I caught Miami Vice on Friday, and while it's a pretty good Michael Mann crime drama in its own right, it certainly loses something when compared with the TV series that defined the 1980s. Stanley Kubrick never directed a crime drama after his classic The Killing in 1956. (The thinking man's Tarantino movie!) But the look and feel of the new Vice, with its surreal documentary atmosphere and moral ambiguity, seems a bit like what the Barry Lyndon through Full Metal Jacket-era Kubrick would have directed had he been handed the original script for the Vice episode "Smuggler's Blues". That's where the film's two primary plot points comes from; though Glenn Frey is happily absent. Instead Jamie Foxx's Tubbs flies the plane himself, to the same fictious region of Central America where loads of Mission: Impossible episodes once took place.

In theory though, Kubrick as a writer would have taken pains to avoid the lapses in this film's logic, as James Pinkerton notes:

OK, now to Gong Li. She's a major actress in China, and a hottie, too. But she is miscast as Isabella, who is both mistress and chief financial officer to the dreaded Colombian drug kingpin, Montoya (Luis Tosar). In a credulity-stretching -- and surely life-shortening -- gambit, she leaves Montoya to become the semi-girlfriend to Crockett, who has gone undercover to penetrate Montoya's operation.

But even though Gong Li is at least a decade older than Farrell in real life, she hasn't yet been able to master the English language, either. So we sit in the theater trying to understand what the two lovers are saying to each other. And we could really use some explanation, since the two lovebirds drive off in a speedboat to Cuba. How do they get past the US Navy? Or the Cuban police?

But hey, logic was never the original series' strongsuit. And I had a few big disapointments of my own with the film. First, its cinematography. Or, to be more prescise, videography. Whereas the original Vice set new standards for television cinematography, many of the scenes in this movie looked like television blown-up for the big screen. Indeed, when I got home, I searched around to find that Mann shot the film with a Thomson Viper FilmStream Camera--and it really shows. Despite all their shortcomings, George Lucas's digitally "filmed" Star Wars prequels all look like films. And when I go out to the movies, I want to see movies, or at least something that resembles the warmth and sheen of projected celluloid. Not digital, pixelated HD blown-up to the big screen.

But that's relatively minor. (My wife never noticed anything wrong with the film's cinematography; I'm not sure if the audience noticed anything unusual about it, either.) And when the film is released to DVD, it will look fantastic on the small screen. More importantly, I wasn't that crazy about Jamie Foxx's portrayal of Ricardo Tubbs. Pinkerton writes:

In addition to the lack of chemistry between Isabella and Crockett, there's a distinct lack of "it" between Crockett and Detective Ricardo Tubbs, his cop-partner, played by Jamie Foxx. The African American Foxx, who won an Oscar for "Ray" two years ago, has plenty of talent. But it takes two to tango, and if Farrell can't dance, there's not much Foxx can do to make their camaraderie come alive. And such male bonding is the heart of cop movies -- think Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in the "Lethal Weapon" series.

While I'm not sure I miss the actor himself, I do miss Philip Michael Thomas's take on Rico Tubbs, for the same reasons that Camille Paglia described a few years ago:

Philip Michael Thomas as Ricardo Tubbs set a standard for hip, pugnacious yet debonair African-American panache that has been lost in today's tedious gangsta vulgarity, aped by so many white suburban teens.

Finally, I really missed Jan Hammer's score from the TV series. As important as the show's leads and cinematography were, it was his synthesized soundtrack (along with all of the then-great original rock music) that really helped to set the show apart from its competition. Following up on my 2003 interview with Hammer, I interviewed him this month for some technical details for an upcoming music article (more on that as it gets closer to publication), and afterwards, asked him if Mann and company were using his theme or soundtrack music in the new movie. He told me that they weren't, and added, "Hey, it's their funeral".

But Vice certainly made money its opening weekend--it was number one, blowing out a hit movie that's a more historic--if much less documentary-style--look at Gulf Coast criminal activity. But I'm not sure if it has the legs to make it into a serious summer hit.

And as my wife noted afterwards--how can it really be Vice without a pink flamingo or two?

Michael Fumento writes:

Was a time when fasting at the very least meant eating less. But while our soldiers are sacrificing their lives for freedom, their detractors don't seem to be to keen on sacrificing anything at all. Thus we have the Cindy Sheehan "hunger strike," which allows smoothies, coffee with vanilla ice cream, and Jamba Juice. Michelle Malkin has a terrific video send-up of the Sheehan Pigout Hunger Strike at Hotair.com.

Now the peacenik group CodePink, according to the Washington Post, "has issued a nationwide call for people to go on at least a partial hunger strike, if only for a few hours, to show their opposition to the war in Iraq." Partial? For a few hours?

Hey, as I wrote on July 5th:

I'm going on my own personal thrice-daily rolling hunger strike. That's right: rather than just one random hunger strike once a year, I'll eschew all solid foods from 9:00 AM until 12:00 PM. And from 1:00 PM until 5:00 PM. And then just to really stick it to the war-mongering imperialists, I'll fast from 6:00 PM until 8:00 AM the following day.

And I'll do it every day. Fight the power, maaaan!

If only I had listened to my lawyer and patented my concept of the personal thrice-daily rolling hunger strike...

My wife is an expert at California's independent contractor issues. (She literally wrote the book on the subject for the California bar.) Over at her new Bizblog, she looks at the IRS's form SS-8 and dubs it "An Invitation to an IRS Audit".

Guest-blogging at Hugh Hewitt's site, Dean Barnett writes that it's been "a good week all the way around" for Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League:

Over at Soxblog, I had some harsh words for Foxman as he squandered his organization’s once considerable prestige on things like protesting school bullies and vilifying Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.” I thought with Israel being surrounded by some pretty passionate folks dedicated to its annihilation, America’s ranking Jewish organization would have bigger fish to fry than schoolyard miscreants and a purportedly offensive movie (which I as a Jew didn’t find offensive). When virtually the whole country went to see Gibson’s supposedly incendiary film and not a single pogrom ensued, I felt entitled to say I told you so and took a virtual victory lap at Abe’s expense.

Now that Mel Gibson has revealed himself as an anti-Semitic kook, it’s admittedly Abe’s turn to take a victory lap. While Gibson’s DUI arrest and subsequent rantings don’t necessarily reflect on the films he made (any more than Woody Allen’s schtuping of his step-daughter makes “Annie Hall” any less brilliant), they certainly make me feel like a Grade A schmuck for defending him.

Gibson’s actions are indeed indefensible. Thus, I won’t be taking a crack at defending them.

(Actually, it’s been a good week for Foxman all the way around. His full-throated and unnuanced defense of Israel the past fortnight has also impressed.)

Jason Apuzzo of Libertas is, if anything even more damning towards Gibson:

Frankly, I’m disgusted with Gibson. If this story is being reported accurately, Gibson’s remarks are vile and particularly contemptible for coming at a time when Israel is fighting for its life. He was drunk? So what. One can only assume lots of people make it through a D.U.I. arrest without blaming it on a Jewish conspiracy.

Gibson’s alleged comments also come after a lot of conservatives in Hollywood and elsewhere had gone to the mat to defend him against charges of anti-Semitism. Those conservatives included Govindini and I - who stood up for Gibson, even on national television. Neither of us believed those charges about him. Neither of us wanted to pre-judge Gibson or his film purely on the basis of his father’s remarks. I did not find The Passion anti-Semitic any more than I find the New Testament anti-Semitic. [It isn’t.] The Passion tells a story that is universal to world mythology - the story of the beautiful male god torn to pieces as a sacrifice for the renewal of life, the redemption of mankind. It is the story of Attis, Adonis and Osiris. ‘The Jews’ are no guiltier in this story or more implicated in the death of the god than anyone else. The point of this story always is: we are all guilty.

But that’s my interpretation. I don’t know what Gibson’s personal motivations were - and it now seems possible Gibson may have been a bull**** artist, a devout but deranged crank who took conservatives and Christians for a ride. If that’s what he’s done, then his behavior has been lower than dirt. For all I’m concerned, he can now stick his career where the sun don’t shine.

Abyssinia, Mel.

Update: Nikke Finke and Jami Bernard have more.

Another Update: Mickey Kaus discovers "a potential semi-exculpatory angle": "Read the first sentence of the last paragraph of this favorable Daily Catholic profile".

EU Referendum looks at Lebanon's "Mr. Green Helmet", seen screaming while holding dead babies for Reuters/AFP/NYT propaganda photos--since 1996. As they write, "Doesn't Hezbollah have anyone else the media can photograph?"

That someone is spotting and writing about these amazing "coincidences" is a testament to the Blogosphere. Does Big Media even know its tools of the trade are being exposed?

Update: Allah writes:

We’re right on the border of “Loose Change” land now. Thisclose.

But … it does look like it’s the same guy.

There’s probably an innocent explanation. He’s a member of the local civil defense. Or he’s just a villager with a helmet who’s happy to help out in a tough spot. Or, perhaps, he’s a member of Hezbollah.

Either way, he sure does seem to get off on having his picture taken with dead babies.
And there sure do seem to be a lot of photographers willing to help him out.

He and Dan Riehl are also wondering why "the male corpses are covered with a sheet while the women and children are laid out for the photographers?"

If alcohol brings out the worst in someone's personality, then this is the perfect example of it in action, if this report is true. If it is true, Mel Gibson can kiss his career goodbye--and for good reason. (Although redemption in Hollywood is always a possibility.) Otherwise, TMZ is "staring at the mother of all libel cases if not, and I’m sure they know it", as Allah notes.

Update: Mel issues the standard apology here; meanwhile David Frum predicts the next stage of Mel's career, and Duane Patterson looks at the anti-Semitism of an even bigger media darling.

This doesn't sound good no matter what the motives were:

SEATTLE – At least two people have been shot at the Jewish Federation at 2031 Third Ave. in downtown Seattle. One or two people have been taken into custody but it’s not known if they are suspects.

One person was reportedly shot in the abdomen and another in the arm. They are being taken to Harborview Medical Center.

Part of Third Avenue has been closed to traffic. Police are urging people to stay away from the area. It’s not known if more suspects are at large but policemen were seen handcuffing one person and others were searching the area.

At least three people were seen emerging from the building, escorted by police. It’s not know if they were hostages.

Medics have been taking other people from the building.

Details appear to be sketchy; Charles Johnson asks if it's "Possibly related to the Hizballah war". Even if it isn't, Hugh Hewitt is spot-on when he writes, "The import of this is clear: All Jewish centers and synagogues need to be on high, high alert asap".

Update: The Seattle NBC affiliate King5 is now reporting that three have been shot, all women.

Another Update: The King5 article is being updated in real time as new details come in. They're now listing four victims, one of whom has died. They add that "Police have taken one person into custody but there may be more suspects in or around the building".

More: Michelle Malkin quotes the Seattle P-I:

One witness, who declined to give her name, said a man walked into the Jewish Federation building with a gun, said he was upset about what was going on in Israel, then opened fire. After the shootings, the man said to call 911, the witness said. The witness said the man identified himself as an American Muslim.

I'm astonished that someone could become radicalized in Seattle, where social services are so plentiful. I'm sure others will share in my incomprehension.

Related: This lengthy post by Austin Bay compares modern-day Islamofascism with the frequently violent anarchy movement of the turn of the 20th century. Be sure to read the comments as well.

Allah's found the perfect video metaphor for the Blogosphere's ongoing auto-de-fe. Meanwhile, his boss looks at someone who's willing to debase children in her politically-motivated (read: BDS-motivated) performance "art".

And remember, the midterms--and their aftermath--are still well over three months away. Meaning that it's only going to get worse, when the rest of the country begins to start paying attention.

Jonah Goldberg looks at Mark Osterloh of Tucson, Arizona; the bright spark who wants to combine voting with a lottery (as opposed to voting on a lottery):

His idea, which has received undue national attention, is simple: If you vote, you’re automatically entered in a drawing for $1 million — and perhaps some fabulous consolation prizes too! His proposal will be on the November ballot in Arizona, and he hopes it will revolutionize the country by enlisting the lottery-line crowd to fix our democracy. He even has a slogan: “Who wants to be a millionaire? Vote!”

Osterloh, an ophthalmologist and political activist (he ran for governor by bicycling throughout the state a few years ago), is one of those classic American cranks who has the audacity to take our civic clichés seriously. Since the civil-rights era, Americans have been indoctrinated with the message that voting is the essential yardstick of citizenship. Editorialists, civics teachers, and an assortment of deep-thinking movie stars residing in Periclean Hollywood have gone to great lengths to tell Americans that voter apathy is, in and of itself, a terrible evil and that, conversely, high voter turnout is a sign of civic health.

Indeed, for several years, voting-rights activists have been pushing to give prison inmates and younger teenagers the right to vote, presuming that giving rapists, killers, and Justin Timberlake fans a bigger say will improve our democratic process.

* * *

What is surprising about Osterloh’s wacky idea is that the franchise maximizers hate it. The New York Times dubbed it “daft” and “one of the cheesier propositions on the November ballot.” USA Today called it “tawdry.” Fair enough.

But I think part of the reason they’re so scandalized is that Osterloh is taking their logic to its natural conclusion. Advocates of increasing voter turnout already frame the issue in terms of “what’s in it for you.” MTV’s condescending “Choose or Lose” campaign, which aims to get 18- to 30-year-olds to vote, says it all right there in the name; the gravy train is leaving the station and the ballot is your ticket onboard.

Just beneath the surface of much of this voter activism is the assumption that increased turnout would move American politics to the left, by redistributing wealth to the poor and “disenfranchised.” There’s probably some merit here, which explains why so many get-out-the-vote groups are proxies for the Democratic Party. But that doesn’t change the fact that they are trolling for votes among people who don’t appear to take their citizenship very seriously. Osterloh’s bribery scheme merely exposes this motivation in a way that embarrasses voter activists.

Osterloh admits that he’s motivated by more than democracy worship. “One of the goals that I’ve had in my lifetime is to see that all Americans have healthcare like every other major country on Earth. One of the ways to do that is to make sure that everybody votes.” At least he’s honest about it.

Or as Thomas Sowell wrote in October of 2004, "Voting is not a matter of personal expression but a serious responsibility":

If you can't spare the time from watching sit-coms to go check out a few facts one evening at your local library, with the help of your local librarian, then don't pretend that you are a responsible voter, or even a responsible parent.

"Mel Gibson Busted for DUI", according to TMZ.com.

As always, whenever someone generally associated (rightly or wrongly) with conservatism is arrested for substance abuse, watch for hypocritical attacks on Mel's sobriety to come from a generation that lionizes Keith Richards, Keith Moon, Charlie Parker, Dorothy Parker, Teddy Kennedy, Scott Fitzgerald, and numerous other famous non-teetotalers.

Update 7/31/06: This post was written before details of Mel's despicable anti-Semitic tirade came to light. See these newer posts for my current thoughts on Gibson.

Found via Newsbusters, Jeffrey Lord makes a great point: Walter Cronkite's ultimate legacy is that he led the way towards the creation of a conservative media to counterbalance the increasingly out of touch groupthink of the mass media.

Which makes Cronkite an important transitional figure--as we've noted several times before, what we now call "the mainstream media" was once a diversified group of newspapers, magazines, and pamphleteers, each with their own unique viewpoints, serving audiences of like-minded readers. But the invention of radio, and its limited number of available frequencies changed all that in the early 20th century, as Shannon Love noted in 2004:

Since broadcasters functioned as public utilities and had monopoly use of a public property, they could not follow the openly partisan traditions of the newspapers. Broadcast journalists began to advertise themselves as "objective" and lacking "partisan" bias. They had no choice. Nobody was going to tolerate their own political opponents having a monopoly on the broadcast media. Also, broadcasting was supported purely by advertising, so the broadcasters had a profound interest in making sure they did not offend any large chunk of their audience by overtly taking sides.

Of course, it was only a matter of time before someone abused that privilege--and if Cronkite wasn't the first, he's certainly the best remembered by history, as Jeffrey Lord notes:

It is hard to pinpoint exactly when this transformation took place, and no doubt there are differences to be had on exactly when this occurred. Surely one of the most notable moments of Cronkite's liberalism being unmasked in a highly visible fashion was his now famous series on Vietnam. It was Cronkite, personally, who took to the airwaves to inform the American people not about the facts of the Vietnam War -- but rather of his quite liberal opinion about the War. (It was, in short, get out.) Former CBS reporter John Laurence was so taken with this Cronkite decision that he rhapsodized in the PBS show that it was a "breakthrough" for a journalist to "express opinion."

Well, now. It was surely news in 1968 that Cronkite would devote valuable air time to such an out front opinion on the war. But by this time conservative Americans were already well awake to the realization that this powerful new institution of television was being used in ways both subtle and not, to convey the message that there was no more enlightened or superior world view than modern American liberalism. Broadcast by broadcast it was increasingly apparent that those who disagreed or who challenged the liberal media status quo would be given either no air time or have their own views graphically misrepresented.

Lord continues:

Read More »

Vital Perspective, and Pamela of Atlas Shrugs have maps showing the extent of Israeli damage to Beirut--and it's staggeringly small. As Vital Perspective notes:

We've gotten a few emails from astute readers who say that our previous Beirut map was limited to the Beirut city limits. This is true. At the same time they claim the southern suburbs have been "decimated" by the Israelis. This map and supplemental information compiled by highly astute authorities on the issue negates those claims.

Or as Pamela asks, "Devastation? What Devastation?" Charles Johnson writes, "The way the bombing of Beirut is being reported is highly reminiscent of the infamously exaggerated Jenin hoax".

Glenn Reynolds sardonically quips:

The Iranians are no doubt confident that no one would be so depraved as to disregard the sanctity of an embassy . . . .

Heh!^TM

AllahPundit has his first spotting of a media-created Israeli "quagmire".

They don't waste time, do they? Afghanistan was declared a quagmire only a few weeks into it (and about 30 seconds before the Taliban were routed), and CNN trotted out the Q-word three weeks before we first entered Iraq to liberate it from Saddam Hussein.

But then, the legacy media has its own quagmires, of course.

Speaking of Charles Krathammer, in his latest Washington Post column, he writes:

What other country, when attacked in an unprovoked aggression across a recognized international frontier, is then put on a countdown clock by the world, given a limited time window in which to fight back, regardless of whether it has restored its own security?

What other country sustains 1,500 indiscriminate rocket attacks into its cities -- every one designed to kill, maim and terrorize civilians -- and is then vilified by the world when it tries to destroy the enemy's infrastructure and strongholds with precision-guided munitions that sometimes have the unintended but unavoidable consequence of collateral civilian death and suffering?

To hear the world pass judgment on the Israel-Hezbollah war as it unfolds is to live in an Orwellian moral universe. With a few significant exceptions (the leadership of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and a very few others), the world -- governments, the media, U.N. bureaucrats -- has completely lost its moral bearings.

The word that obviates all thinking and magically inverts victim into aggressor is "disproportionate," as in the universally decried "disproportionate Israeli response."

When the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor, it did not respond with a parallel "proportionate" attack on a Japanese naval base. It launched a four-year campaign that killed millions of Japanese, reduced Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to cinders, and turned the Japanese home islands into rubble and ruin.

Disproportionate? No. When one is wantonly attacked by an aggressor, one has every right -- legal and moral -- to carry the fight until the aggressor is disarmed and so disabled that it cannot threaten one's security again. That's what it took with Japan.

The only member of President Bush's first term who garned anything approaching what might loosely be called "respect" from the left was Colin Powell. But ironically, the central tennent of the so-called "Powell Doctrine" (it was actually originally shaped by Caspar Weinberger, but why quibble?) is this:

The Powell Doctrine simply asserts that when a nation is engaging in war, every resource and tool should be used to achieve overwhelming force against the enemy.

Which is the only way to ensure victory. But of course, who in the Middle East, the UN or Europe wants Israel to actually achieve victory?

For more thoughts and links on proportionality, don't miss this post by The InstaProfessor.

In 2003 and 2004, Charles Krauthammer not only coined the clinical phrase "Bush Derangement Syndrome", but explored its cause and why those suffering from BDS invariably have such an intense case. Dr. Krauthammer dubbed that component of the ailment, "the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release".

Chris Matthews demonstrates what the explosion sounds like when the pressure cooker blows--to the point where Don Imus asks him--twice--the question contained in the above title. As Duane Patterson writes, also linking to an MP3 of Matthews' breathless rants, "Listening is fine, but you need to really read what he had to say". Or to paraphrase a James Lileks' comment about another BDS-sufferer, would you like a period, sir? It's wafer-thin!

Update: Roger Simon looks at another example of the mind-warping dangers of BDS.

That was then: In the immediate period after 9/11, Howell Raines, then maximum editor of the New York Times puts coverage of the war in Afghanistan, fears of domestic terrorism, and other pressing national issues largely on the back burner to focus on his pet cause: the Augusta National Golf Club's refusal to admit female members. He obsesses on the story, to the point where the Times runs 95 stories on the topic from late 2002 to mid-2003.

This is now: When faced with a potentially controversial country club story that involves a very prominent leftwing challenger to a moderate liberal senator who only six years ago was a vice presidential candidate, how does the Times react? Tom Maguire writes:

This is from some recent Times coverage of Ned Lamont:

Mr. Lamont wears moderately priced suits from Jos. A. Bank and, at 52, still uses words like heck and poppycock. He quit an exclusive country club in Greenwich this year, saying it was too white and too rich and he did not want it to become a campaign issue.

The country club was "Too white and too rich"? The club in question is the Round Hill Club, where George Bush 41 met Barbara and Sen. Prescott Bush was once president.

And here is another description from Kevin Rennie, writing in the Hartford Courant:

Lamont recently discovered, for example, that the oh-so-waspy Round Hill Club in Greenwich is, well, not terribly inclusive, Biff. Golly, candidates for the U.S. Senate must do a lot of reflecting on how to make this world a better place for you and me. And they often discover that the very white, very Protestant associations they have enjoyed for many years are just not right, now that the world is taking a closer look at them.

"Oh so wasp-y". I bet if the Times reporters made a few phone calls they would find that the Round Hill Club did not rush to embrace Jewish members over the years (that is based in part on the "Gentlemen's Agreement" history of the Fairfield County area, and in part on my own ear-to-the ground rumor-mongering); I bet if they poked around, they would find that even today, the Round Hill Club is viewed as a WASP bastion.

Or maybe not! But how can the Times just slide past this? Ned Lamont does not want it to be an issue, so the Times accepts that at face value? Don't they even want to know just what the non-issue might have been? C'mon we are talking about a virtually unknown candidate for the US Senate here - if he happily hung about in a de facto WASP-only club for ten years and then quit as a matter of political expediency, shouldn't the Times try to figure out why? Especially in a story about how Jewish voters perceive the two candidates?

My guess - the Times would love to cover a three-way Senate race this fall, so they are comfortable going into the tank for Lamont right now. The fact that he is anti-war and anti-Bush (now that he quit his club) is just gravy.

On the plus-side, I guess it's safe to say that the Howell Raines era truly is dead and buried at the Times.

Here's an L.A. Times review of the latest example of its hometown industry's product:

“Little Miss Sunshine” hilariously punctures the grotesque bubble of the competitive American spirit in which “winners” are recognized by their rigorous ability to conform to the standards imposed by the market, and “losers” include anyone who won’t bow to its mighty will.

Kind of like the newspaper itself, I guess.

Dan of GayPatriot looks at Pat Buchanan and dubs him an ex-conservative:

I would say that Pat Buchanan represents the last of the conservative anti-Semites. Except that in 1992, Pat Buchanan made clear that he was no longer a Reagan conservative. As you may recall, in his celebrated speech to the Republican National Convention that summer, not only did he make angry statements, but he spoke far longer than the time allotted to him, thus, delaying the speech of the man who was to speak later that evening, a man whose ideas Buchanan once claimed to have championed — Ronald Wilson Reagan.

By going over his time limit, Pat Buchanan bumped that great American’s speech out of prime time. It would be Ronald Reagan’s last address to a Republican National Convention. Any true Republican, knowing that he was speaking before Ronald Reagan, would, instead of extending his remarks (as Buchanan did), have cut them short, out of respect for the then-octogenarian Gipper. And acknowledged how humbled he was to be on the same platform as that great man.

But, apparently indifferent to delaying Reagan’s speech, Buchanan, in his arrogance, rambled on and on, his angry remarks hurting his party. On that day in 1992, Pat Buchanan, in deed if not in word, abandoned contemporary conservatism and cast himself with those on the extreme fringe, his hateful words contrasting so clearly with Ronald Reagan’s optimistic vision.

So, this month, when Pat Buchanan criticizes Israel, he does so not as a representative of contemporary American conservatism, but of a conservatism long past, whose reactionary attitudes were melted away by the velveteen voice of Ronald Wilson Reagan — and that good man’s appeal to our best hopes and the noble ideals on which this great nation was built.

When the Gipper met David Horowitz shortly after leaving the White House, he confided to Horowitz, "I had second thoughts [about the left] long before you did". (That's a close paraphrase--I don't remember the exact quote from Horowitz's autobiography.) President Reagan was a staunch former supporter of FDR and Harry Truman who famously said:

I started out in the other party. But 40 years ago, I cast my last vote as a Democrat. It was a party in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised the return of power to the States. It was a party where Harry Truman committed a strong and resolute America to preserving freedom. F.D.R. had run on a platform of eliminating useless boards and commissions and returning autonomy and authority to local governments and to the States. That party changed, and it will never be the same. They left me; I didn't leave them.

In contrast, as I noted a year ago, Pat Buchanan has moved in the opposite direction in recent years:

The remaining strain of isolationism on the right are paleoconservatives, of which Pat Buchanan is the most prominent example--and it's not surprising that in the effort to prop up his isolationist beliefs, he's been more than willing to come full circle with the left himself.

Reagan's optimistic, expansive view of conservatism took him to the White House--twice. It's safe to say Pat's brand never will.

Pajamas reports:

Governor Huckabee Pardons Keith Richards: “As the bass guitarist for an obscure rock band, Mike Huckabee is unlikely ever to have the pleasure of giving the downbeat to world-famous Keith Richards, lead guitarist for the legendary Rolling Stones. But, as governor of Arkansas, Huckabee can at least give Richards the satisfaction of knowing that the state of Arkansas no longer considers him a reckless driver. A pardon from Huckabee will apparently soon be on its way to Richards.”

You might think it this pardon was given because of Governor Huckabee’s love for rock and roll, but we think he was just being kind to the elderly.

Keith Richards' brain could not be reached for comment. But his favorite guitar could.

James Taranto speculates on the contents of a curious flash cut in an otherwise pedestrian online NBC video report from southern Lebanon.

Update: Charles Johnson has more, including a screen shot.

While Steve Green seems to be on hiatus from his usual Vodka-haunt, he has a fun article on the joys of modern B-movies, in The New Individualist:

Tinseltown fare has become too predictable—and, I know, that’s a statement as shopworn as a Julia Ryan (er…Meg Roberts?) romantic comedy. Moviegoers know it almost instinctively, as decades of sinking attendance figures demonstrate. Film audiences are tired of tired plot lines. Of tired characters. And especially of the oh-so-tired-I-haven’t-slept-since-1987 communitarian values—values so tired, in fact, that they’ve been known to induce sleep in crack-addicted spider monkeys.

The advantage of B-movies is that they’re able to slip under the radar of Hollywood’s PC Values Police. Or at least we used to call them B-movies, back in the days of the old studio system. Today we call these small features “indy flicks,” or “late-night erotic thrillers,” or “Joe Bob Brigg’s Drive-In Theater.” Some critics, like Roger Ebert, call them “guilty pleasures.”

But whatever you call them, today’s B-movies are often the last outpost of individualism in Hollywood. That’s not to say Hollywood gives us the kind of individualists we’d like to be or even see. Howard Beale growling, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” while slowly going insane is hardly an inspiring figure. But like the other characters we’ll discuss here, at least Beale was shouting from the rooftops instead of singing with the choir.

Read the rest.

(Via the blog of TNI's editor, Robert Bidinotto.)

Update: J.R. Taylor of Right Wing Trash emailed to mention that his site features lots of reviews of "Killer B's" from a conservative/libertarian perspective.

Fox News CEO Roger Ailes claims that MSNBC's Keith Olbermann's wearing a cardboard mask of Bill O'Reilly and gaving a Nazi salute yesterday at a summer meeting of the Television Critics Association is "over the line". It culminates a dark, unending obsession that Olbermann seems to have with his ratings better; Brent Bozell notes that Olbermann named O’Reilly the “Worst Person in the World” 42 times in the last year. That's 40 more times than Saddam Hussein earned Olbermann's signature sobriquet:

Olbermann’s constant, stalker-like obsession with O’Reilly, who normally has about eight times his ratings, lacks all sense of proportion. How do you explain that Olbermann named O’Reilly his “Worst Person in the World” 42 times in the last year? (Saddam drew the brickbat only twice, and Osama bin Laden? Not once.) He named O’Reilly the world’s worst human seven times just in the month of April.

If this obsession is drawing ratings, who then is being attracted to “Countdown”? Olbermann isn’t just cultivating some vague “anti-Fox niche.” Nightly, he bays at the moon in search of the hard-core Left, the devotees of MoveOn and Michael Moore and Daily Kos. In 2004, he was just about the last person inside a TV studio (or outside a mental facility) to claim that John Kerry actually won Ohio, not withstanding that nagging 120,000-vote discrepancy.

But in spite of Olbermann’s best efforts at unveiling the fraud, Bush was still re-elected, so now the MSNBC host is painting him as a dangerous proto-fascist.

Olbermann recently invited on old Watergate figure John Dean to promote his new book, “Conservatives Without Conscience,” which argues that the conservative movement is deeply authoritarian. Since when did John Dean become an authority on the conservative movement?

Jonah Goldberg answers that question:

Here's a short rule of thumb for how to tell who is a "respectable" conservative in the eyes of liberals: any conservative out of power or not seen as supportive of those in power. An even shorter rule of thumb would be: conservatives are respectable if they are useful to liberals. Pat Buchanan became respectable, even adorable, among a loose coalition of liberals leftists, from MSNBC's Chris Matthews to Ralph Nader, when he turned on the GOP establishment. Kevin Phillips, David Gergen and John Dean have been "real" Republicans — though rarely conservatives — for decades because they are willing to confirm the assumptions of liberals. An even more telling example would be the "neocons." Before the Iraq war, neocons were the nice conservatives, the good conservatives, the idealistic conservatives the un-racist conservatives, according to academics, The New York Times and others. This is not to say that they aren't nice, good, idealistic and un-racist. Rather, it's to point up the way in which conservatives become evil as they become influential, relevant, or otherwise inconvenient to liberals. John McCain was touted as a good choice for president by The New Republic and other liberal voices. Today, McCain is increasingly villified by many of these same voices because, it turns out, he's actually a Republican.

Similarly, William F. Buckley is suddenly the voice of humane and decent conservatism, according to liberals. A more humane and decent man, you'll never meet. But it's doubtlessly true that if WFB had the president's ear, the same voices cheering him would once again be calling him a fascist. And, needless to say, if Bush governed on Pat Buchanan's playbook, Chris Matthews would lose his crush on him awfully fast.

Exactly.

Update: More here. And speaking of McCain and other Republicans courted by the media and other Democrats, Debra Saunders writes that it's a one-way street:

I think McCain in the White House could go a long way in healing the country's ugly partisan divide. Then again, I added, Democrats have their own maverick -- Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman. Unlike Dems who ran from their support of the Iraq resolution, Lieberman has remained stalwart. He has forged relations with the Bush White House and joined McCain and Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., in fighting pork-barrel spending.

That's when the table got quiet. It is one thing for Democrats to feel superior to rube Republicans who don't like McCain because he is not sufficiently doctrinaire. When, however, a Democrat gets along with Republicans and espouses moderate positions, well then, he is a turncoat, plain and simple. The episode demonstrated how voters value bipartisanship -- from the other side, only.

Read the rest.

Charles Johnson writes, "Australian police have the leader of a Melbourne mosque on tape, urging his followers to kill 1000 people", and links to this article in The Australian:

SUBURBAN Islamic cleric Abdul Nacer Benbrika wanted to kill 1000 Australians to “please Allah” and had the support of a blond recruit who had pledged violent jihad during a meeting with Osama bin Laden.

A Melbourne court heard yesterday that a witness would reveal that Shane Kent, 29, received weapons and explosives training at the Taliban-run al-Faruq training camp for foreign jihadis in Afghanistan.

And at a meeting with bin Laden in that country, Mr Kent, from Meadow Heights in Melbourne’s north, allegedly committed himself to violent jihad. The alleged Melbourne terror cell’s spiritual leader, Mr Benbrika embraced Mr Kent as part of his clique, the court heard, saying: “He’s good, and he doesn’t talk too much.”

Mr Benbrika encouraged his devotees to plan a large-scale terrorist attack, which police foiled during its “developmental stages”, the court heard during the opening day of the committal hearing of 13 suspects yesterday.

“If you kill, we kill here 1000,” Mr Benbrika allegedly said in a conversation covertly taped by police. “Because if you get large numbers here, the government will listen.”

The court was told that Mr Benbrika encouraged his adherents to follow in the footsteps of one of the masterminds of the 2002 Bali terrorist attack. He allegedly told two of them that when they were captured “they should do like Amrozi (bin Nurhasyim) and tell the judge, ‘You can kill me, but there will be others coming after”’.

No doubt.

"Hezbollah is the long arm of Iran."--Tzipi Livni, Israel's Foreign Minister.

Jennifer Harper of the Washington Times writes:

Half of Americans now say Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the United States invaded the country in 2003 -- up from 36 percent last year, a Harris poll finds. Pollsters deemed the increase both "substantial" and "surprising" in light of persistent press reports to the contrary in recent years.

The survey did not speculate on what caused the shift in opinion, which supports President Bush's original rationale for going to war. Respondents were questioned in early July after the release of a Defense Department intelligence report that revealed coalition forces recovered 500 aging chemical weapons containing mustard or sarin gas nerve agents in Iraq.

"Filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist," said Sen. Rick Santorum, Pennsylvania Republican, during a June 21 press conference detailing the newly declassified information.

Rep. Peter Hoekstra, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, who shared the podium, said, "Iraq was not a WMD-free zone."

I'm sure the Kurds--and the Hague--would agree.

Update: James Taranto asks, "Why would people not believe what they hear in 'persistent press reports'? A clue may lie in this report from Harvard Magazine":

Linda Greenhouse '68 went to a Simon and Garfunkel concert soon after the war in Iraq began, and in the middle of the concert she had a crying jag. When she accepted the 2006 Radcliffe Institute Medal at the institute's luncheon on June 9, the New York Times's Supreme Court correspondent explained: "Thinking back to my college days in those troubled and tumultuous late 1960s, there were many things that divided my generation. . . . [Yet] we were absolutely united in one conviction: the belief that in future decades, if the world lasted that long, when our turn came to run the country, we wouldn't make the same mistakes. . . . I cried that night . . . out of the realization that my faith had been misplaced. . . . We were the problem."

Taranto adds:

Too many of today's reporters are liberal baby boomers who seem less interested in presenting the facts than in reliving the dramas of their misspent youth. Is it any wonder Americans of different generations and ideological outlooks are skeptical?

Not from my point of view.

I have a podcast interview with historian John Lukacs on his new book, June 1941: Hitler and Stalin, and its predecessor, The Hitler of History, over at TCS Daily.

Betsy Newmark writes:

A few years after having admitted that CNN let Saddam Hussein have control over their reports from Iraq, they now admit that they let Hezbollah have control over Nic Robertson's piece on how civilians, not Hezbollah were being harmed by Israel's attacks.

Read the whole thing. As Betsy writes:

I predict that Nic Robertson will not suffer at all professionally for such a violation of journalistic ethics. He'll keep reporting away and then come back and bask in his reputation of reporting from a war zone. But, remember, every time you see him on CNN there should be a little blurb beneath his picture: "Spokesman for Hezbollah propaganda."

I doubt Betsy's holding her breath waiting for that happen, of course. While CNN takes it in the shorts in the US ratings from Fox News (or "the F-Word Network", as CNN's Jack Cafferty once dubbed it on air), what other repercussions have they suffered for letting Saddam Hussein dictate their news for so long?

John Hinderaker of Power Line describes an upcoming show featuring Calista Flockhart as a conservative pundit who is, according to the show's producer, is "not Ann Coulter. She's not insane", and writes, "The show's producers sound like they're embarking on an anthropological expedition".

They'd be far from the first members of the legacy media to pretend to be the equivalent of Dian Fossey looking for Conservatives In the Mist.

(For what it's worth, NRO's Corner gives the show 13 weeks and out--which sounds fine with me.)

Based on the duds he's been sporting lately, evidently, Prince Harry has read Edward Feser's brilliant 2004 essay, "The Mustache on the Left", and has decided to live out an Internet article as performance art.

Either that, or he's just another morally brain-dead radical chic idiot.

We report--and deride!

Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin asks, "What's next--a keffiyeh?" Actually, that would be the sort of fashion territory his father has long since been exploring.

Update: In related topics, Charles Johnson spots "Echoes of Nazism in [Lebanon's] Tyre"; Dean Barnett writes, "Some Americans believe that Israel should not exist. And these are the Americans that [Joe Lieberman's opposition, Ned Lamont] and other Democrats have so eagerly embraced".

In her Deadline Hollywood Daily blog, Nikki Finke writes that it wasn't just the heat that was brutal for three big name Hollywood directors this weekend:

M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water, Ivan Reitman's My Super Ex-Girlfriend, and Kevin Smith's Clerks 2, all bombed badly with moviegoers. (It's not that the budgets were necessarily outsized -- in fact, Clerks 2 was cheap -- but by the time insanely high marketing costs are factored in, the movies should have gone straight to video.) So, why? In my opinion, blame it on the arrogance that unfortunately follows Hollywood success. All three directors -- Shyamalan, Reitman and Smith -- have experienced the best of the box office in their past: great reviews, great gross, great wealth. That's when the disconnect comes in.

Speaking of disconnects, Smith's comedies deal in an entirely different definition of "gross" than the two other directors' films. As gross as Smith's raunchy dialogue is, the movies that he's directed have never topped the $30 million plateau at the domestic box office. In contrast, M. Night Shyamalan has had two films each gross over $200 million. And Reitman has had several films over the past twenty years cross the magic $100 million mark, including the first Ghostbusters movie, which earned $238,632,124 in US box office in 1985, when tickets cost that much less than they do today. So to put Smith, a director who's enjoyed cult success at best (and not even Brokeback-level cult success), seems a bit disingenuous.

Incidentally, there's a marvelous working definition of the modern definition of liberal tolerance in A.O. Scott of the New York Times' review of Clerks II, found within the snippet quoted by the Internet Movie Database on Friday:

"Mr. Smith's fondness for jokes about excrement, bestiality and related topics is so evidently childish that it is hard to be offended, or even especially provoked, when he tries to test the limits of taste."

Remember when the Times used to an arbiter of good taste and high quality--which by its nature, required the effort to be offended--or just a tad bit provoked--when the limits of taste were pushed?

Is this to be an empathy test? Capillary dilation of the so-called blush response? Fluctuation of the pupil. Involuntary dilation of the iris...

We call it Voight-Kampff for short.

In his "Happy Warrior" backpage column in the dead tree edition of National Review this past week (subscription required to read online), Mark Steyn wrote:

Remember when Frank Rich was drama critic of the New York Times? Feared as “the Butcher of Broadway,” he could close a show on opening night. He did it to a musical called Dance a Little Closer, set on the eve of World War III and written by Charles Strouse, composer of Annie, and Alan Jay Lerner, lyricist of My Fair Lady. But what did they know? At the first-night party, fax copies of Rich’s review were passed around, and the producers threw in the towel while the first canapés were still going round. Alan told me he spent the next 72 hours throwing up.

I had lunch with Mary Martin back then and she told me she’d just been sent a new play by a mutual friend. “What do you think of it?” I asked.

“It doesn’t really matter what I think of it, does it?” she said. “I should just send it straight to Frank Rich and see whether he thinks I should do it.” Some buddy of hers had just been panned in the Times that morning and Mary was devastated. “Oh, plop!” she said, which was her preferred choice of swear word and always sounded to me far more vivid and obscene than any of the ones the gangsta rappers use.

Well, the Times arts pages aren’t what they were, but the Frank Rich approach seems to have been transferred to the national-security and foreign-policy departments. We may be in a real world war, but the president and the attorney general are in the same situation Charles Strouse and Alan Jay Lerner were when writing about their fictional world war. They can labor away for months, fine-tune this, ditch that, re-tweak the other. But what do they know? In the end, before you go to all that trouble, you might as well mail the script to Bill Keller and ask him what he thinks. Because if he doesn’t like it, he’ll give you a pan and close down the show.

Given the latest published leak du jour, looks like the Israel gotten the thumbs down verdict from the Times.

Update: It seemed like such a polite young newspaper at first. Yet all the signs of delinquency were already on the horizon, if one looked carefully enough.

Sock Puppetry in new media and old; the L.A. Times is in a unique position to cover both of these stories!

In his Daily Quirk humor column, James Lileks writes:

Target's back-to-school catalog for college students gives you an idea of what's new and fresh in popular style. Ready for a shock?

The '60s and '70s appear to be coming back!

That's right: The most overplayed and tiresome decades, which were momentarily out of favor on Oct. 14, 2002, between the hours of 1:17 p.m. and 6:39 p.m., have come roaring back to assert themselves as the Look That Cannot Die Until Every Boomer Has Been in the Grave for 30 Years. And even then, the style will return, because it will remind people of that cool stuff their grandpa wore in 2003 (a golden age of peace and love and prosperity before the Squirrel Flu of '34 ruined everything).

The past is everywhere in the catalog.

Well, there's a lot of that going around, these days.

Right Thinking Girl writes:

A Manhattan judge dismissed a lawsuit by a couple claiming they endured “humiliation, indignity, distress of mind and mental suffering” because they couldn’t have their daughter’s bat mitzvah at The Plaza. The Plaza’s transformation from a hotel into ritzy condominiums scuttled the Alenick family’s dream of celebrating daughter Ashley’s coming-of-age celebration at the famed hotel. Though the hotel gave the family six months’ notice and repaid their $12,000 deposit on the planned $20,000 bash, the Alenicks claimed it “made no effort to compensate for the uniqueness of The Plaza.” Props to the story’s headline: “Court Rules: Mazel Tough.”

Heh.

Shortly after the election in 2004, Howard Fineman of Newsweek wrote "The 'Media Party' is over". Well, not quite, as Peggy Noonan argues this week. But maybe it's increasing dissipation began when, perhaps most visibly with Walter Cronkite taking sides during the Vietnam War, journalists began to adopt what Jon Ham calls "The Platformate Style of Reporting":

In my first journalism course in 1971 we were given an example of what makes journalism superior to advertising. It involved a Shell Oil commercial that ran in the late-‘60s and early-’70s touting an additive called Platformate.

The commercial showed two cars on a straight desert road, one fueled with Shell gas containing the wonder additive Platformate and the other topped up with gas without Platformate. Not surprisingly, the car without the Shell gasoline sputtered to a stop in the hot sun while the Shell car kept going a considerable time longer.

The announcer told us that this was proof that Shell with Platformate was a superior auto fuel to gasoline without Platformate. All of this was perfectly true, in a sense that decades later would be called “parsed” and “Clintonian.” What the ad did not tell you was that all commercial gasolines contained Platformate, and without it your mileage will plummet.

The impression left with the consumer was clear: Use Shell with Platformate instead of those other brands without Platformate if you wanted good gas mileage. As my professor at the University of Georgia, Beverly Bethune, told us, this kind of subterfuge was what made journalism noble compared to the advertising game. Journalism, we were told, would never leave out meaningful context in an effort to mislead readers. It was concerned with truth, not case-making.

This was probably true 35 years ago. But even then something new called “advocacy journalism” was on the horizon. It was considered “alternative” and not quite responsible journalism back then. Unfortunately, it is today the norm among mainstream reporters. It borrows many techniques from advertising, among them the squelching of facts that don’t fit an agenda-driven template.

Read the rest, for several examples of "The Platformate Style of Reporting" in action.

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

Orrin Judd of The Brothers Judd led a panel at the Heritage Foundation in D.C. yesterday, to discuss his new book, Redefining Sovereignty. Also on the panel were Paul Driessen, Ramesh Ponnuru, and Jeremy Rabkin; you can watch video, or listen to an MP3 of the event here.

According to Wikipedia, in Newtonian mechanics, displacement "specifies the position of a point or a particle in reference to an origin or to a previous position". Meanwhile, Tim Blair has a displacement theory of his own: the level of harsh, dramatic language a writer uses whilst discussing minor issues, while seeking to avoid those that actually could be exponentially more life threatening.

Today was World Jump Day! (Was it good for you?)

Martin Landau, Barbara Bains, and David Lee Roth couldn't be reached for comment.

And not exactly Katrina, either: wretched refugees flee Lebanon--sunbathing on a cruise ship.

Update: Austin Bay has much more.

Dafydd ab Hugh pens (sorry--"types" just doesn't sound very atmospheric) a truly fascinating post in which he tries to explain to AP the many, many dangers faced by climbers ascending Mount Everest.

(Via Maggie's Farm.)

Ed Morrissey has details. I wonder if we'll be seeing the equivalent of this site (which itself appears to longer be functional) to check to see if your Website is banned in Bombay.

Update: Much more here.

Joel Siegel, Good Morning America's resident movie critic, walks out on Kevin Smith's Clerks II:

DON’T joke about women, donkeys and bestiality if you expect Joel Siegel to watch your movie. That’s what director Kevin Smith found out when the pun-loving “Good Morning America” film critic stormed out of a press screening of Smith’s “Clerks II,” which opens Friday - an act that’s sparked a vicious war of words between the two.

“Time to go!” roared Siegel to his fellow critics. “First movie I’ve walked out of in 30 [bleeping] years!” His tirade came 40 minutes into the long-awaited Weinstein Company sequel to Smith’s 1994 cult classic about two foul-mouthed Long Island convenience store clerks who razz customers and goof off.

In the scene that sent Siegel to the exit, the characters graphically discuss hiring a woman to [perform sexual acts I can’t even describe here at LIBERTAS because they’re only the sorts or things that a sick, lonely, and probably institutionalized person would think of - and also Kevin Smith]. Siegel told Page Six: “It was so foul and mean and repulsive. I finally realized I could not say anything positive . . . I wasn’t ready for this kind of smut . . . I hope he doesn’t make any more movies.”

Can't say I blame him--the longest 72 hours of my life was an evening six or seven years ago when a friend brought over his DVD of one of Smith's earlier movies, Dogma. Unlike, say, the charismatic thugs and losers who inhabit the average Tarantino movie, these were not characters I'd want to spend any time with whatsoever. I couldn't wait for the movie to end--and I can't blame Siegel (whom I no huge fan of either, for what its worth) for bailing out himself--especially during a scene with "comedic" dialogue focused on bestiality.

Update: Debbie Schlussel wishes she had "walked out of the Detroit 'Clerks II' critics screening at the point Joel Siegel did in New York":

Siegel, ABC's "Good Morning America" film critic, walked out of the movie when characters were talking about paying a woman to perform oral sex on a donkey. Unfortunately, I stayed and saw the part where a man actually does that--and anal sex with the animal, too.

Where is People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals--and Moviegoers--when you need them? This is the deviant "cultural" level to which America has declined. I hope it's the nadir, but I fear we will decline much further. I'm no prude, but I know what sick is. And Clerks II is the epitome of it.

Read the rest. And/or simply skip the movie.

The truth is out there--way out there, as Bill Smith explains the real reason behind the New York Times' seemingly perpetual post-9/11 stock slide.

(Via Armavirumque.)

In a podcast over at Pajamas' new Politics Central site, Roger Simon interviews 17-year old Eugene of Live From An Israeli Bunker--and he is.

Robert Bidinotto says goodbye to the man behind Mike Hammer:

You were the first, Mick. You had the guts to create a real tough-guy hero with a battered rain coat, a .45, fast fists, and a black-and-white code of honor. And no hesitation about taking down the bad guys. Mike Hammer was pre-Miranda and all that liberal b.s. He was Dirty Harry before there was a Dirty Harry. Which is why the critics hated you. Called you a fascist.

No matter about that, either. You didn't give a rat's ass what the liberal critics thought, anyway.

You just kept cranking them out. You kept the fists and bullets flying thick and fast, and the bad guys dropping like weeds under a mower. I, the Jury. Vengeance Is Mine. The Big Kill. My Gun Is Quick. Kiss Me, Deadly. The Girl Hunters...

One Lonely Night...

Yeah.

It's a lonely night, all right.

Well, hey, enough of the sappy stuff. I know you wouldn'tve liked that.

Just wanted to say thanks, Mick. And to raise a Bud to you.

Still...

I'll miss you, you big lug.

A Village Voice columnist said:

"Spillane is like eating takeout fried chicken: so much fun to consume, but you can feel those lowlife grease-induced zits rising before you've finished the first drumstick".

Spillane would have loved knowing that his writing was making someone at the Village Voice reach for the Pepto Bismol.

As I wrote back in May, why does the White House allow Helen Thomas to remain seated in the front row? Because of how easy it is for smart White House press secretaries to look good bouncing off her screeds disguised as questions.

(Via Allah.)

Back in 2004, I linked to a Radley Balko post on what he dubbed "the conservative left". Balko wrote:

You know, you sometimes get the feeling the day after the polio vaccine was invented, today's left would have run editorials lamenting the good ol' days, when we were a little more cautious about what swimming pools we jumped into, and expressing sadness that we'd now have no new stories about the afflicted overcoming their disability to inspire the rest of us.

I'm not kidding. They're that resistant to change. Every mill that shuts down is a "sign of our sad times." No matter that the new mill will do things better, faster and cheaper than the old one. New farming techniques grow more food on less land. But dammit, if there wasn't something romantic about the old-stye "family farm" that's deserving of government protection. Innovation isn't celebrated, it's excoriated for displacing some idealized vision of the way things once were. In matters of progress and dyanmism, the left is far more conservative than the conservatives are.

Or as Jonah Goldberg wrote in 2000, "Well, look who is standing athwart history now". Here's but one of an endless number of examples, as An Englishman In New York photoblogs a protest with C-list celebrities to block commercial redevelopment in Brooklyn.

(Via the Pajamas motherblog.)

Yesterday, we had a brief post written from the point of view of how CBS's 60 Minutes would breathlessly cover a corporate PR stunt--if it didn't involve CBS itself. Meanwhile, Thomas Lifson looks at how the New York Times would cover a recent business cutback...:

A profitable company is to shutter a factory it built in 1992 as part of a much-hailed visionary strategy to take advantage of technology. But now it is just a cost to be cut. Eight hundred jobs, many of them well-paying blue collar positions (supposedly an endangered species) will disappear, while managerial and professional jobs are being protected.

Normally, this would be a juicy target for series of articles on the front and business pages of the New York Times. You know the drill: a parade of blue collar people victimized by the Bush administration, and now facing a bleak future. Meanwhile the insiders make out fine. There’s even a fat cat CEO whose compensation package has done a whole lot better than its profits or stock. If Howell Raines still were editor, he’d get at least 40 stories out of it.

...If the company in question wasn't the New York Times. As Lifson writes:

Family shareholders control the New York Times Company through a dual class shareholding system. When Arthur Ochs (“Pinch”) Sulzberger became assistant publisher of the family business in 1987, and then deputy publisher in 1988, he led the investing of hundreds of millions of dollars in modern printing technology. This would mean eventually closing the historic printing presses in Manhattan, where people could pick up the latest news “hot off the press.” The company would build one plant for the east metro in New Jersey and a second plant in Queens. Pinch’s strategy, as he took over more responsibility for the company, anticipated growing circulation and built up the capacity to handle it. But under his leadership, local circulation has plunged.

When it opened in 1992, the new Edison, NJ printing plant featured modern color printing presses able to run color pictures, charts and graphs. More importantly, however, it could print color advertising, which sells for a sizable premium over black & white.

But the Times editorial side was not able to go with color until the company built a second modern printing plant in Queens, on the other side of Manhattan. When that plant came on-stream, the Times silenced its old Manhattan presses, and the physical newspaper was able to enter the wonderful world of color in 1996, only a decade ago.

It was a bold bet on the future of the print medium, just as the internet was getting going. That bet is now being liquidated.

Ed Morrissey adds, "I guess that Times Select idea hasn't panned out too well, has it?":

The Times, and apparently also the Wall Street Journal, will find themselves no different than any other newspaper in the country. As more consumers turn to the Internet for the news, the need for newsprint will drop accordingly. Newspapers will have to rethink their business process. Eventually, they will find themselves in the news-delivery service, and that the medium (newsprint) has less importance than the news itself.

Will that change be painful? Of course. However, those who adopt this paradigm early will have the easier transition. Newsprint will probably always be around, or at least for a long while, but the daily delivery process has been eclipsed by the new news cycle. Stories do not break at deadline any more -- and the concept of deadlines and putting the paper to bed will be the first casualties. The Times still holds almost all of its stories until midnight, when they release them on the Internet. Competition with the wire services will eventually mean that papers like the Times will have to release stories as they get approved -- meaning their websites will continually update all through the 24-hour day.

That will eliminate the daily delivery, and as more homes get broadband access to the Internet, that paper on the doorstep becomes increasingly anachronistic. It will get the same slow death that afflicted encyclopedias on the bookshelf: it's out of date as soon as it's received. Consumers demand up-to-the-moment news, and the paper is a museum of yesterday's headlines.

This announcement from the Times is just another step along that process. It's not unique to the Times and doesn't reflect its egregious editorial policies. Newsprint will continue to shrink, and in this case, the process has become literal.

I think Iowahawk said it best last year: "In New York, Scrappy Local Newspaper Struggles For Survival".

Linking to Fred Barnes and Noemie Emery, Betsy Newmark compares the legacies of cold warriors Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan to President Bush:

What is clear is that the Democrats, in propagating these myths about both Reagan and Truman, is that they're depending on people not remembering or knowning enough history to recognize the false comparisons that are being set up. And we know that the media won't correct those myths - even if they actually recognized them for what they were. Once again, we are seeing the importance of knowing history. Those who control our history can control what happens today in politics. And with the sorry state of our education, they may well succeed.

That's a topic that David Gelernter explored in depth last year--and was the subject of the Gipper's farewell address as president.

A gigantic corporation with a global reach is planning to imprint its logo on eggs this fall. Will the imprint cause cancer? How will the European Union, notorious for its banning of modified foods, react? Will millions of children, being served breakfast by the parents during the back to school period suffer? Is there a risk of over-commercialization of the family breakfast merely for crass publicity? Tune in to 60 Minutes tonight!

(I think if it were anyone other than CBS itself, that's about the sort of breathless tone the show would take when covering a PR stunt such as this--as would the New York Times, whose article reports the details.)

Last month we linked to a Mark Steyn article on what he and Robert D. Kaplan dubbed "re-primitivized man":

Writing about the collapse of nations such as Somalia, the Atlantic Monthly's Robert D. Kaplan referred to the "citizens" of such "states" as "re-primitivized man." When lifelong Torontonians are hot for decapitation, when Yorkshiremen born and bred and into fish 'n' chips and cricket and lousy English pop music self-detonate on the London Tube, it would seem that the phenomenon of "re-primitivized man" has been successfully exported around the planet. It's reverse globalization: The pathologies of the remotest backwaters now have franchise outlets in every Western city. You don't have to be a loser Ontario welfare recipient like Steven Chand, the 25-year-old Muslim convert named in the thwarted prime ministerial beheading. Omar Sheikh, the man behind the beheading of the Wall Street Journal's Daniel Pearl, was an English "public" (i.e., private) schoolboy and graduate of the London School of Economics.

In his latest Macleans column, Steyn writes that were deluding ourselves as a culture if we fall into the postmodern myth that primitive man was actually as tranquil as many of our multicultural betters wish to believe:

Lawrence Keeley [a University of Illinois professor of anthropology] calculates that 87 per cent of primitive societies were at war more than once per year, and some 65 per cent of them were fighting continuously. "Had the same casualty rate been suffered by the population of the twentieth century," writes Wade, "its war deaths would have totaled two billion people." Two billion! In other words, we're the aberration: after 50,000 years of continuous human slaughter, you, me, Bush, Cheney, Blair, Harper, Rummy, Condi, we're the nancy-boy peacenik crowd. "The common impression that primitive peoples, by comparison, were peaceful and their occasional fighting of no serious consequence is incorrect. Warfare between pre-state societies was incessant, merciless, and conducted with the general purpose, often achieved, of annihilating the opponent."

Why then, against all the evidence, do we venerate the primitive? And to the point of pretending a bunch of torturing marauders devised the separation of powers in the U.S. Constitution. We do it for the same reason we indulge behaviour like that at Caledonia, Ont. We want to believe that the yard, the cul-de-sac, the morning commute, the mall are merely the bland veneer of our lives, and that underneath we are still that noble primitive living in harmony with the great spirits of the forest and the mountain. The reality is that "civilization" -- Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian -- worked very hard to stamp out the primitive within us, and for good reason.

Curious, isn't it, that even as technology increasingly empowers the individual, vast tracts of the left wish for the return of the primitive?

I have doubleheader podcast now online: first up is an interview with James Maguire, the author of Impresario: The Life And Times Of Ed Sullivan. It's followed by a second interview, with James Gavin, the author of Intimate Nights: The Golden Age Of New York Cabaret, whose cover features the great Bobby Short in his heyday. The theme that ties both interviews together is New York's heyday in the 1950s through the 1960s when Manhattan dominated show business and pop culture. Its a fun look at a period, which for better or worse, no longer exists, discussed by two authors who thoroughly know their subjects.

Click here to listen, or subscribe via our iTunes page; in either case, no iPod required--virtually any PC can play an MP3 file.

James Taranto is back from his vacation. It hasn't exactly been a slow couple of weeks in the news; click on over to read his take.

Brent Bozell is praising Oliver Stone's upcoming World Trade Center movie:

Alexandria, VA—Upon previewing the upcoming Paramount Pictures film, World Trade Center, Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center issued the following statement:

“World Trade Center is a masterpiece and must be seen by as many people as possible. Oliver Stone has created something spectacular and it deserves our nation’s gratitude. Conservatives and liberals will praise this movie.”

“For just a few hours following the attacks of September 11th, political ideologies fell by the wayside,” Bozell continued. “Americans came together for a rare moment to recognize the significance and fragility of life and liberty. This film captures that moment in time and honors the true essence of selfless love witnessed on that fateful day. It’s more than a movie – it’s a vivid reminder of the love, heroism, faith and patriotism that comprise the fabric of our country.”

World Trade Center tells the true story of two Port Authority police officers (portrayed by Nicholas Cage and Michael Pena) who volunteered to assist with the rescue of people trapped in the World Trade Center on 9/11 – only to become buried alive in the rubble themselves. The story chronicles their heroic actions and how their faith, families, and new friendship kept them alive.

Libertas was apparently invited, but unable to attend a preview. Too bad--I'd be interested in their take. I suspect we'll read it before or as the film is being released, though.

Update: Not everyone is happy with the film though--Nikke Finke (Cathy Seipp's bete noire) is angry with Oliver Stone for not bringing his usual keen political analysis to the table:

Aren’t there enough bland directors and bland movies in Hollywood without Stone and this film joining that noncontroversial ilk? More to the point: why shouldn’t this be a political film? The NYT may have ignored mention of this dilemma for Paramount, but I won’t: because, if the pic doesn’t do well overseas, then isn’t that a clear signal by other nationalities that the Dubya administration has utterly squandered the post-9/11 sympathy which the world so obviously felt for us?… For Stone to be backing off shows how much of a studio tool he’s become. After all, he likes his monied creature comforts out there in San Ynez Valley, so the big wuss will now go out of his way to please the Paramount poobahs by passing on the political statements he once was so famous for. There’s always the chance that Paramount is craven enough to already write off foreign moviegoers and just focus on those jingoistic U.S. types who wave the flag in one hand and hold a radio tuned to Limbaugh or Hannity or O’Reilly in the other…

Yes, Gaia forbid Paramount make a movie that might appeal to those folks.

OK, it's not very likely, but John Fund looks at Michael Bloomberg's odds as a third party presidential candidate:

In the end, all this speculation may not pan out. Mr. Bloomberg knows that the odds are against him: No modern third-party candidate has come close to winning, and even if one managed to poll close to 40% of the popular vote, it would be hard to carry a majority of the Electoral College. In the absence of an Electoral College majority--something that hasn't happened since 1824--the next president is selected by a vote in the House, with each state's delegations casting one vote and a majority needed to prevail. Given that almost every House member is a Democrat or Republican (Vermont's Bernie Sanders is an independent, but he's leaving to run for the Senate), an independent's chances of victory there are slim.
At the height of Perotmania in 1992, the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call surveyed 301 House members as to how they would vote for president in the absence of an Electoral College majority. Two-thirds said they were uncommitted; the vast majority of the remainder indicated they would either vote the same way as their congressional district or would vote for their party's nominee. "The clear upshot was that Perot was going to have a tough time winning in a two-party dominated House," recalls Jim Glassman, publisher of Roll Call at the time. The same would likely be true of Mr. Bloomberg should he run.

Thus, while the mayor could afford the stratospheric spending requirements of a national campaign, observers think that in the end the 64-year-old mayor is likely to skip the race. "It's a lot of punishment and long hours, and if a reformer like McCain is the GOP candidate, the rationale for [his] candidacy is dramatically reduced," says Ed Rollins, the GOP consultant who along with former Jimmy Carter aide Hamilton Jordan initially ran the 1992 Perot campaign.

The rules and obstacles that stack presidential politics against independent or third-party candidacies aren't fair, but they are nonetheless very real. In the end, three is still usually a crowd when it comes to high-stakes White House politics.

Still though, it's worth noting that Bloomberg shot his first television ad aimed towards a higher office earlier this year...

Read More »

The Chicagoboyz write:

Specifically, though, I find [Germany's] Spiegel Online to be like the child who declares his parents unfair and unjust for disapproving of his rebelliousness, but then turns around and demands a raise in the allowance so he can carry on with that very rebellion.

Seems apt; as Jonah Goldberg wrote a few years ago, collectively, Old Europe really is the world's largest college dormitory.

Chris Muir's "Day By Day" cartoon is now available on cell phones. Does this mean that Dick Tracy can now read it on his two-way wrist radio, or would that be just another unfortunate cartoon crossover?

Mark Steyn looks at the utter, abject failure of decades of shuttle diplomacy:

One of the interesting features of the present escalation is the circumspection of Israel's Arab neighbors. Once upon a time, it would have been Egypt and Jordan threatening the Zionist usurpers. But these countries have been, militarily, a big flop against the Zionist Entity since King Hussein fired Sir John Glubb as head of the Arab Legion. So after '73 they put their money on terrorism, and schoolgirl suicide bombers -- the kind of "popular resistance" that buys you better publicity in the salons of the West. And one result of that has been to deliver Palestinian pseudo-"nationalism" away from Arab influence and into hard-core Iranian Islamist hands. It's Iran that wants war, not Egypt or Jordan, So Jim Baker jetting in to shake hands with, say, Jordan's King Abdullah is a waste of time, because King Abdullah cannot impact on the scene in any useful way.

During all the time the Great Men were shuttling back and forth, a kind of toxic globalization occurred: The Palestinian "movement" (insofar as there ever was a genuine nationalist movement) became infected and eventually annexed by hard-core Islamism and the Palestinians' most depraved terror techniques were exported to every corner of the world. You can build a "security fence" in the region, but what we might call Palestinianism has leapt the psychological fence and incubated in radicalized Muslim communities worldwide: It's not just Palestinians but also Yorkshiremen who now blow themselves up on public transit. What's happened in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Syria and elsewhere is that the weaknesses of those polities were exploited by Iran and others through various client groups and a potent ideology that's really a virus.

That's a much more cunning and effective strategy than sending a fellow in a suit to concoct a plan in his name. We need to learn from the Iranians. We need to wage war on the ideology, because until we do, the reality is that the Middle East's fetid "stability," its demography, its remorseless nuclearization and proxy militarization all favor Israel's and our enemies.

That would require removing the straitjacket of multiculturalism first--and not even Houdini could escape something buckled that tightly over much of the West.

Update: Not surprisingly, Howard Dean either doesn't understand that the shuttle diplomacy era was doomed to failure, or is using its lack of success to score cheap political points--or both.

Frank Martin thanks United for delaying his flight--and there's no snark involved.

David Weigel of Reason: "Michelle Malkin is absolutely right."

Michelle Malkin: "John McCain (yes, McCain) has it right".

(And yes, I agree with McCain as well.)

If so, Israeli author and blogger Allison Kaplan Sommer suggests, "Try cleaning out the bomb shelter, the room you like to pretend doesn't exist, the storeroom for all of the crap that you don't know what to do with and you just toss inside". Read the whole thing.

Last December, when I interviewed Andrew Breitbart for TCS Daily, the proprietor of the Breitbart.com newswire and co-author of Hollywood, Interrupted told me that the star-driven production system that Hollywood's movies are built around is long overdue for a change. After last year's hemorrhaging at the box office, and this year's so-so box office, England's The Independent says that economics may force that change sooner rather than later:

Hollywood stars are being forced to take pay cuts as the major studios are pulling the plug on big-budget projects.

With last year's box office takings down 5.2 per cent and the cost of making movies ballooning because of added expenses for digital enhancement and global marketing, studios are refusing to meet stars' financial demands. In addition, several high-profile films due to go into production have suddenly disappeared from view.

Studios have taken note of the fact that only three of the 10 highest-grossing films last year - War of the Worlds, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Mr and Mrs Smith - were star-driven. The rest of the major hits - such as Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and The Chronicles of Narnia - had no stellar names, or fat salaries, to speak of.

In addition, all of this year's Oscar nominees for best actor - Philip Seymour Hoffman (Capote), Terence Howard (Hustle and Flow), David Strathairn (Good Night, and Good Luck), Joaquin Phoenix (Walk the Line) and Heath Ledger (Brokeback Mountain) - worked for rock-bottom wages. The last of the big paydays went to Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, who was paid a reported $20m plus 20 per cent of the gross for King Kong, made by Universal.

Now studios are making sure that before any stars or directors take money from the film, they get their cut. Sony refused to give the green light for the upcoming romantic comedy The Holiday until Cameron Diaz agreed to a "cash break-even" deal. Even Tom Cruise, who normally collects around 25 per cent of his films' gross profits, agreed to take a much lower cut for Mission: Impossible 3 when Paramount was faced with a massively bloated budget and at one stage threatened to cancel the project.

Brad Pitt is another one who has taken a big cut in pay, from his customary fee of up to $30m down to just £750,000 for his latest, The Assassination of Jesse James.

Former Twentieth Century Fox chairman Bill Mechanic describes it as a long overdue rationalisation of the business: "In the past you paid someone a lot of money to star in a movie and then you spent a lot of money to make a movie and then you lost money."

Another studio executive said: "Movies no longer need big star names to make money. With most studios having to answer to larger parent companies their main aim now is to assess financial risk and that means making movies that cost less."

In March, immediately after what seemed to most to be a trainwreck of an Academy Awards show, Jason Apuzzo of Libertas wrote that the politically-obsessed awards show actually pointed the way towards one likely scenario for Hollywood's immediate future. I think Jason calls it it the Fahrenheit 9/11 model:

Built around lower budget politically-themed agitprop, this business model abandons Red State audiences, except to generate controversy sufficient to whip your smaller but enthusiastic core audience in Blue urban alcoves into enough of a frenzy to attend. (For one example of this strategy at work, check of Mickey Kaus's debunking of what he calls "The Plano Con".)

Michelle Malkin and Tim Blair spot members of, as Tim calls them, "the activist group Mercedes Owners for Islam".

Sorry for the lack of posts since Thursday, but dead tree deadlines, and recording and editing BWIR (don't miss this week's show--the gang, especially Tammy Bruce, we're really on) sort of swamped me.

Regarding the Israel-Hezbollah War, Pajamas, as you probably know by now, has been doing an incredible non-stop job rounding up links, including this one:

08:30 PDT Newt Gingrich says America is in World War III and President Bush should say so.

I've seen a few people recently calling this World War III. I agree with Norman Podhoretz, though: this isn't World War III, it's World War IV. But that's semantics; the main point is that many people are beginning to understand just how intertwined all the facets of the GWOT are.

(Not everyone, of course.)

Update: Jonah Goldberg also makes the case for Podhoretz's WWIV analogy:

I thought Newt Gingrich did a very good job making the case that we're at the dawn of World War Three on Meet the Press today. My only caveat is that I think those who argue this is World War Four (Norman Podhoretz, James Woolsey et al) have a better argument. According to this view, the Cold War was WWIII. I like this formulation because A) it recognizes what a monumental effort the Cold War really was and B) it provides for more creative thinking about the predicament we're in now.

When you say "World War Three" the average person conjures the image of World War II. But the Cold War is the more relevant episode. The Cold War certainly involved bloodshed (Korea, Vietnam, etc) but it also involved aggressive efforts across a wide variety of fronts including public diplomacy, intelligence, propaganda (the good kind) etc. We understood that we were in a battle of ideas and values as much as a battle of blood and territory. Indeed, the stakes during the Cold War were arguably higher than those of the second World War because nuclear annihilation was in the cards. That, it seems to me, is a better prism through which we should see the current predicament. Domino theory and public diplomacy had fairly minor roles in World War II. But such considerations are central to our understanding of today's challenges. Of course, tthe Cold War analogy fails in some important respects as it was mostly a contest between states. But all analogies fail in important respects, that's why they're analogies.

Meanwhile, the advantage of calling all this World War Three is that it's easier to understand and takes less explanation. Most people don't think of the Cold War as a war so much as an effort to avoid one. But I think it's worth educating the public on why this wasn't the case.

Indeed^TM.

Robert Bidinotto has the latest news on the current--and so far the most promising sounding--attempt to bring Atlas Shrugged to the big screen. (Who will be in the cast? Hint: Angelina Jolie was spotted at a production meeting holding a copy of Bidinotto's magazine recently...)

Christopher Hitchens paints a hellish picture of North Korea. I fear though, that the reality is even worse than Hitchens' descriptions:

It was rhetorically possible, in past epochs of ideological confrontation, for politicians to shout about the "slavery" of Nazism and of communism, and indeed of nations that were themselves "captive." The element of exaggeration was pardonable, in that both systems used forced labor and also the threat of forced labor to coerce or to terrify others. But not even in the lowest moments of the Third Reich, or of the gulag, or of Mao's "Great Leap Forward," was there a time when all the subjects of the system were actually enslaved.

In North Korea, every person is property and is owned by a small and mad family with hereditary power. Every minute of every day, as far as regimentation can assure the fact, is spent in absolute subjection and serfdom. The private life has been entirely abolished. One tries to avoid cliché, and I did my best on a visit to this terrifying country in the year 2000, but George Orwell's 1984 was published at about the time that Kim Il Sung set up his system, and it really is as if he got hold of an early copy of the novel and used it as a blueprint. ("Hmmm … good book. Let's see if we can make it work.")

Actually, North Korea is rather worse than Orwell's dystopia. There would be no way, in the capital city of Pyongyang, to wander off and get lost in the slums, let alone to rent an off-the-record love nest in a room over a shop. Everybody in the city has to be at home and in bed by curfew time, when all the lights go off (if they haven't already failed). A recent nighttime photograph of the Korean peninsula from outer space shows something that no "free-world" propaganda could invent: a blaze of electric light all over the southern half, stopping exactly at the demilitarized zone and becoming an area of darkness in the north.

Concealed in that pitch-black night is an imploding state where the only things that work are the police and the armed forces. The situation is actually slightly worse than indentured servitude. The slave owner historically promises, in effect, at least to keep his slaves fed. In North Korea, this compact has been broken. It is a famine state as well as a slave state. Partly because of the end of favorable trade relations with, and subsidies from, the former USSR, but mainly because of the lunacy of its command economy, North Korea broke down in the 1990s and lost an unguessable number of people to sheer starvation. The survivors, especially the children, have been stunted and malformed. Even on a tightly controlled tour of the place—North Korea is almost as hard to visit as it is to leave—my robotic guides couldn't prevent me from seeing people drinking from sewers and picking up individual grains of food from barren fields. (I was reduced to eating a dog, and I was a privileged "guest.") Film shot from over the Chinese border shows whole towns ruined and abandoned, with their few factories idle and cannibalized. It seems that the mines in the north of the country have been flooded beyond repair.

Read the whole thing--its closing sentence is not seen very often in the pages of Slate.

Chris Anderson sounds like he's been getting battered by interviewers:

After doing a full day of press when everyone asked me the same question, I realize that I must say this as clearly as possible. Hits Aren't Dead.

Chris goes on to write, "It's not the end of the hit--it's the rise of a new kind of hit"--actually, several new kinds of hits. Read the rest of his post to understand what they are.

Pretty cool: Fortune's "Business Innovation Insider" blog has kind words about my recent TCS podcast with Chris Anderson:

If you're looking to wrap your arms around the key points of the Long Tail theory, check out the new 15-minute podcast with Long Tail author Chris Anderson over at TCS Daily. During the conversation with TCS Daily columnist Ed Driscoll, Chris explains what the shift from mass markets to niche markets means for business organizations and gives various examples throughout history when a changing economic distribution system altered the relationship between "blockbusters" and niche products.

The Internet is the best example of the Long Tail at work, of course, but the Sears Roebuck catalog of 1896 is another great example. Once the "general store" model of economic distribution gave way to a "centralized warehouse" model of economic distribution powered by the trans-continental railroad, retailers like Sears were able to create massive catalogs of new products. While the 20th century was all about "hits" and "blockbusters," the "infinite shelf space" of the digital age means that the distribution curve is now changing to favor niche products.

The podcast is available as a download from the iTunes music store. It's worth checking out - the Long Tail book is already #24 on Amazon and has been generating a tremendous amount of buzz around the blogosphere.

For a round-up of additional Long Tail coverage, click here.

Tim Blair writes:

Indians stand up to terrorism:

"Terrorists can do anything they like,” 52-year-old businessman Dilip Khadaria said. “We are businessmen, we will be going back to work. It won’t hamper our business, it won’t stop our work."

Businessmen as idealists. These guys rock.

Absolutely.

Terry Teachout explores the demise of middlebrow culture, using as his starting point this year's DVD release of Kirk Douglas' Lust For Life, in which seminal man-of-action Douglas took a surprisingly passable turn in 1956 playing Vincent van Gogh under Vincente Minnelli's directorship :

The result is a quintessential example -- perhaps the quintessential example -- of the American middlebrow culture of the '40s and '50s, which at its not-infrequent best educated and entertained in like measure without dumbing down beyond recognition the art it popularized. The same impulse that inspired Life magazine to publish Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea" and CBS to telecast Leonard Bernstein's "Young People's Concerts" can be seen at work in "Lust for Life."

It says everything about Minnelli and his high-minded collaborators that they made no attempt to turn van Gogh into a regular guy, a potato-eater like you and me who just happened to paint "Starry Night" and chop off his left ear. Instead, he is unapologetically presented as a genius, set apart from the common run of men by his God-given talent and his sense of artistic mission. And that's what makes the film so special: It takes art seriously.

A wise old cynic once observed that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. Had he lived three centuries later, La Rochefoucauld might have added that biopics are the tribute Hollywood pays to real art. Anyone who chooses to make a movie about a great artist, be it good or bad, is making an implicit declaration of faith in the enduring significance of Western culture. Hence it says something of interest about the state of American culture that pictures like "Lust for Life" and "The Agony and the Ecstasy," in which Charlton Heston played Michelangelo, have become so rare in recent years. "Amadeus" and "Shakespeare in Love" weren't biopics but fictionalized fantasies (albeit smart ones). "Pollock" and "Girl With the Pearl Earring" were art-house films aimed at a smallish audience. When was the last time a Hollywood producer with muscle used it to make a big-budget movie about an indisputably great high-culture figure, pitched to the public at large? Instead, we get "Walk the Line." From "Starry Night" to "Folsom Prison Blues": That's how far we've traveled in the past half-century.

Believe me, I'm not turning up my nose at Johnny Cash. I love country music (in fact, I used to play it). Besides, "Walk the Line" is terrific, one of the finest biopics ever made. But Cash himself would surely have admitted that he was no Mozart. Whether or not they enjoyed high art, most Americans of Cash's generation were brought up to respect it, and middlebrow culture allowed anyone to share in its glories. Now we're expected to discover them by ourselves. It strikes me that our culture was healthier when Hollywood offered an occasional helping hand -- even if it belonged to Kirk Douglas.

They're not biopics, but the closest I can think of a positive middlebrow cultural experience in today's Hollywood would be its adaptations of the Lord of the Rings and Narnia books. (I so want to add The Passion, but its endlessly brutal blood and guts gore knocks it out of the middlebrow running.) But as for the two sterling examples of Brit-Lit made celluloid look at some of the grief both productions received. If there are no middlebrow movies, its not because the audience turned their backs, but because there's just not a whole lot of insider slaps on the back when Hollywood makes one, especially on Oscar nights.

Update:Speaking of which, in a post defending the merits of The Searchers after a Slate critic (apparently seeing the film for the first time) ran roughshod over it, Jason Apuzzo of Libertas writes:

It’s basically this: if you really love film, if you view film as something more than just a commodity (Best Tuesday Opening By an R-Rated Comedy Ever!) or as a pretext for bull**** social activism (Watch Syriana, Buy Green Credits!) all we have left to cherish these days - with very few exceptions - are the great films of Hollywood’s past.

Don’t kid yourself thinking I exaggerate. If you actually believe that Hollywood is producing films these days that are of the quality and substance of what the town produced from roughly the 1920’s through the 1970’s, it’s you who are living in an exagerrated, fun-house world all your own …

Tough to argue with that.

Rich Lowry writes that "The Democrats' position on the Iraq War has been a muddle", but that muddle "is moving toward a resolution, and the vehicle for it is next month's Democratic Senate primary race in Connecticut" between Joe Lieberman and Ned Lamont:

As the poet once said, you don't have to be a weatherman to tell which way the wind is blowing. You only have to be a weather-vane politician sticking his (or her) finger in the wind. John Edwards has repudiated the war and lurched left since his 2004 vice-presidential run. He leads in presidential polls in Iowa. John Kerry regrets his prior support of the war and wants a deadline, any deadline, for exiting Iraq. Even the cautious Hillary Clinton just turned her back on Lieberman by saying she would support Lamont if he wins the primary.

If Lieberman does lose, it will be a sign that Clinton herself is vulnerable to a challenge from the left in the 2008 presidential primaries. Then, she will be under enormous pressure to walk away from her support of the war, too.

The biggest winner is Howard Dean, left for dead after his infamous 2004 Iowa "scream." Lamont is a straight Deaniac, not just in his opposition to the war, but in his demographic profile: white, well-off and highly educated. These are the same people who backed the successful peacenik insurrection of George McGovern in 1972, and now they are bidding to make their control of their party all the more complete. Democratic commentator Marshall Wittmann calls the left-wing bloggers "McGovernites with modems."

Their main issue is the war, but they also represent a general repudiation of the one hiccup in the post-1972 McGovernite dominance of the party, the Clinton administration circa 1994-1998. Clinton was pro-growth, pro-free trade, tonally moderate and willing to use force abroad. Al Gore spurned this winning centrist formula in 2000, but he felt compelled to make a bow to it by picking the moderate Lieberman as his running mate. Now, the Democratic party is on the verge of saying a Lieberman-style hawkish-centrism is utterly anathema.

Lieberman could still win the primary. Even if he loses, he could win the general election as an independent, showing that the party's left wing doesn't have wider appeal. But if Lieberman is ousted from his seat, it will be a decisive victory for the party's haters and anti-war bloggers. The Democrats' muddle on Iraq will finally have ended, and the party will be the poorer for it.

Incidentally, there's a curious element in Lieberman's recent televised debate with Lamont. In The Weekly Standard, Matthew Continetti notes:

It was a typical irony of this turbulent and uncertain campaign that Lamont, the advocate of opposition, was timid and soft-spoken, while Lieberman, the advocate of compromise, was aggressive, even rude. Lieberman disobeyed the rules governing rebuttals and interrupted Lamont's answers several times. He seemed dismissive of his opponent--"Who is Ned Lamont?" he kept asking--and irritated at the idea of a contested primary. Smarting at the interruptions, Lamont got off his best line of the debate: "This isn't Fox News, Senator."

"Lieberman kept interrupting and rebutting," one of the liberal bloggers at MyDD.com wrote afterward, "but really didn't make any effective points. He started off angry, and ended angry." It is a testament to the new powers rising in the Democratic party and the ongoing polarization of American politics that if Lieberman had behaved toward Bush as he did toward Lamont, the kiss of death might never have happened, and his political career might be secure.

"He started off angry, and ended angry"--so the angry left is angry that Lieberman appeared too angry towards their candidate? Now that's one ironic Mobius loop.

Cause:

The number of Americans who have broadband at home has jumped from 60 million in March 2005 to 84 million in March 2006 – a leap of 40%. This is a substantial increase in the rate of broadband adoption compared with the previous year. A significant part of the increase is tied to internet newcomers who have bypassed dial-up connections and
gone straight to high-speed connections. This is a striking change from the previous pattern of broadband adoption.

As of March 2006, 42% of all American adults had a high-speed internet connection at home. In March 2005, 30% of all adults had high-speed internet at home.

This growth in broadband adoption has been fueled in part by an increase in internet penetration in the past year, from 66% to 73%. Nearly half of these new internet users subscribe to high-speed services at home.

The 40% increase in home broadband adoption from March 2005 to March 2006 is double the 20% rate of increase that occurred from March 2004 to March 2005.

Its effect? "Big Three Network Evening News Viewership Has Dropped Like a Rock This Year", writes Bizzyblog:

We’re talking about a total audience drop of over 20% in just six months (from roughly 27 million to 21 million). Sure, it’s summertime, but I’m skeptical that the total viewership numbers will recover at all in the fall, even with (especially with?) the arrival of Katie “Don’t Call Me Perky” Couric at CBS. Barring a recovery I don’t see happening, the nets have lost one-third of their evening news audience in the past 5 years, while the general population has grown 5% or so.

Okay, much of the long-term change in viewership has to do with increased television and other news and entertainment choices. But all of those choices were already in place six months ago, so that excuse doesn’t wash in explaining this year’s steep drop.

I daresay that the Big Three Nets are finally paying a substantial accumulated price for their years of endless leftist bias, and especially for their past 5 years of undisguised Bush-bashing. It couldn’t happen to a more worthy bunch.

The crumbling is so severe that one of my predictions from last year may not be correct — The higher-ups at Disney, GE, and CBS (spun off from Viacom) might actually notice and do something about these dying dinosaurs.

Hey, CBS hired Katie Couric and started a blog.

My God, man--isn't that enough radical change for one decade?

Update: Here are more statistics in that Pew report which should worry Big Journalism:

Overall, 35% of all internet users have posted content to the internet.1 Specifically,
we asked about four types of online content: having one’s own blog; having one’s own webpage; working on a blog or webpage for work or a group; or sharing self-created content such as a story, artwork, or video.

An even higher percentage of home broadband users – 42% or about 31 million people – have posted content to the internet. They account for 73% of home internet users who were the source of online content.

Having a fast, always-on internet connection at home is associated with users’ posting content to the internet and thereby shaping the environment of cyberspace.

Although home dial-up internet users get involved in putting content online, they do not do so at the same rate as broadband users. Just 27% of dial-up users, or about 13 million adults, have placed some sort content online.

Sharing a variety of creations online is among the most popular kinds of user-generated content. Overall, 36 million internet users have shared their own artwork, photos, stories, or videos on the internet. That comes to 26% of internet users. Home broadband users account for about two-thirds of this number.

In other words, the Army of Davids is creating the Long Tail, much to big media's consternation.

Read the rest of the Pew report--because it's a safe bet that the boys in the networks won't.

This was the cover story on the August 13th, 1979 issue of Business Week: "The Death Of Equities". The Dow Jones Industrial Average was around 800 the day that it ran. What's happened since? The Dow closed today at 11,134.77. The stock market, flat in the stagflation 1970s took off in the early 1980s, as President Reagan's tax cuts lit a spark under the moribund American economy, and Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker's tight fiscal policies squeezed out inflation. Both were the tonic the stock market needed to rebound after a sleepy decade, and low taxes and low inflation continue to benefit markets today.

Business Week was guilty of a trend that journalism all too frequently succumbs to: it takes current conventional wisdom and extrapolates it infinitely into the future. Betsy Newmark has some thoughts on this week's successor to Business Week's infamous cover story:

Time Magazine, like Newsweek, continually pushes stories designed to denigrate George W. Bush and his administration. This week's contribution is Time's cover story about "The End of Cowboy Diplomacy" and a picture of a cowboy hat. Cute, but so silly. As John Podhoretz points out, the media concocted a caricature of Bush's policies and now wrings a cover story out of pronouncing the death of that caricature. Time seems to have just noticed that Bush is pursuing a multilateral policy in North Korea. Hello? That's been his policy from the get go. That is what North Korea has objected to and the Clintonites have been criticizing Bush for in the past five years. They think that we should forget about China's leverage and meet one-on-one with North Korea so that we can give them some more bribes to pretend to not be developing their missiles and nuclear capabilities. As Podhoretz points out, "Or maybe, just maybe, the North Korea problem indicates that presidents are sometimes faced with lousy options all around." And, it was Clinton's former defense secretary, William Perry, who just wrote an editorial suggesting a preemptive strike against North Korea's missile. This was a suggestion that the Bush administration immediately rejected. Who was the cowboy then?

"The media concocted a caricature...and now wrings a cover story out of pronouncing the death of that caricature".

Now that's one trend I'd love to see the death of. But I'm not holding my breath--or going on a smoothie-fueled hunger strike--waiting for the legacy media to change.

One of the last of the great walking acid casualties of rock finally fell this month, when the man who gave Pink Floyd their name and early sound, Syd Barrett, passed away at age 60. While Syd launched Pink Floyd, it was his replacement, David Gilmour, who shaped their sound and made it his own, as Tigerhawk writes:

While most music fans are familiar with Pink Floyd, few have ever heard of Barrett, the band's original front man and guitarist. He named the band, and really created the extreme psychedelic feel and aura surrounding it. He was central to Pink Floyd's breakthrough album, "Piper at the Gates of Dawn." As Barrett withdrew, suffering from apparent mental instability, the other bandmembers recruited David Gilmour, a childhood friend, first to supplement, and eventually replace Barrett.

His influence on Pink Floyd clearly continued, as Gilmour and Roger Waters developed the extraordinary "Dark Side of the Moon" in 1972 in part to wrestle with issues surrounding mental dysfunction. And the band's later, brilliant album "Wish You Were Here" was dedicated to Barrett, the song "Shine on You Crazy Diamond" intended as encouragement for their old leader. Many will undoubtedly reference that song today.

Who knows what demons drove Barrett into seclusion, and whether they were catalyzed by LSD, the pressure to write music, travel and perform incessantly? But he clearly broke down. Would Pink Floyd have achieved anything approaching its monumental success with Barrett and without Gilmour. I would say No.

I concur. But it's a shame to see a life discarded merely for a brief walk-on part.

I interviewed Chris Anderson of Wired magazine on his new book, The Long Tail : Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, for a podcast on TCS Daily that debuted last week. Glenn and Helen Reynolds have their own podcasted interview with Anderson on Instapundit today. It's the Long Tail discussing The Long Tail!

Update: Here's one impact of the Long Tail on TV: Last week was "the least-watched week in recorded history for the four biggest broadcast networks".

Another Update: Today is the launch day for Anderson's book; click here for media reaction and additional interviews.

Nick Schulz, my editor at TCS Daily, has a great podcast on Townhall.com with James Glassman, who launched and publishes TCS; and Glenn Reynolds, whose Army of Davids book began life there in his ongoing series of columns. It's a fun listen; just click here to tune in.

Ed Morrissey notes that Al Qaeda has decided to add yet another day of infamy to their already bloody list:

It looks like al-Qaeda or an Islamofascist offshoot has decided to add another nation to its blood enemies. Instead of attacking Western targets, terrorists set off a wave of bombings across India today, attacking civilian transportation in several cities and killing scores of people:

Read the rest.

Update: More at Instapundit, and Confederate Yankee spots "a fleeting moment of honesty".

Another Update: Michelle Malkin writes:

Maybe not al Qaeda. More likely related to this, as [Allahpundit] points out. More background here.

Jihad Watch notes that "the bombings show signs of being the work of Kashmir jihadists."

Pajamas has an extensive round-up of additional links.

More: The Mumbai Help blog serves as a clearing house for "information [on] emergencies in the Bombay area".

25 years ago, American feminists would have been outraged--and rightly so--at the plight of women as second class citizens (and often far worse) in the Middle East. But as Michelle Malkin writes, this multimedia presentation by Time magazine, narrated by photographer Kate Brooks, "plays like an apologia for sharia law".

Protein Wisdom's Jeff Goldstein, still apparently under attack from an adjunct instructor gone wild, writes today:

I consider myself a classical liberal (I am about as far from a social conservative as one can be, for instance). so while I’ve written extensively on questions of progressive philosophical assumptions and how they lead to things like, say, free speech zones, I don’t mock liberalism. Just the opposite in fact: I think progressivism is in opposition to classical liberalism — particularly insofar as it promotes group identity over individualism.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in this dispassionate Time spread, which looks at a horrific situation and delivers little more than a yawn and a shrug.

Update: More on the feminine mystique, Middle East-style:

A group belonging to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party announced on Monday that it had recruited Palestinian women to launch suicide attacks against Israel.

A woman who identified herself as Um al-Abed told reporters in Gaza City that so far about 100 women had expressed their desire to carry out suicide attacks against Israel. She claimed that she was a spokeswoman for the Aksa Martyrs Brigades, the armed wing of Fatah.

The Aksa Martyrs Brigades, she added, recently established a secret military unit for female suicide bombers from the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Jerusalem. “We have so far recruited 100 women for the new unit,” Um al-Abed said as she sat next to several masked women who identified themselves as members of Fatah.

“We are expecting more female suicide bombers. The new unit is now preparing to launch attacks against Israel in response to the Israeli aggression and crimes against our people in the Gaza Strip.”

But hey, who are we in the West to judge?

I've written pretty extensively (particularly at Blogcritics) about my interest in home recording over the years. (It was also a door into other DIY activities, such as blogging, and it's no coincidence that Glenn Reynolds of An Army of Davids fame, Blogcritics' Eric Olsen, and several other bloggers also have a background in this area.) But home recording means generating material to record: songs take a fair amount of work to develop properly and nurture to their conclusion; it's easy to get stuck, and wind up staring at recording deck or computer monitor and doing nothing.

Karl Coryat, a consulting editor at Bass Player magazine, and the author of The Guerrilla Recording Handbook, and his co-author, Nicholas Dobson, have co-written a really fun book on breaking that logjam. Called The Frustrated Songwriter's Handbook, it catalogs a whole host of methods of overcoming musical writer's block, whether you're writing your first song, or your 50th.

I interviewed them recently, and it made for an equally enjoyable 20-minute podcast. Click here to listen directly, and click here to subscribe via iTunes. Note that in both cases, no iPod is required; virtually any PC can play an MP3 file.

(Also posted at Blogcritics.)

I must say, this little fella has exceptional taste in imported beers!

(Via Tammy Bruce.)

When it comes to biking, my sentiments lean more towards P.J. O'Rourke's and Mark Steyn's thoughts on the topic than Charles Johnson's. But that doesn't mean I not in agreement with Power Line's John Hinderaker on how the L.A. Times deliberately crashed into Lance Armstrong today:

Edgar Allan Poe wrote an essay called "The Imp of the Perverse," one of the most insightful and important works I've ever read. Poe explored the importance of perversity in human affairs: the fact that surprisingly often, people do things just because they shouldn't. Because they're wrong, or dangerous. Or evil.

Hugh Hewitt did a post this morning that reminded me of Poe's evergreen insight: The Los Angeles Time Does a Hit on Lance Armstrong. The L.A. Times ran a huge, page one story on a lawsuit that Armstrong was involved in against a company called SCA Promotions, Inc. Armstrong sued SCA for breach of contract, and the case was arbitrated pursuant to a contractual provision. Arbitration proceedings are normally not public, but someone leaked thousands of pages of documents and transcripts relating to the arbitration to the Times, and the paper responded with a long article that had virtually no news value.

The purported news hook was that SCA accused Armstrong of using performance-enhancing drugs. What makes the Times' page-one treatment of this non-story bizarre is that Armstrong won the case; in fact, routed SCA. What happened was that SCA was contractually obliged to pay Armstrong a $5 million bonus if he won the Tour de France in 2004, which he did. But SCA seized on the fact that Armstrong had been accused of drug use to justify its refusal to pay the $5 million. By the Times' own account, SCA was not able to come up with any evidence that the drug allegation was true, and Armstrong denied it under oath. Before the arbitration was completed, SCA caved. It paid Armstrong the $5 million, plus interest and attorney's fees.

So where's the story? There isn't one, unless the Times wanted to run an expose on SCA's business practices. I think Hugh's diagnosis is exactly right:

Big MSM has really lost its way, concluding that anything "secret" is in fact wrongfully hidden from public view, and that its function is to act as a conveyer belt to the front page for whatever a party or person doesn't want revealed.

I think that's right. Newspapers like the L.A. Times follow a perverse standard: they print stories simply because they shouldn't. As in this case, where they had an opportunity to invade Armstrong's privacy by disclosing documents that should have been kept confidential. And, in many other cases, where the fact that a story or a document is leaked--better yet, that the leak was illegal, and publication endangers national security--becomes a reason to publish. Exposing secrets, especially when there is a good reason not to, has become a perverse end in itself.

Hugh writes that "most lawyers know payback when we see it, and this looks like payback that ought never to have gotten to page 5 of the sports page, much less this treatment". I'm not a lawyer--to me it looks like just another dysfunctional day at the L.A. Times.

Update: South Dakota Politics (found via Bikelane.com, which also linked to this post) has some related thoughts, including those of Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren from 1890 on journalistic overreach.

Between the rise of the Long Tail of the Internet, DIY-video, and Tinseltown's BDS-driven shorting of Red State values, Hollywood's finding, much to its chagrin, that blockbuster domestic grosses are in short supply these days:

From Superman and the X-Men to Caribbean pirate Jack Sparrow and M:I's Ethan Hunt, it's the year of the return for everything in Hollywood - except the blockbuster movie.

And with increased audience fragmentation, soaring production budgets and more entertainment choices than ever, it looks as though the blockbuster movie may go the way of the drive-in.

Only eight films this year have grossed more than $100 million, the traditional barometer for a breakout hit, and industry insiders believe the rest of this year's slate doesn't have the muscle to match the 19 films that topped that figure in 2005, even though that was the lowest total to reach $100 million since 1998.

"Nothing is standing out like a 'Lord of the Rings' or 'Harry Potter' as a surefire blockbuster for the fall or holiday season," said Exhibitor Relations president Paul Dergarabedian.

The picture is even bleaker when considering that the new standard for a blockbuster is $200 million. "We have to redefine the notion of what a blockbuster is," said Bruce Snyder, Twentieth Century Fox's president of domestic distribution. "You can make $100 million on a film nowadays and still lose a fortune." (Twentieth Century Fox is owned by News Corp., which also owns The Post.)

The $100 million blockbuster benchmark came about during the 1980s. For a film to gross $100 million in 1980, it had to sell 37 million tickets at the average price of $2.69. At today's average price of $6.41, selling 37 million tickets amounts to $238 million.

Given that, BoxOfficeMojo. com's Brandon Gray said $200 million is a more accurate threshold for blockbuster status. And by that measure, 2006 is shaping up to be the worst year for blockbusters in a half-decade.

Color me unsurprised.

Superman Returns is, not surprisingly, being left in the dust at the box office this weekend by the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie. But it's still worth reading what James Lileks has to say about its writers' intentional truncation of the Man of Steel's "Truth, Justice and the American Way" catchphrase:

As it turns out, however, the omission was intentional. "The American Way" sounds Krypto-fascist. The movie's authors are the usual moderns, serenely above rude jingo pride: "We were always hesitant to include the term 'American way' because the meaning of that today is somewhat uncertain," said co-writer Michael Dougherty. "I think when people say 'American way,' they're actually talking about what the 'American way' meant back in the '40s and '50s, which was something more noble and idealistic."

Ah. Well, in the '40s, the American Way included incinerating German cities, nuking Japan, installing occupying armies and imposing our form of government — all the while referring to the enemy with hurtful ethnic slurs. All this plus forced relocation. If these actions are deemed noble and idealistic now, it'll be a handy sentiment the next time the United States gears up for total war.

But the inconstant left doesn't believe any of this is permissible in the service of a noble goal. The right, after all, can't lead the war on terror because they don't "walk the walk" on human rights: Witness those POWs slaving away in the cane fields of Gitmo. Unless we lead by example, no one will choose the American Way. Never mind that the internment of the Japanese didn't keep the Germans — or the Japanese, for that matter — from following our example after World War II. (Note to the dense: That's not an endorsement of internment. Just a reminder of which party has more practice.)

It's also odd to see the '50s held in high esteem. The '60s will be ever bathed in the holy glow of boomer self-regard, a mystical era of great causes and cheap weed; the '70s have become the decade equivalent of a sitcom running in eternal repeats.

The 50s, however, have long stood for stifling conformity, the Mandatory Gray Flannel Suit Act, duck-and-cover nuclear paranoia, and of course the communist witch hunts, which, history recalls, turned up no communist witches. It all ended when Saint Elvis performed the miraculous Swiveling of the Hips, loosening mores that had been cinched tight since Ike banned premarital soul-kissing.

Do the '50s get to be cool again? And not Fonzie-cool, but cool in the sense that confidence, optimism, technological progress, increasingly sophisticated mass culture and the rise of the suburb are now seen as fascinating elements of a complex, hopeful era? Well, that's a start.

Read the whole thing, as they say at The Daily Planet.

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

National Review's Rick Brookhiser chiding fellow columnist John Derbyshire for his love of sandals led me to this passage from Orwell's 1937 book, The Road to Wigan Pier:

We have reached a stage when the very word 'Socialism' calls up, on the one hand, a picture of aeroplanes, tractors, and huge glittering factories of glass and concrete; on the other, a picture of vegetarians with wilting beards, of Bolshevik commissars (half gangster, half gramophone), of earnest ladies in sandals, shock-headed Marxists chewing polysyllables, escaped Quakers, birth-control fanatics, and Labour Party backstairs-crawlers. Socialism, at least in this island, does not smell any longer of revolution and the overthrow of tyrants; it smells of crankishness, machine-worship, and the stupid cult of Russia. Unless you can remove that smell, and very rapidly, Fascism may win.

God, that's remarkable. And in so many ways, remarkably current.

Geez, shades of Apocalypse Now's famous "Terminate with extreme prejudice" scene: AllAfrica.com writes that a girl of age 20 (some reports claim she was as young as 14) was "prematurely terminated": a euphemistic way of saying she was stoned to death by irate youths in Nigeria--whose religion is curiously not listed in some local reports.

As others have written, it does a bit of a disservice to call this kind of language Orwellian--Orwell himself would be horrified at the turns that language has taken in the years since his death.

Update: Err, as I was saying...

Jeff Goldstein's Protein Wisdom was one of the first blogs to link to mine, after I went online in the Blogosphere's Jurassic period back in early 2002. And I had the pleasure of meeting Jeff and his better half in Denver a couple of years later. So this ugly, ad hominem attack coupled with a more or less simultaneous denial of service attack on his blog (which is currently still 404-ing as I'm posting this) against him yesterday was horrific to watch. Power Line and Michelle Malkin have many more details.

Update: Michelle's just posted an update. Afterhis recent Viagra incident, Rush Limbaugh said, somewhat as a throwaway line, "I'll tell you, the election cycles of '06 and '08, especially '08, I think it's going to be one of the most vicious and filthy of our lifetimes". With incidents such as the attack on Jeff, and the "special delivery" to the offices of Colorado Republican Congresswoman Marilyn Musgrave (also allegedly by an academic, for what it's worth), looks like the first salvos of '06 have begun, long before their typical September/October appearance in election years past.

I have a pretty nifty podcast interview with Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine, on his new book, The Long Tail : Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, over at TCS Daily. It's a follow-up, or sorts, to a piece I wrote for TCS back in early 2005, which discusses (with Hugh Hewitt) how the Long Tail impacts the Blogosphere. My discussion with Chris expands the Tail's impact to several aspects of pop culture, and the business world.

But it's no substitute for reading Chris's book itself though, which Amazon says is due out on Tuesday. Chris is having a launch party the following day in New York, and he's having a drawing on his site for tickets, if you're in the area and would like to attend.

Is he in? Sounds good to me.

In his weekly appearance yesterday on Hugh Hewitt's radio show, Mark Steyn asked a great question of the New York Times:

HH: Now over at Powerline, John Hinderaker has discovered some November, 2005, articles by Eric Lichtblau, the reporter who along with Risen, broke the June 23rd story about the banking surveillance. As late as November of last year, Eric Lichtblau was looking into this. He couldn't find SWIFT, and he pronounced that through expert's voices, that we hadn't made a dent in the al Qaeda's ability to move money in financed terrorist attacks, and that in fact, SWIFT was invisible to him as recently as seven months ago. I think that's a very telling article, Mark Steyn, and it goes to the defense they've been mounting that their articles hurt no one and helped no terrorist.

MS: Yeah, their defense now of their big scoop is that it wasn't a scoop, that in fact, everybody knew all this anyway, so they weren't telling anybody anything they didn't know. And I think that's nonsense. You know, Ann Coulter had a very good...she just said it as a throwaway line, really just en passant, and I'm not sure she realized actually quite what a good question it is. She said at some point in a column the other day, how many big al Qaeda secret plans has the New York Times revealed? And I think that's actually an interesting question. You know, when you go into a New York Times planning meeting, how much of their editorial resources are being devoted to getting inside the enemy? The British press is pretty anti-American, they're pretty anti-Israeli, they're anti-all kinds of things. But they still have journalistic instincts. Every week, I read a fascinating story in the London Times or some other paper, in which some guy has gone undercover as a Muslim among the radical Muslims in Yorkshire towns in England, where the July 7th bombers came from. And he's got all this fascinating material. A guy went undercover at some mosque at Brighton, in England, and came out with all kinds of material. How come nobody at the New York Times seems to be interesting in devoting any editorial energy to exposing what the enemy's up to? That's an important question.

It is. And an equally important question is, if this quote from Pinch Sulzberger is correct, does the Times even believe that terrorists are an enemy, and not simply yet another P.C. victim group, as is Reuters' and CNN's mindset?

There was an astonishing exchange between the Times' Bill Keller and CBS's Bob Schieffer on Sunday's Face The Nation, that being on television, naturally didn't receive the follow-up it deserved. Keller said:

I guess I would say if you're under the impression that the presss [sic] is neutral in this war on terror, or that we're agnostic--and you could get that impression from some of the criticism--that couldn't be more wrong. We have people traveling in the front lines with soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. We've had people who've been murdered in trying to figure out the terrorist threat. You know, we live in cities that are targets, proven targets, for the terrorists. So we--we're not neutral in this.

(Video here.) Schieffer's milquetoast follow-up? "All right. Well, we'll leave it there. Thank you very much. Pleasure to have you."

This entirely contradicts the previous "neutral", "objective" stand of the legacy press, especially on war, which this moment from the 1980s crystallized perfectly. So why wasn't the natural follow-up question not asked by Schieffer: Mr. Keller, if you no longer consider yourself neutral, please tell our viewers where you stand--and whom you stand with. And does that worldview alter based on who is currently in the White House? Because a lot of people--especially your critics on the right--would be very curious to hear your response.

Man with Website begs on Internet for money to replace aging Apple G-4 with shiny new G-5. Man promises to blow-up old PC when new one acquired.

Man receives sufficient funds; keeps his word:

In Jonah Goldberg's recent op-ed about Al Gore's claims that man-made "global warming" represents a equivalent horror to the Holocaust, Goldberg wrote that if Gore is going to make that sort of comparison, then he must do everything in his power to prevent such a catastrophe from occurring:

Gore is both serious and consistent on this point. In his 1992 book Earth in the Balance, he wrote that “today the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of glass shattering in Berlin.” He repeatedly refers to the unfolding “ecological holocaust” and invokes Martin Niemoller’s famous quote (“When the Nazis came for the Communists, I remained silent; I was not a Communist. ... When they came for the Jews, I did not speak out; I was not a Jew. ...”) to label himself and other environmentalists “the new resistance.”

In An Inconvenient Truth and in interviews, Gore sticks to his guns. He quotes Churchill’s warning about the gathering storm of fascism and declares: “The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequence.”

In interviews, Gore calls global-warming skeptics “deniers” with an acid surely intended to conjure comparison to Holocaust deniers.

Of course, Gore isn’t alone. The people of good will who raise relevant and sober-minded questions about global-warming scaremongering are subjected to vicious character assassination on a daily basis. Scott Pelley of 60 Minutes recently asked why he should interview skeptics of the new environmental groupthink: “If I do an interview with Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?”

There’s no need to revisit the arguments about the science of global warming. Let’s give Gore et al. the benefit of the doubt and stipulate that they’re right about their worst-case scenario hysteria. Let’s also give them the benefit of the doubt that they actually believe global warming is the moral equivalent of the Holocaust.

* * * I know I’ll hear from all sorts of angry readers for taking Gore’s position to the extreme. But this has it backwards. I’m merely taking Gore’s extreme position seriously. We have lots of debates over the factual soundness of environmental extremism but nearly none on the moral soundness of environmental extremism. Once you compare a problem to the Holocaust — even remotely — you’ve lost your moral wiggle room. No politician, indeed no responsible person in this country, would endorse a comedic cartoon about genocide, never mind take their kids to it. Give PETA credit. While it repugnantly compares the raising of chickens and cattle to Auschwitz, the organization at least has the courage of its convictions, and protests virtually everything that treats animals as anything less than people.

Environmentalists like Gore who invoke the Holocaust are too afraid to follow through. They want all the credit for denouncing what they consider a moral horror, but they’re unwilling actually to face the real consequences of their rhetoric. I don’t believe global warming is akin to the Holocaust. But if I did, I’d like to think I’d have more courage about it than Gore is showing.

Gore is a prominent senior advisor to Google. Shouldn't he be doing everything he can to block--at the very least speaking out vociferously--this further step on the path (actually flight path, in this case) to Hell?

Frequent L.A. Times critic Patterico writes:

I read something disturbing last night about the way the editor of the L.A. Times views criticism of his newspaper. Apparently, editor Dean Baquet sees criticism as something to “push back” against.

And, he may be planning to use the pages of the printed newspaper itself to “push back” against the paper’s blogger critics — including, very possibly, myself. [UPDATE: The “pushback” against Times critic Hugh Hewitt has already begun — see UPDATE below.]

Here are the details:

Read the rest. As Patterico adds:

It’s a far cry from the days when folks like myself were actually invited onto the paper’s own op-ed pages to make our criticisms heard.

And that’s a real shame.

Yes it is--but it's a development that says much about the increasing power of blogs, and the heat they can generate. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune's Nick Coleman decided to end 2004 in a self-immolating bang because he popped a vein over the newly ascendant Power Line blog. This prompted one of Glenn Reynolds' readers to note, astutely:

One of the nation's leading papers now has an opinion writer who has picked a fight with a leading blog. It's practically incidental that the columnist appears to be losing. One of the rules of politics is that you try not to give your adversary any publicity, unless you have to. You don't mention the fellow's name. Even just a year ago, no one in the MSM would have entered into a debate with a blogger. Today, Coleman seems to feel threatened enough by Powerline that he has to attack them. How much does that say about the extraordinary growth of the Internet - and bloggers - as sources of news? To me, it seems that we've reached another major marker of the decline of the MSM.

Surely the L.A. Times' plan to "push back" against their critics is yet another marker.

Update: A much uglier example of a sort of push back, here.

For your listening pleasure, the latest Pajamas Blog Week In Review is up and ready to go.

Tim Blair asks, "Try to make sense of this item in today’s Daily Telegraph":

In these violent times, Um Ahmed takes steps to ensure her safety, strapping on a suicide belt before going to bed at night.

As Tim writes, "Imagine how dangerous it would be to sleep without several kilograms of explosives attached to yourself".

I think I'll find out tonight...and, err, pretty much every night.

Physician and molecular biologist Henry Miller buries Jeremy Rifkin, whom Miller describes as " an "anti-meat, anti-technology, anti-capitalism activist"--and few deserve it more:

The late Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, by his own admission, tried to be sympathetic to Rifkin's views toward biotechnology but was overwhelmed by the "extremism" and "lack of integrity" in Rifkin's anti-biotechnology diatribe, Algeny. Finally, he concluded that Rifkin "shows no understanding of the norms and procedures of science."

Gould, a renowned scholar, was appalled at Rifkin's poor distortions: "Algeny is fall of ludicrous, simple errors -- I particularly enjoyed Rifkin's account of Darwin in the Galapagos. After describing the 'great masses' of vultures, condors, vampire bats, and jaguars that Darwin saw on these islands, Rifkin writes: 'It was a savage, primeval scene, menacing in every detail. Everywhere there was bloodletting, and the ferocious, unremittent [sic] battle for survival. The air was dank and foul, and the thick stench of volcanic ash veiled the islands with a kind of ghoulish drape.'" "Well,' said Gould dismissively, "I guess Rifkin has never been there."

In fact, whether the subject is economics, politics, cosmology, ecology, science or technology, Mr. Rifkin has never "been there." Some of us try in our professional lives to build edifices of one sort or another, to make society richer and more equitable, to make life less "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short," in the words of Thomas Hobbes. But people like Mr. Rifkin devote themselves to retarding progress and to creating only uncertainty and anxiety.

Finally, the coup de grâce from Professor Gould: "I regard Algeny as a cleverly constructed tract of anti-intellectual propaganda masquerading as scholarship. Among books promoted as serious intellectual statements by important thinkers, I don't think I have ever read a shoddier work." But then he did not live to see Mr. Rifkin's later writings.

Read the whole thing.

Michelle Malkin explains the reality of North Korea to Ted Turner.

(The L.A. Times and Harvard could stand to listen as well.)

Joe Biden enters the early presidential fray, causing Hugh Hewitt to rejoice.

Biden then promptly shoots himself in foot.

Fortunately for Joe, nobody but us obsessives are paying any attention to politics right now. But it'll be fun to see if this remark pops up again if, astonishingly, he receives any traction whatsoever.

Update: Video here; Drudge is currently linking to it, which means that it may load slowly--if at all.

Another Update:

It sure is weird how Dems are so comfortable making cracks at Indians' expense.

Remember Hillary Clinton's bizarre joke about Gandhi and gas stations?

Meanwhile, the Professor looks at other examples of foot-in-mouth disease: "It's a Kerfuffle-a-thon, and Taranto's on vacation!"

Coincidence? I think not....of course. But Taranto will definitely have lots of catching up to do upon his return.

Finally (for now), Chris Muir looks at another example of today's Kerfuffle-a-thon:

We've written several posts over the past few months about Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, Yale's Big Taliban On Campus. On Michelle Malkin's Hot Air.com site, Clinton W. Taylor writes that "he won’t graduate from Yale", which certainly sounds like good news for Yale, its alumni, and everyone else concerned.

Elvis, Japan, North Korea and President Bush: Austin Bay is going to Graceland for the connections.

Blogger Freeman Hunt writes:

From Breitbart:

Other supporters, including Penn, Sarandon, novelist Alice Walker and actor Danny Glover will join a 'rolling" fast, a relay in which 2,700 activists pledge to refuse food for at least 24 hours, and then hand over to a comrade.

Note to Hollywood: A "relay" or "rolling hunger strike" is not a hunger strike at all. It is a single day without food.

How about a rolling labor strike? One guy will picket outside for one day while everyone else works. He'll go back to work the next day, and another guy will come out and picket for a day. Then that guy will trade off with someone else and so on.

Lame and unserious.

I agree. That's why I'm going on my own personal thrice-daily rolling hunger strike. That's right: rather than just one random hunger strike once a year, I'll eschew all solid foods from 9:00 AM until 12:00 PM. And from 1:00 PM until 5:00 PM. And then just to really stick it to the war-mongering imperialists, I'll fast from 6:00 PM until 8:00 AM the following day.

And I'll do it every day. Fight the power, maaaan!

Orrin Judd on Ken Lay's passing:

Just as the CIA closed the unit it had searching for [Osama bin Laden], so too can the Times close it's Lay-hunting unit.

Well, this former Enron advisor is probably jumping for joy right now. Because it's safe to say that a national crisis worse than 9/11 itself has concluded.

Update: Pajamas looks at Lay's strange "Death By Wiki".

Another Update: "Not Beyond Our Ken": Mark Steyn flashes back to the early days of the Enron Crisis and writes, "Enron is about Enron, not about Bush", no matter how badly the press tried to conflate them.

OK, let me get this straight: Jon Corzine, New Jersey's governor, spots a revenue shortage and wants to raise sales taxes. If there's a revenue shortage, why is he doing this?

New Jersey's casinos ushered the last of the gamblers away from slot machines and tables Wednesday, and janitors locked the doors behind them as a state government shutdown claimed its latest victims.

In the first mass closure in the 28-year history of Atlantic City's legalized gambling trade, all 12 casinos were under state orders to lock up.

Atlantic City's casinos are lucrative for New Jersey. They have a $1.1 billion payroll, and the state takes an 8 percent cut - an estimated $1.3 million a day. But as a stalemate over the state budget entered its fifth day Wednesday with no deal in sight, even they had to shut down.

With no state budget, New Jersey can't pay its state employees, meaning the casino inspectors who keep tabs on the money and whose presence is required at casinos are off the job.

State parks and beaches were also closed Wednesday because of the lack of staff.

"It's like last call at a bar. It's a little bit eerie," said Michael Trager, 36, of Cincinnati, was playing a video poker machine at 10 minutes to 8 a.m. when an attendant told him to conclude his bet. "They said, 'That's it, you gotta cash out. We're closing.'"

The doors to the Boardwalk side of Caesar's were locked by janitors. An announcement came over the public address system telling gamblers the casino was closing.

"It's history," said Andy Trechock, 41, of Depford, as he stepped away from a slot machine at Bally's Wild Wild West casino.

The problem started when the Legislature missed its July 1 constitutional deadline to pass the budget amid a fight with Gov. Jon S. Corzine over his proposed boost in the state sales tax.

Without a spending plan, Corzine ordered state offices shut down Saturday and all non-essential state government operations closed, and he furloughed more than half the state's employees. Only about 36,000 people in vital roles such as child welfare, state police and mental hospitals remained on the job, and they were working without pay.

Corzine planned to address all 120 state lawmakers to discuss the impasse Wednesday morning.

The dispute between the governor and his fellow Democrats who control the Legislature centers on his plan to increase the state sales tax from 6 percent to 7 percent to help overcome a $4.5 billion budget deficit in his $31 billion spending plan. Experts say the proposal would cost the average New Jersey family $275 per year.

Atlantic City Police Chief John Mooney worried that the sudden evacuation of the casinos could lead to problems in the streets and to labor unrest. If the shutdown continues, casino workers who aren't being paid could make trouble, he said.

"This is a state-created disaster," Mooney said.

Indeed. In addition to payroll taxes, how much revenue is generated in sales taxes via goods sold in the casinos? How many goods and services are bought in the casinos and nearby shops by high rollers--and just everyday folks on vacation? What about the revenue from their hotel rooms?

And why do liberal politicians only spot revenue shortages that require tax hikes after they get into office? With the exception of Walter Mondale of course. Oh wait, that answers that question!

If you haven't heard it yet, for some thoughts on how New Jersey got to this point, tune into my recent podcast with Steven Malanga, the author of the authoritative City Journal article, "The Mob That Whacked Jersey".

Update: More here. In my podcast with Steven, we discussed New Jersey becoming increasingly like California, with its never-ending fiscal crises and spiraling taxes. Much of what Limbaugh discusses gives that impression as well.

Another Update: In a press release in Adobe Acrobat Format, Americans For Tax Reform notes:

Read More »

No one would confuse them with George M. Cohan or James Cagney, but kudos to Google for mentioning Independence Day on their splash page. It's a nice recovery from their transnational snub of Memorial Day.

Betsy Newmark, linking to a post by Lorie Byrd, has some thoughts that are well worth reading, especially today. And Gates Of Vienna stops for a "Reality Check on the Fourth of July".

The Discovery successfully blasted off from Cape Canaveral a half hour ago. As Reuters notes, one of its mission objectives is to test "the shuttle's troubled fuel tank". Which highlights one of the many enormous problems with this antiquated and dangerous vehicle: there have been over 100 previous launches. Shouldn't they have gotten it right long before now?

It's time for NASA to simplify things and go back to the future. And eventually get the government out of the manned space business as much as possible.

Update: Unfortunately, the Space Shuttle wasn't the only vehicle launched towards space today...

Debbie Schlussel spots a sadly typical Hollywood bait and switch maneuver: the full phrase "Truth, Justice, and the American Way" is fine for Superman Returns' U.S. advertisements, but not for the movie itself. Maybe that's one reason why the lead headline on the Internet Movie Database's news ticker reads "'Superman' Didn't Fly High Enough, Say Analysts".

What makes the absence of the phrase even more loathesome is that if Warner Brothers truly did feel that the film's foreign box office would be damaged by its inclusion, they could have easily have either quietly redubbed the line, or shot the scene both ways for airing overseas. It's common for big budget Hollywood movies to have alternate scenes with toned down violence, sexual content or language shot for network television airing. Instead, Superman's writers decided to give American audiences a deliberately punitive Fourth of July weekend slur.

In 2004, shortly after President Reagan's passing, James Piereson wrote an important essay for The Weekly Standard (which we've referenced here a few times) defining "Punitive Liberalism":

From the time of John Kennedy's assassination in 1963 to Jimmy Carter's election in 1976, the Democratic party was gradually taken over by a bizarre doctrine that might be called Punitive Liberalism. According to this doctrine, America had been responsible for numerous crimes and misdeeds through its history for which it deserved punishment and chastisement. White Americans had enslaved blacks and committed genocide against Native Americans. They had oppressed women and tyrannized minority groups, such as the Japanese who had been interned in camps during World War II. They had been harsh and unfeeling toward the poor. By our greed, we had despoiled the environment and were consuming a disproportionate share of the world's wealth and resources. We had coddled dictators abroad and violated human rights out of our irrational fear of communism.

Given this bill of indictment, the Punitive Liberals held that Americans had no right at all to feel pride in their country's history or optimism about its future. Those who expressed such pride were written off as ignorant patriots who could not face up to the sins of the past; and those who looked ahead to a brighter future were dismissed as naive "Pollyannas" who did not understand that the brief American century was now over. The Punitive Liberals felt that the purpose of national policy was to punish the nation for its crimes rather than to build a stronger America and a brighter future for all.

Here the Punitive Liberals parted company from earlier liberal reformers such as FDR, Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson, who viewed reform as a means of bringing the promise of American life within reach of more of our people. The earlier reformers believed deeply that the American experiment in self-government was inherently good, and that the task of policy was to improve it. But in the troubled years following Kennedy's death, the reform tradition took on a furrowed brow and a punitive visage.

In many ways, Jimmy Carter, and his leading appointees, were the perfect exemplars of Punitive Liberalism. Given their sour outlook, it is no wonder that their leadership generated a sense of "malaise" among the American people.

What happens when it expands from viewing America as the source of all of the world's ills to believing it's man himself? In Spiked, Frank Furedi confronts "The New Misanthropy":

All of today's various doomsday scenarios - whether it's the millennium bug, oil depletion, global warming, avian flu or the destruction of biodiversity - emphasise human culpability. Their premise is that the human species is essentially destructive and morally bankrupt. 'With breathtaking insolence', warns Lovelock in his book The Revenge of Gaia, 'humans have taken the stores of carbon that Gaia buried to keep oxygen at its proper level and burnt them'.

Human activity is continually blamed for threatening the Earth's existence. Scare stories about the scale of human destruction appear in the media and are promoted by advocacy groups and politicians. For example, it was recently claimed that human activity has reduced the number of birds and fish species by 35 per cent over the past 30 years. That story was circulated by the environmentalist news service Planet Ark and picked up by the mainstream media, and widely cited as evidence that human action causes ecological destruction. Our engagement with nature is frequently described as 'ecocide', the heedless and deliberate destruction of the environment. In short, humanity's attempt to domesticate nature is discussed as something akin to genocide or the Holocaust. The title of Franz Broswimmer's polemic Ecocide: A Short History of the Mass Extinction of Species captures this sense of loathing towards humanity. According to Jared Diamond, 'ecocide has now come to overshadow nuclear war and emerging diseases as the threat to global civilisations' (4).

Increasingly, the term 'human impact' is associated with pollution, wanton destruction and the stripping bare of the Earth's assets. Former US vice president Al Gore is concerned that the 'power of technologies now at our disposal vastly magnifies the impact each individual can have on the natural world', causing a 'violent destructive collision between our civilisation and the Earth' (5). Over the past 400 years, the human impact on the world, which led to the humanisation of nature, was celebrated by Western culture - these days, human ingenuity is regarded ambiguously or even suspiciously.

Indeed, the very idea of civilisation is presented as a force for ecological destruction. 'Civilisations have been destroying the living systems of the Earth for at least 5,000 years', says one misanthrophic account (6). According to some environmentalists, humans are a 'foreign negative element', even a 'cancer on the environment' (7). For radical environmentalists, the degradation of nature stems from our species' belief in its unique qualities. Such a belief - dubbed 'anthropocentrism' - is openly denounced for endangering the planet. Human-centred ideology, which views nature from the perspective of its utility for people, is said to be destroying the environment. And this tendency to depict humans as parasites on the planet is not confined to any small circle of cultural pessimists. Michael Meacher, Britain's former minister for the environment, has referred to humans as 'the virus' infecting the Earth's body.

Read the whole thing, as this decidedly non-misanthropic fellow would say.

The new Townhall.com, recently acquired by Salem Radio, is open for business, as Power Line notes.

It will be interesting to see how long the blog-style comments and trackbacks last. Policing them for spam and trolls at such a high-profile site is going to become exponentially hard work.

Just got back from a weekend jaunt to Las Vegas; watch for postings to resume shortly. And I apologize to anyone whose Internets I haven't answered yet.