When it comes soldiers captured in the Middle East, for Monty Python alumnus Terry Jones, some POWs are more equal than others.

While I remain a tremendous fan of the Pythons' early 1970s output, Jones' heads-is-tails priorities are a reminder of how ossified so much of the thinking among Britain’s leftwing elites has been for an exceedingly long time. And that Punitive Liberalism is definitely not exclusive to the US.

(And some thoughts on how that sort of cognitive dissonance pervades the BBC from top to bottom, don't miss the latest Blog Week In Review podcast.)

Related: "The Wimps of the West vs. The Mad Mullahs".

Update: "SeeDubya" reminds us that Jones isn't the only Python member to have lost it after 9/11.

Well, they're not too dark, actually. Check out Tim Blair's before and after photos. As John Hinderaker writes, "A good time was had by all, and if not much energy was saved, that's all right: it's the thought that counts".

We all need a little faith to get us through the darkness--or in the case of the Religious Left, to create it.

Update: Mark Steyn writes:

Being on Eastern Time (US) rather than Eastern Time (Oz), I’m afraid I slept through the excitement of Sydney’s “Earth Hour” when, from the Lord Mayor to the lowliest rummy lying in the gutter belching incandescent meth fumes, the entire city turned out its lights for one whole hour in order to stop global warming. You can see a satellite picture of it here.

No, wait, that’s North Korea by night. Now there’s a guy who’s really doing his bit to save the planet.

Kim Jong-il wouldn't be the first Communist to be dubbed "a liberal in a hurry"--towards this, it seems.

"Now, before we get our freak on, we need to match up our beats": the circle is now complete; the recently deceased Larry "Bud" Melman's successor has been discovered.

In the "tradition" of Shatner and Nimoy, and perhaps inspiring future singing thespians like Don Johnson and David Hasselhoff, Jack Klugman and Tony Randall get down with their funkadelic vocalistic selves.

As Orrin Judd writes, "'You're So Vain' is a highlight, relatively speaking".

He may have been a genial hedonist, but he was definitely the Great Communicator:

Tammy Bruce checks in with the state of the computing art in 1989.

Maybe someday, I'll be able to send faxes from the beach, too!

And speaking of RAM, forget two megabytes--you'll be able to put a whole heckuva lot more than two gigabytes in your PC in the coming years.

Compare and contrast:

"Pelosi to Brits: Drop Dead!"

"Unilateral: Pelosi to meet with Assad next week in Syria"

Meanwhile, as Ed Morrissy notes, Pelosi is set to talk Turkey, in a manner of speaking:

Let me see if I get this straight. The Democrats want to condemn Turkey for a genocide that the Ottoman Empire committed before the Turks overthrew them, in order to invest Congress with a certain level of moral authority, if not historical illiteracy. At the same time, Nancy Pelosi -- who has pushed for the condemnation of our Muslim ally in the war on terror -- now wants to fly to Damascus to hang on the words of our enemy in the same war.

As Ed writes, "It's difficult to achieve this conjunction of idiocy in a single week, but Pelosi & Co have proven themselves just the idiots for the task".

Just making sure I understand the scorecard: Ann Althouse has two sips of wine in a video, and is now the reincarnation of Dorothy Parker or Zelda Fitzgerald. Ronald Reagan, who as a former actor was once thought second only to Jack Webb as a rigid authority figure, is now a genial hedonist. President Bush, who gave up drinking nearly two decades ago, is a "dry drunk". Smoking=worst danger to mankind. Automobiles=New Holocaust.

When did the left become more uptight than my parents?

Update: Related thoughts here.

Austin Bay asked me to guest host the Pajamas Media "Blog Week In Review" podcast this week, so I interviewed Robin Aitken, the former BBC journalist and on-air personality who left the network and has written a new book, very much in the vein of Bernard Goldberg's books on American media bias, titled Can We Trust The BBC. I tried to aim the questions towards an American perspective on the topic, but then, how could I not? Aitken also discussed in depth the BBC's biases regarding Iraq, Israel, and the Palestinians. Regular readers of this blog won't exactly be shocked where the BBC comes down on these issues, but for those who still hold out a belief that the BBC is entirely objective, its an eye-opener.

I also asked Robin if this was still flying on the walls of his former workplace.

It's a 20 minute long podcast (no iPod required--any computer with broadband and a soundcard can play an MP3 file), so please tune in and listen.

This week's Sanity Squad podcast on Pajamas Media had all sorts of loud clicks, pops and other elements of digital distortion scattered throughout it. Fortunately, through the help of Cakewalk Sonar and its editing tools, and the Bias SoundSoap Pro noise-reduction plug-in, I was able to make it at least listenable--so please take a listen.

Fascinating topic as well, discussing the psychological aspects of the Iranian capture of 15 British sailors.

Given that Law & Order jumped the shark well over a decade ago, this sounds like it might be reason enough to support a Fred Thompson candidacy.

(And more seriously, so does talk like this.)

Update: "If Fred Thompson runs, his first ad might look like this..."

After recieving an email wishing--in no uncertain terms--ill-will towards Tony Snow, Dean Barnett writes, "It seems like a lot of people have been asking in recent days why our politics have grown so bitter":

Generally, I find such inquiries tedious. Politics has always been a blood sport. Just ask Julius Caesar. Or the Senators who butchered him.

Things haven’t gone much differently in America. One of our founding fathers killed another of our founding fathers in a duel. George W. Bush isn’t the first president to be routinely compared to a primate. Abraham Lincoln’s critics often accorded him the same honor.

Still, there are some differences today. It used to be tough to get a letter to the editor published in a prominent newspaper. Furthermore, the papers edited their letter sections for quality and to make sure the letters’ authors were genuine. They also of course checked for ideological conformity.

Today, anyone can get the equivalent of a “letter to the editor” published on the blog of their choice. They can also do so anonymously. One would have anticipated that some keyboard cowards would appreciate the advent of such a forum. What has been a moderate surprise is how these boards have been a magnet for the keyboard cowards and how great their number has been compared to sensible people. One has to wonder how these people got their jollies before anonymously spewing venom became an option.

I think there are several additional reasons to consider here, as well.

Meanwhile, in a somewhat related post, Ann Althouse meets the New Puritans.

Yesterday, a well-known employee of the American Broadcasting Company said (on an ABC television program, even more ironically co-hosted by one of its most prominent veteran newspersons), that ABC's news programs are not to be trusted:

I’m saying that in America we are fed propaganda and if you want to know what's happening in the world go outside of the U.S. media because it's owned by four corporations one of them is this one. And you know what, go outside of the country to find out what's going on in our country because it's frightening. It’s frightening.

Rosie's only partially correct: you don't have to go outside of America, merely outside of ABC.

Mary Katharine Ham videoblogs this year's installment of the annual Media Research Center "Dishonors Awards":

Many more clips at the MRC itself.

James Panero of The New Criterion's "Armavirumque" blog writes:

You read it here first. And once our post about an art gallery's plans to display an 'anatomically correct' Chocolate Jesus was picked up by Ed Driscoll and Pajamas Media, so did the rest of the world.

Hot Air notes the layers of "sweet, nougaty irony" wrapped up in the gallery's churlish response when called on their reactionary juvenilia.

Update: Ed Morrissey rounds up a list of a few of the other bloggers who have since posted on this topic.

"NRO needs a new mug: Pop culture is our secret weapon in the war on terror!"

(Don't tell Dinesh D'Souza, though.)

Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow Of Death, I will fear no evil. For I am the baddest Muppet in the valley.

(And for additional silliness in a similar vein, don't miss Kermit Reznor as well in the same post.)

If the left is serious about global warming, here's the biggest, bluest state of them all, and in terms of pollution, it's a mess.

(It's a mess in terms of lots of other issues, but this seems like it would be a great place to start.)

This is rich--in the Washington Post, leftwing journalist Timothy Noah is attacking President Reagan for his "genial hedonism":

Reagan, like just about every other actor who ever passed through Hollywood, had a very hard time viewing sex as something to repress. This genial hedonism would later express itself in Reagan's embrace of supply-side economics.

I've referred to the left as "the new puritans" on more than a few occasions here, but up until now, I've never thought that they actually believed they were acting upon this trait themselves.

So if Reagan, who by all accounts wasn't exactly the next Errol Flynn when it came to 1940s and '50s style Hollywood hard partying is being attacked for being too hedonistic, perhaps its time for the left to re-evaluate President Clinton's excesses?

(Commencing holding breath....turning blue...feeling faint...never mind.)

Sorry, union regulations require that we take the hamsters off the generator wheel for about an hour near the end of the month. They've been fed, watered, and are back keeping the site active.

Interesting Kausian Kabuki concepts:

Here's a question: If it's

a) in the Congressional Democrats' interest to try but fail to use their funding power force a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq (it shows the antiwar left Pelosi is trying without giving Dems responsibility for a messy Iraq outcome),

and it's

b) in the Bush administration's interest to have Congressional Dems' try but fail to use their funding power to force a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq (it lets Bush continue the "surge" while giving him the threat of a Dem-forced pullout with which to pressure the Maliki government),

then

c) isn't it true that what probably will happen is that the Congressional Dems try but fail to use their funding power to force a U.S. withdrawl from Iraq?

Tough to argue with that formulation, and if it's correct, it's amazing how incredibly cynical the whole affair is.

"Prominent environmental groups today declared April 1 a 'National Day of Mourning' for the loss of another species to global climate change. Researchers today confirmed that there are no surviving members either in the wild or in captivity of the genus Homo Erectus Hirsutus, also known as the Pacific Bigfoot".

Read the whole thing, with tongue firmly in cheek.

Well, I think we have an answer to this.

What are the odds that some enterprising reporter on the campaign trail will ask Hillary for her own take on it?

I know, I keed! I keeed!

(Speaking of which, if Bob Dole weren't alive and to the best of my knowledge very well, he'd be turning over in his grave over that silence right now.)

Immediately after Tony Dungy, the head coach of the Indianapolis Colts was victorious in February’s Super Bowl, he gave a remarkable speech on the live CBS postgame show, in which he said, at about 2:38 into the above clip:

I tell you what. I'm proud to be representing African-American coaches, to be the first African-American to win this. It means an awful lot to our country. But again, more than anything, I've said it before, Lovie Smith and I, not only the first two African-Americans, but Christian coaches, showing that you can win doing it the Lord's way. We're more proud of that.

Such heterodox thinking was too much for a few of the guests at my Super Bowl party, and after witnessing their vaporous near-faints and splenetic responses, I wrote:

Unlike Janet Jackson's shopworn halftime routine a few years ago, think of this as the most radical example of Epater Les Bourgeois at the Super Bowl.

Certainly far too radical for the Washington Post, It seems. I guess this is more their speed.

(And once again, so much for "Mass With Class".)

The New York Times: same story, new international flavor!

Allahpundit spots the hot new Internet trend.

Update: Related thoughts here.

As a city, San Francisco has had its share of problems in the 21st century, among them: declining population, declining economy, declining children, contempt of the US military, a large and often militant vagrant class, and declining tourism.

Fortunately, when it comes to making an effort to solve those problems, local government has its priorities firmly in order.

Update: More decisive moments in governing here.

Fred Thompson writes:

A lot of people have at least a little in common with [Charlie Sheen and Rosie O’Donnell]. They just don’t like to think about how much our enemies actually hate us. It’s easier to escape down a rabbit hole to a land where our own government is tricking us into thinking the world is a dangerous place.

And also down this rabbit hole, often simultaneously.

That's the headline of an item by James Panero on the New Criterion's "Armavirumque" blog, along with a photo of a new "art" exhibit captioned, "Six Foot Jesus Made Of Chocolate". Panero responds:

'Forty Days in the Dessert'? The 'Immaculate Confection'? The possible New York Post headlines here are endless (and yes, I know the difference between the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth.) But one thing is clear. From Piss Christ to The Sensation Show, America hates New York for cheap art-world stunts, and for good reason. Check out the following notice that just came over the transom. (Be sure to read down for the bit about how this artist is "best remembered for covering a New York City hotel room in melted cheese." And just what is "anatomically correct" supposed to mean? And why do I feel like this has been done before? And why have I yet to see a custard Mohammed?)

Truth be told, I don't think America hates New York because of this stuff. Like the anti-Christian content that fuels so much of Hollywood's current product, they're too bored by how reactionary it all is to break much of a sweat over it.

The Manolo says:

Sometimes the Manolo comes across the pictures of the celebrity event which astound. Such is the case with the photos from the premiere of the new Quentino Tarentino and Robert Rodriguez juvenile movie, Grindhouse.

This is clearly a case of celebrities trying hard to look as ugly and clapped out as the movie they'll be watching.

Update: The Manolo reminds us of another Grindhouse-related fashion abortion.

Hugh Hewitt interviews House of Commons member Brooks Newmark on England's rather tepid response (so far at least) to her 15 sailors kidnapped by Iran and concludes, "Where is Margaret Thatcher when you need her?"

And speaking of which, for a total contrast (again, so far at least), on 18 Doughty Street, there's a videotaped interview with former Secretary of State for Defence Sir John Nott, on his role in liberating the Falkland Islands 25 very long years ago.

Not as large as Mayor Nagin's, but quite well-equipped nonetheless.

(Via Don Surber.)

Glenn Reynolds went with FDR, which is an excellent choice, but I'm picking Lincoln.

Frank Martin writes:

In August 1929, it was all chamapagne and celebration for the crew of Graf Zeppelin. The future looked very bright indeed for the makers of Airships. Sitting below the Graf Zeppelin on its arrival to Los Angeles, I can’t help but think that the smart set of the day would have been betting their money on the big, big future for the use of Airships.

It just goes to show you what a waste of time it is to try to predict the future. Stand in the shoes of the people living in LA in the summer of 1929, and see how far it gets you.

Read the whole thing; Frank goes on to compare 1929's Zeppelin with today's.

(If you were expecting something else by the above title, well, I've got that covered also.)

Ed Morrissey is shocked--shocked!--that Barack Obama, a presidential candidate "with an entire two years of experience in national office turns out to be a policy lightweight. Who'd a-thunk it? It had to hurt that Obama got compared to John Edwards, widely considered an empty suit himself, and found wanting".

On the other hand, as Jim Geraghty recently noted, "Hillary has de facto experience on Bill’s bids, and the 1992 campaign has to rank as one of the all-time chaotic campaigns (Gennifer Flowers, 'I didn’t inhale,' draft dodging, etc.)." That, and the tailwind the media will build for her should serve her quite well this time around.

Update: Or not...

"They're running away with their little curly tails between their legs", writes Glenn Reynolds, adding, "It's a disgrace, but par for the course for this bunch".

Not at all a surprise, of course. But very far removed from how they were actually elected in the first place.

Update: Ed Morrissey explains what comes next:

The President will definitely veto this bill, and the Democrats do not have anywhere near the votes needed to override. That means that Congress and the White House will have to reach some sort of compromise, or else theoretically allow the troops to remain in Iraq but without the funds to either fight or come home. If the President doesn't veto it, he has to start retreating in four months, to which he will not willingly assent. It will take weeks to unravel, and in that time I believe that Congress will work on a much smaller supplemental to keep funding going while the negotiations ensue. Reid, however, wants to wait until after the spring recess to start even on the conference committee talks, which will drag out the event even further.

Undoubtedly, Reid won big by declaring defeat. No one really expected this to pass, but Reid managed to talk Hagel and Nelson into reversing themselves, when even the ladies from Maine remained steadfast. He and Nancy Pelosi made it clear that the last election had its consequences, even if it took them several variations on the defeatist theme to do so.

One thing is certain: Chuck Hagel can skip the exploratory committee for the 2008 race.

Elsewhere, Michelle Malkin explains Reason Number 9,327,235 why the 1970s will never end.

Another Update: "Not with a bang but a whimper".

That's what the headlines would read if newspapers treated their own comments sections the same way they do those on blogs.

Gee, I can't imagine why.

Found via Atlas Shrugs; for some thoughts on how Newark arrived at this point, click here and here.

"I Bet The NY Times will jump on this".

Want to get into digital video? Over at Blogcritics, I review three books that make a fine introduction to medium cool.

Coming so quickly after Cathy Seipp's demise, this is dreadful news. As Mary Katharine Ham writes, "Keep Snow in your prayers".

(For all sorts of reasons, this sounds like a smart move by the HuffPost.)

Now it all makes sense!

"Meanwhile, here's Al Gore's view of humankind". It's certainly this fellow's view of mankind, at least.

In War And Anti-War, Alvin Toffler explained that wars come in many forms, not just the sort of Technicolor battles that are the stuff of Saving Private Ryan or Apocalypse Now. Case in point is the financial war that we're waging against Iran's assets, according to Ed Morrissey:

The US has targeted the Revolutionary Guard with its attempts at isolating the Iranians. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has transformed the Guard into an economic powerhouse in Iran, a major defense and civilian contractor even outside of its arms trading. This has made the Guard very loyal to Ahmadinejad, and the sanctions aim to both drive a wedge between the Guard and the president and also to cripple their ability to prop up the current regime.

In this, the US has received a great deal of assistance from a surprising source: Ahmadinejad himself. Global bankers who might otherwise have rejected American pressure to reduce their engagement with Teheran have either dropped their Iranian business or scaled it back sharply. Why? Ahmadinejad has made himself appear like a very risky investment partner, with his rantings about the Holocaust and wild statements about the destruction of Israel. Perhaps even more importantly, Ahmadinejad has undermined confidence in the Iranian stock exchange, comparing it to gambling. That doesn't make for an encouraging investment atmosphere even under the best of circumstances.

All of this results in a currency crunch for Iran. Importers now have to pay up front for their materials, having seen the normal credit environment disappear altogether. Banks will not issue loans or conduct capital investments into the oil infrastructure in Iran, which has now begun to crumble from years of poor maintenance. Iran can no longer generate the revenues of the past, which means that less money can go to radical Islamist terrorists like Hezbollah and Hamas. The situation has become so bad that Iran has worked to keep its name and the names of its banking institutions off of financial transactions in order to shield them from the prying eyes of the US.

The Bush administration has successfully conducted an indirect war on Iranian interests, and it is a progressive war. The effects of these efforts will be cumulative, and the Iranians have not much time left before their economy begins to completely collapse under the weight of them. Oil production accounts for 80% of their exports, and once those facilities start to fail, they will have nothing left with which to bargain -- and it will take years to repair the damage. When they reach that stage, Iranians will find plenty of motivation to shake off the disastrous reign of the mullahcracy, and even the Revolutionary Guard will not find much motivation to protect them.

How brilliant is the deception involved to make the information war successful? Much like Patton's role as a decoy before D-Day, Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker is feeding Iranian radio all sorts of made-up war plans to add heft to what is likely to be purely an information war. And the postmodern twist is that he doesn't even know how he's being used!

(Well, that's one possible explanation at least.)

Mickey Kaus writes, "Will the Media Critic Please Turn Out the Lights?" (Fluorescents or halogen of course. I'm sure that incandescent bulbs are verboten at the Times on both coasts...):

The LAT's Tim Rutten has defended against the charge that he's "sanctimonious" by publishing a piece titled "These rules we live by." Oh-kay! More on this later. For now, please read through Rutten's piece and ask yourself if he shows any sign of awareness that he and his distinguished LAT colleagues only have their jobs because they produce a product that people are willing to pay money for? Rutten writes as if there's a constitutional provision that credentialed journalists have lifetime professional tenure no matter how much money his paper loses or makes.

Rutten's far from the first journalist to think that way, of course.

Mark Krikorian ponders mathematically challenged journalists:

At a time when more and more policy advocacy and policymaking is based on the assessment of data, the English majors who become reporters and editors are as bad as ever at discussing numbers. The WaPost had some cute stories on teenage entrepreneurs with a couple real howlers: "Last year, he sold 10 of his photographs, netting about $1,000 in gross sales." (Last time I checked, "net" and "gross" were different concepts.)

And this one in a story about a girl who bakes gourmet dog treats: "According to a survey by the American Pet Products Manufacturing Association, people in the United States spent $34.4 billion on their pets in 2004. The bulk of that — $14.2 billion — was spent on food." (How can the "bulk" be less than half of something?) And then a graphic in the Business section, of all places, (it accompanied this story, but isn't online) had a caption saying the volume of first-class mail has been declining since 1999, when the graph clearly shows volume declining since 1990.

Sure, these are trivial examples, but if newspapers can't get "net" and "gross" right, how are they going to write about the federal budget intelligently?

God is in the details, as Mies is always quoted as saying, and it’s these little things that demonstrate the superiority of elite journalists over the pajama-clad masses. Thankfully, unlike bloggers, they have an army of editors just offstage to help them get these crucial details right.

In business journalism, these skills are even more crucial, risking The Death of Equities.

"Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Lamar Smith (R-TX) today asked Former President Bill Clinton if he would be available to testify at the Democrats' Thursday hearing on presidential pardon authority":

"Former President Clinton is no stranger to controversial pardons, most notably the pardon of Marc Rich on his last day in office," stated Ranking Member Smith. "I can think of no better person to address this issue."

At Thursday's hearing of the Judiciary's Crime Subcommittee entitled, "The Appropriate Use of the Presidential Pardoning Power," Democrats are expected to explore what is and is not the appropriate use of pardons, despite a president's plenary power to issue pardons.

President Clinton granted pardons or commuted the sentences of nearly 500 people, including fugitive financier Marc Rich, whose wife donated $450 thousand to the Clinton Library. Other pardons included a person accused of cocaine trafficking and a former Democratic committee chairman indicted on political corruption charges.

The Constitution gives the President the absolute authority to grant clemency, commutation, and remission of fines for offenses. Despite this absolute authority, presidents are not immune from criticism and even congressional attempts to restrict pardon authority.

"Mr. Clinton's exercise of his pardon authority would be of real interest to Members of the Subcommittee," concluded Smith. "I hope he will lend his expertise."

Cute. But something tells me that President Clinton will have another gym workout that he just can't get out of that day.

When someone tells you that he hates America, or that the U.S. deserved it on 9/11, read him this list.

Meryl Yourish writes, "what time is it? That’s right. It’s Israeli Double Standard Time".

Glenn Reynolds advises, "Set your clocks", but why? When it comes to the media and the left, it's always Israeli Double Standard Time. I guess it's somewhat akin to Double Secret Probation--except that it's certainly no secret.

Rosie O’Donnell speaks truth to power! The latest Iranian hostage crisis? Gulf of Tonkin, Part II.

9/11? The greatest conspiracy ever.

Ahh, the journey that Rosie's taken since this moment. It's as if she's captured by history, turned upside down, riding the whirlwind, channeling unseen forces!

Allah asks, "Is it time for Unstable Mabel to go?" I doubt it--she's a trainwreck, but viewers can't turn away. Rosie's the best thing that's happened to The View's ratings; ABC is happy to beam her into your home--F-bombs and all--five days a week. And it looks like her style is catching far beyond the measured, nuanced confines of over-the-air television.

Once again, proof that no satirist can improve upon the folly of man, as Germany releases convicted Baader-Meinhof terrorist Brigitte Mohnhaupt from her sentence two days early so that she doesn't have to face the indignity of--wait for it--talking to reporters.

As Ed Morrissey writes:

This has to be a joke. They wanted to protect a hardened murderer from getting hassled by reporters? How awful! We wouldn't want to have Mohnhaupt experience that kind of inhumanity!

Besides, what exactly do the Germans expect Mohnhaupt to do? She may disappear long enough to write her autobiography, or perhaps to market the one she probably wrote in prison. Afterwards, she will hit the lecture circuit, talking about the grand old days of revolution, when radical leftists like Mohnhaupt and her friends murdered bankers and abducted law-abiding citizens for fun and profit. She'll want to hold press conferences wherever she goes.

The Germans have to have a holes in their heads for ever letting Mohnhaupt out of prison. This latest concern over the inconvenience of answering for herself to a free press shows what a joke this process was from the start.

Who's Germany's equivalent of Leonard Bernstein? She'll be a huge hit at his cocktail parties.

(Via Betsy Newmark. Incidentally, does anyone have Margaret Cho's take on this development?)

Pajamas HQ calls it the "Lecture of the Week"; from his introduction praising David Frum's How We Got Here onward, Evan Sayet, a Hollywood comedy writer who calls himself "a 9/13 Republican", gets it.

It makes a terrific palette-cleanser from the Tinseltown pots & pans banging a couple of posts down--watch the whole thing:

Update: And (via Instapundit) for some context, "What You Can't Say".

Mickey Kaus writes:

This audio of Katie Couric's questions to the Edwards'--with their answers excised--would make a great soundtrack for a piece of conceptual art.

Or as Marshall McCluhan said in 1960 about the contents of an even older legacy media, "Take the date line off a newspaper and it becomes an exotic and fascinating surrealist poem".

George Will has a great piece on Anger In America Now (to coin a book title), but American anger as a whole has nothing on Hollywood.

Back in 2005, I linked to a typically great article on that very topic by Cathy Seipp:

Behind the New Age grin of beatific self-righteousness with which so many Hollywood celebrities greet the world often lurks a tantrum ready to erupt. When the full, roiling boil is over, the slow simmer can last for weeks, if not months. By comparison, old-style screamers can seem quaint, almost benign. The storm may have been intense, but it passed quickly. A classic of the type — the agent Norman Brokaw, for instance — could suggest lunch within minutes of a blowup. And the scream usually took the form of a statement: “Get outta here!”

But new-style screamers eschew declarative sentences for rhetorical, F. Lee Bailey-esque questions: “What were you thinking? Why did you even pick up the phone? Do you even have a brain?” This can be harder to bear. As an observer told me once, “If it's ‘You're fired,’ then at least you're out. If it's someone trying to teach you a lesson, you're there, and you're stuck.”

Some screamers can hardly utter a sentence that doesn’t contain the f-word. The syllable almost seems to function as their sound, signifying only that they are in the room. Others are more careful with their language, because being sworn at is the point where many screamees stop listening and may even quit. So bland, schoolmarmish words of displeasure are amplified to ear-splitting volume. A vein-popping “Un-ACC-EPT-able!” is a great favorite. Also, a drawn out “DIS...A...PPOINTED!!!”

When in full throttle, the classic Hollywood screamer cannot be neither stopped nor shamed. I once heard a story about a studio executive who screamed at someone’s assistant for a good five minutes before realizing he was in the wrong office — possibly even on the wrong floor. “Well, if you see her,” he yelled before stomping out, “tell her what I said!”

I'd like to think showbiz screaming reaches its zenith here (Warning--Strong Language Alert!), but something tells me this is just another day amongst the calm, cool, peace-loving denizens of Tinseltown.

Incidentally, there's only one thing the above clips lack: the reasoned, dulcet tones of Mr. Paul Anka.

Update: Welcome Media Bistro readers, and other fans of the late great Miss Seipp.

Reason's Indur M. Goklany writes, "Mankind has never been healthier, wealthier or freer. Surprised?"

No, not really. See post below for some reasons why.

(Via Tim Blair.)

During the late-1990s, as the new millennium was approaching and pre-Blogosphere, I was largely toiling away for various home automation magazines (something I still do quite often, actually), where I wrote my share of "Welcome To The Home Of The Future!" articles. Here's one that featured quotes from my interview of Star Trek veteran David Gerrold, and is a representative (though heavily edited, as I recall) sample of the genre.

But my sci-fi forecasting had nothing on the Minneapolis Strib's apocalyptic vision of the future domus. Roger L. Simon writes that many of us are having the same reaction from Al Gore's low budget PowerPoint presentation agitpropumentary Academy Award-winnning blockbuster film:

After viewing the movie I was less troubled with the global warming issue and more troubled by Gore's narcissism - not exactly the result intended. In fact, the reverse. And evidently, from the poll results, I am not alone.

Oh yeah? Well, heed the Goracle now maaaan, or pay up in the future!

Read More »

At the start of February, I wrote:

So far the Blogosphere has spotted Chernobyl-style meltdowns in credibility by CBS, the Washington Post, Newsweek, AP, and on numerous occasions, the New York Times and Reuters.

When I interviewed Glenn Reynolds last year for my TCS Daily article on An Army Of Davids, he quoted a passage from Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End that "utopia was a Red Queen’s Race with extinction". Glenn added, "Even if things are going terribly, it will seem like it’s going well, right up until the end".

Have the mainstream media quietly begun some sort of Red Queen's Race of their own? Or is the Blogosphere merely getting increasingly better at catching the media's worst moments and publicizing them? By and large, I believe the general public has come to believe that the vast majority of old media outlets lean to the left, despite the exponentially diminishing claims of objectivity. And since half the country does as well, newspapers and television have a wide audience to aim their content. So does that mean that Blogosphere complaints about the MSM are being read as mere partisan sniping?

Robert Kuttner of liberal house organs Columbia Journalism Review and The American Prospect (and Mickey Kaus's bete noire) confirms my diagnosis:

By the usual indicators, daily newspapers are in a deepening downward spiral. The new year brought reports of more newsroom layoffs, dwindling print circulation, flat or declining ad sales, increasing defections of readers and advertisers to the Internet, and sullen investors. Wall Street so undervalues traditional publishing that McClatchy’s stock price briefly rose when it sold off the Minneapolis Star Tribune at a fire-sale price, mainly for the $160 million tax benefit. As succeeding generations grow up with the Web and lose the habit of reading print, it seems improbable that newspapers can survive with a cost structure at least 50 percent higher than their nimbler and cheaper Internet competitors. (“No trucks, no trees,” says the former Boston Globe publisher Ben Taylor.) The dire future predicted by the now-classic video, EPIC 2014, in which Google, Amazon, and an army of amateurs eventually drive out even The New York Times, begins to feel like a real risk.

Near the end of my post, I wrote:

The media as a whole aren't going away any time soon, of course (although Hugh Hewitt might argue with that). They're too well funded via advertising, subscriptions, stocks, bonds, and other revenue. But it seems like something has to change--the accumulated weight of all of the errors, gaffes, and uses of wildly slanted tone in otherwise "objective" reporting has to begin to register at some point.

What will change amongst journalists? Kuttner presents some surprisingly upbeat scenarios, some of which involve newspapers going intensely local, as other journalists have also long suggested. Kuttner concludes:

Assuming that most dailies survive the transition, my guess is that in twenty-five years they will be mostly digital; that even people like me of the pre-Internet generation will be largely won over by ingenious devices like Times Reader, supplemented by news alerts, rss feeds, and God knows what else. But whether newspapers are print or Web matters far less than whether they maintain their historic calling.

Yes--their traditional historic calling as competing highly-partisan sources, before the mid-to-late 20th century period of media consolidation began, bringing with it not just an overall tone of liberal bias, but perhaps even worse, a deadily uniform dullness, as well.

(Via Hugh Hewitt, who has some thoughts on the Strib's latest gaffe.)

I missed this quote from Kennedy scionette and California first lady Maria Shriver in 1992, but it didn't escape Tammy Bruce's notice:

"When you marry someone, you marry them for sickness and health. [Republican politics] are Arnold's sickness." -- Shriver on Schwarzenegger in the June 1992 edition of McCall's magazine.

Shriver was employed by NBC from 1989 to 2004. (Add her quote to this list.) Their current nightly anchorman has compared America's Navy SEALs and even its founding fathers to terrorists. Or least been "aggressively misunderstood" to have done so.

(Incidentally, I hope that Maria feels her husband's made a remarkable recovery from his "sickness" in his second term.)

Noemie Emery has a tremendous piece in The Weekly Standard in which she performs a task that the legacy media especially hates, and rifles through its archives. Just as the media performed a flip-flop 180-degree dive on Iraq after 2003 that would make Greg Louganis blush, their assessment of President Reagan was remarkably different in the 1980s when compared to today.

Here's her conclusion:

And how did an era of greed, led by an out-of-touch airhead, change two decades later into a golden age, led by a prince among men? The reasons are these: First, the only times conservatives are praised in the press is when they can be used to run down other conservatives; and second, it is a general rule of the press and of the establishment that the best conservatives are those dead or retired; and the more dead or retired, the better they are. As Jonah Goldberg noted this winter when Gerald Ford died, lauded by a media that had little good to say of him while he was president, each Republican president is a fool, a bigot, and a dangerous warmonger while he is in office, responsible for sexism, racism, ageism, and general misery. Once dead, however, he acquires a Strange New Respect. In time, the jibes thrown at him are airbrushed away, and he is seen as a statesman, a true conservative, with all the best values, all the more so when compared with whatever Republican is now in office, who is seen in comparison as someone who really is dangerous, a warmonger, bigot, and fool. In their turn, Barry Goldwater, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush the Elder have become harmless and loveable figures, cherished for their good humor, their prudence, and tolerance--and for their distance from today's modern conservatives, who have run their cause into the ground.

This pattern will not alter: In a few years, when President Rudy or Commander in Chief Thompson begins knocking heads, watch out for the press to express its Strange New Respect for Bush 43, whose government was nothing if not diverse as regards race and gender, and who at least made a pretense of being compassionate. In 2027, if Time is still around, will it run a cover, showing him shedding a tear?

Wherever Reagan is today, he is doubtless not crying. We like to think he is watching the horse race, with other ex-presidents. And laughing his head off at Time.

Via Orrin Judd, who writes, "Starring--W As The Gipper; Islamicism As Communism; Ba'athists As The Sandinistas; And Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Etc., As Themselves".

Jules Crittenden links to Don Surber's assessment of John McCain's financial karma:

McCain-Feingold was supposed to limit money in political campaigns. That is why McCain is having trouble raising money. McCain-Feingold made him a political pariah. Republicans love him and respect his wartime heroism, but they would rather see Hillary get elected.

Well, maybe not Hillary.

What is ironic is McCain-Feingold failed to limit Big Money in campaigns. Democrats exploited the 527 loophole with the top 5 or 6 all being big liberal-labor spending machines. If it were not for the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth, Republicans would have been shut out last time.

The other irony is technology is making McCain-Feingold obsolete.

That “1984″ ad that Barack Obama ran against Hillary showed that a presidential candidate need not spend millions on TV ads. Just put together a good one cheap (political parodies do not violate copyrights) on YouTube and watch the sparks fly.

Frankly, Obama was a jerk for not standing behind the man who came up with it. Nothing wrong with telling the truth about an opponent.

Indeed, but read the rest.

Update: Related thoughts from Bill Hobbs.

Via--appropriately enough--Dr. Sanity:

Katie Couric finally comes to her senses; it's good to see her beginning to understand how much damage the Spinal Tap, all-amps-on-11, all-the-time tone regarding the White House has caused legacy journalism’s credibility in light of the alternatives increasingly available to news consumers:

Couric asked reporter Bob Woodward: “But are members of the media, do you think, Bob, too scandal-obsessed, looking for something at every corner?”

Oh wait, that was Katie in 1997. Keep that BDS pumping, boys!

Of course, while Hollywood has problems these days, its company town newspaper is in even bigger trouble: "Why don’t they just put 'May cause drowsiness' above the masthead and leave it at that?"

After coming back from seeing 300 a couple of weeks ago, and sitting through the preview for Grindhouse, I described one of the more vile scenes that actually made it into that trailer:

the disgusting image of a buxom young woman whose leg is amputated and replaced with a machine gun, which she alternately walks on and fires at the baddies (baddies being a relative term in a Tarantino movie, of course) by crouching in some sort of kung fu-style pose spraying bullets upward. (No, really.)

In his latest op-ed (on the excesses of the NC-17 rating), Brent Bozell lists some more:

The New York Post reports that the forthcoming movie “Grindhouse” is also expected to draw an NC-17, at least at first, for its raw content. The Post had the inside scoop: “In one scene, a cute topless girl is roughly tied down on a table by evil female Nazi experimenters who begin draining her blood and as she screams in agony, they brand her like livestock with a coal-hot steel swastika,” the source said. “And every girl in the Nazi concentration camp is topless.” [Thus ensuring boffo business in Hong Kong--Ed] Another scene features “a grossly obese man chewing on a baby.”

This potential NC-17 film has two big-name directors Hollywood loves at the helm, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. Would they put their prestige on the line to promote the spread of the NC-17 rating? Is this “artistic” sludge the kind of film-making that Dan Glickman is trying to suggest would make the NC-17 “respectable”?

Much like these bipolar reviews from 2004, watch the same critics (on both sides of the Atlantic) who attacked 300 as Leni Riefenstahl incarnate and built-up its stylized CGI gore to abattoir-like levels, to give the bloody, nihilistic Grindhouse a huge pass for "artistic" reasons, especially given the superstar directors attached to it.

As Thomas Hibbs wrote in his exceptional book on Hollywood nihilism, even prior to 9/11, Hollywood and its critics have become so enamored of Shows About Nothing that when a film "gets out" with a positive message, it's to be attacked like a mutant virus escaping its lab. And no wonder Hollywood has turned to gross-out horror lately as one of its main products. When positive stories are passé, when you've buried your head in the sand regarding terrorism and political correctness severely limits all of the stories you can tell, there aren't that many options left.

Found via Tim Blair, Iowa Voice notes:

On March 18, the New York Times published this story about female soldiers who served in Iraq and are now having problems as a result.

One of the women mentioned in the story claims to have been sexually assaulted twice in the last few years and that she suffers severe mental problems as a result of being deployed to, and injured in, Iraq. Her story is griping because of the vivid details given.

One problem though: she never was sent to Iraq. She was in Guam the whole time.

The NYTimes did insert a correction in the online addition today, a full week after they published this story (anyone know about the print edition at all?), but knew full well when they went to print with this article that portions of it may have been inaccurate. Where have I seen that before?

The Times contacted the Navy just three days before this story went to print, not exactly giving them time to look into it. Nevertheless, the Navy DID provide enough info to the Times to where they should have questioned this woman’s story, at least to the point of leaving her out entirely.

Of course there’s NO agenda at work here, folks. None at all.

Where have you gone, B.G. Burkett? Our nation's editors turn their lonely eyes to you.

Update: John Hinderaker also has some thoughts on this latest Timesian gaffe that are well worth reading.

Pajamas reports:

Bill Roggio talks about the surge, security in Iraq, and holding our ground in Afghanistan with host Austin Bay in this week’s podcast. Roggio says that even though “we lost a lot of ground” in 2006, “There’s a very good chance of success for this plan.” Bill is currently filing several reports a week on Iraq that can be found at the Weekly Standard. Produced by Ed Driscoll. Brought to you by Volvo USA.

Tune in here; no iPod (or flak jacket) required!

Tough to argue with this:

Sixty-four-year-old Vivian Westerman rode out Hurricane Katrina in her 19th-century house. So terrible was the experience that she wanted two things before the 2006 season arrived: a backup power source and a gun. “I got a 6,000-watt generator and the cutest little Smith & Wesson, snub-nose .38 you ever saw,” she boasted. “I’ve never been more confident.” People across New Orleans are arming themselves - not only against the possibility of another storm bringing anarchy, but against the violence that has engulfed the metropolitan area in the 19 months since Katrina, making New Orleans the nation’s murder capital.

"The cutest little Smith & Wesson, snub-nose .38 you ever saw"? Man, Tammy Bruce fans are everywhere.

Newsbusters writes:

Can you believe it? ABC displayed a painting depicting Mohammed as a dog, and then had the temerity/stupidity to ask if Muslims would find it offensive. Actually, you can't believe it. ABC did no such thing -- nor is it conceivable it would do so.

But displaying a painting depicting Christ as a dog, and wondering whether anyone would find it offensive? Sure.

As I wrote during Newsweek's phony "Koran-in-the-can" story at Gitmo in 2005:

So how 'bout it, MSM? We now know how ardently you'll defend a religion which is practiced by about three million Americans according to Daniel Pipes, and roughly double that from other sources. Ready to start defending the Judeo-Christian faiths practiced by--or at a bare minimum, respected by--the other 290 million people in this country?

Or as Glenn Reynolds wrote during the (real) Motoons crisis last year:

Once again, the message is that if you blow things up, or even look as if you might, we'll be nice to you. And once again, I note that this is a very unwise message to send.

Of course, ABC could always do what the New York Times once did when it came across an altogether more shocking piece of anti-Christian art: hire the artist yourself to illustrate a story. Maybe something about Abu Ghraib...

As Mark Steyn recently noted on the L.A. Times' Brian Grazer scandalette:

The first responsibility of a newspaper is to produce something readable. If you don’t do that, nobody’s ever going to get to experience your fabulous ethical integrity. The Times, like all the other dreary monodailies across the land, has forgotten that these days nobody needs to buy a newspaper: it’s a discretionary item. The only difference is that, unlike The Nowheresville Sun-Herald-Picayune-Indicator, the Times is the monodaily of the entertainment capital of the planet and it’s somehow decided that virtue requires it to be the dullest newspaper on the face of the earth.

In his latest update, Mickey Kaus explores how the Times of both coasts manages to cast off readers right and left. On the left coast, it's avoiding funny, gossipy writers like the late Miss Seipp; on the right, it's putting your best columnists behind a firewall that compared to your gross revenues, rakes in peanuts a year.

Read the whole thing; cricket bat ala Ian Faith optional.

In the Claremont Review of Books, England's best conservative journalist reviews the latest book by Canada's best conservative journalist: "The Gelded Age--Theodore Dalrymple on Mark Steyn's America Alone".

Very much apropos of the territory that both of the above men frequently explore, James Lileks recently wrote:

I drove home listening to Bob Davis on KSTP; he was revisiting one of his favorite topics, one that mirrors exactly something I’ve felt for some time: the lack of any prominent cultural direction, and the strange incoherent sense of anticipation that lack produces. It’s as if the culture is treading water, with nothing truly new to give it focus and purpose. That’s not exactly a good thing when you’re competing with cultures that have both, in large quantities, and a sense of historical momentum the West has lost. I grapple with this from time to time, usually in the morning; it’s the odd suspicion that the West is exhausted. Not done or over or dead or resigned, but simply exhausted. We live in the end stages of the application of the Enlightenment, at least as applied to our own culture; what now? If you’ve ended debate on the great issues, you’re left with smaller ones, like 720 vs. 1080i; you concern yourself with indistinct dreads and assign to them a moral component; you luxuriate in the hot springs of partisan politics and redefine the issues so the gap between left and right looks like Gog v. Magog territory.

Near the end of his review of Steyn's book, Dalrymple has one response:

The welfare state has sapped all will to what is often mocked as la gloire; but without a notion of glory, without a notion that there is something in human life more worth striving for than universal central heating and television, no great thing is ever achieved. That is one of the reasons why the public architecture in Europe is now so awful: once you have lost the habits of taste, taste itself disappears even when money is available for its exercise.

This is a very urgent book, but I am unsure whether I want to be around to see whether Steyn's pessimism is entirely justified.

Given that Steyn's forecast is surprisingly short-term, I'd like to think I will be around then. But unlike earlier glitteringly technology-oriented forecasts by Clarke and Toffler, I'm also not sure if I'm looking forward to checking how closely Steyn's infinitely gloomier profile of the future ends up becoming reality in a couple of decades.

Jonah Goldberg writes that Al Gore "wants to change attitudes more than he wants to solve problems":

Covering Gore’s congressional testimony, The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank portrayed Gore as a man of science versus a bunch of creationist nutjobs. Milbank wrote: “... instead of giving another screening of An Inconvenient Truth, the former vice president found himself playing the Clarence Darrow character in Inherit the Wind.” It’s an unintentionally accurate comparison, because the movie completely distorted the reality of the Scopes trial. The real Clarence Darrow contentedly lost the open-and-shut case after a nine-minute jury deliberation. The movie was about something bigger than the facts. So is Al Gore. And that’s why his fans love him.

Gore says global warming is “a crisis that threatens the survival of our civilization and the habitability of the Earth.” It’s graver than any war. He compares it to the asteroid that allegedly killed the dinosaurs.

But here’s the thing. If there were an asteroid barreling toward earth, we wouldn’t be talking about changing our lifestyles, nor would we be preaching about reducing, reusing and recycling. We would be building giant wicked-cool lasers and bomb-carrying spaceships to go out and destroy the thing. But Gore doesn’t want to explore geo-engineering (whereby, for example, we’d add sulfate aerosols or other substances to the atmosphere to mitigate global warming). Why? Because solving the problem isn’t really the point. As Gore makes it clear in his book, Earth in the Balance, he wants to change attitudes more than he wants to solve problems.

Indeed, he wants to change attitudes about government as much as he wants to preach environmentalism. Global warming is what William James called a “moral equivalent of war” that gives political officials the power to do things they could never do without a crisis. As liberal journalist James Ridgeway wrote in the early 1970s: “Ecology offered liberal-minded people what they had longed for, a safe, rational and above all peaceful way of remaking society ... (and) developing a more coherent central state.”

And that's the key to making sense of the multiple hypocrisies of the Goracle: Al doesn't care about his growing electricity bill, because, ultimately, Gore cares about what all politicians on the left (and an inconveniently large number on the right) care about: growing big government.

Via Pajamas, Reuters reports, "Many Americans see little point to Web: survey":

A little under one-third of U.S. households have no Internet access and do not plan to get it, with most of the holdouts seeing little use for it in their lives, according to a survey released on Friday.

I believe that the precise, sociological term for this group of digital Luddites is "CBS viewers".

Update: On the other hand, the precise, sociological term for this demographic would be "Chicago voters".

A meme is born, courtesy of Hugh Hewitt. Elsewhere, Don Surber adds:

This backstabbing bill passed 218-212. That is about 72 votes shy of the 290 needed to override a presidential veto. The Senate knows this and will not follow suit. This was political masturbation.

Just in case though, the troops are preparing for the worst.

Update: Tammy Bruce deploys the Weyland-Yutani metaphor.

On March 20th, 2003, at the start of the liberation of Iraq, San Francisco protestors staged what the San Francisco Chronicle quaintly dubbed "a vomit-in". (Astoundingly, their article on the topic is still online). These days, with Saddam playing his golden harp (apologies to Gert Frobe), and the Surge apparently working surprisingly well, Portland Oregon protestors have chosen a different orifice to express their anti-Americanism:

This splinter group of protesters showed its support for “peace” by burning a U.S. soldier in effigy. It exhibited its supposedly pacifist nature by knocking a police officer off his bike — an action that brought out the police riot squad.

Perhaps the most disturbing scene of the afternoon, however, involved the man who pulled down his pants in front of women and children and defecated on a burning U.S. flag. This disgusting act actually elicited cheers from some members of the crowd, but we hope that the emotion it produces in the community is one of revulsion...

...The anti-war demonstrators who behaved responsibly this past weekend have an obligation to denounce — and distance themselves from — those protesters who purposefully offend others and consequently destroy the intended message of peace.

As Michelle Malkin writes, "still waiting".

Found via Maggie's Farm (where it's cocktail hour!), The View From 1776 has a great post on how Hollywood went Red in the 1930. Here's but a sample:

Collins later repented his years in the CPUSA. He unburdened himself in Confessions of a Red Screenwriter, published in the October 6, 1952, issue of New Leader. He wrote:

A Communist is always prepared. He, or rather his party, has an answer for everything. When I joined the party, I was handed ready-made: friends, a cause, a faith and a viewpoint on all phenomena. I also had a one-shot solution to all the world’s ills and inequities....Suppose our Comrade keeps up with all the twists and turns of party policy, what is his reward? Why, peace of mind, of course. Since he has an answer for everything, he has a great sensof personal security; the world is safe; everything is explained – his history and the future; and everything is also simplified – into black and white....

The party member, on the other hand, has to make only one effort. He must be “flexible.” “Flexible” means that you cheer for Earl Browder [former CPUSA head] on his birthday and the next day you despise him as a “betrayer of the working class”...

All of which is a reminder of what a huge "Nyah!" Lillian Hellman's infamous quote that "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions" was to the HCUAA. And of something that Dennis Prager wrote in 2004:

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

And of course, such "flexibility" is an ever-present part of today's society and its media.

And I think that "flexibility" is one of the reasons why Glenn Reynolds is correct when he writes:

It occurs to me that the media sectors that are doing badly -- movies, music, newspapers, TV women's shows -- seem to be the most highly politicized, while the sectors that are doing well, like games, aren't.

The non-politicized sectors are under much less pressure to cut their conscience to fit this year's fashions.

At the end of a long detailed post describing how he became an independent journalist in Iraq, Michael Yon writes:

I’m finally starting to understand what so many Vietnam Veterans have told me. One overarching message from the front is that our combat forces are overwhelmingly good to the Iraqis and extremely accommodating to media, but there is a deeper substrate. We simply cannot beat the terrorists if we do not learn how to embrace media realities. With all the focus on training Iraqi Security Forces, it might be worth considering training our own team, too.

Yet trapped here with Dr Strangelove, while some commanders undermine the media war, it bears frequent reminding that General Petraeus has won complex battles before in Iraq. He is extremely open with the media, and nobody with PhD from Princeton would invite a bunch of writers to document an historical fight he plans to lose. He’s invited press to a process he aims to resolve. I’d planned to watch the surge unfold in and around Baghdad and focus on that, but haven’t had much of a chance with Brooks and Gang playing musical chairs.And so that’s a brief of the route here, and the struggle with some commanders to stay and report on your friends, loved ones, and your war. Because, like it or not, this is YOUR war.

In closing, I’d like to suggest a pact with new readers. This site is 100% reader supported. Not a dime comes from FOX, and clearly I am not getting paid by the Army, cots and MRE’s notwithstanding. To maintain independence, there are no advertisements on my site. It all comes down to you, the reader. If you keep reading, I’ll keep writing the Good, Bad, and Ugly, but I definitely will still need the high-cover that comes from high visibility; truth has a stinger that some seem particularly sensitive to.

As the Professor, who interviewed Yon recently, would say, read the whole thing.

"Let's send Ernie home": Be sure to read this on "the general that has just threatened to kick Michael Yon out of Iraq".

Tammy Bruce writes that the "It" Bear of the American Right (sorry Jonah) will be spared, thus ensuring a long career as YouTube superstar. No word yet on whether or not his seven-figure endorsement deal with Build-A-Bear has come through yet, though.

First Australia and now England--wherever political correctness strikes fear into the hearts of wire service editors everywhere, the Men of No Appearance are sure not to follow.

Last year, when fashion designer Marc Jacobs chose his San Francisco storefront's windows to let the full measure of his BDS blossom, I wrote:

In his classic 1977 book on selling, master automobile salesman Joe Girard wrote that when facing potential car buyers, "Political stuff I say nothing about, because politics is not something you can talk about with a customer without getting into trouble. If my own son were running for President, I wouldn't ware a Girard For President button to work".

That sort of thing used to be common sense in business. But as with so much of what used to be common sense, it seems to be dying away these days in our bluer alcoves.

Kesher Talk spots more evidence of just that hatred coming out of the closet (so to speak) in the Big Apple.

Pardon me while I go all McLuhan on you for a second: The sort of insular groupthink and lack of diversity within the cocoons of the Parenthesis States that the above ad campaigns highlight is reactionary of course, but somewhat understandable. But how much do such overt public displays of BDS impact the pronouncements (such as this one) of a news media and entertainment industry that once served both sides of the political aisle for much of the 20th century before media balkanization increasingly kicked in after 9/11?

Interesting post by Bryan Preston deconstructing the making of the recent Hillary-as-Big Sister Apple Mash-up that the Obama camp created.

Update: More video wonkery: Tim Blair links to this fabulous Ferrari-loaded commercial for Shell Oil. If Stanley Kubrick were still alive, he'd be studying the editing techniques in this one himself.

The parent companies of Fox and NBC are teaming up to battle YouTube.

Hot on the Beatleboots of my podcast this morning featuring the author of The Unreleased Beatles, comes this clip, unearthed by John Podhoretz. Richard Lester's experimental film techniques and choreography have never been more radical!

Exit Question (as Allahpundit is wont to say): How superior will the surrealism in the above clip look when compared to this?

Or at least the movie producer, as the race to the bottom continues. Hugh Hewitt writes:

A few days back The Los Angeles Times trumpeted "the launch of a quarterly guest editor program for Current, the Sunday edition commentary section. Brian Grazer, Oscar® and Emmy®-winning writer-producer, has been chosen to oversee the debut and future guest editors will be similarly intriguing personalities from the worlds of politics, business, culture, entertainment and sports."

In a blow certain to further erode the paper's almost non-existent credibility, it has been revealed that Andres Martinez, the editorial page editor and overseer of the project, has been in a relationship with Grazier's publicist.

Martinez has resigned; Hugh adds, "I suppose this would be a bad time to bring up former Times' editor and Martinez mentor John Carroll's pompous lecture on the rise and dangers of pseudo-journalism".

Meanwhile, media objectivity? Dude, that's so 1994!

A bizarre scandal at the LA Times has prompted the resignation of editorial page editor Andres Martinez. In his angry farewell, Martinez drops this bombshell about the relationship between the editorial and news pages at the LAT:

Among the biggest possible conflicts of interest a newspaper can enter into is to have the same people involved in news coverage running opinion pages. I am proud of the fact that Jeff Johnson, Dean Baquet and I fully separated the opinion pages from the newsroom at the Times. I accept my share of the responsibility for placing the Times in this predicament, but I will not be lectured on ethics by some ostensibly objective news reporters and editors who lobby for editorials to be written on certain subjects, or who have suggested that our editorial page coordinate more closely with the newsroom's agenda, and I strongly urge the present and future leadership of the paper to resist the cries to revisit the separation between news and opinion that we have achieved.

News reporters and editors who lobby for editorials to be written on certain subjects? The newsroom's agenda? Really?

As Spruiell writes, "Cathy Seipp would have had a field day with this"--but I doubt she'd be at all surprised.

Mickey Kaus adds, "When there's a choice between publishing something Columbia Journalism Review ethics police won't cluck at and something its readers might actually want to read, the sinking, hapless L.A. Times instinctively knows what to do".

Yesterday, Al Gore suggested to Congress that, as AP puts it "a revolution in small-scale electricity producers for replacing coal, likening the development to what the Internet has done for the exchange of information".

Russell Roberts of Cafe Hayek perceptively notes the similarities between the Gore's idea, and Mao's 1958 attempt to double steel production in China via tiny backyard steel furnaces. Mao's plan was of course one of his more legendary disasters; Roberts expects similar results if the Goracle's is taken seriously. "Giving up the economies of scale we currently use for energy production is going to be very expensive".

Yes, but think of the benefits!

(Via James Taranto.)

Update: More "Globalistical Warmening Updates" down on Maggie's Farm.

James Lileks on HBO's coarsening of the national dialogue:

Ah, the vulgar, vulgar language of “Rome.” I’ll never recover from hearing Cicero shout “You Svck!” in the Senate.

But what would Vethpathian say?

Charles Johnson writes, "German Judge Rules Koran Allows Wife Abuse", adding, "The nihilistic dead end of multiculturalism has been attained in Germany, where a female judge seemingly forgot which culture’s laws she was supposed to uphold".

Roland Freisler could not be reached for comment.

During his interview with "the irrelevant Rush Limbaugh", Gov. Schwarzenegger said, "I would say a huge amount of businesses are coming back here because we are creating a much better business atmosphere".

For all sorts of reasons, I find that rather hard to believe. And certainly, individuals continue to vote with their feet, according to this December report from the Pacific Research Institute:

Last week, the California Department of Finance released figures showing that the number of California residents moving out of the state exceeded the number of individuals moving in. While the overall population increased due to foreign immigration, domestic migrants on net left the Golden State. This is hardly a surprise given that California continues to foster an economic climate that’s unfriendly to entrepreneurship.

"I heard Humphrey saying things that sounded like socialism, which I had just left..."

Louis Farrakhan: "The Time for the Chastisement of Allah is Here".

Shouldn't CAIR be all over Farrakhan for that kind of hate-speech?

Everything about this particular site category is summed up in the headline of this New York Times article--also printed on paper ironically enough!--found via Tim Blair.

Note that the Goracle is at least smart enough not to actually live like this. But along with the Visualize Industrial Collapse people whose story we linked to a couple of years ago, one could say that these are liberals in a hurry--to become as re-primitivized as possible. As I wrote last year, curious, isn't it, that even as technology increasingly empowers the individual, vast tracts of the left wish for the return of the primitive?

Meanwhile, Ann Althouse has some thoughts on the many inconvenient truths this story illustrates.

Update: Related thoughts here.

Related: Well, staggeringly tangentially related, but still. Despite their occasional sulfurous emanations,"Pampers are not an invention of the devil", reports the Times of London. Glad we cleared that up!

When the Beatles broke up in 1970, they left behind a treasure-trove of archives in the vaults of EMI records, many of which have yet to see the light of day. There are also countless hours of live recordings and movie footage from Let It Be, which is still locked away, despite a few false rumors to the contrary from time to time.

Late last year, rock journalist Richie Unterberger returned from an Indiana Jones-like exploration of those archives, and described their contents in book titled, The Unreleased Beatles. It was originally published by Backbeat Books, and is currently distributed by Hal Leonard, and available from Amazon.com.

Richie spoke with us recently in a 21-minute long, 19.3 MB podcast, which you can download here, or via our Apple iTunes page. Note that in both cases, no iPod is required; virtually any computer with a broadband connection and a soundcard can play an MP3 file.

And speaking of playing, since I somehow lost Paul and Ringo's phone numbers, that's me playing the guitars, bass and keys, along with some Acid Loops for the drums and synths, on the intro and outro music. I think I knocked out some fairly bitchin' (for me at least) lead licks on my Telecaster on the fade out, if I do say so myself.

Update: Also at Blogcritics, and Pajamas Media.

David Letterman stalwart Calvert DeForest passed away at about age 86. Very--extremely unintentionally--funny guy, and the perfect nerd foil for Letterman's proto-postmodernism.

Here's a clip of DeForest in action from early in the Letterman's show's run at New York's Port Authority Bus Terminal, interviewing a driver and several women who look like my aunts, as they arrive in Fun City:

In a post earlier today on Power Line, on the 1984 Hillary ad, John Hinderaker wrote:

Hillary Clinton laughed the video off, saying that she was glad it distracted attention from the one of her singing the National Anthem. Barack Obama said his campaign had nothing to do with it, and noted that they wouldn't have had the technical capacity to do make the video.

When I read that paragraph, I instantly thought, they don't? When every kid today has done his first mash-up video by age 14, I'd be pretty surprised if the Obama team doesn't include someone with some fairly serious video chops.

Guess what? They do. Or at least, they did:

The mystery creator of the Orwellian YouTube ad against Hillary Rodham Clinton is a Democratic operative who worked for a digital consulting firm with ties to rival Sen. Barack Obama (news, bio, voting record).

Philip de Vellis, a strategist with Blue State Digital, acknowledged in an interview with The Associated Press that he was the creator of the video, which portrayed Clinton as a Big Brother figure and urged support for Obama's presidential campaign.

De Vellis, 33, said he resigned from the firm on Wednesday after he learned that he was about to be unmasked by the HuffingtonPost.com., a liberal news and opinion Internet site.

Blue State designed Obama's Web site and one of the firm's founding members, Joe Rospars, took a leave from the company to work as Obama's director of new media. The connection to the campaign is likely to be a setback for Obama, who has cultivated an image as politician who wants to rise above bare-knuckle politics.

More details here.

It's curious to read recent articles comparing the ad to the Swift Vets of 2004--they at least were eager to let you know exactly who they were and what their chief issue with Senator Kerry was.

Update: Found the quote I was looking for. Ironically, it's from an Obama advisor:

Rich Masters, a Democratic strategist supporting Obama, told FOX News that the ad represents a new day in politics, but not one that voters should welcome. He called the ad shameful and part of "the politics of personal destruction."

"For all we know, Swift Boat Veterans For Truth produced it," Masters said, suggesting that those who stand to benefit from the publicity are not Obama and his supporters, but Republicans or another Democrat further down the pack.

Or your own man.

Cathy Seipp passed away at 2:05 PM today, according to Lewis Fein.

Susan Estrich puts partisanship aside for a warm remembrance.

Update: More from Luke Ford.

Mary Katharine Ham wonders if they are sufficient Birkenstocks on the ground to make it work.

They certainly appear to have sufficient firepower, however.

Well, it's not like we didn't know where CNN stood before this:

CNN anchor Don Lemon just couldn’t resist editorializing over liberal Senator Barbara Boxer’s slam against a conservative Senator, James Inhofe. During the cable program "CNN Newsroom," anchors Lemon and Briana Keiler played a contentious exchange between the Democratic Senator and her Republican colleague in which Boxer chastised Inhofe for interrupting former Vice President Al Gore’s global warming testimony. After the clip, this exchange followed:

Brianna Keiler: "Wow. All right. That was quite an exchange. And, you know, we were expecting something from Senator James Inhofe. He is a critic of global warming....We thought maybe it might be with him and former Senator, former Vice President Al Gore, but it ended up between him and Senator Barbara Boxer. She really got a stinger in there, I will say."

Don Lemon: [Laughs, then Quietly] "Good for her."

Elsewhere, Ace some related thoughts.

As Jonah Goldberg wrote last year, Al Gore has a long history of comparing global cooling-warming-climate change to the Holocaust:

In his 1992 book “Earth in the Balance,” [Gore] 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.”

Consequences are for the little people, apparently:

An interesting event took place during soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore’s visit to Congress on Wednesday. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) asked the former Vice President to take a pledge that he would not use more energy in his personal residence than the average American, and Gore refused (video available here).

As reported at the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works website: "Senator Inhofe showed Gore a film frame from 'An Inconvenient Truth' where it asks viewers: 'Are you ready to change the way you live?'”

On the playground, one would call this “Put up or Shut up.” Do you think Gore put up? The press release deliciously continued:

“There are hundreds of thousands of people who adore you and would follow your example by reducing their energy usage if you did. Don’t give us the run-around on carbon offsets or the gimmicks the wealthy do,” Senator Inhofe told Gore.

“Are you willing to make a commitment here today by taking this pledge to consume no more energy for use in your residence than the average American household by one year from today?” Senator Inhofe asked.

Senator Inhofe then presented Vice President Gore with the following "Personal Energy Ethics Pledge:

As a believer:

that human-caused global warming is a moral, ethical, and spiritual issue affecting our survival;

that home energy use is a key component of overall energy use;

that reducing my fossil fuel-based home energy usage will lead to lower greenhouse gas emissions; and

that leaders on moral issues should lead by example;

I pledge to consume no more energy for use in my residence than the average American household by March 21, 2008.

Gore refused. Think this will make the network news programs this evening, or headlines tomorrow?

No, of course not. But like the story of Gore's high-powered home that originally inspired Sen. Inhofe's query, that doesn't mean that news that the Goracle's energy reserves are full of infinite hypocrisy won't get out.

Or as Patterico dubs it, "This is the Dawning of the Age of Inquirious".

Mary Katharine Ham writes, "Put your head between your knees, and kiss your next two years goodbye" as it's Subpoeana Showdown time in Washington:

Dean says Bush is itchin' for a fight, and this will all make the Congress look bad, since they'll be abandoning the war and other pressing matters for a witch-hunt. First, kudos to Bush for getting the word "witch-hunt" in there. It made the headlines and colored the issue his way for at least a news cycle.

Second, I'm not sure dragging this out makes Democrats look that bad. The media will continue to give them a pass, the American public won't know much except that they're tired of hearing about the varying definitions of "executive privilege, and it will blame both Congress and the president for that. Unfortunately for Bush, there have been too many complicated scandals (some legit, most not) pinned on him successfully, partially due to bad damage control at the White House, to suddenly convince people this is just a partisan witch-hunt, I think. And, also unfortunately for Bush, he earned the cronyism charges to some extent with the Brownie and Miers fiascoes, so that's hard to escape as well.

And speaking of the 1970s, it's a chance for the media's only two memes to finally merge this year: Vietnam and Watergate, Part XXXVIII

While the Apple-themed Hillary parody on YouTube promises that 2008 won't be like 1984, it certainly sounds like 2007 could be a lot like 1978 at the movie theater.

Case in point: What does this upcoming film remind you of?

In a perfect world, Sony would love to get behind Across The Universe because it's synergistic. Told mainly through numerous Beatles tunes performed by the characters, it takes advantage of that Sony/ATV music publishing catalog owned with Michael Jackson that boasts some 250 Fab Four songs.

My God, not this again.

Please, please make the 1970s end.

Please. Do it for the children. Or the environment. Or the environmentally-friendly children. Just make it stop!

Update: Of course, it's not like the sixties will ever end, either. I can't believe the teenage grief I gave my dad for listening to Crosby and Benny Goodman long after their shelf-life had expired. His Greatest Generation-minted sense of nostalgia for a rosier past had nothing on the boomers:

Bobby Seale is selling Black Panther posters. They're kind of ugly and black-and-white.

I can, however, vouch for his barbecue cookbook, Barbeque'n with Bobby. Say what you like, but the man knows his 'cue.

What would happen if Barbeque'n with Bobby met Che Guevara's Ceviche? Once you spit out the machine gun bullets and sclerotic Marxist rhetoric, that's some tasty eating!

Deja Chuck: "Frank Facts About Fred Thompson".

Good question from Betsy Newmark, who concludes:

When campaign finance reform was being debated, critics said that it was futile to try to keep money out of politics and that it would find a way to influence campaigns. Now, massive infusions of money are not even necessary for someone unconnected to campaigns to have an impact.

The money in politics got infinitely more massive after World War II, when it became increasingly neccessary to buy national television advertising, in quantity. In 2004, the Internet gave the Swift Vets much more reach and exposure than their relatively meager ad budget would have allowed via television alone. When they were able to extend their reach dramatically via a Web-based viral campaign, we got a clear preview of the future--and a huge warning to television networks. While those networks aren't going away, their power to shape events from a handful of office buildings in Manhattan has weakened dramatically.

(Though far from entirely, of course.)

Update: "Nothing terrifies Democratic politicians like the prospect of democratic political campaigns".

In a post titled, "That's not what I didn't say", The Economist catches Barack Obama in a Kerry-like moment:

HERE's a verbatim extract from CNN's transcript of Larry King Live with Barack Obama from March 19th:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) OBAMA: And if George Bush doesn't listen, then we're going to make him listen because it's time for us to bring our young people home.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: It can be tempting to look at the challenges in Iraq and conclude our best option is to pack up and go home. That may be satisfying in the short run, but I believe the consequences for American security would be devastating.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Senator Obama, you disagree with that. He says it would be devastating to leave now. You say no.

Why not?

OBAMA: Well, first of all, I don't know anybody who's been talking about packing up and going home.

It's only a fragment from a long show, and there was a commercial break in the way, but, you see what I mean?

Well, yeah. But Allahpundit has a more nuanced take.

On her Dynamist Blog, Virginia Postrel has had an interesting couple of posts on whether or not it was worth it for her to appear on BloggingheadsTV, mainly regarding the technical complexity of arranging the two camera/mic set-ups required to record the interview.

But the format must be working in one sense, as its the obvious prototype for a new videopodcast with NRO's Jonah Goldberg and New Republic's Peter Beinart.

How will the Palestinians react to this? "Hooters to expand to Israel".

(Via OJ.)

Adding onto David Strom's take on Edwards' boycott of Fox News, Jonah Goldberg has some further thoughts on where the fallout could eventually lead:

Fox’s biggest critics don’t appreciate why Fox News exists in the first place. It was created because vast numbers of Americans — including many Democratic voters — saw the mainstream media as too liberal and too elitist. Proof that Fox’s creators were right can be found in its enormous ratings success. In response to that success — as well as conservative talk radio’s - liberals have become obsessed with creating their own alternative media. The most famous example, Air America, has been a giant failure, and maybe that explains part of the left’s mounting frustration with Fox. It just seems so unfair that viewers like Fox but don’t really want to watch Al Franken whine about Dick Cheney all day.

Regardless, the Edwards Maneuver ratchets this whole cycle up to a new level. Already, conservatives are mumbling that their politicians shouldn’t appear on liberal networks. That’s hardly surprising. After 40 years of bashing the media from the right, conservatives are unlikely to get one-upped now.

This process of media balkanization may well be inevitable. I’ve long argued that we’re heading toward a European-style press where newspapers and networks are more honest about their ideological biases. But in an age where the press and many politicians decry this division, it’s worth pointing out what we’re getting ourselves into. [Or going back to--Ed.]

For example, Edwards was tactically very smart to do what he did. But he’s also the guy who decries the “two Americas” and hopes to unite them. It’s a dumb metaphor, but by Edwards’s own standards, Fox speaks to one of those two Americas. And boycotting Fox isn’t going to help close that gap.

Hey, it's not like he's running for president or something.

J.R. Taylor looks at a surprisingly conservative-sounding Pete Townshend, circa 1980, and observes:

We got The Who’s Who Are You in 1978, and 1980’s Empty Glass was a great solo effort. All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes made for a fine follow-up in 1982. Let’s include 1977’s brilliant Rough Mix—where Townshend collaborated with Ronnie Lane—as part of the era. The Who released the underrated Face Dances in 1981, and then It’s Hard in 1982…and that last one had Townshend showing that he could stand to recharge his batteries.

As Taylor notes, "This was a good time to be a Pete Townshend fan".

Indeed it was--I really worshiped Townshend during that period, both with The Who (whom I saw at Philadelphia's old JFK stadium in 1982 during their first of what would eventually feel like semi-annual farewell tours) and on his own.

There's one more album of Townshend from that period that Taylor leaves off his list, and that's Townshend's Scoop, the first of an ongoing collection of his demos. Scoop was part of a very strong DIY ethic that was bubbling up in music during that period, both from the "anybody can play!" ethos of punk and new wave, and from the release of the affordable four-track cassette recorders. Townshend would eventually use these himself, along with much more sophisticated hardware. Four-track cassette recorders allowed a budding musician to "write" his own songs onto cassette by recording a drum machine (another early 1980s innovation) onto track one, bass onto track two, rhythm guitar onto track three and vocals and a lead instrument on track four. The tools available today are infinitely more sophisticated, but things had to start some place.

There's a music store poster from around 1983 promoting Scoop that I had framed to hang above my assorted tools of destruction a while back to remind me where I came from. Because virtually everything creative that I've done since flows in some way from that period, beginning with learning music and how to record it, and then figuring out that if I could be creative there, I could explore other media as well. And I suspect I'm not the only one blogging who had similar insights around that time.

Hugh Hewitt is promising "$1,000 to the best YouTube-posted ad promoting A Mormon In The White House".

Details here; meanwhile, Jonathan Garthwaite asks, "Will a YouTube Video Decide the Next President?"

Dan Riehl writes, "I don't think I've ever seen anything else that makes it so clear, the animal rights crowd doesn't love animals nearly as much as it hates humans - and almost by definition, themselves":

At three months old, however, the playful 19lb bundle of fur is at the centre of an impassioned debate over whether he should live or die.

[He's named Knut, and Build-A-Bear would clean up--even more--if they sold stuffed versions of him--Ed]

Animal rights activists argue that he should be given a lethal injection rather than brought up suffering the humiliation of being treated as a domestic pet.

"The zoo must kill the bear," said spokesman Frank Albrecht. "Feeding by hand is not species-appropriate but a gross violation of animal protection laws."

Riehl adds, "The animals in this story aren't the polar bears. It's the nut jobs who think to prove you care for the animal, you have to put it to death". As Robert Bidinotto writes, "Don't you wish George Orwell was still around to serve as a translator for this sort of fanatical insanity?"

The "logic" behind it isn't exactly new, of course.

Update: Via Allah, the sugary-saccharine-cuteness-overload factor of this video is guaranteed to put any diabetic into a permanent coma:

Libertas writes:

The success of 300 terrifies Hollywood. They’re completely stumped. They seriously consider it conservative because it’s not liberal. They actually consider it prejudiced because it’s not politically correct. They’ve had their way so long, they’ve forgotten what a universal theme is. Hollywood, if you want to learn how to make films appealing to more than just the Blood Diamond crowd, park your Prius next to the Hummer, enter your mansion, send the exploited underage coke-addicted hookers and illegal alien housekeepers home, and turn on Turner Classic Movies for a day.

The funny thing is, I would bet serious money that the average Hollywood mogul probably has TCM tuned into his rear-projection HDTV screen pretty often. But when he does, he'll focus on the tiny details, and lose sight of the big picture. He'll get hooked on Orson Welles' deep-focus photography, and not his character studies. Or Hitchcock's rhythmic editing, and not how deftly he handles a story.

From its poster to its cinematography, what was Steven Soderbergh's The Good German if not an attempt to mate the brilliant craftsmanship of old Hollywood with the dark cynicism of its current form? As The Good German's trivia page on the IMDB states, "The film was shot as if it had been made in 1945...The only allowance was the inclusion of nudity, violence and cursing which would have been forbidden by the Production Code". And yet it's that Production Code that virtually created classic Hollywood, by giving it rules to operate under--and yes, push against. But pushing against isn't quite the same as breaking; that would come much later, much to the box office's chagrin.

I remember seeing a PBS documentary on Hollywood in which Steven Spielberg listed as an influence Hungarian-born Michael Curtz, the director of countless Hollywood standards, from The Adventures of Robin Hood to White Christmas. And this little known, low-budget WWII melodrama. There's no doubt that Spielberg has Curtiz's camera moves and compositional style down cold. But square Bogie's classic line that "the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world", with this moment from Saving Private Ryan:

Endeavouring to justify their mission to his unit, Hanks's sergeant muses that, in years to come when they look back on the war, they'll figure that `maybe saving Private Ryan was the one decent thing we managed to pull out of this whole godawful mess'.

As Mark Steyn continued in his 1998 review of the film:

Once upon a time, defeating Hitler and his Axis hordes bent on world domination would have been considered `one decent thing'. Even soppy liberals figured that keeping a few million more Jews from going to the gas chambers was `one decent thing'. When fashions in victim groups changed, ending the Nazi persecution of pink-triangled gays was still `one decent thing'. But, for Spielberg, the one decent thing is getting one GI joe back to his picturesque farmhouse in Iowa.

And then for Spielberg, onward and downward to the further moral equivalence of Munich.

In great art--even great pop art--when it all works, the sum of the whole is greater than the individual parts. But you have to have "the vision thing" to see beyond the individual parts. Reports vary on whether or not he actually said it, but architect Mies van der Rohe will always be associated with the statement that "God is in the details". But it helps if you actually believe that He's in there somewhere, first.

Just click:

More details here; for our interview last year with Even Coyne Maloney on DIY video, click here.

"I'll take, 'Headlines the Obama Campaign Could Do Without' for 500, Alex".

Elsewhere, Geraghty links to Patrick Ruffini's analysis that, despite his previous campaign experience in 2004, Edwards is running adrift. That certainly would explain all of the intense recent pandering to his base, rather than a feint towards the center.

Building on concepts from Joseph Schumpeter, Iain Murray has a great observation on the mobius loop that exists between the marble halls of academia and Washington:

As intellectuals became politically committed, so politicians portray themselves as intellectuals and convey their ideas by stealing the lightning of the academy. Al Gore, the world's greatest scientist, is the foremost example. The working man cannot hope to understand the science; the scientist cannot convey it to the working man; step forward the intellectual politician, who emerges as arbiter of both science and public opinion.

Yet the dangers are obvious. As Schumpeter foresaw, the intellectuals and in particular the intellectual politician, who has far more power than the mere intellectual, are attacking the capitalist system that created them.

Exactly.

Update: In a rare moment of synchronicity between neoclassical economics and tasteful conservative fashion, Manolo For The Men weighs in on the substance of Schumpeter's sybaritic style.

In the 1984 update to his epochal 1962 book, Profiles of the Future, Arthur C. Clarke had a chapter titled "Cosmic Engineering", with a couple of paragraphs in which he explored the idea of orbiting mirrors (they're on page 232-233 of my battered paperback, if you have the same edition):

The idea of ‘orbiting mirrors’ was suggested by Hermann Oberth as long ago as 1925. He pointed out that reflectors miles wide could be made from very small amounts of material such as films of metallic sodium. (Today, aluminized Mylar would be a good candidate.) Something like this might even have happened back in the 1960s. There was a time when the Pentagon seriously considered abolishing night in Vietnam. Only a few Saturn Vs, it was calculated, would be necessary to do the job…

(Elipses for dramatic effect in original.) Beyond providing illumination a war zone, there are other obvious benefits to erecting an orbiting mirror, Clarke wrote:

More constructively, orbiting mirrors might greatly increase agricultural yields (24-hour-day crop growing), alleviate climatic extremes by pumping heat into cold areas, perhaps even direct movement of rain clouds and establish a form of weather control. These would be great benefits; but as usual, there would be a price to pay.

Imagine the combined howls of the anti-war and then-nascent environmental left if there actually was a giant mirror orbited over Vietnam, and the hue and cry of the latter group still to come, if and when an orbiting mirror is ever deployed purely for agricultural or climatic purposes.

But the Associated Press is cheerfully reporting on a negative image version of an orbiting mirror, as it explores combating some of the more apocalyptic envirodoom scenarios--or with a name the "Solar Umbrella", maybe it's more akin to a plot dreamed up by Batman's arch-villain, The Penguin:

For far-out concepts, it's hard to beat Roger Angel's.

Last fall, the University of Arizona astronomer proposed what he called a "sun shade." It would be a cloud of small Frisbee-like spaceships that go between Earth and the sun and act as an umbrella, reducing heat from the sun.

"It really is just like turning down the knob by 2 percent of what's coming from the sun," he said.

The science for the ships, the rocketry to launch them, and the materials to make the shade are all doable, Angel said.

These nearly flat discs would each weigh less than an ounce and measure about a yard wide with three tab-like "ears" that are controllers sticking out just a few inches.

About 800,000 of these would be stacked into each rocket launch. It would take 16 trillion of them — that's a million million — so there would be 20 million launches of rockets. All told, Angel figures 20 million tons of material to make the discs that together form the solar umbrella.

And then there's the cost: at least $4 trillion over 30 years, probably more.

"I compare it with sending men to Mars.I think they're both projects on the same scale," Angel said. "Given the danger to Earth, I think this project might warrant some fraction of the consideration of sending people to Mars."

Close the global umbrellas--prevent global darkening!

(Via Newsbusters.)

Moving tributes to Cathy Seipp, in both text and (via Tim Blair) video.

As James Lileks writes of Cathy, "Read the words and remember the name: in the end it's all an author can hope for. I hope she knows that we did, and we will".

Update: Via Matt Welch, check out Cathy in better days stylin' and profilin' (probably literally, since her reporter's notebook is out) with Bill Blass.

Jules Crittenden checks in with the dark side of the high tech DIY-movement: Cave 321-B, North Waziristan.

(For those who may not remember the budding pop stars of the dimly receding past of long, long ago, such as 2004, here's what the above title refers to.)

If you think that elite journalists are the only ones feeling threatened by the growing number of blog-savvy DIYers , you haven't met the graphic designers who "seem to live in terror of amateurs with Pagemaker", writes Virginia Postrel.

Mickey Kaus writes:

He's a bad actor! I never believe he's the character he's playing (even when the character is essentially Fred Thompson).

Gee, who does that remind you of?

(That said, I think I tend to agree with Jonah's take. And Rich Lowry pours a bit of cold water on the idea as well.)

David Strom makes some great observations about the banning of Fox from the Democrats' upcoming debate in Nevada:

All this points to a serious problem that honest liberals and serious moderates are going to be facing soon: the recent political victories of Democrats has emboldened the crazy left wing of the Party, and has encouraged some of the more partisan liberals in the media. As they spin ever more bizarre theories, make wilder and wilder claims (the New Republic is publishing an article claiming to prove Vice President Dick Cheney is clinically insane, for instance), serious people will be repulsed.

Conservatives have known for years that they haven't exactly gotten a fair shake in the media, although until recently none of us expected mainstream news sources to invent stories (as CBS did in their 60 Minutes attack on Bush’s military record) or distort the truth beyond recognition (as the New York Times has done with the Valerie Plame/Scooter Libby story).

But the rules are changing, and the liberal hatred of and attacks on Fox News could prove to be the undoing of the liberal media. The attack on Fox News and the increasingly shrill attacks on the Bush Administration come perilously close to open partisan warfare, which in the long run could be much more damaging to the liberal media than to the conservatives they hate so much. By legitimizing the attack on media outlets as simple partisan outlets, they open themselves up to the scrutiny they so richly deserve, and cannot survive.

How bad a gaffe was it?

This bad.

Speaking of new media pioneers, Cathy Seipp has been hospitalized and apparently is in rather grave condition, a thought which puts all of the Coke/Pepsi, Drudge/Malkin, GOP/Dem "wars" into sharp contrast.

Back when most people we're still figuring out how to connect their 14.4 kbps modems to AOL, Matt Drudge arrived on the Internet and became the 'Net's first household-name journalist, much to the chagrin of every journalist dining in the Grill Room of the Four Seasons whose last name wasn't Ailes. Drudge got to the 'Net first, established a mighty beachhead, and was the source of breaking news (and a fair amount of gossip) before the Blogosphere began.

Drudge of course is famously prickly when called a blogger. And while it's fair to say that Drudge himself is not a blogger based on his site's format, in the past he's a bit more open-minded about those who followed in his wake, telling an interviewer in 2005:

They tried calling it “Me-Zine” before, that was the word they were going to do, which also was offensive, as if the editors of the papers don’t make their own decisions and it’s their own version of a Me-Zine, as if Bill Keller doesn’t make the decision what is on the front page - that’s HIS Me-Zine.

I just don’t like these negative terms. They’re individuals on the internet, living out their dreams.

But if their dreams also include video, apparently that's a technology too far for Drudge:

Maybe we’ll do, uh, uh, a commentary on the Internet like Michelle Malkin. Maybe I’ll stand in front of like a blue screen and hold a banana and start talking into the Internets. (Sneering tone) ‘This is Matt Drudge reporting on Hot Air.’ Agggh. You know. It’s ridiculous. Looks like, you know, Captain Kangaroo time, Michelle. Get real.

That seems an incredibly cheap shot to me. As Libertas writes about indy filmmaking, "If you’re going to make a no-budget film anything that has nothing to do with budget must be executed perfectly...What doesn’t cost money, you must excel at". And the videos produced by Michelle's small Hot Air team do just that.

Don't believe me? If you're new to the technology, try making one yourself with the same production values: this isn't someone borrowing his family camcorder for a blurry unedited spittle-flecked rant to upload to YouTube. Michelle's videos, even setting aside their often well-written content, are extremely slickly produced, and could easily be cut into a nightly news program with no loss of quality, and that speaks volumes about how technology has leveled the playing field between billion dollar networks and (comparatively speaking), a shoestring operation.

There's no doubt that Drudge deserves an enormous amount of credit from being both a prominent early adopter, and an even more visible target for elites fearful of their status. And yet, faced with an ever-increasing new media environment, Drudge certainly seems to spend a lot of time looking over his shoulder, and risks turning into a new media version of the very same dinosaurs whose hermetically-sealed media world he up-ended.

Compare Drudge's quotes to those of the man who helped put another Internet news format--the Blogosphere--on the map, and has not only linked to those who've been inspired by him, but to whole lists of them. Since increasing competition is inevitable, that seems to be a much healthier attitude.

Update: Welcome Drudge Podcast readers! Umm, listeners...err, readers...Let's try that again: Welcome Drudge fans!

Jim Geraghty writes:

Second Amendment enthusiasts are vocal, active, and perhaps an unrivaled force in American politics, and they'll pull out all the stops at the ballot box to swiftly evict any politician who attempts to restrict their rights.

But there’s no denying that the issue of gun rights faded a bit since 2000, when many Democrats concluded that Al Gore’s stand on guns cost him his home state of Tennessee and perhaps some other states. With relatively pro-gun President Bush in the Oval Office and the relatively pro-gun GOP in control of Congress, the primary threat to gun rights seemed to come from state and local governments, and lawsuits. There was some speculation that despite fantastic reelection rates for pro-gun candidates in 2002 and 2004, that gun owners had gotten a little comfortable, and little less motivated to see this as their defining, make-or-break issue.

But I distinctly recall some NRANews listener asking if Election Night 2006 marked the end of gun owner’s rights in America, and while that dire prediction is premature, gun owners now have more at stake at the federal level. And the huge decision on the District of Columbia’s gun ban will also push the issue to the front page again, and presidential candidates will be asked about their stands, repeatedly. It’s a bigger headache for Democrats, who have to balance the ban-guns stands of their base with the pro-Second Amendment rights stance of a majority of the public (and many New Hampshire primary voters as well).

Geraghty has an interesting round-up of their positions on that issue--don't miss Edwards' attempt, when grilled, to metaphorically dodge the bullet on that topic.

On an unrelated and only slightly less pressing issue, elsewhere, Geraghty writes, the new Congress "passed some law that every radio station must play John Mayer's 'Waiting On The World To Change' at least once an hour". A little-known amendment to the bill apparently also makes it mandatory to play it every frickin' minute in Borders book stores--or at least whenever I've walked into them recently.

Tammy Bruce notes an inconvenient statistic:

I've noted here and on my show numerous times, the appalling fact that 50 percent of our college seniors are graduating functionally illiterate. Well, a new study reveals that a full 21 percent of the American public is illiterate, while 36 percent of people in Washington, DC are.

That's right, 1 in 5 Americans and 1 in 3 residents of DC cannot comprehend a simple 500-word newspaper opinion piece, read a bus schedule, a map, nor can they fillout a job application.

As Tammy writes, "The short bus is getting really packed".

Charles Krauthammer begins his latest column for Time (and very smart of Time to call the good doctor--much smarter than this) with this classic moment of unintentional irony from the Gray Lady. Of course these days, the Gray Lady wouldn't know irony if it kissed her full on the lips:

Goldman Sachs has been one of the most aggressive firms on Wall Street about taking action on climate change; the company sends its bankers home at night in hybrid limousines.

--The New York Times, Feb. 25

Written without a hint of irony--if only your neighborhood dry cleaner sent his employees home by hybrid limousine--this front-page dispatch captured perfectly the eco-pretensions of the rich and the stupefying gullibility with which they are received.

Remember the Leonardo DiCaprio and Al Gore global-warming pitch at the Academy Awards? Before they spoke, the screen at the back of the stage flashed not-so-subliminal messages about how to save the planet. My personal favorite was "Ride mass transit." This to a conclave of Hollywood plutocrats who have not seen the inside of a subway since the moon landing and for whom mass transit means a stretch limo seating no fewer than 10.

Leo and Al then portentously announced that for the first time ever, the Academy Awards ceremony had gone green. What did that mean? Solar panels in the designer gowns? It turns out that the Academy neutralized the evening's "carbon footprint" by buying carbon credits. That means it sent money to a "carbon broker," who promised, after taking his cut, to reduce carbon emissions somewhere on the planet equivalent to what the stars spewed into the atmosphere while flying in on their private planes.

In other words, the rich reduce their carbon output by not one ounce. But drawing on the hundreds of millions of net worth in the Kodak Theatre, they pull out lunch money to buy ecological indulgences. The last time the selling of pardons was prevalent--in a predecessor religion to environmentalism called Christianity--Martin Luther lost his temper and launched the Reformation.

A very few of the very rich have some awareness of the emptiness--if not the medieval corruption--of ransoming one's sins. Sergey Brin, zillionaire founder of Google, buys carbon credits to offset the ghastly amount of carbon dioxide emitted by Google's private Boeing 767 but confesses he's not sure if it really does anything.

But that's what faith is all about: you gotta believe!

You won't see it on the nightly news (and certainly not in this depth), but Hot Air has video of this weekend's Gathering Of Eagles event.

The hard way. Michael Ledeen writes:

The whole world erupts when it is (falsely) alleged that American troops in Iraq are using spent uranium in artillery shells. Hardly a peep from the sanctimonious anti-war agitators when hundreds of Iraqis, and their American protectors, are hit with chemical weapons (chlorine-laden explosives). I think it's likely we will see more of these, and other chemical weapons as well.

Austin Bay interviewed Bill Roggio today for the next episode of Blog Week In Review, and he explored this topic further. Watch for the interview to go live later this week.

"You must be drinking David, Mogen--That explains your clichéd slogan!"

James Lileks has always loved documenting America's post-war history and the pop-kitsch that surrounds it; today he looks at those who long for 1968, and "The Gospel of John & Yoko".

Nikke Finke writes:

That heavy snowstorm and its clean-up in the U.S. Northeast depressed Friday's and Saturday's ticket receipts. Nevertheless, box office was still up again over last year because of blockbuster 300. Warner's bloodbath marched into 1st place with a big $31.6 million from 3,270 theaters, or -58% from last week's haul. The CGI extravaganza made $10.3 mil Friday, $12.5 mil Saturday and an estimated $8.8 mil Sunday (not quite the $38 mil expected before the white stuff came down in major moviegoing metropolitans like New York and Boston). Its new cume is an amazing $127.8 mil after only one week out -- meaning this $60 million epic-on-the-cheap shot in two months with no stars will turn a hefty profit for Warner Bros.

Alert Iranian TV--the warmongering Warners Zionist conspiracy continues apace!

But seriously: 300 is a popcorn film with few stars but loads of action and knock-out special effects. It's coupled with a positive story and a tone that's out of step with the cynicism of the rest of the movies. It's made positive in-roads with a fan base that's typically under-served by Hollywood. Combined, that's a contrarian formula for success that can really sneak up on the cast-in-the-mold movies that Hollywood turns out, especially when it's entrenched in long-term anti-war political statement mode.

Just ask George Lucas.

Mary Katharine Ham writes:

In case you ever wondered whether the AP is in agreement with the Sheehan crowd's take on the war in Iraq and the American military in general, look no further than the lede-- that's right, the lede-- of this AP story on the anti-war protests (emphasis mine):

Shivering in the shadow of the Pentagon “Death Star,” chilly protesters raged against the Iraq war Saturday near the symbol of U.S. military power – 40 years after activists stormed the building trying to stop another war.

The Death Star reference, though in quotes, is not attributed to anyone, giving the quote way more credence and credibility as a descriptor than any halfway straight-up reporter would. It's not until the fifth paragraph that you find out it's Cindy Sheehan who said it.

And, just like that, Sheehan's craziest talking point becomes an AP lede. Perhaps "Death Star" will make it into next year's AP Stylebook as synonym for Pentagon.

Nahh. The Stylebook is just a tool. AP always relies on the subtle and innovative skills of its writers to really make a story work.

Incidentally, if the Pentagon is the Death Star, does that make Jamil Hussein the Iraqi equivilent of Grand Moff Tarkin or Han Solo?

Tom Blumer of Newsbusters writes:

The New York Times (may require registration) reported "several hundred counterdemonstrators" (HT Michelle Malkin, who has the priceless quote of the day -- ".... the NYTimes relied on 'several veterans of the antiwar movement' to give them crowd estimates of the Gathering of Eagles. It's the domestic equivalent of MSMers relying on dubious Iraqi stringers to provide them with war coverage...." -- THWAP!)

The Washington Post, in its article about the protest, wrote of "thousands of counter-demonstrators."

Gathering of Eagles' web site reports that they were told by the National Park Service that their GoE estimate is ..... is .....

30,000

GoE's site is also saying that the protester counts being reported elsewhere were 5,000 to 10,000 (the Times reported "thousands" and WaPo said "several thousand," but both papers acknowledged that the protester turnout was much lower than at a similar event in January).

Bottom line: GoErs outnumbered protesters at least three to one. Remember what you just read here and will read at the center-right blogs, because you probably won't see this "turnout rout," which as far as I can tell is unprecedented, reported in the Formerly Mainstream Media.

As Rick Moran adds:

History ended yesterday. Or at least one version of it. Or perhaps it didn’t end as much as it was overthrown, trampled by the feet of 30,000 ordinary Americans who gathered on the mall and along the broad avenues in Washington to confront those who have, either wittingly or witlessly, given aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States for more than 40 years.

The rancid ideology that has swaggered across the American landscape since Viet Nam (posturing a moral superiority they never proved nor deserved) as ordinary Americans looked on with a growing sense of outrage was quite simply, shown up – bested by an amalgam of military veterans, conservative activists, and just plain folks whose numbers shocked the media, not to mention the anti-everything protestors from the other side.

I can’t come up with anything similar that has occurred in recent American history. During World Wars I and II there were massive rallies for war bonds but that was something else entirely. This was a protest to counter defeatism and the ideology of self-loathing that has had the national stage pretty much to itself for a generation or more. And it showed that while many Americans have no doubt been disheartened and discouraged by what has been happening in Iraq these last 4 years, there is still a considerable number of us who believe it worthwhile to continue the mission in that bloody country until the Iraqis are able to secure their future free from the threat of terrorists and rogue militias.

Or as Michelle Malkin writes, "The silent majority no more".

And possibly the White House as well, but that's a year and half down the road. In the meantime, Hugh Hewitt's newest book arrived at my office yesterday. Here's a clip of Hugh discussing the concept on Fox & Friends:

Related thoughts on Romney and Hugh's new book from John Hinderaker.

Mark Steyn has some thoughts on William Wilberforce, "one very persistent British backbencher [who] secured the passage by parliament of an Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade throughout His Majesty's realms and territories". Steyn writes that Wilberforce was also the inventor of "what New Yorkers came to know in the '90s as the 'broken windows' theory":

What we think of as "the Victorian era" was, in large part, an invention of Wilberforce that he succeeded in selling to his compatriots. We children of the 20th century mock our 19th century forebears as uptight prudes, moralists and do-gooders. If they were, it's because of Wilberforce. His legacy includes the very notion of a "social conscience": In the 1790s a good man could stroll past an 11-year-old prostitute on a London street without feeling a twinge of disgust or outrage; he accepted her as merely a feature of the landscape, like an ugly hill. By the 1890s, there were still child prostitutes, but there were also charities and improvement societies and orphanages. It is amazing to read a letter from Wilberforce and realize that he is, in fact, articulating precisely 220 years ago what New Yorkers came to know in the '90s as the "broken windows" theory: ''The most effectual way to prevent greater crimes is by punishing the smaller.''

The Victorians, if plunked down before the Anna Nicole updates for an hour or two, would probably conclude we're nearer the 18th century than their own. A "social conscience" obliges the individual to act. Today we call for action all the time, but mostly from government, which is another way of excusing us and allowing us to get on with the distractions of the day. Our schoolhouses revile the Victorian do-gooders as condescending racists and oppressors -- though the single greatest force for ending slavery around the world was the Royal Navy. Isn't societal self-loathing just another justification for lethargy? After all, if the white man is inherently wicked, that pretty much absolves one from having to do anything. And so the same kind of lies we told ourselves about slaves we now tell ourselves about other faraway people, and for the same reason: because big changes are tough and who needs the hassle? The hardest thing in any society is "the reformation of manners.''

And societal self-loathing and its inherent lethargy are precisely what are taught in elite schools today.

Jim Treacher and Tim Blair explore the full ramifications of The Gore Effect on New England:

When you're using your homemade "STOP GLOBAL WARMING" sign to shield your face from blowing snow in the middle of March, it's time to take a good long look at the process by which you make decisions.

Maybe's she's simply pining for the 1970s.

18 Doughty Street looks at "The Climate Change Hypocrites"; this certainly sounds like a prime example, especially as it comes fresh off the news of Al's electric bills.

As Glenn Reynolds writes on a similar story, "when you push your ideas not as a pragmatic, technocratic approach, but instead sell it as a messianic moralistic quasi-religious one, then things like this do look hypocritical'.

Like a man patiently explaining modernity to someone who thinks that world is flat, Glenn Reynolds, back from his week-long hiatus, reminds the Washington Post that it's no longer 1968.

Night of the (more or less) Living Keith.

Man I hope that moustache is a leftover from this project, and not a permanent part of Richards' embalmed appearance.

"There's only one thing in the world I want and that is Ed Driscoll!"--Did these discerning readers say that? Err, not that we're aware of.

But The Sloganizer did. It's full of a bazillion clichéd slogans that taste good, like an old advertising slogan should. You simply plug your name or product into the site, producing results such as this:

Nobody Doesn't Like Ed Driscoll!

Ed Driscoll, Love It Or Leave It!

The Ed Driscoll Universe!

Ed Driscoll: Impossible Is Nothing!

I'd Do Anything For Ed Driscoll!

(As found by “Jules Crittenden Is Our Middle Name!”)

Fausta, who created the term, defines it to mean "the innatention of Associated Press and other news agencies to the actual words said by a person who doesn't fit what AP wants to hear". Most recently, she applies it to their coverage of Fidel Castro, of whom AP "reports":

Fidel Castro will be in "perfect shape" to run for re-election to parliament next spring, the first step toward securing yet another term as Cuba's president, National Assembly head Ricardo Alarcon said Thursday.

Assuming he actually lives to 2008, here's a sneak preview of Fidel's election night returns, courtesy of another "elected" official who recently left office.

Fascinating timeline of America's overt covert darlings.

The latest Blog In Review is online:

The anti-liberal message of The anti-liberal message of identitarianism and collective thought are on the table for this week’s podcast. Are the two sides of the political spectrum existing in parallel realities with their own facts and narratives? Protein Wisdom’s Jeff Goldstein, Neo-neocon, and host Austin Bay find the whole mess doubleplusungood. Ed Driscoll produces.

Click here to listen!

Not only is God dead in California, just try getting a Shamrock Shake in Milpitas!

General Kenobi: I have placed information vital to the refinancing of your 30 year adjustable mortgage into the memory systems of this R2 unit. My father in Paramus will know how to retrieve it.

Or is that the Post Office is taking Jonathan Last's beneficent Empire contrarianisms just a bit too seriously? In any event, it's a reminder of something else Jonathan wrote on the topic: what an utter failure the recent trilogy has been to develop characters anywhere near as iconic as the original movies.

"Caroline Eldridge, a Da Vinci scholar and artist, who killed herself after becoming obsessed with the mysteries surrounding the artist and the best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code".

Good to see that Hollywood is finally raiding the Blogosphere for new talent:

And it's astonishing that YouTube selected the apex moment of the trailer for its random screen grab!

(For the real thing, click here.)

As great as the action was in 300, the script of this production is infinitely funnier than anything I've heard in the movies in a long time.

Or as Allahpundit writes, "From the culture that brought us the anti-semitic version of Plan 9 From Outer Space comes a critique bursting with all the nuance and sensitivity that we’d expect".

If he remembers to pack Photoshop CS3.

Tim Blair writes:

Democrats are scared of The Colbert Report:

Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), the Democratic Caucus chairman, has told new Democratic members of Congress to steer clear of Stephen Colbert, or at least his satirical Comedy Central program, “The Colbert Report."

"He said don’t do it ... it’s a risk and it’s probably safer not to do it,” said Rep. Steve Cohen.

Democrats are also avoiding Fox News. Soon they’ll be reduced to chatting solely with the Huffington Post.

As I wrote immediately after the mid-terms last November:

Democrats win when they move towards the center (just ask Bill Clinton), and right now, the center is where the action is. That doesn't sound like an environment that will be smooth sailing for a quintessential San Francisco Democrat like Speaker Pelosi over the next two years, but we'll see.

Update: Related thoughts here. Why such purity of essence exclusivity is such a dumb idea, here.

Something that I should noted in my post yesterday--that tear on the Gipper's face on the latest Time magazine cover was obviously Photoshopped:

Call Tom Cruise and pass out the vitamins because conservatives are officially sad. It seems Time magazine is trying to top last week’s “Verdict on Cheney” cover that photoshopped storm clouds over the lightning-rod vice president. The cover for the March 26 issue shows a close-up headshot of the late Ronald Reagan who appears to have a single tear on his cheek, ala Iron Eyes Cody. The “photo illustration” is accompanied by the caption, “How The Right Went Wrong,” referring to “these gloomy and uncertain days” for conservatives.

Both images are hoaxes. Iron Eyes Cody was featured in one of the most memorable environmentalist promotions that showed a lone “Indian” crying about littering and pollution with a single tear sliding down his cheek in the final shot. Iron Eyes Cody was known as the “crying Indian,” but his family knew him as Espera DeCorti, the son of Italian immigrants. This cover is as accurate as that fake glycerine tear that gently slid down Iron Eyes Cody’s cheek.

Radar Online states that Time table of contents gives the “somewhat cryptic” credits for the cover in small print as, “Photograph by David Hume Kennerly. Tear by Tim O’Brian” but does not specifically state that it the cover is photoshopped. Time responded to Radar, defending their cover:

Time regularly runs conceptual covers, as we did last week with the "Verdict on Cheney" cover, depicting the vice president standing under storm clouds." (That image was far less subtle in its artificiality, but fair point.) "This week's cover image is clearly credited on the table of contents page, naming both the photographer of the Reagan photo and the illustrator of the tear."

Radar goes on to say that this appears to be new style of Time's managing editor, Rick Stengel, who was an adviser and speechwriter for former Democratic presidential candidate, Bill Bradley and even stated last year that he wanted the magazine to "have a stronger point of view about things." In 2000, Stengel even said after working on the Bradley campaign that the "he-said-she-said idea of ‘objectivity’ often makes a journalist a neutral vessel of distortion. Correcting a candidate’s mistake is not subjective; it’s objective." So, he makes it clear that objectivity and neutrality are not the goal for his version of Time magazine. Radar asks how the cover will effect conservatives:

The use of a striking but fabricated image is consistent with the vision laid out by new managing editor Rick Stengel, who has said he wants Time to be more like The Economist—the British newsweekly that often features humorous photo illustrations on its cover. Still, one wonders: Is the wording of the credit enough to make its provenance clear to unsophisticated readers? And, equally important, how will the conservative acolytes who worship Reagan as a demigod feel about seeing a faked image of their hero used for a story criticizing the movement he championed?

We answered that question last night.

A couple of years ago, Michelle Malkin explored the manipulated imagery in Time's covers over the years. Add this one to the list.

Meanwhile, Patrick Ruffini writes "This is not the first time Time magazine has tried to proclaim the death of conservatism using a Photoshopped cover of Ronald Reagan". Note the timing of the previous issue--almost as bad as this legendary journalistic groaner from 1979!

Update: For the technical details, Debbie Grossman of PopPhoto.com interviews Tim O'Brien, the illustrator who Photoshopped the cover for Time.

I'm not sure if that stands for HamNation News Network or Henson News Network, but after this recent self-inflicted debacle, Mary Katharine Ham assembles "a crack news team that might meet the Dems' standards. They're fairer than Katie Couric. Fairer than Jon Stewart. Fairer even than Dan Rather:"

(And to paraphrase Zero Mostel only slightly, they're the best possible reporters. If you have a disagreement with them, you can always use them to wash your car.)

Roger L. Simon writes, "Time Magazine doesn't need a redesign--It needs euthanasia", and while it's tough to argue with that, I will give Time credit for launching their latest dead tree redesign with a strategy that's straight out of postmodern Hollywood: since both know that they've lost vast swatches of their former Red State audiences, why not use them to gin up a little controversy that helps sell the product to your remaining marketbase?

For Hollywood, that means lots of low budget films like Brokeback Mountain and An Inconvenient Truth. Since they're on topics that are guaranteed to get conservative teeth a-gnashing, Hollywood hopes that the starboard side of the Blogosphere, NRO, Drudge and Fox News writes up a storm about them, thus generating loads of free publicity and scare quotes, and making these the movies to see for their remaining loyal urban, liberal audience members.

(Doesn't always work out that way, of course.)

And similarly for Time, this cover. It's ridiculous of course--between the Gipper's 11th Commandment, and the fact that unlike his father, Bush #43 has taken so many of his cues from President Reagan, I doubt Reagan would be too upset with him. But then of course, the goal of Time's cover isn't to criticize the president from the right (since, oh, about 1968, that would hardly be Time's style), as much as to get conservatives to raise a stink about the magazine, even if they wouldn't be caught dead buying it.

Incidentally, I'm pretty sure I saw nearly every Time cover in the 1980s, but I don't remember them running a similar story on President Nixon's disappointment in the Gipper, even though from fiscal to foreign policy, Reagan's conservative stances were remarkably different from Nixon's surprisingly liberal governance.

So I doubt very much that Reagan is looking down and shedding a tear.

Henry Luce might be, though.

60 seconds that perfectly captures the day-glo polyester big-sideburned big-lapeled fat-tie chromakeyed hell of the 1970s, or at the very least, its television:

Ace writes, "A real (I think!) promotion for a local newscast from the seventies".

Real or parody? When dealing with the seventies, why not both!

Update: On the other hand, here's something you won't find on your local TV news these days.

In Opinion Journal, Paul Kedrosky has some thoughts on "Dr. Evil (a k a Sumner Redstone) and his one billion dollar lawsuit" against YouTube (or more specfically, its parent company, Google):

Consumers have spoken, and they don't like the way that electronic media--whether music, television or movies--is being packaged and sold to them. A decade ago they rebelled against being forced to buy entire CDs when they only wanted the few good tracks, and thus spawned Napster. Today, using YouTube, they are rebelling against being forced to watch entire programs when they only really want the 20-second part of American Idol last night where the contestant forgot the song lyrics and broke down in tears. Or a hockey fight. Or whatever.

Seeing that digital media can be sold to them in the equivalent of six-packs, sips and pint bottles, consumers no longer want to buy it by the truckload. And they resent being told by companies like Viacom that they can't have it, or that if they want it they have to go a different site for every clip owner. Consumers don't mind specialty stores, but they also want online Wal-Marts of media, mega-stores where they can buy whatever they want, without having to go to Viacom for this, ESPN for that, CNN for the next thing, and so on.

That is why, to be blunt, YouTube doesn't matter. Because if Viacom wins this suit and busts YouTube--and there is a very good chance it will win; it is, after all, uncontested that this is Viacom's media property we are talking about--that won't change what consumers want one whit. They are demanding unbundled media, sold everywhere and in myriad assortments. Period. And if Viacom won't provide it then some new media entrepreneurs will.

Yet another case of the ongoing civil war between North and South--California that is: Hollywood versus Silicon Valley.

James Lileks is cranky today, but you'll like him when he's cranky:

I’m enjoying all the reviews of “300,” which is one of those rare movies I’ll see in a theater. I’ll probably go around noon so I have the place to myself. One local review was surprised that the movie didn’t make the usual nod to anti-war sentiments, as these sorts of movies are obligated to do. Because that’s what made “The Longest Day” so interesting, you know: the guy in the landing craft who argued that the Germans were just set up by arms manufacturers, and this was really just a pointless conflict ginned up by international bankers.

Wasn't that pretty much Saving Private Ryan's take?

And speaking of war, as Lileks notes, John Edwards is caught on video claiming that global warming will "make world war look like heaven".

I guess that's one up-smanship on the Goracle's otherwise similar apocalyptic apoplexy, but I'll leave it the ultimate decision to the epistemologists. Finally, as James writes:

Because that's what some people think of when they think of the accomplishments of mankind. Not a space probe carrying Bach into the black or in-utero surgery that saves babies. Polar bears. I swear, when some people hear that civilization is over, a small voice deep in the dark cranny of their heart surely whispers: good.

Sadly, yes.

As Allah writes, "Mmmm yeah, that’s the stuff. Imagine that sort of thing as the weekly presidential radio address".

(Certainly tough for me to argue with, as well.)

A gobstopped John Podhoretz notes that Gandhi's intense action plan seems to have spread to Flatbush, of all places. Something tells me these guys would not have approved.

Tim Blair writes:

Our dear old friend Lindsay Beyerstein reveals her Democrat defence strategy:

If you’re already getting burglarized, do you really want to add to your problems by confronting a desperate criminal with your own loaded weapon?

Beats this strategy.

Update: Surprisingly related thoughts here.

Eying the vacationing Glenn Reynolds' slick Insta-studio, Neo-Neocon writes that she's got "podcast studio envy", and posts a photo of her more minimalist rig.

My setup? Somewhere between the two, I'd say. Here is a triptych to give you an idea of how it looks.

(That last shot shows my Sweetwater Creation Station PC resting atop my Roland VG-88 pedalboard, via a simple wooden stand I built last fall.)

Noting its similarities to Chuck Hagel's presidential campaign non-announcement, Mickey Kaus links to this 1980-era "Graduation Speech" by Woody Allen:

"More than at any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly. I speak, by the way, not with any sense of futility, but with a panicky conviction of the absolute meaninglessness of existence that could easily be misinterpreted as pessimism. It is not. It is merely a healthy concern for the predicament of modern man."

Not to mention the predicament one feels watching almost all of Woody's films after Manhattan; as the above speech neatly encapsulates Woody's bleak nihilism to a T.

Ed Morrissey explores the inconvenient truths that the Gray Lady's Whitewash of the Council on American-Islamic Relations skipped:

For an article that purports to inform its readers of the controversy surrounding CAIR, it does its best to avoid looking for any details of the criticism it has received -- which has been specific and part of the public record. Even while MacFarquhar notes Joe Kaufman, the Investigative Project, and the Middle East Forum, the only coverage he gives of their opposition to CAIR is a quote from Kaufman about CAIR being a front group.

Let's get specific and move past any blank stares, shall we? For instance, on Kaufman's site, they have screen captures from 9/17/01 of CAIR attempting to direct visitors to their web site to make donations for 9/11 relief to what they first identified as "NY/DC Emergency Relief Fund". The hyperlink took people to the Holy Land Foundation's website. The HLF funneled money to Hamas by the millions until the federal government shut it down in December 2001. Eight days later, they changed the hyperlink to identify the site as HLF and added one for the Global Relief Foundation -- which also got shut down in December 2001, this time for channeling money to al-Qaeda and Hamas.

CAIR exploited 9/11 to help fund the very group that perpetrated the attack. Is that specific enough for MacFarquhar? Why didn't he bother to note this very specific charge in his article, filled as it was with protestations of lack of specificity?

That's not all that makes critics suspicious of CAIR. Several of its officers have involvement in terror, including the founder of CAIR's parent group and the man who ran the Holy Land Foundation, Mousa Abu Mazook. The US deported Mazook in 1997 for his work with Hamas. Ghassan Elashi helped found the Texas chapter and served on its board until 2002 -- when the US deported him for selling forbidden computer technology to Libya and Syria. Rabih Haddad worked as a CAIR fundraiser until his deportation in 2003, as well as launching the Global Relief Fund that fed al-Qaeda and Hamas. Joe Kaufman included these specifics in a Front Page article three years ago -- again, something MacFarquhar apparently missed in his journalistic investigation.

In short, the Times has published an ass-kissing paean to the poor, misunderstood folks at CAIR and smeared its critics. It's practically a textbook example of hackery; spend all of an article rebroadcasting the complaints of one side and none of it covering the specifics of the other. MacFarquhar apparently couldn't disprove these specifics, and so pretended they didn't exist. The result should be an embarrassment for the New York Times, if they weren't already so incapable of shame.

Sounds like the Duranty method is alive and well at the NYT.

Update: Mary Katharine Ham adds: "NYT: Charges of Terrorist Sympathies and Collusion for CAIR 'Unsubstantiated.' You Know, Just Like the Swift Boat Vets' Claims".

Warner Todd Huston of Newsbusters writes:

I wonder if the MSM ever gets tired of trying to make evil look good? And if they aren't trying to make evil look like good, they are trying to soft pedal evil with a they-are-really-just-like-us analysis of evil’s actions. Such is the case today in the Boston Globe wherein writer H.D.S. Greenway equates Iraqi insurgents to being just like America's founding revolutionary generation.

In 'Surge' doomed to final failure, a badly garbled reading of history is foisted upon an unsuspecting reading public that culminates with H.D.S. Greenway boiling down the entire American Revolution to the claim that British soldiers were a "conquering force" in the Colonies and the Colonists were mad at them for it.

Haven't Michael Moore and Brian Williams improvised enough on that riff, two and three years ago?

(And if America's founding fathers really were as radical chic as these inferences make them out to be, the left wouldn't be so busy rewriting their history or erasing them from history, of course.)

Austin Bay writes:

The chattering class nostrum that Free Iraq and its coalition allies have "lost the Iraq war" is so blatantly wrong it would be a source of laughter were human life and hope-inspiring liberty not at such terrible risk.

In terms of fundamental historical changes favoring 21st century freedom and peace, what Free Iraq and its Coalition allies have accomplished in four short years is nothing short of astonishing.

Consider what Iraq was, not simply in A.D. March 2003, but in 2003 B.C. Both historical frames provide instructive lessons in the obvious.

Read the whole thing; for my podcast interview with Austin regarding his new pamphlet, click here.

Update: Meanwhile, for a close-up look, Jules Crittenden has the view from the ground.

Steve Frank of California Political News And Views asks, "Is The Mainstream Media In The Midst Of Its Demise?"

Readership of newspapers is down 3% in a year. Viewing of ABC, NBC and CBS is down, in total. Do you know anyone that watches Katie Couric?

Cable TV, blogs and online newsletters and web sites are believed more than CNN could hope for.

Apologists for the Left are down to blackmailing Democrats NOT to debate, because the debate is sponsored by Fox News. This type of action is what you would expect in Cuba, not a free society.

The Age of Cronkite is over. People talk back to Wolf Blitzer, challenge The NY Times and cancel the Washington Post.

As Bob Dylan would say, "the times, they are a’changin". When Hillary claims to be anti-war, her votes are brought up. When she claims she supports the troops, her votes are brought up. Obama claims to be a moderate and his bill in 2003-4 to impeach President Bush, as a State Senator, is brought up. These are never written about in the SF Chronicle or talked about by Brian Williams, it is the new media that reminds us of the truth, not the press release fantasy of these Leftists.

No thanks to the mainstream media, but the facts are getting out and they are inconvenient to the Left.

It looks to me, by words and deeds, the mainstream media is causing its own demise.

You're not the only one, Steve. But as I wrote at the start of last month, the sheer vested power of the legacy media means that they're not very likely to go away soon. I do wonder though, where all of their recent credibility meltdowns will lead them, while simultaneously, their power becomes increasingly diluted by the growing Long Tail of the 'Net and the Blogosphere since 9/11.

Ed Morrissey writes that a 1971 letter by Albert Speer ties him to the Holocaust. As Ed notes, that isn't all that surprising: Speer had to know, as Germany's concentration camp system supplied much of the slave labor that Speer, as armaments minister, worked to death to keep pumping out weapons and munitions (and here's but one nightmarish example) in the last years of Nazi Germany:

Historians always looked at Speer's claims of innocence about the Holocaust with some suspicion. William Shirer, whose Rise and Fall of the Third Reich remains the seminal work on Nazi Germany, wondered in his history how Speer could have remained ignorant of the death-camp system. Speer drew his workers from the same system, and demanded more and more as the war progressed. Any ignorance on their provenance or their fate had to either be willful or faked.

They also questioned his sentencing, even at the time of the Nuremberg trials. The men who supplied the forced labor to Speer had their necks stretched, while Speer essentially walked away from the ruins of Nazi Germany. Why? Speer made a calculated decision to defy Hermann Goering and admit all of the horrors of the Third Reich, expressing remorse and sorrow all along the way. Goering had rallied the rest of the defendants to assume a defiant tone, defending the Nazis and blaming the atrocities on everyone else. The tribunal allowed itself to be impressed by Speer's no-nonsense admissions of the obvious and rewarded him with his life.

Now it appears that Speer was more calculating even than most thought. The letter makes clear that Speer knew exactly what the Nazis would do to the Jews, and cared so little that he helped them work prisoners to death. Essentially, Speer lived a lie for the last half of his life, aided and abetted by a credulous West that for some reason wanted to believe his strange protestations of innocence.

Of course, Speer would hardly be the last polished representative of a totalitarian regime with the blood of innocents on his hands that "a credulous West" was all too willing to forgive.

Speer owes almost a half century of additional life to that polished, seemingly cultured persona. But millions of innocent victims in Germany's concentration camps died needlessly due to his organizational genius, which bought Nazi Germany time it wouldn't have had otherwise.

Digital effects require enormous amounts of computer processing to look authentic, otherwise they resemble crude cartoon illustrations. This clip of digital animation shows what the climactic battle of 300 looked like before all of the detail was added in the final rendering process...

In the L.A. Times, where Jonah Goldberg performs somewhat of the same role that David Brooks did at its east coast counterpart before they buried him under the TimesSelect firewall, Jonah writes that "Unity Is Overrated":

It has become a central ritual of our times for Beltway priests like the Washington Post's David S. Broder to lament the coarseness, acidity and all-around ickiness of our polarized political culture. They're not absolutely wrong. All I need to do to appreciate the toxicity of the political culture is check my e-mail each morning.

Indeed, since at least the election of Ronald Reagan, the left and the right have grown ever more snappish with each other. Each feels entitled to take the wheel without suffering any backseat driving. Each side feels the other is illegitimate in some way, which somehow justifies their nastiness. That can be a shame, but really, it's not the end of the world.

We've seen worse. For example, in his 2004 book, "The Two Americas," Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg proclaimed: "Our nation's political landscape is now divided more deeply and more evenly than perhaps ever before."

This might strike some — say, anyone who's seen the scene in "Gone with the Wind," in which all those Civil War dead and wounded are laid out like cordwood — as a bit of an exaggeration. Call me crazy, but such bloodshed seems like a deeper sign of division than a bunch of partisan bloggers sweatily pounding their keyboards, or liberals and conservatives watching different cable news networks.

Read the rest.

My memories of the details were slightly fuzzy, but I knew I wasn't imagining this, when I wrote three years ago:

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

Actually, the real truth is even more awful:

As documentary filmmakers, Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine looked up to Michael Moore.

Then they tried to do a documentary of their own about him - and ran into the same sort of resistance Moore himself famously faces in his own films.

The result is "Manufacturing Dissent," which turns the camera on the confrontational documentarian and examines some of his methods. Among their revelations in the movie, which had its world premiere Saturday night at the South by Southwest film festival: That Moore actually did speak with then-General Motors chairman Roger Smith, the evasive subject of his 1989 debut "Roger & Me," but chose to withhold that footage from the final cut...

The fact that Moore spoke with Smith, including a lengthy question-and-answer exchange during a May 1987 GM shareholders meeting, first was reported in a Premiere magazine article three years later. Transcripts of the discussion had been leaked to the magazine, and a clip of the meeting appeared in "Manufacturing Dissent." Moore also reportedly interviewed Smith on camera in January 1988 at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York.

Since then, in the years since "Roger & Me" put Moore on the map, those details seem to have been suppressed and forgotten.

Linking to our reprint of Pauline Kael's perceptive and dissenting review of Moore's first agitpropumentary (and such criticism would largely vanish from liberal movie mavens once they crowned Moore with Rock Star status), Damian Penny writes that this new revelation "puts Michael Moore's breakthrough film in a whole new light, doesn't it?"

Not to everyone...

Update: Speaking of Roger & Me, Roger L. Simon has some related thoughts on the agitpropumentaries of both Moore and Gore.

How much did the critical meltdowns by the usual suspects over 300 fuel its success this past weekend? Probably not a huge amount, but still. As Allahpundit wrote last week in response to Slate's Dana Stevens, "I wasn’t going to go, but now that she’s turned it into a blue state/red state thing, I sort of feel obliged. Good work, Dana".

Stevens' over-the-top criticism (with yet another Godwin's Law violation, which seems inevitable for film critics these days) was astonishingly reminiscent of similar hair-pulling freakouts when The Passion debuted three years ago. Both immediately made their respective movie the film to see, if only to understand what all of the fuss was about.

But compare the leftwing critics' reactions to the American Christian right, who have been assaulted by four decades worth of Hollywood movies challenging their sensibilities.

Eventually, they finally learned their lesson with Hollywood and the media. Here's Michael Medved in 2006 on Brokeback Mountain, in USA Today:

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

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

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

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

Or as Mark Steyn wrote in his 2006 National Review cover story on politicized Hollywood's box office woes and Oscar snoozefests:

The more artful leftie websites have taken to complaining that the religious right deliberately killed Brokeback at the box-office by declining to get mad about it.

Will film critics learn a similar lesson about films that challenge their own religious beliefs and understand that collectively blowing a gasket over these movies merely helps to fuel their box office returns?

In early 2006, just as YouTube and Google Video were first making their mark, I wrote about the intersection of the Internet and television first for TCS Daily, and later, on the topic of IPTV for The Robb Report's Home Entertainment magazine. (Not on the Web at the moment, unfortunately, and somewhat ironically.) While there have been a number of great Websites that incorporate video clips (and the production values of Michelle Malkin's daily "Vent" segments on her Hot Air site are first class), from what I've seen of it so far, England's 18 Doughty Street Website, with its slick-looking evenings' worth of longform programming has really managed to put all the pieces together in an exemplary fashion. In a recent post, Jeff Jarvis explains what makes them tick.

As IPTV allows for full-length programs to be downloaded into television set-top boxes via broadband, expect many more channels like this. If I was an angel investor looking to fund the TV station of the future for the Web and/or IPTV, 18 Doughty Street, its format, and especially its production values, is the model I'd crib from as carefully as possible.

The polar bears-as-victims market that is--between the derision that Sports Illustrated's self-parodying cover generated last week, this documentary, and now this rather surprising source:

Question: When you’re a liberal, how do you know if you’re on thin ice, especially the kind that you’re claiming is melting all over the planet due to global warming?

Answer: When even papers like the New York Times are publishing articles skeptical of the junk science you’ve been peddling across the questionably warming globe.

As Allah writes, "Does the publication of this article in the left-wing paper of record mean global-warming skepticism is officially bien pensant?"

David Horowitz writes:

This is what is unforgiveable in the campaign that Democratic leaders have conducted against the war in Iraq and therefore against the war on terror. They were the first to identify the post-Gulf War Saddam regime as a national security threat, specifically because of his determination to build and eventually use weapons of mass destruction. This little video says it all:

Just click.

Update: In contrast, Jules Crittenden looks at those most rarefied of journalists: "Media who get it, and bring it to you".

He not only has a remarkable sense of humor, He has an amazingly fine-tuned sense of irony:

The mysterious "non-theist" member of Congress was revealed today to be hot-blooded , 75-year-old Pete Stark of California . It's not the boldest announcement in the world. Stark is consistently ranked among the most liberal members on the Hill, and hails from a decidedly leftist district, so I doubt it'll cost him many votes. Though I guess you do have to admire the guy's moxie to wait until advancing years to announce his doubt about an afterlife.

Certainly not my first choice for an atheist front man. Of course, perhaps God simply never returned the phone call Pete left on His answering machine...

As someone who is half-Irish, I believe it is my civic duty to remind readers to please--please--remember to treat St. Patrick's Day like a real holiday:

(Via Mary Katharine O'Ham.)

Jules Crittenden notes that the post-World War II trend of Jews leaving Europe for safer havens continues apace; Joe Gandelman adds:

Over the past few years there have been reports of French Jews relocating or even being urged to relocate by some Jewish groups and now there’s a new twist:

French Jews are fleeing into Florida, the Miami Herald reports.

As for what this means for Europe, from time to time, we've linked to this exceptional 2003 essay by UPI's James Bennett. It ties in Europe's myriad problems and endless malaise back to the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or if those they persecute in their own backyards continue to flee Europe to the United States.

Via Atlas Shrugs, The Jerusalem Post writes:

A popular US television series is coming under fire after a recent episode portrayed Israel in a harsh light and appeared to promote anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jews as disloyal citizens.

The plot line of the February 27 installment of Law and Order: Criminal Intent, a fictional police drama broadcast across America on NBC, centers on a journalist who is poisoned after his girlfriend uncovers a foul-up by Israeli intelligence.

The show depicts Israeli bulldozers destroying Palestinian schools, with at least one character referring to "Israeli brutality."

It also includes a Jewish police captain who agrees to cover up for Israel by shutting down a criminal investigation at the urging of the head of the local pro-Israel group.

In one scene, after Captain Danny Ross tells his officers to halt their investigation, Detective Mike Logan confronts him and asks, "Are you a Jew first and a cop second?"

Geez. Of course, maybe they're just making amends for this episode a couple of years ago.

Seriously though--what's happened to the Law & Order franchise? It's gone very far astray from its Jack Webb-style Dinkins-era beginnings.

After a long, sympathetic portrait of Jack Paar, JFK, pre-presidential Richard Nixon, and the generally swanky overculture of the early 1960s, James Lileks writes:

Much fun. When all was done I went downstairs for some real movie enjoyment, and noted with delight that the TiVo had recorded “The Great Gatsby,” which somehow I never saw. Script by Coppola! Redford as Gatsby! Extraordinary sets, all infused with that peculiar intense reverence the 70s had for the 20s and 30s.

Short review: it’s horrible.

Long review: it’s really horrible.

Well, yeah.

"Former New Jersey Gov. Brendan Byrne has often joked that he wants to be buried in north Jersey because 'that way I can stay active in politics'".

Heh.

Update: And speaking of Chicago...

Newsbusters explores "Foreign Journalists and '300'":

"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar," Sigmund Freud is purported to have once said, cautioning that not everything has a deeper, hidden meaning to it. Well, sometimes a blockbuster blood-soaked action flick is just that, a blood-soaked, special effects-laden action flick.

Just try telling that to cynical, left-wing European journalists.

According to Entertainment Weekly, everyone from gay interest groups to foreign journalists have engaged in armchair psychoanalysis of director Zack Snyder's screen adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel "300."

Older readers out there may vaguely remember a period deep in Hollywood's past, when Tinseltown actually sought controversy instead of running away from it.

Update: "Realism and cynicism need not be the same thing, and Hollywood doesn’t know how to make the distinction quite yet".

Of the recently concluded "Scooter" Libby trial, Mark Steyn writes:

So much of the current degraded discourse on the war -- ''Bush lied'' -- comes from the false perceptions of the Joe Wilson Niger story. Britain's MI-6, the French, the Italians and most other functioning intelligence services believe Saddam was trying to procure uranium from Africa. Lord Butler's special investigation supports it. So does the Senate Intelligence Committee. So Wilson's original charge is if not false then at the very least unproven, and the conspiracy arising therefrom entirely nonexistent. But the damage inflicted by the cloud is real and lasting.

As for Scooter Libby, he faces up to 25 years in jail for the crime of failing to remember when he first heard the name of Valerie Plame -- whether by accident or intent no one can ever say for sure. But we also know that Joe Wilson failed to remember that his original briefing to the CIA after getting back from Niger was significantly different from the way he characterized it in his op-ed in the New York Times. We do know that the contemptible Armitage failed to come forward and clear the air as his colleagues were smeared for months on end. We do know that his boss Colin Powell sat by as the very character of the administration was corroded.

And we know that Patrick Fitzgerald knew all this and more as he frittered away the years, and the ''political blood lust'' (as National Review's Rich Lowry calls it) grew ever more disconnected from humdrum reality. The cloud over the White House is Fitzgerald's, and his closing remarks to the jury were highly revealing. If he dislikes Bush and Cheney and the Iraq war, whoopee: Run against them, or donate to the Democrats, or get a talk-radio show. Instead, he chose in full knowledge of the truth to maintain artificially a three-year cloud over the White House while the anti-Bush left frantically mistook its salivating for the first drops of a downpour. The result is the disgrace of Scooter Libby. Big deal. Patrick Fitzgerald's disgrace is the greater, and a huge victory not for justice or the law but for the criminalization of politics.

Read the whole thing.

Nina and I checked out 300 yesterday, and we loved it. Of course, my expectation for Hollywood couldn't be much lower these days. My thoughts going into just about any movie theater (something I seem to be doing less and less of each year, and I'm far from alone, of course) rival what James Lileks has written about the recent trilogy of Star Wars sequels:

Just don’t suck. That’s all I ask. Suck not. As for the number of sucking, let it be zero.

300 didn't suck.

Which is a big reason why, Nikke Finke writes, 300 "shattered the record for biggest March opening ever with $70+ million":

It was a bloodbath at the U.S. box office this weekend. Warner Bros. told me this morning its 'R'-rated 300 about the epic Battle of Thermopylae shattered the record for biggest March opening ever with $70+ million. (Or, $70.025 mil to be exact, though the studio didn't provide a breakdown.) Other studios say this 'Gladiator Gore-Fest' raked in $27.7 mil to $28 mil Friday and $24.3 mil to $24.7 mil Saturday and an estimated $16 mil Sunday from its 3,103 theaters. Toldja so... I said back on Tuesday that 300 was tracking huge -- even though most of its target audience fell asleep during that history lesson in school. But rival studios were complaining to me this weekend that the much-buzzed pic was pitched heavily to the youth market despite the R rating. (This is what gets Hollywood in trouble with Congress. In 2000, entertainment moguls had to explain to the Senate Commerce Committee, led by John McCain, why Tinseltown targets its sex and violence fare to kids.) Helped by omnipresent advertising, this CGI extravaganza was sold out even for Thursday midnight sneaks, including all 57 IMAX theaters. This pic from the creator of Sin City was cheap to make and shot in only 60 days and cast with no stars, so it ends up one of Warner's most profitable pics. The studio's moguls were thrilled after enduring expensive disappointment after disappointment in 2006 (Poseidon, Superman Returns, The Lake House, The Ant Bully, Lady In The Water, etc.) with the notable exceptions of Oscar winner Happy Feet from director George Miller and The Departed from Martin Scorsese. Especially with a per screen average of $9,045 Friday and $7,965 Saturday, 300 easily overtook the current record-holder for March: 2002's Ice Age and its $46.3 mil take. That was accomplished Saturday! (FYI: Since 2006 sequel Ice Age: The Meltdown opened March 31-April 2 with $68 mil, it can't be considered a March weekend record-holder. But 300 surged past that, too.) Though 300's haul is amazing considering its 'R' rating (Ice Age was PG), it's still not a record. The biggest R-rated pics are Matrix Reloaded at $91.7 mil in May 2003 and The Passion of the Christ at $83.8 mil in February 2004.

Of course, let's put things into perspective: David Lean and Stanley Kubrick's reps for grand historical epics aren't going to be impacted by this movie, but it did its job extremely well. In fact, I was surprised that its overall look was less cartoon-like than the initial impressions from its TV promos. I was expecting much more of Sin City or Sky Captain-style actors pasted into a cartoon CGI-world, but 300's pseudo-realism was actually much more believable than the looks of those two films. Or at least it was quickly digestable: 300's director seems to understand something that George Lucas doesn't:

Part of the problem with both Attack of the Clones and The Phantom Menace is that they’re so bursting with amazing images, impossible camera angles and compositions filled to bursting with movement, those images become a bit old hat. You can only be knocked out so many times that your brain stops thinking of them as amazing effects, and you start thinking “OK, this is how this corner of the universe works. This is what it looks like. This is how its technology works.” We get that it looks amazing...So get on with the story.

And 300 certainly did.

Was it historically accurate? Probably more so than Gladiator, but that's not saying much. But so what? Nobody goes to a swords and sandals movie expecting historical accuracy. Was it derivative? Well, it did feature a final shot in a wheat field that was straight out of Gladiator, and a character remarkably reminiscent of LOTR's Gollum. But again, who doesn't expect a Hollywood movie to not rely on other Hollywood movies for its inspirations these days. But this movie really moved--and looked incredible doing so, and that's really all I ask of this kind of film.

As Libertas notes:

How did this one slip through? That’s all I can think of to say right now: How did this one slip through? I sat in the theatre waiting. Waiting for the switch. Though I refused to take the bait (too many movies I’ve seen, says I) I still waited for the switch. There’s always a bait and switch. You don’t make the white guys the good guys and the non-white guys the bad guys without a switch — especially bad guys in turbans. Turbans! But there was no switch. Here’s a movie about free men dying to protect freedom against tyranny — where the anti-war voices are corrupt, cowardly, dead-wrong, and politically driven — where people talk about the honor of dying for one’s country — where a strong women urges a skittish council to declare war because the enemy already has — and there’s no switch. And then to top it off: The movie’s actually good.

Ironically, "How did this one slip through?" is basically the question that I've asked of every big movie I've seen that didn't suck since about 2003: The Passion, Narnia, the Lord of the Rings sequels. Hollywood really is at the crossroads: big films (or at least in the case of The Passion, a film about a big subject) that junk political correctness, and are infused with traditional values, and an upbeat ending, make money. Of course, this isn't anything new--Frank Capra could have told Hollywood that 60 years ago. But then, he didn't need to, as Mark Steyn noted in 2005:

It's pointless to mourn for Louis B. Mayer's lost empire. The best thing about Mr. Eyman's book is that by bringing LB back to life he gets you thinking about all the assumptions in today's movie business. The worst aspect is that, in dealing with Mayer's "notorious" (i.e., perfectly unexceptional) conservatism, he can't put aside his own assumption that somehow the creative industries ought to be politically "liberal." The best take on that comes from Arthur Laurents, a quintessential limousine liberal and the co-author of Gypsy and West Side Story: "LB was a terrible reactionary. Very corny. He was against anything progressive..." And those terrible reactionaries made better pictures than the liberals who run Hollywood now.

Will 300 impact Hollywood? Obviously, not in the short term. With the exception of Spider-Man 3, virtually all of the innumerable trailers yesterday before 300 highlighted Hollywood's current phase: dank, gross, low-budget nihilistic horror films, and, in a very similar genre, the latest effort by Quentin Tarantino, which featured the disgusting image of a buxom young woman whose leg is amputated and replaced with a machine gun, which she alternately walks on and fires at the baddies (baddies being a relative term in a Tarantino movie, of course) by crouching in some sort of kung fu-style pose spraying bullets upward. (No, really.)

And speaking of the Q-man, Libertas' "Dirty Harry" notes the comparison between 300 and last year's Sin City:

[300] had no stars, a fairly unknown director, was just another comic adaptation, and -R- rated?

Sin City came from the same source material, starred Bruce Willis, Clive Owen, Josh Hartnett, Brittany Murphy, Elijah Wood, and Jessica Alba. It had a name director, and even boasted of scenes directed by Tarantino. And yet, 300 will pass Sin City’s total domestic take tomorrow.

Hopefully Hollywood is watching. 300 is successful for the very reason it’s being hammered by close-minded left-wing critics: It’s something new. It’s something refreshing. It’s about something.

It’s about heroes, honor, good versus evil, and fighting for something bigger than one’s self. It’s rousing and larger than life. It’s not just another one of those old-fashioned nuanced, nihilistic, anti-hero, thin line between-good-and-evil tired old cliched movies that have been around for decades.

And of course, if 300 wins an Oscar next year, it will be for "Best Negative Cutting" or "Best Use Of Wilhelm Scream", even though by the time it's done, 300's domestic box office will leave Clooney or Gore's next message movie far in the dust.

The latest Blog In Review podcast is online at Pajamas HQ:

The world’s longest horse race is underway for the American Presidency. On Blog Week to discuss it are Glenn Reynolds, and author and screenwriter Katy Wright of American Thinker. Glenn and Katy disagree on whether the unusual length of the campaign season represents an important political fight or an exhuasting and wasteful marathon for voters and candidates

The panel also tackles the plight of imprisoned Egyptian blogger Abdel Kareem Soleman and what his case means for the future of free speach and the internet in the Middle East. Austin Bay hosts and asks the questions. Ed Driscoll produces. Brought to you by Volvo USA.

Don't miss it!

I was never a big fan of the rock group Boston, but lead guitarist-producer-technical wizard Tom Scholz's Rockman invention was absolutely brilliant--in the mid-1980s, it was the only way to record screaming lead guitar sounds and not wake the dead at 3:00 in the morning, and my four-track demos lived and died with it. But Ed Morrissey notes that Brad Delp, Boston's lead singer has passed away at the comparatively young age of 55, and has a fine memoriam.

I know I'm really late to this one, but if you haven't seen it yet, just click:

Something tells me that at least a few of the people on this page would disagree with Chris.

A few posts down, we linked to a short 18 Doughty Street clip of Robin Aitken, author of Can We Trust the BBC? Those interested in the topic of media bias on both sides of the Atlantic may enjoy the full length interview with Aitken, available here. The similarities to Bernie Goldberg's books on American bias are striking, though that's not too surprising.

What happens when two aging mass mediums with deep structural woes combine? These days, often this:

Premiere magazine, perhaps best known for its annual list of the entertainment industry's most powerful executives, will cease publication following the April issue, French publisher Hachette Filipacchi announced Monday. Over the past ten years its circulation had dropped 20.1 percent and its ad pages 24.7 percent. The publisher said it intends to continue the Internet version of the magazine.

I think I may still have Premiere's premiere issue in the attic of my parents' house in New Jersey. I really enjoyed the publication in its first few years, but that was back when Hollywood still seemed to produce a fairly wide variety of product. Now that ideological purity increasingly trumps profit, it's not at all surprising that as Hollywood's box office flattens, magazines that promote the film industry are hurting as well.

(Via The Corner.)

I haven't really been following the progress of 300, but I caught a few minutes of its "making of" video on HBO in my hotel room this week, and thought it certainly looked intriguing--lots of actors costumed as ancient soldiers in front of a green screen to project dramatic animation of stormy skies behind them. That was the general impression I was left with.

That in and of itself may not have been enough to get back into a movie theater, but as Dean Barnett writes, "I guess we now have to see '300'. VDH says it’s really good, and it seems like all the right people might wind up hating it".

Indeed they have!