IS MEL GIBSON A HOLOCAUST DENIER? His dad has certainly been described that way, but I don't believe in guilt by association. Men as diverse as Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan have had awful fathers, but that doesn't mean that their sins get automatically passed down to their sons. But David Frum has some disturbing quotes by Gibson about the Holocaust. As Frum writes, both Peggy Noonan and Diane Sawyer pitched him softball questions about the subject, "to give him an easy chance to show that he does not share his father’s disdain for the murdered Jews of Europe. Yet Gibson declined to avail himself of these chances. I can’t help wondering why."

Me neither. And while I take many things printed by Fleet Street with a large grain of salt, these quotes of Gibson in The Telegraph (by way of Andrew Sullivan) are equally disturbing.

Jami Bernard of The New York Daily News is having to deal with an enormous backlash as a result of her negative review of The Passion, and her comments that The Passion "is the most virulently anti-Semitic movie made since the German propaganda films of World War II".

My own take, and my wife's, are much more sympathetic to the movie. But Gibson's comments are very, very disturbing.

UPDATE: As is this.

ANOTHER UPDATE: William Safire also has some thoughts.

THE FRISCO FIASCO: Skip Bayless writes the 49ers are in heap big trouble this coming season:

It has come to this for the once-proud 49ers: Management needs to keep Terrible Owens for one more year to distract fans from the mess it has made.

Before Terrell Owens fell back into its hapless lap, management had basically decided to concede next season. Anything above 8-8 would be lucky gravy. Anything below would be taking salary-cap medicine.

Really, 2003 was a Super Bowl-or-bust season. Management, sitting on a time bomb of dumb contracts, convinced itself its team had as good a shot as any. But the wildly erratic performance of Owens and quarterback Jeff Garcia, coupled with a defense that, on the road, couldn't stop a chicken from crossing the road, added up to 7-9.

I wouldn't look for any immediate miracles from Norv Turner in Oakland, either.

THE DEAN MACHINE COMES CLEAN: Howard Kurtz looks at the in-fighting behind the scenes of the Dean Campaign and writes that Dean's team concluded that he really did not want to be president.

Roger L. Simon links back to a post he wrote on December 22nd, and says, "You Read It Here First, Folks!".

Pejman Yousefzadeh writes that "it raises an interesting question":

Is it possible that such doubts might plague even the Kerry campaign--despite its successes? I doubt that it would plague the Bush campaign--Bush has had four years to think about running again--but of course, one never knows.

Such doubts certainly seemed to plague his father's reelection campaign (I remember my father telling me at the time, "I get the feeling that if Bush wins, he'll obviously serve another four years. But he just doesn't seem that eager to actually win".) But I'd like think, as Pejman does, that Bush #41's son doesn't have them.

TAX CUTS DO WHAT? Thomas Sowell explains why it's important for economists to combat public ignorance.

Great strides were made in the 1990s, which is why you've probably invested some of your money in a mutual fund instead of a passbook savings account. (When I was a financial planner in the early to mid-nineties, I can't tell you how many times I'd explain basic--and I do mean basic--economic principles to people who told me, "man, we never were taught this in school!) But as Sowell points out, a lot more work needs to be done before the majority of people in the US understand basic economics.

THE MAGIC NUMBER: Rob Schwartz, head of distribution for Newmarket, the distributor Gibson hired for The Passion when no major Hollywood studio would pick the film up, says it's well on its way to reaching the magic $100 million mark. As of yesterday's box office, it's already grossed $64,578,000.

On Friday morning, we found an amusing way to put those numbers into context.

UPDATE (2/29/04): Box Office Mojo, which Drudge uses to track, well, just that, estimates that the film should go over the $100 million mark today. And Sunday seems like a perfectly appropriate day for it to occur on.

HISTORIAN DANIEL J. BOORSTIN DIED: He was 89.

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

UPDATE (2/29/94): John J. Miller of National Review has some thoughts on Boorstin.

IT'S ALL RELATIVE: Is 5.6 percent unemployment a low figure, or a high one? For CNN, it all depends. As the Power Line blog says, try to guess what the key variable is.

SPEAKING OF MODERN HOLLYWOOD BLACKLISTS, Richard Corliss of Time writes:

For some of the industry’s moguls to deny [Mel Gibson] employment because they don’t like what he said, or because he made a controversial film, would send a creepy message to the public: that a liberal is someone who will defend to the death your right to agree with him.

Actually, I'd say that's a precise definition of what modern liberalism has morphed into. Just ask any conservative on a college campus.

(Via The Corner.)

YOU WILL RESPECT OUR AUTHORO-TIE! Is the Screen Actors Guild blacklisting South Park actors? Sean Hackbarth has an interesting post on the topic.

Of course, there's no blacklist in Hollywood. Absolutely none.

COMES EQUIPPED WITH HIS OWN ZAPRUDER FILM: When most people go into their home theaters, they put their feet up and watch DVDs of the latest movie by George Lucas or Steven Spielberg. John Kerry watches himself, in 1969:

Consider this scene from a remarkable profile of Kerry published in the Boston Globe in October 1996, when Kerry was in a tough reelection battle:

Kerry told reporter Charles Sennott the oft-repeated story of the February 1969 firefight in which Kerry attacked the Viet Cong who ambushed his Swift boat. Kerry won the Silver Star, as well as a Purple Heart, for his efforts. But the story wasn't just the firefight itself. It was also Kerry's reaction to it.

The future senator was so "focused on his future ambitions," Sennott reported, that not long after the fight, he bought a Super-8 movie camera, returned to the scene, and reenacted the skirmish on film. During their interview, Kerry played the tape for Sennott.

"I'll show you where they shot from. See? That's the hole covered up with reeds," Kerry said as he ran the tape in slow motion.

Kerry told Sennott that his decision to reenact the fight on film was no big deal — "just something I did, no great meaning to it." But it's clear that the old movie is a huge deal. "Through hours of watching the films in the den of his newly renovated Beacon Hill mansion, it becomes apparent that these are memories and footage he returns to often," Sennott wrote.

"Kerry jumps repeatedly from the couch to adjust the Sony large screen TV in his home entertainment center, making sure the picture is clear, the color correct. He fast forwards, rewinds and freeze frames the footage. His running commentary — vivid, sometimes touching, sometimes self-serving — never misses a beat."

In John Kerry's home-entertainment center, it's always 1969.

His campaign as well, Byron York writes.

Dennis Prager was right--when it comes to The Passion Of The Christ, Jews and Christians are watching two entirely different films. My wife Nina wrote her own review of the film while I was writing mine, and I asked her if she'd mind if I posted it here:

We left the theater where we had watched The Passion of The Christ about 5 hours ago. Since then we have spoken of little else. I, for one, have bawled my eyes out, and I’m exhausted.

What a wonderful tribute to a filmmaker to have his movie engender thought, discussion and a deep emotional reaction. How rare for a movie to do this.

Being Jewish, I was concerned that I would see the movie as anti-Semitic as some reviewers have done. I kind of like Mel Gibson, of the little I’ve read about him, and I really didn’t want to think that he had written, produced, and directed an anti-Semitic movie, so I dug around and read an interview with him which pretty much convinced me that he is far from anti-Semitic, and that in fact he did hope to present a film “about faith, hope, love and forgiveness.” I was happy to go into the theater with a much more positive and optimistic viewpoint than I had had after reading assorted reviews.

We saw The Passion in an old theater that is usually empty, even for big hits, having been eclipsed by a 20-plex nearby. We’ve seen The Lord of the Rings, assorted Matrices, Star Wars: Episode II and other big openings there with only a handful of other theatergoers. We were surprised to see the 3:35 p.m. weekday crowd grow until the theater was more crowded than we’ve seen it in years.

I found the first scene a tad over acted, and I couldn’t help thinking that I had wandered into a Lord of the Rings sequel with the uncharacteristically foggy atmosphere. But I quickly got into the movie, a real tribute to Gibson given the subtitles. Somewhere along the way I was hit by a medicine ball in the stomach. I don’t remember the scene, but a wave of fear came over me. “Oh my God,” I thought. Nothing more rational or coherent, just a deep visceral, almost genetic fear that once again we would be blamed. And tears welled in my eyes.

That moment passed, but I could no longer not notice that Pontius Pilate was portrayed as a deeply conflicted human being, manipulated by the assorted look-alike Jewish priests. I couldn’t help myself from focusing on how often a Roman would be portrayed as having a moment of self-awareness or guilt, and how rarely a Jew was so portrayed. I couldn’t stop thinking that Gibson showed way more Jew’s stoning Jesus and weeping for him. I knew that I was watching a different movie from my husband, who is not Jewish, and a different movie from the one Gibson wanted me to watch. But it was like seeing the damn bunny in the clouds. Once that medicine ball hit me, I couldn’t help what I saw.

Gibson’s obsession with physical pain appeared almost masochistic to me. Of course he wouldn’t be the first Catholic masochist, and certainly not the first person to view pain as a link with the divine. But what I didn’t see was grace. I’m not much of a theologian, and certainly not much of a Christian one. But Jesus knew his fate, he had accepted it intellectually. I do understand that physical torture takes away our intellectual understanding and acceptance. But at some point I believe Jesus reached a point of grace. I didn’t feel any grace at all in Gibson’s Christ.

And the resurrection – it looked to me like someone had told Gibson, after the film was in the can, “Yo, Mel baby, it’s all kind of meaningless unless you at least mention the resurrection” so a resurrection scene was tacked on at the end. While my husband felt this scene was uplifting, I felt it was a mere afterthought overlaid on Gibson’s passion for suffering.

I left the theater drained. I felt that if Gibson hoped to convey faith, hope, love and forgiveness, he had failed miserably. The physical pain was so overpowering that I didn’t feel Christ’s faith, only his loss of it; I saw no glimmer of hope in the nodding reference to the resurrection; the only love I saw was between Mary and Jesus and that was deeply personal; and ok, yes there was forgiveness. Well, one out of four isn’t too good.

So do I think it was a bad movie? No, I think it’s a great movie. It’s great in that it has done what few movies do – made me think, touched deep emotions, caused great discussions with my husband. It is truly a work of art in that it’s an intensely personal communication – one man’s communication of his beliefs, laid out for all to see. That he didn’t succeed (at least with me) is of little merit. He still said what he wanted to say.

My husband found a wonderful article for me to read by Dennis Prager, in which Prager states:

When watching ‘The Passion,’ Jews and Christians are watching two entirely different films.

For two hours, Christians watch their Savior tortured and killed. For the same two hours, Jews watch Jews arrange for the torture and killing of the Christians’ Savior.

And so it was with me and my husband. We saw different movies, but we were also able to believe and trust in each other’s visions. I was able to share things about myself I had never told him, and in fact and never verbalized before. But I still can’t believe Gibson could be so blind to how Jews would see the movie.

In that way, this is a naïve movie. And that too adds to its personal flavor, and intimacy.

In many respects, it's Rashomon all over again. As Dennis Prager wrote, in an extraordinary early article on the film written this past fall (do yourself a favor and read the whole thing), your background and baggage determine how you'll view the movie:

When watching "The Passion," Jews and Christians are watching two entirely different films.

For two hours, Christians watch their Savior tortured and killed. For the same two hours, Jews watch Jews arrange the killing and torture of the Christians' Savior.

And I'll go one better--for the conservative, no matter what his faith his, one admires that such an intensely religious film could be made today. For someone on the left, one fears just that, a point Prager makes as well:

Jews also need to understand another aspect of "The Passion" controversy. Just as Jews are responding to centuries of Christian anti-Semitism (virtually all of it in Europe), many Christians are responding to decades of Christian-bashing -- films and art mocking Christian symbols, a war on virtually any public Christian expression (from the death of the Christmas party to the moral identification of fundamentalist Christians with fundamentalist Muslims). Moreover, many Jewish groups and media people now attacking "The Passion" have a history of irresponsibly labeling conservative Christians anti-Semitic.

Or as Michael Medved wrote:

In this context, many Jewish observers worry because The Passion of The Christ is such a powerful piece of cinematic storytelling: if Christian fervor led in the past to persecution of Jews, isn't the movie inherently dangerous because of the likelihood that it will inspire that sort of emotional reaction?

The many Jews who react in this fearful manner to the prospect of deepening Christian commitment in the United States have allowed the past to blind them to the present--and the future. In today's America, the notably philo-Semitic tone of born-again Christianity makes it more common for Christians to support and defend their Jewish neighbors than to persecute them. American Christians emphasize the Jewish roots of Jesus more strongly than ever before--a trend very much echoed in Mel Gibson's movie. Contrary to the fears and expectations of some Jewish leaders, an agnostic, left-leaning college professor at an Ivy League university is much more likely than a Southern Baptist preacher to harbor anti-Jewish attitudes.

I agree with Medved, but I think he's simplifying things to a certain degree. Obviously, I don't expect mobs from a Frankenstein movie to roam the night burning crosses and lynching Jews. But I do question what Gibson was thinking when he and his co-writer Benedict Fitzgerald were writing the screenplay.

The film goes to great lengths to make Pontius Pilate a three-dimensional character. We see him away from the angry crowds, racked with, if not guilt, then at least concern of what his actions should be. His wife Claudia, is, if anything, an even more sympathetic figure, as she both softens his concerns, and brings a linen cloth to Mary and Mary Magdalen to wipe the blood of Jesus after His scourging.

Why couldn't such scenes have been written for the Jewish priests of the film? Why are they portrayed as two-dimensional characters who all but twirl their Snidely Whiplash moustaches in anticipation of Christ's murder?

Prager wrote:

Jews need to understand is that most American Christians watching this film do not see "the Jews" as the villains in the passion story historically, let alone today. First, most American Christians -- Catholic and Protestant -- believe that a sinning humanity killed Jesus, not "the Jews." Second, they know that Christ's entire purpose was to come to this world and to be killed for humanity's sins. To the Christian, God made it happen, not the Jews or the Romans (the Book of Acts says precisely that).

I agree with that entirely. If Gibson does as well, why couldn't he do something to soften the men doing God's will?

Regarding the violence, it is a very violent film. I'm not sure how much of that reflects what Gibson felt audiences have come to expect of movies of all genres (ranging from slasher films, to cop films such as Mel's own Lethal Weapon movies, all the way to war films such as Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down), and how much he equates, as Andrew Sullivan wrote, Jesus' torture with the intensity of His beliefs and the importance of His mission. Sullivan:

Would our sins have been expiated if Jesus had only been flogged twenty rather than forty times? (The Gospels do not tell us how brutal this process was. For some reason, the evangelists reduced the episode to a couple of sentences. Gibson makes the flogging the centerpiece of the whole film.) If Jesus had been roped to the cross and died of asphyxiation, rather than being nailed there, would we still not be saved? If the nails had been placed in his wrists rather than his palms, would we not have been redeemed? Of course some of these details are there in the Gospels; but Gibson's loving obsession with them, his creepy love of watching extreme violence, is nowhere found in the Gospels.

Let's take a few clear examples. The Gospels do not tell us that the jailers of the High Priests beat Jesus to a pulp before he was even delivered to the Romans, or that he was thrown in chains over a prison wall, almost garrotting him. That's Gibson's sadistic embellishment - so that Jesus already has one eye shut from bruises before he is even tried. The Gospels do not say that the flogging of Jesus was so extreme and out of control that a centurion had to stop it because it had gone beyond any of the usual bounds of Roman punishment. That again is Gibson's invention. In the crucifixion scene, the Gospels do not say that in hoisting the cross, it fell down by accident so that Jesus was pinned headfirst between the cross and the earth, his crown of thorns thrust even deeper into his skull. Again, that's Gibson's interpolation. It's as if Gibson's saying that being crucified isn't bad enough - you've got be crushed face down by timber first if you are going to save all mankind.

All that being said, perhaps I've been numbed by the ultraviolence of today's films, or if I had expected far worse from most critics' reviews. The violence is very, very intense and brutal, as is the bloodletting. But it's certainly watchable, given the story that surrounds it.

On a much more minor note (pardon the pun), I'd also question the soundtrack. We're never going back to the era of overwrought 1950s Miklos Rozsa-style scores for biblical films, but the synthesized soundtrack to The Passion sounded virtually interchangeable with Peter Gabriel's score to The Last Temptation of Christ.

All that said, The Passion is obviously an intense experience. Given Prager's opinion that Jews and Gentiles will see two entirely different movies, it's probably not surprising that I found myself uplifted at the end much more than I expected to be. I found its subtle final scene surprisingly powerful, especially in contrast to the blood and gore throughout the film that preceded it. I do think that this is a film that everyone should see, and I'm very glad I did.

But obviously, your mileage may vary.

(For my previous posts on the film, click here, and here. For my wife's very different take on the movie, click here.)

BACK FROM THE PASSION: An amazing--if far from perfect--film; Gibson singlehandedly is keeping the 1950s and '60s notion of the auteur alive. I'm not sure how well it all worked, and I'll have more thoughts later, but this is most assuredly a film worth seeing, if only to make up your mind about the most controversial movie of the year--if not the decade.

WORDS THAT DON'T MATTER: Victor Davis Hanson looks at the new buzzwords of anti-Americanism.

CAPITALISM, THY NAME IS CASTRO: The world's favorite communist dictator "has amassed a personal fortune of $195 million", according to Newsmax.

(Via The Country Store.)

BLESSED BY THE GODS AND GODDESSES DEPARTMENT: I haven't had a chance to check my stats page until last night, when I noticed that Slate's Mickey Kaus linked to my BBC airbrushing post. (Scroll down Krausfiles to February 16th.)

And Virginia Postrel linked to my article on the electric guitar's "Technological Crossroads" in Tech Central Station.

Thank you both!

HELP, HELP, I'M BEING OPPRESSED--by Naomi Wolf! Hilarious letter discovered by Joanne Jacobs written by an Englishman who says he was the "victim of sexual harassment. And it was Naomi who harassed me".

WE LOST--GIVE US MONEY! Tim Blair says both Wes Clark and Howard Dean have dropped out of the race, but could still use your help.

As Clark writes on his otherwise tumbleweed-strewn Website, "The costs of shutting down a national organization are costly".

Economics, thy name is Wesley.

Comparing Mel Gibson's The Passion of The Christ and Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine, it might be possible to get an idea of which side is winning the culture battle by calculating how each film has done at the box office.

According to The Internet Movie Database, here's the gross from the entire run of Bowling in US theaters: $21,244,913.

According to The L.A. Daily News, here's the gross from the first day of The Passion's release: $26.5 million.

As Brian Anderson wrote late last year, the right's not losing the culture war anymore. But will Hollywood notice this largely abandoned market, or blacklist Gibson?

IS IT 1992 ALL OVER AGAIN? Well, maybe, but in reverse. Tim Blair quotes from an interview in which Christopher Hitchens says:

One reason I think this campaign is very lame -- it's supposed to have momentum, I wouldn't say it had much enthusiasm behind it -- [John Kerry] gives the impression that it's kind of his turn to be president and that he has a feeling of entitlement to the job.

I think that is a very great disadvantage.

I've never heard him or any of his supporters make any case why this is the moment for John Kerry.

He hasn't been able to come up with a reason that would even persuade his wife, as far as I can see.

"A feeling of entitlement" was exactly the feeling that Bush 41 gave in 1992, along with a general feeling of disdain for the whole campaign process. Remember his looking at his wristwatch during the debates? He looked tired and haggard during the rest of the campaign, making the younger, flashier Bill Clinton look all the more appealing. Somehow, I don't think Bush 43 will make the same mistakes his father did when campaigning, not the least of which is because he got to observe those mistakes firsthand.

And unlike his father or Kerry, Bush may be a multimillionaire, but disdain and entitlement are not auras he projects.

THOMAS SOWELL says that parents with a backbone have done the seemingly impossible: gotten rid of one of an endless serious of fad school programs, in this case, "The International Baccalaureate Curriculum", taught in Fairfax, Virginia's high school. If it sounds like a card game Omar Sharif should be teaching the elderly passengers of some cruise ship, it isn't. Sowell writes:

It has a left-wing hidden agenda, as so many other fad programs do. One of the program's supporters gushed that it teaches students "how to think globally" and "how to make us part of the world."

One of the parents critical of the program put it quite differently. She said it "promotes socialism, disarmament, radical environmentalism, and moral relativism, while attempting to undermine Christian religious values and national sovereignty."

None of this is new. This kind of indoctrination has been going on for decades, and the kind of thinking behind it goes back a hundred years, when education guru John Dewey began promoting the idea that schools should be instruments of "social change."

By substituting back-door indoctrination in place of education, John Dewey has done more damage than anyone without an army.

"What is new", Sowell adds, "is that some parents are finally waking up and fighting back". The Washington Times has more.

AS THE PROFESSOR WOULD SAY, more crushing of dissent in Ashcroft's America.

I'm sure Donald Luskin will be picking up on this shortly.

IS KATIE COURIC DRAGGING DOWN THE TODAY'S SHOW'S RATINGS? Her bias has always been transparent. Is it finally catching up with her?

THE CHILDREN OF COMMENTARY: Jonathan Tobin looks at the continuing influence of Norman Podhoretz's long running publication.

JUST ADDED A BRIEF LIST of film reviewers to the Links page.

ANOTHER DOWDIFIED* QUOTE AT THE NEW YORK TIMES: As caught by the JustOneMinute Blog. Here's the article it originally appeared in.

(Via Mickey Kaus, who really needs some decent permalinks.)

PICKING UP THE PIECES OF THE GO-GO '90s: Glenn Reynolds looks at where the money was spent at the now-defunct MP3.com--"Check out the massage table and the Hummer!"--but it wasn't just high-flyers like MP3.com that spent on crazy stuff like that.

Back in June of 2002, I wrote about an auction where the assets of a failed Silicon Valley dot.com start-up were sold off. My wife bid on and won a couple of PCs and some furniture for her law practice, but there was also this:

a multi-person Jacuzzi, 20 ab-rollers (the kind sold on late-night TV infommercials), a ping pong table, a BMX mountain bike(??!!), multiple sets of steak knives, numerous high-end pieces of Herman Miller furniture and God-knows what else.

As I said at the time:

I always thought a business was lean and mean and hungry until it went public, or at least was self-sufficient. No wonder so many dot.coms tanked in the '90s: you don't start living large until you've had some success. (Pick up the DVD of Startup.com to see this kind of fuzzy-headed business thinking in action. Of course, those guys were at least smart enough to get a fairly successful documentary out of their tanked business.)

I would think that most of the companies that have survived the dot.com crash eschewed this sort of thinking. Or else have been very, very lucky.

The 1980s was supposed to be the decade of greed. At the beginning of the 1990s, magazines like Time said we'd spend the 1990s atoning for our sins and excesses. So much for that bit of prediction.

HUGH HEWITT INTERVIEWED CONDI RICE TODAY: Here's a transcript.

OH, THAT LIBERAL MEDIA:

"I'm not going to spend $9 just for a few laughs" -- CBS's Andy Rooney to Don Imus on why he won't see The Passion of Christ.

Rush Limbaugh was forced to resign from ESPN for remarks that many found racist. I hope I'm wrong, but watch Andy Rooney get a pass or a slap on the wrist (from the network that brought you Janet Jackson's boob and Dan Rather's slanted coverage of the 2000 presidential election) for this.

(Via Drudge.)

DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM? 1971 style.

(Via The Corner.)

THE DECLINE OF BOXING: Fascinating article by Paul Beston on why this sport, once among the most popular in America, has gone into decline:

For many Americans nourished at the counter of political correctness and baptized by the Church of Tolerance, boxing is simply barbarism. Americans love violence, but only if it retains a synthetic quality, a stylized irony perfected by Quentin Tarantino. In boxing, violence lies beyond the consolations of irony. As Joe Louis once said, "You can run, but you can't hide." So we seek ways to laugh it off. Pro wrestling, which retains the symbolism of combat while making a mockery of physical pain, is the perfect substitute. It has long since eclipsed boxing in popularity. No wonder then, that boxing increasingly resembles wrestling in its sleazy promotions and the tasteless posturing of the fighters -- a far cry from the stoics of an earlier age.

In a sense, the growing isolation of boxing within popular culture is akin to the estrangement between the volunteer army and the civilian population. Both boxers and soldiers engage in occupations where the code of the warrior is absolute; in a postmodern popular culture, such a code is deeply alien. But in an earlier time, when the material conditions of life were difficult and death lurked as near as a walk around the corner, fighting for one's nation -- or for money -- was not viewed as morally questionable. On the contrary, it was admired. Now it is seen, at least by our elites, as a sign of psychological or moral imbalance. Those who believe that the human impulse for violence can be coached out of the race are also the ones who assume soldiers kill for bloodlust, or that fighters fight because they enjoy hurting people. But most of the time, the soldier's answer is different: "I killed because I had to." The fighter's, too, is more mundane: "I fight to make a living. I fight because I'm good at it."

On the other hand, NBC has announced that it will resume primetime coverage of prize fights, so maybe there's a little hope left, after all.

DECOMMUNISATION: THE MISSING END TO THE COLD WAR: In Tech Central Station, Sidney Goldberg (a.k.a. Jonah's dad) makes a point that we've made here a few times:

Germany underwent denazification after World War II, a lustration that went down to the lowest party levels, making it virtually impossible for a Nazi party member to hold office in the new Germany, so that the relatively unblemished mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, became Chancellor.

The collapse of the Soviet Union, on the other hand, did not result in a decommunisation. There was no equivalent of the Nuremberg trials, and indeed most high offices to this day are occupied by Communists or former Communists, tens of thousands of them with blood on their hands. The supreme insult is that the president of this vast political enterprise is Vladimir Putin, a former high-ranking Communist in the Soviet Secret Police. The equivalent of this would have been the inheritance of the government of Nazi Germany after World War II by the Nazi gauleiter of Poland.

* * * There are very few books on Americans who long for Hitler, mainly because there never was a significant segment of Nazis in America, but unfortunately there is a significant number of Americans who still think that Joe Stalin was an idealistic reformer, and some of these Americans are in control of history departments of important universities -- and virtually no books are available that document and explain this peculiar situation. [In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr] fills this gap.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Decommunisation also would have likely prevented unrepentant Stalinists from being honored by the US government and Hollywood as well.

SHODDY COVERAGE OF A SIMPLE STORY: "Group Captain Mandrake", who knows a thing or two about ships, Fisks a routine CNN story about the USS New Jersey.

As one of his commenters wrote, "People trust the media when it reports about stuff they don't know about, conveniently forgetting that every time the media reports about something they DO know about the media gets it wrong."

RACISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM FROM THE LEFT: John Hawkins has two examples of the left's racism in action. There are plenty more.

Meanwhile, George Will writes about "The Left's Anti-Semitic Chic", which is prominently on display in this blantantly anti-Semitic article from Adbusters magazine, complete with little ticks next to the names of prominent Jewish conservatives.

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds has some thoughts as well.

OK, so let me see if I have this straight. 20 years after the event--and four years after she consulted for the would be successor to the president who never met an intern he didn't like--feminist icon Naomi Wolf accuses literary scholar Harold Bloom of having put his hand on her thigh at Yale University 20 years ago.

As Anne Applebaum writes, "Sometimes in the course of a great American debate there comes a moment when the big battle guns fall silent, the pundits run out of breath, and -- unexpectedly -- the long, bitter argument suddenly turns into farce":

What is most extraordinary about Wolf is the way in which she has voluntarily stripped herself of her achievements and her status, and reduced herself to a victim, nothing more. The implication here is that women are psychologically weak: One hand on the thigh, and they never get over it. The implication is also that women are naive, and powerless as well: Even Yale undergraduates are not savvy enough to avoid late-night encounters with male professors whose romantic intentions don't interest them.

The larger implications are for the movement that used to be called "feminism." Twenty years of fame, money, success, happy marriage and the children she has described in her books -- and Naomi Wolf, one of my generation's leading feminists, is still obsessed with her own exaggerated victimhood? It's not an ideology I'd want younger women to follow.

Don't worry, Anne. I'd say Naomi just put the proverbial fork in it.

UPDATE: Earlier this week, in a post about TV's Sex in the City, Jonah linked to one of his articles from 1998, which really captures those hazy days of pre-9/11 innocence and silliness:

Something remarkable has happened to the cultural Left in the 1990s. Sex is everything. Sexuality has become the linchpin of human identity, replacing race as the chief source of activism and passion in discussions of civil rights, politics, and public morality. In a calculated maneuver, the Left has decided to brand Clinton's sexual behavior with Monica Lewinsky private-despite all of the evidence that Clinton dragooned the country into the most public illicit affair in modern history and then compounded his misdeed with other crimes. Yes, the affair was metaphysically tacky and bordered on the deviant, but the more unconventional the expression of sexuality, the more comfortable the Left is in defending it.

Obviously, this represents a tectonic shift in feminist dogma. It is a shift that was occurring well before the Lewinsky scandal. Today, the most provocative academic feminist isn't a sex hater. She is Jane Gallop, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin. When asked about her sexual preference-at a conference entitled "Flaunting It"-she responded, "Graduate students." On talk shows and on the op-ed pages, the sex-is-rape school is in full retreat while the sex-is-a-passport-to-a-cushy-job school is attracting adherents in droves. Katie Roiphe in the New York Times says of Lewinsky, "There is nothing inherently wrong . . . with her attempt to translate her personal relationship with the President into professional advancement."

The Slate article from 1999 about Wolf that I linked to above has this pretzel-logic quote from her:

The Lewinsky affair was a tricky issue for most liberal feminists, who were caught between protesting sexual harassment and supporting the president they had elected. Wolf did both, by turning the issue into an object lesson on women's professional success. "The people who should be looking into these allegations is not a partisan prosecutor but the EEOC," she opined on the talk-show circuit.

But today, Wolf has blown a gasket because Yale won't investigate charges about an incident that occurred 20 years ago.

Farce, indeed.

LIFE IN THE POST-NIPPLEGATE ERA: Howard Stern Show taken off Clear Channel stations "until we are assured that his show will conform to acceptable standards of responsible broadcasting".

Maybe Nipplegate really was a tipping point of sorts.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis agrees, and is none too happy about the situation.

ANOTHER UPDATE: As usual, James Lileks puts things into proper perspective, by using language that's more appropriate for well, Howard Stern.

ONE MORE UPDATE: While we're on the subject, this is as good a place as any to note that as a result of Nipplegate, Janet Jackson was dropped from the title role of a made for TV biography of Lena Horne--at Horne's request. (And we tip our fedora to the ever-elegant Ms. Horne.)

YOU'RE SOAKING IN IT: Jan Miner, star of Palmolive's long-running "Madge" commercials died Sunday at 86.

KEYSHAWN FOR GALLOWAY? Are the Tampa Bay Bucs and Dallas Cowboys about to swap wide receivers?

FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE FOIE GRAS: Thomas Lifson picks up on a topic we originally posted about here.

SAMIZDATA IS USUALLY A SOBER, SERIOUS Blog, which looks at The Big Issues Of The Day from a reserved, carefully controlled point of view. Which makes their rare attempts at humor all the more enjoyable.

Such as this post, which states that "dozens of speed cameras [in England] are to be replaced with electronic signs that display a frowning face when a driver is speeding but do not result in fines or penalty points".

Oh wait, they're not kidding? England is actually doing that? Smiley or frowny faces depending upon your speed limit. Really?!

Getoutahere!

PROBABLY BEATS BOXED WINE: Canned wine debuts in Australia.

MIDNIGHT MADNESS: Writing in Tech Central Station, Ben Lieberman says:

Remember all those "midnight regulations" finalized by outgoing Clinton administration officials during their final two months in power? The Bush administration would prefer you forget, as its efforts to deal with them have proven to be failures.

To its credit, the incoming Bush officials, faced with a wave of these politically correct but substantively problematic environmental regulations, sought to double check their merits before allowing them to take effect. As a result, they were hit with nasty attacks from journalists and environmental activists. The furor over these so-called "environmental rollbacks" frequently dominated the news in 2001 prior to 9/11.

Read the whole thing.

PUTTING THE BS IN PBS--but not for much longer: Bill "Cash and Carry" Moyers is leaving PBS in November.

CAN YOU SEE THE REAL ME? Charles Johnson looks at John Kerry's flip-flopping position on Israel's security fence.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, CNS News reports:

Teamsters union chief Jimmy Hoffa has confused both environmentalists and free-market advocates after saying that Democratic front-runner John Kerry, if elected president, would "drill like never before" across the United States.

On the other hand, given the last Democratic president's proclivities, I'm glad Kerry's apparently planning to keep his drilling confined to oil, if you know what I mean...

SHOULD GODWIN'S LAW BE UPDATED? Julian Sanchez writes, "Since 2001, the rhetorical trump-card role once played by Hitler seems to have been taken over by terrorists".

If we don't update Godwin's Law, the terrorists will have won!

(Or something like that.)

THIS ISN'T ANTI-SEMITIC (I don't think), it's just disgusting: The Royal Scottish Academy's student exhibition in Edinburgh includes a piece of "art" called, "Mickey's Taliban Adventures"

For our reaction to a vaguely similar piece of "art" from a couple of years go, click here.

UPDATE: James Lileks has some amusing thoughts on the arts, post-9/11.

It opens today; the last film to generate this kind of controversy was probably Oliver Stone's JFK (I was going to say The Last Temptation of Christ, until I remembered the angry debates on shows like Nightline that Stone's film generated at the time of its release about its historical accuracy.)

Speaking of controversy, how's this for mixed reviews? Roger Ebert gives the film four stars.

Simultaneously, my friend Jami Bernard, of the New York Daily News, not only gives it one star, but writes, "Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ is the most virulently anti-Semitic movie made since the German propaganda films of World War II."

Wow.

It's difficult--very difficult--for me to imagine Mel Gibson deliberately making an anti-Semitic film, considering the industry that he works in, and one would imagine, plans to continue working in for several more decades.

Jeff Jacoby writes:

Is "The Passion" antisemitic? That depends on whether it is antisemitic to re-enact the story told by the Christian Bible. To be sure, there is a good deal in Gibson's movie that is not in the New Testament. In one scene, for example, Judas is driven to commit suicide by a gang of demonic Jewish children. In another, Pontius Pilate, beholding a shackled Jesus who has already been beaten bloody by Jewish guards, chastises the High Priest: "Do you always punish your prisoners before they are judged?"

But there is no getting around the fact that the parts of "The Passion" that are the most unflattering to Jews -- the bloody-minded and hateful Temple priests, the Judean mob howling for Jesus's death -- come straight out of the Gospels. I shudder at those depictions and reject them as historically false, but I cannot call a Christian antisemitic for believing in the truth of his Bible. I will not smear Gibson as a Jew-hater.

But neither will I pretend that he is unaware of the long and horrid history of Passion plays, or of the millions of Jews who have died at the hands of killers demonizing them as "Christ-killers." It is not unreasonable to worry about the effect of a movie like "The Passion" at a time of surging antisemitism.

And for immediate, stark, black and white contrast, Joel C. Rosenberg writes about what a blatant 21st century anti-Semitic film looks like.

UPDATE: James Bowman is my go-to guy for hardcore conservative film commentary. And he's none-too-impressed with The Passion:

The accusations of anti-Semitism which have done so much to keep this film in the news for nearly a year before its opening stem, I take it, from this tremendous thrashing that precedes the actual crucifixion. They are to some extent a bum rap. Gibson does not seem to me to go out of his way to stress the Jewishness of the Jewish priests and Pharisees such as Annas (Toni Bertorelli) and Caiaphas (Mattia Sbragia), nor of the Jerusalem mob chanting "Crucify him!" My admittedly unpractised eye caught no stereotypes. The Roman soldiers — a brutal and undisciplined rabble motivated by nothing but sadism — come off worse than anybody. At the same time, Mel Gibson must have known that, in taking torture and brutality as his subject in preference to more traditionally spiritual considerations, he ensured that not only those who were implicated in such a crime but also those with a history of being unfairly implicated in it would feel themselves aggrieved. My guess is that he’s not sorry to have stirred up this hornet’s nest.

At any rate, it takes our minds off what’s really wrong with the movie. I have the most tremendous admiration for Pope John Paul II, but if he really said on seeing the film as he was at first reported to have said (before an official spokesman denied it) that "It is as it was" then I don’t think much of him as a movie critic. The one thing we can be absolutely sure of is that it is as it wasn’t. For although much publicity has been given to the fact that the screenplay is in Aramaic, the language of Jesus, and Latin, the language of the Roman imperial authorities, much less well known is the fact that it is also in a third language and that is Movieish, the language of the long line of cinematic sufferers that have come before this Jesus and that cannot but distract us from a proper consideration of what is, after all, meant to be a unique event in human history.

Nor is it only the scourging and beating which is written in Hollywoodese. Allusions to other movies range from Chuckie-like child sprites out of mainstream horror flicks to a pale Bergmanian devil with a dramatically gratuitous snake to certify his scriptural authenticity. There is even at one point a computer-animated movie demon like something out of The Devil’s Advocate or The Ninth Gate. This kind of thing I found at least as dislocating to the sense of occasion as if, instead of Latin and Aramaic, the movie had been made in Brooklynese. All of which is simply to say that The Passion of the Christ is like every other Mel Gibson picture in being ridiculously overproduced. As the British would say, he has once again over-egged the pudding. The new age music with pan pipes and wordless choruses, the swelling orchestral sounds at moments of significance, the flashbacks cross cut with the main action so as to produce heavy-handed ironies — all these things take us annoyingly out of the period and plonk us down jarringly in the entertainment culture of the present day.

Or as Bowman says in the link to his review, "Mel, we may love you for the enemies you’ve made, but your movie is still a mess."

ANOTHER UPDATE: When I wrote above that "It's difficult--very difficult--for me to imagine Mel Gibson deliberately making an anti-Semitic film, considering the industry that he works in". I was unconsciously alluding to a word to most familiar to Hollywood: blacklisting. Bill Sulik (oops, excuse me, "Václav Patrik Šulik"(!)) writes about just that possibility, but then asks:

You mean Hollywood might maintain it's own blacklist?

That can't be true.

Nope, not a chance.

LAST UPDATE TO THIS POST: I have more here.

GREETINGS FROM SILICON VALLEY: I'm back; flew in last night, after visiting friends and family. While I didn't go down to the site of the WTC, New York seems to be fully recovered from its unfortunately way-too-brief fling with patriotism--much fewer American flags present these days. But on the other hand, other than seeing a couple of "STOP BUSH" signs crudely painted onto mailboxes, it didn't seem to be complete anarchy, either. And, as Andrew Sullivan wrote, if for the left, 9/11 didn't happen, it's much, much harder to toss the events down the memory hole in one of the two actual cities it took place in.

I was very surprised, and quite happily so, to see a serviceman in camouflage, a beret, and carrying an M-16 standing with regular NYPD men at Penn Station. I'm not sure if that's a daily event, or if something unusual was going on this past weekend.

More to come.

GREETINGS FROM NEW JERSEY! Not Asbury Park (that's Bruce Springsteen's old stomping grounds), but not all that far from it, either. Having posted an "I'm traveling" message on Thursday, I did want to add to it that I'm fine, albeit with limited broadband (and hence blogging) access. Watch for regular blogging to resume later this week.

ONE FOR THE ROAD: Before I head out, I wanted to leave you with this passage from Sofia Sideshow, found via Stephen Green. It's too good not to share:

Something about this war is eating Bush's detractors alive, something unquantifiable with conventional weights and measures. I think that it is because if George W. Bush really did lie (and thus surprising both the Right and Left), the anti-war crowd would still have to face a disheartening Spectacle of Freedom For An Entire People, instead of the more satisfactory Humiliation Of Bush At The United Nations And Mass Graves Nobody Knows About.

That simple.

Nothing is more irritating than watching your enemies fail to live up to your worst expectations. If George W. was hawking stolen museum art, or John Ashcroft was forcing Shiites to convert, or Dick Cheney was sucking the oil from Iraqi teenager's skin, the Left would have far lower blood pressure. They would be relieved, vindicated, because the war would be delightfully immoral.

The anti-war crowd long ago started measuring themselves as culturally, intellectually, and morally superior to the pro-war crowd, instead of measuring whether their policies were superior. Thus, the incredible success in Afghanistan and Iraq is not a blow to their policy, it is a blow to their ego and sense of self. I think the worst example I can give is during the campaign in Afghanistan, where it became popular to repeat that ANY civilian casualties should classify the endeavor as a failure for George W. Bush and the administration. This was to raise the goalpost to a level not out of concern for Afghani civilians, but out of concern that the critics' self-image not be a casualty, to attempt to force the debate into one where it was guaranteed that the pro-war side would be inferior. Hey, to each their own, I guess.

Yet as of now, they are constantly reminded that their intellectual and cultural inferiors have accomplished something quite historic. Wonderful, even. And they know it; nobody is this sputtering and unhinged when proven right.

I really think Jonah pegged it, a few months before the war in Iraq, when he called the left on their "hypocrophobia"--their fear of actually being taken seriously.

I'LL BE TRAVELING LATER TODAY, so don't look for much posting. But between the material that's already on the Weblog, and the Essays and Articles pages, there should be plenty to keep you busy. Just tidy up when you leave, OK?

Thanks.

IRANIAN TRAIN DISASTER: A train loaded with a variety of toxic chemicals crashed about 20 miles east of the city of Neyshabur, leaving a death toll of 295, and climbing.

Debka reports:

DEBKA’s sources in Tehran have heard unconfirmed reports that the disaster was no accident, but possibly sabotage carried out by anti-government forces in Khorassan province, which borders on Afghanistan. This report ties in with another that claims the train was not carrying innocent industrial cargoes but hundreds of tons of explosive materials Iran was smuggling into Afghanistan via the Shiite city of Herat to be used by Iranian saboteurs and agents for guerrilla attacks on US troops and the forces of President Hamid Karzai, as well for supplying the Taleban in their Kandahar stronghold.

DEBKAfile’s sources report that there were a series of blasts; the first inside the Neyshabur train station was powerful enough to trigger a second explosion in the remote station of Khayyam. There, it set ablaze another train carrying fuel and other flammable material.

Iran has long used Khorassan province as a conduit for smuggling thousands of its agents into Afghanistan. But the province is also home to nearly two million Afghan refugees, some of whom hire out as agents to the Kabul government or the US military. The suggestion is that a group of these agents were ordered to blow up the train when it pulled into Neyshabur. Their mission: to deter the Iranians from further meddling in Afghanistan.

It would not have been hard to persuade Afghan refugees to undertake the mission. As Sunni Muslims, they harbor strong feelings of resentment against their discrimination at the hands of Iran’s Shiite majority. Three years ago, Afghans were responsible for a large explosion in Mashad, an attack launched after Iran ordered the destruction of a makeshift mosque the refugees had built. Several weeks later, a similar blast occurred in Zahedan, capital of Iran’s Baluchestan province, where Iranian authorities had pulled down another mosque constructed by the refugees.

Of course, as with anything from Debka, take it with a big grain of salt. But at a minimum, it's an interesting and for the moment, very plausible hypothesis.

IF KERRY'S LOCKED UP THE NOMINATION, then it's time to discuss the issues, writes David Limbaugh.

Circumventing the law appears to have failed in San Francisco, at least for the time being:

The California state agency that records marriages said yesterday that forms that have been altered, which San Francisco has done on its homosexual "marriage" licenses, will not be registered.

California has a standard application form for marriage licenses, "and if it has been altered in any way, then it will not be registered and recorded. It will be sent back to the county of origin," said Nicole Evans, spokeswoman for Kim Belshe, the California Health and Human Services secretary.

The more than 2,600 homosexual couples who have been "married" since last week with the help of San Francisco city and county officials have been crossing out "groom" and "bride" as printed on the standard application and writing in phrases such as "Applicant #1" and "Applicant #2" or "spouses for life."

None of these forms will be accepted, Ms. Evans said yesterday.

* * * California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who generally supports homosexual rights, criticized San Francisco officials for disobeying state law.

"I support all of California's existing laws that provide domestic-partnership benefits and protections," Mr. Schwarzenegger said in a statement released late Tuesday. "However, Californians spoke on the issue of same-sex marriage when they overwhelmingly approved California's law that defines marriage as being between a man and a woman.

"I support that law and encourage San Francisco officials to obey that law."

They won't, but it's a nice thought from the California governor.

4,595 VISITORS TODAY!! Thank you all very, very much for stopping by our little corner of the Internet.

FEDERAL ANTI-TRUST OFFICIALS ON THE ALERT: Glenn Reynolds has yet another Blog, continuing his monopolization of the Blogosphere.

THANKS KALAT: Back on April 9th of last year, Peter Jennings rued the loss of sculpting jobs under Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. Maybe Jennings should check out the recent work of Saddam's former personal sculptor, Kalet.

(Karl Rove, if you're reading this, there's a touching campaign commercial in this story.)

UPDATE: And it's better than this lame campaign slogan, which if true (I could certainly see the RNC trying to put one over on Clymer's Times of course), sounds much like the pathetic "Don't Change Horses In Mid-Stream" mock advertisements at the beginning of Wag The Dog.

QUOTE OF THE DAY comes from Michael Duff:

In 2001, New York was burning and we were afraid. Today, there are American flags flying in Baghdad and our enemies are afraid.

And this from a critic of President Bush!

(Link via InstaPundit.)

IT'S BEEN A WHILE SINCE I'VE LINKED TO KESHER TALK, but this is a good one: Judith Weiss looks at where some of Teresa Heinz Kerry's charitable contributions have been going. Hint: Ramsey Clark and IndyMedia are two of them.

BLOGGING: THE NEXT WAVE: Writing in Tech Central Station Glenn Reynolds has two main suggestions for anyone thinking of starting a new blog: regional/local blogging and/or multimedia.

While the ease of getting start with a blog means that there will always be lots of lots of new "one man band" blogs, group blogs such as "Team Stryker", Blogcritics and Samizdata (to name three of many) will only grow in popularity, since they can share their resources and the marketability of their names to leverage their efforts.

Check out this headline:

"Laura Bush Says Gay Marriage 'Shocking'"

Geez, can you say "misleading"? I knew that you could. Here's what the body of the article quotes Mrs. Bush as actually saying:

Laura Bush says gay marriages are "a very, very shocking issue" for some people, a subject that should be debated by Americans rather than settled by a Massachusetts court or the mayor of San Francisco.

Asked how she feels about the issue personally, Mrs. Bush replies: "Let's just leave it at that."

So at worst, she punts on the issue. But that's a far, far cry from "Laura Bush Says Gay Marriage 'Shocking'".

As the Professor wrote about a different AP article, "This is unusually transparent partisanship, even by the not-very-demanding standards of Big Media in an election year. The good news is that it is transparent."

UPDATE: Columbia Journalism Review has more.

END GAME: Charles Johnson writes that "the logic of the war on terror inevitably leads to a confrontation with Pakistan".

Which would certainly lend credence to this news item from a couple of weeks ago.

HUGH HEWITT IS OFFERING TO LET JOHN EDWARDS co-host his radio show between now and Super Tuesday (March 2nd).

"Why? Just because I like a good race."

Think Edwards will accept?

DID NATIONAL REVIEW DOOM DEAN? This cover certainly didn't help him, but NR editor Rich Lowry defends it, citing multiple reasons.

GIVE HIM CREDIT FOR ONE THING: John Kerry is a tireless campaigner, always finding new and novel ways to get his message out.

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

A GREAT IDEA, UP IN SMOKE: So much for Arnold's smoking plaza. James Taranto writes:

It seems Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is not planning to tear a roof off California's state capitol to make way for a "smoking plaza," as the Daily Telegraph had reported (and we repeated yesterday). Sacramento Bee blogger Daniel Weintraub says the story is false: "I checked with the governor's office. They officially confirmed: no plans for any demolition or altering of the Capitol. They have, of course, installed a donated tent, about 10 feet by 10 feet, in the center of the governor's (pre-existing) open air courtyard. The tent looks for all the world like a smoking tent, complete with ashtrays. But Schwarzenegger aides insist on calling the shelter a 'deal-making tent.' "

Too bad. But maybe someone else will run with the idea.

THE AIRBRUSHED BBC ARTICLE that we mentioned here and here (and was the subject of yesterday's Instalanche) is still available, in its original form, in Google's cache. (and Rush's Website has it as a PDF file.) If you're interested, save it before it's gone!

(Hat tip to reader Stephen Hill.)

FLIP-FLOPPING KERRY? Willing to say anything to anybody to get elected? Or is he suddenly pro-business and development?

You make the call!

UPDATE: Roger L. Simon says it's all part of The Unified Kerry Theory. A commenter to Roger's post says:

The Unified Kerry Theory is on a collision course with the "Fact-check their asses" theory of the blogiverse, and I'll betcha the latter comes out the winner. If Kerry had been paying attention to New Media, he'd know that he can never get away with his flexibility, no matter what Teddy Kennedy tells him.

Or as we said a couple of days ago about the press, "I'd like to think that eventually, the left will be damaged by how easy it now is to Google, Lexus/Nexus and search the huge database that the Media Research Center has built up, to compare and contrast how they respond to Republicans versus how they respond to Democrats. Sooner or later, their hypocrisy has got to catch up with them."

NOT WITH A YEAAAARGH!!! BUT A WHIMPER: "Dean Ends Campaign, Vows to Back Nominee".

UPDATE: Picking up the theme, James Taranto writes one of his famous bye-kus:

He raged and he screamed
Then lingered long enough to
End with a whimper

What can I say? Great minds pun alike.

LIFE IMITATES SCRAPPLEFACE: "Once again, Scrappleface's Scott Ott is writing the lines. Kerry's just living them".

LIFE IMITATES WALTER MONDALE:

[In 1984], with the nation facing huge deficits, Mondale told the voters that a raise in taxes was inevitable. "Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I," he said. "He won't tell you, I just did." It was a disastrous strategy. Reagan promised prosperity, a strong defense, and balanced budgets without raising taxes. On election day, he lost forty-nine states and carried only MN and DC. Assessing the results, Mondale commented, "Reagan was promising them `morning in America,' and I was promising a root canal."

John Kerry, in 2003:

"We have to either roll back or prevent the top end of Bush tax cuts from taking place … I’m prepared to go at it and say we’re going to take it away."

Yeah, that'll sell.

MORE ON SCHWARZENEGGER'S SMOKING PLAZA: Jacob Sullum writes:

The outraged response from the anti-smoking crowd is further evidence that the main point of smoking bans is not to protect bystanders from secondhand smoke but to discourage the habit by making it less convenient and less socially acceptable. "That's very frightening that he would even think about smoking inside the heart of our state Capitol," said one activist, clearly more concerned about the symbolism than the smoke. "He could do more good by championing our cause rather than trivializing it."

Maybe Arnold's more of a pro-choice kind of guy?

JOANNE JACOBS HAS A GREAT IDEA for a book on parenting:

Some day I'll write a book titled Everything I Know About Parenting I Learned from Mick Jagger. You can't always get what you want. But if you try sometimes you might find you get what you need.

Heh.

INSTALANCHE! Thanks, Professor.

Here's Hewitt's Blog post about Kerry's 1971 speech. He also has a link to a PDF transcription.

This will come back to haunt Kerry, if he gets the nomination.

Hugh Hewitt is running an audio recording of Kerry's "Winter Soldier" speech in front of the Senate in 1971. It's got every possible early-70s "baby killer" cliche all rolled into one. If you're reading this as of the time of this post, click on over to KCBQ 1170 AM San Diego to hear it on the Internet.

ADVANTAGE ED! Rush Limbaugh picks up on the airbrushed BBC quote that we posted early--very early--this morning. He has links to the original and whitewashed versions of the article.

WHO'S THE LIMPEST WRITER AT THE NEW YORK TIMES? Their frequently MIA ombudsman, according to The New Criterion.

WILL "SLASH" GET SLASHED? Kordell Stewart's not expected back with Bears.

HOW THE DVD WAS BORN is the topic of my latest Electronic House newsletter.

REBUILDING THE PERFECT BEAST: Will Collier, guest-blogging on Stephen Green's VodkaPundit site, has some suggestions for Don Henley, whose ideas of business seem permanently stuck in 1977.

UPDATE: Collier has a follow-up to his original post.

SMOKE 'EM IF YOU GOT 'EM: England's Telegraph reports that "Cigar-loving Arnie plans a 'smoking plaza' at state capitol":

Arnold Schwarzenegger, California's cigar-smoking governor, is to tear a roof off the state capitol so that smokers can enjoy their vice inside the legislature.

The Austrian-born actor, elected governor last November, is facing protests for deciding to turn a courtyard in the building into a "smoking plaza". It will include a drinking area. Part of the roof will be removed to get round a California law banning smoking in offices, bars and restaurants.

The governor's spokesman, Terri Carbaugh, said he planned to be among those using the area. "It's a more positive environment where they can all be on an equal footing, as opposed to everyone going into the governor's office where he's behind his desk."

This is an amazingly common sense solution. As James Taranto wrote, "Now if only we can somehow install Schwarzenegger as mayor of New York."

BEST. BLOG. NAME. EVER: Asparagirl and Scott Ganz have a new blog they call, "The Protocols of the Yuppies of Zion".

INSTAPUNDIT ON AP: "This is just campaigning against Bush, in the guise of reporting".

AIRBRUSH AWARD: Drudge links to a story on the BBC, and quotes from it:

WASH POST REPORTER: 'Nobody would be too shocked if Kerry lied about an affair. Even if someone came to us with photographs we still wouldn't run it'...

But that quote--damning to the Post--is removed. However, as of the time of this post, it's still in the link that Google uses to link to the story. And here's a screen capture, for when it scrolls off.

The BBC has quite a checkered recent history of airbrushing its stories with no warning. Looks like it's happened once again.

UPDATE: More here.

GEE, I GUESS HE'D PREFER SADDAM: Bishop Tutu says Bush and Blair should say they're sorry for "immoral" Iraq war.

Tutu should take this simple test. I'd love to hear his answer.

DOES THIS MEAN PHIL DONAHUE'S COMING BACK? MSNBC boots its president, and hires former ABC and CNN chief Rick Kaplan.

Over a year ago, I posted my thoughts on the little network that couldn't. And little's changed since (other than Phil getting the axe).

As I said yesterday, "I'd like to think that eventually, the left will be damaged by how easy it now is to Google, Lexus/Nexus and search the huge database that the Media Research Center has built up, to compare and contrast how they respond to Republicans versus how they respond to Democrats. Sooner or later, their hypocrisy has got to catch up with them".

James Lileks compares a week at his newspaper in 1992 to their coverage today.

GLENN REYNOLDS has an extremely good point about San Francisco's new mayor, Gavin Newsom, and the law.

I caught a few minutes of Bill O'Reilly on Friday saying that Newsom is breaking the law, and should be impeached, but Gov. Schwarzenegger doesn't have the nerve to do something so blatantly un-PC. And sadly, I think he's right on both counts.

UPDATE: Jacob Levy of The Volokh Conspiracy looks at the legal issues involved here.

KERRY ACCUSES BUSH OF PLAYING THE RACE CARD: Well, at Daytona, at least...

Orrin Judd has some (more serious) thoughts on Kerry, who believes the key to electability is by being our national scold.

UPDATE: Once again, life imitates Scrappleface. Scott Ott's post was written before Kerry condemned Bush's visit to the Daytona 500!

FASTER PLEASE, PART II: "Bremer Hints He May Bar Iraqi Islamic Law".

Good move if he does.

FASTER, PLEASE: British government considering dismantling BBC.

Forgive me, please, for chuckling a little at Radley Balko's new meme, but he's definitely onto something:

You know, you sometimes get the feeling the day after the polio vaccine was invented, today's left would have run editorials lamenting the good ol' days, when we were a little more cautious about what swimming pools we jumped into, and expressing sadness that we'd now have no new stories about the afflicted overcoming their disability to inspire the rest of us.

I'm not kidding. They're that resistant to change. Every mill that shuts down is a "sign of our sad times." No matter that the new mill will do things better, faster and cheaper than the old one. New farming techniques grow more food on less land. But dammit, if there wasn't something romantic about the old-stye "family farm" that's deserving of government protection. Innovation isn't celebrated, it's excoriated for displacing some idealized vision of the way things once were. In matters of progress and dyanmism, the left is far more conservative than the conservatives are.

Radley's far from the first guy to notice that the left are far more reactionary these days than the right ever was, but "the conservative left" is a great way to phrase it.

UPDATE: Let's look at the election from the point of view of the ones now standing athwart history and yelling stop (to coin a phrase). A narrowly-elected president who's spent the last four years toppling the Taliban, putting Al-Qeada on the run, arresting Saddam Hussein and getting Libya to allow inspections of its nuclear program, not to mention making the Tranzis of "Old Europe" look like fools, even has he enlarges several of your social programs has got to drive you absolutely, totally insane.

LOOK SHARP: Musician Joe Jackson makes a surprising amount of sense when it comes to his take on smoking.

Joanne Jacobs writes, "Diane Ravitch, author of The Language Police, got her hands on New York state's guidelines for textbooks. Anything that could offend anybody is out".

And how!

Or, as George Orwell wrote, some 56 years ago:

'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition [of 1984's Newspeak Dictionary], we're not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,' he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction. 'Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?'

I'd say the Party's efforts are right on schedule.

THOSE JOHN KERRY/JANE FONDA PHOTOS: Snopes says that one is doctored, but one is real.

THE BOSS: Bruce Springsteen's faux-populism has become a bit too screedy and obvious in the past few years for my tastes, but Bruce Walker has some kind words for Springsteen's charitable efforts.

OH YEAH, THAT LIBERAL MEDIA, Part XXXVIII: I'd like to think that eventually, the left will be damaged by how easy it now is to Google, Lexus/Nexus and search the huge database that the Media Research Center has built up, to compare and contrast how they respond to Republicans versus how they respond to Democrats. Sooner or later, their hypocrisy has got to catch up with them.

UPDATE: Speaking of which...

I'VE BEEN SAMIZDATA'D! Christopher Pellerito of the nifty Samizdata.net Weblog has some thoughts on my guitar article in Tech Central Station.

867-530NINEEE-INE: Remember the hit song "867-5309"? That number can be yours, if the price is right: $40,100 is the current eBay bid at the time of this posting, and the auction has several days to go.

THE LAST, LAST TANGO IN PARIS: Reason looks at Bernardo Bertolucci latest film, The Dreamers, and finds it wanting.

Watched Casablanca after dinner at Parcel 104 last night. My wife wanted to see it for Valentine's Day, and there's a fairly new deluxe edition out on DVD, with a second disc full of bonus features. Humphrey Bogart's Rick is the quintessential liberal figure of WWII: he's got a misty leftist past (supporting the Communists in the Spanish Civil War), his business isn't all that profitable, but his staff is well paid, and his cafe, like America itself, is a haven and melting pot for refugees all around the world. He starts off the film (set at the beginning of December, 1941) as an isolationist, and ends it by selling his bar, getting Ilsa on the plane to America with freedom fighter Victor Laszlo, and becoming a partisan once again, along with his new best friend, free-French policeman Louis Renault, played wonderfully by Claude Rains. (Renault is from the province in France where they speak the King's English perfectly; Jean-Luc Picard will be born there 400 years later.)

Hollywood was certainly liberal in WWII, but as I understand its past from books like Neal Gabler's An Empire Of Their Own it wasn't quite leftist, despite the best efforts of reds like Dalton Trumbo. But if Hollywood were to make Casablanca today, Rick would chuck it all, move back to America with Ilsa and do his best to dodge the war on terrorism, and probably dub Victor Laslzo a Nazi, terrorist, or racist himself. Look at Hawkeye, as played by Alan Alda in the M*A*S*H TV series: a draftee, the minute his hitch is up, he's getting out of Korea just as fast as he can. He can't see any difference between the communists and America, and while he's a dedicated and brilliant doctor from a New England state (!), he turns a complete blind eye to the devastation and terror that will befall North Korea after the war.

For America--not just the liberal left of WWII and their president, but the formerly isolationist Republicans as well--Pearl Harbor was a turning point and a rallying point. For today's left, 9/11 never happened. FDR became a hero for millions of Americans for willing to wage a two front war against the Japanese and the Germans--again, not just of the left, but for the right as well (President Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole and both Presidents Bush have all praised him). But for the left, stoked by Al Gore, Howard Dean, and John Kerry, President Bush is an enemy of freedom himself.

As cynical as Bogey's character was in Casablanca, what would Rick say about that?

UPDATE: As I was saying...

GEORGE WILL HAS A LIST OF QUESTIONS FOR JOHN KERRY. Steven Den Beste only has three.

DID AL GORE GO AWOL? Tim Graham, on NRO's "The Corner", has some "Gore Army Lore".

UPDATE: Howard Owens asks, did this president go AWOL during his tour of duty in 'Nam?

THE QUOTE OF THE DAY comes from Nick Gillespie, who writes, "Head, heart, whatever. What's lacking on the left most of all seems to be balls."

They lost those in '72.

THE LOW STATE OF HIGHER EDUCATION: Sexism at Harvard B-School, intellectual uniformity at Duke, racism at Santa Clara University, anti-Semitism at UC Berkeley.

I wonder how many parents know what their tuition money is being spent on these days.

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY--just don't get caught celebrating it in Saudi Arabia.

WHO BETTER THAN CAPT. SPAULDING to announce a boxed set of Marx Brothers DVDs coming in May from Warner Brothers.

Now if he could only explain how that elephant got into his pajamas...

VODKA'S SERVED COLD, TOO: The Scotsman reports that "Former Chechen President Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev who has been linked to al-Qaida and was accused by Russia of maintaining international terrorist ties, was killed today after his car exploded in the Qatari capital Doha".

Was it payback by the Russian government over last Thursday's subway bombing?

STANDING AT THE CROSSROADS: I have an article on "The Guitar's Technological Crossroads" in today's Tech Central Station.

Photos of me playing the new Ethernet-cable Les Paul at Gibson's Sillicon Valley labs are included...

DOUG WILLIAMS RETURNS TO THE BUCS: Their first great quarterback (and later Super Bowl MVP with the Redskins) is returning to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers as a personnel executive.

FROM THE HOME OFFICE IN HOPE, ARKANSAS: Timothy Noah lists the top ten ways the press rationalize the publication of infidelity rumors.

TOUGH TALK FOR THE SENSITIVE: An article in the New Yorker asks, "Can liberals take on Islamic fundamentalism?". The author, George Packer, argues they can, but only if they radically change how they think about foreign affairs. But William Voegeli of The Claremont Institute says, "following Packer's advice guarantees they won't".

"THE MEDIA IS THE ENEMY": Heard Rep. Peter King (R-NY) utter that phrase on the Laura Ingraham show while I was in the car just now, and he's certainly got a point. Thank God there's information available on the War on Terror from sources other than the traditional media. On the other hand, as Ingraham noted, this was the same media that was out to bury Reagan, and he managed to do a pretty good job of going around them to get his message out.

But when you look at stories like this and this and this and this and this, (and numerous other examples), unless you're a full-on Tranzi, it's hard not to disagree with King's statement.

UPDATE: No sooner had I posted this, than I read Hugh Hewitt's take on the disparity between the new and old media's coverage of the current Kerry scandal. Hewitt writes, "In the age of the internet, blogging and Fox News, however, the glaring inconsistencies of the media's coverage of its favorites and its foes are quickly noted and absorbed by the public."

ANOTHER UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds adds, "if this infidelity story were about Bush, with the woman in question out of the country, they'd be running with it in a big way already".

But of course.

LIBERALS AND THE LEFT: Porphyrogenitus does a pretty good explaining the difference between the two (be sure to read his previous post on the subject). It helps to explain why we mostly use the term "leftists" around here, rather than the more common--and usually misapplied--"liberal".

(And of course, there's classical liberalism, but that's actually the forerunner to today's conservatism--not the FDR New Dealer-style liberalism that dominated the country prior to the new left of the Vietnam-era late-'60s and '70s. Google some of Jonah Goldberg's previous G-Files--he's written extensively about this sort of terminology.)

UPDATE: Speaking of the left, Edward Feser has some thoughts on why universities are so dominated by them, in Tech Central Station.

"ONE SCREWY JUDGE": Skip Bayless writes on Ohio State running back Maurice Clarett, who sued to be allowed to enter the NFL draft before he had been out of high school for the required three years, and has been granted just that by Judge Shira Scheindlin:

Scheindlin wouldn't even waste time and taxpayers' money on a full trial. She all but laughed at what a blatant violation of antitrust laws the NFL draft policy is and all but told the NFL to forget about appealing because it had no chance.

Maybe I'm as ``screwy'' as Scheindlin, but that's what I've written for 30 years. Forcing gifted football players to risk their bodies and NFL earning power playing college football without pay has for decades been the biggest injustice in sports. How this system has beaten the legal system this long has been even more extraordinary than 41-year-old Jerry Rice's longevity.

What an un-American racket pro and college football have gotten away with since pro football became America's favorite game. All it took to bring it crashing down was one kid just screwy enough to challenge it in court. It doesn't take a judge or lawyer to see that it should have no chance on appeal.

All you need to know is that baseball has always drafted players out of high school and that in 1971 Spencer Haywood opened the legal door for high school players to enter the NBA draft. But until now no teenager has dared to take on the NFL in court and to risk becoming a marked man on campus, on draft day and on an NFL field.

So the NFL has long benefited from a sensational minor league system for which it pays not a penny. What better way to prepare a young man for pro football than by having him play in nationally televised college games before huge crowds against the country's best young players? And what a sweet deal for the NCAA, which can make hundreds of millions in TV revenue while merely having to feed and house its stars.

For pro and college football it has been: I'll fill your vault if you'll fill mine.

The lone losers were the 18- to 21-year-old players who wrecked knees or necks for Dear Old U. Many aren't quite physically mature enough for the NFL. Yet many ruin their pro careers, or at least take years off them, while being forced to play the equally violent game of college football.

Just as last season began with the Lions' controversial hiring of Steve Mariucci as head coach, it looks like this year's football season is starting early as well----and just as controversially.

WAS CHRIS LEHANE THE MAN WHO LEAKED THE KERRY/INTERN STORY? Glenn Reynolds seems to think so. Lehane was apparently fired by Kerry and is now working for Clark, and Clark--and his Weblog--leaked the story first. And, perhaps administering the final coup de grace, Clark endorsed Kerry today.

And for what it's worth, Rush Limbaugh also seems to think it's Lehane.

Of course, the obvious question is what happens next. Drudge, in another heart-palpatating Exclusive! says that Kerry and his team are preparing their media response.

DANIEL PIPES SPOKE AT BERKELEY THIS WEEK: The results were not pretty.

UPDATE: The same could be said for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's lecture at Amherst.

UPDATE TO THE PIPES STORY: Charles Johnson writes that the crowd that attended his lecture was so upset, "they broke out the doomsday weapon of the left, usually reserved only for the biggest International ANSWER rallies—the dreaded giant papier mache Palestinian puppet heads!"

Let's all take a timeout from today's bimbo eruption, and hop into the Jacuzzi, shall we?

Err, in other words, my latest newsletter for Electronic House magazine is online. It offers some tips on building a high-tech bathroom, using the remodel that my wife and I did on our master bath last year as an example. The editor asked for some photos, and chose to run a shot of the TV I installed above the Jacuzzi. To give you an idea of what the room as a whole looks like, I've uploaded a couple more shots here.

Unfortunately, space requirements caused one of my favorite parts of the newsletter to get jettisoned, something that was based on a Blog post from right around this time last year:

Did you ever read the John Cheever story, The Swimmer, or see the 1968 movie version, which starred a surprisingly buff Burt Lancaster as a middle-aged man reliving his life by swimming from pool to pool on a hot Sunday afternoon in his suburban neighborhood? If you didn't, I'm not surprised, but it's one of those offbeat 1960s films that Bravo reruns from time to time (the other is the Canadian film version of The Fox, with Keir Dullea, minus Gary Lockwood and HAL 9000). [Since this post was written, it's been released on DVD, hence the Amazon link to the right.]

I did my own version of The Swimmer today, and I didn't even get wet. As part of our remodeling project, my wife and I are planning to put in a tub-sized Jacuzzi when we renovate our primary bathroom. Because at 6'2", I'm several inches taller than my wife, and 2/3rds of it are legs, I must have sat in 25 different models in a showroom in Fremont, California today. We think we've found a couple of winners, but we'll need to consult with our plumber.

By the way, is this a great country, or what? Anyone making a middle class income can walk into a warehouse-sized operation filled with a hundred or so Jacuzzis, hot tubs, just plain tubs, and showers, and purchase whichever one strikes his fancy. Try doing that in Iraq, Afghanistan, China, or Cuba.

If you're still with me, here are a couple of shots of the Jacuzzi. Click on them to enlarge.

IS THE GOP BEHIND KERRY'S BIMBO ERUPTION? Andrew Sullivan implies that they are. Jonah Goldberg "as someone who was pretty deeply involved in the Lewinsky battles" disagrees, and makes several valid points along the way.

RICH LOWRY PARSES "The Old Kerry Scandal"

And James Lileks adds:

I don’t care what John Kerry said when he was 25.

I care about what John Kerry says today . . . about what he said when he was 25.

Exactly.

NORA JONES AND GLOBALIZATION: Johnathan Pearce says the chanteuse's success should assuage several fears of a globalized culture. "And she is certainly rather easy on the eye", he adds.

Hey, I think this was a Virginia Postrel moment--involving both of her books!

57 VARIETIES OF KERRY COVERAGE: Mickey Kaus is wall-to-wall and treetop tall, when it comes to keeping up with the new JFK.

UPDATE: Bad choice of words on my part. There's much about John Kennedy I admire. Other than his wartime hitch in the service, I can't say the same about Kerry.

LET THE ONE-LINERS BEGIN:

Orrin Judd: "And here we'd always heard that Strom Thurmond had the best constituent services operation in the Senate..."

Stephen Green (channeling Robin Williams): "JFK Jr Jr"

Bill Clinton (via Scott Ott): "I finally see a candidate with whom I can identify. I was withholding my endorsement until I found a candidate who would resonate with mainstream Democrats the way I did. John F. Kerry is the man."

Teresa Heinz Kerry:

"I don't think I could have coped so well" with a mate's philandering as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) has. "I used to say to my husband, my late husband, 'If you ever get something I'll maim you. Not kill you, just maim you.' And we'd laugh, laugh, laugh." Heinz adds that she has never had any reason to suspect either of her husbands. "Not for one day, because what I expect of them, they have a right to expect of me. Maybe I'm into 18-year-olds." At which Heinz's campaign handler, former political journalist Chris Black, cautioned bleakly: "That was a joke."

As Roger L. Simon wrote today, "If [italics and bold mine] it proves out that Kerry could not keep it in his pants in the Post Monica Era, in all probability a strong part of him didn't want the job".

UPDATE: These guys are probably bummed about today's events.

Sound advice from Michael Graham (especially after the Torricelli and Paul Wellstone episodes in 2002): "Don't assume you know who's on the Democratic ticket until Election Day."

GUESS I PICKED THE WRONG WEEK TO STOP SNIFFING GLUE: Geez, wake up early to do an interview for an upcoming article, deal with the cable guy to fix the line to the modem, and then I see...this.

Didn't we already go through this a few times in the '90s? Maybe Gary Hart shouldn't have dropped out so quickly.

CELEBRATING 9/11 AT THE FBI: As Roger L. Simon writes, "If this article is even partly true, "Houston [and everywhere else in America], we have a problem!"

Guess what: we have a problem.

FIGHTING THE LAST WAR, AGAIN: The New York Times reports:

A complacent Saddam Hussein was so convinced that war would be averted or that America would mount only a limited bombing campaign that he deployed the Iraqi military to crush domestic uprisings rather than defend against a ground invasion, according to a classified log of interrogations of captured Iraqi leaders and former officers.

Wouldn't be the first time Saddam fought the last war.

UPDATE: Orrin Judd, ever the contrarian, writes, "Glancing around the Web and twisting the radio knob you'll see and hear folks saying that this shows how badly Saddam misjudged us. In fact, his judgment was entirely sound as regards nearly everyone in the West, except for George W. Bush. No wonder though that the President's radical departure from our previous pusillanimity is paying such dividends from Libya to Pakistan."

HUGH HEWITT WRITES, "There are, it seems, two categories of civilians":

Those who know what they owe to the military, and those who don't. I am in the former category, perhaps because I married into a family of Marines and have heard a more than a few stories of sacrifice and loss. Bloggers who presume to play in these fields should be careful to note where they stand. Feel free to question the president's statements and policies, as I do Kerry's, but it would be wise to leave off on questioning the president's service if you haven't, as they saying goes, walked the walk.

Makes a nice counterbalance to the "chickenhawk" argument, as well.

DEMOCRATIC IRAN: The son of the late Shah of Iran says it's foreseeable. "It is just a question of time that the cracks in the regime will widen and the Iranian people will have achieved democracy themselves", according to 43-year old Reva Pahlavi.

DON'T LET THE BASTARDS GRIND YOU DOWN DEPARTMENT: Perry de Havilland has a prediction that's sure to come true, one of these days. It's kind of along the lines of a question we asked very shortly after fighting broke out in Iraq.

TRADE IS A VERY, VERY GOOD THING. James Glassman (who runs Tech Central Station, to which I frequently contribute) writes that unfortunately, CNN financial anchor Lou Dobbs "and xenophobic politicians are out to kill the goose that lays our golden eggs":

Sen. John Kerry, in his stump speech inveighs against the "Benedict Arnold CEOs [who] send American jobs overseas."

By the way, the Kerry family business, H.J. Heinz Co. of Pittsburgh, operates 22 factories in the United States and 57 in foreign countries. I don't think that Kerry should shut down The Heinz 57, but he might drop the rhetoric and talk about trade responsibly. He should support, not trade's contraction, but its expansion, like George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and every president since Herbert Hoover.

I wonder if the words "Smoot-Hawley" mean anything to Kerry.

Probably not.

THE RESULTS ARE IN: "Kerry Beats Bush in 1972 Presidential Contest"!

As the man says...Heh.

IF THEY SHOULD BAR WARS, PLEASE LET THESE STAR WARS STAY-AY! The original trilogy of Star Wars films is coming to DVD on September 21st.

Well, not the original trilogy--these are the enhanced versions that Lucas prepared for release in 1997, including [geek mode on] the dreadful PC-scene where Greedo shoots at Han first, instead of Han showing what a tough-but-lovable rogue he was by shooting him first. [/geek]

In any event, the Digital Bits has all the details, and ongoing updates, for those who want to get their freak Force on.

COLIN POWELL, HOSS: As Jonah Goldberg wrote, it's "pretty cool to see a witness dress-down a congressman":

[Rep. Robert I Wexler, D-Fla] told Powell he considered him to be "the credible voice in the administration."

"When you reached the conclusion that Iraq represented a clear and present danger to the United States, that meant a lot to me," Wexler said. "But the facts suggest there was a part of the story that was not true."

Powell fielded the assertions calmly, defending the president's judgment and his own.

But when [Rep. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio] contrasted Powell's military experience to Bush's record with the National Guard, saying the president "may have been AWOL" from duty, Powell exploded.

"First of all, Mr. Brown, I won't dignify your comments about the president because you don't know what you are talking about," Powell snapped.

"I'm sorry I don't know what you mean, Mr. Secretary," Brown replied.

"You made reference to the president," Powell shot back.

Brown then repeated his understanding that Bush may have been AWOL from guard duty.

"Mr. Brown, let's not go there," Powell retorted. "Let's not go there in this hearing. If you want to have a political fight on this matter, that is very controversial, and I think it is being dealt with by the White House, fine, but let's not go there."

Powell then went on to defend the Bush administration's assertions on Iraq's pre-war weaponry. "We didn't make it up," Powell said. "It was information that reflected the views of analysts in all the various agencies."

Based on Wexler's comments, I guess Condi Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney--or anyone other than Powell--are no longer credible in the eyes of Democratic congressmen. And since when did Democrats get so concerned about avoiding military service?

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds links to the above article, but also includes contact information for the Democratic congressmen mentioned.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Timothy Perry writes: "Funny how this has not made the air on the mainstream media since it happened. You would think this would turn into great television, but then again it was someone defending the president instead of smearing him. "

Perhaps the Congressmen should heed the advice of a Democratic senator who stood on the floor of the Senate in 1992 and said:

What saddens me most is that Democrats, above all those who shared the agonies of that generation, should now be re-fighting the many conflicts of Vietnam in order to win the current political conflict of a presidential primary.

We do not need to divide America over who served and how. I have personally always believed that many served in many different ways. Someone who was deeply against the war in 1969 or 1970 may well have served their country with equal passion and patriotism by opposing the war as by fighting in it. Are we now, 20 years or 30 years later, to forget the difficulties of that time, of families that were literally torn apart, of brothers who ceased to talk to brothers, of fathers who disowned their sons, of people who felt compelled to leave the country and forget their own future and turn against the will of their own aspirations?

That man? John F. Kerry.

CHARLES PAUL FREUND LOOKS AT an interesting new slant in the New York Times' business reporting: since when did the monolithic chain of Tower record/video/book/porn stores become "traditional music stores"?

When I was a kid (waaaay back in the prehistoric 1970s), a "traditional music store" was the sort of little mom and pop store that Conrad Janis' character owned in Mork & Mindy, and the Times was railing that chains like Tower were putting stores like that out of business. As Freund writes, "When it comes to reporting business developments, most of whatever is happening is not only bad news, it's a sociological melodrama".

Exactly.

MORNING IN AMERICA UPDATE: Dow closes up 124, hits 2 1/2-year high.

STAGGERING STATISTIC: According to UPI, 75,000 have HIV/AIDS in New York City.

JUST ADDED DR. BOB ARNOT to the list of journalists in yesterday's post calling their current or former bosses biased. In this case, NBC.

NEW PURITANS WATCH: Live in California? This fellow wants to take away your choices when dining out. If you disagree with him, here's the phone number for his office.

UPDATE: Chron Watch writes:

Why do we somehow think liberals are all for protecting individual rights when as it shows here, they want to control what you eat, what you smoke, what you drive, where you live, how you protect your home and family, how much money you can make and keep, and the most important action, freedom of speech? Once again, Burton shows WHY liberal Democrats are in trouble in California, as Arnold's election shows. The Dems are misguided in their goals, and disconnected from the needs of the public. While we are battling a smothering state budget deficit, Burton is preoccupied with duck liver. The Democrats know how to control every aspect of our lives, but they can't do anything we really need.

WHO IS NUMBER ONE? Dissatisfied with President Bush's Texas twang, lack of nuance and frequent "Bushisms", Howard Dean raises the level of presidential discourse (not to mention discharge) at a Wisconsin high school.

(Via James Taranto.)

THE DARK AGES REBORN--at least for Iran: Today is the 25th anniversary of Iran's Khomeinist revolution.

LOST IN TRANSLATION: We watched Lost in Translation Monday night, the "It" film of 2003. The cinematography was stunning, Bill Murray did a tremendous job of playing...Bill Murray (although a very subdued, world-weary Bill Murray; this film would make a nifty double-feature with Groundhog Day) and the first two thirds of the film were amazing.

I've always liked somewhat open-ended movies that create a world and allow the viewer to get lost in it. In a way, Lost in Translation is vaguely reminiscent of Kubrick's more open-ended films, as well as oddly enough, Antonioni's Blowup (although minus the murder mystery plot of course--they still bothered with some nuance of a plot back in the Jurassic pre-postmodern days of 1966.)

Sophia Coppola, with the help of Lance Acord, her cinematographer, create a beautiful, surrealistic Tokyo as the backdrop--heck, maybe even the frontdrop--of her film. But anybody who's ever traveled (even if they've never left the country) knows that feeling of being awake at 2:00 in the morning in a strange hotel in a strange city, in a strange timezone--all of which your body is unaccustomed to.

That's the essential feel this film initially creates, and Coppola gives plenty of room for her stars (Murray and newcomer Scarlett Johanssen) to wander around in.

It's gotten very mixed reviews--it seems like one of those films that critics either love or hate. Thomas Hibbs (the author of Shows About Nothing) is in the former camp, and wrote:

Whatever note of hope there is in the film comes not from a clear affirmation of renewed purpose, but from the negative but potentially liberating judgment that all is not lost, that it is entirely too soon to write off these lives. Lost in Translation offers more than a glimpse of what it might mean for Hollywood to recover a sense of film making as a craft.

On the other hand, James Bowman hated it, deriding it as a film too driven by its feelings, and its characters' feelings, to count for much.

I can see Bowman's point, and the film's lack of plot causes it to peter out in its final act. But in a year when, (other than the titanic Lord of the Rings films) Hollywood could do little but blow things up and indulge in verbal scatalogy, this little gem of a film is well worth renting, particularly its widescreen DVD, especially if you've got a 16X9 TV set to view its dazzling cinematography.

A MODEST PROPOSAL: Speaking of President Reagan, Claudia Rosett has a terrific idea: Just as we did with the Soviet Union, let's negotiate North Korea's dictatorship right out of existence.

OPEN MOUTH, INSERT CROW: Roger L. Simon is prepared to make amends for his faltering presidential primary predictions.

SUPPLY-SIDE COMMUNISTS? Larry Kudlow says that the Chinese government's embrace of Reaganomics was an amazing birthday gift to the Gipper--and Reaganomics are working in Russia, too.

OLD SOLDIERS NEVER DIE, they just drop out of primary races.

THE TERRIBLE TWOS: Pejman Yousefzadeh is celebrating the second anniversary of his Blog.

(Ours is coming up soon as well.)

"SHARING THE HUNGER": Joanne Jacobs writes that schools are still doing variations on the same tired shtick of giving every third kid in the lunch line a Third World bowl of rice.

My school did this late one afternoon 25 years ago, after a lecture on Third World poverty. I drew the short straw, and was handed a bowl of unfortunate-looking soggy rice. I simply skipped the meal, my father picked me up a half hour later, and we went to Burger King.

Somehow, I think Sam Kinison would have been proud.

ADAM SHRUGGED: Vinatieri's not just a Patriot, he's an Ayn Rand fan, as well.

RED MEAT: Maybe President Bush is finally throwing some to conservatives, and taking aim at shutting down a Nixon-era big government program.

After decades of trying to claim impartiality, there have been several admissions lately by the media that they are indeed, biased.

Last August, Walter Cronkite said, "I believe that most of us reporters are liberal".

In May of 2003, according to CNSNews.com, Bob Zelnick, who spent 21 years at ABC News, "confirmed fellow former ABC News correspondent Peter Collins' contention that anchor Peter Jennings routinely attempted to insert his left of center editorial slant into correspondents' news copy".

In June of 2002, Andy Rooney told Larry King, "I'm consistently liberal in my opinions," and that he considers Dan Rather to be "transparently liberal."

And of course, former CBS reporter Bernard Goldberg has written two best-selling books on the subject.

But the latest topper is this post by ABC News in their Weblog called "The Note". It completely jettisons any impartiality, and admits that it, and most reporters covering Washington have an agenda, and will slant their stories to fit it.

Hey, whatever happened to the conservative media bias mantra from November of 2002?

UPDATE: Speaking of which, Pejman Yousefzadeh writes, "You don't suppose that Eric Alterman might acknowledge all of this at some point, do you? Perhaps not--after all, God forbid that Alterman might have to confront and argue against any information that might interfere with book sales".

ANOTHER UPDATE (2/11/04): Dr. Bob Arnot has left NBC. The reason, according to the New York Observer? "Dr. Arnot called NBC News’ coverage of Iraq biased."

VERY LATE UPDATE (10/27/04): This is the big one, which I'm linking to this page for completeness.

VERY, VERY LATE UPDATE (5/26/06): I just came across this ten year old quote from ABC's Charlie Gibson; it certainly seems right at home here:

"I don't deny for a minute that I think that the basic political bent of most reporters is probably to the liberal side. Do, you know, do people try, David Brinkley always says there's no such thing as objectivity, there are just lesser degrees of subjectivity. Reporters try to get around that. I think, I don't think that's a particular problem for Bob Dole, I really don't. I mean if, you know, if it was, if it was so overwhelming, the press's influence, you know, why did we have the results we had in 1994? But, but is the press intrinsically liberal? Yeah, probably."

Certainly can't argue with that--and neither would the fellas quoted above.

MORE: Many more admissions of bias from media insiders can be found on this page.

THE PRISONER: Meet Muhsin Khadr al-Khafaji, number six on our Iraqi wanted list, and most recently captured.

Meanwhile, as Glen Reynolds notes, Al Qaeda is losing in Iraq, despite CNN's best efforts to prop them up.

RUMMEL'S LAW: "The less freedom a people have, the more likely their rulers are to murder them."

SCOTT OTT, the very, very funny humorist of Scrappleface fame (see post below) has started a serious Website called BoycottMTV.

I can't say I blame him after February 1st. But what's sad is just how far MTV has fallen. As I wrote last Monday:

MTV is played out. It used to be fun in the mid-80s, back when it actually showed videos. If you've got VH-1 Classics on your cable or satellite system, you can actually see how tame much of those videos from the mid-80s were, and often how much fun. Then, perhaps with Madonna's success in mind, MTV decided it needed to shock--really shock--people. Instead, ultimately, it merely anesthezied them. And once Madonna released her Sex book, shocking the masses was pretty much passe, anyhow.

I don't grimace a whole lot when I turn on my radio and listen to classic rock, alternative rock, hard rock and new rock stations. And other than the cheese-factor, I don't gnash my teeth when I watch VH-1 Classic. But MTV, which started it all, is seriously past its freshness dating. Which is probably the biggest reason why so many people boycott it today. Just ask that other arbiter of hip youth culture, Bart Simpson.

UPDATE: On the other hand, let's not be too hasty here...

WHILE KERRY MAY BE SURGING IN THE PRIMARIES, Howard Dean picked up a key endorsement today.

MAKING HIS APOLOGIES TO PEGGY NOONAN, Fraser Seitel, (who looks exceedingly well-dressed in his Tech Central Station photo) has some thoughts on "Why Bush Held His Own with Russert".

LET 'EM LAPSE: James Lileks is dropping his New Yorker subscription, if only for a little while.

Thanks to my wife's mother, who passed away last March, we still receive the New Yorker, but we're letting our subscription drop as well. My mother-in-law, who lived all her life in Manhattan, thought that we, the pioneers forging a new lifestyle out here in the rough and tumble hinterlands, needed some kind of lifeline to the high culture that is Manhattan. (She probably thought that the Pony Express brought each issue out to us.)

WELL SO MUCH FOR TRUTH IN ADVERTISING: Ronald Bailey almost does a Danny Thomas spit-take over Cisco's latest ad.

I'M GONNA ADD SOME BOTTOM, SO THE DANCERS JUST WON'T HIDE: I have an article on the bass-ics of bass and drums in the current issue of England's Computer Music magazine, including quotes from an interview with Jim Roberts, the former editor of Bass Player magazine and the author of How The Fender Bass Changed The World. It should be available this month or next at your local Barnes and Noble and Borders. Or click here to subscribe via Amazon.

"LEFTISTS WIN: MINORITIES AND THE POOR HIT HARDEST", at least in Berkeley, writes Thomas Lifson of The American Thinker, a fascinating new (at least to me!) Blog.

ONE MORE ON GORE: Ann Coulter was widely attacked by leftists and thoughtful conservatives, for her wide-angle attack on Cold War liberals, Treason. While there were many Democrats who did look the other way when it came to the Soviet Union, there were plenty of thoughtful liberal cold warriors, not the least of which were Harry Truman, JFK, RFK, LBJ, "Scoop" Jackson, Sam Nunn and Jeanne Kirkpatrick.

But Gore's speech today--which has already been called "awfully close to a charge of treason" by at least one person who heard it, will no doubt bring a "see, I told you so" response from Coulter, and quite rightly so.

Incidentally, has anybody written any articles comparing Gore with FDR's first WWII veep, Henry Wallace? I've only skimmed Thomas Fleming's The New Dealers' War a few times since buying it a few weeks ago, but Flemings' portrait of Wallace make he and Gore seem like remarkably similar fellows.

The day the vote was made to impeach President Clinton, Gore delivered a speech in front of a massed group of applauding Democrats at the White House, in which he said that Clinton "will be regarded in the history books as one of our greatest presidents". That was on December 19, 1998. Three days earlier, as CNN wrote, Clinton launched "new military strikes against Iraq":

The president said Iraq's refusal to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors presented a threat to the entire world.

"Saddam (Hussein) must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas or biological weapons," Clinton said.

Operation Desert Fox, a strong, sustained series of attacks, will be carried out over several days by U.S. and British forces, Clinton said.

"Earlier today I ordered America's armed forces to strike military and security targets in Iraq. They are joined by British forces," Clinton said.

"Their mission is to attack Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors," said Clinton.

Clinton also stated that, while other countries also had weapons of mass destruction, Hussein is in a different category because he has used such weapons against his own people and against his neighbors.

So here's my question to Vice President Gore: Knowing what we now know about Iraq's weakened capacity to make WMDs, does Gore still feel that his boss was "one of our greatest presidents", or does he feel that Clinton, to borrow the language that Power Line used, "betrayed" the United States by ordering a war against Saddam Hussein that had been "preordained and planned before 9-11 ever took place"?

WAIT A SECOND--BACK IN '92, wasn't Al Gore picked to be the nominal moderate to offset Bill Clinton's more liberal past?

So much for that idea: former President Clinton is defending President Bush's liberation of Iraq. The New York Times is reporting "Gore says Bush betrayed the U.S. by using 9/11 as a reason for war in Iraq."

As the Power Line blog writes, this is "far worse than the kind of foul accusations Lindbergh used to make to those adoring America First audiences before Pearl Harbor."

(And of course, after Pear Harbor, Lindbergh seemed to have gotten his head screwed on straight again, and flew fighters and bombers in the Pacific. And this story of Thomas Dewey, running for election against President Roosevelt in '44 is also telling in comparison with Gore's current escapades.)

MONDALE BEATS REAGAN! DUKAKIS BEATS BUSH! DOLE BEATS CLINTON! That's what you'd conclude based on their poll numbers at this point in the election cycle, writes Betsy Newmark, "for those moaning about the poll numbers of Bush v. Kerry".

CHECK THE WEATHER CHANNEL to see if snowboots are needed in Hades: John Leo says that college campus censors are in retreat.

UPDATE: It's official--Hell has frozen over:

Thursday night’s Hardball on MSNBC marked Ronald Reagan’s 93rd birthday with a look at his legacy. ABC’s Sam Donaldson declared: “I think he deserves credit for accelerating the fall of communism.” And CBS’s Bill Plante agreed: “What he did absolutely hastened the end of the Cold War.”

Sam Donaldson praising Reagan. Well, I'll be leaving the Internet now; I've seen everything.

JOEL MOWBRAY ASKS, what if, in the summer of 2001, al Qaeda had been hit pre-emptively, before they had a chance to commit their atrocities on America on 9/11?

Mowbray concludes that sadly, the resulting outrage wouldn't be that much different than what the Bush administration is experiencing over Iraq. (Or the furor the Gipper received over how he--ultimately successfully--handled the Cold War, come to think of it).

SHOOTOUT AT THE ALOHA CORRAL: The score of this year's NFL Pro Bowl was an incredible NFC 55, AFC 52.

B-BENDING AWAY THE BLUES: My article on the Stringbender, an electric guitar modifcation designed by Gene Parsons and the late Clarence White of the Byrds, is the cover story for the February issue of Vintage Guitar magazine, along with a sidebar by veteran music journalist Dan Forte. If you've ever heard the bent note, pedal steel-like guitar solos on "All of My Love" by Led Zeppelin, or "Peaceful, Easy Feeling" by the Eagles, you've heard the Stringbender in action.

To get you in the mood while you're warming up the car before you head out to your local Borders or Barnes & Noble, here's a post I wrote for Blogcritics last April built around some of the research I did on the Stringbender, as well as photos of my own B-Bender equipped guitar.

CHARLES JOHNSON LOOKS AT A HORRIFIC ATTACK on a Pakistani boy who refused sex with a Muslim cleric:

On his hospital bed last week, 16-year-old Abid Tanoli sat listless and alone, half of his body covered by burns that all but destroyed both his eyes and left his face horribly disfigured.

The teenager talked, with difficulty, of how his life had been destroyed since the fateful day in June 2002 when he refused to have sex with his teacher at a religious school in Pakistan.

As one of Johnson's commenters wrote, "I would love to see this story on a major American news program. Of course, I also would love to win the lottery."

You'd have better odds with the latter.

QUOTE OF THE DAY comes from (surprise!) Jay Nordlinger, who writes:

this one was circulated to me via the Internet--perhaps you've seen it too:

"An officer in the U.S. Naval reserve was attending a conference that included admirals from both the U.S. Navy and the French Navy. At a cocktail reception, he found himself in a small group that included personnel from both navies. The French admiral started complaining that whereas Europeans learned many languages, Americans learned only English. He then asked: 'Why is it that we have to speak English in these conferences rather than you speak French?' Without hesitating, the American admiral replied: 'Maybe it's because the Brits, Canadians, Aussies, and Americans arranged it so you would not have to speak German.' The group became silent."

I don't know whether this is true, and I'm not necessarily endorsing the cheek. But it's kind of fun, huh?

Qui, monsieur--it certainly is.

UPDATE: Speaking of Jay Nordlinger, Michael J. Totten and the folks posting comments to his blog have some thoughts on Nordlinger's latest column as well, specifically on Nordlinger's thoughts regarding the "Free Tibet" movement. I've long thought a better movement would be "Free China"--you'd be getting two for the price of one. Three, if you include Hong Kong. Four, if you include Taiwan. Five if you include...

(Try that argument on your favorite leftwinger, if you've got a half hour or so to kill.)

THE BLIND ALLEY OF NIHILISM: John O'Sullivan looks at how Germany's courts gave its cannibal a slap on the wrist--and what such a sentence portends for the future.

IS IT ME, FOR A MOMENT? Power Line blog writes that "John Kerry is nearly every Democratic candidate since 1960 rolled into one", and has examples to prove it.

AFTER 14 YEARS OF CONSISTENCY, John Kerry changes his story on WMDs.

IT WAS 40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Actually yesterday to be precise, when the Beatles' Pan Am jet landed at JFK. Joshua Claybourn has some thoughts.

And be sure to read my looks at the Fab Four, on Blogcritics.

MEET THE ASSOCIATED PRESS: AP doesn't just manipulate photos, they manipulate words as well. The InstaPundit looks at how they're spinning what President Bush said during his Meet The Press appearance this morning.

INTO THE BLUE AGAIN, AFTER THE MONEY'S GONE: "Dean paid $7.2 million to aide's company", the LA Times reports:

As Howard Dean's presidential campaign tore through the millions it raised last year, nearly a quarter of it went to the company owned in part by his former campaign manager.

The campaign paid $7.2 million to Trippi, McMahon and Squier, the Virginia-based consulting and media firm - 23 percent of the $31 million it spent through Dec. 31, according to PoliticalMoneyLine, which tracks political spending.

Joe Trippi, one of the company's partners, was Dean's campaign manager for a year - until he was ousted last month and replaced by Roy Neel as chief executive. Dean asked Trippi to stay with the campaign as an adviser, but Trippi quit.

Instead of a salary, Trippi's company had been paid a commission of the campaign's television advertising buys - a percentage he and his company's partners said he never knew.

"I didn't want to know. I didn't do this for the money," Trippi said. "I was interested in beating [President] Bush. I was interested in building a campaign that could get Howard Dean in position. I'm proud of what I did. Anyone who knows me knows my personal money was never, ever on my mind, and it was nothing that motivated me."

* * * But Anthony Corrado, a professor of government at Colby College who is an expert in campaign spending, said the television spending was "extraordinary" because it was so much and so early.

"It's certainly out of scale in what you see in other presidential campaigns in other election cycles," he said.

Corrado also said that Trippi's dual roles - as campaign manager and as a principal in the media company - "at least raises questions about conflicts."

Trippi angrily dismissed such criticism.

"I had no conflict of interest because I wasn't interested in money," he said. "If I was doing it to get rich, I would have done a better job than this. I didn't have control of the checkbook."

If Trippi worked for Enron, the LA Times and their counterparts in Manhattan would be endlessly "flooding the zone" over this story, wouldn't they?

UPDATE: Roger L. Simon has similar thoughts.

C'MON BABY, POUT, POUT! Work with me. Move a little to the left. That's great! Got it! Got it! Move closer to that sign. No, the one in English! Give me everything you got baby! That's marvelous!

And I'm spent.

In 1966, Michelangelo Antonioni released Blowup, his classic film about a photographer covering the mod world of swinging London. In 2004, AP accidentally releases its sequel, which looks at how press photographers manipulate images of the mad world of the PLO.

THE WASHINGTON TIMES has added an "Insider" section, complete with a nascent blog. Registration is unfortunately required, but hey, that's what the Yahoo or Geocities account is for, right?

I'LL HAVE WHAT HE'S HAVING: Clarence Page dreams of interviewing Janet Jackson's bra.

In a related story, lest anyone think that they do sloppy work, the Chelsea fetish shop that produced Janet's S&M gear for last Sunday's Super Bowl halftime show is complaining that that was no clothing malfunction, dagnamit!

WHILE THE GIPPER MAY HAVE WON THE COLD WAR, this man is not getting the respect he deserves for his part in the battle.

If I were Karl Rove, I'd be drooling in anticipation of using audio or videotape, or simply typed up text rolling across the screen of what John Kerry said in February 1971 in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. . . . They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do. They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

As James Lileks and Hugh Hewitt have written, Kerry is eminently beatable.

(Kerry's post-Vietnam record--and the record of the media in covering Vietnam vets in general, is available online in the latest issue of National Review, but a subscription is required.)

UPDATE: Is Kerry actually planting his own phony hecklers in the audience??

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here's more on Kerry's life during the late-1960s and early 1970s.

ONE MORE UPDATE: Robert Moran, vice president at Republican polling firm Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates, writes, "John Kerry should enjoy [his current] poll numbers while they last, because his free ride is about to end.

WE TRIED, BUT YOU WERE YAWNING: Russian President Vladimir Putin, reacting to the Moscow Subway attack this morning, has called upon world leaders to join forces in the fight against terror, which he calls "the plague of the 21st century."

(Via Best of the Web.)

C-RATIONS WITH ANDRE: Rich Lowry "interviews" John Kerry. Hillarity, and stories of 'Nam, ensue.

CASH AND KERRY: Fellow Democratic Senator Zell Miller had this to say about John Kerry's record on Tuesday's Hannity and Colmes on Fox:

They don't know John Kerry's record. They haven't examined it. This is a very vulnerable candidate on several issues. ... [H]e is the Olympic gold medalist, when it comes to special interest money. I also think that he is very vulnerable on the issues of national security. ...[I]f you look at his voting record, it is terrible as far as it comes to national defense and helping fund a good intelligence unit.

Roger L. Simon adds:

I don’t believe Kerry has done that much changing—that’s why I brought up Vietnam in the first place. The same man who could vote in favor of the War in Iraq and then vote months later not to fund our troops once we had won that war is the same person who kept changing his mind on Vietnam for what seem to be in retrospect at least partly opportunistic reasons. (By the way, I have much more respect for Dean—like me another draft dodger—whose views, though I disagree with them, are consistent in this area. I don’t even believe Kerry when he implies the War on Terror is puffed up. I’m sure he’d say something completely different in another circumstance.)

Simon adds, "We live in serious times and this is, despite his fancy suits and seeming gravitas, a fundamentally unserious person. I don't trust him at the controls."

AN EVOLVING POSITION: "Evolution" is no longer a verboten word in Georgia schools.

Via Joanne Jacobs. For our original coverage, click here.

TERRORISTS KILL 30 IN MOSCOW SUBWAY BLAST: "Explosion Rocks Moscow Subway" says Fox News and Drudge.

UPDATE (1:42 AM PST): The death toll stands at approximately 30, with an additional 150 wounded. AP reports that "The Russian capital has been on alert for terrorist attacks following a series of suicide bombings that officials have blamed on Chechen rebels".

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GIPPER! Friday, February 6th marks President Reagan's 93rd birthday. Marvin Olasky looks at the 1940s--the key decade when "Reagan became Reagan".

UPDATE: Orrin Judd looks at birthday ceremonies at the Reagan Library, and then quotes from Reagan's last letter, which is on display at there. (If the Bro. Judd's archives aren't working, click here and scroll down.)

THE SPIDER-MAN, SYRIA AND WAL-MART LINK, revealed.

AMERICA IS DIVIDED: "So what" says Jonah Goldberg, and he's right.

Of course, it also depends on what your definition of "divided" is:

First of all, until you've got more than 600,000 American bodies stacked up like cordwood, spare me the "more divided than ever before" talk. We have this phrase in political discourse which is very useful. It goes like this: "...since the end of the Civil War..." You can put it at the end or the beginning of almost any sentence to indicate that you are discussing trends that began after the War Between the States concluded. Because that period in American history is what you might call a statistical outlier. We were really divided then, what with all the shooting each other and stuff. Even in places where there was no shooting, we were very divided. The New York Draft Riots, for example, featured mobs of 50,000 ticked-off New Yorkers and Irish immigrants who burned big chunks of the city over three days and hanged a lot of black people from street lights. I know the Florida recount was a big deal and all, but let's get a little perspective.

Second, I haven't looked at the survey data on this question since I was a policy gnome at the American Enterprise Institute, but it seems to me that one could make a persuasive argument that America was more deeply divided in, let's see: the 1780s, 1790s, 1840s, 1850s, 1860s, 1890s, 1920s, 1930s, 1960s, 1970s, and possibly the 1980s and 1990s. Now, it may be true, as Greenberg suggests, that we are now more evenly divided than at any time--possibly including the Civil War period. But evenly divided people can, and often do, settle their differences with Nerf bats or over checkers or even, don't you know, at the ballot box. Deeply divided people, on the other hand, are more likely to use guns, knives, and really pointy rocks to settle their differences.

In other words, living in an evenly divided society is an interesting challenge politically, but not a really big problem, while living in a deeply divided society is cause for stocking up on bottled water and shotgun shells.

Exactly.

Hugh Hewitt is being rather evasive here; it's hard to pin down what his take on John Kerry is. While I admire subtlety, the deliberate obfuscation that Hewitt employs makes deciphering his thoughts rather difficult:

He's a tax-raising, free-spending, marriage ending, war crime alleging, missile defense opposing, North Korean appeasing, Soros-loving, cut-and-running Taxachusetts lefty whose voting record is, according to the gold standard of lefties, the Americans for Democratic Action, to the left of Teddy Kennedy? Do you mean that line of attack? I'm shocked that the Republicans might actually point out that the election of John Kerry would install the hardest left president in American history. I suppose we aren't supposed to mention the "cash and Kerry" stuff either? Or botox? Or anything about his dreary, endlessly self-serving rewrite of his statements about Vietnam (see below.) Dean excited the GOP because he was a noisy target. Kerry is quieter but much larger. Let the games begin.

They already have. Saturday Night Live's writers need to start working on "Kerry After Dark" for next season's November 6th episode. It won't take much--merely a quick find-and-replace search with Word 2003.

UPDATE: This isn't helping Kerry, either.

BECAUSE ONE MAN'S TERRORIST IS ANOTHER MAN'S MOVIE STAR: Jesse Walker writes that "Not one, not two, not three, but four films about Che Guevara will soon hit theaters, all from major studios. And that barely scratches the surface of Che chic."

Leave it to Hollywood, the same people who turned a unibrowed Stalin-worshiper into a glamorous box office winner.

ARLEN SPECTER: PORKER OF THE YEAR, as nominated by the Citizens Against Government Waste.

Based on his vote during the Clinton Impeachment, I always thought Specter preferred haggis to pork, myself.

HEY, I'M FIRST RUNNER-UP IN YESTERDAY'S VODKAPUNDIT CAPTION CONTEST! And my acceptance speech is online there.

Thank you, all of you, for being such marvelous people, and for voting the way you did. (And thank you to the automatic Academy Award speechwriting program, for the power assist.)

ABOUT TIME: Amtrak is adding Wi-Fi to six Northeastern U.S. train stations, in a move to attract more business travelers. Hopefully eventually they'll eventually install it on trains as well.

Amtrak has done a reasonable job of embracing laptop users in the past five years--I remember taking numerous Northeast Corridor trains in '95 and '96 that only had two 120V outlet per Amfleet car. Now most cars have been retrofitted to one per each row of seats.

Good to seem them getting serious with Wi-Fi as well.

SORRY FOR THE RELATIVE LACK OF POSTS TODAY: Busy cranking out my next newsletter for Electronic House.

BET THESE WOULDN'T HAVE HAPPENED PRIOR TO SUNDAY: The NFL recinds Bengals quarterback Jon Kitna's $5000 fine for wearing a baseball cap with a cross on it during press interviews.

ESPN canceled their raunchy Playmakers drama about a fictional NFL team awash, as AP describes it, in "drug use, marital infidelity, racism and homophobia".

And the NFL is toning down the halftime show at the Pro Bowl, for the 25 people in America who actually watch the final game of the season.

UPDATE: Oh, and a Knoxville woman is suing Janet Jackson's boob. Or something like that.

JFK=JUST FOR KERRY, whose favorite greeting to lesser mortals is apparently, "Do you know who I am?"

Howie Carr does.

TERESA HEINZ, AFRICAN-AMERICAN: Well, that's what James Taranto says, and he's got a point.

THE BOTOXED BRAHAMIN: Jim Geraghty does the Heinz-Kerry water ballet and once again sees environmentalists whose beliefs "apply to everyone but themselves", as Larry Sabato is quoted by Geraghty as saying.

JAMES LILEKS' MOJO WORKS DOUBLE-OVERTIME today, as he Fisks not only Patrick Stewart, but Kerry as well:

What's the message here? John Kerry is best suited to lead us in the present war because he was a prominent opponant of the last one, which we lost. John Kerry led the fight to leave South Vietnam to the mercies of the North. John Kerry would rather lose a theater for the right reasons than win it for reasons the critics derided. Dress it up however you like, but that’s what it came down to; college students marched not against the Vietnamese war but the American participation in that conflict. Anyone fill the Mall in DC to protest the reeducation camps? Any Solidarity with the Boat People committees formed on campuses after the fall of the south? The privations of the vanquished South Vietnamese were an uncomfortable consequence of their goals – but of course it didn’t detract a jot from the nobility of the cause. I still remember the week we had a Vietnamese woman stay at our house - she was a Party member, a professional, and what did she bring back home for her kids? White paper. To draw on. A luxury item, that.

If Kerry wants to bring this era back, he’s demonstrated that his branch of the party are the modern-day Bourbons. They have forgotten nothing and learned nothing. For them the great evil wasn’t communism, but America’s response to communism. And now the threat isn’t Islamic terrorism, but what we do to combat it. We act without French approval. We act after 170 UN resolutions instead of crafting a 171st which forbids us from acting. We deploy anti-missile defenses around the Korean peninsula instead of striking a deal to give them more food, more oil, more time.

"In short, we act as if we have a pair", says Lileks, something the left began to lose during LBJ's administration, when it didn't have the balls to fight for a clear-cut victory in Vietnam, and really lost when it nominated McGovern in '72.

Be sure to check out the photo Lileks posted as well.

"IF ONLY GEORGE W. BUSH WEREN'T THE LIBERATOR": Orrin Judd writes:

Very amusing moment today on Fresh Air--Terry Gross was interviewing Egyptian publisher and human rights activist Hisham Kassem. She noted that he had supported the Iraq War before it started, in the belief that it would bring reform not just to Iraq but the whole region, and she wondered if he'd reconsidered. He answered that he hadn't, that the war had in fact brought democracy to Iraq and was having a liberalizing effect throughout the Middle East. She asked for examples, which he proceeded to cite, saying there were really too many to go through in their entirety. Then, not knowing when she'd dug her grave deep enough, she asked if the Kay report had called the war into question. He answered that he didn't care about WMD nor think it was the primary cause of or justification for the war, that getting rid of the regime was sufficient unto itself. Her disappointment at the improved prospects for freedom in the Arab world was palpable. How have liberals worked themselves into such a perverse position?

A couple of years ago, Jonah Goldberg dubbed it "hypocrophobia"--the crippling fear that many in the left have of being taken seriously.

ED FLIES OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST of Eugene, Oregon, a city which may name a school after Ken Kesey.

Joanne Jacobs and her readers have lots of fun with this idea.

CATS, DOGS, AND KENNEWICK MAN: National Review Online is praising the 9th Circus Circuit Court, specifically on its decision concerning on the Kennewick Man case.

CLOSING THE BARN DOOR AFTER THE NIPPLE ESCAPES: OK, so Janet is apparently banned from the Grammies this year, after "Nipplegate" was seen by nearly a billion people live, and countless more via the Drudge Report and numerous other Internet sources. And now she'll get to play the martyr, and be the most talked about person at the Grammies, a show seen by far, far fewer people, and whose ratings in recent years have been steadily in decline.

The 2002 Grammies attracted just 19 million viewers. And while math was never my strong suit, a billion shocked people sounds like a more desirable audience than 19 million bored ones, especially for a pop star whose freshness dating expired several years ago.

Nice leftover from the Clintonian '90s: break the law (broadcasting standards in this case), and become even more famous.

UPDATE: Ann Coulter is in rare form over Nipplegate:

Former front-runner Howard Dean sat out this week's primaries, but still managed to make news by ridiculing the FCC's plan to investigate MTV's halftime show at the Super Bowl. Dean pronounced the proposed investigation "silly." He explained that, as a doctor, a naked breast is "not exactly an unusual phenomenon for me."

That's an interesting standard. Presumably a primetime exhibition of Janet Jackson having a full pelvic exam and pap smear would not be "exactly an unusual phenomenon" for Dean either. Let's just be grateful Dean's not a proctologist.

Meanwhile, the rest of the country was not so copacetic about being flashed with what The New York Times called Janet Jackson's "middle-aged woman's breast." Janet Jackson said she decided to add "the reveal" following the final rehearsal, which I found pretty shocking. Not the reveal -- the fact that the number in question was actually rehearsed. Even CBS executives were enraged by MTV's halftime show, saying they could have gotten the identical show from National Geographic for a fraction of the price.

Heh.

TATTOOS: They're not just for soldiers and idiots anymore!

Oh wait, yeah, they are.

PRESIDENT BUSH, DRAFT DODGER? Good collection of links at Instapundit.com.

I'd also add this link to recent ABC and CNN looks at the issue, which--surprisingly, given the biases of those networks--pronounce Bush clean.

The Professor quotes Neil Bortz, who said:

[T]he same people were trying to convince us in 1992 that Bill Clinton's draft-dodging was no big deal. Surely the Democrats don't think we're that stupid. . . . What a bunch of lying, hypocritical phonies.

Hey, just think of it as the chickenhawk slur sexed up for an election year.

STEPHEN GREEN'S ON A ROLL TODAY: Stop on by and check out the VodkaPundit--if you haven't already.

"ONLY THE FLEECED ARE TRULY FREE": Jacob Sullum looks at our outrageously politicized and politically correct former surgeon generals and their views on smoking, and writes:

In other words, people who can't break tobacco's tenacious hold suddenly find that they can when the price of cigarettes goes up. Apparently, the free choice that is lost when you start smoking can be restored through taxation. Only the fleeced are truly free.

Read the whole thing.

COMING OUT OF THE CLOSET is a difficult moment in a young man's life. He worries about what his friends and family will think. Will he be ostracized--maybe even blacklisted--for his unusual beliefs? He knows his life will never be the same, but some things are necessary to do, if only to be able to look at one's self in the mirror and not turn away.

MORNING IN AMERICA UPDATE: Several bits of positive economic news.

Anne Applebaum writes that a new Auschwitz is under our noses, and wonders why, once again, so few people care:

Later -- in 10 years, or in 60 -- it will surely turn out that quite a lot was known in 2004 about the camps of North Korea. It will turn out that information collected by various human rights groups, South Korean churches, oddball journalists and spies added up to a damning and largely accurate picture of an evil regime. It will also turn out that there were things that could have been done, approaches the South Korean government might have made, diplomatic channels the U.S. government might have opened, pressure the Chinese might have applied.

Historians in Asia, Europe and here will finger various institutions, just as we do now, and demand they justify their past actions. And no one will be able to understand how it was possible that we knew of the existence of the gas chambers but failed to act.

As Mark Twain (may have) said, "The past may not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme".

IT'S A SICILIAN MESSAGE. It means Howard Dean's candidacy sleeps with the fishes.

(Via Drudge.)

UPDATE: It's write your own caption time over at Stephen Green's!

MEL GIBSON IS CURRENTLY FOCUS GROUP TESTING The Passion of Christ, and cutting some of its more controversial scenes accordingly...

BLACKLISTING BY THE LEFT? I'm shocked! Shocked! It's certainly never happened before!

MASSACHUSETTS COURT ALLOWS GAY MARRIAGE: Jonah Goldberg comments:

Each of the major Democratic candidates say they are against gay marriage. They are all, I believe, against a Federal Marriage Amendment. Fine, so am I. But what exactly will Democrats do to oppose gay marriage? As I've noted before -- when Dean was the frontrunner -- none of these guys seem willing to do anything to back up their positions. They want the courts to simply take the issue away from them while they insist they are firm on the issue. Dean was the most cynical and dishonest on the subject. But I can't see how Kerry's much better. There might still be room for Bush to get on the right side of the issue politically if he can force Democrats to answer the question "Would you do anything to stop gay marriage?"

To say the least, it will be very interesting to watch all this play out, and to watch Kerry and the remaining Democratic presidential candidates tap-dance.

UPDATE: Stephen Green adds:

I'm all for gay marriage, as I'm sure readers here know. But the Massachusetts Supremes just handed Bush a wedge issue which could very well set back the gay marriage movement.

It's tough for the law to jump ahead of the culture without creating Roe v Wade-type endless rancor -- especially when it tries to do so by judicial fiat. And culturally, I'm afraid, we might not be ready for nation-wide gay marriage. The best hope is that the national Supreme Court stays the hell out of this one, and lets the issue evolve -- and progress -- more naturally.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Looks like the slippery slope is getting slipperier up there. I blame Chuck Woolery.

TAKING YOUR HOME THEATER ON THE ROAD: My latest newsletter for Electronic House magazine is now online.

A seven pound block of cyanide salt was discovered by U.S. troops in Baghdad late last month. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, exposure to even a small amount of cyanide salt through contact or inhalation can cause immediate death.

(Via John Hawkins.)

FOX NEWS LEAVES ITS RIVALS IN THE DUST: There's a stunning gap in the ratings between the Fox News Channel and its nearest competitors. Ed Bark of The Dallas Morning News writes:

It's really no contest anymore -- not the race among the Democratic presidential candidates but the battle for cable news ratings supremacy.

Fox News Channel continues to crush CNN and MSNBC in the political season. The latest available Nielsen Media Research numbers, for the week of Jan. 19-25, show the "Fair and Balanced" network averaging 1.8 million viewers in prime time to rank seventh among all cable networks.

CNN had 906,000 viewers during the same period and MSNBC just 363,000.

The week included the Iowa caucuses and President Bush's State of the Union address, both of which received substantial attention on all three cable news networks. CNN must be wondering what hit it after making another major investment in political coverage. The granddaddy of cable news has fallen and can't seem to get up. Fox's recent hiring of respected Chris Wallace from ABC News is another blow.

Bark quotes Wolf Blitzer of CNN as saying, "If you're distorting, or if you're tilting towards one side, believe me, that will come through very, very quickly. And you'll be slapped very quickly, as you should be."

Maybe this is what Blitzer was referring to.

The average person's brain has a sort of chronometer which assumes that all photos prior to say, the mid-1950s should be in black and white. But Michael Jennings links to some gorgeous color photos of Chicago in the 1940s and '50s, and infinitely more astonishing, staggering color photos of Czarist Russia from the years just prior to World War I.

Found via Joanne Jacobs, these are the sorts of images that truly make owning a high-speed connection worth it.

HOW NOT TO BE A FREELANCER: Just follow the lead of the illustrator that Tunku Varadarajan interviewed for The Wall Street Journal.

THE QUOTE OF THE DAY comes from Virginia Postrel, who writes:

Bush's fiscal legacy is expanding Medicare, just as his father's regulatory legacy was the Americans With Disabilities Act. It's amazing how much damage those Bushes can do by being nice.

There's a lot about both men to be admired, but fiscal and governmental restraint, unfortunately, isn't one of their best traits.

WE CUT AWAY FROM OUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED BLOG to present this special message from the Lieberman 2004 campaign.

SPEAKING OF SMELLING THE COFFEE: Dan Marino resigns as head of football operations for the Miami Dolphins.

ADVANTAGE ED! Back on January 28th, we wrote:

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"?

Flashforward to the next issue of Time Magazine, due out on February 9th:

"As Kerry rails about 'George Bush and his economy of privilege,' his wife flies across the country in a ketchup-red-and-white jet sporting '57' as part of its tail number.

EdDriscoll.com: taking tomorrow's gratuitous shots, today.

DONE DEMS HAVE SCRAMBLED EGGS IN THEIR TRAILERS: Mike Alissi of Reason writes that "Lieberman and Clark are smelling the coffee".

Meanwhile, Stephen Green writes, "Dean is laying off staff and his campaign is broke". And Wes Clark Jr. seems to feel that living in a trailer during your salad days means you're automatically assured a key to the White House later.

But don't worry, Teresa and Hillary will have plenty of scrambled eggs for their men in the morning.

IMPRESSIVE...MOST IMPRESSIVE: Joe Gibbs announces his coaching staff, two of whom are former NFL head coaches themselves, and one of whom was the offensive coordinator for the Dallas Cowboys during their '95 Super Bowl season.

JAMES BOWMAN ON JOHN KERRY AND THE LEFT:

There are certain core constituencies that any political party must avoid offending at almost any cost. The Democrats have more of them than the Republicans. They include blacks, activist women and public sector unions, for example — which is why none of the Democratic candidates will so much as hint that he might have doubts about affirmative action or abortion or opposing educational vouchers. One of these Democratic constituencies is the anti-war left, those whose political consciousness was formed during the Vietnam war. Sometimes called the "Blame America First" crowd, they are as implacable and as necessary as any of the other Democrat constituencies, and they are by nature deeply suspicious not only of the Pentagon and the projection of American power abroad but of all forms of behavior that they would describe as "militaristic."

* * * That may be why Democrats seem at times to be even more willing than the Republicans to swoon over guys like Kerry who have a fist-full of medals. Of course Kerry threw away his medals. Except that he didn’t. He pretended to throw them away during a Vietnam War protest but secretly kept them and, after it was once again popular to have served in Vietnam, mounted them on his wall. In Kerry’s ambivalence about his own service in Vietnam, we see the ambivalence of his party towards American power. Unless he, or whomever the Democrats nominate, gets better about hiding that ambivalence, I can’t see the American people entrusting him with that power.

Read the whole thing.

IN MARKETING NEWS, the NFL has released its Super Bowl XXXVIII commemorative game ball...

OUCH: "My suggestion to the Democrats: Next time you want to earn your bona fides in a southern state, try South Dakota."

--Michael Graham on the South Carolina Primary.

MORE CREDIBLE THAN LAROUCHE and Sharpton: Ronnie James Dio throws his hair extensions into the ring.

The final word on Nipplegate--at least for the moment--goes to Skip Bayless, veteran sportswriter with the San Jose Mercury News.

ANTI-SEMITISM IN MANHATTAN: At a basketball game between two of its top prep schools. What are the kids being taught there?

CRUSHING OF DISSENT at the University of Oklahoma: As Glenn Reynolds might say, John Ashcroft is probably to blame.

(Via Stephen Green.)

"THE BLOODY CROSSROADS": Leonard Garment (remember him?!) writes on how Laura Bush and Dana Gioia are remaking the National Endowment for the Arts.

For our thoughts, and lots of links on the subject, click here.

Darrin McMahon of The Boston Globe looks at conspiracy theories from "the Age of Enlightenment...[to] the Age of the Internet". McMahon throws Ann Coulter's Treason into the mix, perhaps to avoid answering the unspoken question his article raises, but can't or won't answer: arguably beginning with Hillary Clinton's "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy" quip in early 1998, why have so many conspiracy theories been coming from the left?

(Via PrestoPundit.)

UPDATE: Speaking of conspiracies from the left...

ANOTHER UPDATE: James Taranto looks at conspiracy theories regarding Ricin in the Senate mailroom from 2001 and today.

LIFE ON MARS: Proof positive that we need to send manned missions there to investigate further.

THE GIPPER, HOSS: James C. Miller III stresses the importance of preserving the Reagan legacy with his 93th birthday fast approaching. He's right.

HOWARD DEAN, MEDIA ANALYST: Today, Howard Dean says that an FCC inquiry over a football related television controversy is "silly":

Howard Dean, a physician and a Democratic presidential candidate, on Monday dismissed as 'silly' a government inquiry into whether indecency rules were broken during the broadcast of the Super Bowl halftime show when pop diva Janet Jackson's bodice was ripped to expose her right breast.

'I find that to be a bit of a flap about nothing,' the former Vermont governor said. 'I'm probably affected in some ways by the fact that I'm a doctor, so it's not exactly an unusual phenomenon for me.'

Setting aside the fact that Dean apparently doesn't understand that some people (such as impressionable young kids) aren't doctors and aren't used to seeing exposed, pierced nipples on TV everyday (not to mention women having their clothes ripped off by men in 50,000 seat stadiums), this is in direct contradiction to Dean's remarks near the start of the football season. Back on October 1st, Dean said:

ESPN should terminate Limbaugh's contract immediately, and send the message to its viewers and the nation that it holds commentators to the highest standard.

So questioning the biases of the media is grounds for being fired, but exposing nipples is silly. And Dean has no problem demanding that one TV network fire someone whose views he disagrees with, but thinks that the FCC has no business investigating another. And having "the highest standard" is important sometimes, but standards are unimportant other times.

OK. Glad we cleared that up!

UPDATE: John Hawkins also has some thoughts on Dean and Janet.

ANOTHER UPDATE: So does Tim Graham.

Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times writes that denying their role in Nipplegate isn't the first whopper that CBS has told recently:

CBS has told so many howlers over the past 18 months that any claim to dignity — and righteous indignation — by this network is now open to snickering.

CBS insisted there was no quid pro quo when it sent Pfc. Jessica Lynch a letter suggesting that an exclusive interview with CBS News would be rewarded with other lucrative contracts within the Viacom empire.

CBS insisted that its decision to cancel the mini-series "The Reagans" had nothing to do with the right-wing lobbying campaign that threatened a boycott of advertisers' products.

And the network insisted that it did not sweeten a deal with Michael Jackson to secure a "60 Minutes" interview with him after his arrest last November as the network was preparing a Michael Jackson entertainment special.

Implausible deniability and the fungible walls between news and entertainment, and between art and commerce, exist at every major network. But like a high school student caught smoking pot by the principal, CBS can hardly wriggle free by arguing that everybody does it.

Of course, from Walter Duranty to Jayson Blair, the Times itself is hardly pure and innocent themselves when it comes to lying.

RICIN IN THE SENATE MAILROOM? That's what early tests show.

England's Guardian looks at North Korea's Camp 22, and its Auschwitz-like horrors. As Orrin Judd writes, "Saying 'Never again' makes us all feel better, but when it starts happening again we show rather little interest in stopping it".

"DOMINATE. INTIMIDATE. CONTROL.": Reason looks at the sorry record of the Transportation Security Administration.

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE BOOBS: James Lileks writes, "Remember after 9/11, when we wondered whether we'd ever get back to feeling normal? I think the answer is "yes.":

Apparently Justin Timberlake, former suitor of the philosopher and mathematician Britney Spears, was doing a duet with Janet Jackson. She was dressed in what appeared to be formalwear for zombie morticians -- that wretched leather S&M chic we have come to expect from our "edgy" artists. Mr. Timberlake was dressed like a slob, of course -- he's the sort of modern male who, when called upon to knot a tie, digs through his stack of Maxims looking for an article titled "What to Do If You Gotta Hit a Funeral." At the end of the song, Jackson sang "make me naked" -- and why not? It wouldn't be a halftime show without a joyless mechanical bump & grind masquerading as sensuality, set to a grim tuneless squall of sound masquerading as music. And yes, I am now officially in Coot Mode. Whatever happened to the good old halftime shows, when Up With People would come out and sing about Ice Cream Socials and saving kittens that fell down a well? What happened to America?

But I ramble. Point is, Janet -- "Miss Jackson," if you're nasty -- unholstered 50 percent of her bosom, and now the nation is debating whether it was intentional or an accident, and whether Super Bowls of the future will feature enthusiastic deployment of previously shielded body parts.

Oy.

Indeed. (Or "Exactly". Or "Heh", or whatever hep phrase all us cool coots use these days, daddy-o.)

A JOURNALIST WHO GETS IT: Why yes, we do cover more than Janet Jackson's boobs (which is more than she covers, these days). Lowell Branham of The Knoxville News Sentinel is a rare journalist who understands media bias:

I don't know why left-wingers and the media establishment harbor such antipathy toward SUVs, but I suspect it may be because SUVs are a vehicle much favored by those of us who hunt and fish.

Anyone who hunts or fishes must be an insensitive brute, and since the left-wingers long battle to take our guns away has failed to yield results, now they're going after our wheels.

When I started out in the news business nearly 45 years ago, advocacy by editorial writers and columnists was acceptable, but a strong effort was made to keep the news columns free of tilt or bias.

But even back then the principle of impartiality was beginning to erode, and nowadays it's reached the point where there's scarcely any pretense of maintaining fairness and objectivity.

In fact, practically any day of the week I can scan the news wires and find multiple examples of downright falsehoods being foisted off on the public to make a point.

What I don't know is whether the falsehoods are deliberate or simply a product of the ignorance of the writers and the editors who foster them. It doesn't make much difference, though, in terms of the impact on readers who are savvy enough to know when they're being lied to.

Branham writes that "It's no wonder journalists now rank below lawyers and used-car salesmen in the eyes of the public". And it's no wonder so many Blogs have sprouted up to call them on their lies.

YOU DON'T SAY! AP headline: "Super Bowl spurs increase in betting".

Paul Attner of The Sporting News writes that head coach Bill Belichick has helped the Patriots crack the NFL code.

CBS ISSUES STERN WARNING TO PARENTS after yesterday's game. Scott Ott has the "details".

THE GAME ITSELF: Like the rest of this past NFL season, the game on the field yesterday was actually pretty darn good. Pete Rozelle, the late former commissioner of the NFL, was obsessed with parity as early as the late 1970s. The NFL efforts to level the playing field--and level dynasties such as the Packers of the 1960s and the Cowboys and Steelers of the 1970s--culminated in free agency and the salary cap, which has produced an incredibly competitive league. It's a league where the difference between a Super Bowl champ and an also-ran is much, much smaller than it was in the '70s and '80s. Which is the reason why the Super Bowls of the late 1990s and the "noughts" have had far fewer blowouts than those of past.

Skip Bayless writes today that he's "wiped out" from "just writing about the most engrossing Super Bowl I've covered in 29 years".

Too bad, that as with the endless (and I do mean endless) largely leftwing sports reporters' obsessions with Rush Limbaugh, and the Philly media trashing Brett Favre's dad, what happened during halftime yesterday seemed to completely overshadow the game itself.

AMEN: Steven Den Beste puts Nipplegate into perspective--and then some.

WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN Star Trek's Borg and the Jackson family? Let's ask the KGB!

Jonah Goldberg makes a good firm...point about Nipplegate:

This morning on CNN I caught Jack Cafferty (who's great by my lights) reading viewer email on the whole thing. One viewer gave the hackneyed "we all have body parts, get over it" defense. I haven't had time to scan the blogosphere, but I am sure there are already plenty of people having a good laugh at the "prudes" who took offense to Jackson's display.

But here's the thing. Shocking the sensibilities of the bourgeoisie is so old. The people who thought Janet's boob-watch moment was a good idea -- beforehand or afterwards -- almost surely didn't actually enjoy the spectacle themselves. What appeals to them is the idea of shocking other people. Clearly, they weren't shocked -- enjoyably or otherwise -- by seeing Janet's tassledness. They're used to such displays. No, what was cool about it was that it would offend the sensibilities of fuddy-duddies. This sort of thing is the source of a vast, vast amount of bad "art," music, fiction etc. The value of a song or a video is measured not by its creativity or excellence, but by its ability to elicit the desired response from the other side. This sort of thing is so unimpressive. It's tired, it's played-out, it's Madonna. So I'm fine with being might peeved with CBS. But let's not forget to mention that part of their mistake was being predictably banal.

And then lying about it afterwards. Heck, Orson Welles did that, in 1938, when he held a press conference after his radio broadcast of the War of the Worlds terrified a nation. His mouth virtually melting butter, he cooed to reporters that he had no idea of what would happen during the broadcast. He merely set out to tell an entertaining story! (I think there's a clip of Welles' performance--surely his best bit of acting, ever--in the Citizen Kane DVD.)

But then MTV is played out. It used to be fun in the mid-80s, back when it actually showed videos. If you've got VH-1 Classics on your cable or satellite system, you can actually see how tame much of those videos from the mid-80s were, and often how much fun. Then, perhaps with Madonna's success in mind, MTV decided it needed to shock--really shock--people. Instead, ultimately, it merely anesthezied them. And once Madonna released her Sex book, shocking the masses was pretty much passe, anyhow.

I'm not a puritan--but there's plenty of sex available already in popular culture. Heck, just turn to the #500 and #600 blocks of DirecTV channels at around 11:00 PM on a weekend, and it's positively awash in "bare flesh, rouged areolae, moistened crevices, and stiffened giblets", as Tom Wolfe once wrote. And ironically, there were plenty of puritans buying advertising space on the Super Bowl, as the second half was filled with interminable ads begging teenagers and young adults not to smoke, not to do drugs, not to drink and drive, not to buy booze if they're underage, and heck, CBS turned PETA down for their ad about not eating meat.

In a way, this is the final triumph of the XFL. While Rod Smart, a.k.a "He Hate Me", arguably the most famous player of the flash-in-the-pan wrestling-cum-football league played a minor role in yesterday's game as a fairly anonymous kick returner for the Panthers, the standards of his old league became--at least for the post-season--the standards of the NFL and the TV networks that made it an enormous success.

"Nipplegate" is what they're calling it on NRO'S "The Corner" this morning, and understandably so. But the vulgarity of the off-field activities at the Super Bowl goes way beyond Janet Jackson and MTV's schtick during halftime. As the Washington Post's long-time liberal TV critic Tom Shales wrote:

An exciting game -- by Super Bowl standards -- between the New England Patriots and the Carolina Panthers was upstaged not only by its halftime show but also by the "edgy" and often crude humor of the commercials. Over the years -- partly because of the huge expense involved -- Super Bowl commercials have become widely ballyhooed events in themselves, and this year some sponsors, paying up to $2.9 million for a 30-second spot, went the smut route in order to stand out in the crowd.

Early in the evening, a supposedly hilarious beer commercial featured a dog that was trained to bite men in the crotch and hold on. The man being bitten moaned and grimaced in pain and finally surrendered his can of Bud Light.

As it happened, Bud Light set the standards for tastelessness and self-congratulatory humor. A later commercial, stealing a joke from a classic episode of the sitcom "Seinfeld," involved a flatulent horse. The animal, tied to a carriage, emitted an outburst from beneath its tail that caused a candle to burst into flame and burn the hair of the woman holding it. A loud sound effect made it clear that the horse was suffering digestive distress.

Many of the other Super Bowl commercials seemed conspicuously inappropriate for an event that is a national rite and the kind of rare TV attraction that brings families together in front of the set. CBS chose to air a spot advertising the upcoming horror movie "Van Helsing" even though it contained extremely disturbing and graphic images of brutality and gore and despite the fact that it has yet to be rated by the Motion Picture Association of America. If the film were eventually to be rated NC-17, it would be contrary to network policy to carry any commercials for it.

Based on excerpts shown, "Van Helsing" will earn an R, or Restricted, rating, meaning the film is considered suitable for those under 17 only if they are accompanied by a parent or other adult. The ad was wall-to-wall with monsters baring fangs and implied horrific violence.

The negative vibes given off by so many off-color or violent commercials put a soggy cloud over what was supposed to be an evening of wholesome fun. Some of the spots were funny; Jessica Simpson and the Muppets had a high time in their commercial for Pizza Hut, and Homer Simpson starred in a funny spot.

But the ghastly output from Bud Light included a commercial in which a chimpanzee talked to a beautiful girl as they sat together on a couch while she waited for her date to return from the kitchen. The monkey made a pass at the girl and asked, "So, how do you feel about back hair?" There was also an excess of commercials for drugs designed to help men suffering from erectile dysfunction.

I think this Super Bowl set a trio of firsts: first use of the world "erection" (spoken by the narrator--James Naughton, I think--in the Cialis ad), first commercial with flatulence, and first nipple. Naughton was the actor in the mid-70s TV series version of Planet of the Apes, and as Charlton Heston would say, yesterday's Super Bowl was a madhouse. A maaaaadhouse.

Or, maybe it wasn't.

Oddly enough, I never saw Janet's boob, and apparently, neither did the twenty or so other people watching the game at my house. By the end of the Super Bowl halftime show, my wife was serving sliced ham and noodle koogle to our guests, who were getting ready to settle back in for the second half, and I was bopping between the kitchen and the den. During the first five minutes of the halftime show, I was progressively turning the sound lower, as nobody here seemed to care about Janet Jackson, Kid Rock, Justin Whathisname and the rest of the halftime performers.

I had my PC on during the game, but mostly to have Yahoo's NFL coverage loaded. It was only when I clicked over to the Drudge Report after the game that I saw the photo of Janet and her boob. (And fortunately so, it seems: Janet's nipple apparently completely ruined the game for Stephen Green. Well, maybe not completely...)

More thoughts later.

YOU CAN'T SAY THOSE THINGS ON TV: James Lileks, in his thrice-weekly "Backfence" column (why yes, I did just say "thrice"!) writes that he admires "those people who practice verbal chastity".

So do I. And fortunately, so does the current FCC chairman.

SUPER BOWL BRIC-A-BRAC: AP odds and ends about the game.

HEY, I THINK THERE'S A GAME TODAY! To coin a phrase, are you ready for some football?

...JUST THE SAME AS THE OLD BOSS: Andrew Stuttaford writes that the current favorite to become the new chairman of the BBC "is apparently none other than EU commissioner Chris Patten, a man long notorious for his embrace of humbug, hypocrisy and hysterical anti-Americanism". Stuttaford adds, "He should fit in nicely".

"A FORM OF HUMAN SACRIFICE": Charles Johnson writes that "the annual stampede at the 'stoning of Satan' ritual in Saudi Arabia has racked up one of the largest death counts ever, 244":

This traditional stampede takes place year after year, and seems to kill more Muslims each time. Saudi officials invariably respond with a shrug and a hat tip to Allah. They know it’s going to happen, set up the conditions for it to happen, and make no effective attempt to stop it.

What we’re seeing is a form of human sacrifice.

But Johnson adds, "who are we to judge the traditions of other cultures? Just last Christmas, Betty Jo Biolovsky tore a fingernail while battling for the last scrap of potato salad at a church social in Peoria. Isn’t that really the same thing?"

Heh.

Be sure to read the summary of hajj death tolls that one of Johnson's readers compiled.