Wesley Clark steps in it, Ed Morrissey writes:

After decades in the news business, Bob Schieffer may have thought he’d heard it all — until yesterday on Face the Nation, when he interviewed Wesley Clark. Clark came as a surrogate for the Barack Obama campaign and attacked John McCain’s military service, saying that he was “untested and untried”. After Schieffer pointed out that McCain commanded the largest naval air squadron, had honorably endured over five years of torture as a POW in Vietnam, and had been on the Senate Armed Services committee since Obama was in college, Schieffer asked how Clark could claim that McCain was “untested and untried”. Clark stunned him with this answer:

Jim Geraghty notes that Clark's slur is one of eight attacks on McCain's military service by surrogates of the Obama campaign:

Is anyone else sensing a sharper edge to Team McCain since Wes Clark became Democrat Number Seven and Rand Beers became Democrat Number Eight in speaking critically of John McCain's service in Vietnam?

"Mr. Beers' remarks are part of a pattern of Obama supporters attacking John McCain's military service, and a reminder of why it's what Sen. Obama, his supporters and his campaign actually do that matters most," McCain spokesman Brian Rogers tells ABC News. "Sen. Obama speaking out against these attacks isn't really relevant — either his supporters aren't hearing him or they don't believe his words."

It's really nice that Obama said today that "no one should ever devalue that service, especially for the sake of a political campaign." It's also meaningless if everyone else in the Democratic party ignores him. Barack Obama doesn't have total control of the actions and words of every surrogate, but after the eighth instance, without any major consequence beyond a spokesman saying that Obama "rejects" the surrogate's statement, it starts to look like a deliberate and cynical good cop/bad cop routine. Let's see the candidate himself calling out his supporters by name. Let's see some heads rolling — was Samantha Power's declaration that Hillary was a "monster" really that much worse? (Team McCain ditched Cunningham over using Obama's middle name.)

As Orrin Judd noted on Sunday, "The poor Democrats still think John Kerry lost because his service to his country was attacked, rather than his disservice."

We looked at a few of the previous attacks on McCain's service in a mid-May edition of Silicon Graffiti:

In a related development, John Hinderaker spots a pair of attempts to make these attacks seem bipartisan:

Politico--and still more the anonymous Yahoo News headline writer!--know that attacks on McCain's service by the Obama campaign and other Democrats are poisonous and likely to backfire. So they are trying to give the Democrats cover by creating the misleading impression that these disgusting smears are somehow bipartisan.

Read the rest, complete with a screen capture of Yahoo's headline.

There's an unintentionally hilarious juxtaposition about a minute and half into this Evening Magazine segment on hippies descending upon Vancouver in 1967, when the curator of the city's museum looks back on their arrival and says, "The late 1960s and '70s...That's when I think modern Vancouver was born."

The editor then immediately cuts to a shot of the museum's exhibition in psychedelia devoted to a movement that's the very antithesis of modernity:

It's impossible to discern for certain in these matters, but reading between the subtext and the symbolism, one comes away with the mildest of perceptions that James Lileks may have slightly enjoyed Wall-E.

As the above quoted headline of his Wall Street Journal op-ed suggests, John Bolton is none-too-pleased with President Bush's declaration that North Korea is no longer a state sponsor of terrorism:

Maskirovka – the Soviet dark art of denial, deception and disguise – is alive and well in Pyongyang, years after the Soviet Union disappeared. Unfortunately, the Bush administration appears not to have gotten the word.

With much fanfare and choreography, but little substance, the administration has accepted a North Korean "declaration" about its nuclear program that is narrowly limited, incomplete and almost certainly dishonest in material respects. In exchange, President Bush personally declared that North Korea is no longer a state sponsor of terrorism or an enemy of the United States. In a final flourish, North Korea has undertaken a reverse Potemkin Village act, destroying the antiquated cooling tower of the antiquated Yongbyon reactor. In the waning days of American presidencies, this theater is the stuff of legacy.

North Korea has consecutively broken every major agreement with the U.S. since the North's creation. The Bush administration provides no reason why this one will not be added to that long list except the audacity of hope. Where have we heard that recently? Barack Obama and John Kerry both announced support for the deal, and Mr. Obama said he intended to apply Bush's policy to other rogue states, thus confirming the early start of the Obama administration.

The Feb. 13, 2007, agreement states explicitly that North Korea was to provide "a complete declaration of all nuclear programs" within 60 days. This it manifestly did not do, either in timing or substance. The declaration, more than 14 months overdue, and which is not yet public, has long been forecast not to include information on weaponization, uranium enrichment, or proliferation activities such as cloning the Yongbyon reactor in Syria. Although the North provided less than it agreed 16 months ago, we compensated by giving up more than we agreed, which is typical of decades of U.S. negotiation with the North.

Read the whole thing.

P.J. Gladnick flashes back to 1968 and Apocalypse Then:

Today is the official publication date of The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment by Paul and Anne Ehrlich. The release of this book was timed to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the publication of Paul Ehrlich's once exceedingly popular "The Population Bomb" in 1968. If you expect to see much about either of these books in the mainstream media, you are in for a big disappointment. The MSM is avoiding the whole subject of Paul Ehrlich and his apocalyptic "The Population Bomb" like the plague nowadays. The reason is probably because it might draw embarrassing attention to the fact that apocalyptic visions, despite their popularity at one time such as the current global warming alarmism, are usually proven to be flat out wrong. Such was the case with Paul Ehrlich's "The Population Bomb" which the Intercollegiate Studies Institute ranked as one of the 50 Worst Books of the 20th century due to its many errors.

Gladnick quotes from a Brothers Judd review of Ehrlich's book that's also well worth your time.

It's yet another not-so-final countdown!

Charles Johnson has a video clip of, as he says, a typically bizarre piece of Iranian antisemitic propaganda, with the usual lunatic conspiracy theories run amok, and notes:

Good grief. The bizarre antisemitic propaganda being fed to the Iranian people would be funny in a dark way if it didn’t provoke such a sense of foreboding, of history repeating.

Capt. Jack Sparrow, Tom and Jerry, and the cast of Zionist poultry from Chicken Run could not be reached for comment.

Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters asks, "Can a publisher, editor, and owner of magazines be any more biased than proudly admitting on national television that he's contributed to Barack Obama's campaign?"

While you ponder, consider that on Sunday, the publisher and editor of Rolling Stone -- who just so happens to also own Men's Journal and Us Weekly -- told CNN's Howard Kurtz that he's given money to the presumptive Democrat presidential nominee.

In fact, Jann Wenner did so without batting an eye in an interview aired on "Reliable Sources".

Noel seems suprised, but given the far left worldview of Wenner, reflected in his flagship publication since its inception, who couldn't see that one coming? But I actually think Wenner's admission is a very positive one. As I've written before, I'd much rather journalists--and their publishers--come clean on their biases than fall back on the mid-20th century model of feigned objectivity. At least it allows consumers to make an informed decision rather than have to guess at the worldview of a media source.

The Washington Times posits that the model for Obama's hope and change is the nation right next door.

If his Trudeaupian vision for America comes to pass, can we expect a similar stifling of free speech as has inflicted Canada? Yes we can!

Ann Althouse quotes an interview with Uma Thurman's father, whom Ann notes is "a professor of Buddhist studies and is ordained as a Tibetan monk (though he is American)":

"As a Buddhist, how do you reconcile your pacifism with the roles your daughter Uma has played in films like Quentin Tarantino’s bloody 'Kill Bill'?"

A question for Robert Thurman. Answer:

Quentin is kind of obsessed, he’s a wild guy. But he is very brilliant. We trust that his motive is to show people the foolishness of violence rather than to glorify it. I hope that’s true.

Think it is?

Oh, absolutely: Tarantino’s movies illustrate their director's belief in the foolishness of violence in exactly the same way that JFK demonstrates Oliver Stone's faith in Occam's Razor to discern the truth and his hatred of the utter futility of conspiracy theories...

Spanning the globe to bring you the constant thrill of corrupt governmental grifters on multiple continents, "it's Elitist, Do-Nothing, Civic Parasite Day at Hot Air"--complete with video!

John Nolte, the artist formerly known as Dirty Harry, notes that at least one critic is taking offense at the word "homo" being used by Will Smith's eponymous character in the upcoming summer blockbuster Hancock.

Fortunately for the net worths of all concerned in the film's making, it's an American production protected by Hollywood's armies of lawyers--because that line really won't play up north!

(H/T: 5'F.)

"The obvious question: will they look at us in 70 years with the same mixture of amusement, indulgence, respect and outright hilarity? the obvious answer: that's how we regard webpages from 1997. Of course they will."

Back in December, I mentioned Alycia Lane, a Philadelphia-area TV news anchorbabe who was fired after an altercation with a Manhattan police woman:

As Dan Riehl wrote in October when the story of Dallas-area TV journalist Rebecca Aguilar confronting an innocent elderly man on-camera broke, "Leave it to a real journalist to go over the top."

Here's yet another example of a professional TV journalist acting professionally in the most professional manner possible:

Alycia Lane, the evening news anchor on CBS affiliate KYW-TV in Philadelphia, was arrested on early Sunday morning in Manhattan after an altercation with a female police officer, according to the New York Times. Lane and her boyfriend Chris Booker, and another unidentified couple were reportedly traveling in a taxi through Manhattan and became upset over a slow vehicle blocking their way. Philly.com reports Lane confronted the passengers of the slow vehicle, which happened to be a group of police officers in plainclothes.

When one of the officers asked Lane, who was taking photos with her iPhone, to step back, the news anchor reportedly began verbally assaulting the officer. According to Philadelphia Weekly, Lane screamed at the officer, saying "I don't give a f*ck who you are, I am a reporter you f*cking dyke." Lane then punched the female officer in the face, according to the Associated Press, resulting in several lacerations and swelling. The officer was treated at a local hospital and released.

According to Wikipedia, KYW-TV's slogan is "We Are Moving Ahead"--by punching the daylights out of anyone that gets in our way!

While that story sounds trashy enough as it is, it only gets weirder from there:

CBS3 yesterday released anchorman Larry Mendte from his contract 31/2 weeks after FBI agents seized his home computer amid allegations that he illegally broke into former coanchor Alycia Lane's e-mail.

Sources said an internal investigation at CBS3 disclosed that software that secretly captures keystrokes - including passwords - had been installed on a station computer.

Mendte's firing came nearly six months after CBS3 fired Lane, following her arrest in New York for allegedly hitting a cop.

What began as a series of gossip-page scandals embarrassing Lane has morphed into a federal criminal investigation and a sexual-discrimination lawsuit.

The FBI is looking into whether Mendte illegally accessed Lane's e-mails and leaked information from them to the media, including an angry message from a wife upset that Lane sent bikini photos to her husband.

Six months ago, when Lane was fired, Mendte represented a strong public face for the station. But on Thursday, Lane filed a lawsuit in which she said Mendte worked to discredit her behind the scenes and that CBS3 defamed her as she was fired from her $800,000-a-year job.

Now, Mendte, who had about a year left on his contract, has been fired from his $700,000-a-year job.

Mendte's lawyer, Michael Schwartz, said Mendte was notified of the station's decision before it was made public. Schwartz declined to talk about the investigation or specifics about Mendte's career, except to say: "We continue to work with the federal authorities and expect a prompt resolution of this matter. I fully expect that Larry will resume his broadcasting career."

CBS3 said the claims in Lane's suit had no merit.

As of yesterday, Mendte, 51, had not been charged with any crime.

It is illegal under federal law to read another person's e-mails without permission. However, people charged with such a crime are rarely sentenced to prison, unless the crime includes significant economic or physical harm.

The Mendte case broke publicly late last month, when FBI agents armed with a search warrant arrived at the Chestnut Hill home he shares with his wife, Fox29 anchor Dawn Stensland. Mendte went to work the next day, but left abruptly.

Stensland is not suspected of any wrongdoing, sources said.

In a statement read during the 6 p.m. news yesterday, CBS3 anchor Susan Barnett said that Mendte was "released" effective immediately and that he was under investigation by the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Patty Hartman, spokeswoman for U.S. Attorney Patrick L. Meehan, said she could neither confirm nor deny the existence of a Mendte investigation.

Mendte's image and bio were removed yesterday from the station's Web site, which also carried a brief statement about his termination.

The station said the decision to let Mendte go was based on an independent investigation conducted by CBS.

You stay classy, big media!

(Hat tip: My mom, one of the great connoisseurs of Philadelphia television news, who told Nina and I that Mendte was fired "after he was caught going into someone else's Internet!" Hey, everyone's entitled to their own private series of tubes...)

Now that they have Jon Stewart's official permission to make sport of The Man Who Would Be King, readers of NRO's Media Blog have some fun captioning this week's messianic Obama photo on the cover of Rolling Stone.

Click here for some earlier thoughts on Obama And The Age Of Outrageous Credulity.

Ezra Levant writes, "The Canadian Human Rights Commission, like any petty tyranny, has a strong instinct for survival":

As I predicted last week on the Michael Coren Show, that instinct would cause them to drop the complaint against Mark Steyn and Maclean's. And so they did.

With an RCMP investigation, a Privacy Commission investigation and a pending Parliamentary investigation, they're already fighting a multi-front P.R. war, and losing badly. Not a day goes by when the CHRC isn't pummelled in the media. Holding a show trial of Maclean's and Steyn, like the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal did earlier this month, would be writing their own political death sentence.

So they blinked. Against everything in their DNA, they let Maclean's go. That's the first smart thing they've done; because the sooner they can get the public scrutiny to go away, the sooner they can go about prosecuting their less well-heeled targets, people who can't afford Canada's best lawyers and command the attention and affection of the country's literati.

While this is a victory of a sorts, as David Warren wrote last December, the process itself is a form of punishment:

For more than twenty years, in this column and elsewhere, I have been writing against the human rights commissions, which have quasi-legal powers that should be offensive to the citizens of any free country. They are kangaroo courts, in which the defendant's right to due process is withdrawn. They reach judgements on the basis of no fixed law. Moreover, “the process is the punishment” in these star chambers -- for simply by agreeing to hear a case, they tie up the defendant in bureaucracy and paperwork, and bleed him for the cost of lawyers, while the person who brings the complaint, however frivolous, stands to lose nothing.

And if you haven't heard it yet, click here for my recent XM interview with Jonah Goldberg and Kathy Shaidle on the topic.

Update: "Isn't it funny how we're having more fun than the asshats trying to **** with us?"

Pixar's new Wall-E certainly looked incredible in its trailer, but it left Kyle Smith with quite a sour aftertaste:

A more advanced flying probe-bot sent to Earth for reasons unknown has feminine curves and lovely blue eyes that leave WALL-E smitten, though except for her habit of laser-zapping any suspicious object she could be one of those white bullet-shaped trash canisters you’d see at a snack bar.

When she and WALL-E start to beep sweet nothings at each other, she has a higher-pitched tone than he does and says her name is Eva, so WALL-E is confirmed to be a heterobot. The two of them wind up at a space station that houses the remnants of the human race. At this point the film, previously dingy and dark, goes matte black.

The earthlings — or maybe Americans, as none of them have any other kind of accent — are brain-dead blobs perpetually stuffed to the gills with entertainment. They never leave their spotless flying barcaloungers — and never could, since their bones have shrunk to useless twigs inside their Shrek-like masses. They float through their troglodyte lives as unquestioning subjects of the master corporation (the same one that ruined the Earth) that houses them, distracts them and feeds them. All foods are made to be sucked down like milkshakes for maximum convenience.

It’s hard to see how a Disney-certified happy ending can result from this, and the answer is it really can’t. This is perhaps the most cynical and darkest big-budget Disney film ever, and an artistic gamble on the scale of Fantasia, which initially flopped despite critical acclaim. Pixar is now acting like Disney’s senior partner. Perhaps never before has any corporation spent so much money on insulting its customers — WALL-E is expected to be the year’s most heavily promoted film.

The meatball humans in WALL-E are like customers passively being served up a fake existence at the Magic Kingdom (which readily provides wheelchairs for not merely the afflicted but also the obese and the simply lazy), snorfling up the latest wows in an entirely artificial setting where every beverage and hotel room brings profits to the same corporation. And Disney paved over a few thousand acres of Florida wetlands to build Walt Disney World in the first place.

How paying customers will react to being told they’re porky slobs, or are headed in that direction (WALL-E is set 800 years in the future) will depend on how closely the people in the audience ignore the people on screen and concentrate on WALL-E and Eva.

Speaking of Disneyworld, Kyle's description of the schizophrenia of Disney's current cinematic product is of a piece their in-person entertainment. Here's James Lileks' description of his recent visit to Disney World's EPCOT Center:

Since we were here to do things we had not done before, we decided to take in “The Circle of Life,” a show about the interconnectedness of man, nature, and anthropomorphic cartoon characters. I hate to be a killjoy grump about these things, but oy, what a load of sanctimonious rubbish. The actual Circle of Life, as applied to animals, consists of birth, killing, consumption, excretion, copulation, and solitary death from small predators in the blood or nasty ones with big teeth. Sometimes there’s death by fire, for variety’s sake. It takes consciousness on the human level to extract the metaphorical weight in the whole Circle of Life thing, and while I think it’s wonderful to appreciate and marvel at the intricate ecosystems of the planet, and tread as lightly as necessary, wordless choirs voicing ecstatic vowels over footage of wildebeest herds does not really equal a High Mass for spiritual impact or depth. All of which I kept to myself, of course. But I felt like the village atheist.

The plot was hugely ironical: Timon and Roomba or whatever the warthog is named were building a resort in the jungle, and damning a stream to create a water feature. Simba showed up to demonstrate the error of their ways. The hilarity of any manifestation of the Disneyverse criticizing an artificial lake to build a resort goes without saying. And it did go without saying, of course. Simba said that Timon and Roomba or whatever were acting like another creature that did not behave in tune with nature, and that creature was . . . man.

BOO HISS, I guess. Jaysus, I tire of this. Big evil stupid man had done many stupid evil bad things, like pile abandoned cars in the river, dump chemicals into blue streams, and build factories that vomited great dark clouds into the sky. Like the People’s State Lead Paint and Licensed Mickey Merchandise Factory in Shanghai Province, perhaps? Simba gave us a lecture about materialism and how it hurt the earth – cue the shot of trees actually being chopped down, and I’m surprised the sap didn’t spurt like blood in a Peckinpah movie – and other horrors, like forests on fire because . . . well, because it was National Toss Glowing Coals Out the Car Window Month, I guess. I swear the footage all came from the mid-70s; it was grainy and cracked and the cars were all late-60s models. Because I’m pretty sure we’re not dumping cars into the rivers as a matter of course any more. You’re welcome to try to leave your car on the riverbank and see how that turns out for you.

As I mentioned to Tammy Bruce on Tuesday when discussing the envirohectoring subtext of The Happening, Hollywood likes to think of itself as a wild and crazy Sodom and Gomorrah on the Pacific--an endless orgy of hedonistic abandon. But like much of the left in general, lurking just behind its hipster artifice, modern Hollywood has a surprisingly puritanical, we know what's best for you streak. And just as last year's anti-war message was piledriven into the ground by Hollywood, there's lots more eco-lectures to come!

Nobody wanted to be lectured by their parents as a kid; so how long will grown-up audiences voluntarily shell out hard-earned money to replenish the coffers of an industry that's rapidly becoming one giant digital nag?

Back in 2003, in a post titled "Mao And The Godfather", we had some thoughts on, and a photo of, the Andy Warhol print of Mao Zedong that hung above the mantelpiece in Francis Ford Coppola's dining room at the height of his power as a film director in the mid-1970s.

A reader of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism blog quotes from an article by Jed Perl that suggests that Warhol didn't choose Mao as a subject randomly:

Mao is Marilyn, only more so. The terms "icon" and "global icon" are nowadays tossed around with slapdash glee, so it is important to make a basic distinction. It was the moviegoing public that made Marilyn Monroe an icon, because they responded to her beauty, her charm, her wit. The people who hang posters of Marilyn on their walls do so because they like her. It's that simple. But the omnipresence of Mao's image has an altogether different origin. While Leftists in the United States in the late 1960s may have gladly chosen to hang Mao's portrait on their walls, among the billion Chinese who were sure to have his portrait in their homes and in their workplaces, it was understood that they would have endangered their own safety if they did not put his portrait where Mao wanted it to be. There is a world of difference between an icon freely chosen and an icon imposed from above, and the difference has more than a little to do with the difference between a liberal society and an authoritarian society. Warhol's way of blurring this distinction leads straight to the political pornography that characterizes so much of the new Chinese art.

The distinction was not lost on Warhol. According to one of the umpteen books on him that has appeared in recent years, Warhol "often stated that his goal was to obtain the patronage of a dictator, who would then mandate that Warhol's portrait be placed in every governmental office, school, and so on, ensuring the artist unlimited financial opportunities." Was Warhol kidding when he fantasized about being a dictator's court painter? To some degree, of course, he must have been. But then again the fascination of Warhol's work was based on a confusion or conflation of a number of different kinds of power, beginning with the power of celebrity and the power of advertising and the power of art. In the early 1970s he added to that incendiary but still somewhat benign mix another element: the power of communist propaganda. That was the point at which his work turned foul. Warhol's Maos—as well as the Hammer and Sickle still lifes from later in the 1970s and the Lenin portraits of the 1980s—bring his own mercenary spin to a Western love affair with the certitudes of absolutist politics that dates back to the 1920s and 1930s. That was when some members of the European and American intelligentsia decided that the bombastic images of healthy working men and women coming first out of Russia and then out of Nazi Germany offered a relief from the intricacies of modern art. After all, there is nothing less intricate than a painting by Andy Warhol.
The impact that totalitarian imagery can have on free people is an enduring problem. Susan Sontag's essay on the subject, "Fascinating Fascism," was published two years after Warhol began to paint Mao. She could just as well have been thinking of Warhol's Maos, and more generally of the leftist infatuation with the iconography of the Cultural Revolution, when she remarked that the sophisticated public was beginning "to look at Nazi art with knowing and sniggering detachment, as a form of Pop Art." Sontag, who never liked to get too far ahead of her audience, was aware that her readership had still not quite outlived its infatuation with the Maoist look. But she made an important point when she observed that there is a difference between appreciating the peculiar power of a certain kind of totalitarian imagery and going right ahead and succumbing to that power.

As Jonah's reader suggests, expect lots more totalitarian imagery during the coming Olympics in Beijing; in the meantime, we'll always have Che.

Hi, I'm Troy McClure--you might remember me from such automated information kiosks as "Welcome to Springfield Airport!" and "Where's Nordstrom?"

Sorry for the lack of of posts this week, but it's been a bit crazy lately: on Tuesday morning, I appeared on the Tammy Bruce Show, to discuss why The Happening isn't, unless you enjoy zillion dollar enviro-snuff films, basically discussing this post from the weekend. That was tremendous fun--then it was all downhill from there. As soon as my interview concluded, I flew to New Jersey to visit relatives, one of whom is in rather ill-health. In addition to a flight that arrived into Philly two hours late at 2:30 AM, my luggage unfortunately decided not to join me on the flight; despite numerous frantic calls to American Airlines, my bags didn't show up until yesterday evening. But on the bright side--he said, in a tone laced with bitter, bitter irony--you've never met a friendlier, more cheerful staff than the baggage handlers at Philadelphia International Airport at 3:15 in the morning...

As I said recently--The Mrs. Grace L. Ferguson Airline & Storm Door Company: a user manual for cost-conscious airlines, a sneak preview of the future for the rest of us.

Watch for regular blogging to resume in a bit--and thank you for patience.

A member of the LinkedIn social networking Website spots some possible Obamabrushing going on:

"I was beginning to think LinkedIn was on to something, that is until this weekend.

The Obama ad that ran like a legitimate “Question” and members respond with “Answers”. That is the case in point. All was fine, until certain answers were removed when those answers didn’t agree with the Obama campaign positions.

I don’t care which side of the political isle one is on. Had McCain done the same thing, I would equally protest. That act proved to me that Obama is afraid of the 1st Amendment to the Constitution."

W. Strouse and I agree, K von Hopf

What are your thoughts? If you are running for the highest position in the land and representing all Americans, should you censor responses to your posted question? Or, are you just out to win the vote?

I guess they haven't gotten that memo that Obama's morphed from Mr. Hopenchange into a full-on Machiavellian electoral ninja. In any case, his campaign's Website administrator has been deleting Samizdat blogs left and right (err, actually left and more left, to be specific), so why not airbrush his LinkedIn page as well?

When I was assembling the ancillary B-Roll material for the latest Silicon Graffiti video, I wanted to do a segment that charted the growth of electronic media, from three national television networks in the 1950s, to several hundred at the turn of the century, and then compare that to exponentially more rapid growth of the Blogosphere, from a few million in 2004 to 112 million plus today, according to Technorati.

I had remembered a pretty cool Edward Tufte meets Spirograph chart of the Blogosphere from very shortly after we went online in March of 2002, and used a screen capture of it, which appears at about the 5:05 mark of the video, rotating 360 degrees via a little 3-D animation to add some kinetic energy to an otherwise still photo:

But to the best of my knowledge, the above chart hasn't been updated for several years. I wish I had known about a successor to that format a couple of weeks ago, as I would have surely incorporated it into that portion of the video. It's a somewhat similar map of the Blogosphere galaxy, though the emphasis appears to be on a few hundred of the top political sites. Which makes sense--the Blogosphere is so huge today, it must strain even Google and Technorati's capabilities to map it all.

I'm happy to say that we made the cut--here's our position in the political Blogosphere--center right, but not too far out into the whichy thickets, which makes sense:

And here's a close-up of that quadrant of the galaxy, and some of our neighbors orbiting nearby:

(Found via the expert Blogospheric navigators at Hot Air and Protein Wisdom.)

Rich Lowry writes, "I've been thinking lately that Bill Kristol should take a leave of absence for a couple of months and go help out on the McCain campaign":

McCain has been nothing if not energetic (giving a majorish speech almost every day). He has scored day-to-day tactical victories over Obama, as this Washington Post story noted. But the sum is less than the parts. Worse, McCain's political persona seems to be getting lost.

Take energy. There was another McCain conference call on it today. It was painful to listen to Sen. Lindsey Graham pound Obama for saying "no" to every energy proposal, then have to explain (kind of half-heartedly, I thought) why McCain says "no" to drilling on ANWR. If McCain was going to semi-flip on drilling, he probably should have gone all the way and done it in a big way (e.g., hold some sort of conference on energy, or spend a week touring ANWR and off-shore drilling platforms). Then, there was the matter of the contradiction between his new somewhat pro-drilling stance and his continued high-profile advocacy on global warming. I think if McCain could get his own house in order on this issue, he would really do serious damage to Obama.

But there's a sense you never know where McCain is going to be on any given day. Is he zigging toward the center, or zagging right? And on top of this, the campaign feels so defensive—all about not being Bush and not being Obama.

All of this is diminishing McCain, who is a serious, impressive guy for all his flaws. With every clever tactic and worthy small-bore proposal—whether it’s off-shore drilling or the battery prize—McCain loses a tiny bit more of his stature and his sense of who he is. He needs to be bigger than Obama to win the election, and he needs his political persona—as a patriotic fighter determined to fix Washington and win the war—to come out clearly and unmistakably.

I think some new blood—focused just on the big picture—would help the McCain team. My candidate would be Kristol. He obviously has a keen political mind; he's a McCain guy going way back (and as far as I know has a good relationship with McCain's key people); and he's a conservative who understands the need to move beyond the Bush administration without being panicked by every Bush association.

Anyway, that's my suggestion. Maybe someone else would make more sense. Or maybe this big-picture focus can be generated by folks already there. But here's hoping we see it one way or the other...

I'm not sure if Bill Kristol is the guy, but there's a lot of truth there. Obama had a mistake-filled week last week culminating most visibly with his faux-presidential seal, a huge touch of high camp, which though dropped, will be the gift that keeps on giving via Photoshop and YouTube. It's gotten to the point where even the media can't downplay all of Obama's gaffes, no matter how reverentially they treat him. And yet McCain doesn't seem at all poised to pounce his opponent's numerous unforced errors.

We've previously linked to responses from James Lileks and James Pethokoukis, but found via Tim Blair, this is the perfect rebuttal to AP's Doomsday rhetoric:

On Friday, I had some thoughts on the anti-consumerism subtext of Pixar's upcoming Wall-E movie, and wrote:

Anti-consumerism: now there's a message you'd expect from the entertainment industry. Parents--buy your kids less Star Wars toys! And stop paying $15.95 a pop to buy all those DVDs! But thanks for spending ten buckets a ticket and five dollars for a drum of popcorn to watch our movie!

I wonder if the summer popcorn crowd will get whiplash when they go from the conspicuous consumption of Sex In The City to the hectoring subtext of Wall-E?

And once you're done being lectured on the evils of consumerism by your betters in Hollywood, you can buy their merchandise!

For only $250, you can buy the remote-control Wall-E action figure – which will be available in time for Christmas. When kids aren’t busy making the world a better place, they can plop down in front of the plasma and exercise their thumbs on the Wall-E video game, available for Nintendo Wii, PlayStation 2 and 3, and Sony PSP. You can carry your Wall-E lunchbox to school and at night, sleep under a Wall-E poly-blend comforter.

And this isn’t even recounting the junk associated with the Toy Story trilogy (the third one comes out in 2010), Ratatouille, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, and so forth.

Pixar is not in the business of going green. It’s not in their interest. So why tell little children that consumerism is bad while pushing a load of useless crap down their throats?

Hey, nobody said it was easy for Hollywood to be puritanical.

Update: Related thoughts on puritanical Hollywood here.

I quoted James Lileks' take on AP's feverish doomsday piece yesterday, and James Pethokoukis describes AP's screed thusly:

"I know you're just a reporter, but you used to be a person, right?" is a quote from the film Deep Impact and immediately came to mind after I read this article from the Associated Press. (It actually took two people to write it.) The "article" made me weep for my chosen profession. The absolutely disgraceful lead:

Is everything spinning out of control? Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism. Horatio Alger, twist in your grave. The can-do, bootstrap approach embedded in the American psyche is under assault. Eroding it is a dour powerlessness that is chipping away at the country's sturdy conviction that destiny can be commanded with sheer courage and perseverance.

I dunno, maybe contributing to our low national morale are media that 1) compare a weak economy—although one that has yet to suffer even a single negative quarter—to the disastrous economies of the 1930s and 1970s; 2) forget to mention that the average person buying a home in, say, January 2000, is still sitting on a 66 percent gain; 3) ignore the economy's sky-high productivity, which helps make it the most competitive in the world; 4) ignore a global economic boom that is pushing up gas prices but also raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty; and 5) for the heck of it, perpetuate the myth that college is unaffordable. (Oh, and since the authors of the article brought it up, it sure looks to this Soviet politics major that Iraq is turning into a situation for al Qaeda that is exactly the reverse of Afghanistan in the 1980s: Militants take on superpower. Get annihilated along with their global brand.)

America's "can-do" attitude? We are coming off a record year for initial public offerings. I mean, I could go on and on here. I don't know anyone who is giving up, other than the AP.

As Andy McCarthy writes:

Rush talked about that article this afternoon and made the excellent observation that the AP could have just said "Vote Obama" — it would have saved them several hundred words and spared the rest of us a lot of wasted time!

But at least it's giving the Blogosphere a chance to expose the can't-do spirit that seems to permeate AP.

At least until the bill arrives.

Meanwhile, as the AP tells the nation as a whole, "Yes We Can't!", the media as a whole have gone equally silent reporting on another nation's progress.

As Ed Morrissey notes:

Al Sharpton may get another chance to distract everyone from the massive IRS investigation into his personal and professional finances by seizing on another Don Imus eruption.

And this time around, if Imus is ousted, no one can blame this on anti-Hillary forces engaged in battlefield prep.

Bing and Bob are nowhere to be found, but Michael Totten has an amazing assemblage of photos and stories from the road, in a locale that combines Christianity, Islam, and beautiful architecture amidst plenty of Soviet-era concrete monstrosities.

Or, maybe they just thought Faye Dunaway looked smokin' hot brandishing a .38 snubnose in her cashmere sweater and beret.

Making the rounds to promote his new book Nixonland, Rick Perlstein tells Reason:

reason: You like to mix cultural history with political history. Bonnie and Clyde is one of the central texts in the book.

Perlstein: My theory is that Bonnie and Clyde was the most important text of the New Left, much more important than anything written by Paul Goodman or C. Wright Mills or Regis Debray. It made an argument about vitality and virtue vs. staidness and morality that was completely new, that resonated with young people in a way that made no sense to old people. Just the idea that the outlaws were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys—you cannot underestimate how strange and fresh that was.

The 1967 release of the movie certainly coincides with the period where traditional liberalism and the far left began to merge; not coincidentally, this was also the period where traditional morality began to break down. The next year would be 1968, a year the left is alternately trying to recreate, or is permanently trapped in, or both. Mick Jagger's lyrics to the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" called the philosophy of the day "heads is tails", and whereas liberals once worshiped science and progress, they soon found themselves admiring the Black Panthers and William Ayers' Weatherman group, and tossing both modernism and hope for the future under the bus.

1968 was also the year that, only a few months before his death at the hands of a young radical, Bobby Kennedy told a college audience:

"I am also glad to come to the home state of another great Kansan, who wrote, 'If our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all their youthful vision and vigor then there is something wrong with our colleges. The more riots that come on college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow.'"

Orrin Judd reviews Perlstein's book here, and makes a great observation, which dovetails perfectly into Perlstein's Bonnie & Clyde reference and the breakdown of the mid-1960s in general:

I'm only in the early stages of reading Friend Perlstein's book but am struck by a potentially fatal flaw in his thesis that's implied in the review above. With his expected honesty, Mr. Perlstein initially identifies Nixonland as the sort of Red America that the Adlai Stevenson eggheads found themselves stuck in ad unable to comprehend in the 50s. That this part of the metaphor endures--is indeed a seemingly innate part of the culture--is reflected not just in his own essays about contemporary politics but in books by his friends and fellow Brights, like Thomas Frank's unintentionally hilarious, What's the Matter with Kansas.

On the other hand, the sort of violent divisiveness that he associates with Nixonland rather conspicuously developed at the exact time that Richard Nixon was not a central part of the national political scene. Inner-city riots, assassinations, student demonstrations, radical Left terrorism--all of these social plagues arose during the Johnson/Great Society years, the pinnacle of the Left's ascendancy. Even the initial violent reactions were led by Democrats--like LBJ sending federal troops into Detroit or Mayor Daley breaking up protests at the 1968 Democratic Convention. If anything, as Mr. Douthat suggests above, the return of Richard Nixon --a liberal Republican--in 1968 might be seen as an attempt by American voters to restore the social calm and consensus of earlier eras. Richard Nixon, at least in his final incarnation, should probably be considered an effect of the social breakdown of the Liberal 60s, rather than a cause of anything much.

As president, Nixon was no conservative, particularly in his domestic governance, which much more of an extension of LBJ than any sort of warm up act for the Gipper. (And Nixon's poor handling of the economy directly paved the way for the disastrous Carter years, which spawned the economic trainwreck that Reagan and Paul Volker would miraculously right.) But to the America of 1968 that didn't think that Bonnie & Clyde "were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys", no wonder both Nixon's association with the relative calm of the Eisenhower years (at least in comparison with what was to come afterwards), and his promise of law and order sounded remarkably appealing. In that sense, perhaps Nixon's entirely unplanned timeout from the national scene during the mid-1960s wound up serving him remarkably well.

(Perlstein quote found appropriately enough here.)

I had meaning to comment on that ridiculous AP doomsday story that Drudge linked to recently, but there's no way I can top the fine demolition that James Lileks performs:

EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL.

That’s the headline. First line:

Is everything spinning out of control?

No. But they go on:

Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism.

Horatio Alger, twist in your grave.

The can-do, bootstrap approach embedded in the American psyche is under assault. Eroding it is a dour powerlessness that is chipping away at the country's sturdy conviction that destiny can be commanded with sheer courage and perseverance.

Previous generations rolled up their sleeves and swam out there and saved those polar bears. As for “abysmal” home values, it depends where you are; I’ll admit that people who sank everything in Miami condo markets are finding their psyches chipped and dinged, but A) lower home prices mean people who want to buy one but couldn’t afford it now are sitting better – B) the authors can take heart in this story about San Francisco being unaffordable for the middle class. Thank God! There’s hope!

Cue the obligatory heartland can’t-do fella with busted bootstraps:

"It is pretty scary," said Charles Truxal, 64, a retired corporate manager in Rochester, Minn. "People are thinking things are going to get better, and they haven't been. And then you go hide in your basement because tornadoes are coming through. If you think about things, you have very little power to make it change.

Rochester has had zero tornados this year, if I recall correctly. Even if they do get one, it probably won't be as bad as the 1883 example, which was bad enough to have its own wikipedia page. But again: what has happened to America that your optimism is insufficient to turn away rotating clouds? In the old days, by jiminey-crackers, we’d hold up pictures of Roosevelt and the twisters would just melt away.

The guy’s 64 years old, and he hasn’t figured out that some things get better, some things get worse, some things stay the same, and some things to which no one’s paying attention will shape the news much more than the panic du jour in the news today? He’s 64, and can’t figure out that grown men don’t say “scary” unless describing how they felt about the Wolfman when they were nine?

It is amusing, really – after sticking people’s heads in the muck every day for years, promoting every faddish scare, fluffing the pillow beneath every yuppie worry, swapping the straight-forward adult approach to news with presenters who emote the copy with the sad face of a day-care worker telling the children that Barney is dead – in short, after decades of presenting the world through the peculiar prism that finds in every day more evidence of our rot and our failures, they wonder why people are depressed. Hang the banner, guys: Mission Accomplished.

Of course, not everyone feels this way; I’d guess that people who watch television news are more inclined to pessimism. But there’s another side to this: the pessimism among some may not stem from some impotent feeling that one is a cork toss’d in a sea of cruel destiny, that you can’t do anything, that nothing will get better – no, the pessimism may arise from the suspicion that there’s something abroad in the land that’s had a good hardy larf about “Horatio Alger” and all the other manifestations of individual initiative for 30 years. The cool kids and the clever set have always smirked at that sort of stuff. You can get them going if you make a speech about our ability to solve things, but you’d better phrase it in the form of a government initiative, or brows furrow: well, then, how do you propose to do it?

The bottom of the page says “Average rating: two out of five stars.” Our confidence in the media to undermine our happiness is being chipped away, too. We’re in worse shape than we thought.

Remember when AP helped its readers make sense of the news, instead of describing life as one long unfathomable horror? Of course, that was when AP was actually in business to report, instead of "changing the world", or these days, sending dunning notices to bloggers.

Of course, one reason why wire services might be shaking down the Blogosphere is that they could use the money:

For newspapers, the news has swiftly gone from bad to worse. This year is taking shape as their worst on record, with a double-digit drop in advertising revenue, raising serious questions about the survival of some papers and the solvency of their parent companies.

Ad revenue, the primary source of newspaper income, began sliding two years ago, and as hiring freezes turned to buyouts and then to layoffs, the decline has only accelerated.

Sort of like a Red Queen's Race, you might say.

But then, as Michael Crichton wrote 15 years ago, the newspapers brought a lot of this upon themselves:

"[T]he American media produce a product of very poor quality," he lectured. "Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it's sold without warranty. It's flashy but it's basically junk."

Just read the AP story at the of the post. And the media is cranking out that junk during a period when they can least afford to, as a technological sea change is devouring them:

And as I said, fortunately, their own Jurassic Park awaits:

George Carlin, dead at age of 71.

"Obama Moves to Reintroduce Himself to Voters", the Washington Post, notes, but check out the language of the opening paragraph:

In the opening weeks of the general-election campaign, Sen. Barack Obama has moved aggressively to shape his campaign and offered a clear road map for the kind of candidate he is likely to become in the months ahead: an ambitious gamer of the electoral map, a ruthless fundraiser and a scrupulous manager of his own biography in the face of persistent concerns about how he is perceived.

"Aggressive", "ambitious", "ruthless"--this sounds far more like the press at large is beginning to describe Obama using the David Brooks Machiavellian badass political samurai model, rather than the positive Hope! and Change! Yes We Can! new politics message that Obama began nationally with.

If the press continues to describe Obama in such terms, this could create a nifty opening for McCain to attack Obama on his cynicism and rote Chicago politics, much as Reagan deflated Carter in 1980 (who masked his own punitive opinions of America underneath a similar veneer of sunny optimism four years earlier) with his "Well, there you go again" line.

And on a related note, Lexington Green of the Chicago Boyz notes, "It is weird how so many who claim to like Obama hope he is lying. Three examples come to mind immediately". Read the rest.

Update: Jennifer Rubin observes Obama as he loses "His Teflon Sheen".

Warner Todd Huston has a terrific roundup of photos documenting "Obama's Propagandistic Iconography: the Making of a Messiah". Regarding the latest example, Mickey Kaus asks if Obama's mocked-up pseudo-presidential seal was his Mission Accomplished moment. Both certainly pleased the base, while alienating the more skeptical.

And speaking of trips down memory lane, "And now, Barack Delano Obama"...

Related: While we're on the subject of messianic propagandistic iconography, did Obama personally tell a campaign volunteer to shut up about her Che Guevara Flag? He must have forgotten about this one, in any case.

Update: A voice of cool, dispassionate reason emerges as a strong counterforce, finally:

I think that we can take a lesson from the Republicans in the sense that we seem to be continually looking for the next Messiah. I think that’s a bad habit.

Oh wait, nevermind--that was Obama himself two years ago. It's not easy, but I guess a man can get used to rampantly overflowing hagiography pretty quickly if he has to.

Will Kim Jong Il endorse Sen. Barack Obama? Yes he can!

Castro we knew about, and Qaddafi chimed in just the other day, but Kim Jong Il?

I wasn’t expecting that.

Take me now, Lord. My life as a blogger is complete.

The Obamessiah must ask himself once again: Why do all these anti-American tyrants keep s…um, endorsing my candidacy?

Meanwhile, See Dubya also asks, "Come on, Osama, your turn…you know you’ve got one tape left in you…"

If he does, will Uncle Walter once again blame it on Karl Rove, as he did when Punxsutawney Osama emerged and saw his shadow during the last weekend of October in 2004?

While England has many of the same problems that inflict the bluer alcoves of America, fortunately, that enlightened bastion of reason and common sense has its priorities firmly in order:

A council has banned the term "brainstorming" and replaced it with "thought showers".

Tunbridge Wells Borough Council in Kent was accused of taking political correctness to extremes after instructing staff to make the change.

The move came as council chiefs feared the word brainstorming might offend mentally ill people and those with epilepsy.

No, this story offends those of us who have a modicum of common sense remaining, which appears to be the world's scarcest resource these days. Meanwhile, as the editor of the 11th edition of the Newspeak dictionary once said, "You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words -- scores of them, hundreds of them, every day."

(Story via Dirty Harry's other blog; headline via Claude Rains.)

Glenn Reynolds links to San Francisco Chronicle staff writer James Temple, who describes "urban flight flipped on its head":

The number of low- and middle-income residents in San Francisco is shrinking as the wealthy population swells, a trend most experts attribute to the city's exorbitant housing costs.

Many worry it's increasingly turning San Francisco into an enclave of the rich, where nurses, firefighters, cops, teachers and other professionals aspiring toward homeownership or in need of cheaper rent can no longer afford to stay.

"A kind of derogatory term for the city would be Disneyland for yuppies," said Hans Johnson, demographer with the Public Policy Institute of California. "There is a legitimate public policy concern when a city that many people have lived in for many years and regard as their homes becomes so expensive they can't afford to live there anymore."

Last year, USA Today noted, “San Francisco Hopes To Reverse Black Flight”, but it's part of a much larger trend, as I noted earlier in 2007:

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.

But it's not just San Francisco--when I interviewed Steven Malanga of City Journal a couple of years ago, he noted the same trend of the middle class being squeezed out, leaving only the wealthy and poor occurring in New Jersey as well. And I imagine anywhere there are punitive liberal policies simultaneously raising taxes and making a difficult environment for new housing and entrepreneurship, this trend will occur, but San Francisco's certainly had a multiple-decade head start. If it's entered the endgame, perhaps it will serve as a warning to other locales, and not as a prototype.

James Taranto writes:

Could it be that Obama is planning to pivot? That is, what if he goes to Iraq and declares upon his return that he has been persuaded that the surge has made a difference, that things are going much better, and that he is now convinced victory is both possible and crucial?

On the downside, he would risk alienating those among his supporters who crave defeat in Iraq, either for ideological reasons or out of sheer hatred for George W. Bush.

But on the upside, it would show political courage and open-mindedness, two qualities his supporters are eager to ascribe to him but so far on the basis of evidence that is somewhere between scant and nonexistent. Those who do want America to win in Iraq would no longer have to vote against Obama for that reason. As for those who want defeat, where would they go? By their lights, John McCain is even worse; he voted for the war to begin with. So, oddly enough, did the Libertarian nominee. Unless you count Cynthia McKinney or Ralph Nader, Obama would still be the best "antiwar" candidate on the ballot.

We've long been skeptical of the Obama hype, but if he is smart and bold enough to adopt a sensible position on Iraq, we will have to admit there is more to him that we've given him credit for.

On the other hand, it would give his opposition a chance to remind voters of his party's original pivot:

"Politically correct is never a term one would apply to [Maureen] Dowd’s commentary", the New York Times ombudsperson Clark Hoyt writes. If you say so, though standard-issue East Coast establishment liberal boilerplate are all terms that readily come to mind.

In any case, as Hoyt's predecessor ombudsman wrote, "Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? Of course it is." And now it's time to pay the piper:

Over the course of the campaign, I received complaints that Times coverage of Clinton included too much emphasis on her appearance, too many stereotypical words that appeared to put her down and dismiss a woman’s potential for leadership and too many snide references to her as cold or unlikable. When I pressed for details, the subject often boiled down to Dowd.

Andrew Rosenthal, the editor of the editorial page, said it was unfair to hold a columnist accountable for perceptions of bias in news coverage. A columnist is supposed to present strong opinions, he said, and “a thorough reading of Maureen’s work shows that she does that without regard to gender, partisanship or ideology.”

Some complaints about Times news coverage seem justified. A “Political Memo” last fall analyzed “the Clinton Cackle” — a laugh, it was suggested, that she used to fend off political attacks or tough media attention. Cackle? That’s what witches do in fairy tales. Times editors express regret about using the word, though they defend the examination of the laugh. The Times never did a similar dissection of the way Rudolph Giuliani burst into odd gales of laughter under tough questioning.

But other complaints seemed to reflect a shoot-the-messenger anger at The Times. A reader from San Francisco railed against a litany of offending words that she said the paper had used, but most of the slights were imagined. (I can assure you that the word “skank” was never printed in an article about Clinton.)

I asked my assistant, Michael McElroy, to run a database search for some key words that might indicate sexism in The Times — “shrill,” “strident,” “pantsuit” and “giggle,” among them.

So please, all you sexist troglodytes, no giggling at the end of that last paragraph!

(Via Hot Air.)

When the levee breaks, Obama, you've got to move--and attempt to pin it on John McCain.

(Via Greg Pollowitz; Spike Lee could not be reached for comment.)

From the home office in Mos Eisley spaceport, Ace of Spades brings you the Star Wars Obama crawl!

As Mark Steyn wrote last year, "The ecochondriacs mean it: This'd be a pretty nice planet if we didn't live here."

Which is the theme of M. Night Shyamalan's new film, The Happening. The center-left New Republic and center-right Wall Street Journal don't always agree on the issues of the day, but neither publication is in doubt about how the repugnant that theme looks when it's played out on a 30-foot high screen at the local shopping mall's multiplex.

In TNR, James Kirchick, the author of headline quoted above writes, "the mere existence of the human race is a cause for great shame" in Shyamalan's film:

As with most of Shyamalan's films, The Happening has an intriguing plot: centuries of human pollution has prompted nature to retaliate against us by form of a noxious gas released from trees, plants, grass -- it's never really clear. The toxin is first emitted in Central Park, smack dab in the middle of one of the most densly populated places in the United States. First, victims lose their critical faculties. Then they freeze. Then they killl themselves. From New York City "The Happening" spreads all along the east coast, from Boston to Washington. Shyamalan leaves little to the imagination in depicting man's nature-inflicted suicide. We see a woman stab herself in the neck with a hair pin. A man runs himself over with a lawnmower. On can't help but leave the theater thinking that Shyamalan derives a sick, masochistic pleasure in showing the deaths of all his bit characters, hopeless rubes are these human beings. They drove their SUVs for too long and had a big carbon footprint and now they're going to pay.

After 90 minutes of this, the culling of humanity ends. We catch a brief television news segment in which a scientist warns us that what the Northeast just experienced was akin to a terrestrial occurrence of oceanic "red tides." The earth warned us, but thankfully we get another chance to amend the errors of our ways. Like the end of An Inconvenient Truth, we're left with some hope that environmental catastrophe is not a foregone conclusion. Buy a plug-in car. Use public transportation when available. Turn off the light when you leave a room. An unoffensive, and indeed positive message. The second to last scene depicts the female lead waiting nervously in her bathroom to read the results of a home pregnancy test. To her delight, she is with child. Her husband comes home, they embrace. Humanity soldiers on. What a warm feeling after so many scenes of horrific death.

But Shyamalan is obsessed with conceits at the expense of every other aspect -- the script, character development, and most importantly, good taste. He lives by the conceit, and, in this case, dies by it. After the pregnancy scene, the screen goes dark and we find ourselves in Paris, the Jardin des Tuileries to be exact. It's eerily reminiscent of the film's opening, with two men walking, engaged in pleasant conversation about their plans for the evening. A gust of wind! One of the men starts to stutter. People freeze. Screams. Mon Dieu!. Roll credits.

This isn't just radical environemntalist fare; it's perverse and anti-human. Shyamalan cuts immediately from the natural joy of pregnancy to its consequence: mass, nature-inflicted murder. It's not carbon output, styrofoam cups or the clearing of the rain forests that so angers Mother Earth and, thus, her self-appointed human spokesman. It's us.

Meanwhile, in the Wall Street Journal, (found via Dirty Harry's new film blog) Joseph Rago notes, "We have arrived at a strange moment in American pop culture when movie-goers spend two hours in the theater being informed that we all deserve to die":

In a recent interview, Mr. Shyamalan, best known for "The Sixth Sense" (1999), said that "The Happening" is intended to "wake everybody up" and "get back to the correct relationship with nature."

Obviously it isn't Hollywood's first environmental disaster flick. Think of 2004's "The Day After Tomorrow," where all it takes is the CO2-induced obliteration of the East Coast for Dennis Quaid to learn how to be a better dad. But catastrophic climate change in that movie was a simple plot device that could be replaced easily enough with, say, space aliens. "The Happening" is honest-to-Gaia green agitprop: Like the Lorax, Mr. Shyamalan is speaking for the trees.

Environmentalism's seam of misanthropy traces back to John Muir, who founded the Sierra Club in 1892, and probably to Thoreau. We're just another species, the thinking goes, or would be had our iniquities not made us unworthy of a place in the ecosystem. The existence of Homo sapiens is an affliction and cause for profound shame.

Today the position persists along the fringes of the "deep ecology" movement, where adherents can still be found chanting, "Four legs good! Two legs bad!" But the message also has some mainstream appeal: A best-selling book last summer was "The World Without Us," in which science journalist Alan Weisman gleefully imagined how nature would respond if man abruptly went extinct and how great it would be for the planet. "The Happening" merely takes this misanthropy to its logical extreme.

Of course, most mainstream greens limit themselves to nagging on behalf of Mommy Nature. Yet amid the much ado about global warming, the people problem is asserting itself with a neo-Malthusian vengeance. Almost every element of modern life is reducible to carbon. Like it or not, a higher population leads inexorably to more anthropogenic greenhouse gases.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ranks demographic proliferation as a "driver for emissions." British environmental minister Hilary Benn -- most recently spotted endorsing carbon rationing cards as a set of new sumptuary laws -- notes with approval that "family planning is the ultimate carbon offsetting scheme." Even though Paul Ehrlich's "population bomb" has been defused again and again, Jeffrey Sachs, Jared Diamond, Bill McKibben and others have come to similar conclusions.

Since population control led to such PR disasters of the late 20th century as mass forced sterilizations under Indira Gandhi and China's one-child policy, it makes people queasy. Instead, the greens, when not plumping for massive carbon tax-and-regulation schemes, focus on behavioral alterations -- like taking public transit or installing the correct light bulbs. The weight given to consumer-driven change, however, means that the people problem can't help but seep out into the culture at large. Having kids is the most carbon-intensive choice most people will ever make.

Not surprisingly, more than a few of the recent handbooks for "green living" recommend thinking seriously about children. The Sierra Club says that the ideal number is two. Messrs. Weisman and McKibben say it's one. Mr. Shyamalan seems to think it's zero. It can't be long before we're being offered another helpful "tip": Kill yourself.

But that's already occurred. In mid-2006, Tammy Bruce, amongst other pundits and bloggers, reported a speech given by Dr. Eric R. Pianka, a University of Texas evolutionary ecologist named the 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist by the Texas Academy of Science. In mid-2006, the academy enthusiastically cheered upon the conclusion of this speech:

Professor Pianka said the Earth as we know it will not survive without drastic measures. Then, and without presenting any data to justify this number, he asserted that the only feasible solution to saving the Earth is to reduce the population to 10 percent of the present number.

He then showed solutions for reducing the world's population in the form of a slide depicting the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. War and famine would not do, he explained. Instead, disease offered the most efficient and fastest way to kill the billions that must soon die if the population crisis is to be solved.

Pianka then displayed a slide showing rows of human skulls, one of which had red lights flashing from its eye sockets.

AIDS is not an efficient killer, he explained, because it is too slow. His favorite candidate for eliminating 90 percent of the world's population is airborne Ebola ( Ebola Reston ), because it is both highly lethal and it kills in days, instead of years. However, Professor Pianka did not mention that Ebola victims die a slow and torturous death as the virus initiates a cascade of biological calamities inside the victim that eventually liquefy the internal organs.

After praising the Ebola virus for its efficiency at killing, Pianka paused, leaned over the lectern, looked at us and carefully said, “We've got airborne 90 percent mortality in humans. Killing humans. Think about that.”

With his slide of human skulls towering on the screen behind him, Professor Pianka was deadly serious. The audience that had been applauding some of his statements now sat silent.

After a dramatic pause, Pianka returned to politics and environmentalism. But he revisited his call for mass death when he reflected on the oil situation.

“And the fossil fuels are running out,” he said, “so I think we may have to cut back to two billion, which would be about one-third as many people.” So the oil crisis alone may require eliminating two-third's of the world's population.

How soon must the mass dying begin if Earth is to be saved? Apparently fairly soon, for Pianka suggested he might be around when the killer disease goes to work. He was born in 1939, and his lengthy obituary appears on his web site.

When Pianka finished his remarks, the audience applauded. It wasn't merely a smattering of polite clapping that audiences diplomatically reserve for poor or boring speakers. It was a loud, vigorous and enthusiastic applause.

Pianka's Wikipedia entry notes:

The host of the speech, the Texas Academy of Sciences, has released a statement stating that "many of Dr. Pianka's statements have been severely misconstrued and sensationalized."

Much like Reverend Wright would later be, it seems. This is a variation on the "botched joke" do-over the left claims for themselves whenever a Kinsley-esque gaffe of an unusually potent nature occurs. But as Tammy Bruce noted at the time, two years before Shyamalan's new movie, such eco-doomsday thinking isn't all that unusual:

I have been arguing for years now that the destruction of humanity, literally, is the actual agenda, conscious and unconscious, of Leftists worldwide. They have become progressively ugly and hateful politically and otherwise because they hate themselves and consequently project that hate, as Malignant Narcissists do, back onto humanity as a whole. Their frustration at the rejection of their agenda (history at least has taught us something) that they bother less and less with sugar-coating their nihilistic rage.

Now playing at a theater near you!

Related: "Phil Bowermaster On Fear Of The Future." And Rand Simberg adds:

Hey, how about if we save the earth by migrating into space?

Somehow, I don't think they'll like that, either.

Maybe that explains this.

Charles Johnson is livid over a recent Pat Buchanan op-ed titled "Was the Holocaust Inevitable?", and I can't say I blame him. Key passage from Buchanan here:

That Hitler was a rabid anti-Semite is undeniable. "Mein Kampf" is saturated in anti-Semitism. The Nuremberg Laws confirm it. But for the six years before Britain declared war, there was no Holocaust, and for two years after the war began, there was no Holocaust.

Not until midwinter 1942 was the Wannsee Conference held, where the Final Solution was on the table.

That conference was not convened until Hitler had been halted in Russia, was at war with America and sensed doom was inevitable. Then the trains began to roll.

And why did Hitler invade Russia? This writer quotes Hitler 10 times as saying that only by knocking out Russia could he convince Britain it could not win and must end the war.

Hitchens mocks this view, invoking the Hitler-madman theory.

"Could we have a better definition of derangement and megalomania than the case of a dictator who overrules his own generals and invades Russia in wintertime ... ?"

Christopher, Hitler invaded Russia on June 22.

The Holocaust was not a cause of the war, but a consequence of the war. No war, no Holocaust.

Did I read that passage correctly? It's the fault of England and America entering the war that the Holocaust occurred? And if they hadn't, Europe and its Jews would have lived happily ever after under Nazi rule? Even though Germany's euthanasia experiments predate the outbreak of WWII? And the systematic killing of Jews in Europe and Russia predates the Wannsee conference? And in Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that he wished thousands of Jews had been gassed in WWI?

While Pat at least acknowledges (grudgingly?) that the Holocaust took place, he's rapidly going down the path already traveled by David Irving.

A few months ago, shortly after William F. Buckley's death, Jonathan Tobin wrote:

Long after he chased the Birchers out of NR, Buckley found himself forced to confront the issue again. When longtime colleagues Pat Buchanan and Joseph Sobran used their bully pulpits on the right to bash Israel and stigmatize Jews for their support for the state, it was again Buckley who took on the haters.

Buckley repudiated Sobran’s writing, which he labeled anti-Semitic, and pushed him off the magazine’s masthead.

As the issue continued to percolate in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf war in December 1991, he devoted an entire issue of the magazine to an essay titled “In Search of Anti-Semitism” (which was also the title of the book he later published on the same subject), in which he took on Buchanan, who was preparing an insurgent run for the White House against the first President Bush.

His conclusion was damning: “I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism, whatever it was that drove him to say and do it,” Buckley wrote.

At the time, I doubt even WFB knew something like this was coming from Buchanan.

Following up on our post featuring a strangely vegetating Lou Dobbs yesterday, here's Lou, then and now:

(From Eyeblast.TV.)

All that work making Steve Guttenberg a star, and this is how he repays them.

Given its horrid revues from both sides of the aisle, I don't think that Hindu chaplain Rajan Zed will have much difficulty in urging "Hindus around the world to boycott" Mike Myers' new film, The Love Guru:

Movie executives at Paramount Pictures have honoured their promise to preview Mike Myers' new film The Love Guru for concerned Hindu leaders in Los Angeles.

Hindus, led by Rajan Zed, campaigned to see the film before its release on Friday - in a bid to make sure their fears about the movie were overblown.

But the screening has only served to bolster the religious opposition to the film, which Zed and his followers insist is disrespectful to Hindus and their beliefs.

Zed has now urged Hindus around the world to boycott the movie, claiming the picture "lampoons Hinduism and Hindu concepts and uses Hindu terms frivolously".

After attending the screening on Thursday, Zed rages, "The Love Guru is even more denigrating than we earlier perceived from the information gathered from trailers, websites and other sources.

"Mike Myers' guru instigates a bar fight, repeatedly narrates penis jokes, mocks yoga - one of the six orthodox schools of Hindu philosophy, wears female jewellery, mocks the concept of third eye, makes disciples drink tea passed through his nose, orders alligator soup, induces elephant copulation in front of the crowd, introduces himself as 'His Holiness', lives in a lavish ashram staffed with scantily clad maids, and whose goal in life seems to appear on the Oprah Winfrey show."

And the Hindu leader has suggested other religious groups should give the film, in which Myers plays an oddball guru called Pitka, a miss.

He adds, "Today it is Hinduism, tomorrow Hollywood might attempt to denigrate another religions.

Really? They might? Do you think! Let me check on this one and get back to you. OK--back! Unfortunately though, the producers of Dogma, The Da Vinci Code, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Golden Compass, and Jesus Camp could not be reached for comment.

Nor could this director of a different sort of anti-religion movie, who, curiously enough, isn't around these days to cash his royalty checks.

Related: "Admit none: 16 protested movies."

Dirty Harry reviews Pixar's Wall-E and is knocked out by the incredible CGI (as was I when I saw the trailer before the latest Indiana Jones movie), but he's rather offput by one of its themes:

For all its charms and wonders, one moment sticks in my head and, well, craw. It also confuses me. Why? Why go there? Other than the dark chuckles from the liberal critics around me, what’s to gain? And other than a lack of self-control or hubris on the filmmakers’ part, there’s no explaining it. But they did it. They actually had the President (Fred Willard) say about his failed mission, “Stay the course.”

Have we lost Pixar? Have we lost the wonderful studio who brought us The Incredibles and Ratatouille to Bush Derangement Syndrome? Here you have a winning streak going back ten-years, enormous amounts of public goodwill, equal amounts of credibility as serious storytellers, and they stop things cold, yanking you out of the story with the liberal nonsense. Quite a disappointment.

On the other hand, its not the first Pixar movie that some in the starboard side of the Blogosphere thought a bit squishy. But then there's this:

At first there’s not much of an environmental message. The piles of garbage covering our planet come off as nothing more than a good idea to set up a cool alt-version of our world and the lead character. Unfortunately, this doesn’t last. The humans are introduced as meaty, lazy, chair-bound consumers who live in a world run by a large corporation. The message about our consumerism, sloth, and addiction to visual stimulus is eventually beaten like a drum.

Anti-consumerism: now there's a message you'd expect from the entertainment industry. Parents--buy your kids less Star Wars toys! And stop paying $15.95 a pop to buy all those DVDs! But thanks for spending ten buckets a ticket and five dollars for a drum of popcorn to watch our movie!

I wonder if the summer popcorn crowd will get whiplash when they go from the conspicuous consumption of Sex In The City to the hectoring subtext of Wall-E?

Meanwhile, one of Harry's commenters asks:

Have they started with the anti-consumerism merchandising and advertising tie-ins yet?

Heh, indeed.^TM

Update: Steven Den Beste emails, "If you look at the credits, the problem becomes clear: Brad Bird didn't direct this one. He wasn't involved in it at all." It will certainly be interesting to see how handles this upcoming film, given its all-too-recent subtext.

The newly reconstituted Libertas links to an exceptional essay by Anthony Lane on the great David Lean, whose troika of epics--The Bridge on the River Kwai, Dr. Zhivago, and of course, the staggering Lawrence of Arabia made the phrase "the thinking man's blockbuster" not an oxymoron for a brief period in movie history.

Killer passage here:

Lean is talking about the crossing of the Nafud desert, the “sun’s anvil,” by Lawrence and Ali (Omar Sharif), a journey thought to be suicidal. Nonetheless, they and fifty warriors take the risk, on Lawrence’s insistence, because he knows it is the only way to reach the strategic town of Aqaba, then under Turkish control. As for the cut, Sam Spiegel, the bullish producer of “Lawrence,” wants to keep those three shots in, arguing that the audience needs to sense the slog of the night crossing, while Lean feels that any hint of tedium could be a killer. “The film has a certain something which we must be careful not to destroy,” he remarks, as if running his eye over a set of kitchen drawers that he had knocked up in the garden shed. As for a sequence near the start:

I find the map room a goodish scene in a goodish British film. I would, without a second thought, dispense with it but for the match incident. I am not absolutely convinced that the match incident is worth the footage involve

In retrospect, I think we can say it was worth it. One “match incident” leads to another: Lawrence, stuck in Cairo halfway through the First World War, and conscious of a place, not far away, where the fate of nations, not to mention his own private destiny, will be decided, holds a match up close and blows it out. We cut, without ado, to the desert at dawn, and so to the slow explosion of red gold on the horizon’s rim: God lighting the first match of the day. It was a moment that Steven Spielberg saw at the age of fifteen, and which, he says, ignited his determination to make films. If you don’t get this cut, if you think it’s cheesy or showy or over the top, and if something inside you doesn’t flare up and burn at the spectacle that Lean has conjured, then you might as well give up the movies.

Just so! The cinema of the 1960s is bookended by a pair of fabulous edits: the above referenced "Match Cut" in Lawrence, and Stanley Kubrick's brilliant cut between a prehistoric hominid's tossed bone and an orbiting space weapon four million years later in 1968's 2001: A Space Odyssey, a edit that simply had to have been inspired by Lean's earlier juxtaposition.

After that, it was all downhill in epic cinema, as Lane notes--it's a quite a chasm that separates Lean's Lawrence, Kwai and Zhivago and Kubrick's 2001 with Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy and Taxi Driver. Even Alfred Hitchcock, Lean's fellow British master of the cinema wasn't immune--the man who once cast his films with the likes of Cary Grant and Grace Kelly began the decade with Frenzy, of which James Lileks wrote a few years ago:

One of the most disturbing movies I’ve ever seen is Hitchcock’s “Frenzy,” because you get the feeling that this is what he always wanted to do, and was finally able to do it because of the new post-60s frankness in cinema. It’s cheap and dank and smegmatic like no other Hitchcock film, and it’s depressing that he didn’t see how altogether smelly it was.

Fortunately, in 1977, George Lucas had this crazy idea to combine epic-style filmmaking with 1930s-era serials, and managed to get cinema, visually at least, off the street again, at least for a time.

Or, All The President's Vegetables (Margaret Thatcher could relate to that one); in any case, Lou Dobbs sounds like he's warming up to be an extra on Mystery Condiment Theater 3000.

As John Hinderaker writes, "Dobbs has been a joke for quite a while now, but I think he's finally gone around the bend. Yesterday he urged that President Bush be impeached over salmonella in tomatoes." No, really!, as Dave Barry would say:

(Video found at Eyeblast.TV)

Update: "Let’s ask the really important question: how can we impeach incompetent news anchors?"

More: Hot Air-lanche--welcome readers of Michelle, Allahpundit and Capt. Ed! Given Hot Air's multimedia theme, click here to check out my various recent videos.

England's leftwing New Statesman somehow manages to stumble into an interesting take on a surprisingly old topic, in a post titled, “Deviance For Its Own Sake Is Reactionary, Not Rebellious”, complete with a horrific photo of the pierced and inked torso of a fella who looks like he escaped from a Theodore Dalrymple cover:

The ultimate critical virtue, agree many academics, is transgression - social, sexual and political. Theorists such as Judith Butler and Michel Foucault have contributed to a left-wing discourse in which the celebration of deviance has taken over from serious attempts to describe or improve the lot of the oppressed. Scholarly papers extolling the subversive energies cunningly hidden in literary texts or embodied in practices such as body modification, transvestism and every possible sexual perversion (as catalogued by the sainted Georges Bataille) are paying, albeit indirectly, for mortgages in the Home Counties and second homes in France. As often as not, the standard-issue tweed jacket conceals a vigorous champion of polymorphous perversity.

In many ways, this is one of the ambiguous legacies of 1968. Thinkers such as R D Laing and Herbert Marcuse supposed there was a close link between psychic, sexual and political liberation, and prescribed a heady combination of psychedelic drugs, free love and marching. Smashing fun, obviously, but that this recipe is still considered even vaguely plausible as a path to liberation must be because behind the hoopla there was a serious political message.

Yet the Sixties failed to deliver the political and sexual utopia they promised. Social inequality has got worse, and the Aids virus cruelly capped a sexual revolution based on promiscuity and the dissolution of the nuclear family. The current trend retains the form but not the content of the rebellion of 1968, as if rule-breaking were progressive in itself. But Jack the Ripper, Osama Bin Laden and the diehard wing of the fox-hunting lobby are all pretty transgressive, and hardly make comfortable bedfellows for us on the left.

The alternative to transgression need not be a return to the dreaded - and often unfairly caricatured - Victorian morality. Actually, nobody is more dependent on these kinds of rules than the person who lives by breaking them, as Bataille himself realised, opposing the sexual revolution for this reason. And there are cases in oppressive societies where contravening laws and conventions is not just worthwhile, but the duty of the responsible citizen. But this is transgression as a means, and not an end in itself.

Those who dissent from the critical orthodoxy are labelled "conservative", as if being uninterested in cyborgs, pornography and vampirism were tantamount to a betrayal of socialist principles. Yet writers such as Terry Eagleton - a Marxist who bemoaned the ubiquity of PhD theses on "the literature of latex or the political implications of navel piercing" - or Ashley Tau chert, a feminist whose important new book, Against Transgression (Blackwell), debunks many of the myths around the subject, can hardly be described as figures of the right.

As Eagleton and Tauchert both argue, there is something narcissistic and deeply conservative about revelling in transgression. In Tauchert's words, to do so is "reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling".

Aleister Crowley & co. romped through the latter half of the 19th century and the pre-Second World War period of the 20th century with their "sex magick" rituals. Which is right around the time that all of the rules of the more transgressive examples of "modern" art were codified, and haven't been updated since.

Related thoughts here.

(H/T: OJ)

Two guesses as to how this video ends:

(Back story here; lots more fun with Winnie and friends, here. And many more videos, here.)

Related: The original Dukakis in the tank ad from 1988 can be found here--judging by the nuanced headline written by the person who uploaded it, I don't think he was a fan of the ad's message.

Back in 2005, Howard Dean told the late Tim Russert, "I will use whatever position I have in order to root out hypocrisy." As the above clip illustrates, Dean's got his work cut out for him, particularly in his own party and its media.

Over at NRO's Media Blog, Stephen Spruiell explores the New Yorker's recent profile of Keith Olbermann:

I find it amusing that magazines like the New Yorker are just now figuring out that Olbermann is a lunatic. Alternatively, maybe they just found it harder to ignore once Olby started attacking Hillary Clinton with the same frothing intensity he usually reserved for Republicans. Here's Phil Griffin, the senior vice-president in charge of MSNBC, telling Boyer what that was like from his perspective:

But, just as Obama must work to win Clinton supporters for the fall campaign, Phil Griffin has to repair a fractured audience base, a portion of which saw sexism in his network’s Clinton coverage and vowed to boycott MSNBC. Griffin knows that some of that anger is aimed at his star anchor. “It was, like, you meet a guy and you fall in love with him, and he’s funny and he’s clever and he’s witty, and he’s all these great things,” Griffin said of the relationship between Olbermann and the Clinton supporters among his viewers. “And then you commit yourself to him, and he turns out to be a jerk and difficult and brutal. And that is how the Hillary viewers see him. It’s true. But I do think they’re going to come back. There’s nowhere else to go.”

The New Yorker piece leaves you with the distinct impression that Griffin isn't just talking about Hillary supporters here. Olbermann's show is the only program on MSNBC that doesn't routinely get slaughtered by Fox News and CNN. Where else is Griffin going to go?

Meanwhile, as Larry Elder notes, "If 'The Media' Dislike Hillary, How Do They Feel About Those ----- Republicans?"

As Kyle Smith notes:

The indefatigable mystery movie blogger Dirty Harry has broken with the right-leaning site Libertas, where he posted tirelessly and well, and struck out on his own. Lend him your eyeballs at his personal site, DirtyHarrysPlace.com. Good luck, DH.

Absolutely--and as Kyle notes, definitely stop by Harry's Website. It's Magnum Force! (Sorry.)

Incidentally, Jason Apuzzo and Govindini Murty, the founders of Libertas are back posting there; as several commenters have noted, no idea why the split occurred, but it could be a win-win for the Blogosphere, if both sites continue to crank out great posts.

If you missed it on XM, the latest edition of PJM Political is now online, featuring extended interviews with Jonah Goldberg and Kathy Shaidle on Canada's Thought Police, plus Michael Silence on AP's dunning notices to the Blogosphere, and Andrew Breitbart on the untimely passing of Tim Russert.

Plus James Lileks and Bill Bradley!

To paraphrase Anthony Burgess, old age makes a far better go of it than youth, at least when it comes to the White House.

Recently, I linked to Jack Shafer's article in Slate, declaring Advantage: Michael Crichton:

In 1993, novelist Michael Crichton riled the news business with a Wired magazine essay titled "Mediasaurus," in which he prophesied the death of the mass media--specifically the New York Times and the commercial networks. "Vanished, without a trace," he wrote.

The mediasaurs had about a decade to live, he wrote, before technological advances--"artificial intelligence agents roaming the databases, downloading stuff I am interested in, and assembling for me a front page"--swept them under. Shedding no tears, Crichton wrote that the shoddy mass media deserved its deadly fate.

"[T]he American media produce a product of very poor quality," he lectured. "Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it's sold without warranty. It's flashy but it's basically junk."

* * *

As we pass his prediction's 15-year anniversary, I've got to declare advantage Crichton. Rot afflicts the newspaper industry, which is shedding staff, circulation, and revenues. It's gotten so bad in newspaperville that some people want Google to buy the Times and run it as a charity! Evening news viewership continues to evaporate, and while the mass media aren't going extinct tomorrow, Crichton's original observations about the media future now ring more true than false. Ask any journalist.

Ever since dreaming up the "Silicon Graffiti" series last year, I had wanted to do a segment on Alvin & Heidi Toffler's "Third Wave" thesis; particularly since I had taped their segment on C-Span's Booknotes program in 1995. As I attempt to illustrate in the above video, the clashing of a Second Wave, industrial-era institution like Big Media with the Blogosphere, a purely Third Wave phenomenon, is one of the reasons why Old Media are slowly going the way the dinosaurs (and this is but one of many death rattles).

Fortunately, as I noted in an earlier segment, they've already built their own Jurassic Park!

(And speaking of earlier segments, click here for older editions of the show.)

Back in October of 2003, Howard Dean boldly went where no presidential candidate had gone before:

Dean declared himself a "metrosexual," the buzz phrase for straight men in touch with their feminine sides, as he touted his accomplishments in "equal justice" for gay and lesbian couples.

But then he waffled.

"I'm a square," Dean declared, after professing his metrosexuality to a Boulder breakfast audience with an anecdote about being called handsome by a gay man. "I like (rapper) Wyclef Jean and everybody thinks I'm very hip, but I am really a square, as my kids will tell you. I don't even get to watch television. I've heard the term (metrosexual), but I don't know what it means."

Perhaps it means this:

"In many ways, he really will be the first woman president," Megan Beyer of Virginia, a charter member of Women for Obama, told reporters. An op-ed essay in The New York Post headlined "Bam: Our 1st Woman Prez?" came to a similar conclusion, if a tad more snidely: "Those shots of Barack and Michelle sitting with Oprah on stools had the feel of a smart, all-women talk panel."

No wonder Hillary's narrative never gained traction in the Democratic primaries!

(Incidentally, the author of the piece is feminist icon Susan Faludi. Was she a Hillary backer in the primaries? Because that's quite a poison pill she's dropped into Obama's lap if that "he really will be the first woman president" line she quotes goes viral in the general election.)

Or Fox, to be specific--Keith Olbermann trashes Fox's entire Monday morning coverage of Tim Russert's death, because of remarks made (quite accurately, from our perspective) by one guest, Andrew Breitbart:

The final segment included Breitbart as a guest. "He was the last of an old breed of journalists who came from the Democratic party who felt incumbent of them to be fair to both sides," he said of Russert, although acknowledging Russert was a liberal. Kilmeade and Breitbart discussed some possible options, and Breitbart called out Matthews and Olbermann by name for a "leftward lurch." Then, Breitbart described how Matthews brought up the Iraq war in his initial tribute to Russert, calling it "classless."

Fast forward to Countdown at 8:45pmET last night on MSNBC. Olbermann gave the "Worst Person in the World," award to Fox & Friends. He didn't mention what segment of Fox & Friends he is referring to, or quote any part of what was said, but he seems to take offense to the Breitbart interview.

"You want to do a segment dismissing the late Tim Russert as a member of the liberal media?" he said. "You want to continue to feed the delusions of your viewers that the failures of their lives are the fault of somebody else, like TV news, and not their own responsibility?"

This from a man whose entire Joe Pyne meets Howard Beale routine is built on whipping up a frenzy amongst a couple of hundred thousand hardcore lefties whose entire lives revolve around BDS. (And yet, sometimes even they see through Keith's shtick.)

Andrew of course, runs the great Breitbart.com news aggregation site, and its affiliated Breitbart.tv video aggregation site (and full disclosure, we've met and interviewed all of the players there on several occasions). Between his affiliations with Matt Drudge and the Huffington Post, he's building the successors to a very shopworn legacy media. As Michael Crichton noted 15 years ago:

The American media produce a product of very poor quality," he lectured. "Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it's sold without warranty. It's flashy but it's basically junk.

Much more on that topic in a bit.

Meanwhile, this: "Brokaw says he sometimes feels that he has been cast in the role of hall monitor at NBC News; if so, his charges have kept him busy." Heh.

Remember when television news anchors weren't being compared to unruly high school brats? Yes, I can too, but it's a period of time increasingly in the rearview mirror.

From Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five:

'How-how does the Universe end?' said Billy.

'We blow it up, experimenting with new fuels for our flying
saucers. A Tralfamadorian test pilot presses a starter button, and the
whole Universe disappears.' So it goes.

``If You know this," said Billy, 'isn't there some way you can
prevent it? Can't you keep the pilot from pressing the button?'

``He has always pressed it, and he always will. We always let him
and we always will let him. The moment is structured that way.'

"Alan Boyle reports on litigation over the Large Hadron Collider, and claims that it will bring about the end of the world universe."

TigerHawk notes:

The flooding in eastern Iowa has reached the point of catastrophe. Towns are overwhelmed, businesses destroyed, and crops are gone. A fifth of the corn and soybeans are gone. Fox News is calling it "Iowa's Katrina." Here is a gallery of aerial photographs at the web site of the newspaper I used to deliver every afternoon, the Iowa City Press-Citizen.

The thing is, though, the people of eastern Iowa seem to be stepping up in the Iowa stubborn way. I have seen any number of man-on-the-street interviews, and nobody is complaining. They all seem to be working to solve their problem, which is not surprising because Iowans do not complain about tragedy. They complain about hot weather and dry weather, but not tragedy. And I have looked for reports of looting and come up empty so far.

Katrina has become a metaphor for many things beyond natural disaster, including governmental and individual incompetence (depending on your point of view). In Iowa there is a 500 year flood, but the people are not paralyzed, whining, or looting. There will be no massive relief effort from around the world, and nobody will step up to help Iowans except for other Iowans. Yet years from now, there will be no Iowans still in FEMA camps.

Meanwhile, Iowa-based LibertyPundit has asked for your help; if you can hit his tip jar, please do so.

"Obama couldn’t have picked a better way to offend the world’s 325 million Arabs and 1.5 billion Muslims."

(Meanwhile, consider the subtle porcine implications of this affiliation...)

No doubt, particularly given who the potential replacements are.

In the last couple of years, NBC has really been letting its bias show, and of course, MSNBC makes no secret of its tilt. The near-simultaneous exits from the nightly news (admittedly for very different reasons) by Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather marked the effective end of the networks' evening news shows as any sort of cultural force. Similarly, you could make a pretty good case that Russert's death signals the end of the MSM having even a veneer of objectivity, bringing that eighty year experiment to its logical conclusion.

Elsewhere, Jack Shafer explores the inevitable.

The Australian reports:

AN Italian man has been arrested for allegedly kidnapping his ex-girlfriend and forcing her to iron his clothes and wash his dishes.

The 43-year-old man allegedly dragged the woman out of a pub in the port city of Genoa, shoved her into a car and took her to his home where he made her iron and wash dishes after threatening her, police said.

Police were called by a friend of the woman who was with her at the pub.

The man, who was apparently furious at his ex-girlfriend for leaving him, was arrested on charges of kidnapping, police said.

Surveillance tapes recovered here.

Glenn Reynolds excerpts this passage by John Hinderaker of Power Line on Eric Holder, who's been tasked by the Obama campaign to the help in their veep search:

Holder is a legitimate target because of the Rich affair, I guess, but frankly I have little or no interest in who helps Obama choose a V-P. What bothers me most about these battles is the implicit assumption by some that just about any involvement in the business world is somehow suspect. . . . This is frankly stupid. Covington & Burling and O'Melveny & Myers are top-notch law firms that have represented a vast array of clients. The idea that there is something wrong with associations with companies like UBS, Exxon Mobil and Hewlitt Packard is absurd. If any connection with a top law firm or a large corporation is somehow taken as a black mark, pretty soon those who advise our Presidential candidates, or serve in their administrations, will be as inexperienced as, say, Barack Obama himself. That would be a sad outcome.

Indeed^TM, as Glenn would say; we should be happy that people are still willing to ride the train into Manhattan and other major cities every day, even if their candidate considers it a scary, going through the motions existence, while his wife is advising her husbands' supporters, "Don’t go into corporate America."

Or represent them in court, apparently.

As I wrote last week at the tail end of a post on Hillary's swan song:

Meanwhile, Larry Johnson feverishly awaits The Doomsday Machine--I'm sure it's being assembled, deep underground in this long secluded vault.

If you follow the links, it's obvious that Johnson is a man of the left, a Hillary campaign supporter, and as Michelle Malkin writes:

Many readers are wondering why I have not written a single word about the rumored Michelle Obama “whitey” video.

Simple: Larry Johnson, the main source of the rumors, is not, not, not to be trusted.

And these days, neither is much of the MSM, which is attempting to claim that the origin of Johnson's smear against Michelle Obama is not Johnson, but the conservative Blogosphere.

So who's going to be the first in the legacy media to walk that one back? ABC News, Bob Beckel, Time, AP, The Guardian or the Gray Lady?

England's Observer interviews President Bush in the midst of his European tour:

He remained, he said, convinced that Iraq, and the world, was a better place without Saddam Hussein. And he said that while 'Presidents don't get to do re-dos' on issues such as Saddam's lack of weapons of mass destruction, there was one lesson from the run-up to the Iraq war that he felt was hugely relevant to the standoff in Iran.

'We didn't realise, nor did anyone else,' Bush said, 'that Saddam Hussein felt like he needed to play like he had weapons of mass destruction. It may have been, however, that in his mind all this was just a bluff... that the world wasn't serious.'

It's not the first time we've called a fascistic madman's bluff, of course.

As Tom Maguire notes, "Barack Obama channels his inner Sean Connery as he describes his approach to the upcoming campaign":

Barack Obama is warning supporters that the general election fight between him and John McCain may get ugly, but the Illinois senator is vowing not to back down.

"If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun," Obama said at a fundraiser in Philadelphia Friday, according to pool reports.

Maybe he could borrow this one.

(By the way, Obama does know that all of the gunfire in The Untouchables is just pretend, right?)

The Nashville Post's "Post Politics" blog notes that "Harold Ford, Jr. Throws Former Campaign Manager Under The Bus":

It was a long curious day for the Tennessee Democratic party yesterday. Divisions in the party were exacerbated when John Rodgers of the Nashville City Paper reported the words of Tennessee Democratic Party state executive committee member Fred Hobbs on Barack Obama:

“I don’t exactly approve of a lot of the things he stands for and I’m not sure we know enough about him,” Hobbs said when asked why he thought Davis wasn’t endorsing Obama. “He’s got some bad connections, and he may be terrorist connected for all I can tell. It sounds kind of like he may be.”

Adding insult to injury, Beecher Frasier, Chief of Staff to Democratic Congressman Lincoln Davis of Tennessee’s rural and conservative 4th District, was portrayed in the same article as saying he didn’t know for sure if Obama was “terrorist connected” but assumes he’s not.

The Tennessee Democratic Party almost immediately sent out a release rebuking Hobbs. Beecher Frasier, later in the day, released a statement setting the record straight asserting that “no one in their right mind, including me, believes Senator Obama has ties to terrorism.”

William Ayers could not be reached for comment.

Speaking of conspiracy junkies, here's one closer to home:

Asked what he thinks of McCain, Vidal calls him a “disaster,” then tells Deborah Solomon, “Who started this rumor that he was a war hero? Where does that come from, aside from himself? About his suffering in the prison war camp?”

Solomon replies: “Everyone knows he was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.” To which Vidal responds: “That’s what he tells us.”

All merely a part of the master plan by the "fascist government ...which controls the media."

(And yet somehow, as the above interview with Deborah Solomon of the New York Times illustrates, it keeps quoting and publishing him without reprisal. Go figure.)

Iranian TV explores Hidden Zionist Themes in...

wait for it...

Chicken Run.

No really! (I wonder if anybody told Mel Gibson?) It's a bit like watching the Soviets in the mid-1960s complaining how decadent the West had become because they listened to the Beatles and Herman's Hermits. And incidentally, can you say projection, boys and girls?

(Via a post at Free Mark Steyn which looks at the insanity of conspiracy theories through the ages; as you may have already seen, we recently made a quick romp through their last fifty years in video form, here.)

Glenn Reynolds quotes Gregg Easterbrook:

Democratic attacks on Mr. McCain and Republican attacks on Mr. Obama both seek to punish impermissibly positive thoughts. At a time when there exists a sense of crisis over the economy, fuel prices and many other issues, this reinforces the odd, two realities of life in the United States today: The way we are, and the way we think we are. The way we are could use some work, but overall, is pretty good. The way we think we are is terrible, horrible, awful. Possibly worse.

Well, yeah. Check out this recent doomsday riff from David Letterman, who, during the 1980s, despite the equally eeeeevil Reagan being in charge was far too cool and ironic to be this morose about life:

Guys talking about the President really can't do anything about the economy. I don't know if that's true or not, but let's give them that one, let's just say “okay, the President can't do anything about the economy.” Everything else has gone so lousy in the last eight years. I mean – and I'm a guy who doesn't pay attention to much, as long as I got wresting and a TV dinner I'm fine – but even I am perceiving now that things are horrible in ways they shouldn't be horrible. Now, we're not going to impeach the guy. Could we get our money back? Honest to God, what, I mean [audience applause], just at least something.

Dave's clinging bitterness is enough to make you change the channel...And if it's to ABC, you're confronted with more doomsday, as James Lileks notes:

"Are we living in the last century of our civilization? Is it possible that all of our technology, knowledge and wealth cannot save us from ourselves? Could our society actually be heading towards collapse?

"According to many of the world's top scientists, the answer is yes, unless we take action now."

They’re asking for readers to submit their own dystopian nightmares.

What is it with the pessimism of the overclass? If it wasn’t for doom and gloom, they wouldn’t have a reason to live. The latest example comes from ABC News, and suggests that this century may be the last one for civilization. Who says? Scientists! Ah, well, if it’s scientists, we’d best pay heed. Or perhaps you disagree; the century’s still fresh and young. It still has that new century smell. Warranty’s good for another few years, and besides, we haven’t dumped the trunk-junk accumulated in the previous century. We’ll figure something out. We always do.

But you don’t get publicity by suggesting this century might be better than its predecessor, or by asking people to envision how cool the future might be. There are dozens of websites and Flickr sets devoted to retrofuturism, to the art of describing what things might be like. If you grew up in the 60s, you’ll remember all the paintings of space – useful space full of gleaming silver ships. That all ended with “2001: A Space Odyssey” which suggested that the future of space was long, dull, and lonely, punctuated with homicidal computers, trippy FX and enormous wise space-fetuses. Great film, but from then on, something seemed different about the future. Did we really want to live there?

I'm not sure how much of a role Stanley Kubrick's opus played in causing liberalism's turn towards nihilism, but the timing is certainly right; as I noted a couple of years ago in a post titled, "1969: The Shattering of the Modernist Dream".

So is there reason to be optimistic today? Of course. But just don't expect much help in that department from the media, at least until November. They've got the double-whammy of their own industry in dire straits, and an economy to keep talking down, at least until--somehow, miraculously--it begins to turn on a dime the day after the election. (Provided the appropriate audacity and hope and change occurs, of course.)

Tim Blair quotes British journalist Jonathan Foreman on his nation's industry:

British newspaper writing is famously more vigorous and readable than its American equivalent. But this comes at a price: there’s a good chance that anything you read in a British newspaper isn’t true.

And that never happens in the US!

Seriously though, five years ago, Virginia Postrel pointed out the difference in various nations' journalistic practices:

Each national press corps seems to have its own pathology. For the American press, it's the giant campaign swing, as applicable in military campaigns as in electoral contests. First the front-runner can't lose. Then he's a total disaster. Ditto the U.S. military in Iraq. The audience, reporters seem to believe, will reward drama.

The British press corps serves its market, in turn, by passing on every rumor someone tells a reporter in a bar. The result are lots of juicy stories, some of them true. As a former U.S. news editor told her editors after 9/11, when asked why her paper wasn't getting the great stories in the British press, "They're great stories. But they aren't true."

Then, of course, there are the Arab TV services, with their tabloid penchant for blood, guts, and heavy-handed emotion. They're reminiscent of the old-time U.S. press, when big-city journalism was a new industry.

In other words, before they built the museum and began to call it a day.

Kyle Smith sees dead celluloid, braving M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening--it isn't--so you don't have to.

Apparently of a heart attack at age 58. Details as they emerge at Hot Air.

Brent Bozell, whom Allahpundit notes in the link above is--understatement alert--no fan of the MSM writes:

Whenever I’ve been asked to give examples of a fair, balanced and honest journalist Tim Russert’s name was the first name that came to mind. This was a view shared by everyone and the ultimate testimony to his professionalism. As a moderator he was in a league of his own, always knowing when to speak and when to let his guests do the talking. As an individual he was an absolute class act, and always a gentleman. The world of journalism is vastly diminished today.

A truly class act indeed, the likes of which are now in that much shorter supply at NBC and its affiliated cable networks.

Update: Statement from President Bush:

Laura and I are deeply saddened by the sudden passing of Tim Russert. Those of us who knew and worked with Tim, his many friends, and the millions of Americans who loyally followed his career on the air will all miss him.

As the longest-serving host of the longest-running program in the history of television, he was an institution in both news and politics for more than two decades. Tim was a tough and hardworking newsman. He was always well-informed and thorough in his interviews. And he was as gregarious off the set as he was prepared on it.

Most important, Tim was a proud son and father, and Laura and I offer our deepest sympathies to his wife Maureen, his son Luke, and the entire Russert family. We will keep them in our prayers.

Russert frequently--and jovially--interviewed Rush Limbaugh, particularly at Thanksgiving, demonstrating himself to be one of the few in the MSM comfortable with those across the aisle.

Update: Speaking of being comfortable with the other side, Russert even once all-too-briefly donned a Fox News blazer.

Over at my wife's business law blog, she looks at something called "B Corporations":

A colleague brought the concept of B Corporations to my attention. For those of you not wanting to follow the link, the idea is that corporations should benefit all "stakeholders" and actually society as a whole, not merely shareholders. And a company has been formed to not only provide road maps to being a being a better company, but also to test and approve companies with the B corporation stamp of approval.

Personally, and in the words of some teenager somewhere, this just creeps me out.

I think it's great for corporations to both make money for their shareholders AND contribute to a better society.

But I'm always a little concerned about a small (7 person) group deciding who's creating "benefit for all" and who isn't. I don't think creating benefit is something that can be objectively tested, nor should it be. And without seeing all of the testing criteria for becoming an official B Corporation, I can only guess that the founders ideas of societal benefit are going to flavor the testing criteria.

For example, nuclear power is not terribly PC among certain groups. But it could also be argued that in this day and age, it should be re-visited as a concept. Would a start up devoted to developing small, localized nuclear plants to municipalities pass the B Corporation test? As I said, i don't know, I haven't seen the test. But somehow I'm not sure it would.

Another example pops up on the B Corporation website. They offer a legal road map to becoming a B Corporation. You simply enter your type of entity and your state. I entered C Corporation and California.

I was told I should reincorporate in another state and amazingly enough their attorney will graciously help do so.

Here's what the busy little Bs say:

Your state of incorporation is among 20 states that do NOT currently have corporate statutes that explicitly allow Directors to consider the interests of Stakeholders. A team of attorneys is currently in the process of evaluating case law to determine if there are specific rulings that would support the consideration of the interests of Stakeholders by Directors.

For many prospective B Corporations, reincorporating in a state offering greater protection for B Corporations will be the best option to maximize enforceability. Though more involved than simply amending your articles, reincorporating is also a relatively straight-forward process.

The reincorporation process includes forming a "New" corporation in a stakeholder friendly state, and merging the "Old" corporation into the "New" corporation.

For further information on the status of your state, please contact us at thelab@bcorporation.net or call us at xxx-xxx-xxxx. Our attorney will be happy to speak with you.

What they don't say is that California does not DISALLOW statements of societal benefit. Furthermore, Articles of Incorporation are easily changed, so to say that putting the benefit to stakeholders in the articles ensures that the goals will survive is just incorrect.

Corporations can be encouraged to "do good" without an elitist screening panel. And people, I believe, should make their own decisions as to what sort of doing good they want to support. There are also various ways to "do good" and any group that specifies a corporation: "must amend their corporate governing documents" [emphasis added] is not talking about doing good, but doing good their way.

Hey, it takes a village to bring you the audacity of hope and change.

As spotted by Jim Geraghty, David Mendell in Obama: From Promise to Power writes:

"[Obama] always talked about the New Rochelle train, the trains that took commuters to and from New York City, and he didn't want to be on one of those trains every day," said Jerry Kellman, the community organizer who enticed Obama to Chicago from his Manhattan office job. "The image of a life, not a dynamic life, of going through the motions... that was scary to him."

And as scared as he is about the daily Metro-North commuter train, we know he's not very happy about commuters driving into work.

But Obama's not too crazy about people further out in the exurbs, either, as he mentioned in April when he was talking to, as Jean Kirkpatrick would say, San Francisco Democrats:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them…And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

And then there was this classic bit by Michelle Obama back in February:

“We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we’re asking young people to do,” she tells the women. “Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond.” Faced with that reality, she adds, “many of our bright stars are going into corporate law or hedge-fund management.”

Geez, remember when Democratic presidential candidates and their spouses actually bothered to go through the motions of appearing to support the working man?

Related: "Ludwig von Mises v. Obama??"

In the old days of Hollywood, if a film bombed spectacularly, legend had it that its frames would be cut up to make thousands upon thousands of guitar picks. (Or ukulele picks, in Roger Ebert's vernacular.)

Which would be have been infinitely more humane to all concerned than this attempted method of salvaging a recent celluloid megabomb.

(Via the Vast Manolo Empire.)

"Paco" has long been one of the more prolific commenters at Tim Blair's various blogging locations through the years, and he now also has a blog of his own, appropriately titled Paco Enterprises. Based on this recent post, we certainly applaud his excellent taste in blog linkage.

Back in the summer of 2001, Jonah Goldberg did something that almost no one who utters the acronym ANWR in hushed, reverent tones has actually done. He visited there:

I suspect that the majority of Americans who oppose oil exploration in ANWR would agree with me if they saw it firsthand. Indeed, they would probably agree that if America had to be struck by an asteroid, this would be the ideal impact point. Of course, I am not talking about ANWR's beautiful mountain vistas, the ones cooed over by cable-news hostesses. Not only is that stuff legally protected from oil exploration, it is far, far away from anywhere the oil companies want to drill-i.e., the thousands of football fields' worth of bog and marsh.

Today, he reminds us that it's still waiting to be put to use:

Sen. John McCain said this week he would not drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for the same reason he “would not drill in the Grand Canyon ... I believe this area should be kept pristine.”

Pristine means unspoiled, virginal, in an original state.

One wonders how pristine the Grand Canyon can be if it has roughly 5 million visitors every year, rafting, hiking, picnicking, and riding mules up one side and down the other. Campfires, RVs, and motels that do not conjure the word “virginal” ring around large swaths of it.

This isn’t to say that the Grand Canyon isn’t a beautiful place; it inspires awe among those who visit it. ANWR (pronounced “AN-wahr”) inspires awe almost entirely in those who haven’t been there. It is an environmental Brigadoon or Shangri-La, a fabled land almost no one will ever see. That is its appeal. People like the idea that there are still Edens “out there” even if they will never, ever see them.

Indeed, if Americans could visit the north coast of Alaska, as I have, as easily as they can visit the Grand Canyon, the oil would be flowing by now.

ANWR is roughly the size of South Carolina, and it is spectacular. However, the area where, according to Department of Interior estimates, some 5.7 billion to 16 billion barrels of recoverable oil reside is much smaller and not necessarily as awe-inspiring. It would amount to the size of Dulles airport.

Question for McCain: Has South Carolina been ruined because it has an airport?

Most of the images of the proposed drilling area that people see on the evening news are misleading precisely because they tend to show the glorious parts of ANWR, even though that’s not where the drilling would take place. Even when they position their cameras in the right location, producers tend to point them in the wrong direction. They point them south, toward the Brooks mountain range, rather than north, across the coastal plain where the drilling would be.

As James Lileks notes, who'd have thought that, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, that America would remain in such stasis when it comes to energy independence:

It’s not that we cannot produce any more oil; you suspect that some are motivated by the belief, perverse as it sounds, that we should not. We should not drill 50 miles off shore on the chance someone in Malibu takes a hot-air balloon up 1000 feet and uses a telephoto lens to scan the horizon for oil platforms. Also, there are ecological concerns. (The ocean is a wee place, easily disturbed.) There’s something else that may well be my imagination, but I can’t quite shake the feeling: high gas prices and shortages of oil make some people feel good. This is the way it has to be. Oil is bad. Cars are bad. Cars make suburbs possible. Suburbs are the antithesis of the way we should live, which is stacked upon one another in dense blocks tied together by happy whirring trains. So some guy who drives to work alone has to spend more money for the privilege of being alone in his car listening to hate radio?

Good.

Yes, I know, projection and demonizaton and oversimplification. But this is true: there’s a side of the domestic political structure that opposes expansion of domestic energy production, be it drilling or nukes or more refineries.

And speaking of that "hate radio":

[The MSM] called you the maverick! But guess what? Now you're not a maverick. Why, you're Bush 3! That's like the worst thing a maverick could be called, is Bush 3. Get ready, Senator. This is only the tip of the iceberg of all the ammo they have aimed and trained on you. Here's what I'm hoping, ladies and gentlemen. I'm hoping at some point relatively soon McCain gets ticked off enough about this that he comes to his senses on the issue of energy independence in this country. Do you realize that if you look at any poll out there taken of the American people, they want energy independence? They want drilling for our own energy supplies. They want nuclear. They don't want all of this Kyoto stuff. They don't want taxes to go up. They don't want the price of gas to go up even a penny by 60 some odd percent, if the purpose of the increase is to fight global warming. They want cheaper gasoline, and they know how to get it. This is an issue. It is an issue made to order.
Now, McCain has changed his mind on a couple things. This would be a goody. This would be a huge one. Somebody could get to Senator McCain and say, Senator, you want to win this election? You want to contrast who you are with Senator Obama and the leftists in the Democrat Party? Here's your issue. "Drill here. Drill now. Energy independence." Start now and get on this, and I'm telling you, he would see a miraculous thing happen in his campaign. But I don't know who can tell him these things. It's just a sitting duck.

And it's one that another senator, who may be looking to overcome what Ace accurately described as a Kinsley-esque gaffe of the first order might also be looking to exploit if he wanted to (a) get to the right of McCain on one key issue very quickly, JFK-style (Mr. President, we cannot afford a domestic oil gap!), and (b) simultaneously generate a pretty nifty Sister Souljah moment with his enviro-stasis base.

Will it happen? Probably not, but the first man who heads north to Alaska and hops on a podium in front of a phalanx of legacy journalists and an armada of cable and network cameramen in the middle of that Vast Pestilential Wasteland and does an about-face on the issue has a damn good chance of winning it all in November.*

Who wants it bad enough that he's actually willing to accede to the wishes of the American public?

Read More »

Quick--who wrote this?

Even though Vietnam was a divisive war that is not yet resolved in the national consciousness, Mr. McCain can appeal to all sides. He is an inspiration to many veterans and conservatives [...] At the same time, many who opposed the war can nonetheless support the man because of his personal ordeal ...

This broad appeal is unique, especially because it is based on suffering rather than concrete battlefield accomplishments. [...] But a closer look brings deeper insight into why most Americans have come to hold this defining experience in such great esteem. [...]

But if there is insight into Mr. McCain's leadership style, it is with the question of how he worked to normalize relations with Vietnam. To his credit, the man who is so often criticized by opponents for divisiveness succeeded in working across the widest imaginable spectrum of interests in order to bring the Vietnam War and its aftermath to a full resolution. At the same time, as in his dealings with other issues, like campaign finance reform, his relentless pursuit of a solution to the normalization question and the singularity of his approach left a trail of bruised egos and avowed revenge seekers. [...]

And he created a perception in some circles that he would reach over allies to work with enemies by allying himself to Senator John Kerry, who once headed Vietnam Veterans Against the War, as well as providing political cover for President Clinton when normalization was announced.

In fact, these actions may be one reason for the rather surprising statistic that shows George W. Bush running as well among veterans as Mr. McCain himself. But the fact is, Mr. McCain succeeded, and he took the country with him. Yes, he used his prisoner of war credentials to their full impact. Certainly he could have been smarter and more respectful of the travails of others, and more conscious of buttressing his supporters as he reached out to his adversaries. But he took on the most contentious diplomatic issue of our time and pursued it to a satisfactory conclusion.

Resolving this issue may not show John McCain's ability to unite disparate groups, but it is certainly testimony to his ability to lead.

Read More »

England's Independent looks at the classic portrait photography of movie starlets of the 1930s by MGM staff photographer George Hurrell, a topic Virginia Postrel previously explored via a photo essay in Slate three years ago. The Independent's Hannah Duguid writes:

It's the stuff of fantasy: a photograph of Joan Crawford with liquid eyes and flawless skin, her strong bone structure casting sculptural shadows across her face. There is no context, no setting: it is simply a close-up of her perfectly beautiful face. Crawford's troubled character is not apparent in these photographs, nor is her battle with alcohol; the ravages of life are painted over with clever lighting and a thick concealer.

The photograph was taken by George Hurrell, head of portrait photography at MGM Studios in 1930. In those days, Hollywood studios employed full-time photographers who were responsible for creating a star's image. Those were the days of high glamour, when young women became sophisticated princesses, their allure heightened by their unattainability. Hurrell also moulded the images of Jean Harlow, Bette Davis and Rita Hayworth. He spent hours with his subjects, perfecting their look. Their public persona was a creation, a brand, an image on to which people could project their fantasies and desires. They were not meant to reflect reality, or reveal anything about the women's real character – it was all made up.

Yet, as time progressed, audiences and photographers tired of these images of idealised beauty. There was a place for pure glamour in fashion and society magazines, but now people wanted something more real, they wanted to know who their stars really were.

The modern-day implications of that last sentence bring to mind H.L. Mencken's classic line, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard."

Yesterday, I wrote, "Congressman Paul Kanjorski (D-PA) gets busted by the Internet Immortality Thesis". The Scranton's Times-Tribune agrees:

U.S. Rep. Paul E. Kanjorski is getting a first-hand lesson in the hazards of the digital age.

For the second time in a month, a clip on the wildly popular video-posting Web site, YouTube, is earning him election-year attention he’d probably rather avoid.

The clip shows him apparently pushing down on the video camera of a man trying to question him about the Iraq war.

The man’s identity, known on YouTube as truthaboutkanjo, remains unknown. An attempt to reach him Wednesday via YouTube’s message system proved unsuccessful.

“I may have overreacted when this person stuck a camera in my face. But I feel like it was one of those ‘gotcha’ moments in politics, and my comments were misrepresented,” Mr. Kanjorski, D-Nanticoke, said in a statement.

I don't know--I'd say the congressman was misrepresented pretty accurately, myself.

"However you feel about her politics, I feel that Sen. Clinton received some of the most unfair, hostile coverage I've ever seen."

--Katie Couric, an expert on the topic.

Congressman Paul Kanjorski (D-PA) gets busted by the Internet Immortality Thesis:

(Via Freedom's Watch; a related look at Kanjorski's efforts to build a bridge to the 1930s, here.)

Just as the San Francisco Chronicle op-ed writer who dubbed him a "Lightworker" also previous admitted (and he's not the only media figure to do so), Obama is also for higher gas prices. He just wishes they arrived more slowly than the Pelosi Premium did.

As John Steele Gordon noted in Commentary a few days ago, "This would seem to be an opening the size of the Grand Canyon for McCain, and Republican candidates for Congress, to exploit this year."

The latter group already has. McCain? Don't bet on it, sadly.

Update: More more at Ace of Spades.

More: Mike Bloomberg, Manhattan's favorite nanny who has been named as a potential veep to both candidates, is also cool with higher gas prices. Note this bit of Orwellian doubletalk from the mayor and his aide:

"Reducing taxes on energy consumption is the wrong way to go. We should be raising taxes on energy consumption dramatically because it's the only way you're going to force people to use less."

An aide said Bloomberg's comments shouldn't be taken as "a call to action to increase gas taxes," which would be politically explosive.

On the other hand, WWCD?

Robophobia--it's not just for humans, anymore!

Tim Graham spots the Prince of Darkness on The O'Reilly Factor:

O’Reilly was amazed and mentioned how Novak recounts his early days in his memoir Prince of Darkness. But a bigger infatuation than with JFK?

Novak said "I believe it is. It is just such a feel-good atmosphere of my colleagues, my senior colleagues, people I’ve known for years. And I get it from some of the young people, too. They just feel this is such a wonderful thing, in the first place to have an African-American candidate, nominee, but also one that makes them feel so wonderful."

O’Reilly conceded that Obama was tremendously charismatic and could have his own TV show, but the he also makes them feel wonderful because they hate Bush and hate conservatives.

Novak replied with some amusement: "And then the other interesting thing about the media is that they have dropped, Bill, they have dropped John McCain like an old girlfriend. I mean, I remember how much -- some of the very same people who really felt that he was something new, something different in the year 2000 when he ran against Bush. They have no use for him now. They say well, he is not the same guy. He is the same guy! He is exactly the same. Same person but it's a different circumstance. He is not running against Bush. He is running against Obama."

As I've written before, hopefully McCain saw this coming.

Dianne Feinstein, bold senatorial leadership at work! Jonah Goldberg writes:

As befits a government-run commissary, the Senate cafeteria has a decidedly Soviet attitude toward variety. It has averaged only two new menu items a year over the last decade. The food is so bad, every lunch hour Senate staffers rush to the House side of the Capitol like starving New Yorkers of the future storming the last Soylent Green vendor.

According to auditors, the chain of restaurants run by the Senate food service, including the snooty Senate Dining Room, has almost never been in the black. It’s lost more than $18 million since 1993 and has dropped about $2 million this year alone. If the food service doesn’t get an emergency bridge loan of a quarter-million dollars, it won’t be able to make payroll.

So how will the Senate fix the problem? Well, with California Sen. Dianne Feinstein taking the lead, the Democrats — that’s right, the Democrats — have called a classic Republican play: Privatize it.

The House of Representatives made the switch in the 1980s, and its food service is now better. And profitable: The House has made $1.2 million in commissions since 2003. True to the Founders’ vision of the Senate as the more slow-moving branch of government, the Senate has taken 20 years to follow suit.

This was a painful decision for many Democrats who believe that privatization cannot be justified simply because it delivers better service and higher quality for less money. “What about the workers?” they cried. Apparently, some Democrats feel that the top priority in the restaurant business is to generate paychecks for people who are bad at their jobs.

Feinstein, head of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, was forced to deal with reality. “It’s cratering,” the Washington Post quoted Feinstein as saying. “Candidly, I don’t think the taxpayers should be subsidizing something that doesn’t need to be. There are parts of government that can be run like a business and should be run like businesses.”

Yes, yes, go on, Dianne. Run with that thought. Explore it, as the therapists say.

Meanwhile, while Dianne has privatized the nation's most exclusive restaurant, John McCain has bigger fish to fry, Megan McArdle writes:

The campaign policy blogging starts now: apparently, McCain wants to shut down Amtrak. Liberals are predictibly (and understandably) outraged. I'm not sure, however, that this is such a terrible idea, even environmentally. The lines that actually run at a profit--those in the Virginia-Massachussetts corridor--would still be profitable, and presumably operated by some private company. The other lines are a mixed bag, environmentally; it isn't really good for the environment to run trains at low capacity. And the federal government, because of the EIS process, other procedural barriers, and a great deal of logrolling, has so far not succeeded in making sensible upgrades to the system. The Acela was announced in 1994, actually went live six years later despite the really rather minor infrastructure improvements required, and at lavish expense now gets passengers to Boston one half-hour quicker in slightly comfier seats.

Moreover, if oil prices stay high, the math changes substantially for passenger rail, making new routes more profitable. People will probably never take the train en masse from New York to Los Angeles, but a direct train from New York to Chicago could start looking good, particularly when you factor in the drive to out-of-the way airports, delays, and time spent removing your shoes in security lines.

America's freight rail system, while it needs a lot of work, is world-class. Its passenger rail should be too. But it's so far proven pretty much impossible for the government to make it that way--and not merely because we don't have enough liberal politicians who like rail. Most politicians like rail. But they like a lot of other things better, like getting re-elected.

It will never happen (if the Congressional GOP couldn't privatize PBS at the height of their powers in the mid-'90s, I doubt this will), but McCain's heart, or at least his campaign rhetoric, is certainly in the right place.

The great Paul Newman, 83, apparently has terminal lung cancer:

Shawn Levy, an American film critic who has been writing a biography of the actor, said in a post on his blog Tuesday that Newman’s “next birthday is in January, and we can only hope he’ll make it. I suspect I’ll be writing an obituary before I hold a copy of my book in my hand.”

As Libertas notes, "Sadly, Newman’s not denying the story", and has turned over ownership of his Newman’s Own food products line to charity.

“[Inside the windowless courtroom] there’s no link with the outside world except a clock, which is stuck at 8:00. And that’s government bureaucracy for you. You know, in British Columbia, it claims to be able to eradicate hate, but it can’t get someone in to restart the clock.”

--Mark Steyn on The Hugh Hewitt Show, as quoted by Kathy Shaidle, who goes through the looking glass of his Kafkaesque Show Trial at Pajamas Media.

Meanwhile, reader Joseph Somsel emails:

Seems to me that some of the defendants from the Canadian Human Rights Commission trials could legitimately seek asylum in the US as victims of persecution.

I wonder if Canada's chilling of free speech makes it a more or less desirable destination for leftwing Americans?

The Exurban League notes:

I want to prepare all conservatives for an ugly, but unavoidable fact. From here on out, every criticism you make about Obama will be called racist by someone, somewhere. It could be a politician, a reporter, or a commenter on a blog, but steel yourself for this all-too-convenient smear.

As Glenn Reynolds recently noted, "I can think of no better reason to vote against Obama than the prospect of an administration where any criticism of the President is treated as racism."

But hey, this is just the legacy media trying to compensate for being so overtly sexist and anti-women. Just ask any Hillary voter.

In London's Telegraph, Janet Daley explores a few of England's myriad woes (the same sort of territory that Theodore Dalrymple has explored in depth), before concluding, "What we are living through is nothing other than the death throes of 20th-century ideology: the idea that the state is the only repository of civic virtue and moral authority":

The notion that Big Government (whether in the central or the local form) could solve all social problems, and through its interventions achieve absolute justice and harmony, is collapsing. And in its last moments, in its disbelief and agony at its own failure, it is lashing out in every direction: if the earlier measures haven't dealt with crime/public disorder/anti-social behaviour/under-performing hospitals/insufficient recycling, we must add yet more layers of official interference.

If government fails to achieve its objectives, it must be because it isn't doing enough, isn't being sufficiently pro-active - so let's pass another law, bring in a further layer of intrusion, take away another dimension of personal responsibility from community life.

But somehow, everything that government does makes things worse: leads to more perverse consequences and unforeseen complications. And the panic increases and the desperation grows and we get yet more laws and rules and targets and misapplied regulations.

Because they have taken so much power over our lives, we feel free to blame the governing classes for everything that goes wrong. And they feel they must address our every difficulty because everything is their fault. (Indeed, their interventions so frequently exacerbate our problems that we are actually quite right to blame them much of the time.)

When there is a real crisis - not just dog poo or over-loaded wheelie bins - the solution always follows the same formula: take more power away from the people.

For example, the price of home-heating is now a serious problem, so what does the Government suggest? A return to zero VAT for heating fuel, which would lower the price instantly and significantly for everyone? Nope. What they propose is a hugely intrusive programme (at present illegal under data protection laws) in which private financial information about the poor would be handed to power companies, in the hope that the disadvantaged might be given more leeway in paying their bills.

So somewhere in the corridors of Whitehall, someone could have the power to decide which of us is deserving enough to have the confidential details of our hardship handed over to some anonymous manager at British Gas or Npower for their compassionate consideration. (Why not medical records, too? Surely the chronic sick could be given heating privileges?)

This madness is not all Gordon Brown's fault. He just happens to be the man presiding over the final moments of a political philosophy that has reached a dead end.

As Robert Conquest recently wrote, in the Soviet Union's last decade of existence, "came the realization by some in Moscow that the whole regime had become nonviable economically, ecologically, intellectually— and even militarily—largely because of its rejection of reality." Will the Anglosphere's left reach a similar tipping point within the foreseeable future?

(Via Theo Spark's Last of the Few. What--doesn't everyone read it for the articles...?)

Washington is likely to be trapped in the 1970s in perpetuity; coming this January, it won't be Welcome Back Clinton, but it may very well be Welcome Back Carter.

Though, as I predicted yesterday (and it wasn't exactly a tough call) McCain reminding voters of the potential of that seventies show isn't sitting well with the chattering class.

Like I said: more, please.

Naturally this had to make James Taranto's Best of the Web Today column: "Scientists find monkeys who know how to fish".

As James writes, "Mike Kinsley, Call Your Office".

Good Morning America's Chris Cuomo equates so-far non-existent recession with the Great Depression, sees rising suicides(!) on the horizon:

Elsewhere in the legacy media, Tom Brokaw talks David Letterman back from his own ledge:

DAVID LETTERMAN: Guys talking about the President really can't do anything about the economy. I don't know if that's true or not, but let's give them that one, let's just say “okay, the President can't do anything about the economy.” Everything else has gone so lousy in the last eight years. I mean – and I'm a guy who doesn't pay attention to much, as long as I got wresting and a TV dinner I'm fine – but even I am perceiving now that things are horrible in ways they shouldn't be horrible. Now, we're not going to impeach the guy. Could we get our money back? Honest to God, what, I mean [audience applause], just at least something.

TOM BROKAW: David, that's why we have elections and we're about to have an election and on January 20th he'll be out of office. In this book, I write about 1968. Let me remind you that forty years ago this year, Doctor King was killed, Bobby Kennedy was killed, we had the Chicago riots, 16,000 people were killed in Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson decided not to run for re-election, the Kerner Commission said we are two societies – one white, one black, separate and unequal – we had urban riots and in the fall we had as cantankerous and as contentious and in many way as mentally violent an election as we've ever had – with George Wallace who was part of it.

So, we've been through these difficult times before and the way you work your way out of them is you get the two parties to nominate their best candidates and then everybody re-enlists as citizens and say to themselves and their family and their friends: “Hey, it's time for us to get involved.” So that's how I feel about it.

Meanwhile, even as "The Economy Is Better Than You Think", "Adam Smith's invisible hand coldly touches its next victim."

And boy, is he in for a shock!

(Sorry, couldn't resist that last link.)

Betsy Newmark points readers towards Mark Hemmingway's column in NRO today:

Mark Hemingway dissects the latest effort by Newsweek to campaign for Obama in their totally unsourced Obama-friendly attempt to show that he shouldn't have any problem with Jewish voters. Newsweek thus continues their trend of pumping for Obama's campaign. If they can't put him on the cover, they'll slant stories inside. As I noted last week, they have put Obama on the cover more than any other subject in the past year. Jim Geraghty notes some more examples that are, as he puts it, allowing Newsweek to give Olbermann a run for his money. US News' James Pethokoukis ridicules their cover this week about how the recession is worse than we think.

For another example, here's a story about the U.S. economy from the latest issue of Newsweek, "Why It's Worse Than You Think." Not a surprising piece, given that the magazine made its recession call back in February, though the economy has stubbornly refused to roll over.

Newsweek is not bothered by such economic technicalities as the fact that we still aren't experiencing a recession according to the data. They'll just tell us we're in a recession and that we should be darned scared about it. Subtext: vote Democratic.

That's also the subtext of these TV network stars here and here.

Jim Geraghty spots some more fun from the folks who put the Koran in the Can, and this is an unintentional riot as well:

"Obama's Official Blog is Boring. McCain's is Enjoyable. Why That's Bad News for the GOP."

I dunno--I find the Indiana Jones-style archaeological explorations of the former pretty fascinating myself.

At the moment, Obama is pivoting towards the center (which for him is admittedly a long, long drive), and attempting to purge the memories of his rhetoric necessary to woo the far left during the primaries, not to mention the memories of his former associates. Fortunately, the Blogosphere doesn't forget.

Elsewhere, Rachel Lucas explores the "Two Minutes Hate: Jew-bashing on the official Obama site."

Finally, this conversation isn't helping Michelle's children.

Related: "Impeachment: Just Do It".

Olbermann ranting last night about President Bush? Try The Atlantic complaining about President Reagan in 1987:

"Nineteen eighty-seven is Year One of the post-Reagan era. The problem is, Ronald Reagan is still in office. The revolutionary regime has outlived the revolution. Reagan himself is a lame duck, his effectiveness depleted and his popularity squandered."

As Noemie Emery did last year, Matt Lewis also reminds us that Big Media hated Reagan then as much as they hate President Bush today. And this was in era when they were the media: no Fox, no Web, no Drudge, no Blogosphere, and Rush was just setting up shop.

Oh wait, not that Jim Johnson, this one:

Barack Obama's choice of Jim Johnson to vet his VP prospects is already embarrassing his campaign, thanks to a WSJ story reporting that Johnson (according to the NY Sun):

Took at least five real estate loans totaling more than $7 million from Countrywide Financial Corp. through an informal program for friends of the company's CEO, Angelo Mozilo. ...

Mozilo and Countrywide were deeply enmeshed in the subprime meltdown, of course, and Mozilo has been denounced by Obama for his business practices and multi-million dollar compensation.

Mickey Kaus asks, "Is Obama really going to let this story drag out all week?"

Are Johnson's allies so powerful he must be protected--the way Rev. Wright was protected, for a time? Why not say "This is not the Jim Johnson I know" and throw him overboard?

Why not? Obama's settling more family business this week than Michael Corleone at the end of the first Godfather movie.

(Although Obama's timeouts seem to be of a far less permanent nature than Michael's.)

John McCain told NBC:

Sen. Obama says that I'm running for a Bush's third terms. It seems to me he's running for Jimmy Carter's second.

I'm glad to hear McCain saying that, as it exploits the huge disparity between the media, who think the Anti-Israeli Carter was something of a Lightworker himself, and the American public, whom very narrowly elected Carter over Gerald Ford in the first presidential election after Watergate, and who then much more decisively sent the 39th resident to an early retirement four years later.

Update: Video found via Allapundit of Hot Air, who asks, "Think we’ll be hearing more of it going forward?"

I think that's a rather reasonable assumption, yes indeed. Although maybe a closer comparison would be that the Lightworker is running not for Jimmy Carter's second term, but for George McGovern's first.

As Jim Geraghty suggested a month ago, John Steele Gordon urges John McCain to exploit the Pelosi Premium--the $4.00 a gallon gasoline price--to his advantage:

This would seem to be an opening the size of the Grand Canyon for McCain, and Republican candidates for Congress, to exploit this year. To be sure, McCain has always opposed drilling in ANWAR, but he can simply say that four-dollar gasoline has changed the situation, showing a flexibility he has not always shown. Then he just hammers the Democrats as the party of four-dollar gasoline in TV ad after TV ad.

Would it work? Well, that ever-reliable barometer of public opinion, the late-night TV talk shows, indicate that it will. Jay Leno recently noted that the Democrats say it would take ten years to get oil from ANWAR. He also noted that ten years ago, Bill Clinton vetoed a Republican bill that would have permitted it, and if he hadn’t, the oil would now be on line and we could sure use it. The audience roared.

Between the flat stock market, the recent rise in unemployment, rising gas prices, and the ever-strangling eco-insanity, GOP congressional candidates ought to be able to easily craft some sort of nationalized message of Hope and Change, highlighting gasoline prices (lower) and stock prices (higher) when they were in office.

Update: Who am I kidding? There's only one man who can restore America's energy independence--if only because there's only one man whose presidential limousine would be a 1972 hemi-powered Dodge Charger with slotted Cragar mags: Vote Burge '08!

Somehow I don't think Oswald Spengler (the one who wasn't a Ghostbuster) quite expected western civilization to enter its death rattles quite like this:

Some of the comments expressed the familiar desire to leave America for Canada. O Canada. Land of sweet reason and freedom.

You mean the place where a Human Rights Commission can haul up anyone for a show trial and cast out the rule of law and fine them for saying things that made people sad, then force them to recant their beliefs in public?

This ruling is just astonishing – a pastor has been barred for life from ever speaking his mind on a particular issue in any form – newspapers, radio, TV, the internet, semaphore signals. I doubt any halfway serious gay person would applaud it (update: proof.) The pastor in the dock said LGBT people “perverse, self-centered and morally deprived,” which seems a rather broad net to cast, no? It’s a self-refuting statement for anyone who knows anyone who’s gay, and if it had been leveled against straights by someone from the ranty fringe of, oh, I don’t know, Leather Bear Kluxers for Zoroaster, I wouldn’t have felt particularly wounded. You could argue with the fellow if you like, but the idea of bringing him up on charges for talking doubleplus ungood harmthink is absurd.

I know some believe that dissent has been crushed and driven to the margins in this country, but try to imagine a government agency charging Rev. Jeremiah Wright with hate speech for a sermon, and forcing him to disavow key elements of his church’s theology. It’s impossible, isn’t it? It would be different if he said those things on the radio, in which case the government agency responsible for determining Fairness would be required to enforce the airing of alternate opinions. And now, for the response to today's sermon.

It’s a messy world full of messy minds and loose tongues. Words can hurt, and we can’t have that.

It's not the only case before the Canadian HRC system, as noted; Mark Steyn and the magazione that runs his work is facing judgment from this pinhead star-chamber as well. But by all means: pop in your copy of "V For Vendetta" and pretend the dark Christian fascists will surge to power any minute now and use the surveillance infrastructure to justify limits on acceptable headgear. Any minute now. Any minute.

As Natalie Solent writes, "Canada is no longer a free country." How long before we can say that about about the rest of the Anglosphere?

Update: Not long indeed: "Great Britain’s Free Speech Breakdown".

"Obama's catch-phrase is 'Change you can believe in.' Maybe it's time to start asking who Obama has in mind when he says 'you.'"

Meanwhile, Noel Sheppard asks--and I think he already knows the answer as well as you and I do--if the MSM will report this story.

As Charles Johnson writes:

If you aren’t familiar with the story of John McCain’s capture and torture by the North Vietnamese, I highly recommend this article at US News, a reprint of McCain’s first-person account originally published in 1973: John McCain, Prisoner of War: A First-Person Account - US News and World Report.

I was generally familiar with what happened to McCain, but have gained an enormous respect for him after reading this article.

Needless to say, RTWT.

In the Washington Post, Ari Fleischer responds to the allegations made by former bungling White House press secretary turned Soros-affiliated stereotypical bungling BushCo critic Scott McClellan that the press, as Fleischer writes, "failed to aggressively question the rationale for war. As someone whose duty it was to assume the position of a human piñata every day in the briefing room, I only wish Scott were right" The whole thing is well worth your time, including the conclusion:

I hope I don't ruin the careers of tough reporters by agreeing that they were tough, but Charlie Gibson and David Gregory are right. The press did ask the hard questions, repeatedly. Based on the CIA's conclusions, many of the president's and my answers turned out to be wrong, but you can't blame the press for either the CIA's reporting or decisions reached by the president. It's important to recognize that regardless of the outcome of the war in Iraq -- an outcome still being written -- the press didn't cause it to happen or otherwise enable it.

Usually, retired press secretaries don't object to a little outbreak of internal press controversy. Sometimes we even enjoy it. But no amount of revisionism should be allowed to erase the historical record on this.

Historical revisionism by the left in the post 9/11 period? That's never happened before!

At Pajamas HQ, Hillary supporter Taylor Marsh performs one of the many postmortems sure to be published in the coming days on her candidate's efforts:

What if “Fighting Hillary” of the last few months had shown up on day one, replacing “inevitable Hillary”?

What if Robin Givhan’s cleavage column had never been written? That’s where it began for me. It was obvious that Hillary was about to get dissected on terms that her male counterparts were not. Happening simultaneously was the back and forth between Clinton and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Eric Edelman with the added gift of him being a former Cheney aide. When she dared to ask if they’d prepared a plan for redeployment, she got back a letter from Edelman stating “premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda.” Secretary Gates stepped in to do damage control, because a senator on the Armed Services Committee asking questions about redeployment plans, even if a woman, isn’t exactly asking for a recipe.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, in an interview with Bill Moyers, called the anti-Clinton media out. There was “the cackle” coverage: “Hens cackle. So do witches.” Pimpgate. The Clinton “nutcracker” sold in CNBC stores in airports. With the only left-leaning prime time news show host Keith Olbermann reduced to becoming the quintessential anti-Edward R. Murrow and a parody of himself as he degenerated into an unhinged special comment screamer. The big blogs got caught up in it and piled on too. Even David Gregory, one of the finest reporters around, reduced himself to doing a piece on his MSNBC show after Obama clinched the nomination that focused on Clinton’s “political obituary.” The first viable female candidate for president, who got more votes than anyone in Democratic Party primary history, was dissected, eviscerated, and humiliated for political sport, then pronounced dead.

Sucks, huh? But that's how Republican presidential candidates have been treated by the TV networks since at least the days of Nixon. Several of them have managed to rise above it since, but it stands out a lot more when the media turns on someone who was once one of their own before This Year's Model arrived in the showrooms.

(Via Instapundit.com)

Update In his "Happy Warrior" column on the backpage of the May 30th National Review (subscription required, but will probably be availably soon for free on Mark's Website), Mark Steyn also notes:

As Lanny Davis conceded to Laura Ingraham re the media’s Obama swoon, she now knows what it feels like to be a Republican.

Meanwhile, Larry Johnson feverishly awaits The Doomsday Machine--I'm sure it's being assembled, deep underground in this long secluded vault.

Going through my archives, I found this post from March 5th of last year, which quoted Richard Baehr of the American Thinker:

If Hillary's campaign collapses, it will be one of the least pretty sights in American political history. This is a woman wound up very tight, and always controlled, but completely unprepared for failure in her Presidential quest.

Given that Obama has come close to pulling even with Hillary already, I think there is a very good chance that at some point this year he will pass her, since he has room to expand his base of support, and she is desperately trying to hold on to what she has. If Obama becomes the frontrunner, I think Hillary is finished. While a new face frontrunner would normally get tough critical reviews from the press, the major media is in full swoon mode over Obama.

Pretty spot-on, though Hillary herself more-or-less kept it together until her badly phrased RFK-reference a couple of weeks ago. (Which is probably why, as Tammy Bruce speculates, that Hillary pushed back her announcement that she's winding her campaign down until tomorrow, lest it occur on the 30th anniversary of RFK's assassination.)

But look what it's done to her supporters: a half a year after MSNBC came out of the closet and announced (in the New York Times, appropriately enough) that it is indeed a leftwing TV network, there are calls from those who would otherwise be its core viewers for a boycott over the cable network's handling of Hillary (which included a veiled death threat from Olbermann and David Shuster's infamous "pimped out" line regarding her daughter). And Michelle Goldberg, a writer in the moderate-liberal New Republic, says that it's "3 A.M. For Feminism":

Hillary Clinton has lost the nomination, but some of her most ardent female backers seem unwilling to accept it. A strange narrative has developed, abetted by Clinton and some of the mainstream feminist organizations. In it, the will of the voters was thwarted by chauvinistic party leaders in concert with a servile media, and Obama's victory represents a repeat of George W. Bush's in 2000. It's a story in which Obama becomes every arrogant young man who has ever edged out a more deserving middle-aged woman, and Clinton, hanging on until the bitter end, is not a spoiler but a feminist martyr.

This conviction, that sexism cost Clinton the nomination, is likely to be one of the more toxic legacies of this primary season. It is leaving her supporters feeling not just disappointed but victimized, many convinced that Obama's win is illegitimate. Taylor Marsh, a blogger and radio host whose website has become a hub for Clinton fans, says she gets hundreds of e-mails from angry Democrats pledging not to vote for Obama. She's started running posts from such readers under the headline DEMOCRATIC STORM WARNINGS. "I'm not saying that this is a huge voting bloc," she says. "I'm just saying that there is a huge amount of talk and I'm convinced it's a reality that needs to be addressed."

Surely some of this political nihilism will fade by November. Right now, it's hard to quantify; Internet forums and political protests exist, in part, to magnify the passions of a few into an illusory groundswell. In exit polls from Indiana and North Carolina, at least half of Clinton supporters said they wouldn't vote for Obama, but there's no way to calculate the role of gender in their disaffection.

In the months to come, feminist leaders and Clinton herself will urge women back into the Democratic fold. Still, the bitterness is intense. Kate Michelman, the Obama-supporting former head of NARAL, has heard enough of it to get worried. "It does feel to me, just recently, like we're on a death mission," she says. "[T]here is a danger where we set a course for failure in November."

Logically enough, Daniel Henninger posits that since their views on the issues are nearly identical, Obama's identity politics defeated Hillary's identity politics. But at what cost? Time will tell.

As Greg Pollowitz writes, "Here's a great video from the plane of the Obama press corps questioning Obama's press guy on why Obama would ditch them for his super-secret meeting with HRC. It's like they all just found out Santa Claus doesn't really exist."

Obama knows he doesn't have to worry, of course. As long as your ideology is in sync with the MSM--and particularly if you're a "Lightworker"(!), "you can be an honest person and lie about any number of things", as Dan Rather, who knows a thing or two about the topic himself, once said in appreciation of America's 42nd president.

Or is that trench-like oven warfare? In any case, oh to have been a fly on the wall when this commercial was shown to the boys in the boardroom:

(You'll see why it was promptly rejected at the end.)

The Canadian Press notes, "The man whose controversial writing is at the centre of a B.C. Human Rights Tribunal complaint is daring the tribunal to rule against him":

Two members of the Canadian Islamic Congress filed the complaint with the tribunal over an excerpt of Mark Steyn's book published in Maclean's magazine in 2006, saying it was hateful and showed contempt for Muslims.

"We want to lose," Steyn said Friday.

"We want to lose so we can take it to a real court and if necessary up to the Supreme Court of Canada and we can get the ancient liberties of free-born Canadian citizens that have been taken away from them by tribunals like this.

"We want those ancient civil liberties restored."

Steyn, who did not address the tribunal but was in the hearing room for some of the submissions, said he's "terrified" that the issue will be dismissed by the tribunal because the lawyer for the congress "put on such a staggeringly inept case."

Though not present for the entire five-day hearing, Steyn was not shy about how he feels towards the tribunal. He's called its members "pretend judges" and the system a joke.

"I think this court shames the province of British Columbia and is simply incompatible with the traditions of a great free society with a long, legal inheritance," he said outside the hearing room.

* * *

The hearing has been closely followed by members of the Muslim community.

Tarek Ramadan of Vancouver said that while hurtful things are often written about Muslims in the media, he was most offended by how Maclean's magazine dealt with the controversy.

"They're being a little difficult about giving the Muslim community a chance to rebut the article," he said. "Ideology should be faced with ideology."

Fellas, your soapbox awaits--write as many words as you like on the topic, as often as you like, whenever you like, and totally free of charge.

(Via Steyn Online.)

Update: Video added above found via Feet Of Fury.

Your friends:

Via See Dubya; you can see our videos featuring Obama's friends here and here.

Related: And it goes without saying that Obama will be there for you, too!

"Seattle may ban beach bonfires", because, as IowaHawk predicted a few years ago (on target as usual) "Top Scientists Warn: Fire Make Sea Gods Angry!"

Last year, James Lileks produced an MP3 of NBC radio's original coverage of D-Day. It makes for quite a contrast to this look at how today's CNN would cover the events of 64 years ago:

And Roger Kimball adds:

Here’s the news report, sent to me by a friend some while ago:

June 6, 1944. -NORMANDY- Three hundred French civilians were killed and thousands more wounded today in the first hours of America’s invasion of continental Europe. Casualties were heaviest among women and children.

Most of the French casualties were the result of the artillery fire from American ships attempting to knock out German fortifications prior to the landing of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops. Reports from a makeshift hospital in the French town of St. Mere Eglise said the carnage was far worse than the French had anticipated and reaction against the American invasion was running high. “We are dying for no reason,” said a Frenchman speaking on condition of anonymity. “Americans can’t even shoot straight. I never thought I’d say this, but life was better under Adolph Hitler.”

The invasion also caused severe environmental damage. American troops, tanks, trucks and machinery destroyed miles of pristine shoreline and thousands of acres of ecologically sensitive wetlands. It was believed that the habitat of the spineless French crab was completely wiped out, threatening the species with extinction.

And while parody news reports are always fun, we know how one new media giant is covering D-Day's 64th anniversary:

I've always enjoyed Google logos for commemorating important dates. Today they're commemorating Diego Velazquez's birthday with a cute takeoff on Velazquez's famous painting, Las Meninas.

While I wouldn't want to detract anything form Velazquez, but, of all the events in world history that have occurred on June 6th, isn't there one that perhaps stands out?

You stay classy, Google.

Update: Jennifer Rubin adds:

How many Americans know about Tarawa, a true debacle in which the U.S. suffered 3000 casualties, or know the basic facts about the Battle of the Bulge where over 19,000 Americans were killed? Not enough.

Some basic historical literacy might provide Americans with some perspective on our current war and some understanding that even in the greatest triumph, mistakes, horrid mistakes, are made and yet through enormous bravery and determination we can persevere. At the very least we might have an appreciation for the enormity of the sacrifices needed to destroy fascism in the 20th century.

Instead, there's a new ongoing revisionism that appears to be slowly gathering steam to disgrace those efforts.

Hope and Change doesn't arrive soon enough for this bitter, disgruntled worker, who has the audacity to do the full Pete Townshend auto-destruct routine to his corner of the cubicle farm:

http://view.break.com/513310 - Watch more free videos

(Via Breitbart.tv)

Update: In sharp contrast, life is infinitely more laidback inside this particular office park.

Back in February of 2007, as old media seemed to be peddling faster and faster to stay afloat and its tone seemed to quickly become even more hysteric than usual, I asked if the media's Red Queen's Race had begun--and indeed it had. In Slate, Jack Shafer writes that Michael Crichton--who knows a thing or two about dinosaurs facing extinction--predicted its death rattle 15 years ago:

In 1993, novelist Michael Crichton riled the news business with a Wired magazine essay titled "Mediasaurus," in which he prophesied the death of the mass media—specifically the New York Times and the commercial networks. "Vanished, without a trace," he wrote.

The mediasaurs had about a decade to live, he wrote, before technological advances—"artificial intelligence agents roaming the databases, downloading stuff I am interested in, and assembling for me a front page"—swept them under. Shedding no tears, Crichton wrote that the shoddy mass media deserved its deadly fate.

"[T]he American media produce a product of very poor quality," he lectured. "Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it's sold without warranty. It's flashy but it's basically junk."

* * *

As we pass his prediction's 15-year anniversary, I've got to declare advantage Crichton. Rot afflicts the newspaper industry, which is shedding staff, circulation, and revenues. It's gotten so bad in newspaperville that some people want Google to buy the Times and run it as a charity! Evening news viewership continues to evaporate, and while the mass media aren't going extinct tomorrow, Crichton's original observations about the media future now ring more true than false. Ask any journalist.

Read the whole thing.

Then, much like a visit to Westworld or Jurassic Park, let's hit the museum!

All newspapers redesign their mastheads from time to time, but with the Internet radically reshaping the consumption of news, the International Herald-Tribune (created when the New York Times purchased the late great NY Herald-Tribune) really knows where to focus their efforts:

“Did you see the American flag in the old logo?”

“What American flag are you talking about?” I asked her.

“The American flag that was in the old logo … do you think that without the flag the paper will be more accepted in places that hate us today?”

WHAT????

(Now is the time for you, my dear reader, to scroll to the top of this post and see the old masthead and look at the details of the old logo, because I am 100 percent sure that you never paid any attention to, yes, the American flag!).

“Look,” I said to the reporter, “This is getting worse: I didn’t realize that there was an American flag there, so one minute, let me check …”

“Oh yes, holy s***!”

“So, you are killing the logo for this reason?”

Silence.

Well, as you can see, I said readers are blind to logos …

But we are mentally sound enough to realize that your bosses are insane.

If they think that the American flag is the problem to their circulation crisis … these guys must be fired.

On the spot.

And shame on them!

Leave it to one of Pinch's papers to focus on the flag, reacting to it with the same vampire-like fashion as the City of Los Angeles airbrushing the cross out of the city seal.

In a more benign version of an unnecessary old media update, Christian Toto notes that Jay Leno's days on the Tonight Show may be numbered:

It all goes back to a rushed business decision the Peacock network made four years ago to keep Conan O’Brien in the fold. Contract talks with the red-headed comic, who seemed unlikely to last the week, let alone 14-plus years when he first replaced David Letterman, had hit a major snag.

So the network suits threw him a Hail Mary — you can take over The Tonight Show in five years if you stay with the NBC family. Heck, there’s no way Leno will still be the king of that time slot by 2009, right.

Right?

Flash forward to 2008, and Leno remains the undisputed late night champ. The Tonight Show earns more than $100 million annually for NBC, according to press reports. The program regularly trumps rival David Letterman’s The Late Show in the ratings with little sign of slipping.

The change is expected to happen mid-next year. O’Brien will assume The Tonight Show hosting duties, former Saturday Night Live star Jimmy Fallon slips into O’Brien’s Late Night slot and Leno gets to scratch his iconic chin while considering his next move.

Whatever Jay's politics, like Carson, he's managed to craft a benign image that appeals perfectly to television's aging audience and the heartland in general. Much like the ground the TV networks lost to the Internet when the last generation of anchormen left the airwaves (Brokaw via retirement, Jennings via his untimely death, and Dan Rather via his own overarching stupidity), NBC's likely making a profound error by pushing out Leno.

Sonny Bunch of the Weekly Standard writes:

I’m sure I’ve said this before, but if you’re looking for a reason to subscribe to the New Yorker, look no further than Anthony Lane. The smartest, wittiest critic out there, Lane’s reviews drip with wit and, almost as importantly, knowledge about the film industry and the history of cinema. Truly an amazing writer. His take on Sex and the City is, needless to say, a must-read:

“When Samantha couldn’t get off, she got things,” Carrie says. Look at the beam in your own eye, sister. Mr. Big not only buys her a penthouse apartment (“I got it”), he offers to customize the space for her shoes and other fetishes. “I can build you a better closet,” he says, as if that were a binding condition of their sexual harmony: if he builds it, she will come. The creepiest aspect of this sequence was the sound that rose from the audience as he displayed the finished closet: gasps, fluttering moans, and, beside me, two women applauding. The tactic here is basically pornographic—arouse the viewer with image upon image of what lies just beyond her reach—and the film makes feeble attempts to rein it in.

The headline to this post is Lane’s suggested subtitle for the movie; a better one I cannot imagine.

Geez, at least at the apogee of the 1980s, Miami Vice managed to combine glitz and conspicuous consumption with car chases, shoot-outs and a bitchin' soundtrack.

Just to add to my recent video on which side of the aisle is more obsessed with conspiracy theories, reading this, it sounds like Dan Rather's take on how he was discovered trying to sell phony documents to his audience isn't all that far removed from Tim Blair's satiric look at Ra^therGate's birth.

Beginning with his take on Pat Buchanan's new book, Victor Davis Hanson looks at two recent efforts to poison the legacy of the Allies' response to World War II:

Questioning the past is a good thing, but rewriting it contrary to facts is quite another. In the latest round of revisionism about the Second World War, the awful British and naive Americans, not the poor Germans, have ended up as the real culprits.

Take the new book by conservative pundit Patrick Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. Buchanan argues that, had the imperialist Winston Churchill not pushed poor Hitler into a corner, he would have never invaded Poland in 1939, which triggered an unnecessary Allied response.

Maybe then the subsequent world war, and its 50 million dead, could have been avoided. Taking that faulty argument to its logical end, I suppose today a united West might live in peace with a reformed (and victorious) Nazi Third Reich.

That was the theme of Robert Harris' brilliant Fatherland, which of course was a thinly disguised version of the West's ability to live quite comfortably alongside another Evil Empire for decades, until one man decided to Think Different.^TM

Update: Charles Johnson is not amused at Pat's new book, and reminds us of a recent example of Buchanan's occasional convergences with the far left, a topic which Jonah Goldberg also discusses near the end of Liberal Fascism. Here are a few earlier examples.

Kids, you can trust Betsy Newmark on this one--she's a teacher: "If you're going to plagiarize a graduation speech, don't take one from The Onion."

George Will quotes H.L. Mencken's timeless quip that "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard." Particularly at the gas pump:

Rising in the Senate on May 13, Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat, explained: "I rise to discuss rising energy prices." The president was heading to Saudi Arabia to seek an increase in its oil production, and Schumer's gorge was rising.

Saudi Arabia, he said, "holds the key to reducing gasoline prices at home in the short term." Therefore arms sales to that kingdom should be blocked unless it "increases its oil production by one million barrels per day," which would cause the price of gasoline to fall "50 cents a gallon almost immediately."

Can a senator, with so many things on his mind, know so precisely how the price of gasoline would respond to that increase in the oil supply? Schumer does know that if you increase the supply of something, the price of it probably will fall. That is why he and 96 other senators recently voted to increase the supply of oil on the market by stopping the flow of oil into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which protects against major physical interruptions. Seventy-one of the 97 senators who voted to stop filling the reserve also oppose drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

One million barrels is what might today be flowing from ANWR if in 1995 President Bill Clinton had not vetoed legislation to permit drilling there. One million barrels produce 27 million gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel. Seventy-two of today's senators -- including Schumer, of course, and 38 other Democrats, including Barack Obama, and 33 Republicans, including John McCain -- have voted to keep ANWR's estimated 10.4 billion barrels of oil off the market.

So Schumer, according to Schumer, is complicit in taking $10 away from every American who buys 20 gallons of gasoline. "Democracy," said H.L. Mencken, "is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard." The common people of New York want Schumer to be their senator, so they should pipe down about gasoline prices, which are a predictable consequence of their political choice.

The same is true of liberal Californians, who've given America the Pelosi Premium, not to mention the rest of the state's own Potemkin Environmentalism.

In contrast, the bitter clinging people in the heartland of Elk Point, South Dakota know the solution.

"Video: The ten worst running mates Obama could choose".

As Allah writes, "pithily effective as a reminder of just how many seedy characters number among the Messiah’s apostles."

Charles Johnson writes, "How many times can he get away with using this line?"

Obama issued a statement saying he was “saddened,” adding, “This isn’t the Tony Rezko I knew, but now he has been convicted by a jury on multiple charges that once again shine a spotlight on the need for reform.”

As Charles notes:

It wasn’t the Rev. Wright he knew either, or the Father Pfleger he knew, or the William Ayers he knew, or the Samantha Power he knew, or the Robert Malley he knew, or the Trinity United Church he knew ...

I could go on, but I think you get the point.

It's all just a little bit of history repeating...

Related: Meanwhile, the Exurban League looks to the future:

June 1, 2010
"Like Press Secretary Olbermann said, it's all about my superior judgment..."

Duty now for the future of Obamatopia!

Andrew Klavan, the author of True Crime, adopted by Clint Eastwood for the big screen, albeit in a slightly bowdlerized form, visits an inner city fourth grade class, and comes away noting:

Beating poverty in America nowadays is largely a matter of personal behavior. Get a high school diploma, don’t have kids until you’re married, don’t get married until you’re 21, and you probably won’t be poor. It also helps if you work hard, show up on time, act courteously, and avoid anything felonious.

But where are these kids going to learn such things? It’s the stuff you just sort of absorb in a healthy, traditional, two-parent home, and that’s exactly what they’re missing. If they learn what they’ve lived, they’re done for—the girls too likely to “come out pregnant” like their mothers, the boys to be underemployed and maybe even do time.

You can’t legislate responsibility, either. Personal behavior in a free society has to be a matter of choice—choice without which there is no virtue—virtue without which a society can’t be free.

It seems to me that leaves these kids only one recourse: the culture. Where the institution of family is broken, only the surrounding culture can teach people the inner structures required for a life of liberty.

Many conservatives often seem to have given up on culture or not to care. There’s a strong strain of philistinism on the right. When we talk about “culture wars,” we usually mean preventing the courts from redefining marriage or promoting abstinence instead of birth control: culture, in other words, as the behavioral branch of politics.

Culture, in the true sense, is more than that. It’s the whole engulfing narrative of our values. It’s the stories we tell. Leftists know this. These kids get an earful from the Left every day. Their schools serve up black history in a way guaranteed to alienate them from the American enterprise. Their sanctioned reading list denies boys the natural fantasies of battling villains and protecting women from harm. Any instinct the girls might have that their bodies and their self-respect are interrelated is negated by the ubiquitous parable of celebrity lives. And I hardly need mention the movies and TV shows that endlessly undermine notions of manly self-discipline, feminine modesty, patriotism, and all the rest.

Conservatives respond to this mostly with finger-wagging. But creativity has to be answered with creativity. We need stories, histories, movies of our own. That requires a structure of support—publishing houses, movie studios, review space, awards, almost all of which we’ve ceded to the Left.

There may be more profitable businesses in the short run. The long run, as always, depends on the young. If you want to win their hearts, you have to tell them stories. I have reason to believe they’ll listen.

It's all part of the Great Relearning, especially important when the rest of culture is essentially ashamed of any history that's prior to 1968.

Don Surber writes, "Welcome back to reality, Democrats":

Democrats helped President Clinton survive impeachment.

Al Gore then lost the presidency by 537 votes, due at least in part to the impeachment.

Now Mrs. Clinton has lost the presidential nomination, also in part because of the impeachment. Party leaders really did not want that baggage.

It may seem unfair to punish the wife for the philandering husband. But as Michelle Obama clumsily put it, "If you can't run your own house, you can't run the White House."

Mrs. Obama spoke for many.

The irony is that Mrs. Clinton also lost in no small part because of her expectation that the party owed her the nomination because of all she had put up with in her eight years in the White House.

Having failed to make that dream come true, she now seeks the vice presidency.

Obama would have to be nuts to tie that albatross around his neck.

At the moment, this is one gaffe Obama appears to be avoiding, but like Lyndon Johnson and JFK, or George H.W. "Voodoo Economics" Bush and the Gipper, anything's possible.

Related: Dean Barnett asks, "What Drove Bill Clinton?"

No, that's not a Frank Zappa song title, though if he were alive, hopefully he'd be satirizing this:

Beware of the Brown Note.

That's the word among some political activists as the Democratic National Convention nears.

As legend has it, the Brown Note is an infrasonic frequency believed to resonate through human body parts and cause a loss of bowel control. Some protesters are convinced that Denver police will amplify such low frequencies to subdue them in August.

"They'll bring out all the technologies they can get their hands on," says activist Ben Yager. "I wouldn't put anything past police in terms of crowd control."

Sounds paranoid?

Uh, yeah. But like the mythical brown note itself, paranoia strikes deep...

(HT: MM)

Mark Steyn describes his current travails with Canada's "legal" system, in Macleans:

By the way, I see I've been nominated for a National Magazine Award, to be handed out later this month. By then, Mr. Joseph will have succeeded in getting the B.C. troika effectively to ban me from Maclean's and from all Canadian journalism. An impressive achievement. My book was a No. 1 bestseller in Canada, and the new paperback edition was at No. 4 the other day, and President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, Governor Mitt Romney, Senator Joe Lieberman, Senator Jon Kyl and (at last count) six European prime ministers have either recommended the book or called me in to discuss its themes.

But in Canada it's a hate crime.

One thing I've learned these last few months is that it's always worse than you expect. The willingness of the B.C. troika's social engineers to trample over every basic rule of English law has embedded at the heart of Canadian justice a soft beguiling totalitarianism. I'll be the first No. 1 bestselling author and National Magazine Award-nominated columnist to be deemed unpublishable in Canada.

But I won't be the last.

(H/T 5'F)

I judge Ezra Levant to be seriously kicking butt and taking names:

Via Five Feet Of Fury.

See Dubya has a nifty new video on change...that's not so much of a change, with a soundtrack courtesy of Shirley Bassey (hence the above title). Someone should redo her Goldfinger theme:

Ohbaaaahma.....He's the man, the man with the radical friends!

Meanwhile, Ed Morrissey spots some more history repeating, with someone infinitely less exciting than a SPECTRE villain: Mario Cuomo, whom Obama may have borrowed the boilerplate for his latest speech. And speaking of which, James Lileks writes:

“John McCain has spent a lot of time talking about trips to Iraq in the last few weeks, but maybe if he spent some time taking trips to the cities and towns that have been hardest hit by this economy -- cities in Michigan, and Ohio, and right here in Minnesota -- he'd understand the kind of change that people are looking for."

Right here in Minnesota? Hardest hit by this economy? What is he talking about, exactly? Is this a specific reference to a specific plight faced by specific towns, or a boilerplate remark about the dire lives of people trapped in the Bittervilles that dot the strange outlands?

Read the rest--and tune in tomorrow to PJM Political on XM, where James will have further thoughts on the topic.

Clearly, I've been going about this whole DIY video thing entirely the wrong way...

Victor Davis Hanson finds Strange New Respect for Hillary Clinton, but notes the poison pill she's planted to wind down her her campaign:

Her bizarre offer to serve as VP, contrary to popular opinion, was a brilliant (if Byzantine) political move: she knows that she has earned the slot but that the Obamas don't want her "dream ticket"; so now the onus is on them if they reject her "generous" and most logical offer, and only blame will follow if the Democrats stumble in the fall—with consequences for 2012.

Win/win for her: she swallows her pride and offers unity to win—and he looks sort of weak in following her prompt; if she is rejected, Obama looks petulant—and sort of weak.

But didn't everyone expect her to run her entire campaign thinking three moves ahead? If she had displayed more of that Machiavellian thinking before the wheels came off, she might not have come in second.

And speaking of poison pills, Ann Althouse reminds us--and Hillary--that "You can concede, but you can't take back that video."

Well, you can delete it from YouTube, which is why it's always a good idea for DIY video mavens to use Download Helper or this site to stockpile the more outre clips before they vanish forever.

Update: On the other hand: "Dude, McCain/Clinton. It’s time. Especially if the alternative is McCain/Huckabee."

Heh.^TM

More: Related thoughts on Hillary's veep overture (to Obama, so far) from Tammy Bruce, blogging from her new gig at the Fox Forum.

Kathleen Parker has a sense of deja vu:

I was reading Jeffrey Toobin’s New Yorker profile of political spinmeister Roger Stone and thinking, hmmmmm. Where have I read this before? And then I remembered. Matt Labash wrote a very long profile of the very same Roger Stone for The Weekly Standard last November and a follow up in January of this year. I dug up the profile to check my memory and remembered why I remembered it. The profile was mentioned everywhere, including David Brooks’s year-end essay awards, mediabistro, and Romenesko. The similarities are striking, the most egregious of which is a device Labash uses throughout his piece. He repeatedly breaks up anecdotes with “Stone’s Rules” — things like “Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack,” as well as “White shirt + tan face = confidence.”

Toobin does the exact same thing throughout his profile, even including the same mathematical equation and, like Labash, basing his conclusion on yet another rule. The cover art on The Weekly Standard is a photo of Roger Stone with his shirt off, showing his Nixon back tattoo. Whaddayaknow? In The New Yorker’s print edition (not online), they run a photo of Stone with his shirt off, flashing his back tattoo.

There’s more, but I leave a side-by-side comparison to more industrious souls. Both pieces are long. But any casual reading of the two suggests that Toobin owed Labash at least a hat tip. We’re all magpies, picking scraps from here and there to build our nests, but when you use someone else’s rhetorical devices, some recognition is due. It’s always possible Toobin didn’t read the Labash piece, but that seems unlikely. And if he didn’t, why not? Without using the P-word, we can reasonably infer Toobin’s Rule: “If it hasn’t appeared in the New Yorker, it hasn’t appeared.”

But it has. And it has appeared in better form.

I think the New Yorker is counting on very few of its readers also reading the Weekly Standard, Particularly when its former editor has an on-air conversation like this one.

(By the way: the Nixon tattoo is real?! Geez. I thought for sure it was a Photoshop for the cover.)

Richard Cohen, on MSNBC:

Well, I agree that race is a factor on both sides. But, but, but to feel a sense of solidarity with, with someone of your own race or ethnic group, or whatever it is, that's one thing I understand, especially when it's going to be an historic moment. But to vote against somebody...

Cohen in the Washington Post:

I loathe above all the resurgence of racism -- or maybe it is merely my appreciation of the fact that it is wider and deeper than I thought. I am stunned by the numbers of people who have come out to vote against Barack Obama because he is black. I am even more stunned that many of these people have no compunction about telling a pollster they voted on account of race -- one in five whites in Kentucky, for instance. Those voters didn't even know enough to lie, which is what, if you look at the numbers, others probably did in other states. Such honesty ought to be commendable. It is, instead, frightening.

Evidently, one form of racism actually is acceptable to Cohen, on some level, based on his MSNBC remarks: if you're voting for someone based in some degree--possibly quite a large degree--upon his race, on some level, aren't you voting against the other candidate because of hers? That sounds quite a bit like Michael Pfleger's anti-Hillary rant, merely slowed down from 78 RPMs and 130 decibels, and tarted up in more acceptable terms.

IowaHawk headline, April 29: "Dear Barry--Relationship Advice From Illinois Senator Barack Obama".

Glamour Magazine, today: "Obama's Dinner Date Doctrine".

(Incidentally, IowaHawk's latest post is well worth your time as well, involving classic radio programs from America's 58th state.)

From the home office deep inside the Stonecutters' headquarters, a look at conspiracy theories from the era of JFK, up to 9/11 and the current election year, and from General Jack D. Ripper to Rosie O'Donnell and Reverends Jeremiah Wright and Michael Pfleger.

You can see longer clips of some of the more recent players here. The complete edition of Peter Robinson's recent interview with Camelot and the Cultural Revolution author James Piereson can be found at National Review Online.

The clip of NBC's Andrea Mitchell referring to Obama having to "figure out a way to get a fair vote if he's the nominee in those red states" with their "Katherine Harris-type election officials" is available at Eyeblast.tv. (I really wanted to include a snippet of this clip from last year of Mitchell's hard-hitting detective skills in action, but in order to bring things in under 10 minutes for inclusion on YouTube, it ended up on the virtual cutting room floor.) And the December 2001 Reason article on the new breed of General Jack Rippers and their fluidic obsessions is here.

This episode is a sequel of sorts to the segment earlier this month titled "Radical Chic: Frozen In Amber"; this is a slightly broader view of a related but larger topic, but you'll certainly recognize a couple of the same players.

And for the rest of the earlier Silicon Graffiti videos, tune in here.

Right Wing Trash explores one of the more interesting cinematic curios from the late 1960s: Haskell Wexler's quasi-guerrila cinema classic, Medium Cool. With four decades of hindsight, Wexler's movie can be viewed as a sort of mirror image of Michael Moore's work, which begin as documentaries but invariably end up as agitprop fiction, as the late Pauline Kael perceptively first noted over 20 years ago. In contrast, Wexler's goal was to film a fictitious Hollywood drama with the background of real life swirling just behind it, in this case the 1968 Democratic Convention.

Medium Cool blended killer cinematography (Wexler's primary forte) with then-standard-issue late-60s proto-punitive folk Marxist politics, along with a dash of McLuhan for seasoning--not to mention the film's title itself. But its immediacy works against it in one sense: it seems much more locked into its era than Blowup, which was obviously once of Wexler's inspirations. Which makes it a great time capsule of the rot of the late 1960s, with Mr. Sammler just off camera.

A couple of years ago, we looked at Michael Mann's use of high definition video cameras to shoot the big screen version of Miami Vice, often hand-held in very low light. I wonder if any cameras--video or good ol' movie film--will be rolling in Denver documenting the left's latest efforts, Mobius Loop-style, to "Recreate '68."

Hey, maybe I've been too harsh on the Obama campaign--they have to have quite a well-developed sense of humor to actually send their communications director out to and say this with a straight face:

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: In Philadelphia, just in April, Senator Obama said of Reverend Wright "I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community." Now he's cut all ties to Reverend Wright, and left his church. What is it a mistake to wait this long?

ROBERT GIBBS: No, George. I think obviously what Barack Obama made in the past few days is a deeply personal, not a political decision.

Uh-huh. If it is, it would be the first non-political decision Obama has made in his adult life.

Besides, I thought the personal was political.

Reading about Obama's North By Northwest gaffe, I'm afraid to ask what he thinks Roger O. Thornhill's middle initial stood for. And Roger L. Simon notes:

Anyone who doesn't know that was shot on a set is a relative cinematic idiot. In fact, Hitchcock practically always used sets quite deliberately and famously. No kudos to Obama on that one.

Exactly. If only because it's the one invariable contemporary knock against Hitch, which usually goes something like, "Awesome director, but geez, all those sets and rear projection sure looked phony."

The nadir of Hitchcock's studio-bound obsession with rear projection had to have been Marnie. It's an otherwise interesting late-period Hitchcock film, but the audience's suspension of disbelief had to have gone out the window during the scene that cuts from a location shot of a stunt woman on a horse in field, to a close-up of Tippi Hedren on the set, astride a horse so phony looking, it looks like something stuffed by Build-A-Bear.

Finally, moving beyond Hitchcock's oeuvre, Kathy Shaidle ponders "Obama's other questions about the movies".

Kyle Smith has a great piece at the New York Post on the obsessed nature of Sex And The City's most die-hard fans, which would would be instantly recognizable if the genders were reversed and the costumes changed:

Suppose there were thousands of men who, every Thursday night, dressed up as Chewbacca or Boba Fett and headed en masse to an inviting "Star Wars"-themed neighborhood where they could discuss their strange obsessions at bars like Cloud City or Jar Jar's Joint while guzzling specialty cocktails (the TatooTini, the Hothmopolitan).

That would be strange, but not quite as strange as what happens at the "Sex and the City" theme park in the Meatpacking District, which is about two years away from installing its first TGIFridays and already is to hip what Mark Hamill is to acting. Unlike the "Star Wars" nerds, who are under no illusions that they will ever actually take the Millennium Falcon out for a chance to complete the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs, the "Sex and the City" fangirls think that they can live the life they see on TV.

So they swarm the night, staggering packs of "Sex" geeks - the hungry streets beneath them cackling, "Say hello to my leetle cobblestones, Manolo mamas!" - heedless to the fact that the ratio of them to their male equivalents is already the inverse of ComicCon and getting worse. The cougars of the movie, reviving their Jurassic snark for one more pun-dump, have digital airbrushing on their side, but in reality, bitchy 43-year-old women are not the center of attention at the clubs. Sexist? Not I. God.

Even 33-year-old women are not living in reality in this town. The multiplexes and networks and bookstores can barely accommodate all the movies and TV series and books (almost all written by men; one, I recall vaguely, written by me) about comical manboys coming to terms with the need to grow up. There is no equivalent message getting through to women.

Smith sounds like he's describing a textbook example of what Tom Wolfe once called "Information Ricochet". As Wolfe noted, there were no Hell's Angels (or if there were, they were in a pretty nascent form) before The Wild One, but once young motorcycle aficionados saw Marlon Brando projected on a fifty-foot high screen on his bike, they instantly, maybe even subconsciously assumed, "This is how we act! This is what we wear!" (The "Mutt" character in the New Indiana Jones movie is a sort of cartoon illustration of that exact phenomenon in action.) And then, when Hollywood went back to make more biker movies in the 1960s, they could then crib from the real Angels, who in turn stole ideas from those movies as Information Ricochet feeds on itself.

Of course, there were millions of single professional women living in New York prior to Sex And The City, but seeing the rules codified on TV makes for a powerful subconscious incentive to more carefully hone one's own lifestyle to the examples played out weekly on TV, and now movie screen. Or as Newsweek's Julia Baird wrote, "It revealed what they were already doing – and emboldened them to do more."

On the plus side, at least the average Sex And The City-obsessed woman is light years more aesthetically pleasing than the sort of fellow who fancies himself living in Mos Eisley.

Related: This is a riot:

Come on, I’ve been to a sci-fi convention. And once you’ve stood in the dealer room and pondered dropping $45 on the Battlestar Galactica Boardgame you had when you were five years old, you can’t really fault a woman for getting excited about a $600 pair of purple fuzzy pumps that look like they should come with their own stripper pole. I mean, who the f*** am I to judge? But Ch***t in a bucket people, did we need so many montages of them doing it?

Hey, the series didn't earn the sobriquet of "Shoes And The City" for nothing.

That was the headline on this May 1st post by Michael Crowley on the New Republic's blog:

More on the Dems and conservative media: Early in the campaign, team Hillary courted Matt Drudge and earned remarkably kind treatment from his Drudge Report website. That changed a long time ago. When Hillary's artifice of perfection was first shattered in that October 2007 debate exchange over immigrant drivers licenses, Drudge led the gleeful pile-on, and he's never looked back.

But more recently I've noticed that Drudge is not only hard on Clinton, he's actually quite good to Obama. He gave this week's Jeremiah Wright flap surprisingly little play, and today he leads with a superdelegate story that is precisely the narrative-changer the Obama camp is pushing hard. (And recall that even when Drudge posted that photo of Obama in African garb, he basically spun it as a shocking Clinton dirty trick.)

One politico I know who watches Drudge closely says that he doesn't play favorites or push agendas (though he clearly has a conservative streak) but simply does what's good for business. I would think playing up the Wright story and a dramatic crisis within the Obama campaign would move the most traffic. But maybe his internal stats show that what people really want is more on the collapse of the Clintons.

Regardless, given Drudge's real (if absurd) influence over TV producers and some print outlets*, it's a welcome development for the Obama campaign. And given Drudge's historic antipathy towards John McCain, it'll be even more interesting to see how he handles the general election.

Obama selling out Rev. Wright's Trinity United (I keep wanting to spell it "Trinity Untied"--an appropriate Freudian slip if there ever was one) would seem to me to be a flashing police gumball story. But I don't recall it ever popping up yesterday evening.