"Carterpalooza" was the headline that Jay Nordlinger gave to his 2002 roundup of our 39th president's most infamous moments since leaving office. Steve Green of VodkaPundit has numerous additional examples and writes:

Look. I've got a computer. I have an internet connection. I know how to use Google – we could go on like this all day and all night. And even then, we'd only cover Carter's career as an ex-President.

The Wall Street Journal notes that Connecticut's governor is about to do much to increase the state's coffers--the state of Florida, that is:

Florida Governor Jeb Bush ought to send his counterpart in Connecticut, Republican Jodi Rell, a thank-you note with a box of chocolates and a ribbon tied around it. Last month Ms. Rell marked her first anniversary as Governor by signing into law a tax bill that might as well be called the "Palm Beach Economic Development Act."

The law requires that any resident of the Nutmeg State with an estate of more than $2 million pay a death tax of up to 16%--merely for the privilege of dying in Connecticut. The legislators in Hartford hope that the tax will raise $150 million in revenue each year--money that will come in only if the legislators in Hartford are also planning to build a Berlin Wall around the state.

Otherwise, expect a stampede of retirees and family businesses out of Connecticut into the many states without a death tax, such as Florida, which has a constitutional prohibition against estate taxes. Thanks to the Connecticut death levy, a successful small business owner with a $10 million estate can save about $1 million by packing up and heading south.

There are already thousands of high-income Connecticut residents with second homes in Florida or other warm-weather Southern states, so changing domiciles is easy and relatively costless. "The Connecticut legislature can't seem to comprehend that it is taxing away the very wealth-producing people that this state is dependent upon for an economic revival," says economist Dowd Muska of the state's Yankee Institute think tank.

In Washington state, Democratic Governor Christine Gregoire, riding high on her disputed 186-vote victory in last November's elections, linked arms with the Democrat-controlled legislature and overturned a ballot initiative approved by 67% of voters in 1981 that had outlawed a state estate tax. Now Washington imposes a 19% death tax, among the most onerous in the nation.

Glenn Reynolds links to Matt Drudge's latest update on Helen Thomas's meltdown after being caught saying that "I'll kill myself" if Dick Cheney announced he'd be running for the presidency. Drudge reports that "White House press doyenne Helen Thomas is plenty peeved at her longtime friend Albert Eisele, editor of THE HILL newspaper in Washington, D.C.":

Thomas said yesterday at the White House that her comments to Eisele were for his ears only. "I'll never talk to a reporter again!" Thomas was overheard saying.

"We were just talking -- I was ranting -- and he wrote about it. That isn't right. We all say stuff we don't want printed," Thomas said.

But Eisele said that when he called Thomas, "I assume she knew that we were on the record."

"She's obviously very upset about it, but it was a small item -- until Drudge picked it up and broadcast it across the universe," Eisele said.

Still, he noted that reporters aren't that happy when the tables are turned. "Nobody has thinner skin than reporters," Eisele said with a laugh.

It will. But Thomas's meltdown--staggeringly ironic, as it comes from someone who spends her days praying for (and preying upon) similar gaffes from the president and his press secretary--is only the latest in a string of examples of reporters who specialize in playing "gotcha games" with their interviewees, and acting like hypocrites if the tables are ever turned.

Frank Martin writes:

Now that the cause is lost, America is pulling troops out of occupation duty. The foreign policy established by a President that many once considered being illegitimate and has inflamed many countries including former allies to break publicly against the nation, is finally at an end.

resulted in an occupation and a rebuilding of a foreign nation at unprecedented levels. The long term occupation of a sovereign nation by foreigners who didn’t speak the language didn’t understand the culture, who before they occupied their nation exposed it to a ferocious bombing, killing hundreds of thousands of its civilians, then placing their nations leaders on trial and executing them for their crimes.

Read the rest of Frank's post. As BizzyBlog writes, it's a "home run".

There have been numerous books on the horrors of Nazi Germany's Holocaust. And both Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, from 1973 and Anne Applebaum's Gulag from 2003 have exposed the horrors of its Soviet inspiration.

But both of those regimes have been cast aside, to borrow President Reagan's phrase, on the ash heap of history. In contrast, North Korea's concentration camps and that totalitarian nation's multitude of other horrors continue, unabated, to this very day.

In a recent review, Orrin Judd looks at The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag, written in 2000 by Kang Chol-Hwan, who, as the title of his book implies, spent a decade, beginning in 1977, trapped as a prisoner inside of North Korea's nightmarish Yodok concentration camp. One reassuring sign: in contrast to President Ford's embarrassing rebuff of Solzhenitsyn, Orrin links to a Washington Post article which notes that President Bush met with Chol-Hwan earlier this year.

In her post on choosing a new acronym for the Global War On Terror (or GWOT for short), Lorie Byrd writes, "WW4 is possibly most accurate, but what happened to WW3? Vote at The Astute Blogger."

I'm not sure if The Astute Blogger was making an astute homage, but in his brilliant essay last year titled "World War IV", Norman Podhoretz explains the history behind what he calls World War III, and what most of us called the Cold War.

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting review of a new book on diversity gone askew in law schools:

Dan Subotnik once went to his dean and asked to teach a course on race and the law, a subject to which he had devoted a great deal of his own scholarly effort. Teaching a course about something you know is a time-honored method of refining your ideas and, not least, of educating the young. But the dean turned him down. Why? He claimed that Mr. Subotnik's message would be unduly dismissive of racism, amounting to, as the dean put it, "get over it."

While the dean's decision may have been unfortunate for Touro Law School, where Mr. Subotnik is a professor, it was an excellent one for the rest of us because it prompted "Toxic Diversity" (New York University Press, 335 pages, $45), a thoughtful critique of identity politics in the nation's law schools. These days "critical race studies" and feminist jurisprudence are a routine part of law-school scholarship, and much of it is devoted to discovering in the law those white, male power structures that have become an obsession throughout our universities.

* * *

Mr. Subotnik argues that critical race theorists and feminists often publish dubious articles and books that ignore the relevant facts in an effort to deliver an unrelenting message of victimization. He wants to hold these scholars to the same standards by which other legal scholars are judged. That they are sometimes not speaks volumes about the double standards that plague all institutions--not only universities--when ethnic identity and gender become in themselves a criterion of judgment, even an axis upon which the institution turns.
Double standards are deeply embedded in the scholarship, too, according to Mr. Subotnik. Racist speech by whites, for instance, is treated as evidence of racism in whites, while racist speech by minorities is evidence of racism . . . in whites: It is either "justified" or part of the warped sensibility that the governing power structures have imposed on persons of color. Meanwhile, the facts that normally support arguments are treated loosely. One of the first African-American law professors recently lamented that his "colony" was at "risk" because law schools showed "little interest" in replacing black professors when they retired. But in the decade before he wrote those words African-Americans had risen to 7.8% of the legal professoriate, up from 4.8%, casting doubt on his central claim.

And then there is the neglect of social statistics. Many critical race theorists, for example, view efforts to discourage illegitimate children as an assault on the African-American community, where illegitimacy has recently run to more than 60% of newborns. But the theorists refuse even to acknowledge the data showing illegitimacy to be a major cause of crime, poverty and disorder there. By contrast, distinguished scholars outside the legal academy, like Harvard's Orlando Patterson, have written eloquently about the blighted lives that result from families without fathers. Mr. Subotnik sees such law-school myopia as typical of the way that critical race scholarship tends to celebrate any conduct that violates middle-class values, never mind the costs.

Mr. Subotnik's critique of feminist scholarship is less sweeping but no less shrewd. He focuses on claims that paradoxically impugn the fortitude and resilience of women. There are more than a few feminists who argue, for instance, that law schools need to change their ways because certain practices, such as the Socratic method of aggressive classroom interrogation, make female law students uncomfortable and cause them to lose their identity. Mr. Subotnik believes that feminists who make such arguments are reviving the stereotype by which the 19th-century Illinois Supreme Court dismissed women as unfit to engage in the "hot strifes of the bar."

Some of the same feminist scholars also call for the elimination of testing for admissions and hiring because tests do not take into account, among other things, "emotional intelligence." As Mr. Subotnik wryly wonders: Why should we pay attention to such soft academic speculations and not take seriously the comments of Bill Gates, who says that winning in business is all about I.Q.?

Dan Riehl of Riehl World View is not happy with how Google ranks some of its searches:

For the longest time now, if you place the term Natalee Holloway into Google - the first link up has been to a Kuroshin article entitled "F@ck Natalee Holloway".

If someone is paying their own way on the Internet and not breaking the law, I don't support censorship and Kuroshin is free to write or host whatever they want. I have no complaint with their site and have been seeing the link forever.

But given that Google has a reasonable amount of control over their search mechanisms and subsequent results - there's simply no excuse for the same old tired, insulting and, frankly vulgar link to be sitting at the top for every school kid who might do a search on Natalee Holloway without safe search on.

I don't care how someone feels about the issue - whether it is over-covered, or not - that's a fair point. But there is absolutely no reason for what is now a Major Public American corporation to continue a situation potentially so insulting to many Americans for so long.

Confederate Yankee has some related thoughts, in a post titled, "My One and Only Post About Natalee Holloway"--and with a little luck, this post is likely to be mine as well.

One last item in Posner's otherwise interesting essay begs questioning, but I figured I'd break it off into a separate post, as its not really germaine to his main points about the Blogosphere. At least twice, he refers to the Swift Boat vets, at one point writing, "Conservatives were unembarrassed by the errors of the Swift Boat veterans".

I wonder if the New York Times' editors inserted that line, as it's become a cliche on the left. But which errors are Posner referring to? He doesn't say. You can argue back and forth about Kerry's Purple Hearts until you're purple in the face yourself, but the core element of the Swift vets anger was with the infamous "Winter Soldier" speech that Kerry delivered to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on April 22nd, 1971, while he was still in the US Naval Reserves. Unless you want to go into fullblown Foucault-style postmodern dissembling, it's tough to argue with a speech that's been in the Senate records--including audio tape--for almost 35 years.

And then there's Kerry's "Christmas in Cambodia" invention--which is also in the Senate records, and also thanks to Kerry himself.

In his Insta-linked essay in the New York Times, Judge Richard Posner touches upon a number of points that we've addressed here in the past:

The rise of the conservative Fox News Channel caused CNN to shift to the left. CNN was going to lose many of its conservative viewers to Fox anyway, so it made sense to increase its appeal to its remaining viewers by catering more assiduously to their political preferences.

As William McGowan noted in Coloring The News, by drinking the PC Kool-Aid in the late 1980s, the press pretty much assured that this would be their tone. In their fear to not offend anybody--save for, as "Pinch" Sulzberger was quoted as saying, "white, heterosexual males"--they've also completely lost their moral compass.

What's interesting though, as a commenter on Charles Johnson's site noted, is that since this tactic has alienated much of the American public (based on the latest Pew Report), their primary readers are increasingly, exclusively the left. And they either had to have seen this coming, or be clueless as to the unintended consequences of the direction that they set out in. So as not to alienate their remaining readers, it becomes increasingly more important to keep them in the liberal cocoon. And the cocoon narrows that much more--on both the readers and the press. But hey, stay quiet, and you'll be OK!

For somebody the left considers a dummy, this guy is sure on to something.

So why do people consume news and opinion? In part it is to learn of facts that bear directly and immediately on their lives - hence the greater attention paid to local than to national and international news. They also want to be entertained, and they find scandals, violence, crime, the foibles of celebrities and the antics of the powerful all mightily entertaining. And they want to be confirmed in their beliefs by seeing them echoed and elaborated by more articulate, authoritative and prestigious voices. So they accept, and many relish, a partisan press. Forty-three percent of the respondents in the poll by the Annenberg Public Policy Center thought it ''a good thing if some news organizations have a decidedly political point of view in their coverage of the news.''

Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave is full of examples of past forms being reborn via high tech. In the past, disseminating information required owning, or having access to a printing press (and a means of distribution), or a radio or TV station, none of which were cheap to acquire. These days, anybody can go to Blogger.com and start a blog--and according to Technorati, 14 million people have, returning us to the era of one-man pamphleteers, but with a twist: hyperlinked together, it's possible to check sources, find new writers whose viewpoints might match your own, and network with others in an astonishingly easier fashion.

Back to Posner:

A serious newspaper, like The Times, is a large, hierarchical commercial enterprise that interposes layers of review, revision and correction between the reporter and the published report and that to finance its large staff depends on advertising revenues and hence on the good will of advertisers and (because advertising revenues depend to a great extent on circulation) readers. These dependences constrain a newspaper in a variety of ways. But in addition, with its reputation heavily invested in accuracy, so that every serious error is a potential scandal, a newspaper not only has to delay publication of many stories to permit adequate checking but also has to institute rules for avoiding error - like requiring more than a single source for a story or limiting its reporters' reliance on anonymous sources - that cost it many scoops.

What really sticks in the craw of conventional journalists is that although individual blogs have no warrant of accuracy, the blogosphere as a whole has a better error-correction machinery than the conventional media do. The rapidity with which vast masses of information are pooled and sifted leaves the conventional media in the dust. Not only are there millions of blogs, and thousands of bloggers who specialize, but, what is more, readers post comments that augment the blogs, and the information in those comments, as in the blogs themselves, zips around blogland at the speed of electronic transmission.

This means that corrections in blogs are also disseminated virtually instantaneously, whereas when a member of the mainstream media catches a mistake, it may take weeks to communicate a retraction to the public. This is true not only of newspaper retractions - usually printed inconspicuously and in any event rarely read, because readers have forgotten the article being corrected - but also of network television news. It took CBS so long to acknowledge Dan Rather's mistake because there are so many people involved in the production and supervision of a program like ''60 Minutes II'' who have to be consulted.

The charge by mainstream journalists that blogging lacks checks and balances is obtuse. The blogosphere has more checks and balances than the conventional media; only they are different. The model is Friedrich Hayek's classic analysis of how the economic market pools enormous quantities of information efficiently despite its decentralized character, its lack of a master coordinator or regulator, and the very limited knowledge possessed by each of its participants.

In effect, the blogosphere is a collective enterprise - not 12 million separate enterprises, but one enterprise with 12 million reporters, feature writers and editorialists, yet with almost no costs. It's as if The Associated Press or Reuters had millions of reporters, many of them experts, all working with no salary for free newspapers that carried no advertising.

Big difference though: AP, Reuters and the New York Times are all built on the assumption that "sure, for decades, we've been near monopolies on information, but you can trust us because we're large institutions"--and the second half of that statement has increasingly been proven a specious argument. In contrast, one-man blogs have to earn their reputations solely on their readers' judgement--and will fairly quickly lose them, if their writers fumble too far off the mark. (Notice how quickly Andrew Sullivan's stock, at least on the right-hand side of the Blogosphere, fell last year.)

Along similar lines, some have called for voluntary standards, or the equivalent of a Better Business Bureau-style of blog overseer. But even that isn't as good a check on standards as the collective marketplace itself. As Alan Greenspan wrote 40 years ago:

"To paraphrase Gresham's Law: bad "protection" drives out good. The attempt to protect the consumer by force undercuts the protection he gets from incentive. First, it undercuts the value of reputation by placing the reputable company on the same basis as the unknown, the newcomer, or the fly-by-nighter. It declares, in effect, that all are equally suspect…Second it grants an automatic guarantee of safety to the products of any company that complies with its arbitrarily set minimum standards…The minimum standards, which are the basis of regulation, gradually tend to become the maximums as well…A fly by night securities operator can quickly meet all the S.E.C. requirements, gain the inference of respectability, and proceed to fleece the public. In an unregulated economy, the operator would have had to earn a position of trust..."

"Protection of the consumer by regulation is thus illusory. Rather than isolating the consumer from the dishonest businessman, it is gradually destroying the only reliable protection the consumer has: competition for reputation…Government regulations do not eliminate potentially dishonest individuals, but merely make their activities harder to detect or easier to hush up."

In the New Criterion Roger Sandall looks at the best documentary you've never seen:

Can anyone doubt that the next documentary blockbuster will be American Gulag: Inside Uncle Sam’s Camps, from Michael Moore? There must be a dozen scripts already circulating in Hollywood with similar titles, and now that Amnesty International has weighed in, surely it’s only a matter of time before a new example of creative filmmaking will be breaking attendance records nationwide.

So let me suggest a way of dealing with the inevitable agonizing over Gitmo and Abu Ghraib. Get hold of a video of Marina Goldovskaya's film about the genuine article, The Solovky Power: Evidence and Documents, and sit your friends down for an in-depth look at the real, original, death-through-labor Soviet archetype, where something far worse than the occasional mistreatment of Korans occurred. This distinguished film will enable everyone to get their historical bearings; moreover, it is a standing rebuke to those who would recklessly trivialize a name, and a system, that may have cost 2.7 million lives.

By strange good fortune The Solovky Power was recently shown in Los Angeles. At 7:30, on Wednesday April 13, students at the UCLA School of Film and Television, living and working in the shadow of Hollywood, were brought face to face with actual zeks—men and women who had survived ten, twenty, and up to thirty years confinement on the Solovetsky Islands, 150 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle in the White Sea, with the slogan “Freedom Through Work!” over the gate.

One can only wonder what the audience made of it. Many film students would be unable to name the year of the Bolshevik Revolution; while historically, most students planning careers in documentary stand politically to the left of the Hollywood Ten. While it’s possible that those at the UCLA School of Film and Television are better informed than most, I think it would be safe to say that an searching examination of the real Gulag, showing how Stalin’s labor camps were already up and running in 1923, accompanied by interviews with the dictator’s victims, was a campus experience that for California was something new.

Hugh Hewitt posts that he would be happy to discuss his memories of working with Supreme Court nominee John Roberts with a reporter from the Washington Post--if she was willing to interview him during his radio show:

The subject didn't matter to me. I had my assistant call back and say fine. She could interview me. Only one condition: The interview had to be conducted on air, live, during my broadcast. Would she please call the show line at 3:06 Pacific?

I had a similar request from a New York Times reporter for a similar interview a couple of days back. I made the same offer. He didn't respond.

Amy Goldstein did respond. She declined. My assistant relayed that Ms. Goldstein didn't want her story "out there" before it ran.

Fine, I thought. But then I got to thinking: Isn't journalism supposed to be in the public interest? If Goldstein wants information from me, and I am willing to give it to her, isn't she putting her own interests in a "scoop" or an "angle" ahead of the public's by refusing to conduct an interview she thought would be useful in the first place? And isn't she going forward with a story she knows may well be unnecessarily incomplete because she doesn't like the fact that her questions and my answers would have been on the record?

I of course want my listeners to get a chance if not to see the sausage that is MSM "news" being made, at least hear it being ground fine. I had hoped to compare whatever I was able to provide Ms. Goldstein with whatever it is that she publishes on the subject. Interesting all around, no?

But she declined to conduct the interview she requested. How interesting to note that the Post is willing to use sources that insist on anonymity, but not sources that demand transparency.

Update: Roger L. Simon writes that he'd like to employ a level of transparency on the Pajamas Media site similar to what Hugh discusses above. It would be a remarkable contrast to big media's approach to interviews and journalism, as one of Roger's commenters highlights:

[The MSM] will never do it unless the market forces them to do it. If they printed or allowed their web site to carry the entire interview it would take away their most prized weapons. The ability to take partial qoutes and tailor them to the narrative that they are weaving.It would also take away their ability to play the "He said this but this is what he really meant" trick of taking the person being interviewed words and interpret the "true" meaning. The press has fallen in love with the ability to treat the news as a historical novel. Lets face it, it is harder to be a great reporter when you can't play a little bit with the facts.

Last August, arguably the month of the 2004 presidential race, we posted on President Bush's promise to phase out US troops in Germany after sixty years there. The Financial Times reports that "The US army said on Friday it would hand over 13 of its German bases to Berlin, some perhaps as early as next year".

Wow, you mean he wasn't bluffing? Go figure.

Note: My wife Nina has been insanely busy for the past couple of months, and a very big part of her workload has been handling the legal aspects of Pajamas Media. As such, she's retired her own Weblog, but will be posting a few items here from time to time--Ed

Ladies! Have You No Respect For Yourselves?

There, that feels better. But excuse me. If a woman spends 30 to 60 (or more) minutes getting ready to go out, trying to look her best for the event and her partner, and he spends 1.78 seconds putting sandals on over the socks he’s worn for three days (along with the rest of his clothes), then something is seriously out of balance with the respect they are showing each other.

Oh, you say, he didn’t sleep in those clothes for three days, that’s a very expensive and intentional look. Nina, you just don't understand contemporary men's fashion.

Then excuse me again. But that’s worse. So it’s not that he’s just careless, sloppy and was playing video games till she had been standing at the door for ten minutes. It’s actually that he spent money trying to look like he doesn’t care about wherever they are going together. So he is working hard to dress in a way that says "this is an important event for her, but neither she, nor the event is important enough for me to give a damn." Yes, that’s worse than just being a slob.

When a man says once "I love you in short skirts" the woman, even liberated, professional, assertive women, go out and have all of their skirts shortened (ok, I know not all women, but a lot). When a woman says "wow, you look gorgeous in that suit" the one time in five years he gets dressed up, does he look for more places to wear a suit. Nope.

A male friend of mine actually once said "there was this guy in college, he always got dressed up.... and he always got, you know, lucky."

Well duh.

There's no doubt women go for the rough and tumple, Lady Chatterly's tilling the soil gardner type. But slovenliness and rough physicality do not need to go hand in hand. It is possible to do both--urbane sophistication and brute physicality. That is if you care for your partner and wish to show her some respect. And that is, if you have enough respect for yourself that you believe you can do both. I think many guys just don't have enough self-confidence to pull it off.

And for those of you who don't know - my husband dresses, as Manolo would say "Super Fantastic."

Well, at least he tries to.--Ed

In a post about Alfred Hitchcock's great Rear Window a few years ago, James Lileks wrote:

Jimmy Stewart does a nice job playing the stupidest man in the world, i.e., a man who does not want to marry Grace Kelly and spend his 40s photographing New York and beautiful models.

the men who fancied breaking the bank at Monte Carlo had moved down the coast to Cannes and elsewhere and the bank itself was near broke. The Societe des Bains de Mer, which ran the casino and hotels, reported huge losses that year. Next, the Société Monégasque de Banques et de Métaux Précieux, which held 55% of Monaco’s reserves and much of the Grimaldi fortune, went bust. Aristotle Onassis, who served as the young Rainier’s eminence Greece, thought a marriage into movie-star glamour might restore the Principality’s fortunes, and sounded out Marilyn Monroe, to no avail. Then, while in the neighborhood for the Cannes Film Festival, Grace Kelly was taken to the palace for a photo shoot and Rainier made his move.

It worked out well. His bride embarked on the usual charitable activities associated with Royal consorts but with the benefit of a much livelier Rolodex: throughout the Sixties and Seventies, old chums like Sinatra and Bob Hope turned Monegasque fundraising galas into the touring version of the starrier Friars’ Club roasts. Tourism and development followed. Monaco is a small town of 30,000 people, mostly tax exiles but with about 6,000 Monegasques to play the role of Rainier’s loyal subjects. As land was reclaimed and skyscrapers loomed over the fishing boats, Monaco’s stellar princess gave her husband a cachet denied to such other mini-me Euro-royals as the Grand Dukes of Luxembourg and Liechtenstein.

Princess Grace missed movies and Rainier gave her permission to return to her old job for Hitchcock’s Marnie. But his people found the idea vulgar and demeaning, and so High Society remained the House of Grimaldi’s last on-camera performance until Princess Stephanie’s husband made his film debut with Miss Bare Breasts of Belgium. By then, Rainier was old, stooped and exhausted; his princess was dead; and his children seemed determined to return the family name to its seedy antecedents. He made his dilapidated casino kingdom briefly romantic and, when he couldn’t maintain the romance, he had the satisfaction at least of knowing he’d made Monaco bankable again. But the 13th century family curse came along for the ride and in the end it broke the man at Monte Carlo.

James Taranto concludes his tripartite retrospective on the first five years of "Best of the Web Today" with a focus on last year's wild election ride.

Citizen Smash weighs in with other military bloggers on FX's new Over There series:

It was like a bad Vietnam movie, filmed in what was clearly the Mojave desert filling in for Iraq. I even spotted a Joshua Tree in the background.

Simple, stereotypical characters. Not much depth. Unrealistic battle scenes, with poor understanding of fire & manuever tactics. Too much inane chatter. Anachronisms abound, including a Vietnam era "Huey" MEDEVAC helicopter.

Bottom line: total crap.

What--and say something positive about the war? Diversity only goes so far in Tinseltown.

Steve Green (who gains bonus street cred for his admiration of debonair William Powell), highlights exactly what's gone wrong with Hollywood, by examining, of all things, the trailer for Rob Schneider's Deuce Bigalow: European Gigalo:

The trailer for "Deuce Bigalow: European Gigalo" had been up for a couple days, but I just couldn't bring myself to click on the link. Rob Schneider is not now nor has he ever been funny. It's not that I don't enjoy lowbrow stuff - far from it. Give me a couple beers and some Three Stooges, and I'm a happy man.

But Farrelly Brothers-style comedy just isn't funny. There's enough humor in the human condition as is, that I find it impossible to laugh with (or even at) characters who don't behave like real human beings, responding to impossible situations.

Case in point: "There's Something About Mary." The hair gel scene is empircally not funny. Semen doesn't just hang there, and women don't grab random blobs of "is that hair gel?" off of people's ears, then apply to their own hair without so much as a mirror. You want funny? Watch Bill Murray's flower-golfing scene in "Caddyshack."

But back to Deuce Bigalow's European Vacation or Whatever.

Finally, I succumbed to my Watch All the Trailers Rule, and loaded it up. There wasn't so much as a grin to be had. Halfway into the trailer, for reasons I don't understand, a fat American woman in a bad dress is shown speaking practically to the camera. She says "Give thanks to America for bringing freedom to Iraq" or words to that effect.

And then a brick flies in from off camera and hits her in the face.

I know Hollywood doesn't approve of the Iraq campaign. I don't expect serious debate in a Rob Schneider movie - and if there was some, I'd hold it in contempt. But just what the hell is going on here? Making a political statement with a thrown brick? That's supposed to be funny? That's supposed to have a point?

That's in a Rob Schneider movie?

What the hell?

I know the audience for these films - young folks without enough real-world experience to appreciate just how funny real-world behavior can be. I know, because I used to be one of them. We all were once: It's called "youth."

So it's come to this: Hollywood now feels the need to propagandize - with a brick! - in a summer teen flick. Or maybe "need" is giving too much credit. Maybe "audacity" is a better word for it. Whatever the case, at least we know where they stand.

Me, I'm not standing anywhere. I'm sitting in front of the laptop computer - having earlier tonight attacked my desktop monitor with a brick.

But when everything comes with the same mindset and worldview attached to it, is it any wonder that they're losing audience-share? The same thing has crippled the news industry as well. If your mindset is exactly that of the New York Times, then great, you're good to go. But for the rest of us....well, like Lucy and Charlie Brown, you can only pull the football away so many times, before you give the game away.

With Weblogs, there's a blog for every mindset and attitude--and if there isn't, that's probably reason enough to start one. But that doesn't seem to be the case with Hollywood these days. Maybe, at some point in the future, just as the right side of the Blogosphere competes with the MSM, and Fox News competes with CNN, there will be widely available alternatives to Hollywood's product.

But until then, we'll keep wondering why they keep doing the stuff that Steve describes above, and hopefully, they'll keep wondering why they're losing money.

Via Hugh Hewitt, military bloggers Argghhh!!! and Blackfive have posts on the new cable war drama Over There, which make the show sound even more craptacular than its ads imply.

California Yankee writes, "North American Muslims Issue Fatwa Against Terrorism".

In a somewhat related item, James Lileks has some thoughts on the CAIR spokesman that Hugh Hewitt had on his show on Monday and Tuesday.

Update: Well, so much for the good news. (Via Charles Johnson.)

The second part of James Taranto's three part retrospective of the first five years of the Wall Street Journal's "Best of the Web Today" column is online, focusing on the moral equivalence that's been the mark of a few elements of the fringe far right, but a growing component of much of the post-9/11 left:

Filmmaker Michael Moore explains on his Web site that his first reaction was to think the terrorists should have killed more Republicans:

Many families have been devastated tonight. This just is not right. They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC, and the planes' destination of California--these were places that voted AGAINST Bush!

Why kill them? Why kill anyone?

Andrew Sullivan quotes Jerry Falwell as telling his fellow televangelist Pat Robertson: "I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way--all of them who have tried to secularize America--I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.' " Robertson's reply: "Well, I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted their agenda at the highest levels of our government." The mirror image of the Falwell-Robertson calumny is a press release from the Madison, Wis.-based Freedom From Religion Foundation, which declares: "The terrorist disasters of September 11 may well have been the ultimate 'faith-based initiative.' "

It's worth noting that Falwell and Robertson both apologized, and that both remain fringe figures of the American right. Moore, on the other hand, did not apologize, as far as we remember; he did quietly remove the offending passages, and later the entire Sept. 12 posting, from his Web site. Much of the Democratic establishment later embraced Moore, as we noted recently: He had an honored seat next to former president Jimmy Carter at the Democratic Convention, and when his agitprop film "Fahrenheit 9/11" had its Washington debut, then-senator Bob Graham of Florida observed that "there might be half of the Democratic Senate here."

Hugh Hewitt has the perfect gift for the judge who has everything--except common sense. He's suggesting sending Neville Chamberlain-style umbrellas to Judge John Coughenour, the federal district court judge in Seattle, Washington who awarded a sentence 22 years in jail--only 22 years in jail!--to "the millenium bomber", Ahmed Ressam, caught with a trunk full of explosives on his way to blow up LAX on December 31, 1999. As Hugh writes:

The 5.5 years Ressam has already spent in jail counts against the sentence, and he could get an additional 3 years off for good behavior. He could be out by the time he hits his 53rd birthday, before 2020 rolls around.

You would think that a president who stays physically fit through exercise, and a Supreme Court nominee and his family who are thoughtful enough to dress themselves carefully on the most important day of their lives would be good things.

You would think that, that is, unless you were the L.A. Times or the Washington Post, as Tammy Bruce, former president of the Los Angeles chapter of NOW writes.

(Via Charles Johnson. See also this related and terrific (relatedly terrific?) James Lileks Screeeeeed post.)

In Tech Central Station, Patrick Hynes writes that it's time to put the Bully Pulpit to work:

President Bush needs to learn a lesson his father never did. Unless a president -- especially a Republican president -- talks constantly with the American people about the economy, he will be seen by the public as doing nothing about it. This is especially true when the news is filtered through a hostile press corps. And while doing nothing about the economy may at times be the best way to strengthen it, this view is not shared by the majority of Americans.

There is another problem, as well. President Bush's hallmark initiative this year was supposed to be Social Security reform. The public perception is that these efforts are going nowhere. This is a big problem for the administration because President Bush has built his push for Social Security reform on the idea that the system, and therefore Americans' retirement security and the nation's long-term fiscal health, is staring down the barrel of a crisis. President Bush toured sixty cities in sixty days (and even more, subsequently) in a campaign to convince Americans of this crisis and sell his plan to fix it. Unfortunately, while the majority of Americans is still unsure of the cure, a growing majority has come to acknowledge the disease. According to a mid-June CBS News poll, fully 92% of Americans believe Social Security is either currently in a "crisis," currently in "serious trouble," or currently in "some trouble." Moreover, 57% of respondents think Social Security's problems are "so serious they need to be fixed now." The president has exhausted his political capital convincing people their economic future is doomed.

Of course, President Bush's political opponents are always available and willing to poor-mouth the economy. When he first entered Washington, all the talk was of recession. That ended quickly, but Democrats clutched on to the budget deficit, caused of course by President Bush's tax cuts "for the rich." Then it was unemployment; the worst economy since Hoover, they told us. But the jobs situation improved during the 2004 campaign, so the "disappearing middle class" became the freak-out du jour. The president won the majority of middle class votes, so that wouldn't do. So the falling dollar would have us all standing in soup lines in our barrel-and-suspender ensembles. But then the dollar rose. So today it's income inequality and the trade deficit with China that spells certain doom. In an economy so big and so diverse, some grim-sounding statistic will always pop, some indicator will always lag. And a minority party, desperate for power, will only too gladly exaggerate their meaning.

The White House has to speak with the American people about the state of the economy honestly, soothingly, confidently… and constantly. But time and circumstance is not on their side. Just as the Iraq War has kept President Bush from talking about the economy for the past several months, the next couple will be consumed with talk of Judge Roberts, the trial of Saddam Hussein, the CIA leak case, and the 2005 off-year elections. It may be 2006 before President Bush gets another opportunity to tout the strength and dynamism of the U.S. economy.

Communicating an optimistic vision for our shared economic future has become too low a priority for the Bush administration. And that is the real crisis.

in 1992...the Bush recovery was described as the worst economy in 50 years until the day after the election, when it became known as the Clinton recovery.

This history of Pete Seeger by Howard Husock in the current issue of City Journal is a might too conspiratorial in tone for my tastes, ("America’s Most Successful Communist" is its title), but it's still quite an interesting read. It makes a nice double-feature with this October 2000 piece by Brian Doherty in Reason on the current-day heirs to Seeger's legacy in pop music.

Of course, music--even pop music--can be a surprisingly abstract thing, and audiences are often unpredictible in terms of how they adopt songs, and find a meaning in them that's very, very different from their authors' intentions, as Husock notes at the conclusion of his article:

Happily, some have embraced the Popular Front’s legacy in ways that Seeger probably didn’t anticipate and wouldn’t likely approve. In March, a crowd in Taipei, several hundred thousand–strong, sang “We Shall Overcome” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” as part of a protest against forcible annexation by mainland China—and the prospect of Communist Party rule.

James Taranto is celebrating the fifth anniversary of his "Best of the Web" column with the first of a three-part history, which runs from the column's debut in 2000, through 9/11. Taranto's column isn't really a blog per se, but it definitely serves as a great guide to the events of the day--with (as a colleague of Taranto's put it) "a whole sui generis arch style thing" going on, to boot.

Maps of the Middle East are surprisingly fluid: Mercedes and BMW "accidently" forget to include a country on their maps of Middle Eastern dealers, despite the fact that it's existed since 1948. Meanwhile, Tony Blair mentions a country in his latest speech that doesn't.

Now you see 'em, now you don't!

The same folks who brought you such diverse fare as It's A Wonderful Life In 30 Seconds (And Re-Enacted By Bunnies) and Pulp Fiction In 30 Seconds (And Re-Enacted By Bunnies) now brings you...The Rocky Horror Picture Show In 30 Seconds (And Re-Enacted By Bunnies)!

Don't miss the bonus "Time Warp" video at the end. It's just a jump to the left!

In the new issue of City Journal, Harry Stein looks at conservative cartoon strips from "Little Orphan Annie" in the 1930s, to 21st century Blogspheric hit "Day By Day".

For more on the the latter strip and its author, click on our 2003 piece in Tech Central Station.

I have an article on blogs and business in the August issue of CE Pro magazine. The CE in CE Pro stands for custom electronics professionals, such as home theater installers and "smart home" designers. It's not on the Web yet (except for industry subscribers), but if it goes online for the general public, I'll definitely link to it here.

Needless to say, I think blogs are a tremendous tool for any business to communicate to with its customers. I interviewed Phil Melton of Reliegh North Carolina's Audio Advice, which added a Weblog to its site last year. I was only mildly surprised that he follows InstaPundit and other folks in the Blogosphere.

It's sort of coming full-circle for me: I contributed several articles ten years ago to CE Pro's earlier incarnation, Custom Home Electronics, and its original editor, Mary Ann Giorgio, was a huge help in shaping those early efforts. She later went on to edit Audio/Video Interiors, the first home theater magazine, originally started in 1989, where I was proud to also contribute articles.

(Not sure where she's working now. Mary Ann, if you ever do a Google "vanity search" and see this post, drop me an email. You were the best!)

Using the model of Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave, unions and organized labor are classic "Second Wave" models from an era of mass-production, mass-consumption, mass-industry, and mass-men. As Bryan O'Keefe notes in Tech Central Station, this Second Wave force has done little to keep up with Third Wave market dynamics:

Many organized labor leaders and their allies are furious over the decision Monday by the Service Employees International Union and the Teamsters to part ways with the AFL-CIO and form their own labor federation. While SEIU and the Teamsters are two of the largest unions, the vast majority of the 50 other AFL-CIO unions are not considering disaffiliation. Their leaders openly question why, in the face of declining membership and an unfavorable political environment, SEIU President Andrew Stern and Teamsters President James Hoffa would want to divide the house of labor. What happened to brotherhood and solidarity, they ask?

Working in unison might be fine, but it can also be overrated. In fact, competition might be exactly what America's labor movement needs if it wants to survive in the 21st century. Competition has helped to make business more dynamic and to evolve with changing times. It might also have the same effect on a labor movement stuck in the past.

Being stuck in the past wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing if what worked before was working now. That's hardly the case though with current AFL-CIO leadership which lives in a time warp. Fifty years ago, almost one-third of the American workforce was unionized, while today that number stands at a paltry 12.5 percent. Big labor has done little to change with the new globalized economy and American workforce. It's like having a company use the same business plan for 50 years, even as profits go down the tubes. If Stern's comments Monday are sincere, then he understands that the status quo isn't going to work anymore. "Unions are bound to the past. We need new initiatives," Stern said at the press conference announcing his union's bolt. He later added, "It's not the 1930s anymore."

Even those of us that don't agree with Stern's liberal union ideology can appreciate his ability to think outside the box and come up with new approaches that involve more than over-the-top rhetoric. And, who knows, some of his ideas might just work. For starters, Stern doesn't sound like an old-school, fist-pounding labor leader -- rather, he talks thoughtfully about issues like globalization and how unions can evolve in a way that's compatible with the new economy, while attracting younger workers.

Stern's rhetoric has been a turn-off for other leaders in the labor movement who are wedded to the past. In a magazine article this past January, Thomas Buffenbarger, President of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, blasted Stern as somebody who wants to make unions more like corporate America. ''He's trying to corporatize the labor movement. When you listen to him talk, it's all about market share. It's about loss and gain. It's about producers and consumers,'' Buffenbarger said. "I think he's enamored of all the glitz and hype of the Wall Street types. He must be a fan of Donald Trump. I think he wants his own TV show.''

But what Buffenbarger bristles at as corporatizing the labor movement can also been seen as a desire to modernize. And modernizing has worked well for Stern's SEIU during his tenure. While labor membership declined overall in the last ten years, Stern's union grew by 900,000 members, mainly on the strength of his leadership and novel ways of approaching unionization.

Stern also deserves credit for finally asking tough questions about labor's relationship with the Democratic Party. He rightly argues that labor needs to focus on organizing and getting its own house in order, not just electing Democratic politicians. "We just can't rely on elected officials to change workers lives," Stern said yesterday. This echoed comments Stern made his earlier this month when he boldly stated, "We can't just elect Democratic politicians and try to take back the House and take back the Senate and think that's going to change workers' lives."

Stern has also advocated more competition in the political realm. While still donating most of its campaign cash to Democrats, SEIU was the biggest contributor to the Republican Governors Association last year. Competition in this sense might also lead to more legislative success for unions. Corporations figured out a long time ago that it was beneficial to donate and court friends in both political parties, while unions stuck to the same, dated model of donating almost exclusively to Democrats. It's no surprise then that business has accomplished more in Congress.

Of course, this type of talk in the upper echelons of the labor movement is heresy, which finally led to yesterday's dramatic split.

Monty Python's Flying Circus once had an episode featuring BBC TV News broadcasts proprietized for parrots, gibbons, and wombats.

Coming soon: history books written from the perspective of animals.

No word yet if Peter Singer will be writing their introduction.

Update: And speaking of Monty Python, here's news for cows, featuring an interview with Ward Churchill! If anchorcow Barbara Bovine's nom de hoof rings a (cow)bell, she first popped up here.

Over the weekend, it was reported that Pennsylvania's Lt. Gov. Catherine Baker Knoll crashed the funeral of a Marine killed in Iraq. As Glenn Reynolds wrote:

IN THE VERDICT, PAUL NEWMAN VISITED FUNERALS to hand out his business card and try to boost his flagging career. Apparently, he's not the only one to try this approach: "The family of a Marine who was killed in Iraq is furious with Lt. Gov. Catherine Baker Knoll for showing up uninvited at his funeral this week, handing out her business card and then saying 'our government' is against the war."

Sergeant Goodrich’s service was beyond the call of duty. If my regard for his family’s grief was seen another way, it is thoroughly regrettable. The fact that you have been offended deserves and receives my most profound apology.

I will continue to support our troops in my role as Lt. Governor and support our President as an American. That I somehow conveyed an impression that was interpreted as other than that will forever be saddening and upsetting to me.

But Knoll's original line during the funeral--As I wrote above, Knoll was quoted as saying "our government" is against the war--has deeper implications for the Rendell administration that she serves within. As Dennis Prager wrote earlier this month:

This can only mean trouble. Mark Levin writes:

Is John McCain about to do for interrogations what he did for political speech? No senator or group of senators can possibly have the information, knowledge or strategic perspective of a president and his advisors on security issues facing the nation especially during war, which is why the framers empowered the president as commander-in-chief. But now McCain, having thoroughly screwed up the financing of federal elections, is on to his next subject -- interrogating detainees.

I have no problem with Congress's constitutional oversight authority, but legislatively spelling out the circumstances and conditions of interrogations, which McCain and others are now seeking to do, is a completely different matter. And past Congress's have understood this. Issues arise during war that do not lend themselves to broad legislative mandates. Frank Church sought to micro-manage the CIA, and I would argue it helped lead to 9/11. We don't need or want a committee of 100 -- along with federal courts now -- dictating war functions.

We can debate this in more detail elsewhere (including separation of powers issues), but I want to raise the issue here, in truncated form, because it's now front and center.

Amongst other things I scan there, every once in a while, I do a search of Google News to see if there's any word on a release date for The Beatles' Let It Be on DVD.

Apparently, it's finally coming out in September:

Beatles "Let It Be" Film Coming To DVD

July 15, 2005 2:59 p.m. EST
Douglas Maher - All Headline News Staff Reporter

Denver, CO (AHN) - The Toronto Sun reports today that the long-awaited release of The Beatles swan song "Let It Be" film is on its way to DVD.

According to an interview with Bob Smeaton, who directed the "Beatles Anthology", the DVD will be in 5.1 sound along with tons of lost and bonus features.

No word on whether or not the legendary "roof top" performance above Apple Studios will be on the set. Fans have petitioned for decades to have the entire performance released in its original form. The original Naga recordings will be on the DVD version of "Let It Be", which itself has not been on home video for over two decades.

The Naga recordings were only discovered during a 2003 police raid of a bootlegers home in the Netherlands. They had been missing since the early 1970s. The DVD is due in September.

The Beatles Let It Be Heads to DVD

by Paul Cashmere
20 July 2005

The Beatles documentary Let It Be is finally going to be released on DVD.

Apple Records, the company started by The Beatles to produce their music, will release the Let It Be DVD in September.

The disc will also include bonus footage not seen in the movie.

The Let It Be documentary was meant to track the recording of The Beatles in the studio but instead captured the disintegration of the band.

However, the footage is legendary.

The now classic Beatles rooftop appearance was part of the movie. The scene was recently recreated by U2 and was also sent up in the Simpson's Barbershop episode.

Let It Be was produced by Neil Aspinall and directed by Michael Lindsey-Hogg.

It features songs such as Don't Let Me Down, Maxwell's Silver Hammer, Two Of Us, I've Got A Feeling, Oh Darling, One After 909, Across The Universe, Dig A Pony, I Me Mine, For You Blue, Besame Mucho, Dig It, Get Back and Let It Be.

Also posted (with a slightly different lead) at Blogcritics.

"Neville Again" was the punch line of a Mark Steyn piece in the Telegraph last year on how Europe has returned to the Neville Chamberlain-style appeasement which marked the 1930s. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Pete Du Pont agrees with that assessment:

Simply put, Old Europe's thinking today is that of 1930s, when the Oxford Union voted "under no circumstances [to] fight for King and Country," and British PM Neville Chamberlain believed appeasement should be the policy and "peace in our time" the goal. Winston Churchill had the better understanding: "You ask what is our aim? I can answer that in one word, victory at all costs, victory in spite of terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival." He was talking of Hitler and Nazi Germany, of course, but without victory there will be no survival against Islamic terrorism either.

Steve Green finds solid reporting in a in a New York Times piece on the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, the innocent man shot by the London police (after acting very, very suspiciously). But it's sandwiched between paragraph after paragraph of liberal boilerplate. Steve concludes:

There's a larger point here, and it's this: the press takes stories like this one, and reports them like this, and then wonders why we don't think they're on board with this war. They wonder why we're watching Fox News. Say what you will about Fox's many faults, but at least FNC acts like an American company during wartime. Meanwhile, the NYT is doing its damnedest to paint Tony Blair's Britain as a fascist police state.

Thanks for the help, fellas.

...Except of course, for the Times, themselves.

Maybe it's been up for years, but I just discovered, via John Hawkins, that Bernard Goldberg has his own Website.

No word yet if Donny Deutsch will be making a suprise cameo there.

Back in January we looked at the left's increasing love of nostalgia, trying to put the chic back into its radical chic past. Roger L. Simon writes:

nowhere on the planet that is more completely a bastion of stodgy ultra-traditionalist liberal/leftist thought than the UK's Guardian, which has not varied one micro-millimeter from the 1968 weltanschauung for the last, well, thirty-seven years.

James Lileks looks at Tom Tancredo, the Republican congressman from Colorado, who put his Slim Pickens-sized shoe in his mouth last week:

One step forward: A group of British imams issued an honest-to-Allah fatwa against suicide bombers. According to the clerics, terrorists are not acting in the name of true Islam and will ride a hot, slick razor blade straight to hell. Good; more, please.

Alas, there's also one step back: In the same news cycle Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., mused on a radio show about his preferred response to a nuclear attack on America: bombing Mecca.

No doubt Osama bin Laden did a jig after hearing that. As a recruitment tool, it's better than learning that George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon are running to Canada to get married.

Tancredo's supporters could say we need a few fellows who sling the loose talk, the better to concentrate the mind of the enemy on the swinging noose. After all, the foreign press is one of those places where the term "American congressman" actually commands some respect. What's the harm?

Plenty. Bombing Mecca to revenge the acts of maniacs is like nuking the Vatican to protest the pedophilia scandal in Boston. The idea appeals to those whose nuanced study of Islam makes them conclude it's better to alienate 1 billion people than defeat a fraction of the same group. It appeals to those who believe that Islam is a metal shard that cannot be absorbed and must be removed, preferably by blowing up the body. And burying the remains in pig skins! That'll learn 'em!

It's the mirror image of the politically correct conceit that holds Islam blameless for the terrorists who act in its name, as if there's nothing in the Quran but sweetness and light toward the infidel. Both groups are wrong; both groups' misapprehension of the situation will get the rest of us killed.

Tancredo gets points for facing the grim question: How does one respond to a nuclear event on American soil? The horrible imperatives of war demand that you respond, lest anyone get the idea that the United States is just a dead carcass propped in the corner, food for any jackal.

You could hit the nations that have concluded it's still safe to kill Americans. Iran comes to mind. Syria still seems gripped with a nagging case of the Stupids. Our dear bosom friends the Saudis still spread that old Wahhabi lovin' all across the globe and here at home. But do we really want to incinerate Tehran? You'll probably find more people in Tehran who dearly love America than you'll find in San Francisco.

It's come to this: Some say we have to destroy Islam in order to save it. Or us. Whatever.

But just imagine nuking Tehran 10 months after an attack, after the CIA concludes Iran helped with the bomb that was dropped on us. ("Sorry about the WMD thing, but this time you can trust us. If we're wrong, well, we'll all take early retirement. Seriously.") The world would see it as coldblooded murder. The world, for once, would be right.

Tancredo is a popular fellow on the right for his immigration stance, appealing to those who find Bush deaf and clueless on the issue. Providing he apologizes, this incident shouldn't discredit his concerns over border security. After all, if that nuke doesn't come in by cargo container, it'll be hauled over the southern border.

But if he wants to be president? Roll the anti-Goldwater daisy-picking holocaust ads, and goodbye to all that.

On his newly remodeled blog, Hugh Hewitt looks at the damage control--or lack thereof--that Tancredo's been doing since his initial remarks.

Power Line has a letter written by Captain's Quarter regular Dafydd ab Hugh on David Souter's background and nomination, and why the chances are very good that John Roberts won't be Souter Part Deux.

Dafydd's comments on the liberalism of the first President Bush, who nominated Souter, are spot-on as well.

Mark Steyn unloads a corker on the pitfalls of multiculturalism in The Australian:

The Age's editor Andrew Jaspan still lives in another world. You'll recall that it was Jaspan who objected to the energy and conviction of certain freed Australian hostage, at least when it comes to disrespecting their captors: "I was, I have to say, shocked by Douglas Wood's use of the 'arsehole' word, if I can put it like that, which I just thought was coarse and very ill-thought through ... As I understand it, he was treated well there. He says he was fed every day, and as such to turn around and use that kind of language I think is just insensitive."

And heaven forbid we're insensitive about terrorists. True, a blindfolded Wood had to listen to his jailers murder two of his colleagues a few inches away, but how boorish would one have to be to hold that against one's captors? A few months after 9/11, National Review's John Derbyshire dusted off the old Cold War mantra "Better dead than red" and modified it to mock the squeamishness of politically correct warfare: "Better dead than rude". But even he would be surprised to see it taken up quite so literally by Andrew Jaspan.

Usually it's the hostage who gets Stockholm Syndrome, but the newly liberated Wood must occasionally reflect that in this instance the entire culture seems to have caught a dose. And, in a sense, we have: multiculturalism is a kind of societal Stockholm Syndrome. Atta's meetings with Bryant are emblematic: He wasn't a genius, a master of disguise in deep cover; indeed, he was barely covered at all, he was the Leslie Nielsen of terrorist masterminds - but the more he stuck out, the more Bryant was trained not to notice, or to put it all down to his vibrant cultural tradition.

That's the great thing about multiculturalism: it doesn't involve knowing anything about other cultures - like, say, the capital of Bhutan or the principal exports of Malaysia, the sort of stuff the old imperialist wallahs used to be well up on. Instead, it just involves feeling warm and fluffy, making bliss out of ignorance. And one notices a subtle evolution in multicultural pieties since the Islamists came along. It was most explicitly addressed by the eminent British lawyer Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws, QC, who thought that it was too easy to disparage "Islamic fundamentalists". "We as western liberals too often are fundamentalist ourselves. We don't look at our own fundamentalisms."

And what exactly would those western liberal fundamentalisms be? "One of the things that we are too ready to insist upon is that we are the tolerant people and that the intolerance is something that belongs to other countries like Islam. And I'm not sure that's true."

Hmm. Kennedy appears to be arguing that our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people's intolerance, which is intolerable. Thus the lop-sided valse macabre of our times: the more the Islamists step on our toes, the more we waltz them gaily round the room. I would like to think that the newly fortified Age columnists are representative of the culture's mood, but, if I had to bet, I'd put my money on Kennedy: anyone can be tolerant of the tolerant, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti masochists. Australia's old cultural cringe had a certain market rationality; the new multicultural cringe is pure nihilism.

Update (1/15/06): The above link to Steyn's article in The Australian has expired, but full text available here.

Troy Aikman, Michael Irvin and Emmitt Smith, were the famed "Triplets" who brought three Super Bowl trophies to the Dallas Cowboys in the 1990s. (And thanks to Irvin's antics, a fair amount of infamy as well.) Fittingly, they're being inducted into the Ring of Honor that circles the luxury suites at the Cowboys' Texas Stadium on Monday night as a trio, September 19th, at halftime.

That game is the Cowboys' home opener against the Washington Redskins, the Cowboys' historic nemesis, against whom the Triplets wreaked such havoc in the mid-'90s. Cowboys owner Jerry Jones is giving up three separate very big paydays by inducting them as a group, rather than risking that one man being seen (especially by the NFL's Hall of Fame committee) as more deserving than the others by going in first.

No word yet if the Triplets will come running out at halftime from a tunnel with a bobbing inflatable Cowboys helmet festooned with Levitra ads and oozing dry ice...

Not very much, writes Orrin Judd in his review of Thomas Frank's book of the same name.

England's leftwing Guardian has sacked Dilpazier Aslam, their "sassy" moral equivocator, and, as Scott Burgess noted ten days ago on his Daily Ablution blog, a self-professed operative of the radical Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir.

BizzyBlog looks at the ratings, and concludes, "bloggers and blog readers might be eating into talk radio’s audience".

That certainly makes sense--I've been listening less to talk radio, and watching less news and opinion TV, since becoming part of the blog collective. One exception is Hewitt's radio show, partially because he has lots of bloggers, as well as Blogosphere favorites such as Lileks and Mark Steyn on frequently.

(Via Conservative Grapevine.)

The pressures of his increasing celebrity profile have caused radio man Hugh Hewitt to go in for severe plastic surgery, getting a radical facelift and newly improved features.

....err, on his blog that is, which is newly updated by Sekimori, who remodeled our blog last year, as well as InstaPundit, Power Line, VodkaPundit, Michelle Malkin and lots of other cool kids in the Blogosphere.

On Wednesday, I interviewed Bernard Goldberg, the author of 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (And Al Franken Is #37), for an upcoming article. He was fuming about being ambushed during his appearance on cable's Donny Deutsch Show, and I didn't want to tell Bernie that I wasn't sure if I had heard of the show, for fear of sounding like I'm not in the know. On the other hand, nobody else has heard of the show either!

Bill O'Reilly and Goldberg mostly appeared amused at the debacle, with O'Reilly wondering why Goldberg bothered to appear on Donny Deutsch's show in the first place. Apparently, its overnight Nielsen rating was a whopping 0.1, or around 70,000 -- and that after this blog and others "promoting" Goldberg's appearance for 30 hours or so. Goldberg's tongue-in-cheek response: "Well ... it seemed like a good idea at the time."

The tone remained light throughout the interview; when the satellite feed dropped out for a few seconds, both joked about Deutsch pulling the plug. Not as funny, though, was Goldberg's revelation that the Deutsch show edited down the segment. The show's 30-minute run time last night (when it normally runs an hour) makes it look like the Big Idea producers decided to do some heavy-duty whittling. That explains why it appears that Goldberg lost his temper so quickly with Linda Stasi. Interviews on cable news shows rarely edit content unless it violates FCC or libel/slander restrictions, and those who do reveal it. It looks like another example of a serious ethical lapse on the part of The Big Idea's producers and Deutsch.

The producer of the Donny Deutsch show tricked Bernard Goldberg into doing the segment where he was ganged up on. He was in a previous segment and was invited to stay on for the next one under the impression it would be an even match-up, not 5 v 1. Apparently this isn’t the first time a guest has been tricked into a segment like this; over at Captain Quarter’s, Ed has information from someone else who was almost tricked into doing what Bernie did. A poster at Free Republic is saying the producer resigned.

I'll let you know when my article about Bernie's new book is online; in the meantime, here are links to the two-part interview I had with him last year for Tech Central Station.

Update: Ian Schwartz of Political Teen emails, "it seems like ambushing their guests is a common practice at NBC networks".

Mary Katharine Ham, senior writer and associate editor of Townhall.com explains what should be obvious to the Washington Post:

If you're a mom taking two young children to the White House, you'd want your children in their very best clothes--perhaps even one step above their Sunday Best for the MOST IMPORTANT NIGHT in the family's life to date.

It seems to me that Mrs. Roberts hit the nail on the head. But we laypeople know nought of what we speak.

Those aren't cute clothes. They're just another example of Chimpy McBushitler's aristocratic cronies throwing their seersucker-clad affluence in the faces of the masses. This is patent-leather hegemony run rampant! Do not be hypnotized by the "glistening" pageboy and wide blue eyes of global domination.

Perhaps when Robin's done with the pre-schoolers, she could pick on someone her own size-- someone like Ralph Lauren, whose fall collection included this horror...

(Via PoliPundit.)

OK, bear with me--it's my headline, but Patrick Ruffini's analogy:

Much has been made in recent months of how both parties have been spinning their wheels in Washington. But if we know anything of George W. Bush, it is his ability to turn it around on the big plays, usually with a huge turnover late in the third quarter that suddenly shifts the momentum and leaves him in control during the critical fourth quarter.

Tonight, we may have witnessed just such a play.

To me, today feels a lot like July 26, 2004 felt. It was Day One of the Democratic Convention. We'd been hammered relentlessly for months on bad news from Iraq / faux economic pessimism. (It was a barrage of low-intensity attacks you only see when your adversary doesn't have enough to defeat you outright on the battlefield -- and they can work if not responded to decisively.) Though the bounce from Kerry's selection of Edwards had largely petered out, analysts famously predicted a "glow" around the Democratic duo that would be worth "maybe fifteen points." We were certainly bracing for the worst.

Then Kerry went and did this. And a few other little things like it had me wondering whether we weren't witnessing the Mother of All Missed Opportunities. The post-Convention polls certainly bore this out.

To me personally, the first day of the Democratic Convention was the best day Republicans had had in months. In retrospect, I think it was a turning point. And things kept on turning, with Kerry's Bad August, and a slam-bang convention in New York.

Once again, it's the big play, and Democrats are punting. They've whipped their people up into a frenzy -- and the President just put them in a room with no doors and no windows.

(Via Jim Geraghty.)

Saying that Donald Trump can be a blowhard is, if anything, an understatement of Empire State proportions. But be sure to listen to his testimony to the Senate yesterday on repairing the U.N.'s building, where The Donald explains to 100 clueless senators how the world works--at least the world of Manhattan real estate.

Update: Hugh Hewitt, who played Trump's masterful performance on his radio show this afternoon blogs:

The e-mails are pouring in from amazed, amused and astonished listeners. My favorite thus far, from blogger MySandman:

"This is positively absurd!! The architect got HOW MUCH in pre-commission? [Answer: Trump said $44 million] Good Grief, I work for a world-class firm, and that number is science fiction to me. I have got to get this transcript to my bosses. We need to start working for the UN .

Seriously, though. These people at the UN are so tremendously incompetent that I am frightened beyond belief to know they are where they are, controlling aspects of world socio-politics . You say this is a reality show in itself. I am astounded by the fact that it is a scene replayed right out of Atlas Shrugged: A Capitalist dealing with Marxist on the level of parent mentoring infants. Could there be any more profound example of why Socialism does not work? I submit to you, that what you are playing illustrates the supremacy of America on the global stage like no other document in this century."

Another e-mailer wonders if Kofi's son is working with the Italian architect.

Seriously, this testimony should be played in high schools. Given Trump's profile, the kids would listen, and not only would they be schooled in the basics of development, they'd also get a glimpse of why every government building project everywhere is inefficient.

Another Update Dangerous Liberty has video of Trump's performance.

Haaretz reports:

Explosions in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh in the early hours of Saturday morning killed at least 20 people and wounded about 100, a rescue official said.

Police said the explosions were caused by four car bombs in Sharm el-Sheikh and the nearby resort of Naama Bay.

The explosions caused pandemonium in the resort as people rushed to go home for fear of more car bombs, said one resident, who asked not to be named.

The first explosion, shortly after 1 A.M., was audible more than 1 km (half a mile) away, a local resident said. It started a fire and smoke billowed over the town.

About 15 minutes later, more explosions were audible from the direction of Naama Bay, he said.

One blast hit the Ghazala Gardens hotel, a four-star resort on the main tourist strip in the Naama Bay area, witnesses said.

"The hotel was completely burned down, destroyed," said Amal Mustafa, 28, an Egyptian who was visiting Sharm with her family and who drove by the Ghazala Gardens.

Naama Bay has dozens of luxury hotels popular with divers and holidaymakers from Europe.

Khaled Sakran, a Sharm resident, said he saw the first blast from the Old Market. "I saw the saw the fire in the sky," he said. "Right after, I saw a light in the sky and heard another explosion, coming from Naama Bay."

In October 2004, more than 30 people were killed, many of them Israeli, in explosions in Sinai resorts packed with Israeli tourists.

Update: The death toll's up to at least 49 now. Glenn Reynolds and Gateway Pundit have details and thoughts.

Don Banks of Sports Illustrated welcomes Ricky Williams back into the NFL, after his year-long disappearing act, and explains to Ricky what he's missed during his hiatus:

Victor Davis Hanson looks how selective Islamofascists are when it comes to picking their targets, avoiding targets that conceivably meet all of their criteria for attack:

Meanwhile an odd thing happened. It turns out that the jihadists were cowards and bullies, and thus selective in their targets of hatred. A billion Chinese were left alone by radical Islam — even though the Chinese were secularists and mostly godless, as well as ruthless to their own Uighur Muslim minorities. Had bin Laden issued a fatwa against Beijing and slammed an airliner into a skyscraper in Shanghai, there is no telling what a nuclear China might have done.

India too got mostly a pass, other than the occasional murdering by Pakistani zealots. Yet India makes no effort to apologize to Muslims. When extremists occasionally riot and kill, they usually cease quickly before the response of a much more unpredictable angry populace.

What can we learn from all this?

Jihadists hardly target particular countries for their “unfair” foreign policies, since nations on five continents suffer jihadist attacks and thus all apparently must embrace an unfair foreign policy of some sort.

Typical after the London bombing is the ubiquitous Muslim spokesman who when asked to condemn terrorism, starts out by deploring such killing, assuring that it has nothing to do with Islam, yet then ending by inserting the infamous “but” — as he closes with references about the West Bank, Israel, and all sorts of mitigating factors. Almost no secular Middle Easterners or religious officials write or state flatly, “Islamic terrorism is murder, pure and simple evil. End of story, no ifs or buts about it.”

Second, thinking that the jihadists will target only Israel eventually leads to emboldened attacks on the United States. Assuming America is the only target assures terrorism against Europe. Civilizations will either hang separately or triumph over barbarism together. It is that simple — and past time for Europe and the United States to rediscover their common heritage and shared aims in eradicating this plague of Islamic fascism.

I'm not sure what the connection between the late George Harrison and the ukulele is; it's never been an instrument I've associated him with, but I've seen Paul McCartney do several tributes to his fallen band mate on a uke.

And then there's this fellow. The term "ukulele virtuoso" sounds like an oxymoron, but can he ever pluck those strings!

Mackubin Thomas Owens looks at the legacy of the recently deceased General William Westmoreland, by way of Lewis Sorley's A Better War.

Sad to say, it's arguable that history will conclude that his most memorable victory was over CBS in the mid-1980s, two decades before Ra^therGate.

I have an article explaining the basics of DLP-based TV sets in TechLiving magazine.

Makes for nice reading if you're planning on a new 50 or 60-inch TV set to kick off another year of watching the NFL--whose preseason is right around the corner.

I didn't blog yesterday about James Doohan's death at age 85, but these two paragraphs by another man named James say it all:

It’s impossible to understate Doohan's appeal - if you sneak into a NASA control room during a mission and ask the controllers how many chose their profession because of Scotty, half the hands in the room would go up. No one wanted to go into space because of that whiny little red-head kid on Lost in Space. It takes something indefinable to be a Kirk, it takes med school to be a McCoy, it takes green blood to be Spock, but Scotty – aye. Any man could be Scotty, if he applied himself. And he'd be among manly things, too.

In a hundred years from now, no one will remember Brad Pitt. But they’ll have a picture of Scotty taped up in the break room off the moon shuttle.

Not surprisingly, Glenn Reynolds has lots of links.

Elsewhere on her blog, "Neo-Neocon" asks, "Where have you gone, Steven Den Beste? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you":

I miss Steven Den Beste.

No, I never met him; and yes, I know he's not returning to political blogging (he still blogs on anime here).

He's very ill; and, what's more, even if he weren't, I don't get the sense that he's the type who would respond to pleadings from his audience. He's no Andrew Sullivan, playing the "Hello I must be going" game. He's the type who makes up his mind and that's it. No looking back. At least that's what I imagine.

But I still miss him, and hope he's doing well. I think, when I reflect on it, that he was my favorite blogger. There was nothing easy about him; no cheap shots, no funny stuff. He didn't pander, and he was the hardest worker imaginable, churning out reams of lucid prose on a daily basis. I never understood how there were enough hours in a day for him to write as much as he did, even if he was working round the clock. And of course I didn't know at the time that it was done at enormous physical cost to him because he was suffering from a progressive degenerative illness. When he quit blogging about a year ago in July, 2004, he cited both the illness and a massive psychological burnout that seems to have come from the fact that almost all the mail he got--and he got a lot of it--was negative.

I felt guilty, having never written him an e-mail myself that let him know how much I admired and appreciated his work. I wrote one afterwards, but he never replied, nor did I expect him to. I like to think it was because he was inundated with similar missives.

Via Roger L. Simon, (whom she met with yesterday) "Neo-Neocon" is the name of a blogger who calls herself the proverbial "lifelong Democrat mugged by reality on 9/11". In her latest post she looks at Paul Robeson and concludes, "a mind can be an impossible thing to change".

We've blogged a little about Robeson as well--click here and here. And this quote of Robeson's that The New Criterion unearthed in late 2003 as Robeson was posthumously receiving his commemorative stamp by the US Post Office is staggering:

Via Steve Green, the great Anne Applebaum begins a look at Microsoft, Cisco and the totalitarianism of communist China by invoking the best known book written by the artist formally known as Eric Blair:

In 1949, when George Orwell wrote his dystopian novel "1984," he gave its hero, Winston, a job at the Ministry of Truth. All day long, Winston clips politically unacceptable facts, stuffs them into little pneumatic tubes, and then pushes the tubes down a chute. Beside him sits a woman in charge of finding and erasing the names of people who have been "vaporized." And their office, Orwell wrote, "with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one sub-section, a single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records Department."

It's odd to read "1984" in 2005, because the politics of Orwell's vision aren't outdated. There are still plenty of governments in the world that go to extraordinary lengths to shape what their citizens read, think and say, just like Orwell's Big Brother. But the technology envisioned in "1984" is so -- well, 1980s. Paper? Pneumatic tubes? Workers in cubicles? Nowadays, none of that is necessary: It can all be done electronically, especially if, like the Chinese government, you seek the cooperation of large American companies.

Without question, China's Internet filtering regime is "the most sophisticated effort of its kind in the world," in the words of a recent report by Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The system involves the censorship of Web logs, search engines, chat rooms and e-mail by "thousands of public and private personnel." It also involves Microsoft Inc., as Chinese bloggers discovered last month. Since early June, Chinese bloggers who post messages containing a forbidden word -- "Dalai Lama," for example, or "democracy" -- receive a warning: "This message contains a banned expression, please delete." It seems Microsoft has altered the Chinese version of its blog tool, MSN Spaces, at the behest of Chinese government. Bill Gates, so eloquent on the subject of African poverty, is less worried about Chinese free speech.

But he isn't alone: Because Yahoo Inc. is one of several companies that have signed a "public pledge on self-discipline," a Yahoo search in China doesn't turn up all of the (politically sensitive) results. Cisco Systems Inc., another U.S. company, has also sold hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment to China, including technology that blocks traffic not only to banned Web sites, but even to particular pages within an otherwise accessible site.

There's a saying that's been attributed to historian John Lukacs as he watched the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s: "The isms have all become wasms."

Not quite.

Writing on the connections between fascism and pacifism 50 years prior, George Orwell remarked:

Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'. The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security. Mr Savage remarks that 'according to this type of reasoning, a German or Japanese pacifist would be "objectively pro-British".' But of course he would be! That is why pacifist activities are not permitted in those countries (in both of them the penalty is, or can be, beheading) while both the Germans and the Japanese do all they can to encourage the spread of pacifism in British and American territories. The Germans even run a spurious 'freedom' station which serves out pacifist propaganda indistinguishable from that of the P.P.U. They would stimulate pacifism in Russia as well if they could, but in that case they have tougher babies to deal with. In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.

Mark Steyn has a marvelous obit for Ernest Lehman, who passed away earlier this month:

Accepting an honorary Oscar at the 2001 Academy Awards, Lehman urged movie critics to ‘bear in mind that a film production begins and ends with a screenplay’. Just so. If William Goldman is more frequently posited as the archetypal consummate screenwriter, Goldman himself in his last book on the trade acknowledges Lehman as the ultimate movie pro, an author so versatile there’s no signature or style other than superb skill across all the genres: of his big films, North by Northwest is a brilliant original screenplay; The Sweet Smell of Success an unforgettable shot of pure vitriol drawn from his own short story; The Sound of Music an efficient adaptation so spectacularly successful it came to dwarf the original stage version; and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a fabulous one-off in which Lehman demonstrated that his skills of adaptation could be applied just as effectively to new dramatists like Edward Albee as to Rodgers and Hammerstein. He was the Hollywood musical’s last screenwriter (The King and I, West Side Story, Hello, Dolly!) and Philip Roth’s first (Portnoy’s Complaint). He did the glossiest romantic soufflés (Sabrina, with Humphrey Bogart and Audrey Hepburn) and a dark terrorist thriller (Black Sunday by Thomas Harris in pre-Silence of the Lambs days).

As Dave Johnston wrote on Monday, "Over the last few years, 'actors talking' seems like a lost art. And there’s no good reason at least one big studio hasn’t figured that out."

Iowahawk has intercepted a hot-off-the-photocopier memo attacking INSERT NAME HERE John Roberts.

On the other hand, Ann Coulter isn't crazy about him either. Roger L. Simon wonders if there's a triangulation strategy emanating from the White House.

Hugh Hewitt believes that Roberts should employ The Ginsburg Precedent when being grilled by the leftwing members of the Senate.

Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds has a representative round-up of initial thoughts from all corners.

If the news here in California sounds grim, at least it's offset by a wonderful development on the east coast. Offset? For me, it's all cancelled out in terms of how good this piece of news makes me feel: the original Penn Station is (in a sense) being rebuilt. The original was knocked down in the mid-1960s, but the enormous post office across the street is a virtual double for its former exterior. James Lileks links to this New York Daily News piece, which says:

State and city officials yesterday named the developers who will replace one of the city's lost jewels - the old Pennsylvania Station - with a new gem.
After years of delay, the city, state and two big developers are all aboard with a design to turn the main post office on Eighth Ave. into a grand transit hub recalling the elegant Pennsylvania Station that was razed in 1963.

The $818 million plan will preserve the handsome facade of the James A. Farley Post Office, erected in 1913, while adapting the building as the new Daniel Patrick Moynihan Station, to honor the late U.S. senator, who pushed hard for the idea.

"This is going to be a magnificent gateway for New York," Gov. Pataki said at yesterday's unveiling of the design, which also calls for shops, restaurants and a boutique hotel.

Pataki noted that more than 500,000 subway, NJTransit, Long Island Rail Road and Amtrak riders a day now use Penn Station, a bland hub located across Eighth Ave. He called the current location "horribly inadequate." It's "certainly not an appropriate gateway to the greatest city in the world," he added.

As envisioned by James Carpenter Design Associates, in collaboration with Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum, the new central train hall will mirror the old Penn Station through the addition of tall, steel arches on which will sit a huge, yet lightweight, skylight.

A second, so-called "grid shell skylight" will be set atop a hall to be located roughly in the middle of the building, between Eighth and Ninth Aves., that will serve as a taxi station and baggage dropoff.

The winning plan for the project was submitted by a team of major New York developers, The Related Cos. and Vornado Realty Trust, which has extensive holdings in the area.

The companies will put up about $300 million of the projected $818 million cost at different stages before the work is completed in 2010.

The city, state and federal governments and the Port Authority are also helping to fund the project, whose main transit beneficiary will be NJTransit trains.

The congestion that commuters now face in reaching the track level in Penn Station will be relieved with the addition of staircases and other access to 11 platforms that already sit under the Farley building.

The Postal Service will occupy 250,000 square feet.

Up to 1 million square feet of air rights will be applied to the northeast corner of Eighth Ave. and 33rd St., where a Duane Reade store now stands. A residential tower is expected to rise there, next to Vornado-owned 1Penn Plaza.

"The completion of the Moynihan Station gives a second chance to recapture the extraordinary station that once was Penn Station," said Charles Gargano, chairman of the state Economic Development Corp.

I've spent countless hours in the current Penn Station, which arose in the mid-1960s. Lileks has an exceptionally well-written description of just how awful the current facility is:

The sin of the demolition of the old Penn Station was never erased, and the wretched piss-soaked warren they put in its place was a constant reminder of the Original Sin of post-war urbanists. That unholy combo of bottom-liners and utopians took away one of the most magnificent spaces in urban American and replaced it with something that seemed lifted en masse from a claustrophobic dream. To modern eyes it makes no sense: the era where social divisions were keenly felt gave us a space so vast that all distinctions dissolved in its great stone heaven; the egalitarians, by contrast, gave us a space whose equalizing impulse was best expressed as the desire to oppress everyone’s spirit. I usually cooled my heels in the Amtrak First Class club, which was a parody of a sham of a travesty of First Class, at least in the 90s. You got a scratchy seat and a battered magazine and translucent coffee. If I didn’t have a first class ticket I went to the bar on the north side of the room, where you could smoke. It stank. Aside from rush hour, it was empty, and had a sad battered quality that made you feel like a rude sack of meat slumped over a ration of intoxicants. And I never knew which track I should take. It never seemed clear. Even though they had signs and names it always seemed as though they were leaving out some key detail. Like your destination. No, I hate Penn Station. I’d like to go back in time, drag the architects into the present, and ask them: what, you thought we would all be wearing George Jetson jumpsuits, queuing patiently for the Atomic Express? The reality is a waiting room with insufficient signage, a great hall that isn’t, and a Hudson News thronged with balding guys, ties askew, furtively paging through battered porn mags.

Seriously though, this is wonderful news, especially as the plans to rebuild the WTC seem to be in constant limbo.

Check out the artwork that Bill Lockyer, California's attorney general, chose to allow to hang in the lobby of the Attorney General's Office at the Department of Justice in Sacramento.

It reminds me a little of when I visited the small reference library on the third or fourth floor of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the early 1990s. Their library requires permission to use, and its material isn't allowed out of the room, and it isn't open to the general public. MoMA maintains a cool, professional face in its public spaces. But the walls of its reference library were festooned (at least at the time) with all sorts of anti-American and anti-Reagan (yes, I know--I was there around 1993 or '94, but this stuff was still proudly displayed) posters.

Wonder if Arnold knows what his state's AG has authorized?

Update: Daniel Weintraub of The Sacramento Bee has some additional details, and writes, "I suspect you'll be hearing a lot more about this one".

I would hope so. (Registration or cough--Bugmenot--cough required.)

Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds reminds us, "First Lockyer was advocating prison rape, and now this", adding, "Does he have a political tin ear -- or is he just a jerk? It's hard to believe, though, that California couldn't find someone better for the job."

Absolutely.

Another Update: Mark In Mexico, who trackbacked to this post, has many more details about the artist that Lockyer hired. Don't miss it.

I ended my post about independent moviemaking yesterday by writing:

So who's the young writer/director who's going to master the technology that's readily available to make the proverbial good independent Internet-distributed movie? (That doesn't involve the United Federation of Planets?)

No UFP in sight, but it looks like they hired Dr. Freud to do their posters...

Mark Steyn writes on the close proximity of evil and the European establishment:

One of the striking features of the post-9/11 world is the minimal degree of separation between the so-called "extremists" and the establishment: Princess Haifa, wife of the Saudi ambassador to Washington, gives $130,000 to accomplices of the 9/11 terrorists; the head of the group that certifies Muslim chaplains for the US military turns out to be a bagman for terrorists; one of the London bombers gets given a tour of the House of Commons by a Labour MP. The Guardian hires as a "trainee journalist" a member of Hizb ut Tahir, "Britain's most radical Islamic group" (as his own newspaper described them) and in his first column post-7/7 he mocks the idea that anyone could be "shocked" at a group of Yorkshiremen blowing up London: "Second- and third-generation Muslims are without the don't-rock-the-boat attitude that restricted our forefathers. We're much sassier with our opinions, not caring if the boat rocks" - or the bus blows, or the Tube vaporises. Fellow Guardian employee David Foulkes, who was killed in the Edgware Road blast, would no doubt be heartened to know he'd died for the cause of Muslim "sassiness".

But among all these many examples of the multiculti mainstream ushering the extremists from the dark fringe to the centre of western life, there is surely no more emblematic example than that of Shabina Begum, whose victory over the school dress code was achieved with the professional support of both the wife of the Prime Minister who pledges to defend "our way of life" and of Hizb ut Tahir, a group which (according to the German Interior Minister) "supports violence as a means to realise political goals" such as a worldwide caliphate and (according to the BBC) "urges Muslims to kill Jewish people". What does an "extremist" have to do to be too extreme for Cherie Booth or the Guardian?

Given how bad current Hollywood product is, and how out of touch most of its creators are, what's the solution?

Sadly, for the most part, it's not independent movies. Roger L. Simon writes:

The vaunted American independent film movement is close to dead in the water while studio filmmaking is at its most mundane. Alternative film distribution on the internet has not kicked in in any serious way. We are not at a high point in the history of the cinema, to say the least. The subject of yesterday's discussion -- that film stars mouth off excessively about politics -- is only, at best, a minor aspect of this decline. Actors and writers were doing that when movies were great too (the 1930s and 40s). Much more important is the rise of other distractions - computer games, cable television, even blogging. [No, not that.-ed. Okay.]

35 years ago, Stanley Kubrick was asked "If you were nineteen and starting out again, would you go to film school?" He replied:

The best education in film is to make one. I would advise any neophyte director to try to make a film by himself. A three-minute short will teach him a lot. I know that all the things I did at the beginning were, in microcosm, the things I'm doing now as a director and producer. There are a lot of noncreative aspects to filmmaking which have to be overcome, and you will experience them all when you make even the simplest film: business, organization, taxes, etc., etc. It is rare to be able to have an uncluttered, artistic environment when you make a film, and being able to accept this is essential.

The point to stress is that anyone seriously interested in making a film should find as much money as he can as quickly as he can and go out and do it. And this is no longer as difficult as it once was. When I began making movies as an independent in the early 1950s I received a fair amount of publicity because I was something of a freak in an industry dominated by a handful of huge studios. Everyone was amazed that it could be done at all. But anyone can make a movie who has a little knowledge of cameras and tape recorders, a lot of ambition and -- hopefully -- talent. It's gotten down to the pencil and paper level. We're really on the threshold of a revolutionary new era in film.

On Christmas Eve of 2002, James Lileks linked to the efforts of a group of ultra-hard core Trekkies who made their own Shatner-style Star Trek episode. Their first effort was admittedly crude. And their clunky handling of dialogue actually highlights the skills of Shatner, Nimoy and company back in '66. But check out the digital effects in the teaser to its sequel! Admittedly, they're not as over the top mindblowing as the digital effects in The Matrix or Revenge of the Sith, but they're certainly professional and more than serviceable for telling the story.

And if anything, home recording technology is even more sophisticated than video's current state of the art.

The irony is that technology itself isn't as critical to telling a story as many people think. Historically, most low and medium budget movies have consisted mostly of people talking, since that's always been far cheaper to shoot than films that require huge special effects budgets. And some films consisting of little more than actors talking can be enormously compelling (the afore mentioned 12 Angry Men, Woody Allen's best films, Hitchcock's Rope and Dial M For Murder all come immediately to mind).

So who's the young writer/director who's going to master the technology that's readily available to make the proverbial good independent Internet-distributed movie? (That doesn't involve the United Federation of Planets?)

Back on June 24, we quoted David Koepp, the writer of the screenplay for Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise's new version of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds:

“And now, as we see American adventure abroad’ he (David Koepp} continues ‘in my mind it’s certainly back to it’s original meaning, which is that the Martians in our movie represent American military forces invading the Iraqis, and the futility of the occupation of a faraway land is again the subtext”

Among other things, Koepp made the “there-is-no-Internet” mistake, carefully masking his analysis in U.S. interviews, but saying it flat-out in Rue Morgue, an obscure Canadian horror magazine, that he apparently thought nobody would notice. But as the movie makes clear, once the normals begin to track you with their newfangled technology, there is no escape. They can find you even in Canada.

Leo continues:

Mary Anne Lunsford is a contributor to the Riehl World View blog, which we've linked to from time to time. Her Georgia home was flooded recently by Hurricane Dennis and she's looking for help from the Blogosphere.

(I gave a little via PayPal, in case you're wondering.)

That was the headline of a typically witty Iowahawk satire of the history of the Gray Lady. But Tom Blumer, who runs Bizzyblog says that bizzy--err, business--hasn't been too good lately at 229 West 43rd Street:

The New York Times is a publicly-held company (symbol NYT). It has a responsibility to attempt to earn a reasonable return for its investors.

How is it doing in that area? Two words–not well: The stock has taken a 40% dive, from its June 20, 2002 high of $52.79 to a Friday close at $31.20. The Times’ daily and Sunday circulations both declined more than 3% between March 2002 and March 2005. Its other major newpaper property, The Boston Globe, has experienced similar hits to its credibility in the past five years and has seen its circulation decline even more steeply.

Do they care? Apparently not. While there will always be tension between newsroom and business priorities (all kinds of stories have the potential of ticking off advertisers), The Times attitude appears to be “the investors be damned” (HT #2 to Poor and Stupid):

Daniel Okrent, a former Times public editor, stresses that his old employer “has the freedom to take positions that they deem to be in the interest of journalism without fear of the reaction of public stockholders.”

All of this makes me wonder how many years it will take for The Times to transform itself into an alternative newpaper read only in Manhattan and at DNC headquarters in Washington. It seems to be working very hard every day to make it happen.

Shades of the Muppets' old "Pigs In Space" routine! Here's a headline and story you don't see everyday:

China to send pig semen into space
By Daniel Brillman
Jul. 17, 2005 at 7:39PM

Jul. 17 (UPI) — China is hoping to learn what, if any, effect cosmic rays have on sperm by sending pig semen into space, the BBC reports.

Around 40 grams of semen from high-pedigree pigs will accompany two astronauts on an October orbital mission, and will be kept both inside and outside the Shenzhou VI spacecraft.

Sperm that survives the voyage will be tested for effects of microgravity and used to fertilize eggs. The semen is from the Rongchang breed of pig, prized for its high quality of meat and physical characteristics.

China became the third nation to send a human into space, after the United States and Russia, two years ago.

Makes sense to me! Link Hogthrob could not be reached for comment, though.

But we did get through to Homer Simpson. He responded with a long, low, "Mmmmmm....bacon...", before getting back to his efforts to modify donuts for time travel.

Speaking of Col. Flagg ("He's a CPA!" "You mean C-I-A, Radar!"), Glenn Reynolds links to this Mark Steyn piece:

But in the real world there's only one scandal in this whole wretched business -- that the CIA, as part of its institutional obstruction of the administration, set up a pathetic 'fact-finding mission' that would be considered a joke by any serious intelligence agency and compounded it by sending, at the behest of his wife, a shrill politically motivated poseur who, for the sake of 15 minutes' celebrity on the cable gabfest circuit, misled the nation about what he found. . . . What we have here is, in effect, the old standby plot of lame Hollywood conspiracy thrillers: rogue elements within the CIA attempting to destabilize the elected government.

Steyn's comments, I think, point to the next stage of this affair: When all is said and done, I think the CIA will turn out to be the big loser here, because there's just no way to parse these facts that makes the Agency look good -- just varying shades of incompetent, or politically motivated and dishonest.

Sometimes life really does imitate M*A*S*H, especially its earlier, funnier years when Larry Gelbart was overseeing the writing. In the second season episode "A Smattering of Intelligence", Hawkeye and Trapper set-up the CIA's Colonel Flagg and his rival G2 counterpart, Vinny Pratt, by planting conflicting rumors about Frank Burns in Frank's file.

The result is that Flagg believes Frank is a communist, and Pratt think he's a Nazi. Finally, Hawkeye lets the two renegades from Mad magazine's "Spy Versus Spy" in on the gag:

"You two were so intent on finding some breach of security, some leak, you don't need the real thing. You guys are self-leaking!"

And for what? As the great James Lileks wrote this past week:

Economics professor Bryan Caplan explains the beauty of advertising to Adbusters magazine:

Less than a decade ago, I drove from former West Germany to former East Germany, and was struck by how much more beautiful the West was. Houses in the West had flower boxes. Houses in the East did not. I reflected that the aesthetic gap between West and East used to be vastly greater. And I recalled how people I knew who toured the Soviet bloc were more likely to sadly describe the "greyness" of communist life than the machine guns at the border.

The upshot is that the private pursuit of beauty in the West had a striking externality. Every time a West German put a flower box in his window, he was making capitalism look prettier than socialism. And while intellectuals may say they couldn't care less about such things, I suspect that sheer aesthetics changed a lot of minds about East versus West.

What does this have to do with advertising, and commercialism generally? Corporations do not advertise to create support for capitalism, any more than West Germans planted flowers to fight communism. But advertising does more than just sell one firm's products; it also contributes to the beautiful image of the whole system.

Flip through a popular magazine, or wander through your local mall. Even if you don't remember a single product, you get an overall impression of a world that is colorful, fun, glitzy, and sexy. And that probably leads more people around the world to admire capitalism than Milton Friedman ever did.

In other words, Adbusters is right to insist that advertising persuades people to like capitalism more. It does. But contrary to Adbusters, the corporations don't intend to do it. It just so happens that in their quest to make a buck, corporations make the whole capitalist system look marvelous.

Glenn Reynolds links to "The Carnival of The New Jersey Bloggers", a great list of blogs covering my home state.

Goes best with a cheesesteak from Cherry Hill's Big John's!

Self-styled comedian Margaret Cho names her dog after a member of the infamous Baader-Meinhof terrorists of the 1970s. "Terrorism was different then", she was quoted as saying. "It had a chicness to it, which made it seem less like a dangerous menace and more like fashion."

Cho describes Baader-Meinhof as being "art terrorists".

Those fashionable art terrorists are believed responsible "for killing from 30 to 50 people, including high-ranking German politicians, business executives and U.S. military personnel", accoriding to the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism.

You know, this would be the equivalent of a senator praising Osama bin Laden for buildings schools and day care facilities.

Not that such a thing would ever happen of course...

Roger L. Simon has some more-or-less related thoughts on the stances that celebrities enjoy taking:

By making the pronouncements they do, they are trying to convince the audience of their own seriousness and their own goodness (their own value). But most of all they are trying to convince themselves. Fragile egos, not inflated ones, are at work here.

The psychodynamics can be more complex than that, and to dump all celebrity "leftists" in one pot is grossly unfair, but that is, I think, close to the essence. And this, of course, does not exonerate these people for their often peurile opinions. It only indicates why they are not thought through. Most Hollywood liberals of this sort will not engage in a substantive discussion of the issues because they have no real desire to. Thought, or even truth, is not the point. Stance is.

Ever since 9/11 we (by "we" I'm using shorthand that includes both myself and about half of the Blogosphere) have wondered why Reuters has refused to use the T-word when referring to, you know, terrorists. Instead, Reuters refers to them as militants, insurgents, dissidents (as they frequently labeled Osama bin Laden) and other euphemisms that imply that they're more misunderstood James Dean-type loners, than bloodthirsty men with a penchant for killing innocent civilians, and the larger the number, the better.

A 2003 article explains how Reuters' Newspeak works:

Reuters, the influential news agency headquartered in London, whose wire service stories appear in print, broadcast and web media outlets, routinely uses partisan, distorted terminology in its Middle East news reports. It not only bans the word “terrorism” generally but uses language that continually seeks to explain and obscure Palestinian violence. Thus Reuters regularly characterizes Palestinian terror against Israel as “the Palestinian uprising for statehood” or “uprising for Palestinian independence” or “uprising for an independent state.”

This terminology is deceptive, adopting an Arab perspective that legitimizes the use of violence against the Jewish State.

TEL AVIV - Top terrorist Zakaria Zubeidi made a “guest appearance” in a video prepared by the staff of Reuters news agency in Israel and the Palestinian Authority as a “going away” gift for a colleague, Ynetnews has learned.

Zubeidi, who heads Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade in Jenin, has been named by security officials as a key figure in organizing terror attacks on Israeli civilians. Zubeidi’s al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades have claimed responsibility for more than 300 terror acts in the last five years.

A Reuters spokeswoman confirmed the video’s existence, but said the London-based news organization is “not associated with any group or faction in any conflict.”

The screening, which occurred in a Jerusalem restaurant last March, involved the showing of a video during a private party. “The video’s theme was what Israel would be like in 10 years,” said an Israeli government official who attended the party and viewed the video.

“All of a sudden, at the end, there is Zakaria Zubeidi, playing the head of Reuters. Zubeidi was sitting in Reuters’ Jenin office, saying he was Reuters’ chief,” the official said.

The party included guests from the BBC, ITN, the Independent newspaper, and French journalists. “They all thought the video was hilarious,” the official said. He added that only a few individuals did not seem amused during the screening. “They were laughing; they thought it was very funny, he said.”

In a just world, this should be the next Eason Jordan/Dan Rather moment for big media, as yet another mask falls. But will the story gain sufficient traction in the Blogosphere?

Update: Dafydd ab Hugh of Captain's Quarters reminds us that Reuters' chief rival, the Associated Press, isn't exactly a bastion of pure Olympian detached objectivity themselves when it comes to reporting on terrorists.

While the Guardian is running emptyheaded pieces about "sassy" suicide bombers, England's Times has an absolutely superb piece of journalism by Nasra Hassan, a Pakistan-born relief worker and journalist now living in Vienna, in which she interviews a fellow she calls "S", a young Palestinian who survived his (fortunately) botched suicide bombing of Isreali civilians. His words are utterly chilling, as he explains how young men are turned into kamikazes:

In Gaza, S is celebrated as a young man who “gave his life to Allah” and whom Allah “brought back to life”.

He was polite as he welcomed me into his home. The house was surrounded by a high cement wall that had been fortified with steel. We sat down in a large, simply furnished room whose walls were inscribed with verses from the Koran. On one wall was a poster showing green birds flying in a purple sky, a symbol of the Palestinian suicide bombers.

S had just turned 27. He is slight, and he walked with a limp, the only trace of his near-death. He invited his wife to join us, and he answered my questions without hesitation.

I asked him when, and why, he had decided to volunteer for martyrdom. “In the spring of 1993, I began to pester our military leaders to let me do an operation,” he said. “It was around the time of the Oslo accords, and it was quiet, too quiet. I wanted to do an operation that would incite others to do the same. Finally, I was given the green light to leave Gaza for an operation inside Israel.”

“How did you feel when you heard that you’d been selected for martyrdom?” I asked.

“It’s as if a very high, impenetrable wall separated you from Paradise or Hell,” he said. “Allah has promised one or the other to his creatures. So, by pressing the detonator, you can immediately open the door to Paradise — it is the shortest path to Heaven.”

S was one of 11 children in a middle-class family that, in 1948, had been forced to flee from Majdal to a refugee camp in Gaza, during the Arab-Israeli war that started with the creation of the State of Israel. He joined Hamas in his early teens and became a street activist.

In 1989, he served two terms in Israeli prisons for intifada activity, including attacks on Israeli soldiers. One of his brothers is serving a life sentence in Israel.

I asked S to describe his preparations for the suicide mission. “We were in a constant state of worship,” he said. “We told each other that if the Israelis only knew how joyful we were they would whip us to death! Those were the happiest days of my life.”

“What is the attraction of martyrdom?” I asked.

“The power of the spirit pulls us upward, while the power of material things pulls us downward,” he said. “Someone bent on martyrdom becomes immune to the material pull. Our planner asked, ‘What if the operation fails?’ We told him, ‘In any case, we get to meet the Prophet and his companions, inshallah.’

“We were floating, swimming, in the feeling that we were about to enter eternity. We had no doubts. We made an oath on the Koran, in the presence of Allah — a pledge not to waver. This jihad pledge is called bayt al-ridwan, after the garden in Paradise that is reserved for the prophets and the martyrs. I know that there are other ways to do jihad. But this one is sweet — the sweetest. All martyrdom operations, if done for Allah ’s sake, hurt less than a gnat’s bite!”

S showed me a video that documented the final planning for the operation. In the grainy footage, I saw him and two other young men engaging in a ritualistic dialogue of questions and answers about the glory of martyrdom. S, who was holding a gun, identified himself as a member of al-Qassam, the military wing of Hamas, which is one of two Palestinian Islamist organisations that sponsor suicide bombings. (Islamic Jihad is the other group.) “Tomorrow, we will be martyrs,” he declared, looking straight at the camera. “Only the believers know what this means. I love martyrdom.”

The young men and the planner then knelt and placed their right hands on the Koran. The planner said: “Are you ready? Tomorrow, you will be in Paradise.”

From 1996 to 1999, I interviewed nearly 250 people involved in the most militant camps of the Palestinian cause: volunteers who, like S, had been unable to complete their suicide missions, the families of dead bombers, and the men who trained them.

None of the suicide bombers — they ranged in age from 18 to 38 — conformed to the typical profile of the suicidal personality. None of them was uneducated, desperately poor, simple-minded, or depressed. Many were middle-class and held paying jobs. Two were the sons of millionaires. They all seemed entirely normal members of their families. They were polite and serious, and in their communities were considered to be model youths. Most were bearded. All were deeply religious.

I was told that to be accepted for a suicide mission the volunteers had to be convinced of the religious legitimacy of the acts they were contemplating, as sanctioned by the divinely revealed religion of Islam. Many of these young men had memorised large sections of the Koran and were well versed in the finer points of Islamic law and practice. But their knowledge of Christianity was rooted in the medieval crusades, and they regarded Judaism and Zionism as synonymous.

Most of the men I interviewed requested strict anonymity. The majority spoke in Arabic and they all talked matter-of-factly about the bombings, showing an unshakeable conviction in the rightness of their cause and their methods. When I asked them if they had any qualms about killing innocent civilians, they would immediately respond, “The Israelis kill our children and our women. This is war, and innocent people get hurt.”

They were not inclined to argue but they were happy to discuss, far into the night, the issues and the purpose of their activities. One condition of the interviews was that, in our discussions, I not refer to their deeds as “suicide”, which is forbidden in Islam. Their preferred term is “sacred explosions”. One member of al-Qassam said: “We do not have tanks or rockets, but we have something superior — our exploding Islamic bombs.”

The most annoying argument made by apologists for these massacre-bombers is the one which begins with something like, "the Palestinians don't have American-made tanks and helicopters, 'suicide bombers' are the only weapons the Palestinians have...." The reason this argument is so annoying is threefold.

First, the explicit assumption in this formulation is that if indeed the Palestinians had helicopters and tanks, they would in fact use them. In other words, to make this argument is to concede that the Palestinians are at war with Israel which would put all of the peace rhetoric in a very different light.

Which leads to the second issue. Nobody who makes the "the Palestinians don't have tanks" argument will ever concede the logic of their assertion. If you say to them, "So if they had tanks they'd use them? That doesn't really sound like a desire for peace." You get eye-rolls as if you just don't get it.

And, lastly, contrary to what this argument implies and the assertions of countless Arafat apologists, the Israeli military was not designed nor intended to be aimed at the Palestinians. It was designed to fight wars with actual nations which, several times in the past, tried to destroy Israel. To suggest that the Israeli military is a weapon intended for the Palestinians is a form of moral equivalence. It assumes that Israeli weapons were intended for murder just like Palestinian bomber belts. And that's a lie.

Greg Gutfeld (who is having a wonderful time gleefully subverting Arianna Huffington's folly from within) has an excellent suggestion for a possible director whom Paramount could hire to replace Oliver Stone at the helm of their proposed movie about 9/11.

While Gutfeld's choice is remarkably well known in Europe, his popularity sadly hasn't translated to Hollywood, except for perhaps those rare outlying members of the cognoscenti who are familiar with the director. He could probably use the work--curiously, he seems to have been on hiatus since early last November.

A few years ago, Thomas Hibbs wrote a terrific book called Shows About Nothing. Its theme was Hollywood's love affair with nihilism, and how it translated to both movies and TV shows. (Two guesses as to which TV show its title referred to.) Mark Steyn begins his review of Steven Spielberg's version of The War of the Worlds by arguing that making "films about nothing" is what's killing Hollywood at the box office this summer:

Hollywood is in the middle of its worst box-office slump in decades. Well, they hope it’s the middle, if not halfway through the seventh reel. And no one can quite figure out why this should be. The non-blockbusters are no better or worse than their equivalents of a few years’ back. What’s gone wrong?

Here’s one thought. The other day, before the new Bewitched (don’t ask), I sat through a trailer for Stealth. This is a high-tech action thriller about USAF pilots zapping about the skies in which the bad guy is the plane. That’s right: an unmanned computerised plane goes rogue and starts attacking things. The money shot is — stop me if this rings a vague bell — a big downtown skyscraper with a jet heading toward it. Only there are no terrorists aboard the jet. The jet itself is the terrorist.

This is the pitiful state Hollywood’s been reduced to. The Tom Clancy novel The Sum of All Fears was about Islamic terrorists, so naturally the film version made them neo-Nazis. The Nicole Kidman snoozer The Interpreter was about Islamic terrorists attacking New York, so naturally they were rewritten into terrorists from the little-known African republic of Matobo. But doubtless some studio exec panicked that, what with all this Live8 business, it might look a bit Afrophobic to have any more Matoban terrorists. Safer not to have any bad guys. Let’s make the plane the bad guy. In the Eighties and Nineties, upscale Brits like Jeremy Irons and Gary Oldman made a nice living playing the exotic foreign evildoer in Hollywood, but, unless Jeremy’s been practising going brm-brm and taxi-ing down the garden path with outstretched arms, I don’t think he’s going to be getting many roles as the psycho aeroplane. That’s my theory on why the box-office is down: in ‘interesting times’, Hollywood is making films about nothing.

In the 1930s, Hollywood made plenty of films about nothing. Fred Astaire's movies were the purist of pure fluff: Fred puts on his tux or tails, pursues Ginger Rogers (with eunuch-like Edward Everett Horton as his buddy or rival), dances with her, and gets the girl.

But by God, that was enjoyable fluff. (As was the TV series that inspired Thomas Hibbs' book.)

No doubt, the men who created the Hollywood product of the 1930s and '40s were cynical about their audiences, but they also knew that they had to entertain them if they were to get them into the theaters and keep them coming back--especially as this was an era before residuals from PPV TV, premium cable TV, basic cable TV, network TV, VHS, DVD and most of the other myriad types of ancillary product sales that keep the modern movie industry afloat.

If anything, today's Hollywood is infinitely more cynical about its audiences--at least its American audiences. It only took forty years, but perhaps that audience has responded to that cynicism with appropriate disdain.

...Or, maybe we can just blame it all on texting cell phones, like Hollywood did in 2003.

Whenever I hear the word "sassy", I think of the sketches the late Phil Hartman used to perform on Saturday Night Live, where'd he play the editor of "Sassy" magazine, having lots of fun letting the word "sssaaaaassssy!" roll of his tongue.

Somehow though, unlike England's Guardian newspaper, I don't think he'd be writing about "sassy" suicide bombers, as Scott Burgess catches them doing:

Today's Guardian gives space to Dilpazier Aslam, a "Guardian trainee journalist" who suggests that one shouldn't be shocked by Thursday's suicide bombings - such a reaction would be inappropriate because, among other reasons:

"Shocked would be to suggest that the bombings happened through no responsibility of our own."

Yes, ladies and gentlemen - we bear responsibility for the murderous actions of maniacal members of a religious cult. An apology is certainly called for - the queue forms to the right.

Needless to say, there are other reasons why shock is inappropriate. Mr. Aslam explains:

"Shocked would be to say that we don't understand how, in the green hills of Yorkshire, a group of men given all the liberties they could have wished for could do this."

Fortunately for those who still don't quite follow, Mr. Aslam provides an explanation immediately, in the very next paragraph - which reads, in its entirety:

"The Muslim community is no monolithic whole. Yet there are some common features. Second- and third-generation Muslims are without the don't-rock-the boat attitude that restricted our forefathers. We're much sassier with our opinions, not caring if the boat rocks or not."

Suicide bombing .... sassy!

Incidentally, it should be pointed out that there's no question whatever about this "Yorkshire lad's" loyalty to Britain. He has made it quite clear that:

"Muslims grant their loyalty and allegiance to their deen and the Ummah, not to a football team or nation state."

Neither should there be any questions concerning the Guardian's use of columnists who advocate "fighting fire with fire" to bring about the establishment of a sharia-based Caliphate. After all, it's not the first time they've done so.

Daniel Pipes has quite an interesting look at who's tougher on terror--France or Britain. As you may have guessed by the above title, the answer is rather surprising:

Thanks to the war in Iraq, much of the world sees the British government as resolute and tough and the French one as appeasing and weak. But in another war, the one against terrorism and radical Islam, the reverse is true: France is the most stalwart nation in the West, even more so than America, while Britain is the most hapless.

British-based terrorists have carried out operations in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kenya, Tanzania, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Israel, Morocco, Russia, Spain, and America. Many governments - Jordanian, Egyptian, Moroccan, Spanish, French, and American - have protested London's refusal to shut down its Islamist terrorist infrastructure or extradite wanted operatives. In frustration, Egypt's president Hosni Mubarak publicly denounced Britain for "protecting killers." One American security group has called for Britain to be listed as a terrorism-sponsoring state.

Counterterrorism specialists disdain the British. Roger Cressey calls London "easily the most important jihadist hub in Western Europe." Steven Simon dismisses the British capital as "the Star Wars bar scene" of Islamic radicals. More brutally, an intelligence official said of last week's attacks: "The terrorists have come home. It is payback time for … an irresponsible policy."

While London hosts terrorists, Paris hosts a top-secret counterterrorism center, code-named Alliance Base, the existence of which was recently reported by the Washington Post. At Alliance Base, six major Western governments have since 2002 shared intelligence and run counterterrorism operations - the latter makes the operation unique.

More broadly, President Chirac instructed French intelligence agencies just days after September 11, 2001, to share terrorism data with their American counterparts "as if they were your own service." The cooperation is working: A former acting CIA director, John E. McLaughlin, called the bilateral intelligence tie "one of the best in the world." The British may have a "special relationship" with Washington on Iraq, but the French have one with it in the war on terror.

We often criticize left-wing media outlets like the BBC and Reuters over, among other things, their refusal to call terror by its name. But it's worth emphasizing that by far the worst offender in terms of abusing the language via politically correct terminology is Fox News. Here's a report from yesterday on the London bombings:

New evidence suggests four bombers blew themselves up on the London transportation system last week, killing at least 52 in what could be the first homicide attacks in Western Europe, officials said Tuesday. . . .

Two militant Islamic groups have claimed responsibility for the attacks on three subway trains and on a bus. Police had previously indicated there was no evidence of homicide bombings, suggesting instead that timers were used.

Although police stopped short of calling them homicide attacks, Clarke said "strong forensic and other evidence" suggests one of the suspects was killed in a subway bombing and property belonging to the three others was found at the location of the other blasts. . . .

Jeremy Shapiro, director of research at the center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, said Europeans had been involved in homicide attacks in the Mideast, but he knew of no successful homicide bombings in Western Europe previously.

Gosh, what about the murder of Theo Van Gogh? Wasn't that a homicide? What about the 200 or so people murdered in Madrid last year? And how could the police have said there was "no evidence of homicide bombings"? What about the scores of blown-up bodies on the trains and the bus? Did the police figure all those people dropped dead of heart attacks seconds before the non-"homicide" bomb went off?

The answer is that Fox, and only Fox, has redefinied homicide to mean "the act of killing oneself"--what the rest of the English-speaking world calls suicide. So Fox would say, for instance, "Hitler committed homicide by shooting himself in his bunker." But what about what Hitler did to his victims? The Fox brain trust will have to get to work on a name for that.

(Oh, and put me down as someone else who isn't crazy about the "homicide bomber" line. I think most people with an IQ over room tempature know that a suicide bomber usually takes out other people when he blows himself up. But hopefully Fox won't switch to "splodeydope" anytime soon, accurate though it may be.)

Betsy Newmark notes the Groundhog Day-like nature of the Plame/Wilson/Rove kerfuffle:

This Rove/Plame/Wilson scandalette is following the familiar pattern of every such brouhaha we've had in the Bush administration from Halliburton to Abu Ghraib to Tom DeLay to Gitmo. Something comes out in the press that looks terribly damaging. The media goes into overdrive hyping the story and focusing on it monomaniacally. The lefty bloggers start drooling in glee. Democratic politicians make somber, seemingly heartsick speeches denouncing the administration in increasingly vituperative language. Then, after a day or so, the right side of the fence kicks into gear. The RNC starts issuing press releases to show how things are being taking out of proportion. Righty bloggers start looking at the actual evidence, going back through old news stories to remind people of the historical facts. Long-forgotten little reports in the media are resurrected to exonerate the Bush people. Conservatives get just as angry as those on the left. The media barely reports any of the debunking of the original story. They continue with whatever storyline they established in the first days of the kerfuffle. Fox News interviews someone like Byron York to show how misleading the original storyline was. Maybe there is a story in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Post, but barely anything in the Washington Post, New York Times, network news et al. Conservatives get angrier and more cynical about the MSM. Liberals get more gleeful, but also more frustrated. Because polls come out showing that few people care about the story that has so excited both sides. The story eventually dies down with both sides convinced that dirt was done somehow somewhere. They just don't agree who did what that was dirty.

Update: Over at his MSNBC blog, Glenn Reynolds has some related thoughts in a post appropriately titled, "Empty-headed TV people". (Wonder what the MSNBC folks think of that title?)

There was a recent public debate in Hollywood between Lionel Chetwynd and Burt Prelutsky on the right; and on the left, Larry Gelbart. And also Variety editor-in-chief Peter Bart, whom Cathy Seipp generously credits to having politics "somewhere in the middle", but quotes as referring to "the Taliban conservatives who’ve taken over the [Republican] party"--not exactly a middle of the road sort of phrase.

Seipp caught this exchange between the men on the panel and an audience member who attended:

Unfortunately, the Hollywood Forum was not very conducive to audience questions — a situation that will have to improve if this group hopes to last. But my friend Leah, an actress, did manage to ask one about why Hollywood is so sympathetic to Castro.

Peter Bart brushed this off. “All those Hollywood types who talk with Castro, all they do is talk about f***ing movies,” he said. “They go to Cuba because it’s the only place you can get old DeSotos.”

“Name one pro-Castro movie that’s come out of Hollywood,” Gelbart demanded.

“Comandante!” Leah snapped back, referring to Oliver Stone’s recent paean to Castro.

“OK, that’s one...” Gelbart said.

“Motorcycle Diaries!” Leah immediately added. Gelbart was beginning to look exasperated at that point, so she shut up. “But there’s also Havana,” she whispered to me, “by Robert Redford, another lyrical poem to Castro.”

Incidentally, Havana was directed by veteran director (and occasional actor) Sidney Pollack, whom earlier this year directed the pro-UN movie The Interpreter, which failed to break even at the American box office, both because of its controversial subject matter, and Pollack's even more controversial casting of a San Francisco Chronicle Middle East correspondent in the lead role rather than a more experienced actor.

Mickey Kaus notes some of the...unique personal insights that Oliver Stone could bring to a movie about 9/11:

"The new world order is about order and control," he said. "This attack was pure chaos, and chaos is energy. All great changes have come from people or events that were initially misunderstood, and seemed frightening, like madmen. Einstein, Nikola Tesla, Gates. I think, I think . . . I think many things." He explained how the World Bank, McDonald's, and the studios' response to the threat of a Writers Guild strike last year were all manifestations of the new global conspiracy of order.

"This is the time for a bullet of a film about terrorism, like 'The Battle of Algiers' "—Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 movie about the conflict between the French and F.L.N. terrorist cells in Algeria, in which the director's sympathies lie with the terrorists. "You show the Arab side and the American side in a chase film with a 'French Connection' urgency, where you track people by satellite, like in 'Enemy of the State.' My movie would have the C.I.A. guys and the F.B.I. guys, but they blow it. They're a bunch of drunks from World War II who haven't recovered from the disasters of the sixties—the Kennedy assassination and Vietnam. [Emphasis added]

Speaking of political correctness run amok, Tim Blair illustrates absurdity by being absurd, reminding us that "Vile Murdering Scum Have Feelings Too"!

Update: Via Roger L. Simon, Greg Gutfeld explains how to best put your new-found sensitivity towards vile murdering scum misunderstood sensitive fellows to work:

I was just sitting around, thinking about last week's bombings.

Multi-tasking, I was: sitting AND thinking.

And I started to ask myself how we could explain such horrible events so, you know, none of us look stupid at parties?

Even more important, how can my explanation about these acts help me pick up girls?

Mark Steyn writes that the political correctness of liberal societies such as England is harming moderate Muslims by virtually forcing politicians and police to look the other way at very illiberal acts:

Most of us instinctively understand that when a senior Metropolitan Police figure says bullishly that "Islam and terrorism don't go together", he's talking drivel.

Many of us excuse it on the grounds that, well, golly, it must be a bit embarrassing to be a Muslim on days like last Thursday and it doesn't do any harm to cheer 'em up a bit with some harmless feel-good blather. But is this so?

Why are we surprised that "Muslim moderates" rarely speak out against the evil committed by their co-religionists when the likes of Mr Paddick keep assuring us there's no problem? It requires great courage to be a dissenting Muslim in communities dominated by heavy-handed imams and lobby groups that function effectively as thought-police.

Yet all you hear from Mr Paddick is: "Move along, folks, there's nothing to see here." This is the same approach, incidentally, that the authorities took in their long refusal to investigate seriously the 120 or so "honour killings" among British Muslims.

Just as the police did poor Muslim girls no favours by their excessive cultural sensitivity, so they're now doing the broader Muslim community no favours. The Blair-Paddick strategy only provides a slathering of mindless multiculti fudge topping over the many layers of constraint that prevent Islam beginning an honest conversation with itself.

Unlike Malaya or the Mau-Mau or the IRA, this is a global counter-terrorism operation across widely differing terrain, geographical and psychological. We need to be able to kill, constrain, coerce or coax as appropriate.

Kill terrorists when the opportunity presents itself, as 1,200 "insurgents" were said to have been killed in one recent engagement on the Syria/Iraq border the other day. Constrain the ideology behind Thursday's bombing by outlawing Saudi funding of British mosques and other institutions. Coerce our more laggardly allies like General Musharraf into shutting down his section of the Saudi-Pakistani-Londonistan Wahhabist pipeline.

But the coaxing is what counts - wooing moderate Muslims into reclaiming their religion. We can take steps to prevent Islamic terrorists killing us, most of the time. But Islamic terrorists will only stop trying to kill us when their culture reviles them rather than celebrates them.

David Frum has some related thoughts. Click here, and be sure to read the post immediately below it.

In their competition with Reuters and the New York Times to see which "objective" international news agency can appease Islamofascist terrorists the most, the BBC has airbrushed the T-word right out of their coverage of last week's savage terrorist attack casual bombing amongst otherwise good friends in London.

AP reports that Dreamworks has lowered its "full-year profit outlook":

LOS ANGELES -- Less than a year after going public on the strength of hit films such as "Shrek," DreamWorks Animation Inc. SKG is battling a DVD market slump that forced it to warn Monday of a loss in the second quarter and to lower its full-year outlook.

The Glendale-based company, which badly missed first-quarter profit estimates due to disappointing revenue from home video sales of "Shrek 2," also disclosed that it is the target of a securities probe into the trading of its stock and release of first-quarter results.

The company said it is cooperating with the Securities and Exchange Commission inquiry, adding that the investigation "should not be construed as an indication that any violations of law have occurred."

The firm also said its main shareholders decided to postpone indefinitely a planned $500 million offering of common stock.

The series of disclosures sent DreamWorks shares tumbling $3.54, or 13.2 percent, to close at $23.27 on the New York Stock Exchange. Shares dropped as low as $22.88 earlier in the day.

The stock had climbed as much as 52 percent after its trading debut last October, but it now is about 17 percent below its initial public offering price of $28.

The company blamed the weakened earnings forecast on waning demand for home videos. It cited a review of current sales and inventory that prompted an increase in reserves for returned products.

"What appears to be the case is that over the past several months, retail inventory for titles in catalog is lower than what we have traditionally experienced, both domestically and internationally," Chief Financial Officer Kris Leslie told analysts during a conference call. "This is contributing to a higher level of both actual and expected returns."

Govindini Murty is an actress, screenwriter and co-director of the Liberty Film Festival (and a past "GOP Babe of the Week" incidentally, and for good reason).

Writing in the L.A. Times, she has the cure for Hollywood's box office blues. Think anyone in Tinseltown will listen?

Nahh, me neither.

(Via What's The Rumpus.)

Update: As I was saying...

Another Update: Almost forgot--probably not all that surprisingly, Govindini's a blogger as well. But of course!

Liberal England has a surprisingly long and ignoble history of empowering criminals, so this February 2005 article discovered by Charles Johnson shouldn't be all that surprising:

Random immigration checks on Tube passengers have been banned by Underground chiefs after they were exposed by the Evening Standard.

We revealed how dozens of police and immigration officers at a time swooped on stations and asked foreign-sounding commuters to justify their presence in Britain.

And after we uncovered the practice last summer, unhappy Tube chiefs have told the Home Office and police that their officers will no longer be allowed to carry out the raids.

The sides are still in talks but already the number of operations has been cut and the Immigration Service has agreed to curb the way its officers work.

Crucially, under the new rules only people suspected of being faredodgers, drug-dealers or other lawbreakers may be quizzed on their immigration status.

Passengers who follow the rules cannot be questioned.

Jim Geraghty of National Review Online's TKS Blog was highly skeptical of the rhetoric emanating from Tim Russert's chat with Stephen Flynn and Adm. James Loy on Homeland Security. Unintentially perhaps, this exchange was one of the high points:

MR. RUSSERT: Mr. Flynn, if you were president for one day and you could do anything you wanted to steer the nation towards a direction that you think would be important to homeland security, what would you do?

MR. FLYNN: I think the most important thing is something that Admiral Loy mentioned, this is really to engage the American people, to get out of this kind of paternalistic approach of, "You shop and travel. We've got it under control." The problem with the statement that everything that can be done is being done is missing the most critical element to our success in dealing with this issue, which is the engagement of we the people. And coming clean about the limits about our intelligence, coming clean about the limits of what our military capability can be done and the need to roll up sleeves and plan many years ahead making our society more resilient, not fail-safe, resilient, the kinds of things we stand up and applaud when we see the Londoners get back on the train the next day, what we saw in the Blitz, this is the kind of character that is in the American people I'm convinced. I saw it being in New York on 9/11 with no federal authorities in sight. It's the failure to call upon us all to be a part of this solution, to share the sacrifice in dealing with this war, I think, is the most important thing I use my day for.

Actually, amongst the tired ‘roll up our sleeves’ clichés, there’s a serious, even radical point in there. The key to homeland security isn’t really in government programs. It’s in deputizing the American people. Like it or not, you are your own homeland security. If you’re on a plane, and some maniac tries to charge the cockpit, stopping him is up to you and the other passengers. If some odd guy seated across the aisle tries to light up his sneakers, stopping him is up to you. If you have a crop duster, you have to make sure it’s locked up when you’re not using it. If you work in a chemical plant, power plant, laboratory, or other facility where a terrorist could do harm, you have to think like the terrorists and be one step ahead of them. If you’re on the subway and somebody leaves a bag, you have to call it to that person’s attention, and if they still leave it behind… call the cops, get away from that bag, and duck and cover.

The government’s going to do its part, but they can’t be everywhere. But the citizenry can. Of course, this isn’t a comfortable message for anyone in Washington to offer. It’s an admission of limited control and limited power, and argues against endless budget increases.

As its title implies, "The Blogometer" is The National Journal's round-up of daily Blogospheric action. Stop on by and give it a test spin.

Victor Davis Hanson looks at the four phases of our 15-year conflict with Iraq.

Thomas Hibbs writes that the beautiful Jennifer Connelly is largely wasted by the new movie Dark Water.

Want dark? Want Connelly? Hey, there's always Dark City--it's like The Matrix, but with a script!

John Hawkins debunks eight anti-war myths about the conflict in Iraq.

Meanwhile, Paul Mirengoff of Power Line analyzes another frequently uttered cliche: that "neoconservatives have hijacked American foreign policy":

The neocons accomplished this, the theory goes, by selling their half-baked ideology to a president too unschooled, dim-witted, or panicked to resist it. Yet, as Charles Krauthammer noted in his excellent essay The Neo-Conservative Convergence, none of the president's most influential foreign policy counselors--not Dick Cheney, not Donald Rumsfeld, not Condoleezza Rice--was considered a neoconservative prior to 9/11. Rice, in fact, is the protégé of Brent Scowcroft, a leading proponent of the opposing foreign policy school known as "realism." Cheney, too, had been associated with that school through his key role in the "realist" administration of the first President Bush.

The argument that the strong-willed Cheney and Rumsfeld were brainwashed by neoconservatives in lower levels of the current administration is too implausible to entertain. Thus, one of two things must be true: Either they switched to the neoconservative approach in response to the events of 9/11 ("mugged by reality," as Krauthammer would have it) or the administration's approach is not distinctively neoconservative.

What would happen if George Galloway, George Soros, Michael Moore, Scott Ritter, and the entire Managing Board of the BBC wrote the next James Bond script? It would probably read very much like this...

(Via Conservative Grapevine.)

Roger L. Simon writes:

What is most surprising about Christopher Hitchens' decimation of semi-literate talk show host Ron Reagan on Reagan's show the other day is finally how unsurprising it is. It was like observing an expert sniper shoot a deaf-and-dumb duck.

As we all know, very few people watch MSNBC and the reason for it is obvious: The network insults our intelligence be putting people as fundamentally uneducated as Reagan in the positions they do. Having a man who sounds as if he barely made it out of a third-rate junior college home economics course (apologies to home economists) run a serious (or even quasi-serious) political show makes everyone around him, qualified or not, sound like a buffoon. It also demonstrates a disprespect for the American public which, during these serious times, borders on contempt. And for what? No one's watching anyway. You would think the major corporations backing this network would be paying attention, but they don't seem to care.

I've only just now started reading The Future of The European Past, published by The New Criterion in 1997, a used copy of which arrived in the mail today, but I'm very glad to see that one of its key essays, "A Dearth of Feeling" by the great Anne Applebaum, is also available on her Website. The whole thing is well-worth reading, but in light of Dick Durbin's recent outburst, I think this passage is key:

James Panero writes:

Remember the Classic Blunders? Remember Wallace Shawn's melon visage in the dorm-basement-movie-night film The Princess Bride? Good, then you also remember his most famous line in that picture, which went something like: "You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The first is never get involved in a land war in Asia. The second, only slightly less well known, is this: never go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line! Ha ha ha ha ha ha." Now, get out your My Dinner with Andre action figures and repeat after me: In addition to getting involved in a land war in Asia and going up against Sicilians when death is on the line, there is a third Classic Blunder, and that is, Do Not Bomb the British.

The chief object of worship for much of the left of the US has "reportedly" been defiled by American prison guards:

(2005-07-09) -- Law enforcement authorities in major U.S. cities put riot police on high alert today after recently-jailed journalist Judith Miller complained that prison guards had desecrated her copy of The New York Times.

"We know that journalists worship the Times," said one deputy police chief, "If they take to the streets in protest, things could get ugly fast."

Ms. Miller, who works for the Times' counter-intelligence department, told an unnamed visitor that her copy of the revered 'Gray Lady' had been carelessly tossed on the floor, handled by a conservative Republican jailer (who she called 'an infidel') and may have been used as a lining for a cat's litter box.

"They did everything but flush it down the toilet," she said. "They have no respect for the 'paper of record', may it publish forever, nor for the wise and powerful ones who create this daily miracle."

Of Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, Mark Steyn once wrote:

After the spectacular D-Day prologue, the film settles down, Tom Hanks and his men are dispatched to rescue Matt Damon (the elusive Private Ryan) and Spielberg finds himself in need of the odd line of dialogue. Endeavouring to justify their mission to his unit, Hanks's sergeant muses that, in years to come when they look back on the war, they'll figure that `maybe saving Private Ryan was the one decent thing we managed to pull out of this whole godawful mess'. Once upon a time, defeating Hitler and his Axis hordes bent on world domination would have been considered `one decent thing'. Even soppy liberals figured that keeping a few million more Jews from going to the gas chambers was `one decent thing'. When fashions in victim groups changed, ending the Nazi persecution of pink-triangled gays was still `one decent thing'. But, for Spielberg, the one decent thing is getting one GI joe back to his picturesque farmhouse in Iowa.

One of the actors, Daniel Craig, gave the game away in an interview when he claimed that Spielberg intended to have his film send a message that "vengeance doesn't work". This apparently bothered Spielberg's consultant, Bill Clinton's Middle East envoy Dennis Ross, to such an extent that he felt it necessary to warn the Israelis about the direction of the project.

Craig also said that Spielberg "wants to get it right" as a founder of the Shoah Foundation and as a Jew, but the Israelis may beg to differ. Spielberg has yet to do any research with the Mossad, nor has he contacted agents involved in key intelligence posts at the time. It appears that Spielberg has decided to simply work from rumor and innuendo -- much more in the Oliver Stone mode than in the cinema verité of Schindler's List.

Why would Spielberg decide to focus so heavily on Israel's response instead of the terrorist attacks that initiated their actions? Exactly for the reasons given by Craig, only Spielberg doesn't intend on passing judgment merely on Israel for going after the terrorists that targeted its civilians. If these reports are accurate, he intends on passing judgment on America for going after the terrorists that targeted our civilians on 9/11. Spielberg has long opposed the Iraq War and the Bush administration for its efforts to eliminate the threat of Islamofascist terror and tyranny.

Make no mistake -- if Ross and Craig are correct, then Spielberg wants to use the murders of eleven Israeli athletes to issue an anti-Bush polemic. The film will be used as an argument for inaction and introspection instead of fighting the bloodthirsty lunatics that deliberately target and kill civilians. It will provide the ultimate in moral-relativist thinking and terrorist apologetics.

Three-time Oscar winner Oliver Stone will direct superstar Nicholas Cage in the first major Hollywood movie about the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, producers announced.

The as-yet untitled film, which will be made for Paramount Pictures, will tell the true stories of the last two men to be rescued alive from the ruins of the collapsed World Trade Center in New York.

"It's an exploration of heroism in our country -- but is international at the same time in its humanity," said Stone, who won best director Academy Awards for his war epics [err, anti-war epics, actually--Ed] "Born On the Fourth Of July" (1989) and 1986's "Platoon"

Not surprisingly, Roger L. Simon has some thoughts:

Hollywood, for whom foreign ticket sales are greater than those at home, is ever mindful of how its movies play abroad. Even given his string of recent failures, who better to choose if you're going to make a film about an American tragedy and don't want to offend foreign sensibilities than delusional Oliver? Indeed, he can be relied upon to pander to them.

Incidentally, a while back, I posted on the growing power of the foreign box office, which allows Hollywood to virtually ignore Red State America--at least for now.

On their Opinion Journal site, there's a Wall Street Journal op-ed that begins:

The Central American Free Trade Agreement passed the Senate last week, as everyone expected, but the more interesting news is who voted against it. Hint: This isn't Bill Clinton's Democratic Party anymore.

Nafta was one of the former President's signature achievements, and free trade one of the issues he used to define himself as a New Democrat. But last week only 10 Senate Democrats found the nerve to support Cafta, as opposed to 27 who voted for Nafta in 1993. Support among House Democrats looks even worse, with 10 or fewer expected to support Cafta when it comes up for a vote this summer, compared with 102 who backed Nafta.

Just as startling is which Senators voted against free trade with our southern neighbors. They include Joe Biden, who is often lauded as a statesman-internationalist; Chris Dodd, the self-avowed friend of Latin American democracy; Evan Bayh, the alleged heir to the New Democrat mantle; Jon Corzine, who made a fortune from free global capital markets at Goldman Sachs; and John Kerry, who lost last year's election in part because voters suspected he wasn't what he claimed to be (e.g., a free trader).

The biggest surprise, at least to us, is the no cast by New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. We'd have thought that a modest trade-opening deal with a few poor countries was an ideal chance to continue her march to moderation and demonstrate to business that she'd follow in the path of her husband as she seeks the White House in 2008. Apparently not.

On C-SPAN it looked like every Democratic leader voted against it and Hillary and all the other '08 contenders. That might be explained by internal party politics, but guys like John Corzine voted against it. Can he explain that to any of his friends on Wall Street? Can anyone explain why any businessman would contribute to the Democratic Party?

The weird one on the GOP side was the two Maine Senators voted against--anyone know why?

Here's the roll call and it does look like not a single one of the Democrat leaders or their '08 hopefuls voted in favor of free trade. Amazing.

Scott Ott writes:

"Bush: Africa's Poverty Reduces Greenhouse Gases"

(2005-07-05) -- President George Bush, on his way to the G8 Gleneagles summit in Scotland, told reporters gathered near his helicopter today that he sees a crucial connection between the two major issues on the G8 agenda -- global warming and African poverty.

"Everybody feels sorry for the poor people of Africa, because they're not industrialized yet," said the president. "But looking at the bright side, they're also not cranking out too much greenhouse gas either."

Mr. Bush said any G8 agreement on the two issues should take into account the impact African development could have on the Kyoto protocols on global warming.

"The last thing in the world we need is 20 or 30 more developed nations producing prosperity, buying up SUVs and destroying our atmosphere," he said.

The White House said the president has worked with international diplomats Bob Geldof and Bono to craft a proposal that would keep Africa in "clean, green sustainable poverty" for the foreseeable future through a series of charity rock concerts.

Johannesburg (CNSNews.com) - Former Democratic Governor of California Jerry Brown believes that poverty stricken residents of the developing world who want to emulate American prosperity should not be allowed to do so because "it's not viable."

In an exclusive interview, CNSNews.com asked Brown whether he thought the residents of the poorest nations of the world wanted to develop economically as the U.S. has done.

"Many do, but it's not viable," Brown replied. "I would say we can't develop like us, nor them...the developed model cannot work without another five planets," he added.

A British author critical of the Green movement, Professor Philip Stott, said Brown's anti-development views, as relayed to him, can be likened to Marie Antoinette's reported response when she was told the French peasants had no bread to eat: "Let them eat cake."

"I am deeply worried when I hear a white, Western, male start to lecture the developing world on what they should, or should not, want," Stott told CNSNews.com.

Brown, the current mayor of Oakland, Calif., appeared at the U.N.'s Summit on Sustainable Development (or Earth summit) on behalf of the environmental group Global Greens. Brown, who earned the nickname "Governor Moonbeam" for his somewhat unconventional style, appeared in numerous panel discussions while at the summit.

In the interview, Brown defended the Green group's efforts to stop infrastructure projects deemed too ecologically destructive in countries like India and Brazil. The projects would have brought running water and electricity to the poor residents of the nations.

"One thing you have to realize is the economy is inside the environment, not the other way around," an unapologetic Brown replied.

Little Green Footballs' hard drive took a powder today, according to a post by Charles Johnson on Roger L. Simon's site. Meanwhile, Charles is busy getting the site back up, as quickly as possible.

Update (7/9/05): Needless to say, he's back.

Yesterday evening, my wife and I met Roger L. Simon and Charles Johnson, along with syndicated columnist Jill Stewart at the AO/Technorati Open Media 100. Technorati chose to have their bash celebrating the cutting-edge of technological revolution at a decidedly non-cutting edge location, the Alpine Inn, a sort of funky roadside bar and grill with a large open air patio, in Portola Valley.

Roger has his own take on the events there, and of course, there’s no way I can top his description.

But I can take up the events afterwards. After chatting up folks from Technorati and various VC firms, we piled Roger, Charles, and Jill into the back of Nina’s 1987 Toyota Land Cruiser and headed deep into the hills near La Honda--site of Ken Kasey and the Merry Prankster’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests on the “Furthur” bus. (Life was hard for our forefathers in those stone knives and bearskins pre-spell check 1960s.)

But unlike that lysergic era, we had more high-tech discussions in mind. It was great to finally meet Roger and Charles. Charles, whose blog I’ve been reading since very shortly after 9/11, perfectly fits this description by James Lileks:

Turned on the Prager show Wednesday and caught half of Charles Johnson’s interview. He’s the webmaster of LGF, your one-stop shopping center for terrorism updates. He sounds exactly like I’d imagined, although I can’t say why - his writing often bores in like a woodburning tool, but I always suspected the man himself was mild in temperament. Something about the combination of web designer / bike fan / musician / Zappa admirer spelled laaaaiiiid back, and that’s what he was: calm, even, and decent.

Not surprisingly, Roger, who’s written for Paul Mazursky and Woody Allen, was acerbic and funny, even as he fought mammoth jetlag that would have laid low a weaker man.

Arriving at our secret neo-con safe house, I prepared an appropriate drink for the day: Martinis, whose main ingredient was the very essence of Ye Olde England, and whose invention was in the Bay Area--but needless to say, a very different Bay Area than today’s de facto Blue State capital.

The house we dined at was not owned by Blofeld or Karl Rove, as the post of this title suggests, but rather is the province of a mutual friend of Nina’s and mine. She has a top-secret dual identity that would make Agent 99 blush: expert money manager and equally expert chef and caterer. She prepared a superb meal including a butter lettuce salad, a lamb shank that just fell off the bone, and peaches in philo dough for dessert, which was equally marvelous.

We spent quite a bit of the evening discussing China, a country that Roger visited in the 1970s, and all agreed that Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s new book on Mao has the potential to be a blockbuster.

On the way back to the Alpine Inn to pick up their rental car, Roger raved about Ronald Radosh’s new Red Star Over Hollywood, and we all wondered why the writers of Hollywood’s past--no matter what their political persuasions--could write rings around today’s writers.

Of course, I get the feeling that the writers of Pajamas Media, the consortium that Roger and Charles started, along with Jill and others, will be writing rings around today’s writers in the mainstream media as well.

Hugh Hewitt is playing this exchange between Christopher Hitchens and Ron Reagan. Hitchins just demolishes Ron's Michael Moore-like feelings that Iraq was all pizza and fairy tales before we removed Saddam from power:

CH: Have you ever heard of Abu Nidal, the most wanted man in the world, who was sheltered in Baghdad? The man who pushed Leon Klinghoffer off the boat, was sheltered by Saddam Hussein. The man who blew up the World Trade Center in 1993 was sheltered by Saddam Hussein, and you have the nerve to say that terrorism is caused by resisting it? And by deposing governments that endorse it?

RR: No, actually, I didn't say that, Christopher.

CH: At this stage, after what happened in London yesterday?

RR: What I did say, though, was that Iraq was not a center of terrorism before we went in there, but it might be now.

CH: How can you know so little about...

RR: You can make the claim that you just made about any other country in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia.

CH: Absolutely nonsense.

RR: So do you think we ought to invade Saudi Arabia, where most of the hijackers from 9/11 came from, following your logic, Christopher?

CH: Uh, no. Excuse me. The hijackers may have been Saudi and Yemeni, but they were not envoys of the Saudi Arabian government, even when you said the worst...

RR: Zarqawi is not an envoy of Saddam Hussein, either.

CH: Excuse me. When I went to interview Abu Nidal, then the most wanted terrorist in the world, in Baghdad, he was operating out of an Iraqi government office. He was an arm of the Iraqi State, while being the most wanted man in the world. The same is true of the shelter and safe house offered by the Iraqi government, to the murderers of Leon Klinghoffer, and to Mr. Yassin, who mixed the chemicals for the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. How can you know so little about this, and be occupying a chair at the time that you do?

Serious talk is in the air that Chief Justice William Rehnquist has already turned in his papers, and is off to enjoy a well-earned retirement. Further changes are possible too. Duane Patterson, Hugh Hewitt's "Generalissimo" writes that as early as this fall, the Supreme Court will be remarkably different from the Sandra Day O'Connor-dominated "bend with the wind" version:

We are at a momentous time in history. This is a point in time when November could bring about the most responsible Supreme Court in memory. Could you imagine a Court that consisted of Chief Justice Michael Luttig, with Associate Justices Mike McConnell, John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Emilio Garza (Justice Ginsberg doesn't look too good, either), Anthony Kennedy, David Souter and Stephen Breyer? Six and a half to two and a half, in you count Kennedy as the wishy-washy one? It would be like Erwin Chemerinsky every week on the Hugh Hewitt Show...outmanned two to one.

Let's hope the rumor mill is right this time. The more vacancies to fill, the harder it's going to be for the Democrats to obstruct. They can block one seat, but blocking three without any justifiable reason just won't wash with the American people.

In an essay made even more timely by the horrific events of yesterday, Mark Steyn writes about the changing face of the post-9/11 left:

The post-9/11 world is not primarily a war between civilisations — the West vs Islam — but a war within one civilisation: ours. It’s a long existential struggle between those who believe that Western values — or, to be more precise, the values of the English-speaking world — are one of the great blessings of this world and those ‘counter-tribalists’ (in John O’Sullivan’s phrase) who believe those values are the source of most of the world’s ills. The latter are a relatively small group but their numbers are bolstered by legions so immersed in the sappy therapeutic culture of the age that they’ve been persuaded that the best way to ‘celebrate diversity’ is to abase oneself before moral relativism and non-judgmentalism. The Islamists are merely the lucky beneficiaries of this syndrome. It’s hard to fight a war in a culture that recoils from the very concept of an opposing side: there are no enemies, just friends whose grievances we haven’t yet accommodated.

For a few brief weeks after 9/11, back when Americans were celebrating the heroism of the brave passengers who rose up against their hijackers on Flight 93, it seemed as if the last words of Tod Beamer — ‘Let’s roll!’ — might indeed roll back the enervated multiculti squishiness of the age. In those days Michael Moore was an irrelevant fringe figure, a ‘well-known crank, regarded with considerable distaste even on the Left’, as Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate, assured us. Three years later, garlanded with Oscars and Palmes d’Or, Michael Moore was sitting alongside Jimmy Carter in the presidential box at the Democratic Convention.

The mainstreaming of ‘well-known cranks’ like Moore is one reason the Dems have become such reliable losers every other November. Reacting to Karl Rove’s recent assault on American liberals as unreliable on national security and war, big-time Democrats huffed indignantly that this was an outrage given their support over the Afghan campaign. OK, but even taking that at face value it was three and a half years ago: what have you done since? Bitched about Abu Ghraib and Gitmo and whined that Jacques Chirac doesn’t want to be friends any more. These days, heavyweight Dems lumber on to the Senate floor to do Noam Chomsky impressions: the other day it was Dick Durbin of Illinois comparing the US military at Guantanamo with Nazis and the Khmer Rouge.

Let's just say that their immediate reaction isn't promising. If the deaths of 3000 couldn't permanently change their outlook, why should 33?

I'll be offline, possibly until noon or so tomorrow. See you then.

Note: I wrote the bulk of this post late last night, before I woke up to the news of the terrorist bombing in London. I've only modified this piece slightly; I apologize if it sounds too exuberant after the news today.

I have two articles inside the July Nuts & Volts, that are curiously interconnected.

The first is an update to a piece I wrote for the July 2001 issue of N&V. Back then, I did a piece for N&V on Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum. At the time, it was located in the oddest and funkiest of locations--a Quonset hut on the former US Navy air base at Moffett Field (now controlled by NASA). In early September, I spun that article off into a shorter and slightly less technical version for National Review Online, back when they had their now sorely lamented "NRO Weekend" feature. A new blogger, whose Weblog had only gone up back in late August happened to spot it, which I only found when I did a vanity search on Google. (All writers do Google--and now Technorati vanity search--usually a few times a day...) That blogger? Glenn Reynolds.

This of course was all in the weeks leading up to 9/11, which would cause literally thousands upon thousands of Weblogs to spring up in response.

Flash-forward to 2005. Glenn's blog, and Power Line and their "Blog of the Year" sobriquet bestowed by Time magazine are both featured in my new article on Weblogs, along with numerous quotes from multiple interviews I conducted with Hugh Hewitt. The article includes explanations of how that term was derived, how to start a new blog, and what the Long Tail is, and how it benefits new blogs. If you've read the articles I've written for online publications since 2002 on Weblogs, a lot of this will be old hat, but I tried to write the piece as a primer for those coming in cold to the Blogosphere and wondering simultaneously what the heck a Weblog is, how they managed to raise so much hell last year, and how to get in on the fun.

If you're thinking of starting a blog in light of today's events, it could be a good starting point to get your ideas together before "going live".

As for the Computer History Museum, they moved into swank new facilities last year, a huge step up from their old Quonset hut days. If you can't make it out to Silicon Valley to visit in person, it's a great primer (at least I think) on the museum, its origin, and some of the rare pieces of computing history that's on display there.

In contrast, this is far less reassuring. Kathryn Jean Lopez quotes from this excerpt from an article in England's Evening Standard, back in April of 2004:

Four young British Muslims in their twenties - a social worker, an IT specialist, a security guard and a financial adviser - occupy a table at a fast-food chicken restaurant in Luton. Perched on their plastic chairs, wolfing down their dinner, they seem just ordinary young men. Yet out of their mouths pour heated words of revolution. "As far as I'm concerned, when they bomb London, the bigger the better," says Abdul Haq, the social worker. "I know it's going to happen because Sheikh bin Laden said so. Like Bali, like Turkey, like Madrid - I pray for it, I look forward to the day." "Pass the brown sauce, brother," says Abu Malaahim, the IT specialist, devouring his chicken and chips. "I agree with you, brother," says Abu Yusuf, the earnest-looking financial adviser sitting opposite. "I would like to see the Mujahideen coming into London and killing thousands, whether with nuclear weapons or germ warfare. And if they need a safehouse, they can stay in mine - and if they need some fertiliser [for a bomb], I'll tell them where to get it." His friend, Abu Musa, the security guard, smiles radiantly. "It will be a day of joy for me," he adds, speaking with a slight lisp. As they talk, a man with a bushy beard, dressed in a jacket emblazoned with the word "Jihad", stands and watches over them, handing around cups of steaming hot coffee. His real name is Ishtiaq Alamgir, but he goes by his adopted name, Sayful Islam, meaning "Sword of Islam". He is the 24-year-old leader of the Luton branch of al-Muhajiroun, an extremist Muslim group with about 800 members countrywide, who regard Osama bin Laden as their hero.

DJ Drummond writes:

With the horror of the London bombings filling the airwaves, the Hairspray Set have been dourly reminding us how easily it could have been an American city.

Not exactly, pal.

Fox News interviewed John Cutter, who is the former head of Counter-Terror for NYPD. Cutter explained that the city, and many other major cities in the United States, have studied the terrorist paradigm in the interest of learning ways to make their attacks harder and less likely. For instance, Cutter observed that terrorists generally like to control all the variables they can visiting their intended sites of attack several times in advance, and always noting security. They want to know what they will see and can expect when they make their attack. To mess with that love of regularity therefore, Cutter and his team of advisors changed elements of the NYPD patrols and their timing. Cutter explained that if you happened to be in Herald Square right now, you might not see a single cop, but 40 minutes from now there could be more than a dozen. Awful hard to plan a hit when you can’t be sure what the target will do.

This hardly means that terrorists can’t or won’t hit a target in the United States, and no one is saying we should get careless or not study the attacks to be better prepared. But the U.S. is not Europe, folks, and we are not casual about National Security. Any claim that the United States is at all comparable to any city in Europe, even London, should be considered with the same credibility one would attribute to, say, a SCOTUS comment by Senator Schumer.

Was a recently released terrorist detainee from Gitmo involved in the London bombing?

James Taranto's excellent Best of the Web Today column is up, and has numerous London-oriented links, including these two, which certainly resonated with me:

Can We Get Serious Again, Please?
Today's atrocity could have occurred in New York--or in Washington, Chicago, San Francisco or any other major American city. Indeed, we shouldn't have to remind anyone that an attack on a much worse scale happened in the U.S. less than four years ago--though it often seems as though certain people don't remember.

After all, what were American politicians doing while the terrorists were planning this morning's attack? The House, led by self-described socialist Bernie Sanders, was voting to prevent terror investigators from looking at library records. Rep. Charles Rangel was likening the liberation of Iraq to the Holocaust. Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, was urging the administration to treat al Qaeda terrorists as civilians and comparing American servicemen to Nazis.

Closer to London, the Associated Press reported on Tuesday that "a Belgian lawmaker's report calls for the United States to shut down its detention camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and send detainees to their home countries":

"We recommend terminating the Guantanamo detention facility," said the report's author, Anne Marie Lizin, who is also the Socialist president of the Belgian Senate. She said keeping the camp open was damaging the reputation of the United States and causing the "radicalization" of detainees.

As if al Qaeda was moderate before the Guantanamo camp opened. Andrew Sullivan said it well back in January 2002:

The debate over whether to treat the al Qaeda terrorists and murderers at Camp X-Ray as prisoners of war seems to me a no-brainer. To be a prisoner of war requires that you observe the rules of war. A critical part of those rules is that you wear insignia clearly identifying you as a member of a particular army. Al Qaeda did no such thing. Another critical component is that you obey the laws of war. Among those rules, in Yale professor Ruth Wedgwood's words, are also: "never deliberately attack civilians, and never seek disproportionate damage to civilians in pursuit of another objective."

Al Qaeda, of course, massacred thousands of civilians as a deliberate act. These terrorists are not soldiers. They are beneath such an honorific. They are not even criminals. In that respect, Dick Cheney's and Donald Rumsfeld's contempt for the whines of those complaining about poor treatment is fully justified. And vast majorities of Britons and Americans agree with them.

National Review's Jonah Goldberg quotes a reader who points out that violence such as London saw this morning "is what the people in Gitmo would rather be doing." It shouldn't take another terrorist attack to remind us of that fact.

The BBC Calls It by Its Name
"London Rocked by Terror Attacks" reads a headline on the BBC's Web site. This seems unremarkable, except that, as the Mediacrity blog points out, the BBC's "editorial guidelines," in Reutervillian style, state:

The word "terrorist" itself can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding. We should try to avoid the term, without attribution. We should let other people characterise while we report the facts as we know them.

The Beeb does apply this rule sometimes, such as in this timeline of attacks against Israel, which nowhere refers by name to terror, terrorism or terrorists.

Even Reuters is leaving out the scare quotes in some dispatches: "Police said they suspected terrorists were behind the bombings," the "news" service reports from London.

Those two posts and the rest of Taranto's page are extensively hyperlinked--too many for me to reproduce here. Click over for all of the links.

My friends at the UK-based Across the Atlantic Weblog have an extensive post on the London attack. (Which also answers the question I asked my wife at lunch: have we heard from them today? Are they safe? They are.)

Saddam's favorite UK politician is, not surprisingly, doing his best Neville Chamberlain impersonation. (Actually, that's an insult to Chamberlain, who at least wasn't on Hitler's payroll.)

During the spring and summer last year, after the Madrid 3/11 attack by Al-Qaeda, we linked to several articles warning of a possible terrorist attack on an American railroad.

Fortunately, despite numerous weird rumors floating around, nothing happened, of course. But this post by Kathryn-Jean Lopez of NRO sounds like there's still an enormous amount of work that could be done to secure the northeast corridor.

Glenn Reynolds and Power Line have lots of links. Not surprisingly, so does Little Green Footballs and Captain's Quarters. The latter's posts highlight that it's been a busy day in the world of Islamofascism.

Power Line links to this excellent review of Ronald and Allis Radosh's new book, Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony's Long Romance With The Left by The New Republic's Martin Peretz. In its own way, Peretz's review of the Radoshes' book is one of the best articles on the blacklist I've seen from the left side of the aisle. This is just a sample; the whole thing is well worth reading:

Imagine that there were now to be in the elites and among the aspiring elites millions of people who burnished the wisdom and political fortitude of, say, Charles Lindbergh and Ezra Pound. As it happens, these two individuals were truly great men in their ways, Lindbergh as an aviator and Pound as a poet. But they suffered the reasonable public ignominy of being sympathetic to fascism, Pound to the point of treason. Lindbergh did his penance as a combat flyer in the Pacific during World War II, but he was a hero no more. Yes, there is now an adoring Lindbergh website but that is the full of it. And, here and there, some crank clings not to the Cantos but to the curdled confusions of a crazed writer. Pound was truly punished for his war-time fascist heresies on the radio: From 1945 to 1958, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the Insane, now inhabited by John Hinckley Jr. Nothing to compare to the lighting of candles for those who were on the blacklist.

The blacklisted were mostly, though not all, hack writers and directors. But producing mediocre work is no crime. In Hollywood, it was usually richly rewarded. So what did they do wrong? They were enthusiasts for Stalin, certainly a moral offense equal to being an enthusiast for Hitler and Mussolini. This fidelity to Stalinism ran deep, and in behalf of Stalinism the comrades deceived, conspired, plotted. The Radoshes tell us who in Hollywood had had enough and saved their own souls, if not always their jobs. And they also tell us who in filmland perverted and fabricated on behalf of the communist design. It is hard to reconstruct a world in which so many intelligent people lived the ethical life of cosmic cheats.

Here is what Stalinists (no, a Leninist was no better) lied about: the police state, the show trials, the deliberate famines, the repression of the peasantry, the massive ethnic transfers, the executions, the great terror, the Gulag, the systematic and murderous anti-Semitism, the squelching of free thought, the Trotsky plot against the revolution (no, a Trotskyite was no better, either), the perversion of the judiciary, the Hitler-Stalin pact. According to them there were no "widows of the revolution," in David Remnick's affecting phrase. And, if circumstance happened to catch them in flagrante, they would lapse into that hoariest of justifications, "historical necessity." These are the atrocities which the blacklisted denied or defended or asserted were forced on the Kremlin by the West, the flabbiest of excuses. These men and women lived by a tissue of fabrication, and they passed that tissue--like a genotype--on to their children. Instead of being an apologist for Stalin, Richard Dreyfuss shilled for Arafat.

For Hollywood to portray communism as evil would be to look deeply into its own soul--and question much of its last 60 years. As I said, it won't happen.

Although I'd love to be proven wrong.

It's hard to argue that one of the reasons why Hollywood's American box office is sagging is that its writing has slipped remarkably over the years. One of its best writers, Ernest Lehman, passed away at age 89 on Saturday. The films that Lehman wrote include North by Northwest, The Sweet Smell of Success and The Sound of Music. Northwest is arguably both Alfred Hitchcock and Cary Grant's best film, and both it and The Sound of the Music were huge box office hits.

Sweet Smell of Success didn't have the same huge box office, but its dark, cynical look at both show business and the newspaper world, and its snarling dialogue (which Clifford Odets also contributed to) still hold up remarkably well today, as I discovered when I picked it up on DVD last year.

Update: Ian Hamet has much more on Lehman.

Found via James Taranto, Martin Grove of The Hollywood Reporter has a blinding flash of the obvious:

In speculating about why moviegoing is down this summer insiders are starting to ask if there's a disconnect between the public and Hollywood over politics and social issues.

Studio executives have already cited weaker product, pre-show commercials, high ticket prices and DVD competition as contributing to the summer slide. What's even more troubling is the possibility that audiences are being turned off by their general perception of Hollywood's morality and politics. To some observers it seems that as more and more movie stars go public with their personal views on national and international issues, people across the country are starting to take offense.

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago:

I wouldn't have as much of a problem with any of the post-9/11 films, if there was some balance. Nobody begrudged Hollywood producing anti-war films like Paths of Glory or All Quiet On The Western Front (both superb pictures of course, especially the former), as long as we were also getting Casablanca and 30 Seconds Over Tokyo. Even as late as the 1980s, Hollywood could gave its audiences both Platoon and Rambo.

A while back, Mark Steyn noted that the leftwing fetish for multiculturalism has had the perverse effect of making Hollywood movies less ethnocentric than ever before.

And just as with newspapers, an industry that obsesses over cultural diversity is writing more and more of its stories from the exact same homogenized cookie-cutter template, even as they wonder why they keep losing audience share.

Michael Ozanian of Forbes writes that while New York has lost its bid for the 2012 Summer Olympics to London (sorry Jacques), "New York City taxpayers should celebrate":

We've gone from Bernard to Jonah, and now back to Bernard this morning, as the second part of Ed Morrissey's interview with Bernard Goldberg is now online.

Jonah Goldberg looks at Live8 through a gimlet eye:

You may be wondering how much money this intercontinental jam session raised for the sick and dying of Africa. Alas, not a farthing. Sir Bob Geldof was very explicit about this point. Live8 was intended to raise consciousness and exert political pressure on the G8 summiteers. No one was allowed to actually raise money for the masses of starving people in Africa. None of the dollars spent on the concert by fans, corporate sponsors, or television networks will reach Africa. Charities couldn't rattle tin cups outside the porta-potties and concession stands. This was solely an effort to prod the West to get behind the slogan, "Make Poverty History."

Nice line. But, uh, how? I'm sure Geldof, Bono, and a few others have some ideas worth listening to. But I somehow doubt the Madonna and Snoop Dogg fans in the audience had formed a particularly cogent consensus on how to "Make Poverty History." In fact, I doubt you could get even a fraction of them to agree on a recipe for apple brown betty.

Very smart people have been trying really, really hard to make poverty history for a long time. Heck, they've been working very hard to make Africa just ever-so-slightly less hellish for a very long time. Debt relief is probably part of a potential solution, but without ending Africa's tendency to produce horrible, greedy dictatorships, debt relief is more akin to paying off a drug addict's credit cards.

Even if the concert goers were speaking with a single voice, they weren't saying anything of much use, except "we care" — and aren't we special people for it? Geldof summed up the attitude perfectly when he said, "Something must be done, even if it doesn't work."

Had D-Day not gone according to plan, General Eisenhower had prepared a speech in which he assumed full responsibility for its failure. Fortunately, he never had to give it.

Similarly, Bill Safire was tasked by the Nixon White House to write a speech that no one hoped President Nixon would actually have to read:

"To: H.R. Haldeman," reads the memo dated July 18, 1969. "From: Bill Safire." The subject: "IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER."

The Apollo 11 astronauts had lifted off at 9:32 a.m. July 16 from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, embarking on a mission that spanned nine days. Commander Neil Armstrong and pilot Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin were preparing to separate the lunar module Eagle from the command ship Columbia, and descend to the moon's surface. What if they were stranded there? Inside Richard Nixon's White House, chief of staff Haldeman considered that possibility. And so Safire penned a speech of 233 words no one wanted to hear:

"Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace," Safire would have had Nixon say. "Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man's search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.

"For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind."

A protocol was established: Nixon would call the "widows-to-be" before speaking to the nation. NASA would cut communications with the astronauts. And then, the memo went on to say, "a clergyman should adopt the same procedure as a burial at sea, commending their souls to `the deepest of the deep,' concluding with the Lord's Prayer."

But tragedy was not to be Apollo 11's fate.

Along with the Blogosphere, HBO television producer (formerly of CBS, where he worked with Ted Baxter Dan Rather) Bernard Goldberg's books, first Bias and later, Arrogance have done much to reframe how we view the mainstream media, as I discussed in my two-part profile of Goldberg for Tech Central Station.

Goldberg has a new book coming out, and with a title like 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (and Al Franken Is #37), you know he's loaded for bear.

He recently discussed its central thesis with another Ed, Ed Morrissey of the great Captain's Quarters Weblog:

Look, I think whether somebody is a Democrat or a Republican, or a liberal or a conservative, I think we can agree – I hope we can agree – that we’ve become a nastier, less civil, more selfish America than we ought to be. And there’s a tendency to believe that, “Well, these things just happen, it’s the natural evolution of the culture, nobody’s really at fault, it just happens.”

Well, that’s not true. People really are at fault. There are real people with real names, and what this book is about is those real people who, in my view, are doing real harm to our country, in various parts of the culture. I touch on the media; that’s only one very small part of this book, a very small part. We talk about the Hollywood blowhards –

CQ: Right.

BG: I’ll go into each of these specifically, but let me just get the overview. Hollywood blowhards, which is a liberal institution out there. Intellectual thugs – nobody will disagree that colleges are run by the left, and these are people who impose speech codes. What’s liberal about that?

CQ: Right, exactly.

BG: The TV people who put on shows in prime time who put on shows that – at eight o’clock at night, I don’t want to have sit in front of the TV with my kids … You know, I say kids, but my son is older now, but people don’t want to sit there with there kids and watch one cheap sex joke after another. I will tell you, Ed, that I’m not the Church Lady. I don’t care at all how people talk or what people do in their private lives. What this book is about is the public arena, the public square and what’s going on in that area of our lives. In terms of private stuff, people can say and do whatever they want, I don’t care. But this is the public arena, and I care very much about that, and I think a lot of Americans are just fed up with what’s going on.

CQ: One of the things you touch on, you mentioned about not making judgments, and right in your introduction you write about that tolerance has turned into an indiscriminate tolerance. People must tolerate everything or be considered, like you said, a prude.

BG: Or a square.

CQ: Right.

BG: I think that may be the single most important sentence in the book, to be honest with you. Over the years, we grew tolerant of all the right things. We grew tolerant of civil rights, we became more tolerant of women’s rights. We became tolerant of various kinds of rights, and it was a good thing that we did. But over the years, we became indiscriminately tolerant. We became tolerant of crap! To tell somebody, to make a comment about this crap is to be judgmental somehow. And somehow, being judgmental of crap has become a bad thing.

Let’s talk about the TV stuff in particular. As I said, this used to be called the Family Hour. Now, it’s one cheap sex joke after another. But if you complain about that, you’re a prude, or you’re a square. You know what? This is why I come down harder on liberals than I do on conservatives, because the Left has decided to look the other way. They don’t want to complain about this, because if they do, now they’re on the side of the morality police. Oh, they couldn’t possibly want to be on that side.

So they make believe this isn’t a big deal, but you know what? The very people who care the most about the environment, as they rightly should, suddenly believe that what we put out in the cultural environment doesn’t mean anything. Air pollution means something; it affects how we live. What we put out into the culture means something, too, because that affects how we live. It affects the kind of America we live in.

Speaking of Iowahawk, I know I'm really late to this one, but his take on the history of the New York Times is a scream:

Read the whole thing, and prepare to laugh out loud.

Unless your name is Arthur O. "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr., Jerome "Poke" Sulzberger, Norbert "Slap" Sulzberger, Richard "Thwack" Sulzberger, Leonard "Spank" Sulzberger, or Harriet "Wedgie" Sulzberger-Smith.

Update: Nice related quote from The Blogfather:

Any time you start to doubt yourself, and wonder if you're fit for the big leagues of American thought and opinion, you can just read The Times and be thankful that the standards of the big leagues aren't so high.

Check out who the big three are on the list of countries who sold weapons to Saddam in the 1980s. Not much of a surprise, actually...unless of course, like Peter Bull in Dr. Strangelove, your source for news is the New York Times.

(Via Don Surber.)

Pajama Hadin is your one stop source for all of your Live8 needs. He's got dozens of links to bloggers discussing Bob Geldof's big event, all contained in this post.

Iowahawk's Special Guest Commentator, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, is back. And boy, is he p.o'ed.

(Via Charles Johnson.)

Dennis Prager once wrote, "As a famous Soviet dissident joke put it: "In the Soviet Union, the future is known; it's the past which is always changing."

That goes for former Soviet satellite nations as well. We linked last week to a post by David Medienkritik, who noted that Checkpoint Charlie, which memorializes the 1,065 killed trying to cross the Berlin Wall, was scheduled to be demolished on July 4th. (Interesting choice of dates...)

In a post with several photos of the event, Gateway Pundit writes that that schedule was sadly met.

Roger L. Simon links to a post at Nospeedbumps.com that explains which nation has had the fastest growing economy over the last two years:

There are practical reasons why most Iraqis may decide that it is better if some American forces stay. Iraq’s economy is likely to continue to make steady improvements. It has been the fastest growing economy in the world for the last two years. If the Iraqis come to see the U.S. presence fostering prosperity in their country, they may conclude it is better if the Americans stay.

Under Saddam Hussein, . . . cars were as rare on the streets of Iraq as ATM machines. Owning a car was a sure sign of deep loyalty to President Hussein, who tightly restricted the import of these expensive, luxury items. While palace cronies whizzed about Baghdad on Italian radials, the average Iraqi, who earned less than $300 annually, succumbed to public transportation and shoe leather.

The Bush War has changed all that. [Does that mean that World War I is more properly titled The Wilson War and and World War II The FDR/Truman War?--Ed] Foreign exchange has put more dinars in the hands of consumption-minded Iraqis. Near the top of the list of luxury items flowing into the country is the automobile. More than 1 million used cars have entered Iraq during the past two years, according to a police survey referenced by the Riyadh-based IFP report, "Rebuilt Iraq." Less than half that number existed in the entire country before the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Mosul, for example, which previously had only 57,000 registered cars, now has 125,000.

It turns out Payne is nostalgic for the good old days of Saddam's fascist rule: "Blame Bush for flood of used cars in Iraq that have become deadly tools of suicide bombers."

Talk about not being able to see the forest for the trees. Or the cars.

That's what British rocker Chris Martin dubbed Live8. Stefan Beck, Mark Steyn and Peter Burnet beg to differ.

Well, they don't really beg--they're all far too polite to do that. But they do ask very nicely. And far mare articulately than Martin.

What would Joe Biden say if President Bush tapped one of the founding fathers for a Supreme Court seat? Television evening news anchormen would probably say something like this.

(Via Tech Central Station.)

Reading about Garry Trudeau's attack on Bloggers got me thinking about all of the bad press the mainstream media has thrown at the Blogosphere since...well, since before there was a Blogosphere.

In 1998, a young man (who has since indicated that he hates being called a blogger) burst onto the national scene by the name of Matt Drudge. Here's a little bit of what the mainstream press wrote about Drudge, the first person to gain national recognition as an Internet-based journalist:

Live8's an event just begging for someone like Mark Steyn to "take the mickey out of", as the British like to say. And fortunately, he does just that in his latest essay in England's Telegraph:

Sad news from the football world, as NFL Hall of Fame head coach Hank Stram died today, at age 82:

Nancy Pelosi's gift of the gab is the gift that keeps on giving:

Looking for lots of conservative commentary on the Fourth of July? Check out John Hawkins' new Conservative Grapevine, which is a one-stop traffic cop for much of the right side of the Blogosphere.

I've been pretty skeptical of Live8, but Peter Burnet really opens up a can of well-deserved whoop-ass on the whole event:

Please forgive a self-referential rant, but I have asked a few knowledgeable people in government in the last two weeks about Live 8, and read many articles on it. Those with even a modicum of historical perspective and good sense knew full well there is something very wrong and embarrassing here. But all of them felt obliged to bury concerns about rampant corruption, totalitarianism, waste, apathy and inefficiency in gooey bromides about how great it is that so many young people are showing that they “care”.

It’s not great at all. It is a self-indulgent, quasi-racist conceit which betrays the small, but growing, African middle-class and intellectual forces that are the sole hope of that wretched continent. It is an appalling surrender to a post-modern, post-colonial guilt that wasn’t even that persuasive in 1950's Paris, where it was born. It is a selfish, damaging triumph of silly Oprah-speak over genuine charity. As in the Middle East, it proves that the left and its allies have pretty much given up critical though and decided to back demagogues who score high on ideological purity and cut a mean swath through international development conferences at the expense of honest and proud moderate Africans who get up in the morning and strive. Anyone who wanted to make a dramatic, (and moral) difference in Africa would have a hard time gainsaying the ideas that we should abandon our agricultural tariffs and send a message of hope by invading Zimbabwe, whatever South Africa thinks about it. We won’t do that, of course. If we did, we might actually accomplish something. What would we have then to sing about?

On this Fourth of July, Iowahawk has a special guest blogger teaching a message of pacifism, tolerance and diversity that we could all learn something from...

Nick Stewart (found via Instapundit) has some thoughts on the Doonesbury cartoon that's making the rounds today, which implies that bloggers subsist on a diet of cat food. (Man, I hope that's not what the waiter at the Left Bank served me last night!):

What we have to realize is that people like Trudeau aren't going to go away, and regardless of how large the readership of a blog gets, the naysayers will assume that it's a fad waiting to die. This applies in a major way to those who fear the growth of blogs, because every dollar spent on advertising in the pages of blogs is another dollars taken away from traditional sources. Trudeau relies on the synidication of his strip in order to make money, as well as the small writing and television ventures he is pursuing. Advertising effects him in a direct way, although the rise of blogging seems to have hit him in more of a personal way than a fiscal way. He talks about how we're "semi-employed losers" who are "too lazy" to get jobs in journalism, which is not only untrue, but completely misses the attributes associated with being a blogger. As bloggers, we retain the ability to have jobs, most of them being pretty good jobs, while divulging our opinions to as many readers we can. We have a form of income that allow us to life comfortably, while taking care of our families, and having some extra time to put together meaningful columns.

I'll be the first to tell you that by my estimates, only 15 - 20% of bloggers look at blogging as a form of information distribution relevant to local, national, or international news, while the rest use their blogs to post pictures of their family, or talk about their day at school. Some, like myself, use blogs to distribute specialized information. Trudeau creates fiction that mocks reality, not in a funny way, but in a way that makes most turn away with a sour look on their face from the sheer lack of respect [for people of all walks of life] exuded by the comic itself. Trudeau is no better than the so-called artists who pay bums to beat each other within an inch of their lives and then claim it is for "artistic purposes." I'm sure the argument can be waged for an endless number of years as to who holds the moral high ground, and I'm not sure if either medium does, but it's safe to assume that most of us in the blogosphere are not lazy, lacking employment, or filled with enough anger that we can rival Saddam Hussein. The same cannot be said for Gary Trudeau, who seems to take out his anger on whoever he believes will not feel the need to fight back against a comic book character.

Navel gazing was actually the preferred epithet used for many of the attacks on bloggers by academia and the press shortly after 9/11--because that's what the Blogosphere was still primarily known for. But in the wake of fact checking Trent Lott, John Kerry, Dan Rather, Eason Jordan, the New York Times, Newsweek, Dick Durbin and Brian Williams within an inch of their lives, it's fascinating to watch the still surprisingly clueless mainstream media view all bloggers as lone nut political junkies living in Travis Bickle-style apartments eating Friskies for dinner, rather that as but one subgroup of ten million or so computer users uploading all sorts of disparate stuff, using what is currently the easiest form of online publishing.

A few months ago, Hugh Hewitt told me that big media has never understood the long tail of the Blogosphere. "And now they've got the tail just eating them, all day, 24/7."

Tastes better than Fancy Feast.

"How unfortunate for [Brian] Williams and Dick Durbin that people just keep taking what they say in the wrong way."

--Betsy Newmark, who links to this Jeff Goldstein piece, which lists nine other analogies that Williams forgot to make on The NBC Nightly News.

Jonah Goldberg, who once produced programs for PBS in his younger days, has some surprisingly balanced thoughts on what public television is and isn't:

Now, I must disclose a bit here. I worked in the backalleys of PBS for about a half-dozen years. I produced a weekly television show and several documentaries, and I was involved on the business side of things quite a bit. I’ve attended annual meetings and conferences. In short, I know a little bit about public television.

And … it’s liberal. It just is. To say it isn’t is just plain batty. The shows we associate most with PBS are run by liberals — some of them great journalists and some of them miserable partisan hacks — and they tend to tackle questions from a liberal perspective. The people who run PBS are liberals. The decision-makers are liberals, and — contrary to funhouse logic of PBS’s left-wing critics — the fact that these executives sometimes opt to put conservatives on the air doesn’t change that fact. It might mean, as some leftist critics claim, that PBS execs don’t have the courage of their convictions. Or it might just mean that they’re trying to make the network more balanced and respond to a perceived need.

Whatever. But don’t tell me the Volvos in the PBS parking lot with bumper stickers reading “God is coming … and she’s pissed!” are really closet conservatives. It just won’t wash. In fact, just last week I caught a biographical documentary about the late Communist stooge Henry Wallace that was so over the top in its praise, I thought it would end with him riding Pegasus through the clouds.

That said, conservatives who think the regular fare on PBS is crazy left-wing stuff overstate the case. Typical PBS programming involves breathless suburbanites dreaming that grandpa’s old footlocker might actually be the Ark of the Covenant on “Antiques Roadshow.” Yes, Bill Moyers is a disingenuous lefty, but Gwen Ifill and Jim Lehrer try to play it fair. And it isn’t a conservative-free zone.

The liberal-conservative thing, however, is a sideshow. Public television was created to help poor people, educate young people, and to promote diversity on TV. Today, the average PBS viewer is in his late 50s. Somewhere around two-thirds of the poor have cable or satellite TV. Even more have DVD or VCR players. When PBS was created in 1967, it increased the number of television stations by 25 percent. Today PBS stations constitute a rounding error among the choices available to most consumers.

More relevant, with the obvious exception of “Sesame Street,” the target audience for PBS isn’t remotely the poor. It’s the well-to-do. Yes, some poor folks enjoy symphonies and entire shows dedicated to shiitake mushrooms and fennel. I have no doubt that there’s some lunch bucket Joe who races home after clearing roadkill all day just to catch “Washington Week in Review.” But, come on, who’re we kidding?

And that’s the great irony of the restored PBS budget cuts. Because budget rules said the money had to come from somewhere, Congress raided social programs for the poor to give Big Bird back his $100 million.

Which brings up another bogus argument. When public broadcasting’s integrity is attacked, the PBSers harrumph that government money is only a tiny fraction of their budgets. But, they say without taking a breath, if you take even one penny of it away, it will destroy us.

Or consider PBS’s glorious status as “commercial free” programming. The sponsors I used to dun for cash must do a spit-take every time they hear this. PBS is not only chock-a-block with ads — they merely appear before and after, but not during, most programs — but some shows are actual commercials. The cooking shows — dozens of them — are infomercials for cookbooks and delicately placed products. Even the best documentaries (and there are some great ones) are shrewdly packaged as part of a larger marketing campaign to move all sorts of swag, from coffee table books to CDs. And if you think “Sesame Street” is pure, you haven’t seen my daughter’s diapers (or her cups, plates, band-aids, stuffed toys, etc.).

It should also be noted that in terms of fulfilling one of PBS’s original mandates of informing the public about its own government, C-Span eats public broadcasting’s lunch every day — and it’s as commercial free as it gets.

Mark Steyn writes, "On this Independence Day weekend, the people might wish to give some thought as to how they might reclaim their independence from the God-like Supremes":

Most laymen understand the "public interest" dimension as, oh, they're putting in the new Interstate and they don't want to make a huge detour because one cranky old coot refuses to sell his ramshackle dairy farm. But the Supreme Court's decision took a far more expansive view: that local governments could compel you to sell your property if a developer had a proposal that would generate greater tax revenue. In other words, the "public interest" boils down to whether or not the government gets more money to spend.

I can't say that's my definition. Indeed, the constitutional conflation of "public interest" with increased tax monies is deeply distressing to those of us who happen to think that letting governments access too much dough too easily leads them to create even more useless government programs that enfeeble the citizenry in deeply destructive ways.

Nonetheless, across the fruited domain, governments reacted to the court decision by sending the bulldozers round to idle expectantly on John Doe's front lawn: In New Jersey, Newark officials moved forward with plans to raze 14 downtown acres and build an upscale condo development; in Missouri, the City of Arnold intends to demolish 30 homes, 14 businesses and the local VFW to make way for a Lowe's Home Improvement store and a strip mall developed by THF Realty.

Get the picture? New Hampshire businessman Logan Darrow Clements did. He wants to build a new hotel in the town of Weare and he's found just the right piece of land: the home of Supreme Court judge David Souter. In compliance with Justice Souter's view of the public interest, Clements' project will generate far more revenue for Weare than Souter's pad ever could. The Lost Liberty Hotel will include the Just Desserts Bar and a museum dedicated to the loss of freedom in America.

I don't know about you, but the last time I was in Weare, N.H., I couldn't help thinking that what this town urgently needs is a good hotel. If it will help the Board of Selectmen in their decision, I personally pledge to take the most expensive suite in the new joint for the first month it's in service. I'll be sluicing plenty of big columnar bucks around town, racking up big N.H. Meals Tax payments at Weare's finest restaurants and, along with my fellow guests, doing far more for the local economy than one ascetic, largely absentee bachelor like Justice Souter could ever do. Indeed, under Souter's definition, it would be hard to think of a property doing less for the public interest than his own house. So let's get on with putting his principles into action, and with luck his beloved but economically moribund abode will be rubble by the end of the year.

Two actually, who are both stuck in the era of All The President's Men. First up, via PoliPundit, is USA Today founder Al Neuharth, who takes us back to that other touchstone of the media, the Tet Offensive, when a CBS anchorman could completely misread a military battle, and call for the US to cut and run:

Walter Cronkite, CBS-TV news anchor known as "the most trusted man in America," after a combat tour of Vietnam in 1968 declared, "There is no way this war can be justified any longer."

Johnson lamented to aides, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America." He announced he would not run for re-election.

The crucial difference between Vietnam and Iraq is that there is no Cronkite to call Bush's bluff. Without a strong, trusted, non-political voice, too many of us remain Bush-blinded.

The original three networks, plus the similarly biased CNN now compete with Fox, talk radio, and the Blogosphere for public opinion, each of whom have done yeoman work reminding the public that unlike the Al Neuharths of the world, that this isn't 1968, and Iraq isn't Vietnam.

Which makes it virtually impossible for one man to rise to the top of the opinion heap, unlike 1968 when Cronkite was at the peak of his powers as an opinion shaper--there's just so many more choices, for people on both sides of the aisle now that, to borrow Alvin Toffler's word, the media has been "de-massified".

"There is no argument by which one can defend a poem.
It defends itself by surviving, or it is indefensible."--George Orwell*

Stephen Green of VodkaPundit recently posted his list of his favorite concept albums. I'll argue in a moment with only one of those choices, but naturally, I got to thinking what mine would be, and so, off the top of my head, and, as they say on C-Span, with the request that I be allowed to revise and extend my remarks should these opinions change, here goes, in no particular order:

Scott Ott "reports" that Teddy Kennedy isn't wasting any time--he's already slamming President Bush's unnamed Supreme Court nominee!

The Senator's office issued a news release to the media documenting the allegations against the potential high court judge, with a convenient blank line allowing reporters to fill in the nominee's name as soon as that information is leaked.

Last December, when the 1985 Live Aid shows were finally officially released onto DVD after years of being bootlegged, I wrote about the event--and more importantly, its aftermath--for The Weekly Standard.

The Live Aid concerts focused on starvation in Ethiopia, but collectively, the rock stars involved couldn't see the forest from the trees. As I wrote back then:

In the '80s, Colonel Haile Mariam Mengistu, the despot who overthrew (and later executed) Haile Selassie as ruler of Ethiopia in 1974, was more than willing to exploit Geldof and the millions of dollars Live Aid raised.

And the BBC documentary which inspired Geldof made little mention of how Mengistu exploited famine as a political weapon. His goal was to depopulate rebel-held areas by forcibly relocating hundreds of thousands of villagers from northern Ethiopia to areas in the south. Instead, the BBC's Michael Buerk merely described Ethiopia's situation as "biblical famine."

Buerk knew what he was doing. As he later told Wolf, "You've got . . . to make the decision, is this side story of any real significance? And also, at the back of your mind, is: if I overemphasize a negative angle to this, I am going to be responsible for . . . inhibiting people from coughing up their money." Why let facts complicate a good story?

Between the BBC documentary, other news stories, and the Live Aid concerts, nearly a billion dollars flowed into Ethiopia during the '80s. Most of it came from various foreign governments; Geldof's efforts represented nearly a quarter of total.

Along with the cash, thousands of western workers and journalists began to enter Ethiopia. Mengistu knew a good thing when he saw it and used the combined tidal wave
of money and sympathy to prop up his regime. He required that relief workers convert their western tender to the local currency at a rate favorable to his junta, which tripled its foreign currency reserves, allowing it to buy arms and materiel. Mengistu's troops also commandeered aid vehicles and fed themselves on the incoming foodstuffs. As Wolf notes, "it became clear that a significant proportion of the relief food in Tigray--the epicenter of the famine--was consigned to the militia. The militias were known locally as 'wheat militias'."

The money allowed Mengistu to string out his war efforts for six more years. Between starvation and outright murder, the war cost more than 100,000 Ethiopian lives.

On his Weblog today, Don Surber looks at what a mess Africa as a whole continues to be:

The Live 8 concerts to lobby leaders of eight nations to "forgive" loans of $25 billion to African dictators was the latest in a 36-year history of branding rock concerts with world events. Woodstock, concerts for Bangladesh and Live Aid 20 years ago oversimplify the complicated issues of the world for the convenient consumption of teenagers and twentysomethings.

So why is there poverty in Africa? Well, that depends on what one means by "Africa." Let us look at the continent, nation by nation.

And then some.

(But hey, at least the musicians participating get fabulous parting gifts!)

The Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal department looks at Ulf Hjertstrom:

If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, what do you call a Swede who's been kidnapped? Somebody you wouldn't want to cross, that's for sure.

Ulf Hjertstrom has redefined the term Stockholm Syndrome, the bizarre attachment some hostages develop for their captors, first observed during a bank robbery in the Swedish capital more than 30 years ago. No such bonds were forged between Mr. Hjertstrom, a Swedish oil engineer, and the Shura Council of the Mujahedeen of Iraq, which held him captive for 67 days. "I have now put some people to work to find these bastards," Mr. Hjertstrom told reporters after his release. "I invested about $50,000 so far. And we will get them one by one. These scum should be out of business."

It does sound as if Mr. Hjertstrom has seen a few Charles Bronson movies, though it's impossible not to empathize with his reaction. Mr. Hjertstrom was subject to mock executions and forced to witness the murder of several hostages. Contrast his response with that of Guiliana Sgrena, the Italian journalist accidentally shot by U.S. troops, who said coalition soldiers were ultimately responsible for the kidnappings in Iraq.

Likewise, Georges Malbrunot, one of two French hostages released in December, first did not understand why he and his colleague were held captive since their country had opposed the war. Eventually, though, Mr. Malbrunot came to understand. "Little by little, we came to discover we were really on planet bin Laden," he wrote in Le Figaro. "For them [the terrorists], France is the West, it's a global vision, it's the infidel West against the Muslim world."

In The New York Post, Ralph Peters asks us to "Sit back and press the memory button", something the media never does when it comes to the War on Terror:

Hugh Hewitt has some thoughts on what what's to come during the Supreme Court nomination process:

In short, this is going to be very ugly because the left will commit itself to winning at any cost, and if it takes a dozen Melody Townsels peddling two dozen slanders each, then that is what they will try.

Expect as well the demand for documents that cannot be produced or will not be produced under long standing precedents. That will not succeed in and of itself, but again delay will be the objective until the willing witnesses are found and coached. Like Bush's DUI in the 2000 campaign, the biggest charge of all will drop just as the hearings come to a close, with the left hoping to force another round of hearings as happened with Justice Thomas.

The best defense here starts with the combination of a thoroughly scrubbed nominee and vigilance of new media on the center right and perhaps even skepticism of legacy media of sensational charges (unlikely). The key, though, will be speed. Senators Frist and Specter need to establish a schedule, stick to it, and alert the public from day one that a filibuster will be met with the constitutional option after 100 hours of debate following the conclusion of the hearings. The longer the process drags on, the greater the chance to invent and deploy Townsels. The more specific the schedule and the notice on the constitutional option, the greater the attention of the public and the scrutiny of would-be Anita Hills.

It would also be useful to start reminding people that there have been more than 300 recess appointments of judges in the country's history, beginning with George Washington, and including appointments to the Supreme Court. Eisenhower used recess appointments to put Chief Justice Warren, and Justices Brennan and Stewart on the bench.

The Wall Street Journal explains why China doesn't want you to read a book review for the upcoming blockbuster biography of Mao:

The China National Publications Import & Export (Group) Corporation--the official distributors of foreign publications in China--last week informed Dow Jones, publishers of the Review and this newspaper, that inclusion of the book review would keep the June issue of the monthly magazine off newsstands. An article on trafficking in endangered species was also deemed offensive.

"It may seem strange that Beijing is so sensitive to criticism of Mao after all this time," says Hugo Restall, editor of the Review. "But then consider that, despite tremendous economic progress, China's political system is still pretty close to where it was half a century ago--and look at the disasters like the Cultural Revolution that followed.

"Naturally, the country's leaders want to conceal from their own people and the rest of the world just how vulnerable China is to political instability," Mr. Restall went on. "The tools in their arsenal range from the subtle, such as recruiting businessmen to speak on their behalf, to the crude, like banning magazines."

Two years ago at a Harvard conference devoted to Mao Zedong, retired Beijing University Professor Yue Daiyun recalled her suffering during the Maoist era. “Why would Mao relentlessly and repeatedly knock down and trample those who came to support him, had never opposed him, indeed embraced and loved him?” The constant fear during those years, she said, was that “no one is safe.”

Too infirm to come to the Harvard conference, Li Rui, once Mao’s secretary, sent a paper stating that “Mao was a person who did not fear death and he did not care how many were killed. Tens of millions of people suffered during every political movement and millions starved to death.”

Most of the contemporary biographers of Mao, from Stuart Schram, (still the leading Mao scholar), to Philip Short, author of Mao: A Life, were at Harvard. Only two guests from Beijing praised the chairman. But there was an effort among the other academics to find why many Chinese worshipped Mao.

One of those present was Harvard’s Roderick MacFarquhar, who in volume three of his great The Origins of the Cultural Revolution compared Mao to Hitler and wrote, “I have been particularly interested in the human tragedy represented by Mao’s purge of his long-time comrades of the Long March and the base areas [and] his dissolution of the Yan’an ‘Round Table.’”

Now comes Jung Chang, author of the excellent, bestseller Wild Swans. She and her husband, the historian Jon Halliday, have written Mao: The Unknown Story—which is huge in every sense. They answer Professor MacFarquhar’s concern, Professor Yue’s question—how could Mao do it?—and refute Li Rui’s suggestion that while Mao was a world-class killer, he didn’t fear death. From this copiously documented book we learn that Mao killed because he liked it; that he acquired a taste for slaughter in the late 1920s; and that he was terrified of death, probably because he had killed so many that revenge may have been lurking around every corner.

In her publisher’s note, Ms. Chang explains her motives for writing this book:

I decided to write about Mao because I was fascinated by this man, who dominated my life in China, and who devastated the lives of my fellow countrymen. He was as evil as Hitler or Stalin, and did as much damage to mankind as they did. Yet the world knows astonishingly little about him.

In an interview in the Sunday Telegraph she said Mao was “the biggest mass murderer in the history of the world.”

It is always disturbing when a book claims to be the “unknown story.” Ms. Chang claims that the world knows little of Mao. Actually the world, because of years of Western Mao scholarship and the experience of many Chinese whose lives the chairman indeed devastated, knows a lot about him. There are other biographies, some of them excellent, to which little or no credit is given by the authors, and—thanks to Harvard’s Stuart Schram—many volumes of Mao’s writings.

I am no Mao specialist, but before reading this latest biography I was broadly aware of the Mao story, particularly his life-long heartlessness and capacity for inflicting suffering on a national scale. Lucian Pye, for example, saw him pretty clearly decades ago (he is not cited in this book) and Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic by David Apter and Tony Saich, cited but not acknowledged, analyzes Mao’s unusual capacity for striking terror as acutely as Ms. Chang and Mr. Halliday. Some of the lesser parts of the story had been published earlier, such as the enormously profitable opium-growing business at Mao’s guerrilla headquarters, Yan’an, by Chen Yung-fa in 1995 (cited in this biography) but in every case Ms. Chang and Mr. Halliday add considerable detail to a story which will shock many Chinese.

And until this book there continued to be a lingering feeling in the West that Mao, despite everything, was a great man. And among many Chinese he remained a great man who went bad. That is the view of the Communist Party, which has officially judged Mao to be 70% good and “a great Marxist,” and still hangs his gigantic portrait over the main gate to the Forbidden City, from which it gazed down during the Tiananmen Square massacres in 1989. It was a mark of Mao’s continuing special status that in May of that year, near the end of the demonstrations, when three men hurled paint at the portrait, they were tackled and detained not by the police but by other demonstrators. The very people who were shouting “Li Peng resign,” and “Down with Deng Xiaoping,” and calling for fundamental reform of the Party, could not countenance an attack on the Great Teacher and Helmsman who in their childhoods they had learned was “the red red sun in our hearts.”

All that is swept away by the authors. If Mao were on trial, and they presented their evidence, if the judge warned the jury they could convict only if there were no shadow of doubt, the verdict would be a unanimous guilty as charged.

Dafydd ab Hugh, guest blogging over at Ed Morrissey's Captain's Quarters, constructs a logical argument that all roads in the Supreme Court nomination process leads to Emilio Garza.

Who? How? Why? Click on over and let Hugh explain.

Michael Graham wonders what the news from 1776 would have sounded like if "Loyalist playwright Michael LeMoore", "Howard Deanne, head of the Loyalist National Committee" and "Noah Chommsey, head of the political-science department at King’s College" were around to criticize that radical terrorist, George Washington.

In case you haven't already heard, Power Line notes that Sandra Day O'Connor is stepping down.

As Orrin Judd writes, "If the best retirement, from a Republican perspective, would have been one of the Gore 4, this is certainly a close second--it won't be Sandy's Constitution anymore."

Thank God--as Nancy Pelosi might say.

Update: Don Surber looks at "Queen Sandy's Famous Flip-Flops"--and he doesn't mean her choice in leisure-time footwear.

On March 22nd of 2003, with the War in Iraq in its earliest phase, leading to a lightning knockout of Saddam Hussein's ruling Baathist infrastructure, I wrote a post tying together the seemingly disparate strains connecting America, the Middle East and Vietnam together.

Not surprisingly, Victor Davis Hanson does an ever better job in his latest syndicated column, "The real lesson of Vietnam":