Danny Glover reminds people that he's not Danny Glover.

Or is it vice-versa?

Today's the day for hard-hitting press conferences from Democrats in the House and Senate: First-up is Iowahawk's transcript of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi's "Operation Steel Gazelle: A Smart, Multi-Slide Plan For Toughening American Security with Smartness".

Next is Cynthia McKinney's defense for punching a DC policeman while he was attempting to keep American security toughly secured.

I'm reasonably sure one of these photo-ops is satire. I'm just not sure which one--and it gets harder and harder to separate reality and fantasy these days when it comes to Washington.

In Dhimmi Watch, D.C. Watson writes, "If CAIR were anything close to a legitimate civil rights group operating in the United States, they would be encouraging two things":

1) That Borders and Waldenbooks feel free to carry any publication of their choosing, no matter the content, or whom it may offend.

2) That all Muslims living in America should respect free speech and expression, as it is guaranteed to all Americans by the U.S. Constitution, and that there should never be the slightest hint of retaliation against anyone for exercising this Constitutional right.

From the column: Beth Bingham, Borders spokesperson: "For us, the safety and security of our customers and employees is a top priority, and we believe that carrying this issue could challenge that priority."

Has CAIR viewed this as some sort of a victory? In truth, it is a defeat.

It is a defeat for this organization and others like it because Borders and Waldenbooks didn't choose not to carry "Free Inquiry" out of respect for Islam, but out of the fear of repercussions being carried out by Muslims against the bookstores' customers, property, and personnel.

Update: Don't miss the open--and entirely fictitious and satirical--letter "from Gregory P Josefowicz CEO/Chairman of the Board/President/Director, Borders Books to Charles Johnson, Director, Pajamas Media, CEO Little Green Foosballs, Rock 'N' Roller in the Free World, Stealth Cyclist."

Two years ago, as the presidential election year kicked off, Andrew Sullivan wrote:

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

Although to be fair, Van notes that the stores did have a couple of books, including at least one "on a top shelf, where I could barely reach it".

I'm sure it's purely coincidental synchronicity, but there could be a rather unwise association for Borders to make with that location.

Heather Mac Donald surveys the sorry state of education in America, where both genders are now victim groups. As she writes, If both boys and girls are now oppressed classes, who’s left?

(With apologies to Sally Bowles.)

Found via AllahPundit, The New York Times' Manohla Dargis drops the manhole cover on Basic Instinct 2:

It should come as no surprise that "Basic Instinct 2," the long-gestating follow-up to Paul Verhoeven's 1992 blip on the zeitgeist screen, is a disaster of the highest or perhaps lowest order. It is also no surprise that this joyless calculation, which was directed by Michael Caton-Jones and possesses neither the first film's sleek wit nor its madness, is such a prime object lesson in the degradation that can face Hollywood actresses, especially those over 40. Acting always involves a degree of self-abasement, but just watching trash like this is degrading.

Update: John Ruberry asks the critical, defining question: Is BI2 better than than Jane Fonda's Monster In Law?

Attention, MGM: In a couple of weeks...

"Better than Jane Fonda's Monster In Law"! -- Marathon Pundit

Riehl World View notes that "blood found in a trash bin on The College of New Jersey campus in Ewing this week is from John Fiocco Jr., the 19-year-old freshman missing since early Saturday".

There've been a few bizarre occurrences on New Jersey campuses recently.

Here's more from the Blogosphere on Borders' decision not to sell magazines with Motoons. First up is Robert Bidinotto, publisher of the subscription-only magazine The New Individualist, which is running the most well-known cartoon on its cover, who has an open letter to Borders on his blog. Here's an excerpt:

Let me be clear: I did not publish the cartoon to offend Muslims. I did so as a profound matter of principle: to stand up to those who are trying to annihilate our First Amendment rights. I did so because here, in America, nobody can be permitted to get away with coercion and intimidation against anyone's freedom to write and speak and publish. I did so because I learned many years ago, as a child on school playgrounds, that when you surrender to bullies, you grant them dictatorial power over your life.

By its public declaration of pre-emptive surrender, Borders has given the bullies of our age a clear message: Your intimidation works. Your bullying works. Your coercion works. Your terrorist threats work.

Borders has set a morally irresponsible and frighteningly dangerous precedent. It has told fanatics everywhere that all they need to do in order to obliterate First Amendment rights is to growl menacingly -- at which point a leading bookstore chain in America will clear its shelves of anything that could possibly offend the thug of the moment.

Having now encouraged the use of violence and intimidation, which magazine or book are you next prepared to expunge from your stores? Will you remove books about abortion, for fear of provoking some "right to life" fanatic? Will you eliminate Jewish magazines or black publications, for fear of upsetting neo-Nazis and skinheads? Scientology has been known to intimidate critics; are you about to bow to their demands for "proper" treatment in magazines and books, by eliminating all critical material? Or if some investigative journalist probes organized crime, will you hide his work in the back room, for fear of retaliation from the Mob?

You have given a sorry example of where such capitulation begins. But where does it end?

In 2001, Borders hosted events to highlight the tragedy of banned books:

Borders Books, Music, and Cafe, 4030 Commonwealth Ave., hosted a reading in honor of banned books week. This was the first in a series of three readings in the Eau Claire area to increase awareness about banned books. Nine area residents read excerpts from their favorite banned books.

One of the readers, English lecturer Elizabeth Preston, said at the time: “Where is the line between banning a book and banning a group of people from reading? Who is in charge of drawing that line?” Beats me. Ask Borders.

I was shifting rows of books in our religion section and it happened to be that all of our Koran books (a section on its own) ended up on the bottom shelf. The next day I was informed by my General Manager that it is Borders policy as a whole (not my particular store) that due to complaints in the past from Muslim customers, we are not allowed to put our copies of the Koran on any shelf other than the top.

When I heard of this I became so infuriated that the company I work for (and I do love working for it) has caved in to Islamic pressure and is still continuing to do so. I love my job and my company but it does deeply disturb me to see what is happening to it.

This has nothing to do with sensitivity; it’s all about pure, simple fear. If a Christian group complained to Borders about Bibles being placed on a bottom shelf, they would be laughed out of the room. But when Muslims do the same thing, Borders institutes a store-wide policy. The difference? The implicit or explicit threats of violence that accompany the latter.

In yesterday’s statement about their craven refusal to support free speech, a Borders spokesperson admitted it:

“For us, the safety and security of our customers and employees is a top priority, and we believe that carrying this issue could challenge that priority,” Borders Group Inc. spokeswoman Beth Bingham said Wednesday.

And when Sheryl Crow released her self-titled album, Wal-Mart objected to the lyric, "Watch our children as they kill each other with a gun they bought at Wal-Mart discount stores." When Crow would not change the verse, the retailer refused to carry the album. This type of censorship has become so common that it is often regarded as simply another stage of editing. Record labels are now acting preemptively, issuing two versions of the same album for their big name artists. Less well-known bands, however, are forced to offer "sanitized" albums out of the gate.

If you don't like ideas, don't bother arguing with them. Just threaten to kill people. They'll back down. Or at least their booksellers, universities, and governments will. How long before other groups take this lesson to heart?

Advancing toward fascism, one cowardly institution at a time.

At least for the moment.

Update: Steve Green gets analytical with it: "President Bush isn’t a fascist, and I can prove it":

We’ve seen what American bookstores and publications and universities do when confronted with real fascists: they knuckle under. You might not be able to find those Danish cartoons anyplace respectable, but you’ll sure find lots of anti-Bush stuff.

Ipso facto, America is doing just fine, thankyouverymuch.

Sitting in for Michelle Malkin, Allahpundit has some advice for America's youth:

if you're planning to have a youthful criminal indiscretion, and you're trying to decide between shoplifting and blowing up a skyscraper, think big.

(With apologies to Elwood and "Joliet" Jake for paraphrasing one of their riffs.)

What is it with colleges in the state I grew up in and The Reich Stuff, anyhow? Last year, Fairleigh Dickinson had on its staff an admitted Neo-Nazi. Now Mahwah's Ramapo College is running an art exhibition featuring paintings that look like they're straight out of Joseph Goebbels' private collection:

The guest curator is Isolde Brielmaier, a Ugandan art professor from Vassar College who seems to have a particular affection for anti-social “art” including explicit anti-Jewish themes. One work featured in the exhibit, created by artist Deborah Grant (who has no relationship to Ramapo College), depicts a Jewish rabbi dressed in phylacteries with a Star of David on his yarmulke, holding up Torah scrolls with the Nazi swastika instead of text. The inscription below the image reads: “The Old and the New Testament.” The implication could not be clearer: the Jews’ holy text is fascism and they are the new Nazis. [Don't miss the photo that accompanies the article--Ed]

The exhibition is part of African Ancestry Month. What does such an anti-Semitic image have to do with African ancestry? One also wonders what American taxpayers would make of the exhibition which they are funding in part by grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts.

For obvious reasons, the college has not been eager to publicize its controversial exhibition. Indeed, I learned of the art only after a Jewish student, upset with the college’s insistence on keeping it in the exhibit during its entire six weeks run, provided a photograph she had secretly taken of it.

That an outsider obtained a copy of the photo did not go down well with the college publicist, Bonnie Franklin, the Vice-President of Communications at Ramapo. Her initial reasons were bureaucratic: the campus gallery discourages photos of exhibits and especially their release to the public. But Franklin was eager to defend the artist’s right of self-expression. Although admitting that she personally found the work “offensive,” she stressed that it “has been extremely stimulating on our campus as an educational instrument.” She further explained that the campus had held several forums to discuss the work. “The piece is subject to interpretation, people have read other things into it. Some have seen it as anti-Christian for example. There have been a number of interpretations.” Finally, she fell back on the default position that the college is a “public institution and such things are protected by the first amendment.”

The simple truth is that Grant’s image equates Jews with Nazis, as curator Isolde Brielmaier admits. Speaking in the post-modernese language of Grant’s work, she says that it “frequently engages in pop culture and politics, issues of race, neo-colonialism, oppression, violence against women, and the history of fascism.” Brielmaier also notes that artist Deborah Grant studied the style of Nazi film propagandist Leni Riefenstahl—a fact that reveals much about her intent in contrasting the Old Testament, the holy book of Jews, Muslims and Christians, with a New Testament of Nazism.

Ramapo president Peter Mercer said that when he first saw Grant’s piece, he contacted the state attorney general to determine whether exhibiting it was illegal. Informed that it was legal, he proceeded to give his go-ahead, after being assured by Isolde Brielmaier that the artist had “no intention to shock anybody.”

a Jewish rabbi dressed in phylacteries with a Star of David on his yarmulke, holding up Torah scrolls with the Nazi swastika instead of text. The inscription below the image reads: “The Old and the New Testament.”

(Via Atlas Shrugs. For more examples from the Reactionary Art World, click here and here.)

Update: Compare and contrast Ramapo College's art exhibition with NYU's panel discussion on those cartoons. Notice what's curiously missing from the latter: the actual artwork!

The cartoon wars slog onwards: Yesterday we noted that an Ayn Rand-oriented magazine has apparently become the first publication in the US to run that cartoon on its cover.

Today, Charles Johnson notes that Borders and Waldenbooks have banned a magazine which merely features the cartoons on the inside of the publication:

Borders and Waldenbooks stores will not stock the April-May issue of Free Inquiry magazine because it contains cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that provoked deadly protests among Muslims in several countries.

“For us, the safety and security of our customers and employees is a top priority, and we believe that carrying this issue could challenge that priority,” Borders Group Inc. spokeswoman Beth Bingham said Wednesday.

I'm sorry, but the lesson here is that if you want to be listened to, you should blow things up. That's a very bad incentive structure, but it's the one the allegedly responsible parties have created.

Update: Welcome VodkaPundit and Robert Bidinotto readers! Please look around; we're sure you'll find more than a few things you'll enjoy.

Another Update (8:21 PM, 3/30/06): More on this topic, here.

In Ghostbusters, Dan Aykroyd (as Dr. Raymond Stantz) and Ernie Hudson (Winston Zeddmore) had this exchange while riding in the Ectomobile on the way to incarcerating various Focused Non-Terminal Repeating Phantasms, and Class Five Full-Roaming Vapors:

Winston: Hey, Ray. Do you remember something in the Bible about the last days, when the dead would rise from the grave?
Ray: I remember Revelation 7:12. And I looked, as he opened the sixth seal, and behold, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became as black as sackcloth. And the moon became as blood.
Winston: And the seas boiled and the skies fell.
Ray: Judgment Day.
Winston: Judgment Day.

Guardian blog contributor Susan Blackmore - whose website proudly describes her as "Dr." (the honorific having been earned with her acquisition of a PhD in parapsychology, a field since abandoned in favour of the equally relevant "memetics") - has, seemingly unwittingly, solved one of the thorniest moral dilemmas surrounding the inevitable human suffering resulting from climate change: How should residents of Great Britain respond?

* * *

Dr. Blackmore (pictured), proud winner of the prestigious 2005 Spirit and Sky "Best Spiritual Site" award, gets right to the point - immediately establishing credibility by citing an equally qualified commentator on climate change:

"The archbishop was right about climate change on the Today programme this morning. In all probability billions of people are going to die in the next few decades."

At which point an unkind reader is tempted to point out that this is no doubt true - billions will certainly die in the next few decades. Over the next five of them, for example, we'd expect no less than 3 billion to die if things stay pretty much as they are now.

Such an objection would be unfair, of course - what Dr. Blackmore really intended to say is that billions more than that three billion will die. She knows this:

"I know this. The science has been building up for years and is now clear. When sea levels rise further millions will drown, when the deserts grow bigger millions will starve, when the glaciers end their present flood of excess melt water vast cities will become uninhabitable almost overnight."

Ed Morrissey writes:

Today the Democrats launched their mission to revamp their image on security and national defense. They have long complained about a national perception of their party as wimpish, but Cynthia McKinney decided to set the record straight -- by slugging a cop:

According to two sources on Capitol Hill, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., walked through a metal detector in a House of Representatives office building. When an officer asked her to stop, McKinney kept walking. The officer followed her and tapped her on the shoulder.

McKinney then allegedly turned around and hit the officer in his chest with her cell phone..

Members of Congress are not required to stop for the metal detectors, but that policy should change soon. Obviously, some members have less emotional stability than others. Cynthia McKinney probably has less than anyone.

In the freewheeling early days of this blog, we were quick to give last rights to MSNBC. Perhaps we were premature, as Don Singleton notes that MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann has beaten CNN's Paula Zahn in the ratings.

MSNBC lives! Cue "Also Sprach Zarathustra"!

(On the other hand, Singleton reports that Fox News is still ratings king on cable; meanwhile, Clive Davis wonders why they can't spin-off a version of FNC for the UK market.)

Hugh Hewitt interviewed Michael Ware, Iraq bureau chief for Time Magazine yesterday, via phone--as Ware is currently in Baghdad. Needless to say, there were several troubling comments from Ware; this might be the worst:

HH: Because we talked about this on CNN. Do you think Iraq is better off today, just...than it was under Saddam? Do you think that...

MW: Well, I was never here under Saddam. My period during Saddam's regime was in the Kurdish North, where with U.S. air cover, they've forged their own autonomous sanctuaries. So I never lived under Saddam, and I can only imagine what the horrors were like, and what the restrictions were like. All I can tell you that life here right now is extraordinarily difficult, and there's a lot of killing going on, and there's a lot of deprivation going on, and to be able to compare that to something I never saw is a bit difficult for me.

HH: Well, do you think the Russian people were better under Krushchev than they were under Stalin? Neither of us saw Kruschev or Stalin, but both of us...

MW: Yeah, I wouldn't have a clue, you know?

Tim Blair spots yet another great moment in journalism at the New York Times:

One way to collect nasal secretions from a ferret is to anesthetize it, hold a petri dish under its snout and squirt a little salt water up its nose so that it will sneeze into the dish.

Mark Steyn mentions Orrin Judd's new book in his column in Canada's Maclean's magazine:

In Redefining Sovereignty, Orrin C. Judd brings together a splendid collection of essays on the tension between national sovereignty and the new transnational entities. Full disclosure: there's an approving quote from me on the front of the book, but other than that I have no stake in its success or failure; don't know Mr. Judd, nor most of his stellar contributors, from Václav Havel and Jesse Helms to Francis Fukuyama and Kofi Annan. The token Canadian is a good choice: David Warren, represented by a fine essay yoking Bush's approach to Islamism with Lincoln's to the Civil War -- liberating the Middle East is not the point of the exercise, any more than liberating the slaves was. But in both cases it was necessary to fulfill the strategic objectives of saving the Union a century and a half ago, and of saving the nation-state system today. As another contributor, Lee Harris, puts it, "The liberal world system has collapsed internally." He means that there are no longer, in Kant's phrase, "maxims of prudence." That's to say, we don't know the limits of behaviour. When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatens to wipe Israel off the face of the map, we cannot reliably assure ourselves (though many foolish experts do) that this is just a bit of rhetorical red meat, a little playing to the gallery for the Saturday-night jihad crowd.

The transnational gabfests aren't much use in this new world. The Kyoto treaty is, in that sense, the quintessential expression of the higher multilateralism: the point of Kyoto is not to do anything about "climate change," but to give the impression of doing something about it, at great expense. If climate change is a pressing issue and if the global economy is responsible -- two pretty big "ifs" -- then Kyoto expends enormous (diplomatic) energy and (fiscal) resources doing nothing about it: even if those who signed on to it actually complied with it instead of just pretending to, all that would happen is that by 2050 the treaty would have reduced global warming by 0.07 degrees -- an amount that's statistically undetectable within annual climate variation.

That's fine for "climate change," which, insofar as there is an imminent threat, is a good half-millennium away. As Kofi Annan, the bespoke embodiment of transnationalism's polite fictions, says, "There is no substitute for the unique legitimacy provided by the United Nations." Which is swell if your priority is "legitimacy." That and a dime'll get you a cup of coffee -- unless the tsunami hits and sweeps the lunch counter out to sea. Yet these days, even with natural disasters, the international order divides -- like Bagehot's view of the British constitution -- into its "dignified" and "efficient" halves. The efficient humanitarians -- the Pentagon and the Royal Australian Navy -- have boots on the ground in Indonesia and Sri Lanka within hours, rescuing people, feeding them, housing them. The dignified humanitarians -- the UN's 24/7 permanent humanitarian bureaucracy -- are back in New York holding press conferences to announce they'll be sending a top-level situation-assessment team to the general vicinity to conduct a situation assessment of the situation just as soon as the USAF emergency team has flown in and restored room service to the five-star hotel.

Kofi Annan referred to the UN's "unique legitimacy," and he's right about the "unique" part. The transnational system, in insisting that the foreign minister of Syria is no different from the foreign minister of Denmark, confers a wholly unmerited legitimacy on the planet's gangster states. In Redefining Sovereignty, Roger Scruton wonders of Saddam "how it is that a petty tyrant could have defied the world for so long." But, if "the world" is represented by the UN's "unique legitimacy," you don't have to defy it, you just have to strike a deal -- in this case, the Oil-for-Food program, that Hydra-headed racket under which, among other fascinating codicils and appendices, a million greenbacks from Saddam got funnelled via his Korean chum Tongsun Park into a Canadian petroleum company run by the son of the quintessential transnational Canadian Maurice Strong -- Mister Kyoto himself.

Based on current trends, by mid-century, America, India and China will each be producing roughly 25 per cent of world GDP, with Europe down to 10 per cent. As the columnist John O'Sullivan points out, the three global powerhouses are all strongly attached to traditional notions of national sovereignty, so Europeans and others who've bet on transnationalism have the next 10 years to cement its existing institutions and expand its reach. A worldwide eco-tax? Global gun control? Meanwhile, back in the real world, from terrorism to tsunamis, effective multilateralism is now the province of "coalitions of the willing." I'd like to think the Prime Minister's trip to Afghanistan was a first step toward the side of real global leadership.

The Anchoress writes that Italy's Premier Silvio Berlusconi said that he believes Rahman "arrived overnight".

While I would love to see Rahman ultimately emigrate to the US, he might want to hold off on visiting Yale or San Francisco for the moment.

Theodore Dalrymple once quipped that tattoos are a "refutation of the doctrine that the customer is always right. In the tattoo parlour, the customer is always wrong". Surely, there's no better example to prove Dalymple's thesis than this:

While perusing the office copy of People magazine at lunch today I saw that "actor" Dean McDermott has a brand new tattoo dedicated to his fiance (grotesque nepotoid Tori Spelling) emblazoned on his left arm. Well...I suppose "dedicated to his fiance" may be over-simplifying things a bit as the tattoo actually depicts Tori's entire head as well as most of her rather ample breasts.

In the People piece, Tori remarks about how much she likes her beau's latest inkblot because of how cool it will be for their grandchildren to be able to see what their grandmother looked like when she was young (I'm paraphrasing, so Tori's comment probably sounded even more inane than what you just read).

Now, despite the fact that the woman has appeared in countless horrible made-for-TV movies, equally countless horribly bad films and the wildly successful yet horribly horrible television series Beverly Hills, 90210, she may have a point about this single ridiculous tattoo preserving her image for the ages. If God does indeed exist, surely he'll someday lay waste to Tori's entire body of work leaving future generations with nothing but however much ink remains in McDermott's aging and flabby flesh to recall one of the late 20th century's most truly wretched performers.

When engaged to Winona Ryder, he had "Winona forever" tattooed on his arm. After the broke up, he had the n and a surgically removed to simply say "Wino forever!"

Bill Nienhuis writes:

The Democrats have promised that if they are reelected in 2006, they will ‘eliminate’ Osama bin Laden and ‘ensure’ a responsible redeployment of U.S. forces from Iraq.

Removing bin Laden is a one trick pony approach to fighting terrorism. It’s a law enforcement solution which might work if we’re talking about cleaning up a neighborhood by taking out the guy who runs the crack house down the street. Unfortunately for the Democrats, terrorism can’t be localized like this. There are other neighborhoods and thousands of guys who run crack houses. There are other countries and a million terrorists.

When Democrats talk about a withdrawal from Iraq, its not about bringing troops home and preventing further death. It’s not about freeing the Iraqi people from U.S. occupation. It’s not about “playing nice” in the hopes that the French, Spanish and the Russians like us again. To Democrats, a withdrawal from Iraq is about stopping terrorism. They believe a redeployment of troops to other parts of the world sends a message of peace which will soften the hearts of terrorist groups and lessen the risk of further attacks. By pushing this ‘solution’ the Democrats do nothing to disprove the fact that they completely misunderstand the terrorist mentality.

To hear Mr. Abbasi tell it the entire recent history of the U.S. could be narrated with the help of the image of "the last helicopter." It was that image in Saigon that concluded the Vietnam War under Gerald Ford. Jimmy Carter had five helicopters fleeing from the Iranian desert, leaving behind the charred corpses of eight American soldiers. Under Ronald Reagan the helicopters carried the corpses of 241 Marines murdered in their sleep in a Hezbollah suicide attack. Under the first President Bush, the helicopter flew from Safwan, in southern Iraq, with Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf aboard, leaving behind Saddam Hussein's generals, who could not believe why they had been allowed live to fight their domestic foes, and America, another day. Bill Clinton's helicopter was a Black Hawk, downed in Mogadishu and delivering 16 American soldiers into the hands of a murderous crowd.

According to this theory, President George W. Bush is an "aberration," a leader out of sync with his nation's character and no more than a brief nightmare for those who oppose the creation of an "American Middle East." Messrs. Abbasi and Ahmadinejad have concluded that there will be no helicopter as long as George W. Bush is in the White House. But they believe that whoever succeeds him, Democrat or Republican, will revive the helicopter image to extricate the U.S. from a complex situation that few Americans appear to understand.

Mr. Ahmadinejad's defiant rhetoric is based on a strategy known in Middle Eastern capitals as "waiting Bush out." "We are sure the U.S. will return to saner policies," says Manuchehr Motakki, Iran's new Foreign Minister.

Mr. Ahmadinejad believes that the world is heading for a clash of civilizations with the Middle East as the main battlefield. In that clash Iran will lead the Muslim world against the "Crusader-Zionist camp" led by America. Mr. Bush might have led the U.S. into "a brief moment of triumph." But the U.S. is a "sunset" (ofuli) power while Iran is a sunrise (tolu'ee) one and, once Mr. Bush is gone, a future president would admit defeat and order a retreat as all of Mr. Bush's predecessors have done since Jimmy Carter.

Update: TigerHawk adds:

For the span of a generation -- a longer period than the politically conscious lives of the great majority of people in the Arab and Muslim world -- America has fled from conflict in a part of the world where weakness earns contempt and begets more aggression, not less. On September 11, 2001 we reaped the whirlwind. So, whatever our strategy in the long war -- and you will read no argument here that it cannot be improved upon -- we must end Hassan Abbasi's helicopter metaphor. Helicopters can stand for different things. Let them no longer conjure the image of "fleeing Americans."

Betsy Newmark writes:

It's good to know that I'm not alone in having my blog deleted and someone else take over my URL. Blogger did the same thing to the official Google blog!

* * *

You can't go around deleting yourselves. It gets just too existentially weird.

The Freepers have an interesting look at some of the techniques used to inject bias and opinion into what should be a straight piece of newspaper reporting.

On another front in the language wars, The Anchoress notes that the lyrics of "Amazing Grace" have fallen prey to the forces of political correctness.

As she writes, "God forbid we should feel a little bad…"

At the risk of sounding Xenuphobic, this is just bizarre:

Tom Cruise’s pregnant fiancée Katie Holmes will be reminded to keep her vow of silence during birth — by signs plastered around their home.

The couple — following the Scientology tradition of a silent birth — had the posters delivered to their Beverly Hills mansion.

The 6ft placards will be placed so Katie can see them in labour.

One reads: “Be silent and make all physical movements slow and understandable.”

Dawson’s Creek actress Katie, 26, must “keep mum” and will not even be allowed painkillers when she has the couple’s first child due any day.

Friends — believed to be Scientology elders — were pictured carrying the huge white boards through the gates.

Update: Michelle Malkin has several more examples of "Hollyweirdos On Parade".

The Ayn Rand-oriented magazine, The New Individualist apparently has become the first publication in the US to run that cartoon on its cover.

With mass media having been replaced by so many niche publications and targeted magazines and newspapers, it's increasingly much more difficult to keep information bottled up. While most of the major TV networks and newspapers have chosen (for whatever reason) not to run the cartoons, there are simply too many sources (both on dead tree and online) to keep them under entirely under wraps.

(Via Stephen Green.)

If Glenn Reynolds' new An Army of Davids reflects what Alvin Toffler would call the coming “prosumer” society, then Toffler’s own Revolutionary Wealth, due out in late April, is about how “prosumption” will radically transform the world’s economy. Chapter Eight of my galley copy begins with this passage, which might ring a few bells to regular readers of the Blogosphere:

The American Airlines 757 was approaching the Rocky Mountains on a flight from Boston to Los Angeles when suddenly passenger Michael Tighe’s arm and head lurched into the aisle. His wife, a nurse, who was sitting alongside him, immediately knew something terrible was about to happen. Tighe’s heart had begun beating erratically, failing to send an adequate blood supply to his brain. Tighe, sixty-two, was at the edge of death when flight personnel appeared with a laptop-sized device.

Attaching electrical leads to his body, they shocked him--once, twice, several times--and literally brought him back to life, making him the first person to be saved in-flight by a defibrillator. It had been installed on the plane only two days earlier.

Like the human heart, societies and economies, too, are subject to premature beats, local tachycardias, fibrillations and flutters, as well as “chaotic” irregularities and paroxysms…

Jeff Jarvis attends a speech by Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, and notes that to most aficionados of blogs, "there’s not much unheard-of in his speech — except that you won’t hear any of it coming from the mouths of editors elsewhere". Here's but a sample:

Cue picture of Craig Newmark. Russbridger explains Craigslist, its impact on the newspaper industry, and its “very unusual business model: It’s free to both sides…. Now that’s a difficult business model to beat.” He says that “the people who are really terrified of Craig Newmark are The New York Times.” [They're far from the only ones, of course--Ed] He explains that job ads on Craigslist in three cities cost $20 — and that adds up to $10 million a year among 18 employees, he estimates. Then he demonstrates ordering a deluxe $958 ad on the NY Times site — he makes up a call for journalists to work in Guardian America, “and I told them to apply to C.P. Scott in Manchester” (the Guardian’s legendary editor of 57 years). The contrast continues: He shows pictures of Craig’s humble headquarters and the new Times headquarters — “and you see the nature of The New York Times’ problem.” Of course, falling advertising is the problem. Rusbridger reviews the history of newspapers. In Britain, in the beginning, newspapers were supported by their politicians until “advertisers gave newspapers a form of independence.” But now those advertisers are going elsewhere. “There are great, bleeding chunks going out of newspaper revenue at a time when sales are down…. Most journalists are finally getting this The penny is finally dropping….

But he continues: “They’re not necessarily quite up with the next bit, which is about the changing nature of editorial. And this is a thing which is more difficult to grasp and for journalists in a way much more threatening. And I think we’re only at the beginning of trying to figure what this one is all about.”

He calls papers like The New York Times “a tablet of stone, it is a paper of great authority. And if you ever go to a New York Times editorial meeting, it’s a bit like a religious ceremony.” [That's rather ironic--Ed] He talks about the effort and resource that goes into the front page. “‘Believe us,’ is the message. If it goes onto the front page of The New York Times it’s there because it’s important…. ‘You may not want to read it but it’s our opinion.’ And this is a model that has existed again for a hundred years….

(Via Hugh Hewitt.)

Spot the odd man out in the photos printed onto T-shirts at this Chinese shop. Hint: of all the men featured in the shot, he's rather ironically at the far left of the photo, has got the best free kick technique, and has killed the least number of people.

Orrin Judd writes that Japan has "the immigration limits, trade protection, and isolation that our Left and far Right dream of". The consequences of which include a cratered-out stock market, household assets down 11% from '99, and the enticing prospect of a 22 percent sales tax by 2015.

It's enough to give one The Vapors...

And not even Hummels:

Hollywood activist SEAN PENN has a plastic doll of conservative US columnist ANN COULTER that he likes to abuse when angry. The Oscar-winner actor has hated Coulter ever since she blacklisted his director father LEO PENN in her book TREASON. [Huh? I'm pretty sure Hollywood blacklisted Leo Penn, not Ann, unless she used a time machine to go back to the late 1940s--Ed] And he takes out his frustrations with Coulter, who is a best-selling author, lawyer and television pundit, on the Barble-like doll. In an interview with The New Yorker magazine, Penn reveals, "We violate her. There are cigarette burns in some funny places. She's a pure snake-oil salesman. She doesn't believe a word she says."

Whenever I visit my parents, I end up spending far more downtime watching cable TV news than I normally do at home, and this past week was no exception. The invention of television 100 years or so ago was one of the great miracles of science, but the medium that's evolved to fill the vacuum tube is one of the worst ways ever devised to convey serious information. As Michael Medved noted shortly before the 2004 election:

Television is an inherently liberal medium. Visuals appeal to emotion, not reason; Bad news is more interesting than good news and it is also invites liberals to demand that government do something to solve the problem.

To mark the third anniversary of launching the war to depose Saddam Hussein, the manufacturers of the “news” have established their usual template, Realistic Media vs. Pollyanna Bush. It’s not pessimism versus optimism, but reality versus hallucination.

How, then do we greet the bleats of liberals as they wildly overstate the alleged utter awfulness of the war situation? On CNN, Time writer Joe Klein, one of the nation’s leading worshipers of Bill Clinton, declared to Anderson Cooper, “Rumsfeld ran the most criminally incompetent military campaign, you know, in the last 100 years, perhaps in American history.”

Was Klein making a display of chutzpah, or just of his own historical incompetence? How many incompetent military campaigns can we assign, just for starters, to Klein’s hero Clinton? The bombing of the El Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan? The “Black Hawk Down” fiasco and withdrawal in Somalia? What about Jimmy Carter’s failed hostage rescue that fell apart in the desert and humiliated an entire nation in the eyes of the world?

Klein might protest that the number of deaths don’t compete with the scale of Iraq war losses. Fine. What about Vietnam? Klein looks especially silly in rewinding back 100 years, 200 years in his emphasis on unparalleled military incompetence. Has he never read about the Civil War?

Thank God the likes of Joe Klein weren’t around 60 years ago. Historian Victor Davis Hanson has written that the Normandy campaign in 1944, seen today as so smashingly successful, would be painted as full of dramatic military blunders that were costing 2,500 American soldiers daily. Would Joe Klein like to insist that General Eisenhower or General Marshall should have resigned in disgrace?

Update: "TV vs history? TV was winning." Heh^TM.

City Journal's Nicole Gelinas explores the endless holding pattern that efforts to rebuild the World Trade Center are currently stuck in.

New Jersey's Lawhawk has some thoughts on this issue--and Mayor's Bloomberg's central role in impeding progress.

The Electoral College, that is: Ed Morrissey explains its role to The Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

As spotted by Charles Johnson:

From the Christian Science Monitor: "Conversion a thorny issue in Muslim world".

Regular blogging should resume tomorrow--if not sooner.

(Although I did a fair amount of blogging late this past week, via one of those Verizon wireless cards that the Professor frequently refers to. It worked flawlessly--and Wi-Fi-fast--in and near the airports yesterday and today, but was pretty rough in the suberbs, slower, and with plenty of disconnects and dropped pages. But it definitely beat dial-up speed.)

Update: Speaking of flying, Amy Alkon looks at what she describes as "the ultimate idiocy in recent memory"--and that's no exaggeration if it comes to pass. But I'd happily take airborne Wi-Fi on all flights.

Betsy Newmark catches The New York Times utterly astonished that Michael Steele is an African-American conservative:

The New York Times Magazine has a story on Michael Steele's candidacy to replace Paul Sarbanes as senator from Maryland. The title tells you the tone of the piece.

Why Is Michael Steele a Republican Candidate?

[Emphasis, via italics, in Times' headline--Ed]

There is that whole marveling tone as if the author is observing a circus performer and just can't figure the whole act out. The reporter dismisses Steele as not being any sort of usual candidate because all he's been has been Lieutenant Governor in a state where the Lt. Governor doesn't have much clout. So, apparently, the only thing Steele has going for him is his race. The reporter can't pin him down on policy proposals. Gee, does that bother the New York Time with other candidates like Bob Casey, Jr. in Pennsylvania? Or, for that matter, most Democratic incumbents running today?

* * *

Steele seems like a formidable candidate. And when you put him together with Lynn Swann in Pennsylvania and Ken Blackwell in Ohio, you can see why the Democrats are trying with all their might to portray these candidates as tokens pulled out of Karl Rove's bag of tricks. Note that Karl Rove's name appears twice in the first sentence of this story. At what point would that attitude to intelligent candidates who just happen to be both conservative and black seem so insultingly denigrating that it will back fire on the Democrats? Maybe not this year, but I predict that there will come a point that reporters will no longer report on a black Republican candidate as if he's a trick pony put forth by a masterful GOP magician.

Hollywood comedy writer and frequent NRO contributor Rob Long looks at YouTube and DIY video:

Right now, there are two kinds of people in the entertainment industry. Those who've heard of You Tube, and those who haven't. Which is to say that some of us are a little worried, and some of us aren't. Yet.

You Tube is a website, and yeah, for years people have been predicting that the web will eventually rewrite the rules -- and the economics -- of show business, but this time, maybe, it's really happening. You Tube is a little like Google Video, which is a little like a lot of other sites on the web, which are themselves a little like a mix of reality television, America's Funniest Home Videos, American Idol, and tame soft-core pornography. You know: television as we know it.

I've seen some pretty clever things on You Tube lately. Someone somewhere recut a trailer for The Shining to make it seem like a heartwarming father-son tale. And someone else recut a trailer for Sleepless in Seattle to make it seem like a gripping Fatal Attraction-kind of thriller. And I think we've all seen the various trailer recuts of movies like Back to the Future or Top Gun with a strong Brokeback Mountain angle.

So a few weeks ago, on that lumbering occasionally funny warhorse, Saturday Night Live, Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell made a short digital film parody of a rap video. It was called Lazy Sunday, and it was about two guys waking up late on Sunday and deciding to go see The Chronicles of Narnia, but set in the aggressive rap style. I'm not doing it justice, but it was pretty funny.

I didn't see it on the show, of course. I mean, Saturday Night Live is such a hit-or-miss thing -- I do what everybody does: I watch the first fifteen minutes and then turn it off. Right? After 11:45pm, the show just gets worse and worse -- it's been that way for 10 or 15 years -- so why bother?

I saw the clip on You Tube. Some kid somewhere took it off the TV and zapped it on the web, probably with the heading "This Was The Only Funny Thing on SNL Last Night" or something. So that's where I saw it. That's where a lot of people saw it, too, apparently, because it spawned a constellation of responses from all over the country -- people -- normal people, people NOT in the 212 or 310 area codes -- young men, mostly -- remember them? They're the ones who aren't watching TV anymore or going to the movies -- did their own versions of the sketch using the DV cam and the computer software they've been fiddling around with since Christmas...and it turns out that two guys from Indiana did one and zapped it up to You Tube and called it "Lazy Muncie" and it's pretty funny. I mean, funnier than anything that appears on Saturday Night Live after, say, 11:53pm. Funnier than the last Albert Brooks movie. Funnier than an episode of Joey.

So what does it say if you're Lorne Michaels -- the guy who runs Saturday Night Live -- or, for that matter, the head of comedy development for pretty much any network -- and it turns out there are two funny guys in Muncie who don't really need you to give them permission to make a funny little movie because You Tube is their network and You Tube doesn't have a vice president of comedy development to say, "Yeah, yeah, um, I just don't see where this goes. Can it be about people in their 30's juggling relationships and their careers?" And if there are two guys in Muncie, how many are there in Fort Wayne? Or South Bend? Or Indianapolis? And we haven't even left Indiana yet.

What does that say about that huge, packed auditorium at the Oscars, filled mostly with people who get paid to say yes. Or no. It means, I think, that in the future, a lot of them are going to be scrambling to get out of their pricey car leases. I mean, maybe I'm delusional, but it's just possible that what You Tube means is that sooner, rather than later, this privileged, pompous, overpaid class of gatekeepers -- studio executives, network executives, development executives -- is going to get squeezed pretty tight. Of course, that also means that the privileged, pompous, overpaid class of writers and actors is going to get squeezed tight, too. But I don't know: it sounds worth it.

(Via Mickey Kaus, just back from a huge pro-illegal immigration march in Los Angeles.)

I'm sitting in the American Airlines Admiral's Club in the Philadelphia Airport awaiting my dreadfully early 7:47 AM flight back to San Jose. (Why yes, that is a rather ironic time for an airliine flight; I blame Jerry Lewis.) Meanwhile, Orrin Judd has given us crazy Californians a profile of the future, as the 100th anniversary of San Francisco's Great Quake of April 18, 1906 looms ever closer:

We don't even need the quake to actually happen to know how it goes: afterwards, in the midst of 24 hour global tv coverage, Ms DeMuynck complains that no one ever warned her how dangerous it was, the Reverends Falwell & Robertson clainm it was the will of God because of queers, and Democrats claim it's the worst the federal government has ever handled a disaster while the Right digs up the example of '06 to show how much more civilly we dealt with the looters this time. Meanwhile, most of us just shake our heads and wonder how stupid you have to be to live in California, nevermind on a fault line....

Would-be UNC-Chapel Hill motorterrorist Mohammad Reza Taheri included this curious passage in his explanatory note to authorities:

In the Qur'an, Allah states that the believing men and women have permission to murder anyone responsible for the killing of other believing men and women. I know that the Qur'an is a legitimate and authoritative holy scripture since it is completely validated by modern science and also mathematically encoded with the number 19 beyond human ability

Yahoo sports writer Charles Robinson discovers that many of his readers have nasty cases of what might dubbed Condi Derangement Syndrome:

If Condoleezza Rice ever decides to make good on her aspirations to be NFL commissioner, she might want to serve her term wearing a helmet.

After mentioning Rice's attraction to the commissioner's job, the mailbag was hit with a backlash rarely seen in the month of March. Readers were aghast that she was even mentioned in the wake of Paul Tagliabue's retirement announcement. And while it was noted that Rice wasn't considered a real candidate for Tagliabue's seat, that didn't stop fans from lobbing hand grenades into the mailbag.

Somebody should write a book about this sort of stuff!

On the flight out to New Jersey, I read Theodore Dalrymple's superb essay (that's a redundant phrase, isn't it?) on Virginia Woolf:

Mrs. Woolf’s ideal college—the kind that would prevent rather than promote wars—would not be in any way elitist. It would “not [be] parcelled out into the miserable distinctions of rich and poor, of clever and stupid.” It would, rather, be a place “where all the different degrees and kinds of mind, body and soul met and co-operated.” It would be entirely nonjudgmental, even as to intellect. For her, the urge to compete does not inhere in man’s nature, nor does it result in anything other than violent strife. Henceforth, there is to be no testing oneself against the best, with the possibility, even the likelihood, of failure: instead, one is perpetually to immerse oneself in the tepid bath of self-esteem, mutual congratulation, and benevolence toward all.

Of course, it is a mistake to suppose that a hypothetical future state of perfect toleration means toleration in or of the present: far from it. Mrs. Woolf would not let her opponents, or those who think differently, live in peace: on the page after the last marked by Michel Leiris, she gives full expression to her slash-and-burn concept of cultural renewal: “No guinea of earned money should go to rebuilding the college on the old plan. . . . [T]herefore the guinea should be earmarked ‘Rags. Petrol. Matches.’ And this note should be attached to it. ‘Take this guinea and with it burn the college to the ground. Set fire to the old hypocrisies. Let the light of the burning building scare the nightingales and incarnadine the willows. And let the daughters of educated men dance round the fire and heap armful upon armful of dead leaves upon the flames. And let their mothers lean from the upper windows [before, presumably, being burned to death] and cry “Let it blaze! Let it blaze! For we have done with this education!”’”

This incendiary passage, Mrs. Woolf insists in her very next sentence, is not mere empty rhetoric: though she subsequently retreats a little from her incitement to arson by pointing out the self-defeating nature of that crime, insofar as the college she was proposing to burn down was necessary to train women to be able to earn the guinea of discretionary income with which to buy the materials to burn it down in the first place. What a dilemma! The passion, if not the logic, of her argument is clear and perhaps casts a new light on the deliberate destructiveness of the motives that lay behind her literary innovations. She was nothing if not a great hater of all that had gone before her.

“Start from zero” was the slogan of the Bauhaus School, a tiny artists’ movement in Germany in the 1920s that swept aside the architectural styles of the past and created the glass-box face of the modern American city during the twentieth century. I should mention the soaring exuberance with which the movement began, the passionate conviction of the Bauhaus’s leader, Walter Gropius, that by starting from zero in architecture and design man could free himself from the dead hand of the past.

The hippies sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes of restraints of the past and start out from zero. Among the codes and restraints that people in the [hippie] communes swept aside—quite purposely—were those that said you shouldn’t use other people’s toothbrushes or sleep on other people’s mattresses without changing the sheets or, as was more likely, without using any sheets at all.

And in 1968 they were relearning…the laws of hygiene…by getting the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot. This process, namely the relearning—following a Promethean and unprecedented start from zero—seems to me to be the leitmotif of the 21st century.

In politics the 20th century’s great start from zero was one-party socialism, also known as Communism or Marxism-Leninism. Given that system’s bad reputation in the West today, it is instructive to read John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World—before turning to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Well before the sudden breaching of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the relearning had reached the point where even ruling circles in the Soviet Union and China had begun to wonder how best to conquer Communism into something other than, in Bernard Henri-Levy’s memorable phrase, “barbarians with a human face.”

The great American contribution to the 20th century’s start from zero was in the area of manners and mores, especially in what was rather primly called “the sexual revolution.” In every hamlet, even in the erstwhile Bible belt, may be found the village brothel, no longer hidden in a house of blue lights or red lights or behind a green door but openly advertised by the side of the road with a thousand-watt backlit plastic sign. But in the sexual revolution, too, a painful dawn broke in the 1980s, and the relearning, in the form of prophylaxis, began. All may be summed up in a single term requiring no amplifications: AIDS.

The Great Relearning—if anything so prosaic as remedial education can be called great—should be thought of not so much as the end point of the 20th century as the theme of the 21st. There is no law in history that says a new century must start 10 or 20 years beforehand, but two times in a row it has worked out that way.

Did the Russian ambasador to Iraq present Saddam Hussein with America's war plan? If it is, David Frum asks, as a famous Russain once queried, what is to be done?

Update: Roger L. Simon, who's visited Russia--and the former Soviet Union--comments that the real question "is how we could be trusting the Russians on the Iran issue".

Exactly.

Christopher Hitchens debunks yet another myth of the left:

[Chris] Matthews was running through a litany of what he termed "strike-outs" for the Bush administration in Iraq. When he got to "strikes out on the fact that we were going to be greeted as liberators," Hitchens interrupted:

HITCHENS: No, no. We were greeted as liberators. I saw it myself.

MATTHEWS: The pictures, yeah.

HITCHENS: No, no, I was there. I saw it myself, many many times. American soldiers and British soldiers were greeted by hundreds of thousands of people with real joy. I saw it myself. I can't believe people say it didn't happen."

Robert A. George has, I think, the most well-reasoned take on Ben Domenech's spectacular flame-out yesterday. Meanwhile, David M. explores the opposite of reason, here.

(Both via The Professor.)

In The Weekly Standard, Sonny Bunch lists a bunch of reasons why Universal is downplaying Spike Lee's involvement in Inside Man, which stars A-list names Denzel Washington and Jodie Foster:

Spike Lee, quite simply, is not a profitable director, and he hasn't been for some time. His first two major motion pictures, School Daze and Do the Right Thing, were both produced for around $6.5 million. The first made more than double its budget domestically, and the second is his most profitable film to date (other than The Original Kings of Comedy, which owes its success far more to the standup comedians performing in it than the man behind the camera), with a domestic gross of $27.5 million. His winning streak continued for two more films: Jungle Fever made an $18.5 million profit, and Malcolm X brought home just over $14 million more than its budget. Since then, however, Lee hasn't made a drama that ended up in the black. Some have been modest failures (Crooklyn, for example, lost only about $400,000). Others have been much bigger flops. (She Hate Me cost $8 million to produce and brought in less than $400,000 at the box office. Clockers lost even more money; the $25 million piece was almost $12 million in the red.)

The question becomes, then, how does one make a Spike Lee movie profitable? Grazer's Imagine Entertainment is probably banking on the fact that white audiences are unlikely to attend what they imagine will be a two hour lesson on why society is racist. Removing the "Spike Lee Joint" tag from his picture will almost certainly increase its marketability at the box office with whites. It's not too much of a stretch to guess that Inside Man might wind up as Lee's highest grossing movie; his previous best is Malcolm X's $48.4 million.

Stephen Hayes checks in from Camp Saddam:

John Murtha's claim--that there was no connection "with terrorism in Iraq itself"--might come as a surprise to the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Marines. In early April 2003, they found a ten-acre terrorist training camp ten miles outside of Baghdad. In an interview at the time with an embedded reporter from Stars & Stripes, Captain Aaron Robertson said: "We believe this is a training camp where Iraqis trained forces for the Palestine Liberation Front. This is what we would refer to as a sensitive site. This is clearly a terrorist training camp, the type Iraq claimed did not exist."

Citroën-de-fe season returns early this year to Paris; Tim Blair has the details.

Update: While French youth are getting on with their auto-destruction, the rest of France is experiencing ennui with malaise on the side:

Outside the Grand Palais museum, people stood in line for hours in biting cold this winter to see the city's most popular art exhibit -- Mélancolie , a collection of paintings and sculptures evoking depression, sadness and despair.

"It doesn't surprise me that this exhibition is such a success," said Claire Mione, a 20-year-old Web site editor who joined the rush to the show in its closing days. "Melancholy is an overwhelming feeling in our society right now."

Many French agree. In art galleries, on bestseller lists, in corporate boardrooms and on the streets, the country's outlook has become so morose that President Jacques Chirac has urged citizens to stop the "self-flagellation."

(Shades of Howard Dean's bike path fury.)

Augean Stables, whose blog name seems particularly appropriate to this topic, and who's currently touring Paris, has some thoughts as well.

Mary Katharine Ham has photos of the rally earlier today in Washington DC to save the life of Abdul Rahman. She quotes Cam Edwards as telling an NBC reporter:

"This is not a political issue. This is about a man in Afghanistan who is going to die because he believes in Jesus Christ...It's a human rights issue...There are political overtones to everything, but that's not why we're out here. That's not why President Bush should act...If y'all turn it inot a political issue--conservatives vs. Bush or conservatives vs. liberals-- then you will have failed to get the message out."

know that CAIR sent out a press release condemning the possible death sentence, but when I emailed Ibrahim Hooper to invite him out to the rally, I never got a response.

I meant what I said earlier. This really shouldn’t be a left vs. right issue. It seems like in almost every instance these days, if a conservative is for something, then a liberal has to be against it (and vice versa). The only exception I can think of lately is the Kelo decision. The Rahman case should be another.

Anybody get Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi's take--or Yale's in general--on Rahman's situation?

Earlier this week we praised the Washington Post for adding Red America, a blog designed to appeal to a segment of readers who might otherwise feel more than a little ignored by the Post. But Pajamas Media and Michelle Malkin look at charges that Ben Domenech, whom the Post chose to run their blog, earlier plagiarized passages from P.J. O'Rourke, and other authors.

In light of those charges, Domenech has resigned, but it sounds like Red America will continue with a different blogger. That won't make Congressman Pete Stark (D-CA) happy: he's demanding that the Post add a Blue America blog. The obvious rebuttal is, of course, isn't most of the rest of the paper designed to appeal to Blue State-oriented readers? But I agree with Pete--the more proprietized media, the better.

Update: "Like Caesar's wife, Mr. Domenech needed to be above suspicion to survive in that position. He wasn't".

Meanwhile, additional charges of copying start to fly...

Elsewhere, Bill Quick, Will Collier, and the Professor have some rather less silly thoughts on plagiarism and Big Journalism.

Update: Speaking of the Professor, he has an excellent suggestion for Domenech's replacement:

Dave Price emails: "If not Bill Quick, why not Jeff Goldstein? The Left has already been about as abusive to him as they can be." Yep. And it rolls right off. Plus, who could read Goldstein's stuff and even imagine that it had been previously published?

I'll second (or third, or 2,423rd) that emotion. Sign 'im up, Post!

Eric of Classical Values has some thoughts on Andrew Keen of the Weekly Standard, and his negative, somewhat Luddite-ish comments about Glenn Reynolds' An Army Of Davids, Web 2.0 and on Web-based "prosumerism" in general. Regarding the latter, Eric quotes from my own take, written last month.

This is great to see; as John Hinderaker recently wrote, if Abdul Rahman is killed in Afghanistan because of his religious beliefs, it will have significant ramifications on America's War On Terror:

This is, I think, a watershed moment. The American people will bear a great deal of sacrifice, but only on behalf of principle. If, after our liberation of Afghanistan, a man may still be executed for being a Christian--or a Jew, although to my knowledge that case hasn't arisen--there is no logical basis on which our government can continue to request the ultimate sacrifice from its most devoted supporters.

Update: Michelle Malkin adds, "Not sure why President Bush wasn't on the line. But at least someone called".

Update: As that eminent philosopher Peter Dennis Blandford Townshend once wrote, meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Michelle notes that senior Muslim clerics in Afghanistan warn that if the Afghani government caves in to Western pressure and frees Rahman, "they will incite people to 'pull him into pieces.'"

The tipping point is about to topple over.

Tim Graham has some thoughts on the (poor) quality of big media reporting from Iraq:

Katie Couric brought on Tim Russert to defend the network against scapegoating: "Does the Bush administration have a legitimate gripe about the media coverage of the war, or do you think the media is being used as a scapegoat as public support for the war continues to erode?" Russert defensively argued: "We capture reality. Sometimes it’s a political strategy to shoot the messenger, but the fact is what is happening on the ground is what you’re seeing on your TVs and reading in the newspapers."

What arrogance. "We capture reality"? Not even "we try to capture reality"? TV news is a vanishing snippet of reality, a carefully edited (and often loaded) version of reality. Some viewers think the networks have captured reality all right — and are holding it hostage in a basement until the president surrenders. What this narrative omits is that the White House’s so-called war with the "messenger" has two sides — and the "messenger" is holding his own just fine. The networks suggest that they’re just holding the president accountable. Then why can’t the President and his supporters do the same for the media?

Do the L.A. Lakers add pre-recorded crowd noise to artifically pump-up the sound at their home games?

John Green, executive producer of the weekend edition of Good Morning America is reportedly "mortified" over an email he sent in which he wrote that "Bush makes me sick", according to Matt Drudge:

A friend of Green's at ABC says Green is mortified by the email. "John feels so badly about this email. He is a straight shooter and great producer who is always fair. That said, he deeply regrets the sentiment expressed in the email and the embarrassment it causes ABC News."

I agree. Besides, doesn't Green know that it's OK to express your bias these days (as indeed, others at ABC have already done?) Or that the need to claim impartiality is merely a temporary holdover of a relatively brief phase from the mid-20th century, when the mass media needed to justify news being disseminated by three networks (originally radio, and later TV) and one or two big newspapers per city?

Update: Mark Steyn tells Hugh Hewitt that Green's email reveals the groupthink that dominates ABC (with the possibly sole exception of John Stossel--who, as a libertarian, has his own differences with President Bush, but very different ones than the rest of the gang at his network):

you know, a lot of people make me nauseous, but I wouldn't put it on an e-mail, because I wouldn't assume that everyone who saw that e-mail agreed with me. What is reveals is that what the media think of as their impartiality is in fact rather a bland assumption that they all think the same way. And that's what's revealing about this, that he knew he could send that e-mail to all his chums at ABC, and that they would all agree that Bush makes them puke. And the difference is, you know what I think, and I know what you think. And why doesn't...I'm happy that this has come clean, that Bush makes him puke.

HH: Yup.

MS: That's great. Now if he can only say where ABC, where the network thinks Bush makes us puke, that would be one step to a kind of greater honestly and straightforwardness in dealing with the public.

Power Line has some thoughts on the future of the Right Wing Blogosphere. Meanwhile, the Washington Post proves (once again) that it's less obsessed with ideological purity than the New York Times, by adding a blog aimed towards conservative readers.

Surprisingly though, some are perturbed by the Post reaching out towards a niche market hungry for product.

We've mentioned James Lileks' great line about his industry a couple of times already; Glenn Reynolds has some thoughts on what could be done to save it, as 2014 looms closer.

Over at TCS Daily, Douglas Kern explores the cartoon banality of the fascism of V For Vendetta. "It's darkly gorgeous, it's effortlessly slick, and at all times, it's three beers away from comedy gold".

Meanwhile, David Cohen of The Brothers Judd spots George Lucas decrying how influential his peers are. As Cohen writes:

We shouldn't show the world's have-nots what we have, because they might want it and "destabilize" their own kleptocracies. An argument only a billionaire can love. This is a nice demonstration of how the Democrats have become, simultaneously, the party of the wealthy and the reactionary party.

My mom called me at 10:15 PM PST/1:15 AM EST: my father passed away suddenly--he was 84. (I had literally just today put a note into Outlook to call her tomorrow to ask what to get him for his 85th birthday, which would have been this coming Monday.)

Given his age, and his somewhat sallow appearance last time I saw him, this isn't entirely a surprise, but it's still a bit of a shock. I'll be posting very sporadically for the next week or so, as I'm flying back to New Jersey this morning.

Hopefully he and Bing are enjoying a few holes on the back nine together...

Update (3/23/06): Dad's obit hit his local paper today; as you can see, he was classic "Greatest Generation", as Tom Brokaw would say--growing up in Yonkers during the Depression, serving in WWII, then involved in several businesses.

So far--knock wood--my mom's been holding up remarkably well; watch for a few posts to start going up here over the next few days as things settle down. And a warm thank you to everyone who expressed their condolences.

Last year saw the newspaper praising Communist themed-retirement homes and North Korea. This year--only three and a half months old, remember--has already seen it run an op-ed that began "I don't support our troops".

More recently the L.A. Times ran an piece that....well, let Eugene Volokh explain:

Why Did He Steal? Well, Partly Because He's Black: That, I kid you not, is precisely what an L.A. Times op-ed from last week says. Black conservatives are bad, the theory goes; also, being conservative is spiritually bad for blacks; and that helps explain why White House adviser Claude Allen committed fraud: "It's hard to imagine that such compromises and cognitive dissonance don't exact a psychological toll at some point, and Allen's alleged dabbling in crime might have been that point for him."

Oh, and quite a charming little reference to "house Negro[es]" a couple of paragraphs before, as well — plus the old traitor-to-his-race line of "I don't support conservatism in its current iteration, and I support black conservatives even less." (I take this to mean "traitor to his race," since otherwise it makes no sense: Why would holding any view be worse if you're black, unless the theory is that somehow blacks ought not hold that view because it's supposedly bad for blacks?) When whites are called traitors to their race for supporting policies that are supposedly bad for whites, that's pretty roundly condemned as racism, and rightly so. Yet somehow condemning blacks as traitors to their race is seen by many as just fine.

Read the whole piece, if you have a high tolerance for bile and schadenfreude. And ask yourself how "progressive" it is to condemn people differently for the same views based on their race, and how progressive or factually plausible it is to argue that someone has committed fraud partly because he's black.

Did you know that Taco Bell food tastes like crap, is not authentically Mexican, and people who eat it are poor and fat? You did? Well, even so, the editors of the L.A. Times' recently relaunched Sunday magazine, West, thought it worth assigning Dagoberto Gilb several thousand words to elaborate on all this for you.

* * *

This is all perfectly true, I guess, but why would anyone at this tricky point in the mainstream media business think it worth taking up vast acres of increasingly scarce newspaper real estate? And why is Taco Bell the focus of a 2006 feature article discussing Mexican fast food anyway? "Taco Bell Nation" might have seemed fresh and interesting 10 or 20 years ago, before Baja Fresh and Chipotle changed the scene. But I doubt the typical reader (educated, affluent) of this article has much experience with Taco Bell. There are people who do, of course. But they don't tend to read the L.A. Times.

As opposed to staring into--and interacting with--a computer monitor. 2014 (or thereabouts) can't get here fast enough.

Since late November of 2004, I've linked several times to a multimedia Flash presentation on the future of journalism. Among many other predictions, it forecasted that the New York Times would go offline in 2014, focusing their efforts on placting their sclerotic elite and elderly core readers who prefer their news on dead tree. Needless to say, the Gray Lady, beginning with her TimesSelect program, is doing its damndest to make that prediction come true--as I noted in September.

La Shawn Barber posts that the News From 2014 has been pushed back a year to 2015, and updated to reflect last year's technological developments. She also links to this Onion satire which came all-too-true last week:

Google Announces Plan To Destroy
All Information It Can't Index

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—Executives at Google, the rapidly growing online-search company that promises to "organize the world's information," announced Monday the latest step in their expansion effort: a far-reaching plan to destroy all the information it is unable to index.

"Our users want the world to be as simple, clean, and accessible as the Google home page itself," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt at a press conference held in their corporate offices. "Soon, it will be."

Update: Speaking of the present and future of journalism, they intersected today. Retired Army man Bill Roggio, who in November of 2005 embedded as a journalist with the Marines in western Iraq, appeared on CNN to try to explain the shortcomings of their war coverage--a big part of which are structural:

I found it very interesting that a large majority of the CNN audience did not "have confidence" in the news they were receiving from Iraq. It would have been interesting to have explored the reasons for this further. After watching the interview again, it was obvious Barbara Starr and I were talking about two entirely different subjects. Ms. Starr was discussing the administration and "strategic communications, information operations, spin, spin, spin," as well as the difficulties reporters encounter in Iraq. I was discussing how the media has failed to provide the proper context for the war, specifically in military operations, and how their reporting plays into the hands of al-Qaeda. There was plenty I wanted to discuss about the media & war reporting, but this was TV, I knew I'd only get a few minutes and had to focus on what I perceive to be a major weakness in the war reporting. This is in itself a major problem with the media's reporting on the war - particularly in television, where time is at a premium and complex issues are reduced to sound bytes.

In The New Criterion's Armavirumque blog, Stefan Beck writes that V For Vendetta commits the worst sin of all for any agitprop: it's boring:

As a piece of propaganda, V for Vendetta isn't Riefenstahl; it isn't even Michael Moore. It's just too boring. For a movie made from a comic book, that's unforgivable.

The important thing, however, is why it's boring, and why it's part of a worsening trend--if not necessarily in politics, at least in movies. (And isn't that bad enough?) Namely, it doesn't ring true. As Douglas Murray noted, "The present war's movies range from Kingdom of Heaven ('there are a lot of fundamentalists about, Christians are the worst') to Munich ('if someone hits you and you're a Jew, stay perfectly still') and Flightplan ('if you're on a hijacked plane, odds are these days that the flight-crew, not Islamists, are to blame')."

Now we can add to that V for Vendetta, which transforms Blair's Britain or W's America into, as Rolling Stone put it, "a police state ruled by . . . a fear-mongering, gay-bashing, Islam-hating dictator who strips citizens of their civil rights and religious freedoms." Why look to a hypothetical Britain, when present-day Iran has all that and more?

Why don't the movies have plausible, real-world villains anymore? One reason is that a plethora of stereotype-sensitive advocacy groups, representing everyone from hyphenated ethnic minorities and the physically handicapped to Army and CIA veterans, now maintain liaisons in Hollywood to protect their images. The studios themselves often have "outreach programs" in which executives review scripts and characters with representatives from these groups, evaluate their complaints, and attempt to avoid potential brouhahas.

Finding evil villains is not as easy as it was in the days when a director could choose among Nazis, Communists, KGB, and Mafiosi. Still, in a pinch, these old enemies will serve. For example, the 2002 apocalyptic thriller Sum of All Fears, based on the Tom Clancy novel, originally had Muslim extremists exploding a nuclear bomb in Baltimore. Paramount decided, however, to change the villains to Nazis residing in South Africa to avoid offending Arab-American and Islamic groups. Yet, even if aging Nazis lack any credible "outreach program" in Hollywood, they can no longer be credibly fit into many contemporary movies. "The list [of non-offensive villains] narrows quickly once you get past the tired clichés of Nazis," a top talent agency executive pointed out in an e-mail. "You'd be surprised at how short the list is."

Update:Jason Apuzzo of Libertas has a very different take on V For Vendetta:

Legend has it that back in 1933, after the Nazis had taken control of Germany, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels called film director Fritz Lang (Metropolis, M) into his office and offered him control of Germany’s film industry. Lang, it is said, politely discussed the matter with Goebbels - and then promptly hopped the next train out of Germany.

Emerging from the cinema after watching V For Vendetta, it occured to me that had Goebbels lived a bit longer he probably would’ve offered the job to the Wachowskis - whom, I suspect, would’ve given him something much closer to what he wanted than Herr Lang.

This is another way of saying that V For Vendetta is essentially the Jud Süß of our time. Of course, some of you may never have heard of Jud Süß or the people who made it - and will therefore need to do a little research. Others of you will know what I’m talking about … but won’t care, or will think I’m being ‘over the top.’ Fine.

But I can say with complete assurance that there’s going to come a day in the future - and it’s a pity we’ll need to wait for that day - when the people associated with the production of V For Vendetta will be as reviled and despised as the people associated with that most notorious film.

I tend to think Jason should have taken Beck's advice--if only because I remember similar language being thrown around about a very different movie--and also immediately upon its release--right around this time two years ago.

John Fund has really owned the story of Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, the former Taliban spokesman attending Yale--to the point where Fund's critics accuse him of "launching a vendetta against the school"--simply for pointing out the utter absurdity of an American school of higher learning gleefully admitting a terrorist to its ranks.

But then, as Fund notes in his latest piece, they've also had a pair of Nazis teaching there, as well.

One of whom was Paul de Man, whom Fund describes as "the leading guru of deconstructionism", who turned out to be a Nazi collaborator in his native France. As Dave Kopel noted a few years ago, it's no coincidence that movements such as deconstructionism and postmodernism have a shared past with totalitarianism.

Update: Roger L. Simon adds:

Fund raises the spectre of Paul de Man, the famous leader of deconstructionism, who rose to prominence on the Ivy League faculty while hiding his Nazi past. Ironically, the cultural relativisim behind that theory is the very idea that has so permeated the academy that all world views, including the Taliban's extremist Islam, are welcome.

Confederate Yankee writes:

But while preliminary report cites statistics that show a decline in U.S. forces killed [in Iraq], other statistics show an exact opposite trend in another theater of operation far closer to home.

The January-June 2005 murder rate is up 9.3% in cities with a population of 100,000 to 249,999, and the region "spiraling out of control" isn’t the Middle East, but is the Midwest, with a murder rate jumping 4.9%.

Forget Baghdad, let's pull out of Des Moines.

NFL head honcho Paul Tagliabue announces that he will step down in July.

I'll be interested to see how his legacy as NFL commissioner is viewed, especially as it follows the long reign of Pete Rozelle, who built the NFL into America's dominant sports league, only to endure endless battles with the NFL players' union in the 1980s. While Tagliabue wasn't the innovator that Rozelle was (who would be in comparison?) his tenure was, in comparison, much more free of dissention.

Orrin Judd interviews Robert Ferrigno, the author of a Fatherland/1984-style what-if novel, Prayers for the Assassin:

In the year 2040, New York City, Washington, D.C. and Mecca have all been devastated by nuclear warheads, the attacks admitted to by Mossad agents who were trying to drive a wedge between the West and the Islamic world (giving the event the title the Zionist Betrayal). The resulting chaos has led to the creation of an Islamic States of America, making up most of the Northern and Western states of the old Union. An uneasy truce exists with the Bible Belt states of the South after a long civil war, and the Catholic Church is tolerated, but the federal government is essentially an Islamic republic.

Within this richly imagined context, Mr. Ferrigno sets the story of Rakkim Epps, a former elite soldier in the American Fedayeen, and Sarah Dougan, a young historian who has uncovered evidence that casts doubt on the official version of the Zionist Betrayal. The two were raised by Redbeard, the head of State Security -- Rakkim an orphan he found on the street; Sarah, the daughter of Redbeard's assassinated brother. When Sarah disappears, Redbeard asks the estranged Rakkim to find her, without revealing why she's gone into hiding. As he searches, Rakkim soon finds himself shadowed by Darwin, an assassin and psychopath, who serves the Wise Old One, a fundamentalist leader who thinks Redbeard and others in the government too moderate.

All of the author's usual chops are on full display, so fans and thriller readers will be satisfied, but the background he provides will interest even policy wonks and political mavens. Fiction is used here to make us consider why a billion people choose Islam and whether it's too far-fetched to think that Americans might find it attractive under the right circumstances. As Mark Steyn said in his review, "If it's a choice between the defeatism and self-loathing of the Piss Christified West and a stern unyielding eternal Allah, maybe it's Islam that will prove the great seducer."

Welcome to the Zen of Yale: Many eastern religions practice meditation as a way of emptying the mind's thoughts. Yale apparently believes that an empty mind is the sign of an elite education as well:

We now have the first generation of college students who have learned NOT to think; they don't even allow certain thoughts in their heads.

Elsewhere in the Ivy League, the New York Sun notes:

A paper recently co-authored by the academic dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government about the allegedly far-reaching influence of an “Israel lobby” is winning praise from white supremacist David Duke.

The Palestine Liberation Organization mission to Washington is distributing the paper, which also is being hailed by a senior member of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization.

But the paper,“The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” by the Kennedy School’s Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, is meeting with a more critical reception from many of those it names as part of the lobby.The 83-page “working paper” claims a network of journalists, think tanks, lobbyists, and largely Jewish officials have seized the foreign policy debate and manipulated America to invade Iraq. Included in this network, the authors say, are the editors of the New YorkTimes, the scholars at the Brookings Institution, students at Columbia, “pro-Israel” senior officials in the executive branch, and “neoconservative gentiles” including columnist George Will.

Duke, a former Louisiana state legislator and one-time Ku Klux Klan leader, called the paper “a great step forward,” but he said he was “surprised” that the Kennedy School would publish the report.”

“I have read about the report and read one summary already, and I am surprised how excellent it is,”he said in an e-mail.“It is quite satisfying to see a body in the premier American University essentially come out and validate every major point I have been making since even before the war even started.” Duke added that “the task before us is to wrest control of America’s foreign policy and critical junctures of media from the Jewish extremist Neocons that seek to lead us into what they expectantly call World War IV.”

Mr.Walt said last night,“I have always found Mr. Duke’s views reprehensible, and I am sorry he sees this article as consistent with his view of the world.”

Update: Pamela of Atlas Shrugs has more.

Not in Hollywood, anyway: The LA Times' Patrick Goldstein asks, "With a spate of socially conscious movies like 'V for Vendetta' on the way, are the '70s back?"

Setting aside the idea that a pro-terrorist movie is "socially conscious", Libertas examines Goldstein's claims of a resurgence of seventies-style filmmaking:

1) The 1970’s introduced a new crop of fantastic filmmakers - Lucas, Spielberg, Coppola, Scorsese, Friedkin, Woody Allen, etc. Where are their like today? For example, am I supposed to believe Stephen Gaghan is as talented as Alan Pakula? He isn’t.

2) The 1970’s brought a decidedly new vision to filmmaking, both in terms of style and political content. All we’re getting today, however, is just a recycling of the same. What’s ‘new’ about blasting McCarthyism? Or spinning out plots about big-oil conspiracies involving the CIA? (We even got such a conspiracy back in Three Days of the Condor. How has Hollywood’s storyline changed?)

3) Ironically enough, the 70’s almost killed Hollywood. Although the decade produced a lot of small, edgy, wonderful films like Five Easy Pieces or The Conversation, it was basically a string of blockbusters - and their subsequent franchising - that kept the industry from collapsing in on itself. Robert Altman didn’t save Hollywood - it was The French Connection, The Exorcist, The Godfather, Star Wars, Jaws, etc., that kept the town going. So by going back to the 70’s left-wing-political mode of filmmaking, Hollywood would actually be risking its financial future again. And this takes us back to what everybody was saying about this year’s ’social activist’ Oscar films: nobody saw them.

For background material to use in my recent post about Robert Altman, I pulled out my copy of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind. I have to laugh at the tunnel-vision of the filmmakers of the 1970s (and to a certain extent, Biskind himself, as he chronicles their rise and cocaine-laden fall). Sandwiched between blockbuster crowd-favorites of the 1960s such as Dr. Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia, The Sound of Music and The Dirty Dozen and then the Star Wars, Star Trek and Indiana Jones movies (not to mention the bulk of Steven Spielberg's first twenty years of filmmaking), they don't understand what an aberration their late '60s to early '70s films were. Much as I love some of the darker movies of the 1970s (such as M*A*S*H, Taxi Driver, Chinatown, and The Conversation), while all of these films were critics' darlings, its always been popcorn fare that's kept Hollywood afloat. .

Fortunately, as Libertas' post concludes, that's opportunity waiting to be filled.

Neo-neocon explores the tradition of honor/shame cultures, from the duels of the 18th century to the Islamic world, today.

In the New York Sun, James Bowman looks at the new film version of Christopher Buckley's Thank You For Smoking:

Generally, the film is fast-paced and never less than amusing, and as a satire on the public relations "industry," it's very enjoyable. I just think it would have been better if the satire had been given more of an edge, and if Nick had been given a less defensible case - say that of the trial lawyers who shook down the tobacco industry for billions.

(Via Armavirumque.)

Update: Don't expect this film to be made by Hollywood anytime soon, either.

In Michelangelo Antonioni's seminal 1966 Hitchcock-meets-Swinging London suspense fiilm, David Hemmings stars as a professional photographer who can't believe what he's seeing in his own photographs.

These days, it's the New York Times' readers who can't believe what they're seeing in a professional newspaper's own photographs.

Blow-Up ends with Hemmings playing pantomime tennis alone in a London park. If the Times keeps this up, they'lll end up printing newspapers only to be discarded unread in Central Park.

Blow-Up was endlessly satirized by the Austin Powers franchise, with Elizabeth Hurley co-starring as his lady. These days, it's the Blogosphere which endlessly satirizes the Gray Lady herself.

Eugene Polley is a 90 year old man--who just happened to invent one the greatest devices in the history of mankind: the television remote control. Raise your Philips Pronto up in honor to him, next time you're in your den or home theater!

(Via Nick Schulz, my editor at TCS Daily, on his Transistion Game sports blog.)

Tammy Bruce writes, "We should have treated Iraq like Japan--And written their new constitution for them, and forbad religion as an element in government, while also forcing them to Westernize".

Instead, as Tammy notes, we're having to deal with the consequences of an "ally" such as Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani:

His Eminence, Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, the supreme religious authority for Shi'ite Msulims in Iraq and worldwide, decrees that gays and lesbians should be killed in the worst manner possible, according to this news article from a London-based gay rights group.

A quick search through Sistani's official website turns up this page, translated as:

Q: What is the judgement on sodomy and lesbianism?

A: "Forbidden. Those involved in the act should be punished. In fact, sodomites should be killed in the worst manner possible."

Update: Needless to say, we could have used Big Mac not just in Iraq, but Afghanistan as well.

Another Update: This is a hopeful sign: Was Sistani's fatwa a hoax?

The Terrell Owens deal that we mentioned last night when the Dallas Morning News broke the story based on multiple sources panned out: he and Cowboys owner Jerry Jones had their press conference this afternoon. Somewhat surprisingly, the deal was for three years; which means get ready for the real off-the-field fireworks to begin next year--probably right around this time. AP notes:

Jerry Jones was finishing yet another explanation of why he believes Terrell Owens will be on his best behavior with the Dallas Cowboys when his new star receiver chimed in.

"Jerry, I know what's expected of me," Owens said. "I won't let you down."

The Cowboys sure hope so, especially since they didn't get it in writing.

The receiver who has proven he can wreak havoc on or off the field signed a three-year, $25 million contract with Dallas on Saturday. The deal includes a $5 million bonus and $5 million salary this season, but no added penalties should Owens pull any of the stunts that caused so many problems for his two previous teams, the San Francisco 49ers and the Philadelphia Eagles.

His relationship with the Eagles soured only months after he led them to the Super Bowl, leading to a bitter breakup that ended with his release Tuesday.

"It's more than his word, it's about logic," Jones said. "This is an opportunity for him to basically put it all together and come in here and have a very positive experience. ... Whoever got him after those two experiences was going to get a more knowledgeable and educated player."

Agent Drew Rosenhaus said Jones never requested anything beyond a standard NFL contract. He may not have wanted to bring it up considering Rosenhaus said there were six other teams also aggressively seeking Owens.

"There was so much interest in Terrell, there was no reason to do anything but that kind of deal," Rosenhaus said.

After his windfall this season, Owens will get salaries of $8 million in 2007 and $7 million in 2008. All told, it's a lot more than he would've made under the contract with Philadelphia that began his bad blood with the organization.

"All's well that ends well," Rosenhaus said. "He's a big, big winner and so are the Dallas Cowboys."

It's time...to un-pimp your peace symbol!

(And yes, I know the above riff is a Volkswagon ad, but it was too much fun not to borrow.)

Update: Charles Johnson checks his cliche checklist--all cliches present and accounted for today.

Except one: Were there any papier-mache puppets? It's not a real protest until they show up!

Betsy Newmark looks at the quiet success of Brit Hume:

Brit Hume's evening news show on Fox is must-see viewing for me. In fact, I tape it regularly if I'm not going to be able to watch it in real time. And, it seems that viewers agree.

The steady creep to the top for Brit Hume's nightly Special Report on Fox--not just the No.1 Washington-originated cable show but also the fourth in all basic cable at 6 p.m.--has the host eyeing the next victim. "We've been having a series of meetings here about how we can beat Nickelodeon," he says. "We just hope that they don't put SpongeBob SquarePants up against us." Fun aside, Hume's hourlong mix of news and debate now reaches 1.5 million nightly while dominating the key 25-to-54 age demographic. And it happened in a very un-Fox-like way: without fanfare, even though Hume has recently surged to the No. 2 spot among all cable news shows, after Bill O'Reilly.

Of course, 1.5 million on cable is nothing compared to what the three network news shows bring in. Those liberals who bemoan the conservative takeover of the media and point to Fox don't know how to count. Still, it is lovely to have a news show that is intelligent, informative, and also maintains a sense of humor about politics. Congratulations, Brit. As a member of the "key" demographic, you're tops with me.

Andrea Harris believes that Hollywood's cult of "the Warrior Woman" has passed the apogee of its flight over the great white predatory fish:

Have I said how tired I am of women warriors? In the movies, in fiction, in genres where you wouldn’t even expect a woman to have to kick butt, there she is, wielding weaponry that the Governator in his prime might have trouble hefting, and not needing any icky man to protect her fine, independant self. The Cult of the Hot ‘N’ Sexy Warrior Woman is one of the many reasons why I no longer read science fiction, why I’ve quit watching most movies and tv, and even why I have been buying second-hand pre-1980s furniture in my own little campaign to bring back the past.

The Dallas Morning News reports, "Sources: Cowboys, Owens have deal in principle".

The article doesn't yet list the terms of the deal; if it's for one year, fine: Terrell Owens will be on his best behavior this coming season (as he was--more or less--his first year in Philly), wanting to prove that he isn't as bad as his self-inflicted auto-da-fe last year made him out to be. But beyond that, he's a sure bet to crash and burn again. And it's Super Bowl or bust this season for the Cowboys, given Parcell's age and this deal. But I'm not sure if they have the supporting talent to pull it off, even with Drew Bledsoe pitching to Owens and Terry Glenn as his wide receivers.

It will be interesting to see how Owens is accepted by the Cowboys' hometown fans, after his infamous incident dancing on the Cowboys' star logo on the Texas Stadium turf during when the 'Niners played the 'Boys in 2000.

"Google, I think we have a problem", Betsy Newmark writes; she's finally up and running after her blog was inexplicably nuked:

If you're going to start deleting blogs and then take four days to figure out and correct what happened, you're going to lose more and more people. DJ Drummond expresses what a lot a people are thinking about Blogger at this point: they are interested in seeing how Google and Blogger address these problems that they have been having. You may think that we have no reason to complain since we're getting the service for free. But, presumably, Google is not in the blogging business out of charitable impulses. They hope to make money from Blogger. And they will not be able to if they have these sorts of problems. I know that I'm going to be looking into other options.

Welcome to back to the Blogosphere, Betsy!

Update: Ed Morrissey dubs the incident "The Great Blogger Degaussing Of 2006":

Failures happen. It's what providers do to correct the situation that differentiates them, and of all industries, the blogging services should understand that most.

As Saddam's documents (with a Pajamas-clad assist?) begin to be explored, Investors Business Daily notes that, "A look at just a few pages already leads to some blockbuster revelations":

In the early stages of the war that began three years ago, the U.S. captured thousands of documents from Saddam and his spy agency, the Mukhabarat. It's been widely thought the documents could shed light on why Saddam behaved as he did and how much of a threat his evil regime represented.

Yet, until this week, the documents lay molding in boxes in a government warehouse. Now the first batch is out, and though few in number, they're loaded with information.

Among the enduring myths of those who oppose the war is that Saddam, though murderous when it came to his own people, had no weapons of mass destruction and no terrorist designs outside his own country. Both claims now lie in tatters.

As we've reported several times, a number of former top military officials in Saddam's regime have come forward to admit that, yes, Saddam had WMD, hid them and shipped them out of the country so they couldn't be detected. And he had plans to make more.

Now come more revelations that leave little doubt about Saddam's terrorist intentions.

The issue is historical now, but still worth exploring. Why, for two distinct groups of Americans, has it become a matter of conviction held with religious intensity that there cannot have been any relationship between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq?

Gerard Baker of the London Times explores what the Middle East would look like today if Saddam Hussein had remained in power. It makes for a chilling double-feature with one of the 9/11-oriented alternate histories.

And speaking of Robert Harris' chief protagonists, Jamie Glazov explores the Nazi connection to Islamic terror.

In The Weekly Standard, Dean Barnett writes:

But the most disturbing question raised by Crashing the Gate is if progressives don't know what they're fighting for, then why are they fighting so hard?

Crashing the Gate provides an invaluable snapshot of the Democratic party and the progressive movement circa 2006. Moulitsas and Armstrong are at the vanguard of the progressive movement, and even they don't know seem to know what it stands for.

When Google accidentally deletes a blog--it's gone. But apparently emails are another story.

Counterfeiter busted for creating billion dollar bills:

The counterfeit money looked good, but there was one flaw. There's no such thing as a one billion dollar bill.

U.S. Customs agents in California said on Tuesday they had found 250 bogus billion dollar bills while investigating a man charged with currency smuggling.

Tekle Zigetta, 45, pleaded guilty to three federal counts of trying to bring cash, phoney bills and a fake $100,000 (57,000 pound) gold certificate into the United States in January.

Further investigation led agents to a West Hollywood apartment where they found the stash of yellowing and wrinkled one billion dollar bills with an issue date of 1934 and bearing a picture of President Grover Cleveland.

"You would think the $1 billion denomination would be a giveaway that these notes are fake, but some people are still taken in," said James Todak, a secret services agent involved in the probe.

(Via Maggie's Farm.)

The New York Times' stock value has certainly taken a beating since 9/11 and the rise of the Blogosphere. (And from both sides: the left views the Times as not being leftwing enough, conservatives view it as the liberal newspaper its then-ombudsman declared it to be in 2004.)

Given the hits the Times' equity prices have suffered, it seems consistent that the ratings on its debt should suffer as well.

In his interview with Hugh Hewitt yesterday, Mark Steyn said:

Well you know, one of the things I find, and I'm sure you do, too, you travel a lot around the country. And the thing about American newspapers in particular, but it's also true of Canada and certain others, is that if you get off the plane at almost any airport on the continent, and you'll pick up the local paper which will be a monopoly daily, published by Gannett or some other similar company, and it will just have like the world's dullest comment page, the world's dullest op-ed page. This is a great riveting time of war, and say what you like about crazy folks on left or right, but there's a lot to say about it. And in fact, the newspapers, and their monopolies, have made them dull, and that's the danger, I think, in much of the United States, that you want someone, whether you agree with him or not, that you want something that will be riveting and thought-provoking. And some of these guys have been just holding down prime op-ed real estate for decades. It's amazing to me.

Update: Welcome Michelle Malkin readers! If this is your first time here, please look around--we think you'll find lots to enjoy. Meanwhile, the Professor lists more reasons for the Gray Lady to feel Kind of Blue.

Betsy Newmark has been one my favorite bloggers for at least the past two years (just search my archives). But her Blogspot-based blog crashed earlier this week (apparently along with a bunch of other blogs hosted there), only to reappear today under someone else's ownership!

Betsy has a long letter on Instapundit explaining her situation that's must reading for any of her fans.

When I launched my blog in early 2002, I had watched numerous Blogspot-based blogs frequently go offline for hours at a clip (including, at the time, Instapundit himself). So I quickly decided that while I'd use Blogger's templates to put my site together, but actually having it hosted there would be counterintuitive. I had thought that since being purchased by Google, Blogger and Blogspot had gotten things together, and outages/crashes such as what happened to Betsy would be a thing of the past. Obviously, I was mistaken.

Update (11/17/06, 11:55 AM PST): Betsy has control over her Blogspot domain name again, but it looks like it will be a while before her blog is up and running again.

If I were her, I'd consider registering my own domain name and putting a Movable Type blog on a hosting site such as Living Dot. They've been great to work with--and are certainly cheap enough.

Two new products which arrived at Ed Driscoll.com HQ this week as grist for a couple of upcoming dead tree articles are demonstrations of cutting edge high tech, circa 1960, and today.

I've already reviewed Spacecraft Films' DVDs before; I'm doing a profile of their founder, Mark Gray for a coming article. Their new Project Mercury: A New Frontier is an exhaustive six-DVD set focusing on the birth of America's manned space program, which includes a terrific, Right Stuff-flavored long form documentary, and about 24 hours worth of footage shot before and during the program, including unmanned tests, the testflights with chimps, and then finally, the six launches of the original Mercury Seven astronauts (as a result of an ear condition, Deke Slayton would have to wait until 1975 to go up on the Apollo-Soyouz mission). As I once dubbed a review of another Spacecraft Films product, this really is Space Geek Nirvana.

And I mentioned the Slingbox in my recent TCS article on the future of Web video. It allows anyone to view his or her TiVo or cable/satellite set-top box on a PC. So a salesman travelling in Des Moines--or Dubai--who has access to broadband, can watch whatever his PVR has recorded on his laptop. Or if he's working in his home office, can have the game on in the background on his computer monitor, via the cable box in the den.

I'll be reviewing the unit itself this week; I haven't had a chance to experiment much with it yet, but it was a breeze to hook-up. (The two most difficult aspects of installation were stringing the wires through the back of my home theater cabinet, and resetting my router to detect it. The accompanying software installs quickly and painlessly on both my PC, and my wife's.)

The picture quality is very good--certainly good enough for casual, background viewing. But this is all runing on my home's internal, hardwired LAN. I'll be interested to see how it performs on a laptop, via, say, Starbucks' Wi-Fi connection.

Apparently, online may be the only place you're going to see this episode of South Park again.

Which isn't all that surprising, to be honest.

AP reports that "U.S. forces, joined by Iraqi troops, on Thursday launched the largest airborne assault since the U.S.-led invasion, targeting insurgent strongholds north of the capital, the military said".

Apparently, there's some confusion over its nature, though.

Update: Gerard Vanderleun has additional details, and notes:

Spooky's Back: "Good Night and Good Luck".

Power Line looks at the international legal--and verbal--stylings of Justice Ginsburg.

Journalist visits Blue State enclave in Red State, buys T-shirt, transforms into Andorian.

Or something like that.

Generation Why? opens up the unclassified documents discovered in postwar Iraq and discovers some very interesting surprises--and at least one very familiar face.

Steve Green asks:

Question is, why isn't anyone in the White House screaming this stuff from the rooftops?

All of a sudden, Portugal's sounding like an excellent vacation spot!

Instapundit Glenn Reynolds has been out promoting his new book. In order to demonstrate how well connected to the world ordinary people now are, how much choice they have, and much information they have easy and inexpensive access to, he has repeatedly brought up the example of the bar he likes to work " with 27 kinds of beer on tap, a nice patio and... a free wireless Internet hookup,"

It sounds reasonably good.

As it happens though, Jonathan Pearce and I went to Porto in Portugal last weekend in order to get pissed have a stimulating weekend. On saturday night, we ended up in a bar with a choice of over 200 kinds of port. There was something work related that I had to get done reasonably promptly, so I got out of my laptop and joy of joys, the bar was providing free wireless there too. I was able to get my work done. It certainly beat spending time in the office. It beat a mere 27 kinds of beer too.

So what can I say? Samizdata 200 - Instapundit 27. We win.

In the Four Seasons' UItimate Bartender's Guide, the authors have a great recipe for a Brandied Port (Churchill was apparently a big fan of this combination, from what I've read) that's worth experimenting with: pour four ounces of Port, a half ounce of Cognac into a wine (or brandy) glass, and stir. It adds a nice little extra bit of complexity to the Port, and is a breeze to make.

You know you're a lame duck when you're willing to star in a parody like that so soon after re-election.

Pat really steps in it this time:

Comparing Islam to Satanism is unfair. Satanists do a good job of reaching out to Americans and drawing them to their way of life. Their promotional tools include Heavy Metal music, Public School systems, and the new hit series Desperate Housewives. Contrast this to Muslim extremists who: Demand that you not mock Islam; demand that you not question or inquire about Islam, and, finally, demand that you convert to Islam. Really, sometimes it’s enough to make me openly embrace the next Jehovah’s Witness.

Sure, there are some things I don’t understand about Satanists. Like why they need to behead a goat and offer it to their lord as a sacrifice. But I’d much rather they behead a goat than Mr. Goldberg next door. And I’d certainly like to see them use their influence to help clean up congress – but otherwise – I have no problem with these people.

A mid-1980s article in Musician magazine on how Roger Waters of Pink Floyd first built The Wall begins thusly:

Something snapped in Montreal. It was partly the strain of a long tour to a close-the accumulated jet lag, hotel food, pre- and post-show ennui and oppressive stadium squeeze of faceless but demanding flesh of the 1977 Animals tour...What's more, the very vocal majority of people in that black hole of steel and concrete were less concerned with what they had to play and say than with who they were. 'They" were Pink Floyd and that was enough.

Roger Waters spit on a kid in the front rows that night. Pink Floyd's singer-bassist-songwriter also spent a lot of time afterward brooding on what his fame had done to him and how he came to such a scary pass. He later spent a lot of time writing it all down in a series of brutally confessional, emotionally graphic songs that eventually became Pink Floyd's multi-platinum 1979 seller The Wall.

...Only to come full circle:

U2 frontman BONO had to separate SIR BOB GELDOF from TONY BLAIR to prevent him from spitting at the British Prime Minister. The crusading rocker came to the rescue after Geldof's discussion with the UK leader became so heated, he feared a saliva shower was on the way. He says, "I had to call him off Mr Blair. Literally spittle coming out, invective coming out, and Tony reaching over to me saying, 'I believe you've a greatest hits coming,' just to get a break from Geldof. "I have seen Geldof try to bite prime ministers. I accept the rules of ultimate fighting, which are: you can't poke someone in the eye or bite them, and Bob doesn't."

...Or not: George Clooney claims that Arianna Huffington used quotes he provided her to make it appear that he was one of the celebrity posters on the Huff-Blog:

Oscar-winner George Clooney may make politically provocative films like "Syriana." But he doesn't write politically provocative blogs.

So imagine his ire when Arianna Huffington used some of his recent answers to political questions in a way that makes it look as if he wrote one for her Huffington Post blog site.

"He doesn't object to the quotes," says Stan Rosenfield, Clooney's rep. "He said those things and those are his views. Arianna asked for permission to use the quotes and he gave it to her. What he didn't give permission for was the use of his quotes without source attributions to make it appear that he wrote a blog for her site. Which he did not. When he saw the posting Monday, we called and asked her to make the change, to simply attribute the quotes and make it clear that he did not write a blog. But she refused. And it's now Wednesday."

Rather than keep waiting, Clooney got pro-active and issued this statement:

"Miss Huffington's blog is purposefully misleading and I have asked her to clarify the facts. I stand by my statements but I did not write this blog. With my permission Miss Huffington compiled it from interviews with Larry King and The Guardian. What she most certainly did not get my permission to do is to combine only my answers in a blog that misleads the reader into thinking that I wrote this piece. These are not my writings - they are answers to questions and there is a huge difference."

Update: Miss Huffington responds to Mr. Clooney.

Another Update: Max Boot urges Clooney to come out of the closet and reveal once again the secret inner-neocon of his past. And while Syrianna trashes American business, it's worth noting that Clooney once happily portrayed one of the most powerful--and unilateral--American millionaires of them all...

That's what Ronald Bailey of Reason dubs a virus that gripped America in the late 1980s and early 1990s (and caused several so-so movies to be released as well, including Black Rain and Rising Sun):

Looking back, the most wrong-headed foreign policy phenomenon of the time was Japanophobia. Japanophobia was the unreasoning fear that Japanese companies were about to buy up everything in sight in America. The iconic event that focused the public's fears on an imminent Japanese buyout of America was Mitsubishi's purchase of a majority holding in New York City's Rockefeller Center in 1989.

On Sunday, I linked to the WSJ's Tom Wolfe profile, in which he said:

But as to "this business of my having done the unthinkable and voted for George Bush, I would say, now look, I voted for George Bush but so did 62,040,609 other Americans. Now what does that make them? Of course, they want to say--'Fools like you!' . . . But then they catch themselves, 'Wait a minute, I can't go around saying that the majority of the American people are fools, idiots, bumblers, hicks.' So they just kind of dodge that question.

I rarely disagree with Wolfe's assessment of most topics, but think back to the period between November of 2004 and Bush's inauguration the following January. The media were collectively depressed enough about the election's outcome to really let the mask slip, and let language that normally stays inside Manhattan cocktail parties out onto the air.

Now this is how a Karl Rove sting operation works, when it all comes together!

Update: Welcome Hotline readers; Photoshop contest here.

Found via Tammy Bruce, Carol Platt Liebau writes:

There is no reason in the world for the LA Times to have run this piece in yesterday's paper.

Is there anyone who believes that an article about women undergoing plastic surgery to their private parts in an effort to emulate porn stars is newsworthy, uplifting, useful or even relevant to 99.9% of the reading public?

All it succeeds in doing is coarsening the tenor of our public conversation.

Surely even The Times can do better.

Mark Steyn's superb obit of Eugene McCarthy, which ran on dead tree in The Atlantic last month is now online. It begins:

If you strike at the king, you have to kill him. And, amazingly, Eugene McCarthy did. On March 12th 1968, the not exactly barnstorming Senator got 42.4% of Democratic votes in the New Hampshire primary and denied the sitting President even a majority of his own party’s supporters: Lyndon Johnson secured just 49.5%. Within three weeks, he was gone: the President announced he would not seek re-election and effectively ended his political career. The king was dead, long live …well, not Senator McCarthy: the man who plunged the dagger in did not take the crown. But his few short weeks stumping the Granite State changed his party, with consequences it lives with to this day. The LBJ diehards who dismissed him as a mere “footnote in history” failed to understand how much damage one footnote can do when he doesn’t mind whose toes he steps on and all the bigfeet turn out to have feet of clay. Thus, the paradox of Gene McCarthy: the revered liberal icon who destroyed the last successful liberal presidency. His act of insouciant regicide was the defining moment in the Democrats’ modern history.

Over at the American Enterprise's daily blog, Kate Campaigne reviews a new book by leftwing professor (and orginal SDS member) Todd Gitlin:

Gitlin illustrates, purposefully or not, that since the 1960s the Left paradoxically moved away from attempting to understand humanity in vaporous theorizing. More specifically, as the Left celebrated itself and its opinions and became completely engulfed in the present, it did not “progress” in comprehending humanity or the world more fully.

“A generation is now growing old, which never had anything to say for itself except that it was young. It was the first progressive generation - the first generation that believed in progress and nothing else…. [They believed] simply that the new thing is always better than the old thing; that the young man is always right and the old wrong. And now that they are old men themselves, they have naturally nothing whatever to say or do. Their only business in life was to be the rising generation knocking at the door. Now that they have got into the house, and have been accorded the seat of honour by the hearth, they have completely forgotten why they wanted to come in. The aged younger generation never knew why it knocked at the door; and the truth is that it only knocked at the door because it was shut. It had nothing to say; it had no message; it had no convictions to impart to anybody…. The old generation of rebels was purely negative in its rebellion, and cannot give the new generation of rebels anything positive against which it should not rebel. It is not that the old man cannot convince young people that he is right; it is that he cannot even convince them that he is convinced. And he is not convinced; for he never had any conviction except that he was young, and that is not a conviction that strengthens with years.”

Michelle Malkin quotes from a statement issued by Mohammed Taheri-azar, the "Tarheel Terrorist" who drove a rented Jeep through a crowd at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill:

"Allah gives permission in the Koran for the followers of Allah to attack those who have raged war against them, with the expectation of eternal paradise in case of martyrdom and/or living one's life in obedience of all of Allah's commandments found throughout the Koran's 114 chapters..."

"The U.S. government is responsible for the deaths of and the torture of countless followers of Allah, my brothers and sisters. My attack on Americans at UNC-CH on March 3rd was in retaliation for similar attacks orchestrated by the U.S. government on my fellow followers of Allah in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, and other Islamic territories. I did not act out of hatred for Americans, but out of love for Allah instead."

Speaking of on-campus terrorists, Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) has written an open letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff asking for the rexamination of the visa of Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, the former Taliban spokesman recently admitted to Yale.

As Yale Professor David Gelernter writes:

Hashemi was a member of an evil and macabre terrorist group. Worse yet, he became their official spokesman and apologist to the world for their crimes — the Afghani Goebbels. The Taliban were not, as some suggest, a group of benevolent Afghani governors, but a gang of terrorists. Here’s the first of a series of Taliban-committed outrages listed in a Human Rights Watch report on the group:

Yakaolang and Bamiyan districts, June 2001: After retaking central Yakaolang, Taliban forces under the command of Mullah Dadaullah burned about 4,500 houses, 500 shops, and public buildings. As they retreated east, they continued to burn villages and to detain and kill Shi'a Hazara civilians in villages and side valleys in eastern Yakaolang and the western part of Bamiyan district.

The fact that Hashemi didn’t do the actual killing does not absolve him; Geobbels didn’t shoot anyone either. Equally, the fact that he is now retired means nothing — he isn’t “redeemed” by his retirement any more than a mafia gangster would be. I do not care to have this fellow in my dining hall, my college, or my country.

Update: Daniel Pipes explores the causes of "Sudden Jihad Syndrome".

In August, we linked to an American Prowler article on Warren Buffett, who was gleefully shorting the dollar on the foreign exchange markets:

Warren Buffett is bearish on the United States, and he's bullish on Europe. For the first time in his life, starting in 2002, Mr. Buffett entered the foreign exchange markets and shorted the dollar. This rare macro-economic bet was based on a belief that U.S. consumers and the U.S. government were spending beyond their means, and that the trade deficit was a sign of economic weakness.

While his short position was profitable in 2004, he has lost more than half a billion dollars so far in 2005. Some Wall Street sources suggest that his breakeven exchange rate is $1.22/euro, so with the euro trading near $1.21 in mid-June, his short position was seriously in the red.

Buffett's anti-American investment sentiment has cost Berkshire Hathaway shareholders dearly. During the 12 months ending in mid-June, his stock price was down roughly 7 percent, while the S&P 500 was up 5 percent. The stock market voted "non" on this Berkshire investment strategy, just like the French and Dutch voted against the European constitution.

Warren Buffett acknowledged that his bet against U.S. currency had collectively cost them almost $1 billion. Buffet wrote, "My views on America’s long-term problem in respect to trade imbalances, which I have laid out in previous reports, remain unchanged. My conviction, however, cost Berkshire $955 million pre-tax in 2005. ..."

Neo writes:

One of the things that continues to amaze me is the protean use to which the adjective "Orwellian" can be put. It always strikes me as ironic that Orwell himself--Eric Blair--probably wouldn't have been any too happy about his name being immortalized as a synonym for distorting and reversing the truth in clever and devious ways, since this is what he was warning us against. But no matter; the greater irony is that those who cry "Orwellian!" are all too often guilty of the charge themselves.

Reuters' article begins:

U.S. stocks rose sharply on Tuesday, with the Dow and S&P 500 indexes hitting their highest in nearly five years as U.S. Treasury yields fell and record profit from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. boosted shares of financial companies.

Of course, as I wrote back in December, if you're an investor, there's an upside to the media's reluctance to pop the cork and celebrate the economy's success.

Update: Newsbusters has some related thoughts.

The Cowboys release wide receiver Keyshawn Johnson. Does this clear the decks for Terrell Owens to become a Cowboy?

If--and it's a big, big if--that comes to pass, stock up on Maalox, Bill. You're going to need 'em.

Don't miss The American Enterprise magazine's great interview with Shelby Steele.

Mort Sahl, the father of existential humor (why yes, this is rapidly turning into the most pretentious sentence I've written in ages), in much the same way that Miles Davis was the father of modal jazz, once said:

"I submit to you that I've been called an intellectual more times than you can count', Sahl said. "I was sort of a C student in college. To me, an intellectual is someone like Bertrand Russell or Robert Oppenheimer, or Albert Einstein. I'm not an intellectual. It shines great light on show business that I would be called an intellectual. After all, I quote intellectuals. Fifty years ago, I would have been a reporter with some promise on a newspaper, maybe."

Dick Cavett orbited in Woody's circle in the 1960s and 1970s, after apprenticing as a writer for Jack Parr. (The 1970s was the era you could actually imply that Woody was a central figure in comedy, before Interiors pointed the way towards leaden, humorless movies with small, minimal urban audiences. (Once again though, Woody's a pioneer!, I can't help but think after my last post.)

Of Cavett, James Lileks echoes Mort Sahl's description of himself:

Many hosannas are usually heaped at Cavett’s feet for his “intellectual” approach to the talk show genre, but this says more about the genre than the host. He’s certainly an intelligent man, articulate and genial, but there’s a reason he’s in the second tier of talk-show greats. His persona suggests something that simply isn’t in evidence. Smart as he is, you suspect that you’re supposed to think he’s smarter; witty though he could be, you wonder what wit might flower if it weren’t for The Man, in this case the Network, keeping a close eye on this questionable fellow, this odd fellow who no doubt has a picture of Mort Sahl in the dressing room, and thinks the Smothers Brothers got a raw deal. (Communist!) It’s these insinuations that gave him a lot of credibility, I think. He was the anti-Carson in a genre that couldn’t admit such a thing was possible or even necessary. He performed a service by which the viewer could flatter himself: I am not watching Joey Bishop or Carson, because I am Cavett person. His monologues were not particularly funny - but whose were? By then the bombing monologue was a staple of the genre. His one-liners were often delivered underhand, which is fine, but he always seemed to apologize for them in an endearing way that suggested he had repressed 394 other really good jokes. The wry eyes and the vague half-smile convinced everyone he was far smarter than any of this.

The evidence is inconclusive. He’s always auditioning to be the Best Friend of the big sluggers, be it Hope or Groucho or Woody. They’re perfectly content to treat him as an equal because he’s a nice guy. But you never, ever suspected that Hope or Groucho or Woody ever regaled a dinner party with an anecdote about something Dick said.

In the intro to the long interview with Hope, Cavett quoted soemthing Carson told him: "When you have those great stars on, of that era, Hope, Benny, you get a feeling that maybe you're on a par with them." Cavett notes that he found the remark "intelligent and touching." I suspect that the quote continued with a piece of advice, perhaps unspoken: but maybe you’re not.

Last week, we quoted George Lucas as saying that in the future, most films would have budgets of $30 million or less, compared with the runaway costs of blockbuster productions such as his own Star Wars movies. Why the emphasis on lower-budget films? Libertas writes that Hollywood has discovered the formula to turn low budget, highly politicized films into money makers, while kissing off the American heartland--AKA, the Red States:

But if Hollywood is so pitifully out of touch, how does the industry’s economic train keep chugging along? Why don’t market forces come crashing in on Hollywood executives, sort of like the way the Red Sea came crashing down on Pharaoh’s army in “The Ten Commandments”? The answer’s in the numbers.

Let’s take a sampling of 5 left-leaning, ‘hot button’ films from last year, all of which were Oscar-nominated and four of which won Oscars: “Brokeback Mountain,” “Good Night, and Good Luck,” “Syriana,” “The Constant Gardener” and surprise Best Picture winner “Crash.” The average budget for these five films was about $20 million. Their average worldwide gross? Just over $80 million - and that doesn’t even include DVD revenues.

Perhaps you’re getting the picture: there’s decent money to be made being left-wing, so long as a film’s budget is low. Among left-leaning films that underperformed this year, the chief culprits were “Jarhead” and Steven Spielberg’s “Munich” - and really only because those films cost too much (both around $70 million).

So what’s going on here? Hollywood has recently perfected a formula whereby low-budget, indie-looking films generate good reviews, controversy, and oceans of free publicity (a lot of it coming from the conservative media) due to a film’s left-wing worldview. And all this free buzz gets translated into box office dollars.

The model Hollywood’s following here is that of “Fahrenheit 9/11,” Michael Moore’s $6 million film from 2004 that generated $222 million in worldwide boxoffice. “Fahrenheit” opened a lot of eyes in Hollywood - but not about George Bush or Iraq. Those bulging eyeballs were staring at “Fahrenheit”’s grosses.

One company that’s adopted “Fahrenheit”’s model is Participant Productions, founded by eBay’s Jeff Skoll. Participant co-produced “Syriana,” “Good Night, and Good Luck,” “North Country,” and soon will release the Al Gore documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” and Richard Linklater’s adaptation of “Fast Food Nation.” None of these films cost very much (”Good Night” cost only $6 million), and are easy films to sell to the sort of people who read The Huffington Post or The Daily Kos. Crazy as this may sound, this business model is increasingly making sense in Hollywood’s competitive marketplace.

So here’s the bad news: Hollywood doesn’t need the Heartland anymore. There’s basically no pressure for Hollywood to change what it’s doing, because there are plenty of Blue State audiences and DVD sales out there to make even something like the gender-bending “Transamerica” a hit, so long as the film doesn’t cost too much.

I’ve heard conservatives tell me for years that ‘market forces’ will eventually force Hollywood to change, become more mainstream. The argument goes something like this: Hollywood’s product will eventually become so toxic, so nakedly political, that there will eventually be a ‘backlash’ from the public - at which point things in Tinseltown will magically change for the better.

Guess what? It ain’t happening. Hollywood simply doesn’t need the Red States any more. Hollywood’s more interested in how a film plays in Mexico or France these days than in Kansas. After all, Charles Krauthammer may hate “Syriana” - but the Germans and the Brits love it! So do the Spanish and the Italians. That’s the global economy for you - Hollywood’s now out-sourcing its audience.

All of this may be depressing to read, but here’s the good news: if the price of entry into the movie game is $5-$20 million, conservatives can play too.

Err, pretty much this, as Ed Morrissey notes:

So let's get this straight. Dan Rather spent his time in Cherry Hill lamenting the dearth of the tough question and the follow-up. When Walsh got an opportunity, he attempted to provide Rather with exactly what he demanded from the media -- a tough question and a follow-up when the first answer evaded the issue. How did Rather and his handlers reward him? They cut off his microphone and made sure he couldn't finish his follow-up.

And after listening to Rather talk about the supposed spinelessness of the media, how did the audience react to this obvious and hypocritical effort at stifling Walsh's inquiry? They booed him. Quite obviously, both Rather and his audience engaged in mere posturing instead of truly supporting aggressive reporting.

Isaac Hayes quits South Park after the show boldly goes where no one else in Hollywood has gone before: it made fun of the world's second-most prickly religion:

"There is a place in this world for satire, but there is a time when satire ends and intolerance and bigotry towards religious beliefs of others begins," the 63-year-old soul singer and outspoken Scientologist said.

"Religious beliefs are sacred to people, and at all times should be respected and honored," he continued. "As a civil rights activist of the past 40 years, I cannot support a show that disrespects those beliefs and practices."

"South Park" co-creator Matt Stone responded sharply in an interview with The Associated Press Monday, saying, "This is 100 percent having to do with his faith of Scientology... He has no problem - and he's cashed plenty of checks - with our show making fun of Christians."

Last November, "South Park" targeted the Church of Scientology and its celebrity followers, including actors Tom Cruise and John Travolta, in a top-rated episode called "Trapped in the Closet." In the episode, Stan, one of the show's four mischievous fourth graders, is hailed as a reluctant savior by Scientology leaders, while a cartoon Cruise locks himself in a closet and won't come out.

Stone told The AP he and co-creator Trey Parker "never heard a peep out of Isaac in any way until we did Scientology. He wants a different standard for religions other than his own, and to me, that is where intolerance and bigotry begin."

Update: Ed Morrissey stirs the pot: "It seems that Chef can't take what he dishes out". The E-Meter depicts more on the subject from the tortured thetans within the Pajamas Mothership.

Another Update: Steve Green asks:

Chef is the moral center of the South Park crew - not that that's saying a whole lot most days. So what will Parker and Stone do without him?

As one of Captain Ed's commenters suggests, the new Chef could serve the kids clams at every meal...

In her latest blog post, Cathy Seipp writes that she's not very happy when readers cut and paste her entire articles and reprint them on their blogs--and I can second that emotion:

If you don't protect your right to something you'll lose it, and if writers allow their work to be reprinted for free all over the blogosphere, publishers will begin to wonder why they should bother to pay reprint fees. It's a real problem, so don't steal my work like that. If you're using your blog as a sort of online scrapbook of interesting newspaper clippings, then please close it to the general public, so you're not actually republishing these things.

Here's Steyn, from December:

What's the better bet? A globalization that exports cheeseburgers and pop songs or a globalization that exports the fiercest aspects of its culture? When it comes to forecasting the future, the birthrate is the nearest thing to hard numbers. If only a million babies are born in 2006, it's hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in 2026 (or 2033, or 2037, or whenever they get around to finishing their Anger Management and Queer Studies degrees). And the hard data on babies around the Western world is that they're running out a lot faster than the oil is. "Replacement" fertility rate--i.e., the number you need for merely a stable population, not getting any bigger, not getting any smaller--is 2.1 babies per woman. Some countries are well above that: the global fertility leader, Somalia, is 6.91, Niger 6.83, Afghanistan 6.78, Yemen 6.75. Notice what those nations have in common?

Scroll way down to the bottom of the Hot One Hundred top breeders and you'll eventually find the United States, hovering just at replacement rate with 2.07 births per woman. Ireland is 1.87, New Zealand 1.79, Australia 1.76. But Canada's fertility rate is down to 1.5, well below replacement rate; Germany and Austria are at 1.3, the brink of the death spiral; Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1, about half replacement rate. That's to say, Spain's population is halving every generation. By 2050, Italy's population will have fallen by 22%, Bulgaria's by 36%, Estonia's by 52%. In America, demographic trends suggest that the blue states ought to apply for honorary membership of the EU: In the 2004 election, John Kerry won the 16 with the lowest birthrates; George W. Bush took 25 of the 26 states with the highest. By 2050, there will be 100 million fewer Europeans, 100 million more Americans--and mostly red-state Americans.

As fertility shrivels, societies get older--and Japan and much of Europe are set to get older than any functioning societies have ever been. And we know what comes after old age. These countries are going out of business--unless they can find the will to change their ways. Is that likely? I don't think so. If you look at European election results--most recently in Germany--it's hard not to conclude that, while voters are unhappy with their political establishments, they're unhappy mainly because they resent being asked to reconsider their government benefits and, no matter how unaffordable they may be a generation down the road, they have no intention of seriously reconsidering them. The Scottish executive recently backed down from a proposal to raise the retirement age of Scottish public workers. It's presently 60, which is nice but unaffordable. But the reaction of the average Scots worker is that that's somebody else's problem. The average German worker now puts in 22% fewer hours per year than his American counterpart, and no politician who wishes to remain electorally viable will propose closing the gap in any meaningful way.

This isn't a deep-rooted cultural difference between the Old World and the New. It dates back all the way to, oh, the 1970s. If one wanted to allocate blame, one could argue that it's a product of the U.S. military presence, the American security guarantee that liberated European budgets: instead of having to spend money on guns, they could concentrate on butter, and buttering up the voters. If Washington's problem with Europe is that these are not serious allies, well, whose fault is that? Who, in the years after the Second World War, created NATO as a postmodern military alliance? The "free world," as the Americans called it, was a free ride for everyone else. And having been absolved from the primal responsibilities of nationhood, it's hardly surprising that European nations have little wish to reshoulder them. In essence, the lavish levels of public health care on the Continent are subsidized by the American taxpayer. And this long-term softening of large sections of the West makes them ill-suited to resisting a primal force like Islam.

There is no "population bomb." There never was. Birthrates are declining all over the world--eventually every couple on the planet may decide to opt for the Western yuppie model of one designer baby at the age of 39. But demographics is a game of last man standing. The groups that succumb to demographic apathy last will have a huge advantage. Even in 1968 Paul Ehrlich and his ilk should have understood that their so-called population explosion was really a massive population adjustment. Of the increase in global population between 1970 and 2000, the developed world accounted for under 9% of it, while the Muslim world accounted for 26%. Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30% of the world's population to just over 20%, the Muslim nations increased from about 15% to 20%.

Nineteen seventy doesn't seem that long ago. If you're the age many of the chaps running the Western world today are wont to be, your pants are narrower than they were back then and your hair's less groovy, but the landscape of your life--the look of your house, the layout of your car, the shape of your kitchen appliances, the brand names of the stuff in the fridge--isn't significantly different. Aside from the Internet and the cell phone and the CD, everything in your world seems pretty much the same but slightly modified.

And yet the world is utterly altered. Just to recap those bald statistics: In 1970, the developed world had twice as big a share of the global population as the Muslim world: 30% to 15%. By 2000, they were the same: each had about 20%.

And by 2020?

So the world's people are a lot more Islamic than they were back then and a lot less "Western." Europe is significantly more Islamic, having taken in during that period some 20 million Muslims (officially)--or the equivalents of the populations of four European Union countries (Ireland, Belgium, Denmark and Estonia). Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the West: In the U.K., more Muslims than Christians attend religious services each week.

* * *

Best-case scenario? The Continent winds up as Vienna with Swedish tax rates.

Worst-case scenario: Sharia, circa 2040; semi-Sharia, a lot sooner--and we're already seeing a drift in that direction.

Norway’s most controversial refugee, Mullah Krekar, told an Oslo newspaper on Monday that there’s a war going on between “the West” and Islam. He said he’s sure that Islam will win, and he also had praise for suspected terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.

“We’re the ones who will change you,” Krekar told Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet in his first interview since an uproar broke out over cartoons deemed offensive to Muslims.

“Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes,” Krekar said. “Every western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries are producing 3.5 children.

”By 2050, 30 percent of the population in Europe will be Muslim.“

He claimed that ”our way of thinking... will prove more powerful than yours.“ He loosely defined ”western thinking“ as formed by the values held by leaders of western or non-islamic nations. Its ”materialism, egoism and wildness“ has altered Christianity, he claimed.

Krekar, who’s been supported by the Norwegian government since arriving as a refugee from northern Iraq in the early 1990s, now faces deportation after violating the terms of his refugee status and being deemed a threat to national security.

Krekar told Dagbladet that he favours Islamic rule where political and religious leaders are one and the same. One such leader he respects, he said, is Osama bin Laden. ”Osama bin Laden is a good person,“ Krekar said. He claimed Osama bin Laden is considered a terrorist simply because he lacks his own state.

Update The Agora Weblog has translated the full English text of the interview with Krekar.

John Fund in his latest update to the "God and Taliban at Yale" story, quotes Ben Stein on the admittance of ex-Taliban spokesterrorist Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi:

"It's extremely discouraging. It's as if Yale had admitted a largely unrepentant SS man after World War II on the theory he would help rebuild Germany." He told me. "Yale is being run by Froot Loops and is wacky."

Last Wednesday, Mr. Surovov sent an angry email from a Columbia University account to Clinton Taylor and Debbie Bookstaber, two young Yale grads who are so frustrated at their alma mater's refusal to answer questions about Mr. Rahmatullah that they've launched a protest. Called NailYale, it focuses on the Taliban's barbaric treatment of women, which extended to yanking out the fingernails of those who wore nail polish. In a column on TownHall.com, they urged alumni "not give one red cent this year, but instead send Yale a red press-on fingernail."

Mr. Surovov, a Yale alumnus who has worked in its development office for three years and is on the board of the Yale Club of New Haven, wrote Mr. Taylor and Ms. Bookstaber at their private email addresses with the subject heading: "Y [sic] do you hate Yale." Here is his email in its entirety: "What is wrong with you? Are you retarded? This is the most disgraceful alumni article that I have ever read in my life. You failed to mention that you've never contributed to the Yale Alumni Fund in your life. But to suggest that others follow your negative example is disgusting."

Intrigued that someone had looked up his wife's giving record, David Bookstaber, a Yale computer science graduate, used Columbia's publicly accessible IT account database to trace the anonymous email. The trail led straight to Mr. Surovov's Yale office. On Thursday Mr. Taylor phoned Mr. Suvarov, who told him he was angry because the furor over the Taliban official was hurting fund raising and could lower Yale's rankings in the next U.S. News & World Report college survey. He also accused Mr. Taylor and Ms. Bookstaber of "terrorist tactics," which when challenged he amended to "terror tactics."

But sadly that is the definition of multicultural diversity--and modern intellectualism in general, as Theodore Dalrymple noted in 1998 when reviewing what passes for high art in England:

modern sophistication demands a sensibility that nothing can offend or even surprise, that is ironclad against shock or moral objection. To be a man of artistic taste now requires that you have no standards at all to be violated: which, as Ortega y Gasset said, is the beginning of barbarism.

(Via National Review's new "Phi Beta Cons" blog, where Fund says he'd be happy to move onto other stories "if Yale would just start answering questions and stop acting like the Nixon White House and stonewalling".)

Update: Roger L. Simon and his readers have some thoughts on Mr. Suvorov's deep knowledge of post-9/11 Middle Eastern geopolitics.

Via The Volokh Conspiracy. And incidentally, this is a pretty good cat fight video, too...

Ace of Spades writes:

Hollywood's finally made a film about terrorism, after years of avoiding the subject.

Of course, it's pro-terrorism.

Everybody associated with the productions--Portman, McTeigue, Weaving, Silver--forcefully, insistently stresses that V is an ambiguous, ambivalent figure. They express their hope that the movie will spark debates about the definition of terrorism.

Ace adds:

The debates they always seek to spark are about the defensibility of terrorism, rather than its repugnance.

Is there anyone in Hollywood actually brave enough to challenge his own biases and assumptions? It's pretty soft-soap to "challenge" the beliefs of other folks. How about your own once in a while? How about "challenging" the Hollywood community with a truly challenging movie-- one that posits that terrorism is simply evil and abominable?

(They long ago came to a conclusion on its equally evil twin brother, though.)

Things that make you go "Wow": The Arizona Cardinals nab nab star running back Edgerrin James (ex of the Indianapolis Colts) in what AP dubs "almost certainly the most significant free-agent acquisition in the history of the long-suffering franchise".

Wonder how much they miss Denny Green in Minnesota?

Joanne Jacobs writes:

Everyone's who tired of Jay Bennish, the Colorado geography teacher who compared Bush to Hitler as part of a long, rambling rant, should head to Miami to watch free speech advocates change sides.

Roger L. Simon writes that Dr. Wafa Sultan is "more dangerous to Islam than the Danish cartoons". Expatriate Saudi blogger The Religious Policeman writes that Sultan's appearance is "like porn for moderate Muslims".

Wretchard of the Belmont Club compares her actions to Tom Fox, the Christian activist sadly--but not ironically--killed by the very terrorists his actions propped up:

Both Fox and Sultan employed nonviolent methods to achieve their ends. Given the death threats leveled on Hirsi Ali, the Danish caricaturists of Mohammed, Salman Rusdie and others it is arguable that Dr. Sultan by her open opposition to Islamism is showing as much personal courage as anyone in the CPT. Since Dr. Sultan probably has relatives and friends in Syria or the Muslim community in America, she is likely in a more vulnerable situation than a Western Peace Activist who is only in the Middle East temporarily.

To Tom Fox's question "How do you stand firm against a car-bomber or a kidnapper?" -- a question to which he never provided an answer except to say it was not fighting -- Wafa Sultan's answer is that you start by denouncing it. You begin by intellectually opposing the ideology that drives it; that legitimizes it; that portrays it as attractive to children from their cradle. The CPT website, on the other hand, says that denunciation is part of the problem, because it dehumanizes the denounced; hides our Western guilt; and shows a lack of tolerance and respect for Islam.

(Via Austin Bay.)

In his Wall Street Journal profile, Tom Wolfe discusses how out of touch most media elites are:

And so many of them are so caught up in this kind of metropolitan intellectual atmosphere that they simply don't go across the Hudson River. They literally do not set foot in the United States. We live in New York in one of the two parenthesis states. They're usually called blue states--they're not blue states, the states on the coast. They're parenthesis states--the entire country lies in between."

George Bush's appeal, for Mr. Wolfe, was owing to his "great decisiveness and willingness to fight." But as to "this business of my having done the unthinkable and voted for George Bush, I would say, now look, I voted for George Bush but so did 62,040,609 other Americans. Now what does that make them? Of course, they want to say--'Fools like you!' . . . But then they catch themselves, 'Wait a minute, I can't go around saying that the majority of the American people are fools, idiots, bumblers, hicks.' So they just kind of dodge that question.

(Via Sissy Willis, who was disenchanted with the Journal writer's "profoundly shallow" profile of Wolfe.)

Update: Of course, the other big media institution has no problem admitting that it isn't too crazy about the folks in the Parenthesis States, either. As Peggy Noonan writes:

You don't have to be a genius to figure out that viewership of the Oscars is down because movie attendance itself is down, and that movie attendance is down because Hollywood isn't making the kind of movies that compel people to leave their homes and go to the multiplex.

There are those who think Hollywood hates America, and they have reason to think it. Hollywood does, as host Jon Stewart suggested, seem detached from the country it seeks to entertain. It is politically and culturally to the left of America, and it often seems disdainful of or oblivious to its assumptions and traditions.

I don't think it is true that studio executives and producers hate America. They are too confused, ambivalent and personally anxious to sit around hating their audience. I think they wish they understood America. I think they feel nostalgic for what they remember of it. I think they find it hard to find America, in a way.

I also think that it's not true that they're motivated only by money. Would that they were! They'd be more market-oriented if they cared only about money. What they care about a great deal is status, and in their community status is bestowed by the cultural left. This is an old story. But it seems only to get worse, not better.

If a lot of the American audience, certainly the red-state audience, assumes Hollywood hates them, they won't go as often to the movies as they used to. If you thought Wal-Mart hated you, would you shop there?

In a Business Week article titled, "How The Masses Will Innovate", MIT Media Lab head Frank Moss definitely gets it:

Creative expression (is another area). No longer will just a few write or create music. We will see 100 million people creating the content and art shared among them. Easy-to-use programs allow kids to compose everything form ringtones to full-fledged operas. It will change the meaning of creative art in our society.

We are already seeing early signs of it in blogs. The source of creative content is coming from the world. That revolution will go well outside of the written word to all forms of visual and performing arts.

it's worth noting that digital still photography, Photoshop, and especially Weblogs are all part of the same trend of creating entertainment--and opinion and news--from the bottom-up, rather than passively being a receptor to mass media. Which doesn't make the entertainment industry too thrilled, either. (And we already know what most journalists think of blogs.)

Great T-shirt slogan. And pretty much everyone who's on the Internet qualifies!

(Via Geek Entertainment TV.)

Austin Bay has some thoughts on the now fortunately very dead former Serb dictator Slobodan Milosevic:

Milosevic orchestrated the Serb-Croat war and crafted the Serb strategy of “creeping aggression.” He was also the bully behind “ethnic cleansing” in eastern Bosnia. He epitomized the move from “red to brown” in eastern Europe– moving from Communist to ultra-nationalist fascist as the Cold War ended. The Nazis and Communists both knew they were cut from the same hideous human mold. They both share a disdain for liberalism and a disregard for human life. They are also permanently anti-American. Hitler called the US cowboys– remember that next time you hear the US “cowboy” disparaged. You can see these traits displayed by the Stalinists still among us.

Update: Mark Steyn reprints his 2003 piece on Slobo, which reminds us that in December of that year, Milosevic won a seat in Serbia's legislature--even whilst jailed during his endless trial. As Steyn writes today:

his "trial" will presumably come to an end, now that Sloboperry Masonevic isn't around to cross-examine prosecution witnesses into the next decade. Instead, we can move on to a decade-long inquiry into his death.

Ed Morrissey has some thoughts on both the Southern Republican Leadership Conference straw poll yesterday (Frist won, Romney made a supririsingly strong showing, McCain's still wondering what he has to do to shore up his standing with conservatives), and on the left, the efforts to dilute the impact of New Hampshire's primary.

Mary Katharine Ham observes a Cuban official during the World Baseball Classic getting a lecture on "Free Speech 101 with the Puerto Rican police. The Cuban official must have loved that".

Or as Ham's post is titled, "Life is Beautiful".

Klaus Rohrich of Canada Free Press:

Climate catastrophics appears to have become a new religion, replacing Marxism and Christianity as the arbiter of acceptable belief. Anyone who questions the accepted climate-change theories currently in favor is considered a heretic.

G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything." Whoever said it - he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.

Amy Alkon is none-too-thrilled with LAX.

I'm still going with Oakland as the worst major west coast airport I've been in, though. And I did enjoy (with sufficiently reduced tourist trap expectations) LAX's Googie-inspired George Jetson-on-acid-style Encounter Restaurant.

Mark Steyn writes "Media shockingly ignorant of Muslims among us":

A fellow called Mohammed mows down a bunch of students? Just one of those things -- like a gran'ma in my neck of the woods a couple of years back who hit the wrong pedal in the parking lot and ploughed through a McDonald's, leaving the place a hideous tangle of crumbled drywall, splattered patties and incendiary hot apple-pie filling. Yet, according to his own statements, Taheri-azar committed an act of ideological domestic terrorism, which he'd planned for two months. He told police he was more disappointed more students in his path weren't struck and that he'd rented the biggest vehicle the agency had in order to do as much damage to as many people as possible. The Persian car pet may have been flooring it, but the media are idling in neutral, if not actively reversing away from the story as fast as they can. Taheri-azar informed the judge he was "thankful for the opportunity to spread the will of Allah," and it was apparently the will of Allah that he get behind the wheel of Allah.

Meanwhile, a new Washington Post/ABC poll finds that, in the words of the Post, "nearly half of Americans -- 46 percent -- have a negative view of Islam, seven percentage points higher than in the tense months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, when Muslims were often targeted for violence."

"Often" targeted? Want to put some hard numbers on that? Like to compare the "violence" Americans perpetrated on Muslims after the slaughter of thousands of their fellow citizens in the name of Allah with, say, the death toll perpetrated by Muslims annoyed over some itsy-bitsy cartoons in an obscure Danish newspaper? In September 2001, 99.99999 percent of Americans behaved with remarkable forbearance. If they're less inclined to give the benefit of the doubt these days, perhaps it's because of casual slurs like the Post's or the no-jihad-to-see-here-folks tone of the Times.

Ronald Stockton of the University of Michigan doesn't see it that way: "You're getting a constant drumbeat of negative information about Islam," he told the Post. By "negative information," Professor Stockton presumably means the London bombings, and the Bali bombings, and the Madrid bombings and the Istanbul bombings. But surely it's worth asking why in 2006 the Washington Post needs a man with a name like "Ronald Stockton" to explain Islam to us? The diversity bores in the media go out of their way to hire writers of color, writers of gender, writers of orientation. Yet, five years after 9/11, where's the New York Times' Muslim columnist? Where's the ''Today Show's'' Islamic weather girl? Why, indeed, are all the Muslim voices in the press broadly on the right -- Amir Taheri in the New York Post, Stephen Schwartz in the Weekly Standard, Fouad Ajami in the Wall Street Journal?

So the same Democrats who lecture that the war on terror is really a battle for "hearts and minds" now apparently favor bald discrimination against even friendly Arabs investing in the U.S.? Guantanamo must be closed because it's terrible PR, wiretapping al Qaeda in the U.S. is illegal, and the U.S. needs to withdraw from Iraq, but these Democratic superhawks simply will not allow Arabs to be put in charge of American longshoremen. That's all sure to play well on al Jazeera.

Update: Somewhat related thoughts from Jim Geraghty and Jack Kelly.

He may be The Only Republican in San Francisco, but he was far the only person to show up at the Danish Consulate for today's rally in support of the Dutch cartoonists and free speech--including at least one "hottie handing out Havarti".

Bring your own Havarti and Carlsberg, but click on over for photos, details, and links.

Over at Pajamas Theater 3000, I have a long--and very, very idiosyncratic--list of the top ten music how-to books (and a link to one lengthy magazine article) that have influenced my guitar playing and home studio recording over the last twenty years.

Les Paul was once asked if anybody taught him his incredible knowledge of electronics at it relates to music. And he instantly replied, "Just the library. I'm a real book man. If it's in a book, I can get it." And over the years, I've found that to be great advice. Over the past twenty years, I've read dozens and dozens of music books, and a few of these have permanently remained on my shelf.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, budding guitarists such as Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton had little to go on but their ears and trial and error--rock and roll was a new form of music, with little or no written instruction. Today however, it's a different ballgame. For guidance, there's a host of magazines, instructional tapes, CDs, DVDs, and books available.

Reuters notes that Crash producer Cathy Schulman is "flat broke":

It's been a bumpy ride. Accepting the fifth best picture Oscar ever awarded to a woman, independent producer Cathy Schulman landed on the stage of Hollywood's Kodak Theater on Sunday along with writer-director Paul Haggis as one of the credited producers of "Crash."

But while Schulman, 40, has a lot for which to be grateful, including a supportive husband of 12 years and a 5-year-old daughter, she can't entirely savor her win. She still faces a court fight against producer Bob Yari, who is furious that he was deprived of the chance for his own moment onstage because of rulings by the Producers Guild of America and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. And at what should be a career pinnacle, Schulman finds herself flat broke. "I have the interesting distinction of having made five movies in a row without ever being paid," she says. "I can't pay my bills."

Universal Studios president Ron Meyer put Schulman together with on-lot producers Michael Lobell and Andrew Bergman, and she learned about studio-level producing on the ill-fated Demi Moore movie "Striptease" and "Isn't She Great," starring Bette Midler as Jacqueline Susann. "We had fabulously fancy-schmancy offices at Universal," Schulman recalls. "I learned how to make big-budget movies, but they were not the kind of movies I was interested in."

Sam Goldwyn was famous for saying "Include me out" of deals he wanted to avoid. Schulman's career seems dominated by films that American audiences want to be included out of as well.

(Which is why she probably won't be broke for long: like Robert Altman, Woody Allen and Rob Reiner, armed with an Oscar and the appropriate leftwing pedigree, she'll probably work for life in Hollywood, no matter how little her movies make at the box office.)

In Anthony Burgess' seminal work, he wrote that man is born with the capacity to choose both good and evil; when you take one of those choices away, "he ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice".

Daniel Henninger looks at how Google's self-proclaimed "Don't be evil" philosphy is doing these days:

Google, as it was born into the world, announced the good news that the company's creed was, "Don't be evil." From day one the whole Internet enterprise has been similarly goggle-eyed about itself. Read any of the many doctrinal statements on behalf of the Internet or attend one of its constant symposiums, such as the two U.N.-sponsored World Summits on the Information Society held since 2003 and at every turn you will find the language of "revolutionary transformation." Here's Principle No. 1 from the 2003 World Information Summit: "We, the representatives of the peoples of the world . . . declare our common desire and commitment to build a people-centered, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society, where everyone can create," etc., etc. And stage global rampages.

What God told Adam and Eve was essentially "Don't be evil." So Google, Yahoo and the rest of the Internet community have time to discover the tough moral complexities of life outside the electronic garden. That said, there are strong reasons for supporting the Internet industry's innocents abroad. An important mutuality of interests exists between these idealists and the traditionalists they so often seek to displace.

Start with the idea of being free to express one's political views anywhere in any way, a no-brainer on Planet WebWorld. But it appears that several hundred million or so Muslim inhabitants of Planet Earth aren't fully invested yet in one of the most foundational political ideas of Western thought, dating back at least to Milton's "Areopagitica." Today government systems to filter, block or punish politics on the Internet exist not only in China but throughout the Middle East, notably in Iran, one of the heaviest Web-using nations in the world.

The age-old tendency of governments to monitor and regulate behavior, however, has never been limited to speech. In his congressional testimony, Google's Elliot Schrage raised the "matter of business." After noting that China is an "important market" and that Google's competitors are there, he said: "It would be disingenuous to say that we don't care about that because, of course, we do. We are a business with stockholders, and we want to prosper and grow in a highly competitive world. At the same time, acting ethically is a core value for our company, and an integral part of our business culture."

The principle of "acting ethically" is a primary value among people who think about making rules for the Internet, and that's fine. But they and Internet companies like Google are making what they seem to think are special claims for their moral status--as something new that "transforms" any society they touch for the better. If so, then Wal-Mart, Exxon or McDonald's, indeed the entire globalizing enterprise, are entitled to make much the same claim. Google with a market cap floating around $108 billion can't purport that it is significantly different than any of the other capitalists that were trashed by anti-globalists on the streets of Seattle and Genoa.

The Internet fraternity conveys a persona of being really nice, really smart people who want to be open and creative and . . . good. The scent of moral condescension to "old" structures hangs heavily in the air. So it's more than ironic to see executives from Google and Yahoo subjected to morally absolutist criticism from politicians and pundits over attempting to do business in the Chinese market. Google's share price is under enough critical pressure just now without thinking about grandly withdrawing from China's 111 million Internet-user market.

Man, the Veep's got to be more careful in choosing his backdrops...

(Via Michelle Malkin.)

Update: Conspiracy theorists' worst nightmares come true!

(Sorry, Groucho.)

Cathy Seipp, Louis Wittig and Brent Bozell have a round-up of opinion on HBO's coming series on bigomy, titled, appropriately enough, Big Love.

In an early episode of Mary Tyler Moore, Lou Grant faced the possibility of being laid off, and quipped, "I'm 45 years old. In politics, I'd be called 'The Kid'".

With 88-year old Robert Byrd and 82-year old Frank Lautenberg in Washington, the age range has only skewed further north. USA Today looks at some other senior citizens who could be joining them in the world's most distinguished--or at least most comfortable--retirement home.

In the mail today was a Guitar Center flyer, with a page devoted to the "Music Rising Limited Edition Les Paul":

Following a visit to New Orleans late last week, U2's The Edge announced today the unveiling of Music Rising, a campaign to raise funds to replace the lost instruments and accessories of the musicians affected by the hurricanes that devastated the Gulf Coast region two months ago. Lead partners Gibson Guitar and Guitar Center Music Foundation have spearheaded the initial effort by collaborating on the design, manufacture and sale of an exclusive Gibson guitar with all proceeds going directly to the Music Rising program. The guitar will be available through Guitar Center. The instrument captures the essence of the Gulf Coast's musical tradition. A very limited quantity will be produced with all proceeds benefiting Music Rising and a pledge of $1 million in support. The Gibson Music Rising guitar features hand-painted designs using the colors of Mardi Gras. Each guitar will be individually painted and handmade so no two will be alike.

I know it's for a worthy cause, but...yuck! It's definitely painted in the colors of Mardi Gras, though: that top looks like the byproduct of what the French Quarter's streets are covered with after a particularly hard partying Fat Tuesday.

So what should a great Les Paul look like? Pretty much exactly like this.

(And this is what one should sound like, incidentally.)

Larry Kudlow writes that the crisis with Iran will soon come to a head, one way or another:

“[T]he United States is keeping all options on the table,” Cheney said in a recent speech to a pro-Israel group. “We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

It just doesn’t seem like Iran has the slightest inclination whatsoever of applying the brakes to its nascent nuclear program. These guys are not going to listen. And the consequence of Tehran’s stubborn refusal suggests the inevitable moment of confrontation is drawing ever closer.

How this conflict will resolve itself is anyone’s guess. However, one thing looks certain: Israeli cards are on the table. Rest assured that if the United Nations sits on its hands with crazy Iran, we will witness seismic action by Israel to protect itself.

As for the market’s reaction to all this stuff, you really don’t see it reflected yet in oil prices or the stock market. But at some point, both may have to be re-priced to take account of the looming confrontation between Iran and the rest of the world.

I will be paying close attention to these developments.

Dan Rather visited my old stomping grounds in South Jersey yesterday, to give a speech on--wait for it--“Rather’s Rules” for improving journalism.

No, really! As NewsBusters writes, "Isn’t that a bit like 'Dr. Kevorkian’s Rules' for better medicine?"

In his speech, Rather repeated his recent chiding of the national media for being too soft, and in “need of a spine transplant.” But when it came to his own journalistic transgression, the 2004 60 Minutes hit piece on President Bush's National Guard service -- a report based on forged memos -- Rather crouched behind his Nixonian stone wall:

“‘I’ve said pretty much all I have to say about this subject,’ he said in response to a question. ‘The public wants to move on,’” the Courier-Post reported.

Incidentally, given the ego of the man in question, this post is probably as good a place as any to hang a link to Shrinkwrapped's two-part series on "Narcissism in the Real World".

Last month, after rapper/"smartest man in pop music" Kanye West appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone in a cliched Kanye-as-Jesus photo, Jonah Goldberg wrote in his syndicated column:

We're supposed to believe that West has been persecuted for his anti-Bush tirades and his determination to keep it real. But his biggest complaint is that people criticize him for being arrogant. "You want me to be great, but you don't ever want me to say I'm great?" he asks.

Of course, the editors also hoped to stir up some controversy, maybe even incite some religious conservatives to play to type, by exploiting the imagery of Jesus's suffering. I never went to Sunday school, but I don't recall that Jesus was crucified for being smug.

It’s all such an obvious con game. We hear so much about how kids today are cynical, skeptical, media-savvy, and so forth. But if they're buying this hooey, they're idiots.

When asked by Rolling Stone if he's worried that his outspokenness might cost him a Grammy, Kanye replied, speaking in the third person: "Kanye is always opinionated and outspoken, and now that it's Grammy time he turns into a house nigga? Come on. That's not even realistic." Right, but the suggestion that the guy with eight Grammy nominations is a pariah, never mind suffering from Christlike persecution, is entirely plausible?

Alas, this shtick works. It certainly worked for such "gangsta rappers" as Ice Cube, Ice-T, and Snoop Dogg, all of whom once talked a big game about keeping it real and not being "house niggas." Now they're all successful mainstream actors. Messrs. Cube and Dogg make a nice living appearing in family-friendly comedies. I guess acting came naturally to them.

Obviously, none of this is unique to rap or "black" music (quotation marks necessary because white suburban kids are the biggest market for the stuff). Big corporations have been marketing "rebellion" since the 1950s. And the kids fall for it every time. In 1968, Columbia Records promised in an ad that "the man can't bust our music!" Madonna made her career glamorizing slattern chic and attacking bourgeois morality. Now she peddles children's books.

Today, there's a great cellphone commercial in which a corporate executive explains to his assistant that his new billing plan is his own private way of "sticking it to the man." His assistant replies, "But sir, you are the man." The boss says, with some dismay, "I know."

As far as the music industry goes, Kanye West is the man, but he won't admit it. Instead, he sells himself as a victim of a society that can't handle his truth. Four million records sold and saturation adulation in the media suggest that it can handle his truth just fine.

The problem is, it ain't the truth. It's just a scam for kids too stupid to recognize they're being played — again.

Want to be a real rebel? Read a book.

The best thing about Three 6 Mafia winning an Oscar for Best Song is the likelihood of "pimp" losing its luster of hipness.

While the prospect of previously oblivious whites adopting the word is a nauseating probability, the mainstreaming of "pimp" should reduce its popularity in the black communities where it first shucked its cobwebs and regained its currency. Its anticipated lapse in popularity creates an opportunity to suggest new lingo to my fellow African-American city dwellers, who often originate the nation's catchiest slang.

My first suggestion: "scholar."

Imagine yourself amid all the men who used to gather aimlessly on street corners, lounge on the steps of other people's houses and hang out with the rest of the worshipful congregations outside package liquor stores -- all of you deeply absorbed in library books.

Except you can top them all by trundling down the street with -- you guessed it -- a wheelbarrow almost overflowing with the latest volumes by our nation's best authors.

You'll help to popularize an exciting new trend. Once it catches on in "urban" neighborhoods, it will inevitably "cross over" into white ones and, before you know it, openly building one's intellectual muscles will be known as "acting black."

You can win friends and influence people -- plus earn the undying admiration of the women in your neighborhood who are pining for an intelligent, well-read mate -- by handling your load with a mixture of staunch self-discipline and weary resignation.

"Say, brother," one of your fellow intellectuals might say, "looks like you have quite a bit of studying to do this fine evening."

"You're right," you might reply. "I could be off luring vulnerable women into an exploitative economic relationship based on the trading of sex for money -- behavior that would benefit neither myself, the hapless women or all those desperate, duplicitous and disease-spreading customers who should be home with their wives and children (see below). But what can I tell you? It's hard out here for a scholar."

A second suggestion: "husband."

Back in December, in TCS Daily, I looked at the large drop-off in Hollywood's 2005 domestic box office revenue. The AFP wire service notes how America's turning away from the movies has had a global impact:

Hollywood movie ticket sales around the world dropped by 7.9 percent last year to 23 billion dollars, with the US box office accounting for nearly 40 percent of the haul, a study showed.

Movie ticket receipts in North America dipped by six percent in 2005 to nine billion dollars, according to a study by the ratings statistics firm Nielsen Entertainment/NRG that comes as movie-goers increasingly stay out of cinemas.

It's like mass media's become a niche market, or something!

The Anchoress proclaims it "A hand poorly played by everyone".

Mass hysteria, and believing that perception is invariably reality will do that.

Update: Joe Lieberman supported the deal, demonstrating that he is both a voice of common sense, and thus, not at all surprisingly, increasingly a pariah, on the left.

Another Update: Jim Geraghty, who did much in this now-deceased deal's early days to reduce hysteria, has some thoughts:

1) Well, this takes what had been a sucking chest wound of an issue for the Bush White House and makes it go away. Recall that at one point not too long ago, Harriet Miers' withdrawn nomination was supposed to be a sign of an unstoppable GOP crack-up.

2) If this deal had an unrevealed aspect to it, involving intelligence-sharing, I hope we figured out some other quid pro quo to help out the UAE.

3) Those who demagogued this issue and helped organize the campaign of misinformation… got away with it. No consequences. No deterrence from using this tactic again. Expect to see it again in the near future.

At the top of his "Best of the Web" column today, James Taranto hypothesizes an interesting theory about media blowback:

Anti-Muslim sentiment is on the rise, a new poll suggests, the Washington Post reports:

As the war in Iraq grinds into its fourth year, a growing proportion of Americans are expressing unfavorable views of Islam, and a majority now say that Muslims are disproportionately prone to violence, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The poll found that nearly half of Americans--46 percent--have a negative view of Islam, seven percentage points higher than in the tense months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, when Muslims were often targeted for violence.

"Muslims were often targeted for violence" is a drastic overstatement; "occasionally" would have been more accurate. But how could it be that Americans are more hostile to Islam today than they were in the immediate aftermath of an Islamist massacre in New York?

Our sense is that the media's antiwar bias is feeding the public's anti-Muslim bias. By relentlessly focusing on the bad news in Iraq and playing down the good, journalists perpetuate an image of the Muslim world as a hostile, uncivilized place.

Update: Related thoughts from Jim Geraghty.

Kinko? What is this Kinko? Tim Blair notes:

Kofi Annan is alarmed to learn of a rival warlord:

When asked by a staffer if U.N. jobs will be farmed out to Kinko’s from now on, Mr. Annan showed how out of touch he has become from his underlings and from his fellow New Yorkers. “What is Kinko?” he asked.

Bring this Kinko to Kofi! Kofi destroy Kinko!

The Guardian looks at England's "culture of contempt for parenthood".

There is another culture in England--and the rest of Europe, for that matter--that's simply getting on with childrearing though...

"Microsoft Unveils Ultracompact Computer".

And speaking of the Final Frontier, Drudge writes that NASA's Cassini spacecraft:

may have found evidence of liquid water reservoirs that erupt in Yellowstone-like geysers on Saturn's moon Enceladus. The rare occurrence of liquid water so near the surface raises many new questions about the mysterious moon.

(Sorry, wrong sci-fi franchise.)

Back in 2002, Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) infamously asked, "Why is this man (Osama bin Laden) so popular around the world? Why are people so supportive of him in many countries … that are riddled with poverty?"

Citizen Smash finds a former US Diplomat riffing from the same morally equivalent songbook:

ANN WRIGHT: ...Why is Bin Laden and al Qaeda [sic] intent on doing harm to the people of America? Is there a reason why they are after us? And, if there are some reasons... should we consider, perhaps, evaluating whether or not they may have a point on a few things?
(applause)

ANN WRIGHT: For example, one of the earlier things... I mean, if you go through the various tracts that he's given, there are quite a few items that he has a bone to pick with the United States. And quite honestly, I think, having been a diplomat for sixteen years, a lot of people of the world, not just Bin Laden and al Qaeda, have the same bones to pick with America. And a lot of them have to do with leaving, first, U.S. military... on the holy soil of Saudi Arabia -- that was a particular one for them, for al Qaeda and Bin Laden.

But the inordinate use of resources by the United States, our total dependency on oil, and our inability to decide that perhaps our lifestyles are a little bit over the top, and that maybe there is a way that we can have a very comfortable life, but not use up 25 percent of the world's resources for four percent of the population.

(applause)

ANN WRIGHT: And there are some things that we as Americans can do, that very quickly will show Bin Laden, al Qaeda, the rest of the world, that we aren't... We really do have to evaluate what we do in the world, and to the rest of the world, we are... we aren't good stewards of the Earth. That we are sucking up stuff. We're contributing inordinately to global warming, which means that many of the island populations of the world will disappear, as well as most of the coasts of the United States.

We have a lot to do. And hopefully, we can get an administration that will force us to do a few of these things, so that to those people who want to take violent actions against us for some of these things, that perhaps they will see, as the rest of the world will see very quickly and appreciate, the fact that we can change our ways. It's not that we're all bad. But, we've got a little bit of changing to do, I think, ourselves.

Well, about as nicely as Islamofascists have treated Europe since 9/11, I'd guess.

Found via Bizzy Blog, Thomas Lifson and Jack Risko of The American Thinker go deep inside the New York Times' financial numbers. This factoid is particularly intriguing:

The Times has seen its comparable core metropolitan circulation decline by 27% since 1993 (the first year that such figures were available online), when it had a circulation of 758,000. Its current 556,000 circulation places it a dismal number three in its home market behind the New York Daily News (689,000) and the New York Post (663,000).

The New York Times Company’s common shares are divided into separate classes, with the holdings of the founding Sulzberger clan able to elect a majority of directors, despite accounting for a single digit share of total equity. The family gets to call the shots, and so far they are sticking with Pinch Sulzberger, who dreamed up the national circulation strategy, along with some other growth and diversification moves (buying the Boston Globe and investing in the widely unwatched Discovery Times cable channel) which have not exactly set the world on fire.

The way that the Times reports its numbers – so obliquely as to draw attention away from its decline – shows that it does not run itself for shareholders as a normal public corporation should.

But the way the Times reports its business risk does bear a certain uncanny resemblance to the way the Times reports many political issues on which it has a party line. Facts are presented, but in ways intended to persuade the reader to swallow a partial or even misleading truth, because management wants them to believe something dubious.

One man, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr, chooses those who write the editorial content and 10-K reports. Consistency in approach between the news and business sides of the enterprise is not really surprising, and likely reflects his personal leadership.

Last week, Jim Geraghty wrote:

Welcome to Post-Tipping Point politics. There is no upside to doing the right thing – which is to emphasize, as one blogger put it, that there is a difference between Dubai and Damascus. There is tremendous political upside to doing the wrong thing, boldly declaring, “I don’t care what the Muslim world thinks, I’m not allowing any Arab country running ports here in America! I don’t care how much President Bush claims these guys are our allies, I don’t trust them, and I’m not going to hand them the keys to the vital entries to our country!”

The House Appropriations Committee just voted to block the Dubai ports deal by a whopping 62-2 margin. I've come to believe that the deal isn't a threat, though I grant that reasonable people disagree with me. But I can't help but think that this vote isn't driven by reasonable concerns as much as political panic.

Virginia Postrel (whose Dynamist e-zine was one of our original blogging inspirations) recently, courageously, donated a kidney to an ailing friend. Postrel writes that donor and donee are fortunately, both doing fine.

Michelle Malkin describes a novel protest over Yale's admission of former Taliban spokesterrorist, Rahmatullah Hashemi.

The Opinionated Bastard notes that Big Media's mindset has changed not one iota over the last 15 years:

Let me tell you a story.

I grew up in Simi Valley.

My wife grew up in LA.

My wife has been beat up by the LAPD. Simi Valley was where the Rodney King trial was held (though none of the jurors were from there, FYI).

Remember that.

I was in LA the day of the Rodney King verdict.

All day, I saw the media run retrospectives of the Watts riots. “Look, everyone! The darkies might riot!” Then, after the verdict came in, I same them, for 4 hours asking black people:

Are you going to riot?

Are you going to riot?

Are you going to riot?

Are you going to riot?

Are you going to riot?

Are you going to riot?

After goading for hours, they found something somewhere! Some people pulled Reginald Denny from his truck at the intersection of Florence and Normandie. Instantly, they broadcast the beating on all the channels. The message was:

The riot is on!

And sadly, it was.

Prior to the Iraq War coverage, the local television coverage was the most despicable thing I had ever seen the media do. Does the LAPD bear some blame for the riots? Yes. Does Rodney King? Yes.

But for me, the lion's share of the blame falls on the local television stations in LA. The behavior of both Rodney King and the LAPD was terrible, and the verdict, well, it was the verdict. But I truly don't think there would have been riots if the media hadn't intentionally fanned the flames. 50-60 people died in those riots. I lay those deaths to a large extent at the door of the LA media, yes.

Last week, I saw the media chant:

Is there going to be a civil war?

Is there going to be a civil war?

Is there going to be a civil war?

Is there going to be a civil war?

Is there going to be a civil war?

They could have just as easily asked:

So, when are you guys going to work it out?

Update: Further thoughts, here.

Gordon Parks, the man who directed the seminal "blaxploitation" movie, Shaft, was 93. Like Stanley Kubrick, he traded a brilliant career as a magazine still photographer for the movie world.

Parks' son had a similar talent, directing Shaft's equally potent successor, Superfly in 1972. Sadly, he died only a few years later in a plane crash.

Update: Scott Johnson of Power Line has more.

(Not to be confused with The Completion Backwards Principle, of course.)

Via Dr. Helen, psychologist and blogger John Suler has an interesting take on why people act the way they do online--and why it's often very, very different from how they'd act in person.

Think of some of the coarser language floating through the Blogosphere. Think most of those bloggers drop that many F-bombs whilst talking to their friends and relatives? No! Their conversation is slanted more towards using words such as whilst...

Way, way out there; Tim Blair writes:

Who was behind those Danish Motoons? Lyndon LaRouche knows:

George Shultz is behind that cartoon run in Jyllands-Posten, which was used as a trigger to set off these Islamic protests around the world.

Personally, I suspect Charles M. Shultz. More of a cartooning background. Think about it.

Or at least that's what they want us to believe...

The dutch are considering banning the burqa. Tammy Bruce says "Yay!", adding:

It is hostile, and should be considered the equivalent of having blacks walk around in leg-irons. And don't tell me it's okay because "the women want it that way." Yes, and we don't take seriously the insistence of battered women that they deserve it. Sure, some really believe they do, but that doesn't mean civilized society looks away and allows the brain-washed to dictate social policy.

Apartheid and Female Genital Mutilation were (are) also argued as "cultural" or "a religious practice." So what. Those are specious arguments used for years by oppressive tyrants looking for an excuse to justify their barbaric behavior.

Let's hope the Netherlands leads the way on this, allowing the European Union to actually do more than spout slogans about human rights and equality.

Here's a fun 1997 essay on Cato's Website by P.J. O'Rourke on the dangers of redistributionism:

The Bible might seem to be a strange place to be doing economic research, but I have been thinking, from a political economy point of view, about the Tenth Commandment. Now the first nine commandments concern theological principles--thou shall not steal and kill and so forth. Fair enough. Then there's the Tenth Commandment: "Thou shall not covet they neighbor's wife. Thou shall not covet thy neighbor's house, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor's." I mean, here are God's basic rules for how we should live, a very brief list of sacred obligations and solemn moral precepts, and right at the end of it is: "Don't envy your buddy his cow." What is that doing there? Why would God, with just 10 things to tell Moses, choose jealousy about the stuff the guy next door has? Well, think about how important to the well-being of a community that commandment actually is. What that commandment says is that if you want a donkey, if you want a pot roast, if you want a cleaning lady, don't bitch about it, go get your own!

The Bible might seem to be a strange place to be doing economic research, but I have been thinking, from a political economy point of view, about the Tenth Commandment. Now the first nine commandments concern theological principles--thou shall not steal and kill and so forth. Fair enough. Then there's the Tenth Commandment: "Thou shall not covet they neighbor's wife. Thou shall not covet thy neighbor's house, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor's." I mean, here are God's basic rules for how we should live, a very brief list of sacred obligations and solemn moral precepts, and right at the end of it is: "Don't envy your buddy his cow." What is that doing there? Why would God, with just 10 things to tell Moses, choose jealousy about the stuff the guy next door has? Well, think about how important to the well-being of a community that commandment actually is. What that commandment says is that if you want a donkey, if you want a pot roast, if you want a cleaning lady, don't bitch about it, go get your own!

The Tenth Commandment sends a message to socialists, to collectivists, to people who believe that wealth is best obtained by redistribution, and that message is clear and concise: Go to hell! It's as simple as that.