After those two rather heavy posts, how about something a little lighter as a change of pace?

You wouldn't know it from the images of the rather sober-looking fellow who graces this site's photo section, but I used to be a very enthusiastic skateboarder in my youth (I even contributed a couple of items to Thrasher magazine in its very early pulpy underground days). But my boarding skills were no match to this young fellow's.

One more from Collyvvvvvvornia, as Gov. Schwarzenegger pronounces it. Last June, we looked at the ACLU's efforts to remove the tiny cross from Los Angeles' county seal, an effort that L.A.'s city council was only to happy to oblige.

In contrast, The Wall Street Journal notes that James Hahn, the city's liberal mayor, is using the issue as a bulwark against his opponent in an upcoming mayorial primary--which makes sense: his late father, long time Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn helped design the logo back in 1957:

Charles Johnson spots a San Francisco Chronicle article praising a new book written by a self-described Bay Area Marxist-Leninist. And last month, we linked, in fairly short succession, to an L.A. Times article glorifying Sunset Hall, a Los Angeles retirement home for elderly communists and a worshipful editorial on North Korea.

It's just fascinating watching newspapers let the mask slip these days. It's happened in the past of course: the New York Times' Walter Duranty whitewashed Stalin's show trials and his collectivist farming famines out of his coverage--and won a Pulitzer in the process. And the Grey Lady's obit of Stalin is practically necrophilia with a typewriter.

But for the most part, most big city newspapers have, historically, kept this sort of stuff to a minimum, so as not to risk offending a diverse readership. It's curious that articles like those in the Chronicle and L.A. Times keep popping up recently. I can only think that part of the reason is to taunt and tweak bloggers and Bush voters a little bit--or simply to appeal to newspapers' dwindling core audiences as those who don't buy into the left's take on history go elsewhere. Or maybe it's just to keep spirits up in a newsroom that can be a bit gloomy at times.

But geez, talk about revealing your inner self. I mean, I don't lose a whole lot of sleep when a newspaperman tells me that FDR's New Deal programs were the perfect tonic for the Depression--even if in reality, they merely dragged it on and prolonged it until World War II jump-started the American economy. I don't mind the press praising LBJ's Texas-sized equivalents thirty years later, even if they did little to actually end, as it was called back in the 1960s, "the War on Poverty".

I'm just surprised at how far the press has been willing to let it all hang out there recently--of course, based on how they covered the presidential election last year, I probably shouldn't be.

Update: Speaking of the L.A. Times, Patterico catches them selectively editing Reuters wire copy to, as he says, "remove critical facts supporting the U.S. position on an important international issue"--the shooting by US soldiers in Iraq of a car bearing Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena.

Back in 1998, as part of their 30th anniversary, Reason looked at numerous books on the future written during those past thirty years, to see who got it right, and who--really--got it wrong. (Paging Mr. Ehrlich, Mr. Paul Ehrlich to the white courtesy phone, please).

I think you could make a pretty good case that Alvin Toffler's 1980 book, The Third Wave was one of the books that got it right. There's a reason why Newt frequently sited it during the heady Contract With America days of 1994 and 1995, and why it still holds up fairly well today. It doesn't hurt that Toffler had already written Future Shock in the late 1960s, which--while still enjoyable--was quickly rendered somewhat dated with its atmosphere of sixties' zeitgeist. Toffler wouldn't make that same mistake again with The Third Wave.

Here are my thoughts on Toffler's book, written for an Electronic House magazine subscribers' newsletter, and reprinted here by permission. (The resource links at the end of the post are also from the original newsletter):

In his latest Newhouse column, James Lileks writes that conservative base of the Republican party will never forgive Sen. John McCain:

Oh, they don't hate him; he has that brash, squinty charm that makes him stand out among the dull lumps of coal heaped in the bin of the Senate. His war record earns respect and gratitude -- so much, in fact, that his detractors feel compelled to wait three or four seconds before rolling out the big, throbbing BUT that invariably precedes discussion of what they really think of McCain nowadays.

He got a pass on campaign reform, aka the George Soros Empowerment Act, since you can't really slam him for something that Dubya inked into law. But siding with the Democrats against reforming Senate rules to allow a vote for the president's judicial nominees? Unforgivable.

For some thoughts on where the GOP as a whole stands, check out Richard Baehr's latest essay over at The American Thinker, found via Betsy Newmark.

In his latest Wall Street Journal "Wonder Land" column, Daniel Henninger combines a look at Brian Anderson's South Park Conservatives and a look back at how the Fairness Doctrine and its repeal shaped the last 50 years of politics:

Reuters reports that Internet ad revenues are surpassing dotcom boom levels:

U.S. Internet advertising surged 33 percent in 2004 to a record $9.6 billion, surpassing levels seen during the early Web boom, and will grow at a similar rate in 2005, according to data released on Thursday.

The figures bolster reports from individual advertisers who say they are moving more of their marketing budgets online as consumers devote more time to the Internet and fewer hours to television and other media.

The data also underscores breakaway earnings results for major Internet media companies and search engines like Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc., as well as the digital divisions of traditional media companies like the New York Times Co.

"Interactive advertising has clearly become a mainstream medium and one that can no longer be ignored," said Greg Stuart, president of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).

And that trend is not likely to change for the forseeable future: the Internet's demographics have to be far more appealing to media buyers than television, whose viewing demographic is only going to become greyer and greyer.

Glenn Reynolds links to this James Pinkerton article from Tech Central Station on Hollywood and videogames. Pinkerton asks, "Why has Hollywood proven to be so far behind the cutting edge of entertainment?"

Glenn responds:

Movies encourage passive titillation; videogames encourage active involvement, and often present consequences as well.

And maybe that's Hollywood's problem. A culture built around passive titillation isn't likely to view its audience in ways that facilitate active engagement.

Disturbing essay by Caroline B. Glick, the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post, on the increasing anti-Semitism of England's elites:

Mainly due to Britain’s relationship with the US, Israelis have a tendency to view it as an ally. But the situation on the ground in Britain must force us to reconsider this friendly view. Today Britain manifests the symptoms of a suicidal society. Its elites have been taken over by far-Left bigots who, while purporting to care for the downtrodden, work to perpetuate a situation where the Arab world is wholly controlled by brutes who call for the destruction not only of Israel, but of Britain itself.

Anti-Semitism, which has become pervasive among Britain’s aristocracy, and the chattering classes in the media, culture and academia, is a sign of Britain’s steep and steady slide into nihilistic self-destruction. Their animus towards Israel and towards Jews who refuse to denounce the Jewish state, has nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with them. They are fully aware of the threats posed by the international jihad but rather than fight it they have tried to appease it by at once denying its danger and obsessively embracing Palestinian terrorists and calling for Israel’s destruction. They do this even as the jihadis in their own country make it clear that they are unappeasable.

There is nothing that Israel can do to stem Britain’s decline. All we can do is keep our distance from that self-destructive society which, like a dying lion, can still do us great harm if we let it get close to us.

Update: Welcome readers of Salon's "Dau Report", published by Peter Dau, who was online communications advisor to John Kerry's presidential campaign.

Another Update: Charles Johnson has more.

Found via Michelle Malkin, Scott Sala of Slant Point says that Ward Churchill and MEChA (remember them?) have teamed-up, for maximum academic moonbat silliness:

Hmmm. Hispanics mad that America took their land. Native Americans mad that America took their land. A match made only in modern American academia.

Update: More here.

Andrew Ferguson writes that "in the great struggle between cities and suburbs, raging now for a century or more, the verdict is finally in: Cities lost. The vast majority of people prefer the ``burbs.'' The long-predicted comeback of the traditional city isn't in the cards":

There are lots of obvious reasons for the cities' decline -- the decentralizing effects of telecommunications, the loss of manufacturing jobs, the inconveniences of public transit -- but Kotkin is more appalled by the steps urban planners take in hopes of reversing the decline.

``They think they can revive their cities if they make them `hip and cool,''' he says, referring to the street festivals, cafes, arts fairs, high-end boutiques and other yuppie delights that attract the young and single, the childless and rich.

``But that's not how cities last,'' he says. ``You can't build a long-term civic culture around transient populations.''

What any healthy city requires is a stable base of middle- class families. But the conditions necessary for attracting and keeping families are precisely what city planners ignore.

``They've forgotten the basics,'' Kotkin says. ``Are the schools good? Are the streets clean and safe? It's a lot easier to satisfy the yuppies with no kids than to fix the schools.''

And so city life, once the backbone of civilized social arrangements, devolves into just another ``niche lifestyle.''

Much as I love Manhattan, I'd much rather get my dose of city living in small controlled doses, than live in an environment like that all the time.

Well, probably not. But Mickey Kaus observes an L.A. Times columnist suggesting that Google or Yahoo--or maybe Google and Yahoo--pony up $15 billion to purchase the badly listing west coast representative of the legacy media.

Mickey lists numerous reasons why that would be a very bad investment for an Internet portal. And, of course, it seems unnecessary to make this prophecy come true.

Yesterday, we mentioned the nostalgia for the past emanating from the left and the press. Nowhere is that more apparent (well, other than at a Creedence Clearwater Revisted concert) than the endless references to Vietnam. In an essay on the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, Jonah Goldberg observes:

Since the beginning of the second Iraq war, comparisons, insinuations, allusions to Vietnam have been a near-daily occurrence. Literally thousands upon thousands of articles and editorials make the analogy as though it were actually a novel insight. You get the sense that Earth could be invaded by Klingons and some editorialist would hear "echoes of Vietnam" amid their disruptor blasts.

One is tempted to simply chalk this up to the geezerification of liberal baby boomers who can't shake their nostalgia for the glory days of speaking truth to power. But many of today's younger generation have been Vietnamized as well. This isn't as odd as it might sound. World War I seemed like ancient history before the ink on the armistice was dry. World War II, meanwhile, continues to dominate our imaginations, on the right and left, six decades after it ended. As any historian will tell you, public understanding of WWII has become far more literary than literal. So it is with Vietnam.

There's an enduring myth that Vietnam was a singular evil undone by America's idealistic youth, holding hands and singing songs in one voice for peace. This reflects the ego of baby-boomer liberals more than the facts. Not only did large numbers of young people support the war, but in the annals of unpopular wars, it wasn't that special. In 1968, Sol Tax of the University of Chicago cataloged anti-war activity from the Revolutionary War until the beginning of peace negotiations and found that Vietnam ranked as either the fourth or seventh least-popular war in American history.

Regardless, Vietnam is part of our cultural DNA now, and it will probably never be fully erased anymore than the Civil War or WWII will be. Right or wrong, silly or legitimate, that's the reality. And that's fine. If people want to argue about the Tet Offensive forever, so be it. But it is history.

But it's not particularly useful history. Ask military experts about the similarities between Vietnam and Iraq (or Afghanistan), and their eyes roll. Vietnam was a state-to-state war and had vastly more support from its Communist benefactors than Iraqi "insurgents" could ever receive from Syria and Iran. Indeed, in Vietnam, the insurgency phase of the war was largely over by 1965.

The Spanish-American War, for instance, would probably be a far more fruitful point of comparison for critics of the Bush administration, but that would require they read up on it first.

I didn't intend for the past couple of days to feature run-on posts on the dangers of postmodernism. But that's the theme that runs tacitly through my reviews of Fredrick Taylor's Dresden and Orson Welles' F For Fake. Both works are illustrations, in their own way, of just how pliable reality is--and just how eager some people are to accept those who manipulate it, if they're entertaining enough.

Al Sharpton began his career on the national stage with the Tawana Brawley hoax, and built on that fakery to the point where he ran for the presidential nomination in 2003 and early 2004--and was fetted in the last presidential election by both Al Gore and Bill Bradley.

Michael Moore began his career as a filmmaker with a sham documentary on GM and after a sham documentary on a current American president, and as a result, sat next to a former president last year at the Democratic National Convention.

Moore's ability to manipulate the truth was a key theme in 2004, when both he and and the news media were more than willing to invent, out of whole cloth, entire fictions to first destroy the popularity of, then depose a sitting president. Or surpress reality, if that suited their purpose.

If there's a conservative documentarian interested in a making a film of last year, might I suggest he call it "M For Fake"--since the letter "M" can stand for Michael Moore, the Media--and meshuggah. As James Lileks said, "The past was more malleable than you had ever expected". If there wasn't a Blogosphere around to expose such invention, there wouldn't have been millions of smiling people with purple fingers in the Middle East this year--and the promise, hopefully, of more to join them.

In a 2002 article, Paul Mirengoff of Power Line looked at some of the reasons why so much cheating has gone on in politics during the last decade. I can only wonder what other "M For Fake" moments flew under the media's radar during that time.

Update (6/29/05): This post was expanded into an article for The New Partisan; click here to read it.

On September 11th, 2003, we linked to a James Taranto item about the Copperheads, which one reference source described as:

in the American Civil War, a reproachful term for those Northerners sympathetic to the South, mostly Democrats outspoken in their opposition to the Lincoln administration.

So many people turned to the accusations of anti-Semitism, ethnic intimidation, and politics trumping academics at an Ivy League School in a liberal voting district. Columbia's president, Lee Bollinger, said as much in his interview with The New York Times a few weeks ago:

Although Mr. Bollinger did not comment last night on what the report is likely to say, he said it was "simply preposterous to characterize Columbia as anti-Semitic or as having a hostile climate for Jewish students and faculty."

I would argue that it is precisely this assumption of liberal, enlightened behavior that blinds the public to anti-Semitism on Columbia's campus--and to wherever radical professors use the cover of the liberal university to their illiberal advantage. Remember that it took an outside organization, the David Project, to bring Columbia's problems to national attention.

I wouldn't be surprised if it was not this same attitude that set Columbia University up one hundred years ago as the headquarters of racial scholarship regarding the Civil War and Reconstruction. That right--the intellectual apologists of Southern Redemption were based right here in New York City. Professor William Archibald Dunning became Columbia's first Lieber professor of history and political philosophy in 1904. His popular theories of the Reconstruction provided the source materials for, among other things, D. W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation," and cemented racist ideologies throughout the country for half a century.

From the school of William Archibald Dunning to the school of Edward Said: Columbia University enters the twenty-first century in the same tradition it entered the twentieth. All this, from the heart of New York City.

When Orson Welles completed F For Fake in 1976, he never intended it to become the last film of his to play in movie theaters during in his lifetime. Welles would live for another nine years, but his final days alternated between lucrative voiceover and character actor work, and a constant search to find financial backers to get his own productions released.

After F For Fake, he never did. I'm tempted to write, "sadly", but to a certain extent, Welles had only himself to blame: generally speaking, a director must be bankable--his films must turn a profit--and Welles' films rarely did. As I wrote in an early Blogcritics piece about Welles' first and best film, Citizen Kane:

Citizen Kane's inability to turn a profit, coupled with Hearst's actions, ultimately blackballed Welles in Hollywood.

Incidentally, Welles was far from blacklisted--a far, far too loaded a word to describe what happened to his career post-Kane. He worked constantly in movies, both in front of and behind the cameras. He just couldn't come to grips with the seemingly obvious fact that movies have to turn a profit, which means they have to connect with a mass audience. Even Kubrick, the most avant-garde of American directors, knew instinctively that he had to build his films around large, popular themes - nuclear hysteria, outer space, horror, Vietnam, and sex. His one film that didn't have a theme that a large audience could immediately tap into, Barry Lyndon, failed to turn a profit in the US. He wouldn't make that mistake again for the three films he had left in him.) Welles couldn't find a plot or protagonist that a mass audience could bond with.

Danger! Violent, potentially mellow-harshening metaphors ahead: Hugh Hewitt buries the Los Angeles Times in a speech to the L. A. Press Club. Meanwhile, fellow southern California resident Burt Prelutsky writes, "If The Times Were A Horse, They’d Shoot It".

Speaking of mellows being harshed, Tim Porter writes on "The Mood of the Newsroom":

The amount of anger and hostility, of distrust and suspicion, of inertia and ennui that pollutes the journalistic environment in these newsrooms at first surprised me. Now, when I first step into another newspaper I only wonder how long it will take to surface.

Initially, before the realization grew within me that the negativism was not sporadic but pervasive, I tempered my perception of it with the desires I heard from so many journalists to do good work, to chase on still after the dreams that drew them into reporting or photography - speaking truth to power, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted, and, of course, the byline.

After a time, though, I came to see that many of these journalists, and not just those swimming in my end of the generational pool, used these nostalgic desires as substitutes for the actual passion and energy necessary to achieve their journalistic dreams in today's new world of news media. In other words, their notion of "doing good work" meant doing journalism the way it was done "before," a temporal concept loosely bound in the wrappings of time before cable, before Internet, before loss of authority, a time in which "the paper" was "the news."

Remember George magazine? The celebrities meet politics magazine that made a huge splash, lasted a couple of years, and then quietly died? Jim Geraghty says that Arianna Huffington's new "celebrity collective blogging" venture "has 'Tina Brown's Talk magazine' or 'John F. Kennedy Jr.'s George magazine' written all over it--and he's preparing to "savor the impending schadenfreude":

Let me offer a theory on why blogs took off: Many of the best were written by folks who were either A) professional writers who wanted to write in a non-article or column form (Mickey Kaus, Andrew Sullivan, the Corner gang) B) lawyers/law professors who are used to persuading the public (the Powerline guys, Glenn Reynolds, Volokh, Hugh Hewitt) or C) interesting people who happen to be insightful/funny/great writers (Steven Den Beste, Stephen Green, Amy Welborn).

You notice few of those folks are celebrities in their own right — or at least, they don't already have a format to offer their thoughts/analysis/reporting on a regular basis.

If I want to know what Walter Cronkite thinks, sooner or later some journalism magazine will ask him. Warren Beatty, the millionaire who endorses socialism, can tell me what he thinks in movies or in one of his endless glossy magazine profiles. David Mamet gets whole plays to tell the world what he thinks.

Attention, Arianna: We already know what celebrities think. They're telling us all the time. Large chunks of the mainstream media are devoted to telling us the latest political and philosophical breakthroughs they want to share with the world. I suspect people turn to blogs because they want something different.

This project, in short, adds to an already huge supply, in a market for which the demand is limited... perhaps exhausted.

Chris Kobin (found via Betsy Newmark) and Michelle Malkin look at Jesse Jackson's Tawana Brawley incident last week.

(For a look at the original Tawana Brawley incident, click here.)

National Review is praising Disneyland. For our take on the park, click here.

As we wrote last week, the audience of America's "legacy media" is definitely getting greyer--just check all the ads for Geritol, Depends, Fix-O-Dent, Viagra, Levitra, et al. It's not your father's TV news--it's more like your grandfather's.

Where are the younger viewers going? Right here. Well, not all of them to us of course--but to the Internet as a whole:

Thank you to The New York Times for proving the point I was trying to make at the end of my last post--in spades.

Update: Mudville Gazette also looks at the Times' revisionism.

"Europe is a fortress. But it is a fortress without a roof."-Allied propaganda leaflet dropped en masse on Nazi Germany.

While I was in South Jersey, I stopped in the Moorestown Barnes & Noble, and picked up a copy of Frederick Taylor's 2003 book, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945. I read through most of it on the plane today.

All in all, it's a magisterial work. Taylor places the city of Dresden not just into the context of World War II, but within the history of Germany, as well as Europe, going back millennia to trace the city's role in history.

Dresden became famous for its role in two overlapping wars: first, as a target of the allies in the waning days of World War II, as the city was bombed by the British and then the US on February 13th, 1945. Of this, history is certain: the bombing leveled the city and left thousands killed.

As Taylor recounts, almost immediately after the city was bombed, Dresden was about to become a pawn in a different war all together: a propaganda war.

Blogging to resume shortly.

In his "Happy Warrior" backpage column in National Review (subscription required), Mark Steyn writes that multiculturalism has had exactly the opposite impact on culture from its presumed original intentions:

The last episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise are beginning to tick off, one by one, until the series ends for good. I watched the "Mirror, Mirror" homage on Sunday night in the hotel, but I missed the teaser and the opening credits, which sounded like a riot, from everything I read about them in the Blogosphere, including this random sampling:

One more for the road: Orrin Judd interviews Brian Anderson about South Park Conservatives.

(Found, logically enough, via the Brothers Judd.)

Update: Power Line also has an interview with Brian. And just to be a completist, click here for ours.

Another Update: Power Line's interview with Anderson is concluded here.

Ann Coulter shouldn't complain too much. Her Time magazine cover photo problems pale in comparision to Farrah Fawcett. As Jerry Seinfeld might say, so what's the deal with Farrah? She's looking absolutely dreadful on Letterman right now. Her plastic surgery looks seriously botched (compare her circa-1998 face with how she looks today); she looks every bit her age (and then some) and sounds like she's swallowed enough quaaludes to fill the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

That's enough snark for now. I'm traveling back to California tomorrow; don't expect much, if any blogging in the interim.

Last week, I went with my first thoughts on the Ann Coulter cover controversy and thought that she and Matt Drudge were trying to crank up the hype machine just a little too much:

Matt Drudge and Ann Coulter's attempt to create some sort of controversy over the choice of lens used by Time's photographer to shoot Ann for the Time cover this week seems awfully silly to me.

* * *

I'm all for pointing out errors and lies and bias coming from the mainstream media, but this seems like trying to hype a pretty minor issue to me.

Drudge later zinged Time by quoting his friend Coulter as saying her cover photo -- in which her legs took up half the page -- was distorted. But Executive Editor Priscilla Painton says Coulter went through the photographer's portfolio in advance: "She has great looks. She has great legs. She has great ankles. All of that was on full display on the cover. Lots of women would kill for that kind of display."

There's no doubt about it: big media's audience is definitely skewing older. Via Power Line, George Will observes:

The combined viewership of the network evening newscasts is 28.8 million, down from 52.1 million in 1980. The median age of viewers is 60. Hence the sponsorship of news programming by Metamucil and Fixodent. Perhaps we are entering what David T.Z. Mindich, formerly of CNN, calls "a post-journalism age."

Writing in The Wilson Quarterly, in a section on "the collapse of big media," he rejects the opinion of a CBS official that "time is on our side in that as you get older, you tend to get more interested in the world around you." Mindich cites research showing that "a particular age cohort's reading habits do not change much with time."

Baby boomers who became adults in the 1970s consume less journalism than their parents did. And although in 1972 nearly half of those 18 to 22 read a newspaper every day, now less than a quarter do. In 1972 nearly three-quarters of those 34 to 37 read a paper daily; now only about a third do. This means, Mindich says, "fewer kids are growing up in households in which newspapers matter."

The young are voracious consumers of media, but not of journalism. Sixty-eight percent of children 8 to 18 have televisions in their rooms; 33 percent have computers. And if they could only have one entertainment medium, a third would choose the computer, a quarter would choose television. They carry their media around with them: 79 percent of 8-to-18-year-olds have portable CD, tape or MP3 players. Fifty-five percent have hand-held video game players. Sony's PlayStation Portable, which plays music, games and movies, sold more than 500,000 units in the first two days after its March debut.

Let's consider the media universe. With news and opinion, a lot depends on where people are gravitating for their information, and here the traditional or mainstream media, overwhelmingly liberal in orientation, are losing sway--with astounding rapidity. Writing in the New Yorker recently, the media critic Ken Auletta pointed out something I hadn't noticed: the commercials on the Big Three network newscasts are frequently hawking drugs like Viagra and Mylanta, and the broadcasts themselves often focus on health issues. There's a reason for that emphasis on infirmity: the average age of a network news watcher is now 60; only about 8 percent of viewership is between 18 and 34. Ten years ago, 60 percent of adult Americans regularly tuned in to one of the network newscasts. Now it's only about one in three. And people have lost trust in the mainstream outlets. A Pew Research poll last year found that just 21 percent of its respondents viewed the New York Times as a trustworthy news source--a figure below that of Fox News, it's worth noting.

Americans are increasingly turning to new media to get informed. About 40 percent of Americans now watch cable news broadcasts. One in five Americans, maybe even more, look to political talk radio for knowledge of the world. Around 12 percent--26 million Americans--are now reading political blogs, a medium that didn't really exist a few years ago (and even more are using the Internet more broadly for information). And in the new media, the Right either dominates (as with talk radio and increasingly cable news, where Fox News is the ratings giant) or has at least as much influence as left-of-center sources (as with the Internet and Blogosphere).

Publishing is no longer a liberal preserve--just look at the bestseller list. New York publishing houses, long resistant to conservative ideas and arguments, are falling over themselves to launch right-of-center imprints and sign up conservative authors. Simon & Schuster has just announced former Bush official and pundit Mary Matalin will head up a new conservative line, joining Penguin Books's Sentinel and Doubleday's Crown Forum, both recently launched right-of-center imprints.

All these changes have taken place in just a few years. The oldest of the new media--political talk radio--dates only from the late eighties, after Ronald Reagan's FCC junked the Fairness Doctrine. Fox News has only been around since 1996. The blogs and Internet publishing are of course newer still. Their full impact has yet to be felt.

The future of the big media that the young have abandoned is not certain. But do you remember when an automobile manufacturer, desperately seeking young customers, plaintively promised that its cars were "not your father's Oldsmobile"? Do you remember Oldsmobiles?

Charles Johnson links to a couple of interesting articles on the new Sean Penn/Nicole Kidman movie. Its producer has been quoted as saying that he "didn't want to encumber the film in politics in any way"--which of course means that it's crawling with politics--Hollywood style.

Will Collier of VodkaPundit looks at Cordex Petroleum Inc., a Canadian company that Saddam Hussein had invested a million dollars into prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Cordex, incidentally, is listed as one of Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin's assets.

As Will writes:

This illuminates the motivations behind the Canadian Liberal Party's antipathy towards Operation Iraqi Freedom a bit, doesn't it? Then again, I guess when your ideal for governance and policy is Chirac's France, this kind of thing isn't all that suprising.

This past week, after flying the reasonably friendly skies to the east coast, we linked to Tina Brown's latest column, and compared her thoughts with Rod Dreher's great "The Godless Party" essay from 2003. The Anchoress does a full-frontal fisking of it, and makes a great point, here:

There is a lot going on in [Brown's] column - an admission that for the folks on the left the papal election meant nothing more than yet another political defeat. Just as they had deluded themselves on election day (a day on which Kerry’s own pollster predicted a loss by 3% points) to believe that a man who had never actually led the presidential race, who had offered neither real ideas or real military documentation, was definitely going to win the White House back for them, they had decided to believe that somehow the “winner” of the papal elections would be “some youthful cardinal we hadn’t even heard of yet, some charismatic dark horse whom the joyful crowds, so many of them young, would immediately recognize as their own.”

That column is even more fascinating when looked at in the context of last November. Shortly after the election, there were lots of statements emerging from the left that if they're going to have a chance at competing again on a national level, they've got to start taking religion as seriously as they did prior to the Class of '72.

They've had numerous opportunities to do so in the past six months, and little seems to have changed.

Mark Steyn says goodbye, as only he can, to Jumpin' Jim Jeffords with a flashback to 2001:

‘Jim’s a rock star now!’ raved one local politician of the decaff-latte persuasion as Senator Jeffords (R. -- wait a minute, D. -- no, for the moment, allegedly I-Vt.) brushed past and a cheering throng swept us into the packed lobby of the Radisson Hotel (ah, the charms of small-town Vermont country inns). Jim, who normally looks as if someone’s twisting a pineapple up his bottom, seemed eerily relaxed, enjoying his new-found eminence as the world’s most famous obscure senator.

But I don’t think he’s a rock star. He’s more Peter Tork from the Monkees, if you can imagine Peter flouncing off in a huff and joining the Partridge Family. Just over a week ago, Jim Jeffords was an amiable goof, whose three-decade ‘Republican’ voting record read like a guy who’s holding the road map upside down – he voted against Reagan’s tax cut but for Hillary’s health plan, against Clarence Thomas but for partial-birth abortion. This is what we in the media call ‘a force for moderation’. But it took a most immoderate act to secure Jim his place in history: in quitting his party, he’s ended the GOP’s hold on America’s longest continuously held Senate seat – Republican for 140 years. Better yet, he’s brought a dash of Westminster horse-trading, a touch of Italian coalition politics to Washington: for the first time in US history, control of the Senate is passing from one party to another without anything so tiresome as an election.

Sorry for the lack of posts these past couple of days. On Friday, Nina and I drove from Washington, DC to south Jersey, where we’re staying at a hotel while visiting my parents.

The night before, we attended the Media Research Center’s Dishonors Awards. I was about to type an extensive recap, but it’s late, I’m fried, and the highlights are all online at the MRC site. So just click on over.

But before I call it a night, it’s probably worth mentioning one element of the show. If the evening had a flaw, it was the lack of mention of the Blogosphere. The evening could have been called "The Dan Rather Show" due to how many 'awards' Captain Dan won--not the least of which was the Quote of the Year. (Guess what it's related to.) But Dan wouldn't have achieved the notoriety he did last year or resigned from the CBS Evening News, if it wasn't for the work of "Buckhead" and the rest of the Freepers, and Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs. John O'Neill, who accepted the MRC's "Conservatives of the Year" award on behalf of the Swift Boat Vets, mentioned the bloggers and thanked them for helping to advance the Swift Vets' story--and that 15 seconds was pretty much the extent of their coverage.

I'm not sure why there was scant mention of the World of Weblogs--I know the MRC is pretty Internet-savvy. And the Power Line boys were Time magazine's first "Blog of the Year" last year--directly because of their role in advancing Dan's phenomenal knowledge of Microsoft Word. I know libertarian radio talk show host Neal Boortz, who was one of the presenters, has his own Weblog (he blogged about the event before and afterwards). Maybe the MRC was afraid the whole 'Net thing would need too much of a set-up for the somewhat older tilt of the audience. (Although after the awards were handed out and dessert was being served, Nina and I spoke for a few minutes with a 70-something widow who knew all about Hugh Hewitt and InstaPundit, and I'll bet there were plenty more in the audience like her.)

But that's a pretty minor complaint--the rest of the evening was a blast.

More soon, if time permits.

We've linked a few times to some of Tina Brown's classic columns. I still get a kick out of her "more metrosexual approach to foreign relations" line, her reference to 1930s neoconservatives(!), a good 30 or 40 years before there actually were neoconservatives, as well as her "Punk Meets The Godmother" run-in with a waiter who dared question her cocktail party's politics. (Apologies to Pete Townshend for paraphrasing his song title.)

Over at The Corner, Tim Graham highlights her latest report from Fun City:

You have to love reading Tina Brown, since her columns for the WashPost seem to confirm what every conservative suspects about the secular elitism of the Manhattan media crowd. See how she puts it today: "For those of us who came to Manhattan precisely because you're guaranteed never to meet anyone who has read the ‘Left Behind’ series, America's much-celebrated spiritual revival can have its trying moments."

True story: I once proposed a column on some now-forgotten religious theme to the man who was at the time the city editor of the New York Post. He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. "This is not a religious city," he said, with a straight face. As it happened, the man lived in my neighborhood. To walk to the subway every morning, he had to pass in front of or close to two Catholic churches, an Episcopal church, a synagogue, a mosque, an Assemblies of God Hispanic parish, and an Iglesia Bautista Hispana. Yet this man did not see those places because he does not know anyone who attends them. It’s not that this editor despises religion; it’s that he’s too parochial (pardon the pun) to see what’s right in front of him. There’s a lot of truth in that old line attributed to the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, who supposedly remarked, in all sincerity, "I don’t understand how Nixon won; I don’t know a soul who voted for him."

I know Power Line used that headline yesterday (welcome to their readers, incidentally!), but it makes a great point.

I'm stuck in the American Airlines Admirals' Club in San Jose, which has CNN on the bar's TV set, and I can't help but laugh at how many times the CNN correspondents manage to work the word "conservative" into their coverage of Pope Benedict. The British women who report for CNNi really manage to put a nice evil sneer on the word with their accents.

To them, it's a pejorative. But I'm wondering how many people in America's red states hear the word and think, "Hey, the Pope's conservative...what's the problem?"

Of course, religious coverage from a network who's founder once referred to his employees coming back from Ash Wednesday as "a bunch of Jesus Freaks" as he wondered what "the dirt" on their foreheads already seems a bit suspect.

Hugh Hewitt has some similiar thoughts on the same sort of coverage the new Pope is receiving from newspapers.

On the tenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, Mark Steyn flashes back to his original Spectator column on the subject.

Purely coincidentally, Steyn was in Oklahoma at the time, and weaves together coverage of a flop play opening waaay off-Broadway (JFK: The Musical!) with the bombing of Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Through the sheer force of his writing chops, he makes the two disparate stories work remarkably well together.

Update: Speaking of nifty writing chops, James Lileks is in rare form, as he blends thoughts on a new Pope, the tenth anniversary of the Oklahoma bombing...and Scooby Doo Go-Gurt. This line is especially nice:

To those who want profound change, consider an outsider’s perspective: the Catholic Church is the National Review of religion. You may live long enough to see it become the Weekly Standard. In your dreams it might become the New Republic. But it’s never going to be the Nation. And if ever it does, it will have roughly the same subscriber base.

Earlier today, we praised Sam Donaldson for having the courage to admit that nightly network TV news was in big trouble if it remained in its current form.

Those daring bloggers in pajamas jodhpurs, Power Line, have reprinted an industry article written by one of the seemingly few newspapermen who understand that big media is in the midst of a technology-driven sea change. He's Phil Boas, deputy editorial page editor at The Arizona Republic:

Here’s what newspaper editors and writers should know about this new Internet phenomenon. Bloggers don’t have much respect for you. You are the "legacy media," the MSM. You’re the Roman Catholic Church to their Martin Luther and his new high-speed cable modem. To Hugh Hewitt (hughhewitt.com), the blogosphere’s leading cheerleader and one of its most polished practitioners, you are Stalingrad in 1944. Your institutions are hollowed out and your walls are scorched.

But of course, Stalingrad held, didn’t it. And that gets me to the second definition of bloggers. They are your light in the tunnel. The newspaper industry has known for a long time that eventually wood pulp would give way to microprocessors. That long-awaited paradigm shift now seems imminent. We may very soon be predominately an electronic medium and that has many print executives on edge.

Newspapers have enjoyed some of the biggest profit margins of any industry for decades and it is unclear if those can hold in a Web-based environment. Moreover, when you no longer need the millions of dollars in capital, the multi-million dollar press, the network of delivery people fanning out across the land, to start a newspaper, the door opens to competition.

If great gobs of capital will no longer separate you from that competition, what will? Information. Or rather, the quality of your information.

We are headed to the Web in a big way and our readers, especially our most engaged readers – the bloggers - are going with us. They are giving us a taste now of what our new environment will be like. They will challenge and cajole us to confront our biases and our mistakes. And if we don’t confront them, they’ll clean our clocks.

They’ll be our competitors and our colleagues and they’ll force us to dig deeper into issues, think harder about them. They’ll show us how to coalesce expertise on a breaking story and drill deeper for the more complete truth. They’re already teaching us today how to own up to our mistakes. You don’t stonewall, as Dan Rather did. You fess up immediately and with full transparency. There’s a lot of garbage on the blogosphere, but there is a high tier where the product is superior and is drawing mass readership. On those blogs, correcting error is part of the culture.

There's a Nick Coleman spotting at Jay Rosen's PressThink Blog. Here's the letter that Rosen received from Coleman:

Gosh. Do you THINK the press is being de-certified? Which side are you on? I thought that was your game plan. You ripped me last fall without even speaking to me because I had the poor judgment (or maybe the balls) to confront right wing wingnut bloggers who have my newspaper (and most others) in the crosshairs of a constant all-out partisan attack. And they are winning, prof. The Star-Tribune now has hired a by-god certifiable right wing activist and power megaphone. Funny, I haven't seen you make any mention of that yet. Nor do I remember you defending me in December when I criticized the dudes at Powerline, who I called extremists while most of the academic press fakers of the world were bending over to kiss their jodhpurs. By the way, in case you haven't paid attention, many other journalists have since come to the same conclusion. I could cite chapte and verse, but why bother.

Incidentally--what is it with blogging critics and clothes references, anyhow?

(Via Coleman's Bete Noir, Power Line.)

I'll be attending the Media Research Center's Annual Dishonors Awards on Thursday in DC. After the truly bizarre and blatantly slanted election year coverage by the media in 2004, I figured if I was going to attend one of these events, this would be the year to go.

If anybody else is going to be there and would like to meet for a drink before or afterwards, drop me an email.

Bill O'Reilly meets South Park Conservatives.

Terrance and Phillip could not be reached for comment.

(Via PoliPundit.)

Just got back from some errands; Hugh Hewitt sounded pretty excited on his radio show about the ascension of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, but noted that "Andrew Sullivan is probably going to stroke out". Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds has a round-up of links (including to Andrew).

Update: Heh.

Gotta give Sam Donaldson credit for seeing the obvious and not sticking his head in the sand. A Broadcasting & Cable article begins:

Larry Elder writes:

At a recent White House press conference, New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller called Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Bush's nominee for president of the World Bank, "a chief architect of one of the most unpopular wars in our history."

"One of the most unpopular wars in our history"? Hmmm, sounds like another editorial masquerading as a question.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, William J. Holstein, the editor of Chief Executive magazine, says that New York state's Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who's now--or will very shortly be--running for that state's governorship, has what Holstein describes as "a classic conflict of interest" caused by his endless Giuliani-inspired attacks on Wall Street:

Mr. Spitzer has thus created a reasonable doubt about whether he is using the legal process for political gain. An attorney general running for higher office is different than a senator running because it creates a risk that the legal system becomes politicized and is no longer seen as adhering to principles of fair play and due process. In short, Mr. Spitzer has a classic conflict of interest. The only way to resolve it is to resign as attorney general.

Consider the appearance that the New York attorney general's fund-raising activities will increasingly create. If an industry or company that has not been targeted contributes to his campaign, is Mr. Spitzer accepting that money in exchange for not investigating them? And what if a CEO under fire makes a contribution and is able to resolve his or her legal problems? That might create the appearance that Mr. Spitzer softened his prosecution in exchange for a contribution. Because appearance is everything, Mr. Spitzer essentially cannot raise funds while serving as attorney general.

Ironically, the cornerstone of Mr. Spitzer's actions has been an attack on conflicts of interest and cozy relationships that had long been tolerated. He is attempting to create a new ethical standard. Yet he has turned a blind eye to his own ethical problem. If he wants to set new, higher standards of conduct in corporate America, he must himself adhere to those new expectations.

Matt Labash of the Weekly Standard has a great piece of reporting on Ward Churchill's visit to San Francisco.

Here's a lengthy excerpt:

Found via Glenn Reynolds, Cathy Young has a staggering example of hate speech at Stanford University.

The casual acceptance of this sort of thing gives academia its horrible taint in much of the public's eye. It was a shame to see Lawrence Summers cave so quickly at Harvard a few months ago; the headmaster who actively speaks out against idiotarian ravings on his college campus has a terrific Sister Souljah opportunity waiting for him--and box cars full of enrollment money from parents who would breath a tremendous sigh of relief.

Update: Firsthand details from a Stanford Student, here.

I haven't football-blogged in a while, but there's a story via AP about big changes in TV's NFL coverage, starting in 2006:

Matt Drudge and Ann Coulter's attempt to create some sort of controversy over the choice of lens used by Time's photographer to shoot Ann for the Time cover this week seems awfully silly to me:

Why can't they just photograph conservatives straight?!" blasted this week's TIME magazine covergirl Ann Coulter.

The bestselling author and controversialist slammed magazine editors for fronting a photo of her, she claims, which is so distorted "my own mother would not even recognize me!"

The photographer, Platon, appears to have used a wide "Fisheye" lense for the cover snap, stretching Coulter's legs and feet -- while shrinking the rest of her body.

TIME editors selected Platon with a note of irony -- he is the same photographer who captured Coulter-nemisis President Clinton in the infamous "Lewinsky" power pose for ESQUIRE.

Developing...

I'm all for pointing out errors and lies and bias coming from the mainstream media, but this seems like trying to hype a pretty minor issue to me.

(On the other hand, this choice of photo for the article seems more than worthy of discussion.)

Update: PPK Blog disagrees with my take. Elsewhere, Michelle Malkin compares how conservatives and liberals are typically featured on Time covers, and notes that the magazine has updated the online caption under their photo of the Protest Warriors at the 2004 GOP convention.

In his interview with me about South Park Conservatives, Brian Anderson said:

Where the Right does still come up short in the news media is in its resources to report. The elite media have the power to send out squadrons of reporters to investigate, say, Tom Delay but not Kofi Annan and UN corruption, and that can still shape the public's perception of what's newsworthy, still can provide a narrative to the flux of events and issues.

That's why Fox News has been so influential--and so despised and feared by many liberals. As the conservative media critic Tim Graham put it to me, Fox arrived as a major professional news organization with the capacity to define the news as something other than what the elite consensus says it is. So the Swift Boat Veterans' charges deserved investigation; so Richard Clarke's conflicting views on the Bush administration's approach to fighting terror were relevant to assessing his credibility; so the troubles with our efforts in Iraq needed to be balanced against the real successes. Before Fox, nothing like this existed.

The in-your-face right-wing partisanship that marks Fox News Channel's news broadcasts is having two dangerous effects.

The first is that the popularity of the approach -- Fox is clobbering its direct competition (CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, etc.) -- leads other cable broadcasters to mimic it, which in turn debases the quality of the news available to that segment of the TV audience.

The second, far more dangerous, effect is that it threatens to destroy public confidence in all news.

The latter, I admit, is more fear than prediction, but let me tell you what produces that fear. Fox News Channel -- though the people who run the operation are at great pains to insist otherwise -- is deliberately partisan.

He means openly, not deliberately. People trust Fox more precisely because it announces its biases--like thinking America should prevail in the war or that Palestinian bombers are terrorists--than they do the MSM outlets that pretend they're nonpartisan, lying either to themselves, to us, or both.

Fox News offers a lesson here. I know the network's detractors think it's a right-wing propaganda factory. And, I certainly agree that much of Fox's programming is conservative (though liberals' sudden concern with ideologically loaded coverage is ironic). But at least one of the things that has made Fox News successful isn't that it's right-wing, it is that it's populist.

This is an important distinction. From the beginning, Fox anchors weren't ashamed to wear American flags on their lapels. They aren't afraid to refer to American troops as "our brave fighting men and women" or some such. They aren't terrified that they will lose their objectivity merit badges if they sound like they hope America wins.

If Fox goes overboard sometimes, it's only compared to a new standard Ernie Pyle wouldn't recognize.

Update: Betsy Newmark also has some thoughts:

How could [Raspberry] be so dense as not to recognize that FNC is succeeding because there already was that perception among many, many people. Those same people, who distrust the Times and Post, also read blogs. They would be doing so, even without Fox. The distrust existed before Fox came along, before Rush came along. Now, those people who are conservative and don’t have faith in the mainstream media have somewhere else to get their news. Sure, it’s slanted news. But don’t blame FNC for the distrust. Really, I can’t understand how Raspberry would be so obtuse to confuse cause and effect. Doesn’t he remember the appeal of Spiro Agnew’s diatribes against the media? Doesn’t he remember the bumper stickers from the 1992 election, “Annoy the Media. Reelect Bush”? This isn’t a chicken and egg conundrum. It’s quite clear which came first. People have been distrustful of the MSM for decades. Finally, some clever people have found a way to tap into that feeling.

Betsy Newmark links (via Thomas Lifson) to this unintentionally hilarious article (at least I think most of the humor is unintentional) on transgendered campus politics at Smith College, a historically all-women college (with a famous alumni as diverse as Gloria Steinem and Nancy Reagan). Several currently-attending students have started off there as women, and then became men--but wished to remain at a previously all-girls college.

Which of course, in the name of unlimited tolerance, Smith has allowed them to. As Betsy writes, "You know, sometimes it just seems that civil rights issues ain't what they used to be."

And how!

The Rishon Rishon blog links to a powerful Israeli commercial depicting a future that someday might be real--even if some don't approve.

In their profile of Ann Coulter this week, Time unintentionally features a Protest Warrior from last fall's NYC GOP convention with a "Communists For Kerry" poster.

Notice also the poster the other Protest Warrior is holding in the right of the shot. Didn't anyone enter either URL into a search engine before choosing this shot?

Will Collier of VodkaPundit notes that today is the 35th anniversary of the splashdown of Apollo 13, and links to a nifty article on the engineers who manned Apollo 13's Mission Control.

Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox wrote a terrific book about 15 years ago called Apollo, which focused on Mission Control and the rest of the "behind the scenes" crew at NASA who designed and safely flew not just Apollo's manned missions (and recovered and learned from the horrific fire that killed the crew of Apollo 1), but all of the test flights that led up to the moon landings. Naturally, there's particular attention paid to Mission Control's role in Apollo 13. The authors quote several men who worked Mission Control who all said that as important as Apollo 11 was, the successful conclusion to Apollo 13 was the program's finest hour.

I purchased Murray and Cox's book when it was first published as a lark one day in a South Jersey shopping mall while killing time on a lunch break, only to eventually discover a few years ago that because it was out of print, it was selling for over a hundred dollars via used booksellers. Fortunately, it's back in publication--and I highly recommend it.

As Ed Morrissey writes, enjoy trackbacks while they last, because it sounds like spammers' abuse of the trackbacks are killing them for everyone. As I wrote in a comment on Ed's site:

A few months ago, I watched my site get hit with (literally) several hundred spammed trackbacks one night from some sort of Texas Hold'em Poker site. In response, I emailed Stacy Tabb, and she installed MT-Blacklist, and the ability to close trackbacks after a set period of time. The two seem to do a pretty good job of reducing the amount of spam-trackbacks I get, while still allowing legit blogs to trackback to recent posts.

I've found several worthy, if lesser-known blogs via trackbacks, and I'll click on a trackback ping if the headline or blog name sounds interesting. But I'm verry sorry to see spam artists help to slowly kill a pretty unique feature of the Blogosphere.

Whenever I'm writing for the Web, space is typically not an issue for articles. This is different from magazine writing, where normally, a word count is pre-assigned by the editor, because the article has to fit on a certain number of 8.5" by 11" pages, in-between space blocked out for artwork and ads. But while space is not a critical factor on the 'Net, one of the paradoxes of Internet journalism is that Web-based articles are often shorter than magazine pieces, because, ideally, most articles should be able to be absorbed in a single sitting by a reader staring at a monitor, as opposed to holding a paper magazine that can be read on the commute home from work, put down, picked up at a later date, etc.

When I interviewed Brian Anderson about his South Park Conservatives book for Tech Central Station, he preferred that it be conducted via email, rather than over the phone as I often do. That was fine with me--I can understand that a professional writer is likely to communicate in more detail and more precisely by typing rather than talking. (Lord knows I do.) But after I wrote the article for TCS, there was far more of my interview with Brian remaining "on the cutting room floor" than normal.

Brian asked if I'd consider running the actual interview. I kicked it around for a while and thought, sure, why not? So in the spirit of the South Park movie, whose tagline was "Bigger, Longer & Uncut" here's my interview with Brian Anderson in toto:

"Fabulous" is a word that has become primarily known for meaning great or wonderful or marvelous. But as Webster's' online dictionary notes, its primary meaning is:

resembling or suggesting a fable: of an incredible, astonishing, or exaggerated nature [fabulous wealth]

While big media loves to chide blogs for not "making boring commitments" to "covering the news fairly", increasingly, it's been known to be pretty wildly inventive itself. Dan Rather and Jayson Blair are the two most well-known proponents of fabulist journalism, but they're far from alone.

First up via Betsy Newmark, Charles Johnson notes that Reuters has taken a story about twin bus bombings in Israel that actually occurred in September 2004, and presented it as if it happened just this past week.

Meanwhile, VodkaPundit's Will Collier observes the Boston Globe inventing a story about a seal hunt in Canada that never actually happened.

Finally, Mark Steyn notes another Reuters piece that's so wrapped up in its boilerplate conclusions that it can't even locate an excellent reality check on who's winning in Iraq:

Mickey Kaus explains the real reason why John Kerry has yet to sign his form SF-180 to release his military records, despite promising to do so on national TV.

Amtrak has cancelled its Northeast Corridor Acela high-speed rail service indefinitely because of brake problems.

As somebody who grew up loving trains, all I can say is, somebody, please shoot this behemoth and put it out of the taxpayers' misery.

In his review of Brian Anderson's South Park Conservatives, Orrin Judd wrote:

A couple years ago he was one of the first editors to contact us and suggest that we blog about stories from his fine publication, City Journal. This struck us then as a very smart use of a relatively new instrumentality to create buzz for a magazine that deserved it. That there are still major newspapers and other publications that haven't figured out the benefits they could reap from having folks steer readers to them for free only makes Mr. Anderson seem further ahead of the curve.

It's a pretty smart example of marketing to the Long Tail: those writers will draft some thoughts about the book or at least reference that they're mentioned in it; others will link to their blogs or online columns, others will blog about those blogs linking to the original posts, and so on.

When I asked him about the Long Tail, Hugh Hewitt told me:

"I would rather have 90 percent of the blogs and none of those top ten percent bloggers writing about my book, than I would have all of the top ten percent and none of the 90 percent doing so.

"Because the 90 percent of the tail operate in very high trust environments: they're read by their brother in law, they're read by their neighbors, their friends in church, their friends at work. If they say, 'hey you ought to read this book', it'll sell a lot of books!"

Dee Snider and Passover: perfect together.

Well, actually, probably not. But it's tough not to love the idea of a VH-1 show called Matzo and Metal. Will we see An Alice Cooper Christmas in December?

(Via "The Corner" and Throwing Things Blog.)

My review of Brian Anderson's South Park Conservatives is online at Tech Central Station, complete with extensive quotes from my recent interview with Brian.

Kenny was not harmed in the writing of the article.

James Bowman notices how much the style section of the newspaper and politics seem to be intertwined these days--much as increasingly, sports and politics have become interlinked as well.

Get a load of this quote by New Yorker superstar journalist Seymour Hersh:

New Yorker magazine's national security correspondent, Seymour Hersh, has been making speeches and radio appearances in which he has told stories of young boys being raped at Abu Ghraib prison, of U.S. forces murdering 36 Iraqi guards, and of alleged involvement of Karl Rove and even the President himself in prisoner interrogation matters. But he now says he "fudged" some of the stories he's told. He tells New York magazine, "I can't fudge what I write. But I can certainly fudge what I say."

He says, "Sometimes I change events, dates and places in a certain way ... [to communicate] another reality that I know of." But, he insists, he only changes the facts to "protect people."

Orrin Judd reviews Brian Anderson's South Park Conservatives.

Watch for our take as well, shortly.

Hugh Hewitt has harsh words for the GOP Senate on their lack of progress on the filibuster issue.

In a gesture almost as impressive as when the New York Times explained that "Recycling is Garbage", The San Francisco Chronicle published an essay today by Brian P. Simpson, an assistant professor of economics at National University in San Diego, who details some of the reasons why gasoline prices are so high, especially in California. Too much to excerpt; best RTWT, as the pro-consumer forces of freedom like to say.

Glenn Reynolds links to a St. Louis Dispatch column that begins with a variation on the old "Some of my best friends are" routine, before claiming, "I don't recall any prewar speeches about delivering democracy to the Middle East."

Glenn then finds three prominent examples (and there are no doubt others) where President Bush did just that, and adds:

Don't these guys realize that we have Google?

I'm kidding--but not by much. It might take just that for many members of the press to realize that there are search engines and Weblogs they can use before they write their next column.

Mark Steyn has a nifty look at outsourcing, world trade, and a prediction, in his latest UK Spectator column:

Here’s a prediction: Europe’s dependence on immigration will in the end prove far more catastrophic than America’s dependence on oil. The immigrants will run out long before the oil does. And the demographic disaster will be exacerbated by a continent-wide version of ‘white flight’ — the abandonment of socially dysfunctional, economically moribund American cities in the Seventies by a frustrated middle class. Not all Dutchmen or Belgians will wish to follow their compatriots down the Eurinal of history. And, just as you can be a US tax accountant in Bangalore, in the age of the sovereign individual there’s no reason why a Dutch accountant can’t do tax returns for his Dutch clients from New Zealand or the Bahamas.

Permanence is always an illusion. The excuse is that, well, the big things change slowly, almost imperceptibly. But they’re changing very fast right now and you must actively embrace ignorance to be as impervious to reality as Europe’s ruling class is. High welfare costs, low birthrates, high taxes, and zero appeal to the world’s dynamic, ever more mobile wealth-creating class is a recipe for societal meltdown. But, as long as there’s always someone else to look down on, your own descent is less obvious.

Power Line catches Minnesota's Senator Mark Drayton inventing a new "problem" in Iraq--not enough sand(!):

On March 26, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported on the death of Cpl. Travis Bruce of Rochester, an MP who was killed by shrapnel while he was standing guard on the roof of a police station in Baghdad. Bruce's aunt says he was proud to be a soldier and was considering becoming a military recruiter when his active duty ended. But here is what Senator Dayton had to say about his death:

Nearly three weeks ago, Cpl. Travis Bruce of Rochester was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade while standing watch on the roof of a Baghdad police station.

On Tuesday, Sen. Mark Dayton, D-Minn., sent a letter to President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld questioning the circumstances that led to Bruce's death.

In the letter, Dayton said that the day before his death Bruce told his girlfriend in a telephone call that he had been unable to obtain enough sandbags to fortify his position adequately.

"He gave his life heroically and importantly, but it's immoral for our command not to provide our soldiers with absolutely everything they need to give them maximum protection: body armor, armored vehicles, sandbags. ... It's immoral if our soldiers are left in any way unequipped and unprotected," Dayton said in an interview.

First it was body armor, then armored vehicles. Now it's "immoral" that our soldiers don't have enough sandbags. Am I missing something, or is this ludicrous on its face? I can understand a soldier in Iraq being short of armor. But sand? Sand is something Iraq has in abundance; it's not exactly a commodity that the Army airlifts there from the Mojave desert.

In James Taranto's latest "Best of the Web Today" column, he has this classic item:

"Remind me to stay out of Washington", Robert McHenry writes in Tech Central Station--and it's sound advice. "Weird stuff happens there, and for all I know it's catching":

Take paper. Plain, ordinary paper, such as your office and mine are full of, even though somebody or other some years ago promised that if we would just buy these computers and things the paper would go away and our work would be oh! so much easier. Maybe the Paper God heard about the paperless office and decided to remind us who's who in the cosmos. Anyway, paper is acting up in D.C.

Sandy Berger wanders innocently into the National Archives, putters about for a while, easy as you please, and leaves. End of story? Not hardly. Somehow a bunch of important papers end up stuffed down his pants and in his socks, and he has no idea how it happened.

OK, one incident could be a fluke, a statistical offchance. Nobody called in the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.

But then Sen. Mel Martinez walks into the Senate, reaches in his pocket, and pulls out a paper that he's never seen before and can't account for. He doesn't notice that it's a paper he's never seen, though, so he gives it to Tom Harkin, who doesn't look at it. Later it turns out to be a paper that nobody wrote, which is good, because nobody should have written it. When somebody eventually does look at it, everybody is in trouble.

The crafty hand of the Paper God, no? He has lots of tricks, and one of them is to make stupid pieces of paper look not stupid. Everybody falls for this one, but some fall more often and harder, like journalists.

Speaking of James Lileks, a year ago, when Hunter S. Thompson was still (more or less) alive, Lileks wrote of Dr. Gonzo:

He can say what he wants. Drink what he wants. Drive where he wants. Do what he wants. He'ss done okay in America. And he hates this country. Hates it. This appeals to high school kids and collegiate-aged students getting that first hot eye-crossing hit from the Screw Dad pipe, but it's rather pathetic in aged moneyed authors. And it would be irrelevant if this same spirit didn't infect on whom Hunter S. had an immense influence. He's the guy who made nihilism hip. He's the guy who taught a generation that the only thing you should believe is this: don't trust anyone who believes anything. He's the patron saint of journalism, whether journalists know it or not.

In his latest syndicated Newhouse column, James Lileks begins with a rhetorical question:

Please. C'mon. Who among us hasn't shoved classified documents into his pants and jacket by accident? It happens.

You're reviewing some notes -- OK, classified notes, but it's not like they're the secret formula for Coke or anything. Somehow they get in your clothing. Maybe you're the sort of person who's always putting things in your pants, and every night you empty out the contents -- a gallon of milk, some lawn statuary, some D-cell batteries, one shoe, loose rosary beads. And hey, what's this? Dang: classified documents.

Well, better do the right thing, and return them. But somehow they get cut up and thrown away. You're bad. But it's not like you were intending to sell them to the Chinese, or worse, Fox News.

Should you get sent to the Martha Stewart Memorial Wing of the White Collar Timeout Complex? Not if you're that lovable rapscallion, Sandy Berger, who has admitted that those classified papers didn't leap unaided into his wardrobe.

His verdict: a $10,000 fine and a three-year suspension of his security clearance. Just in time for 2008, when he could be President Hillary's secretary of -- now what was the name of that office? He wrote it down somewhere. Must be in his other pants.

When the story first broke, Bill Clinton himself found it risible: Why, that's just Sandy, always a pack rat; once we found him, yelling for help, buried under 200 pounds of documents he'd carted off from the Folger Library.

Professional chameleon David Gergen suspected the story of Berger's crime was released to draw attention away from the 9/11 commission report. (Apparently Karl Rove made Berger walk off with documents months in advance just to set up the diversion.) No harm, no foul -- the real crime was 40 million uninsured caribou in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge etc.

Steve Green of VodkaPundit has quite an interesting theory about the release of an early entry of what will be no doubt be an entire industry of tell-all books about Hillary Clinton over the next four years.

Just added a long update to the "Deconstructing Private Ryan" post below, thanks to an email I received from reader Gregg Hanke, who runs his own Weblog, titled Impacted Wisdom Truth.

Hugh Hewitt links to a disturbing London Times piece about "Lonsdale Youth":

Lonsdale, the British sportswear label made famous by boxers and Eighties pop stars, faces creeping bans across the Netherlands because racist gangs have taken to wearing the brand.

Nightclubs and bars are refusing entry to people wearing the label, it is forbidden in some schools and a town in the south of the country is proposing a blanket ban after a series of race-hate crimes.

In the past week, a Muslim primary school in the town of Uden was subjected to its second arson attack. Witnesses said that teenagers involved were wearing Lonsdale tops. Civic leaders have announced plans to ban the label in the town.

The first attack came after the murder of Theo van Gogh, the film-maker and critic of Islam, last November, a killing that inflamed racial tensions and fuelled the growth of neo-Nazi gangs hunting for Islamic targets.

Last Sunday, a group of youths smashed windows at a mosque in the town of Venray, sparking riots between 20 Dutch youths and 60 Turkish immigrants that left one man in hospital. The Government responded by starting an investigation into the rise of organised right-wing extremism.

The term “Lonsdale youth” has become a widely used synonym for teenagers with extreme right-wing tendencies. A website, Lonsdalenews, has been set up to track racist incidents.

Right-wing extremists like tops bearing the Lonsdale logo, because a carefully placed bomber jacket can leave only the letters NSDA showing, one letter short of NSDAP, the acronym for Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, Hitler’s National Socialist Party.

Meanwhile, the clothing label (the British boxing equivalent of America's Everlast brand) sounds like they're in a situation similar to Tylenol in the early 1980s, when their name became synonymous with "tainted medicine". Fortunately, like Tylenol, as the article explains, they're taking steps to reclaim their brand name. But in the ban-happy EU, will that be enough for them to stay afloat without changing their name?

Everyone has seen the still photo of South Vietnamese General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting his prisoner point blank into his temple. Along with the photo of a child running naked after a napalm attack, it's become the iconic image of The War That Never Ends. What's less known is how much Eddie Adams, the now-deceased photographer who took the shot later regretted it:

Adams wrote in Time magazine, "The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?'"

The picture that Adams took, the picture that CNN thinks is such an atrocious and ignoble deed, ruined Loan's life. More to the point, it didn't expand on "our right to know." It didn't answer questions, or give us the story. It deceived. It gave no context. It confirmed the biases of the anti-war journalists, and they used it to further their agenda.

Last May, I linked to an interview with Lionel Chetwynd, the producer of last year's Ike: Countdown To D-Day, starring Tom Selleck in the title role.

Chetwynd grew up in Montreal, and at one point, he wanted to produce a film on the allies' attack on the French town of Dieppe in 1942. It was a sort of prototype D-Day, except that it was a horrific failure, resulting in the deaths of over 3,000 Canadian troops. (Yes Virginia, there was a time when Canada could field a large army.)

Chetwynd tells an amazing story of Hollywood's response to the idea:

Many years later, when Chetwynd was a successful Hollywood writer specializing in historical dramas, he told the Dieppe story during a Malibu dinner party — as a sort of tribute to the men who died there so people could sit around debating politics at Malibu dinner parties. One of the guests was a network head who asked Chetwynd to come in and pitch the story.

"So I went in," Chetwynd told me, "and someone there said, 'So these bloodthirsty generals sent these men to a certain death?'

"And I said, 'Well, they weren't bloodthirsty; they wept. But how else were we to know how Hitler could be toppled from Europe?' And she said, 'Well, who's the enemy?' I said, 'Hitler. The Nazis.' And she said, 'Oh, no, no, no. I mean, who's the real enemy?'"

"It was the first time I realized," Chetwynd continued, "that for many people evil such as Nazism can only be understood as a cipher for evil within ourselves. They've become so persuaded of the essential ugliness of our society and its military, that to tell a war story is to tell the story of evil people."

As we've observed on numerous occasions, for the left and the media (but I repeat myself), every war is Vietnam.

Fortunately, as Tim Blair writes, the public as a whole sees things very differently.

Ironically, it was the left itself that recently helped to further rehabilitate the era by choosing one of its soldiers as their presidential candidate last year, as we noted last August when he "reported for duty".

Update: Speaking of Nostalgie de la Nam, get a load of this new Time magazine ad. Of course, its photo is open to interpretation...

The Manolo (whom I just permalinked) and I are definitely on the same page when it comes to this book and its author's knowledge of the Secret Vice.

Late last month, we linked to a horrific-sounding story about a human finger found in bowl of chili at a San Jose Wendy's restaurant.

Today, UPI reports that the woman who discovered it has, what they call, "a history of litigation":

Police started scrutinizing Anna Ayala, an unemployed janitor who lives in a $500,000 house, after she announced she had found a finger in her Wendy's food order, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Saturday.

Since going public with the finger March 22, she has hired a personal injury lawyer.

It is not her first experience with suing businesses. In 2000 she sued a San Jose car dealer, the General Motors Corp. and the Goodyear Tire Corp., saying she was severely injured after a front tire fell off her GMC Sierra sport utility vehicle as she drove it in 1999.

A judge later dismissed the case, but not before Ayala repeatedly changed lawyers.

Also in 1999, Ayala filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against a San Jose newspaper claiming a man who worked there exposed himself to her the first day she began work as a receptionist. She got an out-of-court settlement in 2002.

Bay area court records indicate she has been involved in at least half a dozen other such cases, the Chronicle reported.

Or something like that!

Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center has mostly kind words for the coverage the TV networks provided of the Pope's funeral:

In its many hours of coverage, the news media signaled the respect they hold for this pope in spite of the great differences they had with him on important social and religious issues. He was, unabashedly, the “Holy Father” in their reports, and in their eagerness to explain the greatness of this man, they turned to countless Catholic priests, bishops, and theologians for elucidation. For all their respectful attention to Church teaching and philosophy, they deserve the gratitude of the Pope’s supporters, Catholic and non-Catholic alike.

The sad occasion of losing this spiritual giant does have the benefit of causing the world’s media to turn away from the novelty of the next second and look back at the vast history of the Christian church, to ponder eternal questions of God and not just the latest twists in the Michael Jackson trial. Let’s hope it’s an occasion for many people who have lost touch with God to take an opportunity to get reacquainted. For all that the media have brought us to see, to read, and to ponder, America’s millions of supporters of the Pope can only say: Thank you.

As I've written before, my father spent decades as a partner in a large suburban Chevrolet dealership, and while I haven't owned a GM automobile in about 15 years, I still feel a certain sense of affiliation with the company.

Seeing them revolt against the insane excesses of the Los Angeles Times is certainly heartwarming--even if it may not last.

Ed Morrissey writes:

After a number of poor editorial decisions, including running North Korean propaganda as a front-page news article last month, the Los Angeles Times not only has lost subscribers but now a major advertiser has cancelled its account at the paper. General Motors announced today that it will no longer buy advertising in Los Angeles' only major broadsheet due to the editorial incompetence shown by the newspaper.

* * *

For those who are tempted to scold General Motors for a lack of support for a free press, let's remember that GM isn't censoring the LAT at all. They have no power to do so, in any real sense. Censorship comes from the government at the threat of arrest. What GM has done in this case is to make a rational decision that its advertising dollars supported a media outlet that performed poorly and reflected badly on GM. GM will either save the money or put it into more effective advertising, and the LAT is still free to print whatever it likes. What the Tribune Co. (owners of the LAT) should understand from this development is that its revenue stream will be endangered by the poor performance of its staff -- just like any company in a free-market system.

John Carroll and the Tribune Co. just learned a valuable lesson in free-market economics. They can either improve their product, or continue to rely on their near-monopoly position in Los Angeles to slowly run the newspaper into the ground.

Update: Found via Hugh Hewitt, Okie on the Lam in L.A. also has some thoughts.

Hugh notes that last year, GM spent $21 million on advertising in the L.A. Times. That's a staggering sum for the Times to lose. Riehl World View believes that GM's move was designed to send a symbolic message to the car manufacturer's buyers in the red states, and has some thoughts on how it will play there.

Interesting comment from Editor & Publisher:

Prudential is more alarmed about the situation, saying it should be of “great concern for Tribune and the management at the Times, as losing this revenue, even short-term, will hurt.”

Both reports point out the Times is in a sticky position. "Giving into advertiser demands for specific editorial coverage risks severly tainting the journalistic reputation of the Times," Prudential noted.

Somebody needs to tell those wacky pranksters at the New York Times that April Fools Day is over. They have a hilarious piece on 60 Minutes II (the wonderful folks who brought you Ra^therGate) winning a Peabody Award! The photo of Jon Stewart is an obvious tip-off that the Times is in cahoots with Comedy Central.

Oh wait, it's real?! Getouttahere!

The Transportation Safety Agency, who's motto is "Dominate. Intimidate. Control", is apparently being broken up, according to this Washington Post article.

Curiously missing from the piece? Underperformin' Norman Mineta.

Update: Michelle Malkin writes that the Post's article "Sounds more dramatic than it is", and that "At the end of the day, we'll still be stuck with" the TSA, much like the Post Office.

The Bay Area has a new play opening, honoring (with scare quotes and bad spelling) "enemy combabtants" held at Gitmo.

No word yet on whether or not Max Bialystock, Leo Bloom, and Franz Liebkind are producing it.

Update: I should have known--the play in San Francisco is the roadshow version. Back in October, Mark Steyn reviewed the New York production.

If you have Comcast and are wondering why your cable modem is coughing, sputtering, and pages are loading s l o w l y, apparently Comcast experienced a system-wide DNS server failure today.

DSL Reports.com (which also has a newer URL called Broadbandreports.com; both access the same site.) has a possible solution. No guarantees of course, that it will work if you're experiencing similar problems, but it worked for me. Pages are now loading relatively quickly, although perhaps not as fast as before the problem developed around 4:00-ish Pacific Time.

We've frequently lamented much of today's rock music as being repetitive, lacking in originality, and formulaic. How formulaic?

Well, one website took a couple of Nickelback's hits from 2001 and 2003 and put one in the left-hand speaker and the other in the right speaker. Notice that the key, structure and chords are virtually identical.

Yes, file sharing of MP3s have cut into record company sales. But record labels aren't helping their own situation by giving us little reason to buy new CDs.

For $45,000, you too can own an actual Hal 9000. Hopefully he'll let you back in your house, if you connect your burglar alarm to him.

In The Weekly Standard, Duncan Currie looks at the brewing showdown over America's juiciary:

The underlying threat to American self-government is not merely "right-wing" or "left-wing" judges--but the imperial judiciary itself. Yes, most judicial activism these days occurs on the social left. Conservatives are wholly justified in their high dudgeon. But when they base their arguments on a narrow critique of "liberal" judges, rather than a critique of usurping judges generally, conservatives unintentionally concede a vital point: namely, that American courts should be reaching a sociopolitical consensus for the American people.

In fact, the Founders intended no such role for the courts. Divining and defining the popular will on, say, abortion, same-sex marriage, and the death penalty is properly the duty of the U.S. Congress and state legislators. But for several decades now, American politicians have shirked that duty. Congress has also ducked its constitutional obligation to lasso a renegade judiciary. The result: an unchecked court system with metastasizing powers and an insatiable appetite for legislating.

Not surprisingly, it comes from the great Jay Nordlinger:

And here's Sen. Barbara Boxer, on John Bolton, Bush's nominee to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations: "He's been very contemptuous of the U.N." Well, no sh**, senator. And you haven't? You weren't contemptuous when Saddam Hussein's government chaired the nuclear-disarmament committee? You weren't contemptuous when Qaddafi's Libya and Assad's Syria chaired the human-rights committee? You're not contemptuous that China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe, and other beauts sit on that committee?

You weren't contemptuous when the U.N. stood by as thousands were slaughtered in the Balkans? You haven't been contemptuous at the U.N.'s performance in Rwanda, and Congo, and Sudan?

Liberalism used to mean something — e.g., opposition to tyranny and lies. And now? Opposition to George W. Bush seems most important.

And speaking of writing, sorry for the lack of posting this week. I've had several articles to either get out the door, or update for editors.

"NEED SOME QUOTE FROM SUPPORTER", the Times famously asked this past weekend when Pope John Paul II died. Mark Steyn is happy to oblige.

RTWT, as they say.

Brian Anderson is the senior editor of the the Manhattan Institute's estimable City Journal magazine. He has a new book that's just hit the streets (and Amazon) called South Park Conservatives. It builds on themes discussed in this Tech Central Station piece by Stephen Stanton a few years ago, and also Brian's own article from 2003, in which he declared that the right had achieved parity with the left in the culture wars, thanks to a combination of talk radio, Fox News, shows like South Park, web-based publications such as NRO and the Weekly Standard.com, and of course, the Blogosphere.

Brian brings all of those topics up to date to cover The Passion, the Swift Vets, RatherGate, and their November 2nd dénouement. He also has some thoughts on where we go from here.

The title subject of the book is the unlikely Gen-X conservatives who are fans of shows like South Park and The Simpsons. In other words, they're not your traditional, Bill Buckley/Alex P. Keaton-style blue blazer wearing conservatives. They're hipper, rowdier, but also deeply patriotic, distrusting of most of the media, and driving their college professors crazy. And for obvious reasons, South Park appeals immensely to them.

Which brings me to a fun announcement: because I am the paragon of existential Internet coolness, I'm mentioned in the book.

Brian quoted a little from the piece I did for Tech Central Station last year, in which I ripped apart the statistics quoted in a then-recent CNN.com article on Weblogs. Prior to that, Brian and I had exchanged some correspondence when I interviewed Bernard Goldberg for TCS, and mentioned Anderson's article on culture war parity. I knew he was working on this book, but hadn't heard from him again until this morning, when he emailed to let me know it's been published.

So look for my brief cameo appearance inside South Park Conservatives, which is inside your local bookstore--or better yet, just click on the Amazon link on your left!

(And look for additional posts about the book, and an article elsewhere from me about it; details to follow.)

Update (4/14/05): My profile of the book and its author (along with numerous quotes from an interview we recently did) is now online at Tech Central Station.

In an article appropriately titled, "Look Back at Anger", Jacob Laskin looks at Byron York's new book on the left and the presidential election, The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy.

Sounds like it should be a fun read:

Beneath the patina of confidence, however, the left-wing conspiracy often seems pitiable, as desperate as it is determined. Above all, its members are angry--at the perceived injustice of the 2000 presidential election, at the prospect of long-term Republican governance, at John Kerry's inept campaigning. Even, it appears, at being called angry.

It is the anger that does them in. Resting his case on much original reporting, Mr. York convincingly shows that the activist left mistook its base--2.5 million strong and anti-Bush to the (mostly white) man--for the mainstream electorate, as if fury and contempt were the only logical responses to the Bush presidency. Reciting the mantra that it was "too big to fail," the left wing bought into the conspiracy of its own vastness. An inability to connect with swing voters followed, and electoral defeat.

Especially trenchant is Mr. York's analysis of the Center for American Progress. Convinced, mistakenly, that modern liberalism's problem was its deficit of sound bites, the think tank gave short shrift to compelling policy ideas. A disgruntled Democratic source--the book is densely populated with this species--offers an apt postmortem: "Just getting bigger amplifiers doesn't make the music any better."

In this recent New York Sun article, Julia Vitullo-Martin says that a lot of mediocre modernist buildings are about to become landmarked in Manhattan:

Since landmarking has the effect of rigidifying current use and preventing evolutionary change, New Yorkers need to pay close attention to this debate.

The Municipal Art Society’s watch list of 30 Under 30 includes, for example, the egregious Marriott Marquis Hotel designed by John Portman, the immense IBM Building designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes, and Philip Johnson’s cathedral-size AT&T/Sony Building. Do New Yorkers really want these structures pre-empting all future uses? Are we confident enough of their merit to protect them into perpetuity? Will Walter Gropius’s MetLife Building, looming over Grand Central Terminal, be next on the list of buildings to be protected?

The problem is that modernist architects espoused a good number of truly bad ideas, which are far more important than their familiar contempt for color and ornamentation. At its most fundamental, modernist architecture intended to break with the past, defy the streetscape, and rend the urban fabric. In urging that buildings be landmarked, preservationists are not merely advancing the benefits of modernism’s clean, uncluttered lines. They argue the benefits of what are often modernism’s depredations, such as the superblock.

Of course, some of the debate will be settled by deterioration. As a Yale architectural historian, Vincent Scully, pointed out in 1999, modernists embraced an aesthetic of impermanence — with the result that most of their buildings will not survive because they were poorly built. Mies van der Rohe may have defined architecture as the will of an epoch translated into space, but much of that will is crumbling beneath its shoddy materials.

Many of the finest modernist buildings have already been landmarked. Joseph’s Urban’s sublime New School for Social Research, for example, on West 12th Street, is protected by an individual designation. Mayer, Whittlesley & Glass’s Butterfield House, across the street, is protected by the overarching of the Greenwich Village Historic District. The best-known modernist buildings were designated when they became eligible. Gordon Bunshaft’s 1952 Lever House on Park Avenue, for example, was designated a landmark in 1983, a year after eligibility.

The prospect of Gropius's Met Life building (formerly known for years as the Pan Am building) being landmarked is a bit depressing though. It's an enormous battleship of a building, totally dominates nearby Grand Central Station, and divides Park Avenue in half. It was one of Gropius's last buildings, but it's also the building that New Yorkers love to hate, and probably wouldn't miss if they were assured of something better in its place--or an unobstructed view down Park ave.

Earlier today, we linked to an article in the Australian, which is just now getting around to noticing that Al Qaeda's recruiting drive isn't exactly signing up the poorest of the poor in their efforts to destroy Western Civilization. This has been fairly common knowledge in the Blogosphere since not all that long after 9/11.

Also today, Orrin Judd links to this Christian Science Monitor piece, which includes this passage:

I well remember the foreign-policy conservatives of the 1930s and early 1940s. They were called "isolationists" and charged - often angrily - that President Roosevelt was wrongly pulling the US into the war in Europe. But this isolationist resistance ended suddenly with Pearl Harbor.

The country seemed to come together behind Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, attack. But the Democrats never could accept the idea of democracy being spread in a forceful way by the US. So the policy difference grew: The conservative Democrats vs. the liberal Republicans. That's relatively speaking, of course, but still very real.

Welcome to the Blogosphere fellows, where it's always 15 minutes into the mainstream media's future.

Update: Somewhat related thoughts, from Fred Barnes:

CNS News looks at what it would take to reform and downsize a monopoly that's long past its prime: the US Postal Service.

35 years ago, when Tom Wolfe visited Leonard and Felicia Bernstein, he was staggered to find a Park Ave. duplex full of ultra-wealthy celebrities and Manhattan socialites eager to fund and endorce the policies of the Black Panthers, who would have killed their backers the minute they actually seized power.

Found via PoliPundit, Arthur Chrenkoff links to an Australian article that's genuinely surprised to find a similar kind of radical chic that's driven enrollment into Al Qaeda:

The typical recruit to al-Qaeda is Western-educated and has a wealthy, professional background, according to a new study.

The analysis of 500 members of Osama bin Laden’s organisation has turned Western experts’ presumptions about al-Qa’ida upside down.

Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist who conducted the study, said he assumed it would find that most recruits were poor and ill-educated.

“The common stereotype is that terrorism is a product of poor, desperate, naive, single young men from Third World countries, vulnerable to brainwashing and recruitment into terror,” he said.

However, his study showed 75 per cent of the al-Qaeda members were from upper-middle-class homes and that many were married with children; 60 were college-educated, often in Europe or the US.

Just out of curiousity, I wonder if any of the US-educated members of Al Qaeda audited courses by these fellows?

John Fund writes that "a detailed look at last year's voting suggests big Republican opportunities"--and he's got just such a detailed look.

Almost forgot--Fred Barnes has some related thoughts.

Yesterday, we had looked at how badly America's media was covering the death of the Pope.

In his latest post, Mark Coffey says that Aljazeera's viewers aren't too crazy about their coverage--although for decidedly different reasons.

Update: Somewhat related, this is interesting, if not too surprising.

Soxblog looks at the strange case of Jacques Pluss, a former adjunct professor at Farleigh Dickinson University who sounds like he's been in the audience for "Springtime for Hitler" long after its opening night:

The students’ story had numerous classic vignettes: There was Professor Pluss whining in regard to his dismissal that he had been “stolen away in the night.” There was a student who observed, “Now that I think about it, Dr. Pluss seemed to have a morbid fascination with Hitler and Nazism.” And then there was Professor Pluss again castigating the university for “following the typical Jewish, lawyerly, Hebrew line."

Lest you think the modern Nazi only dislikes Jews, Professor Pluss also had some rather negative observations regarding Farleigh Dickinson’s mostly African American basketball team, alleging that the players were “n***** to the core” and prone to listening to “ghastly rap music.” As perhaps the crowning touch to a story that seemed too surreal to be true, Farleigh Dickinson did not dismiss Professor Pluss because he was a hate-spewing Nazi. Rather, they found his six absences during the past academic semester to be his sole hanging offense.

By the way, this is an unintended classic, found at the top of a quick Google search under Pluss's name. The National Socialist Movement (no, I hadn't heard of them either, at least not since '45) has issued a press release on Pluss's purging:

The NSM officially condemns Fairleigh-Dickinson University for engaging in acts of left-wing McCarthyism.

This past Monday, Professor Jacques Pluss, was removed from his teaching position at this university apparently for no other reason than being a member of [the National Socialist Movement].

(Via Charles Johnson.)

Curiously, inside the academy, more and more, life seems to imitate Linda Ronstadt.

Uh, let me explain.

Back in July, we wrote that if you're a Republican and/or fundementalist Christian, Linda doesn't want you in her audience:

In a gushing profile in The San Diego Union-Tribune she's quoted as saying:

"It's a real conflict for me when I go to a concert and find out somebody in the audience is a Republican or fundamental Christian. It can cloud my enjoyment. I'd rather not know."

The remark goes uncommented on by the paper.

Whatever happened to the days when music was supposed to be a unifying force? Bringing people together? Plug in any other phrases in place of "Republican or fundamental Christian" and imagine what the outrage would be.

So why isn't this paper crying foul?

“I think it would be far too stressful for me to teach children of Republicans,” the Multiculturalist commented over cappuccino in Padua, after expounding on profiling as a bigoted, narrow-minded policy of Eurocentrists.

I was tempted to ask if children of Republicans, indeed, young Republicans themselves or — God forbid — conservative professors were forced to stay in a closet of their own at her college, whose mission statement, after all, stipulates diversity in regards to race, gender and religion, but makes no mention of political affiliation. Would she have them wear a bright red R lest they enroll in her classes or sit next to her in the faculty lounge?

I shuddered to think how any of us would react to a colleague making the same statement, substituting party preference with an ethnic, gender or religious denomination: “It would be far to stressful for me to teach children of a gay couple … to teach children of Arab immigrants … to teach children of “fill-in-the- blank” (then run for cover). Yet no one else at our table seemed to view her statement as bigoted or even the slightest bit outrageous...

The Lone Star Times notes that President Bush has ordered flags at half staff in memorium to the Pope:

As a mark of respect for His Holiness Pope John Paul II, I hereby order, by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States of America, that the flag of the United States shall be flown at half staff at the White House and on all public buildings and grounds, at all military posts and naval stations, and on all naval vessels of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia and throughout the United States and its Territories and possessions until sunset on the day of his interment. I also direct that the flag shall be flown at half staff for the same period at all United States embassies, legations, consular offices, and other facilities abroad, including all military facilities and naval vessels and stations.

I'll second both emotions.

Mark Steyn brings his A-game to make much sport of the media's latest call for an impending crack-up of the GOP due to their support for Terri Schiavo:

Blog maestro Andrew Sullivan decided that America was witnessing a "conservative crack-up" over Terri Schiavo and the embrace of her cause by extreme right wing fundamentalist theocrat zealots like, er, Jesse Jackson and Ralph Nader. Sullivan was last predicting a "conservative crack-up" during the impeachment era, on the grounds (if I recall correctly) that Republican moralizing would dramatically cut into Strom Thurmond's share of the gay vote. In the '90s, the Weekly Standard ran innumerable special editions devoted to the subject: Conservative Crack-Up; Conservative Crack-Up 2; Conservative Crack-Up -- The Musical; Abbott And Costello Meet The Conservative Crack-Up; Conservative Crack-Up On Elm Street; Four Weddings And A Conservative Crack-Up; Rod Stewart Sings Timeless Favorites From The Great Conservative Crack-Up, etc.

The point to bear in mind when Hollywood producers, State Department diplomats, respected senators, gay mavericks, the New York Times and the rest of the media offer conservatives advice is a simple one: As that great self-esteem volume has it, He's Really Not That Into You. The preferred media Republican is an amiable loser: the ne plus ultra of GOP candidates was the late Fred Tuttle, the lame, wizened idiot dairy farmer put up for a joke against Sen. Patrick Leahy in Vermont. But, if they can't get that lucky, the media will gladly take a Bob Dole type, a decent old no-hoper who goes down to predictable defeat and gets rave reviews for being such a good loser. Republicans could well run into trouble in 2006 and 2008, but for being insufficiently conservative on things like immigration rather than for anything the media claim they're cracking up over.

The notion, for example, that poor Terri Schiavo will cost Republicans votes in a year and a half's time is ludicrous. The best distillation of the pro-Schiavo case was made by James Lileks, the bard of Minnesota, responding to the provocateur Christopher Hitchens' dismissal of her as a "non-human entity." "It is not wise," wrote Lileks, "to call people dead before they are actually, well, dead. You can be 'as good as dead' or 'brain dead' or 'close to death,' but if the heart beats and the chest rises, I think we should balk at saying this constitutes dead, period."

Incidentally, many of the calls for a conservative crack-up were due to polls released by the media which show that the majority of the American public were for Schiavo being euthanized. Lori Byrd reminds us to take those polls with a grain of salt.

Hugh Hewitt (via Impacted Wisdom Truth) also has some related thoughts.

Update Speaking of poll numbers, President Bush's approval rating is currently at 51 percent. Doesn't sound like he's alienated the public with his handling of the Schiavo case.

The Cassandra Page looks at the top ten methods of, as its author dubs it, "MSM/DNC" bias.

It's actually grown to 12 items--all of which were blatantly on display last year. Fortunately, there was a Blogosphere to counteract the most egregious examples.

Speaking of Robert Byrd, the Wall Street Journal says that Byrd has unknowingly provided Republicans a novel solution to Senate Democrats' obstruction of President Bush's judicial apointees.

Unlike the Grey Lady, Power Line looks at Senator Robert Byrd with a gimlet eye:

The New York Times features a predictably fawning profile of former Ku Klux Klan Kleagle and current West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd: "A master of Senate's ways is still parrying in his twilight." By contrast with its coverage of the Pope's death, the Times had no problem finding quotes from supporters of Senator Byrd before press time.

Robert Byrd is indeed a valuable link not only to the Senate's past, but also to the Democratic Party's history as the party of slavery, segregation, and opposition to equal treatment of blacks. Times reporter Sheryl Stolberg obviously loves Byrd's cornpone constitutional shitck in favor of filibustering a Republican president's judicial appointees. It's a shame that Stolberg exerted no effort to put Byrd's shtick in the context it merits.

Byrd is old enough, for example, to have vowed memorably regarding the integration of the Armed Forces by President Truman that he would never fight "with a Negro by my side. Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds."

Even after his resignation from the Klan, Byrd continued to hold it in high esteem, writing to the Klan's Imperial Wizard in 1946: "The Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia."

And Byrd is old enough to have participated in filibustering the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as to have voted against it after cloture along with 19 other Democrats -- in the name of the Constitution, of course. Funny Stolberg didn't invite Byrd to take a walk down memory lane on that subject. It would have been highly illuminating.

It's truly fascinating how the Democratic Party has closed ranks behind him, to the point where even Barack Obama, the young black, "great liberal hope" (to borrow Rich Lowry's phrase), along with left's Internet collective, Moveon.org, is shilling reelection funds for him.

Byrd has become such an obvious punching bag for Republicans, and easy--seemingly weekly--target for Rush Limbaugh. Why on earth doesn't the DNC cast him off? He's 87. Give him a gold watch and send him home, rather than risking a potential Daschle-style upset in '06.

John J. Miller on everything you ever wanted to know about Daylight Savings Time, but were afraid to ask.

OK, this one was too easy. Yesterday, I wrote:

As with President Reagan's death, it will be interesting to see how the media covers a man that few in that field seem to have many kind words for--unlike millions upon millions in their audience.

Be sure to click on the screen shot of a New York Times Web page that was initially posted only missing just one little item...

Update: Ed Morrissey writes:

What an appalling effort on behalf of the so-called Paper of Record. Such laziness on the part of a reporter and editors cannot simply be accidental. It reminds one of the cluelessness of Pauline Kael who exclaimed her disbelief about Nixon's landslide re-election: "No one I know voted for him!" If the New York Times can ever be capable of embarassment, this incident should shame them greatly.

Another Update: Michelle Malkin has numerous further examples in a similar vein.

Glenn Reynolds, and Ed Morrissey have some thoughts and links, and the Weekly Standard currently has four articles about him on their homepage.

RIP.

Update: Michelle Malkin has lots of links as well.

I've already linked to this essay by Mark Steyn on the Terri Schiavo case. But I missed a particularly curious passage near its end, which Peter Burnet of the Brothers Judd Blog spotted:

Michael Schiavo’s lawyer, George Felos, is a leading light of the so-called ‘right-to-die’ movement, and his book, Litigation as Spiritual Practice, makes interesting reading. On page 240 Mr Felos writes:

The Jewish people, long ago in their collective consciousness, agreed to play the role of the lamb whose slaughter was necessary to shock humanity into a new moral consciousness. Their sacrifice saved humanity at the brink of extinction and propelled us into a new age... If our minds can conceive of an uplifting Holocaust, can it be so difficult to look another way at the slights and injuries and abuses we perceive were inflicted upon us?

Maybe Felos' mind can conceive of the death of six million Jews being uplifting; I'm having a rather difficult time wrapping my brain around the idea.

Tony Blankley is the editor of the editorial page of the Washington Times, which has done an admirable job for decades as a conservative alternative to the Washington Post. Indeed, prior to the launch of talk radio, Fox News, dozens of conservative and libertarian Websites, and now the endlessly diversified Blogosphere, it was one of the few reliably conservative sources of news in America. Prior to editing the Times, Blankley served as Newt Gingrich's press secretary for seven years, including during the height of the 1994-1995 "Contract With America" phase as a Republican Congress assumed power after 40 years in the wilderness.

In other words, Blankley is a smart guy who knows his way around Washington, and the media--or at least the "legacy media". His latest opinion piece compares gossip-oriented bloggers (he singles out Wonkette by name) with veteran big media gossiper Liz Smith. If I'm reading it correctly, and it's not an April fools' joke, Blankley doesn't appear to really know his way around the Blogosphere, and seems to conflate the rise of Liz's newest competitors, which he refers to as "digital rumor blogs", with the Blogosphere as a whole.

In spite of all that, at the end of his essay, Blankley makes a great point about his own industry:

The impending death of the paper-printed rumor business should be a warning to the news divisions of those papers. While the newspaper's rumor department is at a competitive disadvantage with the digital rumor blogs, the news departments actually have some advantages -- if they choose to use them. Hundreds of trained reporters and editors, if they are committed to objective news gathering, can actually produce more usable, objective news each day than even the most hard-working blogger. But if they print rumor and prejudice masquerading as news, they will surely go the way of their official, certified rumor departments.

But they no longer have a monopoly on opinion and fact-checking. Surely somebody who's an editor on a paper that now sees lots of similar voices where it was once a lonely exception in an otherwise near-monolithic media can see the benefit of that--and understand who's doing a solid job of proffering fact checking and opinion, and who's merely providing gossip.

Charles Johnson links to a despicable editorial cartoon in the English language version of Arab News, published out of Saudi Arabia.

If the metaphorical image looks familiar, that's because it's not the first time it's been used.

Brian Maloney, who dubs himself (or at least his Weblog), The Radio Equalizer, says that the ratings aren't looking good for Air America.

Glenn's already linked to it, so you've already read it, but as the Pope lies ailing
near death, I think this post by Hugh Hewitt does an excellent job of placing John Paul II into the context of 20th century history:

Such an outpouring of deep sorrow I don't think the world will have seen since Churchill died.

With Reagan and Solzhenitsyn, John Paul II represents the three forces of opposition to communism that shattered the evil empire, the Soviet Union --the American-led West, the Eastern European resistance, and the Russian dissident movement. They also represented the three spheres of opposition: political, artistic and spiritual. Each man came into the field of his greatness later in life, and each has endured hard circumstances in their later years. I hope Solzhenitisyn is able to and inclined to write about his colleagues in the struggle that triumphed.

Update: Orrin Judd links to this exceptional editorial in the Australian:

Just to keep our trend on PC infantilism going, Ed Morrissey writes that university students have taken to throwing food and even shoes(!) at speakers they disagree with. He links to an AP article that begins:

Commentator and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan cut short an appearance after an opponent of his conservative views doused him with salad dressing.

"Stop the bigotry!" the demonstrator shouted as he hurled the liquid Thursday night during the program at Western Michigan University. The incident came just two days after another noted conservative, William Kristol, was struck by a pie during an appearance at a college in Indiana.

If the attacks weren't so pathetic, they'd be dangerous -- and that may yet come as the International ANSWER/MoveOn faction descends further into its immature, neurotic state. I'm no fan of Buchanan, but he does debate rather well, as does William Kristol. It seems that the Left has no answer for their skill, and so they instead sabotage the debate by hurling food. When that fails, as it did with Kristol, what comes next? Smoke bombs? Worse?

Before that happens, expect to see universities quit hosting such conferences, out of concern for student and guest safety. That's what the radical Left wants; they will brook no dissent from the pseudo-Utopian orthodoxy they've spent a lifetime building in Academia, and will fight any attempt to inject reality by any means necessary.

These poor specimens must often retreat like turtles from debate, because they know nothing of conservative positions--except from their professors' testimonials, which rely on dilution or caricature.

Did I say that life imitates Animal House? Nah--the Delta House gang may have been exuberant party animals, but the professors at a 1962-era college were infinitely saner than many of today's.

Speaking of the destruction of language, amazing, isn't it, how infantile and staggeringly easily offended PC makes people? Check out this item in James Taranto's "Best of the Web Today":

Washington state's Snohomish High School suspended senior Justin Patrick for wearing a T-shirt that said "SNOHOS," an abbreviation for "Snohomish" that appears on the schools own Web site (last item). The Seattle Times explains why:

School officials say "Snohos" contains a slang term for prostitutes and is derogatory toward women.

"As a woman, I am sure that you can appreciate our desire in Snohomish to maintain respect for all members of our community, especially our young women, and to not allow the abbreviated form of our school name to be used to reference them as 'ho's,' " said district spokeswoman Shannon Parthemer, in response to an e-mail query about the suspension.

Well, those are some pretty good points. Some will call Parthemer a hostage to political correctness, but we say she deserves hosannas for her efforts to make the Snohomish environment less hostile and more hospitable.

"It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words", Syme told Winston one day as the two were lunching in the Ministry of Information. No doubt, he would have approved of how language was manipulated to make Terri Schiavo's death sound surprisingly appealing.

As I noted yesterday, AP seemed to spend far more time condemning the reasons behind Sandy Burglar Berger's arrest rather than his actual crime.

In contrast, Glenn Reynolds, Jim Geraghty, and the fellows at Power Line have each written damning posts about Berger's crime. Power Line's John Hinderaker writes:

The idea that this was "an honest mistake," as Berger now claims, is ridiculous. Obviously, he was trying to destroy documents that showed the negligence of the Clinton administration--of which he was a key member--in dealing with the threat of terrorism. Key documents relating to our government's inadequate reaction to the threat of Islamic terrorism prior to Sept. 11 are now gone forever, successfully purged from the historical record by one of Bill Clinton's most loyal servants. This plea bargain appears, on its face, to be a disgrace.

Update: Much more here.

Another Update: In a follow-up post, Hinderaker adds:

So Berger removed five copies of the Clarke report, carefully destroyed three of them "late one evening," and returned the other two to the Archives. Obviously he reviewed the notes on the five documents and destroyed the three that contained information damaging to the reputation of the Clinton administration. I do not find reassuring the Post's suggestion that these were "copies only" and that it "remains unclear whether Berger knew that." Obviously all five copies of the Clarke report were "copies." But they contained unique notes, and Berger certainly thought that they were the only "copies" of those notes in existence, or it would make no sense to destroy them. I have seen no evidence whatsoever that he was wrong.

One aspect of Berger's sentence that seems almost humorous is the fact that his security clearance is suspended for three years. He wasn't going to need it during President Bush's second term, in any event, and he'll have it back in time for the new Democratic administration that, he hopes, will begin in 2009. What a penalty for attempting, apparently successfully, to destroy a portion of the historical record relating to the anti-terror activities in the months leading up to September 11.