I have a review of this impressive suite of recording plug-ins, from the folks that brought you the Antares Auto-Tune program, over at Blogcritics.

Yesterday, I dusted off a John Leo op-ed from two years ago, in which he wrote, "We seem to be in the midst of a campaign to take down high-profile conservatives":

William Bennett went down too, for his over-the-top slot-machine gambling. He did it himself, of course, but the only moral rule always observed in Las Vegas casinos is Thou Shalt Never Reveal How Much the Heavy Roller Hath Lost. That rule was somehow suspended in Bennett's case. The total amount of his losses, $8 million, was somehow fed to the media. Curious, no?

I think I must have inadvertently put the hex on Bill Bennett last night. Today, as you no doubt already know, he was attacked out of context for remarks he made on his radio show. As Nick Schulz, my editor at Tech Central Station writes:

Bill Clinton claimed while he was president that he wanted to have a "national conversation on race." Perhaps he was being sincere. But it's plain from recent events that hardly anyone else in this country really, truly wants to have a "conversation" on this topic. If the mindless, knee-jerk reaction to Bennett's remarks -- including from places like the White House -- is any indicator, no one has any interest in an honest discussion of race.

Perhaps it's nothing new, but we live in a time where uncomfortable truths -- even challenging questions -- are to be shouted down and, if possible, driven from the public square. Harvard University's Larry Summers discovered this recently. Now Bill Bennett is on the receiving end of this same idiotarian nonsense. America is the worse for it. Thank goodness some liberals were honest enough to defend him. Let's hope others see fit to do the same.

Jeff Goldstein also has a great take:

For those of you who wish to dismiss this kerfuffle as the consequence of a soundbite culture about which Bennett, as a political pro, needs to be more cognizant, let me remind you that the way we find ourselves in a soundbite culture to begin with is that we’ve traded context and original intent for brevity and the kind of resignification that comes when an editor decides what to show us is representative of an original utterance. Part of this is the nature of the media beast; which is why it is so important that we be able to trust those who are doing the initial interpreting for us.

Trust the media beast? Sorry, it's going to be quite a while before I do that again.

Here's two otherwise unrelated posts which demonstrated how limited speech can be these days on campus. First up, Stefan Beck looks at "God and Man at Dartmouth":

Yesterday I wrote on NRO about a recent (actually, ongoing) dust-up at Dartmouth College. The short form is this: Noah Riner, the president of the student body, gave a convocation speech to the class of '09. The speech mentioned Jesus--and all hell broke loose:

Surely nothing as banal, as reliably soporific, as Riner's address could rankle anyone. Surely people didn't even listen to these things. As it happens, I couldn't have been more wrong. The bored work in mysterious ways, and a number of Dartmouth students saw the speech as a fine occasion for an attention-grabbing moral tantrum. The Daily Dartmouth's "Verbum Ultimum" allowed that "Riner had every right, as a member of a community that values the freedom of speech, to speak freely about what matters to him." But he chose an "inappropriate forum" — perish the thought — and "[preached] his faith from a commandeered pulpit." Clearly, Riner is corrupting the youth of Hanover. Somebody fetch the hemlock.

Meanwhile, Evan Coyne Maloney writes that the words "hunting terrorists" are now apparently verboten at Bucknell:

Two words. At Bucknell University, that's all it takes to get dragged into the President's Office for a half-hour discussion of word choice. And these aren't offensive words, at least not out here in the real world. But Bucknell apparently has a different definition of what is and is not acceptable.

On August 29th, the Bucknell University Conservatives Club sent out a campus-wide e-mail announcing an upcoming speaker: Major John Krenson, who had been in Afghanistan "hunting terrorists." Those two words--"hunting terrorists"--resulted in three students being called to Bucknell's Office of the President by Kathy Owens, the Executive Assistant to the President.

According to the students, when they arrived at the President's Office for the meeting, Ms. Owens held up a print-out of the offending e-mail and said "we have a problem here," telling the students that the words "hunting terrorists" were offensive. For the next half-hour, the three students were given a lecture on inappropriate phrasing.

(When contacted, Ms. Owens did acknowledge that the meeting took place, but refused to answer any questions about what transpired. She did not deny the account of the students.)

Last year, while collecting footage for my upcoming film Indoctrinate U, I noticed that the campus was plastered with flyers that screamed "vagina" in large block letters. Although some people might find these flyers offensive, it is protected speech at Bucknell--as it should be--but apparently the phrase "hunting terrorists" is not.

(Perhaps someone should remind Bucknell's administrators that the American soldiers who are "hunting terrorists" are fighting the very sort of misogynistic thugs who would gladly stone a woman to death for talking about her vagina in public.)

For years, Bucknell has denied that it has a speech code, the speech-stifling regulations that many schools use to punish political speech they don't like. But if Bucknell isn't in the business of restricting free speech, then why did these students have to spend 30 minutes listening to criticisms of the phrase "hunting terrorists"?

Most students I know would prefer not to spend their time defending their speech in front of highly-placed university administrators. By taking this action, the Bucknell administration is sending a signal to students: say only those things we approve of, or we will hassle you. The long-term effect will be that students will think twice before engaging in political speech that they know will be unpopular with the administration.

Long ago, in an education system far, far away, college was a place where vocabularies were expanded, not compacted. But then to some on the left, it's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.

Debra Orin writes that Congressman Charlie Rangel (D-NY) has an advanced case of BDS--and it's getting the better of him:

Read More »

...and the Blogosphere no blogger: Pete Townshend is serializing his upcoming novel by posting chapters on his own blog.

(Which, in perfect synchronicity, I discovered whilst burning my copy of 30 Years of Maximum R&B, a laser disc of live performances by The Who, to DVD-RW.)

One of the great Freudian slips of all time was uttered by the New York Times' former editor Howell Raines a few years ago, concerning the Times' push for greater diversity in the newsroom:

"This campaign has made our staff better and, more importantly, more diverse."

But how diverse is the culture of the typical newsroom? On Hugh Hewitt's Thursday show, Mark Steyn had some fascinating comments on the monolithic groupthink that pervades the legacy media:

I was once, a couple of years back, I was talking to a couple of journalists in New York, and they were asking whether I was going to be back in town for something. I said I wouldn't be able to, because I was going hunting. And they were stunned. Their jaws hit the floor.

HH: Yes, stunned.

MS: Now millions of Americans own guns. Millions of Americans are evangelical or Christian. Millions of Americans oppose abortion. But how many of those millions of Americans would find kindred spirits in the average New York Times or Washington Post or CBS Newsrooms?

HH: Exactly. When I was at the Columbia School of Journalism last week, I quizzed a group of students, sixteen, how many owned a gun? None. How many had been to church in the last month? Three. How many voted for Kerry? All but three who were not American citizens. It is an intake valve that is permanently stuck on left of center. And as a result, that's what happens to the media.

What's the cure? Tough to complain about groupthink looking over the profiles that have been going up over the past few weeks over at Pajamas Media. Any consortium that includes David Corn, Tammy Bruce, Baldilocks and myself, well...

To paraphrase Howlin' Wolf, and his prodigies, the Rolling Stones, got media diversity if you want it.

The Michael Moore-ization of the Democratic Party appears to be proceeding apace. Of Roger & Me, Moore's first "documentary", I wrote last year:

Back when I was a film junky, I also remember reading an article in England's Sight and Sound magazine (hardly a bastion of conservatism) that exposed many of the lies in that film as well, which put Moore on the map. Not the least of which was the film's premise: Moore wore a silly cardboard cartoon "PRESS" badge whenever he visited GM, thus ensuring that he'd never meet with Roger Smith--because if he did, there'd be no movie.

Byron York writes that Judge Ronnie Earle, Tom DeLay's bête noire, is in the process of starring in a pseudo-documentary of his own that's planned as an inversion of Moore's concept:

For the last two years, as he pursued the investigation that led to Wednesday's indictment of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Travis County, Texas prosecutor Ronnie Earle has given a film crew "extraordinary access" to make a motion picture about his work on the case.

The resulting film is called The Big Buy, made by Texas filmmakers Mark Birnbaum and Jim Schermbeck. "Raymond Chandler meets Willie Nelson on the corner of Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue in The Big Buy, a Texas noir political detective story that chronicles what some are calling a 'bloodless coup with corporate cash,'" reads a description of the picture on Birnbaum's website, markbirnbaum.com. The film, according to the description, "follows maverick Austin DA Ronnie Earle's investigation into what really happened when corporate money joined forces with relentless political ambitions to help swing the pivotal 2002 Texas elections, cementing Republican control from Austin to Washington DC."

"We approached him [Earle], and he offered us extraordinary access to him and, to an extent, to his staff," Birnbaum told National Review Online Thursday. "We've been shooting for about two years."

DeLay's indictment yesterday is a prerequisite of the film: As Orrin Judd concludes, "One hates to be too cynical, but it's pretty basic: no indictment, no movie".

Meanwhile, Bryan Preston of Junk Yard Blog writes:

You want a conspiracy, I'll show you a conspiracy. The mid-terms are a year out. We now have House Majority Leader Tom Delay indicted by one of the most partisan prosecutors in the US. We have the Senate Majority Leader under fire for a stock sale. We have the abuse of Maryland Lt Gov Michael Steele's SSN to get his credit report--no doubt a fishing expedition to find dirt to fling at him when he runs for the Senate. All of this is going on at the same time, and while in Florida Rush Limbaugh is fighting off a partisan invasion of privacy and prosecution meant to bring him down.

This is starting to look like a concerted effort to criminalize Republicans out of office while silencing our pundits.

I'm not sure how much I agree with Bryan's conclusions, and I think John Hawkins makes some great points about DeLay's inability to trim governmental pork, but Bryan's post was a strong reminder of something US News & World Report's John Leo wrote back around this time in 2003, a year before a national election with even higher stakes:

We seem to be in the midst of a campaign to take down high-profile conservatives. The gay lobby did a job on Dr. Laura, in effect getting her new TV show canceled and portraying her as a hater for holding the traditional Judeo-Christian view of homosexuality. She is brusque and blunt, but no hater. There is plenty of testimony on the record about her kindness to gays and the help she gave to PFLAG, Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. But the gay lobby took her down anyway.

William Bennett went down too, for his over-the-top slot-machine gambling. He did it himself, of course, but the only moral rule always observed in Las Vegas casinos is Thou Shalt Never Reveal How Much the Heavy Roller Hath Lost. That rule was somehow suspended in Bennett's case. The total amount of his losses, $8 million, was somehow fed to the media. Curious, no?

John Fund, the very talented conservative journalist, got the treatment as well. He was smeared as a wife-beater. Eric Alterman, the liberal commentator, helped clear the air with a piece in the Nation headlined, 'Who Framed John Fund?' Alterman's question for the left was this: Who do we want to be, people who try to destroy opponents or people who act on principle? It's a good question for the right, too, and for everyone now poised to jump into the Limbaugh case.

As I wrote back then:

Perhaps, having gotten a taste of the politics of personal destruction in Washington, the press need fresh kills, and are expanding their hunting grounds to include any figure whose opinions they disagree with.

And evidently, the political left appears to be following their media colleagues with a similar tactic: if you can't beat 'em at the ballot box--you take 'em to court.

The Anchoress links to several bloggers in this post, including Neo-neocon's thoughts on how Gandhi's pacifism would have permitted the Holocaust (something that would come as no surprise to George Orwell, of course), and my own look at Hollywood's box office slumps of today and twenty years ago.

Just to tie those two seemingly disparate threads together, here's a link to 1983's "The Gandhi Nobody Knows", undoubtedly one of the most incredible film reviews ever written.

In the post below, P.J. O'Rourke said, "I don't think that a person is left wing or right wing according to whether or not they are compassionate". Tammy Bruce is someone to whom that adjective certainly applies, and is finding herself, like many of the writers associated with Pajamas Media, with opinions that transcend those on both the far left and the far right. Her profile is currently attop the Pajamas Media homepage, and it includes this amazing quote:

In 1998 I took Bill Cosby's wife to task for saying her son's killer was "taught by America to hate black people." Here you had a woman from one of the richest couples in the world -- a person whose family has really experienced the love of the American people -- making an outrageous claim. My calling attention to that was forbidden, and as a result I lost my radio gig at a previous station I worked for. There's a reticence in dealing with racial issues because of racist attitudes that in many cases emanate from the black elite. The real racism is not what Mrs. Cosby imagined, it is in allowing the left to continue to condemn people of color to the ghettos of victimhood and marginalization.

Now that's a soundbite.

(And to be fair, while I don't know anything about his wife's current opinions, Bill Cosby does seem to get the message these days.)

It's probably over a decade old, but I just tripped over this quote from P.J. O'Rourke, and think that both the question and its response speaks volumes about contemporary American politics:

You seem to take a distinct relish in propagating the image of yourself as a son-of-a-bitch Republican. Yet much of your writing is distinctly humanitarian in places... "Well, both of those things are true. People on this side of the Atlantic get confused about political conservatism. It is not an excuse for selfishness. I don't think that a person is left wing or right wing according to whether or not they are compassionate. A lot of people on the left, especially the more po-faced ones, have worked that angle. Lots of people are right wing because they're selfish, there's no doubt about that - I can't defend that, I can only point out lots of people are left-wing because they're selfish too. The Hilary Clinton world-view is bossing people around on the basis of a supposed virtuousness - "I care more than you care - therefore I'm going to boss you around." If they couldn't operate that system, then no other system would suit."

The rest of the interview's amusing as well, especially the punchline of O'Rourke's story about the late Hunter S. Thompson.

Back in late June, at the beginning of Hollywood's summer slump, I wrote:

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 Cruise's own Top Gun.

Speaking of the mid-1980s, Hollywood screenwriter Craig Titley, whose credits include Scooby-Doo and Cheaper by the Dozen, looks at some interesting similarities between Tinseltown's box office slumps in 2005 and 1985:

Let’s fire up the Flux Capaciter, program our DeLorean time machine for 1985, and go in search of lessons to bring back to the future.

Like the bizarre series of similarities found in the Lincoln/Kennedy assassinations, the box office “assassinations” of 1985 and 2005 share some eerie similarities and coincidences.

Both slumps began in a year following the November re-election of a president who was despised by the coasts, the media, and Bruce Springsteen. Both of these re-elected presidents liked to wear cowboy hats and boots. Both presided over ambiguous, hard-to-define wars: the Cold War, the War on Terror. During both campaigns the who’s-who of hip Hollywood actors (who now probably need hip replacement) such as Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, Jane Fonda, Barbara Streisand and Ed Asner came out in support of their guy (hint: not the one in the cowboy hat).

The cowboy candidates, then and now, had Chuck Norris. During both campaigns, Bruce Springsteen took a tour on the road to encourage people not to vote for the guy in the cowboy hat. The “bad guys” in the world--Godless Russian commies in the 80’s; Our-God-4-Allah-ya Islamic Terrorists in the 00’s--also didn’t want the guy in the cowboy hat to win. But they didn’t particularly care for Springsteen either.

It doesn’t take Doc Brown to see that the national landscapes preceding the B.O. slumps were as alike as two Rob Schneider movies.

There are also similarities in the reason given for the slumps. The Hollywood-Know-It-Alls in the panic induced by both the Slump of ’85 and the current Slump of ’05, were quick to finger all the new-fangled home entertainment technology as the culprit. In 1985 videocassettes, VCRs, Commodore home computers, and Ms. Pac-Man were allegedly sucking us away from theaters. In 2005 DVDs, plasma screen televisions, chat rooms, and “Destroy All Humans” are supposedly doing the job. In 1985, this proved to be untrue as Hollywood rebounded and had some of the best years of its life in the tech-filled decades to come. It’s untrue now as well.

So what caused the slump of ’85? And what is causing the Slump of ‘05? The eerily similar political climates preceding the slumps have led some to suggest that moviegoers who liked the guy in the cowboy hat were holding a grudge against Hollywood by staying away from the multiplexes. After all, even in a landslide election, the nation is pretty much evenly split between the reds and the blues.

Publicly picking a side is bound to alienate you from half of everyone. If just a small percentage of these moviegoers turned their backs on Hollywood, it could have a devastating effect on the bottom line.

Read the rest--Titley's diagnosis and his prescription are both spot-on.

(Found via Libertas.)

In Liar's Poker, Michael Lewis' brilliant, Plimptonesque look back at his mid-'80s tour of duty with Salomon Brothers, Lewis wrote that when necessary, he and his fellow bond traders would "jam" bonds down their customers' throats. These were typically corporate bonds with lower yields or credit ratings, and Salomon's sales managers would encourage their salesmen to use as much verbal force as appropriate to make a sale. As Lewis wrote:

"I had made the mistake of trusting a Salomon Brothers trader. He had drawn on the pooled ignorance of myself and my first customer to unload one of his mistakes. He had saved himself, and our firm, $60,000. I was at once furious and disillusioned. But that didn't solve the problem. . . . Bellyaching would. . . make me look a fool, as if I had actually thought the customer was going to make money on the [bonds]. How could anyone be so stupid as to trust a trader? The best thing I could do was pretend to others at Salomon that I meant to screw the customer. People would respect that. That was called 'jamming.' I had just jammed bonds, albeit unknowingly, for the first time."

Beginning, arguably, with Walter Cronkite's calling the Tet Offensive a military failure, the mainstream media has had a long history of jamming news stories--frequently with a poor credit rating of their own in terms of their honesty attached to them--down their audiences' throats, rather than living up to their self-proclaimed motto of being objective and unbiased.

That's what CBS tried to do last year with a story that ultimately boomeranged so badly against them, it was dubbed "Ra^therGate", complete with superscript "th", to remind readers of Dan Rather and producer Mary Mapes' folly.

Lewis would occasionally refer in Liar's Poker to the out-of-touch "ozone layer" of Salomon's management, clueless as to what their salesmen and traders needed to succeed. The quotes yesterday from Mapes and Rather are a reminder at just how clueless the ozone layer of CBS' then-management was. As for Rather's what's-the-frequency remarks, Duane Patterson has fisked them within an inch of their life. To the point where he feels sorry ("Elder Abuse" is the name of Duane's post) about deciphering the mutterings of a now aged man who for decades has made Ted Baxter seem like Edward R. Murrow.

But let's take a look at Mapes' classic quotes, including this one, describing her "incredulous" reaction to the response of the Blogosphere, and Internet forums like Freerepublic.com, to the 60 Minutes II show that she built around forged documents:

Within a few minutes, I was online visiting Web sites I had never heard of before: Free Republic, Little Green Footballs, Power Line. They were hard-core, politically angry, hyperconservative sites loaded with vitriol about Dan Rather and CBS.

Has any individual, or any organization, ever been called "hyperliberal" by any reporter or anchorman at CBS?

Is Mapes aware that she's ceding half her show's potential audience by tossing aside the complaints of the Freepers, the Lizardoids, the readers of Power Line, and by extension, everyone else who considers him or herself a conservative? Is she aware of out of touch she makes herself sound, when she claims she hasn't heard of any of these sites, three quarters of the way into an election year dominated--even before Ra^therGate--with Internet and blog-oriented stories?

And you cannot claim to have an anchorman who is free of bias and not "loaded with vitriol" when you let him go on the air and say things like this, in an editorial-masking-as-reporting was delivered seemingly as "the first draft of history" to millions of Sunday viewers watching the second half of NFL doubleheaders--viewers of all political persuasions, not the readers of The New Republic or The Nation, where Dan's editorializing would have been perfectly appropriate and right at home with its bias.

But that was back in November of 2000. Let's return to Rather's producer's words from this year concerning her efforts last September:

Our work was being compared to that of Jayson Blair, the discredited New York Times reporter who had fabricated and plagiarized stories.

Yes, that's precisely right.

This is the one instance where Mary is spot-on, and she has no idea how accurate she is about the connection with another big media fabulist who masqueraded as a reporter. As Mark Steyn writes:

Yes, the US media is overwhelmingly "liberal" but it's also slow, dull, arthritic and bureaucratic. Hence, Ms Mapes' bewilderment at how the rest of the world managed to identify within seconds the obvious fakeness of her documents despite the "months" of "analysis" CBS devoted to them.

What Mary and Dan still don't seem to understand is that when you try to jam news stories these days via the press or television, there's now a whole nation of citizen journalists--some who are amateurs, some who are pros, many of whom are bloggers, but some simply members of online forums--who are examining your efforts, and determining whether they're fair, or you're trying to play liar's poker with us.

Update: Welcome readers of Hugh Hewitt and his producer, "Generalissimo" Duane. Please look around; we're sure you'll find plenty of other posts you'll enjoy.

First up, by way of Vodkapundit, here's Ralph Peters in USA Today on "the true symbols of the War on Terror":

The greatest social revolution in history is underway all around us: The emancipation of women. Advanced in our own society, elsewhere the battle for women's rights lies at the heart of colossal struggles over the future of great religions and civilizations.
The Washington establishment would shrink from any such claim, but the Global War on Terror is a fight over the social, economic and cultural roles of women. The core issues for the terrorists are the interpretation of God's will and the continued oppression of women. Nothing so threatens Islamic extremists as the freedom Western women enjoy.

Equal partners

The sudden transition of women from men's property to men's partners in our own country unleashed dazzling creative energies. In the historical blink of an eye, we doubled our effective human capital — and made our society immeasurably more humane. Our half-century of stunning economic growth has many roots, but none goes deeper than the expansion of opportunities for women.

But such unprecedented freedom threatens traditional societies. Behavior patterns that prevailed for millennia are suddenly in doubt. Relationships that granted males the power of life and death over female relatives have disappeared from successful cultures. Defensively, the failing cultures left behind cling harder than ever to the old ways amid the tumult of global change.

The true symbols of the War on Terror are the Islamic veil and the two-piece woman's business suit.

The math is basic. No civilization that excludes half its population from full participation in society and the economy can compete with the United States and its key allies. Yet Middle Eastern societies, especially, have dug in their heels to resist change. Some, such as Turkey, Pakistan and Iran, have tumbled backward.

Islamist terrorists have formed the last, great boy's club, meeting in caves and warning girls to stay out — or, in the case of the 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, demanding that women be kept from his grave to avoid polluting it. Their vision offers women fewer rights by far than those enjoyed by the wives of the prophet Mohammed. They are women-hating sadists for whom faith is an excuse. Their fears are primal.

What does The New York Times think of Peters' take?

JIDDA, Saudi Arabia, Sept. 27 - The audience - 500 women covered in black at a Saudi university - seemed an ideal place for Karen P. Hughes, a senior Bush administration official charged with spreading the American message in the Muslim world, to make her pitch.

But the response on Tuesday was not what she and her aides expected. When Ms. Hughes expressed the hope here that Saudi women would be able to drive and “fully participate in society” much as they do in her country, many challenged her.

“The general image of the Arab woman is that she isn’t happy,” one audience member said. “Well, we’re all pretty happy.” The room, full of students, faculty members and some professionals, resounded with applause.

Last year, then-Times ombudsman Daniel Okrent rocked the newspaper industry when he finally admitted the obvious:

Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?

Of course it is.

Charles Johnson writes, "The New York Times would like us to know that Saudi women are perfectly happy living inside black sacks, unable to drive cars or even leave the house without a man’s permission".

On what planet is that acceptable to any liberal society--no matter how you define the L-word??

In Tech Central Station, Ilya Shapiro writes that "Like the bedraggled patriarch in My Big Fat Greek Wedding who can't make sense of why his daughter would ever want to leave the fold, Europeans cannot for the love of Zeus understand why the world does not pay constant homage to their clear superiority":

This European descent has very little to do with growing anti-Americanism -- that is but a symptom -- and everything to do with the inability (and unwillingness) to grapple with the internal contradictions of the European economic and social models. Look at Europe's two latest political debacles, the EU constitution and last week's German election. French voters rejected the former because they feared it would force them to change their anachronous ways, while their German counterparts punished both a socialist chancellor who deigned propose modest reforms and a would-be successor who wanted the country's economic policies to make economic sense.

Shamefully, the European Union's constitution did not fail because citizens blanched at a retrenchment of sclerotic Eurocracy (quite the opposite). Appallingly, Gerhard Schröder's biggest losses were to the unreconstructed communists and other disaffected leftists -- for whom even the existing labor and tax laws are too "Anglo-American."

To repeat what has become an unfortunate cliché, Europe is dying -- literally (in terms of population) and figuratively (in terms of living standards, social cohesion, and economic growth). The United States meanwhile, while not without its own problems and pathologies, is prospering.

Robert Kagan identified the trans-Atlantic divergence in his prescient Of Paradise and Power, a sort of "America is from Mars, Europe is from Venus" approach to geopolitics. The United States sees itself as idealistic, man's last best hope for freedom -- a freedom worth fighting and dying for. Europe, pacifistic and cynical, wants nothing more than to conduct business as usual (under America's protective umbrella) -- and send diplomats to bargain with terrorists and tyrants.

The latest issue of American Enterprise magazine goes further, by detailing this rift at the socio-economic level in a series of stories on "Red America, Blue Europe." As Karl Zinsmeister shrewdly writes:

"The irony is that for all their insistence on portraying the U.S. as a land of fired workers, poverty, and economic insecurity, it is now Europe where unemployment is twice as high and four times as deep, where immigrants and the young have far fewer openings, where the ladder of upward mobility has fallen to pieces."

Mark Steyn recently summed up Europe's demise thusly: "The hyper-rationalism of post-Christian Europe turns out to be wholly irrational: what's the point of creating a secular utopia if it's only for one generation?"

John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk were two jazz masters who only played together (in Monk's quartet) for five months in 1957. For almost 50 years, there were no commercial recordings documenting the pairing. That all changed today, according to Zan Stewart of Newark, NJ's Star-Ledger:

The release this Tuesday of the quartet's stunningly vivid, deeply musical performance at Carnegie Hall on Nov. 29, 1957 -- to be issued as "Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall" on Thelonious Records, distributed by Blue Note Records -- is a bona fide marquee jazz event.

The CD is presented in startlingly clear, you-are-there audio, as a jazz master, his disciple -- a jazz master-to-be -- and their cohorts, bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik and drummer Shadow Wilson, play with emotion, passion, depth and blazing-hard swing on several of Monk's superb originals and one pop standard.

Monk, then 40, and Coltrane, 31, both jump-started their careers in that band. Monk, a founder of modern jazz, had returned to prominence with the Five Spot gig (he had had his cabaret card, necessary to play in most New York nightspots, revoked from 1951-57). Coltrane, known for his work with Miles Davis from 1955-57, had recently quit both heroin and drinking. Both men were creatively revitalized.

Their portion of the concert -- a benefit for the now-defunct Morningside Community Center in Harlem that also spotlighted Ray Charles, Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, Billie Holiday and others -- consisted of two sets, approximately 25 minutes each. The sets are complete on the CD, save a fade toward the end of the last number of the second set.

The setlist included the opening Monk ballad, "Monk's Mood," a mix of tenderness and ardor; the bustling "Blue Monk," with romping improvisations from the leader and his saxophonist; the majestic "Crepuscule with Nellie," dedicated to Monk's wife; and the evergreen "Sweet and Lovely," outfitted with an arrangement where Coltrane again unleashes streams of notes, unveiling a style that was later dubbed "sheets of sound."

Throughout, Monk the pianist is stunning, playing with dynamism, invention and commanding sound, a performance that should forever silence those who have said he was not a top-rate pianist, or that he lacked technique.

How this recording -- originally taped by the Voice of America (the U.S. Government's international multimedia broadcast service) but apparently never broadcast -- was unearthed is a story that unfolded gradually.

Read the rest.

(Also on Blogcritics.)

I'm serving as the crash test dummy beta-beta-tester of the Pajamas Media blogger ads. So if the site looks or acts funny, it's probably as an unintentional result of that.

Of course if the actual writing on the site is funny--then it's an intentional byproduct of its owner and his skillful wordplay...

As Glenn Reynolds once wrote, "Bush's ability to drive his opponents stark, raving bonkers is almost supernatural".

One of the ways that the president drives the media insane is by simply ignoring them--the very worst thing you can do to a preening ego amplified by megawatts of network superhype. As Congressman Peter King (R-NY) told Chris Matthews yesterday:

Chris, you won't give me a chance to answer the questions. Just because the president doesn't watch you on television, it doesn't mean he's not doing his job. You know, Franklin Roosevelt wasn't hired to listen to radio accounts of D-Day. You're hired to do the job, and the president can do his job without having to listen to Chris Matthews or Andrea Mitchell or Tim Russert, or any of the others.

Duane Patterson writes:

Thud. Matthews hits the canvas hard after the knockout blow by King. The ref waives off the fight. The doc is in the ring hovering over Matthews. The smelling salts come out. Matthews spent the rest of the segment in a stupor, trying to regain composure, repeating Halliburton over and over again with his speech still a little slurred.

Congressman King, very nice line. Probably the line of the week. You have made Lt. Gen. Honore' proud.

Chris Matthews, you should know what is coming next. You are stuck on stupid!

Ouch.

As Wizbang notes, unlike the San Francisco Chronicle, the members of the Conservative Undergound forum know how to use Google.

As I noted earlier this year, the long tail of the Internet (which includes both one-man blogs and several thousand member forums) is a concept that the mainstream media simply does not understand. "They've never worried about the tail, ever", Hugh Hewitt once told me. "And now they've got the tail just eating them, all day, 24/7."

Update: Found via Instapundit, Clayton Cramer explores the Moby angle, adding:

It makes you wonder, doesn't it, if the reason that the left is so focused on calling Bush a liar has something to do with projection? This crowd can't be bothered with telling the truth about even something as trivial as their party affiliation.

Indeed, as The Blogfather would say.

Obviously, Joe Namath, at age 62, is entirely too old to quarterback. But evidently, at age 41, Vinny Testaverde isn't. Broadway Vinny spent last season in a stopgap role at the Dallas Cowboys after Quincy Carter was released, and is apparently poised for similar service back at his old team, the New York Jets, to replace Chad Pennington, who's out for the season with a shoulder injury.

The Anchoress has some thoughts on artificially-created media phenomenon, and what happens when they've outlived their usefulness:

I can’t think of anything that seems to destroy people’s mental health faster than a few weeks or months of uncritical, gushing media hype. Think about the people you see in the news, day after day, gathering unconditional praise and coverage from the press. They lose themselves, lose their minds, and they are rarely ever the same after the adulation stops. In fact, I can only think of one person who got caught up in the destructive swirl of relentless positive press reportage and managed to find his way back to sanity, and that would be Sen. Joe Lieberman, and perhaps - I am only saying PERHAPS - his faith has something to do with his re-bound.

The rest of them, once courted, feted, promoted, celebrated, hyped and carried by the press have a very difficult time of it.

Sen. John Kerry, a truly terrible presidential candidate, cold, stiff and barely articulate had months and months of uncritical love. Months of the press never asking him a single difficult question, months of the press scurrying to fight his battles, discredit his critics and pat him on the back after soft-ball interviews. He had the press basically promising him a 10-15% advantage for their coverage - a promise which it does seem they delivered on.

When he still lost, and lost soundly, and all of the microphones and cameras went away, he couldn’t seem to believe it. After a nearly silent 20-year career in the Senate during which he did little more than write bills recognizing special days for special people, Kerry was suddenly opining on everything, calling press conferences and issuing statements, and yet the press was not loving him as it had. They barely noticed him. He was back to being a “local paper” story instead of a national figure. He hasn’t been the same, since.

Sen. John McCain discovered he could make the press “love” him by criticizing his party and not merely working with the opposition but shoving his metaphorical tongue down their metaphorical throats. He became the media darling of 1999 and 2000, with endless magazine covers, endless gushing interviews with Katie and Diane and Oprah, endless furrowed-brow talks with Ted Koppel. The “Maverick” became the only acceptable sort of GOP candidate and - for many in the press - a palatable alternative to Al Gore, who was becoming problematic, what with Buddhist nuns, controlling legal authorities, Clinton-fatigue and spots of embarrassing exaggerations regarding his personal life and his “inventiveness.”

When the press reluctantly left McCain behind to cover the actual GOP candidate, McCain was smart enough to realize that all he ever had to do to call them back and bask in the warmth of their klieg lights was to step left-and-lively, and he has done it ever since. He cannot stop himself. Those lights, those microphones, those headlines and all that unequivical approval - it’s heady stuff to a guy who crashed 3 planes.

Al Gore - well, what can be said about poor Al Gore? Told by the press, over and over, that he was gyped, even after a consortium of papers did themselves concede that he lost in 2000, he seems like a gas leak in search of a pilot light. But he’ll always have Paul Krugman.

I cannot even imagine what will happen to any Clinton for whom the uncritical praise ends.

And now, we see Mother Sheehan - an utter media creation who burnished her genuine tragedy with an ability to cry-on-cue, but who has long-since overplayed the “grieving mother” hand and become all about preening and performing for the camera. Yesterday people losing lives and livelihoods to a storm were mere peons interferring with her scheduled adulation. Today she got herself arrested, smiling the whole while and still quite certain that the constitution which guarentees her the right to self-destruct in an endless loop on CNN, is a constitution that is not worth dying for.

Can a posing session for Playboy be far behind? [Shudder--Ed] That’s where all the sad she-clowns go when they’re usefulness has ended, isn’t it?

Once again, repeat after me - it is amazing how much destruction is wrought because of a need to feel loved.

One of the great things about blogs commenting on the media is that they reveal how much news is manufactured, rather than neutrally reported.

Last year, Charles Krauthammer coined his "Pressure Cooker Theory" for the explosion of hatred from the left, after an all-too-brief respite in the culture war after 9/11:

The loathing goes far beyond the politicians. Liberals as a body have gone quite around the twist. I count one all-star rock tour, three movies, four current theatrical productions and five best sellers (a full one-third of the New York Times list) variously devoted to ridiculing, denigrating, attacking and devaluing this president, this presidency and all who might, God knows why, support it.

How to explain? With apologies to Dr. Freud, I propose the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release.

The hostility, resentment, envy and disdain, all superheated in Florida, were not permitted their natural discharge. Came 9/11 and a lid was forced down. How can you seek revenge for a stolen election by a nitwit usurper when all of a sudden we are at war and the people, bless them, are rallying around the flag and hailing the commander in chief? With Bush riding high in the polls, with flags flying from pickup trucks (many of the flags, according to Howard Dean, Confederate), the president was untouchable.

The Democrats fell unnaturally silent. For two long, agonizing years, they had to stifle and suppress. It was the most serious case of repression since Freud's Anna O. went limp. The forced deference nearly killed them. And then, providentially, they were saved. The clouds parted and bad news rained down like manna: WMDs, Abu Ghraib, Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, Joe Wilson and, most important, continued fighting in Iraq.

Stripped of his halo, the president's ratings went down. The spell was broken. He was finally once again human and vulnerable. With immense relief, the critics let loose.

A very large component of what President Bush's critics let loose with have been non-stop comparisons of President Bush with Adolf Hitler, and America in general with Nazi Germany. Both of which are disgusting examples of moral equivalence that are subtle--and sometimes not so-subtle--forms of Holocaust denial, which Jonah Goldberg noted when the first "Bush=Hitler" ads appeared courtesy of Moveon.org in late 2003:

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

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

Since shortly after this blog started, we've been documenting the many examples of Godwin's Law violations as they've occurred, but it took until today for us to give them their own category. If your stomach is up to the task, click here and start scrolling to read its archives.

(Of course, I can understand if you'd rather not. Seeing all those examples of horrendous equivalence one after the other is enough to make anyone want to turn his head away from the verbal carnage.)

Update: For even more examples of the left's Reich Stuff, check out The Brothers Judd's "Obligatory Nazi Reference" archives.

Sadly, he's not the second coming of Carnac. But frequent Iowahawk guest-blogger Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi is back to remind us that war is hell--especially when "you're getting a daily enema from infidel Tomahawks"...

Her dream comes true: Cindy Sheehan was arrested today in front of the White House. Mary Katharine catches AP selectively revising updates to the story.

Meanwhile, John Hinderaker writes:

I may be wrong about this, but I don't think it is wise for Sheehan to go out of her way to cultivate associations between her anti-war protest and similar events in the 1960s. I really don't think that images of her being carried away by policemen, hobnobbing with Communists, marching with Joan Baez and Jesse Jackson, etc., are helpful to her cause. I think such actions will cause light bulbs to go on in many Americans' heads as they realize, "Oh, she's one of those!"

Hinderaker also notes a glaring exception to the media's otherwise careful framing of her photographs.

As Mickey Kaus notes, it was nice of the New York Times to level the playing field, by putting its bloviating columnists (and its stuffed moose toys) behind a pay-to-read firewall called TimesSelect:

Conservative kf reader D.A. emails to say she has stopped "enjoying the failure of TimesSelect" and now worries that it is failing too quickly--that soon the NYT will pull the plug, restoring the reach and influence of the paper's predominantly liberal columnists. ... D.A. suggests that

Republicans and right-wingers should sign up now and pay for it, just so NYT management think it's a success and keep it going.

The conservatives could inspire themselves with the thought that they were in essence paying to erect a barrier between the NYT's would-be opinion-shapers and a public that might all-too-easily have its opinions shaped. ... Once the Times columnists' "status as megapundits" has slowly ebbed away,

Then, and only then, Karl Rove can give the word and everyone will stop subscribing to TimesSelect. It won't matter then if the embargo comes down, because people will have gotten along fine without their daily dose of the NYT's correct enlightened thinking.

P.S.: A few days ago I jokingly called for replacing TimesSelect with "TimesDelete," a service that would allow readers to pay to silence their least favorite columnists. D.A.'s email has made me realize how misdirected this proposal was. TimesSelect doesn't need to be replaced by TimesDelete. TimesSelect is TimesDelete! The Times has taken the columnists people are most willing to pay for and removed them from the public discourse on the Web.

And perfect timing--as a whole host of citizen journalists are coming soon to a browser near you!

As Stephen Hayward explained in The Age of Reagan and David Frum in How We Got Here, in 1970, fresh off of championing civil rights for Americans, and then condeming those of the Vietnamese via the anti-war movement, the left turned, in great numbers, to focusing on environmentalism, taking then-needed reforms to extreme measures as an anti-business cudgel. "The 'snail darter' gambit", as Steven Den Beste dubbed it three years ago:

Someone planning to build a dam on your favorite river? Want to stop them? Find yourself some obscure fish living in that river and then get it declared an endangered species. Is the snail darter really all that important? Hell no. It was never about the snail darter. It was about opposing development.

Trying to force someone to stop logging? Wood is good; wood is useful; wood is consumed by this nation in immense quantities. It's not clear that the way it's being harvested now is the best there could be, but that's not what our friends really want. What they want is a complete stop to logging.

If they say "Stop the logging!" they'll get ignored. They've tried that for years. Then they discovered some magic words: "Spotted Owl." (And then a miracle occurred...)

Found via Power Line, the Wall Street Journal looks at the movement's natural consequences, in a piece titled, "The Lawsuit That Sank New Orleans":

After Hurricane Betsy swamped New Orleans in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson stroked its citizens ("this nation grieves for its neighbors") and pledged federal protection. The Army Corps of Engineers designed a Lake Pontchartrain Hurricane Barrier to shield the city with flood gates like those that protect the Netherlands from the North Sea. Congress provided funding and construction began. But work stopped in 1977 when a federal judge ruled, in a suit brought by Save Our Wetlands, that the Corps' environmental impact statement was deficient. Joannes Westerink, a professor of civil engineering at Notre Dame, believes the barrier would have been an "effective barrier" against Katrina's fury.

All this was reported in the Los Angeles Times on Sept. 9. The reactions of environmental advocates and federal agencies show why we would be a lot safer if the federal government did a lot less.

Speaking for environmentalists, the Center for Progressive Reform called the charges in the Los Angeles Times "pure fiction" because the judge stopped construction only until the Corps prepared a satisfactory environmental analysis. The Corps instead dropped the barrier in favor of levees that were less controversial, but which failed. So, the Center argues, fault lies with the Corps' bumbling rather than with the environmentalist lawsuit.

That's not fair. The Corps cannot stop a project, conduct a lengthy study, go back to court, and then be sure it can pick up where it left off. Large federal projects ordinarily cannot proceed unless executives and legislatures at several levels of government agree on the same course of action at the same time. That's why litigation delay can kill necessary projects. However responsibility is apportioned, but for the lawsuit, New Orleans would have had the hurricane barrier.

But the snail darter was saved! C'mon--which is more important??

Update: Hugh Hewitt writes:

Louisiana wants $40 billion in Army Corps of Engineer projects. Whatever the final cost, it will be in billions, and the Senate Republicans should insist that as part of the package, reforms in the federal Endangered Sprecies Act --similar to this that are poised to pass the House-- be included in the appropriation so that the notoriously expense-increasing and private property rights destroying ESA not delay or increase the costs of these projects or other Corps projects across the country. A simple tightening of deadlines widely abused by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service when the Corps "consults" with that agency under the ESA would be a huge step forward.

I agree.

In contrast to Oliver Jones, there's no moral equivalence amongst Poland's voters, who oust the nation's former Communists in parliamentary elections today. As Jayson of PoliPundit quips with tongue-in-cheek, "I’m blaming Walesa, Reagan, and the late Pope for the fact they even have elections in Poland."

Indeed, to coin an adverb.

Via Norman Geras, here's Oliver Jones, in England's far left Guardian:

Compassion is putting yourself in the other person's shoes and feeling sympathy. It does not require affection. One might feel compassion for Hitler, Stalin or Saddam on learning about their appalling childhoods (like most famous dictators, they lost a parent before the age of 14), or even for George Bush (who had a beastly time), but still hate them for what they did.

Evidently, Oliver forgot the atrocities of National Socialism and international Communism in the 20th century. Or as Jonah Goldberg wrote in January of 2004, during Moveon.org's "Bush=Hitler" ads, the first big salvo in what's becoming a now seemingly endless cycle of moral equivalence by the left:

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

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

As Norm Geras wrote:

OK, so help me someone. I mean with the 'even'. Oliver James doesn't really think George Bush worse than Hitler or Stalin or... Saddam, does he?

A typo? Carelessness? Too many dinner parties? I'm at a loss.

Nowhere near as big as the one Oliver's having.

The very essence of what my "Return of the Primitive" category is all about is on display in this illustrated, must-read post by Baron Bodissey.

(Via Roger L. Simon.)

John Hawkins grabs his field glasses, to help you identify the four main species Of Democrats.

I'm rather partial to the Old School crowd, myself.

By the way, while Debbie Schlussel does give away spoilers in her post on Flight Plan, be sure to at least scroll to the update of the article, to check out Jodie's dream project: rehabilitating the reputation of Leni Riefenstahl.

No, really! Whitewashing Leni Riefenstahl's place in history was only a matter of time I guess, as all the films airbrushing Che's reputation are becoming old hat.

Just watching the ads for Jodie Foster's Flight Plan, I've felt underwhelmed--there just doesn't seem to be any "there", there; certainly not enough to bother spending $9.00 or so on a ticket.

Debbie Schlussel (via Charles Johnson) writes that actually, it's more of the same "beating around the bush" for Hollywood and the War on Terror.

Whenever I submit the text of a magazine article, I end with three pound symbols (# # #), to tell the editor that he or she's reached the article's end.

The alternate symbol is "-30-", which was once used as the name of a Jack Webb movie, in which My Man Friday played a big city newspaper editor.

30 is also about the number of people who showed up to wage war on the War On Terror in Washington DC today, led by Cindy Sheehan, fresh off her equally not ready for primetime performance in the Big Apple.

Confederate Yankee counts the numbers in DC:

The AP, Washington Post, and other news sources gleefully mentioned Cindy Sheehan's march on the White House this afternoon. With the exception of Reuters, however, they were all more than willing to forego this little tidbit of information:

Mrs Sheehan was joined by about 30 supporters in her march down Pennsylvania Avenue to deliver a letter to Bush urging him to pull the troops out of Iraq.

That's all, folks. I count 29 people. This is her entire protest party. Including Cindy.

Just as the -30- symbol tells an editor, the key phrase is "That's all, folks".

Update: Charles Johnson notes judicious use of photo cropping by the MSM to hide the miniscule size of the "rally".

Wondering why gasoline is $3.00 or more a gallon?

The fault of our high energy prices lies not in ourselves, but in the stars--of the left.

Incidentally, Power Line notes that Senator Clinton is "Bemoaning the fate of the porcupine caribou resident in ANWR", A.K.A., America's Vast Pestilential Wasteland.

Update: Here's some advice for government on what not to do, courtesy of James Glassman, Tech Central Station's head honcho.

Update (9/22/05): Welcome readers from The Political Teen!

I know Jonah Goldberg dreams of the days when we lance volcanos with, as Dr. Evil would say, frickin' lasers, people. But I didn't realize, until Greg Hanke sent me a link to his post, that NOAA, the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, is bombarded (so to speak) every year with requests to nuke hurricanes.

Man--I like Sterling Hayden as much as the next guy, but still!

If you're one of the folks who wish that someone would go all Strangelove on Katrina and Rita, Greg and NOAA both explain why that would be a spectacularly bad idea.

Neo-Neocon, with a Magritte-inspired apple carefully placed to protect her identity, is the subject of the current profile on the Pajamas Media homepage.

Her blog is well worth checking out--it's fast becoming a daily stop for many. (Like myself!)

Really fascinating interview with Theodore Dalrymple, to promote his new book, Our Culture, What's Left Of It.

To place the modern culture of millions of middle and lower middle class people in America and Europe into context, compare Dalrymple's comments with this look at day to day life in New York, circa 1939.

Update: Found via Armavirumque, Christy Davis has a similar look at England at the turn of the 20th century.

Meanwhile, here's a flashback to a long recent post of ours, included as part of Willism.com's "Carnival of the Classiness". It builds on Theodore Dalrymple's trenchant comments on the evils of modern architecture, as it's applied to public housing.

(Totally unrelated article, but this late fellow also seemed to be bucking for a Darwin Award himself. Either that, or he was a huge fan of Joyce Kilmer...)

A few times earlier this year, we've noted the sense of nostalgia that permates many big city newspapers. UPI explains one of the reasons behind it:

Three of the most prestigious newspapers in the United States, the New York Times, Boston Globe and Philadelphia Inquirer, announced job cuts Tuesday.

The New York Times Co., which owns the Times, the Globe and a number of other newspapers, said that 500 jobs would be eliminated across the company. The total includes 45 editorial jobs at the Times and 35 at the Globe, Editor & Publisher reported.

Philadelphia Newspapers, which owns the Inquirer and the Daily News, announced that it would try to eliminate 100 editorial positions through buyouts. The plan calls for a cut of 25 in the Daily News' 130-person editorial staff and 75 from the 500 at the Inquirer.

At the same time, the company plans to hire advertising sales people.

"We have to grow our advertising revenue," Joseph Natoli, the company's publisher and president, told E&P.

The Times said that details of its job cuts have not been worked out, although executives expect a mix of layoffs and buyouts.

Like most other newspapers, the Times Co. and Philadelphia Newspapers have been hit by declining circulation and ad revenue as both readers and advertisers turn to the Internet.

Where they discover Dan Rather's New Journalism Order.

Related thoughts from Mark In Mexico.

Update: John Hinderaker of Power Line also weighs in:

As life-long newspaper junkies, we take no pleasure in the industry's current crisis. Apart from anything else, we web-based commenators need newspapers to produce the raw material for our commentary. But my sympathy for the Times, the Globe, the Chronicle, et al. is tempered by the knowledge that there is a path to solvency, which I think would likely succeed, but that they would never consider: stop being so liberal. Wouldn't you think that with newspapers nearly everywhere sliding inexorably downhill, just one might consider whether its readers--or former readers--were trying to tell it something? Like, we're not interested in supporting far-left nonsense?

But no. They would rather go broke than abandon their reason for being, which is, with only a handful of exceptions, promoting the Democratic Party.

Would moderating their hard-left politics help stop the financial bleeding? It's hard to say for sure. But don't you think that if they were motivated mainly be economics, just one of our major liberal papers might try it?

This is a question for Hollywood and the broadcast TV networks as well.

It's not as bad as Ted Turner pretending that North Korea is nothing but pizza and fairytales, but Charles Johnson observes the New York Times leaving out several key details of Cindy Sheehan's visit to New York, New York.

While the post below has an audio clip of Ted Turner's bizarre comments about North Korea to Wolf Blitzer, Shadow TV.com has the video. Click here for part one, here for part two.

In some sort of thankfully rare harmonic convergence of idiocy, two television news veterans simultaneously go coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs, as Hugh Hewitt notes. First up is Dan Rather:

I am going to have to ask the Columbia Journalism School folks about the "new journalism order." Before long, Rather will be blaming the Bilderbergers for the forged docs.

Of Captain Dan The (now retired, thank God) Newsman, Roger L. Simon writes:

'Honest' Dan Rather comes back from the dead to set us straight in an 'emotional' speech about the media at Fordham Law.

"It's been one of television news' finest moments," Rather said of the Katrina coverage. He likened it to the coverage of President Kennedy's assassination in 1963.

"They were willing to speak truth to power," Rather said of the coverage.

I'm not even going to comment on that bizarre statement, but you've got to hand it to Dan. If most of us had been caught lying like he had on national television, we would have moved to South America by now.

Speaking truth to power is certainly a concept that Ted Turner has never heard of. Whether it's Cuba, the Soviet Union, or Iraq, Turner's never met a totalitarian regime he didn't want to prop up with sympathetic coverage.

And these days, North Korea is no exception. One man's Hell on Earth is another man's fun vacation getaway, as Ted describes Kim Jung Il's rotting death trap of a country to Wolf Blitzer, who walks a thin line between being absolutely incredulous, but respectful towards the man who founded the network that employs him:

Read More »

Two men are talking as they drive in car.

Jules: Okay, so tell me again about the porn.

Vincent: Okay, watcha wanna know?

Jules: Porn is supplied for free by the Danish government now right?

Vincent: Yeah, it's free, but it ain't 100 percent free. I mean, you can't just walk into a...videostore, pick up a Ron Jeremy move, and just start bukakking away. I mean, they want only want you to watch it in your home or certain designated places.

Jules: And those are nursing homes.

Vincent: Yeah. It breaks down like this: earlier this year, the Danish government released a report stating that sexuality is an integral part of life for the elderly and the disabled. It recommended that caregivers help elderly residents satisfy their sexual needs. The staff in the nursing home in the Danish capital have been broadcasting pornography on the building's internal video channel every Saturday night for several years. And if videos and dirty magazines don't relieve the tension, residents can ask the staff to order a prostitute for them.

Jules: Oh man, I'm going, that's all there is to it, I'm f***in' going!

Vincent: I know, baby--you dig it the most! But you know what the funniest thing about Europe is?

Jules: What?

Vincent: It's the little differences. I mean, they got the same s*** over there that they got here, but it's just, it's just theirs is a little different.

Jules: Example?

Vincent: All right. Well you can walk into a movie theater in Odense, and buy a beer. And I don't mean just like no paper cup, I'm talking about a glass of beer. And in Hedeby, you can buy a beer in McDonald's. And you know what they call uh...watching porn and getting laid by hookers in a nursing home?

Jules: They don't call it watching porn and getting laid by hookers in a nursing home?

Vincent: Nah man! They got their own morally relative euphemisms, they wouldn't use language like that over there.

Jules: Then what do they call it?

Vincent: They call it "caregivers helping elderly residents satisfy their sexual needs"!

Jules: Caregivers helping elderly residents satisfy their sexual needs?

Vincent: That's right.

Jules: (laughs) What about the hash bars?

Vincent: I don't know, I didn't go into Amsterdam.

I noticed Newsweek's cover yesterday when I saw it on the supermarket checkout stand. As Howard Kurtz describes it:

The fact that most of those left behind in the New Orleans flood were poor and black is being treated by the press as a stunning revelation -- "A National Shame," as Newsweek's cover put it.

Actually, Newsweek itself has no shame, and they certainly aren't lacking in chutzpah, either: he who writes fake-but-fake Koran in toilet stories and puts American flags into garbage cans on magazine covers has no business trying to mau-mau collective guilt out of the rest of America.

Meanwhile, Ed Morrissey has additional thoughts on the media's decade-long lack of coverage of New Orleans' crushing poverty:

Kurtz wants to know why these stories don't get news coverage -- stories like poverty and race, and political appointments gone awry. I think he already knows the answer: most news media do not have the energy or resources to devote to stories that complex or long-term. Even newspapers, which supposedly exist to give more depth and analysis to the news, too often only go after the most superficial of stories, because those can get efficient handling. A reporter can quickly go over the details of the extant issue and then drop it for the next big issue of the day. Poverty and race have too much complexity for any serious treatment, and lower-level political appointees bore readers until they screw up. Columnists supposedly should take up the slack, but the columnists have the same problem as the newspaper regarding the subject matter and a much larger obstacle in terms of resources.

How will this resolve itself? The blogosphere will probably provide the solution. People who find these subjects fascinating will devote themselves to researching them and documenting their findings, and journalists might use the blogs themselves as resources. Beltway blogs already give closer scrutiny to midlevel appointees than the media does, and again, reporters with a sense of survival will eventually learn to nurture that kind of research and the blogger who performs it.

In the meantime, however, the holier-than-thou reaction to the supposed novelty of Bush addressing race and poverty looks more like hypocrisy coming from the nation's newsrooms. If poverty has slipped off the radar screen, they need to start reporting honestly and intelligently on the issue.

Don't hold your breath.

The Anchoress has a long and well thought-out vaguely Freudian analysis of President Clinton's latest utterances, which lambast his successor, who's relied on Clinton (along with Pappa Bush) to help spearhead disaster recovery efforts after both Hurricane Katrina, and the Indian Ocean tsunami last December:

Actually, [in the past] President Clinton has tiptoed around the tactic of lambasting, sharply criticising or launching a “withering” attack against President Bush, several times. He has simply had the sense to do so tentatively, and discreetly - inserting a sly dig at Davos, a mild remark in Rio. This weekend, bouyed by campaign-trailish coverage and the sort of wonky gasbag-fest we know always energizes him, Clinton simply decided to get off his tippy-toes and step lively.

Some of this was predictable. The extreme left of the Democrat Party has grown into a fuming beast that needs constant feeding as it stomps around its cage, waiting to be unleashed. Because Mrs. Clinton is planning a run at the White House, she and her husband are simply shoveling at them the same Triangulation Kibble they used to feed the left (and the center) in 1991 and 1992 - except that this time the ingredients are reversed: this time Bill Clinton is the Hard Left Outside while Hillary is the Deeply Moderate Center. Same food, different packaging; it is a particularly useful recipe for both Clintons because his “centrist” credentials, and her “leftist” credentials are so firmly in place, that no matter how the ingredients are mixed, the same multitudes are fed, and things even taste the same.

All of that is so predictable, it’s almost boring. Bill and Hill are smothering us again, gearing up for another leg of their endless campaign. What’s on Channel 38?

In another way, yesterday’s unloading was simply Bill Clinton doing what he has always done. He serves not God, nor country, nor the simple dignity of an Office quite worthy of respect. What he does serve is his own towering ambition, and his other, sadly insatiable (and ultimately destructive) need - his need to be loved.

The Anchoress links to this passage from Generation Why:

Does this mean Bill Clinton is admitting he bombed Iraq to deflect attention away from his personal legal troubles? Because if the danger in Iraq presented “no real urgency” then how should these quotes be interpreted?

What follows are a series of quotes by Clinton on the dangers of Iraq--quotes that were echoed by the media and the rest of the left up until the dime was turned in mid-2003. As Generation Why asks, "Is he lying now or was he lying then?"

Or is it simply Clinton's renowned postmodernism, which would make Oceania proud?

Update: Chris Lynch has a large round-up of Blogospheric reaction. He's been linked to by InstaPundit, thus ensuring that, as Chris says, "more people will see Clinton's comments in context now".

Indeed.

I hadn't heard of All Things Beautiful until I did a vanity Technorati search over the weekend, but I can't help but like any blog that puts me via a single post, in the same company with John Roberts and Cary Grant:

Roberts' dress code is entirely based on Cary Grant in his favorite movie. Therefore, the man clearly has - 'Integrity'

Number two, he is a born Leader.....of fashion. According to Cathy Horyn of the New York Times, we have a welcomed return of the black tailored suit, the very style that Roberts favors.

The subject of American aesthetics (see interesting article by Edward Driscoll), and inherently men's sense of fashion, still largely rests on Integrity. The quality of being honest, and having strong moral principles, moral uprightness. Roberts is known to be a man of integrity: whole, undivided, unimpaired and unified.

The 'Chief Justice Roberts' Look is corporate, commanding, prudent, full of integrity, with a 'touch of heart' discretely worn on your well cut sleeve. My guess is that we will see a lot of dark tailored suits amongst the young Americans who will be driving this trend.

Sounds good to me.

Incidentally, nifty Warhol-esque photo of the blog's hostess on her bio.

In his Happy Warrior column for National Review (registration required), Mark Steyn writes that when it comes to Europe's rightwing politicians, they're "Rimbauds, Not Rambos":

At the moment, Europe is governed largely by politicians of “the right.” Jacques Chirac, for example, is in French terms a “conservative.” Granted, “conservative” is an elastic designation, and, in the hands of the media, it’s usually shorthand for the side you’re not meant to like. Thus, George W. Bush is “conservative,” and so are unreconstructed Marxists in the Chinese politburo and the more hardline ayatollahs. But even under those expansive rules of admission, I find it difficult to encompass President Chirac within the definition. If he’s “center-right,” where the center is doesn’t bear thinking about. Still, the fact remains that the transatlantic estrangement of the Bush era has occurred during a period of supposed political convergence between Washington and chancelleries of Europe — the end result of which is that the president’s closest ally is the center-left survivor Tony Blair.

That’s why I’m unpersuaded by those Europhiles in Washington who are pinning their hopes on a Euro-American realignment under Frau Merkel and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy. The differences between Europe and America are so profound that political labels are simply lost in translation. You know those showers where the merest nudge of the dial turns the water from freezing to scalding? Mainstream European politics is the opposite of that. You can turn the dial all the way from “left” to “right” and it makes no difference.

Over the last half-century, Continental politics evolved to the point where almost any issue worth talking about was ruled beyond the bounds of polite society. Austria was the classic example: Year in, year out, whether you voted for the center-left party or the center-right party, you wound up with the same center-left/center-right coalition presiding over what was in essence a two-party one-party state. In France, M. Chirac isn’t really “center-right” so much as ever so slightly left-of-right-of-left-of-center — and even that distinction applies only when he’s standing next to his former prime minister, the right-of-left-of-right-of-left-of-center Lionel Jospin. Though supposedly from opposite ends of the political spectrum, in the 2002 presidential election they wound up running against each other on identical platforms, both passionately committed to high taxes, high unemployment, and high crime.

Americans often make the same criticism of their own system — the “Republicrats,” etc. — but take it from me, the U.S. still has a more genuinely responsive politics with more ideological diversity than anywhere in western Europe. On the Continent, the Eurodee and Eurodum mainstream parties are boxed into a consensus politics that’s no longer sustainable. The people are weary of certain aspects of this postwar settlement — permanent double-digit unemployment and the Islamification of their cities — but they’re not yet ready to give up the social programs, the short work weeks, long vacations, and jobs for life. They’re voting against the center-left consensus but there’s little sign they’re willing to vote for any medicine tougher than a modest tweak toward a right-of-left-of-right-of-center consensus.

No wonder Europe seems perpetually trapped in a Jimmy Carter-style malaise.

Nick Schulz, my editor at Tech Central Station, borrows the title from a classic number by Derek & The Dominoes, and reminds us that when it comes to energy policy, That Seventies Show is back:

If you closed your eyes tight -- to ignore the fashion differences -- and merely listened to news broadcasts, you'd swear you were in the 1970s. [Actually, waaaay too much of fashion these days is stuck in the seventies as well--Ed]

On Capitol Hill last week, debate swirled around the Supreme Court and a woman's constitutional right to abortion. Anti-war protesters continue to bleat about U.S. soldiers being mired in a "quagmire." And just this summer, George Lucas once again saw a "Star Wars" film go boffo at the box office.

What's more -- and more troubling -- economic policies from the disco era are being raised from the dead.

In response to recent increased prices at the pump, the Hawaii legislature imposed caps on the wholesale cost of gasoline. Say aloha to an economic disaster. Energy price controls, embraced in the 1970s by Presidents Nixon and Carter, were a bipartisan failure. The Maui News editorialized against its state legislature's decision, remarking, "In the early 1970s, President Richard M. Nixon pushed a program of price controls. Economists credit the effort as the reason for nearly a decade of nationwide stagflation." Despite this history, Massachusetts is also considering such a move, as is Utah.

Adding economic insult to the injury of higher prices, Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-ND, is calling for, of all things, a tax increase. The tax would apply to what he dubs "windfall profits" for the energy industry. The windfall profits tax is another brainchild of the 1970s fever for micromanaging energy markets. It was implemented back in 1980, partly as a political trade-off to get rid of the price controls. The respected Congressional Research Service concluded the tax simply replaced one harmful economic policy with another and increased American dependence on foreign oil. Congress had the good sense to jettison the tax in the late 1980s. And yet Sen. Dorgan joins the chorus of enthusiasts for '70s-era energy policy by calling for its reinstatement.

David Frum's brilliant How We Got Here does a thorough job of analyzing the disparate trends of the 1970s, which, as Frum observes, far more than the 1960s, shaped how we live today. For a time, it appeared that the '80s managed to put a stake in the heart of the worst of them. But sadly, like bell bottoms themselves, sometimes it seems like there's no escape from the excesses of That Seventies Show.

Hugh Hewitt's Sancho Panza, Duane Patterson writes:

On Sunday's front page of the Washington Post, there is a long story about the increase of attendence of Christian chapel services among Major League Baseball players. On the one hand, it's encouraging to see that anybody, or any group of people, relying on Christ. It's also encouraging that a major newspaper reports on it.

On the other hand, you read the piece and get the same feeling as if it were an article on a previously-unknown tribe in the middle of some jungle in Africa. It's almost as if the Post is reporting on a disturbing sub-culture that's permeating the national pastime.

There's a lot of that in the MSM these days, isn't there?

In a profile of James Lileks that ran in August in the New York Daily News, Lileks bemoaned the death of middlebrow culture:

Most of Lileks' writing is on a topic that crosses the political divide. It's what fellow blogger Terry Teachout calls "middlebrow" culture, a concept which, Lileks says, has disappeared from modern life.

Middlebrow, Lileks explains, reached its apex in the 1950s, with TV shows like "What's My Line?" - "where you could find Bishop Fulton Sheen appear, for heaven's sake, followed by Jerry Lewis."

An even better example, he says, may be found in a vintage Looney Tune: "Bugs Bunny comes onstage and he's got long gray hair, which is back in a hair net. As he walks along, the orchestra members are terrified. They're all whispering: 'Leopold! Leopold!' ... everyone knew this was [the great conductor] Leopold Stokowski!" Lileks pauses for effect.

"Can you possibly imagine in a 'SpongeBob SquarePants,' [conductor] Herbert von Karajan walking around and everyone's going 'Herbert, Herbert'? No, you can't."

A couple of years ago, Charles Paul Freund had some thoughts on the post-middlebrow era:

What happened to middlebrow and the cultivated elites it empowered? As I've argued elsewhere, the precipitous decline in middlebrow culture is in large measure a function of technological innovation, which has had the effect of redrawing culture's sociological map. "Cable, VCRs, satellites, and the multidimensional changes wrought by the home computer have not only opened a vast array of new cultural choices to people, they are achieving something much larger: They are moving the consumption of culture out of the city and into the home. Cultural activity is becoming increasingly a private rather than a public matter, and the more culture is a private concern, the less status has anything to do with it. In private, people will immerse themselves in the culture they want. Thus culture—stripped of status concerns and reduced to authentic desire—is stranding elites in their own subculture."

Not everyone thinks that the decline of middlebrow is a good thing. The Wall Street Journal's Terry Teachout, for example, complained recently that "Just as city dwellers can't understand what it meant for the residents of a rural town to wake up one day and find themselves within driving distance of a Wal-Mart, so are they incapable of properly appreciating the true significance of middlebrow culture. For all its flaws, it nurtured at least two generations' worth of Americans who, like me, went on to become full-fledged highbrows..." Though Teachout grew up hundreds of miles from the nearest museum, he writes, "I already knew a little something about people like Willem de Kooning and Jerome Robbins, thanks to Time and Life magazines and The Ed Sullivan Show, and what little I knew made me want to know more."

I'm happy that culture (and thanks to the Blogosphere, news and opinion) is much more democratized these days; I just wish it wasn't also as stratified as its become, with pop culture aimed at the lowest common denominator and its highbrow counterpart (or what passes for it in these postmodern and PC days) so insular and isolated.

As Betsy Newmark writes, "Mark Steyn vs. the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee? Not a fair fight":

New York's senior senator, Chuck Schumer, began with some observations about Judge Roberts' "troubling" record on "the issue of civil rights." Ah-ha! "Many of us consider racism the nation's poison," he said sternly. And then he dropped the big one: Twenty-five years ago Roberts had inappropriately used the word "amigos" in a memo.

I yield to no one in my disdain for Schumer, but at that moment my heart went out to him. If I'd been president, I'd have declared his mouth a federal disaster area and allocated $200 billion so FEMA could parachute in a reconstruction team to restore his tongue to its previous level of toxicity.

Alas, two days later the watery gush that had transformed Schumer into his own devastated wetland had still not dried up. He'd pretty much abandoned the racism angle of the inappropriate "amigos," though he trotted out some boilerplate about how it reflected the "misguided" and "cramped view of civil rights professed in the early Reagan administration." But by Day Four, he'd moved on to "the question of compassion and humanity," telling the judge that he had grave concerns about "the fullness of your heart.''

And what was Exhibit A for the heartlessness of Roberts? Well, back in the early '80s it seems he wrote this memo containing the word "amigos."

Oh, dear. With enemies like Chuck, who needs amigos? Whatever happened to the party's fearsome forensic skills at "the politics of personal destruction"? Granted, blathering on about how, if the other guy doesn't agree with your views, he must be deficient in "compassion and humanity" is a lot of baloney even by mawkish Dem standards. But, if you're going to twitter about the fullness of somebody's heart, why get Chuck Schumer to play Senator Oprah? He has the shifty air of a mob accountant, even with every intern on his staff holding onions under his eyes. Likewise, sneering at Roberts' life of privilege may be a smart move, but not if you entrust it to Dianne Feinstein, one of the wealthiest women in the galaxy.

But, like Lord Cardigan's 13th Light Dragoons facing the Russian guns at Balaclava, onward they rode into the Valley of Death -- or the Valley of Continuous Cable News Coverage, which boils down to flogging your dead horse through a Valley of Living Death.

In her post linking to Steyn, Betsy also has some thoughts on how the Democrats' votes on Roberts will resonate with their base. Ed Morrissey predicts, "Roberts will get Feinstein and Kohl's vote, perhaps Feingold as well as Leahy, the one Democrat who may have improved his standing overall. That will be all." But he also notes one surprise endorsement: the Washington Post, which concludes:

JOHN G. ROBERTS JR. should be confirmed as chief justice of the United States. He is overwhelmingly well-qualified, possesses an unusually keen legal mind and practices a collegiality of the type an effective chief justice must have. He shows every sign of commitment to restraint and impartiality. Nominees of comparable quality have, after rigorous hearings, been confirmed nearly unanimously. We hope Judge Roberts will similarly be approved by a large bipartisan vote.

In other words, it sounds like a done deal, and despite our best efforts all summer long at savaging the judge and his family, there's nothing we at the Post can do to stop it.

Update: Radio Blogger has a round-up of Roberts reaction that also includes coverage of the New York and L.A. Times, along with the Post.

"Martin, it's all psychological. You yell barracuda, everybody says, 'Huh? What?' You yell shark, we've got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July."

--Murray Hamilton as Mayor Vaughn, in Jaws

There's a new 30th anniversary super-duper special edition of Jaws out, which Libertas sings the praises of (and of course, the original movie) in its latest post. Great observations here:

Would Jaws get made today? Yeah, I think so. But would it be as good even with the same talent available? No, I don’t think so. I don’t think so because the straight-forwardness of the script would be lost in today’s agenda-driven Hollywood.

I think a woman would be put on the boat. Probably in the Dreyfus role. Not because she would be better – who could possibly be better than Dreyfus? – but for politically correct reasons. And she’d of course be a liberal environmentalist feminist who would remind us ad nauseum sharks don’t normally do this. And finally we’d learn the shark attack is “our” fault. That man, specifically America - specifically corporate America - had committed some environmental crime that affected the shark’s natural habitat, and with no choice the shark came to Amity to feed. In other words, poetic justice liberal style.

Sometimes a shark is just a shark.

Not seeing the film in five years and not having the best memory (a gift for a movie lover, let me tell you) I was surprised to find there was none of this idiocy in the film. I just expected it in that kind of story because that’s all we find today.

As early as 15 years ago in The Devil's Candy, Julie Salamon documented how Hollywood's political correctness could ruin a great story when it's handed to them on a silver platter. That's only increased today; and yet Tinseltown wonders why it can't get a majority of Americans into the box office, like the old days.

Many people come to me, and they ask, "Ed, how can you, such a reserved, conservative looking guy, actually know how to play guitar".

And I tell them.

It is because of the many years I've spent practicing with that ancient mystic from the far east...Mr. Fastfinger!

Incidentally, can't you just hear Don Black and John Barry writing his theme song?

Fastfinger, he's the man, the man with Steve's Vai's touch
A shredder's touch!
Such a fast finger beckons you to enter his web of sin
But don't go in

Blazing notes he will pour in your ear
But his riffs can't disguise what you fear
For a Fender Strat knows when he's touched her
It's the kiss of death from Mister...

Fastfinger!

Or something like that...

That seems to be the reasoning (such as it is) behind AP's new youth initiative, as Jeff Jarvis writes:

I’m not a big fan of youth products. I believe that readers are just readers and it’s condescending to target something to young people because — so the reasoning and self-fulfilling focus groups say — they allegedly like shorter stories and punchier stuff. No, they want to be informed like anyone! I’m not young (damnit) but I, too, don’t like long, overwritten stories. Anyway, in The Times story on the AP’s asap, as the product is called, this was a line that hit me:

They said asap would use the word “you” more in its articles but would maintain A.P. standards.

Arrrgh. So young people in droves will flock back to newspapers because they are addressed in the second-person. But they’ll be relieved that this doesn’t degrade AP standards. Arrgh again.

Now I don’t want to single out the good folks at the AP. The point is that this is the sort of thing I’ve heard in no end of endless meetings about about what publishers can do to get the elusive young person to read papers. I’ve heard executives earnestly believe that this kind of thing will make a difference.

But maybe they don’t want to read papers. Or maybe they don’t want to read our papers. Or maybe they don’t want to read what we have to say on paper. Maybe we need to break free of the medium and reinvent our relationship with the public and stop thinking of that public as them or you but instead as us.

(Found via Hugh Hewitt, who's boosted his visibility tenfold, by doing just that.)

Michelle Malkin looks at the The HuffMobile, Arianna Huffington and the Sierra Club's wheels of choice.

Read the whole thing, which reminds me of what I wrote about an ABC television season premiere at Disneyland a couple of years ago around this time:

In order to ferry the celebrities from L.A. to Anaheim, ABC employed an enormous fleet of stretch limos. I don't think I had ever seen more black automobiles this side of Don Corleone's funeral.

Lots of those limos were actually luxury black SUVs--and not an electric hybrid in sight! (Imagine that!) Next time a celebrity starts complaining about your Chevy Suburban or Toyota Land Cruiser, just remember how this person probably gets around--and smile at his Disneyland-sized hypocrisy.

I have a review of RGC:Audio (now Cakewalk's) Z3ta+ software synthesizer Z3ta+ (pronounced, "Zeta", for those of us who don't speak fluent l33t sp3@k), over at Blogcritics.

Andrew Sullivan brands Hugh Hewitt "the Sid Blumenthal of the Bush administration".

Hugh, rather remarkably, agrees.

Update: Power Line disagrees with Sullivan. A few years ago, that would have been more surprising than it is today.

Yesterday, I noted that with all the insane quotes that have been in the air since Katrina hit land at the beginning of the month, "The Silly Season", ordinarily purely a summer event to keep the press busy during an otherwise slow period of real news has extended deep into September. I sagely wrote, "Hurricane Katrina has rightly pushed [Cindy] Sheehan's ravings into the background".

Evidently, I spoke prematurely (and just now, far too adverbially). In order to form The Rosetta Stone Of Silliness, all of the disparate elements converged today, as Cindy posted on (but of course) Michael Moore's Website:

I don’t care if a human being is black, brown, white, yellow or pink. I don’t care if a human being is Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, or pagan. I don’t care what flag a person salutes: if a human being is hungry, then it is up to another human being to feed him/her. George Bush needs to stop talking, admit the mistakes of his all around failed administration, pull our troops out of occupied New Orleans and Iraq, and excuse his self from power.

Just think--it was only a couple of weeks ago that the press was castigating President Bush for not sending troops into New Orleans fast enough. Now the heroine they've created wants them out of there.

Meanwhile, Power Line's John Hinderaker catalogs Cindy's association, not just with Michael Moore, but with an ex-Black Panther and Communist:

Who is Cindy's "new friend" Malik Rahim? He is conventionally described as a "veteran of the Black Panther Party in New Orleans," and was recently a Green Party candidate for local office there. But the truth is somewhat worse. Rahim is a Communist. Here is a speech he gave to the Communist Manifesto conference in December 1998; it begins:

I'm here on behalf of two revolutionary freedom fighters that have spent the last 26 years in solitary confinement in Angola, a state prison in Louisiana. I met these freedom fighters as a political prisoner in 1970. I was in a shoot-out with the police in New Orleans as a member of the Black Panther Party.

The Communist Manifesto conference was reported on by the Workers World Party ("Workers & oppressed peoples of the world unite!"). The Workers World Party is currently the most active Communist group in the United States, in its own name and through its subsidiaries International ANSWER and the International Action Center, which is headed by former attorney general Ramsey Clark.

Hinderaker concludes:

The question is, why is she not just a hater, but a famous hater? Obviously, because she was a mainstream media darling throughout the summer. But where are the media, now that her cover has been blown? A curtain of silence has descended. Once again, the American press accepts no accountability for misleading the American people, and it has no intention of correcting the fictitious record that it, alone, created.

You know--you could really get the wrong impression of the press. Even though they're completely non-biased and neutral, it's almost...why, they sort of seem to agree with her viewpoint!

Nahh--I'm sure it's all just an optical illusion.

"There are probably some people among you here who fancy yourself as having leftist revolutionary credentials,” he said, in a discussion of Kurdish and Iraqi opponents of Saddam’s regime. "And, in fact, I can tell that you do by the zoo noises you make and the scars you can demonstrate from your long underground twilight struggle against Dick Cheney. But while you’re masturbating in that manner, the Iraqi secular left…[is] fighting for [its] lives against the most vicious and indiscriminate form of fascist violence that any country in the region has seen for a very long time."

--Christopher Hitchens, to the audience watching his caged pro wrestling deathmatch gentlemanly debate with George Galloway on Wednesday.

(Via Power Line.)

Duane Patterson looks at a DVD of college football highlights produced by the dyslexic folks at the University of Southern California:

The History USC Of Football

(Oh, like you've never made a mistake like that!--Ed. Rarely in the title...)

Tim Blair catches a...dynamite...Freudian Slip from the BBC:

Much of Gaza is a great mass of apartment blocks - flung up to house the exploding population.

The byline is by a reporter named Alan Johnston; no word yet if SCTV's Billy Saul Hurok and Big Jim McBob contributed to this breaking--into a million pieces--story as well.

Compare and contrast the intertwining paths of new media and old, via two items going online simultaneously today: Pajamas Media announces the roadmap to its official launch in November.

Meanwhile, this Washington Post article explains that starting next week, The New York Times' columnists will only be available online for the true believers willing to pay for the privilege of reading them. As Glenn Reynolds says in the Post:

"It seems to me that it's a fairly narrow market that's going to pay for the privilege of reading columns by Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman and such".

The Post quotes The Professor as saying he's "completely mystified" by the Times' decision.

I'm not. They're just doing their damndest to make the roadmap to 2014 clearer and clearer...

Update: Speaking of the Times and the Post, Bizzy Blog looks at the two papers' recently disclosed headline sharing agreement, and asks, "Are you still a 'conspiracy nut' when the conspiracy is acknowledged?"

On Fleet Street, summer is often referred to as "The Silly Season". Real news is slow, but since the newspage is a vacuum that demands to be filled with something, plenty of ridiculous, hyped-up--silly--news stories take their place.

Earlier today, Glenn Reynolds linked to a piece by National Review's John Derbyshire on a sensitivity training program required by FEMA before firemen and paramedics could be sent to New Orleans and Mississippi to actually do the work they're trained to do. Shortly after his post went up, Glenn looked back and updated his post with, "Derbyshire's curriculum is satire. Sadly, I had to read it twice to be sure."

Lately, there's been a lot of that going around, isn't there? I know the categories on my blog to document that sort of thing have been getting quite a workout lately.

As with Hurricane Katrina, the real story driving Derbyshire's mock training program (itself based on real news), the underlying issues behind them are serious. But the response to them by the left and bureaucracies badgered into being responsive to their rococo sensibilities has been so overblown, that they've driven vast swatches of the left into self-parody.

It started in early August with Cindy Sheehan. Her initial story was a sincere one: grieving leftwing mother whose son was killed in Iraq after volunteering not only to serve there, but to reenlist for a second tour of duty in the Army. But between the discovery that President Bush had already met with Sheehan a year ago--a meeting she herself said was surprisingly comforting, and then her frequent speeches and posting of incendiary tinfoil rhetoric about her son dying for oil and expanding "American imperialism in the Middle East" and "Israel out of Palestine" on leftwing Websites, her ranting hyperbole simply canceled itself out.

While Hurricane Katrina has rightly pushed Sheehan's ravings into the background, it unleashed a new round of excess. This one combined (combines? It's still playing itself out to a great extent) similar hyperbole with a sort of punitive moping by vast swatches of the celebrity and media left. As usual though, their contempt is aimed at America that many on the left already loathe and feel didn't meet their lofty standards with its response to Katrina's devastation. Despite the fact that hundreds of millions of dollars in aid has been raised in two weeks time, and thousands of volunteers, National Guardsmen, and other carefully sensitivity trained-relief workers, were quickly mobilized and are on the ground helping. And despite the fact that nothing that could have been done would have caused many who work on Hollywood soundstages or in Manhattan broadcasting booths to say, "Wow, you know what? This is the sort of thing that really makes me feel proud to be American."

And then add to it a rather unique proposed "memorial" to Flight #93, the gaseous emanations of a Senate that would rather hear itself speak than interview a nominee to the Supreme Court, and yesterday's latest seemingly annual attempt to derail the Pledge of Allegiance. You have to wonder: Summer is winding down.

But when does the Silly Season end?

Update: In an essay titled, "The Racism Charges Won’t Wash", Heather Mac Donald writes, "The Katrina donations--$788 million-worth--are colorblind". If only Hollywood could understand that.

As DVD continues to pummel the sales of VHS, the latter's nostalgia value is beginning to soar, according to Delaware Online.

No VHS nostalgia for me though--it's strictly a utilitarian format that I'm glad to see fade into the past. I'm happily (if all too slowly) burning onto DVD-R and DVD-RWs as many of my old VHS tapes as possible, if they contain material that's unlikely to be commercially released onto DVD. I'm doing the same with my old laser discs as well, although their picture quality is definitely better than VHS.

One thing I hadn't realized was just how far DVDs have overtake VHS in the rental market:

In Blockbuster's second quarter, VHS rentals accounted for 4.7 percent of total rentals at company stores worldwide, Hargrove said. DVD rentals made up 84.5 percent, with the remainder coming from game rentals.

For someone like myself who remembers the late 1980s, when there were only about a million laser disc players in the US (and getting new discs was often a matter of mail order, or drives to the Big City), that's an amazing figure.

Virginia Postrel tells all.

I'm sure from the outside, Pajamas Media seems like The Vast Blogospheric Conspiracy, a sort of online Stonecutters Society that wears PJs instead of monks' robes at its secret meetings. The reality is something far less centrally planned and conspirative, as I literally had never heard of this fellow until his profile was online there.

...But based on his excellent milblog, it certainly won't be the last time.

As I said at the end of my profile:

Hopefully, the [Pajamas Media] portal will be a way for new writers to emerge. That's always thrilling for me -- discovering new writers who, before the blogosphere, I didn't even know existed.

Looks like it's already working just that way--even before the final version (complete with what will probably be, sadly, a less whimsical name) goes online!

Of course, the Blogosphere has its own Cassandra--the nom de blog of the hostess of Villainous Company, who links to this Washington Post op-ed by Robert Kagan on a topic we've looked at a few times as well--the recent "forgetfulness" of the left's media and politicians on the bipartisan support the idea of overturning Saddam Hussein enjoyed in the 1990s:

Read More »

Currently up as the lead post on Instant History, the Weblog that catalogs important past Time and Newsweek covers and their accompanying stories, is this prescient excerpt from an article on New Orleans whose subhead reads, "If it doesn't act fast, the city could become the next Atlantis". That was five years ago. And needless to say, the city didn't act--fast, or otherwise.

Here's more:

"If a flood of biblical proportions were to lay waste to New Orleans, Joe Suhayda has a good idea how it could happen. A Category 5 hurricane would come barreling out of the Gulf of Mexico. It would cause Lake Pontchartrain, north of New Orleans, to overflow, pouring down millions of gallons of water into the city. Then things would really get ugly. Evacuation routes would be blocked. Buildings would collapse. Chemicals and hazardous waste would dissolve, turning the floodwaters into a lethal soup. In the end, what was left of the city might not be worth saving. 'There's concern it would essentially destroy New Orleans,' says Suhayda."

Read the rest of Instant History's excerpt, which concludes with a link to the entire piece.

Dave Johnston of the popular NewDave.com Weblog is now Internet Content Manager for the Cato Institute. Congrats on the new gig!

Currently up on Breitbart.com is this:

Judge: School Pledge Is Unconstitutional
Sep 14 2:20 PM US/Eastern

By DAVID KRAVETS
Associated Press Writer

SAN FRANCISCO

Reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools was ruled unconstitutional Wednesday by a federal judge who granted legal standing to two families represented by an atheist who lost his previous battle before the U.S. Supreme Court.

U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton ruled that the pledge's reference to one nation "under God" violates school children's right to be "free from a coercive requirement to affirm God."

Karlton said he was bound by precedent of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which in 2002 ruled in favor of Sacramento atheist Michael Newdow that the pledge is unconstitutional when recited in public schools.

Given the San Francisco dateline, it sounds like Michael Newdow and his buddies on the Ninth Circuit Court are back in action this fall, winning hearts and minds everywhere.

(It's highly likely, of course, to be overturned. And somewhere, Karl Rove is laughing like a giddy schoolgirl over this...)

Update: Michelle Malkin has lots 'o' links on this, including this one, from Ankle Biting Pundits:

The lefties in the Senate and the groups against Roberts have to be PO'ed. This news is going to overshadow their other messages against Roberts - and now they're going to have to play defense because you know this is going to be the 1st question that they are asked about.
You know these kooks agree with the decision, but they can't say that.

This also bodes well for President Bush picking a very conservative replacement for O'Connor. If he's got a short list he should make his selection quick while the iron is hot and it will be much harder for the loons to say his judicial choice is "out of the mainstream".

ABP also has some amusing details about the judge who issued the decision.

Glenn Reynolds agrees that Karl Rove has to be loving this turn of events:

KARL ROVE MUST HAVE ARRANGED THIS: Just as John Roberts is being quizzed by the Senate Judiciary Committee, another court declares the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional.

You know, Elvis was spot-on: I used to be disgusted by our nihilistic masters in Sacramento and San Francisco. Now I'm just mildly amused, and smile softly each time their causality loop repeats.

Back on Christmas of last year, I quoted from Mark Steyn, on how the actions of the ACLU and the Ninth Circus actually strengthen Christianity in America:

But every time some sensitive flower pulls off a legal victory over the school board, who really wins? For the answer to that, look no further than last month's election results. Forty years of effort by the American Civil Liberties Union to eliminate God from the public square have led to a resurgent, evangelical and politicised Christianity in America. By "politicised", I don't mean that anyone who feels his kid should be allowed to sing Silent Night if he wants to is perforce a Republican, but only that year in, year out it becomes harder for such folks to support a secular Democratic Party closely allied with the anti-Christmas militants. American liberals need to rethink their priorities: what's more important? Winning a victory over the kindergarten teacher's holiday concert, or winning back Congress and the White House?

Currently, their priority is on the former; a lesson they failed to heed from President Clinton.

Another Update: Hugh Hewitt agrees with ABP that President Bush should strike while the iron is hot.

One More: Political Teen looks at the continuing tyranny of the minority:

Athiests account for 902,000 or 0.4% of the US population. Those who believe in a God or some sort of a higher being account for over 86% of the US population. It is amazing that such a small minority can rule over a large majority.

The deal here isn’t just the small amount of atheists in America, but the fact that they have to punish everyone for something they don’t believe in. If you do not want your child to recite the pledge of allegiance, then tell them not too. No one forces your child to stand up, put their hand over their heart and say 20 seconds worth of American patriotism. Thank God I go to a private school.

I'm glad I did, too.

Back in April, in a post titled, "Absolutely Fabulist", I wrote:

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

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

It's telling that the synonym that Webster's recommends for the word is fictitious.

So let's look at how Webster's definition of the word applies to the mainstream media's coverage of Hurricane Katrina.

In a post titled, "No Accurate Death Toll Estimates Please, We're The MSM", Paul Mirengoff of Power Line writes:

James Pinkerton thinks Hurricane Katrina demonstrates that reports of the death of the MSM were greatly exaggerated. He's right. The MSM was able to write the first draft of this story in a biased and misleading fashion, to the detriment of President Bush. Blogs and other new media were unable to prevent or counteract this. As Pinkerton puts it, "the MSM got there firstest with the mostest."

However, though the MSM may have been able, in the short term, to trim two or three points from the approval rating of a president who can't run for re-election, there's a good chance it did so at a lasting cost to its diminishing credibility. For it seems likely that the one piece of critical concrete information the MSM supplied about the hurricane -- the estimated death toll of 10,000 people -- will prove to be wildly excessive.

It will do the MSM and its apologists no good to say that they were merely setting an upper limit. People will remember the frightening number, not the weasel words that may have accompanied it. Nor, as Glenn Reyonolds suggests, will it be much use to say, as some have, that the number came from Mayor Nagin. It was the MSM's reliance on the ravings of Nagin that served as the springboard for the "blame Bush" coverage. The MSM hitched its wagon to an incompetent, hysterical mayor in full CYA mode. It will have to live with the consequences. The main consequence is that the MSM appears to have gotten the single most important fact about Katrina wrong. The public is likely to remember.

Well, some will at least.

Someone known for telling fables is a fabulist. And recently, several bloggers have been discussing the media's willingness to openly embrace fabulism and run with it: CNN's Jonathan Klein (the man who gave the Blogosphere its dress code) calls it "storytelling". Ace of Spades pungently describes CNN's "storytelling" as consisting of:

some sort of hybrid of news and strong dramatic narrative. You know--kind of made-up fictitious s*** with a pleasing emotional resonance.

In a way, it's curious to see the media moving further and further way from the appearance of objectivity. As Newsweek's Howard Fineman wrote a couple of months after President Bush was reelected:

Read More »

"Shanna, they bought their tickets, they knew what they were getting into. I say, let 'em crash!"

That's actually a line from an actor appearing on a mock "Point/Counterpart" television news spoof in Airplane!, that benchmark comedy movie. But quotes just as inane about hurricane Katrina and its aftermath are being heard every day on real TV news shows, as John Hawkins notes.

(...At least, I think it's the real TV news. Malcolm Muggeridge noted in the early sixties how hard it was to tell the difference between satire and reality, a trend that--as the quotes John has compiled illustrates--has only accelerated since.)

Update: This remark is late to the competition, but something tells me the judges will allow its entry...

Another Update: Betsy Newmark has some thoughts on John's assemblidge of quotes and concludes, "The media is happily driving a wedge between the races and they should be truly ashamed". They're not: the key word in that sentence is "happily"; Michael Graham's Redneck Nation foreshadowed exactly what the media's tone would be covering Katrina.

There was a spontaneous memorial erected in Shanksville, PA to remember Flight #93 by everyday folks who wanted to remember the heroic actions of that flight's passengers, especially Todd Beamer, whose "Let's Roll" quickly became the post-9/11 rallying cry for America. That memorial has gotten surprisingly little exposure (maybe it isn't all that surprising, given the mainstream media's voracious memory hole), but Jonathan Last of The Weekly Standard had photos of it on his Galley Slaves Weblog back in December. I have no idea if it's still standing, but in retrospect, it's certainly far more appropriate than what's currently being proposed as the permanent memorial, as Mark Steyn explains:

Read More »

A friend of Cathy Seipp goes shopping for the latest book by Orianna Fallaci in San Francisco's City Lights book store and gets rebuffed by their clerk:

Peter had taken his seven-year-old daughter to visit City Lights, his favorite bookstore when he was at Berkeley, and had carefully explained to her that one of the distinguished things about this store's history is that it would carry authors no other store would -- even (perhaps especially) authors whose ideas many people found offensive.

So he really had no complaint that there was an entire City Lights table devoted to the works of Ward Churchill -- you know, the faux Indian and discredited professor who famously called the victims of Sept. 11 "little Eichmanns."

However, it occured to Peter that September is the month the English translation of Orianna Fallaci's new book, "The Force of Reason," is supposed to be published. And he thought that since he was at City Lights, perhaps he would buy something. So he asked a clerk if they had the new Fallaci book in yet.

"No," snapped the clerk. "We don't carry books by fascists."

Oh no he didn't! Oh yes he did. Oh no he didn't! Oh yes he did, and let's just savor the absurd details of this for a minute: That a bookstore supposedly committed to selling suppressed books wouldn't carry, of all people, Fallaci, who's being sued in Italy for insulting religion in "The Force of Reason" but continues to fight the good fight against those who want to suppress books; that someone who fought against actual fascism in World War II should be deemed a fascist by some simpering San Francisco clerk; that this clerk, who was obviously gay, disapproves of an author who defends Western civilization and criticizes radical Islam -- when one of the first things those poor persecuted Islamists would do if they ever (Allah forbid) came to power in the U.S. is crush people like that ridiculous clerk beneath walls.

"You're welcome to buy her book elsewhere, though," added the clerk helpfully. "Let's just say we don't have room for her here."

The strange thing, Peter said when he told me about all this, is that once he wandered into a radical Islamist bookshop in London -- so violently radical it's apparently since been closed -- and even they had a single copy of an anti-Islamist author (Bernard Lewis) in the back. Just for reference, presumably. But not City Lights. That would be too offensive and inflammatory.

Amazing how the origins of fascism--not to mention its definition--has gotten conviently tossed down the memory hole, over the years. Originally, it was a populist offshoot of Marxism.

Now it's simply shorthand by the left to slander anyone whose ideas they don't like.

(Via Roger L. Simon.)

My dad has always been a pious fellow, but he couldn't help making that joking riff on the similar sounding line in the Lord's Prayer from time to time, which I'm sure he heard as a kid, growing up in pre-World War II Yonkers.

It's a phrase that took on new meaning in 1968, when the current version of Penn Station opened, replacing the magnificent original, which stood from 1910 until the mid-1960s, when it was demolished by a cash-starved Pennsylvania Railroad to build its current subterrainian version, and place the current Madison Square Garden and an office tower on its air rights.

The current Penn Station is a horrible, dank place, the absolute nadir of modernism, and blasphemy to the greatness the name implied for decades. But as I explain in my latest Tech Central Station column, across the street, there is, as George Lucas would say, A New Hope...

Other than the expensive therapy bills it cost me from all the brutally painful 1970s flashbacks I experienced while reading it, I loved James Lileks' Interior Desecrations book last year, which carried this important WARNING! on its back cover:

This book is not to be used in any way, shape, or form as a design manual. Rather, like the documentary about youth crime "Scared Straight", it is meant as a caution of sorts, a warning against any lingering nostalgia we may have for the 1970s, a breathtakingly ugly period when even the rats parted their hair down the middle.

What does this have to do with furniture? Nothing. Everything. The kind of interior design you'll see in these pages is what happens when an entire culture becomes so besotted with the new, the hip, the with-it styles that they cannot object to orange wallpaper— because they fear they'll look square.

Please note that the author and publisher are not responsible for the results of viewing these pictures.

It's a warning that Anjelica Huston evidently failed to heed, when she designed her appropriately named "Little Mud House".

(Here's a WARNING! of our own: clicking above link risks blindness and/or physical discomfort caused by overexposure to overly saturated psychedelic color scheme. Don't see we didn't warn you...)

OK, I'm convinced: Mark Steyn has cloned himself, or has dozens of tiny Laotian tots in his basement doing his typing. There's no way one guy can turn out as many great columns as quickly and consistently as Steyn does. Here's his latest, on the media and Katrina:

'Flood That Released America's Demons", said the Sun on Saturday. Underneath the arresting headline was a column by Jeremy Clarkson, and, after the usual good-natured knockabout - "Most Americans barely have the brains to walk on their back legs" - he turned to the desperate scenes being played out in New Orleans: "On the streets you've got some poor, starving soul helping themselves to a packet of food from a ruined, deserted supermarket. And as a result, finding themselves being blown to pieces by a helicopter gunship. With the none-too-bright soldiers urged on by their illiterate political masters, the poor and needy never stood a chance. It's easier and much more fun to shoot someone than make them a cup of tea.

"Especially if they're black."

I have to agree with Jeremy there. It is easier to shoot someone than make them a cup of tea. Especially if you're the US Marine Corps and you're making tea for some Brit columnist: don't forget to warm the pot. Pour the milk before the water - or is it the other way round? Who the hell can stay on top of it all? Easier to pull out the .44 Magnum and say: "Go ahead, punk, make my Earl Grey."

So, instead of Special Forces rappelling down with steaming samovars of PG Tips strapped to their backs, the helicopter gunships blew the poor needy starving blacks to pieces.

Hmm. I must have dozed off during that bit on CNN.

I'll leave it to future generations of historians to settle the precise moment at which Hurricane Katrina finally completed its transformation into a Kansas-type twister, and swept up the massed ranks of the world's press to deposit them on the wilder shores of the Land of Oz. But for a couple of weeks now they've been there frolicking and gambolling as happy Media Munchkins, singing and dancing "Ding Dong, The Bush Is Dead".

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the storm is exhausted, meteorologically and politically. Power has been restored to the whole of Mississippi (much quicker than in Euro-style big-government Quebec during the 1998 ice storm, incidentally), the Big Easy is being pumped free of water far ahead of anybody's expectations, and, as the New York Times put it: "Death Toll In New Orleans May Be Lower Than First Feared".

No truth in the rumour that early editions read "Than First Hoped".

Do I even have to say, read the rest?

Neo-Neocon has a great post on how difficult it can be to change political identities:

Many people wondered aloud why Zell Miller had not switched parties in light of his strong alignment with the Republicans and his staunch opposition to the Democrats. A "conservative Democrat" seemed to be a sort of oxymoron.

Miller's answer? That he was born into the Democratic Party and considers his party label to be "like a birthmark"--innate, and difficult to eradicate.

Miller's not the only one who feels that way in his neck of the woods:

"We're a little bit different than the Washington Democrats," said state Rep. Charles F. Jenkins (D-Blairsville), who represents Miller's home county of Towns as well as Rabun, Union and White counties. Jenkins said he understands why Miller refuses to join the Republican Party.

"You've got people up here who just will not switch from the Democratic Party because they've been Democrats since they were born," Jenkins said. "They're hard-headed mountain people. And hard-headed mountain people don't switch for anybody."

Well, most people are pretty hard-headed in that respect. But it's my impression that liberals may even be more hard-headed than most about changing their political identities.

That's because a liberal political identity tends to be so much more than a political identity--it's also a moral and personal identity. Liberals tend to equate their own position with such abstract (and non-political) qualities as goodness, kindness, lack of bigotry, intelligence--oh, a host of wonderful virtues. Any identity that is so identified is going to be particularly difficult to shed. Do some conservatives feel this way about their identity? Of course. But my impression is that it is a feeling even more basic to the political identities of liberals--at least the ones I know, and I know quite a few.

My sense is that this is one of the main reasons that my attempts to talk to my friends have so often been met with rage: to many of them, my espousing of any conservative causes means 1) I must be a bad (i.e.: selfish, racist, classist) person; and 2) if I ever were to convince them of the rightness of my arguments, they would be faced with leaving the fold, also, and becoming a bad person, too. Much better to let the whole edifice remain in place than to remove one little brick and risk the whole thing toppling down.

We've looked several times at "Nostalgie de la Left" (this Chutch-inspired post from January ties together several of those themes), Neo's last paragraph is a great explanation of why it lingers so strongly these days.

Similarly, in the comments to her post, several readers identify that for many on the left, politics is their religion, thus making a change in political worldviews almost as difficult as from changing from Catholicism to Judism--or vice versa. This also helps to explain much of the left's outright hostility towards traditional religious belief. As the recently deceased Hunter S. Thompson said in November to Sean Penn, immediately after the election, "I've got the worst possible news. Colorado has gone to hell like all the other states. They must have all voted the same way they pray." (Ironically, Dr. Gonzo's statement works for both sides of the aisle, of course.)

It also explains the two parties' difference in attitudes towards those who do switch, something that Glenn Reynolds observed a few years ago:

As the old saying has it, the left looks for heretics and the right looks for converts, and both find what they're looking for. The effect is no doubt subliminal, but people who treat you like crap are, over time, less persuasive than people who don't. If people on the Left are so unhappy about how many former allies are changing their views, perhaps they should examine how those allies are treated.

CBS creates a Weblog, then announces that Vaughn Ververs, its blogger-in-residence will be neutered right from the start:

This week, as the blogosphere remembers the anniversary of the forged National Guard memos that ended Dan Rather's tenure as anchor of the CBS Evening News, CBSNews.com is launching a blog called the Public Eye with the goal of providing "greater openness and transparency into the newsgathering process."

But unless CBS gives its new blogger, Vaughn Ververs, room to breathe, this experiment is going to fail.

CBS got things off to a promising start by picking Ververs, a well-respected columnist and editor for the Washington-insider magazine National Journal. Ververs has worked for CBS and Fox News, and was Pat Buchanan's press secretary during his 1992 presidential campaign. Several people I talked to at the time said that if the goal was to hold CBS News accountable, Ververs was a great pick.

But the p.r. offensive CBS launched two weeks ago to publicize the project included troubling signs that CBS intends to micromanage Ververs and take away his ability to address complaints that CBS News operates according to a left-leaning political agenda.

The first troubling sign was CBS News president Andrew Heyward, whose head should have rolled along with Rather's but inexplicably didn't, describing Ververs as a "nonbudsman" — a take on the word "ombudsman," which in the context of a news organization means a person who investigates the complaints of readers or viewers and tries to address them by providing answers or urging the news organization to take action.

Etymologically, "nonbudsman" doesn't change the word "ombudsman" into anything meaningful, but what Heyward intends it to mean is that Ververs will be non-critical of CBS News. Instead, he will function like an in-house media reporter taking a "just the facts" approach to addressing controversies at the network.

"I think he will be more likely to get cooperation within CBS News if he were a reporter and not another critic," Heyward told the Associated Press. "There are plenty of people out there who are criticizing us already."

Fortunately, Ververs does not answer to Heyward — he reports to CBS Digital Media president Larry Kramer. However, Heyward's description of Ververs as a "nonbudsman" came across to me as negative and sort of demeaning. I asked Ververs about it during a phone conversation arranged by CBS public relations. He said:

Andrew Heyward uses that term because unlike your normal ombudsman, I don't work for CBS News. That's a separation that doesn't exist for any ombudsman that I'm aware of. Also, my role is not coming in every day and looking with a magnifying glass over everything CBS News has done and picking on them. I want to open up a conversation with people who are consumers of news, who are CBS watchers and readers, and the news division itself. It there's a criticism, then we'll say, "Let's go look into this." My opinions are not going to be judgmental. We're interested in helping explain things.

I asked Ververs what he would do if confronted with another situation such as the forged National Guard memos, during which CBS stonewalled for weeks before it finally retracted the story and apologized after the Washington Post, ABC News, and other mainstream news organizations joined the bloggers in questioning the documents' authenticity. Ververs said, "I would get answers." Because the news division is only encouraged, not required, to cooperate with Ververs, "It would be up to CBS News" to provide those answers. Ververs stressed that Public Eye is a work-in-progress: "We'll find out how these sorts of things are handled in the future."

I pressed on this point: Wasn't Public Eye created as a response to the forged-memo crisis, in the same way that the New York Times hired a public editor after the Jayson Blair fraud? Wasn't the idea to prevent such episodes from happening in the future?

At this point the p.r. representative, who'd been on the phone the whole time, broke in and said, "That question would be more appropriate for Andrew Heyward," and told me she would call me back to arrange an opportunity for me to ask it. I never got that call, but that's O.K. After all, I didn't need to hear from Heyward personally that he "felt strongly that letting people know that we are willing to engage in a healthy dialogue about what we do we think will enhance our reputation and give us a competitive advantage." I wanted to know what Ververs thought, but didn't get a chance to hear it.

After that, the image popped into my head of a CBS flack holding a gun to Ververs head as he answered my questions. I didn't want to prolong the guy's agony, so I ended the conversation shortly after that.

I think a lot of people will be taking that advice when it comes to the nonbudsman and his nonblog.

Update: At the risk of having my License To Alliterate revoked, Steven Sturm has something similar on this topic.

Another Update: In a post titled, "Define Irony: CBS Starting Their Own 'Blog'" (no kidding), The Political Teen writes:

Funny how it was a blog that started the demise of Dan Rather and now CBS will have it’s own blog. But this really isn’t a blog, CBS just calls it a blog to sound “hip”. CBS is putting out what goes behind the scenes but they probably will not allow viewer interaction, such as commenting. I am getting really tired of big news corporations trying to start what they think are blogs.

There is a definite "there goes the neighborhood" feeling when CBS starts a blog to compete with the blogs that humbled them last year, isn't there?

As Joe Pesci, wearing David Ferrie's orange fright wig and a pair of Lee Press-On Eyebrows screamed to Kevin Costner, playing screwball New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison in JFK, "It's a mystery! It's a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma!"

(Via Glenn Reynolds, who appropriately dubs it, "Conspiracy theory a-go-go".)

Richie Havens, earning a few extra bucks doing voiceover work sang as the theme of a memorable ad campaign for Amtrak about 20 years ago, "There's something about a train that's magic". Evidently the city of New Orleans didn't agree:

Nagin did not tell everyone to leave immediately, because the regional plan called for the suburbs to empty out first, but he did urge residents in particularly low-lying areas to "start moving -- right now, as a matter of fact." He said the Superdome would be open as a shelter of last resort, but essentially he told tourists stranded in the Big Easy that they were out of luck.

"The only thing I can say to them is I hope they have a hotel room, and it's a least on the third floor and up," Nagin said. "Unfortunately, unless they can rent a car to get out of town, which I doubt they can at this point, they're probably in the position of riding the storm out."

In fact, while the last regularly scheduled train out of town had left a few hours earlier, Amtrak had decided to run a "dead-head" train that evening to move equipment out of the city. It was headed for high ground in Macomb, Miss., and it had room for several hundred passengers. "We offered the city the opportunity to take evacuees out of harm's way," said Amtrak spokesman Cliff Black. "The city declined."

So the ghost train left New Orleans at 8:30 p.m., with no passengers on board.

Amtrak was created by the federal government during President Nixon's administration--so it's not too late for the media to spin this one as yet another fault of a Republican president.

If there's a reason why, as Mark Steyn writes, America's War On Terror is all but forgotten, at least on the left-hand side of the home front, it's that the media are so doggedly determined, in their efforts to be the new reactionaries, to send the Wayback Machine back to 1968 and bury their heads in the sand--Maureen Dowd of the New York Times all but said so, specifically referencing that psychedelic year in a recent column.

The media, of course, also includes the entertainment media. A post of mine from the beginning of May, called "Saboteurs, Then and Now" came out too screedy in retrospect than I would have preferred, but it was intended as a reminder of how Hollywood has all but ignored the War On Terror--to the point where it's shot itself in the foot at the box office this summer.

Of course, as I later wrote, we may look back and view this period of cinematic neglect as being far more benign than what Tinseltown currently has on its drawing boards.

Mark Steyn's latest Chicago Tribune piece is a must-read:

As part of their ongoing post-9/11 convergence, the left now talks about Bush the way the wackier Islamists talk about Jews. I thought the Australian imam who warned Muslims the other week to lay off the bananas because the Zionists are putting poison in them was pretty loopy. But is he really any more bananas than folks who think Bush is behind the hurricane? Bush is apparently no longer the citizen-president of a functioning republic, but a 21st century King Canute expected to go sit by the shore and repel the waters as they attempt to make landfall. Instead, he and Cheney hatched up the whole hurricane thing in the Halliburton research labs to distract attention from their right-wing Supreme Court nominee . . .

On this fourth anniversary we are in a bizarre situation: The war is being won -- in Afghanistan, Iraq, the broader Middle East and many other places where America has changed the conditions on the ground in its favor. But at home the war about the war is being lost. When the media look at those Bush approval ratings -- currently hovering around 40 percent -- they carelessly assume the 60 percent is some unified Kerry-Hillary-Cindy bloc. It's not. It undoubtedly includes people who are enthusiastic for whacking America's enemies, but who don't quite get the point of this somewhat desultory listless phase. If the "war" is now a push for democratization and liberalization in Middle East dictatorships, that's a worthy cause but not one sufficiently primal to keep the attention of the American people. You'd have had the same problem in the Second World War if four years after Pearl Harbor we were postponing D-Day in order to nation-build in the Solomon Islands.

Four years ago, I thought the "war on terror" was a viable concept. To those on the right who scoffed that you can't declare war on a technique, I pointed out that Britain's Royal Navy fought wars against slavery and piracy and were largely successful. Of course, since then we've had the shabby habit of presidents declaring a "war on drugs" and a "war on poverty" and, with hindsight, that corruption of language has allowed Americans to slip the war on terror into the same category -- not a war in the sense that a war on Fiji or Belgium is a war, but just one of those vaguely ineffectual aspirational things that don't really impinge on you that much except for the odd pointless gesture -- like the shoe-removing ritual before you board a flight at Poughkeepsie. The "war on terror" label has outlived whatever usefulness it had.

And, as the years go by, it becomes clearer that the war aspects -- the attacks in New York, Washington, Bali, Madrid, Istanbul, London -- are really spasmodic flashes of a much more elusive enemy. Although Islamism is the first truly global terrorist insurgency, it shares more similarities with conventional terror movements -- the IRA or the Basque separatists -- than many of us thought four years ago. Terror groups persist because of a lack of confidence on the part of their targets: the IRA, for example, calculated correctly that the British had the capability to smash them totally but not the will. So they knew that while they could never win militarily, they also could never be defeated. That's what the Islamists have bet.

Only a tiny minority of Muslims want to be suicide bombers, and only a slightly larger minority want actively to provide support networks for suicide bombers, but big majorities of Muslims support almost all the terrorists' strategic goals: For example, according to a recent poll, over 60 percent of British Muslims want to live under sharia in the United Kingdom. That's a "moderate" Westernized Muslim: He wants stoning for adultery to be introduced in Liverpool, but he's a "moderate" because it's not such a priority that he's prepared to fly a plane into a skyscraper.

As with IRA killers and the broader Irish nationalist population, these shared aims provide a large comfort zone in which terror networks can operate.

Over at his Website, Steyn also flashes back to a number of pieces he wrote four years ago.

Speaking of media failure, Tom Maguire quotes what might go down in history as Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco's most famous utterance:

Ms. Blanco burst into the state's emergency center in Baton Rouge. "Does anybody in this building know anything about buses?" she recalled crying out.

Certainly no one in the New York Times' building, Maguire observes.

In Tech Central Station, Stephen Schwartz writes:

We have reached the fourth anniversary of the terrible attacks of September 11, 2001. I am sorry to say that, in my view, the U.S. and Western media have completely failed to meet the challenge of reporting on Islam, in the four succeeding years since then, or in reaction to the atrocities that followed, including the extremist violence in Iraq, which I would not dignify with the titles "insurgency" or "resistance," the Madrid metro and London underground bombings, and the terror assaults in Indonesia, Morocco, Turkey, and elsewhere.

On September 12, 2001, it was as if two civilizations, the Judeo-Christian and the Islamic, which had shared the planet and had contacts with one another for 14 centuries, sometimes violently, sometimes peacefully, but nearly always fruitfully, were completely unknown the one to the other. Indeed, it seemed that Muslims knew a great deal more about the West than the West knew about Muslims. To borrow a simile from the film industry: in this "war of the worlds" the Muslims may as well be "invaders from another planet," whose beliefs, customs and habits are completely unknown and incomprehensible to Westerners.

Read the rest.

Four years ago, at about 6:45 AM PST, that's how the day began for my wife and I--and quite possibly, you too. In a Blogosphere retrospective, Lorie Byrd of PoliPundit was kind enough to include this post from the year after, which collects a bunch of items I wrote about 9/11. (When I saw her link, I updated it with a couple of more items, and replaced a couple of previously expired hyperlinks.)

If a writer as great as Virginia Postrel can look back on March 11, 2002 and conclude, "Much of what I wrote on this site six months ago, now seems banal or confused, although I can't say I'd take anything back", then keep similar thoughts in mind when reading my work about that day.

PoliPundit also has a look back on what has changed since that terrible day, and Orrin Judd links to what has become one of the most important and iconic photographs of the day, entirely because of the Blogosphere and other grass roots Websites--and equally entirely despite the best efforts of the legacy media to block it. (The Pajamas Media homepage has a retrospective slideshow of many additional photos. The simple fact that the Blogosphere exists is itself a testiment to 9/11, of course.)

Not everything has changed though. In his speech about the event nine days later, President Bush said, "Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists". On October 1st, Rudy Giuliani added:

On one side is democracy, the rule of law, and respect for human life; on the other is tyranny, arbitrary executions, and mass murder.

We're right and they're wrong. It's as simple as that.

And by that I mean that America and its allies are right about democracy, about religious, political, and economic freedom.

The terrorists are wrong, and in fact evil, in their mass destruction of human life in the name of addressing alleged injustices.

For many Americans, 9/11 was the end of much moral equivalency when it comes to dealing with evil--but as Roger L. Simon notes, sadly, there's still a fair amount of what Paul Johnson, in Modern Times called moral relativism left in many who should know better.

Update: Speaking of moral relativism, events such as this and this, happening so closely to the anniversary of 9/11, help to define exactly what the term means.

Sharply contrasting the meaning is a decision by Alex Tabarrok.

Neo-Neocon asks a couple of very interesting questions:

A while back, in the course of doing some research on World War II and the Holocaust, I came across a statistic that absolutely stunned me: the percentage of Jews in the population of Germany immediately prior to World War II.

Since then, every so often I will ask people if they can guess what it might have been, and no one's ever gotten it right, or even come close.

So, what percentage of the population of pre-WWII Germany do you suppose was Jewish? Take a moment and think about it. Then guess.

Here's another one that no one ever seems to get right: the percentage of Jews in the population of Baghdad around the time of World War I. Take a moment and think about it. Then take a guess.

A hint: whatever you're thinking, neither number will be what you expect--by a long shot. Don't miss the comments, either.

Armed and dangerously narcissistic, Sean Penn swings into double-barreled action.

No sign of the horrible red cup of doom, though.

CNN's situational ethics swing into action again. Glenn Reynolds writes:

THE PRESS WANTS TO SHOW BODIES from Katrina. It didn't want to show bodies, or jumpers, on 9/11, for fear that doing so would inflame the public.

It's amusing to go back and look at the media's mindset back then:

"The question is, are we informing or titillating and causing unnecessary grief?" ABC News chief David Westin told the New York Times just days after the Sept. 11 attack. Explaining why his network decided not to show any pictures of people leaping to their deaths at the World Trade Center, he said, "Our responsibility is to inform the American public of what's going on, and, in going the next step, is it necessary to show people plunging to their death?"

If it wasn't necessary to show people plunging to their death, why is it necessary to show them after they drowned? (Or as Scott Ott parodies a CNN spokesman, "Our viewers have a right to see the decaying flesh of each and every citizen who perished from lack of federal government assistance".)

Incidentally, has anybody asked Mayor Nagin or Governor Blanco what they think of this?

It's even more astonishing, coming from a network which for over a decade whitewashed images of Saddam Hussein's atrocities, just to maintain a "LIVE FROM BAGHDAD" line chromakeyed on the screen while their reporter spoke in front of Saddam's Ministry of Information. Broadcasting the same lies from Saddam Hussein's propaganda ministers they could have just as easily have picked up on any news wire and reported from CNN's facilities in Atlanta--along with some thoughts on what the true story might be.

I wonder if next time Hugh Hewitt has someone high up at CNN on his show, he could ask them, "In light of your decision to show the bodies of Katrina victims, do you think it was a mistake for networks like yourself to hide the images of victims of Saddam Hussein or 9/11? Really? Well, why didn't you at least show the latter on its fourth anniversary?"

Which is tomorrow, incidentally.

Update: Speaking of Hugh, in his latest post, he writes:

There are many failures to be investigated in the aftermath of Katrina, including why the evacuation left as many as 100,000 in the city, why the prepositioning of law enforcement and national guard in the Dome and Convention Center was inadequate, why relief supplies from the Red Cross and Salvation Army were blocked, and why FEMA seemed so slow to take control from the locals obviously overwhelmed by the size of the storm and its devastation.

But there's at least a day of hearings on MSM's role in this fiasco as well, from the question of the responsibility of flooding the area with reporters who, while they encourage people to "take cover" or evacuate, are in fact doing neither, to the relentless peddling of the most sensational of stories and estimates.

It will be interesting to see if Congress will have enough of a spine to include the media in its hearings.

Another Update: In a post titled, "The MSM Have Gone Insane", John Podhoretz writes:

If leaders of the mainstream media -- from my old friend Jim Kelly of Time magazine to Jonathan Klein of CNN genuinely think the American people want to see bodies of corpses caused by the levee floods, they have really, really lost it. Instapundit points out that they chose to stop showing horrifying images from 9/11, like the jumpers, because they were worried about inflaming people. But these images are likely only to cause people to be physically ill at worst, and the loss of privacy they will represent to those who died will cause the viewing public to blame the media for showing them in the first place. Parents will not be able to watch the news in their own house, or bring newspapers and magazines into their houses....If the MSM want to continue to have a cow about the unfairness of not being able to show bodies returning from Iraq, by all means let them make a scene about that. But this is a bizarre and repulsive twist on that.

Exactly. Jim Geraghy recently wrote:

A certain friend – won’t say his name, but it rhymes with “Shmam” – is getting really, really fired up about this, says he’s angrier now than at any point during last year’s campaign.

If there’s anything we’ve learned from the ugly during-and-post-Katrina debate, it’s that these folks with whom we disagree so strongly... well, they’re gone, Shmam. Assimilated into the Kosorg Cube. There’s no point in arguing with them. They have concluded the disaster is Bush's fault, and nothing you say will dissuade them. Certainly not this report that the state government refused to allow the Red Cross to bring food, water, blankets and hygiene products to the Superdome and Convention Center right after the hurricane hit.

I was talking to a wise, politically connected blogger yesterday, who reminded me how much of the American population doesn’t follow politics, particularly in an off-year, and doesn’t look at events like this through a political prism. And they don’t think much of us who do.

The vast majority of Americans aren’t watching the scenes of horror on their television, the pictures of despair in their newspapers, and looking for someone to blame. They want to see these people helped.

The “it’s all Chimpy McHitler’s fault” crowd is small, yet somehow has persuaded the high mucky-mucks in the Democratic party that they’re worth listening to.

Sounds like they've done a pretty good job on the media as well.

Update (9/11/05): Wow, quite a Blogosphere troika: Welcome InstaPundit, Hugh Hewitt and Andrew Sullivan readers.

Based on the excerpt from its first chapter, James Hirsen's Hollywood Nation: Left Coast Lies, Old Media Spin, and the New Media Revolution sounds like a pretty good read, sort of along the lines of Andrew Breitbart and Mark Ebner's Hollywood Interrupted from last year (which I ended up naming this site's whole show-biz category after). But I couldn't help noticing it unwittingly recycles urban myths whose origins date as far back as the mid-1930s:

It’s long been the case that the entertainment biz has provided the measuring stick by which we determine who, and what, is attractive or fashionable. As Joel Siegel puts it, “None of this is new. It’s been going on forever.” Siegel cites the famous example of how “undershirt companies went bankrupt” in the 1930s after Clark Gable appeared sans T-shirt in the Oscar-winning film It Happened One Night. Gable was the leading star of the day, a major sex symbol, and so, Siegel says, men took the cue from him and “stopped wearing undershirts.”

John F. Kennedy was that rare politician who had a glamorous air about him. As Siegel remembers, Kennedy broke with tradition by not wearing a hat at his inauguration. Hats were part of the standard look for men in those days—even at “ball games, they wore a hat,” Siegel notes. But as soon as people saw the fedora-absent inaugural footage, formal head attire went out of fashion.

Siegel also recalls the influence of Marilyn Monroe’s most famous scene from The Seven Year Itch, the “scene where the subway blows her dress up.” He tells me that at the time “women in Japan stopped wearing underwear to get that Marilyn Monroe look.”

Well, so much for trusting Joel Siegel's memory...

Maybe Roger L. Simon, just back from Japan, can give us the inside scoop on that last item, but as the Snopes urban-legend Website has documented, those first two items simply aren't true. They have a page on Clark Gable's supposed murder of the T-shirt (which couldn't have been too deadly a shot--every guy I knew in school in the 1970s wore one under the blue oxford cloth shirt of his school uniform, at least during the bitterly cold New Jersey winters, and my dad still wears them to this day--a fact that I hope he won't mind me telling the world).

As for Kennedy and the hat industry, while there's no doubt that hats are a much rarer breed these days (Roger, Tom Wolfe, Matt Drudge and myself may be the only men left still wearing them on a regular basis), you can't blame Kennedy's inauguration for putting them on the endangered species list, something I noted right around this time three years ago:

As someone who has worn hats (Fedoras, Trilbies, and Panama Optimos, not baseball caps with Caterpillar Tractor logos on them) off and on for several years now, I've long taken the "JFK killed the hat industry" myth at its word. However, Snopes' Urban Legends does its usual thorough job of debunking that myth.

Like I said, Hollywood Nation is still probably an enjoyable read, and hopefully if there's a paperback or second edition, it will have Siegel's urban myths eliminated.

(Now if we could just get modern presidents to start wearing top hats again at their inaugurations...)

The Wall Street Journal explains how the private sector ran rings around government (in all its levels) before and during the early days of Katrina:

Wal-Mart mined its vast databases of past purchases to compile lists of goods most desired after a hurricane. (Among the top items? Strawberry pop tarts.) Because of its advance logistics planning, the big retail chain was able to quickly move in to devastated areas with mini Wal-Marts to hand out goods. Other firms leveraged similar supply-chain capabilities; Pfizer dispensed pharmaceuticals via Wal-Mart and other retailers. "What companies do is solve problems," says Johanna Schneider, an executive director at the Business Roundtable.

Granted, a FEMA is never going to operate with the agility of a FedEx. FedEx and the others perform at this level 24/7; that's the nature of competition. That said, surely there are lessons here worth learning and attempting to transfer to the public sector. And we don't mean three years from now after another round of reassessment and performance reviews. The challenge of reconstruction is now. It wouldn't hurt if the responsible public agencies asked the private participants in the rescue operation for some pointers on getting the next job done on budget and on time.

Last week, Professor Bainbridge had a post on outsourcing disaster relief; certainly sounds worth trying.

Bill Quick, the man who gave us the word "Blogosphere", is today's profile on the Pajamas Media homepage. He makes a great point in his conclusion:

To me, the only function the media serves is to give us the raw material. The other day, cable news did a story on a network reporter sitting by an oil drum with a laptop. He was going to upload directly to ABC News. I have the very same capability, but I'd upload to you. So we will see news come from a broader and broader base.

Sounds good to me.

Update: Nice bit of synchronicity (or deliberately planned symbolism by the all-knowing evil geniuses behind PJM!): the biography of the man who gave us the name for the Blogosphere is appearing on the one year anniversary of the event that did the most to put it on the national radar--and set in motion the whole "pajamas" buzzword to boot!

Jim Geraghty explains how America (including New Orleans) works to novelist Ann Rice, who feels (can't say she's thinking, when she writes), "To my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us", in the midst of a nationwide outpouring of charity and support.

I recently received a review copy of Jay P. Greene's Education Myths. In a recent National Review Online article, he writes:

Much of what people believe about education policy is simply not true. An examination of the evidence reveals that many common claims about education are as mythological as anything found in Homer or Aesop.

For example, many people believe that schools are desperately under-funded. In fact, public K-12 spending is approaching $10,000 per pupil — double what it was three decades ago, adjusting for inflation. And total school spending is approaching $500 billion — more than we spend on national defense ($454 billion) and more than the entire GDP of Russia ($433 billion).

Many people believe that teachers are horribly underpaid. In fact, the average elementary-school teacher makes $30.75 per hour, more than architects ($26.64), mechanical engineers ($29.46), and chemists ($30.68).

Many people believe that student achievement has been deteriorating for decades. In fact, today’s students perform about as well as their parents in terms of standardized test scores and high school graduation rates.

Why is education so prone to myths?

Read the rest of the article, and his book, to find out.

I've spent the last week trying to decide on a category to round-up my various posts on Katrina, last year's Indian Ocean tsunami, and other weather-related subjects. I'm not crazy about "The Perfect Storm" as a category name--I didn't really want something that specifically tied into one form of weather, especially when I've blogged about non-storm related natural occurrences, such as snow and earthquakes (and how they impact their respective cultures), but for now, it'll do.

Click here and just start scrolling if you want to read some or all of the 79-and counting Katrina and other weather-related posts.

Over in National Review Online's Corner today, John J. Miller mentioned a piece by Allan Bloom--currently being claimed, nearly a decade and a half after his demise, via the New York Times, as a member of the left, despite his strong anti-leftwing rhetoric. Bloom's "Our Listless Universities", As Miller noted, written by "the hero of 21st-century liberalism...[was] penned for that famously left-wing magazine called National Review" back in 1982.

He didn't link to an online version of it, but I found it pretty quickly via Google. Its description of then-contemporary life in academia still, sadly, holds up remarkably well today.

(Further up from Miller's post, Jonah Goldberg has some thoughts on Bloom and Nietzsche that are also well worth perusing.)

As I explain in my Blogcritics review of Daniel Duffell's 2005 book, Making Music With Samples, when it comes to making music via computer, we're all hip-hoppers now.

(Me too--don't let the suit and tie fool you.)

My friends at Across The Atlantic look at merely a few of the many flaws in the media's coverage of Katrina and its aftermath, and conclude:

I have had it with the MSM. For some time now, I have taken to viewing TV and printed news merely as a starting point. If something interests me, I will hunt multiple sites on the InterNetWebThingie until I can get enough information in order to form my own opinion.

So, I have a suggestion. All the countries in the world that care should create a new criminal offence. I even have an acronym for it:-

IDIOT.
Intentionally Demeaning our Intelligence Over Time.

I don’t believe those guilty of it should face the death penalty. I think Heinlein, in Number of the Beast had a much better idea (I’m referring to his solution for critics everywhere).

Ours is only a little blog so, to get this campaign underway, we need to get the big boys in on it.

Not sure if I agree with the acronym, but I certainly appreciate the sentiment behind it.

Greg Gutfeld has a long list of pre-employment questions each new member of Ariannia Huffington's group blog is asked before he or she is allowed to post. Here's but a few:

Do you own ferrets?
Did you name them Noam and Chomsky?
Do you have dreadlocks?
And you’re white?
Do you have a henna tattoo, a charity band around your wrist, and an eyebrow ring?
Do you celebrate "individuality" above all?
And you're pushing 40?

Actually, I think these must be the key questions universal to all group-oriented Weblogs, as they were on my Pajamas Media application as well. And I think only because I answered "Yes" to all, was I allowed to join.

Thomas Sowell compares and contrasts the declining morality of ordinary citizens during three city-wide crises over the last forty years--two New York City blackouts of the '60s and '70s, and New Orleans at tbe beginning of this month:

During good times or bad, the police cannot police everybody. They can at best control a small segment of society. The vast majority of people have to control themselves.

That is where the great moral traditions of a society come in -- those moral traditions that it is so hip to sneer at, so cute to violate, and that our very schools undermine among the young, telling them that they have to evolve their own standards, rather than following what old fuddy duddies like their parents tell them.

Now we see what those do-it-yourself standards amount to in the ugliness and anarchy of New Orleans.

In a world where people flaunt their "independence," their "right" to disregard moral authority, and sometimes legal authority as well, the tragedy of New Orleans reminds us how utterly dependent each one of us is for our very lives on millions of other people we don't even see.

Thousands of people in New Orleans will be saved because millions of other people they don't even know are moved by moral obligations to come to their rescue from all corners of this country. The things our clever sophisticates sneer at are ultimately all that stand between any of us and utter devastation.

Any of us could have been in New Orleans. And what could we have depended on to save us? Situational ethics? Postmodern philosophy? The media? The lawyers? The rhetoric of the intelligentsia?

No, what we would have to depend on are the very things that are going to save the survivors of hurricane Katrina, the very things that clever people are undermining.

New Orleans can be rebuilt and the levees around it shored up. But can the moral levees be shored up, not only in New Orleans but across America?

Assuming we don't take Denny Hastert's initial advice and stencil a giant, NASA-like "ABANDON IN PLACE" sign on New Orleans, we're bound to see numerous cases of what blogger Val Prieto dubbed "Omnipotent Tourist Syndrome" in Cuba, and Matt Welch described thusly:

Oh, the crumbling, no-longer-beautiful houses! Ah, the lovely two-feet-deep potholes, and rickety Chinese bicycles (because the 50-year-old Chevys and 30-year-old Ladas don't work, and at any rate there's no gas). How people can derive pleasure from evidence of the suffering of innocents is beyond me, and few sights are more unseemly to my eyes than seeing a Lonely Planet-waving travel snob whine about how some current or formerly misgoverned hellhole has been "ruined" by all that yucky reconstruction, material success, and (worst of all!) tourism. Oh how pretty!

A similar enviro-Luddite moment is sure to come during the rebuilding of New Orleans. In other words, the desire to maintain the crumbling ruins of New Orleans, rather than rebuild them with sound, functional buildings.

Actually, it will be interesting to see how modern environmentalism (and its accompanying lawyers) slows the progress of rebuilding the city--whose progress will be infinitely slower than the amount of time that it took to rebuild the World Trade Center after 9/11.

Err, what's that you say? Construction has just barely started after four years?

Exactly.

Frank Martin looks at what's to come in Louisiana--"Lawyers. Lots and Lots of Lawyers":

The people who lived in New Orleans have suffered and they will continue to suffer, but the suffering doesn’t end there. The “Food Chain” of suffering doesn’t end until the last lawsuit is settled out of court. Our children will have kids of their own before that happens.

Remember, everything is just "a problem" until someone checks their tires one day and finds dioxin, asbestos, or PCB’s and someone else discovers that its been driven all over town, then it’s "a real BIG problem". Every miscarriage, every cancer victim, every case of autism in the lower Mississippi will result in a lawsuit against the City and State.

For those of you who find yourself mystified at the attitude and behavior of the Governor and Mayor as of late this little problem might help you understand one reason why they are acting so odd(besides the fact that they were odd before the Hurricane). The real problem we now face isn’t the potential decontamination costs its that there isn’t enough money in the world to cover all those lawsuits and the threats of lawsuits. Do the words " Federal Superfund" spring to mind? Yeah, it does me too.

Add to this ‘witches brew’ of lawyers and potential lawsuits is a history of political corruption that goes back centuries in Louisiana. This corruption was overlooked and in some cases downright tolerated so long as it was kept within the family but what Katrina has done is bring attention to the outside world of a true American shame, the plight of the people who previously lived below sea level on the lower Mississippi. What the Mayor, The Governor and every official in Louisiana above "city dog catcher" is looking at is the one thing they have rarely seen in their careers and that is scrutiny by the press, by lawyers who will be crawling through every transaction looking at every relationship, trying to find every bit of corruption they can find. Insurance companies as well as a whole host of Federal agencies are about to lose a great deal of money and its always been my experience that people will leave you alone so long as you don’t mess with their money, but if you mess with their money, they will make it their lifes work to see that you pay for your error.

Once the Lawyers start finding corruption it will be very much like the effects of a second flood only this time, it’s a flood that will sweep away the Democrat political machine that has run Louisiana since the Civil War.

To the Democrat party, its as if they just lost a capital city in their domain during wartime. Think of it like the impact of the fall of Atlanta on the Confederates during the Civil War. Louisiana just lost its last solid Democrat voting districts, and any part of the existing Democrat machine that is still standing is about to be tied down in a Gulliverian web of lawsuits and Federal corruption charges which will surely come as a result of the floods.

Katrina didn’t just end a way of life in the lower Mississippi, but it has brought an end to a way of doing business in Baton Rouge.

In the end, It wont be 'conservative values' that will have beaten the Democrats, it wasnt the "Reagan revolution" and it wont be the Bush family.

It will be the lawyers.

Read the rest. This sounds like a spot-on preview of the next phase of Katrina's aftermath--and one that's probably being completely ignored by the current coverage by what Hugh Hewitt calls CNN and its clones: "The Hysterical News Network".

I can't say my being asked to appear in the current Pajamas Media profile went exactly like the time that Woody Allen was approached by Smirnoff, back in the mid-1960s to be their "Vodka Man"...

Let me start at the very beginning. I did a vodka ad, that's the first important thing. A big vodka company wanted to do a prestige ad, and they wanted to get Noël Coward originally for it. He was not available, he had acquired the rights to My Fair Lady, and he was removing the music and lyrics, make it back into Pygmalion. They tried to get Laurence Olivier, and Haleloke--they finally got me to do it.

I'll tell you how they got my name, it was on a list in Eichmann's pocket, when they picked him up. And I'm sitting home, and I'm watching television. I'm watching a special version of Peter Pan on television, starring Kate Smith, and they are having trouble flying her, 'cause the chains keep breaking all the time, y'know. And the phone rings and a voice on the other end says "How would you like to be this year's vodka man?"

And I say "No. I'm an artist, I do not do commercials. I don't pander. I don't drink vodka and if I did, I would not drink your product."

He said "Too bad. It pays fifty thousand dollars."

And I said "Hold on. I'll put Mr. Allen on the phone."

...In my case, far more begging and pleading was involved, until, miraculously, they agreed to put me online.

(Incidentally, in his post today, I have no idea who Roger L. Simon is talking about--but since it's some fellow who shares my name, I'll humbly accept his approbation.)

In his syndicated Newhouse column, James Lileks writes that we should consider Katrina as a dress rehearsal:

According to the choir of professional carpers, President Clinton spent half his two terms personally drawing up plans for new levees -- when he wasn't sneaking around Afghanistan in camo paint trying to apprehend bin Laden.

By contrast, the Bush Junta sent 100 percent of the National Guard to Iraq, which meant the 12th Airborne Plunger Brigade couldn't descend to the Superdome with jetpacks and unstop the overflowing toilets. Doesn't matter that New Orleans had hundreds of school buses unused for evacuation -- blame the feds who cut matching funds for bus-driver instruction back in 1927.

This level of incandescent lunacy isn't new. In the '90s there were people who believed that Clinton would use Y2K to herd us into FEMA-run gulags to have bar codes tattooed on our necks, but these people confined themselves to rants at 3 a.m. on Art Bell's radio show. By 2006 their ideological heirs on the left will be the evening lineup of MSNBC guests.

If we learned anything we can take away, it's this: You're on your own. At least keep an emergency kit on hand, the sort of thing Tom Ridge proposed, and which made the smart set hardy-har-har because it contained duct tape.

Don't rely on the government. Four years after Sept. 11, it's apparent that some local governments are not well-oiled machines when it comes to disasters -- more like a box of sand and busted gears. Blame for that can be promiscuously distributed.

Lesson two: The next terrorist attack will not unite us for a warm, hug-filled fortnight. The hard left won't wait 24 hours before blaming Bush, and the country will enjoy the sight of prominent pundits angrier at the president than at the men who nuked Des Moines.

If an attack should happen during the term of President Hillary Clinton, they'll still blame Bush -- and if she wishes to retain her moderate credentials, she'll be canny enough to repudiate the lot. They'll be stunned. They'll be hurt. After all the free-lance hating they did out of the goodness of their hearts! Where can they turn now?

The guy who took over for Art Bell still takes calls.

And there's always Olbermann.

Craig Newmark (a.k.a, Betsy's husband) had a dream--an awesome dream, as Lionel Richie would say--about how the press would have reported Katrina if Bill Clinton were still president. Keep the melody to "Kumbaya" going in your head as you read it...

Tech Central Station has new items online in their section devoted to Katrina and its aftermath.

In a feat of investigative reporting that made Woodward and Bernstein green with envy, Michael Graham, the author of Redneck Nation, blows the lid off of what was previously one the most closely held secrets of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (or maybe that should be Vast Right Wind Conspiracy...):

Hurricane Katrina was a racist.

"Katy," as we called her in the labs of Halliburton, Inc., was unleashed by the Bush Administration and its evil minions in the oil industry using a super-secret, high-tech weather machine originally developed in the labs of Nazi Germany and passed down through the Skull and Bones Society at Yale. Just ask John Kerry—he knows all about it.

Of course Katrina hit New Orleans and its predominantly black population, and largely avoided the mostly white residents of the "Redneck Rivera" of the Florida panhandle. Don't you remember how Katrina started out hitting Florida, then swung around the entire state in order to get a clean shot at the Big Easy? All part of the plan.

The folks in the Congressional Black Caucus know. They know that Katrina (why not "Catherine?" No "K," of course) was created by the Bushies to accomplish two key goals: disrupt oil supplies so when the US finishes stealing all the black gold from Iraq, the prices will remain high; and kill lots of black people, who historically tend to vote Democrat, so the GOP can dominate the South.

Those blacks who didn't die were to be disenfranchised by being labeled "refugees," one of the most insulting and racist terms in the English language, so demeaning it has often been used in the past to describe Jews.

See how the conspiracy all fits together?

No? Well, read the rest.

Update: Related, if less satirical, thoughts from Jonah Goldberg.

John Hinderaker of Power Line writes:

Major Garrett of Fox News is reporting that the Red Cross "had prepositioned water, food, blankets and hygiene products for delivery to the Superdome and the Convention Center in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, but were blocked from delivering those supplies by orders of the Louisiana state government, which did not want to attract people to the Superdome and/or Convention Center."

Explosive, obviously, if true. Hugh [Hewitt] has interviewed Garrett, who says the report comes from "sources at the highest levels of the Red Cross."

Of course, FEMA is no great shakes either:

Not long after some 1,000 firefighters sat down for eight hours of training, the whispering began: "What are we doing here?"

As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters - his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week - a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta. . . .

The firefighters, several of whom are from Utah, were told to bring backpacks, sleeping bags, first-aid kits and Meals Ready to Eat. They were told to prepare for "austere conditions." Many of them came with awkward fire gear and expected to wade in floodwaters, sift through rubble and save lives.

"They've got people here who are search-and-rescue certified, paramedics, haz-mat certified," said a Texas firefighter. "We're sitting in here having a sexual-harassment class while there are still [victims] in Louisiana who haven't been contacted yet."

What we're they being taught that they wouldn't already know as firemen? Apparently this.

Update: The Political Teen has video of Garrett's Fox News segment about the Red Cross being blocked by the Louisiana state government.

Charles Johnson notes that a Florida court has upheld a ruling that Sultaana Freeman, who converted to Islam in 1997, cannot wear a mask in her driver’s license photo. (The Smoking Gun has a page on her which says:

Following her 1997 conversion to Islam, Sultaana Freeman (formerly Sandra Keller) was arrested in Decatur, Illinois for battering a foster child. Freeman, 35, pleaded guilty in 1999 to felony aggravated battery and was sentenced to 18 months probation.

Incidentally, the Florida court's ruling on her photo is also consistent with the laws in the Middle East:

Saudi Arabia: Women aren't allowed to drive
Iran: Women wear a traditional chador, which does not cover the face.
Egypt: Women do not cover their face in I.D. pictures
United Arab Emirates: Women do not cover their face in I.D. pictures
Oman: Women do not cover their face in I.D. pictures
Kuwait: Women do not cover their face in I.D. pictures
Qatar: Women do not cover their face in I.D. pictures
Bahrain: Women do not cover their face in I.D. pictures
Jordan: Women can drive if their faces are covered but do not cover their face in I.D. pictures

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, I was working in a bank. I'll never forget one of the 30-ish tellers saying something like, "that's the problem--you younger folks don't have as much history as we did, back when there was Vietnam, Watergate, the Oil Crisis, the Iranian Hostage Crisis...."

Flashforward to the present, where Tom Maguire writes he's got all the history he needs right now, thankyouverymuch!

I have been chiding my kids, over the years, that they are living through entirely too much history. Do folks still remember the once-momentous Clinton impeachment of 1998? The Florida recount of 2000? (We do!). Both were eclipsed by 9/11 and the war in Iraq.

And now we have the flooding of New Orleans and the destruction of the Gulf Coast, which will, I Boldly Predict, roil American politics for years or decades as people rethink the roles of local, state, and federal government.

He's got some suggestions on how that will play out. In the meantime, Glenn Reynolds has a roundup of excellent suggestions that will, sadly, largely go unheeded by the various levels of government as to how to plan for the next disaster.

In The Matrix, Hollywood posited a future where our minds are fed constant images of alternative reality, while our bodies remain prostrate and in limbo.

Of course, as Ed Morrissey notes, that's pretty much how Hollywood and its echo chamber of MSM big city critics want their audiences to remain all the time, as he compares the critical response to The Great Raid, which was based on actual World War II events, to the fictional The Constant Gardener:

Interestingly, the film industry and its critics have come to the same conclusion: They prefer films that take fiction and pass it off as uncomfortable fact, while excoriating the recreation of real and uncomfortable history onscreen.

Fictional? Morrissey writes that The Constant Gardener is constantly science-fictional in its muddleheaded details:

Most laughably, The Constant Gardener has a stunningly naive grasp of politics and culture. Towards the end, Fiennes must find a doctor (Pete Postlethwaite) who helped conduct the trials in order to find his wife's murderer. He winds up in a tribal village which is being raided by horse backed riders. In real life, we would know these killers as the Janjaweed--radical Islamist Arabs who are attempting to drive Sudanese animists and Christians off the land. Unsurprisingly, the film leaves this tidbit unspoken.

Later, when an African girl boards a U.N. plane out of Darfur with Fiennes and Postlethwaite, the pilot refuses her entry. When Fiennes offers to bribe the pilot, the U.N. employee stiffly warns the British diplomat not to "embarrass yourself." Fiennes has found the one U.N. employee not taking bribes. When the girl runs off despite Fiennes' efforts to rescue her, he asks Postlethwaite what will become of her. Postlethwaite replies that "if she's lucky, she'll make it to a refugee center." That doesn't even qualify as a bad joke; U.N. refugee centers in Africa hardly provide luck to young girls, as U.N. peacekeepers and staffers routinely turn such unfortunates out as prostitutes who must sell themselves in order to get food and water.

But the U.N. means well, doesn't it? At least that's what Sean Penn keeps telling me...

(Via Captain's Quarters.)

Update: Libertas asks a great question:

An interesting thought experiment, incidentally, would be to imagine the last two years’ box office tally without Bay Area independent filmmakers at Lucasfilm or Pixar, or without independent filmmaker Mel Gibson … i.e., people who work outside the Hollywood ‘development process.’

It's also worth pondering whether technology will eventually foster even more folks working outside that Hollywood development process. (The possibility of which is one of the reasons why Hollywood has tried to block a fair amount of it.)

In "Solid Rock", Mark Knopfler wrote and sang, "When you point your finger 'cause your plan fell through, you've got three more fingers pointing back at you". Yesterday, James Taranto wrote:

New Orleans's Mayor Ray Nagin is up for re-election in February 2006, Gov. Kathleen Blanco and Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu in November 2007, and Sen. Mary Landrieu in November 2008. All four are Democrats. When they point the finger at the federal government for whatever went wrong in the Katrina response, remember that they are fighting for their political lives.

Of course, while Taranto's a more articulate political writer, Knopfler can still run rings around him on the Stratocaster.

Meanwhile, in more early '80s pop culture referencing, Jonah Goldberg notes that life (and Randall Robinson) imitates C.H.U.D.

Virginia Postrel writes:

Two Fort Lauderdale-based companies have put together a simple but powerful site that lets Katrina survivors register so loved ones can find out their fate. Katrina.im-ok.org works with phone numbers, avoiding spelling problems and name duplications.

Tom Foster of CompuNex Corp., which did the programming, sent me an email asking blog readers in Dallas (and presumably other cities with a lot of refugees) "to take their portable laptops and wireless air cards and put them to work." I'm not exactly sure of the best way to connect readers' wi-fi cards with displaced hurricane victims, but consider this a solicitation. Check out I'm OK's site for more background.

Sounds good to us; we just added them below the Red Cross on our sidebar.

Meanwhile, Silicon Investor has links to other Katrina-related missing persons sites.

12 years ago--in other words, a decade and two years ago...or 15 minus three years ago!--Dave Barry noticed an alarming trend, in his back to school column, which thoughtfully began:

Summer vacation is almost over, so today Uncle Dave has a special back-to-school ''pep talk'' for you young people, starting with these heartfelt words of encouragement: HA HA HA YOU HAVE TO GO BACK TO SCHOOL AND UNCLE DAVE DOESN'T NEENER NEENER NEENER.

Seriously, young people, I have some important back-to-school advice for you, and I can boil it down to four simple words: ``Study Your Mathematics.''

I say this in light of a recent alarming Associated Press story stating that three out of every four high-school students -- nearly 50 percent -- leave school without an adequate understanding of mathematics. Frankly, I am not surprised. ''How,'' I am constantly asking myself, ``can we expect today's young people to understand mathematics when so many of them can't even point their baseball caps in the right direction?''

I am constantly seeing young people with the bills of their baseball caps pointing backward. This makes no sense, young people! If you examine your cap closely, you will note that it has a piece sticking out the front, called a ''bill.'' The purpose of the bill is to keep sun off your face, which, unless your parents did a great many drugs in the '60s (Ask them about it!), is located on the FRONT of your head. Wearing your cap backward is like wearing sunglasses on the back of your head, or wearing a hearing aid in your nose. (Perhaps you young people are doing this also. Uncle Dave doesn't want to know.)

So to summarize what we've learned: ``FRONT of cap goes on FRONT of head.''

Got it, young people? Let's all strive to do better in the coming school year!

Flashforward to 2005, and David Bernstein observes that few have learned the other Dave's important lesson (did I mention Uncle Dave wrote that 12 friggin' years ago?):

Who would have thought that twenty years [Note: 20 years is eight more than 12 years!--Ed] after I, as a teenager, thought it looked cool to put my baseball cap on backwards (was it a Beastie Boys thing? Who remembers...), that youths, and even some adults (saw a guy in his 30s yesterday), would still be doing it (though there seemed to be a break for a time in the late '80s and mid '90s). Folks, the bill is on the front for reason, to shade your face from the sun. And it's soooo unclassy. Can you imagine Cary Grant wearing a backwards baseball cap? Please ladies, boycott the gents who wear the cap backwards, or at least tell them how silly it looks, and end this travesty for good. Perhaps a simple, "you know, David Bernstein had that look twenty years ago," will do.

And as I wrote two years ago, "the only guys who can pull off a backwards baseball cap are MLB catchers, rap stars, SWAT snipers and 12 year old kids"--and odds are, you and I don't fit any of those profiles.

Sure, ESPN hiring Rush Limbaugh in 2003 brought them heaps of scorn from liberal sportswriters. Does that mean that the NFL has to swing in the polar opposite direction for the halftime entertainment at this year's season opener?

Earlier today, we linked to an article by Cathy Siepp, the proprietor of Cathy's World. She's also the Pajamas Media profile of the day.

But does she like Dewar's...?

Update: Cathy exposes the soft, sensitive side of MSNBC's "Senior Political Analyst".

At the end of 1984, George Orwell wrote:

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

Yahoo first went online in 1995--which means it took them 30 years less time than Winston Smith to come to love Big Brother as well.

No word yet if any gin-scented tears are trickling down the faces of its employees, though.

In Tech Central Station, Philip Klein compares Rudy Giuliani's handling of 9/11 with his counterpart's efforts in the Big Easy last week, and concludes:

Given the events of the early part of this decade, there is a strong likelihood that whoever succeeds President Bush will face at least one national crisis. Handicappers of the 2008 election have been debating whether conservatives would ever allow the Republican Party to nominate Giuliani as their presidential candidate, because he holds liberal views on abortion and gay rights.

But in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, even the most ardent social conservatives should examine whether in the hierarchy of issues it is more important to choose a leader who would best be able to respond to an event such as a biological attack, which would require split-second decision making to save lives. There is simply no politician in the nation who has proven to be a better leader in times of crisis than Giuliani. That's why America needs him.

A lot can happen over the next three years. But right now, the job is his if he wants it.

Update: It's Giuliani-A-Go-Go at Patrick Ruffini's! His Guiliani Wire is one stop shopping for all things Rudy.

Bob Denver, who achieved iconic pop culture status as first Maynard G. Krebs of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, and then as Gilligan, first mate of the doomed S.S. Minnow of Gilligan's Island (and like another endlessly inventive veteran crewman serving aboard ship on a mid-'60s TV series, earning its sad byproduct--permanent typecasting) died last week at age 70.

What made Gilligan's Island so successful that it's run virtually non-stop in reruns after being cancelled in 1967? Cathy Siepp explored the reasons why in a witty essay for Reason back in 2002 titled, "Gilligan's Island vs. the Taliban":

[Gilligan's Island creator Sherwood Schwartz] named the Castaways' ship, the S.S. Minnow, as a jab at then FCC chairman Newton Minow, who'd famously characterized television as "a vast wasteland." He recalls CBS chief William Paley's horror - "I thought it was supposed to be a comedy!" - at Schwartz's description of "Gilligan's Island" as a social microcosm.

Schwartz's response is a classic of let's-save-the-pitch quick-thinking: "It's a funny microcosm!"

Viewed through the prism of America's enemies, it's easy to see how the "Gilligan's Island" gang represents everything Muslim fanatics and their sympathizers hate. As Cantor describes it, "The Skipper embodies American military might, the Professor represents American science and technological know-how, and the Millionaire reflects the power of American business...the presence of The Movie Star among the castaways even hints at the source of America's cultural domination of the world - Hollywood."

Extending this trope, I would add that the Millionaire displays an unseemly Western uxoriousness towards his one wife -- insulting to societies where women are fourth class citizens, after the children and the camels. Mary Ann, besides her fondness for short-shorts, is offensively spunky to anyone who thinks women belong in robes and head scarves. She's the type of virgin who offends the fantasies of suicide bombers bombers everywhere, as she obviously wouldn't even give them the time of day in paradise.

And then there's Gilligan, the essence of the naïve, childish American - as Americans are so often described, ad nauseum, abroad. But bumbling, unsophisticated Gilligan has a way of ruining the plans of every Soviet cosmonaut or Third World dictator who drops by. "Representing the average citizen at his most ordinary," Cantor writes, "Gilligan presides over a kind of democratic utopia on the island and is repeatedly called upon to act as its savior."

What's more, he always prevails.

And always will-- Gilligan's Island will probably run another forty years in reruns, as the longest three hour tour in the history of mankind soldiers on.

Meanwhile, as for Denver's other defining role, Gerard Van der Leun looks at The Many Lives of Maynard G. Krebs.

I'm back in Silicon Valley, after an uneventful flight up from L.A. But getting to that flight was anything but relaxed--I was really surprised at how lame the T.S.A. folks were at LAX, one of the world's busiest airports. After moving through a glacier-slow line and then watching the somewhat emaciated looking 70-something Hispanic fellow standing in front of me in full cowboy regalia from head to toe (white ten gallon hat on top; a bitchin' pair of alligator boots on his feet) get singled out for a spot-check is reminder just how much of Mineta's Folly is a complete waste of everyone's time.

John Leo looks at how the press airbrushed the most extreme language out of quotes by Cindy Sheehan (hey, remember her?):

Sheehan, before and after her arrival in Texas, said a great many colorful things that failed to interest mainstream reporters. Some of her acid comments registered with the public mostly because of George Will’s powerful column of August 25 and his similar comments on the Sunday ABC TV news show This Week. A few made it on to cable news. Others simply failed to make it into the mainstream media. It’s worth reviewing what she said: The neocons deliberately allowed the terrorist attacks of 9/11. American soldiers are “being sent to kill innocent people” in Iraq. Her son, Casey Sheehan, “died for oil” and was “murdered” by President Bush. The United States is “not worth dying for.” The president, who “stole the election,” is part of the “Bush crime family,” a “lying bastard,” a “führer,” a “filth spewer,” “the biggest terrorist in the world,” and an “evil maniac” who is guilty of “blatant genocide.” Sheehan also compared Lynne Stewart, the radical lawyer convicted of aiding terrorists, to Atticus Finch, the heroic lawyer who battled racism in the book and movie To Kill a Mockingbird. She has been accused of making vaguely anti-Semitic remarks, but she attributes those remarks to her political opponents. On Hardball, she said the American attack in Afghanistan was “almost the same thing” (i.e., just as evil) as the invasion of Iraq.

Extreme politics. The mainstream media’s lack of interest in these little verbal grenades is astonishing. According to a computer search, not one of them made it into news coverage by the New York Times. The Times has a public editor, or ombudsman, who might want to ask why. One explanation for the news failure is that the media wedded themselves early to a simple narrative line-the president, holed up on his ranch, refuses to meet with and comfort a grief-stricken mother. This narrative became frozen in cement when columnists of the left began talking about the “moral authority” of a parent who loses a son in war. This story line-moral mom versus stone-hearted president-didn’t allow much room to note Sheehan’s great contempt for America. There is also the vituperation she has been showering on Bush for years. She campaigned against him in 2004, vigorously promoting his impeachment, not seeking a meaningful heart-to-heart chat with the “evil maniac.” Nor did reporters point out that Bush would set himself up for more abuse if he sat down with Sheehan, probably in the meeting and surely in the press conference afterward. By sticking to the anguished-mother story line and declining to publish her outlandish verbal abuse, mainstream reporters protected the public from an inference that would otherwise been obvious: that Sheehan had either gone around the bend psychologically or, more likely, had simply thrown in her lot with the extreme America-hating left. Whenever the mainstream media inched toward actual information about what Sheehan was up to, they employed the familiar “conservatives are claiming” construction, not directly reporting Sheehan’s odd comments and extreme politics.

On the whole, the mainstream media depicted Cindy Sheehan as a moral figure without blemish. Maybe reporters and editors felt paralyzed by the “absolute moral authority” rhetoric or justified by polls showing declining support for the war. Some reporters, of course, detest Bush and oppose the war. For whatever reason, they weren’t able to break from the original soft narrative line about a mother’s grief and tell us what was really going on.

No one who followed the press last year should be very surprised at their willingness to airbrush a spokesperson whose rhetoric they admired--but knew would be damaging to their mutually shared cause if widely shared with the public.

I have an article in the October issue of PC World that explains how to use Adobe's Premiere Elements software to make surprisingly professional DIY DVDs--and it's online now.

The Return of the Primitive was the title of an Ayn Rand book on the post-McGovern left. I borrowed it to use for my category on some of the more extreme examples of the flight from reason that's an ongoing part of much of today's society.

Frankly, it's not a category I use very often. But since Katrina's hit land, it's gotten a workout. And it's not a coincidence that in his latest Chicago Sun-Times column, Mark Steyn refers to a phenomenon called "re-primitivized man":

Anyone watching TV in recent days will have seen plenty of "re-primitivized man," not in Liberia or Somalia, but in Louisiana. Cops smashing the Wal-Mart DVD cabinet so they can get their share of the booty along with the rest of the looters, gangs firing on a children's hospital and on rescue helicopters, hurricane victims being raped in the New Orleans Convention Center. . . . If you're minded, as many of the world's anti-Americans are, to regard the United States as a depraved swamp, it was a grand old week: Mother Nature delivered the swamp, but plenty of natives supplied the depravity.

Not all of them, of course. But it doesn't really matter if it's only 5 percent or 2 percent or 0.01 percent if everybody else is giving them free rein. Not exactly the most impressive law enforcement agency even on a good day, the New Orleans Police Department sent along some 80 officers to rescue the rape victims trapped in the Convention Center, but were beaten back by the mob. Meanwhile, the ever more pitiful governor was, unlike many of her fellow Louisianans, safe on dry land but still floundering way out of her depth, unable to stand up to the lawlessness even rhetorically or to communicate anything other than emotive impotence.

With most disasters, it's a good rule to let the rescue teams do their work and leave the sniping till folks are safe. But in New Orleans last week the emergency work has been seriously hampered by actual literal sniping, as at that hospital. The authorities lost control of the streets. Which one of Tom Ridge's Homeland Security color codes does that fall under?

After Sept. 11, many people who should have known better argued that it was somehow a vindication of government.

* * *

One thing that became clear two or three months after "the day that everything changed" is that nothing changed -- that huge swathes of the political culture in America remain committed to a bargain that stiffs the people at every level, a system of lavish funding of pseudo-action. You could have done as the anti-war left wanted and re-allocated every dollar spent in Iraq to Louisiana. Or you could have done as some of the rest of us want and re-allocated every buck spent on, say, subsidizing Ted Turner's and Sam Donaldson's play-farming activities. But, in either case, I'll bet Louisiana's kleptocrat public service would have pocketed the dough and carried on as usual -- and, come the big day, the state would still have flopped out, and New Orleans' foul-mouthed mayor would still be ranting about why it was all everybody's else fault.

Those levees broke; they failed. And you think about Chicago and San Francisco and Boston and you wonder what's waiting to fail there. The assumption was that after 9/11, big towns and small took stock and identified their weak points. That's what they told us they were doing, and that's what they were getting big bucks to do. But in New Orleans no one had a plan that addressed levee failure, and no one had a plan for the large percentage of vehicleless citizens who'd be unable to evacuate, and no one had a plan to deal with widespread looting. Given that all these local factors are widely known -- New Orleans is a below-sea-level city with high crime and a low rate of automobile ownership -- it makes you wonder how the city would cope with something truly surprising -- like, say, a biological attack.

Oh, well, maybe the 9/11 commission can rename themselves the Katrina Kommission. Back in the real world, America's enemies will draw many useful lessons from the events of this last week. Will America?

All in all, sadly, I wouldn't bet on it. But David Brooks is certainly right: "Rudy Giuliani, an unlikely G.O.P. nominee a few months ago, could now win in a walk". And for good reason.

Update: Related thoughts from Roger L. Simon, and a related video illustrating Steyn's point, via Charles Johnson.

Another Update: Mark Steyn also has a column on New Orleans in England's Telegraph: "The Big Easy Rocked, But Didn't Roll".

Glenn Reynolds writes, "Like Bob Hope In World War II, Sean Penn is able to take a devastated nation and make it laugh". Click on over to read the details and see Spicoli in full maritime action.

Originally, the New Orleans Saints planned to have their home opener against the Giants in the Superdome, where they play all of their home games. Katrina changed all that. The Giants already agreed to allow the game to be played in the New Jersey Meadowlands. And in an effort to bring greater publicity to ongoing flood relief efforts, the NFL has decided to play the game on Monday night along with the previously scheduled Cowboys-Redskins battle, turning the night into a football fanatic's dream, as AP reports:

The Giants-Saints game, driven from New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, will be played as part of a nationally televised doubleheader starting at 7:30 p.m. EDT on Monday, Sept. 19.

The game, already moved to the Giants' home in the New Jersey Meadowlands, will begin on ABC, then be switched to ESPN at 9 p.m., when ABC goes to the regularly scheduled game between Washington and Dallas in Irving, Texas. In New York and Louisiana, as well as other parts of the Gulf Coast, ABC will continue to carry the Giants-Saints game, switching to Redskins-Cowboys when the Saints game ends.

NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said other details, such as ticket sales, will be announced soon.

``We appreciate the leadership of ABC and ESPN in helping us turn this particular Monday night into far more than a prime-time football doubleheader, making it part of the overall Gulf Coast relief effort,'' commissioner Paul Tagliabue said in a statement released by the NFL. ``The New Orleans Saints know the importance of rising to help meet the Gulf Coast's extraordinary challenges, and we salute them, too.''

The NFL said fund-raising efforts for hurricane relief will be intertwined in the telecasts of both games.

The Cowboys/'Skins game is scheduled to include the induction of the Cowboys' famed "triplets" at halftime.

There's no joy in Bay Area football households today: Jerry Rice calls it a career, rather than face the ignominious status of being listed fourth on the Denver Broncos' depth chart of receivers. AP reports:

Read More »

Sorry for the lack of posts--Nina and I are in L.A. for the Labor Day extended weekend, as she has Pajamas-related business. Posting will be sporadic until Wednesday.

Over 200 members of New Orleans' finest have quit their job and gone home--and according to the New York Times, "two have committed suicide".

As a commenter on Little Green Footballs wrote, unlike 9/11 and New York, I don't believe we'll be seeing any NOPD hats sold at department stores in the next few months.

But don't complain about the cops to Louisiana's Senator Landrieu:

Louisiana Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu threatened President Bush with physical violence this morning on ABC's Sunday morning news program "This Week". "If one person criticizes our sheriffs, or says one more thing, including the President of the United States, he will hear from me - one more word about it after this show airs and I - I might likely have to punch him - literally," says Landrieu.

Found via Mark Steyn, this excerpt from a Front Page symposium on Islamofascist suicide bombers contains a staggering detail I hadn't heard before:

They expect to meet innumerable beautiful girls in paradise since all their lives they have been told to proceed directly there as reward for the martyr death. Needless to mention that there will be unlimited erections as well as hymens renewed constantly. Some of the Palestinian suicide bombers wrap their penises into fire-proof aluminum foil to save them for the pleasures to come.

Muggeridge's Law strikes again! Think about it: If Stanley Kubrick were alive today, and planning to make a Middle Eastern version of Dr. Strangleove, there's no way he or his writers would dream up such a detail, nor have the nerve to even include it in a movie if they did.

(Incidentally, don't get the wrong impression: that Front Page article is actually a serious look at its topic, and is well-worth reading in its entirety, along with this great piece that contains first-hand interviews with actual would-be suicide bombers by Nasra Hassan, a Pakistan-born relief worker and journalist.)

Just updated my post earlier today linking to Mickey Kaus's theory that Katrina allows the left "a way to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq", to also include a flashback to Charles Krauthammer's "Pressure Cooker Theory" essay from August of last year. It's well worth revisiting in light of this past week's ratcheting up of Bush Derangement Syndrome (which of course, was another spot-on Krauthammer coinage).

RedState.org posts an excellent timetable of early events in New Orleans and concludes:

There will be a time for the settling of accounts, and that time is not now. When the time comes, we’ll find that the oversight was been more grievous, and deadly, and immediate, than failing to conduct a four-year feasibility study. It is time, as Brendan Loy says, for “No more lies; we saw this coming.” For failing to evacuate New Orleans until the last minute – despite the clear warning signals and a danger many times greater than in any other coastal American city – history will remember the hapless duo of C. Ray Nagin and Kathleen Blanco – and not kindly.

Meanwhile, Nicole Gelinas of City Journal has another excellent essay, this time on the vicious looters of New Orleans--and their victims.

Via PoliPundit, AP reports:

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist died Saturday evening at his home in suburban Virginia, said Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg.

A statement from the spokeswoman said he was surrounded by his three children when he died in Arlington.

"The Chief Justice battled thyroid cancer since being diagnosed last October and continued to perform his dues on the court until a precipitous decline in his health the last couple of days," she said.

Rehnquist was appointed to the Supreme Court as an associate justice in 1971 by President Nixon and took his seat on Jan. 7, 1982. He was elevated to chief justice by President Reagan in 1986.

John Roberts was once was a law clerk for Rehnquist, and there was talk that the chief justice was delying his retirement in order to welcome his former associate to the court. Sadly, that's not going to happen.

Junkyard Blog has an amazing post-Katrina overhead shot of a parking lot in New Orleans with 255 unused buses visible:

we count 255 buses in that one lot. That means at a capacity of 66 on board, 16,830 New Orleans residents could have been evacced out in one trip. Even if you have a lower capacity per bus, say 50 per bus, you're still getting nearly 13,000 out in one run. In an emergency mandatory evacuation, you could probably get away with putting more than 66 on each of those buses.

When we said that the buses are now expenses instead of assets, this is what we meant. Not only are those buses ruined, their disuse resulting in lives lost, but now they're spilling oil and gas out into the already polluted water. A spark near that slick could cause yet another fire and a whole new set of explosions.

Read the whole thing.

Tech Central Station has new items online in their recently created section on Katrina and its aftermath. Click on the banner below to read the articles there, including Nick Schulz's memories of President Reagan's visit to the Big Easy.

Mickey Kaus has a great take on the Katrina-related Bush-bashing by the media and the left (sorry to repeat myself):

I'm not saying Bush and the Feds don't clearly deserve major grief for not getting today's National Guard aid convoy into downtown New Orleans a couple of days earlier. Some people are probably dead as a result. But the commentators on Washington Week in Review seemed a little too happy when proclaiming this a "debacle" that will damage Bush politically for a long, long time. And I don't think they were happy just because Bush has suffered a blow. I think it's because the hurricane and its New Orleans aftermath at least seemed to solve a big problem for anti-Bush commentators and politicians. Previously, they couldn't grouse about the Iraq War without seeming defeatist (and anti-liberationist and maybe even selfishly isolationist). Even the Clintons never figured a way out of that trap. But nature has succeded where they failed; it has opened up a way out, at least temporarily. Now Bush opponents can argue, in some cases quite accurately, that without the Iraq deployment aid would have gotten to New Orleans faster. And 'if we can [tk] in Iraq, why can't we [tk] in our own South?' They aren't being selfish. They are just asserting priorities! In short, Katrina gives them a way to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq. No wonder Gwen Ifill smiles the "inner smile."

As the Professor writes, "Yes, I think he's got that exactly right".

Update: A Charles Krauthammer essay of late August 2004 is worth revisiting, for his "Pressure Cooker Theory" of the far left. It was written to explain how the Bush Derangement Syndrome (an even more famous phrase he also coined) of the election came to be:

The loathing goes far beyond the politicians. Liberals as a body have gone quite around the twist. I count one all-star rock tour, three movies, four current theatrical productions and five best sellers (a full one-third of the New York Times list) variously devoted to ridiculing, denigrating, attacking and devaluing this president, this presidency and all who might, God knows why, support it.

How to explain? With apologies to Dr. Freud, I propose the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release.

The hostility, resentment, envy and disdain, all superheated in Florida, were not permitted their natural discharge. Came 9/11 and a lid was forced down. How can you seek revenge for a stolen election by a nitwit usurper when all of a sudden we are at war and the people, bless them, are rallying around the flag and hailing the commander in chief? With Bush riding high in the polls, with flags flying from pickup trucks (many of the flags, according to Howard Dean, Confederate), the president was untouchable.

The Democrats fell unnaturally silent. For two long, agonizing years, they had to stifle and suppress. It was the most serious case of repression since Freud's Anna O. went limp. The forced deference nearly killed them. And then, providentially, they were saved. The clouds parted and bad news rained down like manna: WMDs, Abu Ghraib, Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, Joe Wilson and, most important, continued fighting in Iraq.

Stripped of his halo, the president's ratings went down. The spell was broken. He was finally once again human and vulnerable. With immense relief, the critics let loose.

The result has been volcanic. The subject of one prominent new novel is whether George W. Bush should be assassinated. This is all quite unhinged. Good God. What if Bush is re-elected? If they lose to him again, Democrats will need more than just consolation. They'll need therapy.

Unfortunately, they never received it. And as Mickey Kaus notes above, Katrina allows the left's pressure cooker to explode--at full Category Five strength.

"John Wayne-ing it" was Vietnam-era speak for what was once described as "gung ho" in World War II--"Let's John Wayne it up the hill" was a line used in Michael Herr's great Dispatches, I think.

UPI reports that the mayor of New Orleans is happy that Army Lt. General Russel Honore, a Louisiana native has been put in charge of the Army's Task Force Katrina. Furthering his newly found credentials as the anti-Giuliani, Mayor Ray Nagin dubbed Honore "one John Wayne dude":

NEW ORLEANS, Sep. 3 (UPI) — A Louisiana native with experience in floods has been put in charge of the Army's Task Force Katrina, winning praise even from New Orleans' unhappy mayor.

Lt. Gen. Russel Honore is "one John Wayne dude," Mayor Ray Nagin said in an interview this week with radio station WWL.

Stars and Stripes reports that Honore, who hails from Lakeland, La., led the 2nd Infantry Division in Korea from 2000 to 2002, dealing with flooding at many bases every year during monsoon season and supervising the installation of flood control measures.

Nagin said that sending Honore was the one thing he could give President Bush credit for -- "he came off the doggone chopper, and he started cussin' and people started movin'!"

CNN reported that Honore has also ordered National Guard troops and even police officers in New Orleans to keep their guns pointed down. The general told CNN that he is most concerned with getting food, water and other necessities to the thousands of people still trapped in the city.

"If you ever have 20,000 people come to supper, you know what I'm talking about," he said. "If it's easy, it would have been done already."

Presumably the paraphrased quote above highlighted in bold means that Nagin doesn't want to give President Bush credit for calling and personally appealing for a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans before the hurricane actually hit.

Update: More thoughts on Nagin from James Panero.

TechWeb reports that DirecTV has adopted channel #100 (which I think normally shows "learn how to control your DirecTV set-top box" sorts of programming) into an information channel on Katrina:

DirecTV Inc. on Friday said it has launched a 24-hour Hurricane Katrina information channel that broadcasts a continuous stream of email messages from family and friends of hurricane victims.

Available on channel 100 of the satellite-TV service, the program also provide information on road closures throughout the Gulf region, which was heaviest hit in Monday's storm; the location and phone numbers of special needs shelters in Louisiana and shelter openings throughout the Gulf Coast.

In addition, the channel lists counties and parishes in the Gulf region that are able to assist evacuees, insurance company contact information and relief agency contact information, including phone numbers for the Red Cross, Salvation Army and Feed the Children.

DirecTV, a Los Angeles unit of News Corp., will scroll at the bottom of the TV screen text messages from family and friends separated by the hurricane and its aftermath. Emails sent to katrina@directv.com are reviewed by DirecTV staff and then posted on the channel. A text message also can be sent via cellular phone directly to text code "48433."

Bob Marsocci, spokesman for DirecTV, said the company launched the channel to help address the difficulty victims have had in contacting loved ones. DirecTV has more than 14.6 million subscribers nationwide.

"Watching the news headlines, it became clear that besides the basics of food, shelter and clothing, there was a lack of communications, so we decided to launch a dedicated channel," Marsocci said. "Communication is of vital importance with 10s of thousands of people out of their homes."

DirecTV plans to keep the channel up for "as long as necessary," Marsocci said. The company plans to install its DirecTV in shelters, based on recommendation from federal officials and the Red Cross. Service already has been installed in the Houston Astrodome, which is housing 10s of thousands of victims.

DirecTV isn't the only company trying to help Katrina victims reach loved ones. Internet service provider Earthlink Inc., based in Atlanta, said Friday it has launched a Web page for people to submit their own names and location, and search the submissions of others.

Meanwhile, the Pajamas Media beta-site has suspended its member profiles for the weekend, and is providing information on Katrina as well.

The Washington Post writes the venerable videotape's obituary, picking up a topic we discussed a few days ago.

Betsy Newmark looks at the implications of Hawaii's Akaka bill, which is scheduled to be debated by the Senate next week.

"More Than 3 Dozen Countries Pledge Assistance"

We've been tracking this week where the New Orleans Saints will be playing their upcoming NFL season. AP reports that the rest of the season is still up in the air, but the game that was originally scheduled to be their home opener, against the Giants on September 18th (after opening the season in Carolina), will be on the Giants' home turf, the New Jersey Meadowlands:

The New Orleans Saints, driven from the Superdome by Hurricane Katrina, will play their home opener against the New York Giants at Giants Stadium.

It is not clear, however, when the game will be played.

NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue said Friday the game, scheduled for Sept. 18, is being moved to the Giants' home in East Rutherford, N.J.

The New York Jets, who share the stadium with the Giants, are scheduled to play at home against Miami on Sept. 18. As a result, the Giants-Saints game most likely will be played Saturday, Sept. 17, or the following Monday.

The league said it was possible the game could be played as part of a doubleheader Sunday, with the one game at 1 p.m. and the other at night. The Jets are now scheduled to start at 4:15 p.m.

``We are in the process of working out the specific arrangements, including the day and kickoff time and plans for television coverage,'' Tagliabue said. He added that information on tickets will be announced in a few days by the Giants.

He said the Saints and Giants had agreed to donate part of the gate receipts from the game to the hurricane relief fund.

The Saints, who spent the past week on the West Coast, are moving their headquarters to San Antonio for the immediate future. The Alamodome in San Antonio, which holds 65,000, had been considered a strong possibility for the game.

I have an article on the Apollo Guidance Computer in my bi-monthly "Micro Memories" column in Nuts & Volts magazine, with several photos supplied by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View California that you might enjoy. Sadly, it's not online, but it should be at your local Borders or Barnes & Noble, or you can click here to subscribe.

And for more old school outer space action, check out my piece on Spacecraft Films' Apollo DVDs over at Tech Central Station.

Fascinating interview with Victor Davis Hanson, posted on his personal site. Here's but an excerpt:

This conflict with radical Islam has much in common with long struggle of the Cold War, but radical Islam has none of the marquee appeal that socialism offers to the naive. Socialism and communism have this chimera of egalitarianism: Give the state enough power and we’ll make you all equal. And that can be appealing to the young and poor. Radical Islam says in contrast, Give us the power and we’ll take you back to the 8th century; we’ll stone homosexuals; we’ll circumcise women; well make you live by a code found nowhere else in the modern world. In other words, Islamic fascism has no real resonance, aside from its showy anti-Americanism.

Plus, in this age of globalization, with the Internet and open media, Middle East dictatorships cannot censor information and news the way they did before. They cannot blame Israel and America for their own failures and expect to shield their population from all other exegeses. In addition, radical Islam has to compete with everything from Britney Spears to McDonalds to John Locke. So far the West, not Islamic radicalism, has proven to be the more dynamic and appealing creed, for better or worse.

So while we have a whole bloc of autocratic nations, as we did in the Cold War, the situation is much more explosive and unpredictable, and can turn in far less time.

Now that we've established that the United States is unpredictable, muscular and resolute, we need to undermine through democratic pressure the dictatorships in Syria and Iran, insidiously through principles of transparency and freedom, through the backdoor if you will, rather than necessarily confronting them head-on with more force. In other words, if Syria wants to undermine us in Iraq, we need to encourage idealists to push out their agents from Lebanon. We need to pressure Iran through Afghanistan and Turkey and other democracies to rise on its perimeter. We can agitate for democratic reform in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and Egypt, through policies that govern aid, sales, largess, and travel, and build a democratic consensus of reform — until Iran and Syria realize they are the odd men out, the Cubas so to speak of the Middle East.

This is all only possible because of the credibility of U.S military force — and only because the U.S. dealt with the worst problems first in defeating the Taliban and Saddam Hussein and scattering al Qaeda. When you deal with the most frightening and controversial obstacles first, the rest becomes much easier and is ironically not always in need of the same initial tough responses.

Do I even need to say...read the whole thing?

James Taranto and Rich Lowry have some thoughts on race and the news coverage of Katrina, and what Lowry describes as the coming racially-fueled battle over its reconstruction.

Update: "The smartest man in pop music", as crowned by Time magazine has some related thoughts on the subject...

Charles Johnson writes, "Messages from people in New Orleans who desperately need help are being posted at the NOLA View weblog".

Earlier today, I donated to the Red Cross via Amazon.com (After busting Amazon's chops yesterday, it seemed the least I could do to make up for it.)

Feel free to click over and do the same--or choose from another of the charities on Glenn Reynolds' list. Every little bit really does help--as Austen Bay said the other day, "There's no America out there except America to respond to [Katrina]. We've got to do it ourselves."

Update: Bumped to top. Just copied the Red Cross logo from Amazon and and pasted it into sidebar on the right, along with a link to the Red Cross relief page.

Click on it early and often.

Technorati Tags: flood aid, Hurricane Katrina.

Neo-Neocon has some thoughts on New Orleans' lack of preparation for a disaster that--in typical 20/20 hindsight--now seems inevitable:

This lethal stew of prohibitive cost, corruption, competing ideas about what was necessary, and denial that something so dreadful was likely enough to justify all that expense, proved to be a deadly mixture that led to the shocking lack of preparedness. As blogger "Laurel," who fled the New Orleans area with her family just before the hurricane hit writes, it was "The day I thought would never come." And if a day will never come, why spend billions of dollars in a very poor state to prepare against that day?

Read the whole thing.

Update: Will Collier has some related thoughts that are well worth reading.

The Lone Star Times Weblog has exclusive photos and posts from inside the Houston Astrodome, where many of the survivors of Katrina who spent days in the New Orleans Superdome have de-camped.

They also note that the Craigslist Internet bulletin boards in Houston and New Orleans have pitched in to help, and its readers are posting available housing.

"Shanna, they bought their tickets, they knew what they were getting into. I say, let 'em crash!"

Patrick Ruffini looks at the "Hurricane of Hatred". Here's but one example.

Michelle Malkin's latest posts are must-reads, as she continues her incredible job of blogging Katrina's aftermath. Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt has a two-part series with excellent recommendations for rebuilding the area and returning some semblance of normalcy to its people.

Micheal Ledeen compares New Orleans with Venice and Naples:

New Orleans is one of a handful of cities that are defined in large part by the recognition that it can all come to an end most any day. Joel Lockhart Dyer wrote that "New Orleans is North America's Venice; both cities are living on borrowed time." New Orleans and Venice are both subject to the vagaries of the water gods, and both have acted sporadically to fend off their seemingly inevitable fate. But their basic response to the looming disaster has been defiance, a ritual assertion of life in the face of the inevitable, and an embrace of human frailty that echoes the frailty of the city itself.

Carnival in Venice, albeit more so in the past than today, has much in common with Mardi Gras, including the use of masks by the celebrants, who thereby throw off their daily identities to participate anonymously in the licentious celebrations. Thomas Mann knew what he was doing when he wrote Death in Venice, in which a proper German professor (pointedly named Aschenbach, the stream of ashes) hurls himself into bawdy Venice to recover his repressed sexuality and creativity. Similar characters abound in the works of Tennessee Williams, who lived many years in New Orleans, the setting for both A Streetcar Named Desire and The Rose Tattoo. William Faulkner also found New Orleans a congenial place for his creative labors. And in both cities, the bacchanals are religious, celebrating both sin and the hope of redemption thereafter, as if a sinner were more attractive to the Almighty than a virtuous soul, at least on that day.

Moreover, Venice prefigured the most likely cultural and political destiny of New Orleans, no matter whether the long-anticipated catastrophe came or not: a slow slide into monotonous ritual, a city transformed into an historic theme park, more frequented by tourists than defined by the energy of its inhabitants, an anachronistic curiosity like Florence, where one focuses on things past, not present or future.

But there is much that separates them. Venice is a northern city, and New Orleans is profoundly southern. A German like Mann might find Venice to be incredibly warm and sunny, but no knowledgeable Italian would. And the presumed naturalness and spontaneity of Venetians could only be taken seriously by someone from even farther north. New Orleans, on the other hand, incarnates the south. New Orleanians are perversely proud of the slow tempo of their daily life, of the absence of industry, and of the fascinating spectacle of human foibles and failures that seems at one with the city. The Italian city that most closely matches New Orleans is Naples, not Venice. Naples also faces destruction — volcanic destruction, from "Vesuvius the Exterminator," as the poet Verga once wrote — and Naples, too, is noted for a lively, and often lawless style of life, along with great literature, art, cuisine and music. Unlike Venice, Naples is every bit as southern as New Orleans, and the European stereotype of the Neapolitan is very much like the American image of New Orleanians: lazy, happy, spontaneous, and unrepressed, slow-moving but quick-witted, and very happy with the food.

Read the rest.

Tech Central Station has created a new section devoted to coverage of Katrina. Click on the banner below to read the articles there:

Just had a great chat with Jill Stewart of Pajamas Media on Thursday night. Watch for my Dewar's Pajamas Contributor Profile to go online, possibly as early as next week.

Update: Just to tie this post in with the previous topics earlier this evening, linking to The Anchoress, Co-Maximum Pajamahadeen Roger L. Simon writes:

I think CNN would turn Noah's flood into a partisan attack on George Bush. Even such a hardened politico as James Carville had to tell their brain dead reporter to shut up and deal with the reality in front of him, rather than casting blame. What is wrong with these CNN people? What culture do they come from? Their lack of moral and psychological sophistication is truly stunning.

When I see this kind of reporting, I know we are doing the right thing at Pajamas Media in trying to organize the blogosphere, just a little bit, as the beginning of an antidote.

Amen.

Several of the posts from Thursday were updated during the night. Just keep scrolling.

On Sunday, we asked the burning (get it!) question, does excessive use of the memory hole by the media hurt the ozone layer? Jonah Goldberg notes yet another Clinton-era quote that's been missing in action (trapped for years in the interdimensional Tholian space between Lexus and Nexus) until now:

But what's unlawful -- and unpopular with the allies -- is not necessarily immoral. So now that I'm not in the White House, I can say what I couldn't say then: we should seriously explore the assassination option. Even though the current crisis may be subsiding temporarily, we don't know what the future holds. A direct attack on Saddam would no doubt be politically risky -- the president, concerned about his place in history, would be torn between the desire to get rid of a bully and the worry that an assassination plan gone awry would embarrass him late in his term. But the president should think about it: the gulf-war coalition is teetering and we have not eliminated Saddam's capacity to inflict mass destruction. That's why killing him may be the more sensible -- and moral -- course over the long run.

As Jonah writes, "Pat Robertson? No....George Stephanopoulos, in the December 1, 1997 Newsweek, explaining why Bill Clinton should have Saddam Hussein offed".

Here's more from Stephanopoulos:

Philosophers have long argued that there are times when murdering a murderer is not only necessary but noble. "Grecian nations give the honors of the gods to those men who have slain tyrants," wrote Cicero. Targeting Saddam also seems in accord with the "just war" principles first developed by Augustine and Aquinas. We've exhausted other efforts to stop him, and killing him certainly seems more proportionate to his crimes and discriminate in its effect than massive bombing raids that will inevitably kill innocent civilians. To those who argue that assassination is the moral equivalent of terrorism, Michael Walzer's "Just and Unjust Wars" reminds us that "randomness is the crucial feature of terrorist activity." Terrorists kill the innocent to coerce the powerful. Assassination, by contrast, is the least random act of war. Relaxing the moral norm against it is a regrettable but justifiable price to pay when confronted with someone like Saddam who is unique in his capacity to inflict evil on his own people and the rest of the world. It's one of the extremely rare circumstances where killing can be a humanitarian act that saves far more lives than it risks.... ....Overcoming the practical difficulties is much more problematic. Experts like former CIA director Robert Gates have said that assassination is a "non-option" because Saddam is so elusive and well protected. That's the strongest argument against assassination. But it loses some force when stacked against the alternatives: an indefinite extension of the sanctions that punishes the most vulnerable Iraqis without weakening Saddam or eliminating his ability to build weapons of mass destruction; or a massive military campaign that will crack the gulf-war coalition, risk allied troops and kill innocent Iraqis without ensuring Saddam's fall.

And here's the last line:

A misreading of the law or misplaced moral squeamishness should not stop the president from talking about assassination. He should order up the options and see if it's possible. If we can kill Saddam, we should.

Maybe George can interview himself on ABC and get an update on where he stands on Saddam today.

Some incredible photos of the aftermath of Katrina, over at the Digital Irony blog.

Earlier day, we noted that longtime New Orleans-based musical legend Fats Domino was missing. Charles Johnson happily reports that he's been found, alive and well.

From AP, this news isn't very surprising:

NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue says it's unlikely the Saints will play in New Orleans this season after the devastation Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath inflicted on the city.

``At this point you have to proceed on the assumption ... that they may be unable to play in New Orleans at all for the entire season,'' Tagliabue said Thursday in an interview with CNBC.

``If things evolve in a positive way, then that would be something that we could adjust to. But our assumption is that for planning purposes, we should assume it will be difficult if not impossible to play in New Orleans at all this year.''

The Saints will move into a hotel in San Antonio, Texas, this weekend and practice in San Antonio in preparation for their regular-season opener at Carolina Sept. 11. They have spent this week in San Jose, Calif., and played their final exhibition Thursday night in Oakland.

But it still hasn't been decided where they will play their regular-season opener Sept. 18 against the New York Giants or play the rest of their games.

Tagliabue says that one possibility is the Alamodome in San Antonio, which seats 65,000. He also noted that the NFL would be donating one million dollars to the hurricane recovery effort.

If you're reading this via broadband, click here for a large, detailed aerial view of New Orleans, post-Katrina. Found via The Corner, where Byron York writes:

This is the best aerial photo of New Orleans that I have seen. It shows the vast areas that are underwater, shows the Superdome, and shows that the area most tourists are familiar with, the French Quarter, appears largely dry.

That's reassuring--getting tourists back will be vital for New Orleans' rebuilding.

Update: In comparison, here's an overhead "before" photo.

While we've been focusing on Louisiana and Mississippi, this Newhouse article says that Alabama was also hard-hit by Katrina:

Hurricane Katrina's powerful east side unleashed a stinging assault on Alabama's coastline Monday, pushing water over roads and up rivers, toppling trees and killing power to thousands of residents.

An oil rig broke free from its moorings and struck a large suspension bridge, forcing its closure; beach areas rebuilding from last September's Hurricane Ivan were awash again; scores of roads were closed; and everything from fish camps to multimillion-dollar homes along the low-lying areas of Mobile Bay took on water at an alarming rate.

As powerful wind gusts burst into downtown Mobile, large rectangular pieces of foam-core insulation flew through the air like playing cards being flung from the upper stories of the RSA Tower, which is under construction as Alabama's tallest office building.

Where vacationers and conventioneers normally sip mint juleps in the historic Grand Hotel in Point Clear, more than nine feet of water swamped the lobby. The resort underwent a $50 million renovation in 2003.

In Washington County, meanwhile, two people died in a wreck attributed to heavy rains from the storm.

Gov. Bob Riley announced Monday evening that he received approval from President Bush to declare parts of southwest Alabama federal disaster areas. The disaster declaration means federal and state assistance will be available to help governments in Mobile, Baldwin, Washington, Clarke, Choctaw and Sumter counties recover costs for debris removal and other hurricane-relief efforts.

"I think we'll find that Mobile County experienced the most hurricane damage since Hurricane Frederic," Randy McKee, head of the National Weather Service's Mobile office, said, recalling the 1979 storm that is the local benchmark for destructiveness.

Read the whole thing.

Update: Michelle Malkin has a post which reminds us that it's "Not Just New Orleans" that's been hit.

Another Update: Speaking of which, welcome to Michelle's readers.

I was a little uncomfortable with James Taranto's comparison in his latest "Best of the Web Today" column, comparing the Gaia-worshiping "Fire Make Sea Gods Angry!" left with the New Orleans looters. After examples from the usual suspects (Cindy Sheehan, Molly Ivans, Robert Kennedy Jr., the New York Times), Taranto writes:

Some people respond to a horrific natural disaster by taking cheap shots at their political opponents. Others respond by stealing TV sets. The underlying impulse knows no boundaries of social class.

This hateful post on a popular leftwing blog, however, really does seem to be verbal equivalent of a looting.

As Charles Johnson writes, "This is where the left has ended up, on their journey into hatred".

Is there a journey back out? All of their writing is being cataloged on the Internet; a few years from now, will anyone remind them of what they wrote and said and ask them, "how on earth could you say such things?"

Update: In a sharp and welcome contrast to others on the left, former President Bill Clinton is taking the high road, working with Bush #41 once again, as they did after last year's tsunami, and delivering some well-deserved smackdown to CNN's Suzanne Malveaux.

(Via Michelle Malkin, who, as she has been all week, is loaded with Katrina-related links today.)

Another Update: Arthur Chrenkoff has rounded-up numerous additional examples of hurricane exploitation in action.

One More: Lorie Byrd writes, "New Orleans Is The New Iraq For The MSM"; Hugh Hewitt writes that this is a replay of the left's dreadfully heavy-handed tactics at Paul Wellstone's funeral--and will have similar blowback in terms of the public's reaction.

Unlike Hugh, I think it's waaay too soon to tell how all this will play out. But I do think it's worth comparing the left's remarks to similar ones made shortly after 9/11. We tend to think of that immediate period as being a time of national unity, but it was also politicized by the far left very early on as well: National Review Online kept a running "Kumbaya Watch" for a month or two afterwards cataloging the most ham-handed examples; a few of the folks who advanced them wound up this year being highlighted in Bernie Goldberg's 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America book.

But what was different back then was the immediate reaction by the left to the lunacy in its midst. As Mark Steyn noted earlier this summer shortly after the 7/7 bombing in London:

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.

And now it's shouting that President Bush and Haley Barbour conspired to flood the Gulf Coast.

When I linked to Steyn's article on July 8th, I wrote, "Just as with 9/11, 7/7 gives the left a chance to hit the reset button and rethink their world view. Will they do it?" Sadly, that last sentence turned out to be more rhetorical than I could have possibly imagined at the time.

Via "Best of the Web Today", former New Orleans resident and current City Journal author Nicole Gelinas has some thoughts on rebuilding the Big Easy. She writes that the city's infrastructure was rather shaky long before Katrina hit:

Read More »

Fats Domino (his real name is Antoine Domino) is a 77-year old living legend and rock and roll pioneer. At least, hopefully he's still alive--he's been reported missing in New Orleans, where he's resided for many years.

Update: Found!

"I had always hoped that Haiti would become more like New Orleans, but what's happened is New Orleans has become more like Haiti here recently."

--Bill Quigley, New Orleans law professor, who's still there, along with his wife, who is an oncology nurse still serving her patients at Tenant Memorial Hospital. He paints a grim, firsthand picture.

Update: A New Orleans-based doctor also has a firsthand report that's well worth reading.

Another Update: Vodkapundit has another letter from the scene.

Maybe the Air National Guard and medivac choppers needs someone to ride shotgun on their helicopters:

The scene at the massive New Orleans arena is chaotic as authorities attempt to evacuate the thousands who had massed inside because of Hurricane Katrina.

The airborne evacuation of the sick and injured was put off temporarily following a report of a shot being fired at a military helicopter, although the federal government said it doesn't know about any such incident.

The air ambulance service that was supposed to transfer some of the worse-off evacuees said it won't fly near the dome until security is restored.

As Jonah Goldberg writes:

Looting for personal gain is reprehensible and should be swiftly punished. But when people fire weapons on doctors and rescue vehicles, it is a sign of profound moral decay more grotesque than words can describe. That these images are being beamed around the world is a source of deep shame. Even copkillers like Mumia Abu Jamal can have a perverse morality to them, in the sense that in their worldview cops represent oppression or some such. I think that's an attitude that runs the gamut from profoundly misguided to profoundly malevolent and copkillers should get the death penalty, period. But shooting people as they try to save the lives of babies and old women is an act so base and vile that it cannot even support the veneer of a pernicious ideology. This is so depressing.

Indeed.

Speaking of helicopters and other aircraft, this seems like a logical use for them as they're flying through the area.

Thinking of loading up the SUV with supplies and heading down to the Big Easy? Don't, says FEMA.

I always liked the old Dewar's Profile ads. But recently, there's been an even better modern equivalent, as the latest contributor's profile on the Pajamas Media homepage is up: Dr. Rusty Shackleford, proprietor of The Jawa Report.

The other day, Power Line had this interesting item:

The Pew Research Center has published an interesting survey on the political parties and religion. The finding that is getting the most press is that only 29% of respondents view the Democrats as religion-friendly, down from 40% just a year ago.

In general, the public seems to view the parties and their attitudes toward religion as mirror images. Almost exactly equal numbers think the secular anti-religion forces have too much control over the Democrats, and the religious conservatives too much control over the Republicans. In almost exactly equal proportions, respondents see the Republicans more concerned with protecting religious values, and the Democrats more concerned with protecting individual freedoms.

In one critical respect, however, this parallel breaks down. The public is equally divided on the question whether conservative Christians "have gone too far in trying to impose their religious values on the country." But in answer to the slightly more specifically worded question whether liberals have gone too far in trying to keep religion out of schools and government, 67% answer "yes," and only 28% "no." This amounts to a national consensus; it is noteworthy, too, that the numbers are even more stark among black respondents: 75% think liberals have gone too far in trying to keep religion out of schools and government.

These numbers have to be very troubling to the Democrats, but, given the centrality of these issues to the party's activists and donor base, it's hard to see the Democrats making much of a change.

Actually, the results of this Pew Poll shouldn't be very surprising to anyone who's read Rod Dreher's seminal "The Godless Party" article during the past few years.

But while many on the far left are self-declared atheists, man seems fairly obviously hardwired to want to believe in some sort of higher being. In the late sixties and early seventies, rock stars such as Pete Townshend, George Harrison, and Carlos Santana were more than willing to abandon western religion for a variety of eastern versions. For a while, it became the norm for superstar guitarists to have their own personal guru or avatar. (Jimmy Page went as far as he could in the opposite direction, but to each his own was certainly a key facet of the 1960s.) Madonna's Kabbalah worship is essentially a variation on this phenomenon.

But these days, the modern far left seems to want modern religions, created in the 20th century (see Hubbard, L. Ron). This is also true in the case of another movement with its roots in the late 1960s, environmentalism, as Jonah Goldberg writes:

A great many people tried to pin the 2004 tsunami on global warming too, even though that wasn't even theoretically possible (it was caused by a deep-sea earthquake). Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth in Britain, spoke for many when he proclaimed, "Here again are yet more events in the real world that are consistent with climate change predictions."

But I also think there's something much deeper going on. It cannot be disputed that not just the activists but millions of normal people honestly believe these self-fulfilling prophecies which explain virtually every kind of weather — except nice weather of course — as the comeuppance of man. And, the key word there is "prophecy."

It's become something of a cliché to say that environmentalism has become a religion, but that's because there's something so obviously true about it. The cant, the ritual, the creation myths all feel more religious than scientific. Within the environmentalist worldview there's "an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all," observed Michael Crichton in a famous speech on the subject.

Secular, "scientific" liberals understandably titter at televangelists who pray away hurricanes or claim that this or that calamity is God's retribution. But as unpersuasive or unhelpful as much of that theater may be, there's at least a serious theology somewhere underneath all the posing. Save for the cults of "deep ecology" and Wicca, environmental theology seems slapdash.

They could start by getting their own theodicy, one that would try to reconcile natural disasters with their faith that Mother Nature is such a nice lady. Rejecting Tennyson's description of nature as "red in tooth and claw" they opt for a nurturing but wounded Mommy Nature. Were it not for man's folly, she would be rocking us to sleep in her gentle arms every night. God, it seems, is a deadbeat dad in this whole scheme and man ultimately has all the power. Indeed, George Bush (with the aid of Haley Barbour, of course) could eliminate catastrophes with the stroke of a pen.

Those who study theodicy spend a lot of time on the book of Job, which tackles God's willingness to do harsh stuff to people who don't have it coming. Despite his hardships, Job never abandons God because to do so would be to abandon hope.

Environmentalists, it seems, need their own book of Job. Because as it stands right now, Mother Nature's ways are not mysterious, but entirely contingent on the output of fossil fuels. And, ironically enough, all of their hopes lie in George W. Bush. Which sounds just a bit like their version of Satan worship.

Hey, that was Page's shtick, 30 years ago!