collision in late July that still resonates to this day".

Well, so much for Howard Dean being anesthetized by Dr. Judy:

"You can say that it's great that Saddam is gone and I'm sure that a lot of Iraqis feel it is great that Saddam is gone," said the former Vermont governor, an unflinching critic of the war against Iraq. "But a lot of them gave their lives. And their living standard is a whole lot worse now than it was before."

The standard of dying is most assuredly improved, however. But Dean would rather have had Saddam remain in power and free to throw people feet first into the plastic shredder.

Not surprising, is it?

As James Lileks wrote on September 11th of last year:

Two years later I take a certain grim comfort in some people’s disinterest in the war; if you’d told me two years ago that people would be piling on the President and bitching about slow progress in Iraq, I would have known in a second that the nation hadn’t suffered another attack. When the precise location of Madonna’s tongue is big news, you can bet the hospitals aren’t full of smallpox victims. Of course some people are impatient with those who still recall the shock of 9/11; the same people were crowding the message boards of internet sites on the afternoon of the attacks, eager to blame everyone but the hijackers. They hate this nation. In their hearts, they hate humanity. They would rather cheer the perfect devils than come to the aid of a compromised angel. They can talk for hours about how wrong it was to kill babies, busboys, businessmen, receptionists, janitors, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers - and then they lean towards you, eyes wide, and they say the fatal word:

But.

And then you realize that the eulogy is just a preface. All that concern for the dead is nothing more than the knuckle-cracking of an organist who’s going to play an E minor chord until we all agree we had it coming.

I’ve no doubt that if Seattle or Boston or Manhattan goes up in a bright white flash there will be those who blame it all on Bush. We squandered the world’s good will. We threw away the opportunity to atone, and lashed out. Really? You want to see lashing out? Imagine Kabul and Mecca and Baghdad and Tehran on 9/14 crowned with mushroom clouds: that’s lashing out. Imagine the President in the National Cathedral castigating Islam instead of sitting next to an Imam who's giving a homily. Mosques burned, oil fields occupied, smart bombs slamming into Syrian palaces. We could have gone full Roman on anyone we wanted, but we didn’t. And we won’t.

Which is why this war will be long.

At time, Lawrence F. Kaplan wrote: "are you a September 10th American, or a September 11th American?"

With the exception of Joe Lieberman, who doesn't stand much of a chance of getting the nomination, the entire roster of Democratic presidential candidates are September 10th Americans. To a man.

UPDATE: Regarding the standard of living in Iraq, Tim Blair writes, "A lot more of them seem to be actually living, however. It’s difficult to measure the living standard of people in mass graves".

QUEER EYE FOR THE BLOG GUYS: Samizdata gets a sophisticated--one might say metrosexual--makeover.

LADY KILLERS: Mona Charen writes, "Women are beginning to sign on for jihad in significant numbers, and radical Islamists are deciding that while women may not show their faces in public, they may explode their bodies in order to kill". It's an amazing bit of Orwellian doublethink by the jihadis--Muslim women normally must keep their faces and bodies covered up, but they can expose them via concentrated blasts of trinitrotoluene. (O'Brien would be proud.)

Charen adds that it's ideas that cause suicide bombers, not poverty:

News events are filtered through a press in the Islamic world that is just staggeringly false and propagandistic. Conflicts in Bosnia, Chechnya, Kashmir, Iraq and Israel are presented as evidence of a worldwide anti-Muslim conspiracy. The most vile and idiotic slanders against Jews and Americans are presented as fact. It is the ideas in men's minds -- mad or fantastic though they may be -- that move the world. And it is the battle of ideas that we must fight with every bit as much vigor as we do that on land, sea and air.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: I'd like to think, that much as Imperial Japan's creation of Kamikaze squads signaled the beginning of their end, and the drafting of old men and teenagers into Hitler's Volksturm the collapse of the Third Reich, the enlistment of women as suicide bombers is also a sign of militant Islam's coming collapse. But it's probably too soon to be that conclusive. And Kamikaze pilots unleashed plenty of destruction before the Japanese were vanquished in 1945.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Charles Johnson links to an Arab News article titled (and no, we're not making this up, as Dave Barry would say), "Women Driving Cars Is a Sinful Thing".

But women blowing them up is just honky-dory. Suuuure it is.

TWENTY, TWENTY, TWENTY FOUR HOURS TO GO, I WANNA BE SEDATED: Mark Steyn writes that "ever since last Monday's audition for 'An American Werewolf In Des Moines'", Howard Dean has been "in sleep mode":

''What I'm not is a rock star,'' he told Diane Sawyer, as she struggled to stay awake. No, indeed. He's turned into Perry Como. Not Perry Como sitting in a patterned sweater in a rocking chair singing ''Sleepy Time Gal.'' But Perry Como after some shortsighted elephant hunter has fired an extra-strength tranquilizer dart into his butt. Instead of impassioned pleas about taking back the country so everyone has the right to live the American Scream, er, Dream, he talked in a voice so evenly modulated that Diane Sawyer kept dropping in tape of the Howlin' Howard roar every five minutes like Baron von Frankenstein frantically clamping the electrodes to the monster and getting no response. Sitting next to the Vermonster, for the first time ever on TV, was his wife, Dr. Judith Steinberg. After being absent for months, all of a sudden she can't leave his side, just in case his medication wears off.

Steyn adds, "Not even Al Gore, in his bewildering array of alternative identities, managed to be both crazy and comatose in the same week".

UPDATE: Speaking of Dr. Steinberg, Paul Jacob quips, "If a Democrat ends up being the next president of the United States, please let it be Judy Dean".

THE SOFT BIGOTRY OF LOW EXPECTATIONS: Joanne Jacobs writes:

This is mind-boggling. Writing in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Marquis Harris, a black college graduate with excellent credentials, says he was rejected for a high school teaching job for being too articulate.

Be sure to read Harris' rejection letter. Yes, God forbid we have articulate teachers in our classrooms. Students might actually...learn. And become...articulate themselves.

No, that's far, far too much to ask of them. Think (as that cliche of the mid-'90s went) of the children.

"DO AMERICANS HATE ARABS?" Is (a paraphrase of) a question asked by one of Steven Den Beste's readers, an Arab-American himself, working in Syria. Den Beste replies:

For most of us, that is exactly what we like about ourselves as a nation and a people. It is that diversity, and that tolerance of diversity, which makes America different from any other nation. It is that diversity, and that tolerance of diversity, which we value in ourselves. It's what we call "the melting pot".

* * * The Arabs who think America hates Arabs should consider what their own governments would do to Israel if they had one thousandth of the nuclear arsenal that the US has, and then compare that to what the US has actually done. Do our actions really make sense as an expression of hatred, given what else we could have done instead?

Exactly.

IS MULTICULTURALISM DESTROYING HOLLAND? Linking to an article in The Daily Telegraph, Andrew Stuttaford has some thoughts.

BRITISH RESTAURATEUR MIGHT SUE CRITIC: Granted, the Sunday Telegraph's reviewer is over the top:

It was, both parties will submit, not quite a glowing review. Indeed, phrases such as "the eighth circle of hell", "among the very worst restaurants in Christendom" and "meals of crescendoing monstrosity" may have conveyed the impression that Matthew Norman, the prize-winning restaurant critic of The Sunday Telegraph Magazine, was not entirely enamoured with the food on offer at Shepherds in Westminster, central London.

But it is a British restaurant, which means that the odds are that he's got a 50/50 shot at being right.

All of which ties in with my unified theory of Great Britain's pre-World War II expansionist policies: Britain had to establish colonies in places like India, Hong Kong, and Jamaica--if only to get decent take out.

(Group Captain Mandrake should be along any moment now to tell you just how sublime England's cuisine is.)

UPDATE: There he is!

WAS IT OVER WHEN THE GERMANS BOMBED PEARL HARBOR?! The Delta House/Iranian Parliament and Harry Truman/Truman Capote connections explored by the Brothers Judd.

Glenn Reynolds links to a photo of Josh Marshall in action in Iowa, and suggests a grooming tip. I'd also recommend that Josh ditch the hat. The only guys who can pull off a backwards baseball cap are MLB catchers, rap stars, SWAT snipers and 12 year old kids, and last time I checked, Josh was none of the above.

I was invited to dinner Saturday night at Piatti's, a somewhat upscale restaurant in Palo Alto, which serves a sort of fusion of Italian and California Cuisine. I knew I'd be one of the few guys wearing a dark suit and tie there, but I'm always surprised at just how shabby people dress for a Saturday dinner out in one of Northern California's richest suburbs. Pony-tailed middle-aged men wearing leather jackets, cheap collarless shirts, sweats, and lots of other items that Tom Wolfe would probably describe as prole gear were the order of the night.

In The Substance of Style, Virginia Postrel argues that America's aesthetics have never been better. And in terms of design--cars, buildings, appliances, household goods, etc., I agree. But somehow, after the sleek 1980s, men reverted back to dressing like the worst of '60s and '70s.

And yet, ironically, this nation has to spend more per capita for clothes than any other on the planet. And money isn't the issue--An hour and a half drive away from Palo Alto is the Gilroy Outlet Mall, where names such as Ralph Lauren, Brooks Brothers, Hugo Boss, Perry Ellis, and many, many others sell extremely nice clothes at deeply discounted prices. And there are certainly plenty of books on the subject as well. Not to mention wives who are probably sick of their men looking like their gardeners.

It just seems odd to see men who own imported European cars that cost somewhere in the vicinity of $52,391, and living on some of the most expensive real estate on the planet to be dressing worse than their gardener or mechanic probably does when he goes out on the town.

Update: In July of 2004, I spun this post into an extended essay in The New Partisan.

WELL, I'M GLAD we cleared that one up!

BIASED ENVIRONMENTAL REPORTING IN ACTION: Nick Gillespie of Reason links to this Cincinnati Enquirer story and notes that the real news (stricter EPA analysis) is buried so as to write a scare tactic first paragraph.

Because let's face it--a tougher EPA under President Bush just doesn't fit the meme, right?

THE SECOND WAVE OF E-TAILERS: Michael Jennings of Samizdata writes that when it comes to the next generation of e-businesses, Britain leads the world.

Colonial pride forces me to say I'm not sure if I agree with that (although apparently, The Economist does), but Jennings does have some interesting thoughts on the subject.

NEW REVIEW: I have a review of The Jaz-Mobi Project's CD online at Blogcritics. It's very eclectic stuff.

THE ONCE LOST MARS ROVER has been found. Scott Ott has the "details".

HELMUT NEWTON, 83, KILLED IN AUTO ACCIDENT: Curious as to why AP decided to mention that the celebrity photographer was Jewish in his obit.

MMMM....RIBS: Orrin Judd quotes from the "Remarks by the President to the Press Pool", live from the Nothin' Fancy Cafe, Roswell, New Mexico. The title sort of reminds me of the Monty Python "Live from the Grill-O-Mat Snack Bar" episode, and the whole thing reads just as surrealistic.

Like President Reagan's episodes with Sam Donaldson, Bush really loves making these guys look like stuffed shirts, doesn't he?

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh compares the president's exchange (which, as Orrin notes, the White House had the chutzpah to upload onto their site) to a can of New Shimmer.

BOB KEESHAN DEAD AT 76: Keeshan played the gentle Capt. Kangaroo for decades on TV--I grew up watching him, and you probably did too.

Philadelphia television in the early 1970s also had the Captain's counterpart from a different branch of the service: Capt. Noah, as well as Captain Kirk, who began his endless reruns on Channel 17 in 1970.

Good rank to reach if you wanted to be on TV!

PRESCIENT: Florence King demolishes Hillary's mystique--almost 12 years ago.

Is it due for a comeback? And if so, what would Mies van der Rohe think about today's practitioners?

CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER: National Review's Corner-ites are praising Peter Jennings for his handling of tonight's Democratic primary debate in New Hampshire.

Start here, and then scroll up.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan also praises Jennings' performance as debate moderator.

STARBUCKS A GO-GO: For such a commercial success, Starbucks really is balanced between the worst of all possible worlds when it comes to the anti-global crowd. The coffeehouse chain had its birth in the 1970s in Seattle (the site of numerous recent anti-global riots), and it has just opened its first branch in Paris, where the anti-global crowd occasionally firebombs American chains like McDonald's.

JUST RECEIVED A REVIEW COPY OF Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life, a handsome coffee table book due out in April (you can pre-order now on Amazon of course). Watch for my review on Blogcritics soon.

I'm way behind on material I need to review for Blogcritics, but I'll also have a review of Steve Thomas' Jaz-Mobi Project CD in the not-too-distant future. Very interesting stuff--sort of John McLaughlin and Pat Metheny-style jazz guitar meets space-age digital multitrack recording technology.

THE TIMES, THEY ARE A'CHANGIN': After his "I want to kiss you" snafu with Suzi Kolber on ESPN's Saturday Night Football back in December, Broadway Joe Namath is undergoing counseling for alcohol abuse.

UPDATE: Speaking of which, "Prosecutors say 49ers' Garcia had blood alcohol level nearly three times legal limit".

JUST UPDATED THE ESSAYS PAGE OF THE SITE: Both Tech Central Station and Blogcritics now have automatically updating pages which list all of an author's work for each site, so I'm now linking to them, rather trying to keep my list up to date. And I added links to my newsletters for Electronic House magazine.

The Articles page is really out of date, but that's going to be a much bigger job to make current.

Hey, I write a lot of stuff!

IS DVD-A DOA? Eric Olsen and I, and some of the readers of Blogcritics have some thoughts. And don't forget to check out my Electronic House newsletter on the topic.

THE ATLASPHERE HAS SOME INTERESTING QUOTES by Camille Paglia on Ayn Rand.

CRISIS MANAGEMENT: Lee Harris's latest column in Tech Central Station had these thoughts about the primaries and Dean:

This last week, unfortunately for his electoral prospects, Howard Dean revealed the stuff that he was made up and did so in a matter of minutes; and -- fairly or unfairly -- many of those who watched his performance found themselves convinced that they now knew what Governor Dean would act like in a moment of genuine national crisis, and were not assured by the insight that had been inadvertently given them.

We should keep this in mind whenever we reflect on the seemingly irrational method by which we as a people select the man to fill the most important office in the world. For the real purpose behind the superficially bizarre rituals of an American election -- caucuses, primaries, televised debates, concession speeches -- is not to provide an exercise in democracy; it is to test the inner resources and character of the candidates, and to do this by exposing them to a grueling series of artificially induced crises that simulate those that he will ultimately have to face as president. The American electoral process is, in a way, like the simulated testing done by the manufacturers of automobile tires -- we want to know which ones are reliable before we put them on our cars, rather than afterwards, and that is why the American people tend to respond so harshly to those candidates who fail to make the grade during this our national period of candidate testing.

Iowa was Dean's first crisis -- and he blew it; and in doing so he lost far more than the Iowa caucus: he lost the reputation as a man who could be trusted to act calmly and rationally in the midst of adversity. And that is a lesson that the American people will not quickly forget. We do not live in a world where we can afford to.

What happens next? Take it away, Mark Steyn.

KIND OF LIKE SHOUTING FIRE IN A CROWDED THEATER: Francis J. "Frank" Flynn, an assistant professor in Columbia University's business school, sent letters out to 240 restaurants claiming that he and his wife were served a dinner that made him violently ill. Flynn was conducting a study on how businesses respond to complaints.

A court has ruled that the restaurant owners who received the letter can sue the Columbia Professor--and Columbia University itself.

GREAT QUOTE by Arnold Beichman, a a Hoover Institution research fellow and a columnist for the Washington Times who turned 90 years young in 2003:

How come newspapers have science writers who know some science, and food writers who know something about food, and best of all an M.D. like the New York Times's Lawrence Altman who can write about medicine with authority? But when it comes to war and terror, anybody and everybody is sent to cover the story with a minimal knowledge of the subject of their assignment. So what do we get 'human-interest' stories and dumb 'gotcha' questions at headquarters press briefings.

You know, the rudiments of journalism can be learned very quickly, not to mention, on the job. TV shows frequently employ ex-generals when there's a major conflict. Why can't newspapers hire ex- or even currently serving military men as well?

You know...like these folks. Or these. Or this fellow?

Just a thought.

BLINK! One of these things is not like the other:

On Jan. 18, the National Taxpayer Advocate, Nina E. Olson, sent a report to Congress that identified "sole proprietor tax noncompliance" as one of the "top two" problems faced by taxpayers. Ms. Olson then went on to recommend that "Congress enact a withholding requirement on payments to independent categories of nonwage workers."

In other words, the "taxpayer advocate," whose job description, in part, is to protect small business from being taxed too much, is saying small businesses need to be taxed more and also suffer an increased paperwork and compliance burden.

Richard W. Rahn, the author of the piece, is calling for Olsen to be immediately removed, because she doesn't understand her job.

I couldn't agree more. When I was a Registered Investment Advisor in the mid-1990s, it not only seemed like the paperwork increased every year--it did. And the fastest way to screw up a recovery is to ask small business to pay more taxes and do more paperwork.

Robert Novak once wrote that Republicans were put on Earth to cut taxes. Olsen needs to get with the program.

PAYTON'S PLACE is apparently with the Dallas Cowboys: Don Banks of Sports Illustrated writes:

Dallas Cowboys assistant head coach Sean Payton never received a contract offer to become the Oakland Raiders next head, and on Wednesday the Cowboys announced that Payton will remain with the organization.

As Fanball.com writes:

Only in Oakland. Not only was Payton the only candidate to interview twice with Al Davis, but he fit the Al Davis profile for a new head coach almost perfectly. Apparently, the enigmatic Davis either reversed course at some point or negotiations with Payton's camp did not proceed well. Either way, we look forward to the fallout from this fiasco, including where Davis turns next to fill the last remaining coaching vacancy.

Of course, as Skip Bayless noted a little while ago, Bill Walsh--tanned, rested, and ready...

UPDATE: Davis gave a lengthy press conference earlier today.

Reason's "Hit & Run" blog is often hit or miss for me (although that's certainly true of many group blogs I read--and no doubt, for many readers of our blog as well).

In this post, Brian Doherty, an otherwise extremely sharp writer, is upset that the federal government is calling the 30 year bonds they issued in 1979--mainly because current interest rates are so much lower than the 9 and 1/8th percent interest the '79 bonds pay.

Doherty fumes, "Sorry, but who knew that promise they made 30 years ago would gets so damn expensive to honor?" But as his more thoughtful readers note, that promise included a call provision.

One not-as-thoughtful reader commented, "There used to be no virtually no risk premium, because there was no perceived risk [on T-Bonds]. No more."

Well, what's your definition of risk? For most investors of government debt, their biggest fear is the risk of default, which is why they invested in T-Bonds, instead of stocks or corporate bonds. And unlike corporate investment, there is no risk of default on US debt. But all investments involve trade-offs. You can't avoid all risk, you can only decide which risks you want to minimize. With Treasury paper, after adjusting for inflation, there's very little chance of having any decent return on your money, with the very rare exception of those who have hung onto their say...1979 Treasury bonds which paid 9 and 1/8th percent interest--in a year when inflation was 11.3 percent.

Which is why, to my mind, the Federal government retiring old, expensive, inflationary-era debt is a very, very good thing. But to Doherty, and many of Reason's readers, they're reneging on a promise--even though call provisions are part of that promise.

Oh, and as to what happened to all that inflation--click here.

GREASING THE ENDORSEMENT: Tim Graham links to a Chicago Sun-Times story on how Dean essentially bought Carol Mosely Braun's endorsement.

To be fair, I suppose that wouldn't be the first time such a deal was brokered.

HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE--WHO WEAR KAFFIYEHS: Back on September 12, I wrote:

Reading between the lines, you just know that Howard Dean really digs the Hamas.

This photo of Dean dancing up a storm does little to get me to change my mind.

Incidentally, because Monday and Tuesday were rather hectic here at EdDriscoll.com HQ, I never got a chance to link to Dean's Iowa meltdown speech. So, here's an audio clip. Watch for samples of Dean's YEAAAAARGH!!!! scream to appear in recordings everywhere.

UPDATE: Oops--I hadn't seen any photographic coverage of Dean in action during his rant. Now it all makes sense!

HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE--WHO SMOKE GAULOISES: Roger Simon comments on a recent Nation article by Brian Klug titled “The Myth of the New Anti-Semitism”, and writes:

Ah, but Mr. Klug is probably saying, that can change. Really? Well, I suppose anything can (and probably will) but right now my personal experience is to the contrary. I’m not sure the extent Mr. Klug likes to do research in the street, as they say, but as a novelist I find it helpful. On my recent trip to France to gain background for my next book, I was taken to Montfermeil, one of the infamous suburban cité ringing Paris where the Moslem immigrants live. These are the housing projects where the police dare not go, even to prevent gang rapes, and where the obscenity “Nique ta mere, juif!” is scrawled on the walls. (Note it says “juif”—Jew—not “sioniste”—Zionist).

One of the interesting (though not surprising) things in this horrible and sad environment is the ubiquity of satellite dishes. They are tuned, of course, to Al Jazeera, but more often, I was told, to Egyptian television, where one of the most popular shows is the serial version of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Now that’s a prescription for ethnic comity—millions of unemployed Moslems sitting in squalid apartments in Paris watching the famous racist libels of the Tsar’s secret service on television. Is that a “new” anti-Semitism? I guess that depends on what your definition of “new” is and finally—who cares? What matters is that it is there and that it is growing.

What also matters is that this statistic--these “millions” of unemployed Moslems--is not much of an exaggeration. And their numbers are growing, without their views of Jews—or anyone else—changing. The French are only now trying to come to grips with this—and obviously are having great difficulty. In their defense, it’s not simple.

In any case, those who “idealistically” advocate the Jews accept a binational state in the Holy Land ought to consider, putting it gently, what the outcome would be for them of sharing their society with a Palestinian culture in its present state. You might as well turn around and walk back into the gas chambers.

Or as Charles Krauthammer succinctly wrote, almost two years ago, "In Europe, it is not very safe to be a Jew".

THE WAR AND THE DEMS: Stanley Kurtz has some thoughts, in an interesting "Corner" post.

ROGER L. SIMON: A "metropolitical" man.

FASTER, PLEASE: "Thousands of Iraqis March to Demand Elections".

AMON'S LAW* IN ACTION: Check out this 1968 quote, from Citizen King, a PBS documentary on Martin Luther King:

"Martin Luther King fled the scene. He took to his heels and disappeared, leaving it to others to cope with the destructive forces he had helped to unleash. And I hope that well-meaning Negro leaders and individuals in the Negro community in Washington will now take a new look at this man who gets other people into trouble and then takes off like a scared rabbit."

--Robert C. Byrd, Democratic Senator from West Virginia, by way of the Ku Klux Klan.

Here's an audio clip of Byrd speaking the above quote. (It's about 48 seconds in, if you want to skip Rush Limbaugh's introduction.)

Why is this man still in office? And why is he receiving an award from the American Historical Association? And check out this fawning tribute by the Wheeling, WV News-Register.

DID "JUNK SCIENCE" make John Edwards rich?

WILL THE REAL BEAVIS please stand up?

THE PROBLEM WITH SOAKING THE RICH: Virginia Postrel looks at California's tax data--and does not like what she sees.

THE STATE OF THE STATE OF THE UNION: Here's a quick round-up:

John Hawkins lists his favorite lines.

Glenn Reynolds has lots of thoughts and links.

Stephen Green Blogged it in real-time--by popular demand!

"The Corner" Blogged it as well--start here, scroll up. Or start here, and scroll down!

And follow everybody's links for a complete SOTU-palooza!

UPDATE: And for those with ADD, Reason's "Hit & Run" Blog has condensed versions of the speech, and the Democrats' response.

MICHELLE MALKIN LOOKS AT the weird world of Gwyneth Paltrow.

As Hollywood celebrities go, it's not Michael Jackson weird. But it's awfully sad.

IT'S OFFICIAL: According to The Dallas Morning News, Cowboys assistant head coach Sean Payton has agreed to become Al Davis's next whipping boy Oakland's next head coach.

BIG PICTURE POLITICS: Robert Moran looks at several of the angles the media missed yesterday.

IS IT TIME TO REPLACE YOUR CD PLAYER? Possibly. But it's definitely a good time to read my latest newsletter for Electronic House magazine on the subject--because it's now online.

OH YEAH, THAT LIBERAL MEDIA: Michael Graham looks at how ABC spins the president's approval rating.

Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan writes, "Can we even trust the [New York Times] polls any more?"

And Jack Shafer looks at how Howard Kurtz's story on media donations to politicians (click here for our post on the topic) misses the real story. Shafer has a few rewrite suggestions for Kurtz.

Speaking of rewrite suggestions, Steven Den Beste looks at a recent Washington Post story with a variety of anti-war, anti-Bush, pro-Saddam cliches in it and writes:

They say, "Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity", but we seem to have gone beyond any possible stupidity now. Have we reached the point where we can assume there's a conspiracy to spread a big lie? And where we can safely dismiss the opinions of anyone who repeats it?

We can't dismiss them--but fortunately, we can--and do--correct them.

"HAVE THE DEMOCRATS GONE SANE?" David Frum asks, adding, "There are some 600,000 Democrats in Iowa, and they may be some of the most liberal Democrats in the country. And yet when the time came to cast a ballot, not even they could stomach the destructive opportunism of the Dean campaign".

STEPHEN GREEN IS CAUCUS BLOGGING (via his TV and PC): No word yet on how much Absolut such a gig takes to get through it.

THE NEXT HEAD COACH OF THE OAKLAND RAIDERS? Sean Payton, the assistant head coach of the Dallas Cowboys, appears to be the frontrunner, according to Dallas Morning News. He had his second meeting with Oakland owner Al Davis in two weeks.

FRUM ON THE TIMES: I know Glenn Reynolds already linked to this quote by David Frum today, so you may very well have seen it, but I wanted to include it as well, since it really, really sums up the New York Times in a nutshell:

The greatest scholar of the Islamic world, Bernard Lewis, has brilliantly explained the roots of Muslim rage. He traces that rage to the failure of Muslim societies to adapt to the modern world. The people of these societies remember that they were once rich and powerful and important. Now they lag far behind – and they do not understand why. Rather than look inward at their own faults and failings, they have sought scapegoats in the world beyond their borders.

Can’t one see something similar at work in the mind of Michiko Kakutani? The brand of liberalism championed by her newspaper was once all-powerful in American cultural life. Over the past decade, that power has ebbed away – and since 9/11, the ebb has become a flood. The New York Times no longer decides what Americans will read and what Americans will think about what they read. Rather than look inward, they blame talk radio and the Internet and Fox TV. And when this ferocious reservoir of accumulated resentment encounters a new and contradictory idea – well it just boils over.

If only for the ability to counterpunch, Glenn sensibly comments, "Every author should have a blog".

STEYN ON KAZAN: Mark Steyn has a terrific essay on Hollywood Communism and Elia Kazan in the Atlantic Monthly:

The 1947 Oscar-winner Gentleman’s Agreement strikes most contemporary observers as very tame, square Kazan. But, in a curious way, that’s the point. When you start watching and you realize it’s an issue movie “about” anti-semitism, you expect it to get ugly, to show us Jew-bashing in the schoolyard, and vile language about kikes. But it stays up the genteel end with dinner party embarrassments, restricted resort hotels, an understanding about the sort of person one sells one’s property to. Dorothy McGuire and her Connecticut friends aren’t bad people, but in their world, as much as on Johnny Friendly’s waterfront, people conform: they turn a blind eye to the Jew-disparaging joke, they discreetly avoid confronting the truth about the hotel’s admission policies, and, as Gregory Peck comes to understand, they’re the respectable face of what at the sharp end means pogroms and genocide.

That’s what all those Hollywood and Broadway Communists did. They were the polite front of an ideology that led to mass murder, and they expected Kazan to honour their gentleman’s agreement. In those polite house parties Gregory Peck goes to in Kazan's movie, it’s rather boorish and tedious to become too exercised about anti-semitism. And likewise, at gatherings in the arts, it’s boorish and tedious to become too exercised about Communism – no matter how many faraway, foreign, unglamorous people it kills. Elia Kazan was on the right side of history. His enemies line up with the apologists for thugs and tyrants. Whose reputation would you bet on in the long run?

If you haven't read it yet, Steyn's article on Dalton Trumbo makes an appropriate bookend.

THE YANKEE AL GORE: Debra Saunders takes aim and fires--both barrels--at John F-in' Kerry.

TODAY IS MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY: Dwight R. Lee of Tech Central Station looks at "MLK, the Marketplace, and a Legacy of Freedom" and concludes, "We may disagree on some of the legislative and policy details that have evolved from the civil rights movement, but we should all agree that King's legacy both enhances and is enhanced by the tremendous benefits we all realize from freedom and markets."

And Paul Greenberg writes, "You can tell a lot about an age by the heroes it chooses. While the Malcolms and Farrakhans come and go in favor, Martin Luther King Jr. remains a light. That is a hopeful sign."

I agree.

UPDATE: James Taranto links to a remarkable essay on the op-ed page of The New York Times by Kiron Skinner, the co-editor of Reagan: A Life in Letters and comments:

It's difficult to imagine such an article appearing in a liberal newspaper during Reagan's presidency. It's also hard to imagine a conservative celebrating Dr. King during his lifetime. But in America, political passions have a way of fading with time. Like Lincoln, both Reagan and Dr. King now belong to the ages (Reagan is still alive, but his mind is ravaged by Alzheimer's, and he has been out of the public eye for nearly a decade). The principle of racial equality is no longer controversial, and even most liberals admire Ronald Reagan, whether or not they agree with his policies.

That ought to put today's political wars in some perspective. On Dr. King's birthday President Bush visited Atlanta and laid a wreath at his tomb. Shockingly, some 400 people protested, as if there were something wrong with an American president paying tribute to an American hero....Perhaps in another generation, when the Angry Left has cooled down, the New York Times will carry an op-ed piece exploring the philosophical kinship between Martin Luther King and George W. Bush. Just remember, you heard it here first.

I won't hold my breath, but yes, it is entirely possible. And that alone is progress, I suppose.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: Pejman Yousefzadeh quips, "I'd like to report that The New York Times editorial page has been hijacked. Because, quite frankly, that is the only way to explain the appearance of this piece.

Back in January of 2001, close to three years before Moveon.org debuted their Bush=Hitler ads, Jonah Goldberg wrote:

I’ve never met a real social-welfare state leftist who could answer the following question without having to think real hard: "Aside from the murder and genocide, what exactly don’t you like about National Socialism?"

Bruce Bartlett lists some of the reasons why leftists have had to "think real hard" about that question.

Meanwhile, Suzanne Fields writes, "Mocking the horrors of the Holocaust has become a cottage industry in the dark corners of the anti-Semitic world, but who could have believed that in 60 years references to the Nazis would be played for laughs. An anti-Bush Web site parodies Time magazine's Person of the Year, pasting a swastika on the arm of an American soldier."

MOVIN' ON UP: Michael Graham, the author of Redneck Nation is getting a D.C. radio show.

WITHER CONVENTION COVERAGE? Dan Rather says:

"I think it's inevitable that the over-the-airways broadcasters and, for that matter, many in cable either take a pass or reduce their coverage even more than we've seen in recent years," Rather told the Television Critics Association this weekend.

So?

It made perfect sense for the networks to cover the Republican and Democratic conventions back when they were the only game in town. But now there are endless alternatives. The conventions will be covered by CSPAN, simulcast over the 'Net, covered by Bloggers and other Web journalists, etc. Rather--and the networks--still don't get that the world no longer revolves around CBS, ABC and NBC.

DOGS AND CATS LIVING TOGETHER: Stephen Green has some kind words about Dr. Dean.

HOWARD DEAN'S INCREASINGLY FAMOUS TEMPER is manifesting itself in unusual ways in Iowa. Fortunately, his faith helps keep some of that anger in check.

THE AFC AND NFC CHAMPIONSHIPS ARE TODAY: Yahoo's NFL page has plenty of articles, just in case you aren't...ready for some football.

UPDATE (4:30 PM): The Pats will be representing the AFC in the Super Bowl--Patriots 24, Colts 14.

UPDATE (9:37 PM) And the Panthers will be representing the NFC. Panthers 14, Eagles 3.

FRIDAY MARKED THE 25th ANNIVERSARY of the Shah leaving Iran. And arguably, the beginning of the current, Islamofascist Middle East. Pejman Yousefzadeh has some thoughts.

TURNING AROUND THE BATTLESHIP: Mark Gauvreau Judge has some very good ideas for Hollywood. They'll go unheeded, of course, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't read them.

AFTER THE FALL: Joanne Jacobs links to a powerful story in The Christian Science Monitor of a 14-year-old Baghdad girl who criticized the American invasion. But "now the ex-Baathist youth group member has changed her view", writes Jacobs.

I suspect there's a lot of that going on--and not just in Iraq.

Howard Kurtz writes that journalists aren't loathe to donate to politicians. Frankly, I don't have any problem with reporters--or their bosses--donating money to political campaigns. But doesn't this undercut their frequent claims that they're impartial?

Of course, claiming impartiality and neutrality is a relatively new phenomenon for journalists. As Bob Goldfarb wrote back in December:

I think history will show the faith in unbiased journalistic "truth" to have been a temporary aberration. The national papers of Great Britain, like the American press of the 19th century, are popular precisely because of their well-known ideological positions, not from any pretense of neutrality. They report the news by their own lights, recognizing that readers prefer the news to be filtered through values and beliefs similar to their own.

So does The New York Times. The Times has become America's only truly national, general-interest newspaper because it has the best reporting, writing, and editing in the country...and because its worldview matches that of its target consumers. It doesn't need to purport to be unbiased.

Sooner or later, the media needs to move away from feigning impartiality, because nobody in their audience buys it. They really ought to consider employing the strategy that has allowed a thousand narrowcasted blogs to flourish, and start saying something like, "yes, we're biased--just like you are. And we know you have lots of different news sources to choose from, each with own slant on things. But if you're a [Republican/Democrat/atheist/Muslim/hobbit/Wookie] we think you'll like us."

Update: Jonathan Gewirtz writes:

Everybody is biased: it's human nature. And the way for journalists to deal with it isn't to remain ignorant, or shun open participation in politics, or engage in ostentatious rituals of non-partisanship. It is to admit their biases and allow their customers to make up their own minds about how to interpret information the media provide.

Political contributions are among the clearest indicators, certainly clearer than words, of contributors' political biases. Far from forbidding them, we should encourage journalists to make such contributions as long as they disclose them. The public is smart enough to evaluate the results. And by permitting political participation by journalists we might encourage better people to become journalists, because becoming a journalist would no longer mean trying to ignore one's own carefully developed opinions, or abandoning a high-level career in the industry one covers. Disclosure, not bureaucratic restriction of behavior, is the answer here.

I agree.

Another Update: More on the long partisan history of journalism in America from Shannon Love, who writes, "Before the 1920s, the idea of an 'objective' or 'non-partisan' media did not exist. Love credits the era of journalistic "objectivity" as beginning with the birth of radio and its limited spectrum of frequencies:

Since broadcasters functioned as public utilities and had monopoly use of a public property, they could not follow the openly partisan traditions of the newspapers. Broadcast journalists began to advertise themselves as "objective" and lacking "partisan" bias. They had no choice. Nobody was going to tolerate their own political opponents having a monopoly on the broadcast media. Also, broadcasting was supported purely by advertising, so the broadcasters had a profound interest in making sure they did not offend any large chunk of their audience by overtly taking sides.

Read the rest.

Is Howard Dean trying to score points with conservatives by stiffing Maureen Dowd? Matt Drudge writes, in his characteristically breathless copy, that:

NEW YORK TIMES op-ed queen Maureen Dowd was left waiting by the phone by Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

After scheduling a phone interview with Dowd at her hotel in Des Moines, the candidate never called!

Add this to the Kerry flip-flop over gutting the Agriculture Department, and if you didn't know better, you'd say that these guys were trying to reach across the aisle for voters.

But I think in the case of Dean and Kerry, sometimes an F-up is just an F-up.

(And for those of you who don't remember the Adam Clymer incident, click here.)

UPDATE: Maybe there's more truth to this than I thought. I hadn't read the Jonah Goldberg piece about Clymer since it first ran back in September of 2000. But Jonah wrote that "sticking it to the press is a bipartisan tradition":

Journalists hate to admit it, but beating up the press is a populist gambit. The media ranks at the bottom of almost every survey when it comes to public trust and confidence. More than a third of America actually thinks our press hurts democracy, according to one major survey. For all of their--often sincere--convictions that journalists are looking out for the little guy, most people see the press as an arrogant and unaccountable priesthood of kingmakers or, in the common vernacular, @$#&*!s.

It will be interesting to see what sort of reaction this very minor tempest in a thimble gets.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Must have been a deliberate effort by Dean. Pejman Yousefzadeh writes, "my respect for Howard Dean just skyrocketed".

ONE MORE UPDATE: Orrin Judd writes, "Memo to Howard Dean: If you're a fire hydrant already, best not to give MoDo any more reason to whiz on you".

READY ON THE LEFT, READY ON THE RIGHT: James Panero looks back at William F. Buckley's Firing Line TV show, quoting from a classic episode from the late 1960s.

LIBERTARIANS FOR KERRY! Brian Doherty of Reason says Kerry's "my man!"--well, sort of.

WHAT WOULD MEL BLANC DO? Scroll down to the middle of the page, to read James Taranto's exploration of cartoon physics and politics in his "Best of the Web Today" column.

RECESS APPOINTMENT: "Bush Installs Pickering on Appeals Court".

I love this line in the AP story: Democrats "said they wouldn't be able to trust Pickering to keep his conservative opinions out of his work on the federal appeals court."

Of course, all liberal judges keep their biases away the bench, right?

UPDATE: There's a round-up of coverage of Pickering from "The Corner" (start here and scroll down) and InstaPundit.

WHERE EVERYBODY KNOWS YOUR NAME: Kevin M. Cherry writes on the coming demise of Frasier, ending a 22-year tradition that began with Cheers:

When Cheers premiered all those years ago, it came in last in the weekly ratings. Yet what is most impressive about the early shows is their quality: Many of the highlights of the series come from these two seasons, as evidenced by the best-of 200th episode (hosted by John McLaughlin). The performances are already spot-on, and the writers had a firm grasp of the different personalities. The series' creators — Glen and Les Charles and James Burrows, who had honed their skills on Taxi — originally contemplated an American version of the John Cleese-Connie Booth classic, Fawlty Towers. However, they came to realize that the best scenes took place in the bar, and set the entire series in a Boston pub based on the Bull and Finch Tavern.

Over the years, Cheers had its growing pains. The second season is weaker than the first, as too much attention is paid to the blooming relationship between Sam (Ted Danson) and Diane (Shelley Long). As Norm puts it in one episode, "I kinda miss the good old days when they threw up at the sight of each other." The series would reach its high points over the next two seasons, with the introduction of Frasier (Kelsey Grammer) as Diane's new (and soon to be jilted) fiancé, which causes the Diane-Sam relationship to mature. The sudden death of Nick Colasanto (Coach) forced the writers to introduce Indiana farm-boy Woody (Woody Harrelson), as the bar's resident simpleton, but he never was able to equal what Danson refers to as Colasanto's "heart and soul, the sweetness of Cheers." Even so, this replacement worked far better than did the introduction of Rebecca (Kirstie Alley) after Diane left. Apart from the staff, the other characters throughout the years — Frasier's wife Lilith (Bebe Neuwirth), Harry the Hat (Harry Anderson), Carla's (Rhea Perlman, the first person cast) various ex-husbands — came and drank, but it was really Norm (George Wendt) and Cliff (John Ratzenberger) who came, drank, and stayed in our comedic memories.

The notion that Cheers did its best work in its earliest seasons is certainly understandable--every TV show does its best work in its earliest seasons. I remember seeing Jim Carrey being interviewed shortly after his first hit movies came out, and he said that when he worked on In Living Color, after the first couple of seasons, everybody on the show was strictly on auto-pilot. (The same could be said for Miami Vice.) M*A*S*H's best episodes were its first three seasons, and then it gradually began to decay.

The original Star Trek's best season was its first, but oddly enough, The Next Generation did its best work in its third and fourth seasons, ironically because Gene Roddenberry was less involved with the show, as his health declined. (That's a whole other subject.)

I actually haven't watched a new episode of Frasier in quite a while, but that's OK: between syndicated reruns and DVDs, like Cheers, the show will be floating around the pop culture ether for quite some time to come.

ROGER SIMON: "Matt Drudge may have put the nail in the coffin of the Wesley Clark candidacy".

YOU DON'T SAY: "Book Claims French Bias Against Iraq War".

FASHION BLOGGING: My fashion sense was developed in the mid-80s, and back then, I'd continually see ads for Ralph Lauren's Polo line. The men and women in those iconic images were dressed and groomed in an impossibly cool and WASPY style, much like the swells who attended Gatsby's parties in the 1920s (and not coincidentally, Lauren's name was made when he costumed the mid-'70s version of The Great Gatsby that starred Robert Redford).

So...who on earth are these guys? How did they sneak into a Ralph Lauren ad with those silly clothes? And why does Ralph think I want to look like any of them?

Just curious.

MUST SCREECH TV: The A&E Network has introduced a new reality TV show called Airline. As Jesse Walker of Reason writes:

The new series Airline contains no celebrities, no courtships, no game-show rules—just a bunch of cameras recording the everyday Fear Factor of American airports. If there's an underlying message, it's that the only thing that might be less pleasant than traveling on an airline is having a job that forces you to deal regularly with air travelers.

* * * One reason that environment is so unpleasant, of course, is that it treats travelers as children, keeping us in the dark about what's happening behind the scenes and stripping us of both freedoms and responsibilities. A system that infantilizes is bound to produce infants; men and women capable of behaving maturely at home or at work will suddenly erupt into embarassing tantrums. The results aren't pretty. But that doesn't mean they can't make for compelling television.

Gentlemen, include me out, as Sam Goldwyn used to say. Flying--and waiting in airports--is brutal enough for me, without having to watch others endure it.

"HUNDREDS PROTEST AS BUSH VISITS MLK TOMB": Talk about a no-win scenario. If he didn't place a wreath on Martin Luther King's tomb, he'd be called an aloof racist. But President Bush gets flak because he honors Dr. King?

As John J. Miller writes, "Left-wing blacks...Accuse him of playing politics with an American icon--but the truth is that by protesting Bush's small gesture, they're the ones playing politics. And looking like fools, too".

UPDATE: Scott Burgess agrees.

I certainly understand that every president will have his share of protesters. But it is interesting which stories the media plays up as their launching pad to rail against him. With President Clinton, there were conservatives who disagreed with his every action. I don't recall them getting as much media attention as President Bush's detractors.

I'M SHOCKED--SHOCKED! "Democrats More Likely Than Republicans to Watch ABC, CBS and NBC".

Bernard Goldberg, call your office.

I GOTTA FEEVAH!!! And the only prescription, is more cowbell!!!

Just wanted to share that. Carry on.

WESLEY CLARK is against the war in Iraq, right? Well, actually, only sometimes.

Back in the early '90s, when he was part of Bill Clinton's administration, George Stephanopoulos was quoted as saying "we are being held hostage by Lexus/Nexus". And that was a few years before the Internet was on everyone's desktop.

Now it's that much easier to find out who's been backtracking, dissembling, lying, and spinning.

UPDATE: Like this story!

JAY NORDLINGER IS IN RARE FORM in his "Impromptus" column today. Be sure to at least read his thoughts about Oscar Biscet--and check out Madison Wisconsin's latest billboard. It makes a nice bookend to one of Seattle's statues.

"YEAH, BABY"--my exact, knee-jerk unconscious, unplanned verbalized remark to this sentence in James Lileks' latest Bleat:

Because we're going back. Yeah, baby. Yeah!

(Oh and--faster please.)

Incidentally, this is probably as good a place as any to post a link to an article on a somewhat related topic that I had entirely too much fun researching and writing.

ARISTOS is a fascinating look at the arts and society. It's a Website that serves as a companion to What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand, by Louis Torres & Michelle Marder Kamhi.

IF GLOBAL WARMING is one pillar of the environmental left, and must be taken on religious faith, no matter how much scientific evidence is against it, then recycling is definitely the other. The American Enterprise looks at its "eight myths".

TiVO ALERT: Dennis Miller's new show on CNBC is less than two weeks away, the New York Times writes, in a surprisingly sympathetic profile of Miller.

WHAT A DIFFERENCE A DAY MAKES: On Wednesday, President Bush outlined his Kennedy-esque plan for a return to the moon by 2015.

On Thursday, former Vice President Al Gore, on what's expected to be the coldest day in New York in a decade, will warn of the dangers of global warming.

I'm not a big government guy, but if we have to have a bloated federal bureaucracy, far better that it aim for the stars, then try to block progress via environmental extremism.

49ERS QB JEFF GARCIA arrested on suspicion of drunken driving.

"I GO WAY BACK WITH LOVIE", Dennis Miller once quipped. "I remember when he was married to Jim Backus".

Da Bears name Rams defensive coordinator Lovie Smith their new head coach.

TROOPERGATE, THE NEXT GENERATION: ABCNEWS.com reports that the state trooper who headed Dean's security detail for nine years "was repeatedly abusing his wife". Despite this, Dean "has taken a tough, zero-tolerance stand on domestic violence, accusing the Bush administration of not being committed to the issue".

Between his gaffes, and scandals coming to the light (gee, now we know at least one reason why Dean ordered his records sealed), Dean's in trouble. He's probably got enough momentum to get the nomination, but is his record too flawed to gain any traction come this fall?

UPDATE: On the other hand, Andrew Sullivan is not amused. "What a vile little smear story from ABC News", Sullivan writes. "I knew this campaign was getting tough, but this kind of irrelevant piece of guilt by association is truly beneath contempt".

Hey, at least this time, it's a Democrat being savaged by the press. And it's not October, so this will all be forgotten by the fall.

NURSE BLOOMBERG: Will the Big Apple's mayor (and definitive RINO) be facing GOP mayoral challenges in '05?

THE FLIP-FLOPPING KATIE COURIC: Brent Baker writes:

What a difference the target makes. Five years ago, when George Stephanopoulos wrote a book with critical insider accounts of President Clinton’s White House, NBC’s Katie Couric asserted the book “has many wondering whether he's a traitor or man of integrity,” stressed how “a lot of people” see Stephanopoulos’ book as “creepy” and she told him that they view him “as a turncoat, a Linda Tripp type.” She was also upset by the timing: “Why now George? Couldn’t this have waited until the President was out of office?”

But nearly five years later, in introducing a segment with Paul O’Neill, Couric wasn’t upset that O’Neill issued his charges in an election year as she recalled how “President Bush once praised Secretary O’Neill for his candor. He was called a straight shooter,” but “today O’Neill is under investigation for a tell-all book that raises serious questions about the Bush administration.”

Couric plugged the interview: “Does Mr. O’Neill think the administration’s threat of investigation is payback for his so-called honesty? We’ll talk about that and some other things.”

As Roger Simon noted earlier today, "The Internet is the greatest memory device we have ever had. It stores virtually everything for instant access—it’s very difficult to hide what you have said. Bloggers and others will dig it out and force the media to publicize it".

And expose the media itself when it lies, obfuscates and flip-flops.

FALSE ALARM: No chemical agent found in recently discovered Iraqi shells.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

"There's no real rationale for colonization of the Moon, so it's hard not to be cynical and conclude this is the space-age equivalent of bread and circuses," Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a Democratic research group, said in The New York Times the other day.

Good thing JFK didn't follow his advice.

JFK has long been an iconic image for Democrats. Bush's space proposals allow him to triangulate off Kennedy's resonating spirit--and present the perfect to trap for liberals and leftists who oppose them to fall into.

UPDATE: "Translation: This would be such a good idea, if only it wasn't George W. Bush's".

Looks like another case of hypocrophobia.

QUAGMIRE WATCH: Steven Den Beste links to an ABC News article, and notes what must be...

Rule number one for all reporters in Iraq and their editors back home:

Thou shalt not report any good news without also including bad news. Thus shalt thou maintain balance. (However, reporting bad news without any offsetting good news is perfectly acceptable.)

It doesn't surprise me. We noticed CNN's first report of a quagmire in Iraq back in February of last year--three weeks before the war began!

See also these thoughts from Brent Bozell and John O'Sullivan from September on why Vietnam analogies desperately need to be retired from the media's vocabulary.

CHEESESTEAK BLOGGING: Jeff Jarvis looks at McDonald's new cheesesteak sandwich.

McDonald's had a great steak sandwich (no cheese, but a zesty BBQ sauce and caramalized onions) in the early 1980s. It didn't last long--and bore little resemblance to something I'd buy in South Philly--but it was surprisingly tasty.

(Of course, I was 15 at the time. I'm not sure if I'd give it such a glowing recommendation today.)

TWO GREAT TASTES THAT TASTE GREAT TOGETHER: Tech Central Station looks at the Fed-Ex/Kinko's merger.

ACCORDING TO ESPN, the Buffalo Bills have a new head coach.

YEAH, BUT AT LEAST BARKLEY COULD DUNK: The Paul O'Neill/Charles Barkley connection revealed.

HOWARD DEAN missed a great opportunity for a "Sister Souljah" moment during the debate on Sunday. Instead he was faced--really faced--by Al Sharpton.

UPDATE: That's a devastating cartoon by Chris Muir.

SHAPES OF THINGS BEFORE MY EYES: Virginia Postrel quotes from a discussion on Meet The Press about the dimensions of Democrats.

Meanwhile, Jeff Jarvis has Howard Dean under his thumb. Or is it the other way around?

'BOUT TIME: "Largest British Airline Will Accept Armed Air Marshals".

DID A EUROPEAN BROADCASTING AGENCY really utter the phrase, "in the US, where the Jewish question is notoriously sensitive"??

Yes the BBC did just that.

(Link via InstaPundit.)

UPDATE: Meanwhile in France:

A comedian's skit portraying a Palestinian guerrilla wearing a Jewish Orthodox hat and giving the Nazi salute on state-owned French television has raised an outcry and is under investigation by a Paris prosecutor for racial defamation.

Dieudonne M'Bala M'Bala, an often provocative French comedian, appeared on France 3 Television in December as a masked guerrilla wearing a Jewish Orthodox hat and called on "young people watching from suburban housing projects to convert like me ... and join the American-Zionist axis."

He then shouted "IsraeHeil" and made the Nazi salute.

I guess, especially after 1941, the Jewish question is less sensitive in France.

But hey, just a month ago, didn't Noam Chomsky say that anti-Semitism "scarcely exists now" in the West?

PROFILES FROM THE FUTURE: James Pinkerton, writing in the year 2054, looks at a possible future of America.

BULLDOZING THE COMPETITION: Charles Johnson posts the winner of the Robert Fisk Award for Idiotarian of the Year 2003.

SAY, THIS IS INTERESTING: Stephen Green links to a Website called Memeorandum, which apparently is some sort of bot-based site designed to list recent news articles and what top bloggers are saying about them.

Top Bloggers? Of course--we're listed! (And we tip our fedora to Gabe, the creater of the site for including us. Thanks!)

ANGRY WHITE MAN: Jason Riley looks at Dean and the black vote.

BOB'S YOUR ANCHOR: Looks who's talking (again)--Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, AKA Baghdad Bob!

Shouldn't this guy be rotting in a cell next Saddam? Is he on a Willie Horton-style furlow program? At the conclusion of WWII, Goebbels committed suicide, Tokyo Rose was sentenced to ten years in prison, and the British hanged Lord Haw Haw.

If the Post's article is true, why on Earth is Baghdad Bob free to do a TV show??

YOU HIRE CARVILLE, I'LL HIRE MATALIN: Texas congressman's ex-wife says she'll run against him.

THE LOGICAL CONCLUSION: Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review takes one of the phallic-oriented theories of the left to its natural conclusion:

I always enjoy appearances of the phallic theory of gun ownership. ("Take gun control. Despite the precipitate drop in crime, white men cling ever more tightly to their guns, and the right to lock and load is a major link between pistol-packing papas and the Republican Party. Assume that most of these guys cherish their weapons for other than practical reasons, and you can see the pull of the phallic on American politics.") Do the people who deploy this theory not realize its implications? If they're right, then gun control is a kind of symbolic castration. How likely is that to be successful as a policy? Or as a political platform?

As someone once said, heh.

DAN THE MAN: Dan Marino hired as the Miami Dolphin's football operations director.

UPDATE: Cris Carter, who's worked with Marino for HBO's NFL show, has some thoughts, including a reason why Marino isn't Matt Millen: The Next Generation.

SOMEWHERE AROUND 2010, PRESIDENT RICE will be meeting with these two European political leaders.

UPDATE: Kimberly Swygert agrees, making a point similar to one we made last year.

GOD IS A CONCEPT by which we measure Howard Dean, writes Christopher Buckley in an amusing Opinion Journal piece.

RAGE OF A RELIC: John Fund writes, "Paul O'Neill is angry that the world has passed him by".

UPDATE: John Hawkins also has some thoughts on O'Neill.

JUST DO IT: Hilarious Easter Egg on Amazon, if you act today.

(Link via Jeff Jarvis.)

In his nifty mid-1970s anthology, The New Journalism (now sadly out of print, but readily available used) Tom Wolfe wrote that in the mid-1960s:

When Truman Capote insisted that In Cold Blood was not journalism but a new literary genre he had invented, "the nonfiction novel," a flash went through my mind. It was the familiar "Aha!" flash. In this case: "Aha! the ever-clever Fielding dodge!" When Henry Fielding published his first novel, Joseph Andrews, in 1742, he kept protesting that his book was not a novel--it was a new literary genre he had invented, "the comic epic poem in prose. He made the same claim for Torn Jones. He compared his books to the Margites, which was believed to be a lost comic epic of ancient Greece (by Homer, some said). What he was doing, of course--and what Capote would be doing 223 years later--was trying to give his work the cachet of the reigning literary genre of his time, so that literary people would take it seriously. The reigning genre in Fielding's time was epic poetry and verse-drama of the classical sort. The status of the novel was so low--well, it was as low as the status of magazine journalism in 1965 when Capote started publishing In Cold Blood in The New Yorker.

Thanks to this initial "Aha!" flash, I began to notice a curious thing. The early days of this new journalism were beginning to look like an absolute rerun of the early days of the realistic novel in England. A slice of literary history was repeating itself. I don't mean repetition in the vague sense of "there's nothing new under the sun." I mean exact repetition, deja vu, finicky details.

The very same objections that greeted the novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were starting to greet the New Journalism. In each case the new form is seen as "superficial," "ephemeral," "mere entertainment," "morally irresponsible." Some of the arguments were so similar it was uncanny.

Flashforward from the 1960s and '70s to today (literally), when Roger Simon (not the Blogosphere's numero ono Roger Simon--but you probably know that already), said, on Meet The Press:

MR. RUSSERT: But you're a blogger.
MR. SIMON: I am a blogger sort of. I mean, the difference between--look, a true blog is I woke up this morning, I decided to skip chem class, now I want to write about the last episode of "Friends." That's what blogs are. You know, it's people talking to each other. My site is actually written columns. There's a difference between writing and typing basically. [Emphasis mine.]

So Meet The Press, to talk about blogs, interviews a guy who says he's doesn't blog! It's the ever-clever Fielding dodge tarted up for the 21st century's equivalent of the New Journalism: Not me! Don't lump me in with that rabble proletariat who blogs. I don't blog--I write columns. I'm old school. I'm one of you fellows. (And just to bring things full circle, notice Simon's updating of Capote's famous bon mot, "that's not writing, that's typing". (Which isn't to say that Blogs--even the blogs of both Roger Simons--are the equivilent of Capote's In Cold Blood, of course. But I think both Simons understand that.)

Maybe, if it wanted to talk about blogs, Meet The Press would be better served if it had on somebody who actually will admit to, you know...blogging! The other Roger Simon would be perfect--a guy who has written novels and screenplays, and now blogs--and admits to it. And understands the medium. Or Virginia Postrel, who blogs, has edited magazines, and writes for The New York Times. Or Andrew Sullivan (although to be fair, he's got the flu this weekend.) Or maybe (say, here's a thought), the man, the myth, the legend, Glenn Reynolds.

Or does that make too much sense?

QUOTE OF THE DAY: On Friday, we mentioned that Castro has made Internet access more difficult for the vast majority of the poor souls trapped in Cuba.

David Carr writes, "So there we have it. A country that has (allegedly) 100% rates of literacy but you are not allowed to actually read anything".

TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE: Reed Johnson of the L.A. Times writes:

Sometime in the future, the media may look back on 2003 as the year when a number of warning bells were sounded. But as an industry it seems we're still trying to agree on how to locate the fires, let alone how to put them out.

Reading his article, you get the feeling that Johnson obviously knows there's a problem, and I commend him for pointing it out. But he's only partially right: the warning bells began to go off a long time before 2003. The public, en masse, only began to hear them last year.

I don't know if the media as a whole can hear them--or if they can, are aware of how loudly they're ringing. And if they can, do much about them. Johnson's industry is too set on auto-pilot, and too paralyzed by political correctness to radically change their direction.

Further into his article (it goes without saying: RTWT) while Johnson properly rebukes Christiane Amanpour for saying that the press was muzzled, he never explains why CNN was really muzzled: they were in hock to Saddam Hussein.

And check out this quote, that goes uncommented on by Johnson:

"You have to consider real news that serves the democracy kind of like a public utility," [Kristina Borjesson, a former reporter-producer for CBS] says. "And you would not want the bottom line to get in the way of your receiving electricity or clean water. Well, in a sense, real information on what the arena of power is doing either nationally or internationally, on behalf of all of us, on behalf of the people, that's almost like a utility."

But utilities are increasingly no longer monopolies.

I have options when it comes to most of them: if my water is cloudy, I can buy bottled water or a filter. If my phone rates go up too high, I can change carriers--or consider using more online chat or Internet telephony. Satellite TV has more channels and better picture quality than cable, so I switched. If my electricity is funky, I can add surge protectors, or depending upon how upset I am, install my own back-up generator.

And after 9/11, when my news sources seemed like they were stuck in Hue City covering the Tet Offensive of 1968, I changed 'em. And you know what? If you're reading this, you did too.

I started my own blog, because I wanted to express opinions on material I normally don't write about during my day gigs. There's no reason why you can't either. As Matt Drudge once said, "Roger Ailes told me early on, you don't need a license to report. You need a license to do hair."

Utilities are not monopolies--and while the media's monopoly on news gathering will remain for the forseeable future, they no longer have a monopoly on opinion.

And it scares them.

15 MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE: Paul Krugman fisks Maureen Dowd--two weeks before she wrote the column!

CITY OF BROTHERLY LOVE: Less than a month after his father died, the Philadelphia media is trashing Brett Favre--and his late father.

Really classy, fellows.

BECAUSE OF REDISTRICTING, Texas Congressman Ralph Hall changed parties shortly after the new year, from Democrat to Republican. And because of redistricting, Jim Turner, another House Democrat from Texas is retiring after this term.

DOES SADDAM HAVE CANCER? Link via Reason's Michael Young, who writes, "No wonder the U.S. gave him P.O.W. status so easily".

A HOUSE DIVIDED: Orrin Judd links to a remarkable article in the Economist that shows just how wide the gap is between the blue and red districts of, respectively, Nancy Pelosi and Dennis Hastert.

The subtext of that article is simple: if the Democratic party doesn't eventually implode, San Francisco may very well--demographics are destiny.

SPOCK'S BEARD: I know Wallace Shawn has been in a few episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine playing the leader of the Ferengis. Perhaps he's gotten trapped in the alternate universe where Mr. Spock has a goatee, and Lt. Uhura saucily displays her bare midriff while on duty.

That would at least explain this quote, found by Andrew Sullivan.

Speaking of alternate universes, Sullivan notes that the BBC has actually labeled the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as left-leaning!! The BBC--up off its feet at last!

Sigh--it won't last, and it's not much, but at least that's more than most American news services do when labeling leftist organizations.

UPDATE: On the other hand, one shouldn't expect too much when it comes to the BBC.

CHEMICAL WEAPONS FOUND IN IRAQ: A few thoughts:

1. Gee, chemical weapons in Iraq--there's a shock, huh?
2. It's about time, huh?
3. What's with the scare quotes around "chemical weapons"? Do Reuters and the BBC pay their reporters bonuses if they use more quotation marks??

This Reuters "article" has "more".

UPDATE: Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds writes the US has found evidence that Russian firms exported night-vision goggles and radar-jamming equipment to Saddam Hussein.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reynolds has some thoughts on the chemical weapons, along the lines of opinion #1, above.

HEY, AYN RAND HAS A BLOG! Always nice to see another author going online, getting high-tech, and exploring his or her thoughts via the Blogosphere. Good luck to her!

Err, actually, The Atlasphere, a sort of Objectivists town hall (who interviewed Stephen Green not too long ago) has created the "Ayn Rand Meta-Blog".

Best item so far: a mention of a new biography of Alan Greenspan, who spent several years early in his career as a member of Rand's inner circle. It's title? Alan Shrugged!

WHILE THE GERMANS WERE BOMBING PEARL HARBOR, Wesley Clark adopted the Bluto look.

Otis Day and the Knights could not be reached for comment.

UPDATE: The Bluto look is designed to bridge the gender gap. But here's one woman who's less than impressed with the General's efforts.

SOONER OR LATER, I will have this conversation with someone.

CUBA TIGHTENS ITS CONTROL over the Internet. Which makes sense--Castro banned personal computers in 2002.

UPDATE: Speaking of Cuba, be sure and read this travel brochure, before you visit.

TO COIN A PHRASE: Heh.

TALKING BOOK: I have a rare online-only article on the Smart TV & Sound Website, called "Talking Book: The Spoken Word Goes High Tech".

Be sure to check out my reference to Yamaha's Vocaloid, which could be a seriously hip product for high-tech musicians in 2004.

POINT/COUNTERPOINT: Roger Kimball looks at the virtues of altruism.

Ayn Rand rebuts.

"AN ALCATRAZ OF FUN": Jund Fund looks at the first travel guide to Hell since Dante: the new Bradt Travel Guide to North Korea.

Be sure to stop by Department Store #1. And really be sure to pay your laundry bill before you check out of your hotel.

THE OP-EDDYS: RealClear Politics issues its first annual awards for the best--and worst--of the nation's op-ed pages. Speaking of the worst:

WORST COLUMNIST OF THE YEAR: Maureen Dowd, New York Times
This one was a no-brainer, and I mean the pun in all seriousness. No one does less with the largest opinion platform in American than Dowd. Her vacuity is legendary, but 2003 was a banner year even by her standards. In addition to weaving her incessant Bush-hating pop culture analogies every single week, this year she also managed to (among other things) deride Clarence Thomas as an affirmative action baby and call into question her own veracity by altering a quote by President Bush. This Op-Eddy is well deserved.

Runner Up: Derrick Z. Jackson, Boston Globe
I can't tell you how many times I've been appalled by the divisive racial rhetoric Jackson uses in his columns. He makes Bob Herbert look absolutely tame by comparison. I suppose its liberal white guilt that causes the editors at the Globe to keep publishing Jackson's weekly rants telling the Globe's readers that America is just one big Southern plantation, circa 1850. It's one thing to make serious arguments about racial injustice and inequality in America - both of which certainly still exist to a degree in our society - and something altogether different to declare that there is a "caste system" in America, as Jackson did earlier this year. If you want thoughtful liberal commentary on race in America skip Jackson and read Clarence Page or Leonard Pitts, Jr.

Spot-on. And it's tough to argue with their lifetime achievement award.

Bernie Lincicome of the Rocky Mountain News writes that the "NFL prefers its coaches shelved, aged".

I'm sure this will be an AARP magazine cover story next fall.

UPDATE: Skip Bayless writes that 72 year old Bill Walsh is friends with Al Davis, and is sorely tempted to coach the Raider. But his wife suffered a stroke five years ago and he's devoting his time to nursing her health:

So there it sits, just across the bay, tempting and even tormenting Walsh -- the one almost-workable opportunity for him to return to the sidelines. Walsh watches Bill Parcells return and take Dallas to the playoffs in his first season, at 62. He watches Joe Gibbs return like George Washington from the dead to Washington at 63. He watches Dick Vermeil commit at 67 to another season in Kansas City.

Walsh belongs to a generation of coaches who often retired too early mostly because society told them it was time to. He has discovered what most do -- that gardening and golfing can't begin to measure up to the grueling joy of coaching. They all need a break and they almost all realize they need coaching.

No one ever has been better than Walsh at knowing and utilizing talent on offense and defense. Not Lombardi. Not Landry. Not anybody.

What a waste it seems to be for Walsh to be watching so many others return.

Of course, if not this season, maybe next. And maybe not with the Raiders. But it's possible--if remote--that the final chapter of Bill Walsh's career as a coach hasn't been written yet.

GAFFING ALL THE WAY: It's somewhat of an obvious point to our regular readers, but Mona Charen looks at the double standard in the media between gaffes made by the left, and by the right.

UPDATE: Orrin Judd has some thoughts as well--and a link to a staggering movie review.

THIS TIME IT'S PERSONAL II: Brent Bozell issues a one million dollar challenge to Tom Brokaw and NBC.

THIS TIME IT'S PERSONAL I: Sgt. Stryker worked on the C-5 Galaxy that the Iraqi insurgents fascists shot a missile at. Fortunately, the plane was able to land safely despite a hit on one of its engines:

It's bad enough that I have to deal with all sorts of obstacles (incompetence, lack of parts, low manning, managerial shenanigans) to keep these pieces of s*** maintained without having some half-literate loser with a chip and a SAM on his shoulder adding to the misery.

(PG-13 version available on the Sarge's blog.)

2004: AN ED ODYSSEY: I have a glimpse of what's in store this year in home electronics in my latest bi-weekly newsletter for Electronic House magazine.

THE VIEW THAT DELIGHTS THE TERRORIST: Tech Central Station looks at how Old Europe (this time including Britain, oddly enough) is balking at having armed sky marshals on flights to the US.

Great punchline at the end, incidentally.

NEW FALCONS COACH ANNOUNCED: Jim Mora (don't call him Jr!), who for the past several seasons has been defensive coordinator for the San Francisco 49ers, will be the new head coach in Atlanta.

Mora's dislike of being known as Jim Mora Jr. does cause some confusion, not the least of which is this AP photo, which at the time I'm uploading this shows his dad, and says:

Indianapolis Colts coach Jim Mora smiles while being booed by Philadelphia Eagles fans after calling for a review of the Eagles' first touchdown which came in the fourth quarter, Sunday, Nov. 21, 1999, in Philadelphia. The Atlanta Falcons have reached agreement to hire now San Francisco defensive coordinator Mora as the team's head coach, a source said Thursday night, Jan. 8, 2004.

On the other hand, the younger Jim Mora has never uttered, "playoffs...PLAYOFFS??!!" as his dad once did near the end of the season he was fired by the Colts, thus ensuring himself television immortality, as that clip is shown at least once every year on ESPN during the post-season.

"DEMOCRATS UNLEARN 9/11": "For about a year, Republicans and Democrats agreed on the need vigorously to prosecute the war on terror", Daniel Pipes writes.

But no longer--RTWT.

(Hat tip: Charles Johnson.)

AS HEADS IS TAILS: John Wilkes Booth, hero? Martyr? Thomas Hibbs visits Ford's Theater:

Sitting in a coffee shop with our three pre-teenage children just blocks from Ford's Theater, where we had just heard a presentation on Booth's assassination of President Lincoln, our nine-year-old daughter commented, "That man made it sound like the bad guy was the good guy and the good guy was the bad guy." The bad guy turned good guy would of course be John Wilkes Booth, the most notorious assassin in American history. In the revisionist history now officially on display at Ford's Theater, Booth's prophecy appears to be coming true, "The world may censure me for what I am about to do, but I am sure posterity will justify me."

* * * Suffering from the crudest of childhood educations, our Ranger confessed that he had been taught in grade school that Lincoln was the great emancipator and that Booth was crazy. He then proceeded to a laundry list of Lincoln offenses — suspending habeas corpus, refusing to release prisoners of war, and causing the number of the dead to far eclipse the number on display at the Vietnam Memorial. Each of these accusations was preceded by a rhetorical "Did you know...?" and followed by the exclamation, "Nobody told me that!" No mention here of the unprecedented historical context of civil war, of the constitutional crisis precipitated by the threat of secession, of the opposition from the North to Lincoln's plans of postwar restraint toward the south, or of the possibility that Lincoln was exercising political prudence in his handling of the issue of slavery.

Having slipped from one crude conception of Lincoln to its polar opposite, from the grips of one shallow myth to another, our Ranger had no time for the complexities of history. Instead, he busied himself with reviving the memory of Booth. Booth, we were assured, was not insane; he was a successful actor, who had been provoked by Lincoln's misdeeds. Indeed, he never planned to kill Lincoln even after the war, until Lincoln had a band play Dixie at a public ceremony commemorating the end of the war. "Lincoln shouldn't have done that," our Ranger thundered. "Can you guess who was in the audience that day?"

What sort of federal park ranger justifies the killing of his boss?

"Our ranger said quite emphatically that there were things Lincoln never should have done, but he never came close to saying anything like this about Booth's actions", Hibbs writes. "Lincoln is thus brought low yet again in Ford's Theater, not this time by an assassin's bullet but by vulgar revisionist history. Ford's Theater, it seems, is now the house that Booth built".

How much play are they getting in the mainstream media? Not very much, says Brent Bozell.

Meanwhile, equating the 43rd president with the leader of the Third Reich speaks volumes about the person making the comparison, says Edward Feser, in Tech Central Station.

It's also a unique form of Holocaust denial, as Jonah Goldberg wrote back in September:

By the way, I don't say this because I feel a passionate need to defend George Bush. I would make the exact same points if Al Gore were president. I would make the exact same points if anybody running for the Democratic nomination were president. This has nothing to do with partisanship. It has to do with the fact that such comparisons are slanderous to the United States and historical truth and amount to Holocaust denial. When you say that anything George Bush has done is akin to what Hitler did, you make the Holocaust into nothing more than an example of partisan excess. Tax cuts are not genocide, as so many Democrats have suggested over the years. (For example,. during the Contract with America debate, Charles Rangel complained that "Hitler wasn't even talking about doing these things" that were in the Contract with America. In other words, the Contract with America was in some way worse than what Hitler did. At the end of the day, that is Holocaust denial.)

"Darn those Republicans" does not equal "Darn those Nazis." The Patriot Act is not the final solution. The handful of men in Guantanamo may not all be guilty of terrorism, but it's more than reasonable to assume they are. And no matter how you try to contort it, Gitmo is not the same thing as Auschwitz or Dachau. There are no children there. You don't get carted off to Cuba and gassed if you criticize the president or if you are one-quarter Muslim. And, inversely, there was no reasonable justification for throwing the Jews and the Gypsies and all the others into the death camps. The Jews weren't terrorists or members of a terrorist organization. To say that the men in Guantanamo — or any of the Muslims being politely interviewed by appointment — are akin to the Jews of Germany is to trivialize the experiences of the millions who were slaughtered. Even if you think Muslims are being unfairly inconvenienced, when you say they are the Jews of Nazified America you are in essence saying the worst crime of the Holocaust was to unfairly inconvenience the Jews.

Maybe Godwin's Law should really be law.

SKIP BAYLESS SEES THE LIGHT: "Remorseless Pete Rose doesn't belong in Hall of Fame".

THE BUZZ IN BUFFALO: Who's going to be the next head coach of the Bills? Don Banks of Sports Illustrated has some thoughts.

FISH, MEET BARREL: Stephen Green is Fisking Maureen Dowd.

Hot fantasy lesbian action ensues. Well, maybe not hot...

THE FIRST POST-SADDAM MONTH: Dale Amon of Samizdata runs the numbers and concludes:

Most significant, of course, is the large drop. One could hypothesize the opposition threw everything they had into a 'Tet Offensive'. Like the Viet-Cong before them, they lost; unlike the Viet-Cong there is no regular army from a neighboring country, armed and funded by a super-power, to take their place.

This is only a supposition; one cannot state this with any confidence of being correct until there are a few more months of data to back it up. One could alternatively hypothesize the enemy is quietly regrouping after their offensive. I do not believe this, but it is certainly possible.

To really put Amon's stats into perspective, include this with them.

Near the end of 1984, George Orwell wrote this interchange between Winston Smith and O'Brien, his tormenter in one of Oceania's gulags:

'We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation -- anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.'

'But you do not! You are not even masters of this planet. What about Eurasia and Eastasia? You have not conquered them yet.'

'Unimportant. We shall conquer them when it suits us. And if we did not, what difference would it make? We can shut them out of existence. Oceania is the world.'

'But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is tiny helpless! How long has he been in existence? For millions of years the earth was uninhabited.'

'Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.'

'But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals -- mammoths and mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever heard of.'

'Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not. Nineteenth-century biologists invented them. Before man there was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man there is nothing.'

'But the whole universe is outside us. Look at the stars! Some of them are a million light-years away. They are out of our reach for ever.'

'What are the stars?' said O'Brien indifferently. 'They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it.'

Winston made another convulsive movement. This time he did not say anything. O'Brien continued as though answering a spoken objection:

'For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?'

Despite the fact that Orwell intended 1984 as a warning, much more than an attempt at predicting the future, it seems like a lot of intellectuals took that passage to heart, as Steven Den Beste demonstrates in a tremendous post, apparently the first of a two part series:

The academics in non-rigorous fields were not even needed any longer to help bridge the gap between the scientists and laymen. In 1991, John Brockman wrote:

In the past few years, the playing field of American intellectual life has shifted, and the traditional intellectual has become increasingly marginalized. A 1950s education in Freud, Marx, and modernism is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking person in the 1990s. Indeed, the traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses science, is often nonempirical. It uses its own jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost.

In 1959 C.P. Snow published a book titled The Two Cultures. On the one hand, there were the literary intellectuals; on the other, the scientists. He noted with incredulity that during the 1930s the literary intellectuals, while no one was looking, took to referring to themselves as "the intellectuals," as though there were no others. This new definition by the "men of letters" excluded scientists such as the astronomer Edwin Hubble, the mathematician John von Neumann, the cyberneticist Norbert Wiener, and the physicists Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg.

But what Snow eventually referred to as a "third culture" began to appear, though not exactly in the way he expected. Scientists and other technical people began to reach out directly to the laymen, to explain what they were doing and why and what significance it had, and why it was so fascinating. (Blush, people like me.)

Scientific topics receiving prominent play in newspapers and magazines over the past several years include molecular biology, artificial intelligence, artificial life, chaos theory, massive parallelism, neural nets, the inflationary universe, fractals, complex adaptive systems, superstrings, biodiversity, nanotechnology, the human genome, expert systems, punctuated equilibrium, cellular automata, fuzzy logic, space biospheres, the Gaia hypothesis, virtual reality, cyberspace, and teraflop machines. Among others. There is no canon or accredited list of acceptable ideas. The strength of the third culture is precisely that it can tolerate disagreements about which ideas are to be taken seriously. Unlike previous intellectual pursuits, the achievements of the third culture are not the marginal disputes of a quarrelsome mandarin class: they will affect the lives of everybody on the planet.

But no one was paying comparable attention to the kind of stuff that the self-styled intellectuals were doing. The worst thing you can do to a proud man is to ignore him; and increasingly the "men of letters" found themselves being ignored or treated as curiosities.

Increasingly isolated, frustrated, useless on a practical level, and with prestige declining, they became intellectually inbred. Since no one else respected them, they "respected" each other and decided no one else's opinion really mattered. The swelling spiral of comment-on-comment continued, divorced from reality. Over the course of maybe thirty years, a form of intellectual "pseudoscience" developed.

Be sure to read what happens next, when in 1991, computer programmer Chip Morningstar was invited to give a speech at a two-day "interdisciplinary" Second International Conference on Cyberspace.

UPDATE: Whoops--Steven emailed me to inform me that his post is actually the second of what he believes will be a four-part series. Here's the first part.

CAN DENNY GREEN TURN AROUND THE CARDINALS? We'll find out, as Arizona has apparently hired Green to be their next coach. Green posted a 97-62 record in 10 seasons as coach with the Vikings, but the Cards have long been where great careers go to die.

OUT OF THE PAST: Joe Gibbs returns to coach the Washington Redskins. All he did was lead them to three Super Bowls (with three different quarterbacks no less) in the 1980s and early 1990s before retiring (temporarily) to a career in NASCAR.

Obviously, he'll be a better fit with the 'Skins than Steve Spurrier was. But will he survive Dan Synder, who's gone through several coaches during his relatively short tenure as Redskins owner?

IN HONOR OF ILAN RAMON, the Israeli astronaut who died in the Columbia space shuttle disaster on February 1st of last year, NASA included an Israeli flag on a plaque on the Spirit Mars lander.

Charles Johnson writes, "Jihadis, this is your cue to go nuts".

Fascinating profile in the Las Vegas Review Journal of Bill Waggoner, Internet marketer.

As quoted by the author, there's much about Waggoner that's ripe for satire--right down to a Ralph Nader and Buck Turgidson-like fear of fluoride, and an obsession with herbal medicine combined with a two pack a day cigarette habit.

(Found via Virginia Postrel.)

HAS THIS BEEN APPROVED BY E. GARY GYGAX? "The Definitive D&D Guide to the Democratic Presidential Candidates".

HEADLINES YOU DON'T SEE EVERYDAY DEPARTMENT: Charles Johnson links to an article which says:

"Libya to Make Peace with Israel" It's all that unilateralism and cowboy diplomacy, I tell you.

TOM COUGHLIN AGREES TO COACH GIANTS: The former Jacksonville Jaguars coach is returning to the NFL. And it sounds like the Giants, especially younger players like Jeremy Shockey, could use his discipline--even if Coughlin says he's mellowed a little bit during his time away from the game.

"REPORT: TERROR SUSPECT Landing At Cincinnati Airport" says this Columbus Ohio local NBC webpage:

The plane is Delta flight 043. It left Paris at 11:20 a.m. and is scheduled to land at 2:30 p.m.

The flight is said to be of interest because of a potential terrorism suspect on board, according to WLWT.

According to reports, a woman was removed from the flight before it took off from Paris because she had an electronic device that was causing some suspicion.

The plane will be held in an area away from the terminal when it lands. Passengers will be re-screened as a precaution when the plane lands in Cincinnati, WLWT reported.

NBC news is reporting that officials want to speak with 14 people on board.

Additional details are forthcoming.

Here are a few more details.

UPDATE: Here's the page that Matt Drudge links to. It may open very slowly, probably because Matt's traffic is blowing out its server. But it lists flight 043 as an Air France flight, not Delta.

Which makes sense. As Mark Steyn wrote, "It's interesting that, during the recent security scares, the terrorists seem to have been targeting BA and Air France. They seem to reckon they've a better chance of pulling something on a non-US airline. I hope that's not true, and that when the next shoebomber bends down to light his sock, he'll find himself sitting next to some gung-ho Brit rather than the 'peace and solidarity' type."

UPDATE (12:01 PM): Sounds like a false alarm. The Channel Cincinnati.com page I linked to above has been updated to include these details:

The fighter jets were called off before the plane, Delta flight 043, landed. It left Paris at 11:20 a.m. and was scheduled to land at about 3:20 p.m., WLWT Eyewitness News 5 reported.

According to reports, a woman was removed from the flight before it took off from Paris Charles de Gaulle International Airport because she had a coat with wires protruding from it.

The coat turned out to be a motorcycle jacket that works like an electric blanket, and the woman was booked onto a later flight, WLWT reported.

U.S. officials were notified after the woman was removed "out of an abundance of caution," a U.S. official said. The officials said several flights have been escorted in recent months as a precaution.

The plane will be held in an area away from the terminal when it lands, and passengers will be re-screened as a precaution when the plane lands in Cincinnati, WLWT reported.

But one question remains: why would you wear a leather jacket (or any jacket), with wires protruding from it on an airline flight??

FROM THE HOME OFFICE IN HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA: James Bowman lists his top ten films of 2003.

Bowman also has a post on Michael Jackson that's worth reading, if only for the punchline.

THE SEATTLE POST INTELLIGENCER explains how to win friends, and influence people.

Dale Carnegie would be so proud.

UPDATE: See also this Peggy Noonan column from March.

FREUDIAN SLIP: Roger Simon knows why Howard Dean confused which Testament the Book of Job is in.

(Link (and headline) found via Stephen Green.)

"THERE ARE ONLY TWO TRAGEDIES IN LIFE", Oscar Wilde once said. "One is not getting what one wants, the other is getting it".

PROOF THEY NEVER SHOULD HAVE FIRED DONAHUE: Drudge passes MSNBC in Internet rankings.

WANTED: JIMMY JOHNSON: Skip Bayless writes that Johnson is the perfect man to coach the Raiders, which is why he doesn't have a hope in the Black Hole Hell of being hired by Al Davis.

BUT I THOUGHT THEY WERE ALL ANTI-GUN! Headline on AP: "Dean Draws Fire From Debating Democrats".

STEYN ON SADDAM and the tranzis:

Up to the moment he popped up out of the spider-hole, the international jet-set's line was that deplorable as Saddam's rule might be — gassing Kurds, feeding folks feet-first into industrial shredders, etc. — it was strictly an internal matter for the Iraqi people and other countries had no business interfering. The minute the old boy was in U.S. custody, the international jet-set's revised position was that gassing Kurds, feeding folks into industrial shredders and so forth were crimes against the whole world and certainly not a matter for the Iraqi people. Instead, we need a (drum roll, please) U.N.-mandated international tribunal.

"This is what the Zionist neo-cons would call chutzpah", Mark Steyn adds.

Heh.

MAYBE MORPHEUS WAS ON TO SOMETHING: Oliver North is lecturing the left on the dangers of conspiracy theories.

The scary thing is--something I never would have believed I would say 16 years ago--is how much sense he makes.

2003: THE YEAR OF THE OPTIMIST, writes Neil Cavuto, and we agree.

BREAD, CIRCUSES, RACECARS: Why did the Hungarian government decide to spend four million dollars to sponsor a Formula One racer? Julian Sanchez of Reason has some thoughts.

THE BENEDICT ARNOLD CHAIR OF ETHICS: Sounds silly, doesn't it? But as Roger Kimball writes, "what about the Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies? Wander on up to Bard College at picturesque Annandale on Hudson and you can meet him in person." Kimball adds:

The love affair with Communism among American academics isn't over, though at many institutions it has migrated into the polysyllabic Leftism of the terminally disaffected.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: I don't know which is worse--the Hiss chair or the American Historical Association honoring the left's favorite ex-Klansman.

THE SNAIL DARTER: Prof. Glenn Reynolds writes, "clever lawyering may not always be clever politics".

IS THIS THE YEAR that classical music dies?

In a surprise development, President Bush will be running for re-election unopposed in November, as his Democratic opponents disqualified themselves by violating Godwin's Law.

We'll have more on this, as it develops...

UPDATE: Seriously though, stock up on high blood pressure medication and Rolaids this year--you'll need 'em.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Daniel Drezner, subbing for Andrew Sullivan, proposes a new award for Sullivan's Blog--the Godwin award. I think the MoveOn.org ad would be a perfect nominee.

ONE MORE UPDATE: John Hawkins has some thoughts.

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".

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.

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.

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!

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.

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...

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.

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:

"Erotics as Outrage: Unlocking Heteronormative Blackness in George Orwell's Animal Farm"

"Xenophobia and Modernity in The Great Gatsby: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Processing Penile Complicity"

"Fragmented Monotheism and the Racism of Resistant
Borderlines in Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic"

"Community as Identity: Producing Male Echolalia in Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek"

"Led Zeppelin, Physical Graffiti, and The Bourgeois: Testing Critical Flight"

Regarding that last title--I once reviewed a book for Blogcritics whose author must have employed this program throughout its creation.

(Link via The New Criterion's "Armavirumque" Weblog.)

THE ON-SCREEN "CRAWL": Are TV news networks using it as a subtle form of bias?

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".