"DARPA sets goal for bionic arm by 2009". Sounds good to me: 2009 would be 40 years after DARPA invented the Internet (sorry Al), and ten years before the 2019 date the replicant-inhabited world of Blade Runner depicted.

Silicon Valley boasts "Geek Fight Club".

Because of how easy it is for smart White House press secretaries to look good bouncing off her screeds disguised as questions.

(Via Mary Katharine Ham.)

Update: Sister Toldjah tells you more.

Veteran liberal journalist Gregg Easterbrook rebuts Al Gore's new agitpropumentary An Inconvenient Truth; Robert Bidinotto rebuts Easterbrook:

Ah, but you see, Gregg, your counter-argument -- that human deprivation is unethical -- rests on the implicit premise that promoting human life is moral. That's a premise that Al Gore and his environmentalist buddies do not accept.

Spot-on indeed; related thoughts from Tim Blair.

John Stephenson links to the NY Times' summary:

Washington-area sniper John Allen Muhammad was convicted of six more of the killings Tuesday after a trial in which he acted as his own attorney and the prosecution’s star witness was his young protege and partner in crime, Lee Boyd Malvo.

Muhammad, 45, is already under a death sentence in Virginia for a killing there. The most he can get for the six Maryland slayings is life in prison without parole.

The jury took slightly more than four hours to convict him after a four-week trial.

The trial marked the first time Malvo testified against the man prosecutors say was his mentor and manipulator.

AllahPundit adds, "He’s already been sentenced to death in Virginia, of course; the maximum sentence in Maryland is life without parole".

You can win if you bring knife to a gunfight...if you're a Marine.

Clive Davis sings the praises of John Frankenheimer's 1966 movie, Seconds. Clive rates it as better than Frankenheimer's best-known film, The Manchurian Candidate; I'd list it as (pardon the pun) his second greatest movie, and arguably, Rock Hudson's best.

While the 1970s are thought of as a renaissance in American filmmaking, it helps to remember just how potent Hollywood could be when it wanted to, long before Coppola or Scorsese arrived on the scene. Early on in college, I perused the library's collection of 1960s issues of Sight & Sound, the influential British film journal, and was reminded what a great era in moviemaking that decade was. For a great look back at it, Ethan Mordden's 1990 book, Medium Cool, is certainly a fun read.

Related thoughts, here and here.

Update: The video above was simply floating around YouTube, but Michelle Malkin custom-produced her own video tribute, for her Hot Air site.

Memorial Day? What's that?!

Update: Found via the update to the Insta-post, Dogpile has a beautiful, and beautifully simple tribute on their search engine's homepage.

Another Update: Greg Gutfeld's young "niece" expresses the transnational worldview surprisingly well at the HuffPost.

One More: Google answered user email last year wondering why there was nothing commerating Memorial Day in perfect corporatespeak:

We have to balance this rotating calendar with the need to maintain the consistency of the Google homepage.

Furthermore, Google’s special logos tend to be lighthearted in nature. If we were to commemorate Memorial Day, we would want to express reverence, rather than mirth. This would be a particularly challenging design. We would not want to, in any way, create a graphic that could be interpreted as disrespectful. In light of the mail we have received about this, we are actively considering designs we could display on this day next year. We welcome any suggestions you may have.

So they had a year to put something together, and punted. Dogpile's illustration looks like it was knocked off by a Web artist in a couple of hours at most and looks perfectly appropriate to me; why couldn't Google do the same? (And yes, I know the answer.)

Late Update (5/30/06 2:16 PM): Welcome Corner readers! Please look around, there's much here we think you'll enjoy.

This time over British troop desertion levels, which its headlines claim is at record levels, even as the article below illustrates that it isn't. Follow the links, here.

Previous Beeb-brushing, here and here.

Update: More here.

In his latest Chicago Sun-Times column, Mark Steyn views the transformation of Congressional Republicans from their 1994 Contract With America days of holding government accountable to their aloof, elite worldview. Or as Steyn puts it: "Gingrich revolutionaries turn into arrogant elite":

Of all the many marvelous Ronald Reagan lines, this is my favorite: ''We are a nation that has a government -- not the other way around.''

He said it in his inaugural address in 1981, and, despite a Democrat-controlled Congress, he lived it. It sums up his legacy abroad: Across post-Communist Europe, from Lithuania to Bulgaria to Slovenia, governments that had nations have been replaced by nations that have governments.

But it's an important distinction for non-totalitarian states, too. For example, in May 2004 the then-Canadian government proudly announced that in the last month the country had "created" 56,100 new jobs. That's terrific news, isn't it? The old economic engine positively roaring away in top gear. But on closer inspection, of those 56,100 new jobs, 4,200 were self-employed, 8,900 were in private businesses, and the remaining 43,000 were on the public payroll. That's why they call it "creating jobs": 77 percent of new jobs were government jobs, paid for by the poor schlubs working away in the remaining 23 percent; the "good news" was merely an acceleration of the remorseless transfer from the dynamic sector of the economy to the non-dynamic. For too much of its recent history, Canada has been a government that has a nation. And across the pond the European Union is a government that has a continent.

As Steyn says, the self-imposed rulers of "Incumbistan" are a "government that has a nation".

John Kerry is back. And he has a hat!

(* Not to be confused with The Blogosphere Full Employment Act Of 2004.)

Update: John In Carolina has some thoughts as well.

With Memorial Day weekend upon us, it's worth flashing back to a 2004 post by The Mudville Gazette, which reprinted a series of quotes from B.G. "Jug" Burkett, who, in late 2003, received the Army's Distinguished Civilian Service Award. The award was presented to him by former President George H.W. Bush; few men have done more than Burkett to restore the good name of Vietnam vets, whom the public have often negatively branded as addled losers since the early 1970s and the efforts of a certain Winter Soldier and others. As Burkett has said:

Though I pointed out that many successful Dallas men, such as former Dallas Cowboy quarterback Roger Staubach, had served in Vietnam, to them, men like Staubach were the exceptions to the rule, the rare individuals who were not ruined by their war experiences. "Everybody" knew most soldiers who fought in Vietnam were reluctant draftees, poor minorities, or dumb cannon fodder not smart enough to avoid military service. When I told them that I - a financial adviser with undergraduate and graduate degrees from major universities - had voluntarily served in Vietnam, they looked at me in disbelief.
"You?" one said. "That surprises me. You seem so normal." Another corporate executive looked right past me - a man with short hair wearing a conservative suit - in his waiting room and asked his secretary, "Where's that Vietnam veteran who's here to see me?"

* * *

In the years after returning home from my military service in Vietnam in 1969, I watched the negative images of Vietnam veterans in movies like Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, and Platoon. I saw the stereotypes on bookshelves, in newspaper stories, on the TV news. By the Eighties, more than two decades after the fighting ended, there were reputedly hundreds of thousands of homeless Vietnam vets, most suffering from PTSD. On top of that, they suffered physical disabilities brought on by poisoning from the defoliant Agent Orange. The common refrain: More men had died by their own hand -- victims of suicide -- than had been killed during the decade of the War.
Still, the popular perception of Vietnam veterans as victims tortured by memories - drug-abusers, criminals, homeless bums or psychotic losers about to go berserk in a post office with an AK-47 - did not fit me or anybody I knew who had served in Vietnam, even those who had been horribly wounded or captured and tortured by the enemy. Certainly their lives were not always perfect, but their problems could not be attributed to their experiences in Vietnam. I brushed off the negative caricatures thinking, "That's not reality."

Sadly, all too often, it still is in Hollywood's eyes.

Have a better one: Warner Brothers is finally getting their act together and releasing Ridley Scott's super-duper, restored, updated, director's cut edition of Blade Runner on DVD, HD-DVD and theatrically as well.

I loved Blade Runner when it originally ran in 1983 (I think I saw it three times that summer), but--as often happens--it took a little time for the opinion of the public at large to catch up with mine...

Reuters isn't content to merely have terrorists drop by their office parties, now they're apparently threatening bloggers with death.

Meanwhile, Saddam's favorite member of Parliament isn't content to compare Tony Blair to Hitler, but to call for his assassination.

Not anti-war, merely on the other side, as the saying goes.

Update: Power Line has some thoughts on the Reuters incident; Ed Morrissey has more on Galloway.

Power Line's John Hinderaker writes:

This was the text of the email:

I look forward to the day when you pigs get your throats cut....

I would not, personally, consider that a death threat, although it's certainly an unpleasant message. We've gotten a lot worse from liberals, and I'm sure Charles has too. Nowadays, that's pretty much how liberals talk.

For what it's worth, that's not my definition of liberal.

This could very well be a historic first: I can't think of another podcast that combines the words "scone" and "nipple ring"--and certainly not within the same sentence, courtesy of special guest (sitting in for Tammy Bruce this week), Jeff Goldstein.

In other words, don't miss this week's Pajamas Blog Week In Review!

Update: Once a closely-guarded secret of anchormen everywhere, Jeff reveals the method of obtaining great-sounding Professional Pundit-Style vocals.

The L.A. Times wonders where Hollywood glamour went. Michael Medved and Frederica Mathewes-Green answered the Times' question even before the article was written.

Will Collier of VodkaPundit writes:

We're a long, long way from 2008, but I'm ready to make a prediction. All by itself, this statement will prevent Hillary Clinton from winning a single "red" state.

And no, surprisingly enough, it isn't this statement.

In late 2004, we noted that some economists believe that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2001 has caused a growing number of businesses to register with foreign stock exchanges rather than the New York Stock Exchange to avoid its onerous enforcement procedures. City Journal's, Nicole Gelinas writes that Sarbanes-Oxley could have negative consequences for the city of New York as well:

The New York Stock Exchange’s proposed merger with Paris-based Euronext, which runs four electronic stock exchanges in Europe, may seem like positive news for New York’s economy. Wouldn’t it be great for Gotham to have the world’s first global stock exchange headquartered right on Wall Street, as the NYSE intends? But in fact one of the NYSE’s key reasons for initiating the merger carries troubling implications for New York’s economic future.

Many corporate executives, particularly those heading up-and-coming entrepreneurial companies at home and abroad, now consider the New York market an obsolete place to do business, and they are flocking to exchanges in Europe instead. In 2005, the NYSE and the Nasdaq won only 28 new international listings, a modest 16 percent increase from the year before; by contrast, the two major European exchanges, the London and the Luxembourg Stock Exchanges, won 50 listings between them, more than double their new listings in 2004. The NYSE is reaching across the Atlantic just to stay competitive.

Europe is winning business that once went automatically to New York largely because companies find that the burdensome requirements imposed by America’s four-year-old Sarbanes-Oxley law simply aren’t worth the trouble. Sarbanes-Oxley (SOx), enacted in haste by Congress and signed by President Bush just months after Enron’s 2001 demise shook the financial markets, requires companies to jump through numerous hoops each year at the behest of government regulators. Companies of all sizes now must spend millions of extra dollars annually to ensure that they have adequate “internal controls” in place if they want a listing on a U.S.-based stock exchange. The Chicago-based Foley & Lardner law firm has estimated that for medium-sized companies, the “cost of being public” has risen 223 percent since 2002, due to these new rules.

SOx’s purpose is to minimize the risk of improper and inconsistent accounting practices, especially those that some managers employ to smooth over volatile quarterly numbers or to paint a falsely positive picture of their companies to investors. But because regulators haven’t spelled out exactly what they mean by good “internal controls,” company executives must guess, adding massive uncertainty to the cost of doing business. The law also forces companies’ chief financial officers to spend inordinate amounts of time shuffling through bureaucratic paperwork, instead of helping to map corporate strategy.

European and Asian companies that, like the vast majority of their American counterparts, already boasted rational accounting and auditing policies long before SOx understandably aren’t interested in spending all that extra money just to list in New York. And they’re finding plenty of willing investors abroad anyway. “Five years ago, most big companies seeking public financing felt compelled to list their shares in New York. Today, non-U.S. companies are finding markets like London and Hong Kong equal to the capital-raising task,” the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

As Gelinas writes, "Chuck Schumer, call your office", and work to fix this law.

We've linked a few times to this Website forecasting a fascinating, if troubling near future for the legacy news media in the coming years.

In a not entirely surprising development, Iowahawk has seen a very different future...

Here's Newsweek's Howard Fineman in January 2005, only a couple of months after the bruising presidental election cycle, in which a series of poor judgements by a biased and overreaching media culminated in Ra^TherGate:

A political party is dying before our eyes — and I don't mean the Democrats. I'm talking about the "mainstream media," which is being destroyed by the opposition (or worse, the casual disdain) of George Bush's Republican Party; by competition from other news outlets (led by the internet and Fox's canny Roger Ailes); and by its own fraying journalistic standards. At the height of its power, the AMMP (the American Mainstream Media Party) helped validate the civil rights movement, end a war and oust a power-mad president. But all that is ancient history.

Now the AMMP is reeling, and not just from the humiliation of CBS News. We have a president who feels it's almost a point of honor not to hold more press conferences — he's held far fewer than any modern predecessor — and doesn't seem to agree that the media has any "right" to know what's really going in inside his administration. The AMMP, meanwhile, is regarded with ever growing suspicion by American voters, viewers and readers, who increasingly turn for information and analysis only to non-AMMP outlets that tend to reinforce the sectarian views of discrete slices of the electorate.

Yes, I know: A purely objective viewpoint does not exist in the cosmos or in politics. Yes, I know: Today's media foodfights are mild compared with the viciousness of pamphleteers and partisan newspapers of old, from colonial times forward. Yes, I know: The notion of a neutral "mainstream" national media gained dominance only in World War II and in its aftermath, when what turned out to be a temporary moderate consensus came to govern the country.

Still, the notion of a neutral, non-partisan mainstream press was, to me at least, worth holding onto. Now it's pretty much dead, at least as the public sees things.

And with its death, Fineman has no problem greasing the skids for Al Gore's new movie about--what else?--global warming:

In Washington the other day, I got a chance to tell Al Gore something I’d meant to say for a long time, which was that I thought his real strength, his real contribution, was as an observer — writer, explainer, outsider — and not as a politician.

The new movie about him was evidence of that, I said. He gave me a blank, dismissive look, and an “umm” for a verbal response.

I’ve known and covered Gore for decades, so maybe his reaction was inspired by Groucho Marx, who always said that he would never join a club that would have him as a member. But I think the brusque reply carried a different message: don’t assume that I’m ready to be put out to that pasture just yet.

Gore has a certain aura of nobility about him these days — a mixture of rue, acceptance and lofty goals that makes him almost, well, endearing.

Compare that sort of fawning coverage with anything the MSM has written about President Bush from 2004 to today.

The Media Research Center compares the rough treatment that Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ received from the legacy media, versus the smooth sailing of the recent movie version of The Da Vinci Code.

It's also worth flashing back to 2004, to see how 23 critics viewed both The Passion and Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11.

Over at City Journal, Nicole Gelinas writes, "Despite Pataki and Bloomberg, the private sector is fixing lower Manhattan":

Seven World Trade Center officially opens its doors May 23 after an efficient two years of design and construction. Seven is a stunning piece of work. Just as important, it’s the first tangible evidence that lower Manhattan will triumph over 9/11, both architecturally and economically. Who built Seven? Not Governor Pataki or Mayor Bloomberg, but private-sector developer Larry Silverstein, who completed the 52-story tower while the pols dithered over 16 still-scarred acres across the street.

Silverstein could build Seven so quickly—replacing the office building of the same name he owned before 9/11—because it’s adjacent to the World Trade Center site, not part of it. Thus, Silverstein’s lease with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the bistate entity that owns Ground Zero, doesn’t govern the site. Free from the government “direction” that has overseen Ground Zero redevelopment, Silverstein did what he does best: he built.

And as the photos that accompany the article illustrate, Silverstein and his architect managed to overcome several sticky design issues, not the least of which was integrating Seven around a new Con Ed substation, replacing the substation destroyed on 9/11.

Jesse Macbeth, in-between scoring a shoebox full of Purple Hearts in Iraq and his first PBS and Playboy Channel specials (with a stopover behind the counter at the Tacoma Wendy's), is guest blogging at Iowahawk to reveal "The disturbing face of American empire".

A strange confluence of events this week involving the favorite sons of the town that Mary Tyler Moore and Bud Grant made famous:

Bob Dylan turns 65, but still sings like a man at least twice his age!

Prince voted "Sexiest Vegetarian", leaving James Taranto to remark, "An Excellent Reason to Eat Meat"--no kidding.

James Lileks can't decide which Star Fleet spacecraft to name his new Honda minivan after.

What it all means no man can say, but it's safe to say that Someday, A Purple Rain Is Going To Fall on the Diner.

(And in the meantime, man, I hope I can get lamb on pita there...)

Nikes and seersucker are two great tastes that shouldn't be anywhere near each other.

'The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,' he said. 'We're getting the language into its final shape -- the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we've finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words -- scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone.

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

Update: Of the Dennis Prager essay that the above passage links to, Dr. Sanity writes:

Praeger still refers to them as "liberals", a term I am careful not to use to describe the left. The classical liberal tradition is alive and well elsewhere--permeating both neoconservative and libertarian intellectual thought.

I try to make the same distinction whenever possible as well. And for the moment that most FDR/New Frontier-style liberals began to shed the last vestiges of classical liberalism, click here.

Austin Bay writes:

In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina I recorded a commentary for NPR’s Morning Edition that assessed the National Guard’s rapid response effort. I contended only the US could respond as quickly and successfully to the destruction of a major city. That commentary drew loads of flak.

However, according to Lou Dolinar at realclearpolitics.com the Katrina after-action reports demonstrate that the national media’s reporting (particularly television reporting) was impressionistic falderol, missing the big story of Katrina and missing the indicative details. National Guard units (from Louisiana and other states) and out of state responders got to critical areas in south Louisiana quickly and in force. They focused on search and rescue first– which is what they are supposed to do.

As Austin suggests, read the entire article.

Vanity Fair contributor Marie Brenner was recently quoted as saying:

[B]loggers often put forth the news with a partisan slant, she said, and "more and more Americans now receive their news through these partisan channels."

As opposed to the partisan channels of the legacy media itself.

Update: Jeff Jarvis has some prescient related thoughts:

At every journalism seminar like this, someone asks whether readers will trust a reporter covering an election after knowing how the reporter votes or what party she belongs to. I argue that the readers wonder and speculate about this anyway and so once it is out in the open, then the discussion can turn to the reporting: ‘Having said that I’m a liberal, now you can judge my work on its completeness, fairness, and accuracy.’ There is no agenda worse than a hidden agenda.

Of course, to be fair, it's not like Vanity Fair's agenda is all that hidden these days.

Orrin Judd has spotted the trailer for The Feel Good Hit Of Summer...3000 years in the making!

Update: Check out Must Love Jaws, a sort of Brokeback Shark Tale! And here's a profile of the guys who made those trailers:

These brilliant remixes are a persuasive argument that content owners could make a lot of money if they could find ways to let people play with their libraries of music, TV shows and movies legally.

I concur.

Lorie Byrd has joined the gang at Wizbang.

The Anchoress has some suggestions for Madonna, on how she could improve her rather worn-out stage act.

Update: The recipe for McDonald's Secret Sauce is still a closely-guarded secret, but the current formula for McRockStar isn't.

Related thoughts, here.

Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch has a theory about the balkanization of pop culture that I think is spot-on. I couldn't find the article discussing it (Lord knows I tried last night), but basically, it goes something like this: there's no one dominant pop culture anymore, it's been demassified, to borrow another societal critic's favorite word. If you take the average movie's domestic box office return, a $100,000,000 gross sounds impressive--until you realize that tickets average $10 a pop, which means that ten million people saw the movie. And 285 million Americans skipped it.

Case in point: The Da Vinci Code's weekend take: $77,073,388 means that 7.7 million people saw the movie on its opening weekend. But, according to James Maguire in his new book, Impresario, 60 million people tuned in to watch Elvis' debut on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1956. And that was in an era when the population was about 125 million less than it is today.

Which is why Mr. Nixon--er, Mojo Nixon that is--was right about Elvis.

Well, in some ways at least: Cathy Seipp explores the plusses and minuses of 2006 versus 1966.

In another post, she also has some thoughts of floppy breasted exhibitionist college professors, something that--I think--was less of an issue in 1966...

Update: Just to add to the first half of this post, Michael Barone writes, "we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that, in most important respects, our civilization is performing splendidly".

If Barone has any thoughts on floppy breasted exhibitionist college professors, clearly he's saving them for his next column.

ABC News names Charles Gibson to be sole anchor of World News Tonight; to compete against the Perky One.

The Wall Street Journal debunks a number of myths about Iraq and its liberation, and concludes:

These, then, are the urban legends we must counter, else falsehoods become conventional wisdom. And what a strange world it is: For many antiwar critics, the president is faulted for the war, and he, not the former dictator of Iraq, inspires rage. The liberator rather than the oppressor provokes hatred. It is as if we have stepped through the political looking glass, into a world turned upside down and inside out.

Indeed^TM.

Update: Somewhat related post, here.

Another Update: Hugh Hewitt suggests this piece by Ralph Peters as a follow-up read after the Journal article.

As NewsBusters asks, "Is Your Internet News Service Fair and Balanced?"

Pinch Sulzberger crucifies himself--for the sins of the world, but not those of his own paper.

Pinch went to work on his dad's paper the same time former editor Howell Raines did, in 1978. Over at Slate, Jack Shafer reviews Howlin' Howell's new memoir:

How wretched a newspaper was the New York Times when Howell Raines assumed the executive editor job in September 2001?

In his new memoir, The One That Got Away, which combines fish stories with newspaper recollection, he claims that the Times had been stinking up the joint since March 13, 1978. That's the first full day he spent in the Times newsroom, when he noticed its "habit of cruising through critical intersections on automatic pilot."

The Times was a "newspaper that liked to wear its dullness like a merit badge" doing "much of its journalism by the numbers." On some stories it revealed itself to be a "churning urn of underachievement." It possessed a "collective, institutional willingness to stand around and get scooped." It was "dull but worthy ... slow, tedious and self-important." Its "stolid pace" frustrated him; it was "selling an ossified product over and over again to the same people."

Read the whole thing as they like to say in the successor media.

Sports Illustrated's Peter King will be part of NBC's return to the NFL this year, as such, he was required to attend NBC's dog and pony show for advertisers at Radio City Music Hall this month. Here's a snippet of how it went:

Then we were ushered into the biggest green room ever, the bottom floor of Radio City, to wait to be taken out, show by show, to the stage. Saw Josh Lyman from The West Wing; Bradley Whitford's on a new show. Got a coffee next to the 40-Year-Old Virgin guy. Sat a row down from Regis Philbin and Donald Trump. Interesting world these guys live in. They sure do get cheered a lot.

The next day I was with Ebersol in an NBC seminar -- actually talking to my old pal Michaels -- when Ebersol got the news that floats boats in this arena. Grey's Anatomy, the Sunday-night ABC doctors/sex show (I'm sure that's not how it's referred to by the Hollywood press, though), was being moved to Thursday night. "To me,'' Ebersol said, "Grey's Anatomy is the only current hit show on TV that has the opportunity to be an even bigger hit. This is very good for us." Whatever you say, boss.

One other surprise: the emphasis on podcasts, the Internet, digital media. Seems like that's half of what NBC's doing, and I hear this network's not alone. "This is the year every major advertiser wants to know what you're going to do for them on the Internet,'' Ebersol said.

Blog away, world.

Nahh. I'd rather write articles on the subject.

David Mastio is planning to use his blog to catalog and help counteract the inevitable spread of astro-turfing that's sure to come this fall:

Election season is here and with it will come a flood of fake letters to the editor from “real people” in reality written by political campaigns and activists groups of the right and left.

America’s editorial page editors make a heroic effort to stem this tide every year, but hundreds of professionally-written plagiarized fakes sneak through, polluting one of the most popular features in newspapers. (Incidentally, for Internet triumphalists, letters to the editor are THE original interactive feature.)

Just for a change of pace, I am hoping that the blogosphere can work with the mainstream media to stop the practice this year, or at least raise the price.

Right now, the National Conference of Editorial Writers, uses a members-only list-serv to trade information about astro-turf letters. It serves to keep some letters out, but because it is private, letters fraud perpetrators pay no public cost and editors who aren’t NCEW members -- or don't have time to read the list-serv -- don’t find out about it.

So, here’s what I am proposing:

InOpinion’s blog is going to become a clearinghouse for letters fraud information through this fall’s election (we’ll decide on a permanent home for the Letters Fraud Project after the election). This is going to be a completely non-partisan effort – fake missives that I agree with are just as bad as ones I disagree with.

I am going to invest my own time to report on as many instances of letters fraud as I can. We’ll report on which organizations are doing it and provide links to the online tool they use to help their supporters plagiarize. Most importantly, we’ll provide emails and phone numbers for the leaders of organizations engaged in this deceit as well as the same information for important financial supporters of these organizations. We are also developing information on the technology and consulting companies that make a profit from deceiving readers. We’ll be exposing them as well.

Sounds like a great idea to me; David has some suggestions on how the Blogosphere can help.

It appears that American Christians have finally learned their lesson with Hollywood and the media. Here's Michael Medved a few months ago on Brokeback Mountain, in USA Today:

The publicity blitz surrounding Oscar front-runner Brokeback Mountain not only challenged stereotypes about gay relationships, it simultaneously cleared away persistent misunderstandings about the nation's Christian conservatives.

Instead of reacting with outraged calls for censorship or condemnation, the much-reviled minions of the so-called religious right have mostly ignored the movie, allowing it to collect every sort of honor with shockingly scant controversy. While derided by prominent liberals as “the Taliban wing of the Republican Party,” conservative Christian leaders have displayed a new sense of security and confidence, in dramatic contrast to the paranoid Muslim mobs that riot across the globe over a dozen disrespectful Danish cartoons.

This doesn't mean that cultural traditionalists in the USA have abandoned their principles and suddenly embraced the much-discussed “gay cowboy movie”: People who revere biblical strictures against same-sex relationships can scarcely commend a film that provides a lyrical celebration of a homosexual affair that wrecks two marriages.

Nevertheless, the publicists and activists involved in promoting Brokeback Mountain seem almost disappointed that religious conservatives have expressed so little indignation. No major organizations called for a boycott of the film, or threatened its producers, or made any serious attempt to interfere with those who might enjoy this artfully-crafted motion picture (it has become a modest commercial success). In the heartland of Evangelical America, Brokeback has generated more ho-hums than howls of protest (or hosannas).

Or as Mark Steyn wrote in his cover story on politicized Hollywood's recent box office woes and Oscar snoozefests, "The more artful leftie websites have taken to complaining that the religious right deliberately killed Brokeback at the box-office by declining to get mad about it".

Not surprisingly, Tim Rutten of The L.A. Times is left wondering where the big Last Temptation of Christ-style frenzy is over The Da Vinci Code:

The collective Catholic response to the book and film probably were best summed up by a Jesuit theologian who responded to an earnest radio interviewer's long and suggestive question this way: "I don't mean to sound obtuse, but are you asking me whether a novel is true?"

Meanwhile, media attempts to deputize the usual evangelical Protestant firebrands into one of those reliably copy-worthy anti-blasphemy posses also have been generally fruitless. You almost can hear frustrated assignment editors [you, like at the L.A. Times--Ed] and producers muttering to themselves: What's the matter with these guys? Don't they care that this cockamamie movie says Jesus had sex with Mary Magdalene? Can't they see this is another battle in the war against Christmas? Didn't they learn anything from those Muslims?

Speaking of which, so far, it's all quiet on the Borders as well--which, I supose is coming as both a surprise and relief to Borders' management, but is equally good to see.

Update: James D. Hudnall has a one word review of Da Vinci--an no, it does not contain eight letters.

Power Line links to an article in the London Times by William Shawcross:

Even those who were opposed to the invasion of Iraq should recognise that this is a whole new battle — between the values of a liberal civil society and nihilism, sometimes Islamic but always nihilism.

Not at all coincidentally, "the values of a liberal civil society and nihilism" are also the precise battle lines that have been fought domestically in the US culture war since the late 1960s.

Mark Steyn reprints his review of Wicked, Broadway's moral inversion of The Wizard of Oz and notes:

There’s a predictable pattern to children’s fables these days. A few years ago, I asked Tim Rice, who’d just written the lyrics for Disney’s Aladdin and The Lion King, why he wasn’t doing Pocahontas. “Well, the minute they mentioned it,” he said, “I knew the Brits would be the bad guys. I felt it was my patriotic duty to decline.” Sure enough, in the film, John Smith and his men are the bringers of environmental devastation to the New World, at least until Captain Smith comes to learn from Pocahontas how to “Paint With All The Colors Of The Wind”. Wicked is meant to be gleefully ironic, but there’s a sourness deep within and you can’t subvert the clichés of Oz when you’re mired in a political correctness quite as oppressive as latterday Disney and all the more stultifying because this is, supposedly, a show for adults. It’s Peta politics with a Dreamworks score.

Meanwhile, James Pinkerton cracks The Da Vinci Code:

Here at TCS, Stephen Bainbridge tallied up the various heresies that Brown conflated to help him with his story. All of which inspired The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan to declare, "I do not understand the thinking of a studio that would make, for the amusement of a nation 85% to 90% of whose people identify themselves as Christian, a major movie aimed at attacking the central tenets of that faith, and insulting as poor fools its gulled adherents."

That is an interesting question—why does Hollywood make movies that bash religion and other conservative verities? Whole books have been written about that topic, including Ben Stein's The View from Sunset Boulevard and Michael Medved's Hollywood v. America, but I think it's fair to say that this view is changing. The dominant movie culture may despise Mel Gibson, but the success of "The Passion of The Christ" made an impression -- about six hundred million dollars' worth.

In any case, the filmmakers weren't expecting the counter-attack from Christians; the slow-gathering criticism of the book has become a fast-and-furious critical crescendo against the movie. To which Howard & Co. adopted an interesting strategy: They tried to shrug off the fusillade -- it's only a movie, folks.

Star Tom Hanks, who has built his career on being Mr. Sincerity, is now the shrugger-in-chief: The film, he says, is "loaded with all sorts of hooey and fun kind of scavenger-hunt-type nonsense. If you are going to take any sort of movie at face value, particularly a huge-budget motion picture like this, you'd be making a very big mistake." And co-star Ian McKellen has called the book "a load of codswallop," although he couldn't resist adding, "I'm happy to believe that Jesus was married."

But if the people who made the movie won't stand up for their own movie, then it's hardly a surprise that critics have been emboldened to tear it down; the compendium site Rotten Tomatoes finds that some 80 percent of critics have dubbed it "rotten."

All of which are reasons why The Passion had a better opening weekend in the US, despite playing in 700 less theaters than Da Vinci.

Castro's doctor is at it again, repeating his annual statement that Castro will live to be 140. (Via Drudge, whose photo of the rapidly aging dictator belies his doctor's absurdities.)

As I wrote right around this time two years ago, if I was the personal physician to a murdering communist dictator and had a wife or family I wanted to protect, I'd probably say stuff like that, too.

(As to what Stalin was planning to do to his doctors, shortly before--mercifully for the world--dying, click here.)

Update: Heh^TM.

Jeff Jarvis goes dinosaur hunting:

So why do we need Time? New managing editor Richard Stengel explains:

Mr. Stengel said yesterday that in some ways, the Internet poses the same kind of challenge to newsweeklies that the plethora of competing newspapers posed to Time when Henry Luce founded it in 1923.

“In a similar way, people were looking for one source to speak with authority and explain the world, and in many ways, that’s still our mission,” Mr. Stengel said. “We can be your guide through the forest of confusing information.”

No, actually, I don’t want you to explain the world to me. A guide, perhaps. But I’m sorry, I just don’t see Time as the one source to speak with authority and explain the world. I am quite glad the days are gone when anyone thought they could be that one source.

Like I said, it's tough to be a Second Wave institution in a Third Wave world.

"A Fiendishly Simple Path To Republican Victory In '08".

The good ones always make it look so easy.

(Via Hugh Hewitt, who's spotted a marketing opportunity for a poster-sized version.)

Update: No doubt, this is just another small detail in the plan.

Related: The Gettysburg Address Power Point Presentation.

Roger L. Simon writes:

Today's editorial on the NSA in the LATimes is an example of why I no longer waste any time on the newspaper (Food Section excepted, of course). The drones at the LAT wrote the following:

The secretive NSA (an abbreviation, Washington wags say, for "No Such Agency") has overseen a domestic surveillance program whose existence is known only because of media reports and whose exact contours remain a mystery even to most members of Congress.

Apparently the fellas at the LAT have never read the best-selling The Puzzle Palace (copyright 1983! and all about the NSA) or heard of the Echelon program, which has been running through several adminstrations. All this "Ohmygod, whatistheNSAdoing?" nonsense is so much propagandistic crap. Anyone paying the slightest attention has known for years what the NSA's brief was. What are all those satellites supposed to be for,anyway? The level of hypocrisy in all this is staggering. If you don't want an NSA, say so. But the obvious question is - where have you been for the last several decades?

The NSA and Echelon, along with Harper's and Borders Books, will be among the topics discussed in the latest Pajamas Media Blog Week In Review podcast, which should be online later today. Don't miss it!

Update: It's online, here.

There's much in Alvin and Heidi Toffler's new book, Revolutionary Wealth to reccomend it to regular readers of the Blogosphere, as I explain in my latest TCS Daily article.

And don't miss my recent podcast with Alvin Toffler, also at TCS.

Update: Nick Gillespie of Reason has a review of the Toffler's new book in The New York Times that's also well worth reading.

While Borders was quick to ban little known secular humanist-oriented publication Free Inquiry in March when it ran The Cartoons That Dare Not Show Their Face, it apparently has no problem carrying the latest issue of liberal stalwart Harper's, which has the same cartoons in it.

Now that these cartoons are in Borders' stores, will the riots that Borders claimed they feared back in March promptly ensue? And if so, can Harper's editor Lewis Lapham use his famous time machine to clean up the mess retroactively?

Fire up the Tardis, Lew!

Of course, it's worth noting that Robert Bidinotto's The New Individualist beat both magazines to the punch; hopefully Bidinotto will have some thoughts on Border's recent flip-flop.

Update: Robert's posted his thoughts:

Borders could have climbed one rung out of hell, in my estimation, had the company publicly acknowledged something to the following effect: "We over-reacted in March to security concerns in our decision not to carry Free Inquiry. We apologize to that magazine, and to those customers who were inconvenienced by our decision. We realize and affirm the importance of standing up for fundamental rights to free expression. Therefore, we will not make the same mistake in the case of Harper's, whose June issue we are carrying on our newsstands."

Such crow-eating might regain the company a small measure of respect and credibility: after all, it's the least they owe to Free Inquiry.

Indeed, to coin an adverb.

James Taranto notes that World Net Daily has removed the offending passage of columnist Vox Day's essay on immigration that we mentioned a couple of days ago. As Taranto notes however, "'Day,' however, stands by his story, which he has posted here".

In 1973, Daniel Patrick Moynihan looked back on the decade which had recently concluded and said, "Most liberals had ended the 1960s rather ashamed of the beliefs they had held at the beginning of the decade". Back in January of 2005, I attempted to use Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic as a signpost on the road between the traditional liberalism of FDR, Truman and JFK and the more radical, punitive version that followed and exists to this day. But in Commentary, James Piereson argues that it was Kennedy's assassination and its immediate aftermath, that would cause the momentous shift that would ultimately consign New Deal-style American liberalism to the ash heap:

Liberalism entered the 1960’s as the vital force in American politics, riding a wave of accomplishment running from the Progressive era through the New Deal and beyond. A handsome young president, John F. Kennedy, had just been elected on the promise to extend the unfinished agenda of reform. Liberalism owned the future, as Orwell might have said. Yet by the end of the decade, liberal doctrine was in disarray, with some of its central assumptions broken by the experience of the immediately preceding years. It has yet to recover.

What happened? There is, of course, a litany of standard answers, from the political to the cultural to the psychological, each seeking to explain the great upheaval summed up in that all-purpose phrase, “the 60’s.” To some, the relevant factor was a long overdue reaction to the repressions and pieties of 1950’s conformism. To others, the watershed event was the escalating war in Vietnam, sparking an opposition movement that itself escalated into widespread disaffection from received political ideas and indeed from larger American purposes. Still others have pointed to the simmering racial tensions that would burst into the open in riots and looting, calling into question underlying assumptions about the course of integration if not the very possibility of social harmony.

No doubt, the combination of these and other events had much to do with driving the nation’s political culture to the Left in the latter half of the decade. But there can be no doubt, either, that an event from the early 1960’s—namely, the assassination of Kennedy himself—contributed heavily. As many observers have noted, Kennedy’s death seemed somehow to give new energy to the more extreme impulses of the Left, as not only left-wing ideas but revolutionary leftist leaders—Marx, Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Castro among them—came in the aftermath to enjoy a greater vogue in the United States than at any other time in our history. By 1968, student radicals were taking over campuses and joining protest demonstrations in support of a host of extreme causes.

It is one of the ironies of the era that many young people who in 1963 reacted with profound grief to Kennedy’s death would, just a few years later, come to champion a version of the left-wing doctrines that had motivated his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. But why should this have been so? What was it about mid-century liberalism that allowed it to be knocked so badly off balance by a single blow?

Hugh Hewitt once said:

There is a Kennedy dynasty in Massachusetts and vast Kennedy affection in the Democratic Party and among liberal media. But there is no Kennedy dynasty in America, just an interesting family that wished for a dynasty and could never figure out that Jack's politics might have pulled it off, but never Teddy's.

Read the whole essay by Piereson, which is tremendous; he brilliantly diagrams the transformation from one era to the next.

Update: Dr. Sanity has some further thoughts; Jonah Goldberg writes that he'll be exploring some of the same territory in his upcoming book.

Another Update: I shouted out who killed the Kennedys, but after all, it was you and me.

Staring at the postmodern continental horror that is the Eurovision Song Contest, Manolo has just witnessed the end of the world as we know it, but he feels fine.

Big Media, of course, aren't the only ones who make poorly chosen analogies from time to time. See if you can spot the Godwin's Law violation in this essay on immigration:

Not only will [mass deportation] work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn't possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don't speak English and are not integrated into American society

The author has a bitchin' wicked Flock of Seagulls hairstyle though, and with a name like Vox Day, a nom de pundit that would make Bono and The Edge proud. That's got to count for something, right?

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

Having read numerous interviews with Keith Richards over the last 30 years or so, I've noticed that they come in two flavors. One in which the writer helpfully translates Keith's thoughts into a language that closely aproximates English. These interviews contain quotes that read like this:

Well, Mick thought that he could get a better sound on his vocals if he rerecorded them in an isolation booth. So we overdubbed them in L.A. at Sunset Sound, after recording the basic tracks at the Record Plant in New York.

Then there are those journalists who simply quote Keith verbatim, transcribing the cassette tape of an interview done at 4:00 in the morning, as the EMPTY! warnings begin to flash on Keith's bottle of Jack Daniels:

Mick...vocals...Sunshhhhet Shoundddd...Record Plant...New Yorkkkkk.....[thump]....ZZZZZZZZZ

Those last sounds were Keith nodding out after being awake for two weeks running.

However, in proof that alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, does indeed produce all the effects of intoxication, Tim Blair interviews Keith Richards' brain--and unlike Keith's vocal cords, it's a delightfully articulate interviewee:

Please allow me to introduce myself. I’m Keith Richards’ brain. A brain of swollen pain, as you’ll be aware if you’ve picked up a newspaper in the past few weeks. For nigh on 63 years, I’ve avoided the unpleasantness of media scrutiny, until my human-form hostpod – Mr Richards, as you call him – recently decided to climb up a coconut tree. Well, technically, I suppose it was my decision; I’ll accept the blame for that. But it wasn’t my decision to fall out of the damn thing and land on me.

For that, I blame the inner ear. Do you know how long it took to send me a message that Keith was overbalancing? I’ll tell you: about 15 minutes. FIFTEEN MINUTES! By then we were already in the stupid ambulance on the way to hospital, cerebrospinal fluid sloshing everywhere, my whole supramarginal gyrus bruised to hell, and this high-level alert suddenly appears: “Dude! We’re tipping over!”

Oh, great work, inner ear. Of course, I’m programmed to react instantly when a big alert comes in, so I launch into an involuntary grab-something protocol that completely humiliates the poor medic inspecting Keith’s head. You haven’t heard such screams since the last time a 19-year-old woke up next to Mick. Two days ago, as it happens.

(Inner ear and I haven’t seen eye-to-eye – well, cerebellum to helicotrema – since the Great Rib-Busting Incident of 1998. True story: I’m completely occupied manipulating Keith’s arms and legs up a ladder in his library, carefully wrapping his fingers around the railings and making sure each foot is secure before taking the next step – please consider the material I’m working with here; this sort of exercise is like re-enacting the beach landing at Normandy, except with cats – when inner ear freaks out for no reason at all and BAM! We’re on the floor again. Third time that day.)

I wonder if Chet Baker, Charlie Parker, and William S. Burrough's brains were this charming and clearheaded? In the meantime, have your own brain process the rest.

And for a discussion about--though not with, Keith's favorite instrument, have a listen to my latest podcast.

Life on Airstrip One spirals in on itself: Britain's ubiquitous traffic cameras are "Guilty of racial profiling", Glenn Reynolds notes.

Since 2004, Lorie Byrd's writing was one of the best things about the PoliPundit blog. But she's being forced out of the nest:

I received a lengthy email from Polipundit tonight alerting us to an editorial policy change that included the following: "From now on, every blogger at PoliPundit.com will either agree with me completely on the immigration issue, or not blog at PoliPundit.com." I would provide additional context, but Polipundit has asked that the contents of our emails not be disclosed publicly and I think that is a fair request. There has been plenty written in the posts over the past week alone to let readers figure out what happened. Polipundit ended a later email with this: "It's over. The group-blogging experiment was nice while it lasted, but we have different priorities now. It's time to go our own separate ways."

Chalk it up, I guess, to the Blogger fatigue that's been making the rounds lately. But it seems rather silly to (a) break up a winning team and (b) lose a great writer.

Fortunately, she'll continue blogging on her eponomously titled Byrd Dropping blog.

This is good to see--and it tells me that Ed Straker and SHADO (the orginal Department of Homeland Security) have definitely been keeping the entire planet's borders secured since the late 1970s.

...And looking damn stylish doing it, to boot!

You know this is coming soon.

(Somebody should ask Cindy Sheehan for her thoughts on the National Guard protecting the borders...)

Update: Well, that didn't take long!

Another Update: Here's an equally plausable sneak preview.

Maggie's Farm has a long excerpt from Tom Wolfe's much longer speech ("Tom Wolfe on Everything" is how they title it) to the National Endowment for the Humanities last week:

Evolution came to an end when the human beast developed speech! As soon as he became not Homo sapiens, "man reasoning," but Homo loquax, "man talking"! Speech gave the human beast far more than an ingenious tool. Speech was a veritable nuclear weapon! It gave the human beast the powers of reason, complex memory, and long-term planning, eventually in the form of print and engineering plans. Speech gave him the power to enlarge his food supply at will through an artifice called farming. Speech ended not only the evolution of man, by making it no longer necessary, but also the evolution of animals! Our animal friends—we're very sentimental about predators these days, aren't we—the lions, the tigers, the wolves, the rhinoceroses, the great apes, kangaroos, leopards, cheetahs, grizzly bears, polar bears, cougars—they're "endangered," meaning hanging on for dear life. Today the so-called animal kingdom exists only at the human beast's sufferance. The beast has dealt crippling blows even to the unseen empire of the microbes. Stunted adults from Third World countries with abysmal sanitation come to the United States and their offspring grow six or more inches taller, thanks to the wonders of hygiene. Cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, turkeys would be extinct by now had not the human beasts hit upon the idea of animal husbandry. So far the human beast enjoys the luxury of crying sentimental tears over the deer because she's so pretty. But the day the human beast discovers deer in his cellar, fawns in his bedroom closet, bucks tangling horns in the attic at night above his very bedroom . . . those filthy oversized vermin, the deer, will be added to that big long list above. We're sentimental about the dolphins, because they're so smart. What about the tuna? It's okay to kill tunas by the ton because they're dimwits? It would take an evolutionary mystic (and there are such) to believe these animals will ever evolve their way out of the hole they're in thanks to man's power of speech.

The whole speech is here; as Wolfe told his audience:

Since The Origin of Species in 1859 the doctrine of Evolution has done more than anything else to put an end to religious faith among educated people in Europe and America; for God is dead.

As Wolfe notes above, the post-religious left simply replaces religion with aesthetics. (Something that another astute social critic also noted, years ago.) Fortunately, the animal world is quick to remind the morally equivalent among us that animals are indeed, animals--don't expect them to be voting in the 2008 election.

Update: Umm, speaking of aesthetics and the post-religious left!

Ordinarily this is VodkaPundit's territory. But Maggie's Farm and John Stephenson are also stepping behind the bar for tonight's speech--which John's discovered a first draft of.

Scott Johnson of Power Line (needless to say, normally considered staunch supporters of President Bush), looks at a (real) draft of the speech and writes, "It strikes me that we are coming perilously close to 'more mush from the wimp' time, though I may well be mistaken".

Michelle Malkin sounds like she concurs with Johnson's initial assessment.

David Cohen has a lengthy--and damning--review of the new, Starbucks financed movie, Akeelah and the Bee:

On the other hand, I turned to my wife two-thirds through the movie and whispered that Akeelah was the most racist movie I had seen in a long time. After the movie was over, she told me that it was among the most sexist movies the had ever seen.

Sounds like a sure-fire Oscar winner. (No, seriously.)

The American Spectator quotes a consulting lobbyist for a broadcast network who says, "This is how poisonous it's gotten in Washington":

"You have Republicans taking money from companies and firms working to end their control of Congress, and even worse, working with outfits like MoveOn.org. And they are taking this money to not only help groups dedicated to defeating Republicans, but also for legislation that would regulate the Internet."

* * *

"You have to wonder when conservatives will wake up and realize what is happening here," says a House Republican leadership aide. "You have this unholy alliance between Google and MoveOn and groups like the Christian Coalition. I mean how is it the Christian Coalition can help a company like Google, which makes money off of online pornography? Conservatives ought to be very concerned about this situation, but they don't seem to get it. And perhaps by the time they do, it will be too late."

Of course, as Mark Steyn quotes (or at least paraphrases) Newt Gingrich, 11 years after the Contract With America, "Well, you must remember Republicans are still pretty new at this, we’re not used to being in the majority".

Keep this up boys, and the pain of leadership will go away.

Update: Speaking of which, "Tonight could be the first fully televised political suicide in history. I don't even want to watch."

Update 5/24/06: On the HuffPost, Eli Pariser of Moveon.org denies the Google connection.

Glenn Reynolds writes that Ayaan Hirsi Ali may be emigrating to the United States (can't say I blame her), and adds:

Hmm. Back in the 20th Century Europe lost a lot of smart people to religious persecution, and it's never really recovered. You'd think they'd want to put a stop to that. Of course, there's a backstory that goes beyond religious persecution.

Back in 2003, UPI's James Bennett wrote:

Continental Europeans, helped by the Marshall Plan and American investment, rebuilt their countries with vigor after 1945. Led by the last generations to mature in the environment of the hybrid Jewish-European civilization, Europe seemed to pick up where it left off in 1933.

Gradually, however, Europe seemed to run out of creativity, in everything from arts, to academia, to demographic vigor, to the will to political reform. Endless rehashing of elsewhere-discredited Marxism replaced creative political thought. Overt fascism and national chauvinism were banned, but a new Euro-chauvinism took its place, loudly proclaiming the superiority of European ways over crude American ones -- a new chauvinism on a wider scale, based like the old national chauvinism primarily on resentment.

It may be coincidence, but these new generations are the ones who grew up without the experience of studying, working and socializing with substantial numbers of Jews. Can this have no effect on politics?

Consider that the current war has seen the rapid re-emergence of the classical anti-Semitic themes in Europe, and coming from the same classes and types that supported the previous anti-globalization revolt of the 1920s and 1930s. The whitewashing of anti-Semitism as "anti-Zionism" grows more and more transparent by the day. French television has begun to adopt the terminology of the Vichy propagandists in reporting on the "Anglo-American attack" on Iraq. "Neo-con" serves the same code-word duty that "rootless cosmopolite" did in Stalin's anti-Jewish purges.

The widespread anti-Americanism in the world, of which Continental Europe is the ultimate source, has almost nothing to do with the character of President George W. Bush or the current administration, or other such cosmetic issues.

The modern world was first carried forward by two great civilizations. The Anglosphere was one. The dynamic industrializing culture of 19th century Continental Europe, to which the spark of the Judaeo-Christian encounter was so important, was the other. That culture committed suicide in the '30s. Perhaps its successor is not the revival of that culture, but rather its zombie.

In considering the Holocaust, most attention has been given to its direct victims, as is appropriate. However, we must also consider that it was a form of self-administered lobotomy for Continental European culture.

It would not be surprising if the twin anti-modernist themes of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, now rapidly coalescing into a single nasty mess visible in many of the pro-Saddam demonstrations of the past year, become once again the predominant political-cultural theme in Western Continental Europe, overwhelming the decent and positive forces there that had previously prevailed.

And we should not be surprised if such people hate us.

Bennett, of course, is the author of the popular "Anglosphere" meme, which seeks to unite the English-speaking world under a common, cultural heritage and shared vision of the future. But England is suffering from many of the same strains that are affecting Europe, as Melanie Phillips, author of the new book Londonistan explained to National Review Online:

Read More »

Back in the early days of the Blogosphere, Cathy Seipp looked at some of the inspired amateurs who were first beginning to make traditional members of the media squirm:

"The long-term question is, will big media become fragmented and collapse so that blogging becomes a real alternative?" Kaus asks. "Clearly, there's no reason it has to be done by professionals. Will newspapers go out of business except for a few big ones and the rest of the business be left to amateurs?"

Reynolds thinks this is at least possible. "There are a lot of people who don't have the designated credentials who are in fact better than some of the fossils you see on the op-ed pages of major papers," he says. "I was on a talk show with Fred Barnes, [executive] editor of The Weekly Standard, and he said to me, 'You've laid bare our dirty little secret. It's not that hard.' "

The BBC, however, may be carrying things a little too far in their support of this spirit...

(Via the Pajamas homepage and Volokh.)

John Stossel explains media bias to fellow legacy media star Howard Kurtz, who's been covering journalism for umpteen years, but still puts liberal media in quotation marks:

I think we are steeped like tea bags in "The Washington Post" and "The New York Times", and it affects the way we view the world.

Soon--the American media can really get steeped like tea bags: the British Invasion is coming!

Back in January, I looked at the pincer movement the Washington Post has found itself stuck in lately. While the Post expects to be attacked from the right (because, to only slightly modify a recent Jonah Goldberg riff, "birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, and conservative columnists gotta indulge their schadenfreude" about the sorry plight of the media. It's what we do), lately it's come under even more vociferous pressure from the left. That's something that Post columnist Richard Cohen recently discovered himself, much to his horror.

The L.A. Times, while far inferior in overall quality to the Post, is beginning to see similar bipartisan contempt emerge. Conservatives such as Hugh Hewitt, Patterico, Cathy Seipp, and umm, me, have long been pecking at it. But lately, Susan Estrich, best known as Michael Dukakis' campaign manager back in 1988, is none-too-thrilled with the Times' coverage of Anthony Pellicano, the wiretapping Hollywood detective. Estrich writes:

Maybe it’s just a coincidence, just a bookkeeping change, a drop in hotel distribution, as the publisher explains. Or maybe the market really works. In either case, to borrow from Abrams, some law professors I know have told me that the way the media has been hyping scandals lately has the potential to turn every newspaper into a suspected liar.

Call it the Spinal Tap media (to coin a phrase): all Marshall amps on 11, all the time.

Or as I wrote back in January:

The contempt that the MSM now finds from both sides of the aisle is quite a unique development--and it will be fascinating to watch how it all plays out.

In any case, seventy years after its creation, how's that one-size fits all mass media concept playing out these days?

To put it in Tofflerian terms, it's no fun being a Second Wave institution in a Third Wave world.

Update: Speaking of Pellicano, I haven't been following his escapades at all (despite Matt Drudge's frequent links, I don't really care), but over at TCS Daily, James Pinkerton calls them "The hottest movie coming out of Hollywood", and has a full round-up of Pellicano and his strange symbiotic relationshp with Tinseltown.

Relapced Catholic makes a great point about those who'd treat terrorism as a law enforcement issue:

Remember the argument after 9/11, with Dems like Al Core trying to spin it as a legal matter and not an act of war. People who aren't as smart as they think they are always bring up the fact that "we nailed Al Capone for tax evasion". Yeah, but they killed Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde, Baby Face Nelson and Ma Barker, to name a few, in shoot outs. No costly trial, no "lousy childhood" defense, no free squares for life.

Today the owners of Little Bohemia would sue for bullet hole damage, and the bystanders outside the Biograph would get free trauma counselling.

As Relapsed Catholic writes, "Mister, we could use a man like J. Edgar Hoover again..."

Mark Steyn writes, "there are now two basic templates in terrorism media coverage:

Template A (note to editors: to be used after every terrorist atrocity): "Angry family members, experts and opposition politicians demand to know why complacent government didn't connect the dots."

Template B (note to editors: to be used in the run-up to the next terrorist atrocity): "Shocking new report leaked to New York Times for Pulitzer Prize Leak Of The Year Award nomination reveals that paranoid government officials are trying to connect the dots! See pages 3,4,6,7,8, 13-37."

How do you connect the dots? To take one example of what we're up against, two days before 9/11, a very brave man, the anti-Taliban resistance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, was assassinated in Afghanistan by killers posing as journalists. His murderers were Algerians traveling on Belgian passports who'd arrived in that part of the world on visas issued by the Pakistani High Commission in the United Kingdom. That's three more countries than many Americans have visited. The jihadists are not "primitives". They're part of a sophisticated network: They travel the world, see interesting places, meet interesting people -- and kill them. They're as globalized as McDonald's -- but, on the whole, they fill in less paperwork. They're very good at compartmentalizing operations: They don't leave footprints, just a toeprint in Country A in Time Zone B and another toe in Country E in Time Zone K. You have to sift through millions of dots to discern two that might be worth connecting.

I'm a strong believer in privacy rights. I don't see why Americans are obligated to give the government their bank account details and the holdings therein. Other revenue agencies in other free societies don't require that level of disclosure. But, given that the people of the United States are apparently entirely cool with that, it's hard to see why lists of phone numbers (i.e., your monthly statement) with no identifying information attached to them is of such a vastly different order of magnitude. By definition, "connecting the dots" involves getting to see the dots in the first place

If an enterprising conservative politician wanted to watch a few heads (figuratively) explode, this would be the perfect time to re-introduce discussions of a flat or consumption tax, and when the inevitable shrieks against it are raised, simply reply, "Oh, I'm sorry--I thought you wanted to get the government out of the data collection business. Isn't the IRS as good a place to start as any?"

O.J. Simpson, class all the way.

(H/T: Tammy Bruce.)

My latest podcast is online; it's an interview with Nacho Baños, author of the superb book, The Blackguard: A Detailed History of the early Fender Telecaster, Years 1950-1954. As I wrote earlier this week:

In 1950, Leo Fender released his first Broadcaster electric guitar. Eventually renamed the Telecaster after a threatened lawsuit by Gretsch, which had a drum kit with that name, the Telecaster became one of the great electric guitars, played by all three of the Yardbirds' holy trinity of Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page, as well as Pete Townshend, Bruce Springsteen, and Keith Richards.

What made the Telecaster so successful was its enduring simplicity: still made in all sorts of variations by Fender (here are the two I own--a mid-1980s reissue of the original early '50s model, and a 1997 B-Bender-equipped Tele), it's also an enormously popular kit guitar, because just about anybody with a screwdriver can knock together its basic shapes: the maple neck, ash body, single-ply black pickguard, and two single coil pickups. Played cleanly, The Tele's twangy tones define country music; plugged into a cranked amp, the Tele becomes the snarl heard on the first Led Zeppelin album and Exile On Main Street.

Nacho Banos is a Telecaster aficionado who lives in Spain. He's recently released The Blackguard, a magnificent hard cover coffee table book (complete with black slipcase) that covers the Tele's formative years from 1950 to 1954, when Leo Fender's first Broadcasters, "No-casters" and, finally, Telecasters rolled off his Fullerton, California assembly line.

These early Fenders now fetch tens of thousands of dollars from collectors, many of whom were at the Dallas Guitar Show a couple of weeks ago, which is where I first saw the Blackguard book, on display at its publisher's table, JK Lutherie. They recently sent me a review copy, and while this is a rather specialized subject and comes with a hefty price tag ($85), Tele fans will be knocked out by this book, which like Yasuhiko Iwanade's classic Beauty of the Burst, combines oodles of professional photography of classic vintage instruments, and an extensive technical appendage, explaining just what made these guitars tick from an engineering standpoint, and why they're so desirable 50 years after Leo's first babies were born.

This description of the book on Fender's Website sounds pretty accurate to me:

The book comes in an individual hard case, and features a beautiful color presentation, with more than 2,000 images of early Telecasters. About 50 guitars are disassembled and pictured in detail. Included are a few non-truss Esquires from early 1950, a large group of Broadcasters and Nocasters, and a good selection of ’51, ’52, ’53 and ’54 Esquires and Telecasters.

At 419 pages, The Blackguard is divided into five chapters, one for each year from 1950 to 1954, plus a final “nitty gritty” technical section in which every component of the Telecaster is pictured and explained in detail. Most secrets pertaining to the manufacturing techniques used for these parts are revealed here, supported by factory documentation, Leo Fender’s personal cost notes, patent prints, Radio-Tel inventory sheets, invoices and other historical documents.

Great pictures of legendary Blackguard players in action abound in the book—players including Redd Volkaert, Waylon Jennings, John Beland, Jim Weider, Bill Hullet, G.E. Smith, Keith Richards, Danny Gatton, Roy Buchanan, Jimmy Bryant, Bruce Springsteen, Arlen Roth, Vince Gill, Mike Stern, Marty Stuart and others. There are forewords by Volkaert, Weider, Beland and Ole Fuzzy, plus special contributions by Hullet and luthier David Eichelbaum.

Baños, a native of Spain, has been passionate about electric guitars since childhood. His father bought him his first real electric, a brand-new 1983 top-loader blonde Telecaster, an event that marked the starting point of an intense love affair with one of the first and best guitar designs. He discovered the magic feel, beautiful looks and unique sound of the early Blackguard Telecasters and started to develop a real passion for them.

Baños conceived of the book in 2001, and finished it after three painstaking years of work. He self-edited and self-published it, and all proceeds from its sale are being donated to Intermon Oxfam (www.oxfam.org/eng) to fund Aquaria, a water-supply development program for Ethiopia.

Rock and Roll as we know it wouldn't be possible without the electric guitar, and so much guitar history begins with the Fender Telecaster. If you're a fan of rock (or country for that matter), you'll certainly enjoy this one.

Back in late April, the Wall Street Journal had an op-ed piece that noted that "The dirty little secret about oil politics is that today's high gas price is precisely the policy result that Mr. Schumer and other liberals have long desired":

High prices have been the prod that the left has favored to persuade Americans to abandon their SUVs and minivans, use mass transit, turn the thermostat down, produce less consumer goods and services, and stop emitting those satanic greenhouse gases. "Why isn't the left dancing in the streets over $3 a gallon gas?" asks Sam Kazman, an analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who's followed the gasoline wars for years.

Scan the Web sites of the major environmental groups and you will find long tracts on the evils of fossil fuels and how wonderful it would be if only selfish Americans were more like the enlightened and eco-friendly Europeans. You will find plenty of articles with titles such as: "More Taxes Please: Why the Price of Gas Is too Low." Just last weekend Tia Nelson, the daughter of the founder of Earth Day, declared that even at $3 a gallon she wants gas prices to go higher.

The subtitle of the essay was "Don't liberals like sky-high fuel prices?". Well, here's one who does, as he screedily writes in his gloriously stuck-in-the-seventies op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle:

No wait, not 6. To hell with that. Make it 10. Ten bucks a gallon, no matter what the going rate for a barrel of light, sweet crude. That would so completely, violently, brilliantly do it. Revolutionize the country. Firebomb our pungent stasis. Change everything. Don't you agree?

Here's what we could do: Give gas discounts to cabdrivers (at least initially), metro transit systems and low-income folks, those who have to drive their busted-up '78 Honda Civics to their jobs scrubbing restaurant toilets and flipping burgers and vacuuming the residual cocaine from the seat cushions of numb SUV owners. Everyone else, 10 bucks a gallon, across the board. Eleven for premium.

It would take some finessing. Maybe also give a price break to some truckers and trucking companies (so vital to the economy), but not so much to global delivery companies (FedEx, DSL, et al), because that would force them to raise shipping rates and force you (and me) to reconsider buying everything online and hence encourage you to shop locally, thus reviving a stagnant local economy.

Voila -- gas crisis, oil crisis, warmongering agenda, pollution issues, road rage, traffic congestion, urban decay, oil profiteering -- all completely, almost totally, somewhat solved. Or at the very least, dramatically, gloriously shifted toward ... I don't know what. Something better. Something more humane, less greedy, more sustainable.

The Carter years.

This seems to be one of those Million Dollar Home Page-style Internet collages. As Gerard Vanderleun wrote, "I like it because I'm in it"--to the right of Judith Weiss of Kesher Talk, and a few rows down from Glenn Reynolds, LaShawn Barber, and Gerard himself, all of whom I met in New York November, and are certainly good company to be in.

Found via New Jersey-based Fausta Blog, the Wall Street Journal's Paul Mulshine explores perpetually blighted Newark:

Cory Booker grew up in a North Jersey suburb. The son of a middle-class African-American couple who broke the color barrier, the tall, athletic Mr. Booker played football at Stanford and later studied at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. And like Richard Florida, he is a disciple of Jane Jacobs.
"She had a very strong belief in creating strong neighborhoods and communities," Mr. Booker told me a couple of days before Tuesday's election for mayor of Newark, which he won in a landslide.

As he talked about his plans for the city, we drove past empty lots and abandoned housing. Mr. Booker was imagining filling those dead blocks with some of the most conveniently located housing in the New York area. "It's quicker to get to the former World Trade Center site on the PATH train than for people on the Upper West Side or Upper East Side to get there." And it's not just Manhattan that's easily accessible. Amtrak will get you to Washington in 2 1/2 hours. Newark also has an airport, a seaport and access to every major highway on the Northeast Corridor.

So why don't builders take advantage of this prime location? "Newark has a notorious reputation in the state of New Jersey for the length of time it takes to get certificates of code compliance or certificates of occupancy for these buildings," Mr. Booker said. One woman had to wait eight months to get approval to open a business, he noted. Meanwhile, one builder found it impossible to get his paperwork approved--even though the work he was doing was for the city housing authority. The guy then hired a "facilitator" to move the project along, but he still got nowhere. The really frightening part, said Mr. Booker, was that the facilitator was the son of the mayor.

That mayor was Sharpe James. In his 20 years of running Newark, Mr. James managed to accumulate a Rolls-Royce, several houses and a yacht. Throughout that time, he openly opposed gentrification. He didn't want newcomers moving to the city. With good reason: They would have voted him out.

When Mr. Booker first challenged Mr. James for the mayoralty in 2002, Mr. James survived only by running what was almost certainly the dirtiest campaign of the century. He accused Mr. Booker of "collaborating with the Jews to take over Newark" and even went so far as to say of Mr. Booker on TV, "He's Jewish." He isn't. He isn't white, either. But Mr. James accused him of that as well.

The tactics won Mr. James enough of a margin in the housing projects and among city workers to beat Mr. Booker. Meanwhile the state's Democratic establishment turned a blind eye to the race-baiting and anti-Semitism. The policy of the political class toward Newark, even in Republican administrations, has been to throw pork-barrel projects at it.

Mr. James looked like he was on a roll. But then he pulled out of this year's mayoral race at the last minute. His reason remains a subject of speculation to those who follow New Jersey politics.

For more on New Jersey's woes, check out our podcast with Steven Malanga of City Journal, on "The Mob That Whacked Jersey", a cautionary tale for residents of all 50 states, not just my place of birth.

Update: Orrin Judd, himself a former Jerseyite, has much more.

In The American Enterprise Magazine, Eric Cox reviews Poseidon, this week's Hollywood remake of yet another decades-old film that should have remained underwater (not to mention yet another attempt to recreate Titanic's enormous success):

For those not old enough to realize it, the movie is a remake of The Poseidon Adventure (1972), one of a number of films in the first half of the 1970s that featured all-star casts trapped in disastrous situations. Other self-explanatory titles of the genre include Airport (1970), The Towering Inferno (1974), and Earthquake (1974).

It was probably no coincidence that the 1970s was also a very tumultuous time. The Vietnam War and Watergate were roiling American politics. The nascent environmental movement succeeded in banning the pesticide DDT in 1972—the same year that the killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the summer Olympics marked the birth of modern terrorism. High gas prices and the creeping economic and political influence of Arab countries were a source of great public anxiety. That fear was explicitly expressed in the satirical film Network (1976), in which a crazed network news anchorman named Howard Beale rants against the fact that an Arab oil company has just purchased his own television network and that the Arabs are taking over the country.

Disaster movies played to the public’s fears, and for a short time Hollywood capitalized.

No doubt Warner Brothers studios decided to remake The Poseidon Adventure because they own the copyright and enough time has now passed that they feel the movie can be recycled for a new, younger audience. But it just so happens that there are some striking similarities between the 1970s and the current decade that may herald a revival of the disaster movie genre.

Do tell.

Arnold Kling looks at the possible coming of Pelosism:

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi plans to use control of Congress to launch an investigation into the Bush Administration. For those of us who have not been drinking the Kos Kool-Aid, this seems like a questionable enterprise.

In the late 1940's, the Republicans finally took control of Congress. Seething after years of the Roosevelt Administration, one of the things that Republicans did in the late 1940's and early 1950's was launch investigations into the "treason" of the Roosevelt-Truman State Department, as well as former Communists in various professions. When I was three years old, one of the investigating committees decided that my mother, who had joined the Communists in the 1930's and left the Party in the 1940's, was of sufficient national security interest to be hauled before the Grand Inquisition. A few of the people that these committees investigated did turn out to be foreign agents or traitors. However, most of those investigated, like my mother, never did anything wrong.

In the 1950's, the Republican Right saw the investigations into "un-American activities" as a way to righteously smite down the Democratic Party. They wanted to expose their opponents' scandals and treason. Instead, they wound up exposing their own bad judgment, radicalism, and incivility. In the long run, the investigations damaged both parties. Certainly, the Republicans gained nothing. Apart from the war hero Eisenhower, their electoral fortunes sagged -- they lost control of Congress from 1958 until 1994. It seems rather odd that Democrats should want to try a similar strategy today.

The most famous of the inquisitors was Senator Joe McCarthy. In American politics today, McCarthyism is an epithet. I am not sure why the Democrats want to turn Pelosism into its synonym.

Because "America Needs An Audit!"

(Say, is there a subliminal message buried in that?)

Perhaps hearing the not-so-subliminal writing on the wall, Pelosi's spokesman is currently saying, "impeachment is off the table; she is not interested in pursuing it".

But where could all this partisan rancor lead? A Blue! Red! civil war in 2008!

An often compelling read about a polarized electorate heading to explosion over a contested presidential election in 2008, Blue! Red! nevertheless sometimes veers into the realm of the unintentionally hilarious.

Even though the book begins with the mandatory disclaimer that it "is a work of fiction and that any resemblance to real persons is purely coincidental," the plucky Democratic candidate in the book is a female senator ("Sheila Brinton") whose husband was once president of the United States. Senator Brinton shows a lot more intestinal fortitude than the previous Democratic candidates for president who, in the book's retelling, meekly allowed themselves to be cheated out of the presidency.

"I want to keep fighting," Senator Brinton declares. "I want the Presidency with every fiber of my being - I want it for the Party, for our people who've been beaten down . . . I'm afraid that if I concede now, and I run again next time, they'll steal the election again. If they steal election after election, we have no choice but to not accept it. I'll not back down; I'll not concede like those soft men who were candidates before me conceded."

Strangely, Blue! Red! foresees the college football bowl games becoming the site of armed conflict between rabid partisans (with Republicans naturally being the aggressors).

Fortunately, Dean Barnett reminds us, it's unlikely to happen:

Walking around Harvard Yard...Sometimes it must seem like Paris in 1789 with all the politically inspired fury sprouting up among the lattes. But if Harvard professors want to storm the Bastille--or start a civil war--they'll have to do it themselves. And that's not very likely.

After all, they don't even want Army recruiters on campus.

Well, there is that.

Update: A new issue is emerging for the 2008 elections: Stop global demagnetizing!

I'm sure there will be a Daily Degauss blog to focus on it by then...

Another Update: Welcome Real Clear Politics readers; please look around, there's much here you may enjoy.

Sorry for the lack of posts, I'm just editing, mixing down, and uploading the latest Pajamas Blog Week In Review podcast. In terms of audio quality, this will be the best one yet--and the panelists definitely came to play as well.

I'll let you know when it's up--or just keep checking the Pajamas motherblog.

Update: Click here--it's now online.

History doesn't repeat, but sometimes an Egg McMuffin does: Vanity Fair contributing editor gets a twinge of nostalgia and the urge to slum it with (his words), "the commoners" and winds up recreating John Kerry's infamous July 2004 trip to the local outlet of a nationwide fast-food franchise.

Self-parody ensues.

Watch this, if you dare...

Of course for obvious reasons, I still think this is the best V For Vendetta parody.

(Via Dorkafork.)

TigerHawk writes, "If I were A.M. Rosenthal's family, I'm not sure how I'd feel about the biographical article the New York Times is running on its front page this morning". The Times obit notes:

As that injunction implied, the columns reflected his passions and what he saw as a personal relationship with readers. He addressed a range of foreign and domestic topics with a generally conservative point of view. But there were recurring themes —his support for Israel and its security, his outrage over human rights violations in China and elsewhere, his commitment to political and religious freedoms around the world, and his disgust at failures in America's war on drugs.

Other than possibly disgust at the war on drugs, are any of those opinions held by today's Timesmen (Or Timespersons, Timespeople, or whatever you'd prefer to call them)?

Note also whom Rosenthal's column was replaced with.

Update: Cliff May, who worked for Rosenthal, writes:

He was not always an easy man to work for. But by any standard, he was an extraordinary journalist of the old school.The Times, under him, was not always strictly neutral, but during his tenure a serious attempt was made to be fair to all sides, to separate news from analysis and to segregate both from opinion and partisanship.

Those days are long gone. Not just the Times but the entire media world is poorer for it.

Especially given the Times' continuing influence over so much of the rest of the legacy media.

Another Update: Somewhat related--Tim Blair awards The Mohamed Atta Prize For Mangled Metaphors to a Time magazine staff memo concerning departing managing editor Jim Kelly:

IT IS A FITTING TRIBUTE TO A MAN WHO WAS SITTING IN THE PILOT’S SEAT AT TIME ON THE MORNING OF 9/11/01, AND HASN’T MADE A MISSTEP SINCE.

Uh-huh.

Confederate Yankee suggests a new ad campaign for Qwest Communications...

In 1950, Leo Fender released his first Broadcaster electric guitar. Eventually renamed the Telecaster after a threatened lawsuit by Gretsch, which had a drum kit with that name, the Telecaster became one of the great electric guitars, played by all three of the Yardbirds' holy trinity of Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page, as well as Pete Townshend, Bruce Springsteen, and Keith Richards.

What made the Telecaster so successful was its enduring simplicity: still made in all sorts of variations by Fender (here are the two I own--a mid-1980s reissue of the original early '50s model, and a 1997 B-Bender-equipped Tele), it's also an enormously popular kit guitar, because just about anybody with a screwdriver can knock together its basic shapes: the maple neck, ash body, single-ply black pickguard, and two single coil pickups. Played cleanly, The Tele's twangy tones define country music; plugged into a cranked amp, the Tele becomes the snarl heard on the first Led Zeppelin album and Exile On Main Street.

Nacho Banos is a Telecaster aficionado who lives in Spain. He's recently released The Blackguard, a magnificent hard cover coffee table book (complete with black slipcase) that covers the Tele's formative years from 1950 to 1954, when Leo Fender's first Broadcasters, "No-casters" and, finally, Telecasters rolled off his Fullerton, California assembly line.

These early Fenders now fetch tens of thousands of dollars from collectors, many of whom were at the Dallas Guitar Show a couple of weeks ago, which is where I first saw the Blackguard book, on display at its publisher's table, JK Lutherie. They recently sent me a review copy, and while this is a rather specialized subject and comes with a hefty price tag ($85), Tele fans will be knocked out by this book, which like Yasuhiko Iwanade's classic Beauty of the Burst, combines oodles of professional photography of classic vintage instruments, and an extensive technical appendage, explaining just what made these guitars tick from an engineering standpoint, and why they're so desirable 50 years after Leo's first babies were born.

This description of the book on Fender's Website sounds pretty accurate to me:

The book comes in an individual hard case, and features a beautiful color presentation, with more than 2,000 images of early Telecasters. About 50 guitars are disassembled and pictured in detail. Included are a few non-truss Esquires from early 1950, a large group of Broadcasters and Nocasters, and a good selection of ’51, ’52, ’53 and ’54 Esquires and Telecasters.

At 419 pages, The Blackguard is divided into five chapters, one for each year from 1950 to 1954, plus a final “nitty gritty” technical section in which every component of the Telecaster is pictured and explained in detail. Most secrets pertaining to the manufacturing techniques used for these parts are revealed here, supported by factory documentation, Leo Fender’s personal cost notes, patent prints, Radio-Tel inventory sheets, invoices and other historical documents.

Great pictures of legendary Blackguard players in action abound in the book—players including Redd Volkaert, Waylon Jennings, John Beland, Jim Weider, Bill Hullet, G.E. Smith, Keith Richards, Danny Gatton, Roy Buchanan, Jimmy Bryant, Bruce Springsteen, Arlen Roth, Vince Gill, Mike Stern, Marty Stuart and others. There are forewords by Volkaert, Weider, Beland and Ole Fuzzy, plus special contributions by Hullet and luthier David Eichelbaum.

Baños, a native of Spain, has been passionate about electric guitars since childhood. His father bought him his first real electric, a brand-new 1983 top-loader blonde Telecaster, an event that marked the starting point of an intense love affair with one of the first and best guitar designs. He discovered the magic feel, beautiful looks and unique sound of the early Blackguard Telecasters and started to develop a real passion for them.

Baños conceived of the book in 2001, and finished it after three painstaking years of work. He self-edited and self-published it, and all proceeds from its sale are being donated to Intermon Oxfam (www.oxfam.org/eng) to fund Aquaria, a water-supply development program for Ethiopia.

Of course, one of the most visible Telecaster players is Keith Richards, Chuck Berry's adopted demon son. There are conflicting reports that his health has taken a turn for the worse after his recent, skull damaging fall vacationing in Fiji. Hopefully they're vastly overblown stories by a tabloid press out of control, as this would be an ignoble end to one of history's great hell raisers. Not to mention the man who made five string guitars hip.

Update: Just had a great phone call with the author, which will form the basis of my next podcast. Needless to say, I'll let you know when it's online.

Another Update: It's online--click here to listen.

As a follow-up to our previous post, Michelle Malkin has a video podcast on Ayaan Hirsi Ali and other women warriors, over at her Hot Air site.

Update: Suggerio has video clips of an interview Ali gave (in English) to Norwegian TV in February.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a staggeringly brave member of the Dutch Parliament, and one of Time's 2005 "World's Most Influential Leaders" spoke at Harvard today. Blogger Miss Kelly has filed a great report:

One business school student (Muslim male) asked "If Islam is so oppressive to women, how can you explain that Muslim countries like Pakistan and Indonesia have had women prime ministers?" Her response to that was deadly: "In some Muslim countries such as Iran and Afghanistan, under sharia, women are forced to wear hijab, adulters are stoned (mostly women, not the men), daughters get half the inheritance that sons do, and a man can easily get a divorce, while it's very difficult for women to get divorced. In secular Muslim countries like Turkey and Indonesia, fundamentalist Islam is on the rise. Twenty years ago, Indonesian women did not go around in hijab, now it is commonplace. There is an attitude of denial in the face of a great deal of empirical evidence about the oppression of women. Anyone who denies this evidence is personally contributing to the subjugation of women." (That means YOU, Dude).

The last questioner (Bangladeshi woman) asked "Do you identify yourself as a woman? If so, why aren't you concerned with domestic abuse? Why are you only harping about Islam?" Ayaan was amused. "Yes, I identify myself as a woman, I think that's self-evident."

I certainly can't argue with that--or with the rest of Ayaan's comments. Read the whole thing.

This must be an apocalyptic sign of some sort: David Corn and Orrin Judd are in agreement on Michael Hayden. Meanwhile, Joe Biden and Jonah Goldberg agree on Iraq.

I'm sure "Tubular Bells" is playing in the background somewhere...

I knew this was merely a matter of time: Tilda Swinton, who plays the White Witch in The Chronicles of Narnia, appears in public without a script based on C.S. Lewis. Predictible results ensue.

As the Professor writes about another cracked actor, "Back in the old days of the studio system, a star like Cruise who behaved badly in public would have been cut off as box-office poison. Maybe those guys knew what they were doing?"

Indeed^TM.

Michelle Malkin fisks Swinton's remarks and writes, "Sort of dampens one's enthusiasm to see the next Narnia movie, doesn't it?"

Not really--it just adds to how we're supposed to percieve the character she's playing. And unlike Swinton, the mogul who spearheaded the Narnia movies still seems to have his feet solidly on the ground.

When an article begins like this...

Question: What do you get when you take two world wars, add the two most malign ideologies of the century, throw in genocide, the collapse of religious institutions, radical secularism, a political elite sealed off from opinions it finds distasteful, spiraling social costs, deathbed demographics and growing numbers of an unassimilated immigrant population?

Answer: You get Europe in the new millennium - mired in aggressive pacifism, moral nihilism, resurgent anti-semitism and reflex anti-Americanism. And, if you want to blame all that on Bush and Cheney, you have to shut your eyes and ears to a mountain of statistical evidence. To those on the American left who find Europe more “sophisticated”, you’re right: it’s sophisticated in the sense that a belle époque Parisian boulevardier is sophisticated – outwardly dapper and worldly, inwardly eaten away by syphilis and gonorrhea. It’s only a question of how many others the clapped-out bon vivant infects before his final collapse.

...You know what to do next. As Steyn writes, "The big story of the last three decades is that the more it’s mired itself in the creation of a centralized pseudo-state the more 'Europe' has fallen behind America in every important long-term indicator, from economic growth to demographics".

Don't expect that story on CNN anytime soon.

Will Collier of VodkaPundit attends the first post-Katrina New Orleans Jazz Festival. Just keep scrolling.

Back from New Jersey; regular blogging to resume tomorrow.

AP reports that "a British judge ruled that Apple Computer Inc. is entitled to use the apple logo on its iTunes Music Store":

Apple Corps, the guardian of the Beatles' commercial interests, contended that the U.S. company's use of the logo on its popular online music store had broken a 1991 agreement in which each side agreed not to enter into the other's field of business.

But High Court Judge Anthony Mann disagreed, saying that the computer company's logo is used in association with the store — not the music — and so did not breach the agreement.

"I conclude that the use of the apple logo ... does not suggest a relevant connection with the creative work," Mann said in his written judgment. "I think that the use of the apple logo is a fair and reasonable use of the mark in connection with the service, which does not go further and unfairly or unreasonably suggest an additional association with the creative works themselves."

Though Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs said he was "glad to put this disagreement behind us," the dispute appears far from over. Neil Aspinall, the manager of Apple Corps, said his company would immediately take the case to Britain's Court of Appeal.

* * *

The 1991 agreement ended previous lengthy litigation over the logo. Apple Computer told the court that it paid Apple Corps $26.5 million as part of that out-of-court settlement, and in turn had received "a considerably expanded field of use." The terms of the deal were kept confidential at the time.

Always fun to see how aggressively two companies with utopian visions are willing to agressively duke it out in court. All you need is love--and an Apple Corps of lawyers and millions of dollars to pay their legal fees.

Betsy Newmark notes that George Clooney is calling for strong military action to protect civilians in Darfur, and writes:

So, welcome Clooney to the neoconservative ranks as he calls for military intervention in a foreign country to promote ideals of liberty and humanity.

Actually, it's merely a return, after a brief nostaligic midlife Blue State, blacklist, Red Soviet flirt, to his roots. Welcome back, George!

The Professor looks at the Confederate angle in the George Allen/James Webb race in Virginia.

One of my most popular posts in 2005 (I kept finding people linking to it in the stats throughout the year) was a throwaway item I wrote on Christmas Eve of 2004 on the controversy of the Confederate flag on the top of the General Lee in the 2005 big screen remake of The Dukes of Hazzard. On the surface, it seemed trivial, but as Glenn notes, critics of Senator Allen are complaining about his Confederate Flag pin...that he wore in high school, forty years ago.

Over at TCS Daily, Lauren Weiner crafts an exceptional profile of Lillian Hellman:

In this woman we find a true master: Capitalism was all greed and exploitation yet Hellman, its critic, enjoyed wealth, luxury, and ordering lesser beings around. She believed herself to be original and independent-minded, but in finding capitalism itself fascist, she was not voicing an original thought but parroting the main plank of the Communist Party's ideological platform.

Read the whole thing. In 1952, Hellman told HCUAA, "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions". Which is remarkably ironic, and quite possibly knowingly so: nothing was more fashionable (especially in Hollywood), or more likely to change direction on a dime, than communism itself.

In today's L.A. Times, novelist Andrew Klavan writes:

"United 93" — the film celebrating the heroic civilian attempt to retake a hijacked plane on 9/11 — opened last week. That's great. Well done and about time. But now, let's have some war movies.

We need some films celebrating the war against Islamo-fascism in Afghanistan and Iraq — and in Iran as well, if and when that becomes necessary. We need films like those that were made during World War II, films such as 1943's "Sahara" and "Action in the North Atlantic," or "The Fighting Seabees" and "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," which were released in 1944.

Not all of these were great films, or even good ones, but their patriotic tributes to our fighting forces inspired the nation.

Yes, I know--I wrote about that a year ago as well.

Ed Driscoll.com: Ahead of the curve, some of the time!

Daily Variety looks at the aging demographics of television viewers:

The major nightly newscasts and newspapers continue to grapple with the need to "get younger," from the "CBS Evening News' " planned makeover and the obscene drift of primetime magazines in television to shorter stories and increased page one "pop culture" coverage in top dailies. Beyond reaching the young adults advertisers covet, the concern is that the next generation needs to develop the news-consuming habit.

Seldom mentioned, however, is the fact that cable news is equally geriatric. Indeed, Fox News Channel and CNN are two of only three leading basic networks (the other being the Hallmark Channel) whose median viewer age is over 60. Headline News rings in next at 59.9, and MSNBC is still on the rickety side at 57.

Yes, I know. I wrote about that a year ago.

Betsy Newmark diagrams "a textbook example of how media bias is done".

The discordent reaction the Elite Media has had to certain recent movies with huge Red State audiences are a pretty good sense of how out of touch the legacy media really is. For the latest example (found via Tigerhawk) just look at United 93:

So has anyone in my newsroom been to see "United 93"? You've got to be kidding. The people who lined up two and three times for "Fahrenheit 9/11" are made visibly uncomfortable by this film. They seem to just wish it would go away.

Just this past Christmas, there was Narnia:

Because here in Narnia is the perfect Republican, muscular Christianity for America - that warped, distorted neo-fascist strain that thinks might is proof of right. I once heard the famous preacher Norman Vincent Peale in New York expound a sermon that reassured his wealthy congregation that they were made rich by God because they deserved it. The godly will reap earthly reward because God is on the side of the strong. This appears to be CS Lewis's view, too. In the battle at the end of the film, visually a great epic treat, the child crusaders are crowned kings and queens for no particular reason. Intellectually, the poor do not inherit Lewis's earth.

Does any of this matter? Not really. Most children will never notice. But adults who wince at the worst elements of Christian belief may need a sickbag handy for the most religiose scenes. The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw gives the film five stars and says, "There is no need for anyone to get into a PC huff about its Christian allegory." Well, here's my huff.

OK, to be fair, that was from England's Guardian, not an American publication. But it's a pretty safe bet that loads of people in big city newsrooms felt much the same way. As Andy Rooney said of The Passion of the Christ, the first post-9/11 to really show the divergence between Red State audiences and Blue Media:

"I'm not going to spend $9 just for a few laughs"

And just to bring this post full circle, here's a reminder of the reviews that 23 critics wrote in 2004 about both The Passion and Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. Try to guess which film they gushed over, and which one they loathed.

Well, I guess I couldn't have done too badly yesterday--Tammy Bruce emailed today to ask me to appear again on her show tonight to discuss assorted Tofflerian concepts. Look for me around 5:30 PM PDT/8:30 PM EDT; listen online, or via many of these fine stations.

And for my TCS Daily podcast interview with Alvin Toffler, click here.

Over at TCS, James Pinkerton goes deep, deep within the Paramount-Industrial Complex to explore the hidden subtext buried underneath the otherwise formula plot of Mission Impossible 3: Your mission, Mr. Cruise, "should you decide to accept it, is to convince people that you are normal":

OK, so light that famous match, cue up the cool Lalo Schifrin music, and away we go with the third installment of this series. Is "Mission: Impossible 3" a good movie? It is if you like that sort of thing -- it's thoroughly technological, thoroughly implausible, thoroughly enjoyable.

But what makes the film so interesting to watch -- at least for tabloid-reading followers of Tom Cruise's love life -- is that it's a spy story within a spy story. There's a spy story for us to unravel as we watch Ethan Hunt, the mysterious movie character, try to save the world from deadly arms dealers, and there's a second inner story for us to unravel as we watch Tom Cruise, the mysterious movie actor, try to save his career from nasty gossip-mongers.

Good luck with that.

Greetings from South Jersey!

Nina and I are in town for the weekend to give my father a sort of proper, if belated, Irish Wake at a local restaurant that was a favorite of his. About 30 family and friends are scheduled to arrive there on Saturday.

We spent all of yesterday in airports, airplanes and cars, not getting to the hotel until 2:30 in the morning. But prior to leaving California, I received an email from Tammy Bruce’s producer, wanting me to appear on her radio show on Thursday, to discuss my podcast interview with Alvin Toffler, which went live earlier this week.

I told him that as much as I’d love to (and greatly enjoy Tammy’s contribution to the Pajamas podcasts), I’m flying. Would Friday work?

Friday would work. So we drove to my mom's house, where company is already arriving from afar, and had lunch at 11:30. And then from 12:30 until 1:15 PM Eastern time, I appeared on the Tammy Bruce show. I did a fair amount of radio in the last years of my previous life, but none since, so while I know the behind-the-scene mechanics and understand my role in them, I have no idea how I sounded today to listeners.

How I sounded to me was basically like one long 45 minute cutting edge technology espousing run-on sentence:

ThankyouTammygreattobehere! TofflerpodcastThird Wave, prosumers,Revolutionary Wealth, JohnKennethGalbreath! BlogosphereInstapunditMalkinHot Air,Vblogs! FreelancejournalistNRO, TCS, PC WorldPajamas Media! thanksit’sbeenfun!

It’s amazing what adrenaline, flop sweat, and that fear of dead air can do to make sounds come out of a mouth. Fortunately, I didn’t blurt out anything remotely similar to this, so I think the show went well, and the fact that Tammy had me over for something like three segments, including the first segment after the on-the-hour newsbreak, was a good sign that I wasn’t completely bombing.

What made it even more surrealistic was to be doing the show in my old room in my mom’s house, pacing the floor with a cell phone and headset, discussing high tech topics with a national radio show host. On the other hand, that’s one of those Army of Davids/Third Wave sorts of things: as a kid, I daydreamed in that room the standard, hey kids--let's put on a show! sorts of fantasies. This week, I recorded, edited and uploaded a podcast (and wrote a magazine article) from my den in California on Wednesday, and then did a radio show on Friday from old bedroom in New Jersey.

And then afterwards for complete reverse Future and Culture Shock, drove my wife to the local McDonald’s so that she can download email, as that’s one of the few sources of public Wi-Fi in this small town. As opposed to the suburbs of Silicon Valley, where it's practically the law that every restaurant and coffeehouse have Wi-Fi service.

Of course, trying to explain all this to my mom and my late father’s sister is virtually impossible. Internet? Blogs? Wi-Fi? Podcasts? Forgetaboutit! But the radio, of course, they do understand, and I think that was enough to make me look good in their eyes.

More this weekend, time permitting.

Jeff Goldstein is having a fundraiser this week to keep his blog alive--and to keep the blogger in body and soul. And unlike PBS, he's not interrupting his usual schedule with reruns of The Last Waltz, The Compleat Beatles and Strawberry Alarm Clock: Live From Shelbyville.

Isn't that reason alone to support good blogging?

The Pajamas Blog Week In Review is up early this week, because I'm travelling today. Fortunately, I was able to get it edited, mixed and uploaded last night. Austin, Eric, Glenn And Tammy really bent over backwards to accomodate my schedule, and I certainly appreciate it.

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I spoke with Alvin Toffler, the author of 1970's mega-seller, Future Shock, on his new book, Revolutionary Wealth, and his enduring 1980 classic, The Third Wave. My podcast interview is now up, over at TCS Daily.

(Note that no iPod is required; virtually any computer can download and play this MP3 file.)

Update: Blogcritics has a review of Revolutionary Wealth.

I emailed documentarian Andrew Marcus yesterday morning, and suggested that he upload his great man-at-the-protest video interviews for Pajamas to YouTube, so that bloggers could put easily put the clip right into their posts. He called back shortly afterwards and said he thought it would be a great idea. And as you can see, it's up.

Is Janeane Garofalo using Air America to promote Scientology?

(Via Hot Air.)

In a topic very much related to the previous post, that's the issue du jour over at Cato Unbound.

Jonah Goldberg revives the Dubya As Nixon meme that started gaining traction right around this time four years ago. He makes some great points, especially about our 37th president (whose pesky razor stubble I sympathize with, though not his actual policies):

The economy was a mess toward the end of Nixon's term. It's going gangbusters now. As bad as the Iraq war may be going, it hardly compares to the bloodshed of Vietnam. And as loud as the antiwar movement may be today, it amounts to little more than a historical reenactment of the antiwar protests of the 1960s and 1970s.

But there is one area where we can make somewhat useful comparisons between Nixon and Bush: their status as liberal Republicans.

Nixon has a fascinating reputation as one of the most right-wing presidents of the 20th century. This impression is largely a product of the fact that few presidents have been more hated by the Left. But simply because the left despises you doesn't mean you're particularly right-wing. If LBJ were alive, you could ask him about this. Or just take a look at poor Joe Lieberman.

The truth is, Nixon was the last of the New Deal-era liberal presidents. He sponsored and signed the legislation creating the Environmental Protection Agency, the Water Quality Improvement Act and the Endangered Species Act. He oversaw the establishment of Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Nixon created the Philadelphia Plan, the springboard for racial quotas; pushed for Title IX (the women's "equality" law); and hired Leon Panetta (later Bill Clinton's chief of staff) as his director of the office of civil rights.

Nixon pushed aggressively for national health insurance that would cover 100 percent of the nation's poor children. He increased federal spending on health and education programs by more than 50 percent and massively boosted spending on the National Endowment for Humanities. He tried to increase welfare with his Family Assistance Plan and Child Development Act.

Economically, Nixon got along swell with the chamber of commerce crowd, but he was well to the left of almost any leading Democrat today, championing wage and price controls as a legitimate tool of state, and boasting "Now I am a Keynesian in economics."

I could argue that Nixon's amoral foreign policy is today alive and well in many corners of the Left, but that's a distraction from my central point.

Bush is certainly to the right of Nixon on many issues. But at the philosophical level, he shares the Nixonians' supreme confidence in the power of the state. Bush rejects limited government and many of the philosophical assumptions that underlie that position.

Read the rest.

Update: It shoudn't be entirely surprising that Orrin Judd has a very different take from Jonah.

Michelle Malkin notes that the genial, longtime host of PBS's Wall $treet Week passed away yesterday at age 73.

I used to really love Wall $treet Week in the late 1980s (until I became an investment advisor myself for a spell, and eventually dreaded taking my work home with me). James Lileks wrote a piece for the American Enterprise Magazine last year on how swanky and sophisticated the panel of What's My Line seemed in the early 1960s. Wall $treet Week was one of the last shows to maintain anything approaching that sort of atmosphere--the group discussion that followed Rukeyser's wry monologues felt more like sophisticated after-dinner conversations (albeit around a single theme, hence the title) than what passes for discourse on most cable talk shows these days. When Austin Bay first described his roundtable Pajamas Media podcast concept to me last month, Wall $treet Week was one of the models he specifically mentioned as a prototype.

The obituary that Michelle links to quotes a fund manager and frequent guest as saying that "No one can replace" Rukeyser, which is sentimental nonsense: on television, everyone is replaceable. But few will describe common stock, convertible debentures, and closed-end REIT mutual funds with as much class as Rukeyser did.

In recent articles, both Umberto Eco and Mark Steyn have referenced an aphorism frequently attributed to G.K. Chesterton that goes something like this:

"When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything."

Both men are careful not to directly cite Chesterton: Eco writes that "G K Chesterton is often credited" with the above quote, and Steyn avoids the use of quotation marks when referencing the phrase.

One of Steyn's readers alerts him to its origin story, which can be found here.

And speaking of mangled quotes, as I posted earlier today, Jim Lindgren of The Volokh Conspiracy believes he's found the actual, original source of "Thomas Jefferson's" quote that "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism".

Betsy Newmark notes that writer Stephen Budiansky is attempting to craft a satiric novel "about a university prostituting itself to bump up its U.S. News and World Report rankings. But he keeps finding his ideas being stolen by real universities".

Betsy writes, "It's rather pitiful when the reality exceeds possible satire". But that's the very definition of Muggeridge's Law, which Budiansky is finding himself running straight into.

Stanley Kubrick's classic Dr. Strangelove was originally going to be a straight Cold War thriller, but, "As I kept trying to imagine the way in which things would really happen, ideas kept coming to me which I would discard because they were so ludicrous", he once told an interviewer. "I kept saying to myself: 'I can't do this. People will laugh.'" Eventually, he felt forced to adopt the wild satiric tone that made the film timeless.

In contrast, these days, it's virtually impossible to write about higher education without making readers laugh at its near-universal absurdities.

In the Wall Street Journal, Leonard Gilroy writes that "Today's urban planners falsely claim" Jane Jacobs' legacy:

Given urban planners' almost universal reverence for Jacobs, it is ironic that many have largely ignored or misinterpreted the central lesson of "Death and Life"--that cities are vibrant living systems, not the product of grand, utopian schemes concocted by overzealous planners.

Modern planners have contorted Jacobs's beliefs in hopes of imposing their static, end-state vision of a city. They use a set of highly prescriptive policy tools--like urban growth boundaries, smart growth, and high-density development built around light-rail transit systems--to design the city they envision. They try to "create" livable cities from the ground up and micromanage urban form through regulation. We've seen these tools at work in Portland, Ore., for more than three decades. But the results have been dismal and dramatic. The city's "smart growth" policies effectively created a land shortage, constricting the housing supply and artificially inflating prices. By 1999, Portland had become one of the 10 least affordable housing markets in the nation, and its homeownership rate lagged behind the national average. It has also seen one of the nation's largest increases in traffic congestion and boasts a costly, heavily subsidized light-rail system that accounts for just 1% of the city's total travel. Not exactly how they planned it.

That's because these planning trends run completely counter to Jacobs's vision of cities as dynamic economic engines that thrive on private initiative, trial and error, incremental change, and human and economic diversity. Jacobs believed the most organic and healthy communities are diverse, messy and arise out of spontaneous order, not from a scheme that tries to dictate how people should live and how neighborhoods should look.

She felt it was foolish to focus on how cities look rather than how they function as economic laboratories. "The main responsibility of city planning and design should be to develop--insofar as public policy and action can do so--cities that are congenial places for [a] great range of unofficial plans, ideas and opportunities to flourish," Jacobs wrote.

Sadly, many in the Smart Growth and New Urbanism movements cite Jacobs as the inspiration for their efforts to combat so-called "urban sprawl" and make over suburbia with dense, walkable downtowns, mixed-use development, and varied building styles. While Jacobs identified these as organic elements of successful cities, planners have eagerly tried to impose them on cities in formulaic fashion, regardless of their contextual appropriateness and compatibility with the underlying economic order. In short, they've taken Jacobs's observations of what makes cities work and tried to formalize them into an authoritarian recipe for policy intervention.

As Jacobs opined in a 2001 Reason magazine interview, "the New Urbanists want to have lively centers in the places that they develop. . . . And yet, from what I've seen of their plans and the places they have built, they don't seem to have a sense of the anatomy of these hearts, these centers. They've placed them as if they were shopping centers. They don't connect."

Jacobs's ideas came from the heart. Her foray into urban theory was partly inspired by the failed urban renewal efforts of the post-World War II era that displaced tens of thousands of poor and minority residents and resulted in the isolation or destruction of previously vibrant neighborhoods in New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh and elsewhere.

As Gilroy writes, "Fundamentally, there is little difference behind the social engineering mentality of those who wrought the disaster of postwar urban renewal [which we covered in a long, long post last summer--Ed] and the mindset of today's planners trying to regulate away suburbia in hopes of master-planned urban living for everyone."

In the past, we've encouraged journalists to drop their claims of objectivity, because, let's face it, everyone has biases and opinions, or we wouldn't be human. Claiming an objective, above-it-all neutrality may have made some sense when there were only three TV networks and one or two newspapers per major city, but those days are long gone.

So congratulations to Tony Valdez of the Los Angeles Fox station KTTV-LA for really letting it all hang out.

Found via Pajamas, filmmaker Andrew Marcus has video of yesterday's pro-illegal immigrant (or at least, hey, that's what critics are calling it) protest in Los Angeles

Jonah Goldberg And Lee Harris look at the Depression-era proto-Marxist tactic of The General Strike. Jonah writes:

I see that Lee Harris has beaten me to the punch in calling attention to the smirking ghost of Georges Sorel in the Day Without Immigrants protests (I just wrote up a somewhat similar piece for elsewhere). He makes many excellent points and I am very reluctant to argue with Lee because if smarts were people, Lee Harris would be China.

Nonetheless, I think he muddies or misses an important distinction in his discussion of Sorel and the General Strike. He seems to be working from the assumption that Sorel believed the General Strike would in fact bring down capitalism and bring about true socialism if it were successful. He writes, for example, that "Sorel argued that the general strike was the utlimate weapon in the arsenal of revolution, one that would lead to an apocalyptic transformation from capitalism to socialism." It's my understanding — subject to correction — that Sorel did not actually take a firm position on whether or not a General Strike would, in fact, work. Rather he argued that it was the Myth of the General Strike which was all important. The Myth was a form of Plato's noble lie. The masses needed to have a religious faith that the General Strike would usher in utopian socialism, but whether or not it would in fact be successful in doing that he remained at best agnostic. He rejected "social scientific" Marxism as a fool's errand and was generally unconvinced by literal Marxist prophecy. Rather, he wanted such prophesies to be seen through a secular religious prism.

“[T]o concern oneself with social science is one thing and to mold consciousness is another” he wrote. Sorel had contempt for socialists who wanted to make their case with facts and reason. Sorel called the prominent Italian socialist Enrico Ferri, one of those “retarded people who believe in the sovereign power of science” and who believed that socialism could be demonstrated “as one demonstrates the laws of the equilibrium of fluids.” True revolutionaries needed to abandon "rationalistic prejudices" in favor of the power of Myth.

I think Harris is entirely right that the spirit of Sorel's General Strike is manifest in many of the protest organizers. And Sorel would certainly celebrate the newfound currency of the Myth (though he'd probably be bummed by the non-violent nature of the demonstrations). But he would secretly believe that many of these organizers were useful idiots if they actually thought a General Strike would usher in a utopia.

That would certainly be consistent with the worldview of one of chief prime movers behind yesterday's marches.

Meanwhile, Rod Dreher wonders if the first of these protests/general strikes/marches created such a backlash that there's no way to overcome the initial negative first impression:

1. I think the Latino activists will overreach with this. It's my impression that they have no idea what kind of backlash is building up. It will be very hard for them to overcome the widespread use of the Mexican flag in the first mass demonstrations. For many people, the meme that "these are foreigners who are demanding rights that they don't have" stuck then, and it will be hard to erase. I've been reading stories saying that some Latino leaders worry that the day will be a bust for them politically, because they are using up all their ammo early in the immigration reform process. Maybe so. But what I'm more concerned about/interested in is the backlash from conservatives and others who can't understand why the laws of the United States don't matter here.

2. Why don't the laws of the United States matter here, anyway? What does it say about our country that we cannot control our borders? Nothing good.

3. At the same time, it bothers me--a lot--that there is no small degree of outright racism present. Yes, the Aztlan loons are guilty of the same thing, but I wonder how many anti-immigrant hardliners have trouble seeing the illegals as human beings. On the other side, I hate it when pro-immigrant activists and others assume that any opposition to the amnesty plan can only come from racist motive.

The rest of Rod's post is equally well worth reading.

Finally, Jonah spots a shifting of the goalposts:

A lot of angry lefty readers are moving the goal posts about yesterday's protests. Some of yesterday's demonstrations were big — in LA, Chicago and Denver, as I said this morning — but on the whole, the protests were smaller than last month's demonstrations. And in countless other cities they were in fact a fizzle. But that's beside the point. The point of yesterday was not to draw big crowds, it was show the economic clout of immigrants — mostly illegal immigrants. While I'm sure some neighborhoods felt the impact, over all the effect on life in America was trivial. The most common reaction from my readers was a joyful appreciation that traffic was a bit lighter. That's hardly a mortal blow to American capitalism.

About the only effect my wife and I noticed yesterday, when we went out for dinner in our small, majority minority, mostly first and second generation immigrant Silicon Valley suburb, is that the local McDonald's was closed in sympathy. That was fine with us--we ate at the local Quizno's, owned and operated by first generation Vietnamese immigrants who were happily open for business. As was the nearby dry cleaner, owned and operated by first generation Japanese immigrants. (For what it's worth, I've heard Hugh Hewitt's afternoon show on in the back room from time to time when I've dropped my shirts off there.)

For lots of still photos, click here, here, here and here.

Update: More video, here.

Another Update: I meant to add this post from the Professor to the above mélange, as it dovetails nicely with Jonah and Rod Dreher's thoughts on the protests but forgot it. Fortunately, reading Damon Penny's fine blog reminded me:

People are talking about backlash, and how these rallies are counterproductive. That's probably right, but I think that's what the A.N.S.W.E.R. folks are hoping for. Right now you have lots of immigrants who want to be part of America. The A.N.S.W.E.R. people have been stoking these demonstrations not because they want to help illegal immigrants, but because they hope to provoke a backlash that will make them angry at America instead. They don't have short-term ameliorative political goals -- they want shock troops for the revolution.

In other words, "the masses needed to have a religious faith that the General Strike would usher in utopian socialism".

One More: While the strike did little to impact local businesses, Ed Morrissey notes that government-provided (read: taxpayer-provided) services took a financial beating yesterday:

So far it appears that Chicago outdrew Los Angeles, where the protests closed down about a third of the small businesses in the area, according to the AP. However, in a story that will likely have immigration hardliners talking for days, the AP reports that twenty-five percent of the children in the Los Angeles School District failed to attend classes today. After all, LAUSD's annual budget for its 746,000 students is over $13 billion, or about $17,000 per student. If the walkout caused 25% of the students to strike, that puts the annual educational cost for illegal immigrants at around $3.25 billion -- just for Los Angeles.

You can bet that a lot of people will do precisely these kinds of calculations nationwide. How many students walked out in Chicago? In Houston? In Denver? One of the reasons why illegal immigrants existed in the shadows was to avoid this kind of exposure, but that's no longer operative. Now that they have decided to make this kind of statement, the true costs of their residency will start coming into focus, as well as their production.

Not that the sacrifice will mean anything to the cause. One-day boycotts and walkouts rarely have any real economic impact, for one good reason: people will still return to shop tomorrow. The restaurants that closed yesterday may have the hardest time with a one-day strike as so much of their business depends on whim, but the groceries, clothing stores, and gas stations will recover with little ill effect. People will buy clothes, food, and gasoline when needed, and skipping a day will do almost nothing to overall production.

The political damage, however, may be quite extensive. The administration has attempted to quietly push a liberal reform package through Congress that delivers most of what the demonstrators demand. However, the spectacle of illegal immigrants demanding that Americans capitulate to their agenda only strengthens the opponents to the administration's approach.

Ed's financial observation dovetails nicely with a related post by Virginia Postrel, who explains "Why (Legal or Illegal) Immigrants Are Better for Texas than California":

It's the political economy, stupid. (Nasty phrase, that.) Texas has no income tax, which means public services are funded by sales and property taxes. Everyone, regardless of income or legal status, pays sales and property taxes, either directly or indirectly through rent. California, by contrast, relies heavily on a very progressive income tax that doesn't fall on people who are paid off the books or who don't earn much money in the first place. Liberals who support immigration should rethink their love of progressive income taxes.

Don't expect that to happen anytime soon, of course.

Jim Lindgren believes he's tracked down the source of the silly ""Dissent is the highest form of patriotism" quote that, as Mark Steyn noted in his latest op-ed, Senator Kerry recently atributed to Thomas Jefferson.

Hugh Hewitt fisks an op-ed by the New York Times' Bill Keller, and responds, "What a newspaper chooses to give presidents is a market-driven decision":

The New York Times fancies itself as a responsible voice of elite opinion so it conducts itself in a certain way. That's its choice. But it owes the president nothing.

It does owe, hwoeber, its customers and the country very distinct obligations.

It owes its customers accurate information. The Jayson Blair scandal and the many subsequent black eyes the paper has suffered over the past few years has damaged the Times' brand, as has its ideological hot flashes that occur within its editorials and among its columnists. The past few days' scandal at the Los Angeles Times involving Michael Hiltzik, Pulitzer winner, is just the latest in a parade of MSM meltdowns that confirms the public's low opinion of journalists' highopinion of their own talents and ethics.

Far more improtant, however, than the accurate information it owes its customers, MSM owes the country obediance to the laws.

That's rather hard for the MSM to remember. For the past four decades, elite journalists (with the Times leading the way) increasingly thought of themselves as being "neutral", cosmopolitan and aloof from their home country--and pooh-poohed any upstarts who dared root for the home team.

As a follow-up to the previous post, Deborah Orin notes that communism's sway over the many college professors holds firm (which illustrates just how reactionary the academy remains):

Harvard University has a bizarre idea of how to advance the education of its grads: Instruct them to bow down to North Ko rea's paranoid dictators and show proper "respect" for the Axis of Evil.

It's the ultimate in radical Stalinist chic - the Harvard Alumni Association's $636-a-night totalitarian luxury tour of a rogue nation where thousands are deliberately starved to death.

"Demonstrations of respect for the country's late leader, Kim Il Sung, and for the current leader, Kim Jong Il, are important," instructs the Harvard Alumni Association's tour memo.

"You will be expected to bow as a gesture of respect at the statue of Kim Il Sung and at his mausoleum."

Harvard even tries to pretend that bowing down to thugs is perfectly normal - explaining that it's because "North Korea, like every country, has its own unique protocols."

Well, yes, that certainly is a charming use of euphemism to cover up an ugly and unique reality - since North Korea is not "like every country."

North Korea's "protocols" feature massive human-rights abuses, deliberate famine, concentration camps, religious persecution, gas chambers, likely genocide and trafficking in women and children.

Plus sending body snatchers to Japan and South Korea to kidnap children and force them to train North Korean spies.

Satie Yokota, the mother of a Japanese girl kidnapped in 1977 at age 13 while clutching her racket on the way home from school badminton practice, calls North Korea "enemies of humanity." Now 70, she fears she'll die before she ever sees her daughter again.

Then there's the Stalinist personality cult - when the Harvard alums bow down, they'll be joining the national worship that requires every North Korean to wear a Kim Il Sung lapel pin or else.

Not surprisingly, the Harvard alums are also instructed to carefully censor their reading matter because "certain types of literature may not be allowed into North Korea."

No word yet on whether or not the L.A. Times sufficiently kowtowed last year to gain admission.

In other news concerning the academy, John Leo is handing out his annual Sheldon Award, "given annually to the university president who does the most to look the other way when free speech is under assault on campus".

In constrast to those who celebrate May Day, Catallarchy has an annual link-filled Day Of Remembrance for the over 100 million--and counting--murdered by the ideology.

Meanwhile, Orrin Judd links to a 1999 article in The Freeman:

On ne saurait faire une omelette sans casser des oeufs.” Translation: “One can’t expect to make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

With those words in 1790, Maximilian Robespierre welcomed the horrific French Revolution that had begun the year before. A consummate statist who worked tirelessly to plan the lives of others, he would become the architect of the Revolution’s bloodiest phase—the Reign of Terror of 1793–94. Robespierre and his guillotine broke eggs by the thousands in a vain effort to impose a utopian society based on the seductive slogan “liberté, égalité, fraternité.”

But, alas, Robespierre never made a single omelet. Nor did any of the other thugs who held power in the decade after 1789. They left France in moral, political, and economic ruin, and ripe for the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte.

As with Robespierre, no omelets came from the egg-breaking efforts of Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler, and Benito Mussolini either. [...]

In The New Yorker in 1984, John Kenneth Galbraith argued that the Soviet Union was making great economic progress in part because the socialist system made “full use” of its manpower, in contrast to the less efficient capitalist West. But an 846-page authoritative study published in 1997, The Black Book of Communism, estimated that the communist ideology claimed 20 million lives in the “workers’ paradise.” Similarly, The Black Book documented the death tolls in other communist lands: 45 to 72 million in China, between 1.3 million and 2.3 million in Cambodia, 2 million in North Korea, 1.7 million in Africa, 1.5 million in Afghanistan, 1 million in Vietnam, 1 million in Eastern Europe, and 150,000 in Latin America.

Additionally, all of those murderous regimes were economic basket cases; they squandered resources on the police and military, built vast and incompetent bureaucracies, and produced almost nothing for which there was a market beyond their borders. They didn’t make “full use” of anything except police power. In every single communist country the world over, the story has been the same: lots of broken eggs, no omelets. No exceptions.

But hey, just wait for the next time, when you know they'll get it right...

Over at the newly redesigned National Review Online (the return of the search engine--finally!), Mark Krikorian looks at today's May Day strike by illegal aliens and their supporters:

Today’s May Day general strike by illegal aliens and their supporters should help clarify the Senate’s immigration deliberations. The question before senators, as they seek to pass an immigration bill before Memorial Day, no longer concerns the specifics of policy—how much border fencing, the period of work for guestworkers, etc.

The question now is whether the government of the United States will give in to the mob.

France recently answered that question in the affirmative (for the umpteenth time), when Chirac backed down from his comically small employment reforms in the wake of mass protests. In Latin America, street protests have toppled two presidents in Bolivia since 2003 and one in Ecuador last year.

But the use of direct action to intimidate lawmakers is largely alien to American experience. The civil-rights marches, which the illegal-alien movement frequently points to as its inspiration, were explicitly patriotic and constitutional affairs. The 1963 march on Washington didn’t feature foreign flags and racist, anti-American signs; on the contrary, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech pointed to the promise of “the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,” written by “the architects of our Republic,” and his peroration was based on the lyrics of “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee.”

The illegal-alien marches, starting almost two months ago in Chicago, have more in common with the anti-war marches of the 1960s in their hostility to the American constitutional order. Prominent among the organizers of the street actions have been CISPES, the ANSWER Coalition, and other communist organizations, with CAIR and its ilk joining in, Subcomandante Marcos sending Zapatistas to protest at our embassy in Mexico City—and even Mumia Abu-Jamal expressing his solidarity!

Of course, both the civil-rights and antiwar protests of the 1960s were by Americans demanding the attention of their fellow countrymen. By contrast, the illegal-alien marchers are morally identical to burglars demanding that the homeowner rearrange the furniture. And part of that rearranging became clear last week when a Spanish-language rewrite of the national anthem was released (by a producer with his own colorful Marxist backstory). And Mexico, following the example of Muslim countries boycotting Danish products, is expecting a boycott of American products, called the “Nothing Gringo” campaign.

The illegal-alien marches resemble the Vietnam protests in another way—they’re backfiring. Just as the antiwar movement’s hatred of America caused a backlash that prolonged the war, the illegal-alien marches are hardening attitudes against illegals. A recent poll shows that the earlier marches made respondents less likely, by two-to-one, to be sympathetic to amnesty. The illegal-alien anthem has been denounced by President Bush (of all people), and a resolution is likely to be introduced today by Sen. Lamar Alexander affirming that “that statements or songs that symbolize the unity of the American Nation, including the National Anthem, the Oath of Allegiance sworn by new U.S. citizens, and the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag of the United States, should be recited or sung in the common language of the United States: English.” (I boldly predict this will be approved.)

I'll be interested to see the photos and video that members and readers of Pajamas, and readers of Power Line come back with.

Update: Bare Knuckle Politics has bare knuckle video feeds from several cities where protests are going on.

Another Update: More at Pajamas HQ. And this cartoon by former Los Angeles Times cartoonist Michael Ramirez sums up the tone of the day nicely.

Austin Bay suggests that post-Ba'ath Socialist (in other words, post-Saddam) Iraq is in a similar phase as Russia in the comparatively same time period after the Soviet Union fell:

Three democratic elections, an improving Iraqi Army, a climbing GDP — Iraqis have accomplished a great deal. Don’t expect the critics to admit it, but in ten years we’ll be swamped with books with titles like “Slow Victory” which reveal how Iraq “triumphed below the radar” over terrorists and tyrants. One literary wrinkle to anticipate: Many of the revelatory tomes will argue the Iraqis triumphed despite the Bush Administration. These books will imitate the books written in the immediate post-Cold War which portrayed President Reagan as an evil if amiable dunce who just happened to be in the White House when the Soviet Union finally collapsed. The Reagan Doctrine? Pshaw. Gorbachev won the Cold War. (Of course these tomes either ignored or underplayed the 1983 “Euromissile” crisis where Reagan defeated a Soviet military-political gambit designed to break NATO. BUt that’s another post.)

Iraq’s successes noted, defanging sectarian and tribal militias is a very tough trick. UN peacekeepers in the eastern Congo understand that. Iraq the Model has the details. As the post notes, the militias argue they provide security where the government cannot.

As Austin suggests, read their whole post.